Is Islam Secularizable? Challenging Political and Religious Taboos 9783940924261, 9783940924278

Citation preview

Copyright 2014. Gerlach Press. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or applicable copyright law.

Is Islam Secularizable? Challenging Political and Religious Taboos

SADIK J. AL-AZM SECULARISM, FUNDAMENTALISM AND THE STRUGGLE FOR THE MEANING OF ISLAM Collected Essays on Politics and Religion. With a Foreword by Stefan Wild 3 Volume Set ISBN: 978-3-940924-20-9

Individual Volumes: Vol. 1 – On Fundamentalisms ISBN: 978-3-940924-22-3 (hardcover) ISBN: 978-3-940924-23-0 (eBook) Vol. 2 – Islam – Submission and Disobedience ISBN: 978-3-940924-24-7 (hardcover) ISBN: 978-3-940924-25-4 (eBook) Vol. 3 – Is Islam Secularizable? Challenging Political and Religious Taboos ISBN: 978-3-940924-26-1 (hardcover) ISBN: 978-3-940924-27-8 (eBook)

Sadik J. al-Azm Is Islam Secularizable? Challenging Political and Religious Taboos

First published 2014 by Gerlach Press, Berlin www.gerlach-press.de Cover Design: www.brandnewdesign.de, Hamburg Typeset by spree-media.net, Berlin Printed and bound in Germany by Freiburger Graphische Betriebe www.fgb.de © Gerlach Press 2014 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reprinted or reproduced, or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any other information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data. A catalogue record for this book is available from British National Library. Bibliographic data available from Deutsche Nationalbibliothek http://d-nb.info/1032969059 ISBN:978-3-940924-20-9 (3 vols set) ISBN: 978-3-940924-26-1 (hardcover) ISBN: 978-3-940924-27-8 (eBook)

Contents

Copyright 2014. Gerlach Press. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or applicable copyright law.

1 Islam and Secular Humanism

7

2

Orientalism and Orientalism in Reverse

27

3

Orientalism and Conspiracy

57

4

Time Out of Joint: Western Dominance, Islamist Terror, and the Arab Imagination

87

5

Palestinian Zionism

101

6

The Peace Process and the Gulf Crisis: A Critical Arab Point of View

111

7

The View from Damascus: Syria and the Peace Process

123

8

Replies to ‘The View from Damascus’

153

9

Answer to Replies to ‘The View from Damascus’

159

10 Islam, Terrorism, and the West Today

165

11 Ground Zero Revisited

187

12 The Arab Spring: “Why Exactly at this Time?”

191

13 Civil Society and the Arab Spring

201

14 Trends in Arab Thought

217



Notes   235



Acknowledgements   242



Chronological Table of Contents

243

Copyright 2014. Gerlach Press. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or applicable copyright law.

1

Islam and Secular Humanism Is it possible to construct universalizing notions of such principles as human rights, freedom of conscience, religious toleration and the rest from a particular tradition? My answer is an emphatic and historically-based yes. For though the notion of human rights and its accompaniments, such as civil liberties, citizen’s rights, democracy, freedom of expression, civil society, separation of state and religion, are of modern European origin and provenance – conventionally attributed and traced back to the Enlightenment – they have indisputably come to acquire by now a universal significance that has turned them into a common human good and into today’s compelling and pervasive normative paradigm on all matters pertaining to rights, citizenship, human dignity, democracy, civil society, government accountability and so on. This is what I call the secular humanist paradigm which comprehends both the set of values recognized above as well as the social and political institutions, practices and attitudes embodying and supporting those values. Let me emphasize that what is important here is not the name “secular humanism”, but the values, practices and institutions named, and you may 7 AN: 1781609 ; Azm, Sadiq Jalal.; Is Islam Secularizable? : Challenging Political and Religious Taboos Account: s8863559.main.ehost

Is Islam Secularizable?

choose any name you wish as long as you remember that a rose still smells just as sweet under any other name. Let me emphasize as well, first, that the modest localized European origins of this modem paradigm do not detract, in my view, from its later paradigmatic universality anymore than the humble rise of Islam in two insignificant desert towns on the edge of the Roman Empire detracted from its consequent universality and sweep. Similar things may be said about the relationship of Christianity’s equally modest and localized origins in a neglected and despised district of the same Roman Empire to its subsequent paradigmatic universality, hegemony and comprehensiveness. And second, that the common good represented in this “secular humanist model” did not come about gratis, but had to be painfully, slowly and very imperfectly conquered over several centuries and at a very heavy price in terms of wars, revolutions and much sacrifice and human suffering. This is one very good reason why it deserves to be defended, elaborated and expanded along with the other human goods that we know of and have come to take for granted. This is why today the serious struggles over the principles of human rights – to take one example – are waged within societies, cultures and polities, both East and West, and not just across civilizations, cultures and states, i.e., not so much between Islam and the West, Europe and the Middle East, the Orient and the Occident as inside France, inside Germany, inside China, inside the United States, inside the Arab countries, inside Iran, inside Indonesia, inside Pakistan and so on. This is why also we find that even in those parts of the world – Muslim and otherwise – where human rights and the other values and principles attendant on them are most flagrantly violated and/or ignored, some public and official lip service has to be paid to them, or at least to some version of them, by offending governments and political regimes and forces in search of self-justification and self-legitimation both nationally and internationally. This, again, testifies to the legitimacy, strength and efficacy that the secular humanist 8

Islam and Secular Humanism

paradigm has universally acquired by now, even in the eyes of its enemies. In fact, experience has shown that the moment these enemies fall prey to the persecution of their own enemies, the first things they appeal to in self-defense are, for example, the idea of an independent judiciary and the recognized universal principles of human rights with plenty of emphasis on their universality and inclusiveness. In fact, the very production of such schemes as the Charters of Islamic, African, Chinese and Hindu Human Rights forms an added testimony to the truth that the original secular humanist paradigm has acquired the dual status of a common human good and of the compelling normative model for passing judgement on all these matters and issues. I would like to emphasize this point in opposition to the currently fashionable, convenient and expedient post-modernist position in the West and elsewhere to the effect that such values as free expression, religious tolerance, respect for human rights are the West’s deepest values from which the contemporary Muslim world, for example, is excluded on account of its own deepest cherished values which are antithetical to the core to free expression, democracy, tolerance, human rights, secularism and so on. This condescending, static, a-historical and exclusive juxtaposition of a set of reified Western values against another reified set of supposedly incompatible Muslim values amounts first, to a re-affirmation of the West versus the rest, and, second, to a re-affirmation of the cynical apologetics, excuses and pretexts for which the repressors of democracy and the persecutors of free expression all over the world delightfully reach for and successfully employ to justify continuing to do what they are so good at doing anyway. For example, it was quite a sight at the World Conference on Human Rights held in Vienna in 1993 to see the spokespersons and representatives of some of the most absolutist regimes and governments around the globe suddenly and most cynically adopting what looked like a relativist, post-modernist, avantgardist European sensibility and outlook on life, politics, history, culture, free speech, women’s rights, human rights, the sanctity of cultural differences to justify, in the name of a conveniently 9

Is Islam Secularizable?

discovered authenticity, nativism, particularism, multiculturalism the death of the grand narratives of emancipation and the sacredness of tradition and inherited custom, yes, to justify their own government’s violations against human rights, civil liberties, freedom of conscience and so on. Suffice it for me to remind all concerned at this point that the deepest values of the West were not always what they are taken to be today. And the supposed most authentic values of the Muslim world need not remain what they are currently perceived to have been and continue to be. For – given this tendency towards historical amnesia, along with the current monopolistic discourses and fundamentalistic attitudes about the deepest values of this or that part of the world, of this or that culture on the surface of the globe – one would think that the West had never known the bloody practices of intolerance, persecution, religious bigotry and the violent repression of free speech, and that the Muslim non-West, for instance, had known nothing but the fanaticism, dogmatism and suppression of free expression characteristic of Mullahs and tyrants. Now, is lslam compatible with this modern secular paradigm? Again, I think the answer has to be a complex and historically-based one. But, first, it should be made immediately clear that this question has been, in a whole variety of formulations, idioms and ways, on the agenda of modern Arab and Muslim thought and history since at least the last quarter of the 19th century. Certainly, the Arabs have been interrogating themselves, in many a way and manner, about its implications and applications for themselves and for their relationship to the rest of the world for at least the last 150 years. For example, we all know by now that the last quarter of the 19th century witnessed the start of a great movement of liberal reform and latitudinarian religious interpretation in Arab life and thought, variously called by ourselves as well as by Western scholars, as an awakening, a renaissance, a religious reformation, the liberal experiment, Muslim modernism, the liberal age of modern Arab thought, and so on. And in fact, this movement compressed in itself all at once a theologico10

Islam and Secular Humanism

legal reformation, a literary-intellectual renaissance, a rational-scientific enlightenment of sorts and a political and ideological aggiornamento as well. Now, anyone taking his cues at present from this great movement of reform and regarding himself as its descendant and as an heir to its intellectual, social and religious achievements will have no problem at all answering such questions as: Are Islam and secular humanism compatible, are Islam and modernity compatible? His answer would be a categorical and unproblematic, yes, they are. On the other hand, and as is natural and expected in human affairs and the processes of history, this great movement of reform provoked a counter-reaction in the form of a counter-reformation and a Muslim fundamentalist movement to go along with it. This reaction crystallized at the moment of the establishment of the Muslim Brothers Movement in Egypt in 1928, the mother of all fundamentalisms in the Arab world as well as in some other Muslim countries and societies. The fact that this counter-reaction witnessed the birth of its formal organisational structures in 1928 was no accident. For, just four years earlier the Muslim Caliphate had been abolished by Mustafa Kemal in Turkey, while the initial reform movement had made massive advances at highly accelerated speeds in Egyptian and Arab life, society, economy, politics, culture and law during the 20’s of the last century and particularly after the famous 1919 Egyptian revolution against British colonial rule. This is why in Nagib Mahfouz’s trilogy of novels about Cairean life in the first half of that century the male-dominated and dictatorially-run traditional Muslim household in Cairo collapses beyond the possibility of rescue at the exact moment of the eruption of Egypt’s great revolution of 1919. This religious counter-reaction naturally defined itself substantively, not formally, as an anti-reformation, an anti-renaissance, an antienlightenment, and an anti-aggiornamento, all at one and the same time. Now, anyone taking his cues at present from this counter-reformation, 11

Is Islam Secularizable?

regarding himself as its descendant and intellectual heir, will have no big problem answering such questions as: Are Islam and secularism compatible? Are Islam and democracy compatible? etc. His answer takes the form of an emphatic and unqualified, no, they are not. What are we to make of this impasse between the no-faction and the yes-faction within the house of Islam and often outside of the house of Islam as well? In the following I shall put before you what I regard as a realistic conceptual scheme for making sense out of that impasse, and for sensibly answering the question about the compatibility of Islam and secular humanism. In my attempt at explaining my position here, I shall raise another question, namely: Was the simple egalitarian and unadorned Islam that arose in Mecca and Medina about 14 centuries ago and that was presided over and managed by the Prophet himself and his first four successors, known as the four Rightly Guided Caliphs, was that simple Koranico-Prophetic Islam compatible with the hereditary dynastic kingships of such complex empires, stratified societies, and hierarchical polities as the Byzantine Empire and Sassanid Persia at the time when the Muslim Arabs conquered and dominated those mighty realms? The accurate and realistic answer is: dogmatically no, the two were completely incompatible; historically yes, the two became very compatible and in an incredibly short period of time. In this instance the historical yes issued then in the imperial hereditary Muslim Caliphate that lasted through the thick and thin of history until its formal abolition soon after the First World War. In other words, the early Muslim dogmatists, literalists, purists, scripturalists were absolutely right at the time of the first Arab conquests in insisting that nothing in the Muslim orthodoxy of the day could make the simple Koranico-Prophetic Islam of Medina and the four Rightly Guided Caliphs compatible with the hereditary monarchy of the imperial sort. But the historicists won the day and prevailed as we all know by now. 12

Islam and Secular Humanism

By the same token I would argue that today the accurate and realistic answer to the question “Is Islam compatible with secular humanism and its components?” is: dogmatically no, they are not compatible; historically, yes, they are compatible. I would also add that in general, whenever the dogmatic no in Islamic history, correct as it may have been scripturally and literally in its own time, came in outright conflict with the historical yes, incorrect and unorthodox as it may have seemed at its own moment, the historical yes tended to prevail over the dogmatic no. This victory used often to reach the point of completely obliterating and supplanting the purist of the moment. Let me restate my answer in a somewhat different and perhaps clearer form: Islam as a coherent, static ideal of eternal and permanently valid principles is, of course, compatible with nothing other than itself. As such it is the business of Islam to reject, resist and combat secularism and humanism to the very end, like any other major religion viewed under the aspect of eternity. But Islam as a living, dynamic, evolving faith responding to widely differing environments and rapidly shifting historical circumstances inconvertibly proved itself highly compatible with all the major types of polities and varied forms of social and economic organisation that human history produced and threw up in the lives of peoples and societies. From kingship to republic, from slavery to freedom, from tribe to empire, from ancient city state to modern nation state. Similarly, Islam as a worldhistorical religion stretching over 14 centuries has unquestionably succeeded in implanting itself in a whole variety of societies, a whole multiplicity of cultures, a whole diversity of life forms ranging from the tribal nomad to the centralized bureaucratic, to the feudal agrarian, to the mercantile financial, to the capitalist industrial. In light of these palpable historical facts, adaptations and precedents it should be clear that Islam has had to be very plastic, adaptable, malleable and infinitely reinterpretable and revisable to survive and flourish under such contradictory conditions and widely varying circumstances as referred to above. This is why I would conclude that there is nothing to 13

Is Islam Secularizable?

prevent historical Islam in principle from coming to terms and making itself compatible with such things as secular humanism, democracy and modernity. Whether it actually does and/or evolves in that direction is a historical contingency and a socio-cultural probability, depending on what actually living and kicking Muslims do as historical agents. Let me present another very contemporary example of what looks to me like a preliminary implicit triumph of the historical yes over the dogmatic no. The Iranian Ayatollahs in their moment of victory did not proceed to restore the Islamic Caliphate, and there was a Shi’i Caliphate in Islamic history, as is well known. Nor did they erect an Imamate or vice-lmamate but proceeded to establish a republic for the first time in Iran’s long history, with popular elections, a constitution, which is a clone of the 1958 French constitution, a constituent assembly, a parliament where real debates take place, a president, a council of ministers, political factions and a supreme court of sorts. All of which has nothing to do with Islam as history, orthodoxy and dogma but plenty to do with modem Europe as history and political institutions. It is also clear for all to see right now how in present day Iran the secular republican principle of popular democratic sovereignty and rule is actively challenging and seriously battling the opposite theocratic Islamic Shi’i principle of the sovereignty and rule of the Faqih or jurist. We stand at the moment before the spectacle of a deadlock in contemporary Iran between the principle of the vilayet of the Faqih, on the one hand, and the principle of the vilayet of the people, on the other. As for the Arab World, a quasi-consensus has been emerging in key Arab countries and societies – accompanied by wide-ranging debates and sharp controversies – over the importance and relevance of such values, practices and arrangements as some respect for human rights, a measure of democratic rule, an active civil society, citizenship, the secularity of the state and its apparatuses, the freedoms of conscience, thought and expression for breaking out of the current predicaments of stagnation, arrest, corruption, 14

Islam and Secular Humanism

decay and further civil strife that evidently engulf the entire Arab World at the present time. As a consequence, the traditional Arab left, including the communist parties, has by and large come to rally around these humanist secular values and to give them pride of place in all their programmes, demands and manifestos. The rational center, represented by the middle classes, think of themselves anyway as the natural bearers and implementers of this kind of consensus. Even the Muslim Brothers organizations, the right wing of the political spectrum, have reluctantly come around to make themselves openly a part of this consensus. For example, Egypt’s Society of Muslim Brothers, after decades of insisting – like the Saudi monarchy – on the claim that the Koran is their constitution, on the imperative of restoring the Muslim Caliphate and on the immediate application of Shari’a Law, made public recently (March 2004) its official initiative and formal programme for the comprehensive reform of the Egyptian state, society and economy, calling for the rejection of the idea of a religious state and government in favour of what it now calls a “civil government” – its euphemism for a secular or at least a religiously neutral kind of state and state apparatuses. This reform programme announced by “the mother of all fundamentalisms” in the Arab World and beyond, has come around to call for: Popular sovereignty, representative democracy, the circulation of power, free, honest and transparent popular elections, the separation of powers, an independent judiciary, empowerment of civil society, empowerment of women, respect for human rights, citizen’s civil rights and liberties, freedom of conscience, freedom of religious belief, worship and practice for all and freedom of thought and expression. This account is not meant to be a judgement on either the Muslim Brothers’ sincerity or earnestness or good faith in genuinely adhering to such a programme in the foreseeable future, but only as an added testimony to the increasing inescapability and continuing effectiveness of this secular humanist paradigm in (and with) such most unlikely quarters. 15

Is Islam Secularizable?

Recent developments in Turkey form an equally instructive instance: It is certainly noteworthy that Turkey, the only Muslim country with a developed and explicit secular ideology, tradition and practice, should be also the only major Muslim society to produce a democratic Muslim political party – something like Europe’s Christian Democratic Parties – capable of ascending to power without a catastrophe befalling the whole polity, as has happened elsewhere. This novel development generates the following most interesting paradox: As is well known, the currently ruling Islamic party there is the most eager proponent and promoter of Turkey’s membership in the European Union – a “Christian club”, as Valery Giscard d’Estaing once called it. At the same time, the Turkish military establishment, traditionally the staunchest guardian of Turkish secularism and the bastion of its Kemalist experiment, is now the most important opposer of Turkey’s membership in the secular European Union. What are we to make of this paradox? It is clear to me that this Turkish Muslim democratic party hopes that EU-membership will help put an end to the military’s traditional meddling in the affairs of the Turkish state. The army generals know this very well and react accordingly by doing their best to delay and obstruct the process for as long as possible. This is why I think the EU would do all parties concerned a great favor and an enduring service by taking Turkey by the hand and helping it through this difficult and risky transition period – pretty much the way it had aided Spain, Greece and Ireland to overcome their troubled fascist, militaristic and authoritarian pasts respectively. Certainly, Turkish membership in the EU would make it almost impossible for the military there to revert to type and distort their country’s fragile democracy. It would also make it just as difficult for any Islamic party or coalition of such parties to revert to type in the future and ruin Turkey’s promising new experiment by one form or another of Muslim fundamentalism, scripturalism and literalism. 16

Islam and Secular Humanism

Both the Arab world and Islam in general are in dire need right now of a reasonably free, democratic and secular model that works in a Muslim society. Turkey is at the moment the most likely place for such a model to develop and mature, given the assistance of the EU-membership and the safeguards it provides. In other words, what we need here is a credible functioning counter-example to the failed Muslim Taliban instance that the Americans left us with in Afghanistan not so long ago, with all its horrors and deformities. Not to be missed either, are the very significant reactions to the current Turkish paradox and example in the Arab World, the heartland of Islam. Allow me to explain myself: It is well known that the Arab left traditionally hated Turkey on account of (a) its close alliance with the West throughout the Cold War, (b) its full membership in NATO, (c) its staunch opposition to the Soviet Union and to communism in general and (d) its recognition of and friendly relations with Israel. This same Arab left has come around now to see in Turkey the only Muslim country where some of the values of the secular humanism that it has come to strongly emphasize and promote have taken root, appear to function comparatively well and seem to have a future. I have certainly watched with wonder, recently, Syrian leftist friends, colleagues and old-timers publicly praising the Turkish democratic experiment and looking up to it for possible benefit, instruction and emulation, while knowing full well that these same persons had spent their entire careers denouncing the Turkish states’ politics, alliances, programmes and all that it once stood for during the Cold War. This instance is particularly telling given the fact that the old Arab animosities towards Syria’s northern neighbour remained most acute, persistent and frank in Syria itself. Similarly, the mainstream Arab Islamists, who traditionally despised modern Turkey and denounced it for its abolition of the Caliphate, its Kemalism, secularism, nationalism and Westernism, have also come around to see the evolution and maturation of contemporary Turkish political Islam – to the point of democratically and peacefully assuming power – as 17

Is Islam Secularizable?

a model for the direction in which the Arab World’s failed political Islam should now go. For example, I have noted the phenomenon of outspoken Islamist critics and commentators publicly castigating the Muslim Brothers Organization in Egypt for its total mental laziness, political sterility and organizational inertia over the last 30 years, all in light of what political Islam has been able to achieve in Turkey. Furthermore, I am confident that had it not been for the Turkish example, the Muslim Brothers would have never had the will (and the cheek) to produce the kind of advanced programme of reform for Egypt that they recently announced, as pointed out earlier. The Arab nationalists traditionally condemned Turkey not only for many of the reasons adduced by the leftists and lslamists, but also on account (a) of lingering resentments against the Young Turks’ early policies of turkification in the remaining Arab provinces of the old empire, and (b) of their eagerness to blame Arab backwardness and failing on what they call the long retrograde Turkish occupation of the Arab lands. This condemnation has always been more severe and vociferous among Syria’s Arab and other kinds of nationalists because of the loss of some northern coastal territories to Turkey, annexed under the French mandate regime shortly before the Second World War. Even these nationalists have come around to a new and different look at present day Turkey. For they see now that unlike their own brand of nationalism, the Turkish variety proved to be a success story on the whole. They have come to admit that the earlier strategic Turkish decisions and historical choices that they once despised so keenly, seem, at the moment, to have served reasonably well the Turkish national interest, something that can in no way be said about comparable Arab nationalist choices, decisions and outcomes. They are actually jealous of the fact that all the things they had wanted for their own nation seem, at present, to be much better fulfilled in a neighbouring Middle Eastern Muslim society for which they had no use before. But now, I find them giving open and public advice to themselves and to others about the lessons to be drawn and learned from 18

Islam and Secular Humanism

the overall Turkish nationalist experience and experiment in state, society and economy. During the United States’ preparations for the invasion of Iraq in the spring of 2003, the Turkish Parliament rejected an American request to station troops on Turkish soil. The US administration had to swallow that rejection because it emanated from a genuine parliament, freely and democratically elected and not even the angry and bellicose Bush administration and team could raise any doubts about that parliament’s legitimacy and representative credentials. In the Arab world, this Turkish stance was highly esteemed and admired at the popular level and the following telling argument was put forward: What Arab king, president or ruler could go to the president of the United States and tell him my parliament rejected your government’s request without the American president either laughing him off the stage or even yelling back at him: Go to hell you and your parliament, we know what kind of an assembly you have at your disposal? Now, it is my considered view that the continuity of the reconciliation of historical Islam with the historical yes of secular humanism as against Islam’s dogmatic no is not a mere choice, or a casual option, or just a point of view but a vital necessity, if at least some Arab countries are not to end up tearing themselves to pieces after the tragic example of Lebanon. In fact, the alternatives to not taking seriously the historical yes of secular humanism at this stage of history may be too bloody and horrible to contemplate. One such horrifying alternative may be illustrated by looking at the present situation in Iraq and asking: Can this tortured Arab country stay intact without somehow reaching an agreement – explicitly or implicitly – among the religious communities, sects, factions and fractions forming its population that accepts without reservations a state and form of government that could be called by some, secular, by others, civil, and still by others, religiously neutral? My answer to this question is a flat no. 19

Is Islam Secularizable?

Let me share with you the following hypothetical mental experiment: Assume that the people of currently occupied Iraq hold a general assembly – under the tight supervision of the United States and its allies there – through real and genuine representatives of all the communities of faith and ethnicities making up that people (Shi’is, Sunnis, Kurds, Christians, Zoroastrians, Sabeas, Majus and what have you) to save the unity and integrity of their country, to prevent it from sliding into a ruinous confessional civil war and to agree on a form of state and government that is minimally acceptable to all the parties involved as well as to the majority of the Iraqi people. Let me ask, then, what kind of concessions the parties to this assembly have to make to each other, to the supervising power and to the rest of the watching world in order to save the new Iraq from the worst-case scenarios. I suggest the following: 1) The Muslim communities have to explicitly retract all the Shari’a Law rules and regulations governing the ahl al-dhimma in the country (the protected minorities of traditional Islam, mainly Christians and Jews), retract them de jure once and for all and not just de facto as is presently the case in most Arab states. This will involve the frank and open admission that the Shari’a principles governing the protégés of Islam have lapsed and become inoperative just like all those other Shari’a rules and regulations that once governed slavery in Islam and in Muslim societies and polities. Short of such a measure the Iraqi state will never become a state for all its citizens. 2) The Muslim communities have to abolish once and for all the archaic Islamic penal code inflicting such punishments as flogging, death by stoning, the amputation of limbs and similar forms of bodily torture and mutilation. This is all the more urgent now, given the revulsion generated in the country and beyond, by the barbaric penalties meted out even to minor transgressors by Saddam’s regime and 20

Islam and Secular Humanism

his henchmen such as plucking out eyes, cutting off ears, removing noses and pulling out tongues.

3) The Muslim communities there have to shun and reject in no uncertain terms the kind of Islam that is obsessed by a view of the outside and inside worlds as full of nothing but damned infidels,

kafirs, unbelievers, pagans, apostates, polytheists, mushriks, heretics, atheists, hypocrites, zindiqs, rawafed, rejectionists, all to be dealt

with accordingly, including such smaller offshoots of Islam as the

“Alawis, the Ismailis, the Druzes, the Bahais, the Ahmadis” and so on. This means putting an end once and for all to the now resurrected

exclusive traditional Muslim division of the World into the House of Islam as against the House of War, the House of Faith and Belief as against the House of Kufr and Unbelief.

4) The Shi’i community has to retract everything pertaining to the

Imamy form of rule, Velayet al-Faqih type of government, deputy of the Imam kind of theocracy with all their implications and

possible applications, otherwise the Iraqi government will never be a government of and for all its citizens.

5) The numerical Shi’i majority has to acknowledge and commit itself to the principle that democracy does not mean majority rule only

but majority rule and minority rights at one and the same time, with all the built-in mechanisms, checks and balances that help prevent any majority from turning into a tyranny against itself, against its own people in general and against its minorities in particular.

6) The final Muslim abolition, de jure and not just de facto, of the status

of women as an “Aura” in Islam, i.e. as something to be ashamed of,

to be hidden and covered like a scandal, or else all official and formal declarations of the equality of women and men in the new Iraq will remain fundamentally flawed and shamefully hollow.

21

Is Islam Secularizable?

Having seen the Russians apologize to the Polish, Hungarian, Czech and Slovak peoples for past wrongs, having seen the whites in South Africa apologize to the black majority for the past injuries of apartheid, having seen the Japanese apologize to the Koreans for past persecutions, having heard of Arab petitions submitted to the Pope pleading for an apology to the Muslim, Arab and Eastern Christian worlds for the wrong of the Crusades, and having learned of the Pope’s positive responses to such petitions, I plead in my own turn with the Sunni religious leaderships in Iraq and everywhere else to apologize to the Shi’a of Iraq and beyond for the unspeakable crime of the murder of the Prophet’s grandson Al-Husayn in the Karbala massacre in the year 61 of the Muslim calendar. And just as the Pope had absolved and forgiven Jewish posterity from the blood of Jesus Christ, I plead with the Shi’i clerical establishments in Iraq and everywhere else to absolve and forgive Sunni posterity from the blood spilled in Karbala, that mother of all crimes. Finally, what about the clash of civilizations prediction, considering that some important quarters, both in the secular West and the Muslim East, have come to think and operate on the assumption that the September 11 assaults and the resulting global war against Islamic terrorism form a sure confirmation of Huntington’s thesis about the inevitability of such a clash between an archaic Islamdom, on the one hand, and a modem advancing secular West, on the other? I would like to submit this Huntingtonian prophecy to some further critical examination by asking the question: Is such a clash really underway and unfolding right now? My simple and direct answer is twofold: first, in the strong, serious and dramatic senses of “clash”, the answer is no; second, in the weak, more casual and standard senses of “clash”, the answer is yes. I read Huntington’s basic thesis as saying, first, that after the collapse of World communism at its very center, the main sources of grave international conflict (and possible wars), ceased to be the hostile rivalry between two incompatible totalizing economic systems (or modes of 22

Islam and Secular Humanism

production and distribution, if you prefer), and, second that these sources have now come to reside in the antagonistic self-assertion and vying of the large, comprehensive and more or less self-contained systems of fundamental beliefs and values that dominate the post-Cold-War world scene, such as traditional Islam, on the one hand, and triumphant western liberalism, on the other. I can make the same point differently by saying that according to Huntington, now that the historical challenge of communism, socialism, working-class movements and third worldism to western capitalist hegemony has definitely come to an end, we have to look for the source of international danger, conflict and tension in the existing major belief and value systems that are inherently incompatible not only with capitalist liberalism but with each other as well. For Huntington, civilization seems to reduce itself to culture and culture to religion and religion to an archetypal constant that, in the case of Islam, is bound to produce the phenomenon of Homo Islamicus propelled on a collision course with, let us say, the West’s Homo Economicus and his instinctive liberalism as well as with India’s Homo Hierachicus and his natural polytheism. It seems clear to me that Huntington’s thesis involves, first, a reversion to old-fashioned German “Philosophie des Geistes” and, second, a rehabilitation of the classical orientalist essentialism that Edward Said demolished so well in his book Orientalism. What comes immediately to my mind in this context, for instance, is the famous concoction of spirit and the system of Protestant ethical beliefs and fundamental values used by Max Weber to explain the rise of capitalism in Europe. Here, we already have the spirit of capitalism clashing with the prevalent spirit of feudalism and the new Protestant ethical belief-system clashing with the antecedent, adjacent and rival Roman Catholic one. Weber’s rivalry, clash and struggle of the two spirits and two ethics turns global and international with Huntington. This vying of spirits and 23

Is Islam Secularizable?

belief-systems is not simply historical, sociological and/or evolutionary, but essentialistic, ontological and static. This kind of a-historical and antihistorical reasoning sets the stage tor the clash of civilizations by exclusively juxtaposing a reified system of basic Western belief and values against another reified but incompatible system of equally basic Muslim beliefs and values. At a more practical level, this means that such values as liberalism, secularism, democracy, human rights, religious tolerance, freedom of expression etc., are to be regarded as the West’s deepest values from which the contemporary Muslim world is permanently excluded on account of its own deep cherished values that are antithetical to the core to liberalism, secularism, democracy and the rest. The interesting irony in all this is that the Islamists find themselves in full agreement not only with Huntington’s basic thesis but with its theoretical implications and practical applications as well. Their theoreticians and ideologists also reduce civilizations to culture, cultures to religion and religions to inherently incompatible archetypal constants that vie, clash and struggle with and against each other. For them, Islam will emerge triumphant in the end. To temporarily relieve the harshness of the clash of civilizations thesis, president Khatami of Iran called for a dialogue of civilizations instead. The president’s main concern, here, is naturally a dialogue between Islam and the West in general and Iran and the United States in particular. Is Khatami sincere or hypocritical in his call? In the long run he is hypocritical, because the Islamist version of the Huntingtonian logic to which he is strategically committed requires a clash of civilizations and the ultimate triumph of his own. In the short run he is sincere because dialogue is not a bad momentary tactic for the much weaker side in this confrontation. I think the clash of civilizations between Islam and the West is already there in the weak and normal senses of “clash”, but is not about to happen in the strong and more dramatic meanings of the term. Islam is 24

Islam and Secular Humanism

simply too weak to sustain in earnest any challenges and/or confrontations that are seriously threatening to an obviously triumphant West. In fact, contemporary Islam does not even form a “civilization” in the active, enactive and effective senses of the term. It may be said to form a civilization only in the historical, traditional, passive, reactive and folkloric senses and no more. The two supposedly clashing sides are so unequal in power, military might, productive capacity, efficiency, effective institutions, wealth, social organization, science, technology etc., that the clash can only be of the inconsequential standard sort. For, as one literary metaphor says: If the egg falls on (clashes with) a stone the egg breaks and if the stone falls on (clashes with) the egg then the egg breaks, too. This is why from the ArabMuslim side of the divide, the West seems to discerning eyes so powerful, so efficient, so successful, so unstoppable as to make the very idea of an ultimate “clash” seem fanciful. As for the current problems, difficulties, tensions, suspicions, confrontations and enmities that characterize the relationships of lslam to the West, they are part of the normal affairs of history, power politics, international relations and the pursuit of vital interests. They are certainly not affairs either of the pure spirit, or of mere clashes or religious ideas, or of conflicting theological interpretations or of mere matters of beliefs, values, images and perceptions.

25

Copyright 2014. Gerlach Press. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or applicable copyright law.

2

Orientalism and Orientalism in Reverse

Part I. Orientalism In his sharply debated book,1 Edward Said introduces us to the subject of ‘Orientalism’ through a broadly historical perspective which situates Europe’s interest in the Orient within the context of the general historical expansion of modern bourgeois Europe outside its traditional confines and at the expense of the rest of the world in the form of its subjugation, pillage, and exploitation. In this sense Orientalism may be seen as a complex and growing phenomenon deriving from the overall historical trend of modern European expansion and involving a whole set of progressively expanding institutions, a created and cumulative body of theory and practice, a suitable ideological superstructure with an apparatus of complicated assumptions, beliefs, images, literary productions, and rationalizations (not to mention the underlying foundation of commercial, economic and strategic vital interests). I shall call this phenomenon Institutional Orientalism. Edward Said also deals with Orientalism in the more restricted sense of a developing tradition of disciplined learning whose main function 27 AN: 1781609 ; Azm, Sadiq Jalal.; Is Islam Secularizable? : Challenging Political and Religious Taboos Account: s8863559.main.ehost

Is Islam Secularizable?

is to ‘scientifically research’ the Orient. Naturally, this Cultural-Academic Orientalism makes all the usual pious claims about its ’disinterested pursuit of the truth’ concerning the Orient, and its efforts to apply impartial scientific methods and value-free techniques in studying the peoples, cultures, religions, and languages of the Orient. The bulk of Said’s book is not unexpectedly devoted to Cultural-Academic Orientalism in an attempt to expose the ties which wed it to Institutional Orientalism. In this way Said deflates the self-righteous claims of CulturalAcademic Orientalism to such traits as scholarly independence, scientific detachment, political objectivity etc. It should be made clear, however, that the author at no point seeks to belittle the genuine scholarly achievements, scientific discoveries, and creative contributions made by orientalists and orientalism over the years, particularly at the technical level of accomplishment.2 His main concern is to convey the message that the overall image of the Orient constructed by Cultural-Academic Orientalism, from the viewpoint of its own technical achievements and scientific contributions to the field, is shot through and through with racist assumptions, barely camouflaged mercenary interests, reductionistic explanations and anti-human prejudices. It can easily be shown that this image, when properly scrutinized, can hardly be the product of genuinely objective scientific investigation and detached scholarly discipline. Critique of Orientalism One of the most vicious aspects of this image, as carefully pointed out by Said, is the deep rooted belief – shared by Cultural-Academic and Institutional Orientalism – that a fundamental ontological difference exists between the essential natures of the Orient and Occident, to the decisive advantage of the latter. Western societies, cultures, languages and mentalities are supposed to be essentially and inherently superior to the Eastern ones. In Edward Said’s words, “the essence of Orientalism is the ineradicable distinction 28

Orientalism and Orientalism in Reverse

between Western superiority and Oriental inferiority…”3 According to this reading of Said’s initial thesis, Orientalism (both in its institutional and cultural-academic forms) can hardly be said to have existed, as a structured phenomenon and organized movement, prior to the rise, consolidation and expansion of modern bourgeois Europe. Accordingly, the author at one point dates the rise of Academic Orientalism with the European Renaissance.4 But unfortunately the stylist and polemicist in Edward Said very often runs away with the systematic thinker. As a result he does not consistently adhere to the above approach either in dating the phenomenon of Orientalism or in interpreting its historical origins and ascent. In an act of retrospective historical projection, we find Said tracing the origins of Orientalism all the way back to Homer, Aeschylus, Euripides and Dante.5 In other words, Orientalism is not really a thoroughly modern phenomenon, as we thought earlier, but is the natural product of an ancient and almost irresistible European bent of mind to misrepresent the realities of other cultures, peoples, and their languages, in favour of Occidental self-affirmation, domination and ascendency. Here the author seems to be saying that the ‘European mind’, from Homer to Karl Marx and A.H.R. Gibb, is inherently bent on distorting all human realities other than its own and for the sake of its own aggrandisement. It seems to me that this manner of construing the origins of Orientalism simply lends strength to the essentialistic categories of ‘Orient’ and ‘Occident’, representing the ineradicable distinction between East and West, which Said’s book is ostensibly set on demolishing. Similarly, it lends the ontological distinction of Europe versus Asia, so characteristic of Orientalism, the kind of credibility and respectability normally associated with continuity, persistence, pervasiveness and distant historical roots. This sort of credibility and respectability is, of course, misplaced and undeserved. For Orientalism, like so many other characteristically modern European phenomena and movements (notably nationalism), is a genuinely recent creation – the product of modern European history – seeking to acquire legitimacy, credibility and support by claiming ancient roots and classical 29

Is Islam Secularizable?

origins for itself. Certainly Homer, Euripides, Dante, St. Thomas and all the other authorities that one may care to mention held the more or less standard distorted views prevalent in their milieu about other cultures and peoples. However, it is equally certain that the two forms of Orientalism built their relatively modern repertoires of systematic conventional wisdom by calling upon the views and biases of such prestigious figures as well as by drawing on ancient myth, legend, imagery, folklore and plain prejudice. Although much of this is well documented (directly and indirectly) in Said’s book, still his work remains dominated by a unilinear conception of ‘Orientalism’ as somehow flowing straight through from Homer to Grunebaum. Furthermore, this unilinear, almost essentialistic, presentation of the origins and development of Orientalism renders a great disservice to the vital concerns of Said’s book, namely, preparing the ground for approaching the difficult question of “how one can study other cultures and peoples from a libertarian or non-repressive and non-manipulative perspective, and for eliminating, in the name of a common humanity, both ‘Orient’ and ‘Occident’ as ontological categories and classificatory concepts bearing the marks of racial superiority and inferiority”. It seems to me that as a logical consequence of Said’s tendency to view the origins and development of Orientalism in terms of such unilinear constancy, the task of combating and transcending its essentialistic categories, in the name of this common humanity, is made all the more difficult. Another important result of this approach bears on Said’s interpretation of the relationship supposedly holding between CulturalAcademic Orientalism as representation and disciplined learning on the one hand, and Institutional Orientalism as expansionary movement and socioeconomic force on the other. In other words, when Said is leaning heavily on his unilinear conception of ‘Orientalism’ he produces a picture which says that this cultural apparatus known as ‘Orientalism’ is the real source of the West’s political interest in the Orient, i.e., that it is the real source of modern Institutional Orientalism. Thus, for him European and later on American political interest in the Orient was really created by the sort of 30

Orientalism and Orientalism in Reverse

Western cultural tradition known as Orientalism.6 Furthermore, according to one of his renderings, Orientalism is a distribution of the awareness that the world is made up of two unequal halves – Orient and Occident – into aesthetic, scholarly, economic, sociological, historical and philosophical texts. This awareness not only created a whole series of Occidental ‘interests’ (political, economic, strategic etc.) in the Orient, but also helped to maintain them.7 Hence for Said the relationship between Academic Orientalism as a cultural apparatus and Institutional Orientalism as economic interest and political force is seen in terms of a “preposterous transition” from “a merely textual apprehension, formulation or definition of the Orient to the putting of all this into practice in the Orient…”8 According to this interpretation Said’s phrase “Orientalism overrode the Orient”9 could mean only that the Institutional Orientalism which invaded and subjugated the East was really the legitimate child and product of that other kind of Orientalism, so intrinsic, it seems, to the minds, texts, aesthetics, representations, lore and imagery of Westerners as far back as Homer, Aeschylus and Euripides! To understand properly the subjugation of the East in modern times, Said keeps referring us back to earlier times when the Orient was no more than an awareness, a word, a representation, a piece of learning to the Occident:10 What we must reckon with is a large and slow process of appropriation by which Europe, or the European awareness of the Orient, transformed itself from being textual and contemplative into being administrative, economic, and even military.11

Therefore Edward Said sees the “Suez Canal idea” much more as “the logical conclusion of Orientalist thought and effort”12 than as the result of Franco-British imperial interests and rivalries (although he does not ignore the latter). One cannot escape the impression that for Said somehow the emergence of such observers, administrators and invaders of the Orient as Napoleon, Cromer and Balfour was made inevitable by ‘Orientalism’, and that the political orientations, careers and ambitions of these figures are better understood by reference to d’Herbelot and Dante than to more 31

Is Islam Secularizable?

immediately relevant and mundane interests. Accordingly, it is hardly surprising to see Said, when touching on the role of the European Powers in deciding the history of the Near Orient in the early twentieth century, select for prominent notice the “peculiar epistemological framework through which the Powers saw the Orient”,13 which was built by the long tradition of Orientalism. He then affirms that the Powers acted on the Orient the way they did because of that peculiar epistemological framework. Presumably, had the long tradition of Cultural-Academic Orientalism fashioned a less peculiar, more sympathetic and truthful epistemological framework, then the Powers would have acted on the Orient more charitably and viewed it in a more favourable light! Raw Reality and its Representatives When Said is thinking and writing along these lines, it is hard to escape the strong impression that for him representations, images, words, metaphors, idioms, styles, universes of discourse, political ambiances, cultural sensitivities, highly mediated pieces of knowledge, extremely rarefied truths are, if not the very stuff of reality, then certainly much more important and informative substitutes for raw reality itself. If Academic Orientalism transmutes the reality of the Orient into the stuff of texts (as he says on page 86), then it would seem that Said sublimates the earthly realities of the Occident’s interaction with the Orient into the ethereal stuff of the spirit. One detects, therefore, a strong and unwarranted general anti-scientific bias in his book. This fact comes out most clearly in his constant inveighing against Cultural-Academic Orientalism for having categorized, classified, tabulated, codified, indexed, schematized, reduced, dissected the Orient (and hence for having distorted its reality and disfigured its particular mode of being) as if such operations were somehow evil in themselves and unfit for the proper understanding of human societies, cultures, languages etc. Yet Said himself admits readily that it is impossible for a culture, be it Eastern or Western or South American, to grasp much about the reality 32

Orientalism and Orientalism in Reverse

of another alien culture without resort to categorisation, classification, schematisation and reduction – with the necessarily accompanying distortions and misrepresentations. If, as Said insists, the unfamiliar exotic and alien is always apprehended, domesticated, assimilated and represented in terms of the already familiar, then such distortions and misrepresentations become inevitable. For Said “... cultures have always been inclined to impose complete transformations on other cultures, receiving these other cultures not as they are but as, for the benefit of the receiver, they ought to be”.14 He even finds “nothing especially controversial or reprehensible” about the domestication of an exotic and alien culture in the terms of reference of another culture, because “such domestications of the exotic take place between all cultures, certainly between all men”.15 In fact Said elevates this to a general principle which emanates from “the nature of the human mind” and which invariably governs the dynamics of the reception of one culture by another. Thus, “all cultures impose corrections upon raw reality, changing it from free-floating objects into units of knowledge”, because “it is perfectly natural for the human mind to resist the assault on it of untreated strangeness”.16 In fact, at one point Said goes so far as to deny entirely the possibility of attaining ‘objective truth’ about other cultures, especially if they seem exotic, alien and strange. The only means for approaching and receiving them are those of reduction, representation and schematization with all the attending distortions and falsifications which such operations imply and impose. According to Said: ... the real issue is whether indeed there can be a true representation of anything, or whether any and all representations, because they are re-presentations, are embedded first in the language and then in the culture, institutions, and political ambience of the representer. If the latter alternative is the correct one (as I believe it is), then we must be prepared to accept the fact that a representation is eo ipso implicated, intertwined, embedded, interwoven with a great many other things besides the “truth”, which is itself a representation.17 33

Is Islam Secularizable?

If, as the author keeps repeating (by way of censure and castigation), the Orient studied by Orientalism is no more than an image and a representation in the mind and culture of the Occident (the representer in this case) then it is also true that the Occident in doing so is behaving perfectly naturally and in accordance with the general rule – as stated by Said himself – governing the dynamics of the reception of one culture by another. Accordingly the Occident in trying to deal (via its Orientalism) with the raw reality of the Orient does what all cultures do under the circumstances, namely: 1) domesticate the alien and represent it through its own familiar terms and frames of reference; 2) impose on the Orient those ‘complete transformations’ which Edward Said says cultures are prone to effect on each other so as to receive the strange, not as it is but as it ought to be, for the benefit of the receiver; 3) impose upon the raw reality of the Orient the necessary corrections needed to change it ‘from free-floating objects into units of knowledge’; and 4) follow the natural bent of the human mind in resisting ‘the assault on it of untreated strangeness’. The Representation of Islam by the West One of the examples given by Said is of particular interest: The reception of Islam in the West is a perfect case in point, and has been admirably studied by Norman Daniel. One constraint acting upon Christian thinkers who tried to understand Islam was an analogical one; since Christ is the basis of Christian faith, it was assumed – quite incorrectly – that Mohammed was to Islam as Christ was to Christianity. Hence the polemic name “Mohammedanism” given to Islam, and the automatic epithet “imposter” applied to Mohammed. Out of such and many other misconceptions “there 34

Orientalism and Orientalism in Reverse

formed a circle which was never broken by imaginative exteriorization… The Christian concept of Islam was integral and self-sufficient”; Islam became

an image – the word is Daniel’s but it seems to me to have remarkable implications for Orientalism in general – whose function was not so much to represent Islam in itself as to represent it for the medieval Christian.18

The significance of the above argument lies in the fact that Said nowhere carries it to its logical conclusion in the light of what he had stated to be generally true about the reductive dynamics of the reception of one culture by another. As he knows very well, the reception of Christianity by Islam in the East differs little from the account given above. To make this point I shall present the gist of the above quoted passage with the following alterations: One constraint acting upon Muslim thinkers who tried to understand Christianity was an analogical one; since Mohammed was no more than the

Messenger of God it was assumed – quite incorrectly – that Christ was to

Christianity as Mohammed was to Islam, namely, a plain Messenger of God or ordinary prophet. Hence the polemics against His incarnation, sonship,

divinity, crucifixion, resurrection, and the automatic epithet of “forgers” applied

to the first guardians of the Holy Scriptures. Out of such and many other conceptions “there formed a circle which was never broken by imaginative

exteriorization… the Muslim concept of Christianity was integral and self-

sufficient”. Christianity became an image – the word is Daniel’s but it seems to me to have remarkable implications for how one culture receives another in general – whose function was not so much to represent Christianity in itself as to represent it for the medieval Muslim.

