Part II
The preceding chapters have explored some of the contradictory intellectual and cultural ramifications of the crisis of modernity in the postwar Middle East. Scholars and commentators on the Middle East all too often casually conflate the Middle East, the Islamic world, the Arab world, and other such constructs without batting an eye. Greater attention must also be paid to subtle (and not-so-subtle) shades of difference within the geographical and imaginative space of the Arab Middle East, as, for example, in the spaces betwixt and between the Maghrib (Arab West) and the Mashriq (Arab East). In this connection, Hosam Aboul-Ela sheds new light on the life and afterlives of the liberal age in the Arab world from an oblique angle, namely, that of Morocco and some of its leading twentieth-century intellectuals. Through a sophisticated theoretical exploration of the historical, philosophical, and cultural writings of Muhammad ʿAbid al-Jabiri, Abdallah Laroui, and Abdelkabir Khatibi, his chapter exposes the fallacy of enduring Western discourses that view and produce the Arab world as a “no theory producing region.” Such a tendency prevents area studies scholars as well as social scientists from treating Arab intellectuals as producers of theory and creative agents of cultural production. If the definition of the intellectual in the modern Middle East is contested, how best to consider intellectuals and theorists is doubly complex, even more so as this relationship is striated by forces of power and knowledge in global context. Through a close reading of the various meanings of “Europe,” among other keywords and categories in intellectual culture, Aboul-Ela provides justification for seeing both commonality and difference across the length and breadth of the modern Arab world, from east to west.
Whereas the demoralizing effects of the Nakba and the radicalizing effects of anti- and postcolonial nationalist mobilization could be seen far and wide in Arab intellectual, cultural, and political life during the 1950s and 1960s, from the Maghrib to the Mashriq, the region careened towards moral and cultural collapse when the Arab states failed yet again to combat Israeli power during the June 1967 Six-Day War. Here was a moment of such profound rupture that many Arab leaders, intellectuals, and ordinary people would find it difficult to suture the pre- and post-1967 periods into a coherent narrative framework. In the aftermath of the Naksa, or Setback, dejected Arab intellectuals grappled with the contradictions of ideology, political praxis, and mounting challenges to empowerment, growth, and development. The liberatory possibilities of postcolonial republican regimes and ideologies appeared to have reached their limits. As radical regimes atrophied into static authoritarianism, many Arab intellectuals began to lose faith in people power and nationalism. 1967 constituted a deep caesura in Arab politics and thought, therefore, what Syrian critic and translator Jurj Tarabishi called a “narcissistic trauma” generating considerable intellectual disillusionment and far-reaching introspection.1 Some began to embrace political Islam and secular discourses of authenticity while others abandoned the quest for social revolution, cultural autonomy, and political agency altogether. The very notion that ideas had a role to play in social and political transformation came under question. Many Arab intellectuals in the region engaged in what might be called an autopsy of Arab culture.2
But conventional narratives of post-1967 intellectual and political history do not tell the full story of how Arab intellectuals, cultural critics, and political activists responded (and continue to respond) to such challenges and setbacks. Fadi Bardawil’s chapter offers an illuminating reflection on the consequences of defeat, disillusionment, and displacement in post-1967 Arab intellectual culture through the juxtaposition of Edward Said’s traveling theory of diaspora and exile to the post-Marxism of iconoclastic Lebanese intellectual and political analyst Waddah Shararah. Even as Arab intellectuals in the region were abandoning ideological imperatives for sociological categories of analysis, exilic intellectuals such as Said were criticized for the seemingly out of touch abstractions of colonial discourse analysis. If Arab intellectuals turned towards critical reflection and an exaggerated tendency to self-flagellate, the post-1967 period has also been characterized by radicalization, polarization, an age of extremes in which the involution of Arab intellectual culture has proceeded in parallel with a globalization of Islamic radicalism, sectarianism, and tribalism. In this sense, Bardawil introduces some of the complex problems confronting Arab intellectuals both in the region as well as in diaspora during the mid-to late twentieth century. In addition to the incorporation of Western models for thinking about diaspora and the politics of difference, as in the case of Said, Shararah finds new ways to read the contemporary Arab political predicament through an innovative recuperation of the analytical purchase of the fourteenth century North African historian Ibn Khaldun. Both Said and Shararah have contributed, in vastly differing ways, to rejuvenating the field of historical, cultural, and political critique in the post-1967 period, in ways that intellectual historians and social scientists have only begun to consider.
Even as cultural critics and political analysts confronted the challenge of the Arab age of fracture through the creative recombination of theory, praxis, and historical memory, poets, writers, artists, intellectuals, and scholars addressed themselves to these new developments in still other ways.3 For example, this entailed new imperatives to reckon with the conditions of possibility of innovation and continuity in matters of language, literature, and culture; the same epistemic dilemma brought to the fore difficult questions concerning the relationship between religion and thought as well. The significance of the religious has been a persistent theme in the modern history of the Arab Middle East. In a sense, one might say that the professional study of the region from its inception has been bound up with the structure and function of religion; indeed, Orientalist discourse long reduced the history of the region to the history (read: fantasy) of a unitary Islam. In response to this tendency to reduce Middle Eastern, North African, and Islamic history to the strictures of a narrow interpretation of Islam, historians during the late twentieth century who were inspired by the turn to social history or history from below eschewed research topics that took religion seriously.4 What had been lacking, therefore, was a critical approach to the study of religion in the modern Middle East.
More recently scholars have begun to think seriously about the relationship between the religious and the secular in the making of Middle Eastern modernity.5 Critical scholarship also affirms that the study of the religious and the secular in the modern Middle East cannot easily be divorced from the study of the sectarian.6 Max Weiss reconsiders the late-twentieth-century Arab intellectual field through an exploration of evolving discourses on the religious, the secular, and the sectarian in twentieth-century Syrian social thought. Scholars and journalists have become increasingly fixated on the problem of sectarianism in Syria, and naturally questions of religion have not entirely escaped the attention of historians. But there have been no efforts to conceptualize the institutional, disciplinary, and categorical ways in which knowledge about Syrian society has been produced, indeed how the idea of the social has intermittently crystallized in Syria. Weiss probes the sociological imagination among Arab intellectuals through an exploration of how the social sciences and social scientific thinking in “secularist” Baʿthist Syria shaped and were shaped by contradictory discourses concerning the sectarian and the religious. Although it would be going to far to identify a specifically Syrian approach to the sociology of religion, Weiss demonstrates the extent to which anxieties over the religious, the secular, and the sectarian in modern Syria have animated scholarly, political, and intellectual engagements with the very category of the social itself.
