Who Am I? Dilemmas of an Arab Intellectual
Makiya, Kanan
The following is an excerpt from Kanan Makiya's forthcoming book, Cruelty and Silence: War, Tyranny, Uprising and the Arab World, which we reprint with the permission of W.W. Norton & Co. The...
...Nothing I say in this book should be construed as a critique of Arabs whose dignity and very identity as human beings is being assaulted daily by Israeli policies on the West Bank...
...In the course of a demonstration expressing solidarity with the arch tyrant of modern Arab politics, he called on Iraq to make use of its chemical weapons...
...Half a century ago, Michel `Aflaq, the founding "Duce" of the Bath party, had captured the essence of what Kareem was running away from: "nationalism is love before anything else...
...Who Is an Arab Intellectual...
...At the same time it became difficult for some Arabs—those most directly affected, overwhelmingly Kuwaitis and Iraqis —to avoid reacting to this latest Middle East crisis on the grounds of what was being done to Kuwait under occupation, and what had been going on inside Iraq during the previous twenty years...
...During the crisis and just before the Gulf War broke out, Mu'nis Razzaz had declared that since Camp David, the Arab world had seen "too much cowardice...
...Life would be simpler if I could just turn around and say, "I write on behalf of the Iraqi people, or in order to expose the crimes of Saddam...
...Marzouki is telling it straight from the heart...
...He is an expert in Islamic history who is also a former critic of Ba`thi practices...
...In 1979, the year he fled Saddam Hussein's Iraq, the Iraqi poet Fawzi Kareem wrote: Each sail not counted as yours, oh policeman of the border, Sailing not in useless search for The Meaning But fleeing from all those black meanings, Know that it is mine...
...The failure, it became clear, had nothing to do with personal integrity and knowledge of classical texts or modern thought, areas in which Adonis is greatly cultured...
...Nor would Mazin admit that the invasion of Kuwait had been a mistake...
...When I interviewed the Kurdish boy Taimour,* * Taimour and his family were victims of the 1988 mass murder campaign waged by the Ba'thi regime against Iraqi Kurds...
...Consider this all-too-common incident...
...That frightening banality was still being defended by many Arabs long after some horrible realities ought to have been thoroughly clarified...
...Accepting Arab Frailty These ways of talking, of thinking, of setting political priorities, have ruled the Middle East for a very long time now...
...Always there is an uneasy tension between a clearly inner impulse at work in the act of writing and the morality of the final result...
...The state will not renew my Iraqi passport, and it has other laws which legitimate violence against my person, because of the demonstrable fact—proven by my books—that I think non-Ba`thi thoughts...
...Nothing, but he proved to the West that we Arabs are nations to be reckoned with...
...Adonis had failed this test...
...I am how I think...
...The "determination, the defiance and insolence" of the Iraqi soldier was a classic instance of "the human being confronting the machine...
...Sometimes legitimacy is more important than legality," DjaIet said...
...It is a historically formed amalgam of sentiments and traditions traceable to the historical role of the Arabs in the creation and spread of Islam...
...Is it possible that he has taken to seeing his books as enactments in theory of what Saddam Hussein wanted to achieve in practice...
...Many intellectuals kept their distance from the Iraqi leader...
...Although I was fortunate enough to know what freedom was in many ways, on that particular day I tasted it...
...It is as though someone senses deep down that he is a failure in the present, in the world he knows and has been brought up in, but is goaded into desperate self-assertion, first by the constant reminder of how wonderful and glorious his ancestors were...
...So, I sat the boy down for two hours and in effect forced him to relive in infinitesimal detail every moment of his trauma...
...The ruling nationalist paradigm of the Arab intelligentsia, severely tested by Saddam Hussein's action on August 2, 1990, cannot be understood apart from the gigantic obsession over who is or is not an Arab...
...Semi-professional clubs and informal networks of "pro-Arab" and "proIsrael" cliques have sprung up even—or especially—in academic life, each of which worships at a particular shrine and has its childish taboos...
...In fact, the political forms in takes are very malleable...
...It read: "Support and Congratulations on Victory to His Excellency the President, Saddam Hussein, May God Preserve Him...
...In less than two weeks, "linkage" fused Kuwait onto the Palestinian question...
...The implicit assumption of Adonis's argument was that "your" Hitler certainly was the incarnation of all evil, but "our" Saddam Hussein is a run-of-the-mill despot...
...Saddam Hussein, we all recall, was supposedly leading the Arab nation when he occupied Kuwait and when he lobbed SCUD missiles into Israel...
...If I write for myself, as I said earlier, I also write from the standpoint of a person who wishes from the bottom of his heart to see this tragic state of affairs reversed...
...There is a morbid subliminal imperative at work in an article like this...
...The outcome of such self-deception is that quote from the writer in an Arabic newspaper published out of London who blames me for holding a passport that I don't hold, and who says, in a final ironical twist, that he used to be a great admirer of Republic of Fear, until its author was "unmasked" by the political positions he took during the Gulf War...
...asks 'small al-Amin, from the Arab daily al- `Arab, which supported the Iraqi regime through the Gulf crisis...
...But the idea of comparing him to Hitler was going too far...
...His voice greatly influenced poets like Kareem...
...The same chilling sensibility is at work in Marzouki's notion of "Arab democracy...
...So that instead of hundreds of thousands dead, we would have had a few millions...
...With the exception of the Gulf states and Egypt—which has been living an isolated intellectual life since the Camp David Accords— I am aware of no community of Arab intellectuals, however small, that could make a meaningful political distinction between the interests of the suffering people of Iraq, who had just lost a whole generation in eight years of grueling warfare with Iran, and the tyrant, who was sacrificing them on the altar of yet another adventure...
