Dreams of Araby
Pryce-Jones, David
Dreams of Araby Fouad Ajami & the Future of the Islamic Past By David Pryce-Jones For the best part of half a century, the Arabs have been fully independent, with the chance to make political and...
...Any suggestion of pluralism or power-sharing is enough to threaten or even induce civil or external war...
...The pages of The Dream Palace of the Arabs are similarly filled with words like "despair," "cruelty," "waste," and "bankruptcy...
...Coming to political awareness in the heyday of Gamal Abdel Nasser and the Suez campaign of 1956, he was like so many others formed by what he calls "an amorphous Arab nationalist sensibility...
...Whatever has gone wrong...
...He gives tragicomic examples of writers who have simply reversed their opinions to fit the twists and turns of tyrannical power...
...They were unable either to learn or to forget...
...But Hawi continued his enthusiastic nationalism: "Let me know if Arab unity is achieved...
...But Arab intellectuals will find themselves unable to revile the name of Fouad Ajami without thereby apologizing for absolutism and tyranny...
...His family had some land in a village, and they grew tobacco...
...But in a dark corner of the dream palace, Ayatollah Khomeini and his kind were concocting another "false gift" for the masses...
...Absolute rulers have killers, jailers, and censors on the payroll...
...In his latest important work, Fouad Ajami explodes this illusion...
...Like nationalism, Islamic fundamentalism professed to be establishing unity...
...The past involved undoubted deprivations, poverty, and hunger...
...A famous poem of Hawi's entitled "The Bridge" rhapsodized about Arab culture and unity...
...In the eyes of some Arabs, Hawi remains a martyr...
...On the surface, Khalil Hawi was a successful, self-made man with a social conscience...
...Some of the most eminent Arab intellectuals (including Neguib Mahfouz, the one Arab Nobel Prize winner in literature) had already perceived Israel for what it is: a small country of no great account to the Arabs...
...Newspapers may have become unreadable, and books are less resonant than before, but a sound intellectual tradition survives...
...There are first-rate intellectuals among the Arabs, and Ajami is the first to recognize it...
...Arab nationalism was dangerous to those who subscribed to it—not merely to Hawi but also to the huge majority of Arabs who had fallen under the sway of charismatic leaders of the type of Nasser: the Hafez Assads and the Saddam Husseins...
...But he is still immersed in the Arab experience and determined to elucidate it—in anecdotes, quotations from literature, interviews, anything that reveals the ebb and flow of contemporary Arab public opinion...
...In the name of Islam—but in fact in mockery of Arab culture and religion—cities and countries have foundered in blood...
...Instead, every contemporary Arab state has an absolute ruler, with a base in his family, tribe, or sect, extending to the army and secret police...
...Born a member of the Greek Orthodox community, he too belonged to a minority, and he becomes, in The Dream Palace of the Arabs, the type of man Ajami himself might have become, had he stayed in Lebanon...
...But he had fallen early under the influence of a charismatic adventurer, Anton Saadeh, the founder of a party advocating a Greater Syrian nationalism...
...The Six Day War of 1967, the deadlock of the Palestine Liberation Organization, the collapse of Lebanon, bitterly proved that Hawi's aspirations had no foundation in reality...
...In the present Arab world, this conclusion is likely to be met with shamefaced silence or even outrage and scandal...
...He is a Shiah from south Lebanon, where his community was in the majority, but traditionally downtrodden...
...These doctrines have nothing to contribute to progress...
...But there was at least a cultural wholeness about it— and Ajami mourns the loss of that wholeness in elegiac prose, for the present is unbearable...
...Here was someone whose life and death seem to represent the complete Arab condition...
...In due course, Ajami suggests, Islamic fundamentalists will also be obliged to come to terms with reality, and a pluralist society will emerge in Egypt...
...Dreams of Araby Fouad Ajami & the Future of the Islamic Past By David Pryce-Jones For the best part of half a century, the Arabs have been fully independent, with the chance to make political and social choices for themselves...
...At the end of The Dream Palace of the Arabs, Ajami discusses reactions to the 1993 Oslo accords signed by Israel and the Palestinians...
...The situation, however, may not be as grave as it looks...
...Ajami sees Egypt as the key to the future...
...If only they were left to themselves, they would duly modernize...
...if I am dead, send someone to my graveside to tell me of it when it is realized...
