The thinker Emmanuel Wallerstein says in his talk about the emergence of the humanities in Europe in the past two centuries:
Within Western thought there has been a division of labor: history, economics, sociology and politics for the study of the West, and anthropology and Orientalism for the study of the rest of the world.
The "rest of the world" is basically us, Arabs and Muslims.
Just as parasites are the subject of biology, and rocks the subject of geology, we are clearly a field of two sciences called by the Western division of the humanities: anthropology and orientalism.
Whoever thinks that it is over is mistaken, we are still the subject of research that no one knows the extent of.
How useful it would be for some of our rich universities to devote a survey to what was written about us - say only in the last decade - in the field of political Islam and the Arab Spring.
This is how our material conditions ruled us from the weakness of states, the poverty of peoples, and the backwardness of knowledge tools and institutions, that we should be “the studied” instead of being the students, the questioned in them instead of the researchers.
It is certain that the study will reveal only the visible part of the iceberg, and most of the high-quality academic studies are intelligence.
It is gratifying that most of them end up on the shelves.
I know from experience that decision-makers do not have time to read such studies, and fortunately, most people do not know how decisions are taken at the highest levels and in what circumstances and based on any data, otherwise they would only sleep with sedatives.
What is important for us in what Wallerstein says is that we did not have - and we do not have until today - "surprising people" and anthropologists traveling by hundreds on scientific missions to research, for example, the origins of church choral art and its role in educating the religious artistic taste in Europe, or the origins of Western savagery and its role in extermination Indigenous peoples in the Americas and Australia, or the Holocaust in the heart of Europe.
In fact, we know almost the beginnings of the science of "strangeness", for example, in the text of Ibn Fadlan's Journey (in the year 921 AD).
Through him, we see the envoy of a powerful state - the Abbasid state - conveying everything he saw on his famous journey, often disgusting with the filth of the peoples (Bulgars and Russians) describing them as barbarism, outraging their strange natures, and the same goal that the Orientalist studies sought, whose favorite subject: the opening of paths Commercial and bringing the light of "civilization" to strengthen and expand the sphere of political, religious, and economic influence of the authority that financed the campaign in Baghdad, Washington of the time.
Unfortunately, the Arab "surprise" did not continue, nor did it grow - with the exception of some attempts here and there - due to the absence of its necessary requirements.
This is how our material conditions ruled us from the weakness of states, the poverty of peoples, and the backwardness of knowledge tools and institutions, that we should be “the studied” instead of being the students, the one being investigated instead of the researchers.
Thus, no "Edward Said-Stein" appeared in France, Spain, or Germany to protest in the strongest terms this hybrid science called "Occidentalism", with its superiority, prejudices and confused methodology, even if this "Eduardo" is only satisfied with living in Arab and Muslim countries, as a teacher in their most prominent universities, and distinguished in playing the qanun, the favorite musical instrument of his Arab masters.
There is no way to go back to the many overlapping reasons of which we know some and do not know most of them, and which made us the studied, not the students.
How and why stop creative thinking?
Where did we fail?
We must dig deep to discover the structural causes, not stop at the lamentations and accusations, which have also become the subject of Orientalists, as if they are another distinctive cultural sign.
The thinker Yuval Harari defends an idea that requires an in-depth discussion that this article does not accommodate, which is that all human beings - contrary to what we think - share the same religion, and all their differences are in names and expressions only.
This common religion is made up of 3 layers that, according to his opinion, are stacked on top of each other, just as the layers of geology accumulate.
The oldest and deepest layer within consciousness is what makes us all animist, carrying in our collective memory the beliefs of those we call primitives, namely: their belief that nature is a living being, that trees and animals have a soul, that they have feelings like our own, that we can relate to them. We influence her through magical rituals to appease her and use her against the temptations of time.
You find the remains of this mentality in the child, the poet and the magician.
The middle class comes from the beliefs that make us polytheists or polytheists, either in a clear form, as in the case of the Hindus, or in a hidden capacity, as in the case of the Jews, Christians and Muslims who recycled their ancient gods into good saints and saints, and their mission is the same, i.e. Mediation between poor humans and the higher power that controls their destiny.
Finally, the highest layer of beliefs that make us Monotheists, we all believe in a being who created everything that exists, Jews call "Adonai", Muslims "God", Hindus "Brahma", French-speaking Christians "Dieu", and speaking Christians In English "God".
In the same way, we can say that humans share a single thought, within which 3 mindsets coexist.
