7

Sidelining Ideology: Arab Theory in the Metropole and Periphery, circa 1977

Fadi A. Bardawil^*

University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

I

Revisiting Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age, a little more than two decades after its publication, Albert Hourani made a series of observations regarding the book’s context of inception in the late 1950s and early 1960s, as well as on the alternative directions the project could, or maybe should, have taken. These retrospective historiographical comments, included in the preface to the 1983 edition, fall into two major domains. The first comment has a disciplinary character. It pertains to the insufficiency of a “pure” history of ideas, and the need to supplement it “by asking how and why the ideas of my writers had an influence on the minds of others.”¹ This series of questions could be answered via recourse to

A fuller and more precise study of changes in the structure of society from one generation to another, with careful distinctions between what was happening in different Arab countries, and also some attempt to study the process of communication, both direct and indirect. The ideas I was concerned with did not spread only through the writings of those whose work I studied, but were mediated to a larger public in writings of another kind, and above all in poetry.²

The histories of ideas and arguments, Hourani suggested, could benefit from an anchoring in social history, an attentiveness to a finer scale of analysis that pays attention to intra-Arab distinctions, as well as an examination of processes of mass mediation of thought via such vectors as poetry, which translates concepts to wider publics.

The second series of comments reconsiders one of the initial guiding assumptions of the project, which honed in on the breaks and discontinuities with the past. Twenty years later Hourani stated his worry about the direction his project took at the time. “To some extent, I may have distorted the thought of the writers I studied,” Hourani wrote, “at least those of the first and second generations: the ‘modern’ element in their thought may have been smaller than I implied, and it would have been possible to write about them in a way which emphasized continuity rather than a break with the past.” Hourani’s interest in the question of historical continuity in 1983 went beyond his retrospective worry regarding the emphasis placed on reading more “echoes of European thought” (discontinuity) than “echoes of Islamic political thought” (continuity) in the works of Arab thinkers he dealt with in his magisterial book, as he put it a few years later in a rich autobiographical interview.³ It took the form of a call to write about other kinds of writers. Those were the ones not given their due in Hourani’s magnum opus. In doing so, Hourani was also alerting his readers to one way through which the historian’s present is refracted through the formation of his subjects and objects via the decision he made in the early 1960s regarding who to include in, and exclude from, his pantheon of Arab thought. Hourani did not pay as much attention to those “who still lived in their inherited world of thought, whose main aim was to preserve the continuity of its tradition, and who did so in accustomed ways, writing and teaching within the framework of the great schools, the Azhar in Cairo or the Zaytuna in Tunis, or of the Sufi brotherhoods.”⁴ Those authors had remained influential throughout the nineteenth century. “In the present century they have lost much of their domination,” noted the veteran historian, “or so it seemed at the point in time when I was writing my book.” This temporal qualifier gives his contemporary readers a clue to his emerging interest in the question of continuity. “It is clearer now than it was then, at least to me,” Hourani wrote, “that the extension of the area of political consciousness and activity, the coming of ‘mass politics,’ would bring into the political processes men and women who were still liable to be swayed by what the Azhar said or wrote, and what the shaykhs of a brotherhood might teach.”⁵

Revisiting futures past in 1983, with an emphasis on continuity rather than its opposite, Hourani subtly revised some of the conclusions of his book’s epilogue, “Between Past and Future,” which addressed the post–World War II era from the vantage point of the early 1960s. There, the picture drawn was of the passing of a world divided into East and West as a new modern world is born. The West had managed to carry out “its historic mission of creating a new and unified world.”⁶ “The world was one,” Hourani concluded, during the age of independence and national liberation. Not only was it unified on the level of material techniques and science, but more importantly for our purposes, “politically too the world had become one: there was a single universe of political discourse. There were of course different political systems, but the differences could not be explained simply in terms of regional, or national character or tradition.”⁷ Differences, during the age of ideologies, were no longer predicated on the particularities of region, nation or tradition. Rather, the differences were themselves contained within a single universal terrain of political discourse. “The most important of all changes which came to the surface in these twenty years,” Hourani added in his depiction of the postwar era, “was this: the past was abolished whether it were the past of ‘westernization’ or the more distant past of the traditional societies.”⁸ The new world had seemed to overcome the pasts of tradition and Westernization. They had passed for good, or so it appeared to Hourani and many others in, in the age of decolonization and national liberation.

II

In this essay I examine the crucial moment in the late 1970s when the fabric of the modern unified world of a “single universe of political discourse,” to borrow Hourani’s phrase, which encompassed the competing ideologies of territorial patriotism, Syrian and Arab nationalisms, and various varieties of Leftism, began to be gnawed at from different angles. This was a time when the question of ideology, once premised on the significance of such binary distinctions as left and right as well as progressives and reactionaries, began to be sidelined in the wake of a series of major political events and theoretical turns. To flesh out this point, I will draw on works from this period by the Lebanese political sociologist Waddah Charara (b. 1942) and the Palestinian-American literary critic Edward Said (1935–2003). The political and intellectual trajectories of these two distinguished Arab thinkers – the latter an exiled Palestinian intellectual in the United States, and the former a Lebanese at home in the periphery – as well as the questions they were tackling unfolded in different problem-spaces and distinct geographical locations.⁹ What their critical interventions from the late 1970s shared, however, was a shifting of the analytical gaze away from the ideological plane, in order to uncover new domains of investigation: the sociological (Charara) and the discursive (Said).

