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| Author: | Mamoun Fandy, senior fellow, James A. Baker Institute for Public Policy, Rice University; president, Fandy & Associates |
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| Presider: | Barbara Slavin, senior diplomatic reporter, USA Today |
May 2, 2005
Council on Foreign Relations
Washington, DC
BARBARA SLAVIN: Ladies and gentlemen, welcome. Hope everybody has had a chance to get something to eat. I'm Barbara Slavin. I'm the diplomatic correspondent for USA Today, and I'm usually sitting down there and not up here, but I'll do my best.
I want to apologize at the beginning; Rick Little, one of our advertised speakers is not able to make it. Unfortunately, he is not feeling well, and so he will not be here today. But we have an excellent speaker, Dr. Mamoun Fandy, who is quite an expert on the subject of Islam and youth. He was born in Upper Egypt in the ancient Valley of the Kings, I discovered.
MAMOUN FANDY: Yes, that's right.
SLAVIN: Went to school at Assiut University in Upper Egypt, which, for those of you who know anything about Egypt, know was quite a hotbed of fundamentalism when he was going there. In fact, he tells me [inaudible]. [Laughter] He tells me that he actually went to school with some of the people who were later involved in the assassination of [former Egyptian President] Anwar Sadat [in 1981]. So if that doesn't give you a good perspective on Islamic fundamentalism and youth, I don't know what will.
Fortunately for us and for him, Dr. Fandy followed a different path, and he came to the United States in 1985 on a Fulbright scholarship. He's taught at Georgetown University, he's taught at the National Defense University, and he's currently a fellow at the Baker Institute for Public Policy at Rice University, as well as head of his own consulting firm.
Dr. Fandy spent last year at the U.S. Institute of Peace here in Washington, studying the crisis in Muslim education. And he focused on three countries— Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan— which together have produced much of the theoretical and physical fiber of al Qaeda. This year, he's looking at Arab media and its impact on regional attitudes.
He's written several books about the Muslim world and the United States and Muslim world, including Saudi Arabia and the Politics of Dissent and America and the Arab World after September 11th. And he's also publisher of— editor, rather, of the equivalent of Foreign Affairs in Arabic. So I can't think of anybody better suited to come here to the Council.
FANDY: Thank you.
SLAVIN: We're going to start with a little bit of a discussion here, and then we'll open it up to questions. I'll ask you all to please turn off your cell phones if you have not done so already. And, let's begin by talking a little about the topic that Dr. Fandy has just been exploring at the U.S. Institute of Peace, and that is education and the Muslim world. Is there something about education in Muslim countries, and Arab countries in particular, that is causing some of the problems that we see among young people, holding them back, and enticing them to participate in radical or even violent causes?
FANDY: First, I'd like to thank you, Barbara, for this nice introduction. I'd like to thank the Council for inviting me. It's an honor. I think— broadly speaking, I think I've been working throughout the last two years on what I call the software problem of the Muslim world. And most of us conceptualize the problems of the Muslim world as hardware problems. There's development and building infrastructures, and so on and so forth, and this is why, probably, the United States spends a lot of money on aid in countries like Egypt and other places to fix the hardware, the streets and the lights and everything.
But I think the crisis is one of a software problem— what is being uploaded in the minds of the young, whether it is through education programming or the media today. These are two elements that are creating a very bad software, if you will, that's responsible for the major problems of the Muslim world today; especially, as we know, that the majority of the population of the Muslim world today is very young, compared to very old leadership. I mean, we're looking at— [Egyptian] President [Hosni] Mubarak today is 76 years old, while his country— I mean, 70 percent of his countrymen are under 25 years of age. The cabinet is the same thing. I mean, if you look at the average age of the cabinet in Egypt or in Saudi Arabia, it's almost a dying generation that's ruling a huge youth bulge throughout that has different ideas about their own world, as well as about the very nature of the problem and how to solve it.
Broadly speaking, let me share with you a few things that probably characterize the— or put a layout for the major problems today for the Muslim world. I think the Muslim world suffers from five major gaps that are very serious, and two of them at least [are] related to the issue of identity and very much central to what we see in terms of the perception of Muslim youth, of the world around them. And that's— what these students learn in school is a vision of a glorious Islamic past compared to a contemptuous present that they live [in]. And it's one major gap, I think, that [inaudible] talked about early on, in a sort of— the relative deprivation gap, in a sense. But this gap is very central to the problems of the Muslim world today.
The second gap is between what I call the hardware of the nation-state and the software of the umma. I mean, everybody in the Muslim world now, especially the youth, are being educated to think they are part of an umma, of a wider nation of Islam that transcends their national boundaries. The Saudis feel they are part of the Islamic umma more than being Saudis or citizens of Saudi Arabia, or— Egyptians feel the same way. Pakistanis have these feelings, that the idea of citizenship is not as rooted as you might see it in the West. And so the hardware of the nation-state does not match the software of the umma that's dominating the minds of the young.
The third, probably, gap is that— you can see it from Lebanon to the occupied territories, to Egypt, to other places— is the gap between movements and states. You have Hezbollah more powerful than the Lebanese government. You have Hamas more powerful than the Palestinian Authority. You have Al-Ikhwan al-Muslimin, or the Muslim Brothers in Egypt, contesting the power of the state.
