We chose defeat and darkness when we abandoned knowledge

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WHEN a nation – any nation – abandons work for the future with a clear scientific vision or sets aside thinking and drowns in sorcery, it must reach the state that the Arabs are in today.

Perhaps, the truest description of our reality is the article written by an Egyptian doctor in 2019 and published in one of the social media platforms. In this article, he explained in simple language the reasons for the defeat of a nation.

He wrote, “We were defeated when we abandoned scientific research and walked behind the clerics and dervishes.

We were defeated when we started saying – this is a Muslim and this is a Christian.

We were defeated when the wonderful Arab women were convinced that they were naked and they lacked intelligence, even though they were very elegant and beautiful, less than forty years ago, let alone being a queen for thousands of years.

We were defeated when engineers, doctors, and university professors bowed before a cleric who did not even get a primary school certificate, and they listened to him with full concentration, while he planned and decided for them all their lives.

We were defeated when a less cultured female cleric came forward to control millions of women, nullify their minds with religious lessons, and make them puppets to act as she wanted them to.

We were defeated when we thought religion is a beard, a veil, or a face cover (niqab), and not morals and the way we deal with each other.

We were defeated when we became aware that the great scientist, the good man, Magdi Yaqoub, was in the fire because he was a Christian, and that cleric Yaqoub was the most knowledgeable of the nation’s scholars.

We were defeated when we donated huge sums of money to build houses of worship and donated very little for scientific research centers, and our lives became religious auctions of the utmost absurdity, falsehood, and superficiality.

We were defeated when we did not realize the difference between honorable opposition and lack of manners and insolence.

We were defeated when we handed our minds over to a handful of hobos, who, the least to say, had limited intelligence.

Our real battle is not a football match, but it is science and modernity versus ignorance and backwardness. Unfortunately we have to admit defeat, and accept the fact that backwardness is the victor until today. That is why we defeated ourselves and will continue to be defeated as long as we give up our minds and choose to be dervishes.

This nation has voluntarily endured its defeat for decades, and no one has imposed it on it. We failed to face with force the tide that came to us from the caves of the Middle Ages when a group of Arabs of different religious and sectarian affiliations raised the slogan of “Export the Revolution” that Khomeini brought to revive a Persian empire that was crushed by the hooves of Arab horses in the two battles of Dhi Qar (War of the Camel’s Udder) and of “Sallasil” or the Battle of Chains.

We were defeated when Hasan Al-Banna and Sayyid Qutb became the most knowledgeable of the nation’s scholars. Millions followed them, elevating them to the level of holiness, and sacrificing themselves for the sake of these two hobos.

For all this, Al-Qaeda, ISIS, Hezbollah, and other extremist groups did not need fuel because it exists and it needed a spark. So how about if it was a fire with a highly flammable substance that is the motto of restoring the Islamic caliphate, but according to Al-Banna Or Khomeini’s tendencies?

We put science aside a long time ago. Even the maps of our countries were drawn in London, Paris, Brussels, Berlin and Washington while we were distracted by illiterate storytellers who wanted to dominate the Arab mind with superstitions. They did not mention to us the importance of the noble verses that urge us to turn to those who are well informed in order to settle arguments and disputes.”

Therefore, today when we look at the fires burning in more than one Arab country and our inability to confront and stop them, and the extent the nation is divided in the face of the most powerful ignorant expansionist invasion – I mean the Iranian regime – which is accompanied by groups of murder, abuse and infidelity, we find ourselves making our defeat everyday with our own hands.

We relish underdevelopment, which is why our Arab economies are collapsing. Our constitutional institutions have become mere decorations for the necessity of prestige in front of other nations to show we are in the modern era, while the democracies that we sing about are just cosmetic powders for the ugly face of opportunism.

Undoubtedly, a nation of this type will not be able to get out of its predicament unless it enters modernity and age with science, knowledge, and justice, and abandons all the rubble of the past that binds it to darkness.

By Ahmed Al-Jarallah

Editor-in-Chief, the Arab Times

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