The Arab masses seem to be putting too much faith in Arab intellectuals to deliver the Arab World from its quagmire of backwardness and political chaos. The general feeling among most Arabs is that it is the sole responsibility of the intellectuals to speak out against all sorts of oppression and injustice, and offer themselves as fodder for change and revolution, as if martyrdom is the exclusive privilege of the intellectuals. While everybody remains silent, it is the intellectuals who are expected to single handedly combat the fundamentalists and extremists and alert the governments to their danger. This is an overestimation of the social role and capabilities of intellectuals.

If, as an intellectual, you happen to be invited by one of the business people to a weekend soiree, you will find yourself in the odd position of having to defend yourself, along with your fellow intellectuals, for not raising your voice against the government and for remaining free still and not yet being thrown in jail for expressing opposition to the establishment. One of the people present, after taking two or three sips from his glass of expensive scotch and gulping a handful of roasted peanuts, would come up to you to reprimand you for your pacifism and give you a long harangue about the necessity of change and reform. You look at his manicured, shiny face and his stiffly starched headdress and wonder to your self: Is this guy really serious? You leave the soiree a bit tipsy but hopeful and full of enthusiasm. The next day you write up a petition addressed to the king or president, whoever happened to be the head of your state and whichever happened to be the system of your government, asking for some moderate measures of liberal reforms. Then, you take the petition to your fellow intellectuals for signature assuring them that some of the most important and influential business people would cosign it. After that, you take the petition to the same business people who two nights ago were full of talk about change and reform. As it turns out, every one of them has his own excuse and ‘good’ reason for not signing. You decide to go ahead anyway with your petition. As a result, you and the handful of your colleagues who signed with you are either thrown in jail or fired from your jobs or your passports are withdrawn from you to prevent you from leaving the country or, in case the language of the petition is not too bold and does not deserve a jail sentence, you are prevented from ever appearing on TV or writing in any newspaper to express any opinion on any subject whatsoever. Any false charge could be trumped up and lodged against you to justify the sentence, from political treason to religious blasphemy. Yet, none of those shiny manicured business people would dare ruffle his starched headdress and come to your rescue. It is only then that you realize that their pompous harangues about reform were meant only to clear their conscious for being so wealthy despite their illiteracy and to prove to their own satisfaction that members of the educated class are losers and failures which shows that education is useless and futile anyway.

Let us now move to the other side of the fence and tell a different story. Let us suppose that one of those religious extremists grabbed the microphone after prayers in any mosque and started a sort of soapbox sermon on the moral ills of the time. Overcome with zeal, he would most likely step over all bounds in seeing heresy everywhere and accusing everybody of infidelity and pointing to government officials as cohorts of the devil for remaining silent while they see all these travesties. He might even challenge the sovereignty of the state and exhort everybody to take the law into their own hands and rise up in the name of the true faith to correct such flagrant transgressions against the Lord. If authorities find the guts to arrest him, multitudes would flood the offices of government officials and religious dignitaries to demand his release. If his sentence is prolonged they will see to it that his family is well taken care off. Websites will be created to collect signatures for his release and donations for his family. When he comes out of jail, he will be received by the people as a conquering hero. On the other hand, the other fellow, our friend the intellectual cum liberal, will be avoided like camel with scabies after serving his sentence and being released.

Actually, governments are not to be blamed for being more lenient with the fundamentalists and not so lenient with the liberals. What they are doing is the political thing to do. This is the nature of the power beast. Politicians take note only of those who have backing behind them, those who express the interest of a class, a block of constituents. The fundamentalist discourse, in its emphasis on the importance of religion in life, is, more or less, expressing the interest of the clerical class, which is quite sizable; from callers to prayers, to leaders of prayers, to judges in courts, to teachers and students in religious institutions, etc, etc. The clerics are the only well established professional class in the Arab World with historical roots, which go a long way back in history, with articulated discourse, substantial literature and a broad public base, not to mention that practically all endowments and philanthropic contributions in the Arab World go to religious functions and institutions with only very negligible share directed towards scientific research, cultural activities, the humanities and the arts. So what if a handful of intellectuals go round talking to a score of audience in few soirees a week!  The clerics meet with millions of devotees five times a day. If the government takes any harsh measure against a cleric or a fundamentalist it would look like as if it were taking that measure against the religion of the people. Yet, it could easily take any measure it pleases against liberals under any pretext and no one would dare or care to raise a finger or express support or give a helping hand.

The main reason the liberal voice in the Arab World is so powerless and so ineffectual is because it does not express the interest of any social class. At the close of the 18^th and beginning of the 19^th centuries, the liberal voice in Europe was expressing the interest of the rising class of the merchants and the bourgeoisie in their struggle against the nobility and the feudal lords. Without the material support and political backing of the merchant class, liberalism in Europe might not have achieved such tremendous success. Before the rise of the merchant class in Europe, many reformers were burned at the stake with no one rushing to take their side, from John Wyclif to John Huss.

The roots of the European merchant class go back to guild associations, a professional class independent from both church and state. The merchant class in the Middle East, and Arab World in particular, especially in the Gulf Region, has a completely different story to tell. Let us start with the prophet. His tribe, Quraish is a merchant tribe. Even before then, the temples in the ancient Middle Eastern States have always been associated with merchant activities. Sacred precincts in the East were meant to be safe areas to engage in commerce. The spread of sufi zawaya and the religion of Islam in Africa and the Far East are associated with the itinerant merchants. Furthermore, all traditional sultanates, emirates, chiefdoms and peti-states in the Arabian Peninsula and the Gulf Region were established by merchant families. The revenue from merchandize gives them their material base, while their alliance with the clerical class give their political and legal authority the necessary legitimacy. This shows the political and religious roots of mercantilism in the Arab World and the intertwining of the merchant class with the ruling class and the religious class. This leaves the intellectuals and liberals out of the show, with no role to play, at least up till now.

Being in league with the ruling class, any liberalization of the laissez faire type might hurt the merchants more than benefits them, since it could break their monopolies. Also, since they draw their wealth mainly from trade and lucrative government contracts, more than from industry, they have no interest in scientific research and technological development. As for clerics, their hostility towards natural and physical sciences and secular knowledge in general need no proof. In such social formation there is no room for any intellectual enterprise.

What is needed is not only a separation between church and state in the Arab World, but rather to disengage the ruling class, the merchant class and the clerical class from one another. Globalization and mandatory membership in international organization such as World Trade Organization might be the catalyst, which could bring about such a process by fiat. After all, it is globalization, which is forcing the regimes of the region to resort to technocrats to fill certain government posts and ministries.