Responsibility for the future is very often a matter of foresight and foresight is always based on insight, as we all know. What does my insight tell me about this whole issue or problem? It informs me that the modern Arabs are truly the Hamlet of the 20th century. Like the endlessly celebrated prince, they seem able continually to join the underlying passion of the elemental to the brooding intellectuality of the cerebral to the lyrical sensitivity of the poetic but only to end up in unrelieved tragedy. The tragedy consists of unending hesitations, procrastinations, oscillations and waverings between the old and the new, between asalah and muca sarah (authenticty and contemporaneity), between turath and tajdid (heritage and renewal), between huwiyyah and hadathah (identity and modernity), between religions and secularity

Al-Azm, S.J.

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General IssuesI S I M  N E W S L E T T E R  5 / 0 0 11Dr Sadik al-Azm is professor of modern EuropeanPhilosophy, Department of Philosophy andSociology, Damascus University, Syria.E-mail: madog@cyberia.net.lbFax: +963 11 373 9510F o r u mS A D I K  J .  A L - A Z MResponsibility for the future is very often a matter offoresight and foresight is always based on insight, aswe all know. What does my insight tell me about thiswhole issue or problem? It informs me that the mod-ern Arabs are truly the Hamlet of the 20t h c e n t u r y .Like the endlessly celebrated prince, they seem ablecontinually to join the underlying passion of the ele-mental to the brooding intellectuality of the cerebralto the lyrical sensitivity of the poetic but only to endup in unrelieved tragedy. The tragedy consists of un-ending hesitations, procrastinations, oscillations andwaverings between the old and the new, betweena s a l a h and muca s a r a h (authenticty and contempo-raneity), between t u r a t h and tajdid (heritage and re-newal), between h u w i y y a h and h a d a t h a h ( i d e n t i t yand modernity), between religions and secularity. Owning the Future:Modern Arabs and HamletIn this way, the 21st century can only belongto the conquering Fortinbrases of this worldand never to the Hamlets hung up on inter-minably rehearsing that classic – but nowtotally d e p a s s é – European p i è c e called L aquerelle des Anciens et des Modernes. Nowonder, then, to quote Shakespeare’s mostfamous drama, that ‘the times seem out ofjoint,’ for the Arabs and ‘something looksrotten in their state.’ No wonder as well ifthey keep wondering, like the fabled Princeof Denmark himself and with as much tragicintensity, ‘whether they are the authors oftheir woes or there is a divinity that shapestheir ends.’This analogy leads me to dig deeper in-side ourselves and to think that for us Arabsto own our future, to hold ourselves respon-sible for it, we have to come to terms with acertain image of ourselves buried verydeeply in our collective subconscious. WhatI mean is the following: As Arabs and Mus-lims (and I use Muslim here in the purely his-torical, cultural and civilizational sense), wecontinue deep down to image and imagineourselves as conquerors, history-makers,pace setters, pioneers and leaders of world-historic proportions.Reconciling self-imagea n d r e a l i t yIn the marrow of our bones, we still senseourselves as subjects of history not its ob-ject, as its agent and not as its patient. Wehave never come to terms realistically with,let alone reconcile ourselves to, the margin-ality and reactiveness of our position inmodern times. In fact, deep down in our col-lective soul, we find intolerable this mon-strosity of a supposedly great u m m a h l i k eourselves standing helplessly on the mar-gins not only of modern history in generalbut even of our local and particular histories.We find no less intolerable the conditionof being the objects of a history made, led,manipulated and arbitrated by others, espe-cially when we remember that those otherswere (and by right ought to be) the objectsof a history made, led, manipulated and ar-bitrated by ourselves. Add to that a no lessdeeply seated belief that this position ofworld-historical leadership and its glorieswas somehow usurped from us, f i g h a f l a hm i na l-t a r i k h as we say in Arabic, by modernEurope. I say usurped – and usurpation is atthe heart of Hamlet’s tribulations and trials– because it is supposed to belong to us byright, by destiny, by fate, by election, byprovidence or by what have you.With this belief goes the no less deeplyseated conviction that eventually things willrighten themselves out by uncrowning thisreigning usurper, whose time is running outanyway, and by restoring history’s legiti-mate leaders to their rightful place, formerstation and natural function.This kind of thought and yearning comesthrough loud and clear in the work of au-thors like Egypt’s Hasan Hanafi and the laterwork of someone like Anwar Abdel-Malek,as well as in the tracts, analyses and propa-ganda of the more sophisticated Islamistthinkers and theoreticians.The constellation of ideas that they leanon for a crutch may be summarized in thetittle of a most famous European classic:Spengler’s The Decline of the West, the falseimplication being, if the West is decliningthen the Arabs and Islam must be rising. Or,to put it somewhat differently (i.e. in termsof the title of Abdel-Malek’s book R i h a l -S h a r q, The Wind of the East), if the wind ofhistory is abandoning the sails of the West,then it must be automatically filling those ofthe East and East means principally, here,Islam and the Arabs. If we use the title of anequally famous Islamist classic by Muham-mad Kutb, Jahiliyyat al-Qarn a l-cI s r i n (T h eJahiliyyah of the 20 t h C e n t u r y ), then the im-plication would be: now that EuropeanModernity has come full circle to the j a h i l icondition, the Arabs and the Muslims mustbe on the verge of leading humanity oncemore out of the j a h i l i y y a h created by Europeand defended by the West in general.Arab nationalism: retrievingthe usurped role of worldl e a d e r s h i p ?But this is not the end of the story. Re-viewing the classics of Arab nationalism, itnow often appears to me that the deeperobjective of these works was not so muchArab Unity as an end in itself, but as a meansfor retrieving that usurped role of world-his-torical leadership