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Background
Arab society is a culture at once mired in tradition and confused
by foreign currents from West and East. In its purest form, Arab culture is of the desert, where life has
been sustained in some of man's least hospitable surroundings through a
remarkable cultural adaptation. The
qualities of generosity and hospitality, fierce pride and individualism,
capacity for endurance in the face of natural and unchangeable
hardships, fanatic loyalty and dogmatic belief, are so necessary for
desert survival, but so ill-adapted to modernization.
There is, of course, an urban tradition as well, the world's
oldest, intermingled and interacting with the desert culture. The values of the townsmen, sophisticated and cosmopolitan, are far from the puritanical rigidity of nomads, but even in the
Mediterranean cities of the
Arab world, the tribal culture is admired if not imitated. Indeed the amalgamation of values and traditions in the Middle East, stemming from successive
invasions of men from the desert, from the Nile Valley, from the Russian
Steppes, Turkey, and Europe makes it impossible to be precise about the
cultural traditions of the Arabs. It
is, nevertheless, useful to identify the main strands and influences as
we design our Middle Eastern program.
Islam, the predominant religious tradition in the area, is
historically one of the world's most tolerant faiths, but for reasons
not fully understood, it seems to offer resistance to modernization. Perhaps the lack of hierarchy in religious organization, or the
historical roots of the religion in conquest, or the subsequent closing
of the door of ijtihad (change through consensus), or the identification of
religion with the state, are contributing factors to the relative lack
of development in Islamic countries. Or perhaps Islam has historically appealed to countries less
endowed by nature.
Language, too, is a cultural attribute of the Arabs that is rich
and noble in history, but linguistically unsuited to modern requirements.
Printing is still done in characters that imitate
handwriting; grammatical refinements are so extensive that only
life-long scholars can use them well; and the living language which
people speak is not as a rule written: only classical Arabic appears in
print, rather as if European countries wrote only in Latin while
speaking French, Italian, and Spanish. The intimate association of Arabic with Islam increases
resistance to change.
Perhaps because of the rigidity of certain aspects of their
culture, modernizing Arabs and Arab societies have sometimes bypassed
their own traditions and adopted foreign notions and institutions. They are hardly alone in this; societies in Africa and East and
South Asia have done the same thing. Secular schools replaced the
Koranic, universities on the western
model replaced or transformed the mosques as sources of higher learning,
foreign languages became the languages of scholars, armies were modeled
on the British or French, and industry, often, on the Russian.
It could be argued that Arab ambivalence over the adoption of
European
patterns of education and organization is sharper than that of other cultures.
Historical
competition, sometimes violent, with European states, and the sheer
proximity to an economically more successful culture, may increase
hostility; while religious similarities and again, proximity, lead to a
deeper meshing of cultures than elsewhere. But, basically, the problems of development are similar to those
of traditional societies in the rest of Asia and Africa.
As elsewhere, there are forces of change in the Arab world
despite the resistance of tradition. Able and energetic people can be found who are eager to reform the education system,
simplify the language or
at least improve methods of teaching it, improve
the efficiency of
government, and raise crop yields. They are the people to whom we relate most
directly.
The Arab task of modernization has of course been complicated by
two exogenous factors of enormous importance: Israel and oil. Both tend to push the knotty problems of social and cultural
development into the background, and both increase the attraction of the
Middle East to the great powers. Because
of its geographical position, the Middle East would, doubtless, have had
a prominent place in the world's attention, but with the addition of
these two factors, the limelight is dazzling. In particular, the Arab confrontation with Israel all but
monopolizes government attentions, so that the middle-distance problems
suggested earlier have scant chance to receive that concentrated effort
which they deserve.
The Arab/Israeli dispute is such an important threat to world
peace that it would be tempting for the Foundation to do whatever it
could in aid of a settlement. I
have argued earlier, and still believe, that this would be a mistake. The Foundation has little to offer to the search for a settlement
that cannot be found elsewhere. Good
ideas are not failing for lack of funds, and we have no special wisdom
to bring to bear on the conflict. It
is not the sort of problem that can be solved if only someone thinks
about it hard enough. On
the other hand, we have much to lose by engaging in well-meaning peace
efforts. No position on the conflict is universally regarded as
positive, and the best most mediators achieve is to be roundly
criticized by both sides. Direct
efforts in search of peace, or even in
search of a dialogue in conferences to which both sides are
invited, should, in my opinion, be left to others.
This does not mean that our efforts will make no impact on the
stability of the region
over time. They may have
little immediate impact, but if we are at all successful in our
programs, we should help to reduce the likelihood of Middle Eastern
states stumbling into conflicts they know they cannot win simply because
they don't know what else to do.