Waddah Charara, a leading theoretician of the Lebanese New Left in the 1960s and early 1970s, exited from the Marxist tradition of political practice and analysis during the early years of the Lebanese civil and regional wars (1975–90). In the wake of his dissent, he embraced a sociological mode of analysis. This method posited the primacy of the social fabric and highlighted the logics structuring its relations of solidarity (regional, familial and sectarian) over and above the ideological divide separating the warring parties of the day. On the other hand, Edward Said’s political engagement and his interest in the question of Western representations of the Arabs, the prelude to his seminal work Orientalism, was inaugurated in New York city in the aftermath of the 1967 Arab defeat against Israel.¹⁰ Said’s book pitched its critique at the epistemological strata, articulating the political at the level of the discursive infrastructures of thought, and arguing that both radical thinkers, such as Karl Marx, and right-wing intellectuals inhabit a common Orientalist matrix despite their major ideological differences.

Revisiting the late 1970s today is pivotal to understanding our present, in the wake of the subsequent fork in theoretical agendas that would separate modernist Arab intellectuals, who turned their gaze inwards towards a critical appraisal of their own societies and cultures, on the one hand, and those engaged, in the wake of Said, in a post-colonial critique, on the other hand. Moreover, thinking about Charara and Said together raises historiographical questions concerning fundamental assumptions undergirding the practice of Arab intellectual history, which I will address in the final part of this chapter. These pertain to Hourani’s presuppositions regarding the study of Arab thought, the articulation of metropolitan to peripheral fields of cultural production and the positionality of the researcher inquiring into that tradition.

III

In February 1976, in the opening passages of Hurub al-istitbaʿ (Wars of Subjugation), Waddah Charara wrote:

Numerous phenomena have come to dominate the surface of our lives in the past ten months, phenomena where blood mixed with cut limbs, and hot ashes with spilled viscera from pierced bellies … Cinemagoers used to close their eyes in horror whenever Bunuel and Dali’s blade would cut through a cinematic eye in “An Andalusian Dog.” We have begun to tally sliced eyes. And between one round and the other, laughter would break out in pity in front of the screens showing “action movies”: “Bloody Mama” is evil because she killed three or four policemen!¹¹

This introductory passage approached the violence, pillaging and battles in Lebanon from April 13, 1975, to February 1976, the first ten months of the Lebanese civil war, through a comparison of the differential responses by moviegoers to violent scenes in Luis Buñuel’s An Andalusian Dog (1929), screened before the war, and Roger Corman’s Bloody Mama (1970), shown in Beirut during the fighting. Here was an audience whose everyday lives had been exposed to so much bloodshed that the meaning of violent scenes in movies was inverted so as to be experienced as comic relief. Inasmuch as the radical change in the everyday life of moviegoers had led to their recoding of the movies’ original messages, the war would also have a great effect on Charara’s intellectual and political positions as well as the vantage point from which he wrote.

Charara, a distinguished and prolific Lebanese social scientist, political and cultural critic, and translator, was by that time an experienced leftist militant in the process of turning his back on the Marxist tradition of thought and political action, nearly fifteen years before the fall of the Soviet Union. In 1964, after returning from university studies in France, during which time he had joined the French Communist Party, Charara founded the Marxist organization Socialist Lebanon along with a handful of comrades.¹² The organization was a hub of militant intellectuals who deployed their theoretical virtuosity on the pages of an eponymous underground bulletin, Socialist Lebanon. A little more than five years after its founding, Socialist Lebanon would merge with the radicalized Lebanese branch of the Arab Nationalist Movement in the aftermath of the June 1967 defeat and found The Organization of Communist Action in Lebanon (OCAL) in 1970–1971.

The founding of the OCAL was in a sense a marriage of convenience between the veteran Arab Nationalist Movement (ANM), which was then searching for theoreticians as it turned further and further towards Marxism after a post-1967 rift with Gamal Abdel Nasser, and the much less numerous militant intellectuals of Socialist Lebanon, which sought a wider platform for their revolutionary practice.¹³ Having played an instrumental role in founding the OCAL, and after assuming a key position as member of its Politburo in 1971, subsequent political, theoretical and organizational divergences with his comrades would lead Charara to head an internal opposition movement. His dissent eventually resulted in his expulsion, along with a considerable number of others, in the summer of 1973.¹⁴ Be that as it may, Charara’s departure from the OCAL did not coincide with his abandoning the Marxist tradition of thought and practice. He remained politically active in the two years before the war, mostly in Nabʿa, a working-class suburb northeast of Beirut where he had relocated, which was home to inhabitants from a variety of areas, ethnicities and sects.

