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Rethinking Nationalism in the Arab Middle East, by Israel Gershoni and James Jankowski, editors
11. Arab Nationalism in the Age of the Islamic Resurgence
Emmanuel Sivan
These are not easy times for pan-Arab nationalism. Three of its major myths have withered in the harsh winds of the last quarter century.
The first to be hit was the myth of "Arab Piedmont and Prussia." As an ethnic-cultural nationalist movement, Arabism got much of its inspiration from nineteenth-century European nationalism, especially from the Italian and German experiences. Sati' al-Husri drew already in 1940 a pivotal lesson from that experience, namely, that it is not enough to build from below, through education and the organizing of civil society. Given the deep chasms within the Arab world, it is incumbent to have a solid territorial basis, i.e., a state strongly committed to Arab unification and headed by a powerful leader. Such a state should be ready and capable of serving as magnet for those ludicrous fragments of Arab political entities; of appealing directly to the masses; and, if need be, of imposing itself, with their help, upon these statelets. The only Arab candidate to fulfill this role, played in Italy by Piedmont and in Germany by Prussia, was Egypt. Husri had no doubt about that, impressed as he was by her demographic and cultural weight, her geopolitical location, and her military potential.
Nasser inherited this vision and tried to implement it. The 1967 war was evidently a severe blow for the dream of Egyptian leadership, yet the quest for an "Arab Prussia" remained alive. As Sadat's Egypt followed a separatist path, believers in Arabism had to look elsewhere. Qadhafi attempted in vain to cloak himself with the leader's mantle, but it was apparent that his resources were too paltry. Syria could have assumed the leadership, but Asad, always the paragon of realpolitik, has drawn the lesson of Nasser's failure and circumscribed the horizon of his ambitions; since 1974, the Ba'thist regime turned to the path of al-Sham or "Greater Syria"--a revised version of Antun Sa'ada's concept (minus Cyprus). And then, to the pan-Arabists' sigh of relief, Saddam Husayn rose in the late 1970s and took up in Iraq's name the scepter of the supreme commander of the struggle for unity.
Like his role model, Nasser, Saddam tried to exploit the confrontation with an external enemy, so as to generate solidarity and promote his hegemony. The confrontation led to a war that ended in defeat and ignominy. In accordance with Karl Marx's dictum, history repeated itself twice: once as a tragedy (1967), and once as a farce (1991). A patent truth was exposed: Iraq and its ruler were a giant with feet of clay. When that giant crumbled down, there was no pretender to the title of "Arab Prussia."
The second myth to be dissipated was that of "artificial borders." This is how Pan-Arabists dubbed the demarcation lines separating political entities created in the Middle East upon the ruins of the Ottoman Empire. Artificial--for they were nothing but the product of Imperialism and its native henchmen, the reactionary Arab regimes. The pressure of the Arab masses from down below, and Arab Piedmont and Prussia from above, were supposed to erase these borders and reunite the Arab-speaking lands.
It is indeed in the name of this myth that Saddam Husayn justified his invasion into Kuwait and its subsequent annexation in August 1990. For could one imagine a better example of an utterly artificial British creation than this despicable emirate, which Iraq had always considered part and parcel of its historical territory. Arab public opinion, including most intellectuals, applauded the annexation. And no wonder. The myth's hold was still powerful. Other territorial entities in the Middle East have acquired some legitimacy over the past half century, but Kuwait and the other Gulf emirates (and to some extent Jordan and Lebanon as well) remained suspect: a memento for an era of weakness and subservience, a reminder for a "divide and rule" policy imposed by colonial powers.
The Kuwait annexation laid bare an astounding state of affairs: despite the reactionary regime, the local population adamantly refused to collaborate with Saddam. The Iraqi ruler could not even establish a puppet regime. Kuwaiti society, however lacking in a tradition of voluntaristic association, organized civil disobedience, even armed resistance, and that in the face of ruthless Iraqi repression. It became strikingly evident that even entities founded artificially--such as Kuwait--may, as has so often happened in Africa, develop a community predicated upon a common attachment to territory, upon a collective memory and upon a cultural variant of the Arab-Islamic civilization. Such a community is most likely to seek for itself, according to the self-determination norms of our century, a political expression. Otherwise put, it seeks to become a nation-state; such a state the citizens are ready to die for. If this was the case in Kuwait, all the more so in Jordan, whose inhabitants withstood the crucial loyalty test of "Black September" (1970), and entities with deep historical roots such as Syria, Algeria, and Sudan.