The history of the inter-war period was one of
avoidance by the
Arabs of negotiations and discussions with the Mandate power over the
question of Jewish immigration. In
1948, after the infant United Nations arranged a thirty-day truce, the
Arabs, led by Egypt, refused to extend it, even though their leaders knew they
had no military reserves to mobilize.
In 1967, Nasser
pushed a bluff too far and received a humiliating defeat in a war he did
not want, despite his volatile speeches and posturing.
This whole sorry history of mismanaged policy is, in my opinion,
traceable to a sense of inferiority at the negotiating table and a need to use external
crises to cover domestic failures. If Arab
governments can gain confidence in their abilities to lead their people
successfully into the modern era, they will, in my opinion, be less
likely to make tragic miscalculations internationally.
This does not suggest that once they are able to get their
muscles together the Arabs may gang up and throw the Israelis into the
sea. No responsible
official statement has been made for years that threatens the existence
of Israel. It may mean that
the Arabs would
eventually have the confidence to face the Israelis across a conference
table (although there may, of course, be some controversy over its
shape).
Another indirect contribution to the eventual settlement of the
dispute may be made by our work in the social sciences on both sides of
the border. If, through the social sciences, Arabs and Israelis can more
profoundly recognize some of the social and cultural issues involved, we
believe that both will deal more effectively with the dispute.
Oil is generally considered to be more of a blessing than a
problem, and of course it is, but as a blessing it is mixed. The presence of oil is greatest in those areas that are least
populated and culturally least developed. Politically, the oil-rich states tend to be rather conservative,
except for Libya, which has a conservative religious position but a
radical international posture, hostile to both East and West. For these states, oil has produced several problems in terms of
their development:
1)
It has forced the pace. Saudi
Arabia and Libya are confronted with complex international and domestic
decisions from which they could have been spared for decades, were it
not for the demands put upon their respective societies by windfall
wealth.
2)
It has sapped the
motivation of the people. Kuwaiti children can't, for the life of them, understand why
they should study hard and learn to do things that they can hire done
quite cheaply. Adults are
able to preserve the traditional disdain for hand-soiling toil with
which most developing societies are forced to compromise.
3)
It has distorted
priorities. Oil-rich
states tend to invest heavily in construction but to neglect the
social aspects of development.
In Saudi Arabia,
for example, twenty million dollars was spent over six years in building
a remarkable irrigation scheme in the desert for the benefit of the bedu,
without doing rudimentary planning for resettlement -- surely the more
difficult aspect of the scheme. Indeed,
the existence of large funds may permit societies to avoid painful
social and economic adjustments for a time, but this merely defers
development.
4)
Like Sweepstakes
winners, the oil states find themselves popular with a large assortment
of people, and do not know whom to trust.
The Arabs might do best to withdraw from the rest of the world,
retreat into isolation and sort out the meaning of
modernization for their culture, just as the Meiji Japanese did,
or the Soviets between the wars, or, perhaps, the present-day Chinese of
Mao. The painful processes
of adjusting relationships among classes, religious communities,
families, and occupational groups, and, most difficult of all, of
learning to live with machines, can be done, it seems, most coherently
when a society is not too heavily influenced by outsiders. Perhaps, like the Japanese, the Arabs might teach many to read
foreign languages, but few to speak them, thus making the knowledge of
others available while minimizing personal intercultural contact.
But this course is not open to the Arabs, at least not now, for
reasons of geography, resources, and international politics, and for the
reason that the Arabs are
not united.
The same factors that would make it difficult for the Arabs to
retreat behind a veil and engage in their own style of cultural
revolution accentuate the importance of the region for the rest of the
world. Enough has been
written about the energy crisis in recent months to make self-evident
the fact that the stability of the Middle East is of concern to all who
use fossil fuels and don't have enough in the ground to meet their own
requirements. Political
crises, so chronic to the area, also affect the entire world, and
represent the current number one threat to world peace. A scant five years from now will find some Arab governments with
financial reserves large enough to affect the stability of the currency of even
the largest western power.
The chronic instability of the Arab world in the past twenty
years is all too reminiscent of the century Latin America spent in
turbulence, with small cliques
engaged in endless struggles for
power, rising to the top on waves of popular discontent but, once
there, unable to do better than their predecessors. Without seeking to draw too fine a parallel, it does seem as if
regions of the world can become enmeshed in recurring cycles of disorder
when they confront problems of large dimensions with leaders of small.
It
may be significant that only two Arab heads of state have college
degrees - Bourguiba of Tunisia and the Sultan of Oman. This is not a slur on the men themselves; it is symptomatic of
the immaturity of the political processes and the social systems that
elevated them to power. When
Latin America endured its century of discontent, one might almost say
the world didn't much care. That
can't be said of the
present-day Middle East.
