ARAB TRANSPARENCY

Indonesia, as per Will Indonesia Save Islam?, is not the only place in the Moslem world struggling against Jihadi Islamism.  It turns out that there are hosts of folks in the Arab world who oppose the Jihadis, the Saudi Wahhabis, the Salafists who want a Dark Ages Islam.

Now they have a voice.

It’s an independent Arabic website called Middle East Transparent.  There are English and French versions (click on “English” in the top banner), but many of these articles are by Westerners.  It is articles by Arabs written in Arabic that make this site so influential.

“Metransparent” gets around 50,000 unique visitors a day, almost all from Moslems living in the Arab world.  There’s nothing else like it – for it gives voice to Arab writers still residing in countries with no intellectual freedom.

These are not exiles safely pontificating from Paris coffee shops and London salons.  These are men – and women – who have the courage to speak out under their own names from within Syria, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Yemen, Libya, Algeria, and every other Arab nation.

Half of Metransparent’s articles are written by women, who argue for equality and freedom for women within the pathologically male-dominant Arab culture, and most especially against the imposition of Sharia Islamic religious law.

Metransparent’s founder and editor is a Lebanese Christian, Pierre Akel, whose goal is to promote an “Arab liberalism” as the chosen alternative for Arabs between dictatorships and the Islamists.  He means “liberalism” and “liberals” not in the twisted American meaning but the classical liberalism of individual liberty and democratic freedom.

He talks of a novel by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, The Autumn of the Patriarch, where people open the palace doors to discover that the dictator has been dead for a long time. “This applied to the Soviet Union and now to Arab dictatorships as well,” he says. “Dictatorships are dead; they lost the ideological and moral high ground years ago. The battle today is between fundamentalists and liberals. Liberalism is the wave of the Middle East’s future.”

As evidence, he cites dozens of “liberal heroes” from a score of Arab countries whose writings are inspiring millions and helping to turn them away from Medieval Terrorist Islam.  He believes a “blog revolution” is underway in the Arab world, spearheaded by Metransparent:

“Arab culture has been decimated during the last 50 years. Arab newspapers are mainly under Saudi control. The book market is practically dead. Even when people write, they face censorship at every level – even their own conscious or unconscious censorship.  Yet people are so hungry for freedom from both dictators and jihadis.  That is why tens of thousands of Arabs come to our site every day.  The monopoly the Saudis and other regimes have on information has been broken.”

Metransparent is planning on vastly expanding its audience through Internet radio, giving actual voice to Arab liberal dissidents.  Over 50% of all Arabs are illiterate, so soon they will hear these voices for the first time.

Arab society is mired in a deep, dark cultural hole, which the Wahhabis and other Moslem radicals are doing their best to dig deeper.  Pierre Akel and his writers are giving Arabs a chance to dig themselves out.  It shows that there is always hope for good men to prevail – even in the Middle East.