Arabs After Defeat: Revolution Inside the Revolution
The story of Arab intellectuals after the Six Day War
In the immediate aftermath of the Arab defeat by Israel in 1967, there were clear indicators of a significant shift, marking the end of one era and the onset of another. The radio broadcasts from Cairo, which had previously been politically oriented, began airing more Quranic recitations and replaced political programming with religious sermons. This change reflected a broader sense of disorientation on the Arab streets. The public had been conditioned to expect an assured victory over what was perceived as the malevolent forces of imperialism and Zionism. This belief was deeply ingrained, having been reinforced over years through a constant stream of publications, newspapers, movies, radio programs, songs, and speeches, all of which had promised that triumph was historically inevitable.
An Arab intellectual from that time captured the prevailing sentiment, stating, “I’m not exaggerating when I say not a single Arab from the leadership on top or from the masses in the base expected anything but triumph.” This statement underscores the profound shock and bewilderment that pervaded the Arab world. The question that loomed large was how Israel, seen as a "stooge of Imperialism," could have decisively defeated the Arab armies in a mere six days. The events of 1967 represented a pivotal moment, prompting introspection and reevaluation across the Arab world regarding its political and military strategies, ideologies, and expectations.
This was the beginning aftershock of the devastating defeat handed to the self-aggrandized armies of the “Arab Mighty One,” led by Nasser in only six short days. Almost all literature, academic or otherwise, blamed the later rise of Islamism and Jihadism on this defeat and the discrediting of ideology in the region. The masses were in intolerable pain, and they needed their sedative.
There were many aspects of the 1967 war, domestic politics, regional politics, and the Cold War. The war was immediately followed by a wave of instability in the Levant, a civil war in Jordan, Syrian political drama of coups and counter-coups, the tremors of civil war in Lebanon, and significant political changes in Iraq. The civil war between the Jordanians and the Palestinians ended with exporting it to Lebanon along with the Palestinians. Syria had to wait for the iron fist of Hafez Assad and his Ba’ath Party to finally see stability. The Iraqi Ba’ath, a rival of the Syrian branch, came to power in a bloodless coup and ultimately gave rise to Saddam Hussein. The Arabs who wanted unity the most were the most disunited.
By the time the Six-Day War broke out, Arab culture and language in the modern republics were already thoroughly transformed. They formed one giant body of absolute leftist cultural hegemony that subordinated everything else to itself. A Hegelian philosophy of History was now unwittingly the structure of thought passed down in textbooks, history books, movies, sermons, TV shows, etc., and almost no one remembered what existed before it and if there was even a before it at all. The triumphalism was passed down to the mass culture by intellectuals who trusted their own theories of historical inevitabilities, trusted the prophecies of the French Left, and trusted the propaganda of the USSR were the main reason for the devastating shock, leading to the fragmentation of the cultural hegemony. Before the war, everyone was walking in the caravan and singing the tune from the top of their throats. At the forefront were the intellectuals and the radical high culture, but suddenly, everyone was panicking. As it happened after the first Revolution, the first people to pay were Jews. The small Jewish community that remained from the previous period, either impoverished families who couldn’t leave Egypt or were too communist to abandon the Revolution, was the first to pay an immediate price and be liquidated. Almost all Jewish males were arrested, paraded in Cairo as Israeli war prisoners, put in what is practically a concentration camp, and then released months later with one ticket out of the country.
The seeds of dissent against Nasser’s brand of Arab Nationalism were sown well before the pivotal year of 1967. This was evident in several incidents, such as his conflict with Sayyed Qutb, the fallout with Syria, clashes with intellectuals, and interactions with Tunisian President Bourguiba. Contrary to his image as a harbinger of Arab unity, Nasser's actions often resulted in greater disunity and division. The 1967 defeat only intensified and radicalized sentiments that had been gradually building since 1961. Young Arab intellectuals were beginning to question Nasser’s ability to bring about the anticipated revolutionary change.
Signs of this growing skepticism were apparent months before the war. For instance, Abdallah Laraoui, a young Moroccan intellectual, published a sharp critique of Arab progressive ideology just five months before the conflict. A significant early setback for Nasser and his ideology was the dissolution of the United Arab Republic, a short-lived union with Syria. Nasser’s regime was marked by its imprisonments of vocal communists and Muslim Brotherhood members. This climate of disillusionment is vividly portrayed in Tayeb Salih’s 1966 novel Season of Migration to the North. The protagonist, an Arab professor of political economy in London, whose sexual escapades with European women are metaphorically likened to "riding a Prussian military hymn," finds himself not in the North but imprisoned and eventually back in Sudan, not Cairo, his original gateway to the North. He comes to a realization that he, like many others, is merely a "self-made lie," living a life of self-deceptive farce, striving to embody a falsehood of his own creation. The novel concludes with a striking scene: the narrator, uncertain whether he is drowning or swimming in the Nile while attempting to follow the current to the North, cries out for help regardless. This ending poignantly captures the broader sense of uncertainty and existential crisis that permeated the Arab intellectual landscape during the period.
In 1966, another remarkable literary work emerged, free from the neurotic sexual undercurrents in Salih’s novel, Naguib Mahfouz’s Adrift on the Nile. This novel centers around a group of friends who meet daily to indulge in hashish. Despite their outwardly successful lives, they are internally corrupt and devoid of purpose or meaning. Their habitual use of hashish serves as an escape from a reality brimming with sexual and material vibrancy but lacking in spirituality and morality. It is an image of an utterly demoralized society that no longer believes in inhibitions or aspirations and falls for the first temptations. This narrative reflected Mahfouz’s own evolving skepticism, a move away from the oppressive, dominant culture of literary commitment, seeking instead a renewed sense of meaning — a theme that had previously been a point of criticism against Taha Hussein, by the new leftist cultural establishment.
This skepticism had begun to manifest earlier in Mahfouz’s works, notably in his 1964 novel The Way. Mahfouz’s acclaimed Cairo Trilogy, penned between 1956 and 1957, portrayed the dissolution of a traditional family following the death of the patriarch, with the ensuing generations gravitating towards Marxism, high culture, or hedonism. In The Way, the story revolves around a protagonist searching for his lost father, whom he never met and only learned of through his dying mother's confession of infidelity. His journey is complicated by an affair with a beautiful married woman who persuades him to murder her husband. After the crime, he ends up in prison, never finishing his journey.
