8
Max Weiss
Princeton University
If you want to worry about anything in Syria, it is not the “minorities.” This is a very shallow description because Syria is a melting pot of religions, sects, ethnicities and ideologies that make up a homogenous mixture, irrelevant of the portions or percentages.1
Il faut savoir que le passé de la discipline est un enjeu des luttes présentes.2
In a blistering account of the disciplinary sociology of religion, John Milbank argues, “the terms ‘social’ and ‘society’ have so insinuated themselves that we never question the assumption that while ‘religions’ are problematic, the ‘social’ is obvious.” Rather than taking this assumption at face value, Milbank insists, “the emergence of the concept of the social must be located within the history of ‘the secular’, its attempt to legitimate itself, and to ‘cope’ with the phenomenon of religion.”3 Both Syrians and Syrianists have “coped” with the phenomenon of religion and its others, to use Milbank’s term, through the production of discourse on society and the social.
Over the course of the twentieth century intellectuals, scholars, politicians, political activists, and ordinary people have debated, described, and debased the shifting forms and meanings of the religious, the secular, and the sectarian; these have been malleable keywords, which might become political lightning rods or remain unarticulated at the heart of struggles over power and the definition of the social; all three terms have been porous and multivalent signifiers. If media punditry has reified reductive conceptions of culture and society in the Middle East beyond recognition, this trend may have reached an apogee in recent breathless discussions of Syria, as the popular uprising against authoritarian rule that broke out in March 2011 decomposed into an intractable and devastating military conflict. So-called experts conjured as if out of midair regurgitate truisms about sectarianism: it is the crux of the Syrian conflict; it is the only solid element of Syrian identity; it is at the heart of modern struggles over Syrian politics, society, and culture; it will ultimately necessitate foregrounding the inevitable question of partition. The pump house of talking heads draws on a deep reservoir of stereotypes in order to sectarianize the social, political, and cultural landscape of the Middle East.4 Meanwhile, left-wing ideologues stand up to defend the Syrian regime even as they mistake it for a bastion of progressive secularism in a region crawling with fundamentalists. On the other hand, those states, organizations, and individuals who have long feared an Islamist takeover of Syria and other countries in the region prefer the “devil they know” to the Muslim Brotherhood and other shadowy political forces that wait impatiently in the wings.
In this chapter, I outline a genealogy of the concepts and (dis)contents of the religious, the secular, and the sectarian in modern Syria, attending to both institutional and non-institutional settings. In order to disentangle such a dense web of political, historical, linguistic, and conceptual associations, the chapter proceeds in three parts. First, I examine some of the metaphors that have been used as the analytical scaffolding that undergirds scholarly and popular engagements with Syria. Second, I turn to look at some intellectual engagements with the secular and the sectarian as they informed debates among figures such as Mustafa al-Sibaʿi and others about constitutional politics, religion, and the state in post-independence Syria. Finally, I analyze how late-twentieth-century Syrian social theorists and sociologists, specifically Bu ʿAli Yasin and Burhan Ghalioun, grappled with sectarianism as a problem before concluding with a discussion of the politics of knowledge and the social sciences in modern Syria.
The resurgence of the religious on a global scale during the latter part of the twentieth century sparked a revival in the humanistic and social scientific study of religion.5 As opposed to the robust disciplinary forms into which the social sciences crystallized in fin-de-siècle European and American academies, Arab social scientists have long lamented a veritable “crisis” in the professional study of Middle Eastern and North African societies. All too often it is said that sociology of religion and history of religions – qua disciplines – have shaky institutional foundations in the modern Arab world.6 Despite the adaptation of intellectual resources such as dependencia, world-systems theory, and the social analysis of Ibn Khaldun, prognosticators on the condition of Arab social science tend to reach quite pessimistic conclusions. While some bemoan the extent to which “Arab sociology is dependent on copying and translating Western sociological works,” others criticize how Arab sociologists trained in the West demonstrate an “almost slavish adherence to Western concepts and models, even when these were often irrelevant to the Arab context.” One might be forgiven for concluding that this ostensible failure of “Arab sociology” to distinguish itself from “Western schools of social theory resulted in the substantial theoretical eclecticism of Arab sociology.”7 But as Mona Abaza points out, “sociology in Egypt emerged at about the same time as other departments of sociology in several European universities.”8 Meanwhile, sociology was being taught at the Syrian University in Damascus as early as 1920, when students first matriculated after World War I; with the advent of French Mandate rule (1920–46), first-year students at the Faculty of Law in Damascus were required to take two hours per week of sociology (ʿilm al-ijtimaʿ, lit. the science of society).9 Scholars, intellectuals, and political figures animated other scholarly institutions such as the Arabic Language Academy in Damascus (al-Majmaʿ al-ʿIlmi al-ʿArabi bi-Dimashq), founded in 1919, that would contribute to the institutionalization of humanistic and social science research. Exploring and situating the history of disciplines as well as what I call disciplinarity without disciplines throughout the Arab world is one essential element in the project of (re)writing modern Arab intellectual history. In order to adequately analyze and fruitfully compare the case of sociology and social thought in twentieth-century Syria, though, historians must recognize but also provincialize the shadow of European disciplines and their universal(izing) norms of disciplinarity. It may be too strong, therefore, to insist that “no sociology [in Syria] is free of state paternalism. Nor is sociology as a scientific discipline really taught at universities in Syria or in other Arab states.”10 The modern intellectual history of Syria must be broadened in order to take into consideration academic activity within the Syrian university and its disciplines but also other sites of intellectual production throughout Syrian society and public culture.
Mosaic, Melting Pot, Pressure Cooker: Metaphors to Think?
