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Hussein Aboubakr Mansour

@HusseinAboubak

Apr 2

I have a lot of reservations about the New Atheists, especially with their atheism as a socio-cultural and political project, but their atheism remains a thousand times more preferable and acceptable than the radical Feuerbachean atheism of Žižek and Marxist thinkers. 🧵

The former, while locked in a truly cartoonish understanding of religion and of the self, remains infinitely more honest and safer. It is very cartoonishness is indeed a testimony to its sincerity.

Its superficiality makes it much safer, like a child who thinks he built his treehouse all on his own and doesn't know that the work was actually done by his father. What the child thinks is of secondary importance to the fact that the treehouse is sturdy and safe for the child.

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Hussein Aboubakr Mansour

@HusseinAboubak

Jan 27

Israel should never concede real advantages in exchange for mere promises which their fulfillment is left to circumstance and good-will. The world of states is not determined by legal commitments or moral principles but by interest.

What determines the policy of the United States in the Middle East is not any moral or ideological considerations but how American interests in the region are conceived by Washington.

The only other considerations that historically qualified these considerations have always been the Jewish and later the Evangelical votes for the D and R respectively.

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Hussein Aboubakr Mansour

@HusseinAboubak

Dec 16, 2023

I have been engaged in pro-Israel circles for over a decade, watching them losing, and sadly only forseeing them to lose even more. The complete denial of the reality of what is the Palestinian Cause actually and the dogmatic insistance on making it /1
newyorker.com/news/annals-of…

exclusively an Islamist/Jihadist issue, a rude intruder on pristine Western political life, the only instance in which the American liberal Jewish establishment actually links up with hawkish conservatives, is both the result of complete mystification of reality as well as /2

the ideological refusal of aknowledging the reality of the tent in which one made their bed. Making it a foreign import of an exotic type of fascism from faraway lands, can make us comfortably delinate identity boundaries in which the forces of civilization and Western glamor /3

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Hussein Aboubakr Mansour

@HusseinAboubak

Oct 23, 2023

While Jihad, both as a historical concept and as an institution, has a long and complex history, in the 20th century, it meant one thing for the overwhelming majority of Muslims: religious war. Denying this is a lie.

In Arabic, jihād, as it is often correctly pointed out, means struggle or strife towards a pre-defined aim. The term is used in the Quran with both the meanings of combat against unbelievers and the personal struggle against one's desires to maintain a life of piety, generally known as jihādu ạlnãf̊si, or self-jihad. In early Islamic history, jihad, as conquest of non-Muslims, was the main institution through which Muslims were able to expand both socially and geographically. It was ạl̊jihādu fī sabīli ạllhi, jihad in the path of God, which often marked the full membership of an adult male in the community. From what we are able to know about the earliest forms of these military conquests, they greatly resembled desert raids of the Arabian tribes against one another.

In time, and with more tribes joining the early community of believers, later to be known as Muslims, the raids evolved into super raids by what could be described as a pro-believers tribal coalition. As these military efforts culminated in major conquests and the establishment of the first Muslim states, jihad was gradually institutionalized and regulated from its raw desert-raid-like form into a fully-fledged medieval warfare institution, one of the world's largest. By the 9th century, Jihad was fully integrated into a fabric of socio-economic and political organization. It was no longer a raid by tribes, each led by their chief, but it became something only the state did and grew into a large tradition of warfare. Medieval jihad was a state institution with a professional class, hierarchy, political loyalties, land endowments, economic mobility, and a large body of legal canons, warfare manuals, and administrative regulations, and it is precisely these texts that we inherited today as part of the legacy of Islamic cultures and civilizations.

Given the nature, concerns, and questions that animate law in general and not just Islamic ones, in the legal classical texts of Islam, one seldom encounters the concept of jihad referring to anything but institutionalized warfare. In their works, Islamic jurists were positively generating legal structures regulating public life, whether in personal hygiene or tax collection practices. Thus, they left us a large body of work regulating every aspect of Muslim wars. Yet, it would be foolish to assume these works were produced for individual Muslims or were meant as part of a believer's piety. To reemphasize, jihad was a state activity, and thus, these works were meant for authorities to serve as manuals of conduct and warfare and not guides for the perplexed and the seekers. Moreover, this large body of works naturally included an extensive legacy of propaganda of every kind: seeking to incentivize and encourage recruitment and promising religious rewards, seeking to demonize enemies, and generally legitimate military actions. It naturally also included, with significant consequences, the ideology legitimating the imperialist expansion of Muslim dynasties through the declaring the necessity of spreading Islam, which naturally in propaganda takes the inverted form of spreading Islam through imperialist expansion.

Thus, jihad is indeed war, and declaring jihad always meant declaring war.

But how about jihad as a struggle against one's desires for the sake of self-improvement? This meaning was also as common, however, not in legal works but in piety literature and Sufism. This meaning, more relevant to the individual and to everyday social life, was so settled that even European orientalists and Arab Christians used it in most Arabic Bible translations, including the most commonly used Arabic one, Smith and Van Dyck of 1865. For instance, Saint Paul's iconic commandment in 1 Timothy 6:12 to "fight the good fight of faith" uses the word jihad both as a verb and a noun. In non-political and non-legal Islamic religious literature, this jihad, considered to be "the greater jihad," was the most commonly referred to.

Confusing? Keep reading, and it may get clearer.

