Yearning for the Past

Sadik J. Al-Azm on "Western dominance, Islamist terror, and the Arab imagination"

In the marrow of our bones, we still perceive ourselves as the subjects of history, not its objects, as its agents and not its victims. We have never acknowledged, let alone reconciled ourselves to, the marginality and passivity of our position in modern times. In fact, deep in our collective soul, we find it intolerable that our supposedly great nation must stand helplessly on the margins not only of modern history in general but even of our local and particular histories.

We find no less intolerable the condition of being the object of a history made, led, manipulated, and arbitrated by others, especially when we remember that those others were (and by right ought to be) the objects of a history made, led, manipulated, and arbitrated by ourselves. Add to that a no less deeply seated belief that this position of world-historical leadership and its glories was somehow usurped from us by modern Europe fi ghaflaten min al-tarikh — while history took a nap, as we say in Arabic. I say usurped ... because this position belongs to us by right, by destiny, by fate, by election, by providence, or by what have you.

With this belief goes the no less deeply seated conviction that eventually things will right themselves by uncrowning this usurper, whose time is running out anyway, and by restoring history’s legitimate leaders to their former station and natural function. This kind of thought and yearning comes through loud and clear in the work of authors like Hasan Hanafi and Anwar Abdel-MaIek, as well as in the tracts, analyses, and propaganda of the more sophisticated Islamist thinkers and theoreticians.

The constellation of ideas they draw on is captured in the title of a European classic, Spengler’s The Decline of the West, the false implication being that if the West is declining then the Arabs and Islam must be rising. ... Now that European Modernity has come full circle to the Jahili condition, the Arabs and Muslims must be on the verge of leading humanity once more out of the Jahiliyya created by Europe and defended by the West in general.

But this is not the end of the story. Reviewing the classics of Arab nationalism, it now often appears to me that the deeper objective of these works was not so much Arab unity as an end in itself but Arab unity as a means of retrieving that usurped role of world-historical leadership and of history-making. In fact, I can easily argue that the ultimate but unarticulated concern is not so much a struggle against colonialism, imperialism, and foreign occupation, or for independence, prosperity, and social justice, but for the restoration of the great umma (nation) to a role of global leadership appropriate to its nature and mission.

Good reading.