Scholarly and journalistic engagements with the question of difference and diversity in modern Syria (and the modern Middle East and Islamic world more broadly) have been informed by numerous conceptual and ideological frameworks. Indeed, as long as there has been European interest in “the Orient,” there has been discourse about minorities and sectarianism. From the mid-twentieth century, academic currents such as modernization theory, structural-functionalist anthropology, and sociology of religion shed new light on the experience and futures of “minority” and “sectarian” communities. The “new social history” that emerged during the 1970s and after, by contrast, rejected categories such as “religion” and “sect” as superfluous or, more precisely, superstructural; such materialist analysis sought to complicate and, in some instances, supplant culturalist perspectives on ethnic, religious, and sectarian difference. The mosaic is one of the most often recycled tropes – one might call it foundational – in Middle East studies in this regard.11 While religious diversity has been a hallmark of the Levant for millennia, the historical fate of the region’s diverse religious communities in the modern period (as at other points in time) has varied widely. One could choose almost at random in order to illustrate the trend lines of what I call a mosaicist literature. In a 1993 Atlantic article, for example, Robert D. Kaplan points to
an explosive and unmentionable historical reality: that Syria – whose population, like Lebanon’s, is a hodgepodge of feuding Middle Eastern minorities – has always been more identifiable as a region of the Ottoman Empire than as a nation in the post-Ottoman era. The psychology of Syria’s internal politics, a realm whose violence and austere perversity continue to baffle the West, is bound up in the question of Syria’s national identity.12
It is unclear how violence in Syria has been worse than anywhere else in the region or the world, or what exactly constitutes the country’s “austere perversity.” It is not difficult to find more recent articulations of such a reductive conception of Middle Eastern societies.13
Historians have long debated the utility of the mosaic concept for understanding and explaining the making of modern Syria, though. “The oft-drawn picture of Syria as a ‘mosaic of minorities’ can be misleading,” Stephen Hemsley Longrigg wrote in the late 1950s, recognizing these pitfalls in scholarly and governmental discourse, “not only by ignoring the immense preponderance of the Sunni Muslim population, but also by unduly emphasizing the elements which separated this majority from the rest, and minimizing the wide common ground which all shared.”14 In its time such a perspective was often soaked in modernizationist rhetoric even as it parroted Syrian and pan-Arab nationalist slogans that overstated the coherence and dominance of an urban, elite conception of this “wide common ground.” The substrate of the Syrian mosaic has typically been depicted as urban Sunni Arab nationalist to the core. Since modern Syrian identity is more complicated – precisely because of the intrinsic ethnic, sectarian, and religious diversity of Syrian society – I suggest thinking of the mosaic model or the mosaicist approach in order to index discourses that represent Syrian society, culture, and history in terms of irreducible essences.15
Elements of identity such as religion or ethnicity often have been taken to be reducible in the cauldron of social engineering supervised by the modernizing national state, which is often explained in terms of the melting pot metaphor, although this term is occasionally (albeit rarely) used in discussions of modern Syria. In the case of “established” societies confronting massive surges in immigration – as in France, Germany, and elsewhere – the melting pot is understood as an adequate vessel or framework for the processing of immigrant groups.16 In a pioneering study of immigration and immigrants in France during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Gérard Noiriel differentiates U.S. and French models.17 The French case is distinguished by “the paradox of a social formation representing, on the one hand, the fulfilled model of the nation … but which, on the other hand, had not been obliged to sink to calling for mass immigration, which would change the composition of its original population.”18 By contrast, Noiriel distinguishes a “pure” model of immigration characteristic of the modern and contemporary U.S. experience. But it might also prove useful to think about comparable processes at work in other settler-colonial societies – say, Canada, Israel, or Algeria – as well as in countries where “the composition of its original population” is differentiated along ethnic, linguistic, or religious lines, as is the case in modern Iraq, Lebanon, and Syria, for example. Beyond its relevance to the history of nation building and national self-fashioning, the concept of the melting pot also belongs to the secular modern, particularly in colonial and post-colonial settings. Secularists often deploy the melting pot concept in order to advance a particular notion of the nation – its boundaries, members, and history – as well as threats to its constitution from within and without. For example, secular nationalist narratives of the history of the nation and its others in the post–World War I Middle East has often been read against the “appearance” or enhanced publicity of certain ethnic and sectarian groups, often lumped together under the broad heading “minorities.”19 Indeed, there is something at once seductive and unsatisfying about the “homogeneous mixture” suggested by President Bashar al-Asad in his interview with Hala Jaber in 2011; it is an echo of the Arab nationalist-secularist saw – “religion is for God, the nation is for all.” By the same token, of course, secularists are not the only dwellers in the secular modern: “The specific practices, sensibilities, and attitudes that undergird secularism as a national arrangement – that give it solidity and support – remain largely unexplored, and yet it is these elements that shape the concepts of civil liberty and social tolerance.”20 But such an invocation of “tolerance” and an almost technocratic concern with the management of difference within Syrian society is by no means limited to secular nationalists; as we shall see, Syrian Islamists have also used this language of the melting pot, albeit in other ways and to different ends.
What seems to be at stake is the power to alternatively define and dissolve difference through the homogenizing solution of nationalism, secularism, Islamism, or some comparable unifying project. Sectarian difference may alternatively be exacerbated or overcome given the right conditions. As such, the pressure cooker represents another possible analytical metaphor, one that increasingly appears in times of armed conflict, and which presupposes a more fractious mix and, hence, more intense mixing process. One problem with this analogy, however, is that a “high-heat model” re-inscribes a conception of the sectarian (and other such forms of difference) in terms not only of pressure but of tension, discord and, stretching the point somewhat, violence. Most historical, political, and journalistic discourse on the sectarian in Syria (and far beyond) focuses exclusively on instances of violence. At the same time, violence is only one facet of constructions of the sectarian in the modern Middle East. Indeed, some of the most interesting and intractable dimensions of sectarian identities, politics, institutions, and cultures in the modern period are their everyday production and reproduction.21 In his fascinating discussion of personal status law and conversion in Lebanon, anthropologist Raja Abillama argues, “sectarian tensions are less phenomena or events emerging from the occasional collisions between religion and politics in non-secular states than occasions for the articulation of secular power.”22 While I am sympathetic to the argument made by Talal Asad and others that the secular and the religious are mutually constituted in modernity and modernizing societies, there seems to be a widespread tendency in this literature to overemphasize the autonomy of the state as well as the invulnerable power of the secular modern.23
The emergence and fragility of multiple forms of nationalism in the early-twentieth-century Middle East has attracted a disproportionate share of attention from historians and social scientists. From the millet system to other strategies for dealing with difference under the Ottomans, continuing through the French Mandate strategy of divide and rule, up until the contradictory secularism of post-independence and Baʿthist regimes during the mid- to late twentieth century, struggles over identity and difference, be that religious, sectarian, ethnic, or tribal, have been at the heart of the making of modern Syria. But an almost obsessive focus on negative capabilities tends to re-inscribe a vision of (failed) national states riven by religious, ethnic, and sectarian enmity that may be written off as artificial. It might be salutary, therefore, to think beyond the reductive logic of the mosaic model, the self-fulfilling prophecies of the literature on pressure cookers and “deeply divided societies,” or the Liberal naïveté of the melting pot. Nations, states, and societies deal with difference amid dynamic social, political, and administrative circumstances. In the case of diverse societies in the Middle East, South Asia, and the Balkans, “communities” that have a long experience of mutual sociability, if not always the same administrative boundaries, must find the best means to manage multiple forms of difference.24 The making of modern Syria is no exception.
