One is hard put to be a thinking citizen of the Arab world today and not be a member of a "protestant" movement. The conditions of political, economic, social and cultural life, while much changed from previous centuries, are still a far cry from the conditions that could form the basis of a productive, stable and open society. But, while Luther nailed his theses to the church door at Wittenberg, the Arab intellectual today is uncertain where to nail his/hers.
The doors of the houses of worship have been closed by the firebrand revolutionary populists of a purist religion. The doors of the state have been closed off by rings of secret police and a state-elite mentality representing a melange of tribalism, bureaucratism and the Mafia.
The doors of the academy have collapsed, following the successive failures of the ideas of the Arab state, Arab nationalism and Arab socialism. This was augmented by the worldwide crisis of revolutionary critical thought in the wake of the collapse of European communism and socialism and the cheerful abandonment of the latter by China. The Arab academy is left with the valueless pragmatism and positivism of Anglo-Saxon social science and the navel-gazing of semiotics, post structuralism, deconstruction, etc. offered up by the French. On the one hand, there are "field studies" that say much about very little within a narrowly defined sub sub-field within a teleologically undefined general social-scientific context and, on the other, the mainly North African attempts to say much about how little we can say about the social realm, given the problematic nature of language and reason.
Aristotle was the first to say that politics (social science) is not an exact science, but it is the mother of sciences: a melange of analysis and synthesis, of reflection and action, of thinking and doing, of understanding and changing. It is a deeply interdisciplinary science that cannot grasp the part without imagining the whole, that cannot achieve partial change without an overall vision, but which is burdened with the critical task of guiding the organization of society. As Hegel, Schopenhauer, Marx, Nietzsche and many others have insisted, thinking cannot be divorced from doing, and meaningful progress in thought and reflection cannot be achieved without some clarity of will and direction. It is not possible to chart a map of the road to nowhere; different destinations demand different maps.
In the Arab world today the dream is dead, although we are having vivid flashbacks. With the fragments of Arab nationalism, Arab socialism and the idea of a progressive Arab state lying at our feet, some assuage the deep loss and disillusion with messianic visions of an imagined past. Our politics are mired in various forms of military, one-party, oligarchic, religious or family rule. Our economies are stuck between monopoly capitalism, state socialism, state capitalism, rentierism, peasant subsistence, and quasi-feudal extractionism. Our society lurches from an imagined past to a receding intellectual modernity to a spreading mass culture. The air is tense with competing forces: patriarchy and liberation, modernity and tradition, Westernization and authenticity, spirituality and materialism, communalism and individualism.
I will sketch out a number of theses in politics, economics and culture as points for discussion of some basic goals for the twenty-first century. As Edward Said noted in his penetrating Representations of the Intellectual (Vintage 1994), "There is no such thing as a private intellectual"; the thinker must relate himself to the value of truth in political struggle and "speak truth to power" in the face of grim social realities (pp. xvi andl2).
ASSESSING THE "SITUATION"
Part of the crisis of the Arab intellectual is our confusion regarding the "modernizing" stage in which we live. Most of us are convinced - and have been for a century and a half - of the need for radical change in the Arab world, and we have little to look to for guidance but the radical evolution of the West. From Hegel, Fichte and Herder we borrowed an evolutionary vision centered on the nation, but this was soon deflated in the disappointments of Arab nationalism. We borrowed from Marx and Lenin a faith in the progressive and determinist engine of economic change that would take us from whatever stage we were in to an advanced, liberated and just socialism, without passing through capitalism and without actually needing an industrial working class of any size. This too was deflated, as it became obvious that class consciousness was not the central organizing force of social identity, that serious class struggle required an advanced industrial economy and did not work well in rentier and patronage-based states, and that a strong state could manipulate and short-circuit any such potential class determinism. From Napoleon, Bismarck and Stalin - even from Mussolini and Hitler, for a time - we borrowed the perspective of progress through state-building, and we trusted that even if the nation or class failed, at least the construction of strong, secular, socialist and progressive Arab states would transform our society and culture and put us on the road to modernity. As the states turned into jails, this vision too faded.
