Joshua Mitchell on Arabs and Americans

Joshua Mitchell, a professor of political theory at Georgetown University in Washington, helped set up Georgetown’s School of Foreign Service satellite campus in Doha, where he served as an academic dean and taught from 2005 to 2008. It was in Qatar that he embarked on a fascinating exercise, to see whether Alexis de Tocqueville’s monumental work, “Democracy in America” — published in two volumes, the first in 1835 and the second in 1840 — spoke to his students’ hearts. “Tocqueville in Arabia” is part investigative, involving young American and Qatari students, and part geopolitical analysis, even if the author reveals something more personal: how he came to terms with his own background.

Mitchell was born in Cairo and has lived in Yemen and Kuwait. His father, Richard P. Mitchell, was a United States Foreign Service officer before going on to become a distinguished scholar with his 1969 opus, “The Society of Muslim Brothers.” The book is substantially strengthened by the author’s rich personal experiences of a part of the world that continues to bewilder Westerners in general and Americans in particular.

“Tocqueville in Arabia”, Mitchell writes, is the result of an “imagined embrace between Azar Nafisi’s ‘Reading Lolita in Tehran’ and Allan Bloom’s ‘Closing of the American Mind’,” though he perceives his contribution to claim an “ancient ancestry … Montesquieu’s Persian Letters” (page ix). The book seeks to “illuminate the concerns of students in the distant lands of the Middle East”, and “aspires to be a comprehensive reflection on the challenges facing America”. As such, this work of political theory, which is a delight to read, written in the most accessible language possible, draws on Tocqueville masterpiece, whose genius was to identify how Americans regenerated themselves by thinking not just of the moment but also of the future, which was and remains the strength of the democratic age.

Through various teaching experiences in the US, Argentina, Portugal and Qatar, Mitchell looks at how others approach the same phenomena of democratisation. Comparing American and Middle Eastern reactions to his lectures in the history of political thought, for example, allows for a better evaluation of the professor’s search for revitalisation, which is that spirit that leads him to conclude that how others adapt to democracy may be revelatory.

Critics of Mitchell’s preferred methodology — teach the young if you really want to know what a particular civilisation holds — will assert that the author focused on elite university students in several countries who did not necessarily represent all of these societies. Indeed, “Tocqueville in Arabia” cannot possibly offer a panacea for how Americans and Middle Easterners misunderstand one another as it chiefly focuses on a very limited sample in Doha. Still, it would be a mistake to dismiss Mitchell’s approach, even his spiritual-sociological preferences, as elite students in Qatar are not much different from elite students elsewhere — and they are the future leaders of these societies. Moreover, while it would be entirely accurate to state that the moral outlook that is transmitted from one generation to the next highlights a society’s fundamental commitments, best revealed through its education system, one should also include other variables in these evaluations.

Yet, this was what Tocqueville concluded in the 19th-century classic, and what Mitchell finds in Arabia.

By his own admission, the professor is puzzled by how reluctant all of his students were to accept the transition from one cultural epoch to another, which was precisely what Tocqueville observed in America, and that showed the disappearance of an aristocratic world. In Europe, as in most of the non-Western world today, identity was bound up with inherited social roles, and in Qatar, Mitchell experienced, it was similarly interesting to see how restricted social mobility protected its members from the anxieties and restlessness that otherwise characterised this democratic age.

In short, Mitchell witnessed a clear example of the “delinking phenomenon” that characterised the way modern man confronted specific threats, including in the Arab world. “The Tahrir Square uprising in Cairo, about which much has been made, is but the first skirmish” of this phenomenon, writes Mitchell, because “underneath the surface of the social, economic and political arrangements in the Middle East, [which] seem resistant to any effort to transform them, this gradual and irrepressible release amounts to a silent revolution whose consequences cannot yet be fully anticipated, even if they can be already felt” (page 39).

If Tocqueville’s “democratic man emerges amidst the ruins of aristocratic society”, and though aristocratic man was firmly linked to “family, to land, to kingdom or empire, and ultimately to the cosmos itself”, there was enough evidence to surmise that recent advances in equality partially dissolved these links (page 34). What man must therefore do is to “relink”, to engage with civic associations, strong families and, especially, through religion. If he fails in these endeavours, an increasingly isolated man will wallow in misery, dependent on the state. “When citizens only look upward to the visible power of the state,” writes Mitchell, “when the neighbour is lost from view, is it any wonder that our national politics becomes a battleground where one fleeting dream of perfection is set against another, and that somnambulant, self-absorbed citizens increasingly die alone, with cats?” (page 41) Indeed.

Beyond rapidly changing conditions, Mitchell focuses on religion in some detail as well, aware that “Tocqueville wrote that whether a nation has had a political revolution or has cast aside its religion increases or diminishes the general level of suspicion towards the current state of things” (page 79). To be sure, Mitchell is chiefly interested in finding out whether the Arab views of America have much to do with Islam, or wounded pride. Remarkably, he urges his American students to perceive their Muslim counterparts as caught up in the same democratic forces that shaped the US and, if possible, to understand Arab anxieties about “democratic” man. The reader will be fascinated with the various exchanges on this vital topic, as “Tocqueville in Arabia” acknowledges that education, especially the liberal arts variety, will drastically change the Muslim world.

Tocqueville in Arabia: Dilemmas in a Democratic Age

By Joshua Mitchell,

University of Chicago Press, 195 pages, $20

Dr Joseph A. Kéchichian is the author of the recently published “Legal and Political Reforms in Saudi Arabia” (London: Routledge, 2013).