One Arab World

Comments
For future reference I edit comments that I repeat in posts under no specific guidance. I do not edit the original version but I do delete some that are unrelated to this sites aim as this is not intended to be a personal blog (and I have a lot of funny friends). My editing usually consists of nothing more than deleting unrelated portions and spell checking.

 
Why "Neo Pan Arabism"?

I have only used that term once and am currently debating its reuse. I defined "Pan Arabism" in the opening of the "My Argument for Pan-Arabism" post and argued that the importance of differentiating it from "Arab Nationalism" and "Arabism". The addition of the prefix "Neo" was an attempt to distance a new attempt at Pan Arabism from previous failed attempts. The only problem is that "Neo" tends to be to closely associated with Renaissance or "rebirth", and who wants to see a failure reborn.

We are scrutinizing little details like this because we understand the importance PR is to play if anything like this is to emerge. As I mentioned in a previous post the most powerful party's pushing Pan Arabism was the Bathist of Syria and Iraq and the Nasserites of Egypt and, currently, no one in their right mind would want to be associated with them.

Pan Arabism is the logical, elusive savior of the Arab People.

It is the severely tarnished ideal that never saw fruit. No Arab would touch it now but ANY, even semi-intelligent, Arab you explain Pan Arabism too will agree that it would be the only way we could rise out of our dilemma. Pan Arabism was never tried but was condemned because most of its previous advocates were thieves and criminals.

Why not a trading bloc (or even political union) like the EU?

That is exactly what I am advocating. Read the post "My Arab World", it's the one just before the one you commented on.

Wouldn't that be more acceptable to (for instance) the Copts?

Religion has nothing to do with ethnicity or the definition of the term "Arab". Some of the greatest Arabs in every sector (Sawiras and family in the private sector and Butros Khali former Secertary General of the UN, for example) are Coptic. Some of the Palestine's most dynamic defenders (Hanan Ashrawi, Edward Said, and George Habash) are, or were, Christian.

There are three factors which may assist to varying degrees in determining whether someone is considered Arab or not:

• Political: whether they live in a country which is a member of the Arab League (or, more vaguely, the Arab world); this definition covers more than 300 million people.

• Linguistic: whether their first language is Arabic; this definition covers more than 200 million people.

• Genealogical: whether they can trace their ancestry back to the original inhabitants of the Arabian Peninsula.

Pan Arabism is a secular ideal focused primarily on trade and self-determination.  

One of the first and most obvious constraints to growth a developing country faces, because it is just that…a developing country, is that it begins to lose its greatest minds. Since this is usually only from the elitist society, our society, and if your reading this then yours as well; the educated, the wealthy, and those with the means to travel, it is imperative that we try to reverse this trend ourselves. It only takes one great mind to start a Microsoft or GE of our generation that in turn can employee by the tens of thousands. It's a path ten times harder than the one taken by the usual path of our parents; "go to Saudi or the States, make a bunch of money and try to get back before you have kids."

Here is the paradox; Nobel Laureate Ahmed Zewail could have stayed in Egypt and won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for Egypt from Egypt, but had he stayed would he have won at all?

Had he stayed and managed the impossible feat of accomplishing that in Egypt there would have been a surge in foreign investment for a new design development sector in the Egyptian economy. In turn that would have opened up the more realistic chance of a future generation of Egyptian engineers and scientists to winning a Nobel Peace prize in chemistry, from Egypt. Moreover the pool of potentials would be exponentially larger because it would no longer be a monopoly held by the elite.

This doesn't happen because of the defeatist attitude we have inherited from our parents. That a person be called "stupid" (by the educated no less) for choosing to pursue a degree in his own country is an occurrence found no were else in the world. Until the next Ahmed Zewail comes out of Egypt we will have to be content with reverse engineering for the Chinese.

So to finally answer your statement we are coming back to Egypt as expatriates no more, full to the brim with ideas, determined to see them through. If the system doesn't work we'll fix it and if you call me an idiot or naïve, you'll just be a defeatist.

Karim Elsahy