Jens Hanssen

This chapter explores Albert Hourani’s early life and reconstructs a
political life that he had disavowed by the time he set out to write Arabic
Thought in the Liberal Age. Resting on a close reading of autobiographical
works, biographical cross-references and the writings of Hourani and his interlocutors themselves, this chapter deploys Albert’s world as a case study of the ‘Anglo-Arab labyrinth’ at the historical moment when the liberal age unravelled. At a more abstract level, Hourani’s and his colleagues’ inability to make their case for Palestine after World War II epitomized the defeat of Arab historicism and the triumph of Zionism’s deterritorialization of Palestinian history.

and Keywords This chapter provides a critical analysis of a selection of Middle Eastern and North African communist parties since the interwar period and the emergence of Marxist-Lenin ist movements during the Arab Cold War. It focuses on the difficulties the parties faced in the changing national and international settings. Arabs were drawn to communism in the 1930s because of Soviet leadership in global antifascism. But the parties suffered from Stalin's support for the partition of Palestine in 1947, especially in countries neighboring Israel, and from Soviet support for Arab military regimes during the Cold War. By the mid-1960s, communists no longer had a monopoly on revolutionary ideology as Palestin ian-inspired national liberation movements began to vernacularize Marxism-Leninism.

When Nafir Suriyya—“The Clarion of Syria”—was penned between September 1860 and April 1861, its author Butrus al-­Bustani, a major figure in the modern Arabic Renaissance, had witnessed his homeland undergo unprecedented violence in what many today consider Lebanon’s first civil war. Written during Ottoman and European investigations into the causes and culprits of the atrocities, The Clarion of Syria is both a commentary on the politics of state intervention and social upheaval, and a set of visions for the future of Syrian society in the wake of conflict.

When Nafir Suriyya—“The Clarion of Syria”—was penned between September 1860 and April 1861, its author Butrus al-Bustani, a major figure in the modern Arabic Renaissance, had witnessed his homeland undergo unprecedented violence in what many today consider Lebanon’s first civil war. Written during Ottoman and European investigations into the causes and culprits of the atrocities, The Clarion of Syria is both a commentary on the politics of state intervention and social upheaval, and a set of visions for the future of Syrian society in the wake of conflict.

This translation makes a key historical document accessible for the first time to an English-reading audience. An introduction by the translators sketches the history that led up to the civil strife in Mt. Lebanon, outlines a brief biography of Butrus al-Bustani, and provides an authoritative overview of the literary style and historiography of Nafir Suriyya. Rereading these pamphlets in the context of today’s political violence, in war-torn Syria and elsewhere in the Arab world, helps us gain a critical and historical perspective on sectarianism, foreign invasions, conflict resolution, Western interventionism, and nationalist tropes of reconciliation.

This chapter provides a critical analysis of a selection of communist parties in the interwar Middle East and North Africa and the emergence of Marxist-Leninist movements during the Arab cold war. It focusses on the difficulties they faced in the changing national and international settings. Arabs were drawn to communism in the 1930s because of Soviet leadership in global anti-fascism. But the parties suffered from Stalin’s support for the partition of Palestine in 1947, especially in countries neighbouring Israel, and from Soviet support for Arab military regimes during the cold war. By the mid-1960s, communists no longer had a monopoly on revolutionary ideology as Palestinian-inspired national liberation movements began to vernacularize Marxism-Leninism.

WAEL B. HALLAQ:
Restating Orientalism: A Critique of Modern Knowledge.
vii-x, 384 pp. New York: Columbia University Press, 2018. £30 ISBN 978-0-231-18762-6

Fifteen years after Edward Said’s untimely passing biographies have been written, numerous scores settled, and homages paid. Wael Hallaq presents a new fundamental critique of Orientalism – of a book that launched the process of decolonizing the humanities beginning in the 1980s – on its own terms. Restating Orientalism accuses Said of both conceptual subjugation of the Orient and limiting his critique to Orientalists. Other disciplines in the humanities were just as, if not more, complicit in the production of knowledge that ultimately made conceivable European genocides. He contends that a reformed and ethical form of Orientalism may yet lead the way towards decolonial epistemologies. At a more abstract level, Hallaq claims that European thought, particularly rationalist philosophy and secularism, preceded the politics of colonialism and bears the responsibility for looming planetary disaster.

During his lifetime, Said did not take lightly to criticism on methodological grounds, especially by those who were otherwise on the same side of the political barricade. The fallout with Sadek Jalal al-‘Azm (2016) destroyed their friendship after the former reviewed Orientalism and accused Said of peddling to cultural essentialism and alterity.  Their acerbic correspondence signaled what Samer Frangie has called “the broken conversation” between academic radicalism and “theory as a weapon” (A. Cabral) on the anti-colonial front lines of the global cold war.  Meanwhile, Islamists have tended to read Orientalism more favourably because – as al-‘Azm predicted – the book appeared to confirm not only Islam’s total and absolute difference but also the pernicious legacy of the enlightenment manifested in Western humanism, liberalism and secularism.  Said spent much effort to dispel such receptions. He had joined the Palestinian revolution and stepped up his criticism of its leadership. He all but abandoned discourse analysis and whenever given a chance repeated the mantra he succinctly expressed in Tariq Ali’s documentary Black Athena, that: “The search for roots and origins is essentially an affirmation of identity, […] that is almost always a construction. There is no such thing as a pure Greek, or a pure Egyptian or pure anything. Everything is hopelessly mixed up together.” Such cultural mixity does not sit easily with the author of Restating Orientalism who presents a labyrinthine argument for an authentic and singular, premodern Islam that was destroyed by the rapacious liberal and secular forces of an autogenetic European modernity. Instead, the author maintains that so long as nefarious modern philosophical presuppositions are not exposed and rejected at their early modern genocidal roots, any political struggle, advocacy or revolution are futile and superficial attempts at human salvation.

Arab intellectual history has been experiencing a resurgence of late, positioned as it is between the ascendancy of global intellectual history and the continued resilience of area studies. Such a precipitous conjuncture has led to a proliferation of Arab intellectual histories that belie the orientalist fallacy of the region as a “no idea producing area,” as once infelicitously described by Charles F. Gallagher. And yet the task of scholars of the Arab world is surely more complex than merely adding intellectuals and writers who have heretofore been ignored to the catalogue of intellectual history.