So these movements are really taking over the states, and that's creating serious problems. We have more or less city-states. I mean, Egypt is Cairo. I mean, that's what we say when we travel from the Valley of the Kings to Cairo, we say we're going to Misr, we're going to Egypt. And probably the government does not rule much south of the Khufu Pyramid. This is the hinterland where the Islamists lived throughout the ‘70s and ‘80s. And if you look at the list of those who assassinated Sadat in—
SLAVIN: ‘81.
FANDY: --1981, 90 percent of them came from Upper Egypt, from southern Egypt. Of course, upper is the lower part of the map. I mean, the country is upside down, if you will.
But— so we have— Damascus is Syria. The rest is really something that's just happening. The same thing for Pakistan. I mean, you're looking at Islamabad, and Peshawar is a different country altogether. So there's a huge disconnect between the hinterland and the city and the elite ruling. And within that context, we have these serious problems that I call software problems.
Let me share with you a column by a Saudi woman that she wrote recently for the Riyadh Dail on February 24th, 2005. She says, "My oldest son came home from school one day, a few years ago, and said to me, ‘Mommy, did you know that Osama bin Laden is a hero?' The day after 9/11, my younger son told me that his art teacher asked him to draw the planes as they hit the World Trade Center. We kept our children from watching these violent scenes on television at home, but apparently the teachers had a different point of view. For four years I suffered silently about all of this, and then the day came when terrorists attacked the Saudi Interior Ministry in Riyadh," that was very recently bombed. "As we were eating lunch, we saw the names and pictures of the attackers on TV. My son said that he recognized one of the men, [inaudible], who was a teacher at his school. This is the kind of man who is teaching my children. How can a mother send her children to school knowing that they might fall prey to a terrorist teacher?" Now—
SLAVIN: Maybe I'll stop you there—
FANDY: Sure.
SLAVIN: --and just ask, the Saudis have said repeatedly that they have changed their educational system. This is something that was much pointed out after September 11th. They claim to have changed the curriculum and so on. But from the sound of it, this really hasn't happened. Is there any— has there been real change in the textbooks in Saudi Arabia? Have they tried to vet the teachers and weed out people like this particular teacher?
FANDY: Well, I think the problem is not really fixing one verse in a textbook. Yes, I think the Saudis changed many of the textbooks, especially the primary and high school levels, and taken out some elements that are offensive to non-Muslims, to Jews and Christians, and others. Now the problem is, as I saw it, as I was working on the issue last year, is the— that the concept of education is a different concept altogether. You cannot have— the best curriculum in the world, if you teach it in Egypt or Saudi Arabia today or in Pakistan, you have the cadre of teachers out doing their own thing. They're teaching the children their own thing.
The people who are running the second tier of the education ministries throughout are these basic people, who grew up in the ‘70s and ‘80s and ‘90s, under the tremendous influence of the dominant discourse of Islamism and fundamentalism. And they have an audience out there. Sometimes parents are sending their kids with the expectation that they learn religion. So you can have— I mean, the battle for these nations today, for the heart and soul of these nations, is being fought on the floor of the classroom. Teachers are circumventing the whole educational process because these are the only men who went to the schools of education in Egypt. I mean, the basic program of the fundamentalists— and that was very obvious in the case of Tunisia, actually.
When Tunisia had its conflict with Ennahdha [Islamist opposition party] in the ‘80s, the basic division— I mean the Ennahdha people— [inaudible] and others, said, "What we want is to really control the Ministry of Education. We will let [Tunisian President Zine al-Abidine] Ben Ali do whatever he does, but we need the Ministry of Education." And in most countries, that was their ideology: take over of the Ministry of Education, take over the curricula, take over training of teachers. And all of a sudden, the whole software of the nation is rewired.
So in a sense, it is not enough to change— it's good PR [public relations] to say we changed these few pages in a textbook. I mean, it's bad software, it's pirated software written by the Islamists. And it's— that conflict also goes back even to the ‘30s in places like Egypt. The story of education in Egypt starts out with a basic conflict between the Sorbonne-educated [literary scholar] Taha Hussein, who came to Egypt, wanted to have a vision, a fantastic vision, for modern Egypt that's part of Europe rather than part of the East. And in it, in his book, you know, the— his book, Mustaqbal al-Thaqafa fi Misr, The Future of Education in Egypt, he said very clearly something very interesting today— that's very relevant today, that economic jihad is the way for the Arab and the Muslim world, and the basic [building] block of an economic jihad is to teach our young the same way the Europeans and the Americans teach their young.
Now most interestingly, that he's No. 2 under Taha Hussein, was none other than Said Qutub, the basic fundamentalist person who turned the whole Muslim Brotherhood toward violence. This is a man— I mean, it was a vision— a fight between two different visions, between Taha Hussein's vision for Egypt and Said Qutub's vision of Egypt. Unfortunately, from 1930's till today, I can assure you that Said Qutub's vision for education won over that of Taha Hussein. So it's really a very sad story.
SLAVIN: So the problem, you say, is with the teachers and the mentality of the teachers. What, if anything, are these governments doing about trying to address this software problem, trying to retrain the teachers in these systems? Or is it something that's simply going to have to wait for a new generation of teachers to flow into the system?
