The Arab World After Gadhafi

The flag of freedom flies high across Libya today. After only eight months, Libyan fighters liberated their country from Moammar Gadhafi, a tyrant who had waged war against his people for more than four decades.

Celebrations have rightly broken out in the public squares and plazas of Libya, but this happiness must be tempered by the momentous tasks that lie ahead for the Transitional National Council and for Libyans themselves. It will not be easy to build a just and tolerant society overnight in a country that did not experience the rule of law for 42 years. But the march must begin, even if the journey is long and arduous.

What happens in Libya has profound implications for an Arab world in flux. If Libyans can lay the foundation of an open and democratic society within the context of their tradition and renounce retribution in favor of rebuilding, neighboring Arab countries can rid themselves of their dinosaurs as well and move confidently toward an enlightened future. There will undoubtedly be mistakes and setbacks. Tribal animosities may flare. (The recent massacre of Egyptian Christians shows how horribly things can go wrong). But if the national council can forge a representative government, there is no limit to what the long-suffering Arab people can accomplish.

In a country of only 6 million, Libya was earning hundreds of millions of dollars from 1.6 million barrels of oil a day. But Gadhafi squandered it all. While the masses lived on crumbs, he lavished wealth and patronage on himself, his family and his sycophants, even as he stirred up trouble abroad. He had his gaudy uniforms, for instance, tailored in Paris. He justified these excesses by making his inane “The Green Book” the de facto constitution of Libya. Under his dictatorship, Libyans, with 0.27 barrels of oil per citizen per day, became poorer on the average than Mexicans, while the average Emirati (UAE), on 0.34 barrels of oil per citizen per day, became richer than the average American.

But that is now past. If Libyan leaders can quickly repair damages to the pipelines and ramp up oil production, it is estimated that the country can start earning as much as $80 million per day at today’s price. It will ease the way toward economic justice for ordinary Libyans. The government will need billions of dollars to steer their country toward the modern age but it has to be cautious because the vultures are already circling.

While Libya scrambles to put its political and economic houses in order, Arabs beyond Libya are rejoicing as well.

One Arab leader, in particular, has been put on notice: Syria’s Bashar Assad. This dictator has been receiving master lessons from Gadhafi on how to put down mass uprisings. Now that his hero has been dispatched after being dragged from a rat hole, Assad must be wondering about his own fate. He, along with Yemen’s Ali Abdullah Saleh, knows that tyrannies are doomed, that hereditary power is history. Syrians and Yemenis are emboldened by the feat of the Libyans and will go all out to overthrow their despots, despite the terrible sacrifices they will undoubtedly have to make.

The larger issue is one of a renaissance in the Arab world. In a sense, the entire Arab world has been caught in a knowledge time-warp for decades. Despite earning trillions of petro-dollars, there has been no world-class discovery or invention from this part of the world in recent times due to bad governance, misplaced priorities and politicized religion. Yet we know that the Golden Age of the Arabs from the 9th through the 13th centuries brought about major advances in mathematics, science, and medicine. Muslim scientists invented algebra, explained principles of optics, demonstrated the body's circulation of blood, named stars, built observatories and created universities.

The situation today? Here is one grim statistics: the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), with 57 member states, claims only 8.5 scientists, engineers, and technicians per 1000 population, compared with a world average of 40.7, and 139.3 for countries of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).

It is possible that as freedom flowers and representative governments take shape in these countries, a new generation of young people will rise to meet the challenges of the 21st century in science, art and technology.

The Gadhafis and the Assads of the world pour poison on the aspirations of their people. They keep them chained to the dark impulses of the soul. As equality, justice, dignity and freedom blossom among Arabs, can a renaissance be far behind?

Thoreau and the "Occupy Wall Street" Movement

What would Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862) make of the “Occupy Wall Street” (OWS) movement now sweeping America and the world?

Based on how he lived and what he wrote, it is likely that the author of Civil Disobedience (1849), whose words inspired Tolstoy, Gandhi and Martin Luther King, would throw his full support behind it.

Thoreau defended John Brown when the abolitionist seized a federal armory in 1859 to arm slaves to rise against the South. He built his own cabin by Walden Pond without borrowing a cent from the bank. He had observed how the crushing burden of mortgages robbed his neighbors of their economic freedom. “When the farmer has got his house,” he wrote in Walden, “he may not be the richer but the poorer for it, and it be the house that has got him.”

If Thoreau were to review the “State of the Union,” these are some of the grim statistics he would encounter in America today:

- The richest 1 percent (the One Percenters) take home almost 25% of the national income, which represents a more unequal wealth distribution than most of the world’s banana republics.

- From 1980 to 2005, more than 80% of the total increase in incomes went to the One Percenters. They now have more net worth (34%) than the bottom 90 percent (29%), according to figures compiled by the Economic Policy Institute in Washington.

- According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, over 14 million Americans (9.1%) are unemployed as of September 2011. (This does not include the significant number of Americans who have given up looking for jobs, particularly those over 50). About as many Americans are working only part-time because they are unable to find full-time work.

- 46.2 million Americans are living in poverty, the most in more than 50 years. Foreclosures and bankruptcies are at an all-time high. Over 50 million Americans do not have any medical insurance.

- The CEOs of the largest American companies earn an average of more than 500 times as much as the average worker.

In New York, the epicenter of the OWS protest, the wealth of the One Percenters derives almost entirely from the sector known primarily for its “financial innovation.” These “innovators” work in Wall Street, commercial and investment banks, hedge funds and credit card and insurance companies. They create nothing. Instead, they claim to create “value” by speculating with others’ money, be it in mortgages, car loans, credit card debt, gas and food prices, always hedging the bets so that they end up with piles of cash whether society wins (rarely) or loses (almost always).

