Intellectuals and Civil Society in the Middle East

Liberalism, Modernity and Political Discourse

Mohammed A. Bamyeh

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9781848856288
• eBook ISBN: 9780857732583
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Middle Eastern History
• Index: History

What is the nature of intellectual activity in the Middle East, and what is its role in politics and society? While much scholarly attention has been given to the intelligentsia in the West, a comprehensive analysis of the social role of intellectuals in the Middle East has until now been lacking. This new book seeks to fill this gap, providing an overview of the role of influential thinkers in public life in the Middle East, and the impact they have had upon social, political and cultural spheres in the region. Covering a diverse range of key thinkers on the Middle East from Edward Said, Mohamed Arkoun and Halim Barakat to Abd al-Rahman al-Kawakibi and Abd al-Ghani al-Nabulusi, the book examines intellectuals' connections to social movements, 'street politics' and civil society, and democracy and its prospects in the region. This is an important new contribution to the literature on Middle Eastern societies and politics.

1

Introduction:
The Social Dynamism of the Organic Intellectual

Mohammed A. Bamyeh

The question as to who qualifies as an intellectual, and moreover what counts as intellectual activity, are questions around which there is an enormous body of literature concerning the West, most recently addressed in John Michael’s Anxious Intellects. In the case of the Middle East our group began from the ground up, asking such questions as: what are the distinctive features of intellectuals in the region? What makes a certain way of formulating ideas more readily propagated, accepted, or debated than otherwise in the public sphere? How do intellectuals influence public life and public debates? How does the work of intellectuals circulate under condition of relative openness or censorship, respectively? What is the audience of intellectuals, and how segmented or stable is it? What are the meaningful ways of measuring the influence of intellectuals in society? What sort of relation exists between intellectuals, ‘street politics,’ and civil society? What are the main idioms of public and organic intellectual discourse? What are the institutional venues of public and organic intellectual life, and how effective, stable, or flexible are they? Do public intellectuals provide a common regional discourse that blends together sentiments in more than one country? How are intellectuals connected (in structured or ideational ways) to social movements? Is the level of activity of intellectuals in any given country a good predictor of the quality of political or other kinds of leadership?

These questions gained more currency with the revolutions of the Arab Spring that, lacking clear organizational or leadership structures, magnified the role of ideas in providing a sort of everyday intellectual compass, that is, a guide for revolution that operates in more diffuse ways than clearly defined organizations or hierarchies. The environment of the revolutions highlighted the role of everyday intellectual activity, since under conditions of spontaneity the revolutions needed to define themselves by themselves, and the best means to do that was through constant dialog in public gatherings. Indeed, most of the intellectual activity during the Arab revolutions tended to be of a type appropriate for movements characterized by spontaneity and lightness. Cairo’s Tahrir Square, for example, was not simply a central symbol of a revolution, but moreover a space permeated throughout by debating circles. Debates in the Square over basic meanings of now common terms—peoplehood, regime, civic state, popular versus constitutional legitimacy, liberalism, freedom, enlightened awareness (wa‘y), and so on—were as constant as those over what the next step should be. The revolution, in a sense, was a conversation about meanings and ideas, none of which had been clarified before. The young members of the Muslim Brotherhood, for example, very quickly found out in revolutionary times that the tired slogan ‘Islam is the solution’ had become even less compelling, since more than at any other time before, the slogan appeared to lack intellectual substance and the demand for depth that characterized revolutionary curiosity in general. And thus Islamic political thought itself developed at a faster pace in revolutionary times, since much more was expected of it than before.

While the studies in this volume were all begun before the Arab Spring, the questions they were based on have become more pressing after revolutionary movements required all intellectuals to think more seriously about their role in society. When we originally posed our research questions, we noted that while there existed a great body of literature on individual Middle Eastern intellectuals, there were few systematic studies of the social role of intellectuals as a specific social category. Yet, the systematic understanding of the social, as well as political and cultural, roles of intellectuals was crucial for the proper appraisal of several other flourishing areas of research and commentary in Middle East studies. Those included studies of civil society; leadership; social movement; the public sphere and the character of public debates. All these areas had clear relevance to understanding patterns and meanings of participation in the region.

The clearest type of intellectual with a social impact is what is called the ‘public intellectual.’ Public intellectuals may be understood as articulate thinkers whose role consists in either: (1) popularizing existing, complex intellectual systems for the benefit of a public rather than academic audience; (2) founding original systems of thought in a language that captures broad public audiences; or (3) expressing existing public sentiments, feelings, and attitudes in intellectual and systematic but accessible formats (be it in the form of philosophical theses, literary works, expository exegesis of ‘tradition,’ systematic analysis of current affairs, or popular artistic experiments).

