The Making of the Arab Intellectual

Empire, Public Sphere and the Colonial Coordinates of Selfhood

Dyala Hamzah

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780415488341
• eBook ISBN: 9781136167577
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Middle Eastern History
• Index: History

In the wake of the Ottoman Empire's nineteenth-century reforms, as guilds waned and new professions emerged, the scholarly 'estate' underwent social differentiation. Some found employment in the state's new institutions as translators, teachers and editors, whilst others resisted civil servant status. Gradually, the scholar morphed into the public writer. Despite his fledgling status, he catered for the public interest all the more so since new professionals such as doctors, engineers and lawyers endorsed this latest social role as an integral part of their own self-image.

This dual preoccupation with self-definition and all things public is the central concern of this book. Focusing on the period after the tax-farming scholar took the bow and before the alienated intellectual prevailed on the contemporary Arab cultural scene, it situates the making of the Arab intellectual within the dysfunctional space of competing states' interests known as the 'Nahda'. Located between Empire and Colony, the emerging Arab public sphere was a space of over- and under-regulation, hindering accountability and upsetting allegiances.

The communities that Arab intellectuals imagined, including the Pan-Islamic, Pan-Arab and socialist sat astride many a polity and never became contained by post-colonial states. Examining a range of canonical and less canonical authors, this interdisciplinary approach to The Making of the Modern Arab Intellectual will be of interest to students and scholars of the Middle East, history, political science, comparative literature and philosophy.

1 Introduction

The making of the Arab intellectual (1880–1960): empire, public sphere and the colonial coordinates of selfhood

Dyala Hamzah

During the long Ottoman nineteenth century, as guilds waned, new professions started to appear in a bid to second the Empire's reforming drive (later framing its colonized former provinces). The protracted process of social differentiation that gripped the scholarly and scribal ‘estate’ brought some of its members in the employ of the centralizing state's new institutions (as translators, teachers, editors and correctors of printed books, etc.), while it pitted others against the publicity and commodification that sanctioned the new occupations. Another fringe resolutely engaged in both ‘old’ and ‘new’, copying and glossing manuscripts, but also printing or editing books, if not in one breath, at least within one generation and often within the same family. This fact of modern Middle East history complicates our apprehension of print culture, not so much however in the sense of relativizing its revolutionary effect,¹ as in highlighting the significance of the overlaps it enabled. As the tax-farming scholar (‛ālim multazim) was taking a bow, and before the alienated figure of the modern intellectual (muthaqqaf) came to prevail on the cultural scene of contemporary Arab societies,² novel types of intellectuals began to emerge and differentiate. Gradually or less so, the scholar (‛ālim) and/or the man of Letters (adīb) morphed into the journalist (ṣiḥāfī) and/or the public writer (kātib ‛āmm).³ Despite the still fledgling status of the publicist and popularizing writer, this morphing resolutely led to a wholesale assumption of this new social role which catered for the public interest. Even more remarkably perhaps, it brought cohorts from among the new professionals (doctors, engineers, teachers and lawyers, but also functionaries) to endorse this new public role as an integral part of their own self-image.

This dual preoccupation with self-definition and with all things public (and the manner with which each affected the other) lies at the heart of this volume. The Arab intellectual mapped his/her public and defined his/her interest and was ‘made’ in return. The making of the modern Arab intellectual, like any other, obtained therefore in the public sphere, i.e. in that legal-social realm where modern political subjectivities usually negotiate rights and obligations. The public sphere of his/her making was however fitted in an interstice between Empire and Colony, i.e. in a dysfunctional space of competing raisons d'Etat, a space of over and under-regulation all at once, which hindered accountability and upset allegiances. The community that the Arab intellectual eventually imagined sat astride many a polity and never became contained by postcolonial states. This was partly because Pan-Islam or Pan-Arabism never fully realized the institutions of their inclusive ambitions, partly because the nation-states that eventually took over were reluctant/unable to overcome, within their sovereign borders, the initial fault line of the imperial-colonial public sphere. The impotence (‛ajz) described by E. Kassab as characterizing the contemporary Arab intellectual is surely grounded in the present political deadlocks but also in the fact that the horizon of possibility and expectations had, until recently (and still perhaps beyond the Arab Spring: the winner of the Tunisian elections is, after all, a party called al-Nahḍa!), its coordinates in the colonial past. A witness to this is the enduring centrality of (an idealized) Egypt; and the (incomprehensibly) resilient trope of reform (iṣlāḥ).