...The first act of reclamation is to move from the knowledge that something has gone wrong toward a new kind of Arab humility, one that is founded on an acceptance of human frailty...
...Ahmad wanted to know what standing up had accomplished...
...Several months after the debacle of the Gulf War, in the course of an evening of partying and fun, Ahmad had a conversation with Mazin, a similarly well-educated Jordanian studying business administration in Chicago...
...Nationalism has always derived great strength from the existence of such a common ground with Islam, or with a pre-Islamic Arab Bedouin tradition like hija...
...This system explicitly associates nationality with private belief...
...Why don't you write about us...
...As these notions enter into open conflict with the exigencies of work, political exile, and even lifestyle preferences, a big lie has to be maintained in the shape of a denial that the change means anything...
...Paradoxically, only insofar as we Arab democrats succeed in uncoupling and disassociating the democratic project and the values of human rights from Western centrism will we be able to salvage something from the rising tide of all "isms...
...Abu Deeb writes of prisons...
...You should have denounced the attack which sent Iraq back into the twelfth century...
...What has now happened is that this person's very identity has become constructed in a totally negative way: he is who he is because of who he hates, not because of who he loves or is in solidarity with...
...What right had I to do such a thing...
...That is why the idea of an "American Crusader plan" for the region was so all-pervasive in the rhetoric that accompanied the crisis in the Gulf...
...The clek implication is that this prison is Ba`thi Iraq...
...They die hardest of all among people who have made it their duty to awaken pride in self and a sense of collective identity by blaming all ills on some "other" —a foreign agency or "alien" culture outside the 190 • DISSENT Reflections of an Arab Intellectual community one is trying to extol, and often more powerful and dynamic...
...The dogma [of human rights], because that is what it is, is sinking all along the southern shores of the Mediterranean...
...On the contrary, it subordinates their pain to the importance of leaving the walls of this combined prison and fairyland guarded and intact...
...When Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait on August 2, 1990, the paradigm that had ruled this characteristic Arab discourse on identity was subjected to a most terrible test...
...You sit in the lap of luxury and in your hand is paper and pencil...
...The day I received the letter granting me British nationality in 1982 was one of the happiest in my life...
...The most ominous sentence in the Djalet interview — "legitimacy is more important than legality" — was a sentiment shared by every Arab who couldn't see what all the fuss over Kuwait was about, but could only see the unfolding of yet another grand Western design against the Arab world...
...He should have come to Baghdad and finished the job...
...When Shaikh As'ad al-Tamimi, the leader of the Islamic Jihad movement in Jordan (and a strong supporter of Iran during the Iraq-Iran War), called Saddam Hussein's "return" to Islam "a high point in the Islamic awakening" of the 1980s, he is meeting people like Djalet, Abu Deeb, Kuttab, and Khouri on the same cultural-historical ground...
...On the other hand, there is no doubt about the Arabness of a professor of Palestinian origin, who teaches in an American university, and who expresses his rejection of the United States in eloquent English, because he "thinks" like an Arab, and because his "cause" is the cause of all Arabs...
...A Tunisian literary critic, after describing the destruction of a handful of buildings in Tel Aviv caused by the first Iraqi SCUD missile, wrote, "Oh, this noble destruction is beautiful...
...He was aware of the problem...
...The passage from heroicizing to mythologizing to celebrating violence is effortless for DjaIet: L'Express: Since August 11, 1990, you have presided in Tunisia over the national committee of solidarity that is providing support for Iraq and its leader...
...Probably not, because Abu Deeb doesn't like Saddam Hussein...
...Anything I did that would benefit "our cause" was fine with him...
...This chapter opens the second part of Makiya's book...
...This rhetoric should make us all pause to rethink the nature of the relationship between the Arabs and the West...
...was the implicit question...
...Even his Arabness is suspect if he didn't take the right position during the Gulf War or when Sadat visited Jerusalem...
...The fact is, I am a traitor, not a citizen, in the eyes of the Republic of Iraq...
...The irony is that while Said and Arabic newspapers like al-`Arab were horrified by the idea of more Allied intervention, even Ba`thist bureaucrats thought the Gulf war was left unfinished: A group of officials whom I had known as meek and loyal servants of the government were standing around in a circle...
...This kind of nationalism did not come out of the blue...
...Saddam Hussein of course is a nasty, unpleasant dictator...
...Such people, by virtue of the freedoms they enjoy, are in a position to do something positive for Arabs trapped inside the oppressive countries of the Middle East...
...It so happens I don't have an American passport...
...The nation may be a policeman whose dogs chase us everywhere inside its walls...
...These islands of boredom in their intellectual predictability create stereotypes far more effectively than the Western media, which at worst simply reiterate them...
...Makiya, using the pen name of Samir al-Khalil, is best known as the author of Republic of Fear, perhaps the most important study of the fate of Iraq under the rule of Saddam Hussein and the Ba`th party...
...he doesn't live in Iraq...
...It "reflects less a collective will freely consented to than a `culture of consensus' with theological connotations that condition the collective Arab unconscious...
...198 • DISSENT Reflections of an Arab Intellectual Now I am a shadow Lost in the forest Of a skull...
...he turned into a big disappointment only after he lost...
...On August 2, 1990, Kuwait became that issue...
...He approved of this marketing tactic on my part because of how much he hated Saddam Hussein...
