On the heels of this general report, CNN broke the story that:
A teen blogger who had been held for nine months in Syria’s Duma women’s prison has been charged with espionage … Syrian Intelligence Services summoned Tal al-Mallouhi, 19, in December to interrogate her about her blog, which contains poetry and social commentary.
To anyone who follows anything of Syrian affairs, this absurdity is unsurprising. The regime of President Bashar al-Assad is known well for its extensive secret police network, suppression of opposition, and tumultuous border relations. Freedom House, an NGO, rates the country as “mostly unfree”, while reports widely circulate about bad blood between the country’s Sunni, Alawite Shia, Druze, and Christian communities. The average person, if employed, earns less than $5,000 a year.
Dreadful as it all sounds, Syria is by all these standards just an average country in the Middle East.
As a student of both the ancient and modern Middle East, I’m struck sad by these figures. While many take the region’s poverty and conflict for granted, I think it’s terribly ironic that the places where people first became civilized and cultural exchange was invented are now among the most uncivilly violent and culturally conservative places on earth.
When I look at Syria, I don’t just see President Assad’s goons cracking down on teen bloggers. Syria, along with Lebanon, Israel, and the Palestinian territories, was the birthplace of human civilization. About ten thousand years ago, the Middle East saw people experimenting for the first time in history with settling down in one place and raising crops.
When I read about Iraq’s attempts to put together a viable government that can represent the interests of its diverse sectors, I think of the track that the ancestors of today’s Iraqis were on thousands of years ago. Sargon of Akkad built the world’s first multiethnic state in 2300 BC, integrating Sumerians, Akkadians, and Amorites in a system that would be the envy of today’s Sunnis, Shiites, and Kurds. In 1800 BC, Hammurabi governed Iraq with a bold, progressive law code. Where’s al-Maliki’s?
But while Damascus and Jericho vie for the title of “world’s oldest city”, they’re caught in a regressive cycle that London and Tokyo, capitals of countries that became civilized much later, have escaped. What’s the problem?
In truth, standards of living in the Middle East didn’t fall behind Europe until the Age of Exploration, which gave European countries the ingredients for the Industrial Revolution. All countries outside the West have been had to play catch-up ever since.
In this sense, it’s wrong to blame Islam, political corruption, or geography as an essential problem. The ultimate barrier to progress in the Middle East is economic underdevelopment – a fact of life that has stymied both liberal culture and its inevitable product, healthy democracy. Attempting to force either blessing upon a country like Iraq or Syria is futile if the economic fundamentals are missing.
Thousands of years ago, the Middle East was the world’s hub of economic integration. In the new global system, reintegration is probably inevitable – a fact that we should be happy about. Until Damascus starts can start raising crops for the twenty-first century, teen bloggers beware.
Photo credit: Wikimedia