The meanings of society, state, and national identity in Middle Eastern and North African contexts have also been hotly contested with respect to questions of gender. Postwar and postcolonial Arab intellectual history are thrown into sharp relief by Natalya Vince, in her chapter on the political and cultural dimensions of debates among Algerian and Tunisian nationalists, Islamists, and political elites. Vince sheds light on how diverse and contested the spectrum of opinion was among women from across the political spectrum in response to halting attempts at the institutionalization of new legal codes and political languages within the postcolonial revolutionary regimes, otherwise known as the nascent “Party-State.” Indeed, discussion of the adequacy of personal status codes across North Africa and beyond would persist well into the late twentieth century and beyond, highlighting the ways in which hidebound conceptions of “the religious” and “the secular” and even gender and “the social” themselves may obscure more than they illuminate in the study of postwar and postcolonial Arab intellectual history.
1Tarabishi (1991), cited in Halabi (2011: 8–9).
2Al-ʿAzm (1968); Carré (1973); Ajami (1981); Abu-Rabiʿ (2004); and Kassab (2010).
3Frangie (2012); Di-Capua (2013); Bardawil (2013).
4To be sure, scholars of Islam continued to offer incisive and insightful analysis of religious discourse in Islamic societies throughout the modern period. Euben (1999); Lahoud (2005); Kersten (2011); Salama (2011); and Zaman (2012).
5Asad (1993; 2003); Mahmood (2004); and Scott and Hirschkind (2006).
6Makdisi (2000); Weiss (2010); Haddad (2011); Abillama (2013); Matthiesen (2014); and Wehrey (2014).
6
Hosam Aboul-Ela
University of Houston
Introduction: Morocco and the Discourse of Arab Intellectuals
For over a generation, Morocco has been regarded within the Arab region and among specialists outside it as a center for cutting edge thinking produced in both Arabic and French, combining – with at times dazzling creativity – paradigms drawn from both local and global semantic fields. For historians and historiographers, the work of Abdallah Laroui (b. 1933) is unavoidable; writers interested in Arab feminism turn inevitably to Fatima Mernissi; in hermeneutics and translation studies, Abdelfatah Kilito appears on the verge of global stardom; and the late Abdelkebir Khatibi’s philosophical contributions have been called by one expert “the most incisive and original critique of [Arab] neopatriarchal thought to appear in the … two decades” after 1967.1
Furthermore, for each of these major figures, a broader study of Moroccan intellectual life that returned to the era of King Mohammed V (r. 1927–1953, 1957–1961) and came forward to the present would find several more locally important thinkers working around Rabat and Casablanca. Yet to point out that Albert Hourani’s Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age, 1798–1939, still the most influential work of modern Arab intellectual history, mentions neither Morocco nor any individual Moroccan accomplishes little.2 Hourani is more usefully read as a “founder of discursivity,”3 who put in play for the first time to the English speaking reader the entire category of modern Arab thought. If Arab thought was also present in areas that Hourani did not mention, or if veritable bustling centers of Arab thought that he could not have imagined would emerge before the second edition of his book appeared, this points to the significance of the initiation he enacted more than it takes away from his accomplishment. At the same time, however, stopping at Hourani’s initial formulations would neither do justice to the importance of his first step nor contribute to the spirit of this present volume, which is, in part, to revisit that moment of initiation both retrospectively and critically. As important as it has been to establish that Arabic thought has a textured history in Egypt, Lebanon, and Syria, and despite occasional gestures toward constitutionalist movements in Tunisia, for example, the field of modern Arab intellectual history must also engage with sites farther afield from the Levantine centers, such as Morocco, that exemplify the region’s diversity and heterogeneity in cultural and intellectual life.
This chapter will focus on the emergence of Morocco as a center of Arab critical thinking, primarily through the case of Abdallah Laroui (ʿAbd Allah al-ʿArawi), a figure whose influence is immense inside Morocco, great in the Arab region generally, and not insignificant internationally. Looking comparatively at local, regional, and international contexts, not only for the production but also for the reception of Laroui’s work, helps us to better understand and even recuperate liberal but also other traditions of thought and intellectual culture in the modern Arab world. The uneven and partial reception of the thriving universe of Moroccan thought (and “peripheral” zones of the Arabic-speaking world more generally) exemplified by Laroui reveals the insidious structures that objectify and delimit the discourse around ideas produced in the region.
Despite Edward Said’s widely influential critique of the western article of faith, “the east proposes and the west disposes,”4 the reception of ideas in academic circles continues to be determined too often by their place of origin with the result that Arabs contribute little to American and European methods for studying the region. The Arab thinker is still more often an object of study than an agent and producer of culture. This chapter suggests that the traditional intellectual history approach reinforces this objectification of Arab thinkers.5 I begin by contextualizing Moroccan thought via the work of Laroui’s compatriot, Muhammad ʿAbid al-Jabiri. From there, I move to a comparison of the Moroccan situation with more traditionally placed figures of the Nahda such as the Egyptian Muhammad Husayn Haykal before finally concluding with Laroui’s interventions as intellectual, historiographer, and theorist. Finally, my argument involves how to position Laroui since I view his critique of nahdawi thought, carried as it is over several book-length studies, as a potentially highly contributive set of claims with relevance to western theories of representation that have become so central in postcolonial and area studies.
Reading the Nahda in Morocco
In his preface to the first paperback edition of Arabic Thought written in 1969, Hourani offers a pithy critique of his path-breaking history:
the word “liberal” does not adequately describe all the ideas which came into the Arab world from western Europe in the nineteenth century, and it may be misleading if it is taken to imply that all Arab reactions to those ideas were themselves “liberal.” Perhaps I laid too much emphasis on those movements of Arab thought which accepted the dominant ideas of modern Europe and did not say enough about those which rejected them.6
Hourani’s autocritique reads the first edition of his book beyond its own context as a text that began a conversation in the British Isles and North America around intellectual writing by Arabs. A more typical approach to modern Arab history in the English speaking world was that of Charles F. Gallagher, who described the entire North African region in his 1963 study as a “no idea producing area,”7 and it is against this representation that the argument for a liberal age in Arab thought should be contextualized. Hourani’s tendency to be overly critical of his own achievement may stem from the growing sense that intricate complexities mark the various heterogeneous histories of Arab thought since Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt in 1798, especially in the aftermath of his provocative study. Still, if Hourani’s self-criticism insufficiently acknowledges the insights of his original text, it also suggests some of the blindnesses that would delimit the later trajectory of the discourse his work inspired.