In the late 1960s and early 1970s, many put their faith in Maoist, Castroist, Ho Chi Minhist, Guevarist, Algerian-style populist-peasant guerrilla revolution as the key to social, cultural and political transformation. In the only place where this thought was allowed full expression, 1970s Lebanon, revolutionary "guerrillism" on all sides succeeded in dismantling the state, but quickly deteriorated into the lowest form of atavistic thuggery and blood-letting. All else having failed, many flocked to religion. It offered a simple binary model of faith and unbelief, power and weakness, prominence and marginality, dynamism and decline, authenticity and loss, rectitude and corruption. The simplicity and cultural rootedness of the model held and still holds many in its sway, but its silence on so many issues of great pertinence to politics, culture and social progress in today's world - as well as the unencouraging experience of Iran, to say nothing of Algeria, Afghanistan or the Sudan - have kept it unworkable for most intellectuals.
Living from succession crisis to succession crisis within a universe of family or tribally based states and within a non-progressive cycle of regime rise and decline, we cannot seem to derive a perspective on moving forward in any meaningful historical sense.
Michel Foucault in The Order of Things describes four civilizational stages following the medieval age of dogma and superstition: the Renaissance, the age of analogy and the expansion of intellectual exploration; the Enlightenment, the age of analysis and understanding; Modernity, the age of organization and standardization; and post-modernity, the age of deconstruction, doubt, fragmentation, and the questioning and dismantling of cultural authority. Do we in the Arab world today fit into any of these categorizations?
Parts of our culture and psyche are still mired in medieval mystification; yet we did have a timid renaissance a hundred years ago whose effects are still with us. A mild enlightenment took place almost simultaneously but was largely derivative and did not strike deeproots of attachment to profound philosophical and scientific principles. Modernity came at virtually the same time as a form of political, economic and social organization shown by colonialism and adopted enthusiastically after independence. We live the effects of Western postmodernism in popular culture - particularly global mass culture - which is increasingly becoming our own mass culture through the spread of the commercial media, but we are not in any profound sense in a post-modern condition. We have not at all worked through any of the other stages to their point of conclusion.
Francis Fukuyama's thesis about history having ended is, while exaggerated, not without insight. The West has reached a certain point of Hegelian conclusion or historical plateau in working out a particular ordering of economic and political life. The new questions set by post-modernity are, in a profound sense, post-historical, "beyond" history. But only those with a strong sense of historical security can venture beyond it. The Arab world is still very much within history, still in the process of working out basic political, economic, social and cultural contradictions. And, despite the recent setbacks in East Asia, one must agree somewhat with Fukuyama's assertion that the combination of a democratic (semi-welfare) state and a (semi-managed) market economy has proven itself. But, while postmodernists are free to critique its faults, they can afford to ignore its Hobbesian alternatives. We cannot.
We cannot abandon the grand narratives of democracy, social justice and industrial production; equality and human rights; or science, secularism and empiricism. There is no postmodern route to modernity, as there was no socialist route to industrialization. We are stuck in a neomodernist project in a postmodern world, in need of modernist beliefs in a world tom between post-modem skepticism and premodern faith.
It is the loneliness of this quest that poses the sharpest challenge to the Arab intellectual today. Before the middle of the century, before the conclusion of their project of modernity, we were still in step with the intellectuals of the West. We could work with them, borrow from them, as we sought the same objectives. Increasingly, however, they have gone their way, and we haven't gone ours. Stranded between the postmodern concerns of the West and the premodern flashbacks of our own society, we seem paralyzed by fear and confusion. Our appeals to modernity seem to ring hollow in our Western-tuned ears, yet we can find no alternative to pit against the contradictions of our societies and against the premodern appeals of our compatriot competitors. It is as if we must plug our ears to postmodernity and return to the unfinished - indeed, hardly begun - project of achieving modernity.