...Not everyone mouthed the brutish values of Saddam as uncritically as DjaIet or Abu Jaber...
...The Lebanese leftist intellectual Fawwaz Trabulsi, long after the war and the uprising had ended and the full scope of the debacle become clear, proudly announced that he had stood by the Iraqi regime without, however, renouncing his opposition to "the repressive relations" that it maintained with its people...
...They didn't seem to care any longer whether anyone heard them...
...So, if Samir al-Khalil happens to prefer to write in English, and if he has lived largely in the West for the last twenty years, and if he called upon the Allied forces to take out the tyrant in the conviction that this was in the best interests of all Iraqis, was he acting as a bona fide Arab given the added complication that the overwhelming majority of Iraqis thought and felt the same way...
...Do Kuwaitis not have rights just because Marzouki despises them...
...and Adonis, who is in a different league entirely, chose silence...
...Certainly this is what he wants us to think But why should any Arab want to be aligned with or inside such a terrible place, especially when he has so few prior illusions about it...
...communism withered, bent, and finally broke under the onslaught of nationalism, SPRING • 1993 • 197 Reflections of an Arab Intellectual long before the collapse of the Soviet system...
...This is all that you own...
...Now I don't want to get personal about any of this, but I urge you to look back into yourself and to direct yourself to God, the all-knowing and all-powerful, especially in these holy days [Ramadhan], asking him for forgiveness for your sins...
...But like any new thing born into an environment hostile to the idea of self-criticism, it is very, very fragile...
...The realization that one has turned into a "shadow" that no longer "belongs" in a world ruled by violence is the beginning of wisdom...
...Well, you are a Kurd, you don't like him anyway...
...This choice was no momentary lapse...
...Nor have I ever had one...
...I witnessed these scenes in October 1990 during a visit to Jerusalem and the West Bank, a visit made possible because I am now a British passport holder...
...This is a cruel rhetoric, one that does not take as its point of departure the sufferings of the people who have to live inside the prison walls...
...Clearly something very complicated is going on in the mind of a man who has committed his life to defending civic freedoms, and yet is still unable to react in a way that is consistent with that commitment...
...Think of the poisoned atmosphere inside some Middle East Studies departments in universities, especially in the United States, where the Arab-Israeli conflict all too often gets replayed in the pettiest of forms...
...These intellectuals are a very diverse group, sophisticated, and by and large politically aware...
...But the most heartbreaking reaction of all to the Gulf crisis came from people who made a vocation of human rights...
...The sentiments it expresses epitomize the anxiety, primal rage, and overt schizophrenia that are the general condition of modem Arab culture today...
...Henceforth a 194 • DISSENT Reflections of an Arab Intellectual new perspective is opening up, that of unification...
...Thinking of myself as a writer, I wanted much more out of him...
...The nation may be the cave of our disillusionment, or the slaughterhouse of our sweet dreams, or the grave of our freedom and honor...
...it was a confirmation of the obsessive and deeply unhealthy hold that identity politics has upon Arab intellectuals...
...Throughout, I am not trying to pillory any individual...
...Nor is this an aberration...
...Saddam's reputation, it seems, rested on his perceived strength...
...They want to know whether I write to please a Western audience or whether I write as an Iraqi, "on behalf of the people of Iraq...
...We have everything to gain from this clarification...
...But in an interview with L'Express, he said that Saddam had "the edge" over the Arab states, which were part of the coalition ranged against him because his newfound Islamic vocabulary "corresponds to a reappropriation of self, to the restoration of a deep identity...
...But I had not come for this...
...He had failed to see what Enzensberger really meant because he was emotionally unprepared to see it...
...the two were separated by an unbridgeable chasm...
...Despair and disenfranchisement, when married to constant abuse and humiliation of this sort, will always generate illusory hopes and superstitious beliefs in any people...
...Right from the start one's motivations are under suspicion...
...One is therefore entitled to think the writer has no illusions about the regime of Saddam Hussein...
...One can dare and challenge technology...
...Moncef Marzouki, president of the Tunisian Human Rights League, the largest such organization in the Arab world, focuses on the lies and distortions of those "soldiers of psychological war," the Western media, "which we envied and admired...
...Many got upset when I visited northern Iraq to document the Anfal operations, which took the lives of at least 100,000 noncombatant Kurds...
...In the Gulf war, it is not only Western information and technology which have failed, but above all the credibility of the famous values of the West...
...To question the factual foundations of this edifice of mythmaking becomes an act of betrayal, indicative only of self-hatred...
...Kuttab thinks Saddam is ruthless and never wants to be ruled by him Nonetheless, the Iraqi ruler embodies "something revolutionary and wonderful that is expressed in the traditional slogan `Allahu Akbar,' which I understand as the faith in a great God: Greater than sophisticated airplanes . . . and all the might of the twenty-eight states that attacked Iraq...
...Abu Deeb is a Syrian...
...He thinks the Iraqi army put up a brave fight, which the Arab world would be able to use to heighten its awareness of Western limitations...
...In the absence of such acceptance of the multiple, frail, nonideological nature of the human condition, a continuing and increasingly morbid hatred of the West and Israel is going to remain the focus onto which increasingly degraded notions of "Arabness" or "Islamic identity" are pinned...
...That is the source of the cruelty of this language...
...L'Express: Even if that were to lead to a generalized conflict...
...In previous chapters he explores, among other things, the impact of the events of 1990-91 on the lives of several Iraqis—Kurds, Sunnis, and Shi`ites —and Kuwaitis (their names will be found scattered throughout the selection, for example, Taimour, Abu Haydar, Omar, Mustafa, Khalil...
