Ayoon Wa Azan (Innovations Come in Two Kinds: Some Guided and others Misguided)

The Arab Creativity Award is one of many activities organized by the Arab Thought Foundation. In fact, I returned two days ago to London from a meeting of the award committee in Jeddah, the third of its kind following the previous two meetings in Beirut, and after tens of hours of deliberation in the committees’ meetings and in reading the available material about the candidates applying for the awards.

Visiting Jeddah during the Hajj [pilgrimage] season deserves itself an award because of the hustle and the bustle, and the health and administrative restraints in place, and which are aimed at ensuring the safety of the visitors to the Sacred Mosque. However, this was not included as part of the Arab Creativity Award, but rather, we examined societal, scientific, technical, economic, literary, journalistic and artistic creativity.

There are many candidatures that really deserve the award, while there were others that do not merit to be shown to anyone, and must rather be concealed from the public to protect their authors’ reputations. I say this while being aware that there are many creative people in every field out there, and of whom we are not aware, or whom no one stepped in to nominate for an award.

This is while some members of the award committees thought that the award should be withheld if the works nominated did not meet the required standard, especially when this is sometimes done with the Nobel Prize, even when the latter is awarded to candidates from all over the world, and is not limited to a particular people or geographical area. The opinion expressed by Prince Khaled Al Faisal, the chairman of the foundation, was that the prizes in the different fields should be awarded in appreciation of the successful candidates, and to encourage others who are seeking to become successful. He also said that creativity includes any work, or any person that goes beyond the ordinary and the basic and rises to excellence.

Innovation is a difficult construct, and many creative and innovative people were considered in their days to be renegades, or heretic or even insane, before becoming subsequently accepted, and their work becoming a part of the worldwide cultural heritage. We have seen many instances of this transformation from rejection to acceptance in philosophy, classical literature, and in the arts, be they in painting, dancing or music.

While innovation may be difficult, it becomes impossible when we look for it among the Arabs, who have become so innovative in failing that I now fear that we are on the verge of a second jahiliyyah [state of absolute ignorance]. I realize now that it is unacceptable, or unfair, to compare our generation to those who lived before us; I will thus content myself with one generation to say that there aren’t any poets amongst us today of the same calibre as Ahmad Shawki, Nizar Qabbani or Maarouf Al-Rasafi, nor are there any singers amongst us of the same calibre as Mohamed Abdul Wahab and Umm Kulthum (may god grant Fairuz the long life); nor do we have any thinkers of the same calibre as Taha Hussein or Abbas Mahmoud Al-Aqqad, or historians such as Philip Hitti, or novelists such as Naguib Mahfouz, nor do we etc, etc, etc.

Perhaps I am being harsh and perhaps the reason for this is that I have as many hopes for this nation as it has latent potentials, and regardless of its poor performance. As for the Arab Creativity Award, every winner definitely deserved to win; otherwise, the award would have been withheld. In some cases in fact, we found many submittals to have deserved to win within the same category, and thus we had to make a choice even if that meant that we had to be unfair to some of the unsuccessful candidates. Those latter would have definitely won had they submitted their works a year earlier, or a year later than the final winner; however, it happened that they competed with candidate who beat them by no more than a few points.

Despite all of the above, the [Arab] nation still falls short of its own abilities and of what is required of it; if we – at the Arab Thought Foundation – had chosen an easier set of criteria, we would have given away awards in failure, as all we need to do in this regard is to consult the television guide, and pick a name – any name -, and he or she will be a failure with distinction in that category.

Personally, I focused my attention on the awards related to the society and the media, and divided – mentally – the works submitted into two sections: Ahl al-Bayt [family of the Prophet], or works that deserve to be nominated, and the Blasphemers of Quraish, or those works that did not deserve to be nominated, and which wasted our time by having to read and reject them. As every reader is probably aware, the Blasphemers of Quraish outnumbered Ahl al-Bayt many times over; however, God was on the side of his religion and his nation in the end, and perhaps he will come to be on their side again in our generation, since we have only tasted defeat ever since that ancient victory.

Finally, we know that the intransitive verb Bada’a [Ar. Invent] is what gave us the word invention; however, it is the same root behind the word Bid’ah [heresy], and we read before “every newly invented matter is bid'ah, and every bid'ah is misguidance, and every misguidance is in the Hellfire”. Also, Ibn Kathir once said that innovations come in two kinds: some guided and others misguided, which means that everything that goes against the Sharia is an innovation [in the sense of heresy].

In the end, I want to say that we at the Arab Thought Foundation are with all creative inventors, or wondrous concocters from this nation.