In the light of these critical remarks it should become clear: (a) why Said deals so harshly with Marx’s attempts to understand and interpret Oriental societies; (b) why he deals so much more kindly with the Macdonald-Gibb view of Islam; and (c) why he deals so charitably and sympathetically with the mystico-theosophical extrapolations bred by Massignon’s brand of Orientalism. 35

Is Islam Secularizable?

Said criticizes and exposes the falsity of the sort of declarative assertions made by the Macdonald-Gibb variety of Orientalism about Islam and the Muslims. He attacks them for being abstract, metaphysical and untrue. Here is a sample of such assertions: 1) It is plain, I think, and admitted that the conception of the Unseen is much more immediate and real to the Oriental than to the Western peoples. 2) The essential difference in the Oriental mind is not credulity as to unseen things, but inability to construe a system as to seen things. 3) The difference in the Oriental is not essentially religiosity, but the lack of the sense of law.19 For him, there is no immovable order of nature. 4) It is evident that anything is possible to the Oriental. The supernatural is so near that it may touch him at any moment. 5) Until recently, the ordinary Muslim citizen and cultivator had no political interests or functions, and no literature of easy access except religious literature, had no festivals and no communal life except in connection with religion, saw little or nothing of the outside world except through religious glasses. To him, in consequence, religion meant everything.20

The trouble with such affirmations does not lie only in their falsity, abstractness and metaphysical character. Certainly neither Macdonald nor Gibb were simple victims when making these declarations of the ‘epistemological framework’ built by the traditions of Orientalism, as Said intimates. In fact one can argue convincingly that in a certain very significant sense: 1) It is true that in general the Unseen is much more immediate and real to the common citizens of Cairo and Damascus than it is to the present inhabitants of New York and Paris. 2) It is true that religion ‘means everything’ to the life of Moroccan peasants in a way which must remain incomprehensible to present day American farmers. 36

Orientalism and Orientalism in Reverse

3) It is true that the idea of an independent inviolable lawful order of nature is in many respects much more real, concrete and firmly established to the minds of the students of Moscow University than it is to the minds of the students of al-Azhar University (or any other university in the Muslim world for that matter). What Said fails to bring out is the fact that the affirmations of the Macdonald-Gibb brand of Orientalism are really declarative only in a very narrow sense. They masquerade as fully and genuinely declarative statements of permanent fact only to conceal a set of broad directives and instructions on how Occidentals should go about dealing with and handling the Orient and the Orientals, here and now. These directives are necessarily of a general nature and hence require a variety of ‘operational definitions’ to turn them into useful practical steps taken by such an assorted lot as Western missionaries, teachers, administrators, businessmen, army officers, diplomats, intelligence experts, politicians, policy-makers etc. For example, such people are guided by these implicit directives and instructions to allow for and take advantage of the fact that religious beliefs, tribal loyalties, theological explanations and so on still play a much more decisive role in the life of contemporary Oriental societies than they do in modern Western ones. The very limitation of the declarative scope of the Macdonald-Gibb type of affirmations betrays not only their practical function and immediate relevance to actual situations, but also the profoundly ahistorical frame of mind and thought out of which they emanate. They pretend that the Unseen was always (and always will be) more immediate and real to the Orientals than to the Western peoples past, present and future. Similarly, they pretend that the idea of an independent lawful order of nature was always and will forever be more real, concrete and firmly established to the Occidental’s mind and life than it could ever be in the consciousness of Oriental human beings. The simple historical fact that at one time, say before the break-up of Christendom, the Unseen was as immediate and real 37

Is Islam Secularizable?

to Occidentals, is not permitted to disturb the seemingly Olympian factual serenity of the Macdonald-Gibb pseudo-declaratives. If one could speak of a hero when dealing with a book such as Orientalism, then Massignon emerges as the most favoured candidate for that role. This towering French Orientalist is praised for having surpassed all others in the almost impossible task of genuinely and sympathetically understanding Oriental Muslim culture, religion and mentality. Due to his profound humanism and compassion, Massignon, we are told, accomplished the feat of identifying with the ‘vital forces’ informing Eastern culture and of grasping its ‘spiritual dimension’ as no one else did before or since him in the West.21 But, in the final analysis, is not Massignon’s presumed identification with the ‘vital forces’ and ‘spiritual dimension’ of Eastern culture simply a personalised, idealised and reiterated version of the classical Orientalist representation of an Orient ‘overvalued for its pantheism, spirituality, longevity and primitivity’,22 a representation which Said has debunked so masterfully? Furthermore, we infer from the discussion of the meaning and importance of Massignon’s work that he nowhere abandoned the cardinal assumption (and original sin, according to Said) of all Orientalism, namely, the insistence on the essentialistic separation of the world into two halves: an Orient and an Occident, each with its inherently different nature and traits. It is evident, then, that with Massignon, as with the work of any other Orientalist attacked by Said, Orient and Occident remain fundamental ontological categories and classificatory schemes with all their attending implications and applications. We learn from Said’s book: (a) that Massignon’s Orient is completely consonant with the world of the Seven Sleepers and the Abrahamanic prayers;23 (b) that ‘his repeated efforts to understand and report on the Palestine conflict, for all their profound humanism, never really got past the quarrel between Isaac and Ishmael;24 (c) that for him the essence of the difference between East and West is between modernity and ancient 38

Orientalism and Orientalism in Reverse

tradition;25 (d) that in his view the Islamic Orient is always spiritual, Semitic, tribalistic, radically monotheistic and not Aryan;26 (e) that he was widely sought after as an expert on Islamic matters by colonial administrators;27 and (f ) that he was of the conviction that it was France’s obligation to associate itself with the Muslims’ desire to defend their traditional culture, the rule of their dynastic life and the patrimony of believers.28 Now, the question to which I have no ready answer is, how can the most acute and versatile contemporary critic of Orientalism praise so highly an Orientalist who obviously subscribes to the entire apparatus of Orientalism’s discredited dogmas? Karl Marx and the Orient The picture which emerges in Said’s book concerning Marx’s attitude towards the East runs more or less as follows:29 Through his analyses of British rule in India, Marx arrived at ‘the notion of an Asiatic economic system’ (i.e., the famous Asiatic mode of production) which acted as the solid foundation for a sort of political rule known as ‘Oriental despotism’. At first, the violent destruction and transformation of India’s traditional social organisation appalled Marx and shocked him as a human being and thinker. His humanity was moved, and sympathy engaged, by the human miseries and suffering attendant upon such a process of transformation. At this stage of his development Marx still identified with downtrodden Asia and sensed some fellowship with its wretched masses. But then Marx fell under the sway of Orientalist learning, and the picture quickly changed. The labels of Orientalism, its vocabulary, abstractions and definitions came to dominate his mind and emotions. According to Said, Marx – who initially recognized the individuality of Asia – became the captive of that formidable censor created by the vocabulary, learning and lore of Orientalism. He cites what supposedly happened to Marx’s thought as an instance of how ‘non-Orientalist’s 39

Is Islam Secularizable?

human engagements are dissolved [and] then usurped by Orientalist generalizations’. The initial sympathy and gush of sentiment experienced by Marx disappeared as he encountered the unshakable definitions built up by Orientalist science and supported by the Oriental lore that was supposed to be appropriate to it. Briefly, the case of Marx shows how ‘an experience was dislodged by a dictionary definition’.30 This is how Said sees the metamorphosis which led Marx to the view (highly objectionable to Said) that Britain was making possible a real social revolution in India by acting as the unconscious tool of history in bringing about that revolution. In this instance Britain is viewed by Marx as acting simultaneously as an agency of destruction and regeneration in Asia. Said unambiguously traces this mature view of Marx to Orientalism’s pseudo-learning and fancies about the East, especially in its 19th century messianic and romantic variety. For him Marx forms no exception to all the Europeans who dealt with the East in terms of Orientalism’s basic category of the inequality between East and West. Furthermore, he declares flatly that Marx’s economic analyses of Asia are perfectly suited to a standard Orientalist undertaking. I think that this account of Marx’s views and analyses of highly complex historical processes and situations is a travesty. Undoubtedly, Marx, like any other creative genius, was greatly influenced by the lexicographical learning, dictionary definitions, abstractions, representations, generalizations and linguistic norms prevalent in his time and milieu. But only Said’s excessive fascination with the verbal, textual and linguistic could lead him to portray Marx’s mind as somehow usurped and taken over (against his better judgement and nobler sentiments) by the vocabulary, lexicography and dictionary definitions of the Orientalist tradition in the West! With Said one stands at times on the verge of regression into belief in the magical efficacy of words. Marx’s manner of analyzing British rule in India in terms of an unconscious tool of history – which is making possible a real social revolution 40

Orientalism and Orientalism in Reverse

by destroying the old India and laying the foundations of a new order – cannot be ascribed under any circumstances to the usurpation of Marx’s mind by conventional Orientalistic verbiage. Marx’s explanation (regardless of whether one agrees or disagrees with it) testifies to his theoretical consistency in general, and to his keen realism in analyzing specific historical situations. This is evident from the fact that Marx always tended to explain historical processes in terms of social agencies, economic struggles, political movements, and great personalities which simultaneously played the role of destroyers and creators. These were often cast by him in the guise of ‘unconscious tools’ of a history unfolding itself in stages and sometimes in inscrutable and unpredictable ways. There is nothing specific to either Asia or the Orient in Marx’s broad theoretical interpretations of the past, present and future. On this score his sources are thoroughly ’European’ in reference and owe nothing to Orientalist learning. One only needs to recall those vivid passages in the Communist Manifesto where Marx portrays the modern European bourgeoisie in the double role of destroyer and creator: destroyer of the old inherited Europe, maker of its liberal present and usher of its proletarian future. Like the European capitalist class, British rule in India was its own grave digger. There is nothing particularly ‘Orientalistic’ about this explanation. Furthermore, Marx’s call for revolution in Asia is more historically realistic and promising than any noble sentiments that he could have lavished on necessarily vanishing socio-economic formations. I shall cite another example related neither to Orientalism nor to Asia or the realm of politics. This is how Marx described the dual role of usurer’s capital in the destruction of ‘small-peasant and small-burgherproduction’ and in the making of modern industrial Europe.31 On the one hand: [T]his usurer’s capital impoverishes the mode of production, paralyses the productive forces instead of developing them… It does not alter the mode of production, but attaches itself firmly to it like a parasite and makes it wretched. It sucks out its blood, enervates it and compels reproduction to 41

Is Islam Secularizable?

proceed under ever more pitiable conditions. Hence the popular hatred against usurers…

On the other hand: Usury, in contradistinction to consuming wealth, is historically important, inasmuch as it is in itself a process generating capital… Usury is a powerful lever in developing the preconditions for industrial capital in so far as it plays the following double role, first, building up, in general, an independent money wealth alongside that of the merchant, and, secondly, appropriating the conditions of labour, that is, ruining the owners of the old conditions of labour.

Said’s accusation that Marx subscribed to the basic Orientalist idea of the superiority of the West over the East seems to derive plausibility only from the ambiguity underlying his own discussion of this matter. That 19th century Europe was superior to Asia and much of the rest of the world in terms of productive capacities, social organization, historical ascendency, military might and scientific and technological development is indisputable as a contingent historical fact. Orientalism, with its ahistorical bourgeois bent of mind, did its best to eternalize this mutable fact, to turn it into a permanent reality past, present and future. Hence Orientalism’s essentialistic ontology of East and West. Marx, like anyone else, knew of the superiority of modern Europe over the Orient. But to accuse a radically historicist thinker such as Marx of turning this contingent fact into a necessary reality for all time is simply absurd. The fact that he utilised terms related to or derived from the Orientalist tradition does not turn him into a partisan of the essentialistic ontology of East and West any more than his constant use of such pejorative epithets as ‘nigger’ and ‘Jew’ (to describe foes, class enemies, despised persons, and so on) could turn him into a systematic racist and antisemite. No doubt, the typical messianic romantic vision was an essential part of Marx’s historicism. But Said errs greatly in attributing this vision to the later influence of Orientalism. For the messianic and romantic aspect of 42

Orientalism and Orientalism in Reverse

Marx’s interpretation of human history was with him from the beginning, and it encompassed the West long before he extended it to the East. Orientalism and Dependency I would like to end this section of my critique by drawing attention to a rather curious view and an enigmatic passage which occur towards the end of Said’s book and right after his sharp critique of the contemporary Area Study Programmes which have come to replace the traditional departments and disciplines of Orientalism in Western universities and particularly in the United States of America. Said makes the following observation and judgement: The Arab World today is an intellectual, political, and cultural satellite of the United States. This is not in itself something to be lamented; the specific form of the satellite relationship, however, is.32

If I understand this passage correctly, Said finds the intellectual, political and cultural dependence of the Arab world on the United States quite acceptable; what he deplores is only the manner in which this dependence manifests itself at present. There are basically two standpoints from which we can view this position. The first emanates from a ‘soft’ and liberal interpretation of the meaning and implications of dependence; while the second flows from a ‘hard’ and genuinely radical understanding of the nature and consequences of this relationship. According to the ‘soft’ interpretation Said seems to be: (a) simply taking note of the well-known fact of the superiority and supremacy of the United States vis à vis its satellites; and (b) hoping that, given greater American comprehension and appreciation of the realities of the Arab world, the lamentable aspects of the satellite relationship can be ameliorated. Such a development would greatly enhance the chances of greater political maturity, cultural independence and intellectual originality in the Arab world. In other words, the objective is not for the Arab world to shake 43

Is Islam Secularizable?

off its dependence altogether, but to alter and improve its circumstances, terms and modus operandi, in the direction of a more genuinely equal and balanced relationship. As a result Said blames the United States – and not the satellite – for an unsatisfactory and deplorable condition relating to “the specific form of the satellite relationship”. More precisely, he blames the American Middle-East experts who advise the policy-makers because neither of these two have succeeded in freeing themselves from the system of ideological fictions created by Orientalism . He even warns these experts and their masters that unless they look at the Arab world more realistically and try to understand it without the abstractions and fanciful constructions of Orientalism, America’s investment in the Middle East will have no solid foundation on which to lean. He says: The system of ideological fictions I have been calling Orientalism has serious implications not only because it is intellectually discreditable. For the United

States today is heavily invested in the Middle East, more heavily than anywhere else on earth: the Middle East experts who advise policymakers are imbued with Orientalism almost to a person. Most of this investment, appropriately

enough, is built on foundations of sand, since the experts instruct policy on the basis of such marketable abstractions as political elites, modernization,

and stability, most of which are simply the old Orientalist stereotypes dressed up in policy jargon, and most of which have been completely inadequate to

describe what took place recently in Lebanon or earlier in the Palestinian popular resistance to Israel.33

All in all, Said’s position here departs little from the conventional wisdom of the liberal establishments of the West in general and of the United States in particular. The ‘hard’ and radical interpretation of the meaning and consequences of dependence has been developed and widely publicised by such scholars and social thinkers as Paul Baran, Andre Gunder Frank, Pierre Jalee, Claude Julien, Samir Amin and Arghiri Emmanuel. According to their account, dependence is structurally incapable of generating any sort of ties 44

Orientalism and Orientalism in Reverse

save those of the intensified exploitation, pillage and subjugation of the satellite by the centre. According to this view, Said’s vague thoughts on the subject can only foster additional illusions concerning the nature of the satellite relationship and generate dangerously false expectations about its possible implications and actual applications. The essence of the illusion lies in Said’s perilous assumption that the lamentable aspects and manifestations of the satellite relationship can be satisfactorily reformed and improved to the ultimate benefit of both the Arab world and the heavy American investment in the Middle East. For the radical view of dependence holds that the satellite relationship leads to the further development of the already profound underdevelopment of the satellite itself. Hence its inevitable conclusion that salvation for the Arab world will remain an unattainable goal until the relationship of dependence is definitively and unambiguously smashed. From this also derives its inevitable criticism of Said for ending his book on a distinctly classical Orientalist note: 1) by not finding the satellite relationship between East (the Middle East) and West (America) lamentable as such; 2) by giving good advice to American policymakers and their Middle East experts on how to strengthen the basis of their investment in the area and on how to ameliorate the conditions of ‘the specific satellite relationship’ by ridding themselves of misleading Orientalist fictions and illusions; and 3) by forgetting that should American experts and their masters listen to his advice the Orient will find an even more formidable enemy in American imperialism than it already has.

45

Is Islam Secularizable?

Part II. Orientalism in Reverse One of the most prominent and interesting accomplishments of Said’s book, as mentioned before, is its laying bare Orientalism’s persistent belief that there exists a radical ontological difference between the natures of the Orient and the Occident – that is, between the essential natures of Eastern and Western societies, cultures and peoples. This ontological difference entails immediately an epistemological one which holds that the sort of conceptual instruments, scientific categories, sociological concepts, political descriptions and ideological distinctions employed to understand and deal with Western societies remain, in principle, irrelevant and inapplicable to Eastern ones. This epistemological assumption is epitomized in H.A.R. Gibb’s statement to the effect that applying “the psychology and mechanics of Western political institutions to Asian or Arab situations is pure Walt Disney”.34 It is also shown in Bernard Lewis’ declared belief that “recourse to the language of left-wing and right-wing, progressive and conservative, and the rest of the Western terminology ... in explaining Muslim political phenomena is about as accurate and as enlightening as an account of a cricket match by a baseball correspondent”.35 In other words, the vast and readily discernible differences between Islamic societies and cultures, on the one hand, and European ones, on the other, are neither a matter of complex processes in the historical evolution of humanity nor a matter of empirical facts to be acknowledged and dealt with accordingly. They are, in addition to all that, a matter of emanations from a certain enduring Oriental (or Islamic) cultural, psychic or racial essence, as the case may be, bearing identifiable fundamental unchanging attributes. This ahistorical, anti-human and even anti-historical ‘Orientalist’ doctrine, I shall call Ontological Orientalism. Obviously, Ontological Orientalism is thoroughly ideological and metaphysical in the most pejorative senses of these terms. Furthermore, Said spared no effort in his book to expose this fact. Ontological Orientalism is the foundation of the image created by modern Europe of the Orient. As Said has shown, this image makes more 46

Orientalism and Orientalism in Reverse

genuine and instructive revelations about certain European states of affairs, particularly about expansionary projects and imperial designs, than it does about its supposed object. But nonetheless this image has left its profound imprint on the Orient’s modern and contemporary consciousness of itself. Hence Said’s important warning to the subjects and victims of Orientalism against the dangers and temptations of applying the readily available structures, styles and ontological biases of Orientalism upon themselves and upon others. I would like to contend that such applications not only did take place but are continuing on a fairly wide scale. Furthermore, falling in the temptations against which Said has warned engenders what may be called Orientalism in Reverse. In what follows, I shall discuss this contention in terms of a specific instance of this reversed Orientalism, namely Ontological Orientalism in Reverse, as I propose to call it. To explain, I shall refer to two instances: the first drawn from the well-known phenomenon of secular Arab nationalism, the second from the recent movement of Islamic revival. Arab Nationalism and Orientalism in Reverse A prominent man of thought and politics in Syria published about two years ago a series of articles in which he proposed to study certain ‘basic’ words in the Arabic language as a means to attaining ‘genuine knowledge’ of some of the essential characteristics of the primordial ‘Arab mentality’ underlying those very words.36 Upon noting that the word for ‘man’ in Arabic (insan) implies ‘companionship’, ‘sociability’, ‘friendliness’, and ‘familiarity’ (anisa, uns, anîs, etc.), he triumphantly concluded that the implicit view held by the ‘primordial Arab mind’ says that man has a natural tendency to live with other men, or, as he himself explained, ‘the primordial Arab mind innately 47

Is Islam Secularizable?

possesses the philosophical idea that man is by nature a social being’. Then our author made the following telling comparison:

The philosophy of Hobbes is based on his famous saying that “every man is a

wolf unto other men”, while, on the contrary, the inner philosophy implicit in the word insan preaches that “every man is a brother unto other men”.

I submit that this piece of so-called analysis and comparison

contains, in a highly condensed form, the entire apparatus of metaphysical abstractions and ideological mystifications so characteristic of Ontological

Orientalism and so deftly and justly denounced in Said’s book. The only

new element is the fact that the Orientalist essentialistic ontology has been reversed to favour one specific people of the Orient.

It should be evident that one of the significant features of Ontological

Orientalism in Reverse is the typical Orientalist obsession with language,

texts, philology and allied subjects. It simply imitates the great Orientalist masters – a poor imitation at that – when it seeks to unravel the secrets of

the primordial Arab ‘mind’, ‘psyche’ or ‘character’ in and through words. In other terms, it has obediently and uncritically adopted what Said

pejoratively called the Orientalists’ ‘textual’37 attitude to reality. In the above

instance of so-called analysis and comparison that I have cited, one can easily see the panglossian and even quixotic character of the attempt to capture something about such a complex historical phenomenon as the

cultural, mental and psychic life of the Arabs, past and present, by literally

applying what has been learned from Orientalist books and philological analyses.

This reversed Orientalism sins doubly because it tries to capture the

essence of the ‘Arab mind’ by learning how to analyze Arabic words and

texts from the words and texts of the master Orientalists. Like a platonic work of art, its textual attitude becomes twice removed from the original reality. 48

Orientalism and Orientalism in Reverse

Thus Orientalism in Reverse presents us with variations on Renan’s racist theme as derived from his philological analyses and linguistic speculations. But the novel element is the conclusion of Orientalism in Reverse that comparative philological and linguistic studies prove the ontological superiority of the Oriental mind (the ‘Arab mind’ in this case) over the Occidental one. For, have we not shown that the sublime idea of the ‘brotherhood of man’ is innate and original to the ‘primordial Arab mind’, while Hobbes’ base idea of ‘the war of all against all’ is innate and original to the ‘primordial European mind’? In classical Orientalist fashion, the essence of the ‘Arab mind’ is explored by an Arab thinker through language only and in hermetic seclusion from such unwelcome intrusions as socio-economic infrastructures, politics, historical change, class conflicts, revolutions and so on. This primordial Arab ‘mind’, ‘psyche’ or ‘essence’, is supposed to reveal its potency, genius and distinguishing characteristics through the flux of historical events and the accidents of time, without either history or time ever biting into its intrinsic nature. Conversely, the series of events, circumstances and accidents forming the history of such a people as the Arabs can never be genuinely understood from this point of view, without reduction, through a series of mediations and steps, to the primary manifestations of the original unchanging nature of the Arab ‘mind’, ‘psyche’ or ‘essence’. Here I shall cite another example. Said points out correctly that: The exaggerated value heaped upon Arabic as a language permits the Orientalist to make the language equivalent to mind, society, history, and nature. For the Orientalist the language speaks the Arab Oriental, not vice versa.38

Orientalism in Reverse follows suit – not only faithfully but also more recklessly and crudely. Thus, another Syrian author wrote the following on the unique status of the Arabic language and the wonders it reveals about the ‘primitivity’ of the Arab and his language: 49

Is Islam Secularizable?

After having studied the vocal characteristics of every letter of the Arabic language I proceeded to apply their emotional and sensory connotations to the meanings of the words starting with those letters, or at times ending with them, by means of statistical tables drawn from the dictionaries of the Arabic language. After carefully examining the marvellous results yielded by this study it appeared to me that the originality of the Arabic language transcends the limits of human potentialities. I thought then, that no logical and reasonable explanation of this miracle of a language can be supplied except in terms of the category of the primitivity of the Arab and his language.39

In perfect Renanian fashion this notion of the primitivity of the Arab and his language is made to define a primary human type with its inimitable essentialistic traits out of which more specific forms of behaviour necessarily flow. This is very explicitly and roughly – hence candidly and honestly – stated by still another Syrian ideologue in the following manner: “The essence of the Arab nation enjoys certain absolute and essential characteristics which are: theism, spiritualism, idealism, humanism and civilisationism.”40 Not unexpectedly it follows that this absolute essence of the Arab nation is also the implicit bearer of a civilizing mission affecting the whole world. Given the decline of the West at the end of the twentieth century the Orient is supposed to rise under the leadership of the Arab nation and under the banner of its mission civilisatrice to guide humanity out of the state of decadence to which Western leadership has brought it. For, the ‘western essence’ produced such unmistakable signs of decadence as: “mechanism, darwinism, freudianism, marxism, malthusianism, secularism, realism, positivism, existentialism, phenomenalism, pragmatism, machiavellism, liberalism and imperialism”, all of which are worldly doctrines manifesting “a purely materialist essence”.41 In contrast, “The human universe” (i.e., man, humanity, the world, life, civilization) is today awaiting its appointed encounter with “the nation bearing that mission and chosen to lead it out of its impasse”. Furthermore: “No matter how tragic the condition of the Arab nation may be at present 50

Orientalism and Orientalism in Reverse

there is not a shred of doubt that this nation alone is the promised and awaited one, because it alone acquired perfectly, ages ago, all the ideal constituents, characteristics and features of a nation. Accordingly, it has come to possess, in a uniquely deep-rooted manner, all the various ideal human traits, excellences and virtues which render it capable and deserving of carrying out the lofty mission for which it was chosen…”42 I turn now to the second instance illustrating what has been defined as Ontological Orientalism in Reverse. Islamic Revivalism and Orientalism in Reverse Under the impact of the Iranian revolutionary process, a revisionist Arab line of political thought has surfaced. Its prominent protagonists are drawn, in the main, from the ranks of the left: former radicals, ex-communists, unorthodox marxists and disillusioned nationalists of one sort or another. This nebulous political line found an enthusiastic response among a number of distinguished Arab intellectuals and writers, such as the poet Adonis, the progressive thinker Anwar ‘Abd al Malek and the young and talented Lebanese critic Elias Khoury. I would add also that its partisans proved themselves quite prolific, utilizing various forums in Lebanon and Western Europe to make their views, analyses and ideas known to the reading public. Their central thesis may be summarized as follows: The national salvation so eagerly sought by the Arabs since the Napoleonic occupation of Egypt is to be found neither in secular nationalism (be it radical, conservative or liberal) nor in revolutionary communism, socialism or what have you, but in a return to the authenticity of what they call ‘popular political Islam’. For purposes of distinctness I shall refer to this novel approach as the Islamanic trend. I do not wish to dispute the above thesis of the Islamanics in this presentation. Instead, I would like to point out that the analyses, beliefs and ideas produced by the Islamanic trend in defense of its central thesis simply 51

Is Islam Secularizable?

reproduce the whole discredited apparatus of classical Orientalist doctrine concerning the difference between East and West, Islam and Europe. This reiteration occurs at both the ontological and epistemological levels, only reversed to favour Islam and the East in its implicit and explicit value judgements. A prominent feature in the political literature produced by the Islamanic trend is its insistence on replacing the familiar opposition of national liberation against imperialist domination by the more reactionary opposition of East against West.43 In the West, the historical process may be moved by economic interests, class struggles and sociopolitical forces. But in the East the ‘prime mover’ of history is Islam, according to a recent declaration by Adonis.44 Adonis explains himself by openly admitting that in studying Arab society and its internal struggles: I have attributed primacy to the ideological-religious factor because in Arab society, which is built completely on the basis of religion, the modes and means of production did not develop in a manner leading to the rise of class consciousness. The religious factor remains its prime mover. Consequently, its movement cannot be explained by means of such categories as class, class consciousness, economics, let alone economism. This means that the struggle within Arab society has been in the main of an ideological-religious nature.45

Adonis’ sweeping conclusion is naturally enough, to “do away with class struggle, oil and economics”46 in order to arrive at a proper understanding of Oriental (Muslim, Arab, Iranian) social dynamics. In other words: ideas, beliefs, philosophical systems and ideological superstructures are sufficient to explain the ‘laws of motion’ of Oriental societies and cultures. Thus, an enthusiastic Islamanic announced that “the Iranian Revolution reveals to us with the greatest emphasis ... that the laws of evolution, struggle and unity in our countries and the Orient are other than and different from those of Europe and the West”.47 A third Islamanic assured us that “all this permits Khomeini to translate his simple 52

Orientalism and Orientalism in Reverse

Islamic ideas into a socio-political earthquake which the most perfect and sophisticated theoretical/philosophical systems failed to detonate”.48 Accordingly, the latest advice of the Islamanics to the Arab Left is to rearrange their priorities in such a way as to stand them on their head: “to give ultimate importance to the cultural and ideological factors which move the masses and to proceed to reformulate scientific, economic and social truths on this basis”.49 According to an Orientalist such as H.A.R. Gibb (and others) this stable, unique, self-identical Islamic totality regulates the detailed workings of all human, cultural, social and economic phenomena subsumed under it. Furthermore, its coherence, placidity and inner strength are primarily imperilled by such foreign intrusions as class struggles, economic interests, secular nationalist movements, democratic ideas, ‘Westernised’ intellectuals, communist parties, etc. So, it is hardly surprising to see Adonis doing two things: First, opposing ‘nationalism, secularism, socialism, marxism, communism and capitalism’50 à la Gibb et al., on account of the Western source of these ideas and their corrosive influence on the inner structures of Islam which keep it oriental.51 Secondly, interpreting the Iranian Revolution in terms of a simple emphatic formula: ‘Islam is simply Islam’, ‘regardless and in spite of politics, the class struggle, oil and economics’. Here, Adonis is presenting as ultimate wisdom the barren tautology of Ontological Orientalism, so well brought out in Said’s critique: ‘The Orient is the Orient’; ‘Islam is Islam’; and, following the illustrious footsteps of such Ontological Orientalists as Renan, Macdonald, von Grunebaum and Bernard Lewis, Adonis and the other Islamanics imagine that they can comprehend its essence in isolation from the economics, sociology, oil and politics of the Islamic peoples. As a result they are anxious to secure Islam’s Orientalist ontological status not only as the ‘prime mover’ of Islamic history, but also as the alpha and 53

Is Islam Secularizable?

omega of the ‘Islamic Orient’. In the Islamic world nothing really counts save Islam. It is noteworthy that the favourite metaphor of the Islamanics is derived from the basically fixed, unprogressive, un-innovative cyclic movement of the oceans. Islam, they say, is once again in high tide after the low ebb of past generations and even centuries. I submit that this Islamanic view of Islam is in essence, and in the light of its logical consequences, no different from the metaphysical preachings of Ontological Orientalism. In other words, Islam is paraded before us in much the same way as H.A.R. Gibb saw it, as a monolithic unique Oriental totality ineradicably distinct in its essential nature from Europe, the West and the rest of humanity. Thus, in classical Orientalist fashion (reversed, however), Adonis affirms condescendingly that the peculiar characteristic of the Western essence is ‘technologism and not originality’. He then proceeds to enumerate the major features distinguishing Western thought on account of that inherent trait. According to him these are: system, order, method and symmetry. On the other hand, ‘the peculiarity of the Orient’, for him, ‘lies in originality’ and this is why its nature cannot be captured except through ‘the prophetic, the visionary, the magical, the miraculous, the infinite, the inner, the beyond, the fanciful, the ecstatic’ etc.52 Accordingly, it should come as no surprise if the revolutionary struggles and sacrifices of the Iranian people amount, in the eyes of the Islamanics, to no more than either ‘a return of Islam’ (the high tide metaphor) or to a manifestation of the innate Islamic opposition to nonIslamic peoples and influences (the East-West contradiction) as Bernard Lewis will have us believe.53 Similarly, the Islamanics would seem to be in full accord with Morroe Berger’s conclusion that ‘for modern Islam neither capitalism nor socialism is an adequate rubric.’54 But why? The reason, as pointed out by Said, is that according to Ontological Orientalism (both in its reversed and original versions) it really makes no sense to talk about classical, medieval or modern Islam because Islam is always Islam. Islam can 54

Orientalism and Orientalism in Reverse

withdraw, return, be in low ebb or high tide, but not much more than that. And since so-called ‘Modern Islam’, according to Ontological Orientalism Reversed, is really no more than a reasserted version of the old Islam, Adonis finds no embarrassment in advising the Iranian revolution about its present and future problems in the following archaic and theological jargon. It is self-evident that the politics of prophecy laid the foundations for a new life and a new order. It is also self-evident that the politics of the imamate or wilaya is correct guidance by the politics of prophecy, or rather it is the same as the politics of prophecy by inspiration and without full identification. For, every imamate or wilaya belongs to a particular age, and every age has its particular problems. Thus, the importance of the politics of the imamate and even its legitimacy lie in the extent to which it is capable of ijtihad to comprehend the change of modes and the newly arising realities under the correct guidance of the politics of prophecy.55

Similarly, is it not this kind of conservative Orientalistic logic which underlies the recent Iranian debate on whether the ‘Islamic Republic’ may be described as democratic? The official Islamic line, which prevailed, argued that ‘Islam’ can not accept any additional qualifiers since it cannot be but Islam. In other terms, just as it makes no sense to speak about classical, medieval or modern Islam – considering that Islam is always Islam – similarly, it makes no sense to talk about an Islamic republic being democratic, considering that the Islamic republic is always Islamic and cannot be anything else. Hence, Khomeini’s statement in one of his many interviews about the Islamic republic: “The term Islam needs no adjective, such as democratic, to be attributed to it… The term Islam is perfect, and having to put another word right next to it is, indeed, a source of sorrow.”56 Ontological Orientalism in Reverse is, in the end, no less reactionary, mystifying, ahistorical and anti-human than Ontological Orientalism proper.

55

Copyright 2014. Gerlach Press. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or applicable copyright law.

3

Orientalism and Conspiracy

I The topic of “Orientalism and Conspiracy” is complex and this chapter is an

attempt to provide a collage of analyses, observations, criticisms, experiences and commentaries dealing with several conventional and unconventional themes substantively related to the issue.

I say this, in spite of Hasan Hanafi’s long-winded, verbose and

rambling call on the Arabs in general and the Arab intelligentsia in particular to rise to the pressing challenge of establishing a science of Istighrab (i.e.

Occidentalism) for the purpose of systematically studying and scientifically

understanding the West, pretty much the way the West had studied us through its science of Istishraq (i.e. Orientalism).1

Unlike the term Istishraq, Hanafi’s Istighrab is itself a strange and

awkward word for naming a new scholarly discipline, considering its current

usages, meanings and connotations in Arabic such as: To find strange, odd, queer and far-fetched. “Gharb” means “West”, both in the geographical and

57 AN: 1781609 ; Azm, Sadiq Jalal.; Is Islam Secularizable? : Challenging Political and Religious Taboos Account: s8863559.main.ehost

Is Islam Secularizable?

political senses of the word, while “ghareeb” means “stranger”, literally “one who comes from the West”, also the far-off place where the sun sets. I certainly did not expect Hanafi’s call to lead to any tangible results, nor did it escape my attention that if this projected science of Occidentalism is to amount to anything at all, then it will have to seriously conform to international standards of scholarship, research, criticism, review and argument that are in their turn almost wholly of modern Western origin and provenance. This surely would not only be enough to impeach the authenticity of such a science in the eyes of the many in the Arab and Muslim worlds that Hanafi is trying to reassure and uplift but also enough to accuse Hanafi himself – by lslamists, for example – of conspiring with the enemy to produce such an un-Islamic science as Occidentalism. And surely enough, his introduction to the science of Occidentalism is so overloaded with modem Occidental wisdom, learning, philosophizing, teachings and approaches that one wonders what is so particularly Eastern or Islamic about it? Among its massive inclusions are an almost scholastic summa of the history of modern European philosophy, the affirmation of a naive Hegelianism where the World Geist is about to return East after having completed its classical journey from East to West and a wholesale uncritical adoption of the West’s well-known modern critiques of its own modernity with particular emphasis on the European right-wing counterEnlightenment types of critiques (Herder, Sombart, Spengler, Heidegger, T.S. Eliot, Toynbee, Foucault) but without, at the same time, neglecting to borrow profusely from such works on the left as Martin Bernal’s Black Athena.2 Furthermore, the heavy influence of Paul Hazard’s La Crise de la Conscience Européenne: 1630-1715 is unmistakable. Scholars in the field know that Hanafi was publicly accused of heresy, apostasy and Kufr in 1997 by none other than his fundamentalist friends at Al-Azhar University; this in spite of his long-sustained efforts to play to the Islamist gallery in Egypt and beyond. Sadly enough, Hanafi failed to mount any vigorous, and/or principled and/or honorable defenses 58

Orientalism and Conspiracy

of himself. The resulting disappointment led Gaber Asfour, one of Egypt’s most prominent literary critics and public intellectuals, to openly castigate him for the shabbiness of his stand, the incoherence of his reply and the defensiveness and hypocrisy of his apology, especially compared with the strong position taken earlier by Nasr Hamid Abuzaid who had to deal with equally serious threats, charges and accusations (including the annulment of his marriage) after the publication of his by-now famous book, Critique of Religious Discourse.3 In the end, Hanafi’s call for a science of Occidentalism (a) amounts to a reaffirmation by means of an emulation of the much denounced and much despised original Western science of Orientalism; (b) emanates from a politics of resentment and a barely camouflaged sense of inferiority where Occidentalism is supposed to do to the West what Orientalism had already done to us, Easterners; (c) confirms all over again the much derided and disparaged “essentialism” of the original Orientalist project by reifying (and at times even fetishizing) anew “Orient” and “Occident” to the point of characterizing his projected science of Occidentalism “as not a history of facts but a description of essences” (p. 103), essences that necessarily issue in a “struggle of civilizations” (p. 34) according to his account; (d) gives up completely on the possibility of historically ever transcending this whole Orientalism/Occidentalism problematique in the direction of a higher synthesis based on our common human concerns and shared scientific and scholarly interests (i.e., a scholarly horizon beyond both Orientalism and Occidentalism); and (e) forms a classical instance of what I once called the trap of “Orientalism in reverse”. There is also that other meaning of Occidentalism that comes through the recent book of Ian Buruma and Avishai Margalit bearing the title of Occidentalism: The West in the Eyes of its Enemies.4 Here, Occidentalism refers to a specific kind of discourse (followed by violent actions) emanating from the Arab and Muslim worlds whose main purpose is to denigrate, denounce and condemn the West in every

59

Is Islam Secularizable?

conceivable way. In their more sophisticated version, these discourses consciously model themselves on what is supposed to be the Orientalist original and mean to retaliate by paying back the West and its Orientalism in kind. But its productions, in my view, never rise to the level of a lofty parody, a captivating satire or a truly funny take-off, except perhaps in the literary works of Salman Rushdie. A good example of the practice of this kind of retaliatory Occidentalism is already to be found in Adonis’ “Manifesto of Modernity (or Modernism)” of 1980,5 where, for example, the old doctrine of Ernest Renan about the imitative character of the Semitic mind versus the creative nature of the Western and/or European mind is turned around to affirm that the essence of the Western mind is technicism, while the Eastern mind is by its very nature creative. Adonis proceeds to explain that technicism is no more than “application, reproduction, the transformation of an already present raw material, the imitation of a pre-given model or plan”, while the Ibda’ of the Eastern mind is “creation out of nothing, an emanation without pre-givens, an eruption without preexisting models”. He, then, appropriates Edward Said’s evocative phrase to the effect that “the West orientalized the Orient” and inverts it to conclude that whenever the West acts creatively, it orientalizes itself, i.e., when it succeeds in transcending its technicism by engaging in real Ibda’ it Easternizes. For Adonis, the West is technique, reason, system, order, method, symmetry and such. While the East is the prophetic, visionary, magical, miraculous, infinite, inner, transcendent, fanciful, ecstatic and so on. In other words – and here I am using Adonis’ words – the East is an originary kind of nebular chaos out of which the derivative Western cosmos emerged. But, the technologically superior West is not satisfied at present with mere rebellion against the creative East out of which it came but is out to kill the father tout court. Then there is that vulgar, barbarous and spiteful Talibanish variety of Occidentalism, which insists that: What you, the West and your local stooges 60

Orientalism and Conspiracy

call our backwardness is our authenticity; what you term our primitivism is our identity; what you denounce as our brutality is our sacred tradition; what you describe as our superstitions is our holy religion; and what you despise as our illiteracy is our ancient custom, and we are going to insist on their superiority to all what you have to offer, no matter what you say and no matter what you do. Shukri Mustafa, the leader and chief theologian of the “Excommunication and Migration” Jihadi Islamist organization in Egypt was an ardent defender and propagator of this kind of vulgar Occidentalism. He glorified illiteracy and innumeracy in the true Muslim community as a part of the religious ideal of the imitatio of Muhammad himself. Challenging almost everyone else he asked: Was it really possible for the Prophet Muhammad and his companions – the hermits of the night and the knights of the day, in God’s service – to be also physicists, mathematicians, pioneers of space exploration and makers of modem civilization?! For thirteen years in Mecca Allah’s Prophet taught the Muslims Islam and nothing but Islam, neither astronomy, nor mathematics, nor physics, nor philosophy; where are those impostors who claim that Islam cannot be established unless it becomes a pupil of the European sciences?6

Although Buruma and Margalit declare in their book that Islamism is the main source of the worst manifestations of Occidentalism in our time, they proceed to demonstrate the fact that the original springs of all forms of Occidentalism everywhere are in the Occident itself.7 This is why we find the more glib, ethereal and tricky affirmations and defenses of the Talibanish version of Occidentalism in the work of a thinker and author like Jean Baudrillard, particularly his essay about the 11 September 2001 New York attacks: The Spirit of Terrorism.8 Here is an example of what I would call his highly refined form of Talibanish Occidentalism: This is the case, again, with Afghanistan. That, on a particular territory, all ‘democratic’ freedoms and license (music, television – even women’s faces) can be prohibited, and that a country can stand out totally against what we call civilization (whatever the religious principle invoked) – these things are unbearable to the rest of the ‘free’ world. It is unacceptable for modernity to be rejected in its universal pretensions. 61

Is Islam Secularizable?

The lure of this kind of Occidentalism seems to emanate from what Baudrillard praises as the “refractory zones of the world”, its “uncolonized and untamed wild spaces, its sacrificial cultures, its sacralized societies, it high intensity communities” and so on. Actually, Baudrillard goes so far in his super-attenuated Occidentalism as to discriminate against the victims of the September 11 assaults in favor of their terrorist attackers by calling the first “the people of an employment contract” while celebrating the second as the people of a “pact and a sacrificial obligation”, and unlike the contract, the sacrificial obligation is “immune to any defection or corruption”. According to him “the miracle (of the ‘sacrificial band’)” is to have adapted to the global network and technical protocols, without losing anything of this complicity “unto death”. Unlike the contract, the pact does not bind individuals – even their “suicide” is not individual heroism; it is a collective sacrificial act sealed by an ideal demand. And it is the combination of two mechanisms an operational structure and a symbolic pact – that made an act of such excessiveness possible. But this is not the end of the story. Baudrillard’s September 11 sacrificial band turns even Hegel’s master-slave dialectic around or upside down, if you wish, for according to him: … seen in that light, this is almost an overturning of the dialectic of domination, a paradoxical inversion of the master-slave relationship, in the past, the master was the one who was exposed to death, and could gamble with it. The slave was the one deprived of death and destiny, the one doomed to survival and labor. How do things stand today? We, the powerful, sheltered now from death and overprotected on all sides, occupy exactly the position of the slave; whereas those whose deaths are at their own disposal, and who do not have survival as their exclusive aim, are the ones who today symbolically occupy the position of master.

It is interesting to note as well that Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri speak in their internationally successful book Empire9 of “a new nomad horde”, “a new race of barbarians that will arise”, a “new positive 62

Orientalism and Conspiracy

barbarism”, and then proceed to celebrate at the end of their book the postmodern “nomadic revolutionary” of today, i.e., the jihadist of Al-Qaeda. At this point, I am certainly tempted to see in all this sort of European intellectual nostalgia dreaming of substituting Nietzsche’s exhausted Blond Beast with a new and more forceful Brown Beast. Here, I should not miss a mention of that benign and popular variety of Occidentalism which helps to reinforce shaken identities, promote some self-assertion, improve self-esteem, restore wounded amour propre and advance a sense of empowerment after the model of “black is beautiful”, “vive la différence” (may be spelled with an “a” also, à la Derrida, to indicate the simultaneous deferral of that “difference” which may never make a difference after all), “communalism is organic”, “identity politics authentic”, “multiculturalism liberating” and so on. Salman Rushdie excelled in the use of this sort of Occidentalism, particularly in his super novel, The Satanic Verses. This is what he had to say about it all: I must have known, my accusers say, that my use of the old devil-name “Mahound”, a European demonization of “Muhammad”, would cause offence. In fact, this is an instance in which de-contextualization has created a complete reversal of meaning. A part of the relevant context is on page 93 of the novel. “To turn insults into strengths, whigs, tories, blacks all chose to wear with pride the names they were given in scorn; likewise, our mountainclimbing, prophet-motivated solitary is to be the medieval baby-frightener, the Devil’s synonym, Mahound.” Central to the purposes of The Satanic Verses is the process of reclaiming language from one’s opponents. Trotsky was Trotsky’s jailer’s name. By taking it for his own, he symbolically conquered his captor and set himself free. Something of the same spirit lay behind my use of the name “Mahound”.10

It would be most inappropriate for me to leave this topic of discussion without saying something about or related to Edward Said’s sharply debated and most influential book Orientalism – a book that is still alive and kicking after the passage of more than a quarter of a century since its publication. 63

Is Islam Secularizable?

