15
Elias Khoury*
Translated by Max Weiss, with Jens Hanssen
Elias Khoury, born in Beirut in 1948, is among the most prominent Arab intellectuals of his generation. His work has been translated widely, and he is best known for novels that deal with the Lebanese civil war such as Little Mountain and The Journey of Little Gandhi as well as historical fiction about the Palestinian struggle in Gate of the Sun. One of the hallmarks of his prose writing is his tendency to include dialogue in colloquial Lebanese dialect. His writing has been deeply marked by the experience of and multifarious attempts to come to terms with the Lebanese Civil War. His political and social commentary is much less often discussed outside of Arabophone circles. He was the longstanding editor of the Sunday cultural supplement of the Beirut daily al-Nahar newspaper.
There are several reasons why our translation of this essay, first published in the immediate aftermath of the attacks on Washington, New York, and Pennsylvania of September 11, 2001, is included here as a part of the epilogue to this volume. First of all, Khoury’s nonfiction writings remain regrettably unavailable to those who do not read Arabic. Of course, such a documentary impulse is not the extent of our interest. Khoury represents a tradition of contradictory liberalism in the modern and contemporary Arabic intellectual field that runs the risk of being forgotten, submerged in the chaotic and impassioned debates now flooding the Arab Middle East.
The Arabs were defeated without putting up a fight. Such is the impression made on the observer of the trajectory of the American war in Afghanistan, following the events of September 11, 2001. It is an impression that is both mistaken and correct at the same time: mistaken because the dominant global ideology represented the war as if it were a clash of civilizations, making of Islam a “side” in a battle waged by one of its fundamentalist wings, which had developed in the context of the Cold War, and making of the “Afghan Arabs” a representative of the Arabs on the whole; but also correct because this has been the Arab trajectory since the conclusion of the First World War. In the 1948 Palestine War that resulted in the Nakba, the Arabs fought armed only with fantasies. The June 5, 1967, war ended before it could start. During Operation Desert Storm we witnessed a surreal situation in which American fighter jets bombed however they pleased, without any deterrent force, until the Storm ended in disaster.
The false and the true converged, such that the observer could no longer distinguish between the two, at a moment when the Arab world seemed – were it not for the Palestinian intifada– to have been convinced by Fukuyama’s theory about the End of History. But history has not ended, except in the superstitious minds that rule the world today through the logic of hegemony, domination, and marginalization, of which the globalized international terrorism that New York and Washington suffered last September is but one product. We do not return to modern Arab history in order to transfer blame outward, but rather to search for the truth that might help us escape from the frightful decline into which the Arabs have slid at the turn of the twenty-first century.
I
When I listen to Fairuz wail, “We have memories, at Maysalun,” I can feel the Arab East that was unable to find its way to independence and freedom. I can see it as the twentieth century turned, as history transitioned from the Ottoman state to the defeat of Faysal’s Arab Kingdom, when the first Arab Minister of Defense was killed on the outskirts of Damascus, as he struggled to defend a stillborn kingdom. Memories of Maysalun are not limited to the voice of Fairuz as it takes us back to the beginning of the century. In our consciousness they are also bound up with the project that responded to the defeat of June 5, 1967, when all those dreams and words came tumbling down over the course of six days of napalm, disappointment, and new refugee hordes.
In the wake of the June defeat, the Palestinian resistance set up training camps in Maysalun and al-Hama, where there was a man named Abu Ali Iyad, who had been badly wounded as he led volunteers toward a new dawn, before falling in the calamities of Jerash and Ajlun. In the space between these two Maysaluns, before them and after, the Arab world lived through a century of language, the defining characteristic of which was the replacement of reality with words.
Perhaps the first word modern Arab culture invented in order to describe its reality is “nakba,” which gave a name to the catastrophe of 1948 in Palestine. Credit in this respect is due to Professor Constantine Zurayk. The Arabic language would have to wait a half-century in order to generate a second word created by the collective imagination, intifada, which was born with the uprising of children in Palestine. Perhaps these are the only two words in the Arabic language that resist translation, not because there is no alternative to be found in other languages, but because translation eliminates their specificity. Therefore in every language on earth these words exist in Arabic. The century of language the Arabs have lived through was a century that deceived reality through language. And so the two Arab Nahdas at the beginning and in the middle of the twentieth century were incomplete. This incompleteness expresses itself in the disconnect between reality and language, between signified and signifier.
