The Arab World’s Search for Moral Authority

• March 8, 2015, 1:25 pm

Has the Arab intellectual been reduced to a bubblehead on some agenda-driven television channel saying exactly what is expected of him or her to say?

The number of published Arab authors and higher education degree holders must have grown exponentially in recent years as a result of the proliferation of well-funded universities throughout the Middle East, but the absence of originality in the realm of ideas is still endemic.

It cannot be that Arabs have collectively decided all at once to disown creativity; they are surely denied the needed platform required to break away from the sanctioned official narrative, the status quo of what is accepted and what is spurned.

But since when do ideas need a licence? It is rarely suggested that the intellectual is a not a passive entity, radical if needed, but always inquisitive and courageous. “His most important activity is action. Inaction is cowardice,” wrote Alan Lightman, summarizing the view offered by Ralph Waldo Emerson some 150 years ago.

The late professor Edward Said’s intellectual notions, however, were particularity dauntless as they were guided by the mission of advancing the cause of freedom and knowledge. He stood at a precarious divide where he was still a part of society, thus engaged and relevant, yet at the same time he was outside of it, preserving the right to be critical and sceptical. Some misinterpreted this as a sign of detachment and alienation, but that was far from the truth because a fine balance is actually required for an intellectual to serve his or her intended role:

“Intellectual representations are the activity itself, dependent on a kind of consciousness that is sceptical, engaged, unremittingly devote to rational investigation and moral judgement; and this puts the individual on record and on the line,” he wrote.

Such moral authorities are lacking these days, but this has not always been the case ..

– Excerpts from The Misrepresentations of the Intellectual: The Arab World’s Search for Moral Authority (forthcoming) – Ramzy Baroud, Gulf News