Thoreau would find that in the America of today, the One Percenters control the rest of the population, the Ninetynine Percenters, through economic and political hegemony. He would find that our government has become a government of the One Percenters, by the One Percenters, and for the One Percenters. He would be deeply disappointed with President Obama who promised to clean up the economic disaster he inherited from George Bush. Obama vowed to be an agent of change, a beacon of hope. Instead, he coddled those responsible for the meltdown - bankers, hedge fund operators, reckless speculators and other assorted wealthy sociopaths - and bailed them out with billions of dollars of taxpayers’ money, while turning a blind eye to their uninterrupted multi-million dollar quarterly bonuses.

But Thoreau would also be heartened by the sight of his moral descendants taking a stand. What began as a small gathering by a handful of New Yorkers on September 17 has spread not only coast to coast but beyond, including cities like Rome, London, Paris, Frankfurt, Madrid, Sydney and Tokyo. Like the Arab Spring, this grassroots movement has no leaders, heroes or ideologues, only ordinary citizens bound by a fierce desire to right the terrifying inequity that threatens that most fundamental of rights, our freedom.

Seeing the resolve of protesters growing by the day, Thoreau would reconsider deleting from Walden, circa 2011, his biting observation that the “mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.” Occupy Wall Street movement is drawing the “mass of men” into an ever-widening circle of passionate activism. Yes, the movement grew from the desperation of intolerable injustice but now it has acquired a momentum that transcends desperation, charging the national and international discourse with timeless ideas of equality, fairness and justice.

“We are the 99” is a banner that Henry David Thoreau would have been proud to unfurl on Main Street, America, for the world to behold and act upon.

A Persistent and Visionary Entrepreneur

No one realized the confluence of technology, entertainment and design in digital products and transformed them into objects of desire more than Steve Jobs. The co-founder of Apple, who passed away at 56 from pancreatic cancer, will be remembered for his seminal contributions to technology with such products and entities as the Macintosh (1984), Pixar (1986), iMac (1998), Mac OS X (2000), iPod (2001), iTunes Store (2003), iPhone (2007), MacBook Air (2008), and iPad (2010). The list is long and unique and sets him apart from other tech innovators who were lucky to hit the bull’s eye with one or two products.

In technology, Jobs believed in revolution, not evolution. His obsession with the look and feel of a product down to the last excruciating detail often rubbed his underlings and executives the wrong way. He could be cruel with criticism and brutal in his appraisal of others. But in the end, everyone who worked for him and was influenced by him became his fierce acolytes. When relentless excellence is the goal, walking on eggshells is not a priority.

Jobs was an anomaly in that he extolled the value of a liberal arts education when only STEM subjects (Science, Technology, Engineering, Math) were (and are) held up as the gateway to employability. Before dropping out of college at 17, the only course he found satisfying was one on calligraphy, an experience he later used in creating graceful fonts for the Macintosh.

Jobs was neither a software nor a hardware engineer but he was the quintessential catalyst who made the whole greater than the sum of its parts. He created products from the user’s perspective, not the geek’s or the executive’s. The mouse, the user interface, the built-in network, the playful and friendly computers, these innovations and more were designed with you and me in mind. He made the computer truly personal.

All these raise an intriguing question: Where did this unique synthesis of art and science come from? Perhaps the clue lies in genealogy, although the story is suffused with sadness.

Steven Paul Jobs was born out of wedlock to a 23-year-old Syrian Muslim immigrant from Wisconsin named Abdul Fattah Jandali and his 23-year-old German-American girlfriend named Joanne Schieble. In the conservative America of 1955, the baby didn’t stand a chance of growing up with his biological parents, particularly considering that his mother came from an ultra-orthodox Christian family.

Joanne Schieble couldn’t convince her parents of marrying an Arab Muslim and so moved to liberal San Francisco. Although the couple formally married later, Joanne put up the baby for adoption without letting Jandali know about it.

The Arab-American boy was adopted by an American-Armenian family in the San Francisco Bay Area. Clara Hagopian and her husband Paul Jobs had been married for seven years. She was incapable of conceiving, so the couple eagerly adopted the baby who was to change the world in unimaginable ways.

Jobs never showed any interest in knowing his biological father. In August of 2011, Jandali, now 80 and a vice-president of a Casino in Reno, Nevada, (he has said that he is not a practicing Muslim but that he is proud of his Islamic heritage) publicly reached out to his son, saying, “I live in the hope that before it is too late he will reach out to me. Even to have just one cup of coffee with him just once will make me a very happy man.”

While there was no reconciliation, is it not possible that the confluence of the East and the West played a decisive role in shaping Jobs into who he was? The keen eye for aesthetics, the flair for technology, the uncanny ability to sense the potential in people and mold them into a never-ending source of creativity, probably came from this mix of two distinct bloodstreams.

Technology has a way of making today’s hottest products obsolete tomorrow. A new Jobs may appear out of the blue to create products that make the iPhones and the iPads look positively arcane.

But even if the digital revolution that Jobs spawned is supplanted by another, there is something else that he produced, or rather wrote, that I believe will stand the test of time. It is the commencement speech that he delivered at Stanford University in 2005.

It is among the most stirring and inspiring addresses ever, dealing with the fragility of life, the power of persistence, the elixir of creativity, and the inevitability of death. Everyone I know who has read it has been profoundly moved by it and resolved to make something of their lives.

“Your time is limited,” he said in conclusion in that address, “so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma – which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinion drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.”

Steve Jobs lived his own life. He moved confidently in the direction of his dreams and passions, relentlessly focused on his goals while never letting failures (and he had quite a few) daunt him. There are lessons in it for all.