“Let us consider a series of illusions that are widespread these days: the illusion of continuity and similarity between the present and the recent past, or rather the idea that the present is being produced by awakening identity – Arab for some, Islamic for others – as the genie is produced by the lamp; the illusion that identity is permanent and eternal (to use an expression which is not my own and which I shall examine critically); the illusion that political and social activity, action to develop and liberate Arab countries, depends in the first instance on the assertion of this identity; the illusion, finally, that the real history of the Arabs in the modern era has been a mere illusory moment, which has not had the slightest effect on the brilliance and purity of this identity.
Until very recently the question of religion had no great importance. The penchant for religion of some social categories, the Islamization of politics and the politicization of Islam, had little effect on public life. Religious culture, the religious referent in the public domain, Koranic or other religious quotations, religious sectarianism: all of these things generally existed on the fringes of daily life. It was thought that these phenomena were an expression of underdevelopment; they were considered reactionary, inimical to progress, civilization and freedom. And until the 1980s they remained restricted to a narrow range of adherents. They did not succeed in establishing themselves in private or public life: religious culture – and I insist on the word ‘culture’ to denominate something distinct from popular, everyday religious observance – remained the property of men of religion and frequenters of mosques. Its diffusion was the exclusive preserve of certain political groups, notably the Muslim Brothers, who during the 1950s had rallied around the pole constituted by Saudi Arabia with a view to fighting Arab nationalism, the Socialist project that had been grafted onto it and the resulting Soviet-Arab friendship. This friendship, incidentally, was far from artificial: it was a basic factor of “our security. Contrary to what people would have us believe, the USSR and Arab socialism did not collapse because they were against nature, or against Arab values, but because they were subjected – for seventy years in the case of communism – to incessant and systematic attacks on the military, political, economic, ideological and cultural fronts, Islamist propaganda having spearheaded the ideological and cultural struggle against socialism in the Arab countries.
The political and social vocabulary of the peak period of nationalism and socialism was modernist and reformist, and did not include religious or pious terms. The fight against what is now called the West was then a struggle against capitalism and imperialism, not a fight against ‘cultural imperialism’ as it is understood now. The political and economic analyses then current dealt with the Arab nation as part of the Third World, and therefore subject to relations of exploitation with the West. Analysis did not depend, as it does today, on notions like the Islamic umma, or ‘Satans’ big or small, or on the idea of an opposition between the forces of faith and the infidels.
Domestic policy was centred on social development and broadening the range of non-political individual freedoms. Only marginal categories, opposed to modernity, called for application of the sharī’a and observance of obsolete precepts, or argued for a reduction of individual liberty (for women in particular). Only these groups saw the political field as a place for the application of primitive and barbaric penalties like amputating hands, stoning, flogging or crucifixion; only these groups gloried in archaic social customs like wearing the veil. Thus at the same time cultural policies were developing that preached – formally at least – an enlightenment, science and the universal values of civilization in the context of a global historical project. It was considered as a deliberately primitivist withdrawal to concentrate on the specific as opposed to the universal, or to cling to the idea that we might be a nation different from other nations, our essence defined wholly or partially by religion. The theory had not yet been invented that Islam was the solution to all ills because it lay at the origin of everything.
Do not deduce from these remarks that the nationalist period of Arab history was some sort of golden age whose disappearance ought to be lamented. To put it plainly, I am not one of those who believe in a golden age somehow impermeable to History and to society. I hold, on the contrary, that belief in an Arab or Muslim golden age which only needs to be restored and coaxed into a renaissance has been and still is a great weakness of Arab thought, Arab consciousness and Arab political discourse. I believe, furthermore, that the weight of this glorious past has resulted in an Arab politics based on passions, denial of reality and an erroneous way of thinking about public matters. This attempt to reconstitute the recent past, and to enlighten the younger generation on the reality of things during their childhood years, is undertaken to emphasize the point that evolution and change are the rule in all political and social processes and that these processes are never completed.