Both Salih’s and Mahfouz’s works of 1966, published months before the catastrophic Arab defeat, reflect a deep skepticism about the revolutionary path, though for differing reasons. Salih questioned whether the revolution truly led 'North,' suggesting instead it sent people back, humiliated and demoralized, to their origins. Mahfouz, on the other hand, depicted the Revolution as a form of seduction. These narratives, rich in their exploration of personal and societal disillusionment, predated and perhaps presaged the profound impact of the 1967 defeat on the collective Arab psyche.
The 1967 war was so large and dominating in its effects on the geopolitical map, emotional response, and the Middle East's subsequent cultural revolution that it hid many other important factors behind it and obfuscated a larger picture. This is an international story of a world only increasing its rate of globalization, connectivity, and the flow of culture. Just like the previous stage of Arab revolutionary activity was part of a larger world movement, so were the following stages. In 1967, Western universities and societies were also on the cusp of a cultural revolution in a different direction, but they just didn’t know it yet. The rise of Palestinian radicalism and the New Arab Left coincided with the rise of a new cultural radicalism and a New Left internationally. In his 1954 Philosophy of the Revolution, Nasser spoke of a script that everyone already knew and a Leninist role that was already written for the man who was going to lead the Revolution against Imperialism. His script was not local but originated in an international cultural community. Everyone knew the script, not just in Egypt or the Middle East, but quite literally everywhere where there was a modern university, a progressive script that was inherently dynamic and ever-evolving.
In the West, radical students, with no clear cause for radicalism, suddenly announced a “Revolution for the hell of it,” as radical activist Abbie Hoffman did in the United States. Some did have a cause, like the radical Black Power groups in the US, of which the most famous is the Black Panther Party, a Marxist-Leninist group with a record in violent acts of terrorism. The founders, Bobby Seale and Huey Newton, were inspired to establish the Panthers after they had read Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth in 1966. The Bay Area Panthers took notes from Algerian guerilla operations portrayed in the film Battle of Algiers. American radicals started hijacking airplanes and flying them to Cuba to join Fidel Castro. Young white, affluent Americans established radical leftist organizations, such as The Weatherman Underground, engaging in domestic acts of terrorism. It was almost leftist ideology in reverse, with college students from middle-class backgrounds beating working-class cops and calling them fascist pigs. Romantic revolutionary figure Che Guevara had just died and turned into a saintly figure, gracing posters, book covers, and various merchandise. It was in 1968 that activists like Angela Davis and intellectuals like Herbert Marcuse became known as they are today. Never before 1968 had Marx, Engles, Lukács, Trotsky, Gramsci, and Lenin been so widely known among American college students and academics.
These student movements were a result of the mass intellectual conversion of European intellectuals to Marxism, or what came to be known as Western Marxism as distinct from Soviet and Third Worldist ones, following 1945 and establishing a tight Marxist hegemony over cultural institutions for two decades. In France, a country with a strong communist base, it nearly missed a revolution as Paris students were unceasingly protesting and put the entire country on halt. When French President de Gaulle inquired about the reason the students were protesting and was told it was because they did not want sex-segregated dormitories, the myth has it that he looked confused and responded, “Can’t they just meet in the cafeteria?” In 1968, the intellectual movements of the old French left seemed to suddenly die and leave the stage for new young post-structuralists, deconstructionists, post-Marxists, and cool post-modern philosophers hip enough for glossy magazine covers. It was the age of the post-everything. It was in the 1968 protests that the founders of German, Italian, and other Marxist terrorist groups met each other. England, Italy, Germany, Greece, Turkey, communist Czechoslovakia, and even Iran saw a wave of unprecedented student protests followed by a wave of Marxist violence all over Europe and the world, lasting until the end of the 1970s. It was in 1968 that Palestine first entered the list of the cause celebres of left-wing internationalism and that Yasir Arafat became a heroic, romantic figure. It was in 1968 that Arafat himself took control of the PLO after ousting the leadership of the Arab old left and established a joint Palestinian command for the guerrilla operation against Israel for the first time. Even in Israel, a few years later but better than never, a Black Panther group out of Mizrahi activists formed and copied the American brand. Students all over the world drew inspiration from each other and copied tactics, slogans, ideas, style, and a personality of rebellion. In 1968, the Beatles sang, “You say you want a revolution… Well, you know, we all want to change the world… But when you talk about destruction, don't you know that you can count me out.” Across the Atlantic, Jefferson Airplane responded, “Look what's happening out in the streets. Got a revolution, got to revolution! One generation got old. One generation got soul. This generation got no dissertation to hold. Pick up the cry!” I wonder if young Arafat was humming this while taking over the institutions of the PLO.
The student protests and the cultural revolution of 1968 didn’t just change our sense of style, mannerisms, and taste but had a profound effect on all our institutions, from the Republican and Democratic parties that started to get farther from each other to higher learning institutions, and down to the family. It was indeed a revolution, just not of the Leninist kind. Few people actually remember that before 1968, the Ivy League universities were bastions of American conservative thought. Drugs were a taboo before 1968, but suddenly, it seemed that everyone was not just toking up but dropping in. Christianity was out, and the psychedelics of Timothy Leary and the Hindu mysticism of Ramdass were in. The sexual revolution, probably the most consequential effect of it all, wholly transformed private and public morality and turned the table on the so-called “sex fascists,” putting them on the defensive. A new decade opened with young Westerners leaving their social settings and looking for the way to the new man and the new society of enlightenment. Centers for new forms of psychotherapy mixed with Indian spirituality and ascetic practices opened and offered cathartic sessions and “enlightenment intensives.” More “square” people who couldn’t do psychedelics and be publicly nude fled to things like est, a “Human Potential” movement seeking to unlock the new epoch in you. Indian gurus found blonde followers and opened commune franchises to accommodate the rising demand for the unification of the Western materialist man and the Eastern spiritual man into a whole new man. And although many of the students' protests didn’t seem to alter political systems immediately, and although the communes faded away, in the aggregate, they were part of a world transformation that heralded the age of a new international religion of environmentalism, unrestrained personal freedoms, and a religion of progressive humanism.