When the two European missionaries Eli Smith and Cornelius Van Alen Van Dyck were sitting in Syria finishing their Arabic translation of the Bible, they were not the only ones engaged in an intensive translation project. As a matter of fact, centers of Arab urban life, notably in Egypt and Syria, were engaged in the most intense cultural program, seeking to translate European works into Arabic, modernize the Arabic language, and revive Arabic culture and society from their decadence. Printing presses were bought from Europe, young Arab students were sent to school in Paris, and state resources were dedicated to book production. During that era, mid-19th-century, one of the important works translated was Montesquieu's most well-known work and a major part of the canon of liberal political philosophy, Spirit of the Laws, which was translated by a young Egyptian Islamic jurist by the name of Rifa'a Tahtawi and commissioned by, wait for it, the diwan al-jihadyyia, or the Department of Jihad.

By the mid-19th century, jihad had become the oldest, largest, and most central state institution in Muslim states, which had been handed down, modified, evolved, and developed from one Muslim state to the other. In its last iteration under the Ottomans, who had inherited from the Mamluks, who had inherited it from the Ayyubids, etc., the Department of Jihad did the functions of nearly ten modern government ministries, such as war, public works, education and training of the state bureaucracy, and public order. Jihadyyia largely meant working in the service of the state, whether it was through being a soldier, digging a canal, or translating French political philosophy. This meaning was generally found among all other Muslim states and not just the Ottomans. In the 19th century, working for the Department of Jihad was the primary form of employment many Western expert expats found in Muslim lands, helping to train bureaucracies, modernize armies, and transfer Western technical knowledge.

By the late 19th century, and as most Muslim states embarked on ambitious programs of state reform seeking to quickly bring the administrative structure of their states to resemble Western states, the term Department of Jihad was dropped and replaced with terms like nizarat al-harbiyaa, which was a direct translation of the European term, Ministry of War. (Later, after WWII, most Muslim countries again followed the Western practice and started using the name Ministry of Defense). With the change of name also came a greater degree of modern technical specialization, with which, for instance, public works and education no longer needed to be bundled with military and police, but each received its own specialized government ministry, leaving the Ministry of War, formerly known as Jihadyya, entirely dedicated to military matters.

By the beginning of the 20th century, both Arabic and Ottoman cultures were thoroughly transformed, at least in the urban centers, that political, social, and economic forms of life were no longer what they were a century earlier. With the move of the secular elites towards European-like secular culture, those who practice politics in Muslim countries no longer imagined their activity was a continuation of a historical Muslim tradition from the past but an imitation of European practices from the present. The model of political thinking was no longer the stories of the distant ancestors but the news cables from the distant contemporaries. The two times jihad had any relevance in the early 20th century was largely due to European requests during WWI in which the Germans asked the Ottomans to declare jihad against the British, and the British asked the Indians and the Arabs to declare jihad against the Ottomans and the Germans. Both were still strictly embedded in the context of state actions and international relations, and none left any enduring effect on social relations, whether among Muslims and each other or between Muslims and Western non-Muslims.

After WWI, and following the wave of state and feudally-sponsored secularism and modern culture, a new generation of Arab bourgeoise intellectuals rose to show interest in European-style mass politics, political activism, and political ideologies: nationalism and communism. This period, the interwar years, produced the Arabic political literature that is the foundation of modern Arab political culture today. These new Arab intellectuals, mostly Christian, embarked on a major project of not merely translating European works but translating European political revolutionary consciousness itself. To do so, they heavily relied on classical religious motifs and symbols taken from Arab and Islamic history, secularized them, and used them to articulate the new revolutionary consciousness. One of the symbols that was appropriated, secularized, and used was that of jihad, which was then used to translate the German term kampf or struggle.

An example of this use was the historically significant work, "Our Struggle/Jihad in Palestine," by one of the godfathers of Arab Marxism, Raif al-Khouri, written at the beginning of the Arab Revolt of 1936. The book was a militant propaganda against Zionism, imperialism, and capitalism, which agitated its readers and asked them to self-sacrifice in the jihad/struggle against the trinity of evil. This work was not an isolated incident but was the discursive norm of all Arabic political revolutionary literature in the period seeking to secularize Islamic legacy and used by all the major political figures, including in nearly all the foundational literature of Arab Nationalism. The Christian founder of Syrian nationalism, Antoun Sa'adeh, the Christian founder of Arab Nationalism, Constantine Zureiq, and the Christian founder of Ba'athism, Michel Aflaq, all heavily used the symbol of jihad in their works, as well as the character of the prophet Muhammad as the proto Arab revolutionary.

Accompanying this secularization was also the use by the less secular and more Islamic political groups, such as the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, which also called for jihad in Palestine, which must have carried more religious connotations, yet, given the context, was indistinguishable from the Marxist or nationalist calls for jihad. It was in Palestine against the Jewish residents that direct appeals to individual Muslims made by intellectuals, not by states and not to states, to conduct jihad were made for the first time in modern history.

For three decades, in the 40s-60s, the word jihad was publically used by the Arab revolutionary government and most Arab political media and political literature to mean either nationalist or socialist struggle. The duality of the religious meaning of jihad, either as war or as an inner spiritual struggle, was itself also secularized into a new duality in the life of the nation, either as a jihad against Imperialism, Zionism, and capitalism or inner jihad against reaction, social stagnation, and economic backwardness. During that time, two Arabic synonyms rose to become interchangeable with jihad to express the ideal of political, existential struggle, and those are kifāḥ and niḍāl.