The first Nahda, which started at the end of the nineteenth century and extended through the 1930s, carried with it two distinguishing characteristics: the first was the refusal of Ottoman despotism and the call for the establishment of constitutional regimes; the second was the call for Arab independence and unity. Beyond these two, the first Nahda failed to properly name the historical moment out of which it first emerged. One did not see in the defeat of the Arab East against rising colonial powers a point of departure that would found the new or the different. Rather, the Nahda saw itself as a continuation of the past. In the wake of the great linguistic Nahda that produced Ahmad Faris al-Shidyaq, Nasif al-Yaziji and the two Bustanis, following the significant modernization of literary sensibilities created by the writers of the mahjar, and after the new literary forms inaugurated by Syrian migration to Egypt – including the historical novel, the “social” novel, and journalism – Arab culture found itself a prisoner of the past in its religious and linguistic dimensions. Thought remained confined within the conformist boundaries drawn by Jamal al-Din al-Afghani and Muhammad ʿAbduh. Meanwhile, politics continued to revolve around the dream of reviving a Golden Age crushed by the Mongol hordes before it was finished off by the conquering Ottomans.
Perhaps there are two main cultural questions that confront me when analyzing the first Nahda: the description of reality and the language of expression.
The Description of Reality
There is no doubt that Ahmad Faris al-Shidyaq and Khalil Gibran initiated a major revolution in expression. The former renewed and modernized language, deriving words connected to the age: steamship, train, automobile, airplane and so forth. He also penned Leg Over Leg, coming close to inventing a new literary style based on the literature of autobiography as well as a language that blended the styles of the maqama with free-form prose writing. In his innovative Romantic tone, Gibran added a new sensibility to the Arabic language, through its sensitivity to feelings, and by means of its discovering a new rhetoric, the rhetoric of subtlety and gesture.
But what gives me great pause with respect to the experience of the nahdawis, their progressive cultural and intellectual achievements, including even secularism – Shibli al-Shumayyil springs to mind – is their deliberate avoidance of the greatest event to storm through Lebanon during the nineteenth century, even leaving its mark on the city of Damascus. The 1840–1860 civil war, which we customarily refer to as “sectarian strife,” resulted in the dispatch of the French army, the establishment of the Mutasarrifiyya government, and all manner of peasant unrest, popular uprisings and disturbances. The absence of this historical fact, their inability to even describe it, resulted in a kind of literature that might be characterized as a dodge. The prophetic tone of a Gibran and the call for reform and awakening, even Arab thought itself, were all different ways of overcoming sectarian–tribal divisions, by simply ignoring them.
The first civil war was not written down, its reality was never depicted, and the truth of the matter was not stated but, rather, effaced from recorded memory so that an unconscious collective memory came to be repressed, only to explode a century later. The violent and destructive Lebanese civil war obliterated the cultural achievements of the Nahda, revealing the impotence and inadequacy of the first two Nahdas.
The Language of Expression
In its linguistic aspect, the first Nahda retreated into the notion of rupture, through the flourishing of one language and the killing of another. The template for all nahdawis, from Nasif al-Yaziji to Sami al-Barudi and Ahmad Shawqi as well as all those who came to be known as the Revivalist school, was ʿAbbasid poetry, the poetry of al-Mutanabbi in particular. The language of the “golden age” was that of the ʿAbbasids and the era of pre-Islamic Jahiliyya, whose model was the poetry produced through prophecy and kingship. Was not Adam the prophet also the first of the Arab poets, as the story goes? Then came the founding father of Arab poetry, Imruʾ al-Qays, a philosopher-king, and finally, poetry was crowned by a poet/prophet who aspired to sovereignty and dominion, namely, al-Mutanabbi.
The nahdawis discovered themselves in the language of al-Mutanabbi, which was a platform of salvation in order to burnish Arab identity that lived under threat of Turkification. Therefore it is not surprising for Gibran to have written a book entitled The Prophet, or for Adonis, the poet of the second Nahda, to have come out with his book, The Book, in which he channels the voice of al-Mutanabbi.
