What do the next ten years hold for creativity, innovation and intellectual production in the Middle East? Among the presentations to the Arab Thought Foundation’s ninth annual conference, FIKR9, were broadly two competing narratives for how the region should evolve.

Enthusiasm for the future: The young participants of FIKR9 Youth Program with HRH Prince Khalid Al Faisal in Beirut. Picture Courtesy of Hibr on Flickr, Licensed CC Attribution Share-Alike NonCommercial 3.0.

The dominant narrative suggests that the region can harness its ‘youth bulge’ to create a knowledge economy. This can happen from within the existing political structures, and will fuse Gulf oil wealth and investment expertise with the ever growing pool of human talent from across the region.

This narrative likes to focus on STEM subjects (Science, Technology, Engineering and Medicine). Educational achievement in these areas can create hi-tech industries and cutting edge research centres that will underpin innovation in areas such as renewable energy, petrochemicals, and nanotechnology.

You can see the mechanics of this strategy already taking root. Gulf money is being invested to build truly world-class research infrastructure, such as laboratories and libraries. Qatar’s Education City or the King Abdullah City for Science and Technology are two good examples. Foreign talent from outside the Arab world is being hired at a premium to train local talent, stimulate new research and foster a productive learning environment.

It is a strategy that gels well with the existing political institutions of the region, as the conference made clear. In his introductory notes, Arab Thought Foundation President HRH Prince Khalid Al Faisal, member of the Saudi royal family and governor of Makkah Province, said that the Arab world needed to lead global society toward a ‘sustainable future’ by ‘accelerating development in Science and Technology’.

With their immense resources and access to human capital from the wider Arab world and Asia, the Gulf states can build hi-tech industries and the talent pool needed to power them – a strategy that would replace oil and gas, and bring many wider infrastructure and economic benefits to society – without needing to change the way in which society works in any fundamental way.

That’s where the second narrative comes in, most prominently displayed here by Professor Burhan Ghalioun, Director of the Center for Contemporary Oriental Studies at the Sorbonne. The fact that he works from France is testament to the fact that his views are unpalatable in the Arab world. No one said it, but these views are also incompatible with the ‘knowledge economy’ thesis.

This narrative says that the notion of a knowledge economy is impossible without a fundamental change in the way in which Arab elites view critical thinking. For Ghalioun, critical thinking is inseparable from the notion of a knowledge economy. But for critical thinking to take root depends on elites relinquishing power. So the nub of it is that building a knowledge economy depends on building democracy.

Ghalioun’s thesis is not new – it notably draws on the ideas of Hisham Sharabi’s Neopatriarchy which was written in the 1980s – but it is still deeply challenging to hear the case being made so passionately at an elite Arab forum from within the Arab world. It is an ironic inversion of the very title of the event – Arab Thought Foundation. Ghalioun is saying, “Arab thought” is a contradiction in terms, and you the elites are the reason why this is so. He also poured scorn on the title of the event (Shaping the Future .. Arab’s role?), suggesting that the Arab world has no positive future to look forward to. But one thing is for sure, no non-Arab could make this case so boldly without being labeled an out-of-touch Orientalist. We certainly have to respect the Arab Thought Foundation for inviting him. It is not easy to welcome someone to a conference when you know his purpose for being there is to question the very forum you have established.

No other presentation elicited so much feedback from the audience, both positive and negative, so clearly Ghalioun’s words had hit a chord. Moreover, he spoke in high classical Arabic with a rhetorical eloquence that resonated with the audience, a further irony in a presentation that on face value to a western outsider might look like an unhelpful polemic rant. Let me quote from my notes:

In the Arab world we have a multifaceted crisis. No one is interested in the future, young people don’t have a future. All our policies are built on ignoring the future. Private interests trump public ones. We need many more jobs than we are creating. We have focused on closed nationalisms. We count on foreign protection for security. We are paying the price for nationalism rather than supporting each other. We need cooperation. We have feudal systems, we have princes. No one is asking the people. We have closed political regimes where political interests are linked to financial interests. We have great potential. But instead of asking people to think and criticize we have a system of tutorship. We have packaged people like sardines. This is why the Arab world has no more value than Hungary. The people are marginalized. A very small minority has control. We have deprived ninety percent from human resources. A small group has monopolized power. We need the blood of the Arab body to circulate, not just flow to one limb. Otherwise it will die.

Clearly, Ghalioun’s suggestion that Arab countries do not think about the future of their societies is wrong. Arab countries from Syria to Saudi Arabia think the future of the region is a knowledge economy, built from within the existing political structures. Much as China has built a powerful export economy from within the structures of the existing Communist regime, so the countries of the Middle East believe they must work from where they are, not a fantasy democracy land. The alternative to the current regimes they believe is the sectarian bloodshed of Iraq or the erratic theocracy of Iran.

But the ‘knowledge economy’ thesis is also fraught with challenges. As Parag Khanna argued, the countries of the region have high barriers to mobility which limit trade and the free flow of talent. Daniel Warner, former the chief of human resources at Apple, argued cogently for greater mindshare and investment in entrepreneurship in the region as a strategy for building human capital. Jordanian social entrepreneur Maher Kaddoura asked how the region would make more intellectual production available to wider Arab publics online in light of the fact that many do not speak English. Privately friends noted that the unwillingness of some countries to grant citizenship impedes the long term development of scientific communities needed to build the knowledge economy. There were also calls at the conference for improved legal frameworks and training that could underpin a successful rejuvenation of trade and business growth in the region.

One thing we can be sure of though is that in any plan for building human capital and knowledge industries, critical thinking matters. This is as true for scientists as much as for researchers in the humanities. We may just find that the highly skilled science community the region seeks to build is the vanguard for other kinds of change we can scarcely begin to predict.