RE-CONQUERING THE POLITICAL
All thinking is in some way political; without engaging in the political, social thought remains barren and ineffectual. Let us decide whether the construction of representative democracies in the Arab world is (or is not) one of our most fundamental political objectives in the completion of the modernist project. If it is, then let us look soberly at the tasks required of us along that path. Our first awkward steps in the interwar period were rudely cut short by the need for militarization against Israel and the urgent social-welfare requirements that came with a population explosion and rapid urbanization. The ideological undermining of these early steps from both the left and the right magnified their admittedly profound flaws and went a long way toward postponing our reconciliation with the institutions of liberal democracy. There is a need for a fresh review of that period in order to provide a domestic source of reference and local legitimacy for the democratic project. We cannot work for liberal democracy and simultaneously curse its first uncertain steps.
The various wagers that we made regarding the emanation of democracy from other sources have to be put aside, and we have to work directly for its institution. The Arab nationalist wager that democracy would be the inevitable expression of post-Inbiaath (now, laughably, post-Baath, or post-Nasser) neo-Arab civilization is no longer valid. Nor is the argument acceptable that we have to continue to put off democracy until we finish the struggle against Israel. That struggle, at least at the state level, ended in the mid- l970s. We lost. Although some Arab states still keep the myth of the universal struggle alive in order to keep democracy off the political agenda, it is time for us at least to reap the domestic political benefits of the defeat. Who knows; maybe democracy will better prepare us to face Israel politically, economically and culturally in the distant future. Democracy certainly served the West well in dominating the world and Israel well in defeating the Arab states. Perhaps it will do some good to us as well.
The wager that democracy would be the natural outcome of the establishment of the modem Arab state by Westernized military and professional elites has also come to naught. This modern Arab state, in many countries, has been established. But it has long settled into a comfortable form of highly policed bureaucratic authoritarianism that shows no serious signs of real democratization.
The argument has also come to naught that authoritarianism was a super structural reflection of capitalist-class domination that would disappear with the destruction of that class, the nationalization of large enterprises, and the redistribution of wealth and income. It was to be followed naturally by a more democratic political superstructure reflecting new conditions of social equality and solidarity. Socialist reforms in a number of Arab states, despite their success relating to wealth and income distribution, had the same authoritarian political results as in the Soviet Union and China and virtually every other country where revolutionary one-party socialism has been tried.
Within the Islamist camp, there are those who argue that democratization in the Arab world must inevitably pass through the legitimizing vestibule of religion. They argue that a culturally alien democracy will never take root, and that Islam's principles of egalitarianism, respect for law and shura (consultation) are the only true bases for democracy. Despite the protestations of these Islamist democrats, there is a fundamental contradiction between democracy and the principles of theocracy and paternalism that are at the heart of religion. Neither are the Islamic movements internally democratic in their higher leadership. Nor has Islam been a convincing basis for democratization in any of the officially Islamic states. Despite considerable democratization in Iran, the official restrictions on who may and may not run for office render the elections essentially a run-off among previously approved clerics and their close allies. In addition, the liberalism that accompanies the modem manifestation of successful representative democracy also runs counter to a highly paternalistic and moralistic approach.
Further, the wager made by some that Westernization and close relations with the West would bring democratization have also proven false. Westernization in its mass cultural content might provide some of the popular images and surface values of a permissive society that are not completely removed from contemporary liberal democracy, but Western mass culture and authoritarianism can coexist for long periods - perhaps indefinitely. And whereas the West, particularly the United States, has imposed democracy in some regions of the world (post-war Germany and Japan), it has allied itself in the Gulf, North Africa and the Middle East with the powers that be. It has too much at stake, especially in the Gulf, to tolerate, much less encourage, strong democratization movements that might result, as with Mosaddegh in 1950s Iran, in a shift of policy. For the Arab world, there will be no externally imposed democratic deus ex machina. Our democracy will have to be home grown.