This linguistic prophethood, which has no connection to religious prophethood, characterized the first Arab Nahda. It led to the eclipse and marginalization of the language in the most beautiful narrative work ever written by the Arabs, The One Thousand and One Nights, under the pretense of its stiltedness, vulgarity and superstition. This meant that the language of Arabic narrative would have to undergo an extended purification facilitated by the Mahfouzian novelistic experiment before reclaiming the living language of spoken talk. Then the Arabs discovered that prose and narrative are the people’s medium of expression, and that the language of the Arabs contains pluralism within its many layers, which it only lost when it descended into repetition and nostalgia.
In this respect the first Nahda was incomplete: it never discovered its language. At the end of World War I, this incomplete Nahda quickly found itself incapable of building independence and unity. The experiment of Arab independence in Syria under Faysal was vanquished and moved on to Iraq, only to decompose into its own antithesis. Faysal’s Arab kingdom was a declaration of the unity of Greater Syria. But when the French ousted the king from his capital, they expelled the kingdom itself along with him. The Syrian lands were partitioned in accordance with the Sykes-Picot agreement, which paved the way for the implementation of the Balfour Declaration and the establishment of the Zionist entity in Palestine.
Similarly, the 1919 Revolution in Egypt led by the Wafd and Saʿd Zaghlul collapsed in the face of its own inability to achieve the dream of national independence, leaving the task of guiding Egypt towards independence to a young military officer named Gamal Abdel Nasser, before he fell victim to defeat in turn at the hands of Israel in 1967.
The first Nahda was born incomplete, possibly because it embodied a new consciousness, and was unable to marshal social forces adequate to it. In spite of its conformist nature and inability to call things as they were, this consciousness was more progressive than its social elements. Therefore, consciousness was broken by reality, and no historical forces capable of leading the Arab East to national independence and unity ever emerged. Faysal’s leadership collapsed, surrendered, and abdicated the dream of “Young Arabia” before it could even start; the Wafdist leadership failed due to its inability to overcome the logic of Egypt’s large landowners.
Perhaps the model of impotence was represented in the banning of the book Islam and the Foundations of Rule by ʿAli ʿAbd al-Raziq and the trial of Taha Husayn because of his book On Jahili Poetry. With these two books there arose the ambiguous relationship between the Nahda and the dominant political classes. It was revealed how the endangered revolutions that had stained the beginnings of the Arab century with the blood of defeats would lead the Arabs directly to their greatest catastrophe in 1948.
II
The second Nahda arrived in search of a way past the shame of defeat and occupation, but it was distinguished by the premature separation of culture and power. The first Nahda was created by a mélange of intellectuals from various movements: Arab nationalists, Islamists, partisans of Enlightenment, secularists, Liberals, socialists. The second Nahda, by contrast, was founded upon an alliance between the army and middle-class intellectuals, reliant upon nationalist thought after it had been rejuvenated with a leftist accent. The idea of resurrection called for by the pioneers of the first Nahda was embodied in the young officers, including those with rural origins who fanned the flames of the Nasserist experiment: land reform, the nationalization of the Suez Canal, Syrian-Egyptian unity.
The second Nahda began like a lightning bolt, bringing with it a fundamental overturning of concepts, literary styles and the structure of political power. The beginning was consciousness of the Nakba, inaugurated by the book The Meaning of the Disaster (Maʿna al-nakba) by Constantine Zurayk. Then this consciousness started to crystallize within political currents, nationalist movements and new fedayeen organizations, exemplified in the first instance by the Baʿth and Arab Nationalist movements.
Perhaps there was a single word with which the founder of the Baʿth Party, Michel ʿAflaq, epitomized his concept of the new Nahda: inqilab or overthrow. This call for an insurrectionist movement found its true embodiment in the Free Officers’ Movement in Egypt. This revolution started out looking as though it were a continuation of the 1881 Ahmad ʿUrabi revolt, and its attempt to reclaim the idea of state-building began with the modernization of the army that had achieved its first gains under Muhammad ʿAli Pasha.
