No Red Lines

A Reason interview with Middle East Transparent's Pierre Akel.

Michael Young | February 9, 2006

(Page 2 of 3)

Akel: Remember the novel by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, The Autumn of the Patriarch, where people open the palace doors to discover that the dictator has been dead for a long time? This applied to the Soviet Union and now to Arab dictatorships as well. Dictatorships are dead; they lost the ideological and moral high ground years ago. The battle is between fundamentalists and liberals. Liberalism is the wave of the future. The Middle East is not like Afghanistan, if only because of oil, and cannot be allowed to turn into a Taliban-led region. Since 9/11 both Afghanistan and Iraq have been liberated. This is the trend. �

reason: Who do you feel are the liberal heroes in the region? Who do you find most interesting among political commentators? �

Akel: You can find liberals in unexpected places. Ahmad bin Baz, the son of the late mufti of Saudi Arabia, is certainly a liberal. He wrote stunning articles in Al-Sharq al-Awsat newspaper, but then was shelved. He was probably "advised" by the religious scholars to stop writing. Mansour al-Nogaidan and the great Wajeeha al-Huweider, the best Arab feminist nowadays, are brilliant Saudi liberal examples. Ali Doumaini is another. In Egypt, I already mentioned a few names, and can add to them Saad Eddin Ibrahim, Abdel Moneim Said, Ali Salem, and others.

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Of course, in Syria Riad Turk is a brilliant example of Arab liberalism. Though he spent some two decades in prison for his communist convictions, I talked to him for four hours and he never once mentioned Marx or Lenin. He even criticized the Lebanese Democratic Left Party, with which I am close, because for him being of the left is not necessary at this historical moment; a democratic movement, he told me, was enough and more adequate. �

The Tunisian Lafif Lakhdar is another radiant example. The Lebanese Shiite Sheikh Hani Fahs is a liberal writer. And of course the late Samir Kassir, whose assassination last June was a terrible blow to us all, both in Lebanon and in Syria. Kassir was the intellectual most aware of the organic relationship between the modern democratic movement in the contemporary Levant and the 19th-century Arab liberal renaissance known as Al-Nahda. �

reason: How has the Internet been able to affect political attitudes in the Middle East? Or has it? �

Akel: In the Arab world, much more than in the West, we can genuinely talk of a blog revolution. Arab culture has been decimated during the last 50 years. Arab newspapers are mainly under Saudi control. The book market is practically dead. Some of the best authors pay to have their books published in the order of 3,000 copies for a market of 150 million. This is ridiculous. Even when people write, they face censorship at every level—other than their own conscious or unconscious censorship. Meanwhile, professional journalism is rare.

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In the future, I would like Metransparent to promote tens (or even hundreds) of blogs representing human rights and activists groups in many Arab cities. This has already started. � Just to clarify a point about the Arab cultural scene. Freedom House writes a yearly report about the Arab world. It never mentions books. I have published official Iraqi censorship documents for the 1990s. Emile Zola, Agatha Christie, Shakespeare, Alexander Dumas, and tens of 19th-century Western writers were banned by Saddam Hussein. The list even included Learn English in Five Days. The whole of classical literature was banned by the Baathists.

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reason: In recent years the Middle Eastern satellite media has gained much prominence. How does the Internet compare to it, in your experience?

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Akel: When it comes to satellite television in the region, Al-Jazeera is controlled by the Muslim Brotherhood, while many of the rest are under Saudi control. Al-Arabiya, for example, is owned by the Al-Ibrahim, the brothers-in-law of the late King Fahd. Even the Lebanese Broadcasting Corporation cannot cross certain Saudi red lines. Yes, you can hear a liberal point of view here and there. But, to take one example, both Abdul Halim Khaddam, the former Syrian vice president who turned against the regime of President Bashar Assad, and Riad Turk, the Syrian dissident, have been under a Saudi ban from Al-Arabiya for the last month, because the Saudi leadership does not now want to annoy the Assad regime. For once, Al-Jazeera has also banned them, but for Qatari political reasons. Qatar is lobbying on behalf of the Syrian regime in Europe.

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