Recent hopes that civil-society organizations and institutions will be the engine for democratization, as was the case in central and eastern Europe in the last decade, have also proven exaggerated. To begin with, civil society is in large part not as civil, democratic, tolerant, inclusive, pluralistic, voluntaristic and participatory as optimistic liberals would like to think. In Lebanon, civil society in a sense helped drag the society into civil war. In other countries civil society is the seat of exclusionary, atavistic, authoritarian, patriarchal and other non-liberal groupings. Those institutions and organizations that we recognize as carrying civic values and participating in pushing toward a civil and political system based on pluralism, rule of law and democracy are indeed in the minority. Left to its own devices, civil society would probably drift away from liberal democracy toward other more original forms of group association and value.
Second, even if civic groupings were stronger, they would not be strong enough to impose change on the state. In the recent past, the state has only altered its policies as a result of armed coups, massive strikes and demonstrations, or organized threats from religious radicals. By contrast, the Arab state is quite comfortable with the civilized debates and requests made by civil society. They put no real pressure on the state; they give an air of freedom and democratization; and they threaten no serious consequences when they go unanswered. If civil society is the battering ram of democratization, it is a very soft one.
What is required, in my view, is a radical politicization of the democratization movement. It must withdraw from the genteel meeting rooms of civic society into the street, into the student organizations within universities, into the labor and professional unions, into the media, into the urban neighborhoods and rural areas. It must do the homework necessary for building a national movement within each country, a pan Arab component to link Arab societies together, and a transnational component linking democratic movements around the world. It should also redesign alliances that the Arab left once had with the European left, between an Arab democratic movement and the forces that might support Arab democratization in Europe, Asia, Latin America and elsewhere. It should prepare for confrontation and seek to capitalize on the mythology and ideology that build as a result of confrontation, strikes and joint struggle.
The democratization movement cannot remain a movement of statements, brochures and seminars. It has to recapture the energy of Paris of 1968, Tiananmen of 1989 or Berlin of 1990. There will be no change without action and no revolution without spectacle. Until the weak intellectual consensus on the need for democratization in the Arab world is translated into will, action and conflict, the chances for actual democratization will remain as remote as they have been throughout the post-World War II period.
REEVALUATING ECONOMICS
Despite the recent historical turn against him, Marx was not far wrong when he asserted that economics was at the heart of social, political and cultural reality. Although twentieth-century Marxians have awoken to the additional importance of politics and culture as independent variables, progress and change in economic life remains central to change in all other aspects of life. And unlike culture, economics is a practical discipline having as its main goal the improvement of material conditions and a general increase in production and wealth.
After more than 200 years of testing and experimentation, and after the adjustment of Keynes and others, it is time perhaps to tentatively conclude that a semi-managed market system is probably the most effective means for increasing productivity, generating fairly rapid and sustained growth, and raising general living standards. The establishment of large and free markets in England and other parts of Europe between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries was the driving force for rapid economic change, technological advances and industrialization. This has brought about the most dramatic improvement in the material conditions of the human species since the dawn of history. We cannot but conclude that fully socialist economics, the only serious challenger to market economics, has failed to deliver sustained economic development and has been abandoned by virtually all those who tried it and knew it best. The flaws of market systems are well known, but it has also been shown since the 1930s by Keynes, Myrdal, Galbraith and others that wise and fair government (a synthesis of the best of capitalism and democratic socialism) can reap the productive energies of the market while at the same time attending to the gaps and inequalities that it leaves unresolved.
In the Arab world we got to know the phenomenon of market economics through the prism of Western colonialism and imperialism. The first capitalist enterprises in our region were largely led by collaborating elites undertaking export and import tasks that often served the interests of the West, with no clear developmental benefit for the native economies. We also encountered market economics when the global challenge to it, international socialism and communism, was reaching its apogee. Market economics was closely linked to the ugly face of colonialism, and almost half of Europe was opposing it, either in the form of communism or state-guided fascism. And this was the pre-Keynesian period, when repeated crises, particularly the prolonged depression that followed the crash of 1929, seemed to confirm Marx's conviction that capitalism contained unresolvable internal contradictions that would generate worsening social conditions and inevitably lead to its demise. There had to be superior forms of economic organization.