Objectives
The question remains, what do we hope to accomplish as a small
private organization working in this turbulent atmosphere. We are
not content to fall back on the argument that the Foundation's presence
is important precisely because of the strained relations between much of
the Arab world and the United States. Our
tenacity in
continuing work in Egypt after 1967 has been much appreciated and,
doubtless, does contribute in a useful way to communications and
understanding between the Egyptian and American societies, but this
would justify only a token presence.
There is a related justification, also inadequate in our view,
that the Foundation is able to offer valuable support to
western-educated and -oriented people who would otherwise be engulfed by
the wind from the East or submerged by the tide of fundamentalist
Islam. Western-educated
Arabs are, indeed, a vitally important group, and they tend to be people
we can work with most effectively; but our reason for being here is not
primarily to preserve their western orientation. On the contrary,
we seek in our programs more and more to encourage this elite group to
adapt their foreign knowledge to the culture and environment of the Arab
world, to go beyond mere imitation into the creation of a modern Arab
culture consistent with its own past.
The modernization of an ancient culture with the minimal
departure necessary from traditional values and beliefs -- that is the
great task facing the Arab world and it is the task to which we seek to
make our major contribution.
Framework
If one were writing about development from Bangladesh or Somalia,
economic development would doubtless figure prominently among
program objectives. It
is important in the Middle East as well, but here one is continually
struck by the cultural problems associated with modernization. Lacking an acceptable general theory
of development, one is forced to rely upon one's own insights as
to the factors that are important, or limiting, in a particular part of
the world. What follows is
a personal statement, an attempt to make explicit some of the
perceptions of Middle Eastern development that guide my own decisions. I hope that in the next year or so our staff can together
improve on the statement, or throw it out and come up with a better one.
One of our most important tasks is to increase our own knowledge
of the development process, as well as the knowledge of those with whom
we work.
Development can be defined as the adaptation of a culture to a
higher level of technology. I
take culture to be the pattern of human interrelationships expressed in
customs, manners, organizational rule and law, which a society follows
in the utilization of its technology in pursuit of the general welfare. This definition may be deficient in that it implies that society
is organized only for the exploitation of technology. Certainly, that would be overstating the case, but the
associational aspects of technology and culture as defined here seem to
be clear.
A culture is stable or mature, or perhaps one could even say
developed, when the behavioral patterns of the society become
well-adapted to the technology in use. Traditional societies are typically well-adapted to their
technology, and their technology to the needs of the society, so they
tend to be stable or mature until affected by an outside force. Outside force was not always required; new technology has been,
and still is, invented inside western culture; but as far as the
currently developing areas are concerned, the impact of western
technology is so pervasive that internal invention of significant new
ways of producing things is very rare.
It perhaps should be noted that a stable culture can be disrupted
by the appearance of the products of another society's technology, and
not solely by the introduction of the new technology itself into the
society. Firearms and
automobiles are obvious examples of external products that disrupt
internal relationships, whether domestic technology has changed or not.
At this point, we should
add a third factor in
the development equation,
geography. The
forms of culture (the patterns of behavior) and of
technology that characterize a stable society will tend to be
affected by physical
factors of resource endowment and geographical configuration.
All societies
since hunters and gatherers have been characterized by a division of
labor that results in a social product greater than could be achieved by
the individuals working independently.
Employment is
goal-directed activity that fits into the pattern of the society's
production; it is, therefore, a share of the division of labor.
In the development process -- that is, when a society begins to
use a new level of technology -- great adjustments are required of the
patterns of human interaction (customs, manners, rules of organizations
and laws), and the patterns of distribution of the goods produced. This process of adaptation of social and economic relationships
to the technology, and likewise the adaptation of the technology to the
geography and traditions (previous patterns of relationships),
inevitably involves social and political conflict.
For a period, at least, an ill fit between the technology on the one
hand, and the skills and organizational forms
employed by the people
using it on the other, is
also inevitable. Unemployment
and underemployment are symptoms of this maladjustment between the
technology and the physical and cultural characteristics of
the society
adopting it.
Within this framework, in order to enhance understanding and
guide policy, one could study the problem of the poor fit, that is, the problems
which inhibit the achievement of maturity at a given level of
technology, under three headings: cultural, geographical and mechanical.
Cultural problems could be classified according to a number of
headings, such as education, social discipline, social status of
occupations, values surrounding work and leisure, and laws governing the
relationships between social classes or people in various productive roles.
The social
sciences provide the tools for analyzing this set of
problems.
The second set of problems is in the geographical arena, where
one
would analyze the resources available to determine which can best be
exploited to meet human needs; such an analysis is already done in most
countries. This
type of exploration would not be affected by the general framework I am
trying to outline, except that governments might show increased
awareness of the social and cultural implications of the forms of technology
chosen to exploit natural resources.
