Responsibility for the future is very often a matter of foresight and foresight is always based on insight, as we all know. What does my insight tell me about this whole issue or problem? It informs me that the modern Arabs are truly the Hamlet of the 20th century. Like the endlessly celebrated prince, they seem able continually to join the underlying passion of the elemental to the brooding intellectuality of the cerebral to the lyrical sensitivity of the poetic but only to end up in unrelieved tragedy. The tragedy consists of unending hesitations, procrastinations, oscillations and waverings between the old and the new, between asalah and mu’asarah (authenticty and contemporaneity), between turath and tajdid (heritage and renewal), between huwiyyah and hadathah (identity and modernity), between religions and secularity.

In this way, the 21st century can only belong to the conquering Fortinbrases of this world and never to the Hamlets hung up on interminably rehearsing that classic – but now totally depassé – European pièce called La querelle des Anciens et des Modernes. No wonder, then, to quote Shakespeare's most famous drama, that “the times seem out of joint”, for the Arabs and “something looks rotten in their state”. No wonder as well if they keep wondering, like the fabled Prince of Denmark himself and with as much tragic intensity, “whether they are the authors of their woes or there is a divinity that shapes their ends.”

This analogy leads me to dig deeper inside ourselves and to think that for us Arabs to own our future, to hold ourselves responsible for it, we have to come to terms with a certain image of ourselves buried very deeply in our collective subconscious. What I mean is the following: As Arabs and Muslims (and I use Muslim here in the purely historical, cultural and civilizational sense), we continue deep down to image and imagine ourselves as conquerors, history-makers, pace setters, pioneers and leaders of worldhistoric proportions.

Reconciling Self-Image and Reality

In the marrow of our bones, we still sense ourselves as subjects of history not its object, as its agent and not as its patient. We have never come to terms realistically with, let alone reconcile ourselves to, the marginality and reactiveness of our position in modern times. In fact, deep down in our collective soul, we find intolerable this monstrosity of a supposedly great ummah like ourselves standing helplessly on the margins not only of modern history in general but even of our local and particular histories.