Official Hansard
Mr. Speaker, as the House marks Arab heritage month, I rise not for the ritual gestures that too often accompany such observances but to speak plainly about a civilization whose story stretches across three millennia and whose people have become part of our own. These calendar designations can slide into performance, but they can also compel us to examine substance, the actual inheritance of language, memory and achievement and the choices that have shaped Arab societies in our time. I intend to do the latter. In his indispensable book Arabs: A 3,000-Year History of Peoples, Tribes and Empires, scholar Tim Mackintosh-Smith demonstrates that Arab identity has never been reducible to a single ethnicity, sect or moment of origin. It is above all a linguistic continuum, the Arabic language acting as a thread that has held together a vast and varied human tapestry from the first recorded mentions of Arabs, in Assyrian records of 853 BCE, through the tribal poetry and trading kingdoms of the peninsula, the urban sophistication of the Levant, the Berber and Arab worlds of the Maghrib and the nomadic traditions of the Bedouin. Pre-Islamic Arabs were already a presence on the margins of greater empires, their poets celebrating honour, resilience and the stark beauties of desert life. The latter expansion of Arabic carried with it not only faith but administration, scholarship and a capacity for synthesis that absorbed and advanced the learning of others. This is the deep inheritance we acknowledge today. It is not a monolith but a living inheritance of peoples who have been both creators and custodians of civilization. That inheritance met the modern world in difficult circumstances. After the Second World War, many Arab societies sought dignity, development and independence. One dominant answer was the pan-Arab socialism of Gamal Abdel Nasser. It drew on Soviet models of central direction and anti-western posture, promising to sweep away colonial legacies and unite the Arabs under a single political and economic project. In practice, it produced authoritarian structures, economic rigidities and repeated foreign policy failures. The United Arab Republic with Syria collapsed quickly. The 1967 war exposed deeper weaknesses. Several societies that followed this path paid in lost decades of growth, suppressed enterprise and the entrenchment of regimes more interested in control than in the human capital of their citizens. The ideology functioned, whatever the intentions of its adherents, as a barrier to the very western institutions, markets and habits of mind that had accelerated development elsewhere. A second answer rose in reaction. Islamist movements, beginning with the Muslim Brotherhood, presented themselves as moral alternatives to corrupt dictatorships and failed secular experiments. They spoke to real grievances and offered a language of renewal that resonated with many, yet the empirical record where such policies gained real influence is clear: deepened social polarization; restrictions on dissent and on minority communities, including long-established Christian-era populations across the Levant, Egypt and Iraq; economic policies that often failed to generate broad prosperity; and in their most extreme expressions, the incubation of violence that has scarred societies from the Maghrib to the Mashriq and beyond. The costs in emigration of talent, institutional decay and cycles of instability are measurable and ongoing. There is a striking exception to these patterns, though, and it deserves our attention. In the United Arab Emirates, Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan built a federation from tribal foundations with a realism and self-confidence rare in the post-colonial era. He prioritized education, infrastructure and competent administration over ideological display. His heirs have extended that project with measurable success: deliberate diversification away from hydrocarbons into technology, finance, tourism, logistics and advanced industry; sustained investment in human capital; and a foreign policy of pragmatic partnerships. The Abrahamic Family House in Abu Dhabi, which is a single complex containing a mosque, a church and a synagogue, embodies this approach in built form. It is a deliberate statement of coexistence among the Abrahamic traditions, not their subordination. It is the product of a confident Arab leadership, not imported dogma. It is therefore unsurprising that the clerical military regime in Tehran, whose revolutionary ideology has relied on exporting instability and targeting pragmatic Arab success stories, has directed proxy attacks and threats against the UAE in recent years. Success is an indictment of alternatives. Across the Arab world, the poles of cultural and aspirational gravity have shifted. The old centres, Cairo under its successive experiments, Damascus in its long decline and Baghdad amid its traumas, no longer set the tone they once did. Increasingly, younger Arabs, entrepreneurs and reformers look to Abu Dhabi and Dubai for working models of modernity, prosperity and competent governance. Rhetoric has yielded to results. This story is not abstract for Canada. Nearly 800,000 Canadians identify as Arab, a population that has more than tripled in two decades through immigration and natural increase. They come from Lebanon, Syria, Egypt, Iraq, the Maghrib, the Gulf states, and elsewhere, the full geographic and human diversity of the Arab world. Many arrived as economic immigrants chosen for their skills. Others rebuilt lives after conflict or persecution. They have contributed in every domain that matters to a modern society, such as enterprise and professional excellence, medicine and engineering, scholarship and the arts, and public service and community building. They have done so while sustaining family structures and work habits that strengthen rather than erode our national social fabric. In Canada, they have found what many Arab societies have struggled to secure: the protection of individual rights, the rule of law and the possibility of advancement based on merit rather than connection or ideology. Christian and Muslim Arabs alike participate in our institutions on equal terms. That participation is not an accident of geography, but a product of a political order that treats citizens as individuals first. Where Arab citizens enjoy full equality and democratic participation elsewhere, we see another demonstration that liberal institutions remain the most reliable framework for minority flourishing and Arab talent alike, such as with Arab Israelis, both Christian and Muslim, who serve in the Knesset, the courts and the professions. I would say to our Arab Canadian brothers and sisters that their presence here is not a footnote to someone else’s story. From the mighty Nabateans in the times of Rome and the great works of philosophers like Avicenna and Averroës to the modern resilience of a people who have endured and created across centuries, they bring the depth of an ancient linguistic and cultural inheritance and the determination of those who chose this country. Canada is stronger for it. We honour that heritage best not by reducing it to grievance or slogan, but by recognizing its complexity, achievements and continuing capacity to add to a free and self-governing society. The lessons of the past 80 years are not obscure. Grand ideologies, whether imported socialism dressed as pan-Arab unity or political Islamism promising moral regeneration, have repeatedly subordinated practical governance and individual agency to abstractions with measurable costs in human welfare and stability. Pragmatic leadership that builds institutions, welcomes talent and measures success by results has produced different outcomes. The shift in Arab attention toward those who deliver is rational and observable. The best tribute the House can offer is to defend the conditions that allow such contributions to continue, such as the rule of law, free enterprise, open inquiry, secure borders and a confident national identity that does not require citizens to shed their inheritances, but requires them to uphold the common principles that make Canada work. In doing so, we honour Arab heritage in the only way that ultimately matters, by ensuring that the sons and daughters of that heritage can flourish here as free people in a free country. That is the Canada worth building and the heritage worth respecting.