The public sphere paradigm does not only seem to provide a significant frame for understanding the colonial-imperial predicament of the Arab Middle East. With its rooting of identity in the dynamics of public engagement, it waives the ‘impact’ paradigms, whether in their soft or hard guise (respectively, the ‘Coming of the West’, the ‘Clash of Civilizations’). Why this has not served as the basis for, or operative paradigm in, a renewed intellectual history of the Middle East is a question that might be answered by taking a journey into the historiography of Middle East Studies.

Arabic thought in the colonizing age: of historiography and paradigms

The sequential contribution of intellectual and social histories to the field of (modern) Middle East Studies had been, up until the close of the last (half) century, a structuring feature of its historiography. Roughly speaking, while the 1950s through the early 1970s saw the surge and triumphant establishment of a Lovejoyan history of ideas in the field, the 1980s and 1990s brought workers and peasants, women and minorities, the poor and the marginal to the fore of scholarship, gradually but ever forcefully relegating ‘great men’ to the sound and the fury of political and military history.

By contrast, the defining mood of the first decade of the present century is one of a fusion of sorts between intellectual and social histories, what with the conspiring of multifarious approaches from cultural studies, critical theory or comparative literature, among others. More accurately, it is one of the reclaiming by social historians of intellectual history. Indeed, and thanks no doubt to its focus on the non-elite, Middle East social history has finally also stumbled on urbanites of the middle walks of life and on their mouthpiece. So, while the famous ‘middle class’ that had gone missing so long from accounts of Middle East modernity was finally gaining recognition, in the words of Keith Watenpaugh, as a ‘fact of late-Ottoman and interwar Eastern Mediterranean urban society’,⁴ the door was being opened for a reclaiming of Middle Eastern ideas, if not exactly ‘from below’, at least ‘from within’

Numbed by the Orientalism watershed, Middle East intellectual history, contrary to its European and even South Asian counterparts, never truly recovered as a paradigm.⁵ It is doubtful that it ever will or even should. A look at its past practice, structure and icons will help us see why a recovery is not desirable and how the current reclaiming is the most adequate antidote against the unrepentant upholding of such categories as ‘high’ and ‘low’ intellectual history, or ‘second-and third-level ideational activity’,⁶ as much as against the wholesale identification of its modern field with the Enlightenment project.⁷

When they had not remained contained in biographies as self-explanations or adornments therein, of the individual lives they sprang from,⁸ ideas, ideologies and intellectual movements of the Middle East had usually fuelled histories of ideas that were, by and large, and despite often highly erudite scholarship, unconcerned with the social mooring of those concepts at work in their articulation.⁹ It had always been a case of either/or, whereby one charted either the ‘intellectual origins’ of an idea or its ‘social roots’. Only when genealogies were downplayed or roughly expedited, have the politics of a social category succeeded in contextually illuminating its ideas;¹⁰ but where genealogies were given the foreground, ‘Middle Eastern ideas’ have invariably failed the acid test of originality, their imprint but the parochial expression of a derived intellect. In exemplary fashion, here were nationalisms modularly imagined; the common good, a shaky transcript of some Lockean commonweal or Benthamite utility; Pan-movements, belated emulations of their Continental counterparts. It was not only that Middle Eastern ideas could never rival with the Canons of Thought, but that regardless of how ‘classical’ they were in their own abode, they needed, beyond the confines of Area Studies and Postcolonial Studies even, constant introducing and rehearsing in order to be simply heard.¹¹

Notwithstanding its diehard beauty, or rather, precisely because of it, Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age remains to this day an iconic exercise in introduction and rehearsal (of modern Arabic ideas to the Western student). It is here, however, that the Nahḍa was enduringly locked within a dialectics of impact and reaction. It is here that the defining trope of its historiography, imitation (and its corollary: failure), was engineered. Even after the linguistic and cultural turns in the humanities and social sciences, we still cannot think ofthat period without due reference, and respect, to Hourani's work. Masterful counter-narratives of resistance, subversion and creation have unfailingly returned to dock at its shores, either to balance the ‘impact’ of the West with an Eastern, i.e. local, one¹² or to relativize or dilute its Western and liberal quality with global and radical ramifications.¹³ Another no less admirable trend has been to engage and wrestle even further with Hourani's thesis (derivative liberalism). First, by questioning its premise (rather than as an import, liberalism in the Middle East came about from local collective and singular experiences with authoritarianism); second, by seeking for its Huntingtonian defacement (modernization without liberalism; hence: failure, silence, absence) objective reasons in flawed methodologies and paucity of sources.¹⁴