First, I would like to present a prime example of what I would regard as “Orientalism” in its really bad Saidean sense: To live in Arabic is to live in a labyrinth of false turns and double meanings. No sentence means quite what it says. Every word is potentially a talisman, conjuring the ghosts of the entire family of words from which it comes. The devious complexity of Arabic grammar is legendary. It is a language which is perfectly constructed for saying nothing with enormous eloquence; a language of pure manners in which there are hardly any literal meanings at all and in which the symbolic gesture is everything. Arabic makes English look simpleminded, and French a mere jargon of cost-accountants. Even to peer through a chink in the wall of the language is enough to glimpse the depth and darkness of that forest of ambiguity. No wonder the Koran is so notoriously untranslatable.11

Obviously Arabic is judged, here (and found very wanting), by the principles of a Cartesian conception of language – a conception implicitly based on the doctrine of “clear and distinct ideas”, the primacy of quasi syllogistic reasoning of the “I think therefore I am” type, the propositional nature of all genuine saying and comprehending, and the full specifiability and discreteness of communicable meaning. Now, if we shift to a postmodernist-deconstructionist approach to language based on such principles as the disjunction of sign, signifier and signified, the unending shiftiness of sense, the undecidability of meaning, the paradoxes of incommensurability, William Empson’s Seven Types of Ambiguity,12 the absurdities of self-reflexivity and so on, then would not the Arabic described by Raban seem like the ideal language for the angstridden Dasein of the postmodern condition? In a comparable vein, Daryush Shayegan adopts and quotes approvingly a similar view expressed by a most famous French Arabist saying: “Referring to the spirit of the Arabic language, Jacques Berque rightly observes, ‘the Arabic tongue, whose every word leads to God, has been designed to conceal reality, not to grasp it’.”13 Again, in his Islam in the World, Malise Ruthven reproduces this kind of judgment by quoting approvingly 64

Orientalism and Conspiracy

Jonathan Raban’s description of the Arabic language and by affirming that (a) “Arabic, more than most other languages, eludes translation, at least into the European languages” and (b) Arabic is “an eminently suitable language for religious expression”. Then, Ruthven proceeds to explain this whole weird situation in the following manner: Arabic is a language built around verbs. Substantives and adjectives are always verbal derivatives, usually participles or verbal nouns. A clerk is a writer, a book is a writ. Aeroplanes and birds are things that fly. European languages, with their multiple origins, are much rooted in substances: most nouns in English are things-in-themselves, not parts of verbs, which are processes; it is precisely because Arabic refrains from classifying words into discrete particles, but keeps them instead in a logical and balanced relationship with a central concept – the verbal root – that it becomes an eminently suitable language for religious expression.14

Again, would not Arabic seem like the ideal language in light of a paradigm shift in the direction of, say, (a) Alfred North Whitehead’s critique of all Aristotelian philosophies of substance, simple location and misplaced concreteness in favor of reality as process or (b) of Henry Bergson’s attack on Chosisme and his dismissal of things-in-themselves in favor of universal flux and a continually creative form of evolution or (c) George Lukács’s rejection of reification and its discreet particles in favor of a reality of events, circumstances and processes. If “In the beginning was the Word”, was that “word” a verb or a noun? According to Ruthven, it was a verb for Arabic and a noun for the European languages. Then, the question is: Which is closer to the spirit of modernity, starting with the static noun or the active verb? At least Faust’s answer is clear from his new translation of the first verse of the Gospel of John: “In the beginning was the deed.” Not that substances, nouns and things-in-themselves are absent from the “Arabic language paradigm”, for just as God had brought His creatures to Adam to give them their proper names in Genesis (2:19-20), the Koran also teaches that Allah “taught 65

Is Islam Secularizable?

Adam the names of all things; then placed them before the angels, and said: Tell Me the names of these if ye are right” (1:31). It is interesting to note as well that a committed Muslim feminist author, academic and activist like Leila Ahmed in the United States not only accepts the pejorative “Orientalistic” Raban-Ruthven account of Arabic but proceeds to turn it into the primary virtue of the language by appealing to and making a lot out of the contingent fact that Arabic is written in consonants only, while the reader has to supply the vowels for any reading to occur and for any meaning to emerge. This is how Ahmed makes her case: Moreover, a bias in favor of the heard word, the word given life and meaning by the human voice, the human breath (nafas) is there, one might say, in the very language itself. In Arabic (and also Hebrew) script no vowels are set down, only consonants. A set of consonants can have several meanings and only acquires final, specific, fixed meaning when given vocalized or silent utterance (unlike words in European script, which have the appearance, anyway, of being fixed in meaning). Until life is literally breathed into them, Arabic and Hebrew words on the page have no particular meaning. Indeed, until then they are not words but only potential words, a chaotic babble and possibility of meanings. It is as if they hold within them the scripts of those languages, marshalling their sets of bare consonants across the page, vast spaces in which meaning exist in condition of whirling potentiality until the very moment that one is singled out and uttered. And so by their very scripts, these two languages seem to announce the primacy of the spoken, literally living word, and to announce that meaning can only be here and now. Here and now in this body, this breath (nafas), this self (nafs) encountering the word, giving it life. Word that, without that encounter, has no life, no meaning.15

It is no less interesting to speculate about whether one may classify this kind of celebration of the properties of the language of the Koran as a form of Orientalism-in-reverse where Arabic certainly stops being a language like other languages. The very flaws that Raban and Ruthven detect in Arabic elevate it – and elevate the Koran and Islam with it – to what Ahmed calls an “intrinsically aural language”. Actually, for her what 66

Orientalism and Conspiracy

is most distinctive and valuable about Arabic, the Koran and Islam is their inherent orality and aurality (p. 127). Here are a few additional observations in a left-handed defense of Arabic, on these new very Occidental and very European grounds: 1) In favor of Arabic one may cite, here, Rousseau’s view in his “Essay on the Origin of Language” to the effect that“ figurative language was the first to be born” while “proper meaning was discovered last”; all of which should please Adonis and suit his Occidentalist thesis (not to mention Ahmed’s auratic thesis), where such a figurative language as Arabic would certainly come first, while such modern languages as English and French, dedicated to “proper meaning” and literal comprehension, would came last. 2) Arabic, with its supposed “forests of ambiguity”, would seem to fit much better than, say, English into the overall critical scheme of a master literacy theoretician like William Empson, especially when he speaks thus in praise of ambiguity:



“‘Ambiguity’ itself can mean an indecision as to what you mean, an intention to mean several things, a probability that one or other or both of two things has been meant, and the fact that a statement has several meanings … Thus, a word may have several distinct meanings; several meanings connected with one another; several meanings which need one another to complete their meaning; or several meanings which unite together so that the word means one relation or one process.”16 We can even raise the stakes higher, in this regard, by imagining (a) the liberation that Arabic could consequently provide from what Stuart Chase once called “the tyranny of words”17 and (b) the complex ramifications it could put at the disposal of either an Empson trying to make sense out of such second-order discussions as “the ambiguity of ambiguity”18 or of a critic like I. A. Richards attempting to figure out “the meaning of meaning”.19 So, all lovers 67

Is Islam Secularizable?

of Akira Kurosawa’s classic movie Rashomon (1950) should not only admire Arabic for its inherent auratic Rashomon-like qualities but should also esteem it as the natural medium of “magical realism” and the suspension of all realist norms. 3) Part of the problem of “living in Arabic”, according to Raban, is that “every word is potentially a talisman, conjuring the ghosts of the entire family of words from which it comes”; while, on the other hand, part of the glory of “living in Arabic”, according to Ahmed, is that every word becomes an empty auratic receptacle for meanings. Raban, for his part, proceeds to explain this “peculiarity” of the language by looking up the Arabic word for “child” (tifl) in Hans Wehr’s famous dictionary – “the treasure-house of Arabic roots” – and then reporting on what he found there in the following manner:

The word is tifl, and it derives from the root tfl, meaning to intrude, obtrude, impose (upon); to sponge, live at other people’s expense; to arrive uninvited or at an inconvenient time, disturb, intrude; to be obtrusive. The linguistic family includes the words for softness, potter’s clay, parasites, sycophants, initial stages and dawn. No richer or more sceptical definition of childhood has, as far as I know, ever been made.20

Now, the intrigue should multiply greatly the moment we remember that it took the deconstructive skills of a Jacques Derrida to concentrate our attention on the talisman-word “Pharmakon” in Plato’s Phaedrus and to conjure the ghosts of the entire family of words attendant on. In other words, the verbal conjuring that seems to come so naturally and spontaneously to Arabic seems to require the Herculean intellectual efforts of a Derrida to accomplish in French and Greek. And à propos of all these ghosts and their conjural, it behooves us not to forget, here, Derrida’s equally celebrated interest in “specters” and the “spectral”.21 68

Orientalism and Conspiracy

In his famous essay, “Plato’s Pharmacy”22, Derrida also conjures the

ghosts of the entire family of words related to “Pharmakon” such as remedy,

recipe, poison, drug, cure, harm, medicine, philter, pharmacia, pharmakeus, sorcerer, magician, wizard, poisoner, scapegoat, etc., bringing into play many

other related contexts as well, like medicine, politics, farming, law, festivity,

sexuality, family relations and, of course, his favorite activity, writing. May one, therefore, conclude, à la Raban, that “no richer or more skeptical

definitional ‘pharmacology’ has ever been made” in any language. Now, on a Derridean reading, Arabic, as presented by Raban, Rathven and Ahmed, for example, would

• be intertextual through and through, an intertextuality that leaks on all sides to boot,

• provide interpretative freedoms hither to undreamt of under the

grim repressive logocentric regimes of conceptual clarity, distinct meanings and literal truths,

• form the finest natural example of the rhetorics of free play coupled

with an amazing capacity for limitless interpretative license,

uncontrolled semantic slippage, unending textual vandalism and constantly deferred meanings (and unmeanings),

• present the best simultaneous carrier of ambiguities, ambivalences,

limitless ramifications of sense, complimentary and antithetical

meanings, infinite signifying chains, indefinite play of semantic substitutions, etc. that work to defy the most concerted tidy-minded

attempts to sort these things out and to baffle the most rigorous protocols of reading,

• be all charisma and no routine and • seem to act like the natural destabilizer of Derrida’s bête noire: “the Western Metaphysics of Presence”.

69

Is Islam Secularizable?

Let me move on to say something about another engagement that I had with Orientalism, but an Orientalism of a different kind. A few months after September 11, I attended a prestigious conference at the India International Center in New Delhi, dealing with India’s relationships with the Middle East. Under the direction and chairmanship of the high politician, parliamentarian and scholar Dr. Singh, the Indian colleagues at the conference worked hard at pushing a certain agenda. They wanted to abolish the whole concept of the Middle East with all its attendant baggage, implications and applications on account of its colonialist origins, Orientalistic overtones and glaring Eurocentrist reference point. But, then, to my dismay and shock, they proposed instead the concept of “West Asia” as the “proper” and appropriate designation for my part of the world, the Arab Middle East, on account of its supposedly greater authenticity, accuracy, adequacy and superiority in comparison with the more conventional “Middle East”. I immediately shot back arguing: If I have to make a choice, by way of self-description and/or self-account, between your natural vision of us as “West Asia” and Europe’s natural vision of us as the “Middle East”, I will not hesitate for a moment in opting for the second designation and for excellent reasons at that. I explained to the conference: First, that out of these two inherently biased and tendentious ways of looking at and naming us, “the Middle East” has the advantage of wide currency, the privilege of long-standing usage and the prestige of emanating from and referring to the center of the Modern world, i.e., Europe. Second, that “West Asia” jarringly violates the fundamental way in which we see ourselves as “Middle Eastern” Arabs by cutting us off from Egypt – which is in Africa. In contrast, no Orientalist view, no Eurocentric definition, no colonial conception of the “Middle East” has ever separated Egypt from the rest of the Arab Mashreq, i.e., from the Eastern wing of the 70

Orientalism and Conspiracy

Arab world, as we often refer to ourselves as well. I insisted also that “West Asia” simply filters out another basic image of ourselves as part and parcel of the Arab world, since it seems to relegate the entire region of North Africa to some other realm or world. Third, that “West Asia”, unlike the “Middle East”, simply robs us from the Mediterranean dimension of our existence, history and self-conception, a dimension permanently bound to and continuously entangled with the other side of our lake, i.e., the European shore of the Mediterranean. Here, I had to marshal all my arguments. I said, think of Alexander the Great, Rome, Hannibal, Christianity going to Europe, Islam extending itself to Spain and beyond, the Crusades, the Ottomans in Europe, modern European colonialism and so on. Think of the fact that these two sides of the Mediterranean share the Judeo-Christian-Muslim tradition, the Greco-Roman heritage, Islam descending on Byzantium and a culturally Hellenized Christian Middle East, Hellenism underlying the scholastic reason of Judaism, Eastern Christianity, Western Christianity and Islam and their sharing of Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus, Adam, Eve, Abraham and Moses. I concluded by insisting that this kind of transcultural, translinguistic and transcontinental historical dialectic can in no way sit well with such a meager concept as “West Asia”, so I would rather stick with the “Middle East” in spite of its obvious flaws and well-known shortcomings. I must confess, as well, that this intervention irritated my Indian hosts and colleagues – especially on the first day – for busting the conference agenda so soon. The mood improved later on, but I could not avoid developing the strong suspicion that they wanted so eagerly to call us “West Asia” because they imported most of their oil from what to them is actually West Asia. Finally, I would like to bring out a certain political aspect of Said’s Orientalism that I do not think has received adequate attention so far. Said – both as loyal American and committed Palestinian – was deeply disturbed by and very concerned over what I shall call the paradox 71

Is Islam Secularizable?

of American policy in the Arab Middle East in general and vis-à-vis the Palestinians in particular. For, while, on the one hand, all of America’s vital interests and oil investments sit in the Arab world, its strategies and policies have on the whole favored Israel and unconditionally supported its expansionist aims, on the other, all at the expense of the Arabs and to the extreme detriment of the Palestinians. Since the birth of the state of Israel, this paradox has been the source of acute embarrassment (and even threat) to the Arab regimes allied with the United States during the Cold War, They all needed an “explanation” as to why America seemed incapable of producing policies commensurate with its vital interests in the area, on the one hand, and that also measured up to the minimum expectations of its closest Arab friends and strategic allies there, on the other. The dominant theory – for a long time favored and patronized by the Saudi monarchy – blamed Jewish-Zionist organizations, forces, pressure groups, vested interests, lobbies, funds, media, conspiracies and so on for distorting America’s vision as to its vital interests in the Middle East and as to where they really reside. The following are examples of how this tactic worked in practice, chosen from some past Arab political discourses: • “And so, the Zionist and American forces supporting Israel succeeded in making the American President withdraw his commitment to the phrase: The legitimate rights of the Palestinian people”, • “The American President gave in to Zionist pressure and retracted his support for Arab rights”, • “The friends of Israel, in congress and outside, put pressure on the American President and convinced him not to openly express his real convictions on account of their detrimental effects on Israel.” This kind of explanation worked conveniently to absolve the American President from responsibility for very unpopular policies in the Arab world and to relieve the embarrassment of the local regimes so 72

Orientalism and Conspiracy

closely allied to that president. Actually, Arab rulers claimed, then, in their propaganda, that they were making progress in resolving the paradox of

American policy in the Middle East by helping the Americans see correctly where their long-term vital interests lie.

My claim, here, is that Said’s Orientalism meant also to provide a

more sophisticated explanation of the paradox of American policies in the Arab world by appealing to French discourse theory in its Foucauldian

version. Accordingly, what comes to distort America’s vision in the area and determine the wrong-headed policies pursued there is that massive prison-house of Orientalist discourse and language built over the centuries

and now fully absorbed by all Western (and particularly American) decision

makers, policy framers, administrators, rulers, diplomats, experts, specialists, academics, functionaries, military commanders, assistants, etc., dealing with

that part of the world. Toward the end of his book, Said explains himself in the following way:

The system of ideological fictions I have been calling Orientalism has serious implications not only because it is intellectually discreditable. For the United

States today is heavily invested in the Middle East, more heavily than anywhere else on earth: the Middle East experts who advise policy makers are imbued with Orientalism almost to a person. Most of this investment, appropriately

enough, is built on foundations of sand, since the experts instruct policy on the basis of such marketable abstractions as political elites, modernization

and stability, most of which are simply the old Orientalist stereotypes dressed up in policy jargon, and most of which have been completely inadequate to

describe what took place recently in Lebanon or earlier in the Palestinian popular resistance to Israel.23

The book certainly meant to dispel this distortion – by exposing the

formidable Orientalist apparatus underlying it – in the hope of improved and more realistic American policies vis-à- vis the Arabs in general and the Palestinians in particular.

73

Is Islam Secularizable?

II Let me confess again that I am neither a believer in conspiracy theories and explanations nor particularly knowledgeable about their origins, causes and modes of operation. This is not to say, of course, that I am not very familiar with the genre, particularly the type that is so rampant in the Arab world and that I invested much time and effort in combating. My purpose in all that was always to minimize as much as possible the harmful and delusionary effects of such theories and explanations even on the considered views and judgments of otherwise very intelligent, enlightened and thoughtful people. I had always thought that the Arabs are the worst offenders around when it comes to the addiction to conspiracy theories, particularly when it comes to history, politics and international affairs, until one day Fred Halliday of the London School of Economics corrected me by insisting that that privilege belongs to Iran and the Iranians, by right. This set me thinking about the role of Shi’ism, for example, in intensifying this Iranian super-addiction to conspiracy explanations, considering that power was in fact usurped from Imamu’Ali and his heirs through a series of dirty conspiracies. It set me thinking as well about the role of theistic religion in general and Islam in particular in perpetuating this affliction in the whole Middle East and beyond, considering that to the religious mentality all explanations are ultimately in terms of personalized will, intention, goal and design – to my mind, a kind of higher order animism. Actually, one of the attributes of God in the Koran is cunning (makr) and you cannot have a good conspiracy without a lot of makr, on the one hand, while any serious exercise of the faculty of makr is bound to generate conspiracies of all sorts, on the other. Perhaps, conspiracy theories are a humanized and secularized version of ultimately religio-theistic ways of making sense of history and of explaining the world. 74

Orientalism and Conspiracy

This, in turn, brings to mind the old teleological argument for the existence of God in philosophical theology known also as the argument from design, namely, that whenever and wherever a natural pattern seems to emerge and/or form, there must be a conscious design behind it; and a design always requires at least one designer. A similar situation would naturally obtain even more forcefully when it comes to making sense out of and explaining all the patterns that emerge, form and re-form in human affairs, plans, goals, decisions and histories. Could it be as well, that conspiratorial explanations are a reversion to the causal enchantment of an already thoroughly disenchanted modem world? Of course, I am not saying that in today’s Middle East, for example, you have to be religious and/or believe in gods and arguments from design to subscribe to conspiracy theories and act on them. For instance, the secular left in the Arab world is as predisposed to the production, circulation, adoption and use of such theories as the religious right. For, there is no running away from the fact that the conspiratorial modes of thinking and explaining are deeply ingrained in parts of the Arab social, intellectual, cultural and the political conscious and unconscious. This is why atheists, skeptics, agnostics, communists, Marxists, liberals, nationalists, secularists, etc. show themselves to be as prone to the influence and use of the drug as the rest. I am not saying either that conspiracies do not happen and that foes, friends, enemies and allies do not conspire in the Middle East, like everywhere else, against themselves and, above all, against each other. I am not denying either that very often, when the strong consult among themselves, take stock of their priorities and define their goals and policies, it all looks like a dark conspiracy in the eyes of the weak. I am certainly not affirming that conspiracy theories and explanations are always wrong, crazy and beside the point; for, later events and revelations have shown often enough that the peddlers of such theories and explanations turned out to be quite on the mark in their own time and place. 75

Is Islam Secularizable?

Let me recount a small story from memory. Shortly after the Ba’ath party and the military seized power in Syria, 8 March 1963, Damascus was abuzz with rumors about a conspiracy hatched by the CIA, in collusion with right wing Syrian forces and elements, to overthrow the new progressive regime. Then, I had just returned to Damascus after finishing my studies in the United States and quickly joined the “rational center” there in criticizing the reigning conspiratorial mentality and in denouncing the resulting hysterical rhetoric and “absurd” accusations of the new authorities against the United States and the West in general. Many many decades later, and while in Washington, DC, I learned from freshly released classified documents of the State Department that the crazy Syrian conspiracy theorists of those days were right on target while we the sober rational center of Damascus were dead wrong. Now, I would like to move on to place before you an account of some of my own experiences with conspiracy theories. (1) I was in Japan when the 9/11 airborne assaults on New York and Washington, DC occurred. The startled Japanese friends and colleagues I was interacting with saw no conspiracies in what happened but were certainly at a loss as to what to make out of a situation where, on the one hand, Islamic Jihad perpetrates a sensational act of terroristic violence without precedent against the heart of the West, while, on the other, the President of the United States seemed to act immediately to mobilize the “Christian West” for a ferocious counter-crusade against Islam. It all appeared to them more like a religious war resurrected from some long gone dark ages than a conspiracy of any kind - hence the cultured Japanese lady who whispered in my ear: “What kind of savage religions do you have on your side of the world?” When I explained to her that our religions are all “heavenly religions” (adyan samawiyya, as we say in Arabic), revealed all the way down from the highest heaven, she ironically asked: “And what have you left to all the other earthly religions, then?” I would like to add a little aside, here, by saying that I found it quite edifying to have experienced the September 11 shock and its first repercussions in a culture very different 76

Orientalism and Conspiracy

from what I am normally used to, i.e., in a culture where such commonplace cries as “my God”, “mon Dieu”, “mein Gott”, “ya Rabbi”, “ya Ilahi” and so on had no meaning at all. Upon returning home to Damascus, Syria, I immediately found myself immersed in conspiracy theories of every conceivable shape, form and complexion about 9/11. The point of the whole commotion was to distance the Arabs, Islam and Muslims from what happened to the World Trade Center and the Pentagon by blaming it all on all sorts of usual and unusual candidates: the Mossad, the CIA, the Pentagon itself, the JewishZionist-imperialist plot, globalization’s super plotters and schemers, the American military-industrial complex and so on. Right, Left and Center were all implicated. The most interesting rationalization in this context asked: But, since when are the Arabs capable of such strategic planning, such longterm preparations, such brilliant tactics, such faultless coordination, synchronization and implementation? The reassuring conclusion inevitably followed: Since contemporary Arabs are neither Germans nor Japanese, they could not have had anything to do with what happened in New York and Washington, DC. For my part, I argued in favor of a much simpler explanation of the whole phenomenon: the Americans trained the mujahidin so well in Afghanistan, and for once the Arabs among them learned their lesson so well that at the first opportune moment they turned its devastating impact on the masters themselves. In all fairness, I should say that a gradual but steady retreat of the conspiracy theories occurred in the face of the accumulating evidence as to the party responsible for the September 11 attacks, with some doubts, reservations and question marks lingering here and there. But as always, the hard-core conspiracy theory believers can never be convinced otherwise no matter how high the evidence piles up, because such theories and explanations are driven by the turns of their own dialectical momentum – 77

Is Islam Secularizable?

no matter how phantasmagoric it gets – rather than by anything relating to evidence and the like. The other side of the Mediterranean is not immune to conspiracy explanations either – especially of the “super” variety. For example, in his treatment of the 9/11 conspiracy theories, Jean Baudrillard produced a meta-conspiracy theory of his own, i.e., a conspiracy theory of the circulating conspiracy theories about 9/11. He argued that the conspiratorial explanations of 9/11 really favor, work for and serve the interests of the United States and the West in general because (a) they portray America as the sole agent and actor capable of such grand extremism and spectacular excess and (b) they rob all other possible actors and agents around of the ability to perpetrate such a grandiose feat as 9/11. In other words, it enhances the power and prestige of America to no end for the rest of the world to believe that only America dares to do a 9/11 to America. It is sick reasoning, but this is how Baudrillard puts the matter: The most recent of the versions of September 11, and the most eccentric, is that it was all the product of an internal terrorist plot (CIA, fundamentalist extreme right, etc.) A thesis that appeared when doubt was cast on the air attack on the Pentagon and, by extension, the attack on the Twin Towers (in Thierry Meyssan’s 9/11: The Big Lie). Above and beyond the truth of the matter, of which we shall perhaps never have any knowledge, what remains of this thesis is, once again, that the dominant power is the instigator of everything, including effects of subversion and violence, which are of the order of trompe-l’oeil. The worst of this is that it is again we who perpetrated it. This, admittedly brings no great glory to our democratic values, but it is still better than conceding to obscure jihadists the power to inflict such a defeat on us. If it were to turn out that such a mystification were possible, if the event were entirely faked up, then clearly it would no longer have any symbolic significance (if the Twin Towers were blown up from the inside - the crash not being sufficient to make them collapse – it would be very difficult to say they had committed suicide!). This would merely be a political conspiracy. And yet, even if all this were the doing of some clique of extremists or military men, 78

Orientalism and Conspiracy

it would still be the sign (as in the Oklahoma bombing) of a self-destructive internal violence, of a society’s obscure predisposition to contribute to its own doom.24

Clearly, this super-conspiracy theory hints that the circulating 9/11 conspiracy theories may very well be excellent self-serving American fabrications and assures us that the United States ultimately stands to benefit from them because they act to desacralize, disenchant, neutralize and trivialize the massive sacrificial significance and grand impact of the 9/11 attacks by reducing them to just another big terrorist act not really that different from the infamous Oklahoma bombing. Allow me to confess that the following are some of the thoughts, images, notions and titles that crowded in on me while reading Baudrillard on this topic: Casuistry, Byzantine intrigue, Hair-splitting, Surrealism, Jesuitical distinctions, Theologico-dialectical feats, Big Brother, Doublespeak, Dr. Caligari’s Cabinet, Kafka-nightmares and George Orwell’s 1984. (2) In my involvement with the Rushdie affair, I did battle with the two major conspiracy theories that emerged in the Arab world about Salman Rushdie and The Satanic Verses. The first regarded him either as a witting or unwitting instrument of the continuing imperialist-ZionistOrientalist plot against the Arabs and Islam in general. The second saw in him a secret agent of resurgent heretical Shi’ism out to defame, discredit and undo Sunni Islam. The “instrument” version found favor among leftist and nationalist circles and was best formulated, argued for and propagated by the late Iraqi communist author and activist (living, then, in Damascus) Hadi Al-Alawi. Conspiracy theories in the Arab world usually start with a certain formulaic rhetorical question: Exactly, why at this moment? Why now? Or more specifically why did Rushdie write and publish The Satanic Verses at exactly this moment and no other? The point of the question is, of course, to intimidate, foreclose any further discussion and dismiss from the start 79

Is Islam Secularizable?

all other alternative answers or explanations, save the conspiratorial one intended. The question is usually asked assertively, menacingly and with a lot of the superior airs of those privy to some “deeper” knowledge or truth that escapes the rest of us, who naively trust in appearances. Inspite of Hadi’s intelligence, broad experience, learning and daring research and publications on such sensitive topics as “torture and assassination in Islam” (including the assassinations ordered by the Prophet himself ), still he became the most important propagator of one conspiracy theory about the Rushdie novel.25 According to him, Rushdie served the imperialists – knowingly or unknowingly – by sitting down to write a novel that fanned the flames of enmity between the Iranian and Arab peoples at a time when Iraq and Iran were at war, thus rendering a service to Saddam Hussein and his American allies and backers at the time. According to him, the imperialists resorted to the ruse of using both the novel form and the reputation of an already established British thirdworld novelist to achieve their goal, because the more conventional forms and open methods of deepening and intensifying the hatred between the two now warring peoples have been exhausted – all to the profit and benefit of world imperialism. By way of entertaining you, I shall digress to mention that the Egyptian Islamist lawyer Abdul-Halim Mandour, who charged Professor Nasr Hamid Abu-Zeid with atheism before the courts in Cairo and clamored for his dismissal from the University of Cairo, made the following comment about Naguib Mahfouz’s Islamically most controversial novel, “If we consider The Children of Our Alley (also Gabalawi’s Children ) of Naguib Mahfouz we will find that it is an Italian novel translated to Arabic and turned over to Naguib Mahfouz just to add his name to it”. As is well known, conspiracy theories and explanations are in their nature unassailable and irrefutable, because all seemingly contrary instances, arguments, pieces of evidence, etc. are immediately absorbed into the theory itself and turned into confirming instances of its claims. So, my preferred 80

Orientalism and Conspiracy

tactic for combating them is to throw in the most outrageous and absurd theory possible under the circumstances and then challenge the others to refute it. For example, I would argue, by sheer assertion, and with all the necessary airs of superior knowledge, that the Palestinian Intifada is really and in depth the result of a secret Plot and Pact between Arafat and Ariel Sharon to destroy the resistance of the Palestinian People for the benefit of the Zionist-Imperialist-Orientalist plot, etc. Even the extreme antiArafatists keep quiet at this point as a part of their “conspiracy of silence” against the man’s achievement and what he has come to represent. I shall return to Hadi now, for a glimpse of how the conspiratorial approach works, by pointing out a few of the principles according to which he said he had read The Satanic Verses – the following are virtual quotations from his writings on the subject: 1) To what extent does the novel serve the imperialist West by stirring up and nourishing Farsi-Arab enmity, particularly during the years of the Iraq-Iran war. 2) Identifying the immediate political Western-colonial objective which this or that character in the novel serves. 3) Exposing the Orientalist nature and drift of the novel in support of the ideology of the West and in opposition to the ideologies of national liberation. Here, Hadi accuses Rushdie of following in the footsteps of the Jesuit Orientalist at the Université St. Joseph in Beirut, Henri Lamens. 4) Demonstrating Rushdie’s role as a “spiritual missionary” by other means for and in the West and on “the ruins of atheistic communism”, a role traditionally reserved for the media and journalism of “America’s Arabs”. 5) Identifying those elements and forces that made Rushdie carry out that kind of work. 81

Is Islam Secularizable?

6) Drawing attention to the fact that the novel embodies a premeditated plan to denigrate the Arabs and to “detract from the personality of the Arab”. 7) Exposing the distortions visited on the personality of Salman Al-Farisi by Rushdie, all in the service of the ideology of the West in its war against Islam and the East, on the one hand, and against materialist scientific thought, on the other. 8) Raising the consciousness of the Arab popular masses in order to undo the effects of the Western media’s imperialist magic regardless of whether that magic proceeds from a man of letters, a scholar or an Orientalist. Now, given Hadi’s Shi’i background, interpreting the personality of Salman Al-Farisi poses a particularly sensitive problem when reading The Satanic Verses. This is why he goes out of his way to contrast Salman’s supposed great personality in building early Islam with what he calls “the Salman Al-Farisi of Rushdie and of Western Ideology” constructed to fulfill the double function of “satisfying a folkloric need of the West’s idealistic obsessions with and misrepresentations of history” and of “confirming the Eurocentric rejection of any effective historical action outside the European continent”. The problem becomes even more complicated for him given his sure knowledge that Sunni-Omayad Damascus is still full of popular conspiracy theories about this hero, namely, that Salman was really a Persian plant sent to Arabia even before the Prophet became the Prophet to sabotage the purity of true Arab Islam from the very start, thus paving the way for the rise of the Shi’i schism and heresy. The second conspiracy theory about Rushdie and The Satanic Verses was elaborated at length by the Egyptian writer and literary critic, Zuheir Ali Shaker, in a book published in Cairo under the title: The White Crow or the Salman Rushdie Phenomenon.26 Shaker accused Rushdie of the following misdeeds: 82

Orientalism and Conspiracy

1) Belonging to the extremist esoteric Shi’i sect in India known as the “Ghurabiyyah” (from ghurab, meaning crow in Arabic). This faction holds the “heretical” belief that the Archangel Gabriel, either

wittingly or unwittingly, delivered the first revelation of the Koran to Muhammad when he should have communicated it to ‘Ali, his first cousin (and extreme look-alike), as Allah had ordered him to do.

2) Satirizing, distorting and discrediting the true Arab Sunni version

of Islam while cunningly adopting and promoting its false Shi’i version.

3) Camouflaging his true purpose or giving as wide a currency as

possible to this heretical form of Islam by making dishonest and misleading declarations about his own atheism, secularism and leftism.

4) Conspiring with Imam Khomeini to have the “fatwa” issued against

his person in order to insure for his novel the greatest possible world attention and the broadest possible global circulation, all in

the service of spreading and propagating the heretical Shi’i kind of Islam that it contains.

5) Producing a novel full of masques, pseudonyms, dreams, reveries and magical appearances that in reality are no more than a transfiguration

of the despicable teachings of his sect about the transmigration, reincarnation and multiplication of souls.

6) Pretending to be a leftist, a secularist, an atheist and a libertine in

order to better serve his esoteric Ghurabism and its anti-Muslim and anti-Sunni objectives.

7) Writing the novel to provide support in the West and other places to

the Farsi-Shi’i side in Iran’s war against Iraq, a war also against the rest of the Arab world in general and Sunni Arabism in particular.

83

Is Islam Secularizable?

The first time I heard of the conspiracy theory accusing Rushdie of being a secret agent of resurgent Shi’i Islam was in the academic year 1989-1990 while teaching in the Near Eastern Studies Department at Princeton University. A Sunni Jordanian Fulbright Fellow from Yarmouk University, Jordan, spending some time there, assured me that the death sentence issued by Imam Khomeini against Salman Rushdie (and known as the fatwa) is really part of a secret plot agreed on by the imam and Rushdie himself for the purpose of giving the widest possible circulation to The Satanic Verses, because the Islam that the author maligns in the novel is Sunni Islam, while the Islam which he promotes is Shi’ism with all its heretical doctrines. In a manner typical to this kind of mentality and approach, the Jordanian colleague assured me, with all the assertiveness and self-confidence in the world, that he can obtain for me the documents necessary to prove all that, including the text of the contract signed and sealed by both Rushdie and Khomeini. He then gave me some anti-Shi’i Arabic propaganda books and tracts produced in Pakistan and obviously financed by Saudi Arabian money. For him, it was self-evident that The Satanic Verses is a deliberate product of a conspiracy traceable back to Tehran, the center of the expanding Shi’i International. According to Shaker’s elaboration of the plot, The Satanic Verses becomes at one and the same time a coded “ode of praise and glorification of Imam Khomeini”, in spite of all appearances to the contrary, and “a manifest ode of biting satire and bitter defamation” (hija) of all the traditional enemies of the Imam and of the Shi’i heresy, particularly Aisha the most beloved and preferred wife of the Prophet. As for the Imam’s death sentence against Rushdie and the publishers of the novel, it was no more than a cunning ruse to achieve the following goals: 1) Introducing the beliefs of the Shi’i Ghurabi sect to the whole world, while at the same time denigrating the true Islam of the sunna. For, had Khomeini been serious about the death sentence, he would have had Rushdie killed first and then declared the fatwa to the world – 84

Orientalism and Conspiracy

but he acted in exactly the opposite manner in order to give Rushdie the chance to hide and escape.

2) Raising the sales of the novel from 50.000 copies in five months

to 100.000 copies in a few days – and maybe the number will have risen to half a million by now.

3) Making the British government extend its protection to Rushdie as a British citizen targeted by a Muslim foreign power, thus permitting the British to present themselves in the false appearances of “the

home of democracy, the refuge of the scared and hunted and the protector of the freedoms of opinion and expression”.

4) Unleashing all the propaganda machines around the world in a

vicious anti-Muslim campaign of vilification and abuse, denouncing Muslims for their savagery and blood-thirstiness.

5) Arousing the curiosity of Muslims all over the world about the novel,

who, otherwise, would not have paid any attention to it without the so-called fatwa, as well as stirring some feelings of pity and sympathy among Muslims for “this poor writer hounded to death by a supposedly Muslim state”.

6) Serving the Imam’s Shi’i vital interests while Saddam’s Iraq is

involved in a protracted war defending Arabism and Islam against the historical enemy: Farsi-Shi’i Iran.

In the end, my point is, first, that although the course of the history

of the modern Middle East is indubitably full of conspiracies, the course itself is not either a conspiracy or the product of a conspiracy; and, second, that although the field of Orientalism is unquestionably full of all kinds of real and imagined conspiracies, the field itself is neither a conspiracy, nor the product of a conspiracy.

85

Is Islam Secularizable?

86

Copyright 2014. Gerlach Press. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or applicable copyright law.

4

Time Out of Joint: Western Dominance, Islamist Terror, and the Arab Imagination

I There is a strong injunction in Arab Islamic culture against shamateh, an emotion – like Schadenfreude – of taking pleasure in the suffering of others. It is forbidden when it comes to death, even the violent death of your mortal enemies. Yet it would be very hard these days to find an Arab, no matter how sober, cultured, and sophisticated, in whose heart there was not some room for shamateh at the suffering of Americans on September 11. I myself tried hard to contain, control, and hide it that day. And I knew intuitively that millions and millions of people throughout the Arab world and beyond experienced the same emotion. I never had any doubts, either, about who perpetrated that heinous crime; our Islamists had a deep-seated vendetta against the World Trade Center since their failed attack on it in 1993. As an Arab, I know something about the power of vengeance in our culture and its consuming force. I also 87 AN: 1781609 ; Azm, Sadiq Jalal.; Is Islam Secularizable? : Challenging Political and Religious Taboos Account: s8863559.main.ehost

Is Islam Secularizable?

knew that the United States would respond with all its force to crush the Islamist movement worldwide into oblivion. But I didn’t understand my own shameful response to the slaughter of innocents. Was it the bad news from Palestine that week; the satisfaction of seeing the arrogance of power abruptly, if temporarily, humbled; the sight of the jihadi Frankenstein’s monsters, so carefully nourished by the United States, turning suddenly on their masters; or the natural resentment of the weak and marginalized at the peripheries of empires against the center, or, in this case, against the center of the center? Does my response, and the silent shamateh of the Arab world, mean that Huntington’s clash of civilizations has come true, and so quickly? In the end, no. Despite current predictions of a protracted global war between the West and the Islamic world, I believe that war is over. There may be intermittent battles in the decades to come, with many innocent victims. But the number of supporters of armed Islamism is unlikely to grow, its support throughout the Arab Muslim world will likely decline, and the opposition by other Muslim groups will surely grow. 9/11 signaled the last gasp of Islamism rather than the beginnings of its global challenge. II Terrorism, Joseph Conrad once wrote, is an act of madness and despair. The madness of the Islamists’ spectacular attack on the World Trade Center is self-evident; its despair lies in its inevitably annihilating impact on the plotters and perpetrators themselves, world Islamism in general, and the al-Qaeda networks, organizations, and systems of support in particular (including the Taliban regime in Afghanistan). Although unique in its horror, in its desperation 9/11 can be compared to past terrorist acts that foretold the ends of the movements in whose names they were committed: for example, the abduction and murder of the German industrialist Hanns Martin Schleyer by the Baader88

Time Out of Joint

Meinhoff gang in the summer of 1977 and the abduction and murder, a year later, of Aldo Moro, the dean of Italy’s senior political leaders after World War II, by the Italian Red Brigades. In these cases a swift and decisive response would devastate not only the plotters, perpetrators, and their supporting networks and organizations, but ultimately their protective communist regimes and worldwide radical leftist movements as well. Looking back after 9/11 it seems to me that the left-wing terrorism of the 1970s in Europe was indeed a futile attempt to break out of the historical impasse and terminal structural crisis reached by communism, radical labor movements, Third Worldism, and revolutionary trends everywhere. The terrorism of that period was the first visible manifestation of that impasse and the prelude to the final demise of those movements, including world communism itself. Today the hard-core Islamists’ spectacular terrorist violence reflects a no less desperate attempt to break out of the historical impasse and terminal structural crisis reached by the world Islamist movement in the second half of the 20th century. I predict this violence will be the prelude to the dissipation and final demise of militant Islamism in general. Like the armed factions in Europe who had given up on society, political parties, reform, proletarian revolution, and traditional communist organization in favor of violent action, militant Islamism has given up on contemporary Muslim society, its sociopolitical movements, the spontaneous religiosity of the masses, mainstream Islamic organizations, the attentism of the original and traditional Society of Muslim Brothers (from which they generally derive in the way the 1970s terrorists derived from European communism), in favor of violence. Both were contemptuous of politics and had complete disregard for the consequences of their actions. Michel Foucault, when asked about the social and revolutionary significance of his books, answered something to the effect that they are no more than Molotov cocktails hurled at the system; they consume themselves in the act of exploding and have no significance beyond the flash they engender. Foucault believed that the only way to oppose the 89

Is Islam Secularizable?

system is direct action in the form of local attacks, intermittent skirmishes, guerrilla raids, random uprisings, and anarchistic assaults. This is a desperate rebellion without either cause or clear objective. Translated at the minimalist level into the activist Islamist idiom, we get, first, what some Islamists call “an act of rage in favor of God’s cause”, and second, the rejection of politics in almost any form – conventional, radical, and revolutionary – in favor of the violent tactics of nihilism and despair. For them, the only other alternatives are co-optation or the admission of defeat. Translated at the maximalist level, we get an apocalyptic form of terrorism on a global scale: the belief that spectacular violence will destroy the obstacles to the global triumph of Islam, catalyze the Muslim people’s energies in its favor, and create poles of attraction around which the Muslims of the world will rally – for example, the al-Qaeda networks, organizations, and training camps and the Taliban model of a supposedly authentic Muslim society and government for modern times. As the September 11 attacks have shown, the perpetrators of the apocalyptic form of terrorism, like their European counterparts, are not the desperately poor of the Arab world, but, more often than not, well-off, upwardly mobile, university-educated youths. They also share with their European counterparts a sense of entrapment in an alien and alienating monolithic sociopolitical reality and a tragic world view centered around a violent and salvific moment of truth that exposes the enveloping world of untruth, false consciousness, and false appearance. Out of the rubble, an essential Truth will emerge. In Europe it was conceived as an authentically humane and egalitarian socialist society. In the Arab world it is the authentic Islamist order reflected in such slogans as “Islam Is the Solution” and “Islam Is the Answer”. The beginnings of this kind of apocalyptic vision can be seen in the 1979 occupation of the Meccan holy shrine. In Saudi Arabia the ruling tribal elite has since the 1950s conspicuously wrapped itself, its society, and 90

Time Out of Joint

its system in the mantles of strict Muslim orthodoxy, moral purity, social uprightness, and Bedouin austerity. At the same time the contradiction between this official pretense and the country’s real substance of life has only deepened. According to official pretense, all non-Wahhabis are Kafirs (apostates, infidels), but Saudi society is managed and the economy run by these very infidels and in huge numbers; Saudis kowtow in all important matters, internal and external, to the United States and its policies, and the ruling classes lead profligate, ostentatious and debauched lifestyles, mostly behind drawn curtains. All Riyadh – and the rest of the Arab world – knows these things. The sons and daughters of the system who took the religious pretenses seriously staged an armed insurrection, occupying the Meccan holy shrine in 1979 and shaking the kingdom to its foundations in the process. In the world of Islam, no action could be more spectacular than storming and seizing the Ka’ba itself, although the occupation itself was peaceful. The leader of the insurrection, Juhaiman Al-’Utaibi, declared one of his followers the “Mahdi” (the divine savior) and demanded an end to the ludicrous discrepancy between official Saudi ideology and pretense, on the one hand, and the substance of the kingdom’s real life, on the other, by bringing the latter into strict conformity with the religious orthodoxy as officially announced and propounded. It took some time to flush Juhaiman and his followers out of the Ka’ba. The Saudis had to call in Western assistance and expertise to be able to accomplish the job without damaging the shrine. Of course, calling on such help contradicted all the pious pretenses of the regime, and all Saudi Arabia knew it too. Those involved in the incident were eventually beheaded. Like the 1979 occupiers of the Meccan shrine, the young Saudi perpetrators of the September 11 attacks were products of the same schizophrenic system. In fact, their leader, bin Laden, may be seen as a more dangerous, advanced, and global version of Juhaiman Al-’Utaibi. 91

Is Islam Secularizable?