Last but not least, came the turn of the third Pan-Arab myth, "the common interests." Following the 1967 debacle and the rise of Arab territorial states in the 1970s, an alternative path for unity was proposed. No more the laying bare, from under the debris of history, of an eternal Arab reality but the cumulative building up of such a united entity, through the education of the masses and especially by a growing cooperation between states. The 1973 war and oil boycott seemed to augur success for such a scenario: military plus political-economic coordination produced impressive Arab achievements.
The following decade proved, however, that the oil-rich states do not subscribe to the vision of the "alliance between Saudi capital, Egyptian brains and Yemeni muscle" (according to one telling formula). These vulnerable states preferred to recycle petro-dollars in Western financial institutions in order to insure their value for the day when oil and gas run out. To the extent they invested in their poor Arab neighbors, this was almost solely in real estate in metropolitan areas. The upshot was a spiraling inflation in housing prices, which hit in particular the lower-middle class and young university graduates.
It is true that the manpower needs of the oil-rich states created for the first time a substantial movement of working population across Arab borders. More Arabs than in any time past came to other Arab lands and stayed there for long periods, getting to know fellow Arabs. Yet intimacy bred contempt and animosity. Most temporary Arab migrants were laborers who moved from poor to rich states, employed there in exploitative conditions, treated with suspicion and condescension.
The schadenfreude toward Kuwait's fate in summer and fall of 1990 fed upon the experiences of these guest laborers, as well as upon the jealousy elicited by the conspicuous consumption of the Gulf nouveaux riches, flagrantly indulged in during their hedonistic visits to Cairo, Beirut, and Amman. "Our daughters prostitute themselves in the Mercedes of filthy rich Saudis," wailed an audiocassette of a popular Egyptian singer.
The belief in the myth of Arab interest-based cooperation was faltering by the late 1980s, yet some effort continued, at elite levels, to create institutions for strategic and economic coordination. There was still room for optimism: a common Arab market in communications was being fleshed out, owing to the rapid development of a "median Arabic," combining literary (but simplified) grammar with a common, modern vocabulary. The gap between the written language and the local dialects--which was a sore spot of Arabism in the past--was in the process of being bridged. Increased communications, it could be hoped, may help create a common consciousness. Yet common interests between Arab economies failed to materialize, for these economies are not complementary but rather competitive (in oil, tourism, textile exports). The path pioneered by Sadat--an American orientation plus peace with Israel--further poisoned the Arab debate over strategic interests. The Iran-Iraq war complicated the clash of strategies, putting Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Syria in the anti-Saddam camp.
All these contradictions were laid bare in a most virulent fashion in 1990-1991 when Saudi, Egyptian, and Syrian forces were positioned in battle formation, flanked by Western forces, against Iraq and its Arab allies. And subsequent to the war, the mass expulsion of Palestinian residents from Kuwait and of Yemeni workers from Saudi Arabia has provided yet another refutation of the "common interests" myth. Such commonality was bluntly sacrificed for the sake of territorial-state homogeneity and internal security. The third major pan-Arab myth expired in the sands of the Peninsula.
Given the decline of Pan-Arabism, one could barely expect it to loom large in radical Islamic thought and propaganda. After all, we are far removed from the heyday of Nasserism when pathbreakers such as Sayyid Qutb had to gather all their courage in order to denounce Arabism as an ersatz religion. It was a quantum jump in the 1950s to argue that the nexus between Arab nationalism and secularism is inherent and inevitable, both being Western imports. But one could ask: Have not such arguments gone stale, lost their poignancy by dint of repetition and given the collapse of the then victorious pan-Arabism?