By the mid-1960s, Arabic political culture, which was engaged in a major war against Israel and the West, had three words to express its conceptualization of this activity in which it was engaged: jihād, kifāḥ, and niḍāl. Jihad, was no longer the historical institution that once dug canals and sent students to Paris but a fetishized concept of self-affirming dialectical struggle in a Hegelian saga of a historical protagonist. With the advance of the cultural revolution of the late 1960s, the collapse of the Arab old left, the rise of the Arab and global New Left, and the rise of new anti-imperialist reading of Islam as a vehicle for revolutionary mass politics, ideological specialization started to happen to those terms: kifāḥ became more associated with nationalism, niḍāl became more associated with leftists and communists, and jihād with the new rising power of revolutionary Islamists. This process of mitosis should not obfuscate the common origin and shared epistemology of the three groups.

Until the late 1960s, and under the guise of Arab absolutist states, this new secular idea of struggle remained a state affair. It was not up to individuals or groups, except for those sponsored by revolutionary Egypt such as the Algerian FNL, to engage in jihad/kifah/nidal on their own. Those who did, such as the nidalist communists, usually ended up in prison. The collapse of this moment of hegemony gave rise to the first major armed militias of international terrorism in the Middle East, the groups of Arafat's Palestinian Liberation Organization, which was engaged in ạlkifāḥ ạlmusalãḥ, or Armed Struggle, an endeavor which they copied from Latin American revolutionary strategy.
During the same time, the Palestinian Fatah and the PFLP were starring the newly popular colored TVs with images of plane hijacking, face-covered gun-toting terrorists, and Arab guerilla warfare, new off-shoots of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood were forming under the influence of the revolutionary inflation. Of those, Hizb ut-Tahrir in the revolutionary Levant and the Islamic Group in Egypt were the pioneers, later followed by the Egyptian Islamic Jihad and other groups. With these groups, we see for the first time the concept of jihad, as we came to know it today in terms of rogue spontaneous terrorist activity by non-state actors acting against states and seeking legitimacy from Islam as a religion, emerging. The fact that these groups were acting in societies already thoroughly revolutionized and radicalized into believing there are engaged in an existential struggle against Imperialism, Zionism, and Capitalism meant that the receptive audience was already there.

One of the major innovations that these new Islamic revolutionary groups brought was to internalize the struggle that the Arab revolutionary states had externalized against Israel and the West. Thus, in the 1970s, we see jihad primarily emerging not against Israel (kifah and nidal were the ones against Israel) but jihad was an inhouse battle against Muslim rulers and states. From here, the rest is a common history.

The aggregate result of this history and the triumph of revolutionary thought, in one version or the other, in Muslim societies, is that jihad settled its meaning in the mainstream of Islam today as a holy war against the enemies of Islam, usually defined as the West and Israel. (Note the interesting absence of China, Russia, Latin America, African non-Muslims, etc.) It was through the portal of "Palestine" that modern jihadism was born, and the historical concept of jihad transformed into the savage nihilism it became. Rarely do lay Muslims discuss jihad as pious self-restraint or self-improvement. Moreover, the decline of Sufism and Islamic spirituality, itself initiated by 19th-century modernization efforts that sought to crush mysticism and superstition, means that very little of such public discourse remains but in the limited Sufi circles and communities of piety. Even major Islamic institutions of learning, for the most part, no longer have a memory of what jihad was prior to the 20th century. Tragically, the only question Muslims left debating is whether revolutionary violence is a legitimate jihad or must be a state-initiated effort. Most Muslims, including al-Azhar University and all major Shia authorities, at least consider revolutionary violence against Israelis and Jews to be religiously justified, permissible, and even advisable. With the theocratic revolutionary Iranian regime, the picture gets more complicated because, by virtue of being a state, it has a right to declare jihad without controversy.

So, while in principle yet, jihad means many things to many people today, for most Muslims, sadly, it means war or revolutionary violence. Insisting otherwise would only work to further lock Muslim societies in the present problems with which they need to deal.

Did it get clearer? Maybe not, and I do not believe there can ever be full clarity when discussing historical intellectual developments during such a long duree, let alone on Twitter. However, for me, at least, one thing is clear: it is the idea of "Palestine" and the Palestinian Cause that initiated so much destruction, death, and nihilism in the world I'm from.
Now, I may be right, and I may be wrong. But, put yourself in my shoes: if this is how I see the world and the destruction that happened to my world, how do you think I see every Westerner, every progressive, every liberal, and even every Jew, every know-it-all professor, who lets me know that they feel very compassionately about the Palestinian cause?!

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Hussein Aboubakr Mansour

@HusseinAboubak

Oct 17, 2023

Everyone takes Qatari money despite that Al-Jazeera radicalized entire Arab generations, destabilized entire societies, and created an environment of mass anger and resentment from which emerged so much terror. The US knew this so much so that it BOMBED the Al-Jazeera office during the Iraq war. But other than that, the US government and US institutions, including media and universities, have prioritized Qatari money and relations over the future of the hordes of poor brown people in the Middle East. Whether woke or conservative, everyone took money from Qatar. This is just the truth and you shouldn't pretend that someone here is innocent. It's a system.

Brookings, the truest voice of liberalism
pbs.org/newshour/polit…

The few, the proud
npr.org/2022/06/07/110…

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Hussein Aboubakr Mansour

@HusseinAboubak

Oct 6, 2023

The Arab Culture War and the Age of Historical Materialism

It’s hard to give a date as to when precisely the Arab culture war started, but it certainly didn’t happen at scale before 1956 when Egypt’s Nasser finally made up his mind to position himself decisively against the West. By the 1960s, it was already a fully developed hegemonic “cultural and artistic revolution in our Arab countries…” But even before 1956, the decolonization effort had started targeting Jews. The idea of a culture war of cultural annihilation, and before it got institutionalized by the Italian totalitarian thinker Antonio Gramsci, was for a long time part of the Enlightenment’s climate. French historian Augustin Cochin once wrote, “Before the bloody Terror of 1793, in the republic of letters there was, from 1765 to 1780, a bloodless terror, for which the Encyclopedia was the Committee of Public Safety and d’Alembert the Robespierre. This terror swept away reputations just as the others chopped off heads. Its guillotine was slander, “infamy,” as it was then called. The term originated with Voltaire, “To brand with infamy was a well-defined operation, an entire procedure comprised of investigation, discussion, judgment and finally execution, which meant the public sentence of [being held in] contempt.”