The beginning of the Lebanese civil and regional wars in April 1975 proved to be a whole new game. Fawwaz Traboulsi, the other dynamo of Socialist Lebanon alongside Charara during the mid-1960s, remained a key leader of the OCAL until the mid-1980s. In an interview with the Middle East Research and Information Project (MERIP) published in October 1977, Traboulsi gave an overview of the Lebanese National Movement (LNM) and its proposed national reforms in which he said:

The principal organization in this front are the Progressive Socialist Party, the Lebanese Communist Party, and our Organization for Communist Action in Lebanon, and the Independent Nasserites (the Murabitun). This is not to negate the role of other organizations and of the larger number of independent personalities that participate. Our main platform, the transitional program for reform, was elaborated on August 16th, 1975. This program gives priority to setting up a secular state and abolishing confessionalism in representation. This is the most essential democratic achievement to be struggled for because it affects the interests of the wide Lebanese masses.¹⁵

By November 1975, seven months after the outbreak of the fighting, Waddah Charara had taken a critical distance not only from his ex-comrades but also from the leftist jargon they used to describe the situation and voice their political demands.

In al-Islah min al-wasat (Reform from the Center), the second text he published after the outbreak of the fighting, Charara took issue with the project of reform proposed by the LNM, writing:

If the masses are supposed to be the water that the militants ought to circulate in with the happiness of the swimming fish, in this case the “masses” in the text are the water that drowns the fish, i.e. the problem. Of what masses is the text talking about? If the question was posed before the last civil war, and notably the last two months (since mid-September), it would have seemed an exaggeration that need not be investigated. But the program seeks to mobilize masses that are sundered by a sectarian civil war, as wide as the masses themselves.¹⁶

In this passage, the former revolutionary, who only a few years earlier had fallen under the influence of Mao Tse-Tung’s thought, ironically referred to the latter’s exhortation to militants to relate to the people like a “fish to water” in order to note the division among the people whom the LNM claimed to represent in its reform program. “Of what masses is the text talking about?” asked Charara, pointing to the incongruence he observed between “masses sundered by a sectarian war as wide as the masses themselves” and the political language used in the reform program of the Lebanese Left.

In addition to his inability to identify any longer with the language of the left, which posited their primary struggle as one that would oppose the revolutionary Lebanese masses to the Phalangist fascists, Charara was also moving away from a wider register of analysis, one that articulated the political via concepts derived from the ideologies of various groups, which reflect their diverging interests. Here is how the OCAL described the conflict in the fall of 1977:

First, what was the aim of the fighting initiated by the fascists in April 1975? There is one thread linking all their positions: to force the implementation of a military dictatorship in Lebanon through the action of paramilitary organizations. This military dictatorship, through fascist control of the army, would reunite the country, preserving the social interests of the regime, and offsetting any attempt at political change, while at the same time severely limiting the Palestinian Resistance movement … That reflects what we call their semi-Zionist ideology: that a minority can never live in peace with any majority anywhere in the world, that it must be dominant, or will be dominated. This is the essence of Phalangist ideology, and thus their goal is very simple: reaffirm overt Maronite superiority over Lebanon … This is the underpinning of fascist ideology; so in using the term “fascist” we are not simply making a political accusation, we are also defining a very concrete form of racial discrimination based on religious sects, on forms of class and religious elitism, and on the belief in the supremacy of the social group defined as a result of its religious affiliations.¹⁷

In turning away from this register of analysis as the frame through which to interpret the Lebanese civil war and its concomitant political identification with either the Left or the Right, Charara adopted a mode of investigation which marginalized ideological content. Instead, he focused his analysis on the multiplicity of practices of power on the ground and their mechanisms of operation, showing in the process how they were common to all warring factions. “The [Lebanese civil] war was a total social fact as much as it was a political one, and maybe more so,” Charara wrote, evoking Emile Durkheim’s founding oeuvre, in the introduction to Wars of Subjugation. “These essays,” he wrote,

tried to examine the structure of this [social] fabric. Therefore they had to somehow abstract themselves from the specificities dictated by the visible course of events. This course does not leave any doubt, for example, about the violence of political division and its bloodiness. However, examining the social dimension (or the socio-historical as Castoriadis calls it) reveals the unity of the implicit rules that govern the warring parties and tear Lebanese society apart. Arabism, political organization, social and sectarian privileges are issues of undoubted contention. Nevertheless, the conflict over these issues is being waged in a battle that abides by foundations and rules which organize it: for it was not a civil [ahliyya] battle in vain, and it did not lead to a relative fusion between different forces in two sectarian groups randomly … These foundations and rules were formulated in a context, which goes beyond objective events and into the bases of social practice itself. And subjugation [istitbaʾ] occupies a pivotal position amongst these bases.¹⁸

The political register of analysis, whether it aims to unmask the interests of certain groups hiding behind an ideological veil or solely to assess conflict via the geo-political interests of a number of international, regional and local players, was sidelined in Charara’s new analytics. In its place, Charara substituted political events, actors and their interests with an agent-less approach, which focused on the socio-political logics governing these societies. Having long been influenced by Marxism and Leninism, Charara observed, Arab thinkers often drew upon such concepts as “the unified state, the dominant or hegemonic class, the unified political society, the dominant ideology, political and social democracy,” overlooking “the socio-political fabric of domination and power in our societies.”¹⁹