For example, when the Moroccan philosopher and intellectual historian Mohammed ʿAbid al-Jabiri opens his essay on the history of Moroccan thought in the liberal age by noting that “the formula traditional versus modern has dominated the discourse of the Arab Nahda in its various directions,”8 he calls attention to the way modern Arab intellectual history remained too much in the thrall of its own point of departure. For even in subsequent self-critique, the notion that European influences created a central liberal strain in modern Arab intellectual discourses against which all other trends must be evaluated remained powerful. The importance of Moroccan intellectual history is that it demonstrates the heterogeneity of Arab intellectual genealogies – before, during, and after the Nahda, partly due to geographical distance and difference. One of the ways in which Moroccan theorists and intellectuals such as al-Jabiri contribute to this diversity is by erasing the presumed binary between the modern-liberal and the traditional-conservative.9
Al-Jabiri’s interpretation of the Nahda in the eastern Arab world (the mashriq) marks off two specific cultural phenomena that distinguished the region from the western part of the Arabic speaking world (the maghrib). First, Ottoman hegemony in the eastern Mediterranean created a general association between Islamic authority and non-Arabic speaking foreign rule.10 Second, a substantial Christian minority in the lands of greater Syria (bilad al-sham) that was especially well represented among the intellectual classes influenced the broad association of Europe with modernity and liberalism with liberation.11
The Maghrib, by contrast, had long remained within only partial reach of Ottoman sovereignty. Moreover, the primary religious minority in the region was Jewish, much smaller than minority communities elsewhere in the Arab world, and tended less toward forming its own distinct sub-national trends within the larger culture of ideas. The result, according to al-Jabiri’s argument, was a relative absence of the dichotomy between traditional and modern. In this reading, the place of Europe in the modern Arab world – including the cultural history of the Mashriq – is much more complex than it appears at times in the writings of those historians who focus on the Levant and Egypt as the center of Arab culture. For al-Jabiri, European civilization established an early foothold among minorities and liberal-leaning elites. “Europe” then became a counterpoint to Ottoman sovereignty much earlier than previously recognized, even perhaps a precursor to the Arab nationalism that truly comes into its own toward the beginning of World War II, which is often represented as the end of the “liberal age.”
To the west of the spheres of Ottoman influence, however, the situation was quite distinct. European intervention arrives later and installs itself ex nihilo, first in the form of settler colonialism (Algeria) and much later under the guise of internationally sanctioned “protectorates” (Morocco and Tunisia). The French launched a full scale and very bloody invasion of Algeria in 1830 that ushered in an occupation that lasted 132 years, during which time Algeria became a full blown French département. Throughout the nineteenth century, the French presence in Algeria was more than merely a distant menace to Moroccans, especially following the crushing defeat of Moroccan forces by the French Army at the Battle of Isly in August 1844. To a certain extent, the Battle of Isly consolidated the French hold on Algeria and allowed them to supersede the state established by the Emir ʿAbd al-Qadir (established with the treaty of Tafna in 1837, leading to a seven year nationalist Algerian state under French occupation), effectively representing the demise of organized local resistance among Algeria’s neighbors.12
At the time of the French invasion, and for the remainder of the nineteenth century, Morocco’s main imperial cities were under the rule of the Moroccan Alawite dynasty, but the decision to defend a retreating ʿAbd al-Qadir greatly weakened the royal forces vis-à-vis the gradually encroaching French colonial power.13 Morocco was able to resist becoming an official French protectorate until 1912. The protectorate system entailed the division of the country into a larger French sphere of influence, a smaller Spanish one, and an even smaller “international zone” around Tangiers. The dynasty was preserved under the inaccurate assumption that the palace would remain loyal to the colonizers as they had for over a generation in Egypt under Britain.
Al-Jabiri is primarily interested in tracing the emergence of the intelligentsia in relation to the modern state. In a sense, his essay is a historiographical response to the “liberal age” narrative from a specifically Moroccan point of view. He begins by tracing the arrival of Wahhabism, the puritanical interpretation of Islam first popularized in the Arabian peninsula by Muhammad Ibn ʿAbd al-Wahhab (1703–92), as it spread through northwest Africa, which took place at around the same time as the arrival of French colonialism.14 Al-Jabiri identifies the first foothold secured by Wahhabist thought in the region sometime in the late eighteenth century, first attracting interest among scholars at Karaouine University in Fez as well as some governmental elites, but because of particular circumstances in the region it took on the characteristics of a “traveling theory.”15 This was a time when pressure toward modernization emanated directly from Europe to the Moroccan lands. For some Moroccans, Wahhabism could mean both reform on the religious plane and revolutionary nationalism on the political. The particularities of the threat of European hegemony meant that clerics and administrators came together to infuse Wahhabism with a nationalist character that it did not always have in many countries of the Mashriq. These new Moroccan Wahhabists exhibited rare antagonism toward the established Sufi traditions of the region, and their embrace of the slogans of reform and revolution meant that no liberal/traditional divide opened as a result of their discourse.16
In al-Jabiri’s narrative, the special character of the Moroccan Nahda is not only the result of particular historical and cultural circumstances such as the absence of Ottoman or Christian influences during the formative period. Individuals were also instrumental. For example, he cites the work of Shaykh Muhammad Bin al-ʿArabi al-ʿAlawi as typical of the kind of cleric who shaped the specificity of intellectual Wahhabism in Morocco. Al-ʿAlawi was born in southern Morocco in 1880 before moving to Fez with his family, who wanted him to study at Karaouine University there. Under the influence of such teachers as ʿAbd Allah al-Sanusi, al-ʿAlawi became both an intellectual and a nationalist, working for the liberation of the country alongside the resistance in the Rif Mountains as well as urban anti-colonial nationalists during a period of growing French encroachment. At the same time, he was innovating an intellectual justification for a new stage in the Moroccan history of ideas: one that could be described as nationalist salafism.17
French political influence grew larger, and Morocco became a French protectorate in 1912. By this time, some of the cultural influences that had played a more determinative role in the Nahda of the Mashriq had reached Morocco. The international and multicultural port of Tangiers, for example, saw a publishing revival in the early twentieth century, specifically with respect to periodicals dealing with arts, letters, and thought, animated in part by Arab Christian émigrés from the lands of greater Syria.18 But al-Jabiri is also critical of historical narratives that exaggerate this aspect of modern intellectual renewal in Morocco, insisting that such a narrative is in the thrall of a Mashriq-centric idée fixe about the modernization of intellectual life, one that sees the Maghrib as a pale copy of its eastern counterpart. In his own reading, the Tangiers publishing movement – liberal and Levantine as it may have been in some cases – did not automatically create a Moroccan copy of the Egyptian/Levantine Nahda. Rather, this was a much later, smaller development, arriving at approximately the same time as the European scramble for Morocco. The result was that this cultural movement contributed a dose of constitutionalism to other strands within the larger nationalist movement, but this larger movement retained the general character that al-Jabiri describes in spite of these new influences. Thus, the Moroccan milieu remained devoid of a central characteristic associated with the Egyptian/Levantine Nahda: namely, the exacerbated division between liberal/modern and conservative/traditional.