Also, you were talking about deficits, and knowledge deficit, obviously, is a huge one; the lack of attention to science, to critical thinking and so on, the method that is used in instruction. What, if anything, can be done about these sorts of rote learning and so on in order to stimulate the young people?
FANDY: Well, that's the issue of, how do you really overhaul the whole system again? I remember— I can reflect on my personal experience. I came here to the United States as [a] Fulbright [scholar], and I felt, you know, whatever I learned in Egypt was not really relevant to what I'm studying here in the United States. I mean, you have to really rework the whole thing. The idea of critical thinking, the idea of writing a paper that's your idea instead of repeating other people's idea or rote memorization that you mentioned.
This is the question, but this is related to a major problem that's really basically political. All these systems do not have a merit system that rewards critical thinking. I mean, these systems work on family networks, and your promotion within the system is about connections. And going to school is getting the appearance of the right degrees, but then joining a government position or something like that. It depends on who you are related to, with an ideology of family-ism and tribalism, in a sense. You can look at any of [the] Arab governments today. You can identify very clearly a family network, or four or five families running the show.
So, if education does not take you in a different place, if it is not a source of upward mobility, then it lost its value. You do the things that will allow you to be hired as a civil servant, but with no real position. So in a sense, there is no incentive for changing the educational system. The way the system— these governments are built, the states are founded, are based on something other than meritocracy.
SLAVIN: Let me ask a political question. The Bush administration is promoting democracy very heavily as a panacea, it seems, for all the problems in the Middle East. Obviously, these countries by and large have authoritarian regimes. If they are based, as you point out, on tribal ties and family ties rather than on merit, would changing the system, the political system at the top, get at the root of the problem? Or would you simply have elections, which would choose people who are members of these families and groups and would continue to reward each other?
FANDY: Well, I mean, really sort of— the question of democracy or the question of appearance of democracy— we have two cases to look at. I mean, we have Tunisia and Egypt. I mean, President Ben Ali of Tunisia went into multi-party elections three years ago and before. I witnessed one of them. I was in Tunis. Then we have President Mubarak saying he is going to allow multi-party elections in Egypt.
But the results, we all know. I mean, Ben Ali won the election with 97 percent. So if you want to promote democracy, first of all you should not accept PR lines to substitute for real things that are taking place. I mean, if a place like Egypt needs to be democratic or allow for multi-party elections or contestation at the top, you have, first of all, to undo the whole apparatus of repression. Again, I will take you back to the notion of the software. There is a software of fear that's dominating people's heads. Nobody would believe that, indeed, their vote would count.
SLAVIN: Yeah.
FANDY: Nobody would believe that these elections will not be rigged. Nobody would believe that they would not be taken to prison if they voted against the president. So basically you need to undo this whole apparatus of fear. You need to allow free air time on the media for everybody.
I think— I do not want to undermine the whole— the meaning of Mubarak's statement. I think it is very meaningful in a cultural sense. This is the first time in the history of Egypt that the pharaoh, who is at the top of the political pyramid, invites somebody else even to think of contesting being seated next to him. So it's a big cultural revolution, and probably there are unintended consequences for that. But you cannot really promote democracy by just sloganeering. I mean—
SLAVIN: Let me go back to my original question, though. Do these countries need to have democratic government in order to change the mindset of the young people? I mean, we look at Asia— the comparison's always made between the Middle East and East Asia. Of course, there they didn't have the oil resources and they had to do something with the brain power of the young people, but they had authoritarian regimes and still have managed to progress economically at a much faster pace and to have more individual freedom perhaps than a lot of people in the Middle East. So is that the issue, is it the authoritarian culture? Is it something in the religion?
FANDY: I think it's a combination of both in a sense of one— one has to be very clear about also not wanting to change the facts on the ground. I mean, if you want to promote democracy in Saudi Arabia, you cannot bring other people out of the Saudis and change them all together. I mean, we have to accept that this is a tribal society that's based on family ties. The idea is for democracy in my mind, democracy means one simple thing: How do you manage differences within society? How do you peacefully manage different interests of different groups peacefully and represent them? It's— so we, I cannot call for changing tribal mindsets—
SLAVIN: Sure.
FANDY: It—
SLAVIN: Going back to the—
FANDY: I accept it at the ground.
SLAVIN: Going back to the original subject, which is Islam and young people.
FANDY: Yes.
SLAVIN: Given the kind of education they're getting, given the lack of skills they have for the modern world, how do you address this issue within the context of these kinds of regimes?
FANDY: Well let me just try to say a few things about Islam and the— first of all, if we look at the [inaudible] Islamists or Egyptian Islamists, again there are mirror images of the regime, in the same way that— regimes are family-based, also the Islamic movement is family-based. You have to only look at the— what happened the other day in Cairo, there were two explosions that happened in Al-Azhar and one towards Saida. Two explosions: one, a kid blew himself up and his sister; and another family member of her's also was shooting out at tourists in that location, one in [inaudible] and one in [inaudible]. So these two operations conducted in the same day by family members— the two young women and the young man— committed one more or less suicide operation and the other were shooting with guns, but this is one family. If you look at most of the Islamic movement in Egypt, Buddhism and others, these are related networks of families, so Islam is in itself— have— it's tribalism.
