Aspirations for freedom and political participation as well as social rights have been stifled at the same time as the revolutions of the “Arab Spring” and this in favor of struggles for individual freedoms, carried by the themes of gender, imposed by the West. Here is the point of view of a conservative intellectual, but which reflects an opinion widely shared in the Arab world.
There is a strong movement of rejection all at once “of feminism, atheism and homosexuality” in Arab public opinion, writes Mohanna Al-Hubail on the site Al-Khaleej Online (“The Gulf Online”).
“These three notions form a triptych and are perceived as one and the same thing”, notes this conservative intellectual, living in exile for having defended civil rights in Saudi Arabia.
According to him, this rejection is explained by “accumulated anger” since the failure of the “Arab springs”. There was then “a general consensus that the Arab world desperately needs a new pact” political, where the state ensures the freedom, equality and rights of citizens.
“The Collapse” of this “Arab Spring” project went hand in hand with a “new western colonial cycle”, where Western authorities and international organizations have taken up the notion of freedom, but only from the angle of gender issues.
This focused approach eclipsed the themes dear to the initial project of the Arab revolutions, which were above all political and socio-economic, with in particular the demand for political participation and a fairer distribution of wealth, recalls the author.
“By ignorance, or by conviction, young people […] took up gender themes in media and blogs”, including some specially created for the purpose of “spread these ideas in the Arab world”, he complains.
“Destroy the Arab family”
While accusing in passing “social media giants, Netflix and others” to be the singers of a “globalization [autour des thèmes] of the kind”. And this while they have otherwise “no regard for the central struggle, which is to free the individual from the burden of tyranny” and build a new political consensus.
If this Saudi intellectual is not far from crying out for the international conspiracy “to destroy the Arab family”, he adds, however, that individual freedoms are also important. According to him, “the discourse of the Islamists has not been able” to create a framework that guarantees these freedoms, and where people are not forced to behave.
Source
Created in June 2014, the site Al-Khaleej Online (“The Gulf online”) is part of the dynamics that followed the “Arab spring”. As the noose has tightened again on the region’s media, it is trying to offer coverage
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