Religion and Its Others in Post-Independence Syria
During the decade and a half after Syria won its independence in April 1946, the country was wracked with turmoil. The rosy picture painted by Arab nationalist historical narratives of unchallenged leadership by mercantile and political elites in the National Bloc (al-kutla al-wataniyya), of frictionless national unity and unstinting resistance to foreign aggression during the transition to independence, is untenable. “Nationalism in Syria was anything but a monolithic secular ideology,” writes Joshua Landis. “It did not act as a secular acid which seeped from its urban containers into the countryside, eroding religious beliefs and dissolving traditional loyalties.”25 Although signs of the ethnic, sectarian, and class diversification that would radically transform the country were coming into view, political instability and military intrigue remained endemic.26
The early phase of national independence in Syria was characterized by political unrest and a dizzying sequence of military coups. The public sphere was also rife with raucous debates over matters of constitutionalism and law, politics and religion.27 Islamic scholar Mustafa al-Sibaʿi epitomized the stubborn divisions separating Islamists from secularists in Syria at mid-century.28 Born in Homs in 1916, al-Sibaʿi received his early education in his hometown before going to study in Cairo, at al-Azhar, the highest institution of Sunni learning. Upon returning to Syria he became active in Islamic affinity groups that sprouted all over the country, from Damascus and Aleppo to Hama and Homs. While one could trace a genealogy of Islamic populism back to the salafi networks and Sufi brotherhoods of the late nineteenth century,29 the earliest seeds of a specifically political Islam in Syria were sown during the 1930s, with the rise of Islamic mutual-aid societies and political associations such as the Jamʿiyyat al-Shubban al-Muslimin (Society of Muslim Youth).30 The Syrian branch of the Muslim Brothers emerged out of Shabab Muhammad (The Youth of Muhammad), a group that was directly inspired by the Egyptian preacher Hasan al-Banna, founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, whom al-Sibaʿi met during his time in Cairo.31 Al-Sibaʿi walked the line between independent political organizing and institutional participation within the Syrian state. In 1949 he was elected to the Syrian Constituent Assembly, subsequently serving as a Member of Parliament from 1949 to 1951. When Damascus University created a Faculty of Shariʿa in 1954, al-Sibaʿi was appointed its first dean, a position he held while remaining secretary-general of the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood. Moreover, while he published widely on matters of theology, Islamic law, and religious practice, his interests in the relationship between religion and politics were not entirely academic.32
Al-Sibaʿi drew on a tradition of Islamic reformism committed to promoting morality and virtue even as he exhorted Syrians to remember they were “part of the Arab nation” that “wants to march to glory under the banner of religious belief and morality … Every appeal which tends toward secularism, atheism and materialism represents a real danger.”33 His goal was not “to overthrow our current laws” but to reconcile the law of the state, “as far as civil law is concerned” with “the views of Islam.”34 Well aware of Syria’s diverse social and religious landscape, al-Sibaʿi sought to allay the fears of many Christians by noting, “secularism does not guarantee the rights of the Christian communities and does not remove sectarian fanaticism.” It is debatable, of course, whether “the one thing which does make that guarantee” is Islam, as he argued. With guarded force, al-Sibaʿi concludes without saying “any more to the secularists except that we face them in the hope that they will not intervene between this nation and the sources of its strength. We are a people who want to return to God; therefore, do not interfere between us and Him.”35 In addition to published commentary, al-Sibaʿi broadcast his opinions over the airwaves of Syrian radio.36 His opinion piece of Monday evening, July 12, 1954, speaks directly to the place of the religious in mid-century Syrian society. The main difference between religion and sectarianism, al-Sibaʿi argued, is the difference between “knowledge and ignorance, truth and falsehood, good and evil, faith and disobedience.”37 For Islamic activists and intellectuals such as al-Sibaʿi, sectarianism is understood as a fierce form of religious attachment and identity, one that is not open, forgiving, and accommodating. The antidote to sectarianism in Syrian society is not secularism or some formula for separating religion from politics, the standard call among Communists, socialists, Baʿthists, and other secularists; the solution is more religion, stronger religion, truer religion.
Al-Sibaʿi participated in a larger set of debates concerning the proper role and definition of religion in post-independence Syria. Syrian and Lebanese intellectuals argued over the nature of the religious and its relationship to the social. ʿArif al-Nakadi (1887–1975), for example, hailed from the southern Lebanese town of Jezzine, where he worked as a clerk in the local court before becoming a judge in Baabda. When the French occupied Lebanon, he moved to Damascus, taking up a position in the courts and serving as a legal representative for Jabal al-Duruz (the Druze region in southern Syria). Beyond his professional, publishing, and charitable activities, from the early 1920s he taught sociology at the University of Damascus, both in the Faculty of Law and the Faculty of Literature.38 Al-Nakadi published widely, including general surveys on law as well as what may have been the first Syrian sociology textbook, Muʿjaz fi al-ijtimaʿ (Introduction to Society) (1925).39
The struggle to define the religious was not entirely dominated by social scientific and secularist voices inside the state and the university. Yusuf Shalhat innovated a different approach to the study of society, influenced as much by French laïciste traditions of sociology as specifically Syrian research methodologies. Born in November 1902 into a Syrian Catholic family from Aleppo, Yusuf Shukrallah Shalhat was founding editor of the influential monthly literary journal al-Dad, which launched in January 1931, and published a number of books on religion, society, and language. In addition to being recognized as bright and erudite, Shalhat worked as a schoolteacher and was an active member of several charitable and scholarly associations.40 After traveling to study anthropology under the supervision of the French Africanist Marcel Griaule (1898–1956), he went on to publish widely under the Gallicized name Joseph Chelhod. He died in Aleppo in May 1956.41 Before making a name for himself in France as Chelhod, however, Shalhat gave a particular spin to the modern study of religion in the Arab world, writing a book entitled Religious Sociology (ʿIlm al-ijtimaʿ al-dini) between 1941 and 1944, published in Aleppo in 1946.42 The book opens with an epigraph from Jean-Marie Guyau (1854–88) (“Celui-là seul est religieux, au sens philosophique du mot, qui cherche, qui pense, qui aime la vérité,” translated into Arabic), only to conclude with a selection from the great Syrian Arab poet Abu al-Aʿla al-Maʿarri (973–1058), and a pointed rebuttal of Guyau’s notion “that religions are headed towards obsolescence and that atheism will be the religion of the future.”43 Beyond reference to a few canonical fourteenth-century thinkers such as Ibn Manzur and Ibn Khaldun as well as modern nahdawi figures such as Jurji Zaydan and Muhammad Husayn Haykal, however, the book draws primarily on French social scientific works, including Émile Durkheim, Marcel Mauss, and Lucien Lévy-Bruhl.44 In his defense of the religious against secularist skepticism, Shalhat does not sound all that dissimilar from contemporary voices in the discipline of religious studies who enjoin scholars “not to impose any metaphysical beliefs or moral judgments on religious people, for the purposes of understanding them.”45
