Monday's Read: Self-Criticism After the Defeat

 Al-Azm, Sadik Jalal. Self-Criticism After the Defeat. (London: Saqi, 2011) translation of 1968 original, with forward by Fouad Ajami




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A major shockwave hit the Arab world with the 1967 Six-Day War. Although there are always arguments about periodization and epistemic rupture - and though there are other significant historical events that influenced the shift in Arab thought in the years after 1967, including the 1972 reprisal, Sadat’s truce with Israel, the worldwide gas crisis, and more – it nevertheless remains the case, as mentioned in earlier essays, that Arab thought shifted markedly from 1967 forward. Part of this had to do with Cold War political alignments. A great deal more was the result of decolonization - the French finally withdrew from North Africa in 1962, and the British left the Trucial States only by 1972 - and the increase in local Middle East government corruption. But the Six-Day War, soon known as “Al-Naksah” (the setback), was salt in the already deep wound of Arab pride, self-worth, and belief in self-determination, and presaged a transition in Arab thought to radical critique and increasing Islamization, sometimes called “the Second Nahdah.”[1] Overall Arab intellectual thought reflected the broader regional sense of numbness and shock, often characterized as “paralysis,” or “blindness,” which pervaded in the immediate aftermath as Nasser stepped down and Egyptian General Mohammed ‘Abd al-Hakim ‘Amir, commander of the surrendering forces in the Sinai, committed suicide.[2]

The aftermath of the war has been almost universally characterized as giving rise to a pervasive cultural malaise. Following the 1967 War, Sadiq al-Azm published Self-Criticism after the Defeat (Al-Naqd al-Dhati Ba'da al-Hazima, 1968). Along with beloved Syrian poet Nizar Qabbani’s “Marginalia on the Notebook of the Defeat” (“Hāwamish ʿalā Daftar al-Naksa”), and Syrian playwright Saadallah Wannous’ 1968 play “A Soiree for the Fifth of June” (“Ḥaflat samar min ajl al-khāmis min Ḥuzayrān”), Al-Azm’s book remains, four decades on, the central work in the “collective Arab memory (at least among the educated)”[3] on the 1967 War.[4] Throughout, Al-Azm insists that Arab society needs to stop blaming God or Zionist conspiracies, dismissing the continued popularity of anti-Semitic screeds like The Protocols of the Elders of Zion as “silly.”[5] He calls instead for a stern reappraisal of self and a turn to proper intellectual inquiry through science, the rejection of superstition and folktales, democratic engagement, and gender equality.
This excellent edition, appearing in English for the first time, was published in 2011 and has just become available. It includes, in addition to the Al-Azm's original text, a foreward by Fouad Ajami, a preface by the author, and an introduction by Faisal Darraj. In addition, it includes several response essays that appeared after the original publication: Elias Shakir's "Class Positioning in the Phenomenon of Self-Criticism after the Defeat," Al Tariq [The Way] (Beirut: June 1969); Ghassan Kanafani's "Criticism of the Criticism of Dr. Sadik Jalal al-Azm," Al-Sayad magazine (Beirut: October 24, 1968); and Jamal Al-Sharqawi's "Self Criticism after the Defeat," Al-Katib [The Writer] 94 (Cairo: January 1969).
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Introduction:

Iconoclast Fouad Ajami introduces Syrian Sunni scholar and Kantian Sadik al-Azm's Self-Criticism with a reminiscence. The broader Arab world responded to the Six-Day War with a benumbed sense of shock. Ajami, then in his early twenties, reflects:

Yet for all the enormity of that defeat - the loss of the Golan Heights, and the West Bank and Gaza, the flight of the Egyptian army, the shame that attended the defeat in a culture of pride - young Arabs didn't have the language and the intellectual equipment to describe what had befallen their world. We had abandoned God and God abandoned us, said what we would later come to describe as the Islamists. We had assaulted the proper order of things - property and hierarchy and tradition - said the monarchies and the traditionalists: we had filled the earth with sedition, and had reaped the whirlwind. A liberal or two said that the Arabs needed a scientific culture and modern armies - as though those could be bought off the rack, as though their absence said nothing about the contemporary condition of the Arabs ... Everything about Self-Criticism ... announced that a new age of Arabic letters and Arabic writing had begun. The book was brief and unadorned when the [sic] Arabic writing had hitherto been ponderous and flowery (6-7, emphasis mine). 

