"O ye who believe! Obey Allah, and obey the Messenger, and those charged with authority among you" [surah 4 An-Nisa (The Women, verse 59), The Holy Qur'an – translated by Abdullah Yusuf Ali]
The Quranic verse quoted above explicitly tells Muslims whom they must obey: Allah, the Prophet Muhammad, and those in authority, that is, the rulers.
Thus the bloggers arrested in various Arab countries in recent years on charges of plotting against the authorities or of publishing lies about them (the blogger Ali Abdul Imam in Bahrain), or on charges of showing disrespect towards the President and attempting to overthrow the regime (the bloggers Abdul Karim Nabil Suleiman and Ahmad Mustafa in Egypt), whose arrest has engendered a great deal of media attention, are in fact a new expression of an old and familiar phenomenon in the Arab world. These bloggers were arrested for having made use of electronic communication in a way that was unacceptable to the regime. The main difference between these bloggers and the intellectuals who were active a half a century before them lies in the platform on which their words were published, not the result. The result was the same: the "obstacle" was removed from the platform.
Fifty and sixty years previously, in the middle of the twentieth century, young intellectuals who wanted their country to make progress and promoted the interests of the man in the street, found themselves behind bars because they had made use of Socialist and Communist ideas in a way that made the regime uneasy. Even in countries with an ostensibly Socialist regime, such as Iraq, for example, intellectuals were not permitted to write and disseminate their ideas freely, because of the regime's fear of being undermined. One such intellectual was Ghaib Tu'ma Farman (1927-1990), one of the most prominent and important writers in the history of Iraqi literature. Farman was born in Baghdad, and because of his Communist views the regime saw to it that he was arrested and prevented from finding work in his homeland, despite the fact that he was well-educated and could have made a great intellectual contribution to the country. The regime's cruel harassment forced Farman to wander in the Arab world; ultimately he settled in Moscow, where he died. Farman's sad story symbolizes the struggles of the intellectuals, especially those of the political Left, whom the regime perceived as posing an immediate danger to its own existence.
In Farman's case the regime "only" drove him into exile, but in other cases it closed places where intellectuals considered "hostile" used to gather, and they were persecuted with great cruelty, fired, imprisoned, tortured and executed, or they just "disappeared".
Other intellectuals who did not toe the line and therefore clashed with the regime include the Iraqi poet Buland al-Haydari, the Syrian author Zakaria Tamer, the Egyptian woman writer Nawal al-Saadawi, and many others.
As already noted, what has changed since then is the technology used by the opposition to disseminate its ideas: not only the written press and the literature, but also websites, blogs and photographs from demonstrations and other events which the regime may not want to be publicized.
The connecting link between opposition intellectuals in the mid-twentieth century and later, and the bloggers who have been arrested in recent years, is thus their constant repression, due to the criticism of the regime which they dare to express. This has remained the common thread through time.
In light of this, whether or not there will be a change in the regime's attitude towards the bloggers and other opposition intellectuals does not depend on any superficial change, such as one ruler being replaced by another of very much the same kind, but on whether or not the Arab Spring will bring about a profound conceptual change of the function of the regime and the ruler.
Hilla Peled-Shapira, Ph.D., is a lecturer on Modern Arabic Literature in the Department of Arabic at Bar-Ilan University.
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