The work of Muhammad al-Mubarak also challenges secularist biases regarding the study of society in Syria. Born in Damascus in 1912, he studied law there and became a student of Shaykh Badr al-Din al-Hasani. Like many Syrians of his generation, including Michel ʿAflaq and Salah al-Din al-Bitar – co-founders of the Baʿth Party – al-Mubarak spent a séjour at the Sorbonne, where he studied sociology and became close with ʿUmar Bahaʾ al-Din al-ʿAmiri, who went on to become an influential lawyer in Aleppo. Samer Badaro makes the important point that, unlike al-Sibaʿi, who trained at al-Azhar, al-ʿAmiri and al-Mubarak first encountered the humanities in a European institution.46 Be that as it may, once back in Syria al-Mubarak would help to set up one of the first branches of the Muslim Brotherhood in the country in 1937, later becoming a prominent figure in the organization.47 After a decent showing of Islamist forces in the 1949 parliamentary elections, which sent both al-Mubarak and al-Sibaʿi into the Syrian government, a French diplomat in Syria took notice of al-Mubarak and his involvement in the Islamic Socialist Front that year, informing the French Minister of Foreign Affairs that his election “in principle should give us reassurances about his future behavior.”48 Not only did al-Mubarak walk a political path quite similar to that of al-Sibaʿi, but he also became a professor of philosophy at Damascus University, subsequently succeeding al-Sibaʿi as Dean of the Faculty of Islamic Law.49
In his academic work, al-Mubarak was particularly interested in Islam, politics, and scientific thought, generally, as well as state–society relations in Syria more specifically.50 In 1958 he published a slim book dealing with the politics and sociology of difference in Syria.51 Although less theoretically sophisticated or engaged with sociological literature than some of the other works discussed here, pitched towards a more diverse readership than some of those textbooks and academic studies, The Formation of Syrian Society (Tarkib al-mujtamaʿ al-suri) can be read as a moderate Islamist gloss on the condition and possible futures of Syrian society. Al-Mubarak comes across as committed to an Arab nationalist – in his words “Arab and Islamic” – vision of Syria, one that may be achieved through the “elimination of particularistic national solidarities (ʿasabiyyat),” to finding common ground (against presumed boundaries) between Christians and Muslims, and to the “linguistic and cultural Arabization” of “non-Arab minorities.”52 In addition to contending with “national” minorities such as Armenians, Circassians, and Kurds, al-Mubarak confronts the problem of religious diversity. In his estimation, the elimination of sectarian sentiment will be difficult – even if people are not believers and do not engage in religious ritual – because “sectarian societies” within the “larger society” have “for a long time” contributed to building what amounts to a “sectarian social formation” (kiyan ijtimaʿi taʾifi).53 The problem of sectarianism is unwittingly reproduced in language that speaks of the need to reconcile differences between “the masses of Christians” and “the Muslim majority.”54 One aspect of this argument that some non-Muslim Syrians might find objectionable is that “religious freedom” and “equality among all citizens” can be achieved without sacrificing “the Arab [nationalist] idea” and the inherently Islamic dimension of Syrian society.55 Programmatically, al-Mubarak calls for Arabizing non-Arab elements; cementing the centrality of the Arab and Islamic aspects of Syrian society; and fusing Islamic sects in “the melting pot of general Islam” (bawtaqat al-islam al-ʿamm).56
Towards a Syrian Sociology of Religion?
Intellectual, political, and scholarly engagements with the religious and its others were integral to the making of modern Syria during the Mandate period and into early independence. From the mid-twentieth century, leftist, liberal, and Islamist intellectuals offered increasingly diverse perspectives on the roles and meanings of the religious, the secular, and the sectarian in the construction of Syrian society. The remainder of this chapter takes up the engagement with these questions by two of the most important postwar Syrian intellectuals. Yasin Hasan was born in 1942 into an ʿAlawi family in ʿAyn al-Jarab, a village just north of the Mediterranean port-city of Latakia, and went on to become one of the most influential Syrian Marxist intellectuals of the late twentieth century, writing under the name Bu ʿAli Yasin. After completing his primary and secondary education in Latakia, he spent one year in Cairo and then won a grant to study in West Germany. Dissatisfied with the intellectual culture he found at Bonn, Yasin moved to the University of Mainz, where he studied from 1965 to 1969. In addition to a broad education in disciplinary economics as well as the Marxian tradition, Yasin got swept up in the German student movement and was a member of the Frankfurt Commune before he returned to Syria in 1969–1970, working for the Syrian Central Bank and other governmental agencies in Damascus and Latakia until his retirement. After a battle with cancer, he died in 2000.57
In his first book, The Forbidden Triangle: Studies in Religion, Sex and Class Strugle (1973), Yasin argued that Syrian society was hamstrung by a force field of taboos.58 This triad might be cynically dismissed as the ideological residue of heady days spent in revolutionary Europe; it was also the stuff of intellectual ferment sweeping through Syria. Syrian historian Muhammad Jamal Barut emphasized that The Forbidden Triangle“shook the consciousness of an entire generation,” in the sense that young Syrians were then breaking out of ossified doctrinal molds (Nasserist, Communist, and Baʿthist) and “returning to [study] Marx himself without any intermediaries.”59 Yasin was not the only Syrian intellectual to adduce Marxian categories and concepts in order to criticize the outsize influence of clerical elites and the hegemony of religious modes of intellectual inquiry. At about the same time, for example, Sadiq Jalal al-ʿAzm launched a similar critique.60
In the preface to The Forbidden Triangle, Yasin identifies the object of his analysis: “religion as the subject of scientific study.” The study of religions, “that is, the study of the rise and development of religions, their relationship to one another as well as their relationship to the development of human beings, societies and political-economic circumstances, in the hands of the ruling classes becomes “atheism” (ilhad) despised by believers – who are the majority of the people – and religion turns into a tool of exploitation in their hands.”61 His political agenda is plain: “We wish to separate religion from state and to grant freedom to every individual in order to believe however they wish. But this does not prevent making religion a subject of study like any other social phenomena.”62 Indeed, following Marx and Mannheim, who identify religion as a form of ideology, Yasin criticizes believers who cling to religion as “an alternative to the natural and the social sciences.”63 If “the social sciences” are institutionally represented by university departments such as sociology, it is obvious here that struggles over disciplinarity are not limited to the disciplines themselves. Yasin goes on to argue, “religion – as is well known – turns people’s attention away from material salvation to spiritual salvation, from the life of this world to the afterlife.”64 Simply put, religions ought to be studied “as the ideological representative of a new social formation,” an approach that would ultimately call attention to the social origins and sociological effects of the religious.65
Religion may be squarely superstructural here, but the very notion of separating religion from state needs to be understood as a bourgeois concept, Yasin insists, one that arose two centuries earlier, with the rise of what he calls “democratic revolution.”66 Be that as it may, materialist commitments have convinced him that “the rationalization of society” (ʿaqlanat al-mujtamaʿ), the establishment of a social system that proceeds along the optimal path to reach its goals, and “the ideal satisfaction of human needs” are inevitable ends of human life that remain “subservient to the logic of history.”67 Lineage and descent may have mattered in olden days; now it is man’s abilities that define his status. This entails the imposition of social relationships “among people of all sects” in a way that may not affect their social status at all. Yasin argues that religion and sect may have been paramount under “the feudal system,” but “what matters in the post-feudalist system is loyalty to the people,” evincing his populist and Arab nationalist credentials.68 Taking this point a step further, he argues that political affiliation and religious identity have absolutely no bearing on one another. “The world has changed! Now, in order to know who somebody is, it isn’t enough to know his religion; rather, we don’t care one bit to know it, what we wish and insist to know his political orientation, his class origin, his class affiliation and the society he comes from.”69 Through a re-imagination of the distinction between religion (relegated to the private sphere) and sectarianism (which tends to appear in public), technocratic modernity and political development should lead to the withering of both religious difference and sectarian conflict.