Thus it comes as a surprise to find Arabism as a frightful bogey in Islamic audiotapes today. These taped sermons are the major vehicle through which the radical message is relayed from Afghanistan to Morocco. Cheap to produce and to copy, accessible to the illiterate half of the population as well as to the rest, often diverting due to their mix of recurrent, formulaic psalmody and uplifting moral admonition and satire, audiotapes are increasingly popular. Their very orality, even though it is electronic, relies upon the existence of listeners (in most cases the tape is recorded during a live performance). It is these listeners the preacher must be attuned to, and they often take an active part in the sermon through interjections and/or questions. This opens to us a tiny window to peer through into that big unknown, the mood and preoccupations of the rank and file of Islamic movements who attend such gatherings. The interaction with the audience is greater (and informality higher) in the lesson (dars) forum, usually delivered by the preacher, in the mosque, just before the Friday prayer or on a weekday evening and revolving around a Qur'anic verse or a Hadith. Here the audience may pose many questions and may even challenge the 'alim's interpretation. The preacher resorts to a homely style, often in colloquial Arabic, picking examples from recent events or daily life. One can hear the audience laugh, jeer, and talk back.
Moreover, the use of voice as major vehicle and the open structure it produces give a premium to the affective rather than to the analytic, which is highlighted by closure-bound written texts. The spoken word, with its acoustic quality, moves from interior (the mouth cavity) to interior (the outer ear) and thus creates a direct encounter of man to man. It is possible, then, to uncover emotional layers--the performer's as well as the listeners'--layers that underlie the readily accessible, rationally constructed arguments. Because orality joins people together, predicated as it is upon a sense of presence-cum-participation, communally generated and shared, it is perhaps the most apt tool for inquiring into questions of identity, in our densely socialized world of vocal-electronic communication.
I have chosen to discuss only popular audiocassettes, dating from the 1980s and 1990s, which have passed a market test of impact. (Videotapes, as a rule, were not included, being costlier and enjoying a lesser share of the communications interaction.) Yet these audiotapes must be interpreted in the framework of the still more prestigious form, written texts, designed for the cadres of the movement, not for rank and file or for sympathizers. For I am dealing here with what specialists call the age of secondary orality: literacy is hegemonic (unlike the situation in the pre-Gutenberg age of orality), yet electronic orality is on the rise, shaped by but also expanding, modifying--at times subverting--the written message.
Pan-Arabism cannot be said to be an obsession for the electronic preachers, the way it was for the fathers of radicalism in the 1950s and 1960s, but it is no doubt an oft-beaten drum. "Arab nationalism was conceived in sin and born in corruption and dissolution," says 'Abdallah 'Azzam, a Palestinian-Jordanian preacher and activist of Afghanistan guerrilla warfare. It is a modern progeny of the age-old Crusading idea, part and parcel of the West's ongoing onslaught upon Islam, intended to pervert the latter's mindset.
Yusuf al-'Azm, the leader of the Jordanian Muslim Brethren, and the Egyptian Shaykh Salah Abu Isma'il concur that Arabism was concocted by European Orientalists such as Margoliouth and Brockelmann who built upon the ideas of the French Revolution in order to separate Arabs and Turks, thereby weakening Islam and facilitating Western takeover. To that very end they also helped create the Pan-Turanian idea. These twin ideas, and the movements they spawned, indeed contributed to the demise of the Ottoman Empire, helped as they were by local Christians, notably the graduates of missionary schools and of the University of Beirut, that hotbed of subversive infidel ideas both then and now. Prominent among the Syro-Lebanese agents of doom, profoundly hostile to Islam, and hell-bent upon the destruction of the Caliphate and the creation of a substitute, secular, religion, were people such as Jurji Zaydan, George Antonius, Edward Atiyah. They spread their gospel all the more avidly upon the ruins of the Caliphate, and they found successors of the same ilk in Michel 'Aflaq and George Habash. ("No wonder" remarks al-'Azm acidly, "that the Ba'th regime was an easy prey for Jewish spies like Elie Cohen.") The Christian agents were aided and abetted by other agents of dubious origin, e.g., Sati' al-Husri, said to be a Donmeh Jewish convert (an accusation usually hurled at Ataturk who had snatched from the Arabs the province of Alexandretta, availing himself of their weakness following the abolition of the Caliphate).