The politico-military inqilab was to be accompanied by a profound cultural inqilab, on three different levels.
1.Modern poetry, which started in Iraq at first. The poetic revolution swept away the authority of Arab poetry as formulated by al-Khalil bin Ahmad al-Farahidi and exemplified in Jahili and ʿAbbasid poetry. For the first time, the authority of the ancient had fallen, replacing the notion of its formal revival with the idea of mythological resurrection. Arab poetry embarked upon the adventure of the absolute unknown. In parallel with that, foreign poetry began to be translated (from English and French first and foremost and then from German) into Arabic literature, translation that had been lacking since the age of great translations during the ʿAbbasid era, when Arab poetry still retained its status as cultural repository of the Arabs.
2.The naturalist and the realist novel, which supplanted the Romantic and the didactic novels in order to present an image of the nation through the microcosm of the family, epitomized by the Cairo Trilogy by Naguib Mahfouz.
3.Leftist-Nationalist thought, which had met its match in other transformative political movements, especially the Marxist ones among them. It offered new contributions in criticism and the meaning of culture, including Raʾif Khuri in Lebanon and ʿAbd al-ʿAzim Anis in Egypt.
Suddenly the cultural and literary scene was shaken up, disturbed, and it seemed as though a re-birth was in store for Arab culture, which not only bestowed upon poetry and the visual arts elements of revival but also overcame formal experimentation in order to try to build a new revival in content as well. However, the irony of the second Nahda was the schism between politics and culture. It is true that the ideas of inqilab and change from above by force were born with the pens of writers, intellectuals and proselytizers such as Michel ʿAflaq and Zaki al-Arsuzi and others. But when inqilab was first constituted in Egypt, and then rooted in the two Baʿthist experiments in Syria and Iraq, it initially resulted in marginalizing the Liberals, then throwing the Communists in prison, and finally executing the leadership of the Islamist current, effectively decimating the political and cultural elite, in order to establish a direct relationship between the leader and the people.
The officers found a scattered culture that prevailed during that time, and so they mixed together authoritarianism with a quasi-religious tone and Baʿthism with a Marxist tinge. They relied upon a tradition of power that quickly devolved into a Mamlukism that not even Muhammad ʿAli Pasha could surpass, or so it seemed, despite the famous banquet he held at his citadel in 1805, in which he killed the entire Mamluk leadership.
The effects of this fragile cultural blend, which lacked internal coherence, did not appear until after the defeat of June 1967. Before the defeat, the popularity of Nasser, his historic stature and mystique, were capable of affirming that they constituted a bridge across the gap between politics and society. But when the fragility of the officers’ state and their inability to wage war were laid bare, the mystique turned into repression. Nasser was impotent to confront student demonstrations and protests. Then along came Anwar al-Sadat, to institutionalize a new era, which led to the collapse of even the bare minimum, namely, the idea of Arab national security. It was as if the army was in need of half a victory in order to announce its barefaced rule. This resulted in the breakdown of the political and intellectual infrastructure that had been built by the first and second Nahdas. And so the religious fundamentalist idea spread, a hallmark of the age of collapse.
III
This separation of politics and culture produced a particular condition in Arab culture, which was called “Beirut.” This is a condition that requires a separate analysis of all its meanings. The course of the first Nahda concluded with a cultural approach towards the second Nahda, which was articulated in thought, poetry, the novel, theater and the visual arts, by transforming Beirut into a margin and a center at the same time. The city received all the clamor of protest and calls for re-vision, becoming a cultural laboratory through its many journals – al-Adab, Shiʿr, al-Tariq, Mawaqif, Dirasat ʿArabiyya – and its newspapers, its cafés and late nights, through Fairuz, through its stages.
