“Morality is doing what is right regardless of what you are told. Obedience is doing what is told regardless of what is right.” – Henry L. Mencken
❑ ❑ ❑
When talking about morals in the West, we must differentiate between peoples and their governments, and between one government and another, with no colonial or hostile legacy. With every cultural clash between Arabs and Muslims with the West, the saying of the “collapse” of morals in Western countries emerges, and its latest manifestation is what we see of the degeneration represented in the behavior of homosexuals on various occasions, with false praise for the morals of our virtuous societies! The problem lies in the fact that our concept of morality is fundamentally wrong and is confined to the sexual aspect, and to women in particular, bearing in mind that the general meaning of morality is more comprehensive and complex than being confined to the genitals. Therefore, we tend to be blind to all the “virtues” of the West, and we only see what we think is a moral “deviance”, which is often represented in the emancipation of women to a degree that our minds, which are traditionally programmed, find it difficult to accept easily, and therefore we do not see the radiant human side in the West, which led the march of sexual emancipation.
Through hundreds of actions, resolutions, charters and international organizations, humanity would have been in an unbearable situation without others, such as the establishment of the United Nations, the dozens of organizations that branched out from it, and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the most important humanitarian document in human history. Ethics in the West is represented in a group of things that we often do not pay much attention to, such as respect for personal freedom, respect for time, preserving public property, keenness to participate in elections, a high percentage of those obligated to pay their taxes, and other civilized behaviors that are purely morally motivated.
Also, the margin of freedom in Western countries makes its members less hypocritical, due to the flexibility of their positions on beliefs, and the refusal to interfere with others in them, unlike what is prevalent in our countries, in which some believe that his role lies in guiding others and driving them to heaven, even by force. No foreigner exposed our societies’ relationship to morals, as did the Japanese Nobuaki Notohara, professor of Arabic literature at the University of Tokyo, and author of the book “The Arabs, A Japanese Point of View.” Notohara lived in the Arab world for a long time, moving between Egypt and Syria, and lived in cities, villages, and deserts; studied Arab culture, focusing on the personality of the Arab within the family and society, and its relationship to systems, customs, and laws.
Forty years later, in 2003, he wrote a book in which he summarized his observations and evaluation of our societies, focusing on the negative aspects of the Arab social experience compared to the Japanese experience, focusing on the relationship of the Arab citizen to political systems and laws, and the way he deals with the idea of the state and the political system, and its association with the way he deals with public property, referring to the state of political dictatorship, the killing of freedoms, and the state of repression experienced by most of the crisis Arab societies, whose crises control all aspects of life in them, and are reflected in the creative and talented people who are subjected to attempts to fail and marginalize, so they emigrate from it to others, where the field of creativity is greater.
From Nobuaki’s personal impressions, about the various issues experienced by Arab societies, especially the deprivation and confiscation of personal freedom, and the feeling of suffocation and tension, being general features of Arab societies, with aggressive looks filling the streets, and the Arabs’ belief that religion has given them all knowledge. He said that when an Arab destroys public property, he believes that he is dishonoring the government. He also insists on maximizing his value in the home and imposing his control, but outside of it he becomes another person, and this contradiction often results in hypocrisy and so on. The book is small, but it is intense and worth studying, and even teaching in our schools. We will not change for the better unless we know our truth.
❑ ❑ ❑
e-mail: [email protected]
By Ahmad alsarraf
