In the last forty years, fears of a cultural invasion have dominated the thinking of many in our part of the world. When the bipolar world order collapsed at the end of the nineteen eighties and the world began to talk of an emerging phenomenon that is now widely known as globalization, the proponents of the cultural invasion theory adapted their language to the new terminology and began to talk of the globalization of cultures as a dangerous development which threatened to erode our cultural specificity.

    I have addressed this issue in many of  my writings, and came to the conclusion that only those with a meager fund of cultural specificity have anything to fear from the globalization of culture. Those standing on a solid foundation of cultural identity, with a cultural specificity derived from factors related to history and geography, like Japan, need not fear the loss of their cultural identity under any circumstances. The examples some people give of the effects the winds of change coming from abroad have had on Japan's cultural construct can all be classified as "secondary issues" like eating fast food, wearing American clothes and the like. But when it comes to human relations, the high  esteem in which old people are held, family values and other intrinsically Japanese values, such as the Japanese understanding of work, Japan has not surrendered one iota of its cultural specificity despite the fact that for the last sixty years it has been dealing extensively with the outside world.

    But while there might be some justification to fear that our cultural specificity will be unable to stand up to the onslaught of cultural globalization, this does not apply in respect of the values of progress, all of which find much to support them in the models of civilization from which we derive our specific cultural straits. There is nothing in any of these models, the Egyptian, Arab, Islamic or Christian, that can be construed as running counter to values like a respect for time, quality, universality of knowledge, teamwork, a culture of systems rather than a culture of individuals, or a belief that management is one of the most important instruments of success. Indeed, I would go as far as to say that these values were upheld and applied in our history hundreds of years before another chapter in humanity's civilizing process took them over and used them in creating a better life. There are those who would agree with me save when it comes to the value of pluralism, on the grounds that Islamic religious thinking is based on a 'a unique model of righteousness'. This is an erroneous assumption which is belied by numerous Qur'ânic texts, perhaps the most important of which reads as follows: "And if thy Lord willed, all who are in the earth would have believed together", (Surah of Jonah, Verse 99). There are also many texts in the Sunna, (the rules of life according to the hadith, or teachings of the Prophet), extolling pluralism as one of the sublime values which all Muslims should strive to uphold.

    How then can anyone allege that values of progress like time, quality and, even, pluralism, threaten our cultural specificity? And yet that is the theme of an ongoing debate in our society which is both bizarre and humiliating. Those who argue against the adoption of values of progress on the grounds that they run counter to our value system and cultural identity expect us instead to embrace values that can only drag society on the road to backwardness and underdevelopment. This regressive trend is a relatively recent phenomenon in Egypt's modern history. For additional proof that the values of progress are compatible with our cultural specificity we need only look at the last hundred years of our history. These were marked by periods of enlightenment during which most of the values of progress were far more present in our lives than they became after what has been termed by some as a process of 'dismantling' Egyptian society began.

    The debate over cultural specificity versus values of progress takes me back to a period I spent in the eighties working in one of the fastest developing countries in Southeast Asia, where the two largest ethnic communities, and hence the main sources of labour, were the Chinese and the Malay. The prevailing view at the time was that any economic establishment wishing to run an efficient and successful business had to recruit its staff from the Chinese community, whose members were diligent and hard-working and who, moreover, displayed a natural propensity for teamwork, as opposed to the Malays, who were generally regarded as lazy, slipshod and highly individualistic. This negative image of the Malay worker remained in place until one man came to lead a country 90% of whose inhabitants belong to the ethnic group once maligned in the international labour market, the predominantly Muslim Malays, towards a miraculous recovery. In less than twenty years, Malaysia, whose people were mired in backwardness and stigmatized as lazy and inefficient, broke through the barriers of underdevelopment to gain world-wide recognition for the high quality of its products and services. With one of the fastest growing economies in the world, Malaysia has come to embody all the values of progress, breaking the stereotype of the ‘lazy Malay’ and opening the eyes of the world to two inescapable truths:

-     First, that backwardness is not the result of a biological fatality but of circumstances, and that, to the same extent that circumstances can change, backwardness can be overcome.

-     Second, that the values of progress can take root and flourish in any environment, Christian, Buddhist, Islamic or otherwise, and that they are by no means exclusive to any specific environment.