What the Body Remembers

My long struggle with colitis, and the hardship it brought, eventually took an unexpected turn—by the grace of God and the wisdom of His design. In November 2022, hoping to avoid medication, I decided to follow a path my friend Othman had taken before me. He had adopted a plant-based diet, free of animal products and dairy. He had done so as a matter of conviction. My ambition was far more modest: I simply wanted to live with less pain.

I felt the effects of the change from the first day. Recovery, however, was not instantaneous. It took nearly six months. During that period—and in the years since—many assumptions began to fall away. These were ideas I had regarded, as many still do, as settled truths. Yet experience revealed how far they could be from the truth.

I came to see that what human beings share in their basic constitution is far greater than what separates them. A meaningful part of the difference in how people respond to food is shaped by years of dietary accumulation. Those habits help form the microbial environment of the gut, influencing what the body tolerates or rejects, what settles it and what throws it into distress.

For me, the experience was too consequential to pass as a brief episode. By God’s grace, it did not merely close the chapter on a problem. It opened a new way of life—one marked by greater curiosity, deeper reflection and a stronger awareness of God’s blessings.

My dietary habits now differed from those around me, so questions followed wherever I went. At times, the curiosity became tiring, but it was never difficult to accept. Before long, curiosity gave way to understanding. My family became especially careful to accommodate my diet at gatherings and meals. That was another blessing, one that stood alongside recovery itself.

I could never count the blessings God has granted me. It was His design that I should undergo this experience after years of accumulating knowledge in mathematics, statistics, programming and economics. Different as these fields may be, they had taught me not to stop at appearances. They trained me to search for the logic beneath an outcome, the accumulated forces that produced it and the paths that led towards it.

Reflection on the body soon opened a window onto life itself. Just as the gut microbiome is shaped by accumulated diets, habits and inherited predispositions, human beings are shaped—in their conduct, their virtues and their failings—by experiences they have inherited or endured, by genetic and physical legacies, and by environments that have gradually become part of their constitution.

Once I understood that a person is not merely the child of the present moment, but the product of an entire history hidden from view, I became more understanding of people’s actions, more appreciative of their circumstances and more at ease with their differences.

Such blessings do not stop with others. They return first to the self. The wider the space for understanding became, the narrower the space for frustration grew. I found myself experiencing a degree of contentment I had never known before.

But the matter did not end there, nor did reflection stop with the individual. This was only the foundation of a journey whose circle widened with every step. It began with intestinal pain and with a scene whose significance I could never have anticipated: Othman debating someone about eating eggs and asking, “Would you accept a lion devouring your unborn child?” At the time, the question seemed too strange to take seriously. I did not know that it would later become the first thread in a much longer fabric of reflection.

Habits Becoming Systems

It was a period crowded with questions, sustained curiosity and a sense of discovery that continually fed reflection. How could changing the sources of certain nutrients do more than open the door to recovery? How could it restore a person to greater vitality? And how could such an experience reveal something of the wonder of God’s power, overturning assumptions that had hardened into social convention and were rarely subjected to doubt?

By the wisdom of God’s design, I found the logic of the experience strangely familiar. Some of its features resembled principles I had encountered in mathematics and programming. There were recursive functions, in which the output of one stage becomes the input of the next, allowing each result to emerge from what preceded it. There was also exponential change: transformations begin so modestly that they are barely visible, then expand and become unmistakable as accumulation continues. I could not have completed every step of recovery at once. The result of each step prepared the way for the next.

Eventually, I no longer saw this logic as limited to food or health. I saw it at work throughout human life—in work, worship and personal development. No lasting transformation begins in its final form. It starts with one step that prepares the ground for another, until modest progress, compounded over time, becomes a change of far greater consequence.

And if, by God’s will, such a logic could succeed in the life of an individual, why should it not also be examined in the life of a society? The social equivalent of the microbiome is the dense and interconnected fabric of entities, ideas, customs, laws, habits, models and institutions—public and private—that emerge within the state.

They did not appear from nowhere. They were called into being by layers of social need. Over time, they evolved to absorb society’s resources and support its established patterns of production and consumption. In this respect, they resemble the microbial environment of the body, which develops around the foods on which a person has long depended, enabling the body to process them and extract what it needs.

With time, this social system ceases to be merely an answer to need. It becomes embedded in the structure and temperament of society itself. It grows comfortable with the familiar, wary of departures from it and resistant to anything that disrupts its settled functions.

A body accustomed to one diet may react to a new food with discomfort—not necessarily because the food is harmful, but because its internal environment is not yet prepared to handle it. The same can be true of societies. Resistance to change may be an expression of old adaptation, rather than proof that the change itself is unsound.

A society that has endured severe inflation does not respond to rising prices as another society might. Its sensitivity may persist long after the original causes have faded. A society that has lived through a prolonged depression may become more inclined to save and more suspicious of debt, even after conditions improve. The same applies to states. A country that built its wealth on production tends to see the world as a market in which to compete and a place in which to seek new buyers. A rentier state, by contrast, often sees the outside world primarily as a source of revenue and imports. A society that has suffered banking collapses may retain a deep mistrust of banks and markets for generations.

None of this is far removed from the experience of a body whose microbial environment has long been accustomed to meat and dairy, only to react to legumes with bloating and distress. The new food is not necessarily defective. The existing environment simply has not yet adapted to it.

Societies, like bodies, do not respond to the new on the strength of its qualities alone. They receive it through the accumulated memory and habits already living within them.

Gen Z and the New Terms of Competition

If the logic described above works, even in part, for an individual, it may be still more worthy of examination at the collective level. Yet the logic cannot be transferred unchanged from one to the other. What changes within a single person over one lifetime may change within a society only through the succession of lives and generations.