This brew of conspiratorial explanations, guilt by association, and suspicion toward non-Muslims is obviously designed with vituperation in mind. Nor does the deleterious impact of Arabism stop at the confines of the Middle East, where the "so-called Arab revolt" did as much as the Young Turks to bring down the Caliphate. In North Africa this "poisonous" ideology is supposed, for example, to have greatly helped the French colonial plan to drive a wedge between Arabs and Berbers (at the time of the Berber Dahir of 1930). A tool of European colonialism, Arabism turned after World War II into a tool of American imperialism. In a manner common to modern Islamic (and Arab) historiography, the recorded sermons advance this argument not merely in the "objective" sense (i.e., which foreign powers did Arabism profit?) but also in a "subjective" one (what were the actual intentions of the pan-Arabists?). Nasser, they argue, was an actual ally/collaborator of the CIA, this being based upon his contacts with Miles Copeland; moreover, his secularism and vision of Egypt as leader of the Arabs had been originally shaped by Taha Husayn, "that agent of the French Deuxime Bureau" (which had even found Husayn a French wife). Arabism informed Nasser's concept (borrowed, again, from Taha Husayn) that "Islam is the sole major obstacle impeding the progress of our civilization." Outside Islam salvation would come. A pipedream which led straight into the 1967 debacle, much as the Arab League, creature of pan-Arabism and its British masters--and not the Palestinians--which was responsible for the 1948 defeat and the loss of Palestine, argues Shaykh Tamimi (of the Islamic Jihad).
Ali Belhadj of the Algerian Front Islamique du Salut (FIS) uses the 1967 defeat as proof that Arabism, being a form of racism, cannot elicit a sense of community, pride, and readiness for sacrifice. Echoing Mawdudi's famous diatribe against Muhammad 'Ali Jinnah's Muslim nationalism in pre-partition India, Belhadj stresses that on top of it all, this is fake racism: there is no "Arab race" in actual fact, due to centuries of intermarriage promoted by Islam's own ethos that disregards all indicators but faith. "Religious belief," cries the eloquent young shaykh, "is superior to the blood nexus." Only it can create the fraternal solidarity that Muslims seek today in their fight against Israel. The most conclusive proof is the Jewish-Israeli case itself: a nationalism based upon religion is viable, cohesive, and combative and can withstand many a trial. 6 In the same manner Tamimi uses post-1948 wars with Israel (up to and including the Lebanon invasion) as ample proof of the bankruptcy of "those in the Palestinian movement who set pan-Arab nationalism instead of Islam, and socialism instead of the Qur'an."
Despite all this well-earned divine punishment, the preachers still have cause for alarm: Arabism--especially in its Ba'thi or Qawmiyyun guise--has retained some of its capacity to woo innocent youth with its self-depiction as Faith and Prophecy (al-'uruba din wa nubuwwa). This subversive work has dismal consequences, claims the Jordanian Ahmad Nawfal: it perpetuates division between states in the Middle East, bolsters dependence upon the United States, promotes a spirit lacking in self-reliance and readiness for struggle. Such a spirit can be generated by religion alone. During the last decade nationalism has contributed in particular to "divide the Arab-speaking countries from Iran, which, whatever its mistakes, is involved in a revolutionary endeavor to enhance the cause of Islam and certainly humiliated the arrogant U.S. in the hostage affair."
Why do these speakers breathe so much fire and brimstone? Most of them are old enough to remember Nasser's persecution of the Muslim Brethren, that defining moment of contemporary Islamic radicalism. The equation Arabism = police state, is for them, albeit not necessarily for their audience, experiential and affective. 9 This is particularly true for those who suffered directly from ill-treatment during the 1965-66 wave of arrests (like the Egyptian popular preacher, Shaykh Kishk). But persecutions and 'uruba are mentioned in tandem even by younger preachers (such as the Egyptian Dr. 'Issam al-'Iryan, Bassam Jarrar of the HAMAS, or 'Ali Belhadj). Here this identification is an integral part of the formation myth of Sunni radicalism--a soaring drama of martyrdom, where the real-life workings of the hegemonic power structure are laid bare, through the discourse and acts of the nation-state. It is virtually an article of faith, learned by rote, exemplified by horror stories. Some such stories are assured prominence by the role they play in the movement's training of cadres (including many of today's young preachers): by reading prison memoirs of Egyptian and Syrian founding fathers, but also by hearing many of the older generation, who came to maturity during the heyday of Nasserism and of the Ba'th; people such as Sa'id Hawwa who grew up in the traditional town of Hama, influenced by the Naqshbandi Sufi order and by local 'ulama, marginalized by the Ba'th rise to dominance; or Rashid Ghannushi, a Tunisian student at the University of Damascus, a fervent adept of Arabism and of the Ba'th almost until the Six Day War. 10 This is even truer of the large number of former inmates of Nasser's gaols (for example, 'Umar al-Tilimsani, Salah 'Ashmawi) who were still around in the 1970s and in the 1980s to tell of their horrible ordeal. 11
But is the audience as immersed in that identification as the preachers? This is difficult to judge. In any case the latter must assume that such invocations are useful as a sort of long-term "inoculation" against Pan-Arabism, which appears now in new guises and calls for "dialogue" with radical Muslims. The new-fangled pan-Arabists tend to reassert the Islamic dimension of Pan-Arabism, the close alliance between pan-Islamist and Arab nationalists in the 1930s and 1940s; they also take care to apologize for the "violent deviations" of the Arab "progressive" regimes during the 1960s. 12 This is particularly relevant in Egypt, Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, and among the Palestinians. Diatribes on the horrors of the past, usually end up by targeting the new-style Ba'th or Nasserist circle and take frequent gibes at the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) and the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (DFLP), successors of the Qawmiyyun al-'Arab.
