Tuesday's Read: Islam et Histoire

Abdallah Laroui. (Arawi, ‘Abd Allah.) Islam et Histoire. (Paris: Flammarion, 1999)

Laroui’s two most well-known books, L’ideologie arabe contemporaine (1967) and La Crise des intellectuels arabes: Traditionalisme ou historicisme? (1974) together constitute a sustained critique of the major ideologies and epistemologies dominating Arab discourse since the time of the nahdah (and thus are best understood when examined together). Laroui eschews most intellectual traditions, whether European or Islamic, insisting that clerics lack the ability to disengage from the concept of polarities separating Islam and the Christian West, and, moreover, that “The conscience of our cleric is religious when he analyzes society, but he becomes liberal when he critiques the West.”[1] He further derides nationalist and liberal trends as passé, arguing somewhat enigmatically that the only way to eliminate traditionalist intellectual traps “consists in strict submission to the discipline of historical thought and acceptance of all its assumptions.”[2] Yet what precisely “historical thought” means in his evaluation remains nebulous and ill-defined; Laroui is a critic of culture groping for an alternative epistemology. The crisis of the Arab world in this reading is not an exigency of history, but a direct result of lingering Salafi epistemology.[3] Laroui can be imprecise in his critique, and is perhaps better at pointing out flaws than articulating clear solutions, but he is nevertheless a significant thinkers whose ideas animated a great deal of Marxist Arab thought in the 1970s.

His second book, Crisis, is in many ways a continuation of the first and a mounting critique of contemporary Arab intelligentsia. He lays quite literally all of the problems of Arab society at their doors, explaining that it is they, and not the unwashed masses, who are the only potential agents of change. Moreover, following Gramsci, he contends that competing ideas among the intelligentsia are mirrors of the classes that they represent; Arab thought is in this reading the result of class wars combined with imperialist pressures. Further, he calls for a distinction between the best parts of Western Enlightenment liberal thought – rationalism, human rights – and the capitalist hegemony that the West is now exporting. He insists that modernization has been decoupled from modernity in the Arab world. Technology may exist there, but backward ideologies persist. For Laroui, Islam is traditionalism is Salafism is the Ikhwan; all of these must be contested through his rigorous, yet vague, “historicism.”[4]

[1] Abdallah Laroui, L’idéologie arabe contemporaine (Paris: Maspero, 1970), 35.
[2] Ibid.
[3] Abdallah Laroui, The Crisis of the Arab Intelligentsia: Traditionalism or Historicism? (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), 153–4.
[4] Ibid.