While Juhaiman directed his desperate, spectacular intervention against the most important local legitimizing symbol of the Saudi system, bin Laden attacked the American core without which the local system could not possibly survive. But both acts of terrorism exposed the essential weakness of today’s Islamists: the embrace of the inevitable emergence of a new Islamic order is itself a symptom of a self-deluding fantasy that has afflicted the Arab and Muslim world for more than two centuries. III A cultural form of schizophrenia is also attendant on the Arab (and Muslim) world’s tortured, protracted and reluctant adaptation to European modernity. This process has truly made the modern Arabs into the Hamlet of our times, doomed to unrelieved tragedy, forever hesitating, procrastinating, and wavering between the old and the new, between asala and mu’asara (authenticity and contemporaneity), between turath and tajdid (heritage and renewal), between huwiyya and hadatha (identity and modernity), and between religion and secularity, while the conquering Fortinbrases of the world inherit the new century. No wonder, then, to quote Shakespeare’s most famous drama, that “the time is out of joint” for the Arabs and “something is rotten in the state”. No wonder as well if they keep wondering whether they are the authors of their woes or whether “there’s a divinity that shapes [their] ends”. For the Arabs to own their present and hold themselves responsible for their future, they must come to terms with a certain image of themselves buried deep in their collective subconscious. What I mean is this: as Arabs and Muslims (and I use Muslim here in the historical and cultural sense), we continue to imagine ourselves as conquerors, history-makers, pacesetters, pioneers, and leaders of world-historic proportions. In the marrow of our bones, we still perceive ourselves as the subjects of history, not its objects, as its agents and not its victims. We have 92

Time Out of Joint

never acknowledged, let alone reconciled ourselves to, the marginality and passivity of our position in modern times. In fact, deep in our collective soul, we find it intolerable that our supposedly great nation must stand helplessly on the margins not only of modern history in general but even of our local and particular histories. We find no less intolerable the condition of being the object of a history made, led, manipulated, and arbitrated by others, especially when we remember that those others were (and by right ought to be) the objects of a history made, led, manipulated, and arbitrated by ourselves. Add to that a no less deeply seated belief that this position of world-historical leadership and its glories was somehow usurped from us by modern Europe fi ghaflaten min al-tarikh: while history took a nap, as we say in Arabic. I say usurped – and usurpation is at the heart of Hamlet’s tribulations and trials – because this position belongs to us by right, by destiny, by fate, by election, by providence, or by what have you. With this belief goes the no less deeply seated conviction that eventually things will right themselves by uncrowning this usurper, whose time is running out anyway, and by restoring history’s legitimate leaders to their former station and natural function. This kind of thought and yearning comes through loud and clear in the work of authors like Hasan Hanafi and Anwar Abdel-Malek, as well as in the tracts, analyses, and propaganda of the more sophisticated Islamist thinkers and theoreticians. The constellation of ideas they draw on is captured in the title of a European classic, Spengler’s The Decline of the West, the false implication being that if the West is declining then the Arabs and Islam must be rising. Or, to put it somewhat differently (in a way that relates more to the title of Abdel-Malek’s book Rih al-Sharq [The Wind of the East]), if the wind of history is abandoning the sails of the West, then it must be filling those of the East (East means principally, here, Islam and the Arabs). If we use the title of an equally famous Islamist classic by Muhammad Qutb, Jahiliyyat al-Qarn al-Ishrin, The Jahiliyya of the 20th Century, then the implication 93

Is Islam Secularizable?

would be: Now that European Modernity has come full circle to the Jahili condition, the Arabs and Muslims must be on the verge of leading humanity once more out of the Jahiliyya created by Europe and defended by the West in general. But this is not the end of the story. Reviewing the classics of Arab nationalism, it now often appears to me that the deeper objective of these works was not so much Arab unity as an end in itself but Arab unity as a means of retrieving that usurped role of world-historical leadership and of history-making. In fact, I can easily argue that the ultimate but unarticulated concern is not so much a struggle against colonialism, imperialism, and foreign occupation, or for independence, prosperity, and social justice, but for the restoration of the great umma (nation) to a role of global leadership appropriate to its nature and mission. After all, the historic civilizations of our part of the world have always been of the conquering and extroverted type: ancient Persia descending on Greece, Alexander conquering Persia and everything else within reach, Hannibal, Rome, Islam, the Ottomans, European modernity, and so on. When this unexamined, unexorcised, highly potent, and deepseated self-image collides with the all-too-evident everyday actualities of Arab-Muslim impotence, frustration, and insignificance, especially in international relations, a host of problems emerge: massive inferiority complexes, huge compensatory delusions, wild adventurism, political recklessness, desperate violence, and, lately, large-scale terrorism of the kind we have become familiar with all over the world. The contradiction that I have been trying to delineate is perhaps best captured – quite gently and very ironically – in the title of Hussain Ahmad Amin’s pointed and lively book, Dalil al-Muslim al-Hazin ila Muqtada al-Suluq fi al-Qarn al-’Ishrin. The author is a well-known Egyptian historian and high-ranking diplomat and the son of Ahmad Amin, the great historian produced by what the late Albert Hourani called the Arab Liberal Age. Interestingly enough, the title of Amin’s book hints at that great 94

Time Out of Joint

classic of Western thought, Moses Maimonides’s The Guide for the Perplexed (Dalalat al-Har’irin). So a free translation of Hussain Ahmad Amin’s title would read, A Guide for the Sad and Perplexed Muslim Concerning the Sort of Behavior Required by and in the 20th Century. The contemporary Muslim or Arab is so sad and vexed in Amin’s account because his cherished convictions about his civilization, religion, and providence, and their role in modern history are all given the lie by hard realities every waking minute of his life. Furthermore, the radical transformations and sacrifices required to transcend this contradiction are either undesirable or unbearable. So what else can the Muslim or Arab do but muddle through his sad perplexity in the 21st century with the conviction that perhaps one day God or history or fate or the revolution or the moral order of the universe will raise his umma to its proper role once again. Under these circumstances, various kinds of direct-action violence (including terrorism in some of its most spectacular forms) present themselves as the only means of relief from this hopeless impasse. There is no running away from the fact that the Arabs were dragged kicking and screaming into modernity, on the one hand, and that modernity was forced on them by a superior might, efficiency, and performance, on the other. Europe made the modern world without consulting Arabs, Muslims, or anyone else for that matter and made it at the expense of everyone else to boot. While the Crusades were ultimately repulsed, Bonaparte’s militarily insignificant adventure in Egypt and Palestine not only triumphed but made a clean sweep of all that had become irrelevant on our side of the Mediterranean – the traditional Mamluk and Ottoman conduct of warfare, the supporting production systems, local knowledges, and forms of economic, social, legal, and political organization. The massive difference between the effects of the Crusades and the results of the French expedition of 1798 distills the essence of European modernity and puts it on show for our chastisement and edification. 95

Is Islam Secularizable?

In fact, modern Europe’s violent intrusion into the Islamic and Arab worlds created a final and decisive rupture with the past that I can only compare to the no less final and decisive rupture caused by the violent ArabMuslim intervention in Sassanid Persia. And just as the history of postconquest Persia stopped making sense without the Arabs and Islam, the post-Bonaparte history of the Arab world stopped making sense without Europe and modernity. In my view, there is no running away from this reality no matter how many times we reiterate the partial truth that modern Europe got it all from us anyway: Averroes, Andalusian high culture and civilization, science, mathematics, philosophy, and all the rest. Without finally coming to terms, seriously and in depth, with these painful realities and their so far paralyzing contradictions, we truly will abdicate our place in today’s world. Is there, then, an inevitable clash of civilizations coming between an archaic Islamic world and the modern secular West, as Huntington seems to affirm in The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order? I would say that in the strong and serious sense of clash, the answer in no. In the weak and more casual sense of the term, the answer is yes. Huntington argues that after the collapse of world communism, the main source of grave international conflict (and possible wars) ceased to be the hostile rivalry between two incompatible totalizing economic systems and came to be the antagonistic self-assertion and vying of the large, comprehensive, and more or less self-contained systems of fundamental beliefs and values that dominate the post-Cold War scene, such as traditional Islam, on the one hand, and triumphant Western liberalism, on the other. I can make the same point differently by saying that according to Huntington, now that the historical challenge of communism, socialism, working-class movements, and Third Worldism to Western capitalist hegemony has come to a definite end, we have to look for the sources of international danger, conflict, and tension in the existing major belief and 96

Time Out of Joint

value systems that are inherently incompatible not only with capitalist liberalism but with each other as well. For Huntington, civilization seems to reduce itself to culture, culture to religion, and religion to an archetypal constant that in the case of Islam is bound to produce the phenomenon of homo islamicus propelled on a collision course with, let us say, the West’s homo economicus and instinctive liberalism as well as with India’s homo hierarchicus and natural polytheism. It seems clear to me that Huntington’s thesis involves, first, a reversion to old-fashioned German Philosophie des Geistes and, second, a rehabilitation of the classical orientalist essentialism that Edward Said demolished so well in his book Orientalism. What comes immediately to my mind in this context, for instance, is the famous concoction of spirit and the system of Protestant ethical beliefs and fundamental values used by Max Weber to explain the rise of capitalism in Europe. Here we already have the spirit of capitalism clashing with the prevalent spirit of feudalism and the new Protestant ethical belief system clashing with the antecedent, adjacent, and rival Roman Catholic one. Weber’s rivalry, clash, and struggle of the two spirits and two ethics turns global and international with Huntington. This vying of spirits and belief systems is not simply historical, sociological or evolutionary but essentialistic, ontological, and static. This kind of ahistorical and antihistorical reasoning sets the stage for the clash of civilizations by exclusively juxtaposing a reified system of basic Western beliefs and values against another reified but incompatible system of equally basic Muslim beliefs and values. At a more practical level, this means that such values as liberalism, secularism, democracy, human rights, religious toleration, freedom of expression, etc. are to be regarded as the West’s deepest values, from which the contemporary Muslim World is permanently excluded on account of its own mostly deeply cherished values – theocracy, theonomy and theonomism, scripturalism, literalism, fundamentalism, communalism, 97

Is Islam Secularizable?

totalitarianism, sexism, absolutism, and dogmatism – which are antithetical to the core to liberalism, secularism, democracy, and the rest. The interesting irony in all this is that the Islamists find themselves in full agreement not only with Huntington’s basic thesis but with its theoretical implications and practical applications as well. Their theoreticians and ideologists also reduce civilizations to culture, cultures to religion, and religions to inherently incompatible archetypal constants that vie, clash, and struggle with and against each other. For them, Islam will emerge triumphant in the end. To temporarily relieve the harshness of the clash of civilizations thesis, President Khatami of Iran called for a dialogue of civilizations instead. The president’s main concern here is, naturally, a dialogue between Islam and the West in general and Iran and the United States in particular. Is Khatami sincere or hypocritical in his call? In the long run he is hypocritical because the Islamist version of the Huntingtonian logic to which he is strategically committed requires a clash of civilizations and the ultimate triumph of his own. In the short run he is sincere, because dialogue is not a bad momentary tactic for the much weaker side in this confrontation. The clash of civilizations between Islam and the West indeed exists in the weak, ordinary sense of clash, but not in the strong and more dramatic meaning of the term. Islam is simply too weak to sustain in earnest any challenge to an obviously triumphant West. In fact, contemporary Islam does not even form a “civilization” in the active, enactive, and effective senses of the term. It may be said to form a civilization only in the historical, traditional, passive, reactive, and folkloric senses. The two supposedly clashing sides are so unequal in power, military might, productive capacity, efficiency, effective institutions, wealth, social organization, science, and technology that the clash can only be of the inconsequential sort. As one literary metaphor says, If a stone falls on an egg the egg breaks, and if an egg falls on a stone the egg breaks too. From the Arab Muslim side of the divide, the West seems so powerful, 98

Time Out of Joint

so efficient, so successful, so unstoppable, that the very idea of an ultimate “clash” is fanciful. As for the current tensions, suspicions, confrontations, and enmities that characterize the relationship of Islam to the West, they are certainly not purely affairs of the spirit, or simply clashes of religious ideas or theological interpretations, or merely matters of beliefs, values, images, and perceptions. They are the normal affairs of history, power politics, international relations, and the pursuit of vital interests.

99

Copyright 2014. Gerlach Press. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or applicable copyright law.

5

Palestinian Zionism A basic maxim of Marxist socio-political analysis states that similar infrastructural conditions tend to produce similar superstructural phenomena. Some of us who have been in close and protracted contact with the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), (particularly with its political militants, higher cadres and more outspoken ideologues), certainly have sensed something of the importance of this maxim, not as an abstract principle but as a concretely lived series of organically developing situations, ideas and experiences. I am referring, here, to the Palestinian comparisons drawn between the modern Jewish and Palestinian diasporas and the superstructural (particularly political) phenomena generated by them. Prior to the Arab-Israeli October War of 1973, informal discussions in the PLO often apologized for the multiplicity of Palestinian armed organizations by arguing that the very similar multiplicity of Zionist armed organizations did not hinder the Zionist Movement from achieving its aim of establishing the state of Israel. The same apology went on to argue, analogically, that: 101 AN: 1781609 ; Azm, Sadiq Jalal.; Is Islam Secularizable? : Challenging Political and Religious Taboos Account: s8863559.main.ehost

Is Islam Secularizable?

1) The Palestinian resistance organizations could go on functioning under the PLO umbrella, regardless of their political squabbles, ideological disputes, institutional rivalries, incompatible alliances and allegiances, pretty much the way the Zionist armed organizations managed to operate and carry on their fight, under the protective umbrella of the World Zionist Organization and in spite of the violent quarrels, numerous disputes and deadly contests that often characterized relations among them. 2) The efforts and energies of every segment of the Palestinian people (moderates and extremists, wealthy and destitute, right-wing and left-wing, combatants and intellectuals etc.) should be mobilized in the struggle for the realization of the territorial aims of the Palestinian people, much the same way as the Zionist movement managed to mobilize almost all sectors of the Jewish people, regardless of ideological persuasions, political inclinations, social status etc., to realize the ultimate territorial Zionist aim. Underlying these political and institutional comparisons rests the following more basic but silent analogy: The larger portion of the Palestinian people lives in a diaspora identical in many a way with that experienced by the Jewish minorities in modern times. Due to this circumstance, the Palestinians lack the territorial base on which to carry on the productive economic, political and cultural activities normal to almost every other people in the modern world, much the same way as the Jews lacked their territorial base prior to the establishment of the state of Israel. Furthermore, the Palestinian diaspora did produce a significant number of social phenomena traditionally associated with the life of the Jewish communities in their respective host societies. Following are some of the more important instances:

(a) The predominantly urban character of the Palestinian diaspora and of the urban nature of the activities carried out by its members. 102

Palestinian Zionism

b) The much higher percentage of the literate, educated, technically trained, highly skilled etc. among diaspora Palestinians, than is the case among the peoples of the Arab host societies.

(c) The remarkably dynamic, effective, audacious and successful role of the Palestinian bourgeoisie in the life of the host countries, hence Palestinian prominence in the liberal professions, ascendancy in the various realms of cultural production and superiority in such fields as trade, finance, banking, industry and entrepreneurship in general. (d) The progressive proletarianization of broad strata of the Palestinian diaspora by the host societies, considering that the refugee camps have always constituted a good source for a cheap and highly mobile labor force.1 Hence, the conspicuous absence of the ordinary and direct exploitative relationship between the Palestinian bourgeoisie and its working class. (e) The strong (and increasing) presence of a lumpen sector among the Palestinians of the camps.

(f ) The persistent relations of tension and oppression generally governing the ties of the Palestinians to their host societies and governments, ranging from ordinary friction, rivalry and hatred to outright physical repression and collective persecution to the point of waging campaigns of “encirclement and annihilation” against them.

(g) The rejection of assimilationism both in its nationalist and radical left-wing forms, i.e., the rejection of Palestinian absorption either in the general nationalist fight for Arab unity, genuine independence etc., or in the overall revolutionary Arab struggle for socialism, communism etc. After the Arab-Israeli War of October 1973, and on the basis of this normally silent analogy, the dominant Palestinian and PLO circles arrived at conclusions not significantly different from those of Ber Borochov2 (the famous left-wing Zionist ideologue) concerning the proper solution of the Palestinian Question. Like Ber Borochov, they called for a “territorial 103

Is Islam Secularizable?

solution”, which, under the circumstances, could take only the form of an independent Palestinian state comprising the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. Thus, political territorial independence on a piece of Palestine became the official aim of the Palestinian people and revolution. For, like the Jews of the diaspora, the bulk of the Palestinian people is deprived of its territory and has to function under abnormal conditions of production which hinder it from developing and enjoying to the full its organs of national preservation, political independence and cultural expression. In other words, the establishment of the Palestinian state is supposed to “normalize” the situation of the Palestinian people, rendering it subject to the same general laws governing the social, economic, political and cultural development of the other Arab peoples and societies in the area. Some of the more radical and enthusiastic supporters of this line of thought argue that just as the establishment of the state of Israel on a part of Palestine provided the required base for further territorial expansion, colonization and settlement (bringing the rest of Palestine under direct Israeli rule), similarly, the establishment of a Palestinian state, on a part of Palestine also, will provide the required territorial base for continuing the struggle of the Palestinian Revolution for the ultimate aim of establishing a secular, socialist, democratic state and society on the whole of mandatory Palestine. At the level of tactics, this kind of argument points out that since the Zionist Movement was greatly helped in achieving its aims by a whole range of shifting (and often unprincipled) ties and alliances with major and regional powers, reactionary and progressive social forces, paramount and dependent ruling classes, it is natural to think that the Palestinian Liberation Movement also will be similarly helped in achieving its aim (the mini-Palestinian state) by a whole range of shifting and unprincipled alliances and ties with Western Europe and the Soviet Union, Saudi Arabia and Euro-Communism, the US oil establishment and the prince of Qatar, the State Department’s proverbial Arabists and the American congressional lobbies. Similarly, since under the leadership of the middle 104

Palestinian Zionism

bourgeoisie the Zionist Movement succeeded in mobilizing practically all Jewish social forces – right-wing and left-wing, rich and poor, moderates and extremists, fighters and intellectuals etc. – to serve the cause within the wide political framework of the World Zionist Organization, it is natural to think that the Palestinian Liberation Movement, under the leadership of the middle bourgeoisie, will succeed also in attaining its territorial objective by mobilizing all Palestinian social forces – right-wing and left-wing, rich and poor etc. – within the wide political framework provided by the PLO. In fact the Palestinian bourgeoisie of the American and Canadian diaspora has been making serious efforts at organizing itself and its constituency, for purposes political and otherwise, along lines which nicely mimic the work of the Jewish bourgeoisie in this domain. This trend is particularly evident in the creation of Palestinian Funds and philanthropic organizations. Thus, the charter of the Holy Land Fund, based in Chicago, amounts to a carbon copy (with the appropriate alterations) of the charter of the corresponding Jewish Fund and enjoys the same privileges, exemptions and rights granted under American Law. Similar things may be said about the Palestine Fund, based in San Francisco, and about the Palestine Red Crescent Association, based in New York City. Again, the repeated Palestinian calls for the mobilization of Arab resources, financial power, strategic location etc. to pressure American and Western governments into more accommodating postures vis-à-vis the projected Palestinian state, always carry the not so implicit reminder that Zionism succeeded on account of its proven ability to generate the necessary pressure on the governments concerned, via the mobilization of Jewish financial power, political influence, electoral weight etc. – Hence the continuing calls of the most prominent Palestinian Occidentalists in American universities for the formation of an Arab-Palestinian lobby allied to American oil interests and capital. Interestingly enough, the proposed territorial solution to the problem affected the PLO in ways analogous to the impact of the proposed partition of Palestine in the thirties on the Zionist Organization. When the British 105

Is Islam Secularizable?

authorities adopted the idea of establishing a Jewish state on a part of Palestine the Zionist Organization split into a large moderate majority supported by international opinion and allies, and a small extremist “Rejectionist Front” led by V. Jabotinsky. The minority fraction abandoned the internationally recognized Zionist Organization in favor of establishing a more militant and uncompromising alternative organization of its own. The moderate majority argued, in those days, that accepting the proposed mini-Jewish state will provide the movement with a firm base from which to continue the struggle for the realization of the more strategic aims of the Jewish people. The rejectionists accused the leadership of the Zionist Organization of capitulation before the pressures and lures of British imperialism, and argued that the historical Fatherland should be never subject to such cheap bargains and humiliating compromises, meanwhile, the aim remains its liberation in toto. After the October War of 1973, and the international and local floating of the idea of a Palestinian state on a portion of Palestine, the PLO split into a moderate majority supported by international opinion and allies, and a small extremist fraction led by George Habash. This minority deserted the internationally recognized PLO in favor of a more militant and uncompromising Rejectionist Front which, at one point, contemplated seriously forming an alternative and more militant PLO of its own. The moderate majority argued that adopting the mini-Palestinian state project could provide the movement with a firm base from which to continue the struggle for the realization of the more strategic aims of the Palestinian people. The Rejectionists, on the other hand, accused the leadership of the PLO of capitulating before the pressures of American imperialism and the lures of the reactionary Arab regimes (Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states), and argued that the historical Fatherland could never become the subject of such humiliating deals and unprincipled compromises, for the aim remains always its liberation in toto. In effect, the adherents and protagonists of the current territorial solution to the Palestinian Question have come to see in the Palestinian Liberation Movement a kind of Zionism in reverse, in spite of the fact that 106

Palestinian Zionism

the dominant content of Zionism was white, European-settler, colonialist and pro-imperialist, while the Palestinian Liberation Movement continues to carry a brown, Third-Worldist, native decolonizing and anti-imperialist content. In the Zionist case the content eminently fitted the form and, hence, the project proved historically realizable. In the Palestinian case, since the content is in obvious and sharp discord with the form the project will, most probably, prove unattainable, i.e., as long as its substance remains constricted by this present incongenial form. In this connection I would like to refer to the published opinions of three prominent Palestinians. In a celebrated article, Walid Khalidi outlined a blueprint for the proposed Palestinian state in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.3 In fact the article of this highly urbane Palestinian author and professor, whose real title is The State of the Palestinians, parallels very nicely that other famous tract entitled The State of the Jews, also produced by a highly urbane Viennese Jewish intellectual and journalist. His major contentions, justifications and rationalizations favoring the establishment of such a state are, interestingly enough, exact replicas of the classical Zionist arguments justifying the creation of a Jewish state on a part (or the whole) of Palestine. Like the traditional Zionist ideologues, Khalidi directs his arguments primarily at the ruling elite of the currently dominant imperialist power in the Middle East viz., the United States (hence, the publication of his article in Foreign Affairs). Secondarily, his arguments are also directed at the ruling elites of the other Western powers. In much the same way as the classical Zionist ideologues tried to convince those European (and later on American) elites that the most rational, realistic, and profitable solution of the Jewish Question is instituting a Jewish state in Palestine, Khalidi argues, also, that the most rational, realistic and profitable solution to the Palestinian Question, from the point of view of preserving and defending the vital interests of the West in the Middle East, is the creation of a Palestinian state. The Old Zionist spokesmen tried to make the project of the Jewish state look harmless to the Palestinians and very pleasing, attractive and 107

Is Islam Secularizable?

profitable to the dominant imperial and regional powers of those days. Khalidi, in his turn, tries to make the project of the Palestinian state look quite harmless to the Israelis and very pleasing, attractive and profitable to the dominant imperial and regional powers of today. In another vein, Sabri Jiryis praises highly the PLO leadership for its newly acquired realism, reasonableness, moderation and pragmatism as evidenced by its total adoption of the limited territorial solution to the Palestinian Question.4 Jiryis explains frankly that this welcome development is the outcome of the tendency of the PLO’s leadership to learn from and imitate the realism, flexibility, moderation and pragmatism of the classical leadership of the Zionist Movement. He also expresses high hopes that just as this kind of political behavior successfully led to the establishment of the Jewish state in the past, it will also lead to the successful creation of the Palestinian state in the reasonably near future. The exquisite texts and photographs of the recently published book of the American Palestinian par excellence, Edward Said, are, tellingly enough, consumed by none other than the ancient cry: “If I forget thee …”5 His earlier book, The Question of Palestine, was a heroic attempt to establish a discursive Western reality and presence for the “Palestinian Question” comparable to the earlier European reality and efficacy of the famous “Jewish Question”. Said unburdens himself thus: … above all, despite the fact that we are geographically dispersed and fragmented, despite the fact that we are without a territory of our own, we have been united as a people largely because the Palestinian idea (which we have articulated out of our own experience of dispossession and exclusionary oppression) has a coherence to which we have all responded with positive enthusiasm. It is the full spectrum of Palestinian failure and subsequent return in their lived details that I have tried to describe in this book.6

His approach, phrases and emphases will inevitably recall to the mind of the historically informed reader the discourses and theses of such classical Zionist ideologues as: Peretz Smolenskin, Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, 108

Palestinian Zionism

Moshe L. Lilienblum and Leo Pinsker.7 The affinities of Said’s Hegelianinspired “Palestinian Idea” to the equally Hegelian-inspired “Zionist Idea” and “Spiritual Nation” should not escape the attention of such a reader, either. À la Walid Khalidi, Said, also, tried his hand at convincing the ruling elites of the United States of America, via his sharply and widely debated book Orientalism, that it would be in their long-term best interests not to view the “Palestinian Question” through the heavily distorting discursive medium built by academic Orientalism in the West.8 Should we want to push these comparisons to their ultimate conclusions the results will look something like the following: Yaser Arafat, with his paternalistic attitude towards the whole Palestinian Resistance Movement, his constant travelling between international and Arab capitals, his unceasing dealings with a curious assortment of heads of state, Prime Ministers etc., his constantly open channels with each and every party with some interest in the Palestinian problem, plus his renowned political flexibility, diplomatic expertise and pragmatic tactics, is a kind of Palestinian Chaim Weizmann who was famous for all these qualities and without which he could not have remained long at the head of the Zionist Organization, given the internal strife and contradictions plaguing its life. George Habash, with his inflexible political stands, his uncompromising opposition to the partition of Palestine under any pretext, his chauvinistic background, his temporary desertion of the PLO at the head of a determined minority, his constant criticism of the PLO leadership for its opportunism, laxness and unprincipled politicking, his permanent inability to become the leader of the majority, his faith in a certain kind of elitist revolutionary violence, is the Palestinian mirror image of Jabotinsky (turned left-wing). Naif Hawatmeh, with his unlimited enthusiasm for the projected Palestinian state, his illusory belief in the improved negotiating position of the Arabs after the 1973 war with Israel, his irresistible desire to erect the 109

state in the nearest possible future and his profound conviction that the mini-state will provide the Movement with the required base for the future liberation of Palestine, is a kind of pseudo-project for a Palestinian Ben Gurion, the builder of the Jewish state on a part of Palestine in preparation for its future conquests.

Copyright 2014. Gerlach Press. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or applicable copyright law.

6

The Peace Process and the Gulf Crisis: A Critical Arab Point of View I was asked to speak about what the Gulf crisis might mean to the Middle Eastern peace process. Since we are not in the business of crystal ballgazing, any realistic thinking and/or serious speech about what the Gulf crisis might mean for the Middle East peace process must take off from the simple truth that foresight is based on insight. I mean insight into the current crisis-situation which is loaded with both latent and active factors, forces, potentialities, opportunities, perils and so on; all capable of detrimentally affecting, modifying and even derailing and destroying the peace process in our area. Such preliminary insight as I may have tells me prima facie that there is something ridiculous and absurd in the Sartrean sense about even mentioning the phrase “peace process” under circumstances where the entire Middle East may be about to fall victim to an explosion of unimaginable ferocity and incalculable devastation and destruction. The absurdity deepens and becomes even more sinister and ironical when one remembers that the supposed patron saint and guardian angel of the peace process itself is at one and the same time the prime antagonist in the imminent killing 111

Is Islam Secularizable?

process that may soon engulf our part of the world. It all has the airs of Dr. Caligari’s Cabinet all over again, where the keeper of the insane asylum turned out to be the craziest of all and where, as in our present case, the peace-keeper turns out to be the most bent on war. In fact he who speaks of peace in this circumstance is bound to look like some silly and trivial character straight out of a novel or play by a Kafka, a Sartre or a Beckett. Nonetheless, we are condemned, as it seems, to brave the ridiculous and to courageously stand up to the absurd and sinister; i.e., to speak coherently and sensibly, one hopes, about the peace process and the Gulf crisis and about what they might mean to and for each other. Therefore, I promise you to be undiplomatically frank and neither to beat around the presidential bush nor to resort to euphemisms. One relevant and very important factor, in this connection, consists in the fact that the short unhappy life of the Palestinian/PLO-American dialogue has laid to rest any doubts that thoughtful Arabs may have had concerning the absence of a genuine commitment on the part of the American Government to the achievement of a peaceful, balanced and reasonably evenhanded settlement of the Arab-Israeli conflict. What we indubitably know now is that the prelude to the Gulf crisis is a US Middle Eastern policy interested, (a) in the overall containment of the conflict, (b) in the management of the crises it continually engenders, (c) in maintaining tensions at a tolerable level from the point of view of American hegemony in the area, (d) in working out temporary arrangements and precarious balances based on nothing more solid than the concept of “constructive ambiguity” and (e) in wanting to do no more, really, than control the damages that necessarily result from the continuation of what seemed, then, like a conveniently fluid and manageable crisis-condition. I would argue that such an American policy towards peace in our area, predicated on the supreme principle and motto: “the movement is everything, the goal is nothing” is to a great extent responsible for the present Gulf crisis; in the sense of providing its remoter cause, its relevant 112

The Peace Process and the Gulf Crisis

broad historical background and its general political context (unless, per chance, the real goal turns out to be not peace in the Middle East but the pacification of the Middle East). I think we all realize now that had the American-PLO dialogue continued bearing some practical fruits such as Israeli-Palestinian negotiations in Cairo, Saddam Hussein’s present desperate scenario would have been much more difficult to implement, he would have had far less sympathy among the Arab masses (let alone some Arab governments and regimes) and the PLO would have been put to a critical test as to the genuineness of its commitment to peace with Israel and to the peace process itself. Reading the published minutes of the last meeting between the American Ambassador in Baghdad and President Saddam Hussein, one can now see how destructive the policies predicated on the concept of constructive ambiguity can get. Now, which ever way the Gulf crisis swings, the continuation of American policies of the containment of the Arab Israeli conflict, of the crisis-management of its periodic crises, of the control of the damages it keeps producing and so on, augur ill for the future not only of the peace process but for the final goal of peace itself. That such a continuation remains a real possibility, in spite of the enormity of the Gulf crisis, may be inferred from past experience. We all know that the Arab-Middle Eastern regional system seems either to explode violently and/or to go down crashing under the tensions of its own inner incoherences at regular intervals; inviting massive external intervention – mainly American intervention to restore balances, stabilize new equations and rebuild security arrangements. But ultimately the goal of peace remains unachieved, the interminable movement of the process of making and seeking peace reasserts itself and the policies of crisis management, conflict-containment and constructive ambiguity reign supreme all over again. All this in an area of the world where everyone concedes, now, that it has been for quite some time an American turbulent 113

Is Islam Secularizable?

lake or volcanic oasis and where no one is seriously challenging US hegemony anymore, save for local actors with their own frustrations, grievances, aspirations and ambitions seeking to improve their relative position and advantage within the accepted system of American hegemony and the precarious successive status quos it helped to erect. The local actors appear now to be what they always have been; i.e., real local actors rather than wicked allies and tools of a meddling Evil Empire seeking to destabilize the world order and subvert the paramount positions of its hegemons. It should be evident to all at this point that the strongest diplomatic, political and popular card that Saddam Hussein holds is the Palestinians, their cause, plight and Intifada. This card proved embarrassing not only to the Arab regimes allied currently with the US against Iraq, but to American Middle Eastern policy and diplomacy in general as well. Now, what is most alarming about this situation is that we have not seen as yet any serious attempt or effort on the part of the US, its European partners and official Arab allies to take away this card from Saddam, or even to weaken, dilute or somehow neutralize it by at least seeming to address the PalestinianIsraeli peace process, enhancing it or saying something clear, serious and substantive in its favor. On the surface what we see is a mere freezing of the peace process, supposedly until the Gulf crisis is over one way or another. Under the surface the opposite, I think, is taking place: i.e., the Palestinian trump card in Saddam’s hand is being strengthened as if deliberately to aggravate an already extremely grave situation. We all know and admit that substantively the Gulf crisis and the peace process are linked and powerfully so. President Bush’s rejection of this palpable reality, on grounds of abstract formality, strikes Arabs as not only unconvincing to the utmost, but even as wantonly arrogant, recklessly arbitrary and as an unexplained and unjustified assertion of American will for no reason and against every reason. Needless to say, the cumulative impact of all this on the peace process and its chances of success is bound to be destructive. Those who deliberately underestimate the political potency of Saddam’s simple formula: Kuwait for the West Bank and the Gaza Strip 114

The Peace Process and the Gulf Crisis

and do nothing either real or symbolic to at least gesture towards this formula are not only uninterested in the peace process, but are real wreckers of the peace process. If the West wants the restoration of Kuwaiti society and sovereignty that badly it is equally true that the Arabs unanimously want, and just as badly and intently, the restoration of Palestinian society and sovereignty in the Israeli occupied territories; and those who give short shrift to this equation, in the present crisis, are again not only uninterested in the peace process but are its subverters. Promising an international conference to take up and proceed with the peace process will greatly weaken Saddam’s position, erode his popular support and undermine the resolve of his regime. The almost irrational resistance to such a promise on the part of the present American administration simply convinces the Arab in the street that the point is not peace but war; the point is not the liberation of Kuwait, but the destruction of a major Arab country; the point is not security for all, but servile compliance with the will, wishes and interests of the Western masters. This is particularly painful and, thus, very injurious of the peace process, because we all know that such a conference can, in any case, take place only within the confines of the American earthquake-ridden oasis or turbulent lake that the present Middle East has become; and under nothing else than the umbrella of uncontested US hegemony over the area. Add to that the fact that we Arabs know that the Americans and Israelis and Europeans know that until the invasion of Kuwait the international conference amounted to not much more than the fig leaf needed by our rulers to reach accommodation with a militarily superior Israel. The hope was simply that the presence of such countries as the Soviet Union, China, France, Britain and so on at the conference would help in slightly mediating the massive preponderance of the AmericanIsraeli alliance at the negotiating table. In such a conference, while the US would take care of Israel, Britain would, hopefully, look after Jordan, the Soviet Union after Syria, France after Lebanon and so on. When even such formal arrangements and fig leaf demands – almost humiliating in their 115

Is Islam Secularizable?

modesty, minimalism and insubstantiality – are regarded by the other side as extravagant, unrealistic and unrealizable, then don’t be surprised if and when more and more dangerous crises erupt within the Arab World, visà-vis Israel, as well as against entrenched, but bankrupt, discredited and servile Arab ruling elites. Add to that the fact that the US position on the international conference can now be clearly seen for what it is, a classic instance of a catch-22 situation: before the Gulf crisis the underlying American message used to say, but why should we have an international conference when nothing obliges us to have one? After the eruption of the Gulf crisis the not so underlying American message now says, but how can we have an international conference when it spells nothing but appeasement for Saddam? Once the Gulf crisis is over you can bet on an American reproduction of this catch-22 situation at higher orders of sophistication and rarefication, quickly explaining away and/or disposing of the need for an international conference and so on and so forth. The Gulf crisis is another one of those periodic violent explosions and/or catastrophic breakdowns of the Arab-Middle Eastern regional system. Now, the point is, do you want to say, how awful the glass is half empty or thank goodness the glass is half full? Do you want to see in the Gulf crisis the same old threats, bogies and pretexts that have bedeviled the peace process so far, or do you want to see a window of opportunity (to borrow the famous phrase) to be explored for completing the peace process? What I see before me right now is the insistent official AmericanIsraeli rejectionism which notices only the half-empty glass and refuses emphatically the window of opportunity and the possibilities inherent in the crisis for the peace process. What adds insult to injury, on the Arab side in general and the Palestinian side in particular, is the fact that we have been sternly lectured by the West (and at great length in the last 25 years) about the evils of rejectionism, the perils of inflexibility, the dangers of unconditional demands; 116

The Peace Process and the Gulf Crisis

and also about the virtues of dialogue, the delights of compromise, the wisdom of negotiated settlements and the wonders of pragmatism, all in the name of peace and the peace process. This is why I think the Gulf crisis plus the Intifada could stand, mutatis mutandis, to the peace process today in the same relationship that the October War of 1973, plus the successful Egyptian crossing of the Suez Canal, stood to the Israeli-Egyptian peace process at that time. In other words, there is a real opportunity right now for American hot diplomacy to achieve again genuine breakthroughs for the stalled and frozen peace process while liberating Kuwait the way Sinai was liberated. War need not explode on us to achieve such results. The other equally important factor detrimental to the peace process is more difficult to gauge. As a young Arab, the Suez War of 1956 brought me to political self-awareness. Since then I have lived through and observed many a Middle Eastern crisis, war and tragedy. But I must confess that the amounts of hypocrisy, cynicism, arbitrariness and outright nihilism generated by the Gulf crisis are simply astounding by any standard and totally unprecedented in living memory. This applies to all sides from the Iraqi insistence on calling masses of hostages “guests” and contemptuously manipulating the historical victimization and sacrifices of the Palestinians to the official American justification of the seizure of Arabia in terms of “protecting jobs” and sustaining “our American way of life” – and death, one may add. One can only note with great satisfaction that the American public is not particularly taken in, as it seems, by the argument that its way of life, cherished values and sustaining jobs either depend on or require the slaughterhouse of another major war on the other side of the planet. Furthermore, at a time when all hands are as dirty as dirty could be, the self-righteous language, moralizing tones and sanctimonious admonitions of the leaders of the anti-Iraqi war coalition show them as true practitioners of a bad faith worthy of Sartre’s heroes in Les Mains Sales. That the current primacy of this very sick climate, on such a huge scale, in such brazen terms and unmediated fashion, is inimical to the peace process and its prospects, I take to be self-evident. 117

Is Islam Secularizable?

How can the peace process have a future in this terribly poisoned environment where nothing is what it seems and where all norms and standards of interaction appear to have gone with the desert wind such that the only thing that seems to count any more is blind will, quasi-biological vitality and anarchic self-assertion and in a situation where all appear to have lost their way? For example: 1) It would do the peace process and its prospects no good to hypocritically paper over, dismiss and forget about that other gulf which separates present Arab popular conviction, stand and emotion from the Arab governments currently aligned with the United States and against Iraq. 2) It would do the peace process and its prospects no good for the United States to have military control over the oil fields, to impose the West’ s divine right to cheap Gulf oil (regardless of market forces) and to encourage the immediate recycling of the resulting Arab petrodollars in the Western banking system and economies, all at one and the same time. These are conditions that no self-respecting government would accept and no people would passively tolerate for very long. In fact the attempt to impose such terms by military might bear strong family resemblances to England’s celebrated opium wars against China where British imperial interests sought successfully through war to export expensive opium to China, unfettered, at their own discretion and at prices to suit their own way of life; pretty much the way American interests today seek, through the threat of war, to import cheap oil from the Gulf, unfettered, at their own discretion and at prices which suit their own way of life. 3) It would do the peace process and its prospects no good in our area to have a Saddam’s last stand as the closing mock-heroic episode of the Gulf crisis. If Saddam goes down fighting his legend – no matter how undeserved – will lash back and react on everyone in the 118

The Peace Process and the Gulf Crisis

Middle East to the detriment not only of the peace process itself but of the future stability and security of the entire of our region. 4) It would do the peace process and its prospects no good for the American discourse of democracy, elections, representative government and respect for human rights, civil liberties and so on, to be so prominently displayed in Granada, the Philippines, Nicaragua, Panama, El Salvador, and to be so conspicuously absent in a Middle East rocked by the Gulf crisis and threatened by the largest American military intervention since the Vietnam War. In short, the discourse of democracy and human rights accompanying and supposedly guiding and inspiring American interventions in other places has been suddenly and cynically replaced in the Gulf by a clear message of enduring political absolutism, reasserted tribal autocracy and restored anachronistic and oppressive feudal privilege. It seems as if the promised new Middle Eastern order is to be reconstructed under American leadership and after the Gulf crisis – out of the old Arab iron cages and the solid-frozen blocks of the present Arab status quo, perhaps minus Iraq altogether. May one, at this point, indulge in an ironic flight of the imagination fancying that a movement, at this time, towards the opening up of the Saudi political system, the democratization of Saudi state and society, even the republicanization of the whole country would have an impact on the rest of the Arab World comparable, in many a way, to the impact exercised by Soviet perestroika and glasnost on the countries of Eastern Europe? The Saddams of the Arab World would, then, collapse under the weight of their own incoherence and unpopularity; i.e., at the hands of their own peoples and not through foreign military intervention, war and destruction. Is one allowed to imagine that the American soldiers camped on the sands of Arabia may still turn out to be a sort of a democratic Trojan camel introduced into the fortified prime citadel of Arab mystification, reaction, autocracy, absolution and illiberalism? 119

Is Islam Secularizable?

I know, of course, that it is pure utopia to think now that the massive American expeditionary force could intentionally act as the bearer of democratic values, principles of human rights and so on, the way, say, Napoleon’s troops carried the French Revolution’s republican ideals and ideas of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights to a still more despotic and reactionary Europe. These considerations acquire greater urgency and sense if we keep in mind that no one has done more or a better job than Western investigative journalism, honest Western research and scholarship to expose the inner truth and real nature of the absolutist regimes offering themselves at present for American military protection and restoration, at all costs and no matter what. To be kept in mind also is the barely concealed utter contempt and total disdain in which these same regimes and their representatives are really held by educated Western public opinion. Following is a quick list of descriptive phrases that I randomly selected from the copious literature in English on the Gulf crisis: Kuwait is a boutique nation. It is an offshore country. It is not a government in exile, but an economy in exile. It is a foreign bank account. Are the deposits in that bank account public money or private family wealth? The Gulf states, we are told are: oildoms and oil-rich family fiefdoms ruled by feudal sheiks and emirs. They are despotic clanrun monarchies guilty of gender apartheid. A no less prominent American political and intellectual public figure than Arthur Schlesinger Jr. reached the following conclusion in The New York Times a propos of this matter: “In consequence we (Americans) are used, exploited and manipulated by wily locals (Gulf rulers) in flowing robes who live in air-conditioned hotels and expect us to do their fighting for them.” The political cartoons are even more devastating to and damning of what American soldiers are supposed to protect and restore, dying senselessly in the process. Is it not the height of Western nihilism to seem to want to spill the blood of its young for the sake of something that it has no better way of characterizing accurately than the above descriptions and epithets? 120

The Peace Process and the Gulf Crisis

Finally, stone-walling, I would like to say that if such bad faith, hypocrisy, arbitrariness, cynicism and nihilism continue unabated in our part of the world, then the prospect is for the Palestinians, their Arab allies, supporters and such, to find themselves driven again willy-nilly – PLO or no PLO, Arafat or no Arafat – to the course of last resort, namely armed insurrection and revolutionary violence carried out at higher levels of combined military and political organization. But perhaps the US and Israel will come to realize, in the heat of the Gulf crisis, that the peace of the brave with a worthy Palestinian foe is both superior to and more lasting than any temporary pacification imposed on merely subdued but still formidable opponents.

121

Copyright 2014. Gerlach Press. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or applicable copyright law.

7

The View from Damascus: Syria and the Peace Process

I Is Syria as Syria, and not just as a government and regime, ready for peace with Israel at the present time? The answer has to be a cautious and qualified yes. Consider, first, the major sea change in official Syrian statements about Israel and the Arab-Israeli conflict in general since the convening of the Madrid peace conference in October 1991. It is a sea change that has continued unabated in spite of the many hurdles and adverse developments that would have normally reversed it along the way, under less auspicious circumstances. This striking shift reached its climax in the wholly unprecedented kind words spoken by President Asad in praise of Prime Minister Ehud Barak in May 1999, words expressly intended for local Arab as well as worldwide publication and circulation. Well before that, President Asad had announced to the world, during his summit meeting with President Clinton in Geneva in January 1994, 123

Is Islam Secularizable?

that Syria had taken a firm “strategic decision” in favor of peace with Israel and its readiness for “normal and peaceful relations” with the ex-enemy. In August 1997, these same assurances were again spelled out by Asad while he was addressing a delegation of Arab Israelis invited to Damascus in a first attempt to reach out to a sympathetic segment of the Israeli public. At a less august level, Syria’s energetic minister of foreign affairs, Mr. Farouq al-Shara’, had already violated several strict Syrian political taboos in the autumn of 1994 by accepting questions from Israeli journalists at press conferences in London and Washington and then by agreeing to meet with prominent Jewish and Zionist leaders in the American capital. He even granted a lengthy interview to a major news program on Israeli television, broadcast October 7, 1994. These manifest changes did not remain confined to the formal utterances of high officials, governmental communiqués, and press releases, but extended with equal thoroughness to the Syrian media, all governmentowned and tightly controlled. It has internal significance when the prefabricated, wooden, repetitive, and at times surreal language used by the Syrian media suddenly starts referring routinely and matter-of-factly to Israel, Israeli leaders, officials, etc., by their proper names, formal titles, actual functions and positions – instead of following the hackneyed, but in Arabic rhetorically quite flowery, practice of speaking about “the so-called prime minister of the Zionist entity”. Consider, second, the intense debates that have been raging inside Syrian society since the Madrid Conference on Israel over the “peace process” and the nature of our future relationship with the neighbor, as well as the fears, anxieties, disappointments, failures, and expectations aroused by a coming, seemingly willy-nilly, deal with the old enemy. Here, a word of warning is very much in order against possible misunderstandings. These intense discussions are not open public debates aired on radio and television or conducted through newspapers, magazines, pamphlets, etc., but are highly charged, comprehensive, and pervasive exchanges whose 124

The View from Damascus

main vehicles are the time-honored methods of oral transmission, through conversations among people who are within earshot of each other. This is Damascus’s rumor mill and the people’s free press at one and the same time. Through a series of informal, private, and overlapping circles, people in Damascus discuss and rediscuss, hash and rehash, spoof and respoof the affairs of the world big and small, internal and external, Pan-Arab and local, regional and international. Through these personalized, highly efficient, and always active informal networks and face-to-face encounters, an informal public opinion is created and crystalizes on the issues, anomalies, and problems of the day. The result is a public opinion which the power centers take into account without ever formally admitting it. For example, one reason why Damascenes invest so much time visiting one another is to stay informed. This is also why, in a city like Damascus, gossip is hardly ever mere gossip and secrets hardly ever remain secret for any length of time. Thus, when some Damascene old-timers checked the information of their rumor mill against Henry Kissinger’s memoirs about his dealings with President Asad after the October war of 1973 with Israel, they were both proud of and pleasantly surprised by how well informed Damascus was, at the time, about those ongoing secret proceedings. What is particularly interesting about these discussions is that they have come to take Israel for granted, to assume that a peace will come as a matter of course. They argue over issues and matters such as: Is Syria really ready for the coming contests, rivalries, and dealings with Israel? In view of Israel’s economic superiority, high technology, advanced planning techniques, and world-class managerial skills, will it not quickly dominate the area, turning itself into a kind of regional core country around which a far less developed Arab periphery revolves? What kind of impact will the peace have on Syria’s internal economic life, political arrangements, military posture, Arab nationalist credentials, etc.? How will Syria’s projected settlement with Israel interact with the pressing high tide of globalization, 125

Is Islam Secularizable?

the newly emerging Middle Eastern order, and the partnership with the countries on the other side of the Mediterranean as outlined in the Barcelona agreements and commitments? What are the most urgent reforms that Syria needs to make now to feel anywhere near prepared for the post-peace phase? Naturally, these questions and issues are of the greatest concern to the merchant classes in general, who are the backbone of Syria’s civil society, and in particular to people prominent in commerce, agriculture, and industry. The currently dominant opinion in these milieus is that Syria is definitely unprepared for the challenges attendant on the approaching peace on account of its highly shackled economy, absentee banking, heavily regulated commerce, and constricted industrial activity. The emblems of these shackles can be seen in such local characteristics as martial law, the backward command-operated public sector of the economy, the maze of unending state restrictions, bureaucratic obstructions, erratic rules, and arbitrary regulations. Hence the mixed mood of fear, apprehension, opportunism, and bravado prevalent in these circles. Some people within them certainly argue that once freed from these artificial constraints, the merchants and entrepreneurs of Syria – who, as they boast, have been in business for thousands of years – will prove to the world that they are up to the coming challenges on all fronts and will show the Israelis, in particular, that they are their match and equal if not more than that. Such an economically revived Syria – so the argument goes – would quickly surge forward, and be able to stand up to a currently superior Israel and more than adequately confront its threats and challenges by means other than the ones tried so far without marked success. Another view suggests that Israel, after all, may not be that interested economically in the Arab countries when it considers that its own economy, including its production processes, goods and services, etc., are wholly compatible with the most advanced economies of the world. 126

The View from Damascus

Those who question this position point out that Israeli capitalism is so agile and so adaptable that it would be foolish of the Arabs not to expect the new economic partner to quickly manufacture the kinds of products and develop the sorts of enterprises that will find him profitable markets in the Arab world. Underlying this last position is the fear not so much of a strong Israel at peace with its weaker neighbors as of the emergence of a dynamic core country in the region flexing its superior economic, military, and strategic muscles (under American protection) to restructure the Arab Middle East in accordance with its own long-term vital interests. In addition to these issues, members of the intelligentsia also debate bigger questions pertaining to Israel’s long-term vulnerabilities, inherent weaknesses, future possibilities, etc., vis-à-vis the Arab world in general and the Palestinians in particular. For example: (1) In spite of possessing atomic bombs, in spite of undisputed military superiority, in spite of powerful American support and protection, during the Gulf War Israel seemed scared almost out of its wits by forty badly aimed Iraqi Scud missiles, which created near panic in a militarily very well prepared and hardened population. Damascus intellectuals did not fail to compare and contrast this curious situation with the fact that no scares or panics of any sort were registered and/or reported in West Beirut during the three-month-long Israeli siege of the city in the summer of 1982. This, in spite of (a) the prolonged, accurate, and finely synchronized Israeli bombing of the capital from air, land, and sea at one and the same time, and (b) the unavailability to the people of West Beirut of any help but their wits and survival instincts, as opposed to the shelters, sealed rooms, necessary provisions, prompt first aid, efficient medical services, etc., available to Israelis during the Gulf War. A friend ironically asked of Israelis scared by the Scud missiles: “Are they a country or a settlement?” At a later point, it did not escape his attention that upon the assassination of Prime Minister Rabin, the spontaneous reaction of Mrs. Leah Rabin was to declare that she was packing 127

Is Islam Secularizable?

and leaving, a reaction for which she later apologized profusely to the Israeli public. (2) Given Israel’s pioneering spirit, and its craving for more land, more settlements, more water, more resources, will we have in the longer run a formula for peace or for another hundred years of unspecified kinds of strife and violent conflict? (3) No matter how many peace treaties the Arabs sign with Israel, no matter how many accords they reach with it, no matter how many assurances and guarantees they give it, will any of this really alleviate, calm, and/or dissipate Israel’s profound existential angst about its place, future, and identity in an Arab region, an angst complicated by a heritage of unspeakable persecution, by its current domination of the region, and by its practice of manipulation, for example its cynical and dismissive treatment of Arafat and the Palestinians after the supposed Oslo reconciliation? (4) Below the surface, what is the situation now of the ‘historical’ balance of power between Israel and the Arabs? Is it not noteworthy, ask Damascus intellectuals, that while the June 1967 war was crushingly won by Israel in six days, the October 1973 war, initiated by Egypt and Syria, shook the country to its very foundations? Then, the June 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon and short occupation of Beirut ended in an unmitigated disaster for the invader on all fronts, even in Israeli eyes. Not too long after, the Palestinian intifada finally demonstrated to all concerned the unsustainability of the Israeli status quo in the occupied Palestinian territories.

