I am stymied. Though for decades I’ve earned my living stringing words together, and writing commentary about the Arab world that remains woven into my DNA, I’m stymied this time around. How does one explain the dizzying chaos that characterises our political culture today? Do you look at the devil, which is in the details, or perhaps for that deus ex machina, which may lurk somewhere in the bad design?
You are from a part of the world whose dream for a dignified place in the global dialogue of cultures was one you grew up with like you grew up with your skin, yet you are confounded by how little insight you are able to bring to your commentary.
Look at the manifestations of that chaos. Iraq, a land that once stood at the epicentre of the Islamic commonwealth of nations, has regressed to sectarian and ethnic conflict whose terminus may be national dismemberment. Libya is ruled, if it is “ruled” at all, by two parallel governments, one made up of elected officials in Tripoli and one of armed militias that roam the country freely, answerable to no one. Egypt has yet to heal from the wounds sustained during its recent revolutionary upheaval, and to provide decent living standards for its citizens. In Syria, close to 200,000 people have been killed as lethal barrel bombs continue to fall indiscriminately on civilians, and two million refugees have fled in fear for their lives to the surrounding countries — all with no end in sight.
In Yemen, tribes fight tribes, then tribes fight gunmen, who then fight government troops, while US drones fly overhead looking for convenient targets to take pot shots at, and never mind the collateral damage. In Lebanon, the country teeters precariously on the edge because of the nature of its social formation. And in Palestine, a helpless people have lived by the rule of the gun of a foreign occupier for virtually half a century, unable to find, or convince an indifferent world to find for them, a way out, around or through their ordeal. Other countries in our region, from Jordan to Tunisia, continue to battle their demons.
Grand delusions
All of which leads one to ask whether Arabs are somehow afflicted with the germ of preordained failure.
In the midst of all that the folks who want to resurrect the caliphate — folks whose delusions are so grand they appear convinced that they are there already — have replaced the grammar of literate political meaning with gibberish. And that by itself is a statement about how a community, severed for a generation or more from the roots of free discourse, becomes ossified by left-over ideas, ideas that are mockingly remote from the critical truths that communicate what our aspirations are.
It was not long ago, perhaps a mere half century, when our own generation of Arabs began to acquire a maturing consciousness, growing up with the belief that the different ideologies we then embraced, pan-Arabism, Greater Syria nationalism, Ba’athism and Nasserism, along with a mimetic kind of socialism, would save the day and finally lead to that united Arab nation that stretched from the Mashreq (the lands where the sun rose) to the Maghreb (the lands where the sun set) united by one vision of its sense of historical oneness, within a single territorial homeland.
Moral optimism
And the moral optimism we felt in our youth — a youth wasted on us — stemmed from our confidence that anyone could pre-empt his tomorrow. Our struggle conjoined us in that illusion of community, and that community’s shorthand (one cohesive people, one united nation, one eternal message) defined our political future. There was an overwhelming sense of imminence, as it were, about that era, which was imbued with expectations of social progress and of personal enfranchisement. The enemy? He’ll be dealt with forwith. Israeli Zionism and American imperialism, along with that third leg of the tripod, Arab reactionism, will be defeated.
Those who make it their business to study the passionate adventure of spirit unleashed by a people in revolutionary or national struggle will tell you how those involved in it experience a quickening sense of felt time, of the concreteness of dreams. The irony of ironies, the mother of all contradictions? Our ideologies, all imported from the West, were supposed to help us shed the skin of our colonial past, grafted on us by the West.
And herein lies the source of our malaise: the emergence of all the Bin Ladens and all the Al Baghdadis and all the fantasies about resurrecting the caliphate. For after being dealt that cataclysmic military defeat in 1967, by an upstart colonist state, Arabs felt betrayed by all their secular ideologies, ideologies that now proved themselves to be hollow and worthless. What better social ideology to replace them with than Islam, the one faith that had grown out of the very bosom of one’s culture? A defeated society would now be transformed into an Islamic one, thereby tapping into divine truth. For how else would you fill a historical vacuum left you by your demeaned elders?
There is nothing wrong, of course, with tapping into the meaning of the divine truths encoded in our holy book. After all, the history of Arabs is the history of Islam and, whether explicitly or unconsciously, our whole contemporary view of the world is penetrated with an awareness if Islamic values. There’s a lot wrong, however, with the idea that those divine truths are left to semi-literate oafs, who have not read half a dozen decent books in their lives, to interpret.
In a way we are the ones to blame, for we left the generation that came after ours — a generation suffused with a reservoir of turbulent energy — a vacuum that they needed to fill, and a legacy of defeat they needed to live down. That’s how these caliphateniks got here from there — they had been left a vacuum. By us.
We were wrong, those of us who went around the block between the 1950s and 1960s acting with what we thought was magnificent dash and spontaneity, when in fact all we were doing was to leave that generation that followed ours a legacy anchored in anaemic ideologies that are now, sadly, being replaced by an even more anaemic reflex system. Now our sins are being visited on the sons. What to say about that? I’m stymied.
— Fawaz Turki is a journalist, lecturer and author based in Washington. He is the author of The Disinherited: Journal of a Palestinian Exile.