Some of the early intellectuals in tum of-the-century Egypt, Lebanon and Syria were able to dissociate market capitalism from the reality of colonial domination and understood that it was one of the secrets of Western prosperity and power, as were other "Western" elements such as patriotism, nationalism, good government, secularism and science. The intellectual shift against capitalism began in earnest in the interwar period. This partly reflected the growing conflict between colonialism and post-Ottoman Arab liberation movements, the growing social conflicts within a developing and urbanizing Arab world, and the growing influence of the Soviet Union and the prestige of socialist organization and thinking.
The drift to the left intensified after World War II, owing to the acute tensions over Israel and Western support for it, continuing problems with Western colonialism and neo-imperialism, the increased prestige and power of the Soviet Union after its successes in World War II, its social, economic and technological achievements, and its support for the Third World in the Cold War. The Chinese, Korean, Vietnamese and Cuban revolutions and similar leftist revolutionary movements in Latin America, Africa and Asia also had a strong demonstration effect in the Arab world. Growing class tensions within an Arab context of increased labor organization and attempts by political parties to mobilize mass support also pushed the political spectrum to the left. In addition, the leftist orientation of French and German intellectuals after World War II had a great effect on the thinking of Western-influenced Arab intellectuals.
Indeed, the Arab world's experience with capitalism is turbulent and of recent vintage. The burgeoning progressive nationalist elements within the nascent middle class in Egypt, Syria, Iraq and other Arab countries were mostly crushed in the wave of leftist, military or one-party revolutionary regimes that swept to power through the region. Even today there are hardly any countries in the Arab world that have developed a modem market economy. The Gulf countries have much capital but little market capitalism. They are essentially rentier state economies with scant productive capacity. The central Middle Eastern systems remain state dominated: the state is the main economic player; a competitive bourgeoisie is still in its infancy; and the market is hampered by myriad obstacles and restrictions.
It is time for a reexamination and renewed study by Arab intellectuals of the principles of market economics, Keynesianism, post-Keynesian economics and welfare policies, and a re-linking of economic values with economic reality and experience in the world. Ann-chair socialism may sound more moral than market capitalism. However, if Keynesian market capitalism can, in the long run, deliver more material improvement to our people, then it is part of our responsibility to realign our thought and values to provide the intellectual, moral and philosophical framework within which a productive modem economy can emerge.
SETTING AN AGENDA
The success of any movement in which intellectuals hope to play a major role depends to a large degree on the full exploitation of the tools and media open to the intellectual class. The first step, of course, is the consolidation of a strong consensus on the agenda for change. I am suggesting a neomodernist democratic plan that includes within it some of the unfinished cultural, moral and philosophical goals of the enlightenment and the industrial revolution.
The common print and audio-visual media are the most direct way to get these ideas across to a broad public. Intellectuals, however, are also influential in the universities and organizations of civil society where much of today's Arab youth can be reached. The task at this stage, however, is not simply to transmit the ideas themselves but - as was the case in the organization of the Arab nationalist movement from university campuses - to engage more fully in the organization and mobilization of youth opinion and_ energy in the direction of a liberal democratic agenda. The universities and civil society are not where the change will be accomplished, but they are the best place to start. The movement will also require the eventual organization of full-fledged political parties with deep local roots and strong Arab and international ties, but they need not exist at the start-up stage.
Beyond the familiar rhetoric of political mobilization, however, and the clear role of Arab social thinkers in this direction, it is important to maximize the potential of a wide spectrum of artists and writers. Culture is not built by social theorists, nor are values, identities, morals, principles and other basic modes of cultural categorization transmitted in their dry form from social thinkers to a receptive public. The role of the artist is key in producing new images and altering sensibilities. Here the discussion of cultural phase - modernist, postmodernist or other - is important, as is an agenda setting dialogue with artists and writers and their counterparts in the West. There is a need for commitment, just as there is a need for committed social scientists who recognize the vital connection between will and representation to shoulder their responsibilities as the "antennae of the race."
