Taleb Al-Rifai No Longer a Kuwaiti

Fakhri Saleh wrote:

The Kuwaiti novelist and short story writer, Taleb Al-Rifai, has been stripped of his citizenship. He and his family are now stateless, despite being one of Kuwait’s most prominent cultural figures, if not the most prominent. This is shocking, shameful, disgraceful, and infuriating. It demonstrates shortsightedness, a lack of understanding of the meaning of citizenship, and a narrow-mindedness on the part of those who revoked Taleb’s citizenship, and that of thousands of other Kuwaitis, driven by petty calculations and a flawed social engineering strategy.

The problem with this afflicted part of the world—I mean our Arab world—is its refusal to understand that citizenship is not the exclusive domain of any one group, and that establishing citizenship and its associated rights is the fundamental solution to many of the political, social, economic, and cultural problems that weigh heavily on the Arab world.

We are saddened by what Kuwait has done to Taleb Al-Rifai, but his problem is Kuwait’s problem as a whole, and this is the dark tunnel it is entering. What is happening is regrettable and shows that superficial appearances do not indicate that we have entered the modern age. This is an illusion we must reconsider, so that we may escape a dark fate.