Arab Parliaments Eye Strasbourg, Reject Angelina Jolie, Why KAUST is Saudi Education's Hope
"The emperor appointed his horse Incitatus a senator." Robert Graves: I, Claudius
"The emperor's favorite horse Incitatus owned a marble stable, an ivory stall and a
jewelled collar; also a house, furniture and slaves - to provide suitable entertainment
for the guests whom Caligula invited in its name. It is said that he even planned to award
Incitatus a consulship." Suetonius: Caligula 55
I have been hearing about the Arab Parliamentary Union for some years now, without knowing what it really did: hardly anybody knows or cares what these inter-Arab groupings do (which is nada). So, I checked.
It consists of all Arab parliaments and advisory councils, or whatever passes for such. One of its goals is to enhance democracy in the Arab world: except that most of them are either fully appointed by the ruler (Saudi Arabia), half-appointed (Jordan), or three-quarters appointed (Bahrain). Now only Iraq’s is fully elected, followed by Lebanon and Kuwait (about 75+% elected). The Palestinian's was elected, but then something funny happened on the way to the forum....
The union has its permanent headquarters in that bastion of freedom and democracy, Damascus.
I looked up its meetings and resolutions (it meets only once every two years, grâce à Dieu, alhamdulillah). At its 2006 meeting it called for rejection of all foreign intervention in Darfur, probably including Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt (maybe that’s why he hangs around New Orleans these days).
At an earlier meeting in Khartoum, Sudan (2003), it reported that: "Speaker of Arab Parliament Union said that the meeting of the Arab Parliament Union's juducial (sic) and political committees scheduled to be held in Khartoum aims at studying the suggestions of the establishment of the unified Arab parliament."
I screamed at the monitor ”Haram, but Strasbourg looks nothing like Khartoum! the Strasbourgoises cockroaches are nothing as big as the Khartoumoises roaches, you can hardly see them..….”.
As an economist, I believe that appointing a horse to such an appointed deliberative body is a waste of good horseflesh.
Recently Saudi King Abdullah laid the foundations for the (what else?) King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST). KAUST is billed as a new attempt by Saudi Arabia to reform an antiquated higher education system. The Carnegie Endowment notes that: "The country’s Ministry of Higher Education—established in 1975—has been mainly controlled by the Wahhabi elite, who emphasize religious instruction over liberal arts or sciences. As recently as 2003, Saudi Arabia had only eight universities for a population of over 22 million people—75 percent of them under 30—and spent less than a quarter of one percent of its GDP on research, as opposed to 10 percent spent on the military."
Of course Carnegie overlooked (everybody does) the fact that a few millions of these 22 millions are single foreign laborers and housemaids who have no access to higher education in any case.
Perhaps the low expenditure on research compared to defense is because there are no lucrative commissions to be gained by the princes (remember the BAE case?) and potentates from research- so why waste the money?
Speaking of commissions (and bribes): where are Prince Bandar Bin Sultan, Tony Blair and the British Serious Frauds Office these days? Have they gone to the mattress, as they used to say?
BTW: many leading Gulf Salafis in academia, politics, mosques and in the killing fields of the world are graduates of some of these same institutions. In this sense KSA is for the Salafis like the New England of the Middle East. You can get a good elite Salafi/Jihadi education there, without having to so much as fly over New Haven, Princeton, or Cambridge (Mass.)- of course you can forget about Brandeis altogether, not their type of ambience. Without having to think hard either: the curriculum is somewhat less rigorous and brains are not mandatory.
Cheers
mhg
m.h.ghuloum@gmail.com
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