Table Of ContentTHE CRISIS
OF THE
ARAB INTELLECTUAL
THE CRISIS
OF THE
ARAB INTELLECTUAL
TRADITIONALISM
OR
HISTORICISM?
by
ABDALLAH LAROUI
Translated from the French by
Diarmid Cammed
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS
Berkeley Los Angeles London
University of California Press
Berkeley and Los Angeles, California
University of California Press, Ltd.
London, England
First published in French under the title
La crise des intellectuels arabes: traditionalisme ou historicisme?
Copyright © Librairie Francois Maspero, Paris, 1974
This translation © 1976 by the Regents of the University of California
NOTE: Chapter 5 was first published in a special number of Diogene (64,
Oct.-Dec. 1958), "Nouvelle actualite du Marxisme," with contributions by
T. W. Adorno, H. Marcuse, J. Hyppolite, E. J. Hobsbawm, M. Rodinson.
A. Abdel Malek, K. Papaioannou, etc. The Appendix to Chapter 4 was
written as a conclusion to the article "Europe" in the Encyclopaedia Univer
salis. The author wishes to thank the publishers concerned for their permis
sion to reprint these articles.
Library of Congress Catalog Card Numbeer 74-29796
ISBN 0-520-02971-2
BY THE SAME AUTHOR:
L'ideologie arabe contemporaine. With a
preface by Maxime Rodinson. Francois Maspero, Paris, 1967.
L'histoire du Maghreb: un essai de synthese.
Francois Maspero. Paris, 1970.
CONTENTS
PREFACE vii
I INTRODUCTION 1
TRADITION AND TRADITIONALIZATION 11
1. The Arabs and History 13
I. Classical Arabia 14
II. The Situation Today 24
2. Tradition and Traditionalization 33
I. The Problem 33
II. Morocco 34
III. Methodological Conclusions 41
3. The Arabs and Cultural Anthropology: Notes
on the Method of Gustave von Grunebaum 44
HISTORICISM AND MODERNIZATION 81
4. Historicism and the Arab Intelligentsia 83
The Rationale of the First Nahda 85
Developments 89
A Second Nahda 92
Recurrences of Tradition 95
The Concept of Politics 101
Double Ideologization 106
Historicism and Realism 110
APPENDIX: Europe and Non-Europe 113
I. The Problem 114
II. Birth of the Intellectual 116
III. Conversion to Revolution 120
IV. Redefinition of Europe 122
V. Developments 124
5. Marxism and the Third World Intellectual 127
Conclusion: The Crisis of the Intellectuals and the
Crisis of Society 153
I. The Cultural Situation 153
II. Alienation in Space, Alienation in Time 155
III. The Role of the Petite Bourgeoisie 159
IV. The Chances for Rationality 166
V. Outside Obstacles to Rationalization 170
VI. A Final Word 174
GLOSSARY 179
PREFACE
Because this book was originally intended for Arab readers, I
confine my discussion to a specific question, one that, at the
time of writing, summed up the Arabs' search for solutions
to the problem of their historical development.
The first three chapters and the Conclusion were delivered
as public lectures at Rabat, Algiers, Tunis, and Beirut. My
audiences, largely composed of academics, were of course
familiar with recent Arab history.
This history may be divided into four principal stages:
1. The Nahda, a vast political and cultural movement that
dominates the period of 1850 to 1914. Originating in Syria
and flowering in Egypt, the Nahda sought through translation
and vulgarization to assimilate the great achievements of
modern European civilization, the while reviving the classical
Arab culture that antedates the centuries of decadence and
foreign domination.
2. The struggle for independence. In the principal Arab
countries this lasted from the end of the First World War to
the mid-1950s. It gave rise to popular parties that played an
important cultural role by promoting the spread of demo
cratic ideals and, to a lesser extent, of socialist values.
3. The Unionist movement, which existed well before the
Second World War but did not make its real influence felt
vii
viii Preface
until after the crisis following the loss of Palestine. Symbol
ized for a short period by the League of Arab States, and
strengthened by the success of the Baath party in Syria and
Iraq and by an increasingly lively concern with social justice
and economic progress, the movement found an apologist
and hero in the person of Gamal Abdul Nasser.
4. The moral crisis consequent upon the defeat of the Arab
armies in the June 1967 war. This culminated in a period of
anguished self-criticism, a searching reappraisal of postwar
Arab culture and political practice. The principal victim of
this process has been Nasserism.
