Thought in times of war:
The logic of stagnation
Why is it the victim that stands accused? Anouar Abdel-Malek analyses the reversal of logic
One of the virtues of Cairo is that every year in its annual book fair it offers Egyptians and Arabs and, indeed, global thought, a unique opportunity to pause, assess and probe what can be. And as long as people are keen to engage in this process it would be useful to add a new type of activity to those surrounding the book fair: a seminar that focuses on new, original and unexpected ideas and methodologies.
Today, the most crucial issue on which such a seminar should train its spotlight so as to dispel the enveloping obscurity is the impact of the US-Israeli- led war against the future on the nature of thought in the primary target areas: the Muslim-Arab circle and the contemporary Chinese renaissance at the heart of eastern Asia. As a title for this seminar, I would propose "New thinking in times of war".
Circumstances have dictated that the global war against the future whip up to fever pitch once cautious or silent voices. Their aim has not just been to revamp rigid empirical thought, but to shake the entire galaxy of concepts, theories and methodologies that have articulated our nationalist and social movement since the 1940s. In the ensuing din the dynamic concepts of our contemporary history have faded, rendered defunct by a whole "new" galaxy of terms. "Colonialism", "imperialism" and "hegemony" have given way to "a single village" and "globalisation" revolving around a single US pole. New expressions such as "modernisation", "secularism", and "the information society" have shunted out "autonomous development", "civilisational revival", "rationalism", and "specificity". At one time there prevailed a dialectic between concepts and theories emerging from national liberation struggles, conflicts of social change and the reawakening of the peoples of the East and of the South after generations of dependency and negation. Suddenly, however, and by pure "coincidence", the new wise men have elevated a theory of "terrorism" to the pinnacle of values to which all peoples and nations must subscribe. Then, just as quickly -- indeed, within hours after the fires of 11 September 2001 erupted and even before the fire brigades and the security, investigations and justice agencies went into action -- they fused terrorism with Islam.
Thus, as we watched the US-NATO television screening of those moments following the conflagration, spellbound by a magnificent production reminiscent of the epic Gone with the Wind, the circle of imperial and racist hegemony lashed out against our nations and peoples. We were the instrument that perpetrated the crime, or at least the base of its perpetrators, the cause of our underdevelopment and the source of the historical tragedy we are living through. Do we not detect in these interwoven ambiguities a black cloud railing against the revival of the civilisation of the East, levelling charges of terrorism, backwardness and fundamentalism?
Some are of the opinion that political capitulation, surrendering the sovereign will and lowering the banners of specificity and international justice are a natural reaction to the vicious assault spearheaded by the racist hegemony against all that is different and possible, in spite of all obstacles. This opinion has a certain validity, if we take for granted that the ferocity of the war led by the axis of monopolar hegemony and its Zionist ally against differing nations, cultures and civilisations must violently rock the status quo and clear the way for a new guard whose byword is "realism".
"Let's be realistic," the new team of thinkers tell us, as though realism is a recent discovery rather than the primary vantagepoint for assessing the dynamics of conflict, progress and regression for all ideological and political orientations. Realism, they want, not dreams, aspirations or "delirious" visions, which social scientists happen to subsume under the category "ideology", or the precedence of the social and political imagination over the actuality of the dialectical interactions between nations and within human societies.
It was only natural that a procession of Muslim and Arab intellectuals should respond to the new way of thinking brought forth by the quake and lend themselves to the tragic consequences of the war against the future we are experiencing. It was natural, but only as long as the spirit is weak, appetites remain unsated and, in the best of cases, eyesight is stunted by a determination to grasp a future that is the intellectual equivalent of "March in place!" It was also only natural that the convergence of these tendencies and ideas should aggravate confusion in this, the era of the war against the future.
However, among increasingly broad segments of the Arab nation the race to ideological dependency has almost reached the point of "unconditional surrender". This gives rise to many questions: What has happened to logic in our times? What is to follow the traditional, or formal, logic that is centred around the nature and appearance of all things? What will replace the dialectical logic that holds that the essence of existence resides in the conflict between the diverse components of things and phenomena, the antithesis that propels ideas and concepts to higher levels of synthesis and sophistication?
I feel that a word of apology is needed, here, to those who are not specialists, especially in this age of "stop the philosophising". My remarks on the status of the formal and dialectical branches of logic which have served mankind until the present was merely a prelude to the issue that should concern us most at this crucial and tragic historical juncture. The new mode of thinking that has come to prevail, particularly in media circles is as remote as can be from those two long established branches of logic. The new thinking does not limit itself to merely dealing with the fait accompli as though it were the only truth and only point on our compass. Nor does it stop at imitation and subordination, and a disinterest in attempting to refute the logical conclusions of studies on the current situation. What it does do, specifically, is project a passivism that epitomises the crisis of political and intellectual capitulation that renders us vulnerable to deception, the breaking of our will and loss. "Stagnant logic" is how I term this way of thinking. It revolves in a cycle of impotence; it offers no alternatives for the future. It even fails to pose clear antitheses.
