A Moroccan researcher: Arab countries not only stumbled on the path of democracy and modernity, but returned to political ignorance after 2011

Rabat – “Al-Quds Al-Arabi”: a Moroccan researcher in Washington said that Arab countries live in schizophrenia in relation to democracy and modernity, since they have representative institutions, such as parliaments and parties, but have not progressed in building real democratic systems.
Muhammad al-Sharqawi, a professor of international conflict resolution at Mason University in Washington, said in a meeting organized by the Mohammed Abed Al-Jabri Foundation for Thought and Culture on Sunday evening that Arab countries have not just stumbled. on the path of democracy and modernity, but “have returned to political ignorance after 2011” and who did not expect the foundations of democratic regimes to be laid in the region in the short term, despite the popular uprisings it has witnessed in recent years , “because democracy takes decades and decades, and this is the imperative of all historical revolts and movements”.
Al-Sharqawi, a former member of the UN Committee of Experts, said: “We should be patient for a few Arab decades until the process of the dialectical relationship of institutions is completed and the gap between centers of power and power and between peoples will be reduced “, criticizing the absence of intellectuals from the front row of popular uprisings in the region, which is considered – according to him – one of the factors that hindered the achievement of its objectives, because the success of any historical movement requires that the the educated elite is in charge.
The position of the late Moroccan thinker Mohamed Abed Al-Jabri on secularism made it clear that the late was wary of European secularism, and said that secularism could not be applied in its strict form which requires separation of state and religion in Arab societies. and Islamic, and excludes all religious issues from political life.
Al-Sharqawi believes that Western secularism has not completely separated religion from politics, but rather has organized the relationship between the Church and the state. Religious and political ».
He said Muhammad Abed Al-Jabri was trying to establish the historical bloc as a project that transcends ideological borders, leading to close ranks among Arab countries, and he hoped that intellectuals would promote intellectual unity in designing this desired strategy. And that the historical blockade wanted by Al-Jabri has imposed itself today, in its non-politicized human sense, given that it is the one that will restore consideration to culture and intellectuals, and a bridge that will bring the relationship between the politician and the intellectual man closer together. , highlighting that the current reality needs the historical mass, and that the elite will be. In the foreground, to crystallize the answers to the questions of the stage, to get out of what he called the “Coronian Cave”.
The Moroccan researcher believes that the criticisms that touched Muhammad Abed Al-Jabri’s thinking could have formed another point of view for them if he had published his books in English. “Al-Jabri is a thinker like other great thinkers, and his thinking is part of global thinking.”