Contemporary North Africa

Issues of Development and Integration

Halim Barakat

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781138122246
• eBook ISBN: 9781317307563
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Regional Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

This book by a group of international scholars, both Arab and Western, was first published in 1985, and considers the state of contemporary North Africa and its position both in the Arab world and within wider international affairs. It examines the cultural and historical contexts which have shaped political and social conditions within the region. It also considers the nature of intra-regional conflict which has long been a feature of the North African political scene. The sociological impact of economic development within the region is treated at length, as are the changing positions of both the traditional elites and new groups such as women workers.

PART I:

THE MAGHRIB: BETWEEN THE WEST AND EAST

1	DOUBLE CRITICISM: THE DECOLONIZATION OF ARAB SOCIOLOGY
	Abdelkebir Khatibi

___________

This paper was originally written in French. It was translated for the purposes of this publication.

ABDELKEBIR KHATIBI is a writer and professor at Mohammed Al-Khamis University in Rabat. He is the author of several books including La Blessure du nom propre, La Memoire tatouée, Le Livre du sang, Armour bilingue, and Maghreb pluriel. Professor Khatibi has also published plays, poetry collections, and works on Islamic art.

From the point of view of what is still commonly called the Third World, one cannot claim that decolonization has been able to promote a system of thought that is radically critical of the ideological apparatus of imperialism and of ethnocentrism, i.e., a decolonization that would constitute a deconstruction¹ of the type of discourse that in various more or less hidden ways, promotes imperialistic domination — which is understood here to include the power of its word as well. Indeed, we have not achieved the kind of decolonization of our thought that would involve not just an overthrow of this power of imperialism, but the affirmation of a difference and an absolute and free subversion of the mind. Hence there is a vacuum, a silent gap between the fact of colonization and that of decolonization. This is not to say that subversive and responsible expressions do not appear or develop here and there, but these feelings, strangled and almost lost, do not succeed in being vocalized or in taking on this power and risk.

However, let us limit our discussion to the social sphere and to sociology as it claims to be. Like any sociology of decolonization (although one may ask what is “decolonization”), that of the Arab world would consist of carrying out two tasks:

(1) A deconstruction of “logocentrism” and of ethnocentrism, that speech of self-sufficiency par excellence which the West, in the course of its expansion, has imposed on the world. This still leaves us much to contemplate as to the structural solidarity that links imperialism in its different dimensions (political, military, and cultural) to the growth of the social sciences. This is undoubtedly an enormous task: Between the fact of colonization and that of decolonization we become involved with the fact of science and technology as forces of domination and mastership over the entire world and beyond.

(2) This equally assumes and demands a criticism of the knowledge and the discourses developed by the different societies of the Arab world about themselves.

The overthrowing of mastership, one could even say subversion, depends on the decisive act of complete turning against one’s foundations and origins — origins stunted by the history of theology, charismatic figures, and patriarchalism (if one can thus describe the structural and permanent elements of the Arab world). The lack of awareness of our own decadence and dependence should be brought to light so that by recognizing it, it can be destroyed and transcended.

This double criticism involves a violent uprooting. Double in movement and indissociable in its aim, this approach is, it appears, the only one capable of opening to the sociologists of the Arab countries the possibility of a knowledge that is less imitative and more adapted to their real differences.

Let us resume. What do we mean by deconstruction? More precisely, what do we mean by deconstruction of concepts? A first-level approach (and I refer here to the indispensable works of Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault) consists of extracting the constitution from the concepts and their interconnections to the laws that govern them, from without to within and from what is social to internal discourse. No researcher can escape the question involving the archeology of the knowledge that he intends to exercise within the limits of his conscience and of his free speech. However, the more one’s consciousness plunges into this archeology, the more one’s research runs up against a stratification of discursive masses and of disparate events, masses which are coagulated and dispersed, as it were, in the rock of their foundations. It is from stratum to stratum that a deconstruction of knowledge should be criticized and it is in order to move toward a “thought of difference” (pensée-autre) that the body of an episteme² unswervingly points itself toward its origins as it moves away from them.

The researcher is a double being, split by this remoteness, by this uprooting as long as he sticks to his need to criticize himself as he is obliterated in the object of his analysis. Such a distance and such an operation from without, which is seen working against the self-sufficiency of the researcher’s reason and the identity of “I,” can establish the clauses of a contract that he signs with his own potential for thought, a blank contract with the yet-unthought-of. What would the social sphere be, from the archeological point of view, except these scattered traces: institutions, laws, and counter-laws of all kinds? What would it be without this perpetual disorganization, this anarchy of signs to be formed in the patient and painful education and learning of the conscience, but maintain such a conscience on the threshold of its silence? There is an “archeology of silence” which cannot be indicated by social affairs and their constructs except by a sustained subversion against them. In this sense, when one speaks of underdeveloped societies, it would be more appropriate to use the term “silent societies.” Even when they speak, they remain unheard in their difference from the West. Are we destined to use violence against the others to force them to hear the voice of reason? To threaten the West with war, destruction, and vile guilt so that it turns against its self-sufficiency and its ethnocentrism, which now affect the whole world? Yet, we of the Third World can follow a third way: neither the path of reason nor of unreason as conceived of by the West in its totality, but rather a subversion that is in a way double, which, by claiming the power of speech and action, goes to work in the context of a difference that is uncompromising. Decolonization would be another name for this “thought of difference”; its result would be the silent end of Western metaphysics. This is where this third speech (tierce parole), this disjunction of Western reason, in its sciences and its techniques, begins. How can this researcher carry in himself the Third World (which is a plural affair), through thought that must accept the overthrow of all values and of all hierarchy? Insurrection is necessary for life and survival. Once again, there is no alternative. This is an unending debate. Let us move to something else.