The attitude of a broad segment of intellectuals in this age of the charge of Islamic terrorism is dumbfounding. Dozens of roundtables, seminars and conferences are being held under the banner of "dialogue". Dialogue in these forums is inevitably between Islam and the West as though, for the West, the East is something remote and obscure, as though the ruling forces in Western nations are unfamiliar with our civilisations and cultures after centuries of crusades, Orientalism, colonialism and imperialism. The eminent thinker Galal Amin observes: "It is the habit of the weak to see himself through the lens of his enemy, to regard his strengths as failures and the mistakes of others as virtues. Intellectuals are more prone to this habit than others, especially if they believe that by adopting this perspective they are meeting a demand in the West which will reap them a generous reward. There are no limits to what an Arab intellectual will go to once he decides to act as a foreign mouthpiece."
"Terrorism is an undeniable reality." "Terrorism has an Arab and Islamic face," these intellectuals will tell us, and then add: "The Arabs are not only poor, they are backwards." Some will even claim the highest levels of freedom are to be had in the traditional political systems of the West. Such is the logic of capitulation long adopted by civilisational agents, especially since Camp David. This is the stagnant logic according to which the victim becomes the accused and is forced to defend himself before his executioners.
The new intellectual luminaries, those proponents of the philosophy of capitulation, have not bothered to contemplate the terrorism so deeply rooted in the circle of Western hegemony, from the inquisition through the decimation of the indigenous peoples of Africa and America to the atomic bombing of Japan and the genocide of the Jews, Algerians and Vietnamese. Nor have they given a moment's thought to discriminating seriously between national liberation movements and revolutions, and the explosions that erupt here and there in direct proportion to the intensification of acts of repression against oppressed groups.
This is precisely the logic that the US and its allies in the West apply to crippled Iraq. Charged with possessing weapons of mass destruction, Iraq has the onus of proving its innocence and when it fails to produce that proof it stands accused of refusing to confess to its crime. In other words, Iraq is expected to recognise the right of its executioners to destroy it whether it possesses weapons of mass destruction or not. This is the purpose of the arms inspection drama emanating from Resolution 4114, intended to provide a formal legal mantle for a military strike.
"Weapons of mass destruction," Iraq's "wars against its neighbours" (Iran and Kuwait), its "annihilation of ethnic minorities" (the Kurds) -- such are the things about which we hear ad nauseam without the faintest mention of the West's black page in Iraq. It was the West that armed Iraq to the teeth (including weapons of mass destruction) in order to stop the Islamic revolution in Iran. Then, having suggested that Kuwaiti oil was to be its reward for keeping Iran in check, the West lured Iraq into Kuwait through US Ambassador Glasby's silence which Iraq was intended to take as Washington's blessing in advance for that invasion.
More insidious was the collusion of the media in the Western democracies in skewing the significance of Saddam's notorious statement that Iraq possessed sufficient weapons to destroy half of Israel if necessary. The statement was a reaction to the West's resolve to destroy Iraq and eliminate its president: Israel is, after all, the number one ally and the material cornerstone for American hegemony over the Arab nation and Middle East oil from the Gulf to Saudi Arabia and from Iran to southwest Asia. The omission of this context was deliberate.
Then came the furore of anti- Semitism, a charge which everyone knows can only be levelled at Europe during its rise to global centrality, with its inquisitions, ghettos and ethnic cleansing, while Islam has always embraced all creeds, ethnic affiliations and minorities in a climate of tolerance, brotherhood and mutual coexistence, as history readily testifies. The Ramadan television series, Horseman without a Horse, gave the anti-Semitism storm the breach it was looking for. This moving, muddled drama sought to commemorate the Egyptian struggle against British colonial occupation. The intrigue and dash and daring of its protagonist were far from credible and certainly the role of such factors in the actual history was grossly exaggerated. In addition, British colonialism was depicted as the partner of the Ottoman caliphate and the tool of the Zionist movement between 1882 and 1919. Most critics panned the series, but without casting aspersions on the intentions of its director and star. Not so some members of the team of new thinkers who seized on it to condemn the purported taint of anti- Semitism in our national culture.
Meanwhile, it is as if the murder and torture of Palestinians, the demolition of their homes, villages, government buildings, and the degradation, isolation and subjugation of an entire people, are happening in another world. Otherwise the criminal state and the racist society that supports it would be held culpable for that gory serial. Otherwise, we would perceive the relationship between that culpability and the Zionist call to crush Arab power from the Nile to the Euphrates and the relationship between the Zionist call at its inception and the crimes today, whatever might be said about the authenticity of the Protocols.
Have our nouveau intellectuals taken note of Barak's speech on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of Israel? The state of Israel is a state for all the Jews in the world, he said. This was a sincere declaration of the facts, an appeal to fortify and expand the edifice of the Jewish state on Palestinian land. It has always been, and remains, the intellectual and psychological cornerstone for the crimes perpetrated by Israel. It implies the refusal to recognise the right of the Palestinians to exist, to recognise the possibility of peace rather than massacres.
Yet, once again, stagnant logic, turning in its futile cycle, diverts attention from the criminal to the victim. An Egyptian television serial is treated as if it was a symposium on the authentication of manuscripts. Not that the matter was allowed to rest there. When the US and Israel hurled their charges against the Egyptian serial, its director and its star, Egypt was once again portrayed as a collaborator in anti-Semitism. It matters not that the series of massacres and demolitions in Palestine continues day after day. What matters is that we, the victims -- not the criminals or racists, or Zionism and the Zionists -- stand in the dock where we are compelled to defend our dignity and our values on the world stage.