SLAVIN: Indeed.
FANDY: I mean, we cannot really just look at Islam as a super structure and do not look at the structural underpinnings. What is under Islam? It's really tribal competition that's fought out in the realm of religion. Now, is the issue of religion hindering democracy? Yes, indeed. I mean, I think it would be the same [inaudible] to say that the current interpretation of Islamic text today are conducive to democratic values and democratic improvements. The current interpretations in the tremendous hundreds [inaudible] to democratic norms and values.
Now, the youth are being educated [with] these very same values, and they are inoculated in them, drilled in them, they were not allowed to think critically for themselves. So the political will, it is not really a question of just forming this. There has to be a political will to share power and that would reflect itself on education, on media, on how people's interests are represented throughout this society.
SLAVIN: How do we see— obviously, this system is creating enormous frustration among young people because their heads are being filled with these ideas and they come out of these schools and they can't get good jobs, they don't really have much of a future, and of course, one would assume that is also pushing them toward violence and toward terrorism. Do we see those as beginnings of Islamic groups and young people— Islamists, who are pushing for other sorts of reforms in society?
You mentioned Hamas, you mentioned Hezbollah, there is obviously a movement for some sort of broadening of political power because they see it in their interest. We have the example of Iran, where the revolution was made by Islamists and also people who thought they were getting a democracy. So, is it quite that bleak, or is there some hope that perhaps, not thanks to President Bush, but thanks to other things that are going on in the region, that something constructive can be made of these principles?
FANDY: Well, I think one can put together a hopeful scenario, as far as movement toward democracy in the Middle East and that they come from two places: Lebanon and Iraq. I mean, most of the people who were filling the streets of Beirut after the assassination of [former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik] Hariri were really young and these— I wrote a column in Arabic about that— between you know the Gucci world and the [inaudible] world. You know, I mean, these are two competing visions for Lebanon: the young and modern, but mainly also Christian in many ways, and the [inaudible] crowd, and these were two demonstrations that were very vivid after the assassination of Hariri.
But you can see there's something taking place, in a place like Lebanon, that the apparatus of oppression is being undone by the Syrian withdrawal, because [of] something— the amazing success of Iraqi elections. These are people who were more or less suicide voters. I mean, these people went to go to the ballot box knowing that they could be killed along the way. I think that at least empowered or gave an idea to the left— I mean, the media played a great deal of, an amazing role in exploiting that image, especially of Lebanon, to the rest of the Arab world.
I mean, if you watch LBC [Lebanese Broadcasting Corporation] Television or Future TV, in particular in Lebanon, these people did [their coverage] more or less like reality TV. The cameras were there on the main square and broadcasting to the Arab world what is taking place on the main square in Beirut. And that was, it has an amazing impact and created general nervousness to the point that the territorial regimes in the region wanted to make sure that the Lebanese democratic experiment failed.
In the same way, there are regional players [who] want to make sure that also Iraq remains plagued in violence and continued to be really a failed model rather than a shining model. I mean, there's a fight between the reality of the fight in Iraq today. It's a fight between George Bush and the dictatorial regime. I mean, we know for a fact that the Iraqi army was defeated completely and wiped out by the American army and there was no resistance after that. But later on, the resistance gathered and they gathered not because of Iraqi resources, but because of the resources of the neighbor, and we've seen the Iraqi government officials and newspapers in Iraq tell us that Jordan is involved, Syria is involved, and other—
SLAVIN: We're getting—
FANDY: --countries are—
SLAVIN: We're getting a little—
FANDY: --we are getting far away.
SLAVIN: Did I say—
FANDY: Yeah.
SLAVIN: We want to move it back to the question of young people and Islam and what their future can be and what if anything, the outside world can do to help. I mean, the picture that you're painting is one in which people are largely powerless and because of that, are very susceptible to influences which are not terribly hopeful or helpful for us. So I think I'll perhaps open this up now to others in the audience who might want to ask about that in particular.
FANDY: Sure.
SLAVIN: And what we can do to break the cycle. Ariel Cohen: calling you first and if you could wait for a microphone and introduce yourself and your affiliation.
QUESTIONER: Thank you, Dr. Fandy.
FANDY: Thank you.
QUESTIONER: Ariel Cohen, the Heritage Foundation. [Inaudible] of the research recently to prepare for [a] presentation on the coverage of the Arab-Israeli conflict on the Arab media, and I was, having known these things for awhile, but I was shocked at what, to look at, for example, cartoons and caricatures in the Arab media that are taken wholesale from Der Stuermer and the Nazi press. And my question is, you painted a very bleak picture of the education system. Is there any hope, for example, either in the media or in the pop culture or high culture, anything that is outside of the classroom or university auditorium, but that is still bringing the images of the world, or a discourse that is different from either Islamic discourse or [former Egyptian President Gamel Abdel] Nasserite socialist discourse, and is pluralistic and more liberal and more hopeful and more tolerant for the age group we're discussing here? Thank you.
FANDY: I think, I mean, the question of media is huge, but let me just try to just provide broad statements.