...I despise both these ways of posing the real human dilemmas involved...
...There is shame attached to changing one's passport...
...Old myths feed into fresh "theorizing," which rests on matter-of-fact assertions such as this: "Violence creates a new historical positivity that makes one forget old pains and voluntary sacrifices...
...Not that this made much of a difference to the vast majority of those who think of themselves as Arab or "pro-Arab" intellectuals...
...The sentiments underlying cultural nationalism should never be mistaken for Pan-Arabism alone (whether Nasserism, or Ba`thism, or any other kind of Arab nationalism...
...Even more important, it is very dangerous...
...Were you [Samir al-Khalil] thinking of visiting your original country, Iraq, carrying your American passport after your American army had installed itself there...
...At least a hundred thousand people perished, he did not want to talk to me...
...SPRING • 1993 • 193 Reflections of an Arab Intellectual politics, it must be stressed, is not the same as abandoning those who are smarting under the lash of Syrian repression or on the receiving end of constant humiliation and a brutal occupation in the West Bank...
...Thus far I have illustrated that paradigm using articles from a typical Arabic daily, al- `Arab, not known for the quality of its journalism...
...The fact is, I don't...
...This was a bold attempt to reexamine the much-bandied-about comparison between Saddam Hussein and Hitler...
...These give rise to despairing conclusions like "we have nothing to lose in this war," and they lead to dismissal of even the fig leaf of a shared morality with Kurds or SPRING • 1993 • 199 Reflections of an Arab Intellectual Jews or Sunnis or Shi 'is...
...Adonis considered this line of thinking from a German writer and a leading leftist democratic intellectual, who played a prominent role in Germany's 1968 student movement, to be "exaggerated to the point of mystification...
...T]he brutal crushing of Iraq . . . will not change a thing...
...The language gets more unreal, hysterical, and self-flagellating, the less the Arab world is actually able to achieve politically and culturally in modern times...
...This is what is so deeply and personally frightening about the current predicament of the Arab world...
...To read Enzensberger and to accept in the core of one's being the reality of Iraq's experience under the Ba`th, was to understand the commonality of the human condition, and to refuse its glib division into East and West, or north and south, or Arab and anti-Arab...
...As for feeling and compassion [for Iraq], of that you have none...
...DjaIet speaks of a "frigid, depressing, virtually rotten" Arab order...
...After taking the usual ritual distance from Saddam Hussein, he proceeds to heap one paragraph of abuse after the other on top of the Kuwaitis whose city had just been sacked and whose oil fields were just about to be set on fire...
...In 1986, he gave up on Beirut to live in Paris, with a sense—as he put it—that "something in the Arab world has died...
...Behind such a question lies the bigoted assumption, widespread among far more intelligent and westernized Arabs than al-Amin, that there is a hermetically sealed, uniquely Arab nexus between how one thinks and who one is, the same nexus that we encountered at the beginning of this chapter...
...Arabs everywhere have gotten themselves tangled up in knots over these kinds of issues...
...This extract from a 1982 poem, for instance, was written inside war-torn Beirut: My era tells me bluntly: You do not belong...
...But there is an unwritten rule among us Arabs that one is not supposed to speak or SPRING • 1993 • 189 Reflections of an Arab Intellectual write about such things, as I am doing now...
...Mazin referred to Saddam as the only "real man" in the Arab world for standing up to the West...
...The real and only valid moral questions arise because I write for myself and for no one else...
...Never again would I have to go to an Iraqi embassy, posting friends at the corner of the street to check up on whether or not I came out again...
...Paradoxically, therefore, the greatest threat facing the new self-critical sensibility comes from the very people who ought to be nurturing it: that community of Arab and self-proclaimed "proArab" intellectuals...
...Now I could travel without restrictions, whether those imposed by the Iraqi state even while I resided abroad, or those imposed by harsh immigration policies and the occasional racist officer at a Western port of entry...
...Adonis is one of the most distinguished writers in the Arabic language today...
...Enzensberger's point was that both men had in common an urge to self-destruction and a complete inability to distinguish between their own individual fatality and that of the collectivity of all Iraqis or all Germans...
...Prison walls are a metaphor for national boundaries...
...I am arguing that a certain way of looking at the world, often entered into with the best of intentions, is morally bankrupt, and the principal source of our inability to come to terms with problems that are of our own making...
...Hence Abu Deeb's sense of his own identity is suspended in a void of his own making...
...In Syria, many of the country's most enthusiastic supporters of deSPRING • 1993 • 195 Reflections of an Arab Intellectual mocracy and liberalization were also the harshest critics of Syria's participation in the Allied coalition...
...Throughout the Gulf crisis Adonis chose to remain silent, thereby expressing an anguish that he clearly felt to be in the culture itself at this crucial juncture...
...EDS...
...The fixation upon the sweet lie, to which all real conflicts between people are subordinated, is the most depressing thing about the Arab intelligentsia's reaction to the Gulf crisis...
...Iraqis, even those who wish me well, sometimes ask: "Who do you write for...
...The book is a remarkable examination by a dissident Iraqi intellectual of the Gulf War and the debates surrounding it, both in the West and in the Arab world...
...Many Arabs realize that something has gone terribly wrong...
...Presumably in Abu Deeb's eyes, and in the eyes of the editor of this review, their plight and their reasons for rebelling are subordinate to being at one with "the nation...
...The article begins with the assertion that the Gulf crisis and the war it gave birth to have created a new, deteriorating "western rhetoric" about the Arab world...
