In the eastern province of Saudi Arabia where I worked for a time, there was a newsagent's shop. Passing by, you would regularly see the censor sitting by the pavement outside, going through a pile of western magazines or newspapers and blacking out parts with a highlighter. One day I stopped and asked him to show me what he was obliterating. Mostly it was photos, or parts of photos, showing feminine flesh or intimacy between men and women. The magazine thus censored could safely go on sale.
I offer this as an image of absurdity, the kind of absurdity that you would think must implode sooner or later under its own weight. Nothing so intrinsically ridiculous can last, surely? For me, this image of the Saudi censor sweating through his pile of Time magazines sums up the whole glitch in the relationship between the Arab world and the modern (western) world, as an internal issue.
I'm not talking here about the famous 'clash of civilisations' which may or may not bug international diplomacy and which depends on simplistic differences of identity in inevitable conflict. I'm thinking more about the complex tapestry of daily realities of life for ordinary people in many Arab countries -- societies which have now erupted into revolt. This upheaval is nothing more nor less than a revolt against absurdity, and in itself has nothing to do with Islamism or any other -ism.
The existential problem for the average Arab citizen can be seen as the tension between what is desirable and what is permissible or attainable. Education is a defining factor here. With education, naturally, expectations of what is desirable rise in a young person, and as they do, they can come up against blocks and obstacles which seem increasingly to be without rhyme or reason: in other words, absurd. Now the whole point of education, as one of my teachers used to say, is to enable you to become aware of the absurd.
My students in Tunis were already, some years ago, seething with the anger that only absurdity can generate. After independence, Bourguiba had laid the foundations for what was to be a 'modern' state, to all intents and purposes shaped on European principles. Education to higher levels and women's rights were essential flagstones. But what was promised by these advances was in practice not delivered, the reality being one of much personal suffering and frustration for those who lacked the necessary family connections or influence. Educated way beyond the capacity of the market to employ them, and in a culture where jobs went to the favoured, not to those with ability, an increasingly youthful population had no framework to express their resentment.
The point here is that you cannot, without absurdity, create a state that pretends to be modern and democratic and then not deliver the essential elements of that democracy. Just as you cannot sensibly import and distribute Time magazine with half its images blacked out.
In the small Tunisian town of Sidi Bouzid last December, against a background of 14 per cent unemployment, Mohammed Bouazizi, a graduate aged 26, set up a fruit and vegetable stall because he couldn't find a job. Then the police confiscated his stall because he was selling without a permit. Out of sheer rage and hopelessness, Mohammed set himself alight with petrol and died later in hospital.
I knew plenty of young men like Mohammed, frustrated by absurdity, even gifted academics who had Masters or PhD's from the USA or Europe and who, when their student visas expired abroad, had to return to Tunis to take jobs way below their intellectual ability.
Ironically, one of the Mohammeds I knew, an intelligent and aware man with a doctorate from the US, was the son of a greengrocer. He used to say to me that seven families ran the country and without some door or link into that privileged elite, you could hope for no advancement. His father's humble status didn't qualify him.
I like to think that Mohammed Bouazizi, too, was the son of a greengrocer and that, when all else failed, he simply went back to what he knew from his childhood.
So let it be said that the son of a greengrocer lit the fuse that ignited a revolt throughout the entire Arab region.
CJM
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