1968 was downstream from the intellectual developments that followed Marx, Lenin, and other intellectuals, and it was both an end and a beginning, a point situated within a larger developmental story in which Marxism decomposed into the world’s culture and merged with most all other forms of thought but led to different forms, shapes, and orientations that often are no longer identifiable. More importantly, the revolutionary wave indeed had its most lasting influence on culture, but it existed in violent forms in all Western societies. In the West, the Marxism that worked was not that of Marx, who spent years studying English political economy, but an alternative Marx, who studied psychoanalysis. In the Middle East, it would be Marx who studied the Quran and the Islamic tradition. One Marx was out to release sexual vitalities and the other violent ones. By this period, we were already far away from historical materialism, which dissolved into various elements and was not a totalitarian materialist system anymore but new forms of idealism reverting back from materialism. Those who insisted on maintaining Marxist orthodoxy gradually shrunk until they became a form of endearing antiquarians. In America, the idea of the Revolution was assimilated into that of order, and together, they formed an idea of progress that was basically an orderly revolution. The drastically different conditions of the American working class helped in transforming the salvific class from being the proletariat to being women, gays, immigrants, minority groups, and so on.
I’m not sure where the chicken is and where the egg is, but I know for a fact that we have a whole chicken coop, and all the chickens are on a riot. There was a global rebellion against all forms of authority: political, scientific, patriarchal, familial, moral, and social. The rise of the culture of Palestinian radicalism was not merely a Middle Eastern event but an international one, both in terms of effects and causes. It inserted into the modern Middle East the culture of social movements, armed struggle, terrorism, plane hijacking, guerrilla operations, redeeming violence, and martyrdom, and after merging with Islamic doctrines, became the blueprint for Islamic resistance groups and Jihadists all the way to Al-Qaeda and ISIS. Its rise took place within a significant Arab intellectual war that led to the collapse of large segments of both Arab and Muslim identity structures into the symbols of Palestine and Jerusalem, leading to ever-inflating antisemitism, anti-Westernism, and rage and what seemed like an irredeemable end to one of the world’s largest religions. Trying to see the whole picture in and out is an imperative.
Fragmentation
In the years following 1967-1968, no longer able to demand conformity, modern Arab culture fragmented into three main currents, which served as an umbrella for all other sub-currents: the Old Left, the New Left, and the Islamic Left. The first reaction to the defeat was a sharper turn to the Left by a younger generation of intellectuals who didn’t grow up in the colonial Middle East but in the revolutionary one. They decided to leave all authority, including that of Arab Nationalism and of the Communist Parties, which for so long insisted, following Soviet instructions, on not subjecting their own societies to class analysis. However, this trend, as we stated earlier, had already been growing even before the war. Two months before the war broke out, an article written by a junior Ba’athist military officer in Syria incensed the pious public by openly calling for abandoning God. According to the article, the belief in God was nothing but a medieval capitalist feudalist obstacle, and the “New Socialist Arab Man” must leave those antique relics behind. Religion was just part of capitalism. To calm the public anger, the government temporarily arrested the officer but released him shortly after.
“We should not wonder we lost the war,
For we entered it,
With all the rhetoric that the Oriental man has,
With empty words that can’t kill a fly.” –Nizar Qabbani
An Arab intellectual once lamented, “The [1967] defeat came and destroyed all our hopes and our self-confidence. In a blink of an eye, all was lost.” This despair caused a deepening of hatred for Israel, which assassinated the dreams of unity and progress and supposedly exposed the inherent primitive nature of Arabs, their culture, and their religion. Just the mere mention of Israel became hysteria-inducing. One intellectual mused, “after the 1967 war and the Arab’s terrible defeat, I and my whole generation were struck with a state of despair that I do not think has ended. The defeat led me to avoid hearing anything that has to do with Israel obsessively.” In the popular imagination, the tiny state of Israel turned into a cosmic menace that was able to stop the wheel of history itself. But this state of despair immediately extended to a major movement of “self-criticism” and profound self-resentment. The best expression of the direction of the new Arab culture after 1967 was Suhayil Idris’s Al-Adab issue of July of the same year. In my opinion, it contained all the directions toward which Arab intellectual life was going to collapse in the decades after the war. The cover carried the title Our New Path in bold letters. The short introductory article to the issue carried the same title and was penned by Idris himself. He said, “Needless to say, the [Western] imperialist intervention is not the only cause for the Arab defeat….we fell short, and the path we took was not the best…the Arab man all over the land now believes we are in dire need of a new path…to realize and continue the civilizational role of his past…what is this path?.... This is what this special issue of Al-Adab is trying to answer…”
The issue carried many articles and poems, many of which will become landmarks of Arab culture. In an article carrying the title Our Battle is a Battle Between Two Civilizations, the author spoke of the war not at a regional level between definite and known political actors but as an epochal confrontation between two forces in humanity, that of capitalism and imperialism and that of the other represented by the Arab nation. It is a war of annihilation in which the West wants to “completely eradicate, from the roots, Arab Nationalism and the revolutionary energy manifest in the Arab masses…. They do this to prevent the Arab nation from awakening because they know, better than we do, that this awakening is not just a quest to end backwardness, or to realize the inevitable unity…but it is the emergence of a new civilization.” The author then presents Israel and Jews not as an autonomous existence but as a weapon crafted by a declining European power seeking to prevent Arab vitality. This confrontation then acquires an epochal universalist status not between the Arabs and others but between the West, with its Jewish instruments, and all of the Third World and their allies in the Eastern bloc.