It was as if Beirut were a Palestinian city: Ghassan Kanafani, Tawfiq Sayigh, Jabra Ibrahim Jabra, then Mahmoud Darwish; and a Syrian city: Adonis, Yusuf al-Khal, Nizar Qabbani, Sadiq Jalal al-ʿAzm, Ghada Samman; and an Iraqi city: Badr Shakir al-Sayyab, ʿAbd al-Wahhab al-Bayati, Saadi Yousef; and an Egyptian city to a lesser extent: Ghali Shukri and the group of journalists that worked in Beirut, including Ibrahim ʿAmer who passed away during the early days of the war; and, naturally, a Lebanese city, especially with its poetic experiments, voices of protest and literary experimentation that produced, in literature, Unsi al-Haj and Layla Baʿlabakki, in theater, Roger ʿAssaf and Jalal Khuri, and in the visual arts, Amin al-Basha, Paul Guiragossian, Rafiq Sharaf and so forth.
This laboratory on the periphery came to life because it welcomed those whom the resurrection regimes now led by the militarocracy were no longer able to accommodate, pursuing the idea of the second Nahda in a fragile nation, founded upon subtle balancing that had granted it a democratic margin. This democratic margin is what would make Beirut the capital of the Palestinian cause during the early seventies. The Lebanese capital was burned to ashes in the asymmetrical confrontation between an Arab world that had lost its raison d’être following the June defeat and by a Zionist project that had entered a new phase of occupation, revealing its true nature, founded upon ethnic discrimination.
The fragility of this reality did not become apparent until the Lebanese civil war, when the final clash occurred between the culture of the second Nahda, exemplified by the Lebanese Left, and the Arab powers embodied in the entrance of the Syrian deterrent forces into Lebanon; and when a major cultural experiment was snuffed out and suffocated by the repression of the Syrian regime and the repression of the various militias on all sides, which only wanted to reproduce the Arab power of repression within the Lebanese margin that was staunchly opposed.
Besieged and alone, Beirut’s last outposts of the second Nahda fell in 1982. Amid the massacres that made Sabra and Shatila into the hallmark of blood and devastation, and amid the civil war that dragged on, Lebanon was thrown back into the climate of its first war, the one that had been forgotten ever since the nineteenth century. Its ideas and bodies were smashed, until Lebanon arrived at its final destination, and the Arab world remained frozen, as if waiting. The second Nahda suffered from a sharp split between its language and its reality. It is true that it had succeeded in achieving political independence in Algeria and South Yemen, for example; and it is true that it dared to establish the first occasion of Arab unity – in the United Arab Republic incorporating Syria and Egypt between 1958 and 1961; and it is true that it had put forward the question of development and social justice. It also announced its impotence in three respects.
The first axis was the absence of democracy, which, especially after the defeat of June 5, would reduce civil society to ruins. The second axis was the inability to build Arab unity, the marginalization of all forms of collective Arab action, until the Arab League was transformed into a Wailing Wall. Military inadequacy represented the third, and most notorious axis: the second Nahda failed to build fighting armies. Their death appeared in their very institution, which was defeated in a humiliating fashion in 1967. During the October 1973 war Arab armies were unable to do anything but stop before a wall; with the impossibility of achieving a military victory, they were limited to establishing a pseudo-military balance of power that was swept aside by isolated agreements (Egyptian-Israeli Camp David), civil wars (Lebanon) and the madness that led to the Iraqi catastrophe.
On the margins of the defeat, the Palestinian resistance emerged with its two bloody experiences in Jordan and Lebanon, which carried within it both the elements of the resistance and its disintegration at the same time. The Palestinian experience did not escape from the abyss, with the exception of the first intifada, which affirmed that Palestine would remain the open wound of the Arabs in the long-coming century. This wound has been deepened in the al-Aqsa/Independence intifada that broke out in 2000.
The first Nahda was defeated at Maysalun, but its defeat was not complete until the Palestinian Nakba that dispossessed an entire people from its land, and plundered its country. The second Nahda was defeated in June 1967, but it would not be complete until the Lebanese tragedy, the Iraqi horror and the misery of Algeria during the 1990s.
Can we now speak of a third Nahda, even as we live in the darkness of decay, in the shadows of siege and the death of dreams? Which Nahda shall I write about while we watch the bitterness of repression, the tyranny of the Iraqi dictator who will not be satisfied with orchestrating massacres and imprisonment, but who has begun to write books and novels as well? New places of exile for Arab writers are cropping up all over the world, alongside the death of a society that has been forbidden from even the most basic measure of its rights.