128

Again, Operation Grapes of Wrath, ordered in April 1996 by Prime Minister Shimon Peres against Hizbollah in southern Lebanon, not only failed to translate Israel’s overwhelming military superiority into a swift, effective, and neat punitive military operation on the ground, but instead backfired, leading to (a) what is now generally known as the Kafar Qana massacre where one hundred civilians

The View from Damascus



(mostly village women and children) perished in the Israeli shelling while taking refuge at a United Nations facility nearby, (b) acute international embarrassment for Israel over this disaster and severe Arab condemnations of it, (c) a hastily arranged cease-fire that still makes Israel’s military feel uncomfortable, (d) the ouster of Peres and the Labor Party from power by the Israeli electorate a few weeks later, and (e) Israel finally coming around to convincing itself of the wisdom of unilaterally withdrawing from southern Lebanon as soon as possible.

As seen from Damascus, though this trajectory may not be indicative of a consequential shift in the region’s balance of power, it certainly raises serious questions about the limits of what the raw power of Israel can achieve and sustain and about the possibility that Israel may have reached the outer limits of its inner capabilities vis-à-vis a defeated but still restive and defiant surrounding Arab world.

(5) Golan or no Golan, the big time bomb threatening all future relations, settlements, and agreements with the new neighbor remains the Palestinians themselves, particularly “Israel’s Palestinians,” regardless of whether they happen to be Israeli citizens or belong to a nominally sovereign Palestinian state. In this connection, there is at present a kind of broad consensus among the intelligentsia in Damascus over the following two points: (1) that the issues of final status to be negotiated with PLO Chairman Arafat – such as Jerusalem, the settlements, the refugees – will really lead nowhere because Israel will concede little of substance on these matters and the best that Arafat can hope for is the implementation of the renegotiated and remodified Wye River agreement, made in October 1998, but not much more; and (2) that the Oslo arrangements on the ground, coupled with Israeli settlement policies, can only lead to a “Palestine” made up of a number of enclaves encircled by Israeli security forces and subjected to a system of informal apartheid. Under such circumstances, the Israelis will enjoy democracy while 129

Is Islam Secularizable?

the Palestinians will have to struggle with and against apartheid. Thus when a prominent Palestinian poet and public intellectual told me not too long ago, “if the Israelis give us citizenship, we will accept to be their blacks”, he had in the back of his mind images from Jean Genet’s Les Nègres and Frantz Fanon’s Peau Noire, Masques Blancs, where the blacks eventually turn the tables. Not too surprisingly, therefore, the discussions of the Damascus intelligentsia these days seem full of analogies with South Africa and the South African experience, old and new. II Syria certainly has its deep rejectionists – people who refuse to accept the existence of Israel. To the best of my judgment they are in a minority now, but they are there. Their position has its own deep emotional appeal, and under the right circumstances they could easily rebound, strike a chord with the mainstream of opinion, and become a decisive force in Syrian culture and politics. Prominent among them are members of the Islamist currents in civil society who now rally around a Muslim version of the doctrine of Palestine as the Promised Land. The doctrine teaches that Palestine is a Waqf – a place divinely consecrated for religious purposes – which the Almighty has reserved permanently and eternally for the Muslim Umma, the religious community. By this logic, in other words, Palestine is an endowment made by God to the Muslim Umma, and like all such endowments it may not be transferred, tampered with, or squandered by any one person, government, or generation. The other type of deep rejectionists are hard-line nationalists who rally around a watered-down and secularized version of the Waqf doctrine. They argue that Palestine does not belong to our generation only – or to any one Arab generation, for that matter – so we cannot proceed to sign it away both de facto and de jure. Palestine belongs to the entire Arab and/ or Syrian nation and to all its generations past, present, and future. This 130

The View from Damascus

means that the best course of action at present is to keep the conflict going, leaving open the future and its manifold possibilities. This will secure for new and unborn generations the chance to continue the just fight against the usurper with, it is hoped, an improved balance of power, both locally and internationally. A version of this argument surfaced at the Geneva Syrian-American summit conference this March. When President Clinton tried to impress on President Asad that “the window of opportunity was narrowing”, the Syrian president was reported to have replied by referring to Syria’s readiness to wait “for future generations to retrieve the whole land”. Consider as well that, beyond Syria’s governmental discourses and informal social debates, the country went through a relatively smooth period between the opening of the Madrid Conference in October 1991 and the election of Benjamin Netanyahu as Israel’s prime minister in May 1996. For example, (a) Syria was the only country to emerge unscathed from the Gulf crisis and war thanks to the deft and far-sighted way in which President Asad dealt with that perilous situation. (b) The country reaped tangible material benefits in the aftermath of the war and even experienced an economic boom of sorts. (c) President Asad was being assiduously courted by the Americans, while Syrian-American relations were being reconstituted and ties with the European Union became closer than ever. (d) With Syrian-Israeli negotiations in Washington and then Maryland progressing slowly, Syria felt at its most confident and relaxed. It seemed to discerning Damascenes that maybe the Israelis had come to realize that concluding a peace agreement with a self-confident and reassured Syria would be in their best interest, knowing full well that if anyone could make such a deal stick in a place like Syria, it would be Asad at the peak of his prestige, power, and control. It was during this phase that President Asad announced to the world in 1993 his “full peace for full withdrawal” formula for finally resolving the conflict with Israel. He made this statement in a long interview granted to the British journalist and expert on Syrian politics Patrick Seale, which was 131

Is Islam Secularizable?

published in full in the London-based Arabic weekly Al-Wasat on May 10, 1993, and in the form of a long Op-Ed piece by Seale himself in The New York Times on May 11, 1993. It was clear to people in Damascus at the time that through this interview President Asad meant, first, to communicate to the widest possible public something about the arguments, hagglings, offers, and counteroffers going on in the negotiations conducted behind closed doors in Washington, and, second, to take up openly Prime Minister Rabin’s earlier suggestion that the depth of the Israeli withdrawal will be proportional to the depth of the peace with Syria, a formulation that brought the total evacuation of the Golan Heights within the realm of the negotiable. The Israeli reaction came a week later in the form of an Op-Ed piece in The New York Times on May 19, 1993, by Itamar Rabinovich, then Israel’s ambassador to Washington and chief negotiator with Syria. Rabinovich welcomed Asad’s interview as “one of the most important developments of the round of Arab-Israeli peace talks that ended last Thursday” and as “the single most impressive act yet of public diplomacy performed by Syria’s President in the context of the peace talks with Israel”. Still, Rabinovich failed to endorse the “full peace for full withdrawal” formula. He talked both of “the prospect of a breakthrough in these negotiations in the coming months” and of “the lingering threat of a stalemate”. Politically informed people in Damascus did not fail to note that the “full peace for full withdrawal” recipe departed for the first time from the often repeated Syrian position of “establishing a comprehensive, just, and lasting peace in the region”. Many suspected that while a “comprehensive, just, and lasting peace” meant the return of all Israeli-occupied Arab territories and the settlement of all outstanding Arab issues with Israel (including Jerusalem, Palestinian national rights, the refugees, etc.), a “full peace for full withdrawal” applied to the Golan Heights only. We know now that at a certain stage in the Syrian-Israeli negotiations the formula of “full peace for full withdrawal” replaced in effect all other 132

The View from Damascus

formulations, including the “comprehensive, just, and lasting peace” recipe. In this shift lurked what in the idiom of the US State Department is known as a “constructive ambiguity”; for “comprehensive peace” tends to link the Syrian-Israeli talks to the Palestinian and other negotiating tracks while the “full peace for full withdrawal” formula tends to sever all such links and ties in favor of a separate settlement that “stands on its two feet”, as the Israelis put it. This short-lived “constructive ambiguity” showed President Asad trying to the last minute to maintain some coherence and practical coordination among the different Arab-Israeli negotiating tracks, while at the same time offering Israel a full contractual peace in return for the Golan Heights. The revelation in the summer of 1993 of the Oslo agreements between Israel and the PLO effectively shattered this useful ambiguity; the subsequent Israeli-Jordanian peace treaty of October 1994 rendered it totally irrelevant. “Comprehensive peace” with Israel was no longer sought by Syria’s neighbors themselves. At about this same time, a wide-ranging and noisy public debate erupted in Syria over the meaning, implications, and applications for Syrian society itself of “full peace with Israel”. This is now known as the “normalization” debate – i.e., the normalization of relations with the ex-enemy. This was a controversy neither instigated nor sponsored nor controlled by the regime. The authorities followed it carefully, particularly to make sure it did not directly attack or subvert the very idea of “full peace for full withdrawal”. The Syrian press and television were neither the sole nor the primary vehicles for this debate, although they were widely used by the contributors and contestants; so were various Palestinian publications appearing in Syria and Lebanon, the much freer and varied Lebanese press, and many of the Gulf newspapers, magazines, and television stations, in addition to the Arab press in London and Paris. The Egyptian press joined in the controversy as well, particularly the opposition papers. 133

Is Islam Secularizable?

It was clear to all participants in the debate that the “full peace for full withdrawal” formula had, through no fault of Syria’s, disengaged the Syrian negotiations from the fate of Arafat, the PLO, the West Bank, and the Palestinians in general. In Damascus people absorbed this message in sorrow rather than in anger, sorrow at the evaporation of the last vestiges of Arab solidarity and cooperation in the negotiations with Israel, plus a relieved conscience that it was not Syria that had broken ranks with its Arab partners. The normalization controversy focused sharply, critically, and passionately on such issues as: What does full peace with Israel mean beyond agreements, treaties, arrangements, and protocols between governments? What does the normalization of relations with Israel imply for Syrian society? Do we, as Syrian citizens from all walks of life, want such a normalization of relations, regardless of what our rulers do at the top and at the official level? If we reject this normalization, how do we go about opposing it? How do we go about resisting our rulers’ expected attempts to impose it on us? Various efforts were made to form action committees and united fronts for the sole purpose of opposing the normalization of relations with Israel at the personal, social, commercial, cultural, touristic, and scientific levels. The entire debate was conducted on the two assumptions that a peace treaty with Israel had become inevitable (and sooner rather than later), and that Syrian society had better think quickly about how to deal with the treaty’s implications and consequences for the country. All in all, the dominant temper of the debate in Damascus inclined toward saying that whatever our government does or does not do with Israel is its own official and political business, and that we, as ordinary people and citizens, will and should resist this normalization of relations any way we can, whenever and wherever it touches our lives. Still, there were many varied positions and shades of opinion expressed on this matter, plus some carefully stated dissent from the mainstream view. 134

The View from Damascus

Needless to say, the deep rejectionists stuck to their guns, insisting on seeing the conflict with Israel as a deferred existential struggle instead of the standard fight over land, borders, occupation, resources, and sovereignty that it had become. Another faction accepted the principle of a peaceful settlement but rejected the type of accord reached at Oslo, arguing that “full peace” with Israel is possible only after “full withdrawal” from all occupied Arab territories is achieved (including East Jerusalem), and not just from the Golan Heights. A third position advocated postponing all forms of normalization until the occupied territories were returned and the Palestinian people were satisfied, particularly diaspora Palestinians. In practice, “normalization” remains another bargaining chip on the SyrianIsraeli-American negotiating table. Among the most prominent of Syria’s open but cautious dissenters were Adonis, one of the Arab world’s most senior and eminent poets and public intellectuals; Hani El-Raheb, the famous Kuwait University-based novelist; and Dr. Hisham Dajani, the well-known Palestinian-Syrian journalist, critic, and political commentator. The worst that happened to these dissenters was that they were expelled from Syria’s official Arab Writers Union. The expulsions led in their turn to another public controversy over questions of due process, the legality of the act itself, and whether the job of the union is to protect its members and their rights or to punish them for expressing unorthodox views. The new debate heated up greatly when Syria’s foremost dramatist and playwright, Sa’dallah Wannous, denounced the expulsions in no uncertain terms and submitted his resignation – by wire – from the union in protest, all while he was on his deathbed. At the same moment, one of Syria’s most senior and prominent novelists and short story writers, Hanna Mineh, condemned the expulsions in no less uncertain terms and announced his immediate withdrawal from the Writers Union as well.

135

Is Islam Secularizable?

III If I were to try to capture in one sentence Syria’s mood concerning peace with Israel during the period extending from the Madrid Conference to the election of Netanyahu as prime minister in May 1996, I would say it was one of stoic resignation before a necessary evil. Underlying this mood was a range of powerful emotions: a deep sense of Arab defeat, resentment, grudging acceptance, principled defiance, dissatisfaction with what is, humiliation, submission to the force of circumstance, disillusionment, endurance, fatalism, and certainly pride in having been Israel’s (and Zionism’s) most entrenched and implacable enemy. Naturally, all these pent-up passions continue to influence, in subtle and not so subtle ways, Syria’s approach to the peace process, the way it negotiates, its attitude in the actual peace talks, its seeming intransigence, extreme caution, skepticism, reluctance, literalness, formalism, reclusiveness, etc. What adds insult to injury, in Syrian eyes, is Israel’s repeated insistence, privately and publicly, that Syria help Israeli leaders convince their own public that peace is not only at hand but also good for them. Or, as Syria’s chief negotiator and ambassador to Washington, Walid Mu’allem, once complained in an interview. This, actually, was a problem with the negotiations all along. We always felt that the Israelis wanted Syria to do their work for them. They wanted us to convince their public that peace was in their interests. We prepared our public for peace with Israel. Many things changed in our media. But they wanted us to speak in the Israeli media to prepare Israeli public opinion… We considered such insistence a negative sign: When you do not prepare your own public for peace with your neighbor, this means you do not really have the intention to make peace.

No less objectionable were policies like Israel’s insistence (particularly Rabin’s) on a protracted Golan deal designed to “test” Syria’s good intentions and behavior by trading several partial and limited withdrawals in return for heavy doses of “normalization” over a period of 136

The View from Damascus

up to five years. This is where the summarily rejected “Majdal Shams First” proposal had its origins (Majdal Shams is the largest village on the Golan Heights). Add to that Israel’s widely trumpeted plans, particularly under Peres, for plunging immediately into grandiose economic ventures and all sorts of joint projects with Syria for the purpose of making a whole new Middle East for the Arabs. According to some reports, the Israelis, at one of the last sessions of the Maryland negotiations, went so far as to submit a score of projects for integrating the Syrian and Israeli economies. Not to be dismissed either is general Syrian and Arab resentment of the insistent demand not only that the Arabs make peace with Israel, but that they also make it cheerfully and jubilantly. In contrast, the images and analogies that kept crowding my mind during this period mainly recalled scenes from Renaissance politics. Here we have a sturdy and independent-minded bride and a robust, defiant bridegroom each belonging to a powerful, long-feuding and warring dynasty, family, or tribe. The two candidates despise, cannot stand, each other; still, for the sake of higher collective interests, for what the French call raison d’état, they have to go through a marriage ceremony regardless and in spite of their personal feelings and different aspirations. After the ceremony, the couple may stay together in some formal sense for the sake of appearances while each goes his or her own separate way, or they may come to accommodate each other – but then who knows? It is the Romeo and Juliet story in reverse. During the period before Netanyahu was elected, President Asad acquired additional Arab prestige and popular admiration as a result of the dignified and sober manner in which he conducted Syria’s negotiations with Israel and the United States. By resolutely refusing to cave in to the Israeli agenda, he was widely seen as a real negotiator and player instead of another Arab pawn. It only added to his stature that he was doing all this 137

Is Islam Secularizable?

against the severe odds of a very adverse Arab, regional, and international balance of power. At the same time, all Damascus knew that the Israelis were pushing hard, with American support, for a “declaration of principles” with Syria, and a possible summit meeting with Asad to be followed by the long and torturous path of detailed negotiations over all the difficult issues which we all know bedevil the course of both countries toward a peace treaty. But people in Damascus knew as well that Asad’s way is first to negotiate and agree on each and every one of the contested issues and details; then to go forward with the high declaration of principles, the summit meeting, the ceremonies and celebrations that follow as the crowning achievement of the entire operation. It certainly seemed in Damascus that President Asad drew all the right lessons from Sadat’s spectacular experiences with the formula “declaration of principles now, negotiations later”. Sadat went to his grave unmourned by his own people and in a manner that led the Arab world’s most famous journalist, the Egyptian political analyst and commentator Mohamad Hasanein Haykal, to declare in his book Autumn of Fury that Sadat’s death caused a huge sigh of relief throughout Egypt. The other living lessons and examples come from the innumerable humiliations, indignities, snubs, and even insults to which various Israeli leaders subjected Yasser Arafat almost immediately after the PalestinianIsraeli “declaration of principles” and the famous handshake on the White House lawn in September 1993. Add to that the sorry sight of Arafat having to put up with all those renegotiations of accords, protocols, promises, and commitments that had already been painfully negotiated, agreed to, duly signed, and then guaranteed by the United States. IV In all spheres of society – official, popular, diplomatic – Damascus received the news of Netanyahu’s election as prime minister of Israel at the end 138

The View from Damascus

of May 1996 with a mix of disappointment and relief. Smart intellectuals went about town saying things like: Look at what our cousins are doing down south, they kill Rabin, reject Peres, elect Netanyahu and Ariel Sharon, and then swear they want nothing but peace with us. (“Our cousins” is the benign way of referring to the Israelis when educated Damascenes discuss them around the kitchen table.) I said a mix of disappointment and relief: disappointment, because the entire normalization controversy was predicated on the resigned assumption that a peace agreement – whatever its shortcomings and humiliations – was about to be concluded. And since all sights were set on the arrival of this Godot, a feeling of suspense, expectation, and intrigue naturally crept over everyone; but when nothing happened, a measure of disappointment became inevitable. Relief, because the tough decisions, painful concessions, and embarrassing reversals had all been postponed for the time being and through no fault of Syria. The change of mind – whatever its causes – occurred on the other side. It was Israel and not Syria that withdrew from the Wye negotiations in Maryland on March 3, 1996. In fact, for the first time no one was blaming Syria – either locally, regionally, or internationally – for willfully obstructing the peace negotiations or for expressly seeking to subvert them. I can also add that I had never seen the Western diplomats in Damascus more frankly and vehemently critical of Israel than during Netanyahu’s tenure. The advent of Netanyahu and his policies was quickly perceived in Damascus not only as a throwback to the obstructionist policies and tactics of the Shamir government, but also as a reversion to the hard-line “peace for peace” idea in place of the “peace for land” principle that had been underlying the negotiations so far. Syria’s deep rejectionists found much relief and satisfaction in Netanyahu’s declarations, such as his famous three no’s: to a withdrawal from the Golan Heights, to an independent Palestinian state, and to a compromise on East Jerusalem. His so-called “subarrangements” with Syria aimed at the gradual normalization of relations between the two countries without any withdrawals from the Golan. The new guidelines submitted to the 139

Is Islam Secularizable?

Knesset affirmed that his government “views the Golan Heights as essential to the security of the state” and that “retaining Israeli sovereignty over the Golan will be the basis for any arrangements with Syria”. Netanyahu’s “Lebanon First” initiative was expressly designed to extricate the Israeli army from southern Lebanon without addressing Syria’s territorial demands for the Golan. Understandably, the heartened deep rejectionists said, “We told you so”, reemphasizing that when the chips are down Israel will always revert to type as a settler-colonial nation and an aggressive warrior state and society, far more interested in expansion, domination, territory, settlement, and resources than in peace. At the same time, there was concern in Syrian civil society – particularly among the intelligentsia – that on account of the new Israeli intransigence the Syrian regime would also revert to its pre-Madrid rhetoric, positions, and practices. But none of these fears materialized. On the contrary, the Syrian government shrewdly put the Netanyahu interregnum to good use, quickly assuming the political-moral high ground by constantly harping on the themes that (a) it was not Syria but Israel that had second thoughts, if not a change of heart and mind, about the peace process, (b) it was not Syria but Israel that withdrew from the Maryland negotiations, and (c) it is Syria, not Israel, that is ready right now to resume the peace talks from where they broke off. Locally, no significant changes were noted in either the official line or the media accounts, even those meant for purely internal consumption. Clearly, Syria’s policies during this period were skillfully designed to appeal to the gallery and play credibly to the jury, knowing well that both the gallery and the jury, in this instance, were located in the United States, the European Union, and the West generally. At the start of the Netanyahu interregnum, Syria stood accused of having missed two rare opportunities to conclude a peace treaty with Israel and retrieve the Golan Heights. The first opportunity supposedly came up just before Prime Minister Rabin made his momentous decision to pursue 140

The View from Damascus

the highly secret breakthrough arrived at in Oslo with the Palestinians, instead of continuing his push on the Syrian negotiating track. The second opportunity presented itself, according to this logic, after Rabin’s assassination, when Prime Minister Peres decided to call for early general elections instead of serving the rest of Rabin’s term of office. The accusation goes on to hold President Asad’s excessive caution, suspiciousness, and procrastination responsible for the loss of these two opportunities. Secretary of State Warren Christopher said as much in an interview with the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz in late October 1997, while Ambassador Itamar Rabinovich expounded these charges in his fine book The Brink of Peace: The Israeli-Syrian Negotiations.1 Naturally, the Damascus rumor mill took up the accusations as well, but without arriving at any serious conclusions or informed deductions at the time. According to Rabinovich’s account, Rabin on August 3, 1993, sent a message to Asad, via Warren Christopher and Dennis Ross, exploring the possibilities of an agreement for “a very specific peace deal” embracing both Syria and Lebanon. The American mediators returned from Damascus with a response “which they regarded as positive, but which Rabin found disappointing”. This led him to immediately pursue instead the already prepared breakthrough on the still-secret Oslo track. Now we know that the message sent by Rabin to Asad was a proposal for the Israelis to withdraw fully from the Golan Heights in return for Syria’s fully meeting Israel’s security and normalization conditions. We also know that the Asad response, which the American mediators regarded as positive but which Rabin found disappointing, sought to clarify whether the proposed withdrawal would extend to the June 4, 1967, line or stop at the international border of 1923 as demarcated by the French and British mandatory authorities in Syria and Palestine respectively. A withdrawal to the 1923 frontier would prevent Syria from returning to its earlier positions on the northeastern corner of Lake Tiberias and from retrieving the land that has now become the hot springs resort known as al-Hemma, originally an old Palestinian Arab village of that name. According to some observers 141

Is Islam Secularizable?

and analysts of the peace process, the American sponsors of these indirect negotiations missed a fine opportunity for an imminent breakthrough on the Syrian-Israeli track by failing to explore further with the Israeli side the clarification sought by President Asad at the time. Upon assuming the premiership, continues Rabinovich, Peres, for his part, explored the possibility of reviving the Syrian track through a number of extraordinary economic proposals and dramatic political measures (an early summit meeting with President Asad, for instance) designed to help his election prospects when the time for the campaign came. However, according to Rabinovich, “Asad’s response was cautiously positive but very guarded” and in the end he failed to “meet Peres’ terms” and to provide him “with real prospects of a good agreement in good time”. As a result Peres decided not only to call early elections, but also to authorize Operation Grapes of Wrath against Hizbollah in southern Lebanon. A reply to these accusations was made by Patrick Seale, President Asad’s biographer, in the Journal of Palestine Studies.2 He stressed three main points: first, that Rabin responded to Asad’s offer of full peace for full withdrawal by making the withdrawal part of the offer contingent on such unacceptable preconditions (including the “restructuring”, as Seale put it, of the Syrian armed forces) that he, in effect, subverted the “peace opportunity”. Second, that the supposed overture that Rabin made toward Asad just before committing himself to the secret Oslo breakthrough was no more than a political ruse meant to cover Rabin’s clear preference for proceeding on the Palestinian track. And third, that Prime Minister Peres had provoked the Islamist suicide bombings – which, he said, compelled him to suspend the Maryland peace talks and call for early elections – when he authorized the assassination of Yahya ‘Ayyash (known as “the Engineer”), in spite of the fact that this Hamas operative had suspended his activities a year earlier. A more comprehensive answer was put forward by the Syrian ambassador Walid Mu’allem in a long and authoritative interview, again 142

The View from Damascus

published in the Journal of Palestine Studies.3 Ambassador Mu’allem rebuts the charge of a missed opportunity by arguing that the ongoing negotiations over such major Israeli concerns as security arrangements, normalization, the timetable for completing the deal, etc., could only have started in earnest, in the first place, after an agreement had been reached by the two sides on the question of full withdrawal, both military and civilian. Or, as Rabinovich wrote in his account, the Syrians, from the start of the negotiations in summer of 1992 until August 1993, would not budge until they heard the two words “full withdrawal”. But then the Syrian side, Mu’allem continues, was completely surprised by the announcement of the Oslo accords as well as by the sudden developments that followed on the Israeli-Jordanian track, leading rapidly to a peace treaty between the two countries. Concerning the second “missed” opportunity, Mu’allem holds that Peres’s call for early elections and his suspension of the Maryland peace talks took Syria by surprise no less than the Oslo agreement. He attributes both decisions to internal Israeli pressures and party concerns rather than to any peace opportunities that suddenly had become available for the taking. In support of his position, Mu’allem refers to Israeli sources that accused Peres himself of missing the golden opportunity for making peace with Syria. The reference here is primarily to the accurate revelations about the details of Rabin’s negotiations with Syria made by Orly Azulay-Katz in his biography of Shimon Peres, The Man Who Could Not Win.4 Mu’allem also alludes to a much-publicized television interview given by the chief negotiator under Peres, Mr. Uri Savir, in which he (a) admitted that much was achieved at the Maryland negotiations, (b) confirmed that the two sides were indeed on the verge of reaching an agreement when Peres withdrew from the talks, but (c) made no mention of any opportunities, missed or unmissed. Add to that the story published by the Israeli newspaper Ma’ariv under the headline “This is How We Missed the Peace with Syria” (December 12, 1997), which blamed Peres for the lost opportunity on the basis of information from sources close to Savir himself. 143

Is Islam Secularizable?

By then, Damascus had guessed that there were no missed opportunities at all, but the usual power plays, tactical maneuvers, and deliberate efforts by both sides to further as much as possible their explicit and implicit agendas. For example, Rabin’s last-minute Syrian move before openly embracing the Oslo option – i.e., his August 3 overture referred to above – was expressly designed to offer President Asad a contract that he could only refuse, i.e., one that confronted him with a fait accompli that Rabin knew he would either diplomatically or bluntly reject. The offer came to Syria more as a take-it-or-leave-it package deal than as a new negotiating gambit. Accepting the package would have put Asad in Arafat’s present shoes, turning him into the breaker of Arab ranks, the abandoner of his negotiating partners, in addition to making a mockery of all his efforts to maintain a minimally coherent “Eastern Arab Front” – including Jordan, Lebanon, and the PLO – while dealing with Israel. Similarly, the short-lived Peres approach came overloaded with demands and conditions that Syria had either to meet swiftly or face the delays and risks attendant on early elections in Israel. Among these demands were: 1) An almost immediate summit meeting with President Asad to take place in Jerusalem, the first preference, in Damascus, the second, or in Washington as third best. Actually, Peres not only made the continuation of serious negotiations on the Syrian track contingent on such a meeting, but went so far as to regard the summit as “the litmus test” (to use Rabinovich’s characterization) for any peace agreement with Syria. 2) That the Golan Heights be turned into a “free economic zone” and/ or a “zone of economic development”, as a part of the new Middle East unilaterally envisioned by Peres himself. 3) The initiation and development of economic enterprises and shared interests in the areas around the border to be designated between 144

The View from Damascus

the two countries, all as a measure of the “quality and depth” of the coming peace. 4) The creation of a regional security organization under American supervision and tutelage to be launched under the title “the Clinton Plan”. In Damascene eyes, Peres’s over-ambitious approach could go nowhere because it neglected the simple fact that Syria is also at all levels a highly security-conscious state. Syria naturally finds it much easier to digest a security-based peace agreement that it can understand and cope with than one overburdened by grandiose economic schemes and ventures that it is ill-equipped to handle. Hence the belief in Damascus that Israel was successfully fragmenting the Arab negotiating front, consolidating its peace agreements on the other tracks, and leaving an isolated Syria to the very end of the negotiating process. I should add that the image of President Asad as a self-defeatingly cautious, reluctant, suspicious, procrastinating, formalistic leader, ruler, politician, and player can be quite misleading. In Damascus, there is no question that these qualities are all highly prized when brought to bear on Syria’s dealings with Israel and the United States. But people in Damascus also know that at critical moments, Asad has shown himself politically capable of bold decisions, daring initiatives, and decisive actions that have ultimately proved successful and far-sighted, even if unpopular at the time of their initiation, because they have emanated from an excellent grasp of regional alignments and international trends. Examples are fresh in every Syrian’s memory: 1) The armed intervention in the Lebanese civil war in 1976, on the side of the Phalangist Party and against Syria’s natural and traditional allies in Lebanon, including the Palestinians. 2) The swift eradication of the Islamist armed insurrection in Syria in the early Eighties. 145

Is Islam Secularizable?

3) The defiant destruction of the separate Lebanese-Israeli peace treaty that Secretary of State George Schultz concluded behind Syria’s back and at its expense in 1984. 4) The unwavering alliance with Iran throughout the Iraq-Iran war, at a time when the entire Arab world and the West were solidly backing Saddam Hussein. 5) The daring participation in the Gulf War on the side of the Allies in their campaign to free Kuwait. Halfway through Netanyahu’s tenure, a sharp controversy erupted again in the Arab world with Egypt and Syria as its epicenters. This is known as the Copenhagen controversy. Once more, the regime in Syria had little to do either with initiating the debate or with its course and development, although the local media were used by the contestants. What is this Copenhagen quarrel? Acute dissatisfaction with Netanyahu and his policies suddenly created a qualitatively new kind of special Arab vital interest in who rules Israel (and in the party that happens to be in power there). Even in Syria, a feeling was creeping over us that the local conventional wisdom about Labor and Likud agreeing on all the decisive issues is already outmoded and not in touch with new realities in the area. Israel’s internal affairs seemed, all of a sudden, to be acquiring an intimate sort of interest in Damascus that was never there before. In this climate, a number of prominent Egyptian public intellectuals – led by the famous writer, journalist, and activist Lutfi Al-Khouli – started preparing a conference with like-minded Israelis to be held in Copenhagen, to see what could be done about getting rid of Netanyahu, returning Labor to power, and putting the peace process back on track again. This is indeed the first time ever that Arabs openly and frankly organized a meeting for the purpose of affecting directly Israel’s choice of government. The feeling that they now have a vital stake in who rules Israel could no longer be 146

The View from Damascus

dispelled, camouflaged, or sublimated. The initiative was intended to throw for once the weight of the Arabs, for whatever it is worth inside Israel, against Netanyahu and his government, and to create some sort of an ArabIsraeli-Palestinian peace block that would help return Labor to power. Although the conference itself never took place – owing to the fierce opposition it encountered and the defection of some of the people involved in organizing it – the Arab controversy over its very purpose and program was huge, varied, passionate, and often vicious. It reached a climax in a PanArab debate in the “Crossfire” format on satellite television between Lutfi Al-Khouli himself and the secretary general of Syria’s Arab Writers Union, ‘Ali ‘Ouqla ‘Ursan, in the winter of 1999. The confrontation was broadcast by the Arab world’s currently most successful and widely watched television station, Al-Jazeera, based in Qatar. V Unfortunately, Lutfi Al-Khouli died before Ehud Barak acceded to power in May 1999. But the consensus among observers of the peace process in Damascus right now is that the Copenhagen idea and debate served their purposes eminently well. It is true that throughout the controversy the general attitude in Syria was critical of the project and even hostile to it. Nevertheless, a remarkable development did occur with the start of the new Israeli electoral campaign. Never before had an Israeli election been so apprehensively followed, so deeply discussed, and so carefully watched, by both official and popular Syria, as the contest between Netanyahu and Barak. I would not be exaggerating if I were to say that Damascus followed the contest this time as if it were an internal matter. To the dismay of some, it had become clear to all that even Syria had developed a direct vital stake in the results of Israeli elections. In Damascus, the Barak victory was generally received with unaccustomed relief and some heightened expectations concerning peace 147

Is Islam Secularizable?

and the peace process. To the surprise of most of us, the exchange of smiles and compliments between President Asad and the new prime minister passed casually and without raising eyebrows either publicly or privately. It became evident to me at that point that Syria had been pushed beyond its earlier mood of stoic resignation. Had President Asad praised an Israeli prime minister during the post-Madrid phase of contacts, for instance, observers in Damascus would have been surprised as never before, and would have received the news with utter disbelief and dismay. But when Asad praised Barak after Barak won the elections of May 1999, Damascus was surprised at itself for having taken the news so coolly and in stride, as if the whole episode were a matter of course. Even more telling is the fact that no controversies have erupted so far over the issues involving normalization of relations, for instance, and no denunciations of the type directed against the Copenhagen idea have been heard either. The Netanyahu interregnum is now seen in Damascus in three different ways: first, as a necessary evil needed to bring the two parties together and drive home the lesson that there is a considerable difference between Labor and Likud when in power; second, as an imperialist plot and a Jewish-Zionist conspiracy to make Labor look good, conciliatory, and acceptable in Arab eyes; third, as an example of the Hegelian cunning of history working itself out in the direction of a peaceful settlement with Israel. Some Hegelio-Marxians think now of a higher Middle Eastern synthesis emerging historically out of the supersession of both the old Arab thesis and the newer Israeli antithesis. For intellectuals in Damascus, the fall of Netanyahu pointed to another kind of lesson as well. When he first ran for election, much was said about him as a great television personality, much was made of the present power of the media to make or break candidates, leaders, and politicians regardless of programs, issues, stands, qualifications, etc. Much hype was heard – particularly from the postmodernist pundits and spin doctors – about how only images, television appeal, sound bites, and media manipulation counted in politics these days. Well, the fall of this supposedly 148

The View from Damascus

highly photogenic media manipulator goes to show that at least in one troubled part of the world, burning issues still count, affairs of war and peace remain decisive, and political stands and tactics continue to make or break candidates. Syria is adamant about the return of the entire Golan Heights as a condition for peace, security arrangements, and the normalization of relations with Israel. Although officially the whole Golan extends to the cease-fire lines as they existed just before the start of the war on June 5, 1967, Syria has recently shown flexibility on this matter by admitting (at the Shepherdstown peace talks in early January 2000) that these are really adjustable military lines and not borders. On the other hand, the present Israeli government is promoting a definition of the “whole Golan” that stops at the international border between Syria and Palestine as demarcated by the British and French mandatory authorities in 1923. The withdrawal precedent cited in this instance is the return of the “whole of Sinai” up to the international border between Egypt and Palestine as demarcated in 1906, by the British colonial administration and the Ottoman authorities. All informed observers in Damascus know that the fundamental point in Syria’s resumed negotiations with Israel at Shepherdstown is to find an adequate way to cross the bridge between these two definitions of “the whole Golan”. As has been said, one Syrian objection to the Israeli definition is that it would cut Syria off from the access it had to Lake Tiberias before June 4, 1967. In the end, given the very small size of the area between the two definitions, there is nothing to stop the two sides from agreeing on a convenient and mutually acceptable line of withdrawal, and then calling it the rectified June 4 line as well as the final international border between the two countries. The American sponsors of the negotiations may very well promote such a helpful calculated “constructive ambiguity”. In fact, these peace talks could not have recommenced in the first place had not President Clinton resorted to one of these “constructive ambiguities” when he announced on December 9, 1999, that the two sides had agreed to resume their negotiations from the point at which they were interrupted, 149

Is Islam Secularizable?

expressly refraining from defining that point of interruption. Underlying the need for such a gimmick are Syria’s longstanding affirmations that: (a) Had Prime Minister Rabin not pledged himself, in 1993, to a withdrawal to the June 4 line, Syria would not have permitted the negotiations on all the other issues and details to proceed in the first place. (b) This highly secret pledge, relayed by Secretary of State Warren Christopher to President Asad, took the form of a written document deposited with the US Department of State. (c) Although Christopher informed Asad in December 1995 of Peres’s continued commitment to the “Rabin Deposit”, Peres nonetheless proceeded to withdraw from the Maryland peace talks and to call for early elections. (d) Syria will, therefore, resume negotiations with Israel only from the point at which they were broken off – i.e., agreement on the “Rabin Deposit”. This Syrian insistence is to be seen in light of the fact that Netanyahu was elected prime minister on a platform that expressly precluded a full withdrawal from the Golan Heights. This secret pledge may also be understood against the background of Syria’s longstanding position that since the Golan Heights is occupied territory, the settlement of its future should flow from the principles of international law and not from the principles of Israeli sovereignty. In other words, there is no need to submit a Syrian-Israeli agreement on the Heights either to a referendum or to approval by the Knesset. It was not until February 27 this year that Prime Minister Barak openly confirmed both the existence of the “Rabin Deposit” and his predecessor’s commitment to a full withdrawal from the Golan (down to or very near the June 4 line), in return for Syria’s satisfying Israel’s security and normalization conditions. As The New York Times reported on February 28, Prime Minister Ehud Barak of Israel told his cabinet today that Yitzhak Rabin…had given guarantees that Israel would fully withdraw from the Golan Heights in exchange for security commitments by Syria…. Mr. Barak appeared to confirm what Syria has long maintained – that Mr. Rabin had left a “deposit” with the Americans, a promise that a full withdrawal would be undertaken if Syria conceded Israel’s demands on security. 150

The View from Damascus

Since Barak’s accession to power, observers of the peace process in Damascus have noted that a number of lines of interest seem to be converging in favor of producing a peace agreement in the reasonably near future. Among these lines of interest are: 1) Barak’s open commitments to negotiating a framework for a permanent settlement with the Palestinians and concluding the final status negotiations before the end of the year 2000. Also to disengaging Israel from southern Lebanon by July of the same year, on the basis of an agreement with Syria if possible, but unilaterally if necessary. 2) Arafat’s deadline for the announcement of the new Palestinian state before the end of this year. 3) The evident eagerness of key Arab states (Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Algeria, Morocco) to bring the whole Middle Eastern peace process to a successful conclusion as soon as possible. 4) President Clinton’s natural desire to end his presidency with a significant and lasting success in so troubled and vital a region as the Middle East. 5) Syria’s desire to end the conflict on credible terms so it can attend to its own internal problems and urgently needed reforms in view of the mounting pressures of a post-cold war globalizing world order. Finally, when the peace comes, it will be, then, not so much the peace of the brave as the peace of the weary and exhausted.

151

Copyright 2014. Gerlach Press. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or applicable copyright law.

8

Replies to ‘The View from Damascus’ By Moshe Ma’oz, Amos Elon, and Itamar Rabinovitch The late president of Egypt Muhammad Anwar al-Sadat used to state that 70 percent of the Arab-Israeli conflict had stemmed from the “psychological barrier” between Arabs and Jews, who mutually harbor fears, anxieties, suspicions, and mistrust. Sadat had indeed contributed to cracking that barrier and to alleviating the concerns of many Israelis (and Egyptians) when he made his historic and bold journey to Jerusalem in November 1977. Alas, Asad was not Sadat and Syria is not Egypt; and in his article “The View from Damascus” [NYR, June 15] Mr. Sadik al-Azm discusses the Syrians’ psychological and ideological inhibitions concerning peace with Israel. But the author does not allude to Syrian perceptions regarding Israeli fears and concerns, stemming, for example, from the equation of Israel to Nazism in Syrian official organs and textbooks. Nevertheless, it is comforting to learn from Al-Azm’s account that Syrian intellectuals no longer have a monolithic view concerning Israeli 153 EBSCO Publishing : eBook Academic Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 9/29/2020 1:06 PM via VANDERBILT UNIV AN: 1781609 ; Azm, Sadiq Jalal.; Is Islam Secularizable? : Challenging Political and Religious Taboos Account: s8863559.main.ehost

Is Islam Secularizable?

political leaders and parties, and how they distinguish between Barak and Netanyahu, Labor and Likud. Following Barak’s accession to power the prospects for a Syrian-Israeli peace agreement have been promising, according to Al-Azm. Indeed, with the ascendancy of Bashar al-Asad, the chances for such an agreement have been reinforced; this following the recent disengagement of Israel from southern Lebanon, and in view of the Syrian and Israeli vested interests in a peace agreement. Moshe Ma’oz, Professor of Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Jerusalem, Israel *** Most Israelis, I am sure, are as weary and exhausted by the half-century of war as I understand from Sadik al-Azm that most Syrians are. They likely share Mr. Al-Azm’s hope for, and endorsement of, a formal IsraeliSyrian peace at an early date. His article is an unprecedented public step by a leading Syrian intellectual, and will greatly encourage liberal Israelis to press their government to show flexibility and imagination - all the more so since the death of President Asad shortly after his article was published. I happen to have been among the first involved in the so-called Copenhagen initiative mentioned in Mr. Al-Azm’s article. Led by Herbert Pundik (Israel/Denmark), Marwan Barguti (Palestine), the late Lutfi Huli (Egypt), and retired general Ihsan Shurdun ( Jordan), it was meant to be, and still is, a kind of Egyptian-Jordanian-Palestinian-Israeli PEACE NOW movement and, at least in Israel, an active political lobby. It is an ongoing initiative. Its last public major event took place in Cairo last summer and was attended by leading intellectuals, fifty Egyptian, fifty Jordanian, fifty Palestinian, and a like number of Israelis, promising to give their governments “hell” if a comprehensive and just peace is not quickly arrived at. A similar conference is planned in Tel Aviv this coming fall. The founding conference in Copenhagen did indeed take place, in 1997. 154

Replies to ‘The View from Damascus’

It adopted the very resolution - cited by Mr. Al-Azm - that created such a constructive furor in some of the Arab countries that Mr. Al-Azm writes about. Its content is of interest to this day. Here are some excerpts: Copenhagen Declaration Egyptians, Israelis, Jordanians, Palestinians, and peace-loving people from all over the world are gathered in Copenhagen to establish an international alliance for Arab-Israeli peace. Peace is too important to be left only to governments. People-to-people contacts are vital to the success of the peace efforts in the region. As long as the popular base remains weak, the peace process may falter. We are gathering in Copenhagen to contribute to a comprehensive and lasting resolution to the Arab-Israeli conflict before the end of this century and to commence an era of durable and just peace in which the whole Middle East should enjoy stability, security, and prosperity…. We plan to hold public meetings, lobby governments, monitor progress and setbacks in the peace process as well as dis-crimination, collective punishment, abuse of human rights, and violence. We will mobilize public opinion behind the peace effort…. We are deeply concerned about the stalemate in the Israeli-Syrian, IsraeliLebanese tracks, about possible deadlocks in the Israeli-Palestinian negotiations over the implementation of the Interim Agreement, and about the eruption of violence that has in the past led to the loss of Arab and Israeli lives…. We need each other and we are determined to close ranks with all peaceloving people to attain these objectives. In order to do that, the signatories to this declaration have agreed on the following: The attainment of peace between the Israeli and Palestinian peoples will resolve the core problems of the Arab-Israeli conflict. We…call on concerned governments to act vigorously and speed up the full implementation of the Israeli-Palestinian agreements in letter and spirit, faithfully and honestly, and particularly to restore full normality to and improvement of the lives of the Palestinians. We call on the Israeli government and the Palestinian 155

Is Islam Secularizable?

