Self-Criticism After the Defeat

Sadik al-Azm

• Publisher: Saqi Books
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9780863564840
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political History & Theory
• Index: Politics & International Relations

A devastating critique of the Arab world's political stagnation by one of its most revered thinkers. The 1967 War - which led to the defeat of Syria, Jordan and Egypt by Israel - felt like an unprecedented and unimaginable disaster for the Arab world at the time. For many, the easiest solution was to shift the blame and to ignore some of the glaring defects of Arab society. Syrian philosopher Sadik al-Azm was one of the few to challenge such a view in his seminal Self-Criticism after the Defeat. Exposing the political and cultural faults that led to the defeat, he argued that the Arabs could only progress by embracing secularism, gender equality, democracy, and science. Available in English for the first time, Self-Criticism after the Defeat is a milestone in modern Arab intellectual history. It marked a turning point in Arab discourse about society and politi on publication in 1968, and spawned other intellectual ventures into Arab self-criticism.

SELF-CRITICISM
AFTER THE DEFEAT

Sadik al-Azm

I

In the first days of the year 1904, a small Asian country that had only recently entered the stage of scientific development, industrial expansion, and modern military organization was able to deal a decisive military blow not only against the largest state in Europe in terms of land-mass, but also a state that was considered at that time one of the strongest naval powers in the world, Russia. Japan gained victory quickly and surprisingly, by the standards of that time, despite the established disparity between the two countries and the known superiority of Russia in all aspects including land area, population, and latent power. Japan achieved its crushing victory with a surprise attack on the Russian fleet in the Pacific Ocean, destroying its ability to wage war and stripping it of its power, which gave Japan total and absolute naval supremacy from the beginning. Remember that in this historical period, naval power had the importance and consequence for states hostile to one another that air power has for our generation today, and that supremacy on the sea meant something very similar to what air supremacy means today in our present wars, especially wars that take place in the desert.

After Japan had annihilated the Russian fleet with its first strike, it was no longer in doubt that the young country would win quickly over old Russia despite its magnitude, because of Japan’s progress and Russia’s backwardness. Moreover, those who followed the course of the war observed how Imperial Russia overestimated its strength and ability to mobilize in response to that first strike with an even harder strike that would gain for it greater military and political results than it actually achieved. Whoever reviews and examines the facts of history also finds a number of striking similarities between the situation of the Russians and the Japanese in January 1904 and the situation of the Arabs and Israel on the morning of the 5^th of June 1967.

If history does not repeat itself in every detail and at every point, this does not mean that historical events do not fall within similar repetitive patterns worth studying and examining closely. Otherwise there is nothing to learn from past experience, no profit gained from the study of the past, and no meanings from history that inform the present.

Let us review some of these similarities: The Tsar, his advisors, and those responsible for guiding the policies of the country were unable to imagine this small country daring to risk a military confrontation with the largest power in Europe. Military intelligence experts declared at that time that if Japan was so mad as to attack Russia, then Russia would respond immediately and confront all Japan’s actions without great difficulty.¹ Similar declarations from before the 5^th of June continue to ring in our ears, reverberate in our minds, and bring a shudder to our hearts. Russian military intelligence experts made preparations so that Russia would meet the first strike in its central defensive positions and then undertake the strengthening of its forces and launch a sweeping attack that “will push the impudent Asiatics into the sea,” to quote their words literally.² This self-confidence led to declarations and headlines in the Russian newspapers well represented by the following: “Russia will route the Japanese and bury them under their caps.”³ Expressing the temperament that prevailed in official Russian circles and the governmental bodies, one of the senior Russian officers wrote that “Japan is not a country of the type that can give warnings to Russia. Russia, on the other hand, is obliged not to accept warnings from a country such as Japan.”⁴ That disdain of the powers of the enemy and this hollow self-confidence resembles nothing so much as what the well-known Arab commentator Mohammed Hassanein Heikal wrote in Al-Ahram on June 2, 1967:

Whatever happens, and without trying to anticipate events, Israel is drawing near almost certain defeat … whether from the inside or the outside.

It also resembles the following: (a) what a correspondent for the Al-Jumhuriyya newspaper wrote on the 21^st of May 1967 under the title, “We Can Crush Israel in a Matter of Hours Without Using All of Our Weapons in the Battle;” (b) the assurance that one of the senior officers in the Syrian Arab army expressed in saying that the destruction of Israel will take no more than four days at the maximum; (c) what Al-Ahram published in a column estimating the prowess of the Arab and Israeli armies on May 27^th, 1967, where it made great efforts to run down the value of Israeli weapons and praise the value of Arab weapons, calling Israeli military prowess a fable propagated by the West and claiming that the enemy army was lacking in unity because it was composed of incongruent bands from every region of the world.