Again, this new sociological mode of analysis marginalized ideological distinctions, revealing a common social terrain that subsumed various political orientations. Beyond the fact that this approach comported well with his growing distance from, and disenchantment with, the left, Charara also began reworking and putting to use concepts from the corpus of Ibn Khaldun (1332–1406) around this time. He drew upon such notions as istitbaʿ (subjugation) and iltiham (fusion) in order to examine the modalities of power in a society, which failed to produce a unified hegemonic “political culture.”²⁰ “Power does not work,” Charara observed,

on generalizing a set of unified organizational and ideological criteria that cover the social networks of the country: production and educational networks as well as the political one … Rather, at the origin of current power and social relations is a consecration of the independence of intertwined units that share – amongst whatever else they share – power itself. And this distribution does not work in a unified political sphere that possesses a common fabric and rests on the triumph of a socio-historical axis … The difference of criteria and their variety (despite the intertwinement of some of them) raises difficult obstacles in the face of power as hegemony and not dominance… And as much as the social content of domination becomes thinner, the necessity of using armed forces, administrative techniques, and the direct possession of a sample of production is increased. In the last case, power takes a form that Ibn Khaldun knew perfectly that of iltiham [fusion] and istitbaʿ [subjugation].²¹

Drawing upon and re-working concepts from Ibn Khaldun’s oeuvre at the start of the Lebanese civil war may be understood as symptomatic of a return to a local intellectual tradition that would call into question the universality of Western social scientific concepts or, alternatively, as subscribing to an ahistorical, essentialist view of Arab societies. Charara’s Ibn Khaldunian moment was not driven by an agenda of epistemological decolonization that sought to substitute Western social theory with its Arab counterpart; nor was his method ahistorical. “While these relations are all based on elements which belong to pre-capitalist [social] forms,” Charara wrote, “they only gained their prominence in the organization of social and political life within the uneven movement of capitalist expansion on the one hand, and the formation of the Lebanese State with its borders, administrations, and statuses, on the other.”²² In fact, by looking into forms of power in the absence of hegemony, Charara emphasized in the mid-1970s, well before the prevalence of anti-essentialist critique in the Anglo-American academy, that sectarian, familial and regional social bonds were neither timeless essences nor pre-capitalist remainders.

IV

At the same time, a parallel intellectual episode that would also sideline ideological distinctions as well as provide a criticism of Marxism was unfolding in response to a different set of questions in metropolitan cities. A thirty-one-year-old Professor of English at Columbia University in New York, Edward Said was “no longer the same person” after the 1967 defeat, as he wrote in his autobiography Out of Place three decades after the war. That transformative moment would usher in Said’s scholarly interest in the Arab world and its representations in Western discourse. It also marked the beginning of his engagement as a public intellectual. His first and only attempt at political writing before 1967 was a piece on the 1956 Suez crisis submitted to the Princeton student newspaper while he was an undergraduate.²³ In the wake of the June defeat, Said wrote “The Arab Portrayed,” an essay that was printed in a special issue of Arab World, the monthly published by the Arab League in New York, guest-edited by Said’s close friend Ibrahim Abu-Lughod, the Palestinian academic and member of the Palestine National Council (1977–91).²⁴ This special issue, Said noted, was “intended to look at the war from an Arab perspective. I used the occasion to look at the image of the Arabs in the media, popular literature, and cultural representations going back to the Middle Ages. This was the origin of my book Orientalism, which I dedicated to Janet and Ibrahim.”²⁵

Repercussions of the war were also felt on the institutional level. In 1967–1968, Arab-American scholars who were wary of the founding in 1966 of the Middle East Studies Association (MESA), so “soon after the closure of the American Association for Middle Eastern Studies, and [given] the overlap in the leadership of the two bodies” and their fears that “MESA was simply a continuation of the earlier pro-Washington and pro-Israel organization,” established the Association of Arab-American University Graduates (AAUG), which “organized a series of annual conferences and publications under the leadership of Ibrahim Abu-Lughod.”²⁶ The June 1967 war, as Timothy Mitchell observed, “had shocked them into realizing that the scholars speaking about the Middle East in the United States, even the minority who seemed sympathetic to the Arab World, were not from the region, and did not speak for the region.”²⁷ In the wake of the war, those Arab-American scholars “began to challenge the style of academic detachment with which establishment scholars maintained both their status as experts and a silence about controversial issues, especially the Palestine question” as well as the construction of the Middle East as an area of study.²⁸ These intellectuals not only contested the styles of academic writing, and their flagrant elisions, but, more importantly, also turned their critical gaze towards a more fundamental level, to the politics inherent in the Metropole’s construction of its objects of knowledge. “They argued,” wrote Mitchell, “that [the Middle East] was a colonial conception, which, by including Turkey and Iran with the Arab countries, minimized the much stronger common culture of the Arabic-speaking world.”²⁹ Following up on “The Arab Portrayed,” Said would articulate his first critique of Orientalist scholarship at the AAUG graduate conference in 1974.³⁰

