Islam and the Arab Awakening by Ramadan Tariq

Author:Ramadan, Tariq. [Ramadan, Tariq.]
Format: mobi

Culture and Meaning

Culture is an essential element. As people rise up across the Middle East and North Africa, the diversity of their cultures is not only the means but also the ultimate goal of their liberation and their freedom. Th ough imperialism was primarily political and economic, it was also cultural; it imposed ways of life, habits, perceptions, and values that rarely respected the societies under its domination, that seized control of minds, a true colonization of human intelligence. Globalization extends to culture, oft en leading, in the societies of the Global South, to self-dispossession. Genuine liberation, the march toward dignity and democracy, requires a “cultural uprising” in all dimensions of its popular, artistic, intellectual, and religious expressions. I have pointed to the impor- tance of culture and the arts in undertaking the task of reappropriation: 65 the tools of thought and tradition must be used to lend shape and substance to the sense of belonging that alone can guarantee the well-being of individuals. Such is the function of applied ethics. If there is no culture without religion, and no religion without culture, as suggested, and if, fi nally, culture is not religion, the issue must be explored; the complex questions of values, mean- ing, spirituality, tradition, and the arts—the factors that give form to history, memory, nations, and identities, that transmit well-being and freedom, or fail to—must be faced squarely. Arab and Muslim majority societies are riven by religious and cultural ten- sions that have at times torn them apart. Th e role of the religious reference is constantly being discussed; its relations with tradition and with Arabic—or other national languages—have triggered passionate debates and set ruling elites and intellectuals at loggerheads. Close examination and study of these experiences leads but to one sole conclusion: we are dealing with a complex, deeply rooted malaise. Its dimensions are manifold: cultural, religious, linguis- tic, and therefore, a fortiori, strongly identity-related. It cuts across all social sectors, all classes, and all trends of thought, from secularists to Islamists and from atheists to believers, observant or not. Th e attraction-repulsion complex

and attracted by the now-global Western culture, while the same force of attraction is rejected by the analytical, cultural, and ethical conscience and then experienced as self-dispossession, colonization, and on occasion, as the violence of cultural rape. 67 Th e aspirations and contradictions that have arisen must be acknowledged, as they can be enlisted as a driving force for liberation movement, as Fran ç ois Burgat reminds us, 68 or become obstacles that paralyze societies by trapping them in sterile confrontations that perpetuate the iden- tity crisis rather than solving it. Much has been written, quite justifi ably, about the new “Internet culture” of the young cyber-dissidents of Tunisia and Egypt, not to mention the rest of the Middle East and North Africa. Th eir mastery of the tools of communi- cation and their ability to express themselves have earned them praise. To the West, they conveyed the reassuring impression that they were speaking the same language as “we” were, that they shared “our” values and “our” hopes.

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