The issue also included two articles attacking Sartre, including one written by Idris, who had signed a French intellectual statement supporting Israel. This was the end of the French intellectual's special relationship with Arab intellectuals. Sartre's position will become one of the most bitter memories of Arab intellectuals. Lebanese communist thinker Hussein Muruwwa contributed an article titled, Our Path to Changing the Arab Man in which he confronted the reality that Arabs have proven they could not achieve historical progress. (the reader must not lose sight that progress and modernity in Arab writings meant something philosophical that could self-validate historically by the Arab success of defeating and destroying Israel militarily.) Muruwwa then spends a few pages trying to reconstruct the nature of the battle and defeat. He then concluded that "the essence of the cause is the struggle between the forces of the Arab revolution for national liberation and the social and civilization progress against the forces of the counterrevolution…imperialism, Zionism, and [Arab] reaction." He ended his article by saying that through the struggle and the battle themselves, the Arab Man will be transformed into a new Man able to make history and achieve historical progress.
The neopagan poet Adonis also contributed to the issue, not a poem, but a long piece of poetic prose in which he lamented the causes of Arab failure. For Adonis, the causes were deep inside the hearts of man, or more accurately, only skin deep below the surface. Arabs “are living the catastrophic results of their impulsivity for the last fifty years in pursuing superficial change and not deep change.” Adonis claimed Arabs quickly copied Western civilization, whether in its technology or its theories, by remaining pre-modern from the inside. The Arab intellectual “builds progress theoretically, but practically lives traditionally. In ordinary times, he worships freedom vocally and is normally leftist in his thought, but in fateful times…he is a rightist in his manners and his life….he wants to make history while running from it. He wants to fight but is war averse… he is a communist and a bourgeois…. The Arab revolutionary loses reality for theory…he exercises his power over words, not reality. He changes the vowels of the words in a sentence and imagines he is changing the form of life.”
But the most iconic work in Our New Path, and the one familiar to most educated Arabs today, was the poem written by the superstar poet Nizar Qabbani. The long poem is almost prophetic in expressing the need to destroy the old and build the new, and it indeed greatly motivated a new generation of Arab intellectuals. Generally, in post-1967 Qabbani’s poetry, one can clearly discern the turn Arab cultural life took against itself. Qabbani’s poetry once specialized in mercilessly humiliating Jews and Gulf Arabs. After 1967, it still did so, but now it turned indiscriminately against all Arabs, humiliating them and attacking them with even greater scorn. Immediately after the war in 1967, he published his iconic poem, On the Margins of Defeat,
I mourn to you, my friends, the old language,
And the old books.
I mourn to you our words worn out like old shoes.
I mourn to you,
I mourn to you the end of thought that led us to defeat…
Oh, my sad fatherland,
You turned me in a moment
from a poet who wrote for love and affection
to a poet writing with a knife…
We should not wonder why we lost the war,
for we entered it
with all the rhetoric that the Oriental man has,
with empty words that can’t kill a fly.
Because we entered it with a drum and a lute.
The secret of our tragedy
is that our cries are bigger than our voices…
To summarize… in one sentence,
We wore the shell of civilization,
But our spirit is still barbarian…
The Jews didn’t come from the borders,
But they infiltrated like insects from our flaws.
The poem is long and continues in the most scathing form of self-denigration, denouncing Arab culture, Arab thought, Arab history, and the Arabs themselves. In the end, Qabbani called,
We want an angry generation.
We want a generation that opens the horizons,
We want a generation that renews thought from its roots
We want a different generation,
A generation that does not overlook mistakes… does not forgive,
Doesn't bow… doesn't know hypocrisy…
We want a pioneer generation… a giant.
Oh, children,
From the ocean to the Gulf, you are the hope.
You are the generation that will break the chains,
kill the “opium” in our heads,
And kill the delusion…
Do not read about our defeated generation,
For we are losers.
We are like the peel of watermelon, shallow.
We are empty…
Empty like shoes.
The tone, the self-humiliation, and the self-resentment in this poem foreshadow what is going to unfold in Arab intellectual life in the rest of the 20th century: an unmatched zeal for self-destruction driven by the false pathos of the failure to destroy Israel. This won’t be Qabbani’s last masochistic poem. Indeed, in his collected works, his scornful post-1967 poetry fills an entire volume out of eight.
In all this new direction of self-criticism, the soundness of the revolutionary theory, of progress, of the understanding of progress, the world, the self, or of Israel was never questioned. The Hegelian structure was the invisible God to which no one referred, and the Marxist theories were the religion everyone adhered to. What was questioned was the authenticity of the self and whether the Arabs had what it takes to realize the dialectical progress. Those intellectuals and men of letters did not really self-criticize. Still, they attacked, humiliated, and violated an imaginary Arab who is too primitive for theory, too Muslim to be an atheist, too traditional to be progressive, and too "Arabic" to be socially scientific. The core of their claims was that Arab progressivism and Marxism were only skin-deep, hiding behind them a pre-modern social and intellectual structure that couldn't handle real theory. (Many American and Jewish liberal scholars grinned with approval, revealing their profound ignorance of what Arab intellectuals meant.) The primary manifestation of this situation is agreed upon to be the rhetorical nature of Arab politics. This was expressed most aptly by Adonis's claim, "he [the Arab] exercises his power over words not reality. He changes the vowels of the words in a sentence and imagines he is changing the form of life," and by Qabbani's "all the rhetoric that the Oriental man has, with empty words that can't kill a fly." It is exactly this last point that will become the locus of Arab intellectual life for decades to come, seeking to analyze, expose, revolutionize, and utterly transform the inner Arab. But this seeming consensus could delude the reader into assuming its reality in nature or that it must have arisen from natural conditions. Again, the reader must maintain sight that what was meant by modernity and progress was concretely, exclusively, and specifically a Marxian understanding that rested on its ability to amass power to destroy Israel and achieve total liberation in a historical materialist sense. Unless the reader agrees with this meaning of being "modern," I implore them not to follow the thoughts of deranged intellectuals. Besides the expected disappointment from the failure of delusional theories, the source of this line of thought is an intellectual stream of inquiry that the intellectual Abdallah Laraoui specifically and concretely started five months before the war, to which we will shortly turn. This was part of a global rise of the New Left intellectuals displacing the older generations. In the Arab world, 1967, by sheer accident, served as a vehicle and a catalyzing factor in the rise of the Arab New Left.
