Today we remember Samir Kassir. Nine years ago to this day, a car bomb exploded in Beirut. The usual confusion that followed was soon replaced with a nation-wide shock. The victim this time was none another than Samir Kassir. Kassir cannot be described in a few words, so I won’t try and do so. The son of a Palestinian father and a Syrian mother, Kassir was one of the most well known intellectuals of the Arab left. He was a strong supporter of the Palestinian cause, and of Secular Democracy throughout the Middle East. His attempt to defend universal principles of equality and justice and adopt them to a Pan-Arab context made him deeply unpopular with some, leading to his death – it is usually believed that it was his opposition to the Syrian government’s presence in Lebanon and his criticism of the Baath party that killed him. The following is an extract from the book “Being Arab” in which he popularized the concept of the “Arab Malaise”: -- Some people are driven to despair by the Arab malaise. They believe that the Arabs are so profoundly trapped that they will never be able to break free and, in so believing, they only make the deadlock worse. This is the extreme variant of modernism, propounded by liberals, disappointed nationalists and former activists of the left alike. Decline, according to this way of thinking, is so widespread that it damns the very notion of a renaissance: the nahda† did not just end in failure, but it was also by its very nature a historical anomaly, an impossibility right from the outset. Worse still, all attempts to free the Arabs from their predicament, particularly nationalism, are considered to have only made the problem worse. Some of these disappointed souls go so far as to internalize the culturalist distinctions that legitimize imperial domination. Their most affirmative thesis, echoing the American neoconservatives, is that change and democracy can only come from such domination, not realizing that all this will achieve is to aggravate frustrations, exacerbate victimhood and the culture of death, and thereby perpetuate the Arab malaise. For, if they are to overcome their malaise, the Arabs have no choice but to do it themselves. [..] The cult of the victim claims that Arabs are the West’s primary target, totally disregarding the other peoples of the world, and world history in general. No mention is made of Africa and its systematic pillaging; of the Americas and the genocide of the pre-Columbian populations, perpetuated in the continued marginalization of their cultures, of Indochina and its decimated generations. Of course I am not denying what we have presupposed, that the Arabs have nothing that might compensate them for their misfortune, and that the Arab world is the only region on earth where the West has continually acted as if it were the master – and still does today, either directly or through Israel. But this doesn’t change the fact that recognizing the threat to the Arab world is not the same as condoning Arab victimhood. None of the major figures of the renaissance showed any signs of indulging such a cult, nor the ideologues or practitioners of nationalism. Victims par excellence, the Palestinians avoided it in the past, and continue in a very large degree to do so, even if their situation fosters a propensity among those who helplessly look on to claim such a status. Victimhood is the price of the defeat of the universal, rather than a product of the status quo, and its cult, served by the Arab media, in particular the much-lionized Al-Jazeera, has only been able to grow because the ideology of the moment preaches a refusal of the universal. Ideology is in fact a very grand word for the current amalgam of the fossilized remains of Arab nationalism, which, because of their age, have cut themselves off from their original, universalist sources of inspiration, and an ‘Islamic nationalism’ that explicitly sets out to differentiate itself from the universal, if not supplant it. Such a nationalist mishmash is not new. It was around at the end of the nineteenth century, propounded notably by Afghani. The only difference is that Afghani was a reformer of Islam, with a perfect knowledge of, and uninhibited dealings with, Western thought. The same cannot be said of his present-day successors, who abhor nothing so much as talk of religious reform.
Posted on: Mon, 02 Jun 2014 08:06:51 +0000
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