Contemporary Arab Thought: Studies in Post-1967 Arab Intellectual History

501 Pages·2003·2.55 MB·English

by  Ibrahim M. Abu-Rabi

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CONTEMPORARY
ARAB THOUGHT
Studies in Post-1967 Arab Intellectual History
Ibrahim M. Abu-Rabi‘
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First published 2004 by Pluto Press
345 Archway Road,London N6 5AA
and 22883 Quicksilver Drive,Sterling,VA 20166–2012,USA
www.plutobooks.com
Copyright (c) Ibrahim M. Abu-Rabi‘ 2004
The right of Ibrahim M. Abu-Rabi‘ to be identified as the author of this work has been
asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright,Designs and Patents Act 1988.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 0-7453-2170-4 hardback
ISBN 0-7453-2169-0 paperback
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Abu-Rabi‘,Ibrahim M.
Contemporary Arab thought:studies in post-1967
Arab intellectual history / Ibrahim M. Abu-Rabi‘.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-7453-2170-4––ISBN 0-7453-2169-0 (pbk.)
1. Arab countries––Intellectual life––20th century. 2. Arab
nationalism. 3. Secularism––Arab countries. 4. Islamic renewal.
5. Islam and politics––Arab countries. 6. Globalization. I. Title.
DS36.88.A275 2004
909(cid:2).09749270825––dc21
2003010260
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Designed and produced for Pluto Press by
Chase Publishing Services,Fortescue,Sidmouth,EX10 9QG,England
Typeset from disk by Newgen Imaging Systems,India
Printed and bound in Canada by
Transcontinental Printing
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To Jasmine,Adam, and Jad:
Three Flowers from the Garden of Paradise
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Contents
Acknowledgments ix
Foreword by Ghada Talhami x
Preface xiii
Introduction 1
PART ONE:THEMES
1 The Scope and Limitation of Post-1967 Arab Thought 43
2 Contemporary Arab Intellectual Trends 63
3 Secularism and its Hazards:The Recent Debate in the Arab World 93
4 Contemporary Arab Philosophical Views of Secularism 114
5 Formation of Contemporary Identities:Nationalism and Islamism in
Contemporary Arab Thought 126
6 Traditional Values,Social Change,and the Contemporary
Arab Personality 150
7 Globalization:A Contemporary Islamic Response? 164
8 Contemporary Arab Thought and Globalization 185
PART TWO:THINKERS
9 Rashid al-Ghannushiand the Questions of Shari‘ah and Civil Society 203
10 Muslim Self-Criticism in Contemporary Arab Thought:
The Case of Shaykh Muhammad al-Ghazali 223
11 Islam and Muslims in Crisis 242
12 Towards a Critical Arab Reason:The Contributions of
Muhammad ‘Abid al-Jabiri 256
13 Towards Modern Arab Reason 279
14 Costantine Zurayk and the Search for Arab Nationalism 296
15 Mahdi‘Amil and the Unfinished Project of Arab Marxist Philosophy 318
vii
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viii CONTENTS
16 Abdallah Laroui:From Objective Marxism to Liberal Etatism 344
17 Conclusions 370
Notes 375
Bibliography 453
Index 482
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Acknowledgments
I spent eight years researching and writing this book. Over these years,a number
of institutions and people made it possible for me to complete this project. In this
regard, I would like to thank the Fulbright Foundation for its generous financial
help which enabled me to live in three different Arab countries in 1997:Morocco,
Egypt, and Syria. I had the benefit of meeting with a number of prominent Arab
thinkers in those countries, among whom were Muhammad ‘Abid al-Jabiri in
Morocco, Hassan Hanafi, the late Muhammad al-Ghazali, Fahmi Huwaydi, and
Muhammad ‘Imarah in Egypt, Sadiq Jalal al-‘Azm and Muhammad Shahrur in
Syria,to mention but a few.
My thanks also go to Ms. Valerie Vick,Assistant Editor of The Muslim World,
for copyediting the entire text. I did benefit a lot from her.
Finally, I should like to thank my colleagues at Hartford Seminary for their
understanding and encouragement.
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Foreword
The Travails of the Arab Intellectual
Ghada Talhami
D. K. Pearsons Professor of Politics
Lake Forest College,Illinois,USA
The war which the United States waged on Iraq eliminated the last bastion of Arab
nationalism in the region,heralding a new age. This was painful and reminiscent
of the past when Britain occupied the position of the world’s great hegemon.
Memories of the ignominious departure of that power from the region did little to
dissuade the new overlords who quickly proceeded to secure their physical and
cultural space. The result was hastening the process of globalization, economi-
cally as well as intellectually. Moreover,this much maligned term,which referred
to the regularization of all economic relationships in favor of the super-capitalist
powers of the world,alienated the poor masses of the underdeveloped segment of
the globe. It is one of the contradictions of globalization that the more world mar-
kets are integrated,the more unequal becomes the distribution of wealth. Unable
to perform the desired role of consumers of manufactured goods,the poor become
a burden on the world economic system and its most visible victims.
This is the story of the Arab world today,especially as it moves from crisis to
crisis and from economic loss to greater intellectual decline. But who speaks for
the Arab world? Who speaks for its devastated and impoverished classes,as well
as for its defeated intelligentsia? This is the main theme of this study,which,while
definitely focused on the contemporary period,also takes the long view of the cri-
sis of the Arab intellectual. In the long run,the Iraqi defeat may prove to be more
devastating for the region than that other seismic event, namely the 1967 Arab-
Israeli war,which the author correctly identifies as the great divide separating the
Arab age of the nakbah and its accompanying sense of bereavement and shock
from the age of despondency and deepening crisis. But since no comprehensive
analysis of the intellectual confusion resulting from the events of 1967 exists,the
task at hand becomes the necessary prelude to greater understanding.
It is also important to note the author’s choice of the Arab world as the
metaphor for the hegemonic consequences of globalization and his reference to
the area’s deep cultural wounds as but one of the most egregious examples of the
