Why Culture Alone Cannot Explain the Underdevelopment of the Arab and Islamic World

When Shakib Arslan was asked more than a century ago about the reason for the nation’s backwardness, he argued that “a redoubled effort to address the deficits of the Ottoman Empire could provide us with the driving force to overcome its collapse.” He spoke as a politician and statesman, urging people towards solidarity, hard work, and the contribution of knowledge and wealth for the sake of the state’s cohesion, regardless of its weakness and ignorance.

In the same context, intellectuals of the era were discussing a new caliphate and searching for an alternative to the Ottoman state. Muhammad Abduh believed the Ottoman Empire was a veil obscuring the diseased reality of the nation, while Abd al-Rahman al-Kawakibi met with a group of scholars to seek an alternative to the Ottoman Caliphate in the Hejaz.

During that period, debate raged over the utility of continuing the Caliphate. Some argued it lacked evidence from the Quran and Sunnah, while others, like Muhammad Rashid Rida, conceded it was ailing but legitimate. As for Taha Hussein, he believed there had been no rightly-guided caliphate after the first four caliphs, and that they were a historical anomaly that would never be repeated.

Thus, a narrative seeped into discourse, known as “The Great Fitna” (The Great Strife). This refers to the major political discord that plunged the nation into a stage of introspection, what Malik Bennabi termed the ‘stage of the ego’ [a concept he coined to describe the phase of civilizational introspection in the life cycle of civilizations]. Or, as Ibn Khaldun wrote, it was when governance turned into a monarchy devoid of the spirit of prophecy. It is cited as the cause of the constitutional crisis, as narrated by al-Shanqiti in his book “The Constitutional Crisis,” or as the crisis that transformed the nation’s history into one of fighting and bloodshed, as reiterated by the Sudanese thinker and politician Hassan al-Turabi.

In this way, a narrative saturated with a cultural explanation for the nation’s backwardness was constructed. The voice of Shakib Arslan was overshadowed and ultimately buried beneath the literary prowess of Taha Hussein, the writings of great scholars like Muhammad Abduh and al-Kawakibi, or the subsequent narratives of Islamists following Hassan al-Banna and Sayyid Qutb, along with the rest of the interpretive efforts of contemporary proselytizing movements, all following the same explanatory model to this day. Can we really subsume all of this under the ‘cultural explanation’ for the nation’s backwardness?

What is the Cultural Explanation?

By the mid-twentieth century, the search began for the historical and cultural roots of the many crises witnessed by the world. It was as if human consciousness had been emptied from people’s minds; as Karl Marx depicted in his theory of historical dialectics, consciousness arises from society, not from individual minds. Society, with its economic and political structures, was the foundation.

Culture became the part that a person defends fiercely with his rifle, because it is identity. And whenever we hear about identity, countless disagreements emerge. Therefore, delving into cultural explanation became a fundamental issue: ‘He who has no past, has no future.’ The more one delved into history and the statements of predecessors, the more capable they became of interpreting the present, until a cultural determinism for reading history was formed.

Islamic thinkers extracted propositions resembling inevitabilities, such as the ‘just despot,’ the ‘Eastern man’ who does not believe in democracy and perhaps does not want it, the latent violence within us Arabs, and the absence of political theory.

Finally, talk began about the crisis of the Arab mind and the crisis of the political mind. Thinkers like al-Jabri, al-Tarabishi, and Arkoun extracted from the depths of heritage—from old books and narratives reaching back to the Great Fitna and subsequent events—what they believed explained our backwardness. The cultural explanation incorporates anthropology, cultural studies, the sociology of knowledge, and other theories that now seem to be crumbling and fading.

How Did the Cultural Explanation Crumble?

The cultural explanation relies on extrapolating from history in its cultural aspects, as al-Jabri did, for example, in his books. He studied Islamic political history and concluded that the Arab political mind is confined to the concepts of tribe, creed, and spoils.

Thus, a model is formed that turns into a tool for interpreting and evaluating reality. Of course, reality will validate much of this extrapolation, and one ends up with frames of reference—as cognitive scientists see them—meaning a set of propositions that guide the mind to understand reality, through which it sees and perceives the world. Therefore, the cultural explanation is nothing more than a form of determinism, like other determinisms.

Extrapolation—all historical extrapolation—is a form of selection. It might be intentional when we aim to prove preconceived facts, or it might occur through the type of research that leads to those results. But in all cases, it is extrapolation.

Hence lie the weaknesses of the cultural explanation: it interprets the present through the past and assumes it can comprehend and plumb the depths of this present. Consequently, one enters a vicious cycle of interpretation, trapped between a past that incessantly causes pain and ache in the present, and a present we view through the eyes of the past with yearning and nostalgia. Thus, the past prevents us from seeing a composite picture of the present and the future.

Therefore, the cultural explanation can be considered part of reductionist systems: (Extrapolation → Law → Explanation). In contrast, a composite explanation, which does not neglect people’s behavior, their interaction with reality, and its present causes in all their complexity, is what suits our reality, and it is entirely different.

Propositions That Must End

In his book Imagining the Unimaginable by Glen Morgan, a writer specializing in speculative fiction, he explains how Jews who survived the Holocaust adopted a narrative of silence, asserting that what happened to the Jews was unlike anything else, and they hurried to build a complete imagination of the Holocaust. Their primary concern was not documentation and stating facts as much as it was building consciousness and perception. Thus, according to the author, the Zionist narrative succeeded.

As for us, we say about ourselves that our history is a history of bloodshed, that our minds are deficient, that we are a nation of talk that does not excel at action, that our rulers are creations of colonialism, that our armies lack the power to resist, that our societies are unfit for democracy, and that among us are those more dangerous than the Zionists… We say all this, yet we wistfully hope from God that we become a strong nation with weight among nations. How can this be consistent?

Herein lies a real problem in our interpretation or in our narrative construction. The Jews substituted imagination for falsehood to manufacture their narrative, while we have substituted the construction of a unifying narrative with propositions we invented from our hatred of our own reality.

This is a sincere call to recognize the danger of ideas and narratives; that even if they are not wrong, they are unhelpful; that extrapolation is unsuitable for building a political discourse; and that many of the conflicts among us are due to these erroneous and selective narratives. This is because we lack an epistemological model capable of seeing the future, not just interpreting the past.

So if you tell me, “He who has no past, has no present,” I will say: “He who cannot see the future will be unable to read anything, neither the present nor the past.” How can this be, when we are a nation that believes in divine preordainment (al-Qadar al-Sabiq)—meaning we believe that the future is what shapes the present?

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