If his leftist and secularist credentials afforded him a wide berth in Syria, Yasin also articulated a cogent call for religious pluralism. His vigilant defense of the “separation of religion and state” ensures the possibility of a “homeland (watan) for inhabitants who belong to various religions.”70 But Yasin is well aware that the state exercises coercive power in order to enshrine precepts of tolerance; identity documents that recognize cultural or religious difference (as was the case in Lebanon) violently interpellate citizens. Whereas a proper name is a “simple” matter and is little more than a “symbol” of a person, “religion is belief and ritual and teachings and morals that might or might not suit” the person in question; indeed, “another religion might suit him or no religion might suit him.” Under such conditions, everyone “would be forced to inherit his religion just as he inherits the color of his eyes or the length of his nose. This slap in the face to individual humanity is a violation of the freedom of worship and the freedom of religious affiliation, which is a human right that every member state of the United Nations has accepted and signed on to.” Such a right “means the guarantee of the freedom of the citizen to believe anything, in any way he pleases,” as long as “it does not harm the real interests of society as a whole and doesn’t limit the religious freedom of others.”71 In a sense, the Marxism informing Yasin’s critique of political economy has been supplanted by a liberal plea for freedom of conscience and freedom of belief, which is then recast as revolutionary virtue. Commitments to individualism and Marxist critique may have put Yasin on a collision course with the post-1970 Baʿthist state, but his staunch secularism fits nicely with the Baʿthist version of republican laïcité.
Yasin sees the religious at work in social and political-economic terms, beyond the individual frame, such that “religion is not only a relationship between the person and God, but rather it is also, and sometimes primarily, an expression of a social movement.” Decrying the conflation by some of the religious with the political without taking adequate account of social dynamics, he refers to the case of the Jews. “For example,” Yasin writes, “we don’t have anything against the Jewish religion as a religion, but we strenuously oppose [the notion of] the Jews being ‘God’s chosen people.’ That is racism and chauvinism, and it doesn’t change our opinion if the sentence appears in the Old Testament or in any other sacred text (which could be interpreted otherwise).” The problem for Yasin is social, not moral. Whether the claim of religious superiority is scriptural or ideological, this case “transgresses the boundaries of worship (the boundaries of the relationship between the person and the divine), infringing upon the well-being of human society.”72 Separating religion from state, however, need not entail “the abrogation of religion from popular consciousness.”73 If Yasin accepts the Marxian dictum that religion is the opiate of the masses, he is apparently a proponent of the controlled legalization of drugs. In the final analysis, and in a way that parallels other critiques of the Baʿthist “revolution,” Yasin refuses to recognize the secularity of the Syrian regime, arguing that, “for a little more than a thousand years, [the Syrian state] has been Sunni Muslim according to the Hanafi rite.”74 Islamists like Muhammad al-Mubarak would not disagree, although they certainly would not accept these conclusions regarding what is to be done.
Burhan Ghalioun (b. 1945) has a different perspective on what should be done in order to understand and manage difference in Syria with respect to the religious, the secular, and the sectarian. Born in Homs, Ghalioun studied at Damascus University and went on to complete his doctorate in sociology at the University of Paris, where he is now a Professor of Sociology at the Sorbonne. Ghalioun wonders whether there is a risk of imposing sectarian political norms on a country like Syria in light of widespread presumptions that the contemporary Arab world is “a society of minorities and sects and the mosaic.”75 His most important analytical contributions have been to distinguish sectarianism from religious belief, and to highlight the significance of the state in the construction of modern sectarianisms.