In 1978 Said published Orientalism. The book put North American “establishment Middle East studies on the defensive” and threatened the professional field of area studies epitomized by the establishment of MESA.³¹ Critics of the political bias as well as the methodological and theoretical mediocrity of work on the region had begun to shift the ground of arguments. Of course, Said’s intervention in the North American academic field did not inaugurate the critique of Orientalist forms of knowledge. It was preceded by earlier critiques by French-speaking Arab intellectuals such as Anouar Abdel-Malak and Abdallah Laroui, and by the Hull group in England, whose key figures included Talal Asad, Roger Owen and Sami Zubaida. Three conferences were held at the University of Hull (in 1974, 1975 and 1976), whose proceedings were subsequently published in the Review of Middle East Studies journal founded by Asad and Owen.³²

Said’s contribution widened the scope of this critique while also identifying discourse as an ideal site for analysis. Moving beyond the disciplinary confines of those who taught and wrote about “the Orient” Said claimed that Orientalism was tightly linked to a Western style for dominating the Orient. In the introduction to Orientalism, Said provided three meanings of the term. The first was associated with the scholarly profession and its affiliation to academic institutions that research, teach and write about the Orient. The second, Said wrote, is a “style of thought based upon an ontological and epistemological distinction made between ‘the Orient’ and (most of the time) ‘the Occident.’” This second definition enlarges the field of study to include imperial bureaucrats, philosophers, travel writers and novelists who in their respective intellectual and other labors begin from a premise that distinguishes between an East and a West. In his third way of understanding of the term, Said related Orientalism to the matter of empire: “Orientalism as a western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient.”³³ Drawing on Michel Foucault’s archeological methods and his later Discipline and Punish (1977) as well as Gramsci’s oeuvre, Said argued, “without examining Orientalism as a discourse one cannot possibly understand the enormously systematic discipline by which European culture was able to manage – and even produce – the Orient politically, sociologically, militarily, ideologically, scientifically and imaginatively during the post-Enlightenment period.”³⁴

In an essay published the same year as Orientalism, Said observed how Foucault’s work, despite its limited focus on Europe, could provide adequate keys to understanding the non-European world and Europe’s hegemony over it. “[Foucault] seems unaware of the extent to which the ideas of discourse and discipline are assertively European,” Said wrote, “and how, along with the use of discipline to employ masses of detail (and of human beings), discipline was used also to administer, study, reconstruct-and then subsequently to occupy, rule, and exploit-almost the whole of the non-European world.”³⁵ Said formulated one of his defining questions as follows:

One can very well ask – as I have tried to – what makes it possible for Marx, Carlyle, Disraeli, Flaubert, Nerval, Renan, Quinet, Schlegel, Hugo, Rückert, Cuvier, and Bopp all to employ the word “Oriental” in order to designate essentially the same corporate phenomenon, despite the enormous ideological and political differences between them. The principal reason for this was the constitution of a geographical entity – which, were it not for the Europeans who spoke for it and represented it in their discourse, was otherwise merely passive, decadent, obscure – called the Orient, and its study called Orientalism, that realized a very important component of the European will to domination over the non-European world and made it possible to create not only an orderly discipline of study but a set of institutions, a latent vocabulary (or a set of enunciative possibilities), a subject matter, and finally – as it emerges in Hobson’s and Cromer’s writing at the end of the nineteenth century – subject races. The parallel between Foucault’s carceral system and Orientalism is striking. For as a discourse Orientalism, like all discourses, is “composed of signs; but what they [discourses] do is more than use these signs to designate things. It is this ‘more’ that renders them irreducible to the language and to speech. It is this ‘more’ that we must reveal and describe … Above all Orientalism had the epistemological and ontological power virtually of life and death, or presence and absence, over everything and everybody designated Oriental.”³⁶

What I would like to focus on here is not the points of contact and divergences between Foucault and Said, but rather the productive effects of pitching the critique of Orientalism at the discursive level. This was an exposition that bypassed the level of political and ideological differences to hone in on a more subterranean level of commonality, that of discursive assumptions. Said’s intervention took Foucault out of Europe and moved the ground of critique away from the ideological languages of Left and Right, the opposition between imperialism and national liberation, Marxism and Liberalism, and towards the discursive assumptions that undergird these political distinctions instead. In brief, a right-wing imperialist and Karl Marx may have had more in common than they thought when it came to their views on “the Orient.”

A retrospective glimpse at “The Arab Portrayed,” published in 1970, five years before the publication of Foucault’s Discipline and Punish, and nearly a decade before Said described Orientalism as a “European will to domination over the non-European world,” reveals his insight that the common mold through which Palestinians, in particular, and Arabs, in general, are represented in the U.S. media transcends ideological distinctions and the elite/masses binaries. In this piece Said cited a text from the Times Literary Supplement of September 26, 1968, which, as he wrote, “put the problem admirably”:

Part of the Arab case against the West is that they cannot get through. The communications are blocked, or so it seemed to them. They see themselves in the same situation as any other non-European people subjected to colonization and the force of European arms, but their situation is not recognized. The liberal and left-wing sympathies which are so freely engaged for Africans and Vietnamese today as once upon a time they were for the Irish or the various Balkan nationalities have never been available for the Palestine Arabs. Their Zionist opponents seem to control all the lines to liberal world opinion … There will have to be some penetration of world opinion by the Arab, that is the Palestine Arab, point of view.³⁷

Moreover, when it comes to facts, “all facts are equal,” he observed, “but facts about Israel are more equal than those either perceived by, or about Arabs. And, in this, it is not only the popular press or television which are to be faulted, but also the academic or enlightened liberal view, not to mention the Israeli view of the Arabs as well.”³⁸ The Palestinians, unlike the other people waging anti-colonial struggles, Edward Said observed, were denied the sympathies and solidarities of the Western Left. One’s position vis-à-vis the Palestinian cause, Said noted early on, could not easily be mapped onto one’s ideological orientation.

