Mired in the infitah, the “opening” connected to the petroleum illusion, Arab governments lost the legitimacy from which they had benefited until then. Political Islam rushed into the political void, where it has been in the forefront ever since. As Antonio Gramsci once said, “The old world is dying and the new world struggles to be born; now is the time of monsters.”
For someone my age, who has lived through these three periods, the involution associated with this sequence necessarily called for in-depth consideration of the reasons for this dramatic failure. Having experienced this from the inside, I put forward written analyses on the issues involved, which the reader will find elsewhere. I attributed the involution to two sets of causes: those related to the limitations and contradictions of the Nahda, the Arab “Renaissance” initiated in the nineteenth century, which were behind the longevity of the political model called the “mameluk regime,”10 and those related to the world geopolitics of the new collective imperialism of the triad (United States, Europe, and Japan) under the leadership of the United States.11
2. THE FAILURE OF THE NAHDA
Modernity and the European Renaissance
Modernity is based on the principle that human beings, individually and collectively, make their own history, and to do that, they have the right to innovate and not respect tradition. The proclamation of this principle was a rupture with the fundamental principle that governed all premodern societies, including those of feudal and Christian Europe. This principle called for renouncing the dominant forms of legitimizing power—in the family, in communities within which ways of living and modes of production are organized, and at the level of the state—that were based up to then on a metaphysics with a generally religious expression. It implies, then, a separation between the state and religion, a radical secularization, which is a condition for the development of modern forms of politics.
Modernity is born with this declaration of principle. This is not a question of a rebirth (renaissance), but a birth as such. The characterization Europeans themselves gave to this moment of history, the Renaissance. is thus misleading. It is the result of an ideological construction in which Greco-Roman antiquity was already supposedly familiar with the principle of modernity, buried during the Middle Ages (between ancient modernity and new modernity) by religious obscurantism. This is a mythical understanding of antiquity, the basis for Eurocentrism, through which Europe claims to inherit its past and “return to the sources,” hence re-naissance, while in fact this renaissance is actually a rupture with its own history.
The concomitant birth of modernity and capitalism is not accidental. The social relations that characterize the new production system implied freedom of enterprise, free access to markets, and proclamation of the inviolable right to private property, which is made “sacred.” Economic life, freed from the type of supervision by political authorities that characterized the premodern systems, developed into an autonomous area of social life, driven by its own laws. In place of the traditional determination in which power is the source of wealth, capitalism substitutes a reverse causality in which wealth is the source of power.
The Arab Islamic Nahda
The European Renaissance was the result of an internal social dynamic. It was, in effect, the solution provided by the invention of capitalism to contradictions specific to Europe in that era. In contrast, what Arabs called, by imitation, their Renaissance—the Nahda of the nineteenth century—was not that at all. It was the reaction to an external shock. Europe, made powerful and victorious by modernity, had an ambiguous effect on the Arab world. It was a cause of both attraction (admiration) and repulsion (through the arrogance of its conquest). The Arab Renaissance took the qualifying term literally. It believed that if, as the Europeans had done (and this is what they themselves said), the Arabs “returned” to their sources, a disparaged time, they would rediscover their greatness. The Nahda did not understand the modernity that made Europe powerful.
The Nahda did not implement the necessary ruptures with tradition that define modernity. It did not grasp the true significance of secularism, a necessary condition for politics to become a domain of free innovation, thus of democracy in the modern sense of the term. The Nahda believed that it could substitute a reinterpretation of religion purged of its obscurantist excesses. Even now, Arab societies are poorly equipped to understand that secularism is not a Western “specificity,” but a necessity of modernity. The Nahda did not understand the meaning of democracy, understood properly as the right to break with tradition. It thus remained a prisoner of concepts of the autocratic state; it hoped and prayed for a “just” despot (al-moust-abid al-adel)—not even an “enlightened” one. The nuance is significant. The Nahda did not understand that modernity also produced women’s aspiration for liberation, thereby exercising their right to innovate, to break with tradition. It reduced modernity to the immediate appearance of what it produces: technological progress. This deliberately simplified presentation does not mean that I am unaware of the contradictions expressed in the Nahda, or that some avant-garde thinkers were aware of the real challenges of modernity, such as Qasim Amin concerning the importance of women’s liberation, Ali Abdel Raziq on the centrality of secularism, or Abd al-Rahman al-Kawakibi on democracy. But none of these breakthroughs were followed through; on the contrary, Arab society reacted by giving up any pursuit of the indicated paths forward. The Nahda is not, then, the moment of the birth of modernity in the Arab world; it is in fact the moment of its failure.
In his magnificent book, The Arabs and the Holocaust, Gilbert Achcar dissects the writings of Rashid Rida, the last link in the chain of the Nahda in decline.12 Rida wrote in the 1920s and was one of the original inspirations of the Muslim Brotherhood. The Islam that he proposed, described as a “return to the sources,” is utterly devoid of thought. It is a ritualistic, conservative Islam of convenience and communitarian affirmation. The adherence of Rida and the Muslim Brotherhood to Wahhabism, an equally heinous expression of a total lack of critical thinking, which scarcely responds to the requirements of an archaic society of nomads, heralds the advent of political Islam.
Limits and Contradictions of Modernity
The modernity that developed under the restrictions of capitalism’s limitations is, consequently, contradictory, promising much that it cannot produce and thus giving rise to unsatisfied aspirations. Contemporary humanity is thus confronted with the contradictions of this modernity—the only one we have experienced up to now—a modernity that began with the capitalist stage of history. Capitalism and its modernity are destructive of the human being, reduced to the status of a commodity embodying labor power. Moreover, polarization on the world scale caused by capitalist accumulation on the same scale nullifies any possibility for the majority of human beings—those in the peripheries—to satisfy their needs as promised by modernity. For the great majority, the modernity in question is quite simply odious. Hence, the rejection of this modernity is violent. But rejection is a negative act. The inadequacies of various alternative projects eliminate the effectiveness of any revolt and ultimately lead it to submit to the requirements of the capitalism and modernity that it supposedly rejects. The main illusion is sustained by nostalgia for the premodern past. In the peripheries, the backward-looking posture proceeds from a violent and justified revolt, of which it is only a neurotic and powerless form, because quite simply it is based on ignorance of the nature of the challenge of modernity.
The backward-looking position is expressed in various ways, generally in terms of a fundamentalist religious interpretation, which in fact masks a conventional conservative choice, or in terms of an ethnicity