In his defining work on the subject, Nizam al-taʾifiyya min al-dawla ila al-qabila (The Regime of Sectarianism from the State to the Tribe), Ghalioun introduces a distinction, perhaps only compelling for its heuristic value, between those who approach sectarianism as an unalloyed evil in need of remedy and those who consider it an authentic element of Arab society. For lack of a better term, the former might be called “modernists”; they view sectarianism as a sickness, a historical relic that needs to be treated, updated, or eliminated in the same way as “religious consciousness in general.” The only way to combat sectarianism and religious obscurantism, then, is with “nationalist (qawmi) and secular consciousness, intellectual enlightenment (tanwir) and the condemnation of anyone who could be accused of spreading it and propagandizing on its behalf.”76 From this modernist perspective, “sectarian consciousness” is the “antithesis” (naqid) of “nationalist consciousness,” and proof positive of the absence of nationalist ideology.77 By contrast, from the standpoint of those who might be called “traditionalists,” sectarianism is the “natural expression of a deep social structure that sets apart Arab societies from others, making it impossible for nationalist and modern secular values to be applied or to spread as they have done in other parts of the world.”78
In their quest to make sense of and escape this binary trap, many Arab intellectuals drew upon the social thought of the fourteenth-century historian Ibn Khaldun. As Fadi Bardawil points out elsewhere in this volume, the “return” to Ibn Khaldun among Lebanese intellectuals during the 1970s “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.”79 For Ghalioun, this intellectual trend has to do with “Arab scholars enthusiastic to affirm their identity and independence from the West, as well as Western scholars who have come to doubt the globality (ʿalamiyya) of the concepts of Western sociology.” Therefore, if “individual attachment” to a particular community is an “element” in the constitution of the social, Ibn Khaldun helps to explain sectarianism as “particularistic belonging” (intimaʾ juzʾi), which can be reduced to ʿasabiyya (or taʿassub), a Khaldunian keyword for understanding politics and society and connoting group loyalty, social solidarity, and communal feeling.80 In Western languages, the term ʿasabiyya is often tendentiously glossed as “fanaticism.” If the original usage indexed the challenge posed by nomadic society to centralized power/authority (al-sulta) and settled civilization – indeed, had concrete political meaning – Ghalioun derides contemporary discussions of ʿasabiyya as a “cultural concept” for missing the boat.81
“Sectarianism as a system,” Ghalioun remarks, “like secularism as a system, is a product of European history.”82 Without getting mired in the debate over the diffusion of intellectual concepts and political systems, it is clear that for Ghalioun, the onset of modernity scrambled social, political, and intellectual categories and practices in the Arab world: “sectarianism, as a political social phenomenon, and not, of course, as a distinction between different religious communities, is a product of the modern Arab state and modern politics.”83 This must be understood in relation to the national state and the regional environment. The other important consequence for understandings and deployments of sectarianism in the modern context is the ambiguity (iltibas) that arises from the equation of the sectarian and the religious “from a theoretical perspective.”84 Ghalioun explains that the Arabic term taʾifa originally referred to a “group of people with a certain solidarity (ʿasabiyya)” and a “single creed (ʿaqida)” that distinguished them from others; the modern notion of taʾifa (sect) bespeaks a “closing in on the self” and the impossibility of interconnection between different groups.85 From here, Ghalioun is well placed to build a liberal multiculturalist argument about the place of the sectarian in modernity.
Despite any resemblance to the secularist premise informing Yasin’s argument that the religious belongs to the private sphere while the sectarian belongs to the public, Ghalioun pivots to turn Yasin on his head. One rather astounding claim is that “sectarianism is the bastard child of atheistic materialism (al-dahriyya), that is, the natural separation of religion from the state.”86 This does not lead Ghalioun to the conclusion that the secular will safeguard against the dangers of religious, sectarian, ethnic, or tribal differences in modern Arab societies. Indeed, his depiction of the secular state, one that is undoubtedly clouded by his experience of authoritarian secularism and Baʿthist rule, presents thorny challenges to the rethinking of these intellectual categories and political practices in the Syrian experience of modernity. Ghalioun comes down on the side of liberal nationalism, arguing that the way to defeat sectarian regimes is to build a strong national state that can protect the interests of entire society, in terms of sovereignty and individual liberties.87 The problem of sectarianism is not solved with an invitation to secularism or through a change of ideology alone, because “the problem is fundamentally a problem of power (sulta), that is, the relationship of individuals in the society as a whole with the state.”88 Here, then, is a liberal account of sectarianism, in which the social contract between the state and individual citizens must be renegotiated. Ghalioun analytically aligns himself with nationalist tendencies in modern Arab thought that conflate the nationalist and the secular while also grappling with the opposition of the national-secular to the sectarian.89
In a multi-issue exploration of the problem of sectarianism published in the recently discontinued Beirut literary and political magazine, al-Adab, the Syrian writer Luʾayy Husayn insists that it would be short-sighted “to claim that the Syrian regime is a sectarian one,” because even if the term “sectarian dictatorship” (istibdad taʾifi) is apposite, this “ultimately diminishes the significance of or distracts us from the extent to which the regime is tyrannical.”90 Lacking the nuance of Yasin and Ghalioun, though, Husayn simplistically equates sectarianism with religious sentiment, claiming that sectarian “feeling” ultimately “finds its roots in religiosity and religious thought itself.”91 This is a tendentious definition of the sectarian, one that has roots in reductive Marxist accounts of the sociology of religion in the Arab world. “Sectarian attachment is a shared religious belief (ʿaqida), formed over time, carried by a group of individuals in its development, in accordance with historical necessity, like a religious madhhab or a kinship group (jamaʿa ahliyya).” But then Husayn contradicts himself by arguing “that sectarian belief (ʿaqida) distinguishes itself from other beliefs by virtue of the fact that it is not the expression of the free association of individuals.”92 Sectarian identity remains a coercive institution even as individuals choose, embrace, and celebrate such a mode of identification. The challenge for those committed to a more sophisticated analysis of the sectarian in modern Syria is to reckon with both its ascriptive and voluntarist dimensions as part of a larger excavation of the intellectual and institutional history of modern Syria.
Sectarian Genie or Sociological Génie?
If Bu ʿAli Yasin designates a non-doctrinal Marxist theory of history and constitutional reform as means by which to promote a non-sectarian and non-irredentist religious foundation for state and society in Syria, Burhan Ghalioun offers a vision of liberal multiculturalism for the Arab world, in which “cultural difference” (al-tamayuz al-thaqafi) would no longer be seen as a threat but as the expression of “fruitful diversity” (al-tanawwuʿ al-muthmir).93 For a brief period in and after August 2011, when he was named the first president of the Syrian National Council, the primary external opposition coalition, Ghalioun was perhaps the best-known Syrian intellectual in the world (for some perhaps the only one). Before the Syrian opposition became hopelessly mired in rivalries and infighting, Ghalioun was succeeded in that leadership position by Moaz al-Khatib, an Islamist with connections to the Muslim Brotherhood. Beyond the need to put an end to hostilities in the Syrian war and to begin the process of physically caring for the wounded and displaced, the reconstruction of Syrian political, intellectual, and cultural life in the coming period will depend upon the ability of the political class as well as the broader citizenry to deal with the matter of difference also as well as to find new ways of re-imagining and even reconciling religious, secularist, and sectarianist conceptions of the social. Mosaic, melting pot, pressure cooker, and similarly reductive metaphors are only heuristically useful up to a point in understanding and writing the history of society and social thought in modern Syria.
Intellectual historians of the modern Middle East continue to grapple with the dialectical dilemmas of diffusionism in the history of ideas. In her study of the rise and institutionalization of the social sciences in interwar Egypt, Omnia El Shakry describes the adaptation of European knowledges in the (semi)colonial and postcolonial Middle East.94 The preliminary narrative sketched in this chapter regarding a specifically Syrian sociology of religion needs to be stitched together with other such moments of institutionalization and intellectual production, with respect to such disparate fields as agronomy and law, literature and history, just to name a few.95 In the Syrian case, the production of knowledge in the public sphere was as significant as the consolidation of academic disciplines within the university and other scholarly institutions.
