Why is it that
Arabs revere their leaders more in death than in life?
Ahmed Tharwat
November 22, 2004 THARWAT1122
After suffering for a long time with illness and political setbacks,
Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat died this month in a hospital bed in
Paris.
At his compound in Gaza for the burial on Nov. 12, a frenzied flow of
Palestinian mourners poured over the internal courtyard, trampling the red
carpet, desperately hoping to touch Arafat's coffin. There were wails and
chants of "Yasser! Yasser!" and "We will sacrifice our blood and souls to
redeem you."
A young mourner said of Arafat, "He is like a father to me, and to me he
did not die. He is in my heart, and I will never forget this day in all of
my life."
This Arabic wailing for their dead is a deep-rooted tradition in their
psyches. The first televised example of this may have been in 1970 after
the death of Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser, only a few years after
the debacle of the Six-Year War. More than 2 million Egyptian mourners
crushed into Cairo's Tahreer Square to catch a glimpse of their dead
leader's coffin.
I know, because I was one of the young mourners.
Now I wonder why Arab masses idolize their corrupt leaders once they have
died. Other world leaders just die in peace or wither away in the abyss of
history after writing their memoirs.
So what is it about Arab leaders' deaths that resurrects them to idol
status? They don't get this kind of reverence when they're alive.
Although these deaths are usually the only agent of political change, the
people express their disbelief or relief by turning the leaders into
idols, not so much by building pyramids in which to bury them, as the
Egyptians did thousand of years ago, but by building pyramids of myth and
despair.
"Arafat was the symbol of the Palestinian cause," they explained. "He put
the Palestinians on the international map."
But which map? This map has been shrinking for the last 50 years, and yet
the Palestinians still chronicle the misery. So why do the Arab masses
idolize their corrupt leaders after their deaths in the same way that
American masses idealize their rock stars after they die of drug overdoses
or gunshot wounds?
At a coffee shop I put that question to my Arab guru, Mazher Al-Zoby, a
graduate student at the University of Minnesota.
He thoughtfully explained, "The West defines Arab countries by their
leaders -- Nasser, Arafat, Saddam, Gadhafi, Assad -- then launches a
crusade against them.
"The Arab masses resist by coming to the side of their leaders dead or
alive; they don't necessarily support their leaders' democratic or
political wisdom, but in a sense they are telling the West, 'Look, the
symbol of our country never dies.' "
Just then the waitress interrupted our conversation to ask what kind of
coffee we'd like.
"Dark, please," I mourned.
Ahmed Tharwat
is host of the Arab American TV show "Belahdan,"
which airs
Sundays at 10:30 p.m. on public TV (Channel 17).
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