There are many intersections and much intertwining between countries in terms of international interests. There is no fixed rule that defines the nature of relations or political and economic interests between countries. There is a common mistake that either international relations are in consensus and complete agreement or there are no relations at all. This is certainly a deficit in the political agenda of this country and its political leadership, because international politics now follows a new rule, namely, the management of international relations through agreement and consensus according to the interest of each country and the problems it faces.
It is not surprising to see an agreement in views between two or more countries on a certain international issue in the world, especially in the Middle East, despite an apparent conflict between those countries.
Some mistakenly think that addressing the political strategy of a country and the problematic relationship between religion and politics is a cultural luxury, especially in the midst of our life concerns and the foggy vision created by a bitter political reality over the past decades. Actually, tackling political and ideological issues is very important, particularly in such difficult circumstances in the Middle East.
Taking into consideration all religious and political complexities, we always see Iran trying to dominate the Middle East, taking advantage of the political and religious shallowness of Arab people. Arab political leaders who ruled their countries for more than 60 years are the ones to blame for that.
As a result of tyranny and autocracy of political Arab regimes and the shrinking role of religious scholars and politicians, the lights of religion became dim amid the darkness and mazes of politics. So, the public now believes that religious preachers’ politicised advice has become useless, and they resort to another type of religious men who adopt fanaticism and plant pessimism among the youth and peoples. Those religious men encourage people to follow new ideas and doctrines such as the Shiite doctrine and the Iranian revolutionary thought, as was the case in Yemen, Syria, Iraq, and Lebanon. The autocrats, who ruled Arab countries and turned state institutions into tools to serve their interests, have restricted religion, allowing Iran to promote its agenda among Arab peoples under the pretence of religion and salvation.
Iran has controlled a significant part of the people of each Arab country, especially Egypt’s neighbouring countries. It succeeded for the first time not only in making Arab countries fight each other, but also igniting civil war, as is the case in Yemen. The Yemeni Houthis are definitely Arab but with an Iranian head. We need rational and objective analysis to know the roots of this problem and the reason for this blatant shift in the Arab personality.
I will not discuss here Arab rulers’ philosophy of governance that contributed significantly to the current situation, along with major countries’ policies in the region. I will focus on the shallowness of the Arab personality in terms of politics and religion.
Arab policies that are based on oppression and violating freedoms led to the isolation of Arab collective consciousness, as well as the elimination of its political, religious, and cultural creativity. They made Arabs regress many centuries behind their bright old civilisation and contemporary development through abandoning reading and scientific research, using the most powerful tools, namely “ignorance and poverty”. These repressive policies produced repugnant peoples fearing everything.
Arab rulers also used a more effective weapon,: religion. They used it wrongly, however they were aware of its powerful spiritual effect on the Arab man. The abandonment of the spiritual part of religion helped Arab rulers achieve their goals and objectives. It made it easier for the rulers to control minds, prevent them from thinking, and put them in blind closed circles of “Halal” and “Haram”, in other words: fear of life and aspiration for heaven. They created a supervisor on people, connected to political and religious powers, with conservative concepts that prohibit thinking within the authority of the law.
In light of all these circumstances, Iran has known that Arab citizens have been transformed by successive Arab regimes into humans without hope for a better future, and that religion has become the most important thing in their life and their only salvation from what they face. Therefore, Iran took advantage of this Arab confusion and presented its principles and objectives, cloaked as religion. Now, Iran provides Arabs with money and weapons to kill each other easily. As for the complexities and entanglement of interests in the Arab region, we will discuss them next time, God willing.
