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 adorned with specific virtues that transcend other dimensions of social reality—classes, among others. The common denominator to all these forms is their attachment to a culturalist thesis in which religions and ethnic groups are characterized by transhistorical specificities that define inviolable identities. Even though without scientific foundation, these positions are nonetheless able to mobilize the masses who are marginalized and made helpless by destructive capitalist modernity. They are thus effective means for manipulation that are incorporated into strategies designed to reinforce submission to the joint dictatorship of the dominant forces in capitalist globalization and their local and subaltern transmission channels. Political Islam is a good example of this method for managing peripheral capitalism. In Latin America and Africa, the proliferation of quasi-Protestant obscurantist “sects,” supported by North American authorities to hinder liberation theology, manipulates the helplessness of the excluded and their revolt against the conservative official church.
[ABOVE EXTRACTS ARE FROM THE REAWAKENING OF THE ARAB WORLD.]13
3. MODERNITY, DEMOCRACY, SECULARISM, AND ISLAM
The image that the Arab and Islamic region gives of itself today is that of societies in which religion (Islam) is in the forefront of all areas of social and political life—to the point that it seems incongruous to imagine that it could be otherwise. The majority of foreign observers (political leaders and the media) conclude from this that modernity, even democracy, must be adapted to the heavy presence of Islam, thereby de facto precluding secularism.
Modernity is a rupture in universal history that began in sixteenth-century Europe. Modernity proclaims that the human being is responsible for his or her own history, individually and collectively, and consequently breaks with the dominant premodern ideologies. Modernity thus allows democracy, just as it demands secularism, in the sense of separation of the religious and the political.
From this point of view, where do the peoples of the Middle Eastern region stand? The image of crowds of bearded men prostrating themselves, as well as cohorts of veiled women, can and does inspire hasty conclusions about the intensity of the religious commitment being expressed. The social pressures exerted to obtain the result are rarely mentioned. The women have not chosen the veil, it has been imposed on them with prior violence. Absence from prayer almost always costs the person in question work, sometimes even that person’s life. Western “culturalist” friends who call for respect for the diversity of beliefs rarely inquire into the procedures implemented by governments to present an image that suits them. There are certainly religious extremists (fous de Dieu). Are there proportionately more of them than the Spanish Catholics who parade at Easter, or the innumerable fanatics in the United States who listen to televangelists?
In any case, the region has not always presented this image of itself. Beyond differences from one country to another, we can identify a large region extending from Morocco to Afghanistan, including all Arabs (except those from the Arabian peninsula), Turks, Iranians, Afghans, and the peoples of the former Soviet Central Asia, in which the potential for the development of secularism is far from negligible. The situation is different among some neighboring peoples, such as the Arabs of the Arabian peninsula or the Pakistanis.
In this extensive area, the political traditions were strongly affected by the radical currents of modernity. The Enlightenment, the French Revolution, the Russian Revolution, and the communism of the Third International had an impact on thinking and acting and certainly were more important than Westminster-style parliamentarianism, for example. These dominant currents inspired the major models of political transformation that the ruling classes implemented, which in some ways could be called forms of “enlightened despotism.”
This was certainly the case in the Egypt of Muhammad Ali or the Khedive Ismail Pasha. Kemalism in Turkey and modernization in Iran proceeded with similar methods. The national populism characteristic of the more recent stages of history belongs to the same family of “modernist” political projects. The model’s variants were numerous (the Algerian FLN, Tunisian Bourguibism, Egyptian Nasserism, and Baathism in Syria and Iraq), but moved in a similar direction. The apparently extreme experiences—the so-called communist governments in Afghanistan and South Yemen—were in reality not very different. All these governments accomplished a great deal and, consequently, had very wide popular support. That is why, even when they were not