and of history making. Infact, I can easily say that the ultimate butunarticulated concern here was not somuch colonialism, imperialism, foreign oc-cupation, liberation, independence, pros-perity, social justice, equality, freedom assuch, but the restoration of a right usurpedfrom this great u m m a h to exercise theworld-historical role and function naturallyand/or providentially suited to its natureand mission. After all, the historic civiliza-tions of our part of the world have alwaysbeen of the conquering and extrovertedtype: Ancient Persia descending on Greece,Alexander conquering Persia and every-thing else within reach, Hannibal, Rome,Islam, the Ottomans, European modernityand so on.Now, when this unexamined, unexor-cized, highly potent and deep-seated self-image collides with the all-too evidenteveryday actualities of Arab-Muslim impo-tence, backwardness, frustration and in-significance, especially at the level of inter-national relations, then anything becomespossible on the Arab side. This includes atleast grand illusions, massive inferioritycomplexes, huge compensatory delusions,wild adventurism, heedless political reck-lessness, desperate violence, and so on. Ob-viously, this is a recipe for owning neitherthe present nor the future. In fact, it is arecipe for the abdication of all responsibilityv i s - à - v i s both the present and the future.The contradiction that I have been tryingto delineate and that I think we have toopenly come to terms with if we are goingto have any future at all is perhaps best cap-tured – quite gently but very ironically – inthe title of Hussain Ahmad Amin’s pointedand lively book, Dalil al-Muslim al-Hazin ilaM u q t a d a al-Suluq fi a l - Q a r n a l -cI s r i n. The au-thor is a well-known Egyptian historian andhigh-ranking diplomat and the son ofAhmad Amin, the great historian producedby what the late Albert Hourani called theArab Liberal Age. Interestingly enough, thetitle of Amin’s book hints at the great classicof Moses Maimonides, D a l a l a h a l - H a ' i r i n(The Guide for the Perplexed.) So a free trans-lation of Hussain Ahmad Amin’s title wouldread: A Guide for the Sad and PerplexedMuslim concerning the sort of behaviour re-quired by the 20t h c e n t u r y .The contemporary Arab: sad,melancholic, perplexed andv e x e d ?The contemporary Muslim and/or Araband/or what have you is so sad, melan-cholic, perplexed and vexed in Amin’s ac-count because his instinctive convictions,profound self-image and cherished illusionsabout his u m m a h, religion, culture, civiliza-tion, providence, their role and function inmodern history are all given the lie by thehard realities and harsh actualities of thecontemporary world at every wakingminute of his life. Furthermore, the radicaltransformations, revolutions, sacrifices,changes, losses, etc., required to transcendthis contradiction continue to be deemedunbearable, unacceptable and undesirableby Amin’s totally frustrated Arab and/orMuslim. So what else is left for him to do ex-cept to muddle through his sad, melan-cholic perplexity right into the 21s t c e n t u r ycarrying with him the pious conviction thatperhaps one day God or history or fate orthe revolution or the moral order of the uni-verse will undo the usurper and again raisehis u m m a h to the status of world-historicalleadership. Meanwhile, the Fortinbrases ofthis world will have inherited the earth at hise x p e n s e .Modernity is basically a European inven-tion. Europe made the modern world with-out consulting Arabs, Muslims or anyoneelse for that matter, and made it at the ex-pense of everyone else to boot. There is norunning away from the fact that the Arabswere dragged, kicking and screaming intomodernity, on the one hand, and modernitywas forced on them by superior might, effi-ciency and performance, on the other.The Crusades were ultimately repulsed,but Bonaparte’s militarily insignificant expe-dition and adventure in Egypt and Palestinenot only won the day but actually made aclean sweep of all that had historically lostthe ability to live and continue on our sideof the Mediterranean. The massive differ-ence between the results of the Crusadesand the results of the French expedition of1798, distills the essence of Europeanmodernity as far as we are concerned andputs it on show for our chastisement ande d i f i c a t i o n .In fact, the modern European violent in-trusion into Islamdom and Arabdom creat-ed, in my view, a final, decisive and defini-tive rupture with the past that I can onlycompare with the no less final and definitiverupture effected by the violent Arab-Muslimintervention into the history of SassanidPersia. And just as the history of post-con-quest Persia stopped making sense withoutthe Arabs, Islam and their eruption on thelocal Farsi scene, similarly, the post-Bona-parte history of Arabdom stopped makingsense without Europe, modernity and theireruption on the local Arab scene as well. Inmy view, there is no running away from thisreality no matter how many times we re-it-erate the partial truth and often lame ratio-nalization to the effect that Modern Europegot it all from us anyway: Averroes, Andalu-sian high culture and civilization, Arabic sci-ence, mathematics, philosophy and all ther e s t .Without finally coming to terms, seriouslyand in depth, with these painful realitiesand with their so far paralyzing contradic-tions, tensions, paradoxes and anomalies,there is neither an owning of the future forthe Arabs, nor any real responsibility for thepresent on their part. In other words, eitherwe come to terms critically with this deep-seated, ritualized and stratified complex ofhighly emotional beliefs, valuations and im-ages that in their turn give the sanction ofsacredness, taboo and immutability to in-herited illusions, archaic institutions, dys-functional attitudes and arrangements,anachronistic but cherished modes of living,thinking and governing, or, again, the Fort-inbrases of this world will win the day andhave the final say.In any case, in Mamdouh Adwan’s adapta-tion of Hamlet, staged some years ago inDamascus, by the time the Prince wakes up,it is already far too late. ♦

Owning the Future: Modern Arabs and Hamlet

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Owning the Future: Modern Arabs and Hamlet

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