Such an approach to the modern history of Syria may help to shed light on the distinction between “internalist” debates among sociologists, writers, and public intellectuals, on the one hand – what is often called the history of ideas – and the “externalist” social, political, and cultural dimensions comprising the broader narrative of modern Syrian intellectual history. This might open up a space to consider the historical significance of disciplinarity without disciplines with respect to the sociological analysis of the religious, the secular, and the sectarian in postwar Syria. A more thoroughgoing analysis of the production of Syrian discourses on religious identities, politics, and society can complicate our understanding of the making of modern Syrian state, society, and intellectual culture. In a sense then, this chapter is also a story about genealogies of the social sciences, in relation to but also beyond the frame of Europe.96 It also concerns specialization and the separation of various spheres – society and economy, politics and religion – in Syrian modernity. The construction of the sociology of religion in modern Syria through multiple discourses on the religious, the secular, and the sectarian has not yet been explored let alone explained by historians. It has been noted that those who support the “indigenization” of sociology in the Middle East and North Africa through recourse to specifically “Arab” concepts, methodologies, and theoretical frameworks “are also believers in secularism and the secular outlook of Western sociology even while they try to transcend the latter.”97 The history of the social in modern Syria reveals that there is a more complicated relationship at the interface of the religious, the secular, and the sectarian. Such an alternative genealogy of the religious, the secular, and the sectarian in modern Syria can serve at least three purposes. First, any such institutional and intellectual history needs to be part of a collective effort to re-write the history of modern Syria without shying away from topics that have long been taboo. Second, Syrian intellectuals and ordinary people wrestled with the sociological and political problem of the religious, the secular, and the sectarian long before the Middle Eastern uprisings of 2011, and the failure on the part of historians and other commentators to adequately address those debates within Syrian society and intellectual culture impoverishes our understanding of modern Syrian history. Finally, at a more quotidian political level, this kind of critically engaged research on the religious, the secular, and the sectarian should push us beyond thinking of the current predicament in terms of a “sectarian genie” that has been released tragically and inevitably from the bottle of Middle Eastern societies previously held back by dictatorships and autocratic regimes. This intellectual work might spur the reclamation and celebration of other conceptions of as well as institutional frameworks for managing pluralism, diversity, and difference in Syria after the fighting stops.
1Jaber (2013).
2Bourdieu (1976: 418)
3Milbank (2006: 102).
4Ahmed Salkini, “Syrian Secularism: A Model for the Middle East,” Christian Science Monitor July 13, 2010, available at: www.csmonitor.com/Commentary/Opinion/2010/0713/Syrian-secularism-a-model-for-the-Middle-East; Irina Papkova, “Syria: Stronghold of Secularism?,” Revealer: A Daily Review of Religion and Media, January 11, 2013, http://therevealer.org/archives/16163; Papkova, “Syria: Stronghold of Secularism? Part Two,” Revealer: A Daily Review of Religion and Media, February 11, 2013, http://therevealer.org/archives/16699. Mercifully, more informed voices populate some pockets of the media, the blogosphere, and the Twitterverse. Elizabeth Shakman Hurd, “Stop Trying to Make Syria’s War Into a Sectarian Conflict,” Atlantic, March 15, 2013, http://m.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2013/03/stop-trying-to-make-syrias-war-into-a-sectarian-conflict/274060/; Alia Malek, “The Syria the World Forgot,” New York Times, June 9, 2013, www.nytimes.com/2013/06/09/opinion/sunday/the-syria-the-world-forgot.html?pagewanted=all; Toby Matthiessen, “Syria: Inventing a Religious War,” NYR Blog, June 12, 2013, www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2013/jun/12/syria-inventing-religious-war/; Ussama Makdisi, “Playing Politics with Religion,” International Herald Tribune, July 4, 2013, www.nytimes.com/2013/07/04/opinion/global/playing-politics-with-religion.html?_r=1&; Marwa Daoudy, “Sectarianism in Syria: Myth and Reality,” OpenDemocracy, July 22, 2013, www.opendemocracy.net/marwa-daoudy/sectarianism-in-syria-myth-and-reality.
5Berger (1990); Casanova (1994); Masuzawa (2005); Turner (2013).
6Sabagh and Ghazalla (1986); Abaza (2010); Hanafi (2013).
7Sabagh and Ghazalla (1986: 377). For a different take on the intellectual politics of eclecticism, see Scott (2005).
8Abaza (2010: 188).
9Rafeq (2004: 48). The instructor was Professor ʿArif Nakadi, to whom I return below. On al-Nakadi, see Ishti (2006). Talal Asad (2003: 198 ff 24) argues, “the modern Arabic word for “society” – mujtamaʿ – gained currency only in the 1930s. [Edward] Lane’s Lexicon, compiled in the mid-nineteenth century, gives only the classical meaning of mujtamaʿ: ‘a meeting place.’”
10Volkmar Kreissig, “Report from Syria – a Sociologist’s View (July 19, 2012),” Global Dialogue: Newsletter for the International Sociological Association, www.isa-sociology.org/global-dialogue/2012/07/report-from-syria-%E2%80%93a-sociologist%E2%80%99s-view/.
11Shimoni (1947); Kessler (1987); Jidejian (2001).
12Robert D. Kaplan, “Syria: Identity Crisis,” Atlantic Vol. 271, No. 2 (February 1993): 22–26 (available online at www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1993/02/syria-identity-crisis/303860/. The professional study of minorities in the modern Middle East – the Arab world in particular – has produced a vast historiography, which perhaps starts with Hourani (1947). This mosaicist approach was kicked into high gear during the 1980s and 1990s: McLaurin (1979); Chabry and Chabry (1984); Esman and Rabinovich (1988); Nisan (1991); Bengio and Ben-Dor (1999); Ma’oz and Sheffer (2002).
13Consider those who call for the United States to support “transitional governments” such as the one in Egypt following the July 3, 2013, coup, even when they behave like dictatorial regimes, so long as there is a chance they might bring (U.S. national) security. Recycling canards about the social composition of the Middle East, one such insta-pundit provides an abbreviated history lesson regarding how “religion and politics are intimately interwoven throughout the Middle East”: “Absent the Western tradition of separating the sacred from the secular – which came about only after the bloody wars of the Protestant Reformation – pitched battles over the role of Islam in politics will bedevil aspiring Middle East democracies for generations to come.” In response to the events in Egypt, this “expert” proffers two quintessentially untenable arguments about the Middle East that historians and other social scientists have been breaking down for generations: (1) that Islam renders pluralism impossible and (2) that nationalism is a panacea for sectarian/tribal/ethnic differences: “Social cohesion will be even harder to come by in many of the region’s other states – like Iraq, Syria and Lebanon – which are contrived nations cobbled together by departing colonial powers. They risk being split asunder by sectarian, ethnic and tribal cleavages.” Charles A. Kupchan, “Democracy in Egypt Can Wait,” New York Times, August 17, 2013. See, too, Thomas Friedman, “Same War, Different Country,” New York Times, September 6, 2013.