To give the reader an idea about how Egyptian culture looked before the revolution, I’m going to use an example from the Egyptian film industry, the oldest Arab one and one of the oldest in the world. One of the last major movies produced by the Egyptian movie industry prior to the Revolution was Flirtation with Girl (1949). It was an artistic masterpiece as well as the product of financial ingenuity, gathering Egypt’s most beloved actor, Naguib Rihani, originally an Iraqi Christian migrant, Leila Murad, Egypt’s superstar at the time and the daughter of a Jewish cantor, Youssef Wahba, and musicalized by the musical genius who modernized Arab Music, Muhammad Abdul Wahab. At the time, and long before Umm Kalthoum was known or became the voice of Arab music following Arab Nationalism, Murad was Egypt’s top-grossing movie star and singer. She also starred in the first-ever full-length Egyptian film with sound, Leila (1942), which was directed by pioneer Egyptian Jewish director Togo Mizrahi. The plot of Flirtations revolves around Hamam, played by Rihani, who was a poor Arabic tutor hired to tutor the playful and reckless daughter of a wealthy Pasha, Leila, played by herself. He struggled with her insincerity and playfulness and the snobbery of her wealthy father, but he inevitably fell in love with her. Leila, on the other hand, fell in love with a con man who wanted to exploit her. Hamam intervened and saved Leila, motivated by his love and ambition that saving her will make her fall in love with him. At the end of the movie, Hamam realized that he, being decades older than Leila, is not a suitable man for her and that she needs a man her age. In the end, they both stumble into a concert hall with Abdul Wahab singing, his only honorary appearance, about the selflessness of love. “The love of the soul is eternal, but the love of the body is ephemera,” said the lyrics. A few years after, this Egypt will be but a distant memory. Later, the film will be even analyzed by Egypt’s most notable economist, Galal Amin, as the last attempt of the pro-British bourgeois, the Pasha’s side, to dissuade the Egyptian working class, represented by Hamam, from the Revolution and be content resignation.

The culture war was not really a war but a quick and swift cultural cleansing performed in the high culture by the young critical intellectuals and in the new mass culture by way of mass radicalization through state control over information and media. The high culture cleansing aimed to rid Egyptian high culture of the old liberal milieu of older Arab intellectuals, the ones from the developmental line of Tahtawi, who dominated the cultural scene before the Revolution and national liberation. It sought to repudiate such bourgeois culture and replace it with a new high culture shaped in the spirit of the Revolution with the leadership of the young radical intellectuals. In the later autobiographies of many of these radical intellectuals, who never truly deradicalized, and which they published decades after the catastrophic failure of Arab Nationalism, they spoke about their writings and activities in the time in apologetic terms. The cultural production was “not objective studies… it was merely the expression from the pivotal events and our faith in unity, democracy, socialism, and freedom. Today, the reader may find these ideas and opinions in these partisan words to be fantastical or romantic, enthusiastic without contemplation or depth, more like excitements… During the period, the tasks of the thinker and the man of letters were to follow the caravan and sing for it,” wrote Suhil Idris, who established the al-Adab publishing house in Beirut, which remains to be one of the major hubs of Arabic progressive literature. Major Egyptian Marxist figure Mahmoud Amin al-Alem also wrote apologetically years later, “most of [my early] articles are of a political propagandistic nature… it was absolutist in describing the Nasser’s experiment making it apologetic… I don’t want just to justify these deficiencies or offer a Catholic confession seeking self-absolution… I was possessed by a false consciousness believing in the possibility of a quick revolutionary transition… through connections with the ruling power and state agencies which then had intimate relations with the revolutionary leadership.”

Such figures later dismissed their earlier works as an outburst of enthusiasm and passion, but in reality, it wasn’t. This was a systematic effort in which all the agencies and bodies of the most powerful Arab states, all intellectuals, and all cultural production were engaged. Moreover, this was part of the rising global left of the Third World. In this cultural struggle, the Arab left used concepts from the French left, namely commitment, to police all those who participated in cultural production, novelists, playwrights, critics, essayists, etc., into conforming to representing an Arab culture of masses engaged in a struggle against social injustice, imperialism, and Zionism and that all culture, all religion, all aspects of life, are merely a manifestation of this struggle, i.e., historical materialism without ever explicitly saying so. This local variant of historical materialism, an inherently atheistic doctrine, reached cultural hegemony in modern Arab culture by forcing and seducing all those who worked in culture to fulfill the role of Marx’s critical intellectuals.

The Battle of All Poets and Authors

In the atmosphere of personalist politics, the embodiment of the liberal bourgeois culture in need of eradication was made to be Taha Hussein (1889-1973), the deacon of Arab letters. Albert Hourani described him as “The most systematic thinker… the most considerable artist… he deserves study both for his own sake and because he can be regarded as the last great representative of a [liberal] line of thought, the writer who has given the final statement of the system of ideas which underlie social thought and political action in the Arab countries for three generations.” Hussein had a long career in which he received both traditional education and modern education in France where he authored his dissertation critiquing Ibn Khaldun’s view of society. He left a rich body of works, including essays, literary criticism, novels, autobiographies, and social commentary. He was a man of liberal sensibilities who loved liberal Europe and considered it to be the shining city on the hill. In the new culture, Hussein needed to be dethroned to be replaced with historical materialism.

