After the 1967 defeat, Arab political thought developed a strong penchant for decay, and for divestment from everything that modernity and modern organization of politics and social life had produced, yearning for a return to what had come before. The Islamist critique defined by the formula “We have forsaken God, and so God has forsaken us,” the overarching Islamist explanation for what happened during the Naksa, gained a growing following.
However, the extreme left’s critique was no less keen on decay, albeit on the basis of a different system of political consciousness. To address the defeat, this critique went, guerrilla warfare must replace classical warfare; and, by implication, replace the region’s states, their sovereignty, institutions, social leadership, and especially their armies, which were seen to be worthy of nothing but demobilization. To this end, texts were penned lauding the wilderness - plateaus, and swamps - as an ideal terrain for waging “protracted people's wars.”
This penchant for decay broke new ground with the rise of resistance and rejectionist politics in the 1980s. In practice, they replaced states and armies with militias, with a transnational axis led by Tehran eclipsing both states’ national foundations and the Palestinian cause. They also binned what had remained of the national idea, glorifying one form of political Islam or another instead, and reviving forms of economic exchange that laws had prohibited long ago.
The fact is that this trajectory is running rampant today, remaking the knot that ties a broad stream of our political thought to the ideas that had been dominant between the period of the Ottoman Empire’s collapse and the emergence of the modern state. From Jamal al-Din al-Afghani, Muhammad Abduh, and Rashid Rida to the Muslim Brotherhood and Shakib Arslan, the idea of a “return” to some moment in the past was equated with emancipation and embracing the future.
True, these figures did not constitute a monolith - some even deludedly fancied their call to return to “divine scripture” to have been inspired by the Protestant Reformation. However, it is equally true that the struggle with the “other” (first the West, then Israel) did more than anything else to shape their view of the self and the world, and of the past and the future.
Yet, our memory can also bring us back to moments when things were not so rigidly shut. For instance, just months after the 1948 Nakba and Israel’s founding, Constantin Zureiq published “The Meaning of the Catastrophe,” a book in which he emphasized, among other things, the importance of acquiring scientific and technical knowledge in determining the future of the Arabs. Zureiq went so far as to suggest, in light of the Arabs’ reluctance to pursue this knowledge, that the Nakba had been inevitable.
The book was widely read, and it left a strong impression on many. Nearly 20 years later, following the 1967 defeat, Zureiq returned to the same theme in “The Meaning of the Catastrophe Revisited”, reiterating this thesis even more vociferously. It could be said, rightly, that his claims involve simplification, naivete, and preaching overtones. They nonetheless broke with the dominant mindset: instead of calling for subtraction, he called for addition, for building over the space we occupied. Moving forward (which intellectuals liked to frame as a “Renaissance”) remains superior to a return to a time before the rupture of modernity.
However, the latest/ongoing war has settled matters beyond reasonable doubt, making it difficult for anyone to solve. From Al-Aqsa Flood Operation emerged (and continues to emerge) a flood of lampoons of the “West,” civilization, and progress itself, which are all presented as mere ruses intended to facilitate our subjugation and humiliation. With the Israeli “pager attack” in Lebanon and then its war on Iran, the inclination to renounce science and technology as nothing more than instruments for our destruction grew stronger. Thus, the phrase “We no more believe in...” bulldozed its way through Arab political texts, which had already been brimming with moans and groans.
Indeed, intellectuals who identify with one school of modernity or another did not hesitate to express their pride in the ancient empires built by our “great civilizations” in Persia, Mesopotamia, and elsewhere. The technological supremacy of nations that have been betrayed by authenticity and antiquity pales in comparison to these civilizations, especially since the “hostile” nations were born only two or three days ago in the timescale of human history.
As our stance on the world continues to emerge from the womb of war and fanaticism, science and technology, and everything the US and Israel excel at, have become akin to a despised tribe whose overwhelming real dominance we "defeat" with delusions of ancient empires or an image, slogan, or angry student protest we declare a watershed moment.
To make matters worse, political decay is now ravaging the Levent, creating increasingly weak and poor countries struggling to rebuild and end the succession of cracks undercutting social cohesion and national unity. Even as the massacre in Gaza (the supposed root cause of this war) continues, everything about it is vague while our “disavowal of the world” is fundamentally conditioned on the fate of the Iranian regime. That, in itself, is a compelling enough reason to confront the real ruse we have fallen, in the hope that we might finally begin to confront our ongoing decay.
