There is no going back to before October 7

If we really want to conduct a deep and equal review of Arab-Western relations, after a country demonstrated, over the past two months, its complete bias against Arab interests and against Palestinian rights, practicing two-faced contradictory rhetoric, playing with words, and completely ignoring everything it claimed to carry of civilizational and liberal values. As for the entire Palestinian issue... if we want that, let's start from the beginning. The basis is to completely get rid of the complex of inferiority, admiration, fascination, and childish adoption of all the Orientalist claims put forward by its civilization under the name of objectivity, hostile intellectual generalizations against the culture of the nation, and falsely and slanderously linking the doctrine and values of the Islamic religion to terrorism, backwardness, and puritanism behind the rest of the other religions, especially its religion.

The first step is to revive a tradition of renaissance carried out by Arab Islamic thinkers in the past when, without fear or hesitation, they represented, understood, criticized, took and responded to all the knowledge and cultures of others that preceded them or surrounded them, in order, first, to solve some of the problems of their present at that time, and second, in order to build a new Arab-Islamic renaissance that dazzled the world and made it imitate them and admire them and their new civilization.

Today we have before us multiple and disparate civilizations, cultures, experiences, values, and systems that we need to deal with just as the ancients dealt with the civilizations of Greece, Persians, India, and others. It is time for us to be like them, interacting and transcending, not being dazzled followers and spectators.

Many modern Arab and Muslim thinkers and philosophers have written over the past two centuries on this very point, and we have created a very rich intellectual and philosophical heritage. The time has come to review, renew and disseminate it, and make it a general trend and not an elitist dialogue that shines and fades without becoming an original and effective part of the formation of the nation.

Of course, the goal is not to achieve unilateralism in thought and knowledge, which will become an idol with time, but rather to reach diversity that interacts with each other, to enrich each other, and to contribute to the renewal of each other.

This step will not be sufficient if it is not accompanied by equal evaluation steps for relations with the West in the fields of politics, economics, and media. These are topics that contain thousands of sub-headings, which ultimately lead to an exit from the dependency we live in, which has reached shameful and unprecedented heights in the past two months when we allowed an Arab existential issue, such as the Palestinian issue, to be handed over to the West to do with it according to his interests, madness, and false religious and moral beliefs. While we were content with inaudible protests, and sometimes with silence towards Western madness, in order to go too far and deviate from all human borders and civilizational norms. After those neglects and resounding scandals practiced by the colonial West towards the Arab-Islamic bloc, a review of our daily political relations with it, and of our relations, interests, and common economic interests, has become in need of radical changes that make it feel that its interests with us and in our land will, after today, become Linked to the extent to which he respects our interests and takes them into account in the living reality and not through empty verbal reassurances and lies.

This last step will have no value if it is limited to a step here and a step there. Rather, we need a real activation of the foundations, commitments and goals of our Arab and Islamic regional institutions, after the specter of death loomed over many of them due to the prioritization of national or country self-interests over common national and Islamic interests. What matters to us is that we all raise the slogan: “There is no return to what was before October 7, and there is no acceptance of the humiliation, weakness, and helplessness that accompanied its events.” This is the least we can do to honor those who died, and to calm the souls of the martyred children and women who were assassinated by the hands of Western immoral and arrogant colonialism. 

In agreement with "Al-Khaleej"