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Clearly, the West wrote a recipe for revolution. But the army-backed regimes that have seized power in many Arab countries since 1948 have not harnessed the revolution to constructive ends. They seethed in self-pity and plunged into irrational external misadventures rather than rational internal development. Admittedly, they faced huge obstacles. One of the major inhibitors of Arab progress remains Islam. As a religion, Islam goes on attracting millions of non-Arabs, from Nigeria to Pakistan and the Philippines. It is clear, reassuring, tolerant; even animists can profess it without giving up their assorted spooks. Here and there, it has been able to change with the times. To almost all Arabs, though, Islam is still God's perfect society—and the problem is how to respond to the upsetting fact that Western technological society is evidently a lot more effective. Arnold Toynbee points out that Moslem Turkey solved the dilemma by separating church and state, jettisoning Islamic law in secular matters, adopting Swiss and Italian legal codes, switching from Arab to Latin script, and inspiring Turks to enter commerce against Islamic tradition. But unlike the Turks, who still retain much of the brash confidence of Ottoman rulers, Arabs are unable to shed Islam's heavy hand. Arab culture has no positive secular alternative to religion. As Harvard Divinity School's Wilfred Cantwell Smith puts it: "The Arab world has had no Tom Paine or Voltaire." Besides, the Judeo-Christian tradition enables man, in the freedom of his will, to contend with nature, even with God. The notion of such creative tension is alien and frightening to Islam.
The Need for Ego
Along with the Moslem religion, centuries of foreign occupation have left the mass of Arabs with scant sense of nationhood, cooperation or civic responsibility. The masses today are a political factor, but they are not politically active in the usual sense. Says Nadav Safran, Harvard professor of government: "The relationship can be compared to a circus. The people are the audience and the government is the performer. The audience expresses its approval or disapproval, and the performers respond to the cheering or the booing. But neither feels that the audience enjoys any right to determine what acts should be performed, or in what order, or how." The Arab's loyalty is to himself, his family, his tribe. Long isolation has stunted Arab mechanical skills, and so have traditional social prejudices. The manual worker is still looked down on; every self-respecting Arab always had some underling to take care of his camel, and many Arab mechanics feel that they are lowering themselves by taking care of machines. It is true that Egyptian engineers have done an excellent job running the Suez Canal and the Lebanese have developed some highly mechanized agriculture. Yet these are the exceptions. Basically, the Arab yearns for Western technology, but does not comprehend or want the Western ethos that makes the technology possible.