National Authority to reach fair agreement on all outstanding final status issues ( Jerusalem, refugees, settlements, borders, security, and water) as soon as possible, certainly no later than May 5, 1999, as stipulated in the Oslo accords. Jerusalem, in particular, is a deeply sensitive and central issue to all parties…. We believe that the comprehensive peace must be the goal of all political efforts from within and outside the region. Renewed efforts must be made to reach a peaceful settlement between Israel and Syria and Israel and Lebanon based on the land-for-peace formula and on UN resolutions 242, 338, and 425. This settlement must include maximum mutual security for the parties as well as normal relations between them. Comprehensive peace should allow for a region free from weapons of mass destruction and their delivery systems, a Middle East in which economic potentials are harnessed for the prosperity of its inhabitants, and steps should be taken to achieve these goals. We urge all forces in the Middle East to join hands to rebuild a region free from arms races and free from strife and poverty. In this noble endeavor, we will seize every opportunity, knock on every door, lobby every government, and attempt to spread our vision to serve the interests of present and future generations…. Amos Elon, Jerusalem, Israel *** It is significant and sad that Israelis and, in fact, many others had to wait through nine years of negotiations for a real insight into the Syrian discourse on the peace process with Israel. Sadik al-Azm’s New York Review of Books essay is intriguing and important in many ways, but its most valuable contribution comes from the light it sheds on the depth and complexity of the Syrian debate on peace with Israel. Of course, those of us who met and negotiated with Syria’s official representatives heard at length about Syrian public opinion, its reservations 156

Replies to ‘The View from Damascus’

regarding reconciliation with the enemy and the limitations it imposed even on a powerful ruler like Hafiz al-Asad. We know that public opinion and constituencies exist in authoritarian regimes but we knew also that invoking them as a constraint was a familiar negotiating technique for democratic and authoritarian governments alike. But how does one gauge the public mood in a country that has no free media? As Sadik al-Azm himself tells us: “These intense discussions are not open public debates aired [by the media]…but are highly charged, comprehensive, and persuasive exchanges whose main vehicles are the time-honored methods of oral transmission…. This is Damascus’s rumor mill and the people’s free press at one and the same time.” Occasional glimpses into that debate have been offered to outsiders but it was not until Syria’s Foreign Minister Faruq al-Shara addressed the Arab Writers’ Union last February that the constraints affecting Asad’s regime became fully apparent. It was a complex speech, dotted by harsh statements but first and foremost an apologetic presentation explaining to a critical audience why Asad’s Syria was forced to abandon her erstwhile principles and come to terms with the enemy. The speech and its tenor were also manifestations of the waning of Asad’s regime. In years past, he alone would have given such a programmatic speech, his foreign minister serving as a mere technician. Asad still wielded ultimate control but he became less visible and less present and very much preoccupied with guaranteeing the succession to his son. The failure of President Clinton’s last-ditch effort to galvanize the Israeli-Syrian negotiations in his last meeting with Asad in Geneva has yet to be fully explained, but from several authoritative accounts it emerges that Asad’s foreign minister had either gone beyond his mandate in the earlier sessions or was subsequently overruled by his boss. Be that as it may, the Israeli-Syrian negotiation is the victim inter alia of bad pacing and bad timing. We are told by Sadik al-Azm that the mainstream of Syrian society has “come to take Israel for granted, 157

Is Islam Secularizable?

to assume that a peace will come as a matter of course…” We know that successive Israeli prime ministers have since 1993 conveyed to Damascus their willingness to withdraw from the Golan in return for a satisfactory full peace with Syria. This should have led to a deal and yet has not. Perhaps most exasperating has been the failure to reach the deal during the last year when a single-minded Israeli prime minister had focused his policies on the quest for a Syrian deal but encountered the waning regime of Hafiz al-Asad. We do not know what impact Asad’s death will have on the prospect of a renewed negotiation with Israel. It is quite possible, though not inevitable, that the succession, installation, and consolidation of a new regime will postpone the renewal of the negotiations. But even if this is the case, the foundations for a prospective agreement remain in place and the negotiation is bound to be revived at some point. When it does, it is important that one issue that is badly misconstrued by Sadik al-Azm be reconsidered by the Syrian side. Al-Azm fully endorses the Asad regime’s utter refusal to engage Israeli public opinion by investing in what we call “public diplomacy”. It is viewed in Damascus as yet another capricious demand. But it is not. It is reflective of Israel’s collective psyche. Thoughtful Syrians like Asad should ask themselves what prompted many Israeli doves, most notably the writer Amos Oz, to come out against the idea of an agreement with a sour-faced Syria. Without addressing it, Syria, dealing with Barak or any other Israeli prime minister, will not have a viable partner in Jerusalem. Itmar Rabinovitch, President Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv, Israel

158

Copyright 2014. Gerlach Press. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or applicable copyright law.

9

Answer to Replies ‘The View from Damascus’ I would like to thank Amos Elon [Letters, July 20, NYR] for correcting a mistake I made in my article “The View from Damascus” [NYR, June 15] in claiming that the Arab-Israeli Copenhagen conference never met. His fuller explanation of the origins and purposes of the Egyptian-IsraeliPalestinian-Jordanian “Copenhagen initiative” is informative and to the point. I cannot help noticing, in Moshe Ma’oz’s and Itmar Rabinovich’s letters [NYR, July 20], the persistent tendency of many eminent Israeli spokespersons and representatives to overpsychologize their country’s politics with regard to the Arab world in general and Syria in particular. This is evident, first, in Ma’oz’s continuing nostalgia for President Sadat’s exaggerated and reductive (but at the time useful and self-serving) claim that 70 percent of the Arab- Israeli conflict had stemmed from the “psychological barrier” between Arabs and Jews. It is also evident in Rabinovich’s repeated insistence that peace with Syria somehow hinges on certain Syrian acts of “public diplomacy” that would placate the neuroses of “Israel’s collective psyche”. 159

Is Islam Secularizable?

In my view, the prospects for peace with Syria will improve the sooner the Israeli side overcomes its fixation on Sadat and leaves behind its unrealistic attachment to the “charismatic” moment of the Egyptian visit to Jerusalem, and returns soberly to “normal” politics among states. I have no doubt that “Syria’s collective psyche” is, for its part, incapable of producing “charismatic” and paradigm-shifting gestures in the Sadat mode. When we consider that Israel craves normalization with the Arabs and with Syria in particular, a return to “normal” politics becomes doubly important for the achievement of a peace agreement. At the same time, it would be most helpful to all concerned if the Israeli side stops painting the idea of normalization, and the process to achieve it, in such bright colors. The “normal” in Middle Eastern politics and Arab affairs is, after all, quite somber. To get a glimpse of the “norm” in this case all you have to do is look at the history of the relations between Syria and Turkey, Syria and Iraq, Iraq and Iran, Morocco and Algeria, and so on. For example, it is “normal” for Syrian-Turkish relations to swing violently and unpredictably between cold-blooded ostracism and outright threats of war (as in Turkey’s threats concerning the Kurdish PKK’s alleged relations with Syria) and highfalutin expressions of warm friendship, cooperation, and exchanges of state visitors at high levels. In 1978-1979, Syrian-Iraqi relations suddenly veered in the direction of unifying not only the two ruling Ba’ath parties, but the two states as well. That much-trumpeted pan-Arabist collaboration flaunted, at the time, a very high-profile visit by President Asad to Baghdad and the unveiling of a mutually agreed-on Charter of Nationalist Action. Soon after, and no less suddenly, relations between the two states reverted to the usual condition of bitter enmity, destructive rivalry, total boycott, and mutual vilification. So observers of the peace process in Damascus ask, why should Syria’s relations with Israel be any more “normal” than, say, its relations with Turkey or Iraq? They also wonder whether optimistic Israeli discussions on 160

Answer to Letters ‘The View from Damascus’

normalization and its rewards are genuinely aware of the actual meaning of “normalcy” in the region. Certainly it is gratifying that, in spite of the recent upsets and reversals, all three distinguished Israeli commentators on my article sent an upbeat message in their letters concerning the prospects of an IsraeliSyrian peace agreement. And those prospects are now reinforced by the accession to power in Damascus of Dr. Bashar al-Asad, the son of the recently deceased president of the country. The most commonly asked question at present is whether in dealing with Israel the new, young president can settle for less than his father’s commitments concerning an acceptable price for making peace and, in particular, the retrieval of the Golan Heights. But then, exactly to what did the father commit Syria? The answer is to be inferred from (a) the draft peace treaty submitted by the Clinton administration to Prime Minister Barak and Syria’s minister of foreign affairs, Farouk al-Shara’, at the end of their Shepherdstown negotiations in January of this year1; and (b) the failed Clinton-Asad summit meeting in Geneva last March. According to the draft treaty, Syria showed unprecedented flexibility in dealing with Israel’s primary demands and concerns. For the first time, Syria openly admitted that the June 4, 1967, lines are adjustable military lines and not borders. Or, as Ha’aretz commented in introducing the text of the draft treaty: “According to the American document, there is no argument between Israel and Syria over the fact that no clear boundary line exists between the two countries.” The Syrian position now accepted as “the location of the boundary” is to be commonly agreed upon by the two sides as “based on the June 4, 1967 line”2 and no more. In the first partial leak of the contents of the draft treaty made to the London-based Arabic daily Al-Hayat on January 9, 2000, Syria made 161

Is Islam Secularizable?

clear that “it does not object to taking into consideration the topographical nature of the terrain on each side of the border” when fixing the boundary line. This pretty much granted the Israeli position (as stated in the Al-Hayat leak), to the effect that “the June 4 line is not a border, but the lines marking the concentration of the armed forces of the two sides on the eve of the war”. It seemed to me then that this new adjustability of the June 4 line would resolve in favor of Israel the question of which nation had sovereignty over the northeastern corner of Lake Tiberias. The second major Israeli concern that Syria accommodated at Shepherdstown was that there be a ground listening station at Mount Hermon, whose information, it was assumed, could be available to Israel. According to the draft treaty, the Syrian side agreed to allow for “early warning capabilities including an early warning groundstation on Mt. Hermon operated by the United States and France under their total auspices and responsibilities”. It should be remembered that Syria and Israel had remained deadlocked on this issue all along, and right through the breakup of the Maryland negotiations in March 1996. Article III of the draft treaty dealt at length and in minute details with normalizing relations between the two countries. The specifics mentioned ranged from full diplomatic relations and the exchange of ambassadors to roads, crossings, rail links, ports, cargoes, civil aviation, post, telephone, telex, facsimile, wireless, tourism, trade, travel, electricity, and much more. In contrast to all this, the Israeli side determinedly refused to address Syria’s primary concerns about borders and full withdrawal. Although the draft treaty says “A Joint Boundary Commission is hereby established”, the commission never even met. We know now that Prime Minister Barak blocked its work and President Clinton went along with this decision, in spite of the fact that the Water, Security, and Normalization Commissions met and worked hard to produce results. All four commissions (or subcommittees) were formed at the Blair House talks between Barak and Shara’ in December 1999, and were 162

Answer to Letters ‘The View from Damascus’

supposed to proceed simultaneously with their work. From more than one authoritative account, I learned that Barak would not “talk borders” except with Asad himself. This in turn meant that a Barak-Asad summit meeting remained an Israeli precondition for a serious breakthrough with Syria. Furthermore, the Israeli side spoke in the draft treaty of “relocating all its armed forces” behind the boundary line and never of a “withdrawal” from occupied territory, although the entire negotiating process was supposedly based on Asad’s original formula of “full peace for full withdrawal”. This left the question of the “withdrawal” of the settlers in limbo, a very “destructive ambiguity” indeed for the Syrian position. In view of this drastic imbalance in the results of the Shepherdstown meetings, the failure of the Geneva summit became inevitable. In the first leak published in Al-Hayat ( January 9), I could already sense the Syrian position stiffening. In the Geneva meeting with Clinton, President Asad refused to show any of the conciliatory flexibility reflected earlier in the draft treaty. This is why the summit turned into a fiasco. According to the Jerusalem Report (May 8, 2000, p. 22), Asad even flabbergasted Clinton at the summit by reopening the question of sovereignty over the northeastern shore of Lake Tiberias; apparently he did so because the American president glossed over the issue on the firm assumption that the matter was already settled at the Shepherdstown talks. American news reports described Asad at the Geneva summit as “immovable”, as “the most implacable person in his delegation”, and as “obstinate in his long-held view that there must be a full Israeli withdrawal to the frontier that existed on June 4, 1967.” This was read in Damascus as simply evening the score and returning what was perceived at Shepherdstown as a snub over the question of withdrawal. Once the Syrian side felt that the act of retaliation had been effectively completed and the field was level once more, the signals of willingness to negotiate reemerged. For example, when the Lebanese minister of defense suggested in early April that Syrian troops accompany the Lebanese army 163

Is Islam Secularizable?

on its expected march to fill the vacuum created by the withdrawal of the Israeli forces from southern Lebanon, Farouk al-Shara’, the Syrian minister of foreign affairs, immediately killed the idea by announcing in Beirut itself that “what we need is negotiations and peace, not war.” On April 18, The New York Times reported as follows on Dr. Bashar al-Asad’s interview in the London-based weekly Al-Wasat: In one of the most upbeat messages to come out of Damascus since the breakdown of the Syrian-Israeli peace talks in January, the son of President Hafez al-Asad said in an interview that a deal was still possible. “The time is not too late and it has not run out”, said Bashar al-Asad, “the positions that need to be achieved and worked on are known in detail. There is a need to make a decision and enough time to make such a decision.”

The conclusion seems clear that Syria’s new president will remain committed to the achievements of the Shepherdstown draft treaty as long as the Israeli side shows signs of doing something serious and substantive to meet Syria’s primary concerns over borders and full military and civilian withdrawal from the Golan Heights. Sadik J. Al-Azm

164

Copyright 2014. Gerlach Press. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or applicable copyright law.

10

Islam, Terrorism, and the West Today

1. Personal I was in Sendai, Japan, as a visiting professor at Tohoku University when the September 11, 2001 airborne assaults on the World Trade Centre in New York and the Pentagon fortress in Washington, DC occurred. I happened to be watching television when the stunning image of the smoking first tower flashed on the screen. As soon as I assured myself that this was neither the science fiction channel nor some mega Hollywood urban fear and panic movie on display and that what I saw was for real this time, I could not help experiencing a strong emotion of Schadenfreude that I tried to contain, control and hide. This primitive emotion took hold of me in spite of the strong injunction in Arabo-Islamic culture forbidding Schadenfreude (shamaleh, in Arabic) when it comes to death, even if it happens to be the violent and deserved death of your mortal enemies. At that moment, I intuitively knew, as well, that millions and millions of people experienced the same emotion throughout the Arab World and beyond. As the macabre drama of the two towers unfolded and as I regained myself and my composure two ideas and a question spontaneously flashed in my mind. 165

Is Islam Secularizable?

The first said: our Islamists did it, because they have a deep-seated vendetta against the World Trade Centre, as they had tried to blow it up in 1993, but failed. And as is predictable with Arab and Middle Eastern vendettas, the aggrieved party revisited the site with a far huger vengeance than ever, to settle accounts and even the score. From that moment on, I never had any doubts about who perpetrated that all-destroying act and who committed that heinous crime. For, as an Arab I knew something about the power of such motives in our culture and their ability at times to engulf all behaviour and colour all outlooks to the detriment of all other considerations. To appreciate this matter, all one needs is a quick look at the endless acts of deadly retaliations and counterretaliations unfolding in Palestine and Israel since the start of the second Intifada. The second idea said: the United States will be out in full force to crush the Islamist movement world-wide into oblivion; while the question asked: why the Schadenfreude on my part? Why this unworthy and reprehensible emotion of taking delight – even if awkwardly, shyly and selfconsciously – in such a massacre of the innocents? Various answers crowded in on me: the news from Palestine had been particularly bad for the last few days. The sneaky satisfaction of seeing the arrogance of power abruptly humbled, even if temporarily. The sight of the jihadi Frankensteins that the United States had so carefully reared, nourished and used suddenly turning their deadly skills against their masters, handlers and manipulators. Certainly, one legitimate occasion for such glee and gloating in my culture is the moment when ‘the black magic finally turns against the magician’, as we say in Arabic. The very dramatic exposure of the cynicism and hypocrisy inherent in Ronald Reagan once hailing the Taliban-types invited to the White House not too long ago as ‘the moral equivalent of America’s founding fathers’. The natural resentment of the weak and marginalized at the peripheries of empires against the Centre and in this case against such a self-righteous and vain Centre of the Centre. 166

Islam, Terrorism, and the West Today

Startled Japanese colleagues and friends were naturally at a loss as to what to make of the whole situation. For example, they saw television images of a lot of Palestinians – including little boys and girls – jubilantly celebrating the September attacks, exchanging personal congratulations in public, distributing sweets in the streets as if it was feast-time. They also heard official Palestinian denials and dismissals of these festivities as the acts of uncomprehending innocent little children and saw Yaser Arafat extending his deepest condolences to the American people and government while donating some of his blood – under the glare of the television cameras – to the victims in New York. I quite honestly explained to the puzzled Japanese colleagues and friends that the simple Palestinians and uncomprehending children celebrating in the streets, genuinely expressed and reflected the spontaneous feelings and sincere emotions of masses of people throughout the Arab World; and that Arafat’s denials, condolences and gestures represented the hypocrisy of the politics of the moment in its purest form. To emphasize my point, I explained also that it would be very hard these days to find an Arab, no matter how sober, cultured, and sophisticated, in whose heart there was not some room for Schadenfreude after what happened to the Americans on September 11, 2001. Is this then Huntington’s ‘clash of civilisations’ come true and so quickly? Well, the Japanese with whom I was interacting figured out the matter somewhat differently. The whole affair seemed to them at the time like a religious war resurrected from some long gone dark ages where Islamic jihad perpetrates a sensational act of terroristic violence without precedent against the heart of the West; and where the President of the United States acts immediately to mobilize the Christian World for a ferocious countercrusade against Islam. No wonder, then, that a cultured Japanese lady whispered to my wife, ‘what kind of savage religions do you have on your side of the world? It is best to be a Buddhist these days’. Actually, I found it quite edifying to have experienced the September 11 shock and its first 167

Is Islam Secularizable?

repercussions in a culture very different from what I am normally used to, i.e. in a culture where such common place cries as ‘my God’, ‘mon Dieu’, ‘mein Gott’, ‘ya Rabbi’, ‘ya Ilahi’ and so on have no meaning at all. In October of that same year, I returned home to Damascus, Syria, to immerse myself in the immense and intense debates going on about September 11 and to listen to and take account of all the conspiracy theories circulating wildly not only locally but all over the Arab World and beyond. The point of the whole commotion was to distance the Arabs, Islam and Muslims from what happened to the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon by blaming it all on the usual candidates: the Mosad, the CIA, the Pentagon itself, the Jewish-Zionist imperialist plot, globalisation’s super plotters and schemers, the American military-industrial complex and so on. The most interesting argument used in this context asked: But, since when are the Arabs capable of such strategic planning, such longterm preparations, such brilliant tactics, such faultless coordination, synchronization and implementation? The reassuring conclusion inevitably followed: Since contemporary Arabs are neither Germans nor Japanese, they could not have had anything to do with what happened in New York and Washington, DC. For my part, I argued in favour of a much simpler explanation of the whole phenomenon: the Americans trained the mujahideen so well in Afghanistan, and for once the Arabs among them learned their lesson so well that at the first opportune moment they turned its devastating impact on the masters themselves. Four significant and interesting points are worth remarking in the more sophisticated forms of these Arab debates and discussions: 1. A gradual but steady retreat of the conspiracy theories in the face of the accumulating evidence as to the party responsible for the September 11 attacks, with some doubts, reservations and question marks lingering here and there. But as always, the hard-core 168

Islam, Terrorism, and the West Today

conspiracy-theory believers can never be convinced otherwise no matter how high the evidence piles up. 2. A cautionary note against getting carried away by the wildly exaggerated rhetoric about September 11 somehow forming a turning point of world-historic proportions in the life of humanity such that one may speak of the world before and after September 11, pretty much the way we speak of before and after Christ, before and after the Hijra of the Prophet Muhammad or even before and after the First and Second World Wars or before and after the atomic bomb over Hiroshima. It was pointed out that permitting this kind of pseudo-apocalyptic rhetoric to define the terms of the international debate on the issue and/or allowing it to dominate our local agendas and programs, simply means helping the United States in its current efforts to impose its own private agenda on the rest of the world and helping Israel’s Ariel Sharon to impose his no less aggressive agenda on the Arab World and the rest of the Middle East, as well. 3. A concern over the effects and consequences of what looks like a rightwing drive to abridge and curtail the well-established civil rights and civil liberties of citizens in the United States and Western Europe in the name of protecting national security and facilitating the war on terrorism. The main worry here is self-interested, as any seeming abbreviation of civil rights and liberties in the western democracies simply provides our martial law regimes and shari’a law authorities with the pretexts they crave to continue with their repressive policies and arbitrary measures. For, if the most advanced democracies in the world resort to such methods in a moment of perceived danger, what are we to say, then, about our own authoritarian societies and dictatorial governments, especially given their perennial obsession with ‘national security’ and their ever-available stock of real and imagined internal threats and external dangers? 169

Is Islam Secularizable?

4. A fear for the safety, condition and future of the sizeable Middle Eastern, Muslim and Arab minorities in the western countries, particularly in Europe. The most telling opinion to emerge out of these discussions pointed out that past experiences have shown that after every wave of anti-Arab and anti-Muslim hysteria in Europe the manifestations of animosity, racism and discrimination against the affected minorities tended to return to their previous levels and conventional forms. This happened after the violent Palestinian arrack on the Munich Olympic Games in 1972 (the Israeli team was the target and victim). It happened after the triumph of the Islamic Revolution in Iran in 1979, and after the sensational drama of Imam Khomeini’s ‘fatwa’ against Salman Rushdie in 1989. Will the same pattern reassert itself again after the passions released by the enormity of September 11 have run their course? 2. Political In the heat of the American-led war on global terrorism does the search for an ‘acceptable’ definition of terrorism make sense? More specifically, is the current Arab and Muslim insistent demand for such a definition from the hegemonic West realistic? As long as the will to power reigns supreme at this juncture, the answer has to be a resounding: no. Still, we all know that terrorism is more often than not part of the weapons of the weak, although the mighty have never hesitated in resorting to it whenever they deemed it necessary. At present, the United States is intentionally working hard to extend the range of the conventional meaning of terrorism to cover every act of violence, insurrection, rebellion, civil war, armed resistance etc. that the West in general finds objectionable. This selectively and arbitrarily erases the boundaries between terrorism, on the one hand, and various forms of violent resistance to foreign occupation, national liberation struggles and insurrectionary action against intolerable oppression, on the other. It also empties the concept of terrorism of all specific 170

Islam, Terrorism, and the West Today

content and significance, turning it into a purely discretionary idea serving the immediate interests of the high and mighty. A more discriminating and carefully defined concept of terrorism is exactly what the strong do not want at this moment, because their war on terrorism is meant to extend far beyond specific terroristic acts, organizations and structures. This process reached absurd proportions in Israel’s military reoccupation of the West Bank and the destruction of the Palestinian National Authority there in the name of continuing America’s war against terrorism. The absurdity compelled even The Washington Post to remind President George W. Bush of certain indispensable distinctions if his generalized war on terrorism was to maintain its effectiveness. The Post drew his attention to the following points in its editorial of April 25, 2002: The Bush administration’s uncompromising opposition to terrorism following Sept. 11 is politically and morally powerful and has yielded impressive results both in Afghanistan and in many other parts of the world. Nevertheless, if counter-terrorism is to remain an effective cause, the administration must discriminate between terrorism and the sometimes legitimate causes it is used for; and it must also differentiate between legitimate defences against terrorism and attempts to use counter-terrorism to justify unacceptable aims. The Israeli writer Amos Oz has observed that Israel is engaged in two separate campaigns against the Palestinians – a legitimate war against terrorism and an ‘unjust and futile’ bid for control of the West Bank and Gaza. The Bush administration needs a policy that can tell the difference between the two.

The search for an alternative approach led me to the characterisation that Joseph Conrad once gave in his novel, the Secret Agent, of the ideal terroristic act: ‘But what is one to say to an act of destructive ferocity so absurd as to be incomprehensible, inexplicable, almost unthinkable; in fact, mad? Madness alone is truly terrifying, inasmuch as you cannot placate it either by threats, persuasion, or bribes.’ This account came from the mouth of Vladimir, the suave First Secretary at the Russian Embassy in the London of those days, trying to recruit the half-hearted anarchist and police informer, Mr. Verloc, to 171

Is Islam Secularizable?

commit an act of terroristic violence so extraordinary as to shock England (the superpower and hegemon of the time) out of its complacency, at a moment when an international conference was about to be convened on ‘the suppression of political crime’, as trans-European terrorism used to be called in those days. The plot called for blowing up the Royal Greenwich Observatory in London, that great symbol of British scientific superiority and of the most advanced international system of time reckoning at that time. If there ever was a concrete violent acte gratuite of ‘madness and despair’ that totally fulfils Conrad’s definition of the ideal terroristic deed, then it is the Islamists’ spectacular attack on the World Trade Centre in New York, that great symbol of contemporary American global superiority in everything and of the most advanced international system of commercial and financial reckoning in our time. One part of the madness lies in its annihilating impact on the plotters and perpetrators themselves viz., world Islamism in general and the Al-Qaeda networks, organizations and systems of support in particular (including the Taliban regime in Afghanistan). The other part lies in the spectacle of the sole superpower on the surface of the earth standing defenceless against implements no more sophisticated than box cutters and civilian airplanes, at the moment when it was gearing itself up for the gigantic task of building the most futuristic high-tech missile shield ever imagined. Other reasonably recent instances of violent acts that fulfilled, in their time and place, Conrad’s ideal definition are the abduction and murder of the German industrialist Hanns Martin Schleyer by the Baader-Meinhof gang in the summer of 1977 and the similar abduction and assassination, a year later, of Aldo Moro, the dean of Italy’s senior political leaders after World War II, by the Italian Red Brigades. In these cases also, the destructive effects on the plotters, perpetrators, their supporting networks, organizations, protective communist regimes and worldwide radical leftist movements were no less devastating. Imaginative literature has something edifying to offer even about the violated city of New York. Consider the following account: 172

Islam, Terrorism, and the West Today

For many generations New York had taken no heed of war, save as a thing that happened far away, that affected prices and supplied the newspapers with exciting headlines and pictures. The New Yorkers felt perhaps even more certainly than the English had done that war in their own land was an impossible thing. In that they shared the delusion of all North America. They felt as secure as spectators at a bullfight; they risked their money perhaps on the result, but that was all… They thought America was safe amidst all this piling up of explosives. They cheered the flag by habit and tradition, they despised other nations, and whenever there was an international difficulty they were intensely patriotic, that is to say they were ardently against any native politician who did not threaten and do harsh and uncompromising things to the antagonist people… And then suddenly, into a world peacefully busied for the most part upon armaments and the perfection of explosives, war came… Then blinding flames squirted out in all directions from the point of impact, and the little man who had jumped became, for an instant, a flash of fire and vanished – vanished absolutely. The people running out into the road took preposterous clumsy leaps, then flopped down and lay still, with their torn clothes smouldering into flame… Lower New York was soon a furnace of crimson flames, from which there was no escape… Dust and black smoke came pouring into the street, and were presently shot with red flame… Cars, railways, ferries, all had ceased and never a light led the way of the distracted fugitives in that dusky confusion but the light of burning… Below, they left ruins and blazing conflagrations and heaped and scattered dead; men, women and children mixed together as though they had been no more than Moors or Zulus or Chinese… Great crowds assembled … to listen to and cheer patriotic speeches, and there was a veritable epidemic of little flags and buttons … strong men wept at the sight of the national banner … the trade in small arms was enormously stimulated … and it was dangerous not to wear a war button… The newspapers and magazines that fed the American mind … were instantly a coruscation of war pictures and of headlines that rose like rockets and burst like shells.

This is some of H.G. Wells’ account of ‘How War Came to New York’, the sixth chapter of his early 20th century science fiction novel The War in the Air. It bears mention here that Conrad dedicated his novel, The Secret Agent, to none other than H.G. Wells himself.1 173

Is Islam Secularizable?

It seems clear to me at this moment that the left-wing terrorism of the 1970s in Europe was a desperate attempt to break out of the historical impasse and terminal structural crisis reached by communism, radical labour movements, Third Worldism, and revolutionary trends everywhere by resorting to violent action directe of the most extraordinary and phenomenal kind. Now we can also discern that the terrorism of that period was (a) the then barely visible manifestation of that impasse and crisis and (b) the prelude to the final demise of all those movements and trends including world communism itself. It is no less clear to me at present that the Islamist extravagant action directe approach that culminated in the September 11 assaults forms a no less desperate attempt on the part of certain hard-core Islamists to break out of the historical impasse and terminal structural crisis reached by the world Islamist movement of the second half of the 20th century. In my estimation this will equally prove to be the prelude to the dissipation and final demise of militant Islamism in general. Actually, one can cogently argue that just as the action directe types of armed factions and fractions in Europe had given up on society, political parties, reform, proletarian revolution, traditional communist organization, the inert masses in favour of blind and spectacular activism (heedless and contemptuous of consequences, long term calculations of the chances of success or failure and so on), similarly the action directe Islamists have also given up on contemporary Muslim society, its socio-political movements, the spontaneous religiosity of the masses, their endemic false consciousness, mainstream Islamic organisations, the attentism of the original and traditional Society of Muslim Brothers (from which they generally hail in the same way the original action directe hailed from European communism) in favour of their own brand of blind and spectacular activism, also heedless and contemptuous of consequences, chances of success and failure and so on. One time Michel Foucault was asked about the social and/or revolutionary significance of his books. He answered something to the effect that they are no more than Molotov cocktails, hand grenades, or 174

Islam, Terrorism, and the West Today

sonic bombs hurled at the system which consume themselves in the act of exploding and have no significance beyond the flash they engender. This is desperate rebellion without either a cause or a clearly specifiable and/or attainable objective. It is all part of Foucault’s more general view that under the present circumstances, the only opposition option open against the system is action directe in the form of local attacks, intermittent skirmishes, guerrilla raids, random insurrections, senseless resistances, impatient outbursts, anarchistic assaults and sudden uprisings. When this is translated at the minimalist level into the somewhat more primitive activist Islamist idiom we get, first, what some Islamists call ‘an act of rage in favour of God’s cause’ (ghadba lillah) and against the system, an act which need not have any immediate significance beyond itself and is not expected to have any importance beyond the flash it engenders. And second, an Islamist impatient rejection of and contempt for politics in almost any form: conventional, radical, agitational and/or revolutionary in favour of the violent tactics of nihilism and despair. For them, the only other alternatives available are either cooptation or plain withdrawal or an admission of defeat. When the same Foucault line is translated into maximalist Islamism we get action directe terrorism on a global scale where the only kind of politics permitted is direct and immediate armed attack against the enemy. The assumption in all this is that such apocalyptic Islamist self-assertion will (a) explode the obstacles blocking the way to the global triumph of Islam, (b) overcome the structural impasse in which the Islamist project finds itself at present, (c) develop better objective conditions for the success of that project, (d) catalyse the Muslim people’s energies in its favour and (e) create poles of attraction around which the Muslims of the world could immediately rally, for example the Al-Qaeda set of networks, organisations, training camps etc., and the Taliban model of the supposedly first authentic Muslim society and government in modern times. 175

Is Islam Secularizable?

As the September 11 attacks have shown, the action directe Islamists, like their European counterparts, are not rabble or anything of the sort but more often than not well-off, upwardly mobile, university educated youths who unknowingly share with their European equivalents a sense of entrapment within an alien and alienating monolithic socio-political reality, an ontology of total rejection of that reality and a tragic world view centred around the salvational potential of the supreme moment of crisis as also the supreme moment of truth in an enveloping world of untruth, false consciousness and misleading appearances. Escape from this Société du Spectacle, to quote the title of a famous European book2 takes the form of pushing their way willy-nilly toward the moment of crisis out of which the moment of Islamic or some other kind of Truth will explode. This is also the common illusion of the shortcut course to the restoration of an authentic Islamic order (the reductionism of such slogans as: ‘Islam Is The Solution’, ‘Islam Is The Answer’), or an authentically humane and egalitarian socialist society in Europe. For example, in Saudi Arabia the ruling tribal elite insists on conspicuously wrapping itself, its society and system in the mantels of strict Muslim orthodoxy, moral purity, social uprightness and Bedouin austerity. At the same time the contradiction between this outward official pretence and the country’s real substance of life continues to deepen and sharpen to the point of becoming so explosive as to drive those among the sons and daughters of the system who insist on taking the religious pretences seriously to stage the insurrection that occupied the Meccan holy shrine in 1979, shaking the kingdom to its foundations in the process. In the world of Islam, no action could be more spectacular and earthshaking than storming and seizing the Ka‘ba itself. Like the Saudi young men involved in the September 11 attacks, the 1979 occupiers of the Meccan shrine were all typical products of that same Saudi schizophrenic system. Their leader, Juhaiman Al-‘Utaibi, made it very clear that the purpose of his dramatic rebellion and astounding demonstration was to put an end to the ludicrous discrepancy between 176

Islam, Terrorism, and the West Today

official Saudi ideology and pretence, on the one hand, and the substance of the kingdom’s real life, on the other, by bringing the latter in strict conformity with the religious orthodoxy as officially announced and propounded. In fact, Bin Laden may be seen as a more dangerous, advanced and sophisticated version of Juhaiman Al-‘Utaibi gone global and turned international. While Juhaiman directed his desperate spectacular intervention against the most important local legitimising symbol of the Saudi system, Bin Laden went after the American core without which the local system could not possibly either survive or continue. 3. Cultural At an even deeper cultural level, there is that other form of schizophrenia attendant on the Arab (and Muslim) world’s tortured, protracted and reluctant adaptation to European modernity with all its implications and applications. This seemingly unending process has truly made the modem Arabs into the Hamlet of the 20th century and after. Like the endlessly celebrated prince, they seem able continually to join the underlying passion of the elemental to the brooding intellectuality of the cerebral and to the lyrical sensitivity of the poetic, but only to end up in unrelieved tragedy. The tragedy consists of unending hesitations, procrastinations, oscillations and waverings between the old and the new, between asala and mu‘asara (authenticity and contemporaneity), between turath and tajdid (heritage and renewal), between huwiyya and hadatha (identity and modernity), between religion and secularity. Hence the sense of some of their best minds that the new century can only belong to the conquering Fortinbrases of this world and never to the Hamlets hung up on interminably rehearsing that classic – but now totally dépassé – European piece called La querelle des Anciens et des Modernes. No wonder, then, to quote Shakespeare’s most famous drama, that ‘the times seem out of joint’ for the Arabs and ‘something looks rotten 177

Is Islam Secularizable?

in their state’. No wonder as well if they keep wondering, like the fabled Prince of Denmark himself and with as much tragic intensity, ‘whether they are the authors of their woes or there is a divinity that shapes their ends’. Hence, also, their sense that for the Arabs to own their present and hold themselves responsible for their future, they have to come to terms with a certain image of themselves buried deep down in their collective subconscious. What I mean is the following: As Arabs and Muslims (and I use Muslim here in the purely historical, cultural and civilisational sense), we continue deep down to image and imagine ourselves as conquerors, history makers, pacesetters, pioneers and leaders of worldhistoric proportions. In the marrow of our bones, we still sense ourselves as subjects of history not its object, as its agent and not as its patient. We have never come to terms realistically with, let alone reconciled ourselves to, the marginality and reactiveness of our position in modern times. In fact, deep down in our collective soul, we find intolerable this monstrosity of a supposedly great umma (nation) like ourselves standing helplessly on the margins not only of modern history in general but even of our local and particular histories. We find no less intolerable the condition of being the object of a history made, led, manipulated and arbitrated by others, especially when we remember that those others were (and by right ought to be) the objects of a history made, led, manipulated and arbitrated by ourselves. Add to that a no less deeply seated belief that this position of world-historical leadership and its glories was somehow usurped from us, fi ghaflaten min al-tarikh (while history took a nap), as we say in Arabic, by modem Europe. I say usurped and usurpation is at the heart of Hamlet’s tribulations and trials - because it is supposed to belong to us by right, by destiny, by fate, by election, by providence or by what have you. With this belief goes the no less deeply seated conviction that eventually things will right themselves by uncrowning this reigning usurper, whose time is running out anyway, and by restoring history’s legitimate 178

Islam, Terrorism, and the West Today

leaders to their rightful place, former station and natural function. This kind of thought and yearning comes through loud and clear in the work of authors like Egypt’s Hasan Hanafi and the later work of someone like Anwar Abdel-Malek, as well as in the tracts, analyses and propaganda of the more sophisticated Islamist thinkers and theoreticians. The constellation of ideas that they lean on for a crutch may be summarized in the title of a most famous European classic, Spengler’s The Decline of the West, the false implication being: If the West is declining then the Arabs and Islam must be rising. Or, to put it somewhat differently (i.e., in terms of the title of Abdel-Malek’s book Rih al-Sharq, The Wind of the East), if the wind of history is abandoning the sails of the West, then it must be automatically filling those of the East, and East means principally, here, Islam and the Arabs. If we use the title of an equally famous Islamist classic by Muhammad Qutb, Jahiliyyat al-Qarn al-‘Ishrin (The Jahiliyya3 of the 20th Century), then the implication would be: Now that European Modernity has come full circle to the Jahili condition, the Arabs and the Muslims must be on the verge of leading humanity once more out of the Jahiliyya created by Europe and defended by the West in general. But this is not the end of the story. Reviewing the classics of Arab nationalism, it now often appears to me that the deeper objective of these works was not so much Arab unity as an end in itself, but as a means for retrieving that usurped role of world-historical leadership and of history making. In fact, I can easily say that the ultimate but unarticulated concern here was not so much colonialism, imperialism, foreign occupation, liberation, independence, prosperity, social justice, equality, freedom as such, but the restoration of a right usurped from this great umma to exercise the world-historical role and function naturally and/or providentially suited to its nature and mission. After all, the historic civilisations of our part of the world have always been of the conquering and extroverted type: Ancient Persia descending on Greece, Alexander conquering Persia and everything 179

Is Islam Secularizable?

else within reach, Hannibal, Rome, Islam, the Ottomans, European modernity and so on. Now, when this unexamined, un-exorcised, highly potent and deepseated self-image collides with the all too evident everyday actualities of Arab-Muslim impotence, backwardness, frustration and insignificance, especially at the level of international relations, then anything becomes possible on the Arab-Muslim side. This includes grand illusions, massive inferiority complexes, huge compensatory delusions, wild adventurism, heedless political recklessness, desperate violence, and lately large-scale terrorism of the kind we have become familiar with all over the world. Obviously, this is a recipe for owning neither the present nor the future. In fact, it is a recipe for the abdication of all responsibility vis-à-vis both the present and the future. The contradiction that I have been trying to delineate and that I think the Arabs (and Muslims) have openly to come to terms with, if we are going to have any future at all, is perhaps best captured – quite gently but very ironically – in the title of Hussain Ahmad Amin’s pointed and lively book, Dalil al-Muslim al-Hazin ila Muqtada al-Suluq fi al-Qarn al-‘Ishrin. The author is a well-known Egyptian historian and high-ranking diplomat and the son of Ahmad Amin, the great historian produced by what the late Albert Hourani called the Arab Liberal Age. Interestingly enough, the title of Amin’s book hints at the great classic of Moses Maimonides, Dalalat al-Ha’irin (the Guide for the Perplexed). So a free translation of Hussain Ahmad Amin’s title would read: A Guide for the Sad and Perplexed Muslim Concerning the Sort of Behaviour Required by and in the 20th Century. The contemporary Muslim and/or Arab is so sad, melancholic, perplexed and vexed in Amin’s account because his instinctive convictions, profound self-image and cherished illusions about his umma, religion, culture, civilization, providence, their role and function in modern history are all given the lie by the hard realities and harsh actualities of the contemporary world at every waking minute of his life. Furthermore, 180

Islam, Terrorism, and the West Today

the radical transformations, revolutions, sacrifices, changes, losses, etc., required to transcend this contradiction continue to be deemed unbearable, unacceptable and undesirable by Amin’s totally frustrated Arab and/or Muslim. So what else is left for him to do except to muddle through his sad, melancholic perplexity right through the 21st century carrying with him the pious conviction that perhaps one day God or history or fate or the revolution or the moral order of the universe will undo the usurper and again raise his umma to the status of world-historical leadership. Meanwhile, the Fortinbrases of this world will have inherited the earth at his expense. Under these circumstances, various kinds of action directe violence (including terrorism in some of its most spectacular forms) present themselves as the only remaining means for breaking through this hopeless impasse. Modernity is basically a European invention. Europe made the modern world without consulting Arabs, Muslims or anyone else for that matter and made it at the expense of everyone else to boot. There is no running away from the fact that the Arabs were dragged kicking and screaming into modernity, on the one hand, and that modernity was forced on them by superior might, efficiency and performance, on the other. The Crusades were ultimately repulsed, but Bonaparte’s militarily insignificant expedition and adventure in Egypt and Palestine not only won the day but actually made a clean sweep of all that had historically lost the ability to live and continue on our side of the Mediterranean. The massive difference between the results of the Crusades and the results of the French expedition of 1798, distils the essence of European modernity as far as we are concerned and puts it on show for our chastisement and edification. In fact, the modern European violent intrusion into Islamdom and Arabdom created, in my view, a final, decisive and definitive rupture with the past that I can only compare with the no less final and definitive rupture effected by the violent Arab-Muslim intervention into the history of Sassanid Persia. And just as the history of post-conquest Persia stopped 181

Is Islam Secularizable?

making sense without the Arabs, Islam and their eruption on the local Farsi scene, similarly, the post-Bonaparte history of Arabdom stopped making sense without Europe, modernity and their eruption on the local Arab scene as well. In my view, there is no running away from this reality no matter how many times we reiterate the partial truth and often lame rationalization to the effect that modern Europe got it all from us anyway: Averroes, Andalusian high culture and civilisation, Arabic science, mathematics, philosophy and all the rest. Without finally coming to terms, seriously and in depth, with these painful realities and with their so far paralysing contradictions, tensions, paradoxes and anomalies, there is neither an owning of the future for the Arabs, nor any real responsibility for the present on their pan. In other words, either we come to terms critically with this deep-seated, ritualised and stratified complex of highly emotional beliefs, valuations and images that in their turn give the sanction of sacredness, taboo and immutability to inherited illusions, archaic institutions, dysfunctional attitudes and arrangements, anachronistic but cherished modes of living, thinking and governing, or, again, the Fortinbrases of this world will win the day and have the final say. In any case, in Mamdouh Adwan’s adaptation of Hamlet, staged some years ago in Damascus, by the time the Prince wakes up, it is already too late. Is there, then, an inevitable clash of civilisations between an archaic Islamdom and the modern secular West, as Samuel P. Huntington seems to affirm in his famous book, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order? In the strong and serious sense of clash, the answer is: no. In the weak and more casual sense of the term, the answer is: yes. I read Huntington’s basic thesis as saying, first, that after the collapse of world communism at its very centre, the main sources of grave international conflict (and possible wars) ceased to be the hostile rivalry between two incompatible totalising economic systems (or modes of production and distribution, if you prefer) and, second, that these sources 182

Islam, Terrorism, and the West Today

have now come to reside in the antagonistic self-assertion and vying of the large, comprehensive and more or less self-contained systems of fundamental beliefs and values that dominate the post-Cold-War world scene, such as traditional Islam, on the one hand, and triumphant western liberalism, on the other. I can make the same point differently by saying that according to Huntington, now that the historical challenge of communism, socialism, working class movements and Third Worldism to western capitalist hegemony has definitely come to an end, we have to look for the sources of international danger, conflict and tension in the existing major belief and value systems that are inherently incompatible not only with capitalist liberalism but with each other as well. For Huntington, civilisation seems to reduce itself to culture and culture to religion and religion to an archetypal constant that in the case of Islam is bound to produce the phenomenon of Homo Islamicus propelled on a collision course with, let us say, the West’s Homo Economicus and his instinctive liberalism as well as with India’s Homo Hierarchicus and his natural polytheism. It seems clear to me that Huntington’s thesis involves, first, a reversion to old fashioned German ‘Philosophie des Geistes’ and, second, a rehabilitation of the classical orientalist essentialism that Edward Said demolished so well in his book Orientalism. What comes immediately to my mind in this context, for instance, is the famous concoction of spirit and the system of Protestant ethical beliefs and fundamental values used by Max Weber to explain the rise of capitalism in Europe. Here, we already have the spirit of capitalism clashing with the prevalent spirit of feudalism and the new Protestant ethical belief-system clashing with the antecedent, adjacent and rival Roman Catholic one. Weber’s rivalry, clash and struggle of the two spirits and two ethics turn global and international with Huntington. This vying of spirits and belief-systems is not simply historical, sociological and/or evolutionary, but essentialistic, ontological and static. This kind of a-historical and antihistorical reasoning sets the stage for the clash of civilisations by exclusively 183

Is Islam Secularizable?

juxtaposing a reified system of basic Western beliefs and values against another reified but incompatible system of equally basic Muslim beliefs and values. At a more practical level, this means that such values as liberalism, secularism, democracy, human rights, religious toleration, freedom of expression etc., are to be regarded as the West’s deepest values from which the contemporary Muslim World is permanently excluded on account of its own deepest cherished values that are antithetical to the core to liberalism, secularism, democracy and the rest. The interesting irony in all this is that the Islamists find themselves in full agreement not only with Huntington’s basic thesis but with its theoretical implications and practical applications, as well. Their theoreticians and ideologists also reduce civilisations to culture, cultures to religion and religions to inherently incompatible archetypal constants that vie, clash and struggle with and against each other. For them, Islam will emerge triumphant in the end. To relieve temporarily the harshness of the clash of civilisations thesis, President Khatami of Iran called for a dialogue of civilisations instead. The President’s main concern, here, is naturally a dialogue between Islam and the West in general and Iran and the United States in particular. Is Khatami sincere or hypocritical in his call? In the long run he is hypocritical, because the Islamist version of the Huntingtonian logic to which he is strategically committed, requires a clash of civilisations and the ultimate triumph of his own. In the short run he is sincere because dialogue is not a bad momentary tactic for the much weaker side in this confrontation. I think the clash of civilisations between Islam and the West is already there in the weak and normal senses of clash, but is not about to happen in the strong and more dramatic meanings of the term. Islam is simply too weak to sustain in earnest any challenges and/or confrontations that are seriously threatening to an obviously triumphant West. In fact, contemporary Islam does not even form a ‘civilisation’ in the active, enactive and effective senses of the term. It may be said to form a civilisation only 184

Islam, Terrorism, and the West Today

in the historical, traditional, passive, reactive and folkloric senses and no more. The two supposedly clashing sides are so unequal in power, military might, productive capacity, efficiency, effective institutions, wealth, social organisation, science, technology etc. that the clash can only be of the inconsequential standard sort. For, as a literary metaphor says: If the egg falls on (clashes with) a stone the egg breaks and if the stone falls on (clashes with) the egg then the egg breaks too. This is why from the ArabMuslim side of the divide, the West seems to discerning eyes so powerful, so efficient, so successful, so unstoppable as to make the very idea of an ultimate ‘clash’ seem fanciful. As for the current problems, difficulties, tensions, suspicions, confrontations and enmities that characterise the relationships of Islam to the West, they are part of the normal affairs of history, power politics, international relations and the pursuit of vital interests. They are certainly not affairs either of the pure spirit, or of mere clashes of religious ideas, or of conflicting theological interpretations or of mere matters of beliefs, values, images and perceptions.