14Longrigg (1958: 11).
15The critical study of difference and diversity in the Ottoman and post-Ottoman world has been a cornerstone of the historiography for at least a generation: Rodrigue (1995a, 1995b). For more recent work on the construction of “minority” as a concept and “minorities” as sociological communities see Tejel (2009); White (2011); Longva and Roald (2012).
16Noiriel (1988).
17Ibid., 19–22.
18Ibid., 334.
19For critical thinking on the topic, see van Dam (1980); Zubaida (2002). The foundational work in this connection is Chatterjee (1993).
20Asad (2006: 224).
21Weiss (2010).
22Abillama (2013: 146).
23Asad (2003); Scott and Hirschkind (2006); Agrama (2012).
24A discussion of the multiple genealogies of secularism in the intellectual history of the modern Arab world is beyond the scope of this chapter. See Khoury (1983); Keddie (1997); Yarid (2002); Asad (2003); Luizard (2008).
25Landis (1997: 363).
26Seale (1987 [1965]).
27Martin (2015).
28It appeared in English translation four years later: Sibaʿi (1954). Al-Sibaʿi (1953) subsequently published a short book on the topic.
29Commins (1986); Commins (1990); Weismann (2001a; 2001b).
30Thompson (2000: 103–10).
31Abd-Allah (1983); Porat (2010); Talhamy (2012); Lefèvre (2013).
32Al-Sibaʿi (1944; 1959; 1961).
33Sibaʿi (1954: 218).
34Ibid. 225.
35Ibid. 226. The following year George N. Sfeir (1955), a Lebanese Christian lawyer, published a scathing rebuttal, which was only one, relatively moderate, example of the kind of critique and opposition that al-Sibaʿi and the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood would elicit.
36In this respect, al-Sibaʿi was far from unique, as Syrian radio and television increasingly acquired a salient role in national political and intellectual life. For example, one could point to the life and work of Najat Qassab Hasan (b. 1921), a Damascene lawyer and public intellectual who wrote a column entitled “al-Muwatin wa-l-qanun” (The Citizen and the Law), and hosted a radio call-in program (from 1952) of the same name. See Hasan (1989); Martin (2015: 26–45).
37Al-Sibaʿi (1955b: 93).
38Swayd (2006: 121–22); Ishti (2006).
39Al-Nakadi (1922; 1925).
40Shalhat (1931); Hallaq (2007). On the Shalhat family of Aleppo, see “Min almaʿ wujuh al-suriyaniyya/2…mashahir Al Shalhat,” ad-Dad Online, February 22, 2012, www.addadonline.com/index.php?page=YXJ0aWNsZQ==&op=ZGlzcGxheV9hcnRpY2xlX2RldGFpbHNfdQ==&article_id=MTAzMg. Almost incredibly, the brief biographical note in this source does not once mention his scholarly output on religious sociology. I am grateful to Jack Tannous for this reference.
41Chelhod (1955; 1958 [translated into Arabic as (2003)]; 1964).
42Shalhat (1946).
43Ibid. 158.
44On the development of the social sciences – especially sociology and anthropology – in France during this period, see Lebovics (1992); Chimisso (2000); Conklin (2013).
45Gregory (2006: 146–47, emphasis in the original).
46Badaro (1987: 161–64).
47Teitelbaum (2011: 227); Batatu (1982: 14). On al-Hasani, see Weismann (2005).
48M. Serres, Ministre de France à Damas à Son Excellence Monsier le Ministre des Affaires Etrangères (Afrique – Levant), Paris, “Le ‘Front Musulman Socialiste,’” Damas, 17 novembre 1949.
49Botiveau (1986: 77).
50Al-Mubarak (1961; 1968; 1971).
51Al-Mubarak (2003 [1958]).
52Ibid., 45.
53Ibid., 48.
54Ibid., 79–80.
55Ibid., 82.
56Ibid., 102–07.
57On the life and work of Yasin, see Agha (2005: esp. 32–35).
58Yasin (1973). The essays in this book were originally written between 1970 and 1971.
59Barut (2005: 56).
60Al-ʿAzm (1969). The book has not yet attracted as much attention from historians as it deserves, or as another book of al-ʿAzm (1968) [translated as al-ʿAzm (2011)]. A more contemporary (and controversial) example is Abu Zayd (1995).
61Yasin (1973: 6).
62Ibid., 7.
63Ibid., 15.
64Ibid., 23.
65Ibid., 59–60.
66Ibid., 94.
67Ibid., 95.
68Ibid., 96.
69Ibid., 97.
70Ibid., 101.
71Ibid., 102–03.
72Ibid., 103.
73Ibid., 105.
74Ibid., 152.
75Ghalioun (1990: 6). See, too, Ghalioun (2012 [1979]).
76Ghalioun (1990: 6–7).
77Ibid., 7.
78Ibid.
79Chapter 7.
80Ghalioun (1990: 9). On ʿasabiyya, see Baali (1988); Mohammad (1998). On its application in the contemporary Arab world, see Seurat (1985).
81Ghalioun (1990: 15).
82Ibid., 26. This is not unlike the arguments made by Ussama Makdisi (1996; 2000).
83Ghalioun (1990: 27–28).
84Ibid., 20–21.
85Ibid., 32–33.
86Ibid., 109.
87Ibid., 192–93.
88Ibid., 202.
89Ghalioun (2006: 82) points out that the tradition of Arab nationalism – inspired as it has been by Western thought – views “religious and ethnic pluralism in society as an obstacle in the way of the emergence of a [pan-Arab] nationalist (qawmi) consciousness that can overcome sects and secondary religious affiliations.”
90Husayn (2007: 69).
91Ibid., 69–70.
92Ibid., 70.
93Ghalioun (1990: 204).
94El Shakry (2007). More recently, El Shakry (2014) has investigated the appearance of Freudian psychology in mid-twentieth-century Egypt.
95Al-Nakadi (1925); Zakariya (1955); Mousa (1959); ʿAdil (1960).
96Prakash (1999); Mitchell (2002).
97Sabagh and Ghazalla (1986: 383).