A Saudi-funded institute with a remit to engineer a "renaissance in Arab thought" held its first conference in Cairo this week. Amira Howeidy attended It could have been an emergency Arab summit, what with the prime ministers, foreign ministers, Saudi princes, parliamentary speakers, business tycoons, politicians, writers, TV luminaries, dozens of journalists and camera crews that were present. Even the Arab League's secretary-general was there. Arab national security, as the Arab world's leaders are keen to remind us, is under threat. America wants to launch a war on Iraq. Israel is moving beyond the wanton killing of Palestinians towards activating plans to transfer the population of the occupied territories. Terrorist acts targeting the Western presence in Jordan, Kuwait and Yemen are sending unequivocal messages. Libya even withdrew from the Arab League, albeit briefly, last week. But this was not the convening of a much vaunted Arab summit. The impressive gathering that assembled in Cairo this week for three days of seminars and discussions had come as guests of the "First Arab Thought Conference", organised by the Arab Thought Institute, brainchild of Saudi Prince Khaled Al-Faisal, son of the late Saudi monarch King Faisal. The institute, formed a year ago at the prince's initiative, is an NGO registered in Lebanon though temporarily based in Saudi Arabia. Its money-and-thought philosophy has been translated into an organisational structure with a membership drawn from among intellectuals and the super-rich, which might seem a strange meeting of bed-fellows. "Thought", though, is a broad, and it must be said, exhausted term in contemporary Arab culture. And if there is consensus that the nation is suffering from "a crisis" in "thought", this does not mean there is any consensus on quite what can be defined as "Arab thought", despite an endless, ongoing, decades-old debate. So is throwing money at the problem going to lead to the much- desired renaissance? And precisely how, critics ask, is the Arab Thought Institute going to achieve its lofty aims? The institute's members clearly believe that the confluence of money, for which read power, and thought, is at least a possible answer. "Let's be practical," Ahmed Fathi Amer, member of the institute's consultative committee, told Al-Ahram Weekly, "how can thought be funded without capital?" Yet despite an impressive turnout from among the Arab nation's "men of thought" -- they could be counted in their hundreds -- as many respected Arab scholars and independent intellectuals stayed at home. And judging by some of the conference's three-day sessions their absence might well have been justified. The discrepancy between the institute's ambitious objective -- "to contribute to the development of the nation and rise to its expectations, acting as a channel for constructive dialogue to serve its higher interests" in the words of Prince Khaled -- and what actually took place in some of the sessions was at times glaring. Take the "Shura and Democracy: a contemporary vision" session, the participants at which included Egypt's Parliamentary Speaker Fathi Surour, Sudan's former Prime Minister Al- Sadek Al-Mahdi, Saudi Arabia's Shura Council President Saleh Ben Hamid, Advisor to the King of Morocco Abbas El-Garari and Lebanon's Parliamentary Speaker Nabih Berri. All five men were articulate, some choosing to highlight the overlap between shura and democracy, others choosing to call for the implementation of one or the other. All agreed in their condemnation of the post-11 September backlash and the negative stereotyping in which the West has indulged when it comes to Muslims and Arabs. All agreed on the dubious nature of the West's "real" intentions when "it demands that we apply democracy". "Their intentions," Surour stated baldly, "are bad." All of which was predictable enough, and the session might have passed quietly if not for the fiery words of Abdel-Salam Al- Magali, Jordan's former prime minister, who described "all Arab parliaments" as mere "décor". The West doesn't attack us simply because we don't apply democracy, he told the speakers, "but because of what our regimes have produced over the past two decades... It's time for a serious dialogue on this matter and not academic lectures like the one we're having now." For three days the high-profile figures continued their discussions on such topics as "Towards a fair relationship between the Arabs and the West"; "What if the peace option fails?"; "Arab economy and reasons for failure"; "Monotheistic religions and Arab identity"; The media and Arab problems"; "Women's contribution to Arab thought," and if nothing was ever resolved, many were keen to point up the positive elements in the conference. Al-Tayeb Saleh, leading Sudanese novelist and participant at the conference, believes that given the extent of the institute's financial backing "it is capable of making a contribution." "We must not judge from this first conference," he told the Weekly. "There are numerous Arab and Islamic institutes, but this one is different because there's a person [Prince Khaled] who is really enthusiastic about reform." And it is reform, or the lack thereof, that is the crux of the matter, as several speakers argued during the sessions. So is spending huge sums of money on conferences such as this ever really going to have an impact; is it going to promote the desired "renaissance" while the Arab world suffers from its current lack of democracy? Saleh conceded the problems "but that doesn't mean we shouldn't try to fix anything because we can't fix everything. This institute and others could create an environment that will widen the margin for freedom and democratic thought." This is the second Saudi initiative since the Arab Summit in Beirut last March. Although this one is not political, its connotations were felt in the atmosphere that focused, intentionally or not, on 9/11 and why Arabs must improve their image to the West. It did not discuss how to improve the image of Arab regimes for their people.
