Azmi Ashour* examines the legacy of civilisation vis-à-vis the Arab world Two factors govern the differences between one civilisational experience and the next. The first is the time or era in which the civilisation emerges; the second the nature of the experience itself. All civilisations have contributed, in varying degrees, to the evolution of human civilisation. This is possible by virtue of the processes of retention and assimilation which set human beings apart from other animals and for which reason each successive civilisation has been more advanced than its predecessors. Thus it is not chronological time that plays a role as much as time measured by historical memory. The civilisational experience and its progress, or lack of, are shaped by a society's social, cultural and behavioural memory, its awareness of reality through its cognitive environment and its vision for the future. One important way of comparing civilisations is through their cognitive development and the literature they produce, whether in the natural or the social sciences. The scientific revolution that emerged with the rise of modern Western civilisation generated an unprecedented boom in scientific methods and applications, essentially extensions of ideas that existed in previous civilisational experiences. For example, the Hellenic civilisation and its philosophers laid the first bricks of human thought. Then the Arab civilisation and its philosophers assimilated this legacy and built upon it, producing new and original ideas and inventions in the fields of chemistry, medicine and social sciences. By all standards these were advanced civilisations. Yet the socio-cultural interplay in Arab societies over the past two centuries suggests that an Arab mentality afflicted by a kind of schizophrenia, torn between attraction to Western civilisational progress and an ingrained tendency to deny or reject, directly and indirectly, Western ideas and ways of thought. Perhaps the most blatant manifestation of this attitude is to be found in the radical Islamic fundamentalist movements which reject modernist thought outright. Such Arab schizophrenia was able to take root as a result of the lack of awareness of the laws of human evolution and of the unity of human civilisation in all its diversity. Foremost among these evolutionary laws is that human beings are unique in the animal kingdom not only for their ability to carry their cultural legacy in their memory but also for their ability to add to that of their predecessors. Rather than being confined by the properties of the culture upon reception of the ideas and know-how of preceding civilisations, the recipients take these as their starting point. It is this dynamism that generates the unity of the accumulating body of human expertise. Diversity in the cultural environments in which human civilisations evolved can be highly productive as long as there is an awareness founded upon the unity of the human experience as opposed to the imposition of the self through false consciousness. The unity of human civilisation with diversity is, in fact, one of the laws that propels human civilisation forward. The simplest proof of this is to be found in the fact that the benefits to be had from the fruits of modern civilisation are not confined to the people of the West. Everyone can benefit according to their abilities, needs and outlooks from such products of progress as the Internet, satellite networks, modern transportation systems and the like. A unity of civilisation exists, quite concretely, whether or not people accept its existence, though acceptance implies willingness to interact with and absorb human expertise. Having established the universality of human expertise, I would like to turn to the following question: Did a concept of power emerge that is structurally unique to the Arab Islamic experience and, if so, what form did it take? Naturally, when dealing with such concepts as power or authority in the framework of Arab Islamic cultural experience, the understanding is that the concepts are essentially universal and that if they have Arab Islamic characteristics these characteristics differ from previous experiences only insofar as they furnish values and ideas that have helped elevate man's humanity to man. The study of concepts, and of political concepts in particular, raises many issues. All civilisations, including those that preceded the Islamic civilisation, such as the Pharaonic, Babylonian and Hellenic, all practised government in ways less sophisticated than those we find in the West today. However, it is impossible to deny that political authority has always existed in one form or another. The existence of a ruling authority evolved in the earliest human societies from the tribal elder to the village headman to the kings of the ancient city and, in ancient Egyptian civilisation, political authority became embodied in the person of the Pharaoh. Indeed, the relics of Pharaonic civilisation testify not only to the emergence of a concept of political power in its hierarchical form but in other forms as well. There were sciences, music and arts (such as the sciences and arts of mummification) which indicate that power was associated with knowledge. This is only natural given that any civilisation is fundamentally the product of intellect. Hence, the development of knowledge and its structural link to power evident in modern civilisation also existed in ancient times. Islamic civilisation also passed through these phases in which the concept of power evolved in various forms. The concept evolved from primitive phases associated with tribal structures to a much more sophisticated concept embodied in the Islamic caliphate. The problematic here resides in the fact that the transition from the tribe or city-state in the Islamic civilisational experience gave rise to a duality in the relationship between religion and politics that continues to the present. The foundation of the Umayyad dynasty in 41 AH (661 AD) marks a turning point between two phases in the Islamic experience, particularly with regard to political affairs. Before was the idealistic phase which lasted from the death of the Prophet Mohamed to the death of the fourth Rightly-Guided Caliph Ali bin Abi Taleb. In the second phase political authority emerged in the course of interactions between Islamic leaderships and their socio- political environments, beginning with the Umayyad dynasty and passing through the Abbasid and subsequent dynasties, and ending with the Ottoman dynasty which was founded in 1517 and ended in 1924. As varied as the experiences were during this phase, and as numerous as were the areas that fell under the influence of the Islamic caliphate, it was a realistic and pragmatic phase in that it instituted a form of separation between religious and political authorities, even if both were nominally combined in the Caliph. The most recent phase in the Arab Islamic political experience began with the Napoleonic campaign in Egypt in 1798 and has continued through the period of Arab awakening to the present. This phase can be characterised as an era of confusion and inability to fathom the fundamentals of civilisation's dictionary of evolution. This phenomenon may be connected to the decline that afflicted Arab societies at the end of the second phase: combined with the relative superiority of Western civilisation a shadow began to be cast over Arab societies at a time when they were in a state of decay. It may also be attributable to certain distorting factors inherent in Arab Islamic culture from the outset and that have never been resolved. All these conditions gave rise to a state of schizophrenia and a false, adversarial us-versus- "the other" consciousness. It was, therefore, only natural that the factors propelling these societies towards rejectionism and a recoil into the past gained prevalence over the factors propelling towards progress despite the cultural differences between Arab and Western societies. This raises questions over the methodology that might be brought to bear on the study of political concepts in the Islamic civilisational experience which, since it is first and foremost a human civilisational experience, is by definition part of human heritage before being either Arab or Islamic. Indeed, it is because of this prime characteristic -- it being a human experience -- that, as positive as it was in many ways it was not short of negative aspects. In other words, not everything handed down to us by our civilisational legacy is necessarily appropriate to the present. But how are we to identify that which is serviceable and that which might be deleterious? The starting point is to differentiate between laws connected with human heritage and those connected with the time and the environment in which a civilisation arose and thrived. The first we might term the universal laws of the ongoing process of human experience: they are founded upon two primary components, the exercise of the intellect and, secondly, memory and its capacity to retain history. When these two components interact constructively the result is qualitatively different from the point at which the interaction began. The Arab Islamic cultural problematic, in the past and the present, is that it has tended to focus more on the transient laws of time and environment than on the universal laws of collective human experience. * The writer is a political analyst at the quarterly journal Al-Demoqrateya published by Al-Ahram.
