The Arabs in the Wilderness
Nevertheless, this great ignorance, this philosophized heedlessness, and this disastrous intellectual setback call themselves, in our present time, “revolutionary and progressive.” They knock on the doors of Muslim Arabs and, to our astonishment, find among the Arab Muslim leaders those who open these doors wide - heedlessly and foolishly.
Today, the Arabs are lost in the wilderness. They are in the wilderness, with no Moses, no Aaron, and no Joshua - indeed, with no guide at all. They have forgotten Allah, and so Allah has forgotten them: (“Thus Our signs came to you, but you forgot them; and likewise, today you will be forgotten”) (20:126).
This situation cannot be met with silence; swift action is necessary. The first thing that must be pointed out is that the problem facing the Arabs today is not, as they think, the issue of Palestine - a land taken by the Jews with the help of Britain and America, with the consent of the Soviet Union and other countries, who displaced its people and established the state of Israel. The problem is far greater and more dangerous than that.
This significant, perilous problem lies in the fact that the current stage of human societal development on this planet has confronted the Arabs with a challenge they have never faced before in such a decisive manner. Palestine is merely the spot where the gauntlet of this challenge has been thrown.
The Arabs confronted this challenge with the wrong tools, mistaking it for the state of Israel. They went to war with it on May 15, 1948, and were defeated. They then began searching for the causes of their defeat, yet they did not reach the root of the problem. Their thinking led them to conclude that the cause of the defeat was the corruption of Arab rulers and their collusion with Western colonial powers that created and supported Israel in its war against the Arabs.
In response, they revolted against some of their rulers, removed them from positions of leadership, and brought in new leaders. They believed they had thus found the root of the problem. These new leaders also assumed that the problem lay with the state of Israel and the Western countries behind it - or, rather, they chose to believe that their real problem was with the Western powers that, after planting Israel in Arab lands, were using it as a military base against them.
Consequently, they confronted the West with hostility, as manifested in the nationalization of the Suez Canal. However, by doing so, they created a new problem without identifying the original one, which led to the October 29, 1956, aggression. In truth, they were defeated in this aggression, but they deluded themselves into thinking they had emerged victorious for one obvious reason: the conflict between the two global blocs halted the aggression before it achieved its objectives.
They mistook this halt for a defeat of the aggressors and a victory for themselves. Thus, they drifted even further from identifying the root of the problem and fell deeper into misguidance.
Then came the June 5, 1967, aggression, which inflicted upon them a humiliating defeat. We had hoped that these repeated, disgraceful defeats would lead the Arabs to the root of their problem.
However, the evidence suggests that Arab leadership is drifting further away each day from understanding the root of this problem. The decisions recently made at the summit held in Khartoum from August 29 to September 1 of this year are nothing but the latest proof of how misguided Arab leadership remains regarding the true nature of the issue.