One, what we're looking at in the Arab media today is the trajectory of [inaudible] that was basically the first radio that was Pan Arab— that's in the ‘50's up to the ‘60's. [Inaudible] was more or less, and have nationalism was defeated completely [in] ‘67, but then we have the rise of counter-Nasser [inaudible] was fighting the Saudis and the monarchical system. After [inaudible] was defeated, we had the rise of Islamic media, if you would. In the case of Saudi dominance of Arab media: by 1990, we have the difference between Saudi Arabia and Qatar, and then we have the Saudi media verses Qatar media, and you look at all media verses [inaudible] media, if you want, on an economic level.
So in a sense, these are all political issues. The Arab media is not, it is not very much similar to western media. I mean, there is such promos about Al Jazeera and Al Arabiya, they will tell you these are the CNN and BBC of the Arab world. Of course, those two make this point, forget there is a major difference, even if we agree that Qatar, the Qatar government gives the money toward Al Jazeera, but there is some basic difference between, of course, the BBC and Al Jazeera.
One, this is a slight difference: one is an old Westminster democracy that sponsors the BBC, and one that's a very small dictatorship in the Gulf that sponsors Al Jazeera that tells us nothing about what's going on in Saudi. And we cannot really sort of be suckers for this kind of PR issues.
Now in the Arab Israeli— there's something very interesting that happened in Lebanon, in particular. In Lebanon, for 40 days and I watched it very carefully, for 40 days throughout the, after the Hariri assassination afterwards, you look at the [inaudible], at LBC a future of another side, even in the end— there [may] be various networks, there was no mention of the Palestinian issue or the Iraq issue or America or Israel with them. And that tells you when there is a very big local story, Arab media can let go of these fake stories that are used to justify local policy failings.
So when there is an opening and there's a big local [story], if you can cover local stories, well, then all of a sudden, Israel and America just more or less disappear from the scene, they are irrelevant. But if you do not have a big story, and you don't want people to talk about the rise of the cost of living, the issues of food shortage, the issues of unemployment, and the many youth who are not employed, then America and Israel become the scapegoat, this is the main story you cover, the pan-Arab story, it's really the whole world. Every miserable condition in the Muslim world is due to two major factors: Israel and the United States. And that's it. And everybody else is absolved of any responsibility.
SLAVIN: Mr. Fandy, what is the unemployment rate now among young people in the Arab world?
FANDY: It depends on various counties, differs basically. I mean, if I know, in Egypt, today, it reaches up to 20 percent, inside the [inaudible], it's around 15 percent, in Pakistan, it's huge. So it's basically, also it's not unemployment, but also underemployment and very low-paying jobs, and then there are people today in Egypt who make about, at best, $200 a month. How could you live on $200 a month? Of course, you create moonlighting and other jobs and you get involved with networks and money laundering, to others forms of illegal ways of getting money. So these are very disconcerting problems, and unless we address them at the root cause of this, we have a problem.
The Bush administration still today is not addressing some of these issues. You cannot have a Middle East Partnership [Initiative] office in Tunisia to promote democracy. Everybody knows what Tunisia is, you know, I mean, it's an embarrassment to say your main office for North Africa to promote democracy is in the [inaudible] dictatorship in that neighborhood. What kind of message are you sending?
SLAVIN: Yeah. Yeah. Let's see. Henry Price.
QUESTIONER: I'm a retired Foreign Service [officer] also. When I was the vice counsel in Egypt in the mid ‘60's, I used to travel around villages in the Delta, and I would ask people what did the Nasser revolution of 1952 mean to you? Inevitably, they would say, "Education for the children." Twenty-five years later, education became a burden because, in order to get into the university, you had to pay extra fees for tuition, and if you succeeded in getting into the university, it was so overcrowded that you never got an education. So I'm suggesting that there's another gap, and that is the astute [inaudible] gap that Egypt just simply doesn't have the cadre of knowledgeable people in order to deal with the modern world. But I want to ask a different question. That was a comment. [Laughter]
Iran, when Arab youth around the country were demonstrating against the excesses of the Israeli government and the invasion of Iraq by the American government, demonstrating when they were permitted to, Iranian youth were passive about Israel and very positive about the United States. I asked an Iranian, I asked Iranians, "Why was that so?" They said the youth hate their government so much, that anything the government is against, they are for. Now, does that suggest that maybe Egyptian and other Arab youth don't hate their government, that they're willing to go along with their message against, for the United States? What does that tell us about the attitude of Egyptian and other youth in the world?
FANDY: Well, I would probably, on Iran I would be able to— [I've] just come back from Iran and I cannot claim expertise on Iran, but I could tell you something about the Arab world. One, you have to understand that education has started out with Nasser regime until probably today, has only one purpose, and that is nation-building and mobilization purpose. You are creating individuals who would support the regime. That was the main revolution; Nasser wanted to create the revolutionary individual in Egypt, so the whole purpose of the educational system was not to provide expertise and not to provide young men and women to go on the marketplace and fix things. The education and the classroom was basically a place to inoculate young men to believe that Nasser is their savior. It's a hero and hero-worship approach to education. And it continues until today, that it is in Saudi Arabia as well as in Egypt, and let alone [inaudible] and Jordan and everywhere else. I think Jordan is maybe a better case, but the basic purpose of education is mobilization, the basic purpose of media is also is to deflect issues away from the regime.
