Precious words written more than four decades ago, but they are still relevant.
“So, if I may bring to bear upon your problems the opinion of a foreigner – a foreigner who knows your history and the social and cultural structures of your countries well, but a foreigner nonetheless, however sympathetic to your aspirations – I would like to make an appeal.
Firstly, I appeal for lucidity. Myths may be useful for certain mobilizations, but they end up by mystifying, blinding and misleading the very people who manipulate them. To retreat into myths, especially the use of the past to elucidate today’s problems, is another sign of weakness. If forceful ideas are needed to guide action, let them be as close to reality as possible.
Secondly, I appeal for open-mindedness. I have already said that societies which turn in on themselves and on their particular problems are dying, static societies. Living, progressive, dynamic societies are not afraid to borrow in order to get down to the task of forging a new synthesis. Indeed the same is true for individuals. The most appealing and most promising trait of the studious Algerian youths I have met is their thirst for knowledge, their desire to drink at every fountain and to assimilate every input.
Finally, and especially, I appeal for an open-mindedness towards a universal vision of the existing problems, the only kind of vision which is genuinely revolutionary.
I hope I will be forgiven for insisting on the point. There are three ways of devoting oneself: to God, to the group and to Man. To devote oneself to God is to have a faith which it is not given to everybody to share, and which in any case does not, in general, exclude the other types of devotion. To devote oneself to the group to which one belongs is necessary, and when that group is humiliated or oppressed, it becomes a primordial human duty. But the group should not be defied, placed above everything else. That would be what classical Muslim theology calls shirk, associationism, the act of assimilating some other person with God. The group is not everything. An exclusive aspiration to the greater glory of the group, taken as a supreme value, would lead to an anarchic world of hate-filled nations in perpetual struggle one against the other.
Beyond the group, ethnic or national, there are universal values which stand above it: liberty, equality and fraternity, for all men. Integral and exclusive nationalism logically leads to a barbaric attitude towards all humanity outside the group. Its motto, ‘my country right or wrong’, translated into German, stood over the gate of the camp at Buchenwald. And in Algeria, one could ask how, if the nation is the supreme value, can one justify the actions of those Frenchmen who defended the cause of Algerian independence? Were they then traitors? If, on the contrary, the value one places above all others, the vision one holds before one’s eyes, is a universal value, namely the struggle against all iniquity, this implies a perpetual renewal, for the forms pose problems which are always new, unexpected and unprecedented.
The Kingdom of God is not of this world, there is no end to history, the struggles will not cease, He who struggles for justice, the militant, the radical revolutionary, he who tackles the root of iniquities, as Marx puts it, will never have the right to settle back into the blissful self-satisfaction of the righteous man through whom Heaven has descended to Earth. I am no prophet and do not like the prophetic style. But if one can draw a lesson from past experience and from rational analysis, it is that the future before us is a future of struggle, a future which demands courageous souls, and thus a future worthy of Man.
There is no reason to believe that such struggles will spare the Muslim world. Man is neither beast nor god, said Aristotle, whom the Muslim Middle Ages knew as al mo’allim al-awwal, the first master; he is the zoon politikon, whose life is civil society, and whose life is thus protest, struggle and conflict. The man whose life in Muslim society is neither the monkey nor the robot pictured by the colonialists; nor is he the angel in direct communication with the heavens imagined by the naïve, by the apologists and the mystics. He has enjoyed no fantastic privilege nor has he been the victim of some terrible curse. History shows him to have engaged in the struggles and tasks which are common to all humanity. He shares the same kind of aspirations, reactions, conceptions and illusions, the same opposite tendencies, the same efforts to defend himself, to free himself and to enslave others, to conserve and to go forwards, which are the common lot of all mankind. There is no Homo Islamicus. The history of the Muslim world is specific, it has its own style and colour, it is an incomparable part of human diversity. But it is not exceptional. Men everywhere have faced similar problems, to be resolved by analogous means. There is no reason to believe that this will not always be so.
To face the forthcoming struggles, one must be armed. One must learn to distance oneself from the myths, to assimilate the lessons of human experience, to reject complacency and self-satisfaction which are causes of stagnation; one must always seek to surpass oneself and the existing situation, in the effort to accomplish the great human tasks.”
—Maxime Rodinson, Marxism and the Muslim World, London: Zed Books, 1979, p. 160
Comments