Freedom of expression is primarily based on freedom of thought. In the Arab and Muslim societies there is only one kind of thought: a religious and authoritarian thought that exploits human beings and tends to reduce them to their smallest common denominator, so that they appear
Freedom of expression is primarily based on freedom of thought. In the Arab and Muslim societies there is only one kind of thought: a religious and authoritarian thought that exploits human beings and tends to reduce them to their smallest common denominator, so that they appear as a multitude of identical copies, unable to criticize and avoiding any form of thinking whether free or oriented. This explains why there isn’t yet freedom of expression in those societies.
As for the forms of free expression that some citizens in the Arab world have attempted to manifest, they are receding and still pretty restricted to an intellectual elite which is the produce of Western influence. This elite, however, tends to shrink considerably with the takeover of the education systems across the region by the ruling oligarchy. This explains the dramatic quantitative and qualitative reduction in the intellectual elite.
As these societies started opening up to the Western world, some leading religious and political figures entered the modernization debate, and despite their calls against the Western civilization, the reality of everyday life made people question the credibility of their anti-Western rhetoric. In the eyes of people it was obvious that the Western civilization could at least achieve some form of happiness in this world. The ideological battle between Socialism and Capitalism during the twentieth century distorted the view and created alliances for one economic doctrine against the other. In their quest to win the ideological war, political movements resorted to every possible tactic including the exploitation of religious ideologies which eventually led to the resurgence of political groups with strong religious reference. Religion and theology then were introduced to the school in order to silence critical thinking among young people and facilitate their subjugation by traditional and religious approaches and also to avoid revolutionary uprisings like the one seen in 1969, which was based on critical thinking that spread during the