What kind of a third Nahda would I be writing about, I who am dripping with the blood being spilled today in Palestine, and Palestine alone, as the Arab world remains impotent, untruthful, deceptive and occupied? About which Nahda, as Beirut, which forged my soul and my mind, lives through the ambiguities of this age of security states, savage capital, worsening sectarianism and the repression of brotherhood? How is the city not permitted to rejoice after the resistance succeeded in expelling the Israeli occupation from Arab land without any restrictions or conditions? About which Nahda, while Damascus experiences the first unrest of its intellectuals after years of prison time, and Baghdad is imprisoned, and Cairo remains silent?
IV
The third Nahda will not be created by the optimism of the will, as Antonio Gramsci suggested during his long prison sentence, but rather, by the optimism of the mind, that is, the capacity to look at reality, to call it what it is, to recognize the truth of it, in order to change it. The third Nahda is neither a linguistic-intellectual requirement like the first Nahda, nor is it a military necessity like the second: it is a vital need. The Arab world is threatened today by its departure from history. This is not metaphorical talk; it is realistic and tangible. Therefore the third Nahda is necessary because today it has become a means of defending existence, of affirming the right of the Arab person to be a person in his country.
Awakening from the nightmare of the twentieth century and its two defeats begins from three foundations. First of all: democracy. We learned during the first two Nahdas that change cannot come about from above, or be left to kings and officers. Revolution is not actually of the will, borne by an isolated elite, established by attaching it to society. Revolution is a social act built by institutions of civil society, through everyday work that departs from the joining of dreams with reality. Democracy is the precondition of Arab thought. Arabism does not resemble the European nationalist movements in their internal consistency, does not pertain to the nation-state, and is not made out of ethnicity and blood. It is a plural Arabism unified in language and culture, cognizant of the various cultural sources that produced the civilization of these peoples who speak Arabic. Arabism is not a dream in memory, plucked from a past gone by never to return; rather, it is a plural horizon, crystallizing the interests of Arab societies in continuity and integration.
Second, we need to abandon the ancient language. Language is not an alternative to reality; it is a means of expressing experience and approximating the truth. A requirement of the third Nahda is calling things what they are. The Arab world cannot establish its Nahda without comprehending its defeat. Yes, the Nahda begins by way of calling the defeat by name. The Arabs were defeated by the Israeli-American project, and they must recognize this if they wish to resist the defeat. However, if they wish to remain in the putrid marshes of decay, they need not do anything more than continue naming defeat as victory, shame as pride, and kneeling as standing upright.
The untruthful ancient language was a tool used by dictatorial governments in order to repress the people, to reduce them and their leaders to poverty, hunger and servility. The Nahda begins by restoring language to language, that is, by granting the truth of historical defeat inflicted upon the Arab world by the Zionist-American forces, and establishing on this basis an enduring resistance, the requirement of which is building democratic, pluralist and modern Arab societies. The battle with Israel begins with this ostensible “incomplete peace,” rooted in the idea of justice, as a human value that cannot be destroyed by the God of the American market that slithers along like a gigantic idol.
The relationship between the new culture and these two approaches seems firm, unavoidable and necessary. This relationship expressed itself fundamentally in the diverse currents that are now contributing to the universe of the Arabic novel; in its search for the poetics of truth and its details, in founding a new language, incorporating within itself the grammar of the colloquial, making it a constitutive part of the Arab linguistic structure. The new culture is born amidst incalculable difficulties, confronting unparalleled repression. Comparing what happened to Taha Husayn in the 1930s with what is happening today to Nasir Hamid Abu Zayd reveals at once the depth, the ferocity and the necessity of the confrontation.