Al-Jabiri integrates these local influences into his interpretation of the arrival of French colonial rule in Morocco, which inadvertently consolidated the Wahhabist character of Moroccan nationalism by co-opting a Moroccan comprador elite into the colonial regime.
Subsequently, the French Protectorate was imposed on Morocco in 1912, and the local elite that held sway over the society politically, economically, and culturally began to benefit from the structures, systems, and instruments of the new state that France imposed on the country. In response, salafism in Morocco took on a particular character commensurate with the new situation effecting thought and civilization, with the result that it bore a content that was utterly liberal. Thus, the issue of modernization was taken up by these new salafists themselves, and “tradition” came to mean contemporaneity and modernity.19
In sum, al-Jabiri’s reading of Moroccan intellectual history does more than geographically expand and extend the traditional account of modern Arab intellectual history. It also challenges the rigid binary between Europe/modern and non-Europe/traditional. Therefore, al-Jabiri’s account has implications that go beyond the simple inclusion of the Maghrib in this narrative of Arab thought. Indeed, his critique potentially leads us back to a critique of the modernizationist binarism at the core of widespread understandings of the Nahda in the eastern Mediterranean as such.
Abdallah Laroui and the Historiography of the Nahda
If the narrative of the Nahda and the liberal age paradigm unfolds primarily through the lens of nineteenth and early twentieth century Egypt, al-Jabiri’s analysis advocates for a separation between Egyptian and Moroccan historical trajectories. In fact, though, the many connections running through social and intellectual life in Morocco and Egypt make such a separation more complicated. Al-Jabiri notes the Egyptian influence in the region stemming from Muhammad ʿAbduh’s visit to Tunisia in the 1880s, which is all too often cast as a fleeting moment during his period of exile from Egypt. Moreover, the subsequent influence of Egyptian literary critic and public intellectual Taha Husayn throughout the Maghrib, from his training of Moroccan students in Cairo to his own voyage in post-independence Morocco at the invitation of no less than Mohammed V (r. 1927–61), is another example of the tangible connections linking Morocco to Egypt during the “liberal age” and after.20
More important, however, are the complications that emerge out of the historiographical account that al-Jabiri offers, which invite us to revisit the modern/traditional divide as it was long understood in the Egyptian context. For these purposes, the work of Muhammad Husayn Haykal, a key figure in the later stage of the Egyptian Nahda, whose intellectual and travel writings are understudied outside Egypt, proves useful. Haykal is often presented as the author of one of the first important literary novels in Arabic, Zaynab (1913), but his nonfiction work from the 1920s and 1930s also influenced the Egyptian public sphere as much as that of any other nahdawi of his generation. Furthermore, his early and trenchant critique of Orientalist scholarship offers a potential re-reading of Egypt’s own intellectual history that might incorporate some of al-Jabiri’s formulations.
Haykal’s Hayat Muhammad (The Life of Muhammad), on the life and times of the Prophet, is often misread as a reactionary turn to soft Islamism; it should more properly be understood as part of a broader critique of Orientalist discourse, an outgrowth of texts like Tarajim Misriyya wa-Gharbiyya and Thawrat al-Adab.21 Although Haykal’s early writing often has been categorized as part of a liberalizing trend in Arab letters, his attitude toward Orientalism is quite consistent throughout the 1920s and 1930s. After visiting Hungary and Bosnia in the 1920s, for example, he concluded his report on the difficulties of the Muslim minorities in Europe with the following comment on an exemplary case of Europe’s Orientalism:
I wrote several years ago of a book published by a group of Western thinkers called “The Face of Islam.” This book sets out to explore the extent of Muslim desire in the various Islamic countries to escape from their own Islamic high principles in favor of embracing those of the West in the present day. This book is nothing more than an image of the West’s attitude toward the issue of Islam. Their line of thinking is natural. For dominant civilizations in every age have always been anxious to convert the peoples they conquer, no matter what original religious affiliations the conquered may hold.22
Here Haykal connects Orientalism with political power and the colonial project in a manner that is reminiscent of a pivotal chapter of his best-known work of criticism, Thawrat al-Adab. Dealing with the “causes for lagging behind of the [Arabic] narrative,” by which he means the perceived comparative paucity of richly complicated and mature Arabic novels in the first part of the century, Haykal critically addresses the work of the celebrated British Orientalist Hamilton Gibb. Haykal concludes that Gibb’s value judgments about Arabic literature are self-interested and self-fulfilling prophecies. Moreover, they cross the line between scholarship and politically motivated rhetoric. In the end, “such authors dress themselves in the scientific and historical researchers clothing while the work reinforces what many Western political leaders call for along the lines that the fates have thrown upon them the burden of conquering and civilizing the states of the East. In fact, it is their own ambition that has thrown upon them the burden of oppressing the states of the East and dictating to them their affairs.”23 The rigorous consistency Haykal demonstrates in linking the conclusions drawn by Western Orientalists with political power and colonial ambition in Europe, through such various genres as travel writing, literary criticism, and religious texts, suggests an inchoate yet profound critique of Western metaphysics that must be taken into account by scholars interested in historicizing this period in Arab thought.
I am most interested in the place of such a critique within the larger body of Haykal’s work. Furthermore, his oeuvre demonstrates the persistence of such a critique of Orientalist rhetoric across the Arab world.24 This deep ambivalence regarding European cultural influence in the Arabic-speaking world – expressed by none other than a leading Egyptian thinker of the later Nahda period – takes al-Jabiri’s complicating of the modernity/tradition binary further still by suggesting its instability even in Egypt itself, at the very center of the Nahda’s conventional geographical focus.