If you really study even the language, I mean, that's the result of the educational system in places like Egypt. If you study very carefully the daily language of Egyptians, you will realize how serious this problem is. While we say here, probably, in the United States and other places, "I missed the train," that's a basic sentence. If you ask an Egyptian to say it in Arabic, they say, "The train missed me." [Laughter]
So, in a sense, there is no accountability within the very way of talking about the world. And you look at almost every sentence today, in the daily spoken Arabic, it absolves the individual of any responsibility. I was, it is not, "I was missed by the train," it's not a passive voice by the way. I mean, there's some linguists who debate with me on that, saying "Well, but other languages have that." This is not a passive voice form. It is a very peculiar form of Arabic that results within the context of fear and the context of lack of accountability and responsibility. It's not only "I missed— the train missed me, the plane missed me, the fire burned me," it is, "I'm not involved in anything." It's a passive individual that's being created.
I mean, the problem is really deeper than what we think, although many of what's here think that I painted a bleak picture, there is yet a bleaker picture, if you really come with the actual evidence, looking at the discords and the language. But very few people would have the time even to listen to this kind of more or less academic, archaic discussions about how do Egyptians speak and describe their world.
SLAVIN: You remind me, my husband and I were correspondents in Egypt 20 years ago, and my husband was then with the Los Angeles Times. And I— you remind me of something he said. There were two theories then about Egypt. There was apocalypse-now and muddles-through, and he had a third, which he thought was the most likely, which was that Egypt would muddle through the apocalypse. [Laughter] But anyway, I'll say just a word about Iran, and then I'll get to the rest of your questions.
I think Iran is a very different society. It's a much more pluralistic society. It's been through a revolution that was truly a popular revolution. It did not turn out the way they'd hoped, but in the Arab world, we have coups; we don't have revolutions, as you know. So, there is a history of participation and empowerment among the young people that goes back some time.
I compare Iran now to the Soviet Union in the ‘70s and the ‘80s. It is ripe for change. The young people are very alienated from the regime. And I think there will be change in Iran, one way or the other. In the next five or ten years, we'll see some sort of change. Whether it comes through an Ayatollah [Mikhail] Gorbachev or some other way, we'll have to see, but it is ripe for change.
I'm not sure the same is true in the same constructive way in the Arab world. And what I worry about is the nihilism of these young people and the passivity and the conspiracy theories. As you say, it's always someone else who has done this to us, and it seems like these young people are still living out the historical grudge of the loss of Arab power centuries ago. As you point out, their heads are being filled with visions of the grandeur of the Arab empires, and then they face the reality of today, and it's quite [inaudible]. The gentleman with the red tie.
QUESTIONER: Dick Huber from News Foundation. The accountability/responsibility issue, which both of you now have touched on— there seems to be some possibility that Hamas is evolving into a political force in the Palestinian state. Will that lead to some acceptance of responsibility on their part, or are they going to continue to duck and blame others, including their own countrymen, for failures?
FANDY: Hamas has followed kind of inclusion in the political process, and even the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. And these are part of probably what I would consider strategies for diffusion of this very explosive bomb, but only as a strategy. But I think, if we want to think long term, I mean, you have to really think hard as to how this inclusion ought to take place; under what conditions these groups can participate in political society, what other things that they should give up before joining in.
I mean, to talk about people who want to die to build an Islamic state in Egypt, like the Muslim Brotherhood, if they join and they win, we're looking at a country that has 12 [percent] to 15 percent of non-Muslims, that's the [inaudible] population. And 12 [percent] to 15 percent of 72 million people, that's double the population of Jordan. So if we do not really take that into account, what do we do with minorities throughout the Arab and Muslim world?
We have not talked about minorities and the impact of minorities throughout, and this is— we're looking at the mosaic of minorities throughout. I mean, use Lebanon as a case. I mean, you have— how does Hezbollah feel about— about non-Muslims in Lebanon? I think it would be a very useful step to actually diffuse this time bomb and to undermine the whole discourse of violence and discourse of suicide bombers and the martyrs and the shahids and so on and so forth. That's a good first step. But I think one has to go into it very cognizant that this thing also can go haywire. That you have to be very careful in terms of what is the trajectory of that process with the inclusion and exclusion of the Islamists from the political process?
SLAVIN: Let's see, all the way in the back. The gentleman.
QUESTIONER: Me?
SLAVIN: Yeah, you.
QUESTIONER: Hi. I have a question regarding the topic here—
FANDY: Sure.
SLAVIN: Could you identify yourself, please?
QUESTIONER: I'm sorry. I'm Martin McMahon, an international lawyer. I think I coached your son in Little League baseball.
SLAVIN: Oh my God, you did. [Laughter] That's Washington for you. [Laughter]
QUESTIONER: Yeah.
SLAVIN: Hi. I don't recognize you without your little cap. [Laughter]
QUESTIONER: Yeah, well, I got sunburned on the Mall yesterday, but— [laughter] but I wanted to ask, Mr. Fandy, what would you do to blunt the efforts of the— and I may be mispronouncing this— the Tablighi Jamaat movement, otherwise known as the Preaching Party? They are targeting the disillusioned youth in Europe and doing a hell of a job. And they suggest to the kids, you know, "Clean up your act with Islamic fundamentalism." How do you take on that?
