AHDR: a critique
We have passed to each other more than one message on this panel and I can follow up from the three previous speakers. But I wish to briefly deal with culture in a rather different way: the way culture, is used in the Arab World to mask and dissimilate neo-liberal, economic, political and social agendas. For that purpose I take the example of Dubai, which is now THE globalized city for the region, and considered by many as the most globalized city in the world. From the 1950s to the 1970s, the ‘globalized’ Arab city was Beirut. Now it has become Dubai. I find it very paradoxical and sad that the ambition of the late Lebanese Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri was to transform Beirut into Dubai number two. That should give you an idea about the war years did to the cultural role of Beirut!
My concern here is the latest project by the ruler of Dubai to solve the social-economic problems of the Arab region, through culture. Recently, some 150 Arab intellectuals were invited to Dubai to attend the creation of the Mohammed Bin Rashid Al-Maktoum Foundation (MBRF). This cultural foundation, with an endowment of 10 billion US dollars, aims to bridge ‘The Gap’ between the Arab region and the advanced western societies, a gap mainly represented by three major ‘lacks’ as diagnosed by the UNDP’s Arab Human Development Reprots (AHDR) of 2002-2004: i) the highest illiteracy rates in the world; ii) the highest rates of unemployment in the world; as the region needs to create no less than 80 million new jobs in the coming decade; iii) the lowest levels of scientific research in the world. In order to deal with these three ‘deficiencies’, the MBRF assigns to itself, in collaboration with the UNDP, to build the Arab Knowledge Society by means of ‘culture, education, pioneering business and leadership’. A ‘knowledge complex’ will be the centre for research and fellowships. The education of women will be well taken care of through online programmes to be followed in their homes, as ‘women’s obligations’ require them to stay at home. The project would also provide refugee loans, though it is not clear to which kind of refugees they are addressed. Last but not least, of course, charity programmes are envisaged to alleviate poverty.
A major task in education and culture is assigned to translation also along the same lines of the AHDR’s of 2002 and 2003 where translation tops the major tasks of culture and education. In its 2002 report, UNDP claimed than an average of no more than 300 books are translated per year in the whole Arab region. It was soon discovered that the source from which the magical number was taken was both marginal, unreliable and only covered five Arab countries. Nevertheless, the Report did not correct or modify this rapid statement. It corrected another exaggeration, which says a lot about the accuracy of its statistics. In the first report on human development it was stated that since the time of al-Ma’mun, the Abbasid caliph in the ninth century, the Arabs have translated 100,000 books. Let us note: 100,000 books, not one less or more, have been translated in the Arab region since the ninth century. How were those numbers computed? We know not. All we know is that in UNDP Report No. 3 the number was corrected. It seems that there were not 100,000 translated books but 10,000. Again, not 9,9380, 9,879; no: exactly 10,000.
At first, translation seemed to be limited to translating from foreign languages into Arabic. It was envisaged that a special school be created in the Culture Complex to teach Arabs foreign languages so that they can address foreign audiences, in the rest of the world and especially in the ‘West’, in their respective languages.
Be that as it may, the first act of the Foundation has been to sign an agreement to translate 50 the classics of Western civilisation. No big deal! Bear in mind that a rival Abu Dhabi foundation –Kalimah– promises to translate 1000 books in one year. The other immediate task is a project to produce an Arab literary magazine!
It is not that culture is not important in itself, but what we have here is a semi-conscious attempt to shift priorities from one sphere to another, to give the impression that you can solve social-economic problems by education and translation and substitute cultural development for socio-economic development. Not only has the market taken over the task of development, but we are to be convinced that more and better education – good and needed in themselves- are capable of providing jobs for millions of our youth in the coming decade. Does it need to be said that reducing unemployment requires a productive economy that produces jobs? Otherwise, education increases unemployment rather than the opposite, which is precisely the case in most of the countries of the Arab World as it slides more and more into rentierism and consumerism.
It is also of note that gap in translation is measured by the number of translated books rather than by their quality and use. It still has not occurred to those who are funding translations to fund research of the books already translated say, in the last two decades; their dominant disciplines; their content; and more importantly of course their impact and last but not least, what use are they in the production and advancement of knowledge in the region.
There certainly us a great deficiency in scientific research. But can scientific research and innovation be divorced from the nature of the economy and its needs. Does the consumer, rentier-dominated economies of the Gulf and Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, and the invsion of rentierism and consumerism in the rest of the near eastern economies create a need for scientific research and innovation?
More importantly, very little is said about the fact that the question of the knowledge society has to do with another aspect of the globalisation of culture, namely the increased role played in late capitalism by the concentration of scientific and technical know-how in the hands of the EuroAmerica while production proper is being spread all over the world. It so happens that the increasingly important role that culture plays in development did not produce a more equitable distribution of knowledge and technical know-how across the geographic and class barriers across the world, but it led to the opposite: a bigger concentration and monopolisation of culture/knowledge in the North. At least this implies that the progress of the Arab region in this field is problematic and involves long struggles and investments rather than consumer fantasies.
Many of the intellectuals who attended Sheikh Muhammad’s conference had participated, two years earlier, in March 2004 in a Congress on Arab Reforms convened in Alexandria, Egypt, at the invitation of president Husni Mubarak. They produced a programmatic text known as the Alexandria Charter which succinctly summarises the AHDR philosophy.
As the issue is the ‘gap’, the gist of the economic wisdom of the Alexandria Charter is to encourage the region to join the ‘financial bubble’. Finance is presented as the leading sector of the Arab economies. Not only the productive sectors are marginalised but two of them are missing, oil, where the main Arab natural wealth is, and agriculture, on which the majority of the Arab populations still live. The Arabs are summed to open up to the famous Direct Foreign Investments (DFI ) in a region whose main function in the global economy is to export capital.
Under the rubric of political reforms, you will find a call for the adoption of all the constituents of a democratic regime, except for political and judicial equality, and secularity, of course. Freedom of the press and the media is to be protected against the intervention of the state, no mention of the intervention of big capital and of wealth, in the media for a region where the oil states, oil rulers and oil rich monopolise and control its media.
We have here a full ‘shopping list’ of modernity, as Huntington means it. The author of the Clash of Civilisations admits that the rest of the world shopping for modernity in EuroAmerica, but they cannot buy Westernisation, i.e. the language, religion and values of EuroAmerica. Huntington was wrong here: you cannot buy modernity, either. You either produce the factors that make modernity at home or you don’t get it. But the important thing now is that the 36 shopping bags in the Alexandria Charter, all tell us what we should have or wish to consume from western artifacts. But nowhere do we find mention of ‘what is’. The answers are there. But not the questions. The cure but not the illness. How detailed are the remedies of democracy! Yet how little de we know about the makings and mechanics of oligarchic theocracies and authoritarian regimes, to take just one example. More, having detailed all those ‘reforms’, nowhere are we informed about: how to implement them; the social and political forces that have an interest in these reforms and those that can shoulder the responsibility of action to implement them; the means and institutions for their implementation; the transition periods required; etc. etc.
No wonder that a Lebanese op-ed writer, having noticed that the reforms of the Alexandria Charter are the same as those of the American Administration Reform Initiative, announced in early 2004, concluded that ‘Reform can only come from outside’. He, and his colleagues, must be still waiting.