Amidst the challenges within the Arab world, the dilution of power at its periphery, and the dynamism of non-Arab projects unfolding in the region, Arab consciousness is living through a dichotomy.
On the one side, there is a mix of powerlessness and anger. The most palpable expression of this mix is amongst the millions who have suffered the direct consequences of geopolitical clashes and civil wars over the past decade and a half.
For these people, the present has become a difficult act of survival amidst their acute living conditions. And the misery will continue into the foreseeable future, for there are millions of children, primarily in the Levant, Sudan, and some parts of Arab periphery that are, and will continue to be, denied decent education and other basic services, and so will end up with limited skills and means to secure sustainable employment over the next ten to 15 years.
But powerlessness and anger go much farther in the Arab world. Tens of millions of Arabs are living under acute and persistent inflationary pressures that have eroded their living standards and have turned their lives into mere existence in a grinding machine where they have limited time and energy left for any meaningful personal development.
This is increasingly a global situation, and one that is being experienced these days not only in the Global South, but also in parts of the developed world. However, what exacerbates the situation in the Arab world is the fact that a significant majority of Arabs lack the social infrastructure that exists in other parts of the world. Whether in education, healthcare, or other key domains, many Arabs have been experiencing various forms of the degradation of the basic social services they receive.
Often the regress is absolute, when compared to what previous generations of Arabs, at least in large urban centres, used to receive, as well as relative, when compared to social services in other parts of the world, including in large parts of the Global South.
Politics exacerbate the situation, not only because of the challenges of representation and the situation of rights across most of the Arab world, but also because geopolitics have instilled a sense of powerlessness in the collective Arab consciousness that pervades even the Arab elites.
The latter are spared the grinding experience of the daily lives of the vast majority of the Arabs, and their economic prospects are generally much better than theirs. But their sense of belonging to their countries, and, for many, of being part of the Arab world, impress on them something of the general malaise that surrounds them.
Not surprisingly, many opt to leave, whether by directing the bulk of their savings abroad or by detaching themselves from the culture of their countries. There has been a notable Westernisation of many of the cultural and entertainment pursuits of the Arab elites, including a clear reduction in the knowledge and proper usage of Arabic.
This trend will likely continue into the future. The spread of foreign school systems, and not just foreign schools, has already created an educational caste system in the Arab world that it has not experienced for over a century. In this new system, a tiny elite receives an almost totally Western education anchored almost entirely on Western traditions and frames of reference with hardly any connections to the foundations and pillars of Arab culture, whether traditional or contemporary.
For the poor, attempts to leave their countries entail harrowing risks. Thousands of poor Arabs, with no chance not only of social mobility but also of even decent living standards in their own countries, take to the Mediterranean every year, risking their lives in the hope of reaching the lands of milk and honey on the northern shores. This signals a level of desperation that the vast majority of Arab countries have never previously known.
Moreover, Arabness itself is facing acute challenges. The word, its connotations, and the subtle and intangible ideas that surround the notion have become problematic in large parts of the world. Whether they are feelings of sympathy or of contempt, the sentiments that are stirred in different parts of the world by the idea of Arabness have become largely negative.
Often, as in some parts of Europe, there is the heritage of centuries of seeing the Arabs, or the “Saracens” or some other term, as the continent’s other, or over long periods of history as its enemy. However, even putting that aside, there has also been the accumulation over the past few decades of consistently looking at the Arab world and seeing threats and problems. In large parts of the West today, especially in Europe, the prevailing desire is to sever links to large swathes of the southern and eastern Mediterranean.
This creates an asymmetrical situation. Large parts of the Arab world need the West, while large parts of the West want to avoid the Arabs. This makes leverage in any situation far from balanced. But perhaps more importantly, this situation has created a brooding, some might say dangerous, emotional environment in which the two shores of the Mediterranean have been living for some time.
Yet, as mentioned at the beginning of this article, the Arab consciousness is living through a dichotomy, for there is also another vastly different emotional universe in the Arab world, which the next article in this series will present.
The writer is the author of Islamism: A History of Political Islam (2017) and Egypt on the Brink (2010).
* A version of this article appears in print in the 6 March, 2025 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly
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