The early work of Abdallah Laroui, the Moroccan historiographer, critic, and contemporary of al-Jabiri, continues in the spirit of such a reconceptualization of Arab intellectual history. Both historical and conceptual connections have been made between Laroui and figures in the Egyptian Nahda. During a break from his graduate training in France during the early 1960s, Laroui spent time in Cairo. Serving as cultural attaché at the Moroccan Embassy in Egypt, he formulated a view of Arab culture that systematically critiqued both the enthusiastic Nasserist Arab nationalism that surrounded him and its precedents in the liberal age. If his time in Egypt has not been heavily emphasized in the relatively few studies of Laroui’s work, this may result from his own tendency to speak dismissively of the experience. For example, in an interview with the historian Nancy Gallagher, he said:
I admired the Egyptian people, but not the intellectuals, whom I found ignorant and arrogant … But I met some fine people, the late George Henein, for instance, who emigrated later to Paris and worked as a journalist, the playwright Nùman Àshur, and the noted intellectuals, Lutfi al-Khuli, and Khaled Mohyieddine. My stay in Egypt was unfortunately very short and I have never returned. I cannot say honestly that I felt it as a want. The time of the Egyptian intellectual supremacy in the Arab world is over, at least as we see things from the Maghrib.25
While Laroui colors his biographical connection to Egyptian intellectual life in this negative shade, at the level of intellectual discourse his analyses of Egypt’s cultural relationship to both liberalism and nationalism greatly complicate received wisdoms. In this sense, his short stay in Egypt may have been profoundly generative. Laroui was in Egypt at the same time as new strains of fundamentalist thought among the Muslim Brothers, inspired by the late Sayyid Qutb, were taking shape. This was also the period in which President Gamal Abdel Nasser sought to crush all active manifestations of opposition, be that in the form of communism, locally driven Marxism, or intellectual leftism.26 Laroui felt no personal desire to return to Cairo, but at the level of intellectual production, his critical voice turned to the Nahda, to the rise of nationalist thought, and to their aftermaths, producing a series of studies that contribute greatly to the historiography of the region as well as global theories of representation.
In the decade or so following his departure from Cairo, Laroui produced three influential studies. Two of these incorporated profound critiques of the legacy of the Nahda in the Arab East. In L’idéologie arabe contemporaine: essai critique, Laroui attempts to trace the ways in which certain genres of thought among the nahdawis have delimited and deformed how contemporary Arab thinkers treat their own history. The first chapter, for example, describes three ideal-types: the religious shaykh, the politician, and the technocrat. For each character, Laroui makes clear that he has a particular Egyptian associated with the Nahda in mind: Muhammad ʿAbduh, ʿAli ʿAbd al-Raziq, and Salama Musa, respectively. Each type put forward a program to redefine the modern Arab subject in a changed and changing world, one in which the region increasingly found itself dealing with the challenges of unequal development. For the religious leader, the solution is a renewed interest in reformed religious principles. For the politician, liberalism is the answer. Meanwhile, the technocrat takes an almost Gandhian position, holding that the only advantage enjoyed by the industrialized West is industrialization itself, and in fact, spiritually speaking, the Muslim world maintains its ascendancy. Therefore, the real challenge is to catch up with the West technologically.27 (Here, the overlap between the politician and the shaykh is very much intended and prefigures his later argument that nahdawi thought at its core undermined historicism.28
In Laroui’s reading, these seemingly different approaches build on tautological thinking that only reinforces the cultural dependency that afflicts modern Arab thought. This critique is made even more explicit in his follow-up essay, The Crisis of the Arab Intellectual: Historicism or Traditionalism?, in which Laroui inventories the predicaments and challenges facing Arab intellectuals in the light of a failed collective nationalist project. In the course of this argument, he makes repeated reference to the ways in which European cultural hegemony continues to hold sway over the methods employed by Arab thinkers:
It is postliberal Western culture that is conceding its modernity to Arab culture, which accepts it as a gift, effortlessly. The Arab intellectual of today who sets out to investigate these directions has, in one way or another, more or less interiorized liberal culture; therefore his sensibility and his intellect have already positively conceded what I call cultural retardation.29
Laroui emphasizes the historical rupture constituted by colonialism in the trajectory of Arab thought. This point may also be read as evidence of an intellectual melancholy, especially when stripped of its connection to the intellectual genealogy that I have called the Mariátegui tradition, a critical approach to global culture stretching across the colonial and postcolonial worlds that birthed a productive historiography out of anticolonial discourse.30 But to settle by calling Laroui a cynic who approached the figure of the modern Arab intellectual agonistically would be not only to read him ahistorically but also only partially. What is particularly interesting about his critique of Arab intellectuals in The Crisis of the Arab Intellectual is the double movement not only analyzing the local production of knowledge but also critiquing the wider encounter between the Arab thinker and intellectuals in those Western countries that appear to enjoy hegemonic authority in the Arab world. This not only connects Laroui to the earlier but far less systematic anti-Orientalist leitmotif in the work of Haykal, it also – properly contextualized – looks forward to the famous critique of Orientalist discourse launched by Edward W. Said, which has so pervasively influenced postcolonial studies, literary criticism, and the study of the Middle East in North America, even as it erased Laroui (and other interlocutors) from its semantic field of engagement.
Abdallah Laroui and the Critique of Orientalism
Abdallah Laroui, born south of Casablanca in 1933, has published a number of acclaimed works of history, a three-volume memoir, five Arabic-language novels, and theoretical essays that have greatly influenced postcolonial thought on a global scale. Since the translation of two of Laroui’s first three books from the French in the 1970s, no other work of his has been translated into English. There has still not been any extended study or even overview survey of his thought and oeuvre by a North American scholar. In fact, scholarly and academic mention of Laroui is rare; when it does occur, it tends to lack substance.31 I will return to the larger implications of such general neglect at the end of this chapter.