Ajami quotes Moroccan historian Abdullah Laroui's characterization of popular transnational Arab attitudes toward Israel at the time: "[O]n a certain day everything would be obliterated and instantaneously reconstructed and the new inhabitants would leave, as if by magic, the land that they have despoiled; in this way will justice be dispensed to the victims, on the day when the presence of God shall again make itself felt" (9). Yet in the aftermath of the defeat Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser tendered his resignation almost immediately, and Israel's existence as a hard-won state and regional force was impossible to ignore any longer. Times had indeed changed.

Thinkers like editor of the Egyptian daily Al-Ahram, Mohamed Hassanien Heikal (not to be confused with earlier thinker Muhammad Husayn Haykal), who had entranced audiences for two decades with his accessible style and ardently pro-Nasserist apologetics, were directly confronted by al-Azm's work. Al-Azm was not flowery and not complimentary. His rhetoric, on the contrary, was a direct indictment, a biting - and bitingly earnest - argument against a culture that still focused on tribal loyalties and male defense of female "honor" in the face of Israel's efficient, machinized war machine.

Ajami closes his introduction with a pithy cross-cultural reference to describe contemporary Arab culture several decades on. He states:

A cultural form of schizophrenia is also attendant on the Arab (and Muslim) world's tortured, protracted, and reluctant adaptation to European modernity. This process has truly made the modern Arabs into the Hamlet of our times, doomed to unrelieved tragedy, forever hesitating, procrastinating, and wavering between the old and the new, between asala  and mu'asara (authenticity and contemporaneity), between turath and tajdid (heritage and renewal), and between huwiyya and hadatha (identity and modernity), and between religion and secularity, while the conquering Fortinbrases of the world inherit the new century. No wonder, then, to quote Shakespeare's most famous drama, that "the time is out of joint" for the Arabs and "something is rotten in the state." No wonder as well if they keep wondering whether they are the authors of their woes of whether "there's a divinity that shapes [their] ends (14).

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Notes on the body of the text:


It is probably worth noting that in the immediate aftermath of the '67 War, a tone of absolute denial prevailed in much of the Arab world, perhaps typified in articles like Nasserite and leader of the Arab Nationalist Movement in Lebanon Muhsin Ibrahim's June 14, 1967 Al-Hurriya article "No, Abdul Nasser Did Not Err and the Arabs Were Not Defeated" (18). The Virgin Mary appeared to a group of believers in a Cairo church, leading them to further denial of defeat. Al-Azm remembers learning of the outbreak of war when he received a call from now-legendary Syrian Alawite poet Adunis ( أدونيس, born Ali Ahmad Said Esber, علي أحمد سعيد إسبر‎). Al-Azm states by way of introduction:

It is impossible to compare the condition of optimistic emotional mobilization, alarming enthusiasm, and wild triumphalist intoxication that prevailed in the Arab world (it touched all of us with its deceptive magic) in the period between the deploying of the Egyptian forces in the Sinai and the moment the war broke out to anything except the similar condition that prevailed in our Arab world the day President Gamal Abdel Nasser announced the nationalization of the Suez Canal in the summer of 1956 and during the momentous events that followed. I do not believe that anyone from this generation truly recovered from this sudden fall from the dizzying heights to the bottom of the abyss of the crushing defeat, which took no more than a few moments (19-20, emphasis mine).