The first two influential political thinkers to lead the sharper political turn to the Left were Lebanese German philosophy professor Sadik Jalal al-Azm, who, immediately after the war, published his seminal book Self-Critique After Defeat, and Syrian intellectual Yassine al-Hafez publishing Defeat and the Defeated Ideology. Those two books were some of the founding documents of the New Left in which they discarded Arab Nationalism altogether, accusing it of being of an inherent reactionary nature and seeking more refined scientific socialism. The importance of those two books was not just their intellectual significance in grappling with and rationalizing defeat but was also politically salient as they opened a path for a new kind of political activism oppositional to what had become then the Arab Nationalist establishment. Only Hafez was a known intellectual prior to 1967, and together, these books hit a very fresh wound and found a receptive audience of young intellectuals who were done with big father figures. The two Levant books were published by a new Lebanese publishing house, al-Tali’a, the Vanguard, which was recently established and replaced Idris’s al-Adab as the new hub of vigorous intellectual activity. Lebanese Leftist intellectual Abbas Beydoun described it as “played a role in our formation. It is the godfather of our cultural youth.” Al-Tali’a was established by Bashir al-Da’ouq, a young Lebanese leftist entrepreneur who received his BA in the United States and Ph.D. in the London School of Economics and was married to the famous feminist writer Ghada al-Saman who, similarly to Ba’albaki, wrote books subtly engaging erotic imaginations. All those figures were originally Ba’athists and SSNP, but now they were leading a young exodus from the ranks of the Ba’ath, effectively taking with them the youngest, most intelligent, and most dynamic intellectuals.
Unlike Idris’s al-Adab, al-Tali’a focused less on sentimental propaganda and would ratchet up the conversation multiple notches upwards to analytical and critical writings. Already in Self-Critique and the Defeated Ideology, the tone was sharply polemical against what now suddenly became the institutions of an old corrupt left, earning the books an official ban in multiple countries and making the newly established authors opposition figures. This was no existentialist fad of a counter-culture; the revolutionary wave this time was made of serious Marxist critiques of Arab Nationalism, Nasserism, and Ba’athism. According to the new intellectuals, those ideologies were nothing but right-wing reactionary capitalism in disguise, or at best, reformist, not fulfilling the Revolution but, as a matter of fact, blocking it. They called for the establishment to be exited and new forces to be built. Azm called for “the emergence of new revolutionary forces which are ultimately committed to the fulfillment of the [aspirations] of the absolute majority of the Arab masses…shouldering the responsibility of transforming the Palestinian [guerilla] action into a real populist and comprehensive liberation war.” This was not a self-critique; this was a doubling down on all the pillars of revolutionary thought and ideology and enforcing Palestine as the single battlefield in which the Revolution and the dark forces must confront each other.
Hafez’s Defeated Ideology was the beginning of what was later called the thorough “Arabization of Marxism” in its pure form. The 1967 defeat was so shocking to him that he contemplated suicide and was prevented only by his concern for his wife and children. In the introduction, he attacked all pitiful attempts by the old left intellectuals to rationalize the defeat, claiming “the [Israeli] aggression failed because it wasn’t able to destroy the Arab progressive regimes” or that it “opened the door for the total liberation of Palestine” He accused the Arab intelligentsia of not being able but to either circle the wagon or fall into a revolutionary delirium. He then turned to critique Arab Marxists, whom he blamed for failing to leave the conformity of Soviet Marxism in allying itself with Arab Nationalism and dissolving themselves in Nasserism. After such a blazing introduction in which he cleared the way from intellectual junk, he proceeded to analyze the defeat, starting by asserting the need to modify the position of Zionism. Arabs henceforth thought that Zionism was nothing but a minor ploy at the hands of Western Imperialism, but the truth is, claimed Hafez, that Zionism is much “larger and more violent from the challenge of imperialism.” In later editions of the book, Hafez reframed the Arab loss in 1967 not as a lost war but as “an absolute and total defeat. And that the attempts to start a third Arab Renaissance were crushed and liquidated because of it.” He ultimately identified the cause of all disasters as Arab irrationality and called for applying “Western rationalism in its deepest and highest form, Marxist-Leninism.” More significant was the pivotal Contemporary Arab Ideology, written in 1967 by a young Moroccan intellectual by the name of Abdallah Laroui, who became one of the most iconic intellectual figures in the Arab world.
“We want a generation that renews thought from its roots”
Hafez’s sharp Marxist turn would not have occurred if it hadn’t been for the lucid writings of a young, unknown Moroccan intellectual by the name of Abdallah Laraoui. Laraoui was to become the intellectual of intellectuals and was responsible for a major epistemological turn in Arab intellectual life and bringing Arab intellectuals up to speed with Western Marxism’s obsession with epistemology. He had a huge influence on many intellectuals, including Edward Said, who praised the book in his 1970 essay, The Palestinian Experience. Even Hafez admitted that “the most important factor in that stage of development of my ideological political consciousness were the writings of Laraoui, especially his two books Contemporary Arab Ideology and Arabs and Historical Thought… Laraoui helped me, and I say it with all modesty, to become conscious of the historical dimension of Arab reality, and he is the one who revealed to me the role of traditionalist ideology in obstructing Arab progress. He is the one who suggested historicism as a singular foundation for our perspective and emphasized the importance of the harmony of methods and objectives… he gave my perspective its cohesion and integrity and provided its historicist and universalist grounds.” It was Laraoui who first expressed in the clearest and most intellectually crisp way the direction that the new generation of Arab intellectuals was to take, and it was in Laraoui’s path that Qabbani, Adonis, Hafez, al-Azm, and for a while, Edward Said, were walking.