In a systematic manner that goes beyond Haykal’s initial set of claims, Laroui elucidates how certain Western modes of representation index the instrumental role of place in representational politics broadly conceived as well as an underlying nationalism that insists on reading ideas against their geo-historical contexts. This insistence is manifest in a passage near the end of his historiographical analysis, The History of the Maghrib: An Interpretive Essay, which addresses liberal French discourse regarding the colonial project in the Maghrib. Laroui asserts that this French critique evinces a broad willingness to acknowledge the injustices of French rule without simultaneously being capable of recognizing the fundamentally structural problem of colonialism. He explains this blind spot through an assertion of the distinctive nature of the critical gaze across the colonial divide:
The flaw in this critique is only too evident: its proponents pretended not to see that the foreign colony amounted to an imported bourgeoisie, which, true to its inherent logic, refused to serve the honor of man or the glory of God without recompense, and that the foreign colony formed a separate society juxtaposed to another society which it was able to repress but not to revolutionize.32
In other words, even those French observers who were critical of the colonial project failed to completely avoid a nationalist framing of the problem. Here Laroui’s analysis shares with Haykal the sense that perception occurs in a particular geo-historical location, but he goes beyond Haykal’s liberal double-consciousness regarding Western culture, seeing the cultural problem behind politically motivated Orientalist discourse as a symptom of the West’s thoroughgoing complicity in the degradation of the Maghrib. In the conclusion, Laroui sums up his trenchant critique, leaving little room for confusion about the pervasiveness of this problem, which “is the great crime of colonialism. It not only stops historical evolution, but obliges the colonized people to regress. In principle, every colonization is a condemnation to historical death, the old structures, the old habits, the old egoisms, rise to the surface of minds and societies, and in misfortune, everyone takes refuge in childhood.”33 Although Laroui’s analysis is nuanced, this quotation makes clear that his nuances never quite qualify his sense of the historical role of colonialism in the region. More specifically, Laroui takes issue with how colonialism interrupts historical progress. In his famous critique of the Arab intellectual, and indeed in most of his writing, Laroui emphasizes the significance of historicism, with respect both to questions of rhetoric and to those of material history. His consistent emphasis on historicism might thus be read as attentiveness to colonialism’s problematic primary legacy in the region.
While Laroui offers little room for justifying the degradation and destruction imposed by the colonizer upon the colonized, a sense of balance does seem to emerge in his equal opportunity critique of the historiography of Moroccan nationalism.
In the nineteenth century, two mutually hostile historiographies, the one colonial, the other nationalist, came into being, and developed in opposite directions – if not in all their aspects, at least in their view of reality. Colonial historiography treated its subject most adequately in its beginnings, while that of the nationalists acquired its content at the end of the process.34
If both of these views ultimately manage to systematically exclude the majority of Moroccans from their own story, Laroui’s illumination of the problem recalls a parallel critique made around the same time by Ranajit Guha in his manifesto explaining the foundational beliefs of the Subaltern Studies approaches to the history of South Asia. “The historiography of Indian nationalism,” Guha writes, “has for a long time been dominated by elitism – colonial elitism and bourgeois nationalist elitism. Both originated as the ideological product of British rule in India, but have survived the transfer of power and been assimilated to neo-colonialist and neo-nationalist forms of discourse in Britain and India respectively.”35 The analogy to Guha makes apparent two important aspects of Laroui’s analysis of Moroccan historiography. First, the issue in both cases is that of representation, specifically representation’s implication in, and inability to transcend, colonial politics. Even more specifically, representations of regional histories by the colonizer are incapable of freeing themselves from the self-aggrandizing presumptions that fuel and underwrite the colonial project.
But it is equally true, second, that neither Guha nor Laroui allows the political representations of nationalist historiography to escape the same critique. In this, Laroui can be distinguished from the better known 1963 critique of Orientalism by the Egyptian Anouar Abdel Malek. Both Laroui and Abdel Malek view the Western scholar’s presentation of “the Arab” as a hermetic and self-referencing discourse, made evident on the first page of Laroui’s study. “All these historians,” Laroui writes of the Orientalists, “refer the reader back to each other and invoke each other’s authority.”36 This viewpoint is also shared by Edward Said, whose discussion of Orientalism’s “textual attitude”37 exposes a citational style that made it difficult if not impossible for Orientalists to break from the received wisdoms passed down from their predecessors. But the Said of Orientalism, although he cited both Abdel Malek and Laroui, can be distinguished from them in his persistent avoidance of any agency, voice, or narration coming back against Orientalist discourse.38
For Laroui, though, the historical conditions that made the discourse of Orientalism possible are always local as well as global. Writing after the 1967 War, Laroui’s degree of skepticism seems to distinguish him from other Arab intellectuals who wrote about the Orientalists regarding the possibilities of Arab nationalism. In fact, one might read his less qualified critique of colonial discourse, in part as a product of the failures of Arab nationalism, which only further provoked his sense of how deeply rooted the unequal development engendered during the colonial period had truly become. Although nationalism had proved incapable of transcending it, Laroui hoped that historicism, or the search for better solutions through a better understanding of the past, might offer something more.
In The Crisis of the Arab Intellectual, the Arabic version of which carries the less agonistic title al-ʿArab wa-l-fikr al-tarikhi (The Arabs and Historical Thought), Laroui also turns his attention to the connection between colonial politics and Orientalist discourse. Said’s citation of Laroui takes up the latter’s focus on the figure of Gustave von Grunebaum, to whom an entire chapter of Crisis is devoted. Throughout his early scholarship done in interwar Vienna, the Austrian Orientalist specialized in philological studies of classical Arabic and Islamic texts. Laroui links the impulse toward generalization in von Grunebaum’s work to his move to the United States at the beginning of World War II. Only after this late career re-location, and under the influence of the American scene, von Grunebaum is said to evolve into an expert on Islam, lapsing into commentary about broad swaths of history and across regional subdivisions. In the United States he is first promoted to a position of administrative authority and then encouraged to turn his lens away from philology and the classical tradition and toward the modern Muslim world. As Said points out, Laroui is particularly critical of von Grunebaum’s broad claims to represent a supposed Orient:
Each of the many diverse aspects of Islamic culture could be seen by von Grunebaum as an unvarying matrix, a particular theory of God that compels them all into meaning and order: development, history, tradition, reality in Islam are all interchangeable. Laroui rightly maintains that history as a complex order of events, temporalities, and meanings cannot be reduced to such a notion of culture in the same way that culture cannot be reduced to ideology, nor ideology to theology.39
It is possible to distinguish between the theories of representation underpinning the respective critiques of Orientalism offered by the work of Said and Laroui. For Said, Laroui fails to portray fully the scope of the problem, since his resort to von Grunebaum as an exemplary figure does not give a complete picture of the extent to which, “the need for Islam to use Western methods to improve itself has, as an idea, perhaps because of von Grunebaum’s wide influence, become almost a truism in Middle Eastern studies.”40 Said’s goal is a broadly comprehensive portrait of Orientalist discourse across space and time, presented in light of its genealogical contingency, but without so much variation as to keep every example from reinforcing the dominant political subtext of his discursive history.