In response to this emotional firestorm, Al-Azm pulls no punches in Self-Criticism, insisting that Arabs look themselves squarely in the mirror:

... [O]ur use of the term "nakbah" [disaster] to indicate the June War and its aftermath contains much of the logic of exoneration and the evasion of responsibility and accountability, since whomever is struck by a disaster is not considered responsible for it, or its occurrence, and even if we were to consider him so, in some sense, his responsibility remains minimal in comparison with the terror and enormity of the disaster. This is why we ascribe disasters to fate, destiny, and nature, that is, to factors outside our control and for which we cannot be held accountable (45). 

Further, Al-Azm will brook no opposition or evasion to his call for much-needed technological and scientific advancement:

Whether we turn the blame on colonialism or not, the basic issue remains the effectiveness of the Arab people and society in confronting the effectiveness of the Arab people and society in confronting present challenges and dangers. There is no doubt that Arab underdevelopment in production, technology, science, planning, and leadership is the latent source, to a great extent, o the lack of this sort of practical effectiveness among the Arabs today (65).

Al-Azm proceeds to spend some time debunking ideas popularized by tracts like the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, explaining through practical, social science- and economics-based analysis that it is shoddy, non-empirically based thinking to ascribe the events of history to a shadowy cabal of advantageously-situated Jewish leaders. He insists that the Arabs who buy into the notion of secret meetings of Jewish leaders pulling the puppet strings of world history are doing so out of a desire to avoid acknowledging the faults in their own societies.

Al-Azm next responds to those who were arguing that Arabs retaliate toward Israel in much the same way that the Vietnamese were then fighting the United States. He explains that such popular guerrilla warfare requires a level of determination and will among the people that he has not observed, though he concedes that it may be growing among the Palestinian fedayeen. He further argues that the Arab world as a whole is abysmally behind in terms of scientific development, comparing the extensive scholarly output emerging from Israeli institutions like Hebrew University to the dearth from the Arab world. He notes that the vast majority, nine tenths, of scientific research was then coming out of the United Arab Republic (then the name of Egypt), and calls for vastly more investment in scientific and technological research as a society.

Furthermore, Al-Azm spends some time bemoaning the lack of education of women.

The greatest example of entirely wasted Arab human resources is the completely and utterly excluded half of the Arab people, and I mean by this Arab women. When we observe the matter from this angle, we see that the Arab people do not comprise one hundred million people, as the broadcasts tell us, but only fifty million. Arab women form today, undoubtedly, the greatest reserves of latent human power in our society, still unused and untouched. It is the greatest bloc of raw intellectual and human material that the nation possesses that does not benefit the Arab revolutionary movement in any aspect. (163)  .. It appears to me that a great number of the revolutionary Arab youth- whether they are officially committed to a progressive socialist political organization or not - will embrace this view of women ... as long as it is a kind of masculine leniency towards the 'fair' of 'weak' sex, or a type of indulgence, disdain, or concession towards women on the part of their male superiors, in terms of mind, body, and the rest of the well-known myths (168).

Al-Azm insists that socialist principles of true equality should be adopted over traditional romanticized visions of women as mothers and raisers of the next generation.

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[1] See, e.g., Kassab, 345.

[2] Ghassan Kanafani, “Thoughts on Change and the ‘Blind Language’,” in Ferial J. Ghazoul and Barbara Harlow, eds., The View from Within: Writers and Critics on Contemporary Arabic Literature (Cairo: American University of Cairo Press, 1994), 43.

[3] 2007 Preface, Sadiq Jalal Al-Azm. Self-Criticism After the Defeat. (London: Saqi, 2011)

[4] In addition to the books detailed in my essay, leftist Syrian Yassin al-Hafiz wrote Defeat and Defeated-ideology (Al-hazima wa al-idioligia al-mahzouma); Sadiq al-Azm wrote both Criticism of Religious Thought; Abdallah Laroui wrote L’idéologie arabe contemporaine; Islamist thinker Yusuf al-Qaradawi wrote The Islamic Solution; and Constantine Zurayk followed his 1948 essay with Revisiting the Meaning of Disaster.

[5] Al-Azm, 229.