In Orientalism, Said was well aware how his intervention diverged from but also shed light upon a dimension of imperial power that had been neglected by Marxist critique. “I have written this study with several audiences in mind,” he remarked.

For readers in the so-called Third World, this study proposes itself as a step towards an understanding not so much of Western politics and of the non-Western world in those politics as of the strength of Western cultural discourse, a strength too often mistaken as decorative, or “superstructural.” My hope is to illustrate the formidable structure of cultural domination and, specifically for formerly colonized peoples, the dangers and temptations of employing this structure upon themselves and upon others.³⁹

If Said warned readers in the Third World of the dangers of epistemological naïveté in the introduction, the last pages of the book contain a much harsher evaluation of Marxist modernist intellectuals in the peripheries. Among the “indications” of cultural domination, Said pointed to the auxiliary status of the Third World intelligentsia to “what it considers to be the main trends stamped out in the West.”⁴⁰ “Its role,” he wrote,

has been prescribed and set for it as a “modernizing” one, which means that it gives legitimacy and authority to ideas about modernization, progress, and culture that it receives from the United States for the most part. Impressive evidence for this is found in the social sciences and, surprisingly enough, among radical intellectuals whose Marxism is taken wholesale from Marx’s own homogenizing view of the Third World, as I discussed earlier in this book. So if all told there is an intellectual acquiescence in the images and doctrines of Orientalism, there is also a very powerful reinforcement of this in economic, political, and social exchange: the modern Orient, in short participates in its own Orientalizing.⁴¹

While radicals and liberals or those revolving around the Soviet and U.S. orbits may belong to opposite political camps and ideological universes, when their discursive assumptions about the Orient are examined, they share much more than they may have recognized. Moreover, what they share is not mere trifles. Their rigged concepts, so to speak, that are at the heart of their thought and that guide their political practice, risk turning them from emancipators into unknowing dupes partaking in their own domination.

V

Said’s highlighting of the primacy of the discursive register in his epistemological critique is structurally homologous to, and takes place around the same time as, Waddah Charara’s sliding of the analytical gaze from the political languages of Left and Right onto a sociological register of analysis. Both moves sideline the ideological distinction between Left and Right, progressive and reactionary, radical and liberal, positing in the meantime a common ground upon which apparent ideological polar opposites are more deeply unified. Furthermore, the critical moves of both Charara and Said consisted in unmasking a particular shrouding itself in universal garb. Underneath the unifying ideological veil of Left and Right, observed Charara, lie more fundamental and multiple regional, familial and sectarian loyalties, whose variety preclude the articulation of a unified hegemonic project and call into question the validity of concepts such as “dominant ideology” and “unified political society.” Underneath the universalizing aspirations of Marxism, Liberalism and modernization, noted Said, lies a particular Western essentialist view of the Orient.

By emphasizing the parallels between their two theoretical interventions vis-à-vis the question of ideology, however, I do not mean to reduce their work to that dimension or to erase the differences separating the two theorists. Charara’s excavation of the logic of the social fabric, which united Lebanese fighters on opposite sides of the trenches, is an agent-less approach, which seeks to highlight how the different regional, familial and sectarian agents on the opposite sides of the trenches are, despite their ideological distinctions, united by similar modalities of power. In Said’s Orientalism, the West is clearly the main agent and the Orient remains threatened by the former’s domination. In both cases, however, these two post-Nasser era thinkers, who intervened in contrasting problem-spaces, relegated universal ideological distinctions to the back seat, while foregrounding sociological and discursive grounds.

In the mid-to-late 1970s, the notion of one unified world constituted by a universal terrain of political discourse, which Hourani associated with the age of national liberation struggles and decolonization, began to be called into question. There is more to this story than to simply trace the eclipse of that universal ideological moment through the resurgence of particulars. This moment saw the emergence of a fork in intellectual and critical agendas among Arab intellectuals. In the wake of Said, some, mostly residing in the Metropoles, would go on to criticize their colleagues for importing Orientalist taxonomies into their thought, while others would latch onto the universal impulse of Marxism and Liberalism, at times turning their analytical gazes inwards to examine the culture and social structures of their own societies.⁴²

VI

Thinking about Charara and Said together, therefore, as distinguished yet distinctive voices in a wider tradition of contemporary Arab thought, raises some questions about some of the tenets undergirding the study of Arab intellectual history. I will conclude with a few comments on this practice, revisiting Hourani’s 1983 preface to Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age once more. “The underlying assumption of the book,” Hourani wrote,

is that a small group of writers, who were set apart from those among whom they were living by education and experience, nevertheless could express the needs of their society, and to some extent at least their ideas served as forces in the process of change. Without making such an assumption, it would scarcely have been worthwhile to write at such lengths about thinkers some of whose ideas had a certain intrinsic interest, but none of whom were of the highest calibre.⁴³

Hourani’s fundamental assumption revolved around the articulation of the intellectual’s relation to his society. Despite his separation from the common people, the work of the intellectual was taken to be expressive of his society’s needs and a vector in the process of change, whether that was dubbed “Westernization” or “modernization.” Ideas were taken to be representative of, and agents in, Arab society, and that is what sparked the historian’s interest in them, not their own value as Hourani clearly puts it.