In Arab literature, there is at least a century's worth of committed, socially transformative poetry, plays and novels. There is a need, however, to re-engage the large and sophisticated literary community with the social thinkers in order to grapple with the challenges of the coming age and attempt to devise a common agenda for change. Resources should as much as possible be coordinated and complementary.
In recent times the potential of music, for example, has been largely ignored except as cheap entertainment. In the late Abbasid period, however, music was a highly intellectual pursuit undertaken by philosophers and savants and considered, as in Plato, as one of the building blocks of intelligence and character. As Pythagoras, Plato, Nietzsche and other philosophers and social psychologists have asserted, however, music is of fundamental importance in transmitting sensibilities and values, identities and roles, and, in its more sophisticated manifestations, analytical and mathematical intelligence. Medieval Arab philosophers realized this long ago, as in Kitab al-Musiqa al-Kabir (the Great Book of Music) of al-Farabi. Bach is closely connected to Escher and Godel, and figures like Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms and Wagner have been significant in shaping Western culture. More recently, the youth rebellion of 1960s America cannot be divorced from Dylan and Lennon. In Arab society today, it is impressive to see how many hundreds of thousands have been transformed through the music of artists such as Sayyed Darwish and Ziad Rahbani. Unfortunately, most Arab music of the twentieth century is uncommitted and commercial. A transformation would have to be accompanied by the inclusion of musicians in the deliberations of social thinkers and writers. Musicians should be reintegrated into the realm of intellectuals. Once exposed to the thinking and concerns of the broader intellectual community, many will understand the means through which to translate these intellectual and life concerns into their art. It is important that musicians not be relegated to the commercial realm of Musak and MTV.
In the visual arts, the task is subtle and complex. Art has served various functions in history: religion, narration, propaganda and social criticism, to name a few. In the West today, the sociopolitical role of the artist has been somewhat eclipsed. Impressionist, cubist and abstract art of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as well as the postmodern art of Warhol and others, situated the modern Western artist squarely in the middle of the debate regarding postmodernism. For the Arab artist, there is a need for a reexamination of the role of art and the artist, in cooperation with philosophers and social thinkers. If we are still within modernist history, perhaps the Arab artist should take stock of that fact and create in relation to that reality. The result here might be, among other things, more of an orientation toward socially committed visual arts.
As in the case of Arab musicians, it is important to rescue visual artists from their immediate environment. This means including them among the ranks of intellectuals and trying to help them resist the lures of commercial advertising and interior decoration. In some countries, there is a need to pry artists away from their jobs as state portraitists and propagandists.
CONCLUSION
I have tried to put forward some suggestions for connecting will to thought and action in the Arab world, focusing on the role of the Arab intellectual and the ways in which philosophical and intellectual change is related to economic, cultural and political change. I have argued that, within our modernist period of development, the road to proceed along is the road of democracy, enlightenment culture and semi-managed market economics. Some of the propositions put forward here and some of the questions raised and answers proposed should properly be the subject of deeper and more detailed research, reflection and dialogue, but I hope the ideas presented are at least worth debating and disputing. It is highly atypical in the contemporary academic tradition to take such a broad non-disciplinary approach, cavalierly touching on politics, economics and culture in the same essay. But here I find myself more in agreement with the premoderns and the postmoderns: An understanding of one's historical condition can only be grasped through a multidisciplinary approach. Any attempt to join thought to action requires linking academic disciplines together to present to the thinking citizen a coherent world view through which to direct his or her will.
Middle East Policy is fully accessible through the Wiley Online Library
Click below to subscribe to the online or print edition of Middle East Policy and gain access to all journal content.