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530andreas christmann (2007)MS: We lost the war because of our wishful thinking. We thoughtIsrael is so small and we are so big that we can defeat it in oneday. We said to the world leave us Israel, we can deal with italone—and they did leave us with Israel and we lost miserably.We were so convinced we would win that on the first day of thewar the PLO invited all Arabs to come to a reception party inPalestine—which shows that they had completely lost touch withreality. 1973 was different, because the Arabs were better organizedand also much more determined, in particular the Egyptianswho could not tolerate the occupation of Sinai and the seizure ofthe Suez Canal. The Golan Heights are different, for Syria theydon’t mean anything.The problem is that these events shook people tremendously. Theysaid we were defeated because we were remote from God, andthus the Islamist movement was born.AC: You said what we needed was a revision of how we reason.MS: Until now I have been saying this, and I am still working onthis.AC: Do you think it is possible to do this revision by returning to the philosophicaltradition of Ibn Rushd and other rationalist thinkers?MS: Yes, I believe that. The problem with Ibn Rushd is that whatlinks him to us Arabs is only his name, his ideas however havebeen forgotten. Not even 1 percent of our thinking is influencedby Ibn Rushd. Arabs keep talking about Ibn Rushd and how greathe was and how proud we should be that we have such a prominentArab philosopher, but our thinking is influenced byal-Ghaz§lÊ, not by Ibn Rushd. Ibn Rushd went to Europe andwe were left with al-Ghaz§lÊ. I wish it was the other way round,then we would flourish and Europe would stagnate [laughter].Unfor tunately, Ibn Rushd revolutionized only the Europeanmind, while the Arabs were entirely left untouched.AC: And yet we seem to have a kind of revival of interest in Ibn Rushd in Arabcountries. More and more people call for a rational enlightenment ( al-tanwÊr)in the tradition of Ibn Rushd and the ideas of the European Enlightenment.Would you yourself identify with this movement?MS: Not really, for the simple reason that, even though Ibn Rushdhas influenced European rational thoughts, European philosophy