The concerted attack on Taha Hussein, which started at earnest in the early 1950s by state intellectuals, both Marxist and Arab Nationalists, was a moral assassination of all pre-revolutionary Arab culture. In 1955, there were two attacks on Hussein, one from Cairo and the other from Beirut. The one from Cairo was in the form of a book co-authored by Amin al-Alem and another young radical intellectual. The book was titled On Egyptian Culture, published by a new publishing house called New Thought, and was a repudiation of a famous 1938 book by Hussein titled The Future of Egyptian Culture. Later, Arab intellectual icon Abdallah Laraoui remembered how On Egyptian Culture was the major Arab cultural event of the 1950s. In Hussein’s original book, he laid the basis for what he foresaw to be the future Egyptian culture, a rich cosmopolitan culture that is liberal and open, enriched by its unique location and relations to Arabs, Islam, Europe, and the Mediterranean yet asserting that Egyptian thought is inherently Western. Regardless of what we may think today of the latter claim, Hussein was trying to build a bridge between Egypt and the scientific and rational European culture based on the conviction that ideas mattered for their own sake, not because of any struggle. Hussein’s battle with the new young intellectuals, mostly Marxist, had started a few years earlier on the pages of literary journals. In one article, Hussein described the new young writing as “cryptic and unreadable.” Other figures from Hussein’s generation accused the younger generation of being communists in need to be turned to the “nearest police station.” The 1955 book, On Egyptian Culture was an escalation. As one Arab Marxist intellectual enthusiastically later described it, “This was the battle of all new progressive poets and authors in all the Arab world.”

A later edition of On Egyptian Culture, published in 1988 in Morocco, was prefaced by an introduction from the master of “Islamic historical materialism,” Hussein Mwurwa. In the introduction, published 35 years after the original publication, Mwurwa offered an analysis of the culture war as the “inevitable eternal battle between the new and old, between a culture which reflects the opinions and thought… and interests of a class in the moment of the disappearance of its historical role, and between a culture projecting the opinions and thought… of a new group in the new society to move society to a new historical role.” He took the sides of al-Alem and his peer and repudiated Hussein and his generation. In the body of the book itself, it is promoting historical materialism while never openly confessing it. The repudiation of Hussein’s work can be summarized as “in literature, meaning is nothing but an instrument of materialism… meanings and words both are means and tools of that which is greater and nobler.” What is that “greater and nobler”? It is the expression of the events and movements which happen in the real world, the world of social relations organized around the means of production domestically and internationally. This was a sly way to offer a Marxist interpretation of literature as part of the superstructure and its real meanings to be found in the base and the social relations of the economic structure. They called for the abandonment of the literature of the past and producing realist literature, which meant literature conscious of the struggles of the masses. Afterwards, realist literature became the official form of all literature produced by nearly all Arab authors for decades. It was originally formed by Joseph Stalin and Maxim Gorky and adopted by the Congress of Soviet Writers under the name “Socialist Realism,” and its doctrine was that the author must provide a party-minded truthful historic-concrete portrayal of reality in its revolutionary development, taking into account the education of the workers into socialism, in other words, literature of indoctrination. In the literature of Socialist Realism, the job of the author is to translate social facts into literary ones, and the job of the critic is to decode them back into reality. Al-Alem went on to have a prominent career in the Middle East, running Egypt’s largest state-owned news agency, Akhbar al-Youm, for decades.

The same year in Lebanon, Suhayl Idris’s al-Adab organized a public debate in the Islamic Legal College between Hussein and the Marxist intellectual Raif Khoury titled, For Whom Does the Author Write? The exchange was then published and distributed by al-Adab. Khoury, by then much more prominent than when he wrote his Jihad in Palestine booklet in 1936, had the first word, which turned out basically to be an attack. He attacked the view that the vocation of the author is to write only for the elites, implicitly accusing Hussein of being a bourgeois intellectual. He argued that the man of culture must be committed and must write for the masses to create “the will which demands freedom and independence to the fatherland or social justice to citizens and crushing of imperialism in any form.” He attacked those who treat literature as mere consolation and mystification. Hussein was stunned. He was not prepared for this. He responded with the following, “I have to tell you the truth before I engage with you, I never committed to defending writing to the elites or to the public, and I did not commit to a certain topic. All I know is that I received a kind invitation from the Islamic Legal College passed to me by Suhayl Idris… This debate, this battle, or this fight is artificially provoked, and I do not know where it came from… I write literature for whoever reads literature.” Hussein, with a visibly upset and baffled tone, respectfully continued talking about literature without truly responding to Khoury’s attack. At one point, he added, “I don’t know if I responded to Mr. Khoury. I think I didn’t engage at all for the simple reason that I never believed in this debate.” The debate ended, and Hussein went back to Egypt, probably recognizing this is no longer the world he once knew.

The debate was a great success in the Arab literary community, generating more debate and stimulating conversations about this new idea of literary commitments, the public role of the intellectual, and realist literature. Following the buzz, Khoury published an article to advocate for his position further titled, Guidance and Literature. In the article, he asserted, “there is no value to the man of letters but through being both guided and guiding, helping people to develop consciousness seeking freedom and defeating Imperialism.” Khoury was practically describing the Marxist role of the critical intellectual who is tasked with the mission of harvesting revolutionary consciousness. In an article praising Maxim Gorky’s Realism, Khoury wrote, “Gorky spilled his own blood in the drops of ink with which he painted his eternal literary heritage. Each drop of this ink is today bright as fire burning the hearts of all humanity with the love of liberty and light.” At that point, the writings of Khoury and other radical intellectuals were the fuel of al-Adab’s success.

