Saudi Commentary on recent events
Saudi Commentary: Arab World Miserable, Backward, 'Hopeless'
GMP20120917614007 Riyadh Al-Riyad Online in Arabic 15 Sep 12
[Commentary by Raja al-Mutayri from the "Shujun" column: "A Worthless Movie Has Disgraced Us"]
There is no hope in the Arab World. Blood is being spilled everywhere, chronic anarchy prevails, ideological deformities are abound, and religious loathing boils over the hearth of sectarianism. It is a miserable world, due to the backwardness of which it has become the biggest market for arms dealers in the United States and Europe. In a single week, Yemen and Iraq shook to the sound of the bombings, massacres continued in Syria, the fools killed the US ambassador to Libya, and Egypt has not seen one calm day since the onset of the Arab Spring.
Every time, a series of tragedies bring us back to square one, where backwardness, fundamentalism, and violence with which no revolution or coup works, can be found. Having promisingly expected an alteration in the Arab mentality in the wake of the Spring and 11 years since the 9/1 bombings, here we are back at the beginning; raising Al-Qa'ida's black banners and chanting Bin Ladin's name in a state of mass hallucination that indicates that the decay of the Arab reality was not caused by corrupt political regimes but by an original flaw in the Arab mental structure and its set of values.
Who would have expected our reality to be turned upside down because of a worthless movie that does not deserve a pause, in a silly repeat of what we had done with Indian national Salman Rushdie and his novel "Satanic Verses" 20 years ago. We granted Rushdie global fame after he was an obscure non-entity. The Arabs have not learned after 20 years, for they remain in the same place, where the least provocation could turn them into irrational blind killing machines.
After twenty years, we say it in despair and defeat, just like actor Izzat al-Alayili had said at the end of the great Egyptian movie "Al-Tawq and Al-Iswirah" [the necklace and the bracelet]. Upon returning from a long absence abroad to his village in Al-Sa'id in Egypt, hoping to find the reality of his village had changed after all these years, he discovered that backwardness remained the same, set deep within both minds and the earth. He felt disappointed and ashamed and smashed everything around him, shouting and cursing this backwardness in one of the greatest scenes in the history of Egyptian cinema.
This movie tells the story of our disappointment, summarizes our tragedy, and presents an everlasting pessimist omen for the future of the Arab world. Just like Izzat al-Alayili, we were hoping to bear the fruits of the past 11 years in which we worked to refute any link between Islam and terrorism, only to discover that the Arab world was hopeless.
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