Historically, the social sciences developed in the West. This development took place at the same time as the growth of imperial hegemony and the expansion of industries and techniques. This is an established fact, not a question. Later we will come back to the ramifications of this world event as they relate to the social sciences. For the moment, however, let us state that this juxtaposition would not be of any interest to us, if it did not expose a structural solidarity between the social sciences as such on the one hand, and Western societies in their industrial and imperial phase on the other. Yes, this has been stated repeatedly. Nevertheless, let us present another argument. For example, Marxism presents itself as, claims to be, and is applied — in one way or another — against imperialism. Yet, as a Western system of thought that has achieved universality, how does it analyze other societies? One detail is crystal clear, if not schematic: in its traditional typology, Marxism groups the other societies under the label of “the Asiatic mode of production.” This is a general term, perhaps too general, which includes an impressive number of societies and a variety of cultures. In one pre-colonial society alone (Morocco), it is possible to distinguish several conflicting systems: the patriarchal system, the tribal system, the artisanal and mercantile capitalist system, the rural seignorial system, and the Makhzen (the central state). The state became truly dominant only after colonization; that is, its capacity to rule has been strengthened thanks to the instruments and techniques of power bequeathed by imperialism. Surely, this follows a pattern of historical logic.

We must not forget, too, that Marx wrote that England’s occupation of India had “a double mission to fulfill in India, one destructive, the other regenerative: the annihilation of the old Asiatic society and the laying of foundations for Western society in Asia.”³ This is a terrifying statement in its very nakedness, and one which deserves much thought. One may ask, for example, where the place of the Hindus is in relation to this redeeming dialectic. The Hindus are characterized by an ancient and highly developed metaphysical tradition and exceptional thought about negativity and death. Socially speaking, they do not fit the classification of which Marx spoke, but have their own very unique system of castes and of hierarchy.

One may therefore read Marx in the following manner: the murder of the tradition(s) of the other and the liquidation of its past are necessary so that the West, while seizing the world, can expand beyond its limits while remaining unchanged in the end. The East must be shaken up in order for it to come back to the West, that is, to the metaphysics of the Self. The East must be separated from itself, have its continuity broken, be separated from its time and its memory. Separated from its time, it must rediscover itself in dialectical reasoning (Hegelian in this case, let us recall). This sort of negative work which characterizes imperialism is therefore a regenerative force of the world; this force is to colonize, Westernize, and “capitalize” to the maximum, until it collapses in the advent of communism. It is necessary to destroy and to regenerate: a principle which Marx’s West imposes, and must impose, on the other, on that strange India which for thousands of years has never ceased to pose enigmas.

It would be futile simply to say that Marx spoke badly of other countries and that this was, in a way, a logical error in his system. We think that it would be necessary to question this system (because it is one) in its totality and with respect to its great weaknesses, that is to say, also with respect to its will to power which accompanied (while diverting) the expansion of imperialism. This is a huge task, it is true, but one inevitable for any “thought of difference” that claims to stand on a different ground from the West as a whole.

But let us quickly set aside this objection which would reduce Marx’s thought to a murderous ethnocentrism. Who can deny that he was against colonialism and imperialism, that his thought has helped and continues to help the Third World in overthrowing imperialism and local powers? We are concerned with presenting a different type of objection to Marx, about that power of will which seeks to unite the world on the basis of a world system, and of which the least that can be said is its failure to recognize the other as such, in its irreducibility. In this sense, Marx’s thought, more or less dissociable from that of Hegel and therefore of Western metaphysics, has achieved an absolute form of absolute knowledge, while shaking the world with an unrelenting dialectic.

This is why the “thought of difference” that we call for is neither Marxist in the strict sense nor anti-Marxist in the narrow sense of the term, but does recognize the limits of its potential. For we want to uproot Western knowledge from its central place within ourselves, to de-center ourselves with respect to this center, to this origin claimed by the West. This should be done by operating in the sphere of a plural and planetary “thought of difference” that struggles against its own reduction and domestication.

Now let us turn our attention back to the social sciences. Since there is no such thing as a pure sociology, that is, a sociology detached from its cultural archeology, it is suitable to carry out the double criticism set forth here. A scientific and ideological strategy is needed, but also an active plurality of continuity and discontinuity, violence and self-violence, in every war of repudiation.

Let us consider an example illustrating this side of this double criticism. Contemporary Arab knowledge cannot, without experiencing a radical rupture, escape its own theological and theocratic foundations which characterize the ideology of Islam and of all monotheism. The task, then, consists of pointing out the places where such a knowledge is an ideological adaptation of metaphysical concepts, including Arab Marxist sociology. Arab sociologists and Orientalists thus use the notion of ’aṣabīyya (socio-agnatic social solidarity, and, in a more general sense, solidarity of a political clientele) borrowed from Ibn Khaldūn. But this notion implies a cyclic pattern of history, in relation to the initial model: the revelation of the Qur’ān and the prophecy of Muḥammad. How can dialectical thought adopt a discourse positioned between theology and a speculative dialectic? Would the notion of ‘aṣabīyya be transposable into that of the class struggle? The underlying debate that Maghribi sociology cannot avoid here is that of the contradiction and the opposition between a religious ontology and a historicist ontology, between an ideology with a theological foundation, and an ideology that considers social classes insofar as they are a subject of history and of its transformations.

However, perhaps we see a contradiction wh...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part I: The Maghrib: Between the West and East
• Part II: Intra-regional Conflicts
• Part III: Structural Changes
• Part IV: Cultural Dynamics
• Index