The moral assassinations of liberal figures such as Taha Hussein was legitimated within a larger self-conception narrative of kulturkampf that expressed the revolutionary class struggle of Arab societies. In a 1955 long essay providing such a narrative, an anonymous author explained that, “at the turn of the 20th century… a new class of foreign merchants arrived in Egypt after they had been expelled by their own societies due to their selfish philosophy and narrow self-interest… they were talented merchants looking for opportunity for profit.” Those selfish and individualistic “foreign merchants,” according to the article, are the ones who established the first Arab modern cultural, educational and intellectual institutions. For them, culture was merely a privileged commodity sold to wealthy Arab families who monopolized culture as accessories of capitalism. Soon, the new culture escaped its hut and portrayed a “beautiful hope for a beautiful future,” for the toiling masses. But cultural institutions remain “in the bosom of classes that exploited the land,” and thus they produced a selfish class seeking to apply the philosophy it had learned, that of irresponsible exploitation and selfish interest. Protected by imperialism, feudalism, and the corrupt monarchy, this priviliged cultural elite, like Hussein and the institutions with which he was associated, monopolized the culture. They deprived the masses from the consciousness they needed and used their superior cultural “technical skills” in cultural production to deceive people and protect their commercial interest. Therefore, Arabs need a popular cultural revolution to fulfill their hopes. Without using any Marxist jargon, this narrative effectively provided the revolutionary ideological appropriation for the pre-revolutionary history of Arab society in the period known as the Nahda, or the Arab cultural renaissance, in effect turning it as a prologue to the revolution and legitimating the cultural elimination of Arab liberal bourgeois culture.

In Iraq, al-Wardi and others succeeded in dominating Iraqi intellectual life, creating what seemed to be the most fertile ground for radical nationalism, communism, and widespread atheism. The first serious attempt to intellectually challenge such conditions was made by a young Shia clergyman by the name of Mohammad Baqir al-Sadr (1935-1980), later acquired the rank of an Ayatollah and who rose to prominence in Iraqi Shia politics and formed one of the main antagonists of the Iraqi Ba’ath until he was executed by Saddam Hussein in 1980. In 1958 and 1960, al-Sadr published two large volumes titled Our Philosophy and Our Economy, in which he attempted to provide a systematic modern critique of modern, mostly Marxist, thought and construct an Islamic philosophical and political alternative. In Our Philosophy, after al-Sadr attempted to invalidate empiricism in favor of rationalism, he spent the main body of his work critiquing Marxist dialectical reasoning in favor of a renewed Aristotlean formal logic. More importantly, Our Economy, twice the size of the former volume, was nearly equally split between a systematic critique of Marxism and the attempt to construct a theory of Islamic economics which more or less resembeled the idea of a European social democratic state with both legal protections for private property and massive programs of government economic planning.

The non-traditional nature of Ayatollah Al-Sadr’s work can not be overstated. As a matter of fact, close readings of the texts reveal that his primary claims were sociological and historical, which is perfectly logical, given the fact that his work was aimed at discrediting the sociological works of intellectuals such as Ali al-Wardi, Ba’athism, and communism. As a matter of fact, in his 1000-page volume of Our Economy, al-Sadr didn’t spend more than 40 pages on dismissing capitalism while dedicating the bulk of his work to critique Marxism and leftwing political economy. His primary method of theoretical assessment was “to accurately observe the objective conditions of the nation and its psychological and historical composition because it is the nation that is in the medium that theories are applied. Thus, it is necessary to carefully study the medium of application, its features, and conditions in order to discover the possible efficacy of such theories when applied. The efficacy of free market capitalism and socialist planned economy in the experience of the European man does not necessarily mean that such efficacy was a pure outcome of theory to be repeated whenever the theories are applied in any medium. But, the efficacy is an outcome of the theory only as a part of a cohesive whole and a chain of history.”

The modern epistemology underlying al-Sadr’s historicism of “the whole” and his appeal to sociological claims reveal a remarkable extent to which even traditional Islamic intellectuals, scholars, and clergymen were now irreversibly beyond traditionalism. Their attempt to compete with the radical ideologies of the day naturally led their own thought to imitate that which they opposed. Wardi’s 1952 influential Preachers had so thoroughly refuted notions of autonomous morality and virtue in favor of economic determinism that an Islamic traditional response which would have appealed to religious ideas of truth and virtue would have been self-defeating. Al-Sadr’s primary success, and which propelled him to his iconic status, was exactly his ability to argue for the tradition without the resort to tradition but from within the categories of modern thought, a process which does not leave the content of religious thought unaltered. However, the works of Ayatollah Al-Sadr must have seemed peripheral to the official Arab cultural and political establishment when they first appeared in a climate dominated by a hegemonic Arab socialist culture. Still, as events progressed in Arab societies and as Arabism and Marxism started to crack, al-Sadr and his idea rose to prominence, making him the leading Shia anti-Ba’athist figure in the two Shia populations in the Levant, Iraq, and Lebanon, and one of the ideological founders of Arab political Shiism. After his excution by Saddam Hussein, his various works on Islamic economics and Islamic banking were appropriated by the Islamic Republic of Iran and republished in various languages by the Iranian Ministry of Economy and Finance.