A reign of a hundred years was once foreseen for Hourani's work¹⁵: were this prophecy to hold true, another half century worth of defensive scholarship will be further produced before the father is eventually killed. One way of averting that course (not the parricide, but the wait) is to call for a paradigm shift from precisely within a discussion of methodology and sources.

It could however be objected that the paradigm shift has already happened over twenty years ago, with Timothy Mitchell's call on Foucauldian archaeologies.¹⁶ With brilliance, Colonizing Egypt unravelled the ‘machineries of truth’ in which both colonizer and colonized were locked, demonstrating how the technologies of (modern) power were actually developed in the colony. In so doing, was the ‘impact and reaction’ framework actually loosened, rendered irrelevant, or rather reinforced? One critique levelled at Mitchell's work concerns the hegemonic nature of the system of representation spelled out by bio-power, which could neither account for dissent or plain exteriority to this system of representation, nor explain how/why resistance was eventually mounted by those very local actors who initially helped create and operate this system.¹⁷ The point is well taken and hinges on the assumption that something is amiss in the Foucauldian framework.

As a consequence perhaps, the legacy of Colonizing Egypt has been diffuse, its heirs few and far between. What is more, most were critical while only a few were straight intellectual historians. For example, Khaled Fahmy's 1997 All the Pasha's Men, an account of the making of the first Middle Eastern standing army, is a work of social history that sees the technologies of power at work within the Ottoman context, i.e. not only before the colonial state but outside of the Egyptian nationalist project.¹⁸ A decade on, Omnia El Shakry's 2007 The Great Social Laboratory is an admirable inquiry into the institutional and discursive establishment of the social sciences in colonial and postcolonial Egypt, i.e. into the production of positivist knowledge for the purpose of disciplining and controlling that partook in the colonial and anti-colonial projects. As such, it partially answers the aforementioned critique lodged with Mitchell's work, in that it shows how and why the colonial system of governance was perpetuated within the postcolonial nation-state.¹⁹ Within the spectrum of works that explicitly champion Mitchell's approach, recent studies in social and cultural history either partially engage with some of its tropes (Michael Gasper's The Power of Representation)²⁰ or implicitly cry out to that ‘something amiss’ in this approach (Ziad Fahmy's Ordinary Egyptians).²¹ By contrast, Yoav Di-Capua's Gatekeepers of the Past, an account of the acculturation of the idea of historicism in colonial Egypt which stands alone in its claim to strict intellectual history, neither relies on the Foucauldian framework nor denounces its inadequacies in conceptualizing the making of the modern Arab intellectual. A perplexing feature, given it is centrally concerned with th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• SOAS/Routledge studies on the Middle East
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Note on transliteration
• 1 Introduction: the making of the Arab intellectual (1880–1960): empire, public sphere and the colonial coordinates of selfhood
• 2 Pharaoh's revenge: translation, literary history and colonial ambivalence
• 3 Public deliberations of the self in fin-de-siècle Egypt
• 4 Inscribing socialism into the Nahḍa: al-Muqtaṭaf, al-Hilāl, and the construction of a Leftist reformist worldview, 1880–1914
• 5 From ‘ilm to Ṣiḥāfa or the politics of the public interest (maṣlaḥa): Muḥammad Rashīd Riḍā and his journal al-Manār (1898–1935)
• 6 Partitioned pasts: Arab Jewish intellectuals and the case of Esther Azharī Moyal (1873–1948)
• 7 The Mahjar as literary and political territory in the first decades of the twentieth century: the example of Amīn Rīḥānī (1876–1940)
• 8 The generation of broad expectations: nationalism, education, and autobiography in Syria and Lebanon, 1930–1958
• 9 Waiting for the Superman: a new generation of Arab nationalists in 1930s Iraq
• Bibliography
• Periodicals consulted
• Index