OUR WORLD
Maat, the spirit of balance with the natural world
that was part of their cultural legacy. This balance
was lost in the rush to modernize the country and
enjoy the fruits of the consumer society. This led to
rampant corruption; the population increased catastrophically, outstripping the ability of the land to
support the people; and there were multiple waves
of bloody uprisings. In the Arab Spring revolution
of 2011, it seemed for a brief while that the Egyptian soul was crying out for a return to Maat.
I suspect that very few of us have much knowledge
of the early attempts of the prophet Mohammed
to forge an alliance among the followers of the
Abrahamic religions. Tribal allegiances quickly
short-circuited these ecumenical attempts, and
left a bloody legacy of Shia and Sunni enmity in the
power struggle that followed the Prophet’s death.
The book also provides a context for understanding the wounds in the Arab psyche inflicted by the
West that eventually led to the rise of the Muslim
brotherhood and the more extreme and bloody expressions of fundamentalism.
A substantial burden of blame can be laid at the
feet of Western imperialists, who carved up the
Middle East without regard for tribal iden ѥ