Abdallah Laraoui was born in 1933 in a small coastal Moroccan town. In 1945, he moved to Marrakesh to obtain a college education, and there he was introduced to existentialism and captivated by Sartre's dictum, "hell is other people." He later moved to Rabat to study at a French international school where he continued to study Nietzsche and Schopenhauer closely and develop his beliefs in the creative potency of man's will to power as that which can "fulfill the subjective and objective conditions, cognitively and socially enabling us to expect the truth-making superior man and his will to power and domination, the "ubermensch" along with all his positive dimension of excellence, creativity, and dutifulness. So, we must erase the Socratic turn... we must demolish Plato and Aristotle." After his juvenile flirtation with existentialism, Laraoui had a “Cartesian” turn towards epistemology, which ultimately led him not to a merely political but a keen and profound philosophical interest in Marxism, granting him a unique status in Arab intellectual life. After finishing his graduate studies in Morocco, he received a scholarship to study history and economics in Paris in 1953. During his time in Paris, he started to study Marx, not the prophet of the most momentous political project in history, but the historian, philosopher, and founder of a tradition. This interest in Marxism, not as a political doctrine but as a first philosophy central to French intellectualism at the time, became Laraoui's lifework and the center of his intellectual activity, rendering him the most remarkably consistent Arab intellectual figure whose life did not reflect the many twists and turns of the general culture.
After finishing his studies in Paris in 1958, Laraoui went back to Morocco to work for the Foreign Ministry, where he came to have contact with many political figures, notably Mehdi Ben Barka, the socialist revolutionary figure and the secretary of the revolutionary Tricontinental Conference. In 1960, he received a post as the cultural advisor of the Moroccan embassy in Cairo, the capital of Arab progressive culture and politics at the time, where he could observe the deep flaws of the Egyptian progressive intellectual elite leading the Revolution against imperialism and Zionism. These experiences ultimately made Laraoui deeply wary of Arab Nationalism and all Arab progressive ideology. He viewed them as revolutionary platitudes hiding a deep structure of pre-modern and pre-Marxist thought, ultimately producing a syncretic ideology that is reformist best and thus anti-revolutionary. In 1962, he started writing his Contemporary Arab Ideology as a comprehensive critique of all Arab progressive movements, both nationalist and socialist, and a call for a great change of the Arab episteme into the true philosophical soil in which Marxism grew, Hegel's historicism.
Laraoui’s importance does not just come from the fact that he was one of the early voices to swim against the tides of revolutionary populism of Nasserism and Ba’athism, but that he was the pioneer Arab intellectual to abandon the political and turn to the philosophical, specifically to epistemology. His book was the first in a series of epistemological assaults targeting what he perceived to be the mutual traditionalist epistemological ground on which all Arab political movements, progressive and conservative, stood. In this, Laraoui was the first to follow a very similar turn in the French Left with the New Left celebrity intellectuals. By the late 1970s, epistemology was to become the primary focus of Arab thinkers, but in January 1967, this seemed incomprehensible. The Arab defeat five months later ensured Laraoui’s status as an intellectual icon and a prophetic figure in post-1967 Arab intellectual life to the extent that his work was pivotal to the transformation of already established Ba’ath intellectuals such as Yassine al-Hafez. To the second generation of Arab revolutionary intellectuals, Laraoui’s Contemporary Arab Ideology was the foundational document of Zureiq’s Nationalist Consciousness for the first. Intellectually, Laraoui established epistemology as the new bar of intellectual labor. Politically, he provided the necessary philosophical and intellectual legwork needed for the theoretical delegitimation and deconstruction of the ideologies of the Old Arab Left.
Although Contemporary Arab Ideology, prefaced by Maxime Rodinson, was only the beginning of Laraoui's long, fruitful life, which included prolific writings of the most theoretically rigorous kind, it remains one of the most important works in modern Arab intellectual history due to the fact it is the key to understanding Laraoui's lifework and philosophical project. Contemporary Arab Ideology was followed by Arabs and Historical Thought and a series of volumes, each dedicated to systematically reconstructing the modern concepts of Ideology, Freedom, State, and History, respectively, in the most rigorous and systematic way. Together, the two first books constituted "an ideological critique of Arab ideology... as a preface for the project to transform social structures. It's primarily a critique of an intellectual elite in a transitional phase..." Laraoui's work was consciously directed to intellectuals despite knowing that "the march of History does not stop with the intellectual. But the intellectual is asked to submit to the laws of History if he was to exist and influence."
What was Laraoui's vision? This vision, on which he assiduously worked throughout the years, emerged from his critique of Arab revolutionary thought in Contemporary Arab Ideology. In its simplest terms, it is a final and decisive break with all pre-modern Arab and Muslim intellectual legacy and the philosophical adoption, at the level of final belief, not of pedagogical Marxism but of Marxism's philosophical roots and presuppositions. It is the final replacement of all structures of thought and meanings with the conceptual landscape produced by the German Enlightenment, and at the center of this landscape is the concept to which Laraoui dedicated most of his writings: History. This, according to Laraoui, is the path to achieving the single and unitary goal of all Arab thought and will, the epochal change to modernity.
Laraoui started Contemporary Arab Ideology with the call to recognize that today, Arab society has been facing urgent and immediate needs, both theoretical and practical, that forced it to adopt an amalgam of incoherent concepts and theories, all eventually derived from Marxism; Arabs are overwhelmingly speaking the tongue of Marx even if they do not realize it. He wrote, "Marxism is the latent ideology in every utterance which comes out of the mouth of the Arabs today, yet they persecute Marxists in all their countries." Laraoui contended that Marxism of this sort, which he called subjective Marxism, remains barren, hollow, and utterly ineffective. This is what Laraoui referred to as the "contemporary Arab ideology," a Marxist expression of traditionalist mythological epistemology. (The fact that this analysis is nearly identical to that of Western Marxists' view of their own societies should not be passed lightly.) The way out is for Marxism to stop being an ideology and become a consciousness.
In the first part of his book, Laraoui gave his own scheme of modern Arab intellectual history, the first Arab attempt at intellectual self-examination, in order to give a historicist account of how such an ideology was formed. He divided Arab modern intellectual history into three consecutive abstracted characters, each representing a generation of modernizers: the Sheikh or the Religious Man, the Liberal Man, and the Technical Man. The generation of Religious Man were religious leaders who still viewed the world through the prism of the traditional epistemology of a contradiction between Christendom and Islam. That generation was only interested in learning about the West as far as they could advance their defense of Islam and anti-Christian polemics. This referred to the first generation of Arab modernizers from Tahtawi to Rashid Rida that, according to Laraoui, remained loyal to religious and pre-scientific thought and were not able to go past traditional learning.
