Surprise of solace

By Fadia El-Ghazali Harb

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One can only respond with shock to the horrifying contradictions that dominate the behaviour of individuals in a society exhausted by political, economic and cultural crises. Such behaviour has metamorphosed into an ability to accommodate contradictions, to subsume them beneath torpor and passivity, to unthinkingly accept that this is the way things are.

The prevailing religious discourse, for example, promotes the appearance of religiosity, the practice of ritual. Yet at the same time a state of moral disintegration prevails: most people have lost the ability. Chronic problems are thus analysed in the most superficial manner.

What is true of religious discourse applies equally to its political counterpart. Ideas are thrown out as if in a vacuum. they ignore actual political practice. Nobody explains how democracy -- the current buzz word -- is supposed to take root in a political space that finds it ever more difficult to accommodate difference, where the only compulsion is towards autocracy and in which public opinion is routinely dismissed as irrelevant.

There is shock, then, and surprise. But we should not forget that this society is, too, the same society that has stood its ground in the face of Westernisation, and attempts to consolidate Western control. It is a society that was once capable of scaling the civilisational heights.

And perhaps there is some solace to be found in surprise, even if it is all we have left.

This week's Soapbox speaker is deputy director of Middle East Radio Broadcast.