...Eventually he was to teach literature there, with academic interludes in England and America...
...But the mere idea of peace sent other equally eminent intellectuals (the American-Palestinian Edward Said, for example, and the poets Nizar Qabbani and Mahmoud Darwish) scurrying back into the dream palace, once more to indulge in expectations which can be fulfilled only in war and ruin...
...On the day in 1982 that Israel invaded Beirut, he committed suicide...
...Islamic terrorists attack the Coptic minority and destabilize the government...
...Oil wealth gave them a colossal windfall, and their religion, their language, and the memory of their great past ought to have coalesced into a confident identity— retaining their inherited structures or adapting them as they see fit...
...Who, or what, is to blame for this state of affairs...
...As a writer, Ajami is specially distressed that Arabic itself has been so abused in the service of absolutism that this great language no longer communicates truth...
...Ajami knows that self-examination and the power of the intellect alone can liberate the Arabs...
...But in tacit complicity with those who tyrannize over them, Arab intellectuals have fashioned and applauded empty doctrines: first nationalism, and then Islamic fundamentalism...
...Neither he nor his friends attended the local mosque: "We were not a religious breed...
...But Ajami makes it clear that he ought to be a cautionary tale instead...
...But until they examine truthfully the causes and effects of absolutism, custom, and backwardness, they cannot settle on an identity and create the culture worthy of them...
...But responsibility for the breakdown principally falls upon this educated elite, who have not risen to the task of analyzing their society...
...For Ajami, Arabs have only themselves to blame if they prefer dream palaces to the hard work of social construction...
...Although he knew Muslim West Beirut in its heyday, he left for America at the age of eighteen and is today a distinguished professor at Johns Hopkins University...
...Nasser's successors have undone much of his mischief...
...In The Dream Palace of the Arabs, he has had the courage and vision to tell people what they must hear for their own good...
...Nearly two decades ago, in The Arab Predicament, he was already speaking of a deep and terrifying breakdown of Arab society...
...A third of Ajami's book is taken up with an account of the life and death of Khalil Hawi, a Lebanese poet and once something of a household name...
...Originally a poor villager, he worked as a stonemason and cobbler, before obtaining a scholarship to the American University of Beirut...
...In sober fact, Saadeh derived his beliefs from Hitler's Nazism, and he ended, predictably enough, before a firing-squad—leaving Hawi himself a marked man for a time...
...Conditions have not been easy, to be sure...
...Nobody is forcing anything on them...
...The economy cannot keep pace with the rising population...
...Pretensions to justice and equality found their conclusion, suicidally indeed, in repression and frustration...
...Power changes hands only through death, sometimes natural but often from coup and assassination...
...Fired by hopes of messianic salvation, he had politicized and spoiled a genuine poetic gift...
...Hawi had simply made a series of judgments so willful that they were altogether unbalanced...
...This is a failure of the intellect, and from it stem the many symptoms of disorder...
...There is a middle class with much to lose...
...The Dream Palace of the Arabs includes another self-contained essay of about eighty pages, in which Aja-mi turns to the phenomenon of Islamic fundamentalism, ostensibly the opposite of nationalism, but actually its Siamese twin: another would-be revolution born out of a sense of inferiority and defeat...
...There is no innovative science, medicine, or philosophy...
...Great is the truth, we must hope, and it will prevail...
...The Dream Palace of the Arabs has enough autobiographical underpinning to show how Ajami resolved the crisis of identity for himself, quite exceptionally...
...Arab writers and apologists have a long list of foreign culprits, beginning with Israel, the United States, and that all-purpose entity known as "the West...
...In such a perspective, Arabs appear the innocent victims of the malignancy of other A scholar in London, David Pryce-Jones is the author of The Closed Circle: An Interpretation of the Arabs...
...As a boy, he played about in the ruins of a nearby Crusader castle...
...Arousing expectations incapable of fulfillment, Arab nationalism involved a mass deception...
...They are vain dreams—Ajami's "Dream Palace"— of power and glory, of consolation, and revenge for grievances more imaginary than real, and this triumph of emotion over reason has politicized and degraded the entire Arab world...
...people...
...Discursive, elliptical, highly particular, this is the testimony of a free spirit and a tour de force...
...Unable to go backward or forward, they have been doing violence to themselves, psychologically and physically...
Vol. 3 • March 1998 • No. 25