Hourani would stick to this main assumption, observing, “I do not think this was a false assumption, and if I were to write a book on the same subject today I think I should write about these thinkers, and a few others in much the same way.”⁴⁴ In the preface to the updated version he supported supplementing his limited focus on textual analysis with social history, political history and mass media studies in order to answer the question of a text’s influence. Especially in the wake of the Islamic revival, he also called for an emphasis on “continuity rather than a break with the past.”⁴⁵

The distinguished contributions of Edward Said and Waddah Charara complicate Hourani’s basic assumptions, including the model of intellectual labor as a vector of either change or continuity, which is itself premised on the modernity/tradition binary. The rise of diasporic Arab intellectuals, their institution building (founding the AAUG, for example) and their political engagement – both Ibrahim Abu-Lughod and Edward Said were members of the Palestine National Council, for example – push us to re-think this simple model of expressiveness and change and its relation to one particular society. More importantly, it urges us to ask what counts as Arabic thought or who counts as an Arab intellectual in the genealogies constructed by intellectual historians.

In this chapter I attempted to think through the structural homology joining the theoretical moves of two theorists who intervened in distinct intellectual and political problem-spaces, located in different geographical settings – war-torn Beirut and New York City. In doing so, I aimed to fold into our historical genealogies those distinguished exilic contributors, whom I worry are not commonly enough included in, and thought of as part of, contemporary Arabic thought, despite the fact that Edward Said is probably one of the most well known household names in the Arab world.⁴⁶ Without folding these intellectuals into the same tradition, however, one cannot address historical questions related to the shifting conditions of possibility of production of Arab thought as well as the different modalities of intellectual engagement.

There are many other stories waiting to be told, including chapters about forced displacement and exile, as in the case of the Palestinian diaspora, as well as about seeking refuge from authoritarian regimes, such as the murderous Syrian dictatorship, which are constitutive of the experiences of Arab thinkers who end up producing from, and intervening in, a variety of disciplinary, linguistic and geographical contexts. Edward Said’s intellectual and political trajectory, as well as his institutional involvement with the AAUG in the wake of the 1967 Arab defeat against Israel, is a case in point. The shifting configurations of intellectual labor and political commitment, how thinkers and theorists travel, as well as the different kinds of interventions they perform, steer us away from the expressive model of Arabic thought.

Attending to the different geographical sites, languages, audiences and sets of questions animating Arabic thought beyond the liberal age is not only a crucial historiographical and reflexive issue that urges us to think the conditions of our thought as produce genealogies of contemporary Arab thought. A failure to do so, one that eschews seriously engaging the ramifications of the increasing dispersion of Arab thinkers, risks reproducing a (post)colonial division of intellectual labor by relegating thinkers located in the periphery to the status of objects of study while those in the metropole may be subjects of conversation, colleagues to be engaged or theorists whose work would not be historicized but used as a paradigmatic conceptual arsenal. Who is the “theorist”? And who is an “indigenous” intellectual? Is Edward Said a theorist and Waddah Charara an autochthonous thinker? What are the different weights attributed to different discourses? Which ones are still taken to be local, rooted and representative of a society? And which ones are slicker, frequent-fliers and members of a more abstract theoretical club with universal aspirations and applications?⁴⁷

Arabic Thought mapped the traveling of theories from West to East. To think beyond that model is to partially map the traveling of intellectuals from East to West as well as the travels of their theories back home again.⁴⁸ These questions bring me to my final point. In thinking about Arabic Thought as a space of conflicting arguments, in which a multiplicity of languages circulate, articulated from a number institutional anchor points, crossing national boundaries, answering a wide array of questions, and drawing from their own religious, philosophical and literary traditions as well as from non-Arab ones, the question of the historian’s positionality vis-à-vis the tradition she is reconstructing poses itself. Questions pertaining to the units of analysis and the categories of explanation adopted by the historian, the thinkers folded into the historical narrative as well as the kind of account produced are not unrelated to the historian’s positionality. Albert Hourani was very much aware of the effects of the historian’s positionality on the narrative she produces. One need not necessarily subscribe to his characterization of the historian’s craft in the overarching terms of a “collective consciousness” engaged in “self-reflection” to realize it. By way of closure, I borrow his words one last time. “Before everything else,” he wrote in the conclusion to Patterns of the Past, his elegant, late autobiographical essay, “the writing of history is an act of self-reflection of a collective consciousness, a community taking stock of its own past and what has made it what it is, creating its own principles of emphasis and categories of explanation.”⁴⁹

^*I would like to thank Samer Frangie, Zeina G. Halabi, Jens Hanssen and Max Weiss for their comments on earlier drafts. I am also indebted to the intellectual generosity and support of Waddah Charara and Fawwaz Traboulsi; this essay is the outcome of a sustained intergenerational conversation with both of them about their lives and works that has been going on for many years.