Meanwhile, leftist intellectuals such as al-Wardi and Mahmoud Amin al-Alem didn’t just target bourgeois morality, whether traditional or liberal, but targeted any rival of historical materialism. In the mid-50s, al-Alem also engaged in a defamation campaign against the interest of some Arab intellectuals in Freudian psychoanalysis. In a series of articles carrying the title History is not Made in the Bedroom, al-Alem polemicized against both Sigmund Freud and American sociologist Philip Reiff for their psychoanalytic approach to social institutions. He insisted that “this is not about sex as much as it is about the interpretive methodology of human psychological life… Sex, marriage, passions, emotions, and latent tendencies are not the decisive factor in social change.” He recognized that humans “are indeed born in the bedrooms, but their history… is never determined there.” Al-Alem’s writings were so effective that at one time he even forced Nasser to correct a previous speech in which he had praised the idea of an open society. Following the speech Alem wrote an article strongly attacking Karl Popper and his open society concept after which Nasser corrected, “I meant the revolutionary open society.”

When it came to the historical materialist treatment of Islamic history, Wardi proved to be the founder of a modern Arab historical tradition, and what he started didn’t end with him but rapidly expanded and became the standard reading of the Islamic tradition and Islamic history by committed Arab intellectuals producing new readings of classical Islam based on class analysis. In the 1950s, Egyptian intellectual Ahmed Abbas Saleh wrote the book The Right and The Left in Islam, in which he provided a new reading of Islamic history showing a nucleus of revolutionary socialist thought always combating a nucleus of reactionary thought. Events from Islamic history were then redescribed as earlier revolutions. Iraqi intellectuals were especially apt at rewriting early Umayyad and Abbasid history as a history of revolutions and reactions. All scholars and men of letters were becoming critical intellectuals. All those men and few women who are producing songs, films, novels, plays, essays, op-eds, books, textbooks for the school system, and even including religious content were committed to an Arab mass culture educating the masses in a consciousness of struggle against Imperialism, Zionism, and reactionary forces. The triumph of the Arab masses, led by Nasser, was a historical inevitability, and thus the final word had to be always triumphalist and generated a new radical culture of commitment. Even writers who came from traditionalist religious backgrounds, such as Suhayl Idris, the owner of what was then becoming the most important publishing house in Lebanon, wrote articles insisting an author must be a man of the vanguard, a committed author constantly in battle. He explained in a more crude way, “today, the Arab writer cannot but put his pen in the fountain of the blood of martyrs and heroes…so when he may lift his pen, it drips with the meaning of revolution against imperialism.” In a very short time, literary social realism became the enforced paradigm of all Arab cultural production which was primarily ideological production. According to Arab intellectual Abdallah Laraoui, "two-thirds or three-quarters of our ideological critiques appeared for us [Arabs] as literary criticism. It used novels, stories, and plays to promote political and social ideas."

Suhayl Idris (1925-2008) was born in Lebanon to a religious Sunni family; he proceeded to obtain classical Islamic education in religious law in Beirut. After graduation, Idris turned secular, obtained a Ph.D. from the French Sorbonne in literature in 1953, and returned to Lebanon to establish al-Adab, the leading Arabic literary periodical and publishing house of the time, and which translated the works of Sartre, Camus, Isaac Deutscher, Rosa Luxemburg, Gramsci, Marx, and others. Idris’s literary style was the furthest possible from the traditional background he came from. After his return from Paris, he published his first novel, The Latin Quarter, in 1953. The novel was of a semi-autobiographical nature about the unchaste life of an Arab student in Paris. In the novel, the protagonist, obsessed with Sartre and women, spends his time reading or pretending to read while looking at beautiful Parisian girls. He then had an affair with a fair young lady, whom he later accuses of impurity due to her sexual conduct, and ends the affair. Madly in love with him, she pursued him but finally realized that he is much purer than her leaving him the note, “no, I won’t follow you… if I accompany you, you will drag me behind you, and I will obstruct your ambition. I will be at the bottom and you at the top. Go forward, my love, and don’t look back!” Symbolizing Arab-Western relations in sexual terms of masculine domination and feminine submission, dehumanizing to East and West and men and women, became a main theme of committed Arab literature from that period and until today. In Saleh’s Season of Migration to the North, a novel taught in most postcolonial studies courses around the world, the Arab protagonist went to bed with European women in the language of war armed with “spears” and “swords” and riding them like one rides a “Prussian military hymn.” In Idris’s fiction, the pure masculine Arab hero ends up leaving the corrupt European woman and heading back home in triumph over the impure French whore, a transparent metaphor for national liberation.

When not writing about his sexual escapades in Paris, real or fictitious, Idris was constantly writing emotionally charged political commentary. In his writings, a man who started his life on the path of becoming an Islamic scholar, there is nothing but radical irreligion, radical Arabness, radical anti-Zionism, radical anti-imperialism, and triumphalism. Objecting to The anti-Soviet anti-Nasser Baghdad Pact, in 1958, he wrote, “we Arab Nationalists are objecting to the policies of Turkey, Iraq, Iran, and Pakistan despite being Muslim countries… if Islam indeed supported imperialism, we would have fought against Islam!” Those who don’t support Nasser are “infidels against the people.” Idris used Islamic terms, but only to construct propagandistic texts glorifying blood, revolution, war, violence, hatred, and eternal Arab history. His view of the world is totally Manichean. One is either “reactionary, isolationist, pro-Western,” or “progressive and marching towards the struggle against tyranny and despotism, receptive of the motion of history.”

Poetry

Arabic poetry, too, started popularizing the new ideology. In 1956, as all Arabs were eagerly watching the confrontation between the progressive camp of Nasser and the Western powers and their Baghdad Pact, iconic Iraqi poet Mohammad Mahdi al-Jawahiri incensed the crowds at a concert in Syria with his poem,

I left the fog of defeat behind me,
And I came to harvest the fire of the martyrs.