One has the impression the anti-Arabist tirades touch a raw nerve among the listeners, as evidenced by the shocked cries or loud, derisive laughter, recorded on the tapes. But such reactions recur all the more often when the vagaries of pan-Arabism are interlaced in another context--the behavior of oil-rich states toward their poor Middle-Eastern neighbors, presented as proof of the delusion of the idea of Arab solidarity. This topic gets at least as much attention as historical arguments, if not more. And no wonder. For here we deal with an experience common to many listeners (either directly or through members of their family and social circle). The objects of all this sound and fury are the "rich Arab" or "Arab billionaires"--terms borrowed from the language of the media and denoting either the regimes or the citizens of the Gulf emirates, Saudi Arabia (and sometimes also Libya). The adjective "Arab," in this context, is double-edged: Arab signifying desert--i.e. primitive--origin, in premodern usage and from the viewpoint of the civilized urban areas, as well as identification with the notion of an Arab umma. This second meaning embodies claims of solidarity with fellow ethnic group members that were dashed by Gulf greedy employers, suspicious police, stingy states, and profligate tourists who came to the poorer countries for fun and games.
"Our compatriots working in the Gulf suffer insults as Egyptians, and that despite Egypt's generous help to these countries in the field of education," recounts Shaykh Salah Abu Isma'il. Shaykh 'Abd al-Hamid Kishk tells vivid stories about the way prosperous Arab visitors behave in Cairo's Pyramids Street, indulging in wine, betting, and the pursuit of easy women from amongst "our daughters." And, of course, he adds with sarcasm, these super-rich Arabs never bother to give aid to Egypt. 13 In the same vein Shaykh Kishk addresses the 'ulama of Hijaz: "Why don't you rebuke your rulers for failing to share [Saudi] wealth with the poor lands of Dar al-Islam; with Egypt for instance, whose inhabitants live on lentils and beans alone. Why don't those rulers take the camels and sheep slaughtered during the pilgrimage, process them, and send them in cans to poor Muslims all over the world? We in Egypt had to buy a whole ship loaded with English meat cans, which was discovered upon arrival at Port Said to be rotten, because it had been slaughtered years ago. And all this in order to enable Arab [sic] merchants and middlemen to draw a hefty profit!" 14
Ahmad al-Qattan, a Kuwaiti preacher whose cassettes are popular in Jordan and in the Occupied Territories, confirms such arguments by tales of his own about the loose manners of Gulf people in Cairo nightclubs. His series on child-rearing, though designed for a Kuwaiti audience, is widely distributed in the Middle East and can merely bolster the low esteem in which Gulf Arabs are held. He takes to task parents in Kuwait who indulge their offspring's every whim (including consumer goods that are beyond the reach of common mortals in the Middle East), who send their sons to private schools where foreign nationals, "usually atheists," teach and where they are introduced to rock music and drugs. They send their daughters to finishing schools abroad and let male members of the household have access to pornographic magazines and/or Marxist books. Smaller children are raised by Christians, usually by Philippine nannies. In another of Qattan's sermons, consecrated to corruption in Kuwait, these nannies figure as objects of licentious exploitation by their employers. This is indeed one of the major sins that account for God's wrath and retribution, namely, the Iraqi occupation of 1990-1991. 15 The present writer has seen many a Palestinian listener nod in acquiescence upon hearing these stories and make remarks that denote finding in them the justification for the listener's own lack of sympathy for Kuwait at the time of her misfortune. Qattan rebuked his own countrymen as well as the Saudis (whom he dubs "rich Arabs") for not caring at all about the fate of the Palestinians in the Occupied Territories, the Intifada itself never inspiring them into action. 16