FANDY: Well, this is a tough question, but let me back up. I'm not sure we— you're an international lawyer for— are you representing anybody in particular?
QUESTIONER: No [inaudible].
FANDY: Good, OK. That's exactly what I want. [Laughter] I mean, that's the first step, is a conversation with Sheikh [inaudible] to— the first step to fix that— [inaudible] is the— basically, that would be the equivalent of Rupert Murdoch of Arab television, who has the ART [Arab radio and television network] group, yes? You represent the ART group, so correct me whenever I'm wrong. [Laughter] The ART group has a bouquet of channels. Two of them are extremely dangerous for you, and that's Al-Safwa and Al-Majd. And these are very much religious channels. What you have now is media cameras station, a fad taking over throughout the Arab world because of the rise of satellite television and sometimes by design, and sometimes by just default, religious programmings take over. And religious programming of the sort that contribute to writing that horrible software that talks about matryrs and suicide bombers and so on.
I say that before, because you have now 716 satellite TV stations throughout the Arab world. And these satellite stations, many of them are news, like Al Jazeera, Al Arabiya, and others. And terribly, these people have enough content to put on the air. They have the Iraqi suicide bomber and so on and so forth. They can, actually that monster that has to be fed 24 hours, can get enough from the occupied territories and Iraq and so on.
The rest of the channels do not have that conflict, and therefore, they produce mostly a preacher on-air. It's somebody sitting like this preaching and also commenting about world affairs. So you look at the, bad version even of the 700 Club. [Laughter] That continuous, on-air, 24 hours, you change individuals. This is very cheap television for producers producing television, and very cheap television, a camera and a person talking.
But there is only one product that Arabs can sit and watch for awhile and that's somebody teaching them about their religion. And [inaudible] is contributing to that. So probably, I would like to have a conversation with Sheikh [inaudible]. OK, can we do something that's more or less, can we broadcast Discovery Channel maybe on both? Can we broadcast, say, may of the PBS documentaries here and maybe the Bush administration will help put money out and get you these programs for free?
Can we get many of the educational programs here in the United States and translate them? So, you have to look at 10 mega-tycoons with Arab media today and tell them this is a bad— cheap television is a bad idea and using all kinds of preachers, we're giving it an illegitimate— to just be on the air to say things, actually, my opinion, in respectable societies. A lot of these people can be taken to court and go to jail for— about other religious affiliations, other religious groups. I think if the Jews of the world sort of take up cases against Arab television, they would make a lot of money. Or if Christians would do the same, this is becoming the [inaudible], but there's a lot of money to be made by probably more domestic lawyers rather than international lawyers.
SLAVIN: I hope you're not representing this gentleman.
QUESTIONER: I'm sorry?
SLAVIN: Are you representing this gentleman?
FANDY: No, we have some good channels actually. Also, the movies and everything else, bringing old movies back, which is contributing to—
QUESTIONER: --fair and balanced. [Laughter]
SLAVIN: All right. This gentleman over here.
QUESTIONER: Yeah, I'm Al Millikan, affiliated with Washington Independent Writers. How much American and Hollywood-made film and television are young people exposed to? Does the serious, devoted Muslim youth think that the American Christians, Jews, and pagans that they see on the screen are people of the book that Abraham, Moses, Jesus, and Mohammad would approve of?
FANDY: I think that moments of violence, sort of charred atmospheres. I think sometimes these differences that we make in conferences and other things about Abrahamic religions and people of the book, these things are really sort of taken over by a different, a very emotional atmosphere. It's very difficult to sort of go into detail of explaining that the Jews and Christians are part of the [inaudible]. These are elaborate discussions that do not lend themselves to good guys-bad guys television.
I mean, the world is divided: good guys us, bad guys them, and that's it. So, you want to— these are for academic— higher academic institutions— you get them at the universities. But mass communication is really different—
SLAVIN: Can I ask, obviously with all these satellite channels, does that diminish the Egyptian dominance of areas like film? And as I recall, you could always be understood with an Egyptian accent throughout the Arab world, because everyone was watching Egyptian movies and soap operas.
FANDY: I mean, the trajectory of, as I said probably throughout— from 1954 to 1970, probably we can talk about dominance of Egyptian television. By the 1973 on, then we're looking at really Saudi [inaudible] television. And—
SLAVIN: They don't make very good movies there. [Laughter]
FANDY: They don't make very good movies in Saudi Arabia. But there's still, I think, old Egyptian movies are still re-circulating, but that's a good thing, actually. Some of the channels, a lot of the LBC and sometimes even Al Jazeera, get some documentaries, and I actually watched Frasier dubbed in Arabic on Dubai television. So, one channel that is decent in Dubai— is American entertainment, and they bought the rights to many of the good American shows and the youth also gravitate toward that. I mean, good shows sell everywhere, but these are not the youth that go toward [inaudible] and the Islamists. These are the youth who are part of the globalization and part of something other than the Islamic movement.
SLAVIN: The lady in the back, toward the back there.
QUESTIONER: [Inaudible] Turkish public television. Mr. Fandy, I would like to know your reason about the young Muslim population in Europe, where they are being educated by Western standards and they have access to everything that the Westerners have. Could you consider them as moderate Muslims or could you elaborate on what do you think?
