How did Arab elites become the biggest obstacle to state-building?‎ By Zakaria Nimer

‎How did Arab elites become the biggest obstacle to state-building?‎

By Zakaria Nimer

Translated from Arabic by Ibrahim Ebeid. July 19/2026

‎The most serious crisis of the Arab world is not that it is underdeveloped, but that it remains defined in different ways. For more than 100 years, elites have not stopped producing answers, but they have rarely agreed on the question. That’s why reform projects have been deadborn: a doctor who misdiagnoses a disease will not succeed in prescribing a cure, no matter his culture or intentions. At first glance, the Arab scene seems to be crowded with ideas. Nationalists, Islamists, liberals, leftists, and secularists each have a coherent explanation for the causes of the collapse. But the irony is that this abundance of explanations did not yield an abundance of solutions, but rather produced more division, as if each current were seeking the victory of its idea rather than the salvation of its homeland. The first mistake the elites made was treating history as a court rather than a laboratory. I was more concerned with condemning the past than understanding it, and judging ideas rather than testing their results. Thus, Arab political culture turned into a long series of intellectual rivalries, while the state itself remained silently eroded. At each stage, the elites found a new accused. Once religion was responsible for everything, once it was colonialism, then imperialism, then tyranny, then foreign conspiracy, then heritage, then modernity. Names changed, but the approach remained the same: searching for a single cause for a crisis born of centuries of accumulation. It is as if history were a simple book that could be summarized in a single title. But countries do not collapse because of a single idea, nor do they advance a single idea. Civilizations are not built by slogans, but by institutions. What brings down nations is not their intellectual differences but their inability to build just rules to manage these differences.‎

‎The Arab world has expended enormous energy on identity battles to the point that the question of the state’s shape has become more important than its efficiency. The debate revolved around whether the state was religious, secular, or nationalistic. At the same time, the citizen continued to clash with the same administration, the same judiciary, the same corruption, the same education, and the same poverty. It is no coincidence that the most present words in Arab discourse are renaissance, identity, originality, and conspiracy. In contrast, words such as production, efficiency, innovation, management, and scientific research are absent. A society that consumes more concepts than it produces knowledge ends up turning culture into an arena of conflict, rather than a tool for understanding reality. There is also a paradox that is difficult to ignore. Some elites have exercised sweeping philosophical skepticism about their heritage, but they have not exercised the same degree of criticism of many imported theories. It is as if the mind becomes critical when it looks inward, and imitates when it looks outward. The truth is that thought becomes free only when everyone reviews it the same way, because ideas do not gain their value from geography but from their ability to interpret reality. What is most regrettable is that the Arab League, which was supposed to be a factory of ideas, has often turned into a factory of testimonies, and that the intellectual, who was supposed to be the conscience of society, has become a prisoner of political or ideological polarization. Thus, the production of knowledge declined, was replaced by the consumption of knowledge, and was accompanied by the decline of diligence, transportation, and cash, and by the replacement of alignment. It found in the intellectual division the perfect opportunity to sustain its survival. The more the debate among the elites intensified, the fewer questions about corruption, the independence of the judiciary, the efficiency of the administration, and the misdistribution of wealth receded. Thus, ideological difference has become a veil that obscures the real crisis, the crisis of a state that has been unable to be a state for all its citizens. But blaming power alone is just another aspect of the culture of justification. A society that reveres the leader more than the law, prioritizes tribal or sectarian affiliation over citizenship, and places loyalty above competence participates, intentionally or unintentionally, in the reproduction of the crisis. Tyranny lives not only by the power of the ruler, but also by the weakness of the culture that justifies it.‎

‎The question the elites have long avoided is not, “How do we win the battle of ideas?” Rather, how do we build a state that can survive no matter how many ideas change? Strong states are not based on ideological consensus, but on institutions that respect the law, punish the corrupt, protect rights, allow the transfer of power, and invest in human beings above all else. Reform does not begin only with rewriting constitutions and changing slogans, but with rebuilding the school, because it is there that the image of the citizen is formed before that of the politician. It also begins with the university’s revival as an institution for the production of knowledge, not just a pathway to a job. It begins with the establishment of an independent judiciary, a modern administration, and an economy that rewards work and creativity rather than proximity to power. An intellectual who becomes an advocate of an ideology loses his most important characteristic: the ability to review himself. A society that turns ideas into closed doctrines condemns itself to repeat its mistakes generation after generation.‎

‎The crisis of the Arab world is not in the multitude of ideas, but in the lack of thinking. It is not in the absence of slogans, but in the absence of institutions that turn principles into reality. Unless the elites move from defending references to building the state to self-accountability, history will continue to repeat the same lesson, and the new generations will continue to inherit the same crises under different names. It is a battle between a society that produces knowledge and a society that consumes it, between a state governed by law and one governed by loyalties, and between an elite that seeks truth and one that seeks victory. As long as this difference is absent, all reform projects will remain mere eloquent speeches thrown on the ruins of an unchanging reality.‎