There are many venues for the dissemination of the works of these respective intellectuals: popular treatises and commentaries; memoirs; literary works; old and new media; and so on. But persons identified as public intellectuals tend to be those that add intellectual substance to the public sphere; crystallize what is otherwise called ‘street politics’ into intelligible and referenced arguments; provide ideational support for the further evolution of civil society as well as social movements; and establish or defend criteria for the quality of social leadership.

Contributors to this volume were asked to identify one intellectual or a group of intellectuals who have had a role in social life. They then set out to systematically explore the intellectuals in question as a social phenomenon; to assess them in terms of the areas mentioned above; to identify meaningful methods and theories as guides for empirical studies of the phenomenon of intellectuals; to explore fruitful theoretical and methodological approaches to the study of intellectuals; and to identify further directions of research.

While there are various studies of patterns of intellectual thought, there is little in the way of explorations of the precise social dynamics that make one idea or way of stating it more socially effective than another—although a foray into that terrain was attempted in a brief study of the intelligentsia by Saad Eddin Ibrahim earlier in his career. Important surveys, such as Albert Hourani’s Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age; Sadiq Jalal al-‘Azm’s (himself an important public intellectual in his own right) The French Revolution in Nahda Thought; or Hamid Enayat’s Modern Islamic Political Thought, explore largely the history of ideas rather than the social nature of intellectual activity.

A possible exception here may be Nadim al-Bitar’s al-Muthaqqafun wa al-Thawra, an excellent study from 1987 informed by a Marxist perspective and centered on the thesis that the influence of revolutionary intellectuals increased precisely when other material sources of revolutionary potential were weak, such as working class organizations or when faced with an ‘underdeveloped’ socio-economic reality. In that case, according to Bitar, intellectuals become more important precisely because they provide reality with something that is actually missing from it, that is, with thought that provides revolutionary credentials such reality does not in fact possess. Yet this thesis, otherwise supported by a wealth of historical examples, fares poorly in the context of the Arab revolutions of 2011, which caught all Arab intellectuals by surprise, including intellectuals who had opposed everything about the old regimes and sincerely wished for a revolution. Of course, revolutionary scenarios have been portrayed in Arabic literature and cultural life before the revolutionary wave— most recently in Mohamed Salmawy’s novel Ajnihat al-Farasha published just days before the Egyptian revolution, and we can also note earlier outlines of future revolutionary principles, as in Elias Khoury’s prediction of a third, democratic Arab nahda. But the revolutions seem to be experimenting with their own intellectual language, and none seem to be based on prior knowledge of any intellectual system outside of that provided by customary civic ethics. The fact that an intellectual like Burhan Ghalioun appeared as a consensus candidate to represent the Syrian revolution was not because the revolution was caused by his thought, but because his earlier democratic credentials seemed so well fitting for the discourse of the revolution underway. This more dialectic sort of relation between a specific intellectual and a social movement tends to be more typical than that in which a proscriptive or predictive intellectual work is widely read and then inspires a movement.

In recent years there has been some scholarly interest in the history of intellectuals as a group, in a way closely linked to the study of genealogies of civil society. This interest has clustered around studying the role of the ‘ulama’ or (religious) scholars in Islamic history, who may be seen as a synthesis of two types of intellectuals—the ‘public intellectual’ and what Antonio Gramsci calls the ‘organic intellectual.’ Particularly noteworthy here is the extent to which the ‘ulama’ viewed themselves, rather than governments, as guardians of moral and social order, and the extent to which scholarly self-fashioning in the public sphere involved contesting governmental over-extension of authority. But clearly significant here is how such a self-understanding highlighted the authoritative role of expert knowledge in society. The common conclusions, expressed for example by such commentators as Richard Bulliet or John Kelsay, among others, is that modern authoritarianism in the Middle East was related in at least one way to the weakening of the ‘ulama’ as a social class and their cooptation by modern governments. Stated differently, modern authoritarianism seems here related to the general weakening of intellectual authority (one dimension of which being that of Islamic knowledge) in society.¹

The questions this project raises are vast, likely greater than what could be answered in a single volume. But what could at best be outlined in this introduction are ways of approaching some elementary propositions:

•If we begin with intellectual activity itself, the question would be how does such activity involve seeing society from a distance? Put otherwise, what produces this propensity to look at things from a distance, this alienation, that seems to be the primary basis of intellectual activity? Is modern education perhaps a culprit, and if so, why does it affect certain species that we come to understand as ‘intellectuals’ more than others?

