We all call it water

Making a guest appearance this week, Mohamed Hassanein Heikal brought his usual deep analysis, writes Dina Ezzat

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As usual, the Egyptian press had many home-front woes. Questions are still being asked about the reasons for the failure to identify the culprit behind the sinking of the Egyptian ferry Al-Salam Express in the Red Sea last month which killed 1,000 people. New questions are being asked about the true identity of the smuggler who brought tons of Viagra and thousands of mobile phones into concealed packages of ceramic material imported from the United Arab Emirates.

There were also equally perplexing queries about the fate of the nation's leading political parties including the ruling National Democratic Party which has been rocked by defections and persistent rumours about its internal power play and the stance that President Hosni Mubarak -- in his capacity as the NDP leader -- is taking on these developments.

On the economy pages questions remained over the fate of the much sought after free trade agreement with the US that forced Cairo to take many political and economic steps to sign, and details and history of the privatisation process that many economists, especially but not solely of left-wing ideology, have been sharply criticising.

The nation's par excellence number one political commentator Mohamed Hassanein Heikal, who retired from writing in the press a few years ago, made a sudden and well-received appearance on the front page of the Sunday weekly Al-Arabi, the mouthpiece of the Nasserist Party. Heikal chose a totally different, albeit pressing issue, to contemplate: "Clash of civilisations -- The crisis and its undertones leading up to the Danish cartoons".

The full front-page piece by Al-Ustaz (the master) as he is often dubbed, written to mark the 1,000th issue of Al-Arabi, offered a detailed analysis of an argument that Heikal had previously shared with his wide audience, in Egypt and elsewhere.

"I am personally close to the school of thought that tends to argue against the so-called clash of civilisations -- or for that matter dialogue of civilisations -- simply because there is only one human civilisation that is the result of the many contributions of the wide and varied human heritage throughout history," Heikal so eloquently argued.

According to Heikal, the exchange of ideas and values among the peoples of this earth is a clear sign that there are no clear-cut borders that divide the cultural input of the many peoples in a way that would allow for the alleged battle of civilisations to be evoked. Long ago in history, agriculture started in the East and is now modernised to the maximum by the West, and the same goes for many branches of science and now technology, he stated. Today, he added, only very few tend to think about who and where of the beginnings of things, and that, he said, applies to the sophisticated science of physics just as much as it applies to the sandwich and pasta industries.

"What we stand before, if we take a close look at the picture, is one joint human culture made by many peoples and resources... but it so happened that the imperialist attempts reached a point of expropriating this collective human heritage and attributing it to one particular power."

This expropriation, Heikal hastened to add, is by no means the brainchild of the American empire for it was there with the old empires of the world in the 18th and 19th centuries. Heikal wrote, "The ascent of the American empire has been so exaggerated to the extent that the US is now a hyper power following the end of the Cold War. And it was in that context that it occurred to this empire that the perquisites of power, conflict and arms should allow it to go as far as claiming full and uncontested property of civilisation."

It was unfortunate, Heikal added, that it was the Arab/ Islamic culture in particular that seemed to fall prey to this alleged talk about the clash of civilisations, unlike the examples of Indo-Chinese civilisation that is opening new vistas of world communication at a time when contemporary Arab-Islamic civilisation, due to unfortunate analysis, conditions and miscalculations, is falling into isolationism.

"So, by accepting the argument of the clash of civilisations, or rather the dialogue of civilisations, then we in fact have accepted the lot that we were offered, which meant we immediately relinquished our rights as partners in the making of collective human civilisation."

Heikal provided a way out (almost a roadmap) that starts with better self-perception, rejection of imposed or even self-imposed isolation, activation of Arab-Islamic participation in collective and ever-formulating human heritage and most certainly refraining from the traps of political-turned-religious battles.

On Wednesday, in his weekly article on the opinion pages of Al-Ahram, poet and prominent cultural critic and commentator Ahmed Abdel-Moati Hegazi also subscribed to rejecting the "tale" of the clash, but not necessarily the dialogue of civilisations.

Essentially reviewing a book about science and Islam, Hegazi resorted to "strict objectivity" to argue his point. "What Muslims know about water or for that matter sharks is exactly what Christians and Jews know."

As such, Hegazi categorically warned against calls circulated in some Islamic (or perhaps Islamist) quarters about the need to Islamicise science. What Muslims and Arabs need desperately to do, he argued, is to harness science to serve a legitimate purpose.

Moreover, in his regular article in the Wednesday weekly magazine Al-Musawwar, Islamic thinker Abdel-Moat Bayoumi argued that Muslims and Arabs have a role to promote their values that have become so negatively perceived in the West. The value of human rights in Islamic culture is a good beginning, he argued. "When we resort to Islamic history -- and despite failures -- we will encounter impressive and firm commitments to the values of human rights... and we can find solid support for human rights concepts in the volume of sacred Islamic texts including the Quran and Sunna."

Whether such arguments will find a response -- much less interest readers -- is another question.