It is small wonder, then, that the Palestinian Shaykh As'ad Bayyumi al-Tamimi sniggers at the "empty-headed a'rab (bedouins)"--a term of opprobrium directed at the Gulf Arabs--addicted as they are to mundane pleasures and sublimely indifferent to Palestinian suffering. The discovery of oil in the Arabian Peninsula and the absorption of modern technology by the "statelets" were an omen of Allah's solicitude for His believers, yet the locals have chosen to squander the riches He had bestowed and do not deign to share them with their less fortunate neighbors. 17 During the Gulf crisis, add Bassam Jarrar and 'Ali Belhadj, the Saudis and the Kuwaitis heaped humiliation upon sin by calling upon the United States, which was headed by that arch-enemy of Islam, "George Ibn Bosh," to station her troops upon the hallowed soil of Arabia and by providing the latter with logistic support. 18
Moral dissolution and lack of solidarity alike could be expected to be given a purely Islamic spin. What could be more apt in sermons? One could, for instance, lament the fact that a kingdom created by puritan Wahhabis is now immersed in sin, or how Muslims in these wealthy lands are oblivious of the misery of Egypt, that age-old fulcrum of Dar al-Islam as well as of the occupation by Infidels of the "blessed land of Palestine," where the third most holy shrine of Islam is located. And yet, it is an Arab sin that virtually all preachers choose to speak of: super-rich Arabs disdain and exploit fellow Arabs; due to the indifference of Arab haves to the fate of Arab have-nots, Arab solidarity has been proven to be a chimera.
For the preachers, indeed for many a listener, the experience was lived as an encounter between fellow Arabs, not between fellow Muslims; an encounter all the more disappointing as the discourse of the 1950s and 1960s, as well as the hype of the post-1973 decade, led them to hope that Arab solidarity is a spiritual reality that just needs to be fleshed out; for instance, through preferential treatment to Arab migrant workers (in comparison to Pakistanis, let alone to non-Muslims such as Indians and Koreans). That dream has gone sour, leaving a bitter taste.
Still, the "Arab world," the "Arab umma," the "Arab peoples," are terms common to most taped sermons; the frontiers of Arabhood extend there, according to the sacred formula "from the Gulf to the [Atlantic] Ocean." Even an older generation preacher such as the octogenarian Syrian Nasir al-Din al-Albani views Dar al-Islam as divided between an Arab sphere and an a'jami (Persian, non-Arab) one; though, as could be expected, neither he nor Shaykh Kishk accept this antinomy as a justification for the Iran-Iraq war, deplored as fitna (internecine war between fellow Muslims). 19 The tyrannical Arab regimes are the incarnation of all evil (a "rudderless ship," says Ahmad Nawfal). The peoples, exploited and oppressed as they are, constitute a glimmer of hope, for their religiosity is on the rise. 20
Is this a contradiction in terms? Do the preachers, usually so attuned to the sensibilities of the audience, fail to gauge its mood? This does not seem to be the case. Let us note that usage of the term "'arabi" is limited to adjective form, it is never substantive or adverbial. The function is merely descriptive. "Arab" signifies a cultural attribute, it does not generate solidarity or fraternity (as the term "'arabiyyan" could, for instance). It is certainly not embedded in an integral, historical-familial web of relationships. The solidarity claims staked out by Arab nationalism are never alluded to. They are, as some militant 'ulama spell out, nothing but an artificial and secular construct. The leader of the Islamic Jihad, Fathi Shqaqi, tells--in a story the listeners confirm by assenting interjections--of his own disillusionment when he came as a young student from Gaza to Egypt, full of admiration for "Egypt the throbbing heart of Arabism." In Zaqaziq University he discovered that in the eyes of his fellow students he was just a foreigner, a Palestinian. The plight of his people was of no interest. It was only among the few Islamic-minded students that he found any real compassion. From the rest he encountered the same indifference that Egyptian preachers bemoan with regard to the treatment of their countrymen in the Gulf states. 21