In contrast, Laroui embeds his critique of Orientalist discourse exemplified by von Grunebaum’s work within a larger discussion of regional intellectual history – the “crisis of the Arab intellectual.” For Laroui, the link between Orientalism and (neo)colonial politics exposes a flaw in the Arab Nahda, with its intellectual dependency on post-Enlightenment European thought. In Crisis, as well as in later work down to his al-Sunna wa-l-islah (Tradition and Reform), Laroui proposes historicism – tarikhaniyya in his Arabic writings – as the method that might allow the Arab intellectual to work through the double bind between intellectual dependency and traditionalism. But a precise definition of Laroui’s concept of historicism remains elusive. This is primarily because European modernity has been more pervasive and insidious than anti-Western traditionalists in the region have been able to recognize. In the case of the salafi traditionalist, for example, it is presumed that the region’s pre-modern past is readily accessible, when in fact, according to Laroui, it is lost forever as a consequence of the complete transformation of institutions, social relations, political economy, and ideologies in the region during the colonial and neo-colonial periods. Instead of such a quixotic, reactionary, and counterproductive approach to the analysis of Arab society, Laroui does not propose an Arab version of European liberal ideology but rather tarikhaniyya, which approaches the concrete institutions and ideologies that exist in the region through a historical materialism that will not impose upon them a master narrative structured around either Hegel or Allah.
Conclusion: Intellectuals, Theorists, and Representations
Laroui’s emphasis on historicism foregrounds an important difference from the Said of Orientalism. In some early critiques of Said’s analysis, summed up by Bart Moore-Gilbert, Orientalist discourse appears in the celebrated study as a hermetic, closed rhetorical tradition that leaves the Arab/“Oriental” character passive, mute, and excluded.41 In Laroui’s analysis, by contrast, Orientalist discourse itself is also part of a crisis that exists within Arab rhetoric. His main focus is on the contrapuntal discourses provoked within the Maghrib in particular, and the Arab and Third Worlds more generally. Nonetheless, in his career-long struggle to define a local intellectual discourse that is at once historically grounded and innovative (mubdiʿ), Laroui also suggests the complacent glibness of the early critiques of Said’s project, such as that of Moore-Gilbert and other scholars of “colonial discourse analysis.”
It is on this point that the critique of Laroui’s project by Abdelkebir Khatibi, his fellow Moroccan (and fierce intellectual rival), proves most relevant. In Khatibi’s polemic against Laroui, the latter’s historicism is portrayed as a mere ideological trope, one which does not get beyond the faith-based methods of so-called traditionalists. Khatibi seeks to emphasize a certain notion of “difference,” finding inspiration in Fanon’s declaration of the death of Europe and calling for Arab intellectuals to engage in the first instance with European philosophers of difference: Nietzsche, Heidegger, Blanchot, and Derrida. What he expects this engagement to produce is a more penetrating portrayal of the diversity of Arab and Maghribi experience, a portrait of a “plural maghrib” (maghreb pluriel). Like Laroui, Khatibi sees Arab nationalism as an obstacle:
This unity is thus, for us, of the past, and to be analyzed in its imaginary insistence (son insistance imaginaire). Moreover, this so-called and oft proclaimed unity includes not only its specific margins (Berbers, Copts, Kurds, and, most marginal of all, women), but it covers over as well the divisions of the Arab world into countries, peoples, sects, classes; not to mention other subdivisions down to the suffering of the individual abandoned by the hope for his God, Who will always remains invisible.42
I began this chapter by citing Hisham Sharabi’s claim that Khatibi represents the most radical figure in his generation of Arab critical thinkers. Today this judgment seems somewhat overstated and Khatibi’s language seems increasingly (out)dated, to a specific moment in France in particular. Be that as it may, Khatibi adapted radical European thought with a degree of creativity that cautions us not to read Laroui too superficially.
A reductive reading of Abdallah Laroui and his oeuvre might take him to be arguing that the problem with the Nahda and its legacy is its connection with Europe. But understood more comprehensively, the real issue at stake here is a widespread and persistent unwillingness on the part of modern and contemporary Arab intellectuals to historicize the relationship between the Arab world and Europe systematically, through both space (al-Jabiri) and time (Laroui). The Khatibi/Laroui debate, therefore, sharpens the focus of the methodological challenges surrounding the issue of representation. Both start from a presumption of historical difference if not radical alterity. Both suggest, in other words, an authentic wilderness – an epistemologically unreachable Arab space – that exists beyond the second rate iterations of the Maghrib and Arab world produced by both Orientalist and Arab traditionalist discourses. In other words, for Laroui and Khatibi, historicism and metaphysics, respectively, are methods that can subvert and confuse the fixity of our current representational options.
To push the point further still, Said’s own dissatisfaction with his treatment of the problem of representation in Orientalism can be observed in his later work, as in his essay “Traveling Theory,” which both critiques and bids adieu to Michel Foucault. Later still, Said would develop his “contrapuntal method” in Culture and Imperialism as a strategy for incorporating the serious study of cultures of decolonization alongside analyses of colonial discourse in Western art, letters, and institutions. His contrapuntal method pushes forward our discussions of the politics of representation across the postcolonial divide. Yet, in almost all of its current manifestations, it fails to challenge the core–periphery divide that lies at the heart of global theoretical discourses. Said tends to prefer poets and novelists as representatives of the culture of decolonization. When he does take up intellectuals – such as C. L. R. James or Ranajit Guha – they seem to become reduced to primary texts; that is, they fill in the portrait of cultures of imperialism without speaking in any significant way to questions of method. This chapter has sought to provoke the question of what type of contrapuntalism might result if theorists of the postcolonial and the transnational thought about employing this contrapuntal strategy at the level of method. In that spirit, I will close with two examples that I hope will be suggestive.
First, a recuperation of the Arab intellectual genealogy that produced Laroui’s original critique of von Grunebaum and, subsequently, Said’s extended critique of Orientalist discourse might have several additional benefits. For one thing, this genealogy links Arab agency to critique at every turn. In this sense, it becomes possible to make consciousness of the links between politics and discourse an essential component – but never the sufficient condition – for the regional version of what Haykal called thawrat al-adab, the revolution of literature.