Collective accumulation is not governed by time alone. Another variable magnifies its effect: the replacement of one generation by the next, each carrying new needs, different perceptions and a greater willingness to reconsider what previous generations had accepted as settled. Societies naturally lean towards conformity. They prefer proximity and consensus, and often distrust difference—even when they themselves once departed from the customs of those who came before.

Yet the authority of the familiar does not last forever. It is eventually constrained by generational succession. Each new generation arrives with its own needs, questions and measures of value. What was condemned yesterday may become acceptable today—not necessarily because those who rejected it changed their minds, but because a new generation found it suited to its circumstances and insisted on giving it a place in the world.

Still, we rarely stop reproaching younger generations for differing from us, as though we had never been reproached by those who came before. Every generation regards the divergence of its successors as rebellion, while viewing its own divergence from its predecessors as progress.

It is true that the pursuit of knowledge was more difficult in the past. Research could require hundreds of hours spent across thousands of pages, dozens of books and several public libraries, merely to reach an answer that artificial intelligence may now provide within minutes. But ease of access to knowledge should not be the only basis on which generations are compared.

Why do we not also compare the opportunities available to them? Why not consider the expansion of competition, the transformation of the labour market and the speed of change that earlier generations never had to confront?

Across the ages, the human being remains largely constant in basic needs: security, status, stability and the urge to compete and prove one’s worth. What changes is not the person, but the environment—the social microbiome—in which that person must operate. It reshapes the tools, opportunities and standards that define the competitive arena, then magnifies their effects through speed.

Knowledge has become easier to obtain. But every achievement also becomes obsolete more quickly, every skill becomes more vulnerable to replacement and every opportunity becomes more crowded with competitors.

The social environment has not simply evolved. Its evolution has been raised to the power of accelerating time. What people gained through shorter routes to knowledge has been offset by a wider field and a fiercer race.

Think tanks and research centres have recently produced report after report on the changing preferences and behaviour of Generation Z. Older generations have often received their conclusions with surprise or unease.

Yet Gen Z is, to a considerable extent, the product of its circumstances rather than their architect. It inherited a social fabric that had taken shape before it came of age—a fabric that moulded its needs, expanded its fears and pushed it towards choices that others interpreted as rebellion.

In this respect, it is no different from the generations that preceded it. The human being has not changed in basic constitution. The conditions under which people seek security, stability and status have changed. Gen Z is not abandoning the logic of its ancestors. It is applying the same human logic to a different reality.

The Gulf’s Post-Oil Test

Economics begins, in its simplest terms, with the relationship between expanding human wants and the world’s limited resources. From this foundation emerge two broad fields. Microeconomics examines the behaviour of individuals and firms, as well as supply, demand and the assumptions surrounding them. Macroeconomics considers the wider national picture—production, growth and the overall balance of the economy—through tools and policies accumulated from the experiences of nations.

In practice, the macroeconomy cannot exist independently of its microeconomic foundations. The national picture is ultimately the combined result of the conduct of individuals and enterprises. Microeconomics, in turn, rests on the human being: needs, choices, fears and ambitions.

Under the logic developed above, the human being remains constant in basic nature. Yet human striving never takes place outside an arena of competition. The nature of that arena is permanent; its form changes with alarming speed. Competition is as old as human society, but its tools, opportunities and standards are constantly renewed—at an increasingly exponential pace.

What drives that renewal is the social environment, or the social microbiome in the terms of this analogy. In every era, it reshapes what is possible and available, then multiplies the effects through speed. The human being remains the human being. But the ground shifts beneath the person’s feet, the race accelerates and the distance required to reach security changes.

This brings us to the question preoccupying Gulf economies: how can they move from dependence on oil income towards genuine productive capacity? Many strategic proposals still begin with deeply rooted assumptions—assumptions resembling those that began to collapse before me when the microbial environment of my own body changed.

They address visible outcomes without penetrating the environment that produced them. They demand different results while preserving the accumulations that led to the original condition.

Many proposed solutions are little more than temporary palliatives. They postpone confrontation with the root of the problem without creating an independent productive capacity for the long term. The transition away from oil income is also far more complex than a macroeconomic challenge alone.

It is a move from an economy whose natural wealth secured its position to an arena in which entire national economies compete. Each has its own microeconomic foundations, and each of those foundations rests on people operating within a distinct competitive environment shaped by accumulated skills, institutions, values and tools.

The equation therefore becomes far more complex. A Gulf economy can no longer measure its performance only against its own past. It must measure itself against economies that are moving at the same time—learning, adapting and reshaping their advantages at different speeds.

Oil rents granted the Gulf a favourable position for several generations. But the region did not hold that position before oil, and it is not guaranteed to hold it after oil.

What natural scarcity created as a historical advantage, modern competition will grant only to those capable of renewing their productive strength. It is therefore not enough to recognise the need for transformation. We must understand the nature of the problem itself.

The objective is not merely to find one source of revenue to replace another. It is to build a new environment capable of reshaping the individual, the institution and the market.

This is the heart of the matter. If God wills such an environment to emerge, it cannot be built from tools, opportunities and standards designed for competitive arenas that have already passed. Nor can it be the product of belated attempts to catch up with what others have already created.

It must grow from strategies capable of anticipating the competitive arenas of the future—and helping to construct them before their rules harden and their fields become overcrowded.

This is not a call to sever ties with the past, nor to surrender to the future without judgment. It is a call to build with the wisdom of those who came before, while drawing courage from the questions of those who follow and their willingness to challenge the familiar—from Generation Z and the generations that will come after it.

They have vision that hungers for wisdom; we have wisdom whose vision has been veiled by habit.

O God, ordain for this nation a course of right guidance.