Yet use of the term "Arab" is neither necessarily pejorative nor even just neutral. After all, the Islamic activists, whose voices we hear in the tapes, are people who excel in articulating the Arab language (classical but also dialectal and, in some cases, median-journalistic); people whose life trajectory has almost never (with rare exceptions such as 'Abdallah 'Azzam) taken them to non-Arabic-speaking lands. And in that they are no different from the bulk of their listeners. Yusuf al-'Azm is, in this respect, quite typical: born in Ma'an (Jordan), he attended high school in Iraq (under the monarchy) and graduated from 'Ayn Shams University in Egypt. The cassette on Arabic culture (entitled "Pens Writing in Arabic Letters but Subservient to Foreigners") records a lecture he delivered in Yemen. During the question and answer portion of that tape, he gives a limpid formulation of the notions discussed above: "My Arabness refers to my linguistic identity; I'm Islamic in heart, in civilization and consciousness. It follows that I reject both the age-old barbarian-jahili Arabism and the secular Arabism of today." 22 Note the emotion-laden, derogatory term "jahili," a key concept of Sayyid Qutb, which is still very much in vogue. Arabism in the ethnic sense is, hence, anti-Islamic: this was true of the bedouin version of pre-Islamic (and early Arab conquest) times; it is likewise valid for the modern incarnation of this state of mind.
Listening to the tapes, it is important to note that the speakers are engaging in a half-improvised exercise in popularization. One could hardly expect the preachers to have the systematic and theoretical sophistication of major writers such as Anwar al-Jundi 23 in the 1970s or Rashid Ghannushi and others of his ilk today. The Tunisian Ghannushi distinguishes between two connotations of the term "Arabness": one, which he endorses, is that of a "historical-cultural reality"; the other, which he considers presumptuous, even false, is that of an ideology, a totalistic, all-embracing vision, a sort of civil religion. The former version of 'uruba had created "an existential entity," anchored in culture and in politics, which served as a powerful vehicle for Islam and helped it absorb many peoples and communities living outside the Arab Peninsula by dissolving the bonds of ethnicity and race. By virtue of the inextricable relationship between the Arab language and Islam it is vain to attempt to transform Arabness artificially in to a non- (maybe anti-) religious ideology or belief system--a source of identity pretending to exclude non-Arab-speaking minorities (e.g., Kurds and Berbers). The historical-experiential sense of Arabness is a historical given that no true-blue Muslim can deny. By the same token that Muslim cannot accept the latter-day version. That version borrowed Western notions of nationalism and/or Communist ones in the manner of "Arab Socialism," and reduced (or eliminated) the role of Islam as the linchpin of identity and way of life. It manipulated Islam as a tool for mobilizing the masses or for legitimating certain policies, whether in a Western (nationalist) or Communist guise. Arabism thus served to intensify the dependency upon non-Muslim powers and cultures. 24 Even when he agreed to publish his most recent book under the auspices of the Research Center on Arab Unity (Beirut), Ghannushi did not budge one inch from these views. He extols in it Islamic solidarity as the only one available. 25 It is perhaps a sign of the times that the center, a bastion of Arab nationalism, sought out the exiled Tunisian writer to add prestige to its booklist, rather than the other way round.