The second generation was that which Albert Hourani dubbed the liberal age of Taha Hussein and parliamentary politics. According to Laraoui, this generation of the Liberal Man was genuinely interested in importing European legal, political, educational, and economic innovations and practices. It was animated by the single idea that despotism was the cause of Arab and Muslim backwardness that could only be healed through parliamentary, secular, and liberal political life. According to Laraoui, Arab liberalism imported all banalities and intellectual hollowness of liberalism and capitalism, including the singular emphasis on political liberalism. This kind of syncretic thought may aim at modest reform but not at the revolutionary change needed.
The third generation was that of the Technical Man. Laraoui used this term to refer to a new generation of Arab intellectuals who believed that industrial power was the single determining element of the difference between the West and the East. This industrial power was determined by two factors, labor and science, and those two factors should replace the Liberal Man's politics as the central objective of Arabs. According to Laraoui, the Technical Man is usually the son of a peasant, spice merchant, or even a religious minority that received some economic mobility during the progress made by the Liberal man. Laraoui exemplified this generation in Salama Moussa, the man who introduced Arab intellectuals to Marxism. Here, Laraoui was attacking the foundation of Arab progressive culture itself with all its petite bourgeoisie intellectuals and military officers who led the Arab national liberation movements of Nasserism and Ba’athism. According to Laraoui, this foundation itself was flawed. Moussa’s Technical Man believed in industry, science, and hard power. They adopted Marxism, not as the philosophy that needs to shape one’s mind, thoughts, and actions but as a superior engineering technology capable of achieving industrial modernization. Their writings didn’t go beyond considering it a system for progress, equality, and social justice. Laraoui’s claim remarkably echoes Qabbani’s sentiments, “we wore the shell of civilization, but our spirit is still barbarian.”
According to Laraoui, the instrumental adoption of Marxism reveals that neither the modernizing Religious Man nor the Liberal Man helped Arab thought to become genuinely modern and that the current Arab moment is the synchronism of the three stages. For example, the Arab Marxist attempt to pass a critique of the capitalist financial system through the appropriation of the Islamic strictures on usury is not helping to dissolve religious thought into revolutionary thought, but the opposite. Arab pseudo-Marxism reduced Marxism to its positivist and empiricist contents and deprived it of its dialectical anthropology, which means that, in reality, the Technical Man is nothing but a continuation of the two stages preceding him. In introducing a later edition of the book, Laraoui moved from abstract analysis to concrete political commentary. He explained that "Nasser's regime fought Islamists as persons, as political rivals and enemies, but, except for in the last year of his rule, Nasser never abandoned the Islamic theory on which he [Nasser] was nursed intellectually and politically. This is also clearly the case in Algeria and Tunisia."
After this timely and intellectually edifying intervention to which the 1967 defeat and 1968 rise of the New Left ensured a captive audience, Laraoui followed with Arabs and Historical Thought, which deepened his critique and went further into his project. In the introduction, Laraoui emphasized the conclusions from his original claims. The failure to adopt Marx, the philosopher, resulted in a failure to adopt Marxism, not as an ideology, but as a method, which meant that "the ideological structure of Ba’athism and Nasserism was fundamentally weak because it tried to justify a politically correct program of liberation, socialism, and unity through traditional methods." This helped the revolutionary regimes to connect with the masses but at the cost of perpetuating inherently conservative sensibilities.
According to Laraoui, the primary failure that produced the Arab ideology he was critiquing was that of the Liberal Man, for it was the liberal man who gave Arab culture its current shape of a modern vestige without changing its traditional structure of thought. This formal modernization is the cause for the cliche Marxism prevalent among Arab intellectuals. Laraoui offered an intellectual genealogy, and he traced the problem to the original hollowness of liberal ideas produced by the shallowness of positivism and its surrogates, such as Stuart Mill's idea of liberty, which allowed Arab modernizers to import them quickly without a need for an epistemological modification or deepening. Laraoui expounded on his example by discussing how Arab modernizers easily used legal terms from Islamic law, primarily concerned with prohibition and license, filled a hollow liberal concept of arbitrary freedom with traditional Islamic content of no freedom.
To concretize his analysis and reveal an impressive deliberate and conscious intellectual vision that understood its self-importance, Laraoui decided not just to target Salama Moussa but also the intellectual founder of Arab Nationalism, the man who gave Arab progressive political terms their meaning, Constantin Zureiq. In Arabs and Historical Thought, Laraoui started his assault on Arab political thought by dedicating an entire chapter to critiquing pre-modern Arab conceptions of history and linking them to Zureiq’s writings, especially Zureiq’s We and History, showing that the true contents of the latter were nothing but a continuation of the former. Laraoui even goes as far as to claim that the failure of Zureiq and others to internalize historicism led to disastrous defeats in the struggle against Zionism, which is the defeat of the entire Arab project of modernity. According to Laraoui, “The Palestinian problem will always be a function of the modernization of the Arab mentality… there is no doubt that Israeli leaders always depend in their planning on Arabs’ traditionalist understanding of history…”
How do we abandon superficial modernity and adopt Marxism the philosophy? For Laraoui, the foundation of historical materialism is German universalist historicism. It is not Marxist orthodoxy but the Marxfied Hegel that needs to be the point of departure along with all his necessary components of German philosophy. He asserted, “Historicism is the philosophy of every historian who believes that only History is active in the lives of men. It alone is the cause and the purpose.” He concluded that if epistemology is the first philosophy, then German historicist epistemology is needed for Marxism to become real consciousness. Without German historicism, Arabs will remain unable to distinguish between natural and historical. He further explained, "Marxism for the Arabs should be primarily a school of historicism, which is the standard of [Marxist] modernity. Without such a standard, every idea drowns in the sea of the eternal present, which means it retreats to traditional thought... The only weapon against inefficacy is acquiring historical thinking..." From the concept of universalist history to freedom to culture, Arabs need to adopt the German philosophy only in which Marxism is possible. Why Marxism? Because “it is the best path to absorb [all modern] logic… it is the science of all sciences, the totality of conditions for science and the condition of dispelling backwardness.” If Marxism is German philosophy made world, then having the philosophy is a prerequisite to the transformative deployment of Marxism in reality.