...Tomorrow, they are likely to turn into rabid hatred of the "wrong kind" of fellow Arab...
...During the Gulf crisis, cultural nationalist feeling revolved around hating the West and taking pride in Saddam's personification of Arab-Muslim strength...
...In that little boy's position, I thought, as I scoured the dirt for my eraser, pencil sharpener, and scattered papers after the soldiers had gone, I too would look upon Saddam Hussein as a savior...
...Consider, for instance, Hisham DjaIet, graduate of the Sorbonne, a knight of France's Legion of Honor and probably Tunisia's best-known intellectual...
...The law was a distillation of everything the Ba`th had been saying about Arab identity since the 1940s, in Syria, Iraq, and everywhere else the party had a presence...
...Aflaq's "Republic of Love" has since been realized in the shape of Saddam Hussein's Iraq...
...Who is an Arab intellectual...
...The more plausible explanation is that Abu Deeb's nation is a myth...
...it is on "being" an Arab because one behaves or thinks like one, whatever that is supposed to mean...
...My only criterion for including someone in the pantheon of people presented here is that he or she is very accomplished by generally accepted international standards (whether as a scholar, a professional, a poet, or artist of one kind or another...
...Treason is killing your own people, dragging them through a bloody long war and then telling them to take Kuwait back...
...On a more sober note, and before the war had come to an end, the head of Jordan's delegation in the current Middle East Peace talks, Kamil Abu Jaber, predicted that the Iraqi leader was heading toward military defeat...
...We have nothing to lose from this war, even if it ended in defeat...
...To many Arabs like Mazin, Saddam Hussein looked like a savior, riding in as though from a heroic past in order to uphold "Arab honor" and salve old wounds of frustration and impotence...
...The nation may be a gargantuan tyrant...
...What if an individual fits in somewhere between these two extremes, as do that motley collection of exiles from all over the Fertile Crescent who live in Paris and London, and write in Arabic for dailies, magazines, and journals appearing simultaneously in the kiosks of capital cities all over the world...
...Sometimes legitimacy is more important than legality...
...An Arab or Palestinian nationalist, on the other hand, might think that exposing the genocidal campaign of 1988 against the Kurds will be turned by Israel or the West into an attack on all Arabs, and that is bad for the Arabs...
...DjaIet and Abu Deeb's politics of despair is saturated in violence, hatred, and bitterness...
...A less sophisticated acquaintance of mine, an Iraqi businessman, was actually convinced that I played up the story of what was done to Iraqi Jews in 1969 in Republic of Fear only in order to sell more copies of the book...
...Unfortunately, it is not enough to realize that something is amiss, for the realization may lead to conclusions such as "war has the merit of clarifying things...
...His emphasis is not even the classical nationalist one on language as the criterion of identity...
...The "rights" of countries and of peoples were at issue in all of this, no matter which way one looked at the crisis...
...The painful thing to observe is the unrelenting stridency of the Arab intelligentsia's attempt to blame every ill on the West or Israel...
...The example that Adonis singled out to illustrate his point is an article by Hans Magnus Enzensberger...
...In the Mashriq, Arab liberals became an extinct species...
...He is all-forgiving and merciful...
...For culture is the terrain on which Shaikh As'ad and nationalist intellectuals met during the 1990-91 Gulf crisis, just as stereotyping is the terrain on which they meet with Nizar Qabbani in spite of the latter's honorable personal position toward Kuwaiti suffering during the crisis...
...I am not who I think I am...
...That is why it has lasted for so long and can renew itself time after time...
...For twenty years, the Arab world has been stuck in a frigid, depressing, virtually rotten order: a Saudi-American order whose vision does not go beyond petrodollars...
...Djaiet: Iraq and Saddam Hussein bring hope to the Arab world...
...But he will remain a hero for the next 1,000 years...
...But that is treason...
...The Language of Cruelty In this section I will be focusing in particular on the views of those cosmopolitan, westernized Arab and "pro" Arab intellectuals who, more often than not, reside in the West, or who are in a position to write and say what they want...
...I answer bluntly: I do not belong, I try to understand you...
...He despises politics, like most educated Iraqis of his generation brought up in Saddam Hussein's Iraq...
...The fact that westernized cosmopolitans might be embarrassed by the Shaikh's admiration for Khomeini, and his desire to have the caliphate of the eighth century restored under Saddam, is irrelevant...
...Ahmad recalls the conversation: He started the war too soon, he should have gotten the bomb first...
...One reads them or not largely because of what or how they write, not because of where they come from or the views they hold...
...If the latter has suddenly ceased to impress, what is to be said about the values...
...He has delved into the history of ideas, East and West, and he has plumbed psychological and emotional depths that many Arab intellectuals have avoided...
...The assumption once again is that one is who one writes for and that one writes only for who one is...
...Many Iraqis, Palestinians, Syrians, and Lebanese in forced or voluntary conditions of diaspora and exile will identify with these feelings and with this personal experience...
...Whose nation is this that "We cannot but be with...
...In the same breast-beating tradition, during the height of the Gulf crisis the Palestinian poet Samih al-Qasim wrote: "Since the earth is not about to split asunder and swallow me up, let me try then to tear myself apart to swallow up the earth...
...This is what the author of the passage quoted above meant when he rubbed in the words, "your American passport . . . your American army...
...I remember a feeling of sadness sweeping over me as I read Adonis's article, for I too had read Enzensberger's commentary...
...he writes as though he is on the verge of packing it all in and giving up on his profession...
...The twelveyearold boy survived by a miracle...
