Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
So Dr Zulfa, do we Arabs prefer laying our mistakes on an external delusive enemy instead of admitting to our failure?
He mentioned things like Masonery, Zionism and Christendom, as perhaps reasons to conquer the Arab world.
Do you agree?
With all sadness I don't agree because he begins by saying all that our Ummah is facing is a conspiracy,
and that there are people who have existed across history in Masonery, Zionism, and Christendom...
and then we forget that not only are we part of creating the problem that our Ummah is going through, but we don't even do something to fix those issues
Instead we go find a hanger to hang our mistakes....
He mentioned the effect of mystery. Is this enough to explain the existence of these conspiracy theories?
And why is it everything we experience derives form mystery? For example he mentioned the fall of the caliphate in 1924.
There are many reasons why it fell, and we all agree on their validity, but when it fell it was called a conspiracy, because we did not accept but the caliphate.
So why do we have to assume that all our affairs are just mysterious speculation and which allowes a conspiracy theory worthy of our analysis.
Dr. Sarraf in your opinion, are conspiracy theories only a product of the Arab nations, not of all nations?
Good question. If I were to chose between a list of questions I would have chosen this one.
We are a verbal nation. The desert has no resources. There was a lot of creativity...but no stability in the region.
So therefore, poets flourished because poetry only requires memorization, no resources required.
To live a verbal life made even the most noble human act, marriage, undocumented, and not required to be documented.
Death and divorce -- we wouldn't know what's going on in our lives.
So because we belong to a verbal nation that doesn't document, even if we showed-off the names of the historians,
lets say from before the message of Mohammed till today, it will be a very small number compared to other nations.
So because we don't keep documents, because we don't keep records, because we don't study, because we don't learn,
our attachment to the idea of a conspiracy theory is perfect for all our faults in being weak, subservient or
having weak faith, weakness of unity, or weakness of parenthood: all is a conspiracy, so we can rest.
I'll go back and say that we belong to a verbal culture that doesn't believe in documentation.
I mean, the first book that published an Arabic story was published in 1926 by Mohamed Husayn Heikal
Twenty six stories for an entire nation! All this culture, and the first story gets published just 90 years ago?!
So there is a problem with our intellectual upbringing
The faults that are in us are not in others.
The spread of this targeting rhetoric in our politics, public and media, which appears in phrases like
"The Arab and Islamic nation is targeted" Are we really confronting this threat we think we are facing?
These are the kind of ideas that belong to the current that Mr. Montaser belongs.
That is we will remain at the point of target as Muslims and Arabs, etc. and therefore we're weak.
I think that this is a mistake, really.
And just like you said, the reality of the conspiracy only resides in the minds of for example leftists and nationalists, which today
have been replaced by Islamists.
Therefore I can't imagine that this nation has absolutely any future if we were to continue under this pressure and rhetoric,
which I call a mental defeat. If we continue with these ideas, there is no hope for the future
...
Yes, the problem is that there is not only conspiracies about America and Israel, but also between Arab nations.
Which one Dr do you think is more critical?
This idea of conspiracy theories in Islam, is really a sad rap, because the world has nothing to do but
hit us and eat our Islam. When the Ottoman caliphate , collapsed what were the Arab nations which drew the world to concentrate on countries on us.
It had no resources, oil wasn't discovered then...
Imperial borders were drawn in Africa, they were also drawn in Southeast Asia and it also happened in the Middle East.
Take a country like Singapore. Singapore is only 710km in length and a population of 5 million.
Its GDP $238 billion, at par with Egypt [population of 80 million]. Lebanon's GDP is $39 billion, Singapore's is $238 billion.
Why isn't their a conspiracy for Singapore when they are surrounded by China and Malaysians which are Muslim?
Malaysia is a Muslim country, created by Britain. Why aren't there conspiracy theories for it?
The best universities in Arab countries -- The university of Fuad the First was created by a king who was pro-British.
The most prominent Lebanese universities originated from French and American churches.
These are the educational sources that were created by institutions which we are claiming are trying to destroy us.
They should have put us in prisons since 120 years. They should have had detention centers and ghettos, not universities. This is real analysis of conspiracy theories.
Saiks-Piko said that the Arab world did not have the capacity to govern itself, and therefore there was the Saiks-Piko agreement.
Saiks himself said that we are sitting on the Arab and Muslim map and we are going to divide it like a cake.
I heard Heikal [the journalist] said nothing was done to nations like Saiks-Piko agreement.
How do we just want to explain things in normal terms, and in a none-conspiracy way?
There is some middle ground between conspiracy theories and hanging our weakness and poverty on a hanger.
Please let me say that if Heikal did infact say this, this is wrong because the Arabian peninsula and the reforming (North African) coast, and Qatar and Bahrain and Kuwait
were developed by Britain. If Saiks-Piko takes credit for this, I have another 20 countries with no relation
to the Arabian peninsula. Africa was divided amongst Britain, France, Belgium, Holland and Italy...