Times are not yet for calm in the Arab world as it’s the scene of continuous clashes and geostrategic issues give an international dimension to these conflicts. Can we speak of failure of the Arab Spring and if so, how can we explain it?
So many questions were asked at the roundtable to which the panel tried to give an answer namely Mssrs.Abdeljalil Salem, President of the Zitouna University in Tunis, Zayd Al Foudayl, researcher and Saudi academician, Bourhan Koroglu, Turkish university professor and Mustapha Mourabit, teacher-researcher and former director of Al Jazeera Center for Studies serving as the moderator of the meeting.
In his speech, M.Zayd el foudayl believes that Arab cultural challenges can be explained by the desire to maintain the cultural perspective of the Arab nation, which directly affects the political system.
He therefore considers that changing this cultural perspective will affect the entire Arab identity. He cites the example of the creation of the Arab League, the beginning of the last century, which came in a cultural context that promoted the Arab nation and the concept of cultural alliance of the nation, ater changing with the emergence of globalization, which has produced a crack in the obvious Arab national identity after the July war and the emergence of a current which does not recognize the religious presence in the state. The same thing happened in the events of the Arab Spring that led the region to move towards a new direction that highlighted ethnic and religious tensions
“The main challenge is the search for a cultural point of view to maintain the national state away from the nation-state”
He also stressed that the Arab world needs to reconfigure its intellectual sphere in light of the dominance of the West which resulted in significant changes to the Arab culture.
Salem Abdul Jalil took up his intervention to sift the Tunisian experience in democracy and state-building, especially after the fall of the regime of Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, saying that this has led to a change of power in Tunisia.
He also recalls the conditions behind the fall of Bourguiba: political congestion and social mobility; Unemployment and repression set fire to the wood leading the elite to push Bourguiba to the exit, this time the initiative came from the street and young people without the participation of political parties.
The departure of the Party “ Annahda” and the organization of the elections gave victory to the party Nidaa Tunis that did not exist and was created due to the lack of success of the Government of the troika in the management of the State’s affairs and because they had no prior administrative and cultural experience allowing them to successfully manage a state like Tunisia.
He explained the secular party of Tunisia as a natural result of the awareness that the national interest imposed on the Islamic Renaissance Party to step down in order to preserve the higher interests of the Tunisian State, The awareness is due to a current in the Party of the Renaissance, which was convinced of the need to maintain the national state and integration of Islamists to combat terrorism and growing extremism in neighboring countries.
To seal his speech, Mr. Salem criticizes the Islamist vision of the modern state, stressing that the Islamist problem is the cultural weakness of their government project that remains traditionalist.
Meanwhile, Bourhan Kuruglo commends the Turkish model and discusses aspects of the success of the Turkish experience, which went through the same crises of some Arab countries fifty years ago to toggle elections and coups d’état before emerging stronger and more experienced focusing its model on economic production and human development.
According to Kuruglo the Islamic world has been in crisis for two hundred years, and modern history testifies to that due to an insufficient economic, scientific and cultural production, adding that awareness of this crisis came too Late in addition to the dispersion of the Arab nation, let alone the dream of building a unified state, which was replaced by the maintenance of the national state.
Mr. Kuroglu excludes Iran and Turkey from the crisis in the Arab world due to the fact that they were able to maintain their national stability after the fall of the Ottoman Empire. He also said that Turkey is a model for other countries in the region that have the same history and common habits, expressing at the same time his optimism about the future of the Arab world despite the impasse in which it is located today