...Many Arabs enjoy the very benefits that they will then deny they wanted so desperately as they sought to obtain American or British or French passports...
...These two factors combine into an ideological apology for his own impotence: his people would be glorious, his state would be all-powerful, but for the machinations of the imperialists (or the Great Satan, which amounts to the same thing...
...His poem is a humble act of acknowledgement and self-renewal at the same time...
...Nor can I forget a scene just outside Jerusalem's Bab al-Khalil, Jaffa Gate, when two Israeli policemen astride jittery horses searched a terrified Arab boy, who cannot have been more than eight or nine years old, by making him turn his school satchel upside down and spill all the contents onto the grass verge...
...But then we could have faced Israel...
...And the nation may be a thousand worse and even more terrible things...
...However, goaded and taunted by the editor of the cultural page in the Arabic daily al-Quds al- `Arabi, on March 11, 1991, he broke his silence in the aftermath of the Gulf War with an article entitled, "The Prayer and the Sword: Or Savage Democracy...
...Iraqi patriots and Kurds who hate Saddam Hussein approve of what I did, seeing in it the necessary subordination of an individual's welfare to the general welfare of all Iraqis...
...There were horrors unfolding all around, and there was a rhetoric about those horrors...
...This then produces a definition of what it means to be an Arab, which is itself an affirmation of a prior mythologized assertion of "deep identity...
...Abu Deeb's rhetoric is symptomatic of a fundamental cultural malaise...
...Still, we cannot but be with the nation...
...Aren't you a Shiite...
...The advertisement went on to extol the "legendary steadfastness" of the Iraqi leader "in the face of the conspiracy of the evil invaders...
...He has done so with a degree of grace—why (God forbid...
...and second, by the image of apparently omnipotent outsiders, who effortlessly sweep him aside in every real or imagined confrontation...
...In this context, the feelings of shame about changing one's passport are rooted, whether consciously or unconsciously, in similar notions of identity...
...Yet in their vast majority they chose, directly or indirectly, either to excuse or to actively go along with the Iraqi dictator's political project...
...The very existence of such labels is a sign of how degraded the intellectual climate of debate about the Middle East has become both in the Arab world and in the West...
...A hero always presents two choices: to win or to lose...
...Because thanks to Saddam Hussein it is taking place on the level of realities—oil, military force, etc., and no longer on the level of symbols...
...The General Secretariat of the Union of Palestinian Lawyers plunged into the same surreal world when it published an advertisement with Saddam's picture in the Jordanian daily, al-Dustour, a full week after the war had ended...
...Yet for the first few days after the invasion, a reader restricted to Arabic newspapers would not even have known that Kuwait had been invaded, because the Arabic language press was either engaging in self-censorship or waiting to be told by its financiers what was permissible to write...
...Culture is also the area in which these sentiments and traditions will have to be interrogated and reshaped in the future in order to become consistent with a less cruel view of the Arab condition—one that is founded on the idea of inviolable individual political rights...
...The law that reformed the legal system in 1977 takes great care to exclude from citizenship "all persons who take a political, economical or intellectual attitude hostile to the revolution and its Programme...
...Moreover, Saddam's brutishness was, Adonis asserted, a fact known to all Arabs...
...This is harder to pin down than one would think because there are no longer any coherent criteria that combine the qualities of being an Arab (and not, say, an Egyptian) with an interacting intellectual community such as one finds in a country like Egypt...
...The point of Enzensberger's article, a point Adonis had completely failed to see, was the humbling one of integrating the phenomenon of Saddam Hussein into his own country's experience of political evil...
...The nationalism of too many cosmopolitan "anti-imperialist" Arab intellectuals today speaks only to base sentiments associated with that rising pile of bodies...
...Is Taimour better off for it...
...He had been taught to spew out a canned speech...
...The only way to face Israel is by shaking hands...
...it is at one and the same time a prison and a fairy tale...
...Amin believes that even Arabs who write in Arabic may no longer "be" Arabs, because they do not rely solely on Arab sources...
...An Egyptian publishing in Arabic in Egypt is not a "good" Arab intellectual, or the right kind of intellectual, if he sees himself as an Egyptian and if he fits into a circle of publishers, commentators, and readers who are restricted to Egypt...
...In the same interview on intellectuals and the Gulf war, Said spoke approvingly of a popular source of conspiratorialism in the Arab world, namely, asking of every piece of writing: "who is this person really speaking for...
...However, criticizing the rhetoric of Arab including all members of Taimour's family...
...It is a good question, which he answers very poorly: "How can a writer be an Arab intellectual, a carrier of Arabic culture as long as he footnotes his article, study or book with references that have not the remotest connection to Arabic, neither in language nor in culture nor in thought...
...A bona fide citizen is one who thinks in a certain way, and deviancy is manifest in "bad thoughts" before it is realized in treacherous behavior...
...You had to find out what was going on from the Western media...
...Like Nizar Qabbani's poetry, Abu Deeb's mythmaking and Samih al-Qasim's selfflagellation operate at a gigantic distance from the actual feelings of Iraqis and Kuwaitis as they experience the world that these men of letters are writing about...
...DjaIet is perfectly happy to see tens of thousands of Arab lives expended in order to repossess historical territory...
...In the wake of the Iranian revolution, the same sentiments that created Ba`thism turned into Islamic revivalism and the sudden rediscovery of political Islam by one formerly secular intellectual after another (the Egyptian ex-Marxists Muhammad `Amara and 'Adil Hussein, for instance...
...He has since become a prime target for assassination...