185

Copyright 2014. Gerlach Press. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or applicable copyright law.

11

Ground Zero Revisited While trying to follow, at great distance, the news and sharp controversies about the project to construct an Islamic Center and Mosque near Ground

Zero in New York City, another telling occurrence deflected my attention in the direction of Washington, DC.

On August 28, 2010 a host of right-wing Americans, neo-

conservative crowds and Tea Party USA multitudes demonstrated at the

Lincoln Memorial in the American capital in favor of “American Dignity

Restored” and implicitly against that part of the country that had elected a black President for the first time ever, with a Muslim for a father and a

Hussein for the obligatory American middle name. The demonstration took

place exactly where the American civil rights leader, Martin Luther King, had delivered his famous “I Have a Dream” speech 47 years ago to the day.

Liberal and Civil Rights America was appalled at such tactics, timing

and protestations regarding the whole affair as a deliberate provocation of and an intended affront to the best in American values in general and to America’s blacks and its other ethnic minorities in particular.

187

Is Islam Secularizable?

At this point, I thought to myself: Is not the same logic of provocation and affront applicable to the Muslim construction project and Mosque in the Ground Zero zone? I do not want to answer the question simplistically. Obviously, the intention of the New York project is forgiveness and reconciliation and not just to insist no matter what on exercising, in a certain way, the constitutional right guaranteeing to all Americans the freedoms of religion, conscience, worship and expression. At the same time, it is no less clear that the intention behind the Tea Party USA demonstration in Washington, DC is out and out provocation, at least to all those who hold dear the memory of Martin Luther King’s speech and the epochal shift it triggered in American life. I say this with all due respect to the inalienable right of all people to assemble, congregate, demonstrate and express themselves and their grievances peacefully. In my estimation, the Ground Zero Muslim construction project shows, at its best, lack of tact, inconsiderate approaches and bad “live and let live” strategies and tactics. This can only be of great disservice to a religious minority, like the Muslims, in a country such as the USA where the disabling backlash phenomenon is pervasive, powerful and so well known. At its worst, the project is open to charges of gratuitous provocation, bad faith, and hypocrisy. So, all in all I am for moving the Center and Mosque to another and more suitable location in New York City to prove good faith and honourable intentions. In any case the organizers and financial backers of the project have already made so many concessions to the opposition as to render the whole idea pointless. For example, they agreed to change the name of the Center from the telltale “Cordova House” to the utterly bland street address of “Park 51”. They denied that they are building a mosque in the first place. And they reassured everyone concerned that no casual passer-by would recognize the Center for what it is from its outside appearance. In other words, no minarets and no revealing Islamic architectural or decorative features. Given these demeaning and humiliating concessions, it would be 188

Ground Zero Revisited

more dignified to relocate the Center to a spot where there will be no need to conceal its identity in such a ridiculous manner. Furthermore, the Muslim and Arab Worlds do not have much to show on matters of freedom of religion, conscience, worship and freeexpression, neither officially nor at the popular level. The current despicable plan of the small evangelical Florida Church to burn copies of the Koran on the occasion of remembering the 9/11 destruction and victims should not be a warning only but should also critically remind us of the recent Muslim resurrection of the Medieval rituals of book burning (and people burning as well) when they put to the torch, in view of the whole world, copies of Salman Rushdie’s novel, The Satanic Verses, most spectacularly in Bradford, England. It should be a critical reminder to all as well, that it was Muslims who dynamited the historical Bamiyan Buddha statues in Afghanistan, not so long ago, in the name of Islam. Regrettably, no authoritative voice, either institutional, individual or personal, in the whole Arab and Muslim Worlds condemned that act of monumental desecration and vandalism directed at the Sacred of another living world-historical religion and its faithful adherents. In the nineties of the last century, Salman Rushdie’s novel, The Satanic Verses, was accused of having deeply hurt the feelings of a billion and a half Muslims. No doubt, any present day ritualistic public burnings of copies of the Koran (in the US or anywhere else for that matter) would constitute a grave injury and a provocative insult to the world’s billion and a half Muslims. Still, at the time of the demolition of the Bamiyan Buddhas no voices were heard in the Arab and Muslim Worlds speaking out either against that savage assault on the Sacred, or against the hurting and insulting of the religious feelings of the world’s two billion or so Buddhists and Hindus or in favor of the historical importance, artistic value and religious significance of the destroyed monuments. 189

Is Islam Secularizable?

Obviously, Muslims are as adept at selectively and arbitrarily using and abusing double and triple standards as the West is Islamically accused to be. So, the usual Muslim self-righteous uprightness is very much out of place, here. Perhaps, at least American Muslims should heed the Arab piece of wisdom saying: “He who lives in a glass house does not throw rocks at other people.”

190

Copyright 2014. Gerlach Press. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or applicable copyright law.

12

The Arab Spring: “Why Exactly at this Time?” “Why exactly at this time?” Such is the classic question raised by conspiracy theorists – with apparent nervousness, offering the most surreal interpretations – the moment any remarkable event occurs in the Arab or Islamic world. Though I did not expect to live long enough to witness it, what has truly been remarkable during these days of the Arab Spring – popular, peaceful, civil, and urban uprisings against despotic Arab regimes – has been that the parties which have rushed with intense anxiety and unmistakable panic to take refuge in conspiracy theorizing have been the despotic regimes themselves. Conspiracy theorizing was decidedly not indulged in by the masses themselves – masses which we intellectuals had always thought of as enamored, sometimes to the point of dementia, of conspiracy theorizing, and as the prisoners of their naivete and oversimplifications. The contrast was particularly remarkable after the incessant efforts of the tyrannical and coercive regimes that had worked so hard to present themselves as the loci of the most rational, enlightened, inclusive, patriotic, and civilized tendencies in Arab societies plagued by sectarian, ethnic, tribal, and regional divisions, divisions that had always reinforced their 191 AN: 1781609 ; Azm, Sadiq Jalal.; Is Islam Secularizable? : Challenging Political and Religious Taboos

Is Islam Secularizable?

backwardness and anachronism.The usual assumptions about enlightenment and backwardness were suddenly upended by the popular uprisings from Tunisia to Yemen, Egypt, Syria, Bahrain, Libya, and so on. Now we saw those very “enlightened” Arab regimes, at the moment of truth, clinging mechanically, repetitively, and neurotically to the lie of a “conspiracy”, and persisting against all odds with the Kafkaesque absurdities of their delirious logic – the logic contained in the original question, “Why exactly at this time?” The Arab Poet had a ready answer to that question: “Exactly at this time because it is in the nature of such regimes’ tyranny to render the people ‘incapable of avoiding evil until it afflicts them,’ and ‘incapable of handling their affairs save through make-do measures’.” Naturally, this answer neither uncovers any real conspiracy, nor offers any serious or even semi-serious answer to the question, “Why exactly at this time?” What it merely does is to vilify the autonomy of the insurgent and sacrificial masses, casting insidious doubt on their capacity for selfgovernment, and offering some twisted insinuations as to its mental, political, and patriotic capacities. The suggestion is that secret, nefarious wills and covert, harmful intentions lie behind the mass uprising, the essence of which is unknown, while the danger to the nation and its unity from this uprising are beyond comprehension, except by the “trustworthy hands” preserving the old regime and its security, state, and authority. The result is to weld the requirements for the preservation of a tyrannical regime with the requirements of the people’s security, so that the survival of the one depends inextricably on that of the other. But the masses of protesters, dissidents, and rebels among the people of the Arab Spring had another sort of answer to the question, “Why exactly at this time?” No answer to the question was more eloquent than the outcry provoked by the young lawyer who trembled with elation as he wound joyfully through the streets of the Tunisian capital: “The Tunisian people are free!” It was an outcry followed throughout the world, in sound and 192

The Arab Spring: “Why Exactly at this Time?”

in image. In other words, the Jasmine Revolution came at this exact time because the Tunisian people are free, and not because they were the victims of any conspiracy. Not that that answer diminishes the eloquent response of the old Tunisian gentleman we all saw on television, tugging at his gray hair, and expressing regret for the years he had lost: “We grew old, we grew old for this historical moment” – a moment that came too late both for us and for him, but fortunately came before it was too late for everyone. There was also a third eloquent answer, in sound and in image. “Why exactly at this time?” Because the people wanted to overthrow the regime oppressing them in order jointly to save the nation and the people – and not in submission to the dictates of the foolish and belittling conspiracy asserted by the likes of President Ali Abdullah Saleh of Yemen, according to whom the mass uprising was hatched at the White House and directed from Tel Aviv. Some have argued that the Arab Spring uprisings in Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen, Bahrain, Syria, Libya, and elsewhere are a continuation of the popular Islamic Revolution in Iran against the Shah’s tyranny (1979), or perhaps an imitation of the overwhelming popular democratic movement that toppled the military dictatorship of Suharto in Indonesia (199798), or an extension of the millions-strong Lebanese Cedar Revolution of 2005, which purged Lebanon of the bitter tutelage of Syrian military domination, or an imitation of the Green Movement in Iran, opposing the fraud of its presidential “elections” guaranteeing victory for the regime’s candidate Ahmadinejad (2009). Others mention in this regard the massive peaceful, popular movement that toppled Philippine dictator Ferdinand Marcos and his wife Imelda in 1986 in favor of a new and more acceptable democratic rule. These assumptions and hypotheses, while entirely respectable, give insufficient attention to the Damascus Spring of 2000 in its specifically Arab context.1 193

Is Islam Secularizable?

It is the Damascus Spring which represents, in my opinion, the “theoretical introduction” and initial peaceful “dress rehearsal” for the later explosion of slogans, demands, complaints, appeals, aspirations, and sacrifices that arose during the Arab intifadas of 2010-2011. The pioneering precedent in the Arab context derives from the Damascus Spring because the collective slogans, demands, and protests invoked by the popular Arab uprisings from Tunisia to Yemen to wounded Libya were all present, in a very sophisticated manner, in the political, reformist, and critical documents issued by the Movement for the Restoration of Civil Society in Syria during the brief Damascus Spring. These documents were the subject of public democratic discussion through a wide range of lectures, seminars, debates, fora, and meetings which dominated Syria during that period, offering a wide variety of theses, competing views, criticism, and journalistic ferment. The hope was that the new youthful leadership of Syria would participate in this lively and refreshing activism, and make its contribution through debate toward forming an inclusive form of public opinion concerning Syria’s need for immediate remedies, intermediary reforms, and political solutions for the more distant future. For example, the Statement of the 99 Intellectuals (Charter 99, Damascus, September 30, 2000) and the Founding Document of the Committees for the Revival of Civil Society, known as the “Document of the One Thousand” (Damascus, January 2001), as well as the Statement of the Forum of the Supporters of Civil Society (Damascus, August 2002), all deal accurately with and concisely diagnose the issues, dilemmas, difficulties, and gaps that caused Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Yemen, Syria, and Bahrain to rise up in the name of freedom and dignity in 2010-2011. It is true that none of the aspirations of the Damascus Spring came to fruition. Indeed, quite the opposite: the authorities suffocated the Spring’s discussions gradually, killing them off before any of its flowers could blossom. The Damascus Spring was suppressed because it explicitly brought light to the accumulating crises in the country without having had a hand in creating them; because it explicitly touched on the stagnation and gridlock 194

The Arab Spring: “Why Exactly at this Time?”

which plagued the Syrian regime, without having had a hand in bringing them about; and because it responded clearly to the general deterioration of Syrian society, without having produced any of it. The great strength of the Damascus Spring consisted in its having reacted to intractable problems in the knowledge that its participants were not responsible for having brought them about. For these very reasons, and “exactly at this time”, precious blood has been shed in Syria’s cities, towns, and villages, not because the protesting masses have been implementing a nefarious foreign plot to undermine the stability and strength of their country, but for precisely the reverse reason. The fear is that there is a policy of official, willful blindness about all of this, and that a security-based solution will consistently be sought for each protest and demonstration, treating its peaceful, popular demands as subversion, rebellion, treachery, and betrayal. This has deepened an already deep rift between the ruling regime and Syrian society from which there is no escape in the foreseeable future. Policies that drive this divide will lead to generalized sectarian strife and factionalism that wax and wane in cycles of concealed repression and outward explosion. The current Arab Spring intifadas have been called “youth revolutions” and “high-tech revolutions” on account of their reliance on such instant communication and electronic information technologies as mobile phones, laptop computers, satellite television, the Internet, or even more specifically, Facebook, Twitter, and You Tube-technologies geared to monitoring events moment by moment, around the clock. This enormous qualitative shift has played a decisive role in favor of the insurgent people, and has helped strengthen the movement’s character as skillful, well-informed, and fundamentally peaceful, educated in the latest achievements in communications technology, information exchange, and the social transmission of knowledge. At the same time, this technological shift has put the old Arab regimes and their security apparatuses in an awkward position, as they lack the techniques by which to deal with the emerging situation, except to seek cover in the supposed uniqueness of each 195

Is Islam Secularizable?

Arab country, asserting the illegitimacy of what is happening in this Arab country as against the possible legitimacy of what is happening in that one. Suddenly, each despotism insists that it is the sui generis exception to the rules that govern its Arab neighbors. And so, each official Arab government spokesman claims that Egypt cannot be likened to Tunisia, that Libya cannot be likened to Egypt or Tunisia, that Syria is neither Tunisia, nor Egypt, nor Libya… And yet the fact is, in these revolutionary times, Egypt was never more similar to Tunisia, Bahrain, and Libya. Just as the insurgent citizen of Bahrain wants reform that provides him with a constitutional monarchy and a Prime Minister who is appointed not by the Royal Palace but by the actual balance of forces in the political arena, so the insurgent Egyptian and Syrian citizen wants, in his turn, a reform that provides him with a genuine constitutional president of a republic, a Prime Minister who is not appointed by Presidential fiat, but by the democratic political processes of his or her country. The truth is that Arabs have never felt their political affinities – the similarities in the challenges they face and aspirations they share – as keenly as they have today. Nor have the police states of the Arab world ever been as similar as they have been during the Arab Spring, unified in their commitment to despotism and oppression. A note of caution ought to be made about the desire to reduce the Arab Spring’s revolutions, especially those in Tunisia and Egypt, merely to the use of high-tech communications. It is people who make revolutions and intifadas. It is people who demonstrate, protest, object, and sacrifice, using whatever technology is available to them. It is true that the youth constitute the largest demographic in the Arab population, so it is no surprise that the intifadas of our people now tend to be revolutions of young men and women, and likewise unsurprising that they use modern technologies to bring them about – just as previous revolutions and uprisings made use of the audio cassette, radio, transistor, newspaper, pamphlet, and newsletters. (During Nasser’s times, there were the “Voice of the Arabs” radio broadcasts; even messenger pigeons were at times used to achieve revolutionary goals.) 196

The Arab Spring: “Why Exactly at this Time?”

But we ought not to let the fascination with technology obscure the real character of the present uprisings. The youthfulness of the uprisings broke radically with the deep-rooted Arab tradition, which requires the emergence of charismatic leadership behind which the revolutionary masses march, charismatic leadership being the necessary condition for the achievement of revolutionary goals. This time, the “charisma” of the revolutionary moment has shifted from the usual fixation on a single or unrivaled leader to the flow and diffusion of the assembled masses in many Tahrir Squares across the Arab world, making their assembly itself the true charismatic locus of revolution and change. This important development is certainly new for us Arabs and for our modern socio-political history. For this reason, and perhaps for the first time, the various “Tahrir Squares” of Tunisia, Cairo, Sana’a, Manama, and Benghazi were characterized by intense civil participation by women, and by the visible presence of children – both boys and girls – and this in extremely conservative societies and cities. In addition, the demonstrations were characterized by innovative forms of aesthetic and other expression – various forms of art, music, performances, plays, dances, balloons, prayers, satire, sarcasm, and graffiti. Generally, this found joyful expression, despite the wholesale use by the entrenched regimes of aggressive thugs, deadly militias, indiscriminate repression, and live ammunition. There was, despite this, something of a carnivalesque spirit and practice in the packed squares of the Arab Spring, something certainly unheard of in modern Arab political history. Such innovative youthful phenomena were foreign to the usual mode of Arab political protest, which had previously inclined to the severely cruel, the intensely grim, and the immensely angry, as expressed by aggressive screaming, conflagrations of books, flags, and other objects, attacks on foreign embassies, and constant threats of violence and intimidation. In fact, most of the uglier manifestations of violence were confined, for the first time, to the despotic regimes themselves and their agents of repression – thugs, militias, and “trustworthy hands”. The “mark” one saw on their faces bespoke servile prostration, venality, and blind loyalty. 197

Is Islam Secularizable?

In fact, the regimes behaved with great cunning in adopting narrow, destructive, and self-interested domestic policies whose basic objective was the destruction of all prospects and possibilities for civil society. Typically, they confronted the population with an irresolvable trilemma: either (1) allow the continuation of the despotic regimes, with their martial law, their permanent states of emergency, and their security apparatuses; or (2) accept the dark rule of Islamic fundamentalism, out to cancel modern history in the name of God’s hakmiyya (divine sovereignty), and eager to impose the Islamic form of martial law called Islamic sharia, with its notoriously brutal penal code; or (3) accept the inevitable vertical disintegration of our societies along sectarian, ethnic, regional and/or tribal lines, with all that this means in terms of discord, strife, and war. The point was to restrict the possible options so as to force on the population a politics of “the lesser evil” – option (1) being the presumptively least evil of the three.2 The goal was to force the people’s submission to the despotic status quo, whatever the cost. Brother Leader Colonel Muammar al-Qaddafi took this further by adopting a kind of Samson option: either me . . . me . . . me . . . and my family and children remain in power, or I bring the Libyan national temple down on our heads.3 The charismatic moment of the Arab Spring uprisings exhibited a high degree of maturity that succeeded in transcending the alarmist scenarios promoted and put into practice by the entrenched Arab regimes. The popular intifadas transcended this disabling trio of options – transcended it in principle – through their transparent civility, collective citizenship, open patriotism, tolerant humanism, and nascent democracy. In fact, the very effort required to transcend the evil options, along with the work carried out on behalf of the animating values of the popular movement, contained within them the capacity to bind together the pre-national loyalties, sects, allegiances, and regionalisms that still divide Arab society. This same political energy should also provide the capacity to deal properly with democracy and its constitutional and electoral mechanisms so as to prevent any elected majority from turning once again into a power-monopolizing 198

The Arab Spring: “Why Exactly at this Time?”

tyranny intent on imposing yet another despotism on the country. The political minority’s right to exercise its role as a democratic opposition, and its right to reconstitute itself democratically into a new ruling majority, have become permanent features of Arab political psychology. This energy should likewise help to secure greater empowerment for civil society, as well as the rules and conventions for participating in it; to ensure the expansion of the civil state, along with the neutrality of its agencies, posts, regulations, and procedures (including the principles of the separation of powers and independence of the judiciary); to guarantee a minimum level of respect for human rights, for both male and female citizens, and all of their personal and public rights, chief among them the rights of conscience, thought, belief, expression, and the right to worship or not to. If glory goes to the youth Muhammad al-Bouazizi for sparking the Jasmine Revolution in Tunisia by immolating himself (and not others) in protest, and if glory goes to the Egyptian youth Khalid Said, who died under torture after the notorious security services arrested him before the spark of the uprising moved to the roundabouts and squares of Egypt, then surely the glory of sparking the Syrian intifada goes to the boys of Dera’a who had their nails pulled out and palms burned with fire after being arrested.4

199

Copyright 2014. Gerlach Press. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or applicable copyright law.

13

Civil Society and the Arab Spring Through this discussion of the Arab civil society question and the Arab Spring, I hope to be able to shed some light on the nature of the upheavals that have suddenly hit a number of key Arab countries – after a long period of stagnation and decay – and shed light also on the recent historical background and social context of what has come to be known as the Arab Spring. The commotion over “civil society” and “civil government” heated up and asserted its immediacy and relevance in the mid-seventies of the last century – particularly in Egypt, Syria and Lebanon, with important contributions coming from North African thinkers and intellectuals; the most famous instance being the “debate” and exchange of letters between two very prominent Arab thinkers and public intellectuals1, one in Morocco and the other one in Egypt on the topic of secularism in the Arab World. Since the term “secularism” in Arabic got associated with atheism and anti-clericalism, the term “civil” gained dominance as a euphemism for secularism, for a secular form of government, for a mild kind of separation of state, power politics and law, on the one hand, from Islam as a faith and religion, on the other. 201

Is Islam Secularizable?

In the middle of the seventies of the last century, particularly after the October War of 1973, between Israel on one side and Egypt and Syria on the other, it became evident that the earlier Arab politicocultural consensus of nationalism, populism and Arab Socialism put together and presided over by President Nasser of Egypt had broken down catastrophically and dissipated. Naturally, various forms of Islam, Islamism and Jihadism rushed in to fill the resulting political and cultural vacuum. At the time, it seemed that the only acting agents in key Arab societies, particularly in Egypt and Syria, were the military regimes with their martial law and state of siege condition, on the one side, and armed insurrectionary Islam with its demands for the immediate application of Shari’a law (the martial law of the Islamists) and their powerful slogan, then, “Islam is the solution”, on the other. It was at this critical juncture that the concepts and practices of “civil society” and “civil government” imposed themselves as the only practical way out of that destructive dead lock. This is the occasion on which the Arab concerns and discourses on “civil society” and “civil government” intensified and were felt to be a most urgent and pressing matter for avoiding worst case scenarios. The working definition of “civil society”, then, took the form of two negatives: a society of equal citizens run and managed neither by martial law authorities nor by Shari’a law Islamists à la Iran. The working definition of a civil government said at the time: a government that is positively neutral vis à vis the religions, sects, confessions, and ethnicities that make up the people of countries like Iraq, Syria and Lebanon, for example. In the continuing Arab concerns over these issues, the concept of “civil society” is not only a descriptive category, but has for us, and especially at present, a critical content and a political cutting edge. This is why John Locke, Hegel, Marx and Antonio Gramsci figure so prominently in these discussions and are quoted and re-quoted as focal reference points for validation and persuasion. 202

Civil Society and the Arab Spring

By the mid-eighties of the last century, I can say a new quasiconsensus had emerged concerning the way out of the impasse that had been reached between the oppression of the militaristic state, on the one hand, and the random violence of the Islamist and Jihadist opposition, on the other. This quasi-consensus embraced the notion of “civil society” plus a number of allied values and practices usually attendant on it such as the primacy of citizenship, some respect for human rights, something of an independent judiciary and a more attentive attitude to things like civil rights and liberties. This new consensus flowered for the first time politically and in practice in the short-lived Damascus spring of 2000-2002 and in the important documents it produced and propagated, in the civil society movement it sparked and in its “Charter 99” declaration (named after the famous civic initiative in communist Czechoslovakia known as Charter 77, 1976-1992). All of which formed a kind of prelude and dress rehearsal for the later outburst of the Arab Spring, its aspirations, values, demands and slogans. A fundamental distinction drawn by the civil society movement is between “civil society” on top and “Ahly society” below. Ahly society is characterized by the primacy of primordial relations, and forms of social organization such as kinship, blood ties, clan, tribe village, ethnicity, religious sect and so on, each with its “Asabiyya”. The concept of Asabiyya comes from Ibn Khaldun and is usually translated as “group solidarity”. But the term “Solidarity” is too weak really for our purposes here, as it fails to communicate the powerful charge of fanaticism and intransigence that needs to be added to the English “solidarity” before approximating the Arabic “Asabiyya”. Historically Arab civil societies emerged slowly out of Ahly society and tend to float on top of the latter. The main agency for this emergence has been the modern colonial and post-colonial state, with modern legislation and law acting as effective forces of socio-economic change and 203

Is Islam Secularizable?

modernization. As is well noted, in civil society ties of a primordial kind tend to erode and get diluted in favor of more utilitarian approaches and forms of social interaction. I mention all this, because the Muslim Brothers and Islamists in the Arab world willfully obfuscate this distinction by speaking and acting as if civil society is all society, especially in places like Egypt and Syria. Thus, intentionally absorbing back whatever civil society now exists on top into the deep sea of Ahly society below. For Ahly society is the political province proper of Islamism and Islamists, as this is where their popular constituencies and sources of strength really reside. This is why they speak loudly and accept firmly democracy as majority rule but fall completely silent on democracy as minority rights. In this sense, “the return of Islam” may be seen as Ahly society lashing back at this thing in the making that we call Arab civil society and its novelties via organizations and instruments like the Muslim Brothers Gama’a and its sisters and offshoots. For the Arab martial law regimes, the very mention of the word “civil” is anathema, as the first association that comes to the mind of an Arab when the word “civil” is mentioned (Madani, from the median) is: “not military”. These regimes have intentionally worked on fragmenting whatever civil society we may have achieved in countries like Iraq and Syria, and fragment it along the lines of the primordial divisions of Ahly society by energizing the latent “Asabiyyas” of those divisions. All in order to render any kind of popular organized opposition unthinkable. This is why the Damascus Spring and its civil society movement were so swiftly and brutally crushed. In the end, both military rule and Islamic Shari’a law rule use abuse and instrumentalize Ahly society for their own purposes and interests and they do it always at the expense of emerging civil society and in ways detrimental to civil society. Let me add here that thinking of Arab civil society in terms of the way out of the impasse of the martial law state pitted against the Shari’a law violent opposition and as a mediating autonomous and relatively neutral 204

Civil Society and the Arab Spring

sphere between Ahly society and its fissures and Asabiyyas, on the one hand, and the militaristic state, on the other, is akin to the way European theoreticians and philosophers accounted, once upon a time, for “civil society” as a sphere of human activity, interaction and relations which is neither the province of the traditional private household nor the province of the modern state with its increasing public functions. Hegel identified this new sphere with “bourgeois society” tout court. While Durkheim understood it in terms of a new division of labor between the public sphere of the state per se and the private sphere of the household as such, regarding the whole new arrangement as distinctive of modern Europe. Gramsci would have thought that a vibrant civil society is the best protection and guarantee against a grab of power by the more regressive elements and forces in society. In current Western discussions of civil society, the emphasis is on NGOS, voluntary associations, churches, mosques, clubs, charities, selfhelp groups, professional associations, trade unions, various interest groups and so on, all as the decisive constituents of the meaning of civil society. For example, in his work on civil society in the Middle East, Augustus R. Norton of Boston University gives the following definition of civil society: Civil society is the mélange of autonomous associations, guilds, unions, interest groups, clubs, social institutions and political parties which provide a buffer between the individual and the power of the state.2

This definition is too static and too mature for giving an accurate account of the civil societies that are still in the making in the Arab World. Many of the elements mentioned in Norton’s definition tend to be more a part of Arab Ahly society rather than civil society proper. Furthermore, Norton’s definition overlooks completely the critical content in our use of the concept of civil society and blunts its political cutting-edge. Basing himself on this kind of conception of civil society, the Dartmouth University anthropologist Dale Eickelman goes very far in his enthusiasm for proving (against Western skeptics like Ernest Gellner) that civil society does really 205

Is Islam Secularizable?

exist in Middle Eastern countries. Eickelman goes so far as to affirm that under the Buyid dynasty of 10th and 11th century Iraq and Iran a vibrant civil society existed and functioned. For Eickelman, also, civil society is equivalent to the presence of institutions, autonomous from the state, which maintain orderly economic and political relations depending on forms of informal association and so on.3 Carrying the concept of civil society as we understand and promote it now all the way back to 10th and 11th century Iraq and Iran is a gross abuse of the term that renders the idea of civil society totally useless for present Arab purposes. The grand divisions of classical Islamic society were free vs. slave, Muslim vs. non-Muslim, man vs. woman and plebian vs. patrician. Does it make sense to speak of “civil society” under the reign of such ancient social divisions and classifications? Again, if 10th and 11th century society in Iraq and Iran is to be seriously described as “civil society” then what is so hot and so novel about this thing we call “civil society” in the Arab World? Why all the commotion? Why all the sound and fury? We may as well have stayed where we were in the 10th century as Arabs and Iranians. Add to that the silent implication that our history is incapable of producing anything genuinely new on this score and which is not simply the continuation of what once existed in some classical phase of history or period of time. Here, Norton and Eickelman show themselves to be good salafis in wanting to justify the present by invoking continuity with the deep past and by calling for support on the presumed longevity of what we have had and what we are today. As an Arab, I understand that in highly atomized Western societies, it would be natural to think of civil society in term of NGOs, clubs, churches, mosques, voluntary associations of all kinds, as these tend to bring the separate social atoms together and promote a sense of community. But this is not a big problem at all in Arab and Middle Eastern societies. For example, what is most interesting and crucial for the promotion of civil society in the Arab World is the idea and practice of “citizenship” which takes the form of a movement from Sunni to citizen, from ethnic minority 206

Civil Society and the Arab Spring

to citizen, from ‘Alawi, Druzi, Ismaili to citizen, from woman as a ‘Awra (something shameful to be hidden and covered) in Ahly society to woman as an equal citizen of civil society. All this is absent in Norton’s definition of civil society, while it all becomes quite absurd transporting this baggage back to 10th century Iraqi and Iranian societies, à la Eickelman. In other words, it is best to confess from the outset that the struggle for a functioning civil society in the Arab World is neither a restoration of something that was once there nor an extension of it, but the instituting of something genuinely new where, for example, the old merchant classes and Bazari types of Ahly society are transformed into something resembling a modern bourgeoisie. For purposes of contrast and comparison, let me note that when the Muslim Brothers organization or Gama‘a (as they insist on calling themselves) was first formed in the late twenties of the last century, they purposely and intentionally anchored themselves in the pre-civil, precitizen identities of the Egyptian people. This practice continues to the present moment. Let me note also, that towards the end of the cold war, the bulk of the Arab left – including most communist parties – became the most ardent and eloquent defenders of civil society, its role and the kind of programs and practices attendant on the idea. This was not a purely opportunistic move on the part of the big segment of the left, but a retreat to the second line of defense against what that left saw as the creeping medievalism of the Islamists, Jihadists and Taliban types, on the one hand, and the oppression of the martial law states we have lived under, on the other. Now, I can say that in its prime, the Arab Spring was the finest hour of the various youthful Arab civil societies on hand from Tunis, to Cairo, to San‘a, to Benghazi, to Manama but not to Damascus where the Tahrir Square experience proved impossible. Above all, the Tahrir Square masses defeated the dynastic principle of Arab presidents passing power to their offspring and secured, in principle, the victory of the democratic idea of the 207

Is Islam Secularizable?

electoral circulation of power, all encapsulated in the shout “La tamdeed, la tajdeed, la tawrith” reverberating throughout the Arab World’s Tahrir Squares, which translated freely says: A big NO to the mechanical extension of the president’s term of power, and another big NO to the automatic renewal of the president’s tenure in power, and a still bigger NO to the Arab presidents’ irrepressible desire to pass power to their sons and relatives. In other words, down with the republic of cousins in the Arab World. In this, various Arab civil societies finally found their voice and are busy asserting it. Conspicuously absent from the Arab Spring and from its Tahrir Squares and revolutionary forces were the traditional cries, slogans, demands and banners of good old Arab nationalism, especially as we have known them during their heyday in the early post-colonial era of the last century and after. So, just as no banner was raised anywhere from Tunis, to Cairo, to Tripoli, to San‘a and to Homs, Syria, saying “Islam is the Solution”, similarly, no banner was in sight either saying “Arab Unity is the Solution” or “Pan Arabism is the Solution”. All the Tahrir Square shouts, cries, demands, slogans and goals were typical civil society values and aspirations, they all centered on freedom, on rights, on dignity, integrity, democracy, transparency, equality and so on. I can say here that all this had been very carefully and systematically formulated, raised and presented in the documents produced by the Damascus Spring and its civil society movement. Most importantly, the Tahrir Square experiences showed how for the first time ever, the charisma of the revolutionary moment shifted from the usual Arab concentration on a single or unrivaled leader to the flow and diffusion of the assembled masses in those many Arab Tahrir Squares, making the congregation the true charismatic moment of the revolution and of change. 208

Civil Society and the Arab Spring

Indeed, it was a charismatic moment of collective self-assertion and speaking truth to power, heedless of the risks and dangers attendant on such a move. This important development is new for us Arabs, and for our modern social and political history. It is civil society’s main contribution to the moment. Thus, the Tahrir Squares in Tunis, Cairo, Sana‘a and Benghazi were all characterized by the immense participation of women and the visible presence of children, boys and girls; this, in extremely conservative societies and very prudish cities. Add to that the various forms of art, innovative types of expression, music, performances, songs, plays, dances, balloons, prayers, satirical cartoons, sarcastic comments and critical graffiti. Generally, all of that done with comfortable faces, despite the wholesale use of aggressive thugs, deadly militias, indiscriminate repression and live ammunition. Actually, there was a carnivalesque spirit and practice in all these packed squares, in the Bakhtinian sense of carnival mocking and deflating the pretensions of high power and oppression. All of which is certainly unheard of in the history of modern Arab political protest. It bears mention here that civility and tolerance were abnormally at their peak in these Tahrir Squares. I will cite one example: while Egypt has been known for a while now for Muslim-Christian confessional clashes, killings, church burnings and such, the Cairo Tahrir Square was the exact opposite throughout the 20 days it took to push President Mubarak out. During this charismatic moment, you could see Christian priests with their distinctive garb, hats and crosses conducting Coptic religious ceremonies, while right next to them an Imam leading rows of Muslims in prayer without a trace of tension or interference. Similarly, crowded Cairo is notorious for the harassment of women, still it has been noted that no case of sexual harassment was reported and no complaint raised throughout the Tahrir Square experience there. 209

Is Islam Secularizable?

It is interesting as well, that the Arab Spring revolutions did not raise the banners of “revolutionary legitimacy” to justify themselves or resort to “revolutionary justice” to deal with their foes as happened in Iran with the success of the Islamic Revolution there. The Arab Spring revolutions appealed, instead, to typical civil society concepts as “constitutional legitimacy” and to ordinary “due process of justice” to deal with their foes. This is a major break with a history of Arab military coups d’états that invariably designated themselves as “Revolutions” and that justified their seizure of power by appeal to “revolutionary legitimacy” and dealt with their foes in terms of special courts and extra judicial proceedings. In Syria, the Tahrir Square experience proved impossible because of the ferocity of the military repression. Still, the revolution there is accused of being spontaneous, leaderless and lacking in strategy. This is so, because here again the charismatic moment of the revolution saw a shift from the old leaderships of organized vanguard parties, inspired single leaders and unrivaled singular heroic personalities to the youthful local coordinating committees known as the Tansiqiyyat. It is these local coordinating committees that led and energized the street power of the revolution and are responsible for sustaining the on the whole civil and non-violent side of the uprising against military rule, martial law and the police state that Syria has been for the last half century. Given the spontaneity of these committees, still they have been able to knit themselves into a national network continually in touch with similar activists both in Syria and the Arab World as well as the wide world beyond, using with great expertise the most up-to-date electronic forms of communication to further their revolutionary agenda. They have been able, as well, to frustrate the military regime’s efforts to block and suppress the flow of information. They achieved that by sustaining a steady flow of real-time images and vital pieces of information on what was actually taking place on the ground all around the country and practically around the clock. On the military side, the fighting local equivalents of the coordinating committees, through their very dispersion all over Syria forced the regime’s 210

Civil Society and the Arab Spring

storm troops to spread themselves very thinly all over the country at the same moment, which led to their scattering and exhaustion, having to shuttle suddenly from Der‘a in the extreme south all the way up to the Turkish border in the north and then back again to the middle and south of the country once more. This is why we hear that a rural town like Der‘a was invaded, occupied and then evacuated by these storm troops at least 20 times during less than 15 months. As for the Free Army of Syria, I would like to remind all of us here that Europe and the United States did a lot of soul searching during the second half of the last century on the question of whether higher orders – especially higher military orders – do absolve those so commanded from responsibility for their actions. The defectors from the Syrian army (to form the Free Army of Syria) are spontaneously and without too much reflection living up to the norm that higher orders to commit crimes and atrocities do not in any way absolve those so commanded from responsibility for their actions and deeds. They live up to it by refusing superior orders to shoot at and bomb villages like their own villages, folks like their own folks and city quarters like their own city quarters. This is the ethical meaning both of their defection and of putting their life and the lives of their families and relatives at great risk by refusing to obey higher orders of this kind. We should thank our stars, as Syrians, that the Syrian army is still a conscription and people’s army and not a professional army. These officers and soldiers have my highest respect and deserve recognition and the greater respect of Europe and the West, in general. Still, to be noted here is that in post-revolutionary Egypt and Tunisia, the spirit and charisma of the Tahrir Square experiences are certainly not dead, but continue to struggle against great odds, to make a better future for the two countries. In fact, if only 20 to 30 percent of this spirit and charisma became routine in the ordinary life of these societies, then immense progress would have been undoubtedly achieved. 211

Is Islam Secularizable?

This should be evident from the fact that when newly elected President Mohamed Morsi of Egypt, impatient with the messy due process procedures of a democratic transitional stage towards stability and normalcy, arrogated to himself absolutist powers and immunities putting himself and his presidency beyond any accountability, half of Egypt suddenly erupted in anger at and protest against any hint of the possible reproduction of Egypt’s traditional despotism and despotic rulers, thus showing, in the process, that Egypt today is not just Muslim Brothers, Salafis, fundamentalists and religious fanatics but is also a crystallizing energetic civil society. This civil society eruption was so intense and pervasive that President Morsi quickly had to withdraw this absolutist decree and rush the other way to make sure his controversial draft of the constitution passed the plebiscite. In spite of the heavy Islamic rhetoric and Shari‘a justifications only a fraction of the electorate took part in the plebiscite and the draft of the constitution was approved by a rather insignificant margin, while Cairo returned a resounding NO to this constitution. In other words, for the first time ever the ruler of Egypt is denied a mandate to steer the country and run it as he sees fit. Certainly, an earth-shaking development in both past and present Arab politics from above and Arab politics from below. Again, it was civil society’s finest hour. I will end with some additional explanatory remarks about the Arab Spring and the revolution in Syria: The Arab Spring simply means the return of politics to people and of people to politics after a very extended estrangement on account of a prolonged confiscation and monopolization of all politics in key Arab countries by small cliques of military elites and their cronies, especially their business cronies. In Syria, the Arab Spring is the popular attempt to retrieve the republic from the usurping military hereditary dynasty. A dynasty that declared itself “ila al-abad” – i.e., forever and to eternity and that is putting 212

Civil Society and the Arab Spring

in practice its motto “Asad or we incinerate al-balad” i.e., burn the country. Now, Asad’s scorched earth war-policies are on exhibit everywhere around the world. The point here is to put an end once and for all to “Suriya al-Asad” i.e., Asad’s Syria, and simply go forward to “The Republic of Syria” without any additional modifiers and/or qualifiers. On another note, the international system, at present, deals with Syria predominantly in terms of grand geopolitics, high strategy, great power conflicts of vital interests and so on, without much attention to the internal springs and dynamics of the revolution itself, something I am trying to emphasize. This approach is very palpable in the Western media as well. A segment of the left (Arab and international) buys into a version of this approach by seeing a universal Western imperialist plot or conspiracy against the only regime in the area that still stands up to Israel and remains a stumbling block in imperialism’s way to the total domination of the Middle East, its countries and resources. This way Syria and the revolt of its people are seen only as pawns in this grand game of nations, while the reality of long-term and mounting oppression is at best neglected and at worst dismissed as irrelevant. For example, when president Obama publicly and openly drew the red line at Asad’s use of chemical weapons, this was perceived in Syria and the Arab World in general as an extremely cynical way of saying to Asad: You can continue killing them with everything you have except chemical weapons. Still, when chemical weapons were actually used, Obama modified his red line to mean: “Systematic and extensive use of chemical weapons” and not just the mere use of chemical weapons. Similarly, the international dealings with and discourses over Syria expressed a lot of concern over the minorities of the country and over their rights (Kurds, Christians, Alawis, Druzes, Ismailis, Turkomen, Syrcassians and so on). This, at a time when the Sunni Arab majority of the country is 213

Is Islam Secularizable?

getting a savage beating from the storm troops, militias and scud missiles of a small militarized minority that has an absolute monopoly on the power and wealth of the country. Now, all the villages, towns, cities, city quarters that have been bombed, destroyed and often raised to the ground are of the Arab Sunni majority. The minority communities, villages, towns and cities have remained fairly safe and relatively untouched until this moment. The absolute majority of the 100,000 or so killed so far, of the wounded, of the permanently impaired, of the disappeared and vanished, of the imprisoned and tortured are predominantly from among the Arab Sunni majority as well. The millions of Syrians who have become internal and external refugees, who are exiled and/or displaced persons are also of the Sunni majority. So, what is trampled underfoot in Syria right now, in this supposed grand game of nations, is the majority itself and its rights, about which no one seems to speak outside Syria. Add to that the silent – but false – assumption that the Sunni majority is just waiting for the right moment to attack the minorities of the country and to persecute and oppress them. Under these circumstances, all Syria now needs rights, protection, concern and attention and not just its minorities. Actually, this international discourse over Syria’s minorities and the protection of their rights at a time when the Sunni majority is under brutal attack and exposed to savage repression takes me back to the Europe of the 19th century and to what was then called the “Eastern Question” with its famous gunboat diplomacy, where every European power worth its salt, then, was searching for a minority in our part of the world to adopt and protect: France, the local Roman Catholics and Alawis. Russia, the local Greek Orthodox. Britain, the few local Anglicans and Protestants along with the Druze minority, and so on. I would not be exaggerating if I say that the militarized security agencies of Syria (the fearful Mukhabarat) saw themselves like an invincible granite block where anything that bumps into it crumbles to dust very quickly. The Syrian jailed intellectuals and prisoners of conscience have all testified, after their release, that after their detention the interrogating 214

Civil Society and the Arab Spring

and torturing officers would give them the following final advice: “Why do you bother to criticize, oppose and protest, when you know we are a solid invincible block with a will of steel that crushes anything and anyone that stands in its way. Go find something more profitable to do than to dabble with this kind of hopeless politics and opposition.” Now, the most important achievement of the Syrian revolution, so far, is to have reduced, at great sacrifice, this arrogant, insolent and merciless granite block to a shadow of itself, to a ghost of what it had thought of itself and its invincible powers, reduced to a trifle of what it once imagined itself and wanted others to imagine it. This is why Asad had to call in the Hizbollah militias from Lebanon and the paramilitary Shi’a organizations from Iraq and Iran to bolster his deteriorating position and weakening hold on the country. This is why, also, his storm troops, Hizbollah and the other fighting militias managed to occupy a small rural town like Qusair near Homs only after such an extended siege, in spite of their far superior numbers and their surplus of firepower. Here, I do not mean to make light of the growth of extremism and its dangers for Syria and its future, particularly religious extremism, but to emphasize that extremism, religious or otherwise, is not a one-sided affair in the Syrian situation. Of course, the longer Bashar Asad and his police state cling to power and continue to use their MiG and Sokhoi airplanes, their ballistic missiles and scuds against Syria’s population, its cities, villages, farms and forests, the greater the dangers of growing extremisms of all kinds, not least of which is religious extremism. For, in our societies, in moments of great peril, extreme danger and crisis people turn to God. This in turn brings solace and consolation, on the one hand, and it brings holy revenge, militant jihadism and desperate suicidism, on the other. The high-tension Islam that the Syrian Revolution is living through now promotes to no end the recruitment of Islamists, Muslim brothers, Jihadis, Talibanis and suicide bombers among Syria’s youth. Discourses about the need for stability and continuity in 215

Is Islam Secularizable?

a post-Asad Syria mean simply to decapitate the murderous system, by removing Bashar, but leaving the criminal police state beneath intact. We keep hearing all the time about how complicated, complex, sensitive and touchy the situation is in Syria. But, then, what is so complicated, complex, sensitive and touchy about a ruthless, highly militarized minoritarian regime manned and supported by a small minority sect using all the up-to-date heavy weapons of war available to crush the revolt of the country’s majority? This is why, also, it is incorrect and inaccurate to describe what is going on in Syria as a civil war. In the generalized civil war of Lebanon, the communities, sects, factions and fractions of the country attacked and fought each other very ferociously while the state pretty much helplessly stood by. In Syria, and contrary to the Lebanon model, the Druze are not about to attack their Sunni neighbors in Horan, nor are the Sunna preparing to invade Ismaili territories, nor are the Ismailis readying themselves to violently settle old scores with the Alawi community and so on. To be noted as well, is that in spite of the fact that the victims of the many massacres perpetrated in various parts of Syria were all Sunni, still, no massive retaliatory attacks against Alawi villages by Sunni villagers and/or soldiers were reported, although it is well known that many of the murderers came out from some of those Alawi villages. Extremism is almost always attributed to and associated with the opposition, but extremism and its evils are hardly ever attached or attributed to the regime itself, its storm troops and marauding militias, this, in spite of its obviousness. Whatever extremism comes out of the revolution, it remains hardly anything in comparison with the extremism of a regime and power bloc that showers its people with poison gas and chemical weapons.

216

Copyright 2014. Gerlach Press. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or applicable copyright law.