FANDY: Well, I can tell you quite honestly I haven't studied that. The one thing, probably, I can say something about Muslims probably in France, this is something that I looked into, and in England, but even here in the United States, I did not concentrate on that.
But the one problem in these places, first of all, the junction between the education at home, especially first-generation immigrants, and what they get in school. We are looking also at young men and women who live in Paris, but they [are] still waiting for [inaudible] on their lives and how they conduct their lives, whether they date a Muslim girl or a non-Muslim girl from somebody living in [inaudible] in Egypt or living in south Indonesia or living in some corner that has not been touched by modernity or even Kandahar.
So if you get, you're living at a place of modernity but your are trying, in a time of Islam in a sense, but still you are getting your [inaudible] on your life and how you conduct your affairs from people who have no sense of that modern world, these are very troubled young men. And [French national] Zacarias Moussaoui [who pleaded guilty in April to conspiracy to commit terrorism] is an example of them. And if you listen to the conversation between Zacarias Moussaoui and his mother— you know, between a woman who is this very, like, a French Republican woman, versus her son who decided he was part of the umma. And this French Republic doesn't mean much to him or French citizenship.
I think the problem today for Western countries is the issues of Muslim youth thinking that they are sojourners rather than citizens. These are people— the debate here in the West ought to be about the issue of citizenship. Are you a part of the software of the umma or a part of the hardware of the French Republic and the American Republic or the British Kingdom? So, if you start conceptualizing yourself as a sojourner, you're a floating individual who does not have any rootedness in any society, and your American passport and British passport, a French passport— something that you facilitate your movement without any obligation— then you have a very serious, very serious problem. And I think many of French intellectuals today are very concerned about the issue of rootedness and citizenship for North African— the North African population. I'm not sure even your Turkish population in Germany is also rooted within the German party politics.
QUESTIONER: I'm [inaudible]. To what extent, if any, would an accord or an agreement in the Arab-Israeli conflict diffuse the issue as an inflammatory element in the thinking of, not only Arab, but Islamic youth throughout the Islamic world?
FANDY: I think this is the sort of, the big question, and there are two schools on that. And I have to be really serious about it. There are those who are in both divides of the Arab-Israeli [conflict], who tell you if you solve the Palestinian problem, then everything will be fantastic tomorrow, which is something that I do not subscribe to. There are those who say well, "The Palestinian issue is not important at all," and this is something that I personally do not subscribe to. I think the Arab-Israeli question, in addition to America and Israel, provided dictatorships with [inaudible]; would leave its amazing power to continue. [Inaudible] "No voice should be higher than that voice of war." There was not this slogan.
So the existence of that hot problem, first of all, affecting the amount of the defense spending of this country and how it relates to spending on education and other things that might ameliorate some of these problems of the youth. But the Palestinian— the Arab-Israeli conflict provides— was used by most dictatorial sides to justify their existence, to justify their failed policies at home, to absolve them of any responsibility.
And in that sense, solving the Palestine-Israeli problem, would certainly undermine— take a wild card from the hands of the political leaders. It's a problem that ought to be solved on its own right. We cannot be all so oblivious to the needs of the Palestinians to have their own state and their own rights and so on. Like [inaudible] citizens of the world, I think we have to be very sensitive in terms of what to solve first, and the order, the hierarchical order of issue, which one should go first and how to solve this. And second, are we able to solve it? We might have the desire to solve it, but maybe we don't have the means to solve it.
SLAVIN: I'm going to have to take just one more quick question, because we're already running over a little bit. So, last question. Yes, Chris.
QUESTIONER: [Inaudible] I'd like to thank you. This has been very, very thoughtful. I particularly liked your idea of the sojourners. But in the main, this has been a discourse on the conflict, if that's the right way to say it, between traditionalism, traditional states, traditional culture, and modernism. I am struck— I've spent most of my career in East Asia, particularly southeast Asia, and I'm struck by the fact that the economic jihad has been very successful out there, especially in Malaysia and Indonesia, secular states that have had very successful elections— democratic elections last year. I'm not sure that whatever lessons there are can be translated to the Middle East. But I do know that the Malaysians have had quiet relations with Israel for quite a while and they were very anxious to get into that part of Malaysia, obviously the business possibilities that exist. So, basically, my question is, are there any lessons that can be transferred from the economic jihad to the political and religious jihad?
FANDY: I think the issue, I think you're raising a very fundamental issue and that's the issue of [the] grafting of modernity in different societies and different social formations. And modernity was successful in more, in an Islamic context, where the Asian tradition and Islam mix, and there was the embeddedness of modernity within that was worked out, if you will. But modernity with sort of the Arab or Islamic context was not grafted well and did not take root. And neither, the why's of that, a really kind of long discourse [inaudible].
SLAVIN: --tribal culture, the problems created by oil?
FANDY: The curse of oil.
SLAVIN: --the curse of oil.
QUESTIONER: --the disconnect between Islam they've got out there and the Islamic [inaudible].
FANDY: That's correct. That's absolutely right, and that's what I'm saying, Islam and modernity are ideas. And they take root differently in different societies.
SLAVIN: Thank you all very much for coming and I want to thank our speaker, Dr. Fandy. [Applause]
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