The third problem area is the
mechanical: the adaptation of imported
technology in the light of cultural and geographical factors. Appropriate technology
is a term coined to recognize the importance of adapting technology in
different places in the world. It
is usually taken to mean only the adaptation of technology to factor
proportions, whereas I would
use it to mean adaptation to prevailing patterns of human interaction
(culture), as well. Adapting
technology to the extent feasible mechanically, so that its use requires
the minimum disturbance of established social patterns, would ease the
trauma of the development process.
To illustrate the application of this conceptual framework to
Arab society, one may use as an example the printing press -- one of the
seminal technological innovations of the West. We may ignore the geographical aspect in this case and look
first at the mechanical. The
first striking fact is that five hundred years after its invention, the printing
press is not manufactured in the Arab world. Presses could, of course, be made here, but one would need to begin with rather
simple machines, and the
technology has advanced so rapidly
in the West that it would not be feasible to invest in the design
and production of machines capable of printing economically in
comparison with imported machines.
Such machines have been adapted, to some extent, to meet local
requirements -- they use Arabic characters. But the orthographic reform
that Claude Garamond brought to the
West in the 16th century, by designing separate letters for use in
print, has not occurred here as yet, with the consequence that print
must look like handwriting. Also,
the script has not been
simplified, letters must have different forms depending on whether they
occur at the beginning, the middle, or the end of a word, and
short vowels are not written as letters but as symbols attached to
consonants, when they appear at all. All this means a printer requires around 500 characters to be
well-equipped.
There are other problems of adapting the language to the machine,
and vice versa. Arabic is
written with extensive ligatures, which is convenient for the scribbler,
but not for the printer. The
word Mohammed, for example, is written with an economical four letters,
but three of them are combined into one ligature, something like this:
m
d h
m
This
is an inconvenience for the printer, not only because he needs a
separate typeface for each
ligature, but also because it covers three lines vertically and makes
the reduction in size of a printed page difficult.
Other problems of the mechanical fit are much like those of
adjusting to any machine, such as the difficulty of finding a person at
once educated enough to be trained to maintain the press and willing to
undertake such a filthy job, especially for the wages typically paid to
people of the “technician class.”
The cultural "fit" with the printing press can be
viewed in terms of the uses made of its products. To begin with, there are few storybooks for
children. This is partly because books are written in classical Arabic,
which the young child doesn’t understand. Reading for pleasure by adults is perhaps more likely to be done
in a foreign language than in Arabic. Novel-writing is not a highly developed art form, partly again
because the words used to describe everyday human life, at least those
most familiar to writers and their readers, are likely to be colloquial
words, until recently, not suited for
print. The scientific literature in Arabic is very thin, most of it
in translation, as is true of the social sciences. Arab scholars tend to publish their best work in foreign
languages, rather than in Arabic, for a number of reasons: the market is
greater for a book in another language; greater prestige is accorded to
publication in a foreign language and particularly in an international
journal; scholars generally received their higher education abroad or in
a foreign language at home and, thus, are professionally more at ease in
it; standardized terminology for scientific and social scientific
subject is inadequate in Arabic.
The technical potential of the printing press is clearly not yet
fully realized in Arab society; vast cultural adaptations are necessary
before they can be achieved.
One has only to observe high-powered automobiles thundering
around Beirut's crowded streets to bring another example to mind. No culture has completely adapted itself to the automobile, or
adapted the automobile to its needs, but in Lebanon the
inappropriateness of the imported technology in mechanical terms is
particularly glaring. Also
apparent is the fact that the laws, customs, and manners that govern the
use of the car in the West have not matured here: the etiquette that
often otherwise governs interpersonal relationships has not yet evolved,
traffic laws are inadequate and rarely enforced, and the driving
patterns are more demanding on the machine and the operator than need
be.
Modernization should not be viewed solely in the context of
adaptation to and of specific machines; they simply offer the most
obvious examples. One could
take modern medicine as another form of technology that has too
uncritically been adopted by the Arab world and other less developed
countries. Vast sums are
spent on hospitals and medical faculties that yield very modest returns
in terms of the general health of the population, whereas expenditures
on preventive medicine, where a real difference can be made, are
comparatively meager.
China's example
of investing in paramedical training could contain
lessons for many countries.
The development process, as defined by this model, is a pervasive
one, and one that is less amenable to foreign aid than has sometimes
been supposed. Yet there
are a number of areas in which we believe Foundation assistance can be
critically important in stimulating
and supporting creative local efforts. We have selected
a number of program themes, vectors of development, where we believe
work on the middle-distance problems of cultural adaptation is most
vital. (continued)
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