Do we not think magically while we make room in dreams and in waking dreams?
And because magical wishing is not enough, we have created beliefs that weave beautiful stories for us about our ability to achieve our desires in this world or the hereafter, if we submit to the orders and prohibitions of an unseen force, especially if we believe in it without any doubt or revision.
Most importantly, it gives us a framework for action, even though a large part of it is still loaded with the remnants of magical thinking residing in the depths of the subconscious.
Thought quickly discovers that heaven does not provide continuous services to prevent hunger and disease despite the many prayers and sacrifices, and then it sees it pass for thinking based mainly on the continuous experience of solutions it sees as possible and capable of overcoming the problems it faces.
This third orientation is what will give us science in its Western, not Islamic, sense.
Let us guard here against the naivety of the visions of progress that suppose the gradual transition of human beings from magical thinking to doctrinal thinking, to scientific-experimental thinking.
If those we call primitives had not had strong empirical intuition and the ability to think objectively and accurately calculate, they would not have been able to hunt a single deer, and they would not have died of starvation and offspring, and you would not exist to read what I write.
The rule is the juxtaposition of magical, ideological, and scientific mentalities among our ancestors, as it is today in the majority of human beings, and therefore there is no need to denounce or deny that Isaac Newton - one of the fathers of contemporary science - was fond of magic and practiced it regularly.
For complex reasons in which chance and necessity intertwine, you see, on the individual or collective level, the dominance of one of the three layers of thinking without the disappearance of the rest of the fixed components of the mind.
In the West, for example, the victory of science and technology - which are the brightest manifestations of the empirical mind - did not lead to the disappearance of the churches that lost the Monopol to defining the truth and imposing their perceptions of the world.
Question: What is the motive that makes thought move to experimental scientific thinking, so that the latter becomes the loudest voice within the individual or collective mind?
We are here in front of a qualitative leap in relation to magical thought, as it interrupts with its vision of the world and its means, to discover that they are useless in achieving goals.
Are we victims of very narrow-minded thinking, and we forget or are ignorant that human history is the time space in which they experimented and are still experimenting with all the political systems, religions, philosophies, sciences and technology that resulted from their genius, and that the future will only witness other forms of their experiences in the same fields ?
He breaks with ideological thought because he learns from his mistakes. Rather, flexibility in dealing with them constitutes acceptance, evaluation, and transgression of the source of strength that magical and ideological thinking lacks.
The most important thing in it is daring against any alleged holiness, since there is no holiness except for the truth that experience shows.
Thus, the Bible can say whatever it wants in the field of spirituality, morals and social relations, but it will be false without hesitation on the part of Galilei and Darwin regarding his statements about nature and the origin of man, and scientific study proves their inaccuracy.
The rule in experimental scientific thought is that he does not see in the early ones - whom the ideological mentality considers the role model, the example and the source of all truth - except as human beings who are not distinguished from us in anything, they have the same defects and our virtues, they have the same amount of good and evil, honest and liars, who are right and wrong.
Therefore, just as Galilei did not bow before Aristotle, Nielsen Bohr did not bow before Einstein because of his extraordinary ability and gift in the field, and he refuses to acknowledge quantum mechanics, which experiment has proven its immense richness in theory and practice.
Is the secret of Western supremacy of the predominance of the scientific-experimental mentality, which history has proven to constitute a huge qualitative leap in man’s ability to adapt reality, in contrast to the weak performance of magical and modest thinking of ideological thinking?
Is the sterility that made us the educated, not the scholastic, our living primarily under the domination of the magical and doctrinal class of our mind, that we hardly allow the empirical scientific class to express itself?
Are we victims of very limited and narrow-minded thinking, forgetting or ignorant of the fact that human history is the time space in which they experimented and are still experimenting with all the political systems, religions, philosophies, sciences and technology that resulted from their genius, and that the future will only witness other forms of their experiences in the same fields?
Who is aware of us that nature itself is a field of continuous experiments since the appearance of life on this planet, on countless living species, including the human race?
The problem may not be in the malfunctioning or short-sighted thinking mechanisms only, but in a deeper defect.
Does the scientific-empirical method not require a great deal of courage that alone allows daring against the alleged sacred, and integrity that does not sell illusions and lies, and the humility that enables not to persist in denying the error, and the flexibility that enables it to learn from it and overcome it?
Is behind the intellectual shortcoming that made us the students, not the students, a moral shortcoming that is the source of the disease and its treatment is the starting point of every attempt to heal?
Night must pass.