human cost of this phenomenon. The Arab world, in a very colonial sense,
remains vital to the survival of world capitalism both economically and strategi-
cally. No global power can afford to overlook its geographic location or its riches
as long as the world continues to live under one hegemon. The Arab world,as the
core of the Middle East,has the capacity to create a unified regional system capa-
ble of genuine autonomous rule based on its homogenous culture, past political
experience and the existence of vast natural resources. The determination of
x
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FOREWORD xi
theUnited States and others before it to annex it to the global world markets,is,
therefore,neither novel nor surprising.
The author builds his case around the inevitable collusion between economics,
religion and culture in order to maintain world leadership and control. For him,as
for Antonio Gramsci in his prison notes,hegemony is elusive unless serviced by
a class of intellectuals. The Gramscian world of the intellectual
speaks of the non-neutrality of ideas and knowledge, of the partiality, that is,
of the producers and disseminators of knowledge, of the political role of
the intellectual as part of a system of relations that is inscribed by power and
domination.1
Only the intellectuals,hence,are capable of acting as legitimators of power and its
system of values. What Gramsci calls the “organic intellectuals,”accompany the rise
of every historical phase of human development. Hegemony often results in counter-
hegemony which can only be legitimized by the intellectuals. But this study is not
only an exposé of the work of Gramsci, the great Western Marxist, it is also a
thoughtful recall of Samir Amin’s contribution to our understanding of economics
and intellectual dominance in the modern world. Amin not only heightened our
understanding of the effects of hegemonic capitalism on the underdeveloped world,
he also amplified the relationship between colonialism,capitalism and religion.
The author thus makes a concerted effort to distinguish various class formations
and strands of social thought which reflect the dilemmas of each age. This gets
him into the “problematic” of religion and changes in the Arab educational sys-
tem,which diminished the power and influence of the traditional religious intelli-
gentsia. The decline of the Muslim intelligentsia due to the spread of Western or
modern education, first witnessed in Egypt, is one of his major themes. He then
asks whether or not it would be appropriate to consider the Islamic intellectuals
the “organic intellectuals”of Gramsci’s definition.
The book poses additional crucial questions to students of Middle East history.
Did Islam mandate the creation of a state,or was it intended to be a social system
of values? Why is democracy absent from the debates of the intellectuals both
before and after 1967? Or should we be satisfied with issues that could only be
described as the preconditions of democracy and which were always the subject
of debate? Despite the absence of the modern language of democracy,according
to the contentions of Bernard Lewis,the ideas of what could be termed civil soci-
ety, pluralism, and justice, both in its political and economic sense, were always
emphasized. Did not constitutionalism occupy the attention of late nineteenth cen-
tury intellectuals to such an extent that Shaykh Muhammad ‘Abduh,the Mufti of
Egypt and its greatest Muslim reformer criticized Ahmad ‘Urabi’s military solu-
tion for Egypt’s colonial oppression?
Only this author, additionally, examines the Arab intellectuals’common expe-
rience of migration and imprisonment. These were two salient features of the life
1Renate Holub,Antonio Gramsci:Beyond Marxism and Postmodernism(London:Routledge,1992),
24.
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xii FOREWORD
of the Arab intelligentsia, an experience which crept into their work but was
hardly noted by scholars of Arab social thought. Indeed,one cannot overestimate
the significance or meaning of the physical migration of Sayyid Qutb or the spir-
itual migration of Munir Shafiq. Neither can one ignore the prison experience of
Nawal El-Saadawi or Rashid al-Ghannushi. The author also does not overlook the
impact of oil and the oil economy on generations of writers,fueling the careers of
traditional scholars, salafis, and sycophants, as well as erstwhile critics of
the ideology of pan-Arabism. He keenly analyzes the superficial and technical
types of modernization overtaking the Arab Gulf countries today as the work of
the “Bedouin bourgeoisie” whose absorption of Western ideas rarely exceeded
adaptation to consumerism and the material culture of industrialized societies. He
describes their role today as the class which dominates the lives of naive Muslim
believers flocking to their hallowed shrines and a multinational Muslim Asian
workforce drawn to the Gulf countries by dreams of piety and prosperity.
It should be pointed out that the author possesses encyclopedic knowledge of
modern intellectual life and social thought in the Arab World. He examines the
work of crucial Arab writers who are still unknown to the Western reader. For
the first time,the ideas and influence of such ideological figures as the Lebanese
Marxist Mahdi‘Amil,the Maghrebi liberal etatist Abdallah Laroui,and the Tunisian
Islamist Rashid al-Ghannushi are brought to light. The work of these three alone
illustrates not only the fecundity of modern Arab social thought but also the
courage of that same intellectual class who challenge the forces of capitalist dom-
ination,sterile traditionalism and strict dogmatism.
Finally,the book provides new insights into the travails of the Arab intellectual
by situating the author’s own life journey within the narrative of the Arab intelli-
gentsia. Abu-Rabi‘’s journey epitomizes the social and ideological alienation of
the Arab intellectual, who, as in Albert Camus’ The Stranger, develops the
courage to rebel against his own environment. In a very genuine way,the author
represents the final metamorphosis of the alienated intellectual into the social
critic simply because,as in this case,he stands astride Israel,the place of his birth,
and the Arab World, the embodiment of his cultural and civilizational universe.
That experience alone has prepared him well for the writing of this book.