¹Hourani (1983 [1962]: vii).

²Ibid., viii.

³Albert Hourani, “Albert Hourani,” in Gallagher (1994a: 33).

⁴Hourani (1983 [1962]: ix).

⁵Ibid., ix.

⁶Ibid., 348.

⁷Ibid., 348.

⁸Ibid., 349.

⁹I borrow the notion of problem-space from David Scott’s work. “A ‘problem-space,’” Scott writes, “in my usage, is meant first of all to demarcate a discursive context, a context of language, But it is more than a cognitively intelligible arrangement of concepts, ideas, images, meanings, and so on – though it is certainly this. It is a context of argument, and therefore one of intervention. A problem-space, in other words, is an ensemble of questions and answers around which a horizon of identifiable stakes (conceptual as well as ideological-political stakes) hangs.” Scott (2004: 4).

¹⁰Said (1994a [1978]).

¹¹Charara (1979: 225–26). All translations are my own. From now on, I will refer to the English title, Wars of Subjugation. The book is a collection of essays published between the autumn of 1974 and the winter of 1976. All citations are from the book, but I will refer in the body of the text to the initial dates of publication of the articles.

¹²In a relatively recent interview with the Lebanese daily al-Akhbar, Fawwaz Traboulsi, the social scientist, historian, translator and public intellectual, recalls founding the organization in 1964, alongside six other comrades: Waddah Charara, Mahmoud Soueid, Ahmad al-Zein, Wadad Chakhtoura and Christian Madonna Ghazi. Husayn bin Hamza. “Fawwaz Traboulsi: ‘al-Faa al-Ahmar’ ʿad ila qawaʿidihi saliman (Fawwaz Traboulsi: ‘The Red Lad’ Returns to His Bases Safely),” al-Akhbar, November 4, 2008.

¹³For more on the Arab Nationalist Movement, particularly in the Gulf region, see Abdel Razzaq Takriti’s chapter.

¹⁴Al-Hurriya, the weekly political magazine and mouthpiece of the OCAL at the time, published on July 16, 1973, a four-page piece entitled: “A Communiqué from the Politburo of the OCAL announcing the expulsion of the boyish leftist band apostates [al-murtadda] of Marxism-Leninism.”

¹⁵Salkind and Trabulsi (1977: 5).

¹⁶Charara (1979: 117).

¹⁷Quoted in Salkind and Trabulsi (1977: 6–8).

¹⁸Charara (1979: 11).

¹⁹Charara (1979: back cover).

²⁰Rosenthal, the translator of Ibn Khaldun’s Muqaddimah, renders iltiham as close contact, and istitbaʿ as subservience. By contrast, I am translating iltiham as fusion; istitbaʿ will be translated as subjugation, as was suggested to me by Waddah Charara.

²¹Charara (1979: 233).

²²Ibid., 250.

²³Said (1999: 279).

²⁴Said (1970).

²⁵Edward Said, “My Guru,” London Review of Books Vol. 23, No. 24 (December 13, 2001): www.lrb.co.uk/v23/n24/edward-said/my-guru, accessed April 2, 2010. The American sociologist Janet Abu-Lughod, née Lippman, was married to Ibrahim Abu-Lughod from 1951 to 1991.

²⁶Mitchell (2002: 12).

²⁷Ibid.

²⁸Ibid.

²⁹Ibid.

³⁰Ibid.

³¹Ibid., 16.

³²Abdel-Malek (1963); Laroui (1976). For more on Laroui, see the chapter by Hosam Aboul-Ela in this volume. On the Hull group, see Talal Asad and Roger Owen, “Introduction,” Review of Middle East Studies Vol. 1 (1975); Asad and Owen (1980); and the sophisticated critiques in Talal Asad (1975a; 1975b).

³³Said (1994a [1978]: 3).

³⁴Ibid.; Foucault (1970; 1972; 1977 [1975]); Gramsci (1971).

³⁵Said (1978: 711).

³⁶Ibid., 711–12.

³⁷Said (1970: 4).

³⁸Ibid., 8.

³⁹Said (1994a [1978]: 25, emphasis in the original).

⁴⁰Ibid., 325.

⁴¹Ibid.

⁴²Bardawil (2013).

⁴³Hourani (1983 [1962]: vii).

⁴⁴Ibid.

⁴⁵Ibid., ix.

⁴⁶Recent volumes dealing with contemporary thinkers and trends in Arab thought do not include Edward Said amongst the authors they discuss. See, for example, Abu-Rabiʿ (2004); Kassab (2010).

⁴⁷Hosam Aboul-Ela makes a similar argument and distinction between theorist and intellectual in the context of Moroccan thought elsewhere in this volume.

⁴⁸Edward Said (1983; 2000a [1983]; 2000b) insightfully analyzes the international circulation of ideas. See Yoav Di-Capua’s essay in this volume as well.

⁴⁹Hourani (1993: 54).