There are those who maintain (a little hastily, in my
opinion) that the Arabs have entered upon a new phase since
the October 1973 war. Characterized by an equilibrium
favorable to both the conservatives and the leftist revolution
aries, the new situation may well result in an increasingly
pronounced polarization of forces.
My listeners did not need to be reminded of this historical
background; rather, they were concerned to hear a discussion
of the consequences and an evaluation of the dominant
ideologies. What are the definitive achievements of the
Nahda, the shortcomings of the traditional political parties,
the causes of the relative failures of Nasserism and of Baath-
ism, the reasons for the failure of Arab Marxism? What
interested my listeners was not so much the positive results as
the failures of these movements; for the question they were
asking, given the situation around 1970, was this: Why, in
spite of all our efforts, are we facing the same difficulties as
our parents and grandparents faced?
The central thesis of this book is that the concept of
history—a concept playing a capital role in "modern" thought
—is in fact peripheral to all the ideologies that have dom
inated the Arab world till now. If this thesis can be estab
lished—it is for the reader to decide whether I have gathered
sufficient evidence—what conclusions ensue? Does it follow
that the renovating movements have failed because their
conception of history is false? And if the answer to this
Preface ix
question is "yes," does it follow that the Arab intellectuals
have only to appreciate this point in order to find miraculous
solutions to all the problems besetting their society? If in fact
that were my conclusion, the diagnosis would indeed be
superficial and the remedy simplistic.
To understand the historical process is to understand both
oneself and others in a temporal perspective; it is to conceive
of tested and effective courses of action. To the extent that
Arab intellectuals, a good number of whom are also political
leaders, have a non-evolutionary conception of reality, so
will all collective action in the Arab milieu be deprived of a
constant and definite orientation; and so will politics, in the
noble sense of the word, be reduced to the level of short
sighted tactical manoeuvering subservient to egotistical in
terests. But it must be stressed that if the Arab intelligentsia
has not succeeded in working out a theory of history but is
beginning to acquire the necessary historical consciousness—
a fact to which my own book, among others, bears witness—
that is for well-defined, objective reasons, which I have
attempted to analyze in Chapter IV. Thus my method is
phenomenological, since I have undertaken to describe the
historicization of at least one area of Arab thought. My aim
is not so much to uncover the causes of past failures or to
prescribe remedial action as to understand, through examina
tion of a cultural fact of symbolic value, the real evolution
of Arab society.
Nevertheless, in the Conclusion I call upon Arab intellec
tuals to espouse and propagandize an "historicist" rationale.
Why do I abandon the domain of cultural society in order
to launch into ideology?
When intellectuals think collectively about the failures of
their society, they do so because of a belief that they can find
remedies. Those who deny all effectiveness to ideas, yet who
organize themselves into active groups, are living an irre
ducible contradiction. Having become concerned with an
essentially political problem, the Arab intelligentsia must
inevitably reach the stage where it passes from diagnosis of
Preface
the situation to prescription of remedial action. Why should I
escape from this rule? Moreover, both liberal political science
and the Marxist left acknowledge the existence of a minority
(which the one terms a modernizing elite and the other an
avant-garde) possessing new values in whose name society is
to be remodeled. The role in the Arab world of minorities,
and of intellectual minorities in particular, need not be
labored further, although this admission does not imply a
lapse into idealism.
Finally, what of historicism itself?
Historicism, though born in Europe, has today fallen into
disfavor in the industrialized West. If it were regarded as a
means of analyzing the Arab world or as offering a solution
to contradictions experienced by this world, such a position
would be tantamount to borrowing a worn-out version of
reality. This objection may be raised both by the Arab reader,
concerned about originality, and the Western reader, who
may dislike historicism.
I am not attempting a philosophical rehabilitation of
historicism in opposition to the numerous schools that are
hostile to it. What I do state is that it alone offers a rationale
for collective action—and it is action with which the Arabs
must be concerned. Historicism is implied therefore in all
their planning. Those who criticize historicism as a philo
sophy—I refer in particular to the Frenchman L. Althusser—
are interested primarily in a rationale of understanding: they
take as models the exact sciences, which presume an eternal
present and a homogeneous milieu. A society that believes
itself to be at the apogee of evolution and that strives to
preserve the equilibrium it imagines it has attained will
experience no difficulty in transposing such a rationale to the
social and human sciences. But a society that rejects its
present, that lacks homogeneity, that feels itself to be differ
ent from those cultures that appear to be in the ascendant,
will rediscover historicism as the theoretical justification for
its course of action, sometimes in the guise of Marxism (see
Chapter V).