Laraoui left dozens of works that are solely focused on historicism. He also left the most systematic and rigorous Arab analytical histories using historical materialism as its method, making him the Arab philosopher of history per excellence. However, one of his most important contributions was made in The Crisis of Arab Intellectuals. This work determined some of the fundamental questions of Arab intellectual life for the following decades and inspired Edward Said’s landmark work, Beginnings. In the book, Laraoui did not leave his claims about Arab pre-modern epistemology that is obstructing German philosophical epistemology in the abstract but concretized it in the Arabic language itself. Like Adonis and Qabbani, who blamed the rhetoric of the Oriental man for his delusions, Laraoui claimed that no culture in the world invested the truth of reality in the structure of its language, like Arab culture. Thus, for Arabs, truth is inherently rhetorical and linguistic, found in the structure of the Arabic language, canonized, finalized, and sealed in the Quran and Islamic texts.
Laraoui’s Western Marxist analysis, while downstream Marxian, was actually post-Marxist orthodoxy in the sense that it was pre-Marxist. Locating the source of the problems of Arab societies, economic and political, in epistemology and not in the matrix of relations generated by the mode of production-determined economic organization goes against the core tenets of historical materialism, which deems issues of ideas and thought to be an outcome and never a cause. Laraoui was, in effect, the first Arab intellectual to restore Marxism to its idealist origins, bringing Arab intellectual life up to speed with the emergence of postmodernism and Critical Theory in the West. In many of his writings, including in an essay titled Three Conceptions of Justice, which he published in the same volume in which Edward Said praised him, Laraoui revealed a keen intellectual awareness of the despair and hopelessness of postmodernism in any possibility of establishing epistemological neutrality. His Justice essay basically discussed how the Israeli-Arab dispute is insoluble because each involved party had a completely different conception of justice untranslatable to the other’s rationality. In his Arabic writings, Laraoui never actually expressed that he believed that Marxism and its foundational German epistemology were true or are the truth. His promotion of Marxism was often qualified by his statement that it was “the most suitable” and “the most necessary for our epoch.” I believe we should then ask, doesn’t this instrumentalism make Laraoui himself just another version of his much disparaged Technical Man?
Most importantly, like all the bodies of Marxist and Hegelian theories, which usually carry latent radical conclusions that are only apparent later, Laraoui’s project included the seed of major conclusions that will become a disastrous turning point in modern Arab historical self-conception. Laraoui’s historical scheme of the three stages of Arab modernization completely negated that Arab intellectual life had made any progress since the days of Tahtawi in the early 19th century. This, in effect, erased an entire historical period and ignored all its achievements, such as the leaps in the conditions of women, minorities, and literacy, and connected the present into a continuous linear time of a pre-modern Arab dark age. Laraoui opened his book by explaining that “Arab society has been facing urgent and immediate needs, both theoretical and practical, that forced it to adopt an amalgam of incoherent concepts and theories.” Later, the standard historical self-conception narrative for Arab intellectuals will be constructed and will translate those “urgent and immediate needs” to the “shock of modernity.” The quick adoption of incoherent ideas and the failure to modernize Laraoui’s Muslim episteme will be described as the failure to “absorb” the shock. Laraoui’s own Marxian post-Marxist jump backward from Marx to Idealism generated an Arab intellectual jump back from 1967 to pre-Tahtawi. Thus, Laraoui’s lofty and compelling theoretical account of religious epistemological resistance teleported Arab intellectuals back from the questions of their time to questions of Islam vs. modernity on the eve of the Napoleonic invasion in 1798.
The new intellectual turn concluded that the 1967 defeat, the source of the pathos, is a result, indeed a repetition, of the failure of Muslims to “absorb” the “shock” of modernity. As this conclusion became more apparent, by the 1980s, the standard intellectual narrative became that Muslim societies clashed with and did not accept modernity. In looking at history as meaning, alienation replaced progress as the central organizing principle. Through another single step backward, which will indeed be taken, the origin of the crisis of 1967 and the failure to liberate Palestine will be located in 13th-century Islamic theology, or in a more extreme version, in 7th-century Arabia. This will become the most devastating form of false intellectual consciousness. It is actually the central false consciousness that I’m trying to dispel in my writings. The fact that all Arab intellectuals took this line means that they irreversibly paralyzed Arab intellectual life in abstract philosophical battles, losing any connection to the actual social and cultural reality and thus being unable to recognize, address, or help in stopping the gradual process of de-civilization and moral erosion. Laraoui’s reset of Arab intellectual life, in effect, mired it in the most insoluble abstract problem of all, the abstract totality of Islam in a showdown with the abstract totality of modernity understood exclusively as Marxism, a point often completely absent to American observers of Arabic discourse who have a different understanding of what modernity is. This regression to what Robert Pippin called “modernism as a philosophical problem” mirrored, indeed copied, what was occurring in Western universities.
Secondly, Laraoui’s theory led to the establishment of a radical inherent and final dichotomy between Islam and modernity (again understood as Marxism by most Arab intellectuals) in front which individuals are left with a radical either/or choice. Israel, as the obstacle to Arab progress and the rock on which the dreams of unity and socialism crashed, was replaced by the much greater obstacle of Islam. Laraoui himself said that much when he discussed Palestine and claimed that Israeli leaders must be factoring in backward Muslim thought in their military planning. He thus preconditioned Arab progress on the complete and final abandonment of Arab and Muslim culture, a call that, while received enthusiastically by many intellectuals, sent others fleeing to the bosom of the cultural and religious heritage. This will open a whole new world of intellectual obsession with Islam, the Islamic tradition, and Islamic epistemology through which Arab intellectuals will seek to dissect, anatomize, and dismember the entire body of traditional Islamic knowledge in what a Christian Arab intellectual called “the massacre of the [Islamic] tradition.”