The nationalist period was marked by glaring flaws, of which political despotism was by no means the least (the freedoms referred to above are specifically individual, not political). It was characterized by the tendency of nationalist regimes, in Egypt notably, to ally themselves with social and religious reaction. No regime in modern Egyptian history has helped and supported al-Azhar, no regime has whetted its appetite for power, as much as the Abdel Nasser regime, for political reasons known to everyone. The nationalist regimes and their present-day surrogates lived simultaneously in several different worlds, extremely complex and strongly differentiated worlds; and there is no doubt at all that the worst fault of these regimes, from the viewpoint of Arab political and social thought, was their break with enlightened thought and the liberal heritage. This break, which has a whiff of vengefulness about it, was a consequence of the rejection of the liberal nationalist regimes which preceded the military nationalist regimes. Its effect was a caesura in the history of thought and sometimes in social development. And as a result the liberal heritage, along with its element of critical spirit and its openness to the history of other peoples and to democratic ideas, came to be regarded as ‘reactionary’. Such, for example, was the epithet levelled by the influential Egyptian review al-Talī’a at Constantine Zureik, a genuinely liberal and supremely enlightened Arab nationalist thinker marginalized in his own country, Syria. The same process led to the eclipse – not just in the political domain but in the intellectual world too – of enlightened men like Ṭāha Ḥussein and Alī ‘Abd al-Rāziq, who resorted to rationalism in their examination of the Muslim Canon; an eclipse so complete that access to their work is currently restricted to its rubbishers at al-Azhar. We also witnessed the virtually total burial of the works of al-Sanhūrī, a man who had given the Arabs an accomplished, historically admissible body of juridical thought: he held the sharī’a to be a secular code of the same nature as other juridical systems in the world, and laid the foundations of the Egyptian civil code which inspired those of several other Arab states. Similarly, the nationalist tendency would only see the Bourguibist experiment from the perspective of its allegiance to the West and its relative indifference to the Palestinian cause; when in fact it was inconstestably [sic] the most serious attempt in modern Arab history to encourage social, intellectual and moral advance as part of the development.
In trying to make a clean sweep of the past, the nationalist regimes thus contributed to the rejection of critical reformist thought. On the pretext that everything had to start from scratch, they denied intellectuals the ability to accumulate historical and social knowledge, without seeing that nothing useful can be achieved by denying the past and robbing the collective memory of its progressive capital. But it is true that the nationalist era coincided with a period of siege and encirclement; and that in the brief period before the Arab nationalist states turned in on themselves and changed into Mafias monopolizing power and wealth, it did not have enough time to complete its historical project, or enough perspective to retrace its steps. It thus accumulated errors. It did not stop at denying the recent past of the Arab countries (in the same way that, today, the whole of modern history is denied by the holders of Islamic authenticity) but, influenced by an ideology based on the concept of purity of the nation, denied that society had any historical characteristics at all, with the sole exceptions of decline and decadence. It saw the future solely as a continuation of its own essence. As a result, past and future were both diluted in such expressions as ‘destiny’, ‘rebirth’ and ‘message’ (these days this historical mystique is conveyed in expressions like ‘total civilizational project’); and the political vocabulary became confused with a vocabulary of mystical character. People used oratorical forms in the belief that they were constructing our social and political future. In the name of Islam, it then became possible for marginal social and cultural forces opposed to the Arab states and the modernity of Arab societies to draw ideological nourishment from this political mystique; to absorb the nationalist discourse into their own Islamist political discourse, and forge the image of a totalitarian state based on an absolutist social vision that is just a mirror image of the nationalist absolutism they oppose. This development was the consequence of the end of the Cold War, during which the nationalist regimes were subjected to attacks by political and cultural Islam and, on the military level, successive defeats at the hands of the historic enemy Israel. This unleashed the forces of reaction which, earlier in the modern history of the Arabs, had occupied the position of victim. The progressive nationalist state thus undertook, in a hostile external context, equipped with very limited competence, to construct a history which it conceived as the restoration of a fantasized past.”
Excerpt From Islams and Modernities by Aziz Al-Azmeh, Verso, 2009 edition, pp. 62-66
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