•Is alienation only part of the experience of the intellectual in society, the other part being the intellectual’s ‘organic’ or embedded nature?

•How is this duality of alienation/organicism connected to the dialectics of innovation or novelty?

•And finally, from what ‘locations’ (institutional, geographic, mediated, and so on) do intellectuals come to exercise a measurable impact on social life and civil society?

In what follows, I would like to suggest some modes of examining these themes.

Intellectuals and Modern Alienation

It is not a novel discovery that what we generally call ‘modernity’ produces a feeling of individualization and constant reflexivity, which we often summarize as ‘alienation.’ For Edward Shils, who does not use the word ‘alienation,’ intellectual activity seemed premised on lack of satisfaction (by a small minority) with the appearance and concreteness of things, which then generates a quest to commune with more general principles or expressions.² But the intellectual quest itself resolves the alienation, since for Shils—writing at a time when theories of order defined sociology—that quest transforms the intellectual from an alien creature into a guardian of the social order and a voice of its cohesion.

In contrast to this view, more pervasive contemporary views regard the alienation of the intellectual as part of his very identity as an intellectual. For Edward Said, the clearest example of this was Theodor Adorno, whose difficult style and impenetrable tastes marked his view of the intellectual as someone who lived more or less in a permanent state of exile.³ Said’s own advice was that the intellectual was someone who, while viewing reality from some distance, nonetheless lived with it and allowed it to energize his curiosity, rather than compel him to conquer it—more like Marco Polo than Robinson Crusoe.⁴

For an earlier generation of modernist reformers in the Middle East, however, intellectual alienation was a novel rather than ancient feature, and also had a very specific source. That source was located neither in the naturally exilic nature of intellectual activity, nor in an overall abstraction called ‘modernity.’ Rather, alienation was rooted in a specific tool of modernity, namely its educational systems. That was the main point of Fazlur Rahman’s Islam and Modernity, where ‘modernity’ was identified specifically with transformations in educational systems rather than with macro social processes, including economic or political transformations. For Rahman, the fundamental problem with nineteenth-century Ottoman educational reforms, for example, was their lack of sufficient radicalism. The reformers lacked the courage to contest the traditional educational system, so they ended up with two opposing systems: a modern system for the elites, and a traditional one for the masses.⁵

The outcome was the emergence of an educated elite that had no connection with the heritage of the masses, and whose alienation from the masses therefore could be expressed in forms ranging from heroic paternalism to frustrated impotence. Muhammad ‘Abduh, who is often seen as a synthesis of modern and traditional intellectualism, likewise saw modern education to lie at the root of this alienation, and in a very concrete way. More than a century ago, ‘Abduh saw modern education as only producing unemployed, resentful individuals.⁶ The educated were no longer expected to respond to or even know a heritage that most of their own people still adhered to in some way. At the same time, their education could most easily be deposited into a European socio-economic grid that did not yet exist in their home country.

Underlying that critique was the notion that the ‘traditional’ intellectual, which ‘Abduh wanted only to modernize without alienation, still had a role, and the intellectual in general ought to play a leading role in society, just like before. But he could do so only to the extent that his education did not produce such a profound alienation from such society. However, modern educational systems seemed to be capable only of producing disconnected, alienated individuals, who not only became discouraged given the magnitude of the modernist challenge of which they were custodians. They also had no natural role in a society that has no institutions in which to house their expertise, and no natural connection to their own society and its traditions.

Writing from the point of view of a later generation, Taha Husayn saw things differently; the alienation of the intellectual lay less in any specific style of education and more in the character of the society towards which he was answerable. For example, while both rural and urban ‘ulama’ may be equally traditional,⁷ rural ones enjoyed far more prestige in their small local environments than did urban ‘ulama’,⁸ who could not as effectively dominate their more complex social environment. But as Dale Eickelman argues, such prestige may in fact be based on nothing more than the limited rather than extravagant expectations from traditional intellectuals by their communities.⁹ This is in contrast to modern vanguardist intellectuals who expected much and of whom much was expected, thereby magnifying disappointments against which old traditional education had guarded its people well.

These objections do not simply offer a critique of modern education. Implicitly they also endorse an old expectation; if the scholars are the inheritors of the prophets, according to the famous saying attributed to Muhammad, then their scholarly authority also suggests a form of social authority as well. But this authority means li...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction: The Social Dynamism of the Organic Intellectual
• Part I: Intellectuals As Modern Vanguard
• Part II: Intellectuals As Defenders Of Heritage
• Part III: Intellectuals As Migrants
• Bibliography
• Notes on Contributors