What is being witnessed in the field of the Arabic novel, particularly in Egypt and Lebanon, indicates the signs of a new and real Nahda. It reveals reality by way of imaginative narrative, and names things in a fresh new language produced by speech and not dictionaries. The new novel in its two greatest experiments – in Egypt and Lebanon – presents a field deserving of study and reflection. In Egypt, a new sensibility is being born in the post-Mahfouzian novel, in the writing of Gamal al-Ghitani, Sonallah Ibrahim, Bahaa Taher, Ibrahim Abdel Meguid, Ibrahim Aslan and Muhammad al-Bisatie. The Lebanese novel was not born as a literary movement until the war and the postwar period, that is, after the imaginary ideological spell that had enframed Lebanese cultural life, frozen among the language of Gibran, the Rahbani experiment and poetic modernism, was broken. Suddenly a novelistic river flowed, saying things and naming them, approaching them, creating multiple forms of vision. There is no doubt that these two experiences were not created in a vacuum: they are a continuation in a new form of the literary experiment crated by the second Nahda, of the writing of Emile Habibi, Jabra Ibrahim Jabra, Ghassan Kanafani and ʿAbd al-Rahman Munif, and especially the experimentation that produced new linguistic and visionary approaches to poetry.
The features of the third Nahda are not only given shape in the novel, but rather are inspired by the new poetry signaled in Mahmoud Darwish’s “Rita,” or “Tyre” by ʿAbbas Beydoun, or in the writings of Sargon Boulous, Salim Barakat and Wadiʿ Saʿadeh. Their poetry is in conversation with the earlier writing of Khalil Hawi, Badr Shakir al-Sayyab and Adonis. It is also part and parcel of the experimental search into the problematics of narrative in visual culture and cinema: Muhammad Malas, Osama Muhammad, Nuri Bouzid, Michel Khleifi, Elia Suleiman, Maroun Baghdadi, Yusry Nasrallah and Youssef Chahine; and in the arts and theater: Fadil al-Juʿibi, Jawad al-Asadi. The visual arts are raising similar questions about the question of culture: Diyaʾ al-ʿAzzawi, Kamal Boullata, and many others; not to mention the music of Marcel Khalifeh and Ziad al-Rahbani.
The third Nahda only arises in a climate of freedom; its author is an intellectual in terms of the transformative and conscientious meaning of the term, as it was defined by Edward Said in his book, Representations of the Intellectual. The cultural mode produced by resistance to oppression and the quest for the trappings of freedom leads to the third foundation of the new Nahda.
The third foundation for the third Nahda is the fall of the militarocracy. The game started by the officers of the secret Arab nationalist al-ʿAhd organization in the Ottoman army, which extends deep into modern Arab history, is over. Armies only wage wars as the arm of living societies. But when armies kill and destroy society, they only make war in retreat, and they only fight in a mode of surrender. The precondition for a third Nahda is the abandonment of the fantasy of revolution by inqilab and of freedom with chains. The twentieth century witnessed the greatest cultural tragedy in Arabic history, with the destruction of socialist humanity at the hands of the inqilabi Marxists who erected the gulag-society in the name of freedom.
The Arab militarocracy has crowned the Arab defeats in Iraq’s two catastrophes, the massacres in Algeria, the famine of Sudan and so on to the infinite tragedies of the end of the century. The dictatorial Arab regimes have succeeded not only in stealing bread and dignity from the people, but also in stealing the air they breathe as well. Arab decay is overflowing with blood, and in order to avoid going extinct Arab societies have no choice but to break their chains and to announce the end of the inqilab.
At the start of the third millennium, the Arabs cannot afford not to embark upon their democratic Nahda. Arab culture has not perished under the boots of soldiers, contrary to the painful silent scene of many Arab cities. Culture did not bow for oil polluted with blood, as it may seem from the perspective of the “kings of the overturned hour,” in the expression of Saadi Youssef, who believe that the defeats at the end of the century are going to send the Arabs back to the defeats at its beginning. Arab culture has not ceased its fertile reproduction in thought, poetry, the novel, art, cinema and theater. It is born in the prisons and in exile and in the besieged homelands.
Here, today, at the end of the century of defeats, crowned by “the peace of surrender,” resisted by the Palestinian intifada with bare bodies, will and death, the third Nahda must establish a resisting, democratic, pluralist peace, which will build independence and freedom, liberating the Arabs from their enslavement to the idols of power and the idols of a dead language.
*Originally published as Ilyas Khuri, “Min ajl nahda thalitha.” al-Tariq 1 (Jan. – Feb. 2002): 28–39. Thanks to Zaki Haidar for reading a draft of the translation, and for offering thoughtful suggestions.