Another similarity between the two wars is that the first masterful strike that destroyed the Russian naval fleet decided the rest of the course of the war, and with startling speed. The same can be said of the first masterful strike that destroyed the Egyptian air force in the most recent war between Israel and the Arabs; however, the second strike decided the fate of the Arab war with Israel with such an unprecedented speed that a BBC correspondent was able to announce the following on the evening of the 5^th of June on the “Ten o’Clock News Broadcast”:

After less than fifteen hours after the outbreak of the battle, Israel won the war. Egypt can no longer continue fighting…it is the swiftest victory the modern world has known.⁵

Japan, despite how small it was compared to Russia, had been able to absorb the achievements of modern civilization such as industry, technology, organized scientific research, and technical training, and was able to assimilate them so quickly that it was able to challenge a large state and triumph over it. For Russia, despite its reforms, and attempts at renewal, industrialization, and the assimilation of modern science, remained, in essence, an underdeveloped country, secure in its past and heritage until the war exposed its real position in this domain in comparison to what another smaller, aggressive country achieved. It is not necessary that I explain that the comparison between Russian and Japan in 1904 applies in most features and details to any comparison we draw between Israel and the Arab nation in 1968.

After suffering defeat, Russia turned inward, probing itself, re-examining everything, and criticizing itself through the words of its cultural elites, thinkers, artists, political parties, and the enlightened leading factions of the toiling classes. The famous 1905 Revolution was the first of the important direct consequences of the military defeat and the first fruit of the activity of self-examination and self-criticism. Although the 1905 Revolution failed, the strikes and disturbances that followed paved the way for the comprehensive October Revolution, which directed its rage against the inherited traditional models in production, thought, organization, and government, these models that the war put to the test and exposed as obsolescent and inadequate to the demands of modern and contemporary civilization. In other words, Russia was able to transform military defeat from ordeal to constructive experience and from catastrophe to a cultural lesson. It would not have been able to achieve all of this had it not accepted responsibility for the defeat, not attempting to blame anyone but itself, its situation, its organization, and its current status, especially in comparison with the condition and reality of its enemy, the Japanese.

It ought to be clear to the Arabs that their recent defeat resembles the Russian defeat in all aspects, and that it cannot be summed up as merely a transient military loss resulting from political alliances and diplomatic vicissitudes that were not to their advantage, but rather largely to the advantage of their enemy. As in the Russian case, the Arab defeat was tied directly to the prevalent economic, cultural, scientific, and civilizational conditions in the Arab nation, i.e., it was a reflection and expression of those conditions.

I must indicate here a major difference between Russia after the defeat of 1904 and the Arabs after the defeat of 1967. No one who has followed the state of the Arabs before and after the recent war has failed to note our vehement tendency to expend the greatest effort in order to shirk our responsibility and shift it instead onto factors outside our control, allowing us to excuse ourselves for the embarrassing situation we fell into, and for our failure to live up to our obligations in regards to the paramount Arab cause (Palestine) and in regards to modern civilization in general. Although every one of us knows deep down that the responsibility for the defeat, in the end, belongs to us, we persistently attempt in what we say, think, write, and declare to save face, protect appearances, defer to emotions, and concern ourselves with proprieties, morale, flattery, and sensitivities, instead of doing the necessary work of calling things by their names and fixing responsibilities where they belong, saying to the ones who failed “you failed” and to those who are incompetent “you are incompetent.”