My second example concerns the issue of intellectuals and how they are represented. A theorist is someone who produces systems and methods that help shape our thinking. In this sense, the Arab world appears to have no theorists. Intellectuals, on the other hand, have bodies, belong to social classes, and are products of their moment and their region. In the case of Arab intellectuals, they may even be said to be incarcerated in their bodies, their regions, and their times.43 This gives us license to undertake partial readings of what intellectuals have written and extrapolate from these representations of them as symptomatic figures. One might then recommend the example of Laroui as an illustration of how this process hinders methods of reading, since in his double critique, linking Orientalists and Arab nationalists, he actually offers us a Saidian contrapuntalism avant la lettre.
A few important points regarding method should be added here by way of conclusion. First, Laroui remains focused on ideas and methods in his own proto-contrapuntalism, an emphasis not even imagined in Said’s work, where contrapuntalism is transacted almost exclusively at the level of the primary text. Second, what Said proposes has not yet been taken up systematically within postcolonial studies. Orientalism remains the most influential of his texts, and the number of studies conducted by scholars of comparative literature or postcolonial studies that take seriously Culture and Imperialism’s call for a contrapuntal lens are very few indeed.44
Finally, these questions of method take us back to the legacy of Albert Hourani and the aftermaths of the liberal age. On the one hand, Hourani’s formative work in the intellectual history of the Arab region has struck a powerful blow against the construction of an Arab “Orient” that outsiders perceive as a “no idea producing area.” On the other hand, the half-century since the publication of Arabic Thought cannot be said to have liberated North American scholarship from this prejudice. In fact, it is difficult to study intellectuals without objectifying them in a way that strips their work of complexity, contingency, and specificity. The challenge, therefore, for historians and comparativists alike, is to forge a disciplinary contrapuntalism that is capable of reading intellectuals as if they were theorists, and to read theorists as if they were intellectuals.
1Sharabi (1988: 113).
2Hourani (1983 [1962]).
3Foucault (1984a: 114).
4Said (1978a).
5My argument works in tandem with Fadi Bardawil’s comparative analysis in the next chapter of the way the work of Waddah Shararah circulates distinctively from that of Edward Said.
6Hourani (1970: viii).
7Cited in Laroui (1977: 23 n18).
8Al-Jabiri (1988: 9).
9Other articles in this volume that present a distinctive extension of the narrative and/or the argument in Hourani’s germinal text include: Di-Capua on the neglected era of nationalism between the Nakba and the Naksa; Creswell’s on poetry as intellectual production; Bashkin on Arab Jewish contributions. Al-Jabiri’s work in particular suggests the possibilities of a geographic/scalar perspective in extending the portrait presented in Arabic Thought.
10One finds this same association in the work of Muhammad ʿAbduh as characterized by Hourani: “The Turks, newcomers to Islam and devoid of the gift of understanding, failed to grasp the meaning of the Prophet’s message. In their own interest, they encouraged a slavish acceptance of authority, and discouraged the free exercise of reason among those they ruled.” Hourani (1970: 150).
11Al-Jabiri (1988: 10).
12Here I am paraphrasing al-Jabiri’s characterization of the battle’s historical significance. In The History of the Maghrib, by contrast, whose historiographical dimension I discuss in the last section of this chapter, Laroui mentions the Battle of Isly in the context of ʿAbd al-Qadir’s failed attempt to forge an alliance with the Sultan ʿAbd al-Rahman while on the verge of losing control of Algeria to the occupying French. Laroui (1977: 301).
13For a fuller discussion of the history of the period in Morocco, see Laroui (1977: 262–348).
14For a study of Wahhabism’s origins, and its migration to North Africa that that broadly echoes al-Jabiri’s argument for particularity, see Dallal (1993).
15In his essay “Traveling Theory,” Edward Said (2000a) traces the movement of György Lukacs’s concept of “reification” from its militant origins in Hungary’s communist movement to its reappropriation in Paris by French Marxist/structuralist Lucien Goldman to its later adaptation by Raymond Williams in his British academic milieu. Said shows the way the force and content of ideas are shaped by the historical contexts in which they are received. See, too, the essay by Fadi Bardawil in this volume.
16Al-Jabiri (1988: 12–14).
17Ibid., 24.
18Ibid., 20.
19Ibid., 40.
20For al-Jabiri’s mention of ʿAbduh’s trip to Tunis, see al-Jabiri (1998: 23). Taha Hussein’s connections to Morocco are catalogued in Mʿalemi (2009).
21Haykal (2002 [1935]).
22Haykal (1985 [1929]: 62).
23Haykal (1978 [1933]: 81).
24At the Princeton conference where this chapter was first presented, one historian responded to this discussion by emphasizing the rivalry between Haykal and Gibb and the counter-attacks directed at Haykal by Gibb’s Egyptian allies.
25Gallagher (1994b: 80).
26Abdel-Malek (1968).
27Laroui (1982 [1967]).
28In this sense, Laroui’s critique might be compared to Hassan Hanafi’s attempt to tie the Nahda to the rise of Salafism as described in Yasmeen Daifallah’s chapter.
29Laroui (1976: 8–9).
30Aboul-Ela (2007: chapter 1).
31An exception is the insightful – if rather partial – references to Laroui’s work in anthropologist Stefania Pandolfo’s (2000) work on Moroccan subjectivity, in which she treats Laroui’s critiques of intellectual culture in North Africa as one of three phenomena exemplifying the melancholia that characterizes Moroccan subjectivity in its confrontation with modernity.
32Laroui (1977: 346).
33Ibid., 382.
34Ibid., 11.
35Guha (1988: 37).
36Laroui (1977: 3).
37Said (1978: 92–96).
38See also al-ʿAzm (2000: 231–34).
39Said (1978: 298).
40Ibid.
41Moore-Gilbert (1997: 51).
42Khatibi (2008: 11).
43This was recently evidenced by some pseudo-intellectual media treatments in major American periodicals of the “failure of Arab intellectuals” in the wake of the revolutions that have shaken the region since December of 2011. See, for example, Robert F. Worth, “The Arab Intellectuals Who Didn’t Roar,” New York Times, October 30, 2011 (www.nytimes.com/2011/10/30/sunday-review/the-arab-intellectuals-who-didnt-roar.html?pagewanted=all, accessed July 5, 2012).
44The work of Elliott Colla (2008) jumps to mind as an important exception.