The Power

I was invited to deliver a speech at the University in Cairo about humanitarian work as soft power. As we all know, the socio-political and economic field recognises two types of power: hard (politics, economy, military) and soft (media, culture, art, history, religion, fashion, food, sports, technology, language, education, human resources).

In my opinion, westernised audiences are familiar with the effectiveness of the soft power; however I wanted to talk about the context of the Arab Spring.

In my opinion, power reflects strength, ability, command and vision. Soft power, in my understanding, should be the one which can make a change without conflict or over a long period of time. In the cases of Egypt, Libya, Sudan, Tunisia, one of the emerging powers in the Arab Spring has been that of women.

The Soft Power doesn’t stop at those mentioned above; for example, Hard Power can have its own Soft Power, often used by governments to implement policies using the “Carrot and Stick” approach.
While reading around this topic, I came up with a new term: “Rough Power”. This surprised the academia in the room and I saw a few raised eyebrows and shrugging.

In my opinion, Rough Power is the Soft Power that has been changed from being soft, smooth and conflict-free to become confrontational and conflicting for the community. Such examples of soft powers that have been transformed into rough powers are religion and history.

In the example of religion, so-called scholars have misinterpreted certain aspects of the sacred texts. Narrow-mindedness and taking things out of context, together with not keeping up with the times and the emerging culture of civil society has lead to the transformation of religion into Rough Power in some cases, in my opinion.

On the other hand, history has been corrupted as well. Let us take the history written about Muslim communities and countries. It is all about war, conquests, bloodshed, coup d’état, political manoeuvres etc, without focusing on the social aspect of the lives of the millions of people that lived in these countries. Historians failed to mention the achievements of the Soft Power, focusing instead on the Hard Power: military etc.

Another good example of a Soft Power changed into Rough Power is the Media. For various reasons, whether economical or others, some Media outlets fuel cross-cultural conflicts instead of encouraging partnerships.

In my opinion, in every situation, it is a question of moral value. Soft, Hard or Rough, it is still a form of power and it should be used by the citizens to help other citizens. It is not for citizens to use against other citizens. If we focus on the shared values of the citizens of the globe and we use all the power to empower others and maintain the life of other creatures, we are both serving and saving the life of humanity.