...Even the Palestinian human rights activist Jonathan Kuttab, a Christian lawyer from East Jerusalem, spoke of Saddam Hussein as the bearer of a new "liberation theology...
...Making distinctions, however, is the very stuff of a creative engagement with the world...
...In the end, it doesn't matter what local coloring that hatred takes (anti-imperialism, Arab nationalism, Palestinian nationalism, religious fundamentalism...
...But none of these reactions can match that of Kamal Abu Deeb, a professor of Arabic literature at Columbia University, who tapped into the emotional wellsprings of this intellectual mind-set...
...You have no right to speak of Iraq and of those who live in it...
...However, after years of working hard at it, I succeeded in freeing myself from the restrictions imposed by that great bane of fourteen years of my adult life, that ball and chain upon my freedom: my Iraqi passport...
...Arab nationalist sentiments rooted in the memory of deep historical injustices—the carving up of the Arab world after World War I and the creation of the state of Israel in 1948—came face to face with the ugliness of the regime spearheading Arabism in 1990: Ba`thi Iraq...
...His is a more sympathetic way of expressing basically the same way of thinking as those non-Iraqi 192 • DISSENT Reflections of an Arab Intellectual Arab-Americans who thought of Samir alKhalil during 1991 as a "self-hating Arab" who wrote critically about the Arab world in order to curry favor with publishers and book reviewers in the West...
...A very large number of people have invested much of their lives in constructing and defending this "rejectionist" paradigm, which has now become second nature to a new generation of Arabs like Mazin...
...Why is it that we do not hear about "pro-French" or "pro-Latin-American" intellectuals...
...Even though most Arabs didn't support the invasion of Kuwait, Saddam Hussein's fearlessness in standing up to our enemies . . . appeals to the new spirit of the Arab world—a spirit that says we'd rather die on our feet than live grovelling on the ground," wrote the editor of Jordan Times and host of Jordanian television's most influential public affairs talk show, Rami Khouri...
...Abu Deeb is on the editorial board of the innovative theoretical journal Mawaqif, and he is the translator into Arabic of Edward Said's Orientalism, among many other distinguished literary accomplishments...
...Think of Kareem as one of the many Iraqis who have become desperate to escape the suffocating embrace of so much love, and you can see how a new Arab sensibility is born, one whose logic is a repudiation of the old paradigm that welded my identity into how I think, not into who I think I am...
...In his writings of the 1960s, he explored the complex terrain between culture and politics...
...When all things are equally nasty, then nothing is really nasty at all and one is simply unable to make distinctions any longer...
...And Iraq is its pole and motor...
...Djaiet: War has the merit of clarifying things— with respect to your contradictions and with respect to ours...
...The same notions of betrayal, it so happens, found their way into the Iraqi legal system long ago...
...But it was the Syrian-born poet Adonis, that innovator in the forms of the Arabic language, who first began constructing the scaffolding of new literary forms around which a new quality of Arabness could be built...
...Ahmad, an upper-middle-class, well-educated young man, was born and brought up in Baghdad...
...He is one of the few who sensed that no one had anything new to say, which troubled him greatly...
...Dajiet: I don't have to tell you, as Europeans, that your nations were born out of wars...
...This is a tragedy . . . I have been deceived by this man," said Mu'nis Razzaz, a novelist and newspaper columnist in Jordan who came to this realization rather late considering that his father, Munif Razzaz, was a well-known Jordanian Ba`thi who died in an Iraqi prison on the orders of Saddam Hussein for supporting a nonexistent "conspiracy" in 1979...
...Schoolchildren will sing songs about him and mothers will call their sons Saddam...
...The funny thing is that "being a Palestinian" or being a "pro" or even an "anti" Arab spokesperson is an effective strategy for drawing attention to oneself or to one's cause, and it is most effective in the United States...
...I will never forget the experience of sitting in a Palestinian taxi driving from Birzeit to Jerusalem, tailing a jeepload of jeering Israeli soldiers gesticulating rudely at the six stony-faced Arabs in the taxi...
...Emotional blocks like this are the greatest obstacle to the emergence of a healthy sense of identity, one that fully embraces the "other...
...Like Saddam Hussein, Hisham DjaIet is able to convert even the most abject defeat into proof of the indomitable spirit of Arabism...
...Old habits die hard...
...Accepting with Walid Khalidi that in spite of everything, "the Arab world still paradoxically constitutes a single area of psychological, emotional and intellectual resonance transcending state frontiers," my sole criterion for including someone is that he or she writes from a position of deep empathy with, and sense of belonging to, that world—howsoever defined...
...After the creation of the state of Israel in 1948, they began sweeping through the entire ideological spectrum...
...An "issue" is all that it takes to bring that formless emotional amalgam bursting out into the open...
...Iraq and its people are as innocent of you as the wolf is innocent of the blood of Yousuf...
...The result is always more Arab and Muslim dead...
...John Simpson, From the House of War...
...Then there are specialists in the work of such writers, who are interested in looking for connections and common preoccupations, but who would never imagine themselves as "pro" or "anti" Latin America...
...From the piece, it does not appear that the thought crossed Abu Deeb's mind...
...Neither Arab nationalism nor Islamic political activism has yet developed even the most primitive conception of political "rights," whose most elementary underpinning is the absolute isolation of all matters of belief from entitlement and obligation in public life...
...These are, I submit, false, self-destructive, and ultimately cruel sentiments...
...In the current historical conjuncture—not always or for all time—it is incapable of rising above them because it is so deeply hostile to accepting a notion of individual human rights in politics not based on double standards...
