Many people followed the news of the nuclear agreement between Saudi Arabia and the United States, each for their own reason. Some viewed it from a political perspective, others regarded it as a source of national pride, while a third group focused on its commercial implications. For me, however, the most important aspect is breaking the technological barrier.
Let me begin with a story from nearly four decades ago. In short, one of our merchants owned a factory that assembled the familiar yellow buses. He later discovered that importing the buses was cheaper than assembling them locally, so he decided to shut the factory down. When a newspaper asked him why, he replied, with impeccable eloquence, that some peoples are destined to excel in trade, others in agriculture, and still others in industry, while we are a people whom God has destined to succeed in trade.
Twenty years later, I listened to a prominent businessman in Al-Ahsa speak about what he called "the beauty of God's design": the division of people into merchants, scholars, rulers, and craftsmen. That is how they were born, that is how they will live, and that is how society remains in order.
I imagine some readers will smile to themselves at this reasoning. But, incidentally, it did not arise out of nowhere. Aristotle, the "First Teacher," embraced it when discussing the ideal city in the Politics, and his own teacher, Plato, did the same in the Republic. It stemmed from a belief widely held in the past: that behavioral traits are inherited, and that different races vary in their intellectual capacities just as they differ in their physical characteristics.
Readers of Ibn Khaldun may recall his famous observation that the Arabs are a people of war and conquest, and that wherever they settle, ruin soon follows, because they are incapable of construction and industry.
To soften the force of such statements, one might interpret them as referring not to genetic differences but to differences in the environments in which people are raised. Ibn Khaldun and others did point to the influence of climate on people's intellectual and behavioral tendencies, allowing us to argue that they did not entirely overlook the role of environment and upbringing. But that is merely an interpretation. Otherwise, belief in inherited behavioral traits was simply the prevailing view of the age.
Today we know that such ideas are closer to folklore—or, in the words of philosopher Karl Popper, pseudoscience. God created all people with equal minds. What distinguishes them are their actions, ideas, and aspirations, shaped by the natural and social environments in which they live. Yet every human being possesses a mind capable of breaking free from that environment and community, and reaching their very opposite, if they choose.
Science and industry are among the fruits of the human mind, and we are just as capable of achieving them as anyone else. All we truly need are three things:
A deep, practical conviction that we are no less capable than others.
The removal of the obstacles that hinder those who believe in their own abilities.
The choice of a starting point.
Most of us already know those obstacles, or at least some of them, so I will limit myself to one: what I call the awe of technology.
The awe of technology is simply the illusion that I cannot take apart a mobile phone and put it back together, or dismantle a car engine and reassemble it, or do the same with an air conditioner. It really is that simple. We stand in awe of these machines because we fear failure, or perhaps because we imagine there is something inside them that lies beyond the reach of our minds.
The starting point, then, is to break these illusions—not by opening repair shops for phones and cars, but by handing a phone to our children in primary or middle school and encouraging them to take it apart and put it back together. Then give a high school student a used car and tell him it will be his if he dismantles the engine and reassembles it. Encourage young people to take apart the devices in their hands, even if the result is that they destroy them beyond repair. You may lose a device, but you will gain a genius who no longer stands in awe of technology.
The Saudi nuclear program interests me for one reason alone: some of our young people will work on it, and they—and all of us with them—will come to realize that we are capable of doing what others have already done. If someone else can accomplish something, then so can we, because our minds are no less capable than theirs.