This tendency to the evasion of self-responsibility has emerged in our claims that American and British airplanes provided a protective umbrella above Israel and participated actively in the strike on our positions. It emerges also in the blame we have poured on the Soviet Union and countries of the socialist bloc immediately after the war, knowing that no country in history lost the major part of its arsenal in the course of a week and then had most of what it lost restored in the course of two months, except the United Arabic Republic [Egypt’s formal name at the time, trans. note], and the credit for this replacement goes to the Soviet Union. It emerges, too, in the exaggerations we arrive at in order to blame all of the shortcomings in the political and military conditions of the Arabs on colonialism. Some have gone to the extent of dragging in the gods and the unseen to explain and justify the Arab failure, as occurs in the book published recently under the title Amidat Al-Nakbah [Pillars of the Disaster], where the author says: “The Arabs renounced their faith in God, and God renounced them.”⁶ As if the relation between man and his God relies on the basis of shared reciprocal needs and common benefits in the manner of “if you abandon me, I abandon you” or “if you love me, I will love you.” The Mufti of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, in the course of explaining the Arab defeat and the meanings and moral to be drawn from it to the newspaper Al-Dustur (December 22, 1967), stated about the Jews:

They lack the prowess, boldness, or courage to accomplish these deeds, and we know them better than most others do. However, God desired to impose this group upon us because of our distance from our religion.

In fact, the deviousness of this mode of thinking has reached the point of compassion for the Ottoman state and its caliphate. The author of Pillars of the Disaster has written the following in the course of his analysis of the Arab defeat:

However, the impartial researcher will find that the only fruit of this Arab nationalist and patriotic call is, in the beginning, the destruction of the Ottoman caliphate, and, in the end, remoteness from religion and faith.

The Arabs never gained independence or freedom after the Ottoman defeat and the breaking up of the Ottoman Empire, but instead acquired mandates and protectorates and colonialism, and the Ottoman Muslims became “colonialists” in the view of the nationalists, who adopted the phrase of the Europeans.⁷

Indeed, our use of the term “nakbah” [disaster] to indicate the June War and its aftermath contains much of the logic of exoneration and the evasion of responsibility and accountability, since whomever is struck by a disaster is not considered responsible for it, or its occurrence, and even if we were to consider him so, in some sense, his responsibility remains minimal in comparison with the terror and enormity of the disaster. This is why we ascribe disasters to fate, destiny, and nature, that is, to factors outside our control and for which we cannot be held accountable.

This deviousness in thinking about the defeat and its causes reaches its farthest point in the drivel we find in a book written by Dr. Kamal Yusif al-Hajj (the chair of the philosophy department in the Lebanese University). Dr. al-Hajj asserts in all seriousness that the correct answer to our question, “Why do the Jews persist on coming to Palestine,” is “because they want to deny the Messiah.”⁸ The author creates a folk tale out of the Palestinian question and the essence of the Arab-Israeli conflict, emptying it entirely of all its tangible practical and historical contents and making of it, instead, a supernatural-religious problem in which we have no role and are powerless to confront or resist the course of events. The author draws this picture:

Today, the struggle taking place under our skies is not, in reality, between the Jews and Arabs (as Zionist diplomacy claims), but primarily between the Jews and Jesus Christ.⁹

In fact, this astonishing folk-tale version of the Palestinian question waves a wand to transform the Arabs to a marginal and secondary factor in the “struggle taking place under our skies” and upon the occupied Arab lands. The Arabs stand at the margins of this struggle since Dr. Al-Hajj has discovered the surprising fact that after World Jewry was unable to

harm Jesus of Nazareth during his life…It has focused all of its cunning to harm his representative on earth. I mean by this His Holiness, the Pope, as the head of the Church.¹⁰

All I can say is that not even Zionist claims, in their distortion of the Palestinian question, have reached the point of erasing the Arabs from existence as Zionism’s sole chief adversary in the historical struggle for the land of Palestine. World Zionism knows who its enemies are and it did not colonize Palestine by rushing into quixotic battle against hidden, supernatural powers that are unidentifiable in the first place.

We regret to find that a progressive Lebanese thinker like Mr. Hussein Muruwwa has been carried away with this current, in the beginning at least, and attempted to remove responsibility for the 5^th of June from its real source, that is, the Arabs themselves, and their current historical, economic, and cultural situation compared to Israel today. For after he assails those he calls “those spreading doubt” and disparages them with some of the usual disparagements (a fifth column and the like), he says:

Why, then, are they so eager to spread doubt about the Arab to that extent, is it because of the military defeat that befell him, a defeat for which only very few individuals are responsible, individuals who share nothing with the Arab as a kind but kinship?¹¹

Obviously, this sort of talk is pervaded by obscurity and vagueness, and is no help in identifying those really responsible; it instead helps, in an obscure and vague way, to remove responsibility from the Arab as a kind, according to Hussein Muruwwa’s expression.

It would be unfair if we did not here make a correction and mention that there is a clear direction now concerning how Arabs speak and think about the 5^th of June and its consequences that tends towards backing a...