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Al-Ahram Weekly 26 Aug. - 1 Sep. 1999 Issue No. 444 
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Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Al-Ahram Weekly 26 Aug. - 1 Sep. 1999 Issue No. 444
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Egypt Region International Economy Opinion Focus Culture Features Profile Travel Living Sports People Time Out Chronicles Cartoons Letters Simplicity and complexity
By Mohamed Sid-Ahmed
When, in January 1977, riots contemptuously described by the late president Sadat as an "uprising of thieves" erupted in the aftermath of a government decision to abruptly increase the price of a number of basic commodities, a question arose that has yet to be satisfactorily answered: how could a spontaneous uprising spread to every corner of Egypt in less than one day? The state first accused leftist elements of instigating the riots, but it soon became clear that they were far beyond the organisational abilities of any number of individuals, and the accused were eventually released. But I remember wondering at the time whether there might not have existed an organisation that was not even aware it constituted an organisation capable of successfully inflaming the whole of Egypt that swiftly.
Not long after, I had an interesting conversation with a high ranking member of the intelligence community who expressed surprise at the sheer scope of the riots, especially that, despite their best efforts, the authorities were unable to find any evidence linking them to an underground organisation. I questioned his assumption that the riots were necessarily the product of a conspiracy, and asked him whether the mosques could have played the role of an organisation without actually being one -- at least not an organisation along the lines of a leftist party, whose structure was familiar to the authorities and which they tended to focus on in any investigation of civil unrest. It is because you were looking for the wrong type of organisation, I said, that you failed to find one.
More than 20 years on, the conversation has come back to haunt me, as a series of seemingly unrelated events appear to confirm the truth of what was then only a tentative theory. With hindsight, Egypt's 1977 riots can be seen as a dress rehearsal for a much broader phenomenon extending to wide portions of the Islamic world and, indeed, beyond. This reading of events in no way implies that I subscribe to the conspiracy theory of history or that I believe there is one central authority masterminding developments in far-flung corners of the world, even if they do display many features in common. From the Islamic infiltrators fighting the Indian army in Kashmir to the Islamic volunteers who enlisted in the Kosovo Liberation Army, from the Islamic communities growing in many West European and American cities and openly challenging the symbols of western civilisation, sometimes by violent means, to the uprisings in Chechnya and, more recently, in Dagestan, which are symptomatic of the continuing disintegration of Russia after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the list is endless. Not to mention the serious crisis situations in such Muslim countries as Algeria, Iran, Afghanistan, Sudan and Pakistan. Although all pride themselves on being part of the Islamic civilisation, some are Sunni, some Shi'ite, the wide variety of Islamic traditions on which they draw making it impossible to talk of a common front, an 'Islamic International', as it were, along the lines of the Bolshevik Comintern. And yet somehow they appear to be integral elements of a wide Islamic network, albeit one that is not aware of its organisational capabilities.
One possible explanation is that what binds divergent Islamic schools together is not organisational ties but some form of 'civilisational' ties in face of challenges to their shared legacy from other civilisations. Could we be seeing a living demonstration of Samuel P Huntington's "clash of civilisations" theory? Huntington came forward with his theory as a substitute for the Marxist theory of class struggle, when the collapse of the Soviet Union was seen by some as marking the collapse of Marxism itself. This overly sanguine view assumes that the two theories are mutually exclusive. I believe they are not, and that a clash of civilisations can be an expression of class struggle in the complex setting of the new world order.
For there is no doubt that the contemporary world has become extremely complex. It is witnessing unprecedented change at an ever-accelerating pace, and even if the economy still remains the main theatre for conflict between human communities, where conflict assumes the form of clashes between different classes belonging to one community, it is also true that conflict assumes many other forms as well, which are not necessarily related to economic interests, and which appear in the form of conflicts over ideas, cultural matters, ideology, religion, art, science, etc.
One significant illustration of the complexity of our world is the fact that the same citizen in a given society can belong to many classes simultaneously: he could be a blue-collar worker, own stocks in the stock market and own a plot of land. With his overlapping identities placing such an individual at the crossroads of a number of conflicting class interests, class struggle can assume the form of psychological strains and stresses, with complex social, cultural and ethical repercussions.
Until recently, man believed he was the centre of the universe. He saw himself as the crowning point of all development throughout the dimensions of time and space, the only living creature with the capacity for abstract thought. But as knowledge increased, man attained a degree of technological sophistication which revealed to him that the planet from which he emerged was nothing more than a small planet revolving around an average star, the sun, one of billions of similar stars in our galaxy, which is just one of billions of similar galaxies in the universe.
And after years of believing that, in Darwinian terms, he had the best credentials to survive in the struggle for existence, man now knows that other creatures are better adapted for survival. Man's existence on the planet can be measured in a few million years, while bacteria have been around for billions of years. In fact, primitive forms of bacteria first appeared less than one billion years after the Earth's crust was formed. We now also know that if dinosaurs had not become extinct some 65 million years ago, the human species may never have emerged as the only intelligent beings on the planet. In other words, man owes his superior status in the hierarchy of living creatures to an accident.
Man's conviction that he was the centre of the universe was accompanied by a belief that the universe could be reduced to what he perceived through his five senses, and because the senses reflect a simplistic view of reality, it appeared legitimate to regard the natural world as simple. But thanks to the startling achievements of modern technology, man has liberated himself from the constrains of his five senses, and is now able to explore the micro cosmos and the macro cosmos, the elementary particles invisible to the naked eye as well as the galaxies beyond the range of human vision. He is now aware that the simplified world he believed he belonged to is much more complex and that an overly simplistic view of the nature of the environment is bound to be counterproductive and can eventually expose the human species to self-destruction. It is no accident that so much interest is now devoted to such new scientific theories as Complexity theory and Chaos theory.
The Arab-Islamic world is one of the main arenas in which the clash of civilisations theory finds concrete expression. For centuries, it was locked in conflict with western imperialism, today it is facing the challenge of Zionism. To see the current Middle East peace process as necessarily heralding a historical conciliation between adversaries in a traditional conflict situation is to fall into the trap of over-simplification. For a new and complex dimension has been added to an already volatile brew: a causal relationship between the success of the Zionist project and the growing militancy of a rebellious type of radical Islam which is determined to resist making peace with the enemy by all possible means, including violent means running counter to international legality and exposing the international community and world order itself to deep disturbances.
To gauge the magnitude of these developments, one cannot rely on the assumption that our traditional simplistic assessments can be successful in coming to grips with the problems we have to face. This applies not only to the natural world but also to the socio-political field. Resorting to police measures or even to legal proceedings against expressions of the confrontation between Zionism and political Islam is to ignore the complexities involved and to make any prospect of a modus vivendi between the two even more remote. And yet that was the method used to resolve the dispute between the Al-Shaab newspaper and the minister of agriculture, who was accused by the paper of colluding with Zionist interests. This simplistic approach to a highly charged and complex issue can become self-defeating and counterproductive.