14

Trends in Arab Thought An Interview with Sadik Jalal al-Azm Saqr Abu Fakhr: You have stated that one of the errors of the Left was that it neglected the importance of civil society, democracy, human rights, secularism, and so on. At present, many are giving up the mantle of Marxism and enlisting in the ranks of the secularists as though they believed secularism could serve as a shield against religious fundamentalism [salafiyya]. Where do you believe we are heading in the near future? Sadik Jalal Al-Azm: I would add that secularism, as an issue, was always part and parcel of leftist thought, even though it was not announced or talked about for tactical reasons. The justification was that it drove away the masses, seeing that the masses are religious. Of course, I did not agree with that approach, but the leftist parties made their own calculations and developed their tactics accordingly. Secularism is a very important issue. Communism and capitalism have been at odds on almost everything, from music to dance and literature, even mathematics at times, but the one thing they agreed on is secularism. Following the collapse of the Communist regime in Poland, the church, 217

Is Islam Secularizable?

at its moment of victory, tried to curtail secularism, but this produced an immediate popular backlash in support of a secular society, institutions, and state; the public did not want a retreat from this minimal achievement, seeing that there can be no citizenship, no equality before the law, no democracy unless there is a secular civic society. In Poland, they realized that despite everything, Communism had performed a valuable service by secularizing society and the state, and they were not about to give up that tremendous historic achievement. In the Arab world today, critics of secularism deal with the issue in the most superficial way, saying that we do not need secularism because it is a European phenomenon that arose in a confrontation with the church, whereas there is no church in Islam, and so on. But look at India. The chief defender of a secular state is the Muslim minority there, because Hindu fundamentalists want to transform Muslims from citizens into dhimmis [protected minorities] by doing away with secularism and making India officially a Hindu state. The issue of secularism in India is not just a point of view, it is a matter of life or death. There is a measure of demagoguery among prominent Arab critics of secularism (who are secularists in everything that touches their personal, public, or professional daily lives). I find their attacks on secularism loathsome and hypocritical. I said that secularism is a precondition for democracy, by which I mean democracy for citizens, not sects, clans, or tribes. If they find the word “secularism” distasteful, fine, they can call it civil government [hukuma madaniyya], as Lebanon’s Shaykh Muhammad Mahdi Shams al-Din does. He has realized that there is no salvation for Lebanon in going back to sectarian “democracy”. I don’t want to get into a quarrel over words, but I do not think that democracy is possible in the absence of a minimal level of secular civil society that transcends sectarian, denominational, regional, or tribal affiliations, subordinating these to the values of citizenship. That is not to say that secularism is the magic solution for all problems; I feel I have to say this because we live in an age of putative cure-alls: Islam is the 218

Trends in Arab Thought

solution, democracy is the solution, revolution is the solution, secularism is the solution, and so on. I have proposed a definition for secularism, a sort of minimum common denominator: Secularism is the compulsory neutrality of the state and its institutions and agencies with regard to religions, sects, denominations, and ethnic categories which are constituents of the society in question. I propose this definition because secularism in the maximal sense is not a viable option at this time, and there is no point in making it part of the current discourse in the Arab world. The maximal or most extreme forms of secularism can become viable only at times of major revolutions, such as the French or the Bolshevik revolutions. The secularism of the Kemalist movement in Turkey lies somewhere in between, a bit less than midway between them. Needless to say, Nasserist secularism is weaker than Kemalist secularism. Abu Fakhr: Contemporary fundamentalist [salafiyya] movements see secularism as their true enemy. Do you feel the same way about neofundamentalism [al-salafiyya al-jadida]? Azm: It is a serious enemy, yes. My broad assessment of neotraditionalism [neosalafiyya] or Islamic fundamentalism is that it is a reaction more than a new creation. For example, take the emergence of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt in 1928. The 1919 revolution in Egypt brought about a new level of maturity and assertiveness both in the Egyptian bourgeoisie and Egyptian Islam, enabling them both to actualize their modernizing or reformist inclinations. Although the revolution failed, a widespread process of modernization did occur in Egypt between 1920 and 1930: Tal’at Harb and Bank Misr and all that. I see the emergence of the Muslim Brotherhood as part of the reaction to this kind of initiative or new trend in Arab life. Another way of understanding the phenomenon is to see the rise of the Brotherhood as a counter-reformation, given that reformations engender counter-reformations, and a certain degree of religious reform had taken place; many researchers compare Muhammad Abdu to Martin Luther. 219

Is Islam Secularizable?

One aspect of the retreat of religion from public life can be seen in the decolonization process. If we look at modern history starting from the turn of the century, we can detect a broad anticolonialist trend. Religious forms of resistance to colonialism are to be found in the classic examples of Libya and Algeria. Traditional forces fought against colonialism, they fought well, and heroes and role models were created. All the battles were fought in the steppes and deserts and untamed countryside. Yet the resistance failed in the end. In the next phase, the resistance moved to the cities and succeeded in the fight for independence. That is in itself an indication of the retreat of the role of religion in the confrontation with colonialism. Not a lessening of the power of religion as a mobilizing force – that is always there – but as an organizing force, as a movement, a leadership, as a source of ideas, goals, ideology, awareness. The new phase gave us Mustafa Kemal and Sa’d Zaghloul in place of Sulayman al-Halabi and the shaykhs of al-Azhar. It gave us political parties and the notion of citizenship and nationalism and the slogan: “Leave religion to God; let us all share one nation.” The phenomena of demonstrations, strikes, sit-ins, and the well-known forms of civil disobedience replaced the populist urban movements, rebellions, and riots. For another example of the diminishing role of religion, look at the educational system, which has been taken out of the hands of the men of religion and religious institutions and entrusted to a modern civil system. Look also at legislation and the judiciary, where the same process has been at work. On the subject of the judiciary, a real turning point in the development of these societies can be seen in the incident described by the historian al-Jabarti, who was astonished at the way the French authorities treated Sulayman al-Halabi, the young Syrian who assassinated General Kleber, Bonaparte’s successor in Egypt. The French soldiers did not cut the assassin into little bits in traditional Mamluk fashion, but gave him a genuine trial where he had every chance to defend himself in accordance with the conventions and procedures of modern French law. Al-Jabarti’s description far transcends the mere recording of his personal experiences, 220

Trends in Arab Thought

for the incident points to an entirely new historical direction in the life of Egypt and other Arab societies. The broad trend in the Arab world to make religion a private matter represents a retreat for the hegemony of religion over public life: The issue of faith and the observance of religious rites is now up to the individual, then the family. It has become common to find within the same family one religious daughter, an atheist son, and another daughter in between, as in Naguib Mahfouz’s novels. If we study the fundamentalist [usuli] movement very carefully, I believe we will discover it to be a reaction to these deep and fundamental changes. What does it mean when they demand a return to the application of the Islamic shari’a? It means that the shari’a is not being applied, which is true. In other words, Islamism is an attempt to recapture a situation which prevailed in the past, when Islamic societies were Islamic. What does this mean? It is a form of acknowledgement, a confession that the hegemony and control previously exercised by religion have retreated from public life in these societies in favor of something else. Islamism is trying to regain a position it has lost. In this sense, it is a reactionary and restoration movement in the true sense of both terms. The entire question of hisbah in Egypt,1 for example, was an attempt to strip the individual of his recently acquired right to decide freely in matters relating to religious faith and religious observance, or the lack thereof. This is the source of the Islamists’ hostility to secularism and democracy. Democracy assumes freedom of conscience and belief, which they reject. In the wake of the failure of the populist and leftist nationalist movement, they saw an opportunity to regain the position they think is theirs by right and belongs to their leaders and shaykhs. This is why they reject the greatest slogan of modern Arab history: “Leave religion to God; let us all share one nation”; hence their frank demand that the Copts be expelled from the Egyptian army. 221

Is Islam Secularizable?

There is one last point to be made concerning secularism. Turkey had fought a victorious war against its enemies. After the final collapse of the Ottoman Empire, Mustafa Kemal [Atatürk] was in a position to proclaim that the new state would be secular and that there would be a separation between state and religion. He could do this from the apex of victorious power, and do it officially, from the center of the former empire. However, in the peripheries of the old empire, i.e., in the Arab provinces, such a transformation was impossible because these provinces were extremely weak and divided. This is why Arab public life was secularized de facto, that is, through a string of successive and cumulative events, measures, developments, and transformations, without a public proclamation of secularism or a developed and clear and frank secular discourse to give expression to it. Arab secularism was a practical affair that occurred slowly and hesitantly, cautiously and timidly, compromising to the end. My personal conviction is that had Nasser officially announced the separation of state from religion at the time of the nationalization of the Suez Canal, it would have worked. Many things may have turned out differently, because that moment, in the Arab context, was similar to the moment of Atatürk’s victory over the invading armies of occupation that were trying to divide up his country. The fundamentalists believe this de facto secularization to be far more dangerous than Atatürk’s secularization because the latter had been frankly and clearly proclaimed, whereas Arab secularism came about through the infiltration of societies in a covert manner while the religious cover, in one form or the other, was maintained. Abu Fakhr: For some thirty years, through your writings, including A Critique of Religious Thought and The Taboo Mentality, you have always stirred up controversy, challenging what you saw as worn-out and antiquated barriers to progress and constraints on justice and freedom. How would you evaluate your intellectual odyssey at this point in time? Have you mellowed? Have you and other enlightened thinkers succeeded in digging channels for rationality and critical thought in the rigid Arab mentality? 222

Trends in Arab Thought

Azm: The most sweeping expectations have not been realized, but that is not to say there has been no cumulative progress – this is not purely a personal response, for I see myself as part of a trend that originated in the renaissance period (al-Nahda) through the birth of the literary, intellectual, and social critique that it unleashed. There has been some movement. The tendency has been in the direction of greater clarity, rationality, and objectivity and the scientific method. There is less oratory in prose, culture, and intellectual discourse; there is less concern with verbal embellishment and writing rhymed but empty prose, and so on. In all fairness to modern Arab thought, there has been a long series of books similar to A Critique of Religious Thought and other works of mine that have created local and at times pan-Arab controversies with echoes, on occasion, in the larger Islamic world or in Europe. As an Arab, I feel proud that the authors of those pioneering books were not forced to pay an exorbitant price for their positions and analyses. It is true that they were harassed and treated roughly, perhaps persecuted to some extent, yet – since Qasim Amin and for the duration of this century, except for Faraj Foda2, they did not pay with their lives for their courageous stands. In this sense their experiment bore fruit in the Arab world, and something new and important developed in contemporary Arab life. Each one of these books, and the uproar it caused, made it a bit easier for the book and the ideas that were to come after it. Each of these experiments further undermined the traditional high level of intolerance regarding sacred or taboo issues, so that the capacity for tolerance of opposed viewpoints increased, as did the ability to formulate critical and independent opinions. All these are significant gains. For example, none of the death threats or assassination attempts in the Salman Rushdie affair came from inside the Arab world, where the reaction was limited to more civilized methods such as condemnation, critical responses, and verbal or written attacks. As an Arab, I am proud of this point. I believe that the positive cumulative and long-term influence of the series of works I mentioned earlier on Arab intellectual and cultural, even political, life was responsible for the difference between the Arab 223

Is Islam Secularizable?

and non-Arab Islamic responses to Salman Rushdie. I hope that the assassination of Faraj Foda and the assault on Naguib Mahfouz will remain the exceptions that prove the moral rule which has governed our lives since Qasim Amin. When I revisited the controversy which engulfed A Critique of Religious Thought, after a long absence from those texts, I felt a sort of satisfaction at the high level of the debate. There was no incitement on the part of my antagonists and critics. The religious leaders and the ulama engaged in a truly serious and rational discussion of the book even as they attacked it. The diligent Shaykh Muhammad Jawad Mughniyya wrote something to the effect that even though he did not agree with a single opinion in the book, it was appropriate for Islamic thought to be concerned with the issues it raised and to come to terms with them, because otherwise Islam would be the biggest loser. The learned Shaykh Nadim al-Jisr, the mufti of Tripoli, adopted a similar position and invited me in an open telegram published in the press to a public debate of the book in Tripoli itself. Imam Musa al-Sadr´s response was of the same caliber. I have to admit that at no time during the embroiled and complex controversy surrounding A Critique of Religious Thought did I feel my life to be in danger even though the book and myself served as grist for the mill of Friday sermons whose tone was frequently quite extremist. It should also be noted that despite the rise of Islamic fundamentalism [usuliyya] and despite the sectarian dimensions of the Lebanese civil war, A Critique of Religious Thought has been continuously available on the market for over twenty-five years, the last printing being in 1997. Similarly, The Taboo Mentality was met in the Arab world with debate, attempts at refutation, and even curses, but no violence in any shape or form despite the extreme sensitivity of the Rushdie case. These are achievements which we must defend and incorporate permanently into our lives. That is why, in one of my lectures, I called on the Arab intelligentsia, reading public, and cinema- and theater-goers to adopt – in place of the “eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth” of our forefathers – the code of “a book for a book, a poem for a poem, a novel for a novel, a research work for a research 224

Trends in Arab Thought

work”. And that in place of their observance of the holy months, all our months should be holy. Abu Fakhr: When A Critique of Religious Thought came out in 1969 and The Taboo Mentality in 1992, they both stirred up hornet’s nests. You seem to have grown accustomed, since A Self-Critique in the Wake of the Defeat and A Critique of the Ideas of the Resistance, to the use of the intellect and reason as shields against the arrows and slings of this group or that. Are you preparing to poke another hornet’s nest? Azm: I don’t go out of my way to stir up hornet’s nests, nor do I knowingly bait my intellectual adversaries (some of whom are personal friends) with critiques. I deal with and become engaged in thorny issues that are taboo or prohibited at times. Occasionally I take topics that come up in private discussions into the public domain when no one else dares to do so. I believe that to keep such issues out of the public realm is very costly to us now and in the future, as it involves a form of self-deception, a way of being false to oneself. As for me, my patience with self-deception and hypocrisy was exhausted long ago, so I shall continue to poke my finger into sore spots when I think it necessary and when I see that ignoring the issue will involve a certain loss. That is precisely what I did when I went on record – ahead of everyone else, I might add – to describe what was going on within the Palestine Liberation Organization as “Palestinian Zionism”. At the time, the cost of saying what I did could have been extremely high. Yet who objects to such a description today? Even the PLO does not object, they may even take pride in it. Should the hornets fly into a rage, so be it. I see in the idea of stirring up hornet’s nests something positive, I see it as stirring up the vitality of cultural life, the exchange of ideas, critiques, and intellectual life. Abu Fakhr: But you were almost alone in your defense of Iblis,3 as you were in your defense of Salman Rushdie. Then you took to defending materialism when most of the Left was abandoning the idea. Are you committed to defending lost causes? 225

Is Islam Secularizable?

Azm: I don’t pick losing causes to defend. In the legal sense, ‘defense’ is of the accused, the weak, the losers, sometimes the guilty, who need someone to defend them. I believe this is an important concept we should get used to. Even the enemies of Salman Rushdie should accept the principle that he has a right to defend himself, to be heard, and to have someone defend him, even if they are certain that he is going to end up on the gallows. This right should become a permanent principle in our lives. In this sense I don’t mind defending losing causes and believe that the causes I have championed are of great importance to our lives. The defense of Iblis, for instance, was in fact an affirmation of the idea and significance of ijtihad4 and an early defense of our right, as intellectuals in today’s world, to go back to our tradition and re-examine it and explain it in a way that is meaningful to us. I believe this issue is now being debated much more vigorously and with greater insistence than was the case in the 1960s when I took up the tale and character of Iblis. Consider the issues that have come up upon the release of Muhammad Shahrur’s books5 in Syria and Nasr Hamid Abu Zaid’s writings6 in Egypt. The central question here is this: Do we as Arabs living in today’s world have the right to reclaim our tradition, to understand it in a new way, to use our reason (ijtihad) to explain it, to benefit from it, and adopt it in a manner that is suitable to our situation? This heated battle is going on at the present time, and I don’t think it is a losing battle. Concerning Salman Rushdie, I may have been alone in defending him at the beginning, but I am not alone now. When I was preparing to write The Taboo Mentality, Arab reaction was invariably hostile. But the long debate that my book occasioned demonstrated that an important change had taken place in the position of intellectual and critical Arab opinion of Rushdie. Salma al-Khadra’ Jayyusi was the first to bring this to my attention, although she had been against Rushdie and his novel from the start. In the debate following The Taboo Mentality, there were some who undertook an indirect defense of Rushdie by way of the defense of reason, ijtihad, and freedom of opinion in relation to criticism, excellence, and art. This amounts to a defense of Rushdie without necessarily embracing him or his ideas. 226

Trends in Arab Thought

Others softened their hostility to Rushdie, and still others rethought the justifications and causes of that hostility from a more objective perspective, more or less. This is similar to what had happened to many other writings in the past, including Boris Pasternak’s Dr. Zhivago, as well as the books of Ali ‘Abd al- Raziq, Taha Husayn, Abdullah al-Qusaimi, and many others. I do not believe that the defense of Salman Rushdie is a hopeless cause, because I believe that within twenty years, his novels, particularly The Satanic Verses, will find their rightful niche in world literature of the second half of the twentieth century, just as Pasternak’s novel did despite the wild storm it stirred up when it was first published in 1958. Abu Fakhr: In an interview with the Turkish newspaper Milliyet in 1996, you expressed the surprising view that Islam could become secular. Can you explain how you arrived at that conclusion? Azm: That interview was actually an abbreviated version of a lecture I gave on “Islam and Secularism” at Damascus University and at several other places in Syria, including al-Suwaida’, Homs, and Dayr al-Zur. What I was trying to say is that if Western Orientalists and Islamists agree on one point, it is that there is something in the Islamic religion that differentiates it from other religions. This is its essential hostility to secularism, which Islam finds impossible to accept in any shape or form. I wanted to cut through that knot because I do not think that Islam is that different from the other major religions on this issue. Secularism is a historic choice: it may or may not come about, but I do not see that there is a barrier to it in Islam in principle that differentiates Islam from other religions and that makes to respond to the assertion of Western Orientalists – not all of them, to be fair – and the corresponding assertion on the part of the Islamists. I wanted to demonstrate that correspondence. To that end, I drew a distinction in Islamic history between the “doctrinaire no” [al-la al-suratiyya] and the “historic yes” [al-na’am al-tarikhiyya] and the struggle between them. The idea can be put in a nutshell with the question: Was the original, simple, and egalitarian Qur’anic-prophetic Islam compatible with hereditary monarchic rule prevalent in the empires that the Arabs 227

Is Islam Secularizable?

conquered and controlled? Historically, the answer is certainly yes, despite the “doctrinaire no” whose adherents have always maintained that imperial Islam resulted in righteous Islam being replaced by a vicious monarchy, and they have fought to restore Qur’anic-prophetic Islam. The Kharijites embodied the “doctrinaire no” in its purest form, i.e., the original, simple, quasi-nomadic egalitarian Islam. The Umayyad Mu’awiyya represented the other side of the coin; he knew how to establish an Arab Islamic state in the process of turning it into an empire. In other words, imperial Islam embodied the “historic yes” despite the continuation of the “doctrinaire no”, which rejected and fought against it. Of course, the “historic yes” changes and adapts to the circumstances of the times, but on the whole, I think one can say that victory always went to the “historic yes” in the course of Islamic history. Victory was the ally of the Islam that adapted itself to changing historic reality, of the Islam that knew that if it did not keep up with the times, it would be marginalized, petrified, and defeated. I also believe that secularism is the “historic yes” of modern times. Islam is capable in theory and in practice of accommodating itself to secularism as it has accommodated itself to many things before, and it is capable of reinterpreting and redefining itself in order to achieve that objective. Of course, there are no prior guarantees; whether such a development can reach fruition depends on what the Arabs and Muslims do, which choices and decisions they make. Let me add that Islam as a paradigm of a set of sempiternal doctrines is compatible only with itself, but Islam viewed as a historically developing human faith has accepted all the various forms of social, political, and economic organization known to man – tribal, agrarian, urban, imperial, slave, mercantilist, modern industrial, nation-state, etc. – and, to an extent, adapted to them. Given this logic, I see nothing to prevent Islam, in principle, from accepting secularism as part and parcel of the “historic yes” of the contemporary age. Look at the accommodation of the Iranian Shi’ite clergy to the republican form of government, although they had been against it to begin with: elections, a constitution, a parliament, and other things that 228

Trends in Arab Thought

have nothing at all to do with the traditions of either Shi’ite or Sunni Islam. They are all imported from modern Europe. Abu Fakhr: While the awaited peace is supposed to bring democracy and prosperity for the Arabs, exhausted by wars and martial law, many fear that the opposite will occur, and that the Arab governments that sign the peace agreements will have to resort to brute force, in the name of living up to their agreements, to quell the anger of people whose expectations will not be met and to put down the resulting opposition. How do you see the situation? Azm: I am afraid this description is accurate. The promise of democracy and prosperity is pure propaganda, because if democracy comes about, it will result from and be secured by domestic factors. Arab regimes have taken advantage of the Palestine problem to suppress liberties and to undermine any aspirations to democracy. Unfortunately, it does not work the other way round: Taking the Palestine problem off the agenda will not bring about democracy and public liberties.The regimes can find a hundred other pretexts and a hundred enemies, real or imagined, to justify the continuation of their policies. For that reason, I believe that even the argument that they have to live up to the agreements they signed is a pretext for the continuation of existing policies. Netanyahu has settled the issue of Jerusalem in principle and has decided the issue of peace by the same token. The Israelis and the Americans are starting from the working assumption that the Arabs will protest and rally around in opposition to what is being done, and this may go on for ten or fifteen years, but in the end they will bow down to the status quo. They are probably right about that. There are rumors of a conspiracy and a “done deal” with Arafat, according to which Israel will get Jerusalem in return for something or the other for Arafat. Whether there is a deal or not, I believe that Netanyahu has settled the issue; he will not give up Jerusalem. He is an ideologue, and we need to take him and what he says seriously. In the West Bank there are now Bantustans like there were in South Africa, supported by a network of highways and ring roads that make it possible 229

Is Islam Secularizable?

for a visitor to tour the West Bank without seeing a single Palestinian – except from afar, working at construction sites. It is what a Scandinavian ambassador in Damascus called ‘autostrada apartheid’, an entirely new phenomenon. As American Whites used to say of the Blacks: you only see them in the kitchen. Still, I believe that this plan will, in the long run, lead to two peoples living in a united Palestine. Perhaps Netanyahu is working unwittingly to bring this about. This will be a totally unintended result of his policy decisions and his actions. Abu Fakhr: You are referring to a binational state? Azm: I don’t think it is farfetched, in the long run, that Judah Magnes’s old idea will re-emerge, but through the guile of history, à la Hegel. That is to say, this idea may reappear and impose itself despite the wishes of Netanyahu or Arafat. What happened to the areas under apartheid and occupation in South Africa may yet happen to the Palestinians. They may find that the only way to secure the bare minimum of political, civil, and human rights and to achieve some progress in their daily lives is to impose themselves as citizens on the occupying states. On examining the history of settler colonialism, I have detected two outcomes. When settler colonialism is able to eradicate the native population, it triumphs, and there the matter ends. When it is unable to do so, there is a reaction on the part of the native population giving rise to an uncertain amalgam. Algeria, South Africa, and Zimbabwe are three different models for this process. A united Palestine may develop into a fourth model. I don’t think it is out of the question to expect to see a Palestinian social movement demanding political and civil rights and citizenship in an entity called Israel-Palestine (or Palestine-Israel) along the lines of the civil rights movement under Martin Luther King in the United States or a struggle like that of the African National Congress led by Nelson Mandela, which never demanded secession or partition. Only the racist extremists demanded an independent state separate from Black society in South Africa. Bear in mind that a peaceful social movement of this sort will receive widespread support 230

Trends in Arab Thought

from governments and peoples throughout the world. Of course, Israelis who are more far-sighted than Netanyahu and the Likud – people like Abba Eban and the late Yehoshofat Harkabi – fear such a future. They fear the day when Israel will be confronted with a social movement demanding civil rights, like the Blacks in the United States, which will arouse a great deal of sympathy in European and American public opinion. ‘Azmi Bishara is proposing such an idea now,7 as Sari Nusseibeh did before him. I see the march of history seriously headed in that direction, regardless of what individuals may want. Abu Fakhr: Such an outcome would favor the Palestinians in the long run. Azm: Yes. This may be where their true interests lie in the absence of other alternatives. It would be better if the Palestinians could have their own state. However, I believe that an independent state is no longer a viable historic option for them, particularly since Netanyahu has decided the issue of Jerusalem. Ever since the idea of an independent Palestinian state was proposed, I argued that under the prevailing conditions the chances of bringing it about were slim indeed. From the beginning, that objective, which became a slogan, was an expression of weakness rather than of strength, vitality, and renewal. I remember an analogy recounted by Abba Eban at a public lecture my wife and I attended at a university in California. That veteran politician, who is a fascinating orator in several languages, was trying to explain to American Jews the dangers represented by a greater Israel, i.e., one that includes the West Bank and Gaza Strip. He said that in the nineteenth century there was a place called Mount Lebanon, which had a Christian minority and could have evolved into an enlightened and advanced Christian polity in the Middle East. But the French created greater Lebanon in 1920 by annexing Shi’ite and Sunni regions and their populations to Mount Lebanon. He explained that what had happened there since was that the more backward population has swallowed up Lebanon at the expense of the more advanced and civilized Christians. The lesson was that if Israel would absorb the “barbaric” Palestinians (though he did not use the term) its fate will be like that of Lebanon. Eban’s solution 231

Is Islam Secularizable?

was to allow the Palestinians to set up their own demilitarized state with limited sovereignty, because for him, Israel’s cultural identity and its special calling is more important than territorial expansion. Yehoshofat Harkabi presents similar ideas in Israel’s Fateful Hour. Harkabi, who had served as chief of military intelligence during the 1967 war, shifted, as did Ezer Weizman, from hawk to dove, not out of love for Arabs and Palestinians but out of concern for Israel. Of course, the Likud, particularly Netanyahu, is proceeding in the opposite direction. Recently I read a long article by Amos Elon, who is close to Shimon Peres, in the New York Review of Books entitled “Israel and the End of Zionism.” He says that the Zionist movement has achieved its most important declared aims quite efficiently and brilliantly and that it is finished in the sense that it has finished what it set out to do, especially in view of the Oslo accords and the end of the hundred years war with the Arabs, as he puts it. Elon therefore attacks Netanyahu and the ruling Likud bloc because they are about to spoil this tremendous achievement by insisting on further settlement and land, the annexation of the Golan Heights, and the repression and subjugation of the Palestinians. Elon frankly accuses those in power of trying to cram the Palestinians into “Bantustans” and townships isolated from each other and surrounded by Israeli settlements on all sides, a situation he believes will lead to the collapse of Israeli democracy into apartheid for the Palestinians and democracy for the Israelis on the model of pre-Mandela South Africa. (In this regard, it is interesting to note that from what Elon says, Moshe Dayan himself was apparently the first to use, in the early years of the occupation, the South African term “townships” to describe Palestinian communities in the occupied territories.) Abu Fakhr: Yet the Likud intellectuals are trying to avoid that outcome. Azm: Of course. They think that through repression and control they can prevent less desirable alternatives. Yael Dayan gave a talk near Princeton in which she tried to convince American Jews of her point of view by making a comparison with the Soviet Union. She said that the Soviet state, with all its might and authority, was unable to control its ethnic and national 232

Trends in Arab Thought

minorities or to institute a lasting order along the lines it desired. Her point was that if there were limits to what the Soviet Union at the height of its power could do in this respect, there are surely limits to what Israel can do to control and subjugate the Palestinians. Of course, the senior security people within the Likud appear confident that they can continue to seize Palestinian land and govern the population without such effects. Abu Fakhr: Do you believe that peace will lead to fundamental changes in the makeup of Israel and Zionism, which some people see as a false political ideology that claims to liberate Jews? Azm: First, I object to the description of Zionism as a false political ideology. It is true that it is a settler colonialist political ideology, but it is not false in the least. Among the movements that arose at the end of the last century, Zionism was particularly successful. It achieved all that it set out to do, and one cannot describe its ideas as false: A movement that succeeds in achieving a state of this sort cannot be based on myths, along the lines of Roger Garaudy’s theses about Israel’s “founding myths”. It is we Arabs who have harbored the most dangerous myths about ourselves, about the Jews and Zionism and Palestine. Like all human beings, Zionists have myths too, but at the same time they had a highly developed sense of reality and politics and the world balance of power, to the extent that they were able to mobilize myths in the service of their objectives, which they achieved. To say that their ideas are false or mythical is a form of self-consolation on our part. As to what impact peace will have on the composition of Israeli society if it ever comes about (which now seems far-fetched), I have nothing significant to say. I do detect a continuing general tendency, despite everything, for Israel increasingly to undergo a transformation into a quasi-local Middle Eastern society and for its European character to recede to some extent. There are factions and trends in Israel that welcome this development and that would like the country to become more Mediterranean, more Middle Eastern, to feel itself part of the region. 233

Is Islam Secularizable?

Other factions and trends resent and resist this tendency. I do not know which trend would be reinforced if there were to be peace in the future. A lot would depend on the kind of peace that would come about – whether it would be a peace of graveyards, a peace of slaves, a peace of masters, or a peace of the brave. I have heard discussions between Israelis and Americans in which the Americans tell the Israelis: “Stop pretending that you are Europeans. Look at yourselves, how you act, what you eat and drink, the songs you sing: you have become like others in the region.” Some Israelis, especially the young, respond: “Who wants to be European? We want to be part of the region in which we live.” Others refuse to acknowledge, even tacitly, that the first trend may be the one that represents the destiny of Israel, a destiny that is inescapable for a thousand and one reasons. Such people may be able to do no more than to hinder the process and delay it for a little while.

234

Copyright 2014. Gerlach Press. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or applicable copyright law.

Notes

Notes to Chapter 2 Orientalism and Orientalism in Reverse 1 Orientalism, Pantheon Books, New York, 1978. 2 Said recounts the achievements of Academic Orientalism on p. 96. 3 Orientalism, p. 42. 4 Ibid., p. 50. 5 Ibid., pp. 56, 62, 68. 6 Ibid., p. 12. 7 Ibid. 8 Ibid., p. 96. 9 Ibid. 10 Ibid., pp. 202-203. 11 Ibid., p. 210. 12 Ibid., p. 91. 13 Ibid., p. 221. 14 Ibid., p. 67. 15 Ibid., p. 60. 16 Ibid., p. 67. 17 Ibid., p. 272. 18 Ibid., p. 60. 19 In other words, a natural order governed by invariable laws. 20 Ibid., pp. 276-279. (Emphasis added by Edward Said.) 21 Ibid., pp. 265-270. 235

Is Islam Secularizable?

22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36

37 38 39

40 41 42 43

44 45 46 47

236

Ibid., p. 150. Ibid., p. 267. Ibid., p. 270. Ibid., p. 269. Ibid., p. 271. Ibid., p. 210. Ibid., p. 271. Ibid., pp. 153-156. Ibid., p. 155. Capital, vol. III, Chapter 36. Orientalism, p. 322. Ibid., p. 321. Ibid., p. 107. Ibid., p. 318. Georges Saddikni, ‘Man, Reason and Synonyms’, al-Ma’rifa, Damascus, October 1978, pp. 7-17. Mr Saddikni was until very recently a member of the Ba’th Party’s National (pan-Arab) Command and head of its Bureau for Cultural Affairs. He was Syria’s Minister of Information for many years. Orientalism, p. 92. Ibid., p. 321. Hasan Abbas, ‘The Arabic Letters and the Six Senses’, al-Ma’rifa, October, 1978, pp. 140-141. The crucial conclusion of this line of reasoning runs as follows: ‘Thus, Arabic letters become transformed from here vocal containers filled with human sensations and emotions to the quintessence of the Arab, of his ’asabiya, spirit and even of the constituents of his nationality.’ [Ibid., p. 143.] Isma’il ’Arafi, Qital al-’Arab al-Qawmi, published by the Ministry of Culture and National Guidance, Damascus, 1977, p. 70. Ibid., p. 145. Ibid., pp. 147-148. Anwar ’Abd al-Malek re-emphasised recently his conviction that the main feature of our times is the continuing ‘civilisational confrontation between the Orient and the Occident’ (Arab Studies Quarterly, vol. I, no. 3, Summer 1979, p. 180). ‘Islam and Political Islam’, An-Nahar Arabe et Internationale, Paris, January 22, 1979, p. 64. Republished in Mawaqif, Beirut, no. 34, Winter 1979, pp. 149-160. Mawàqif, No. 34, p. 155. Ibid., p. 152. WaIid Nuwayhed, al-Safir, daily newspaper, Beirut, December 19, 1979, Editorial page.

Notes to Chapter 3

48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55

Suhail Kash, al-Safir, January 3, 1979. Sa’d Mehio, al-Safir, January 20, 1979. Mawaqif, no. 34, pp. 47-48. Orientalism, p. 263. Mawaqif, no. 36, Winter 1980, pp. 150-153. Orientalism, p. 107. Ibid, p. 108. An-Nahar Arabe et Internationale, Paris, February 26, 1979, p. 24. See also Mawaqif, 34, p. 158. 56 Al-Safir, October 10, 1979.

Notes to Chapter 3 Orientalism and Conspiracy 1 2 3 4 5

Hasan Hanafi, Introduction to the Science of Istighrab (Occidentalism), Al-Dar AlFanniya, Cairo, 1991. Martin Bernal, Black Athena: The Afro-Asiatic Roots of Classical Civilization, Free Association Books, London, 1987. For Hanafi’s reply see the Egyptian weekly magazine Al-Musawwar, 16 May 1997. For Asfour’s critical assessment see Al-Hayat newspaper, 7 July 1997. Ian Buruma and Avishai Margalit, Occidentalism: The West in the Eyes of its Enemies, Penguin Press, New York, 2004. See Adonis’ collection of essays published under the title: Fatiha li Nihayat alQarn, Dar A-Awda, Beirut, 1980, pp. 212-240. Adonis confuses on purpose the two senses of “modernity” in Arabic, (Hadatha), i.e., modernity in general and modernism as a literary movement of the twentieth century.

See my essay, “Islamic Fundamentalism Reconsidered – A Critical Outline of Problems, Ideas and Approaches”, South Asia Bulletin: Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, vol. 13, no. 1-2, 1993 and vol. 14, no. 1, 1994. 7 This point is also noted and discussed by the British author and critic Jonathan Raban in his book, My Holy War: Dispatches from the Home Front, New York Review of Books Inc., New York, 2006, pp. 36-39. 8 Jean Baudrillard, The Spirit of Terrorism, Verso, London, 2002. 9 Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 2001. 10 Salman Rushdie, “In Good Faith: A Pen Against the Sword”, Newsweek, 12 February 1990. 6

237

Is Islam Secularizable?

11 Jonathan Raban, Arabia through the Looking-Glass, Fontana/Collins, Glasgow, 1980, p. 19. 12 William Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity, Penguin Books, London, 1995 (first published, 1930). 13 Daryush Shayegan, Cultural Schizophrenia: Islamic Societies Confronting the West, Al-Saqi Books, London, 1992, p. 4. 14 Malise Ruthven, Islam in the World, Oxford University Press, New York, 1984, p. 111. 15 Leila Ahmed, A Border Passage: From Cairo to America – A Woman’s Journey, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, 1999, pp. 127-28. 16 Seven Types of Ambiguity, p. 24. 17 Stuart Chase, The Tyranny of Words, Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1938. 18 Ibid. 19 Charles Kay Ogden and Ivor Armstrong Richards, The Meaning of Meaning, Routledge and Kegan Paul, London, 1956 (first published 1923). 20 Arabia Through the Looking-Glass, pp. 18-19. 21 See his The Specter of Marx. 22 See Jacques Derrida, Dissemination, University of Chicago Press, 1972. 23 Edward Said, Orientalism, Vintage Books, New York, 1979, p. 321. 24 The Spirit of Terrorism, pp. 77-79. 25 Hadi Al-Alawi’s articles on the subject (in Arabic) are to be found in the Palestinian weekly magazine Al-Hurriyah, Damascus, 9 March 1988, 29 July 1990 and 3 March 1993. See also my book in Arabic: Beyond the Tabooing Mentality: Reading the Satanic Verses, Dar Al-Mada, Damascus, 1997, pp. 53-109, 414-422. 26 Al-Hilal Books No. 465, Cairo 1989. See also Beyond the Tabooing Mentality, pp. 85-107.

Notes to Chapter 5 Palestinian Zionism 1 2 3

238

This applies also to the Palestinians under direct Israeli rule and occupation. 1881-1917, See Arthur Hertzberg’s The Zionist Idea, Harper Torchbooks, New York City, 1966, pp. 353-366. “Thinking the Unthinkable: A Sovereign Palestinian State”, Foreign Affairs, Vol. 56, No. 4, Washington, DC, July 1978, pp. 695-713. Walid Khalidi headed the Institute of Palestine Studies in Beirut, Lebanon.

Notes to Chapter 7

4

“On Political Settlement in the Middle East: The Palestinian Dimension”, Journal of Palestine Studies, No. 25, Beirut, Autumn 1977, pp. 3-25. Jiryis headed the PLO Research Center in Beirut, Lebanon. 5 After the Last Sky, (With photographs by Jean Mohr), Faber and Faber, London, 1986. 6 The Question of Palestine, New York Times Books, New York, 1980, p. x. (Said’s emphasis). 7 See The Zionist Idea, part 2. 8 Orientalism, Pantheon Books, New York, 1978, pp. 321, 322.

Notes to Chapter 7 The View from Damascus 1 2

3 4

Princeton University Press, 1998. See his “Asad’s Regional Strategy and the Challenge from Netanyahu”, Journal of Palestine Studies (Autumn 1996), pp. 27-41; see also his three major articles published in the London-based Arabic daily al-Hayat, November 21, 22, 23, 1999. “Fresh Light on the Syrian-Israeli Peace Negotiations: An Interview with Ambassador Walid Al-Moualem”, Journal of Palestine Studies (Winter 1997), pp. 81-94. Tel Aviv: Yediot Ahronot, 1996.

Notes to Chapter 9 Answer to Letters ‘The View from Damascus’ 1 2

After a leak of some of the contents of the draft treaty to Al-Hayat ( January 9), Ha’aretz published the text in full on Thursday, January 13. Emphasis added.

Notes to Chapter 10 Islam, Terrorism, and the West Today 1

I am indebted to Mike Davis for providing me with the link between my roused interest in and curiosity about Conrad’s dedication and this particular novel of H.G. Wells. See: Mike Davis, ‘The Flames of New York’, New Left Review, No. 12, November-December, 2001. 239

Is Islam Secularizable?

2 3

Guy Debord’s book is available in English translation under the title: Society of the Spectacle, Detroit, 1970. Jahiliyya refers to the age of ignorance, paganism and godlessness that preceded the rise of Islam in Arabia.

Notes to Chapter 12

The Arab Spring: “Why Exactly at this Time?” 1

2

3

4

See Sadik J. al-Azm, “The View from Damascus”, New York Review of Books, June 15, 2000, reprinted as chapter of this book. See also Torgeir Norling, “A View from the East: Sadik al-Azm”, Global Knowledge 1 (2006), accessed online at: http://tinyurl.com/gua4w5q; and Juliette Terzieff, “Whither the Damascus Spring? Syria Steps Up Crackdown on Reformers”, World Politics Review (May 23, 2007), accessed online at: http://tinyurl.com/j2zlaot

Cf. Anthony Shadid and David D. Kirkpatrick, “Promise of Arab Uprisings Is Threatened by Divisions”, The New York Times (May 21, 2011), accessed online at: http://tinyurl.com/gt2y68t The original version of this essay was written and published before Qaddafi’s death in rebel hands on October 20, 2011. The exact circumstances of Qaddafi’s death remain unclear as of November 2011.

Originally published in Al Tariq Quarterly (Beirut), Summer 2011, pp. 42-49. Translated by Steve Miller (Foundation for the Defense of Democracies), and reproduced in Reason Papers by permission of Sadek J. al-Azm, with editorial revisions by Sadik J. al-Azm and Irfan Khawaja. Thanks to Ibn Warraq for editorial advice.

Notes to Chapter 13

Civil Society and the Arab Spring 1

Hasan Hanafi and Mohamed Abed Al-Jabiri, The Dialogue of the Mashreq and Maghreb, Rou’ya Publishers, Beirut, 1989.

2 Augustus R. Norton (ed.), Civil Society in the Middle East, E.J. Brill, Leiden, 1995, vol. I, p. vii. 3

240

Ibid, vol. II, pp. ix-xiv.

Notes to Chapter 14

Notes to Chapter 14 Trends in Arab Thought 1

2

3 4 5 6

7

Hisbah is an old, little used Islamic concept whereby any Muslim can take a fellow Muslim to religious court on the charge of conduct in violation of the shari’a, even if he himself is not personally affected by the behavior. The principle was used against Nasr Hamid Abu Zaid in Egypt in 1995 (see Editor’s note below). Qasim Amin, whose pioneering The Liberation of Women was written in 1899, suffered abuse and attacks for advocating women’s education and integration into society and for calling for the removal of the veil. Faraj Foda was an Egyptian university professor assassinated by al-Jihad al-Islami in June 1992 for his relentless critiques of fundamentalism Satan in Islam, who refused to bow down to Adam as commanded by God. The use of reason to decide certain types of issues not governed by an explicit religious doctrine. Muhammad Shahrur is the author of al-Kitab wa’l-Qur’an [The book and the Qur’an], a modernist exegesis that departed from traditional interpretations and thus created considerable controversy. Nasr Hamid Abu Zaid, whose writings seek to reinterpret Islam in a positivist and historical mode rather than as a divine phenomenon, was taken to religious court in 1995 on the basis of the hisbah concept (see Editor’s note above). Found guilty of apostasy, he left Egypt for fear of his life and now resides in Holland. See the interview with ‘Azmi Bishara, “Bridging the Green Line: The PA, Israeli Arabs, and Final Status”, in Journal of Palestine Studies 16, no. 3 (Spring 1997), pp. 67-80.

241

Is Islam Secularizable?

Acknowledgements The publisher would like to thank the following for permission to reprint their material: Brill Academic Publishers for:

Sadik J. al-Azm (1988), Palestinian Zionism, Die Welt des Islams XVIII (1988), pp. 90-98.

Copyright 2014. Gerlach Press. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or applicable copyright law.

California University Press for

Sadik J. al-Azm (1998), Trends in Arab Thought: An Interview with Sadek Jalal al-Azm, Journal of Palestine Studies, Vol. 27, No. 2 (Winter, 1998), pp. 68-80.

Disclaimer The Publishers have made every effort to contact copyright holders of works reprinted in this work. This has not been possible in every case, however, and we would welcome correspondence from those companies whom we have been unable to trace.

242

Chronological Table

Copyright 2014. Gerlach Press. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or applicable copyright law.

Chronological Table of Contents of Volumes 1–3 Date

Title

Source

Vol.

Chapter

2014

Civil Society and the Arab Spring

First publication

3

13

2014

The Struggle for the Meaning of Islam

First publication

1

3

2014

What Is Islamism? A Short and Compact Answer

First publication

1

4

2014

The Takfir Syllogism

First publication

1

5

2011

Orientalism and Conspiracy

First published in: Orientalism & Conspiracy: Politics and Conspiracy Theory in the Islamic World: Essays in Honour of Sadik J. Al-Azm, ed. by A. Graf, S. Fathi, M. Gray, I.B.Tauris, London 2011, pp. 3-28.

3

3

2011

The Arab Spring: “Why Reason Papers 33, Fall Exactly at this Time?” 2011, pp. 223-229.

3

12

2010

Ground Zero Revisited

Resetdoc.org, Monday, 15 November 2010

3

11

2007

Islam and the ScienceReligion Debates in Modern Times

European Review, Volume 15, Issue 3, July 2007, pp. 283-295.

1

1

2005

Islam and Secular Humanism

First published as “Islam und säkularer Humanismus”, J. C. B Mohr (Paul Siebeck), Tübingen 2005.

3

1

243

Is Islam Secularizable?

Date

Title

Source

Vol.

Chapter

2004

Time out of Joint. Western Dominance, Islamist Terror, and the Arab Imagination

Boston Review October/November 2004 issue

3

4

2004

Islam, Terrorism and the West Today

Praemium Erasmianum Essay 2004, Amsterdam 2004, pp. 9-33.

3

10

2000

The View from Damascus. Syria and the Peace Process’

The New York Review of Books, June 15, 2000

3

7

2000

Three Replies to ‘The View from Damascus’ by Moshe Ma’oz, Amos Elon, and Itmar Rabinovitch

The New York Review of Books, July 20, 2000

3

8

2000

Author’s Response to the Three Replies to ‘The View from Damascus’

The New York Review of Books, August 10, 2000

3

9

2000

Satanic Verses Post Festum. The Global, The Local, The Literary

Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, Volume XX, Nos. 1&2 (2000), pp. 44-78.

2

2

1998

Trends in Arab Thought. An Interview with Sadik Al-Azm by Saqr Abu Fakhr

Journal of Palestine Studies, Volume 27, No. 2 (Winter 1998) pp. 68-80.

3

14

First publication 2014

2

4

[1996] Universalizing from Particulars

244

Chronological Table

Date

Title

Source

Vol.

Chapter

1993 - Islamic Fundamentalism 1994 Reconsidered. A Critical Outline of Problems, Ideas and Approaches.

South Asia Bulletin, Volume XIII, Nos. 18:2 (1993), pp. 93-121, and Volume XIV, No. 1 (1994), pp. 73-98.

1

2

1993

Is the “Fatwa” a Fatwa?

Middle East Report 183 ( July/August 1993)

2

3

1991

The Importance of Being Earnest About Salman Rushdie

Die Welt des Islams XXXI (1991), pp. 1-49.

2

1

[1990] The Peace Process First Publication 2014 and the Gulf Crisis. A Critical Arab Point of View (Presented at the conference “The Changing World Order: Implications for the Peace Process in the Middle East”, American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Cairo, December 14 - 18, 1990)

3

6

1988

Palestinian Zionism

Die Welt des Islams XVIII (1988), pp. 90-98.

3

5

1981

Orientalism and Orientalism in Reverse

Khamsin No. 8, 1981, pp. 5-26.

3

2

First English publication 2014. Translation from Arabic by Mansoor Ajami. (Arabic original published in: Naqd al-fikr al-dini, Dar al-Talia, Beirut 1969.)

2

5

[1969] The Tragedy of Satan (Iblis)

245