Breaking the Fear Barrier

We’ve been told for over a decade now that Arabs, and Muslims generally, are all terrorists. We’ve been told that we have to support Arab dictatorships in the name of security. But with courageous democratic uprisings happening all over the Arab world right now, I think the Western world now has a chance to understand Arabs better, and to understand why we need not fear them. Indeed the more I read about the Arab democratic movement, the more I find myself admiring Muslims instead of fearing them.

A lot of people I know are looking at the events in North Africa with a cynical ‘wait and see, it might become corrupted’ point of view. But I think we should be studying the movement very carefully. We can learn from it how not to be afraid.

On 18th January 2011, Asmaa Mahfouz, a 26 year old Egyptian woman, decided that she had enough of the corruption in her country’s government and the brutality of the police. Therefore she posted to the internet a video in which she described her intention to go to Tahrir Square, in downtown Cairo, and start protesting, and she invited others to do the same. A certain amount of fear attended her decision. Later on she told a journalist: “I felt that doing this video may be too big a step for me, but then I thought: For how much longer will I continue to be afraid and hesitant? I had to do something,” Ms. Mahfouz is a very visible example of leadership by action. A single person’s initiative and bravery became the most important link in a long chain of cause-and-effect which resulted in removal of Egyptian Presiden Hosni Mubarak from power, only twenty-four days later. It is important to note that in all the democratic uprisings in north Africa in the first two months of 2011, the Islamic fundamentalist terror group Al Qaeda played absolutely no role whatsoever. Nor did the protesters in those countries use violence to achieve their goals. They simply occupied major public squares in their cities and refused to leave until their demands were met. Mariam Soliman, another Egyptian activist, described herself as follows: “I am not socialist, I am not a liberal, I am not an Islamist. I am an Egyptian woman, a regular woman rejecting injustice and corruption in my country.”

There was violence at these protests. But it was overwhelmingly instigated by the corrupt politicians attempting to cling to power, again through the use of fear. Mubarak of Egypt, for instance, hired poor people from rural parts of Egypt to come to Cairo and beat up the protesters. And Muammar Gadaffi of Libya claimed that the protests were caused by Al-Qaida, and by drugs in young people’s coffee. In the first few days of the protest he deployed snipers on the rooftops of buildings, killing at least 15 people; he also destroyed the minaret of a mosque full of protesters using anti-aircraft missiles. The governments of these countries used fear to maintain their rule: fear of Islamic terrorists, primarily, as well as fear of their own police and military. But this kind of fear cannot be effective forever. As Mahfouz said, “Everyone used to say there is no hope, that no one will turn up on the street, that the people are passive. But the barrier of fear was broken.”

We, the people of Western world countries, continue to live in an environment of fear. We fear being attacked religious extremists, both foreign and domestic. We fear the loss of political rights, a loss of privacy, or a loss of freedom, taken by big governments (if you happen to be right-wing), or by big corporations (if you happen to be left-wing). We fear foreign immigrants with their strange customs, coming to our neighbourhoods to take our jobs, drain our welfare state, or commit crimes. We fear being injured, robbed or attacked, being judged by others, or neglected, or left unloved. We fear succumbing to an exotic pandemic disease. We fear the social breakdown that abortion, divorce, and same-sex marriage will supposedly cause. We have existential fears such as the fear of death, fear of freedom itself, fear of the afterlife, fear of being ‘unreal’ (a surprisingly common one, although difficult to describe), and fear of loneliness and isolation. We might boast of having none of these fears. Yet we immerse ourselves in escapist mass entertainment. We support fanatical politicians and preachers. Our politicians support dictators and tyrants in the name of “security” and “stability”. We arm ourselves to the teeth, and pray to God to be saved.

You might not feel constantly afraid of things all the time. But there is a part of you which knows what boundaries cannot be crossed. You believe, for instance, that bad things will happen to you if you speak out in favour of a just but unpopular cause. And so we supervise ourselves. Thus even when we say we have no fear of these things, fear still governs our minds.

But life does not have to be that way. We can liberate ourselves from the labyrinth. There are better ways to live. Someone has to take the initiative to break through the fear barrier. Someone has to take the initiative to love and trust her fellow living creature, and set us all free.

Will it be you?

________

Links related to this story:

Mona El-Naggar, “Equal Rights Takes to the Barricades” The New York Times, 1 February 2011.

Scott Shane, “As Regimes Fall in Arab World, Al Qaeda Sees History Fly By” The New York Times, 27 February 20111.

Volkhard Windfuhr, “Rural poor paid to attack opposition supporters” Der Spiegel, 4 February 2011

“Libyan snipers fire on mourners” CBC News, 19 February 2011

“Gadhafi blames al-Qaeda for Libyan riots” CBC News, 24 February 2011.