...Borges and Marquez think of themselves as writers who come from Argentina and Colombia...
...he has even been able to make something of it...
...Yesterday, they revolved around Sati'a alHusri, Michel 'Aflaq, or Jamal 'Abdel-Nasser and the romantic ideal of umma `arabiyya wahida, one Arab nation...
...L'Express: How do you justify the annexation of Kuwait...
...He was trying to make sure of a source of wealth for himself, material means...
...Islamic militancy, on the other hand, had no problem with the language in the first place...
...It is a component part of culture, not an explicit political ideology...
...As an old Palestinian friend of mine, who is constantly having to shuttle between conferences, once put it: "I have turned into a professional Palestinian...
...This is not the case with writers from or about the Middle East, who too often project themselves and their work as "Arab," "Palestinian," or "pro-Arab" in the politically charged connotations of those labels...
...Instead, you asked the barbarians to finish what they had started...
...In annexing Kuwait, Saddam Hussein has entered into the dynamics of history...
...General Schwartzkopf didn't go far enough," said one in a loud voice...
...But the same obsession is present in one form or another in all the anti-Western rhetoric that comes out of the Arab world...
...the idea of a rapacious West descending on the Muslim world is as old as the Crusades...
...Their talk of the decimation of the Iraqi air force by the Allies is, he says, "today the laughingstock of all...
...As they say in Arabic, min warrah?, 'who's behind him?' " The fundamental difference between myself and Said can be boiled down to the fact that whereas I reject the very asking of such questions of any human being, he approves of them...
...To paraphrase Milan 196 • DISSENT Reflections of an Arab Intellectual Kundera, this kind of intellectual mendacity is about gazing "into the mirror of the beautifying lie," and being moved "to tears of gratification at one's own reflection...
...They are false because they are so obviously grounded in a lie, a lie that was being proved to be one at the very moment of writing by the actions of the "prisoners" themselves—the people of Iraq — who, unlike Abu Deeb, were obliged to be in or "with the nation...
...Millions of Iraqis—like Abu Haydar, Omar, and Mustafa—were either rebelling against the tyrant or voting with their feet and running away from his prison at the very moment that an-Naqid, a London-based Arabic monthly cultural review, was publishing these lines...
...This world of attitudes, emotional responses, and cultural images does not need a wellconstructed political ideology to make itself felt in speech and intellectual discourse...
...Arab intellectuals, or intellectuals from among the Arabs...
...I write for myself, like everyone else," is the confusing answer I give to all these critics...
...Another way of constructing one's identity, by looking inward self-critically, rather than outward, has not been explored by the Arab intelligentsia as a way of facing up to the crisis of their world after 1967—a world that has been lurching headlong from one catastrophe to another for longer than any of us care to contemplate...
...Commentary in al-'Arab newspaper What is the connection between the passport one holds, the views one expresses, the books one writes, and one's innermost emotional and belief system, which is of course what constitutes one's identity...
...All his friends in the United States, where he recently came to study, were Arabs...
...Saddam did not remain a hero for long in the eyes of some...
...What is a "pro-Arab" intellectual...
...Is this the Arab nation that Abu Deeb has in mind...
...And although I had certain reservations—his view of Iraq was too "German" —my impressions were exactly the opposite of Adonis's...
...A poem like this overturns Djakes obsession with Arabness and Abu Deeb's selfflagellating anxiety over who he is, because it rests on the poet's celebration of his difference and his individuality...
...Kareem has accepted his condition as one of "fragmentedness...
...it is perceived to be an act of betrayal of some kind...
...most Arab and SPRING • 1993 • 191 Reflections of an Arab Intellectual "pro-Arab" writers aren't...
...In addition, he was undertaking the beginning of the unification of the Arab world...
...The morality of what I did to Taimour is subject to all kinds of important questions, the most interesting of which have nothing to do with who I write for, or even who I am...
...In a similar vein, Edward Said has criticized my writing for being "unsympathetic" to Arabs and advancing the thesis that the violence in the Middle East is inscribed in Arab genes...
...Wherever one looks, it seems, the principle of "human rights" in politics is on the run in the Arab-Muslim world...
...The others nodded...
...A new, self-critical sensibility has begun to enter Arab politics...
...In its latest Gulf crisis incarnation, Arab nationalism creates an even more dangerous conundrum of identity than before—one that is wildly at variance with the actual condition of Arabs, especially the intellectuals among them...
...After the war had ended, Abu Deeb published a piece of poetic prose entitled Sarkhah fi Matah (Screaming in a Wasteland): We cannot but be with the nation...
...It is as if Khalil, Abu Haydar, Omar, Mustafa, Taimour, and all the flesh-and-blood individuals that I quoted earlier in this book do not exist, or have been turned into a theoretical abstraction...
...That condition is factually one of fragmentation and atomization, regardless of whether one is struggling to survive under siege in Birzeit University, writing for the Arab newspaper conglomerates of London and Paris, preaching from the rostrums of Western universities, or in exile from one of the many regimes that have choked off all civility in the Arab world...
...The important point is that today all these ideologies are being boiled down into pure unadulterated hate...
...q 200 • DISSENT...
...The more common stance was to support his policies in practice while vehemently protesting one's innocence of his thuggishness at every step along the way...
...Like Islam, Arab nationalism is not going to go away...
...Because they don't exist...
...The whole Arab world was stunned by what Saddam had done...
...Dangerous because it takes place at the expense of life as it is really lived, and finally at the expense of the real lives of people...
Vol. 40 • April 1993 • No. 2
