Name the Shakespeare of the Arab World. You Can't, Can You?

Egyptian Culture Minister Farouk Hosny, center, speaks to the media on his return to Cairo after being defeated in his bid for the top UNESCO position. Photo by www.latimes.com

It would really have been a memorable day for civilisation if the Egyptian Culture Minister Farouk Hosni had been made head of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation. This is the fine fellow who, as Egyptian minister for culture in May of last year, told an Islamist politician that he would personally burn any Israeli books he found in an Egyptian library. He also says that Israeli culture is "inhuman".

In addition to these opinions, Farouk Hosni has been a central censor on speech and artistic expression within Egypt for 21 years. According to the French-based and woefully-named Reporters without Frontiers (some terms simply don't translate): "This minister of Hosni Mubarak has been one of the main forces for censorship in Egypt, trying unfailingly to control Press freedom, as well as citizens' freedom of information."

To put such a creature in charge of the UN body for science, education and culture might seem rather like appointing a bull as manager of a china shop. But that is only to western susceptibilities. Farouk Hosni's candidature won the backing of those sterling friends of cultural freedom, the Arab League, the African Union, and the Organisation of Islamic Conferences. And lest you think irony is something you find in a smithy's forge, that term "sterling friends of cultural freedom" is said, not so much with tongue in cheek, as in the next county.

As it happens, the UN voted down Hosni's candidature, an outcome which is being denounced in the Muslim world. "It was time to appoint a Muslim," complained one Egyptian. "No one from the Arab world or Muslim world has made it to the top of the UNESCO, while Europe has held the post several times."

Well now! I wonder why that is? On the one hand, there is the culture which has given the world Beethoven; Bach; Shakespeare; Da Vinci; Darwin; Newton; Mozart; Michelangelo; Bellini; Gallileo; Tolstoy; Einstein; Rutherford; Bohr; Curie; Dostoyevsky; Wren; and Brian Cowen. On the other, the Islamo-Arabic culture has given the world ... well, I'm not quite sure what, certainly not in recent centuries. Suicide-bombers don't count, by the way.

Nor does pathological anti-Semitism. Nor does female circumcision. Nor does the hijab. So what has this vast block of humanity, hundreds of millions strong, given the world over the past few centuries, which has enriched our letters, our thoughts and understanding of the human condition? Go on: What?

Now to be sure, the UN is not simply a body which recognises and rewards achievement. It is, among other things, a forum for diplomacy, which is why Gaddafi's Libya and Mugabe's Zimbabwe were both on the UN Human Rights Commission - chaired, if I remember correctly, by North Korea, with probably Saddam Hussein as its correspondence secretary, and no doubt his two sons as roving human rights ambassadors. Quite so: For into this life, some little compromises must fall. Moreover, within the general culture of the Arab and the Muslim world, Farouk Hosni is a liberal. After he expressed his dislike for the Islamic veil on women's faces, he had to go into hiding from the Muslim Brotherhood, which said this proved that he was a homosexual. Not quite.

The point is that Farouk Hosni, by Egyptian standards, is a card-carrying nancy boy; but by our standards, he's a book-burning, anti-Semitic, toadying censor for Hosni Mubarak. Yet, given the choice available, he's still the good Arab, the secularist, the one that nearly got the UN job.

Which takes us to the heart of the problem, and to the great division in this world, the one that no one in the West decently likes to talk about, and that the UN tries to conceal within a danse macabre of subterfuge, disingenuousness, humbug and bribery. For world culture is essentially a Euro-American creation. Those two continents have been the primary creators of free-thinking civilisations which celebrated political, social, artistic and scientific endeavours.

Simply, neither the Chinese, the Japanese, the Indians nor the Senegalese invented the motor car or the aeroplane or rubber bands or the steam engine or the computer or the washing machine or the paper clip or the dinner fork or modern toothpaste or the combine harvester or frozen food or the civilisation-creating concepts of personal liberties, the welfare state, free speech, organised sport and representative government.

These are all Euro-American creations - as is the United Nations. Other cultures - the Japanese, the Indians, and to some extent the Chinese - have successfully copied the political and technological innovations of the West, and have accordingly become inventive, prosperous and free. But not Africa, and for different reasons, not the Arab world which, despite its ancient and long-lost traditions of scholarship and mathematical discovery, has for centuries remained locked within an Islamic cycle of self-destructive, impoverishing nihilism.

In this context, the really sobering thought is that the book-burning, anti-Semite Farouk Hosni is, in fact, the forward-looking face of modern, enlightened Arabia. So, if you ever wonder why Israelis are sometimes a little glum, does that awful truth not go some way towards explaining why?

 

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