Paths toward an Arab Knowledge Society

Abstract

The Arabic Science and Technology Gap and Its Economic Consequences in the International Development Race During the first third of the twentieth century, self-critical Muslims asked themselves two critical questions: “Why do Muslims remain behind, and why are others progressing?”1 The cause of this dilemma was the confusing experience of the Muslim world’s decline and subsequent colonial domination by the West, which hit the Arabs’ sense of self-worth in its core. Their repeated military defeats by Israel and dependency on foreign technical and financial development aid demonstrated their own deficits. They could barely tolerate these humiliations, particularly since they were in striking contrast to the Qur’anic revelation, which promises Muslims the leading role in the world. The history of Islam’s expansion during the first century of the Islamic era seemed to support this belief. However, its gradual decline was repressed,2 and a fatal apologetic tendency (viz., the passionate attempt to prove to oneself and others that one’s own inferiority does not exist) became characteristic of the debates on how to find a suit- able way out of the crisis, as well as in the case of vital questions concerning socioeconomic development.3 In the 1960s, a central category of the Arabic worldview appeared in the highly emotionalized unity of the “West” and “colonialism.” This narrow perspective of “the Arabs and the West” obstructed the Arab world’s view of the Far East’s economic and technological dynamics. Up until the 1980s, few Arab economists in science and administration had any concrete idea of the education, research, and technology-based4 growth dynamic of the Asian “tiger states” and why they had been so spectacularly successful. This was largely due to the lack of personal vision, because the countries of East and Southeast Asia had little interest in those regions that were lagging behind in the development race. Nor did they feel obligated to offer seminar events, well-paid according to western examples, in order to remedy Arab perception deficits. In other words, Arab economists only became aware of the [Asian] periphery countries’ dynamic by accident. Certainly, no learning processes designed to help the Arab world catch up (e.g., conducting case studies of specific countries, which could be done by students working on their university theses) took place. The responsible political leaders did not grasp the necessity of such studies, and, therefore, no research means were made available. The result was a second self-isolation that, in the 1970s, was becoming even greater. After the industrialization strategies of staving off world markets and import substitution, this self-isolation now appeared in the form of a technological gap. The full extent of the R&D5 gap caught the attention of Arab governments only because of the oil-boom, when the OAPEC6 countries, in particular, unexpectedly found themselves exposed to a massive presence of East Asian periphery countries while building up infrastructural and large-scale industrial investments. However, oil revenues concealed the urgent need for massive investments in education and research in order to catch up with other regions. It was deemed sufficient to expand educational opportunities quantitatively, without regard to quality and job market requirements.7 Growing budgetary demands in the face of the OAPEC countries’ finite oil resources, as well as the unavoidable economic and political pressures for reform in the non-oil Arab states after the Soviet Union’s collapse, raised questions about a fundamental strategic reorientation. Added to this was the increasing international pressure from low-wage Asian countries to compete on the global level (particularly in such technologies ...