In the seventies, I wrote my first three books (published successively in
1978, 1980 and 1983), which together form a comprehensive critique of
Marxism in theory and in its practical application.
Although they were written more than ten years before the sudden
and devastating collapse of the socialist temple, my books not only
predicted the collapse but also described the mechanism by which it would
come about (the political and social erosion of socialist regimes as an
inevitable result of their economic failure).
From 1986 to 1995, I published six books giving a detailed diagnosis of
Egypt’s political, economic and social problems, most of which I
attributed to the way the country was administered during the ‘fifties
and ’sixties.
Starting 1997, I have been writing about the imperative need for a
complete overhaul of Egypt’s educational and cultural systems as a
prerequisite for the country’s link-up with the modern age, with
scientific progress and with the march of humanity.
Why
do I write? The reasons are many:
I write to urge Egyptians to accept criticism and to engage in
self-criticism because, unless they are willing to do so, they will not
discover the root causes of the ills they complain of today.
I
write in defense of the values of knowledge and imaginative thinking, of
linking up with the collective human civilizing experience, of accepting
the Other and of opening wide the doors that were kept tightly shut
throughout the ’fifties and ’sixties.
I
write to warn against the debilitating disease of self-aggrandizement that
has come to afflict us. Its most obvious symptoms, vainglorious posturing
and a tendency to regard ourselves as distinct from and superior to
everybody else, are manifested constantly in our written and spoken words.
This overweening self-satisfaction is not only unhealthy but totally
unjustified, based as it is on an inability to distinguish between the
glories of our past and the realities of our present. Moreover, it is to
be questioned whether it is truly indicative of a sense of superiority or
of something altogether different. And what is the role of the Goebbels-style
information media in engendering and fostering this negative phenomenon?
I
write to promote my basic idea that Egypt must concentrate on putting its
own house in order by building a strong, successful socially stable and
modern educational and cultural infrastructure, instead of continuing to
give priority, as it has been doing since the ’fifties, to its external
role. For no country can play an effective external role in the absence of
a strong and stable internal structure.
I
write in defense of freedom of belief, but not in the context of a
theocratic culture that places our destinies in the hands of men of
religion. No society should allow its affairs to be run by clerics who
are, by their nature and regardless of the religion to which they belong,
opposed to progress.
I
write to advocate a new culture of peace, one in which the
countries of the region will learn to live together and
Israel and its neighbours can work out settlements along the lines
of what the French and Germans succeeded in doing less than fifty years
after the end of World War II. In
promoting the notion of peace, I point out that it is only when the region
moves from a dynamic of conflict to one of peace that real democracy will
spread throughout the Middle East.<
I
write to promote the idea that knowledge and culture are universal, the
common heritage of all humankind, and that opening the door to both is a
prerequisite for reform and progression.
I
write to call for an end to the Goebbels-style propaganda machines
operating in Egypt and the Arab world and their dangerous manipulation of
public opinion.
I
write to drive home the point that only market economics can bring about
the economic takeoff to which Egypt aspires, and that the main players in
the world of market economics are huge private corporations based on
institutional structures and run according to the latest techniques of
modern management, human resource and marketing sciences, not privately
held organizations whose familiarity with the tools of business is limited
to public relations, specifically, to the cultivation of close relations
with decision-making circles.
In a word, I write for the sake of a modern, thriving and stable
Egypt, at peace with itself and with the outside world, integrated into
the mainstream of science, innovation, humanity and the civilizing
process.
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