Crime and effect

The end of the Saddam regime in Iraq makes it incumbent on all Arabs to examine the historical and cultural factors that gave rise to it, nothing short of a cultural break being required to build a new life and culture on its ruins, writes the Syrian poet Adonis

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Dismantling one of the four bronze busts of Saddam Hussein that have long dominated Baghdad's skyline (photo: AP)

With the end of Saddam Hussein, one cannot help but ponder the nature of colonialism, occupation, dictatorship, violence, murder and terrorism. But above and beyond these things the end of the Saddam regime compels us to contemplate, deeply and comprehensively, the historical, political and social structures that gave rise to the phenomenon of Saddam Hussein, as a culture and as a mode of political practice.

Saddam Hussein did not suddenly drop out of the sky and land on Iraq. He emerged from that land and from its people, coming from a specific history and a specific culture. What he did was not the product of his ideas or his labours alone; he had around him his own entourage and his ever-compliant army to carry out his commands.

The intellectual exercise I am proposing should be incumbent upon all those concerned by the current condition and the future fate of the Arabs. But I urge it in particular on Saddam's comrades, aides and flatterers, on all those who cheered him on while being pleased to snatch up his money, from the far left to the far right, from Lebanon to Algeria. I urge it on the processions of poets and writers who flocked to his literary festivals to sing panegyrics to his "conquests", "glories" and "achievements", from the "mother of all battles" to the "Qadisiya", the "Halabja" and all his other "battles", both "large and small."

Whether these people really believed that the Saddam regime existed for them or not, or whether they believed it existed for Palestine, for Arab "nationalism", "unity", "socialism", or whatever, they now have the intellectual, humanitarian and historical responsibility to tell us in the light of their experiences and Iraq's current plight what they now see in the Saddam experience beyond "occupation" and "resistance".

Once again, Saddam did not make Iraq; Iraq made Saddam. What is the nature of this Iraq that permits the rise of such a brutal regime? What role did history, sectarianism and inherited beliefs play in all this? Will it be possible to establish a truly democratic system in Iraq under which all Iraqis are equal in rights and duties if the Iraqis, and the Arabs in general, continue to ignore, or constantly put off, the task of examining this role on the grounds of "current circumstances", or other excuses? Such excuses are forever at hand. They existed in the past, they are used in the present, and they are probably being stored up for use in the future.

Yet, the structures of this history, of this sectarianism and of these inherited beliefs are an inveterate part of Iraqi and of all other Arab societies. As long as we remain unable to analyse and deconstruct them, so as to free ourselves from their grip and move towards other, humanitarian horizons, they will remain the foremost obstacle to our vitality and progress. If we do not free ourselves from their grip, then even under the best of circumstances we will not be able to produce more than variations on the Saddam regime, and we will continue to come up against formidable barriers separating man from himself and man's self from life and reality. This does not apply to Iraq alone, but to all Arab societies to some extent or other.

The "revolutionary" culture that adopted these Arab regimes, or that these regimes adopted, is itself the offspring of such structures. This culture was another vacuum, another regurgitation and another death. And, with this death and the assorted armies that existed to promote it, this culture camouflaged the profound fragmentation of Arab life, fighting all the schisms and eruptions that make up the linguistic, chromatic and aural textures of that life. Thus, it entrenched the authoritarianism of culture and the culture of authoritarianism, and it perpetuated the Arab regimes by freezing society's dynamism, compelling it to sustain life and thought in a backward-looking present and in tribal, clan, and religious- ideological sectarian loyalties.

The situation in Iraq today has enabled us to see such phenomena in the clearest possible light. This was a culture of the past tense that shaped the Arabs, consumed their lives and present, rendering them no more than projections of the past, unlike in living societies that shape the past to their own needs and mould it to support their creative dynamism. The very persistence of this culture is a warning that there will always be a "barbarian horde" at the gates of the Arabs waiting for the signal to advance.

Although the "revolutions" in the Arab countries that began in the second half of the last century scored some major achievements at home and abroad, from the revolutionary standpoint -- that of radical change -- they ultimately failed on all fronts, bringing further retreat from knowledge and further social and economic deterioration and collapse. I do not believe that these outcomes can be attributed to dictatorship alone, or to colonialism alone: they must also be attributed to causes that reside in those structures, or at least the ways we understand those structures, associate with them and apply their values and strictures.

Culturally, the failure of these revolutions was crowned by the abolition of both "subjectivity" and "objectivity", and, as a consequence, by the abolition of things, society and the world. Everything was fused together in the crucible of "the leadership" and its powers and plans. If thought, creativity and production in philosophy, science and the arts emanates from the free and unencumbered self and from its interaction with society and the world of which that self is an integral part, then the writers, poets and artists of the Arab regimes worked to subordinate thought and art to the leadership and to its delusions and ignorance, reconstructing society and culture in the image of that leadership. Today, as one looks back at such intellectual, literary and artistic output one cannot help but be struck by how inferior it was, by how confined were its horizons, and by how dismal was the world that it preached.

When a people lose their free creative dynamism their history becomes an endless circle of beginnings, whereas history should be a process of innovation. It was this loss of creative dynamism that plunged Iraq and all the other Arab countries into an overwhelming fog of illusions that obscured reality and life and obscured the human spirit itself through identifying it with the "leader". This identification, as with the identification with the "Caliph" or with the "ideals of the past", carries with it the notion of a "return" to roots and origins, which, as put into practice by the authorities' corps of intellectuals and scriptwriters, is a naïve and impossible quest. It also negates the development of life and thought and negates the exercise of history, which are branded as "deviations" from, and "distortions" of, what is termed "pure" and "perfect".

The past, or "roots", can only be perceived through the exercise of history. This exercise confirms that the questions of the present require answers from the present. Historical texts, however interpreted and regardless of the extent to which they are open to different interpretations, do not meet the demands of present reality. Indeed, the very need to subject them to political or sociological interpretation is proof that they have become extraneous to reality. Moreover, the prevailing mode of interpretation is not so much a process of intellectual inquiry as much as a kind of ideological fabrication that serves not to shed light on reality, but rather to obscure it. This form of artifice does not corrupt thought alone: it also corrupts the moral dimension, the pursuit of life and activity, by alienating man from his self, from reality and, consequently, from the truth.

We must therefore break with the "ideal" of a return to "roots" and "origins". We must break with the "past" as an institution or as an order. This is imperative if we want to build a new life and create a new culture.

However, the primary prerequisite for such a new life and culture is for every individual or group to make this break themselves, freely, independently and responsibly, in order to ensure that every individual speaks for himself. When we have started to look askance at individuals who have nominated themselves as speaking on behalf of "the people", "the group", "the class" or "the nation", we will have begun to make this break in the realm of politics. Once we have achieved this break we will have put paid to the belief that there is such a thing as a complete and absolute truth; indeed, we will have abandoned the idea that there is such a thing as the absolute at all in the realm of ideas.

Cornelius Castoriadis has said that a society is coherent as long as the world that it signifies is coherent. Applying this notion to the Arab world, it appears all the more alarmingly and mournfully fragmented. I am convinced that the prevalent culture, borne of the politics of the Arab regimes, is at the root of this fragmentation -- which is not to say that fragmentation cannot also become the platform for new beginnings.

Translated by Peter Danie