Observers commented that once Jawahiri uttered those lines, the crowds, who were getting ready to leave for the Ramadan Iftar, froze and were mesmerized for the rest of the evening without leaving to break their fast. al-Jawahiri continued,

Stop! This is not a funeral or mourning,
Should the wedding of manhood be grieved?
Stop here for the rhymes we have collected,
From glory to glory, from alpha to omega.
I have faith in blood,
For I have been soaked in blood all my days.
The myth of the [Baghdad] “Pact” shall be erased,
By the same hands of history that once erased the myth of the “Allies.”

Jawahiri (1899-1997) was born into a scholarly family in Najaf, Iraq. His father prepared him from an early age to the Najaf seminary to receive a traditional education and become a member of the Shia clergy. After following up on his traditional education, Jawahiri became a communist at an early age and started writings poetry of struggle and distributing revolutionary pamphlets. His unmatched poetry and his political commitment made him an icon of 20th-century Arabic poetry. He supported The Nazi-packed Kilani coup of 1941, after which he escaped to Iran only to return to Iraq later. As the tide of the war was turning, Jawahiri started writings poetry supporting the Soviets and Stalin,

Oh, Stalin! What great letters,
those of your name.
Letters with which the world seeks,
liberation, prosperity, and fraternity.

In 1956, he was invited by the command of the Syrian army to stay in Damascus, which he did, and remained so for the rest of his life and became close to Syria’s future president Hafiz al-Assad for whom he dedicated the poem, Damascus, The Front of Glory, saying,

Oh, Hafiz, you preserver of the covenant, commander of legions,
You run to the rings of glory before anyone.
You don’t move when the grounds shake under your feet,
And you don’t slip when the world tries you.

Among the young Arab talents introduced by Idris’s Al-Adab and who was destined to become a landmark of modern Arab culture was the young Syrian poet Ali Ahmed Sa’id, known by his pen name Adonis. He chose this pen name, a name of ancient pagan god, to assert his pre-Islamic neopagan ambitions, which is understandable given his long standing relationship with Sa’adeh’s paganistic SSNP. Adonis was an enthusiastic fan of Martin Heidegger, and in his poetry, he transposed Heidegger’s Manichean existential terminology to describe the East, the place of the latent, the concealed, and the hidden being, and the silent, and the opposing West as the radical other of the manifest, the exposed, the matter. This method wrapped his works with mystified gnosis that extended to land, soil, blood, and nature. He led one the most ambitious literary project to modernize Arabic poetry which for him meant completely discarding Arabic styles and structures and adopting European ones to bring Arabic poetry to the standards of aesthetic universalism.

The other poet who ended up being the unquestionable icon of 20th-century Arabic poetry was the Syrian Nizar Qabbani (1923-1998), whose poetry dominated Arab popular culture more than anyone. Qabbani was born to a merchant family in Damascus who invested in his education and future. He became a Syrian diplomat and served in many Syrian embassies in Europe until he resigned to dedicate all his life to poetry. Qabbani is known for two things, his erotic poetry, which significantly pushed the boundaries of love expressions, and his committed political poetry, which was a potent pan-Arab force. His 1948 erotic Story of a Bosom was daring enough that it immediately gained his name recognition. His 1955 poem Rachel Schwasenburg was the beginning of a long career of influential political poetry. It began with the opening,

I write this to children,
To Arab children wherever they were…
I write to them briefly,
The story of a terrorist soldier,
Called Rachel.
She was a prisoner during the war,
In a German concentration camp in Prague.
Her father was one of the filthiest Jews.
He forged money
And she ran a brothel in Prague,
For the German soldiers…
Then she traveled from East Europe,
In the morning,
On a ship cursed by the winds,
Heading to the South.
It was filled with rats, the plague, and Jews.
They were made of the rubbish of nations.
From Poland, From Austria…
They came to our tiny home,
Filthed our land.
Killed our women,
And orphaned our children…
Let the children remember…
A woman called Rachel,
She took the place of my murdered mother.

The rest of the poem was not any different in its intensity or language, calling at the end for a final battle to uproot the Jews. The celebratory reception for his poem established him as the icon of pan-Arab poetry. His poems articulated every major historical event until the 20th century and articulated the populist sentiments of Arab masses. He was particularly harsh on Gulf Arabs, the so-called reactionary stooges of imperialism, authoring many poems dedicated to their humiliation as Jerusalem-betraying fat men who only care about their lust for the breasts of women and for whom oil is to be ejected like semen. One such poem, authored in 1958, said,

When do you understand?
Sir, when do you understand?
I’m not like your other girlfriends,
Or another sexual conquest.
And not a number in one of your bank accounts.
When do you understand?
Oh, you unrestrained camel of the desert.
You whose face and hands are being devoured by smallpox…
You with barren feet…you who are a slave of your impulses,
When, oh you fat,
When do you understand?
Oh wallow, oh you prince of oil,
In the mud of your lusts…
You sold Jerusalem.
You sold God.
You sold your dead…
Israel’s spears aborted your sisters
Jerusalem swimming in its blood, and you are captive to your lusts.

This kind of incitement language against both Jews and non-progressive Gulf Arabs was thoroughly welcomed and encouraged by the progressive regimes that often broadcasted them through their radio stations. Qabbani’s brand of incendiary, uncensored, and seditious poetry earned him a massive readership. His eloquence, combined with inflammatory politics and erotic motifs, ensured the wide success.

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