Interesting interview with Salman Masalha, an Israeli Arab writer. Excerpt:
..."There's something in the Islamic perception that drives you crazy, and that is the looking only backwards, not to the future. If the golden age was in the past, your entire vision is rearwards. This causes deterioration. In our mentality as Arabs, there is a poisonous formula that can lead to nothing good at all. There is a need for change in this programming. There is a disk in the Arab mind that must be replaced with another disk, and only this way can change come."
"The Woman is the Solution"
Question: "How is it possible to change?"
Salman Masalha: "First of all, separation of religion and state. [Then] war on ignorance, opening up to the world and to [other] cultures. The Islamic motto of 'Islam is the solution' must be replaced by 'the woman is the solution.' Women must be educated, encouraged, and enlightened. In a home with an educated and productive wife, the children will grow up to be educated and productive. A large part of the backwardness and tragedy of the Arab world lies in its abhorrent treatment of women.
"Islam is in my view a prescription for going back in time, to the pre-Islamic period of benightedness. The solution is to build a liberal and democratic society that places the individual in the center, and more than anything the woman at the heart of this center.
"We Arabs have a problem with self-sarcasm. We do not know how to laugh at ourselves. This is part of our problem. There are many taboos, almost [as powerful as] the living word of God, that must not be transgressed. There is no Arab satire, for example. In [satiric] Arab writing, it is rare to find anything interesting, except perhaps by Emil Habibi. We take the world very seriously."
Israeli Arabs Are More Free Than Anyone in the Arab World
Question:"And this restricts your writing?"
Salman Masalha: "The Arab newspapers do not publish erotica, criticism of Islam, or intimate revelations, not even political expose. For example, there are no new Arab historians. Everything is 'establishment' in the Arab world. We never ask ourselves the real questions. Doubting does not exist. No one doubts the Qur'an.
"Doubt is an essential part of the development of society and of culture. It is of this programming I speak, and of the need to replace it. To begin, for once, to ask about and talk about the most essential things in our lives, in order to find solutions or ways to change this sad reality.
"We here [in Israel], with all our problems, and all the complexity of our situation, know deep inside that we are free, I mean, as far as thinking goes, and as far as the possibility of writing goes. We are freer to think than anyone in the Arab world."
Question: "What about Arab secularism?"
Salman Masalha: "I don't know whether it is possible even to talk about Arab secularism. Is there really any such thing?…
"The problem in the Arab world, as in Israel, is that the so-called secular movements suffer from feelings of inferiority in the face of religion. In the Arab world, anyone who opposes the existing regimes sees one way [out], and that is the mosques, because of the inferiority of these regimes in the face of Islam. [But] my secular values are no less supreme [than religious values]. Secular people must not feel inferior. The whole thing must be turned upside down."
Question: "But there is no other way. Democracy is not an alternative for the average Arab."
Salman Masalha: " This is the greatest betrayal of the intellectual Arabs. Those who dare flee to America or Europe, because they cannot create and write in their own societies. Others, according to reports that are beginning to be published, received over the years envelopes full of dinars from Saddam Hussein. Intellectuals of this kind are the root of the problem.
"Today anyone who may not even have finished elementary school can grow a beard and become an authority and a source of power. People don't know the history of Islam. The moment you have some creation that is absolute truth, it has a representative on earth – and go argue with him. There's no arguing with faith. Therefore, the war on fundamentalism cannot come out of ignorance; it must come out of knowledge – and the Arab world today, as it is, is a world of ignorance.
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