Singular, inspiring and resolute leadership is above all what the Arab and Islamic world needs, writes Aijaz Zaka Syed I was hopelessly young and green when marked his 25th year in captivity on the now legendary Robben Island in South Africa. The idea of someone spending a quarter of a century in solitary confinement was so overwhelming and mind boggling that I wrote a poem to mark the occasion, paying rich tribute, which came naturally to a young, sentimental mind. Mandela was released two years later, in 1990, after the peaceful revolution that transformed South Africa, putting an end to the long, dark night of apartheid. A revolution that no one thought was possible. The man, who is often compared to Mahatma Gandhi, believed in his dream, never giving up hope of freeing his people from the clutches of apartheid. And free them he did. But it's easier said than done. Imagine spending 27 years of your life -- nearly 10,000 days -- behind bars, waiting for that dawn of freedom that few thought and believed ever would come. The white supremacist apartheid regime was as ruthless, repressive and apparently invincible as today's Israel. If the dawn of freedom and hope eventually arrived on the Dark Continent, the credit goes to the heroic sacrifices made by Mandela and his comrades and ordinary people of South Africa. Mandela retired 11 years ago from active politics after a brief stint in power, but his influence and imprint on our world and times remain as powerful as that of Gandhi. Perhaps no leader in recent times has captured the global imagination as Mandela did, transcending all distinctions of colour, creed and class. South Africa would have ended up in social and political chaos, as many countries in the continent have, if Mandela had not gone out of his way to unite the black and white parts of the country after the end of apartheid. He looked beyond his own suffering and the atrocities and humiliations his people suffered for ages to heal the national and racial divide by reaching out to the white minority. And by his singular magnanimity and generosity of spirit, Mandela not just won the white minority but also billions of hearts and minds around the world. This generosity of spirit is now celebrated in film by a rare constellation of stars. Two of my favourite Hollywood icons, Clint Eastwood and Morgan Freeman, have come together to turn the spotlight on this real battle of hearts and minds. Eastwood, who often reminds me of James Green of Oliver Strange's Western classics, has cast Freeman in the role of Mandela in his latest offering, Invictus. Or rather, Freeman cast himself in Mandela's role and invited Eastwood to direct the movie based on John Carlin's amazing book, Playing the Enemy. Freeman, a long time admirer of the legend, has long dreamed of playing Mandela and even bought the movie rights to his autobiography, Long Walk to Freedom. But it was Carlin's book that eventually helped Freeman realise his dream of a lifetime. Carlin, former South Africa correspondent for The Independent newspaper, feels Freeman was born to play Mandela and conveys the "giant solitude" of the legend. Carlin's book -- and Eastwood's epic -- focuses on a single defining event in Mandela's life to illuminate his greatness and the universality of his message. It tells the inspiring story of how Mandela, as the newly elected president of South Africa, joined forces with François Pienaar, the white captain of the South African rugby team, in the run-up to the 1995 Rugby Union World Cup, to unite a divided nation. A sport that had been the most potent symbol of racial division on the continent was transformed into an instrument of national unity. The final, South Africa's Springboks against New Zealand's All Blacks, was more than a rugby game. It was an epic political encounter used masterfully to unite a divided nation. Mandela joined Pienaar to plump for the national squad uniting all South Africans -- blacks and whites -- in a common cause. It was the first time since the first European settlers arrived in 1652 that the entire country found itself rallying behind a common goal. As Carlin says in his article in The Sunday Times this week, that day, the master-slave relationship between whites and blacks was finally dissolved. "The whites shed their fears, their guilt and their disdain; the blacks shed their shackles, their suspicions and their resentment. The whole country celebrated as one. The guiding spirit behind this most improbably euphoric of reconciliations was the master politician Mandela. Pienaar -- played by the talented Matt Damon -- and his team, big white sons of apartheid, were his valiant co-conspirators." Reading about the movie and how the greatest hero of our times united his people, I cast my roving eye across the Middle East and beyond. For we need a Mandela-like figure as never before; someone who could heal and unite us, and help us to transcend our self-serving, selfish ways. The Arab and Islamic world is going through perhaps the greatest existential crisis in its long history. From Morocco to Malaysia, there's not a single man of vision who could unite, lead and guide the Islamic world out of the intellectual wilderness that it finds itself struggling in today. There's not one leader, a leader like Mandela, who can rally this so-called Umma behind a positive, constructive vision, on an agenda of hope, peace and progress. Someone who has the courage of conviction to join the action right on the field, and to lead from the front. The Islamic world has produced no Mandelas despite the daunting challenges it faces. Ours is a world of short-sighted pygmies. And we need visionaries who can look far and ahead, beyond their noses, to lead us to a new dawn of hope. The Muslim world may not be fighting apartheid and colonial repression like South Africans once did, but it has other far more dangerous demons to fight. From ignorance to illiteracy to poverty to violent extremism, we perhaps face even greater challenges than the people of South Africa ever did. Despite its rich natural and human resources, ours remains one of the world's most backward and dispossessed regions. While the Middle East sits on most of the world's known energy resources, when it comes to benefiting from them, the Arab- Muslim world finds itself at the bottom of the pile. Can you believe that until recently Spain's GDP was greater than that of the entire Arab world put together? The UN-sponsored Arab Human Development Reports have done some excellent work to highlight what the authors call "the acute deficit of freedom and good governance" in the Arab world. The reports underscore how much Arabs and Muslims crave -- and need -- freedom and good governance, things that are taken for granted elsewhere. Commenting on this state of affairs, the third Arab Human Development Report observes that Arab states today resemble "a 'black hole', which converts its surrounding social environment into a setting in which nothing moves and from which nothing escapes."
