The Middle East can return to being a “land of culture, civilization, peace and prosperity” through strong leadership, consensus and a “new social imagination”, presidential spokesman Ibrahim Kalin said Saturday.
Kalin said failed states and weak governments were breeding terrorism. Countries such as Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Libya, Somalia and Afghanistan “fail to protect their citizens but also pose security threats to their neighbors,” he said.
The radical and violent extremism of groups such as Daesh, al-Qaeda, Boko Haram and al-Shabaab represented the second pressing issue. Cloaked in religious arguments, such organizations’ main aim was to “amass power at all costs,” Kalin added.
“Muslims of good conscience must reject their perverted ideology and prevent the youth from buying into it,” he said. “This requires a serious intellectual work of the highest order whereby we have to recover the Islamic intellectual tradition and show its relevance for the 21st century.”
The third problem was increasing sectarianism between Sunni and Shia Muslims that was “presented to hide nation-state interests and struggle for influence and expansionism.”
Finally, despite abundant resources, Muslim nations were trailing the developed world.
To tackle these issues, Kalin suggested further investment in human development, education, science and technology in a way that “respects and protects the tradition and remains open to novelty, adaptation and renewal. A morbid tradition and a blind repetition of it will only lead to the death of the tradition.”
He called for “strong and wise political leadership” that understands that one country’s safety is “dependent on that of others. In an age of growing interdependence and globalization, no one is safe until everyone is safe.”