I will address the issue from two angles: a political one and an economic one. What I have observed for more than ten years now, on the political level, is that the popular anger in countries such as Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen, Syria, Libya, and Sudan pushed both the people and the elites to seek liberation from the evils of corruption and tyranny—only to fall into something worse. How did we reach this point?
Quite simply, those who expressed their anger did so in a spontaneous, emotional, and unplanned manner, without preparing for the “day after,” and without implementing any project to unify the word, close ranks, and agree on a minimum set of common denominators. The result: in Tunisia, the people have grown weary of the democracy of powerful factions; in Egypt, a president who ventured to run at the wrong time was not given a chance; and in Syria, armed groups that know little about the civilian administration of a country like Syria ended up dominating the scene.
The problem of Muslims today is that border fragmentation has deepened their divisions, and that the widening class gap between the masses and the elites—along with their adoption of ideologies alien to Islam—has divided more than it has benefited.
This is on the political level. As for the economic level, the regimes that regained power through counter-revolutions relied on the economic sphere to silence the angry and the discontented. Unfortunately, they resorted to economic development aligned with Western agendas that do not match the geographic, historical, or cultural particularities of the Arab-Islamic world. I do not understand, for example, why they turn to extremely costly hydrogen energy instead of relying on a natural resource and a clean energy source such as solar energy. And why adopt the model of “small enterprises,” which is purely Western, when we have not replicated their economic-rise experience; what works for them does not work for us.
Even the notion of “social entrepreneurship,” which imposes on women the obligation to be economically productive members of society, ignores their vital and decisive role within the family—and how they are, in fact, productive by fulfilling their roles as mothers, wives, and daughters. And why exploit minerals such as iron through costly extraction and transport projects instead of marketing knowledge-based wealth that relies on intellect and creativity more than raw materials? And why the preoccupation with bringing in Western partners whose sole concern is preserving their inventions and civilizational superiority, instead of pursuing local economic solutions rooted in our own particularity?
Questions that remain without answers.