The Moroccan thinker 'Abd al-Salam Yasin states succinctly: "Both the allegiance to Allah and the allegiance between His believers are diametrically opposed to racial or nationalist (qawmi) allegiance. Nationalism is our scourge and plague, for it sows divisiveness among Muslims, based upon a presumed ethnic affiliation. It further leads to political, internecine fights initiated by the nationalist statelets. . . . The Prophet himself has declared solidarities predicated upon blood and ethnicity to be jahili, dregs of the past, which must be combatted and erased." 26 Yasin's book is written in a lucid Arabic style, and the reading list for the movement's cadres comprises a special section on Arabic language and grammar (the entire list is made of books originally written in Arabic with the exception of translations of Mawdudi and Nadwi). 27
The same tune can be heard, perhaps more clearly, from that growing breed, the former Arab nationalists and Marxists who converted to radical Islam from the late 1970s on. The Egyptian 'Adil Husayn says that his personal transformation began when he perceived how inextricably the national identity was associated with religious affiliation. He discovered that society was made of institutions, themselves divided into subunits, and that the only cement holding together this intricate structure was religion. He was particularly struck by the role Sufism played in the lower classes, in blending the individual into minisocieties and the latter into larger wholes. Yet instead of building upon and improving this socioreligious structure, the state demolished it and atomized individuals, eliminating all intermediary forces between them and the state. Bereft of civil society, the state could have no real hold over individuals--hence the 1967 debacle. After a long search for a panacea to rehabilitate civil society, hesitating between Arab and Egyptian formulas, it dawned upon Husayn that only the glue that had held traditional civil society together, namely, Islam, could serve to reconstruct it. The impact of that discovery upon him was profound; at that moment (ca. 1980), all the pieces fell into place. 28
The Palestinian thinker Munir Shafiq came like Husayn from the Marxist wing of Arab nationalism, but as he was a non-Muslim (Greek Orthodox), his conversion was even more radical. He finally converted to Islam out of admiration for Fundamentalism. Shafiq began his militant life by adopting a positive yet instrumental view of the Islamic component of pan-Arabism, given the fact that while the Arab nationalist elite are secularist the masses are profoundly permeated by Islam; a stance typical of other thinkers as well (e.g., Manh al-Sulh, Anwar 'Abd al-Malik) who reacted to the Iranian revolution and to the resurgence of Islam in the Arab world. Yet Shafiq did not stop there. In the course of the 1980s he perceived that even among the elites only Islam can actually touch human beings at the affective level and generate an authentic solidarity. He recounts a key experience: "I once came to visit a physician friend and stayed the night at his home. I woke up at dawn and found him reciting the Qur'an, moaning, weeping loudly, his tears moistening the Holy Book. I wished I could experience such a profound belief, such humility before the transcendental." The hybrid alliance between Arab nationalism and militant Islam--which he had been preaching recently--now seemed to him illusory. 29
Against this background it is not surprising that for these thinkers there was no return to the 1950s concepts of Arab unity as a milestone on the road to Islamic unity and Arab identity as part of an Islamic one. Arabism was laid bare: a Western import, an artificially concocted idea, an abstraction with no grounding in social reality and in collective sentiment. The divorce consummated at the time of Sayyid Qutb remained valid: Qawmiyya infused with Muslim values is an oxymoron.
When writers such as Shafiq use terms like "Arab-Islamic world (or community)," they do it with a hyphen between the two adjectives, namely, to denote the Arab-speaking part of an Islamic social network of believers. In that they are no different from old-timers such as Shaykh Muhammad al-Ghazali who used to believe, in the manner of Hasan al-Banna, in "allying Arabism and Islam" under certain conditions, but discovered their incompatibility during Nasser's brazen attempt to make Arabism into a civil religion. Today Shafiq never tires of stressing that this attempt was no accident: it brought onto the surface what had been an ever-lurking potentiality and one intimately linked with the deep seated nature of Arabism. 30
Among major Islamic thinkers today perhaps only the Sudanese Hasan al-Turabi still advocates the cause of "concentric circles of identity," but in an attenuated version. He views Arab unity (as distinct from unity between any two Arab countries that have an Islamic regime, which Shafiq and his disciples also cherish) as a valuable stage on the road toward restoring the unity of Dar al-Islam. In that he is, in a way, no different from the Syrian Muslim Brethren in exile (perhaps also the Yemeni Tajammu' al-Islah militants) who speak of the "Arab arena" or "Arab countries" as virtually identical with the geopolitical term "the Middle East," with a salient linguistic-cultural factor as common denominator. Arabhood is never spelt out as a national identity.
Turabi uses a softer, less confrontational language toward Arab nationalism, both in his own writings and in the resolutions of the Arab and Islamic Popular Congress, of which he is the founder (1991) and secretary-general. The motivation seems to be to woo former or present believers in Arabism (or Arab Socialism) into the Islamic orbit. Yet when Turabi gets to marshaling solidarity for the Palestinian cause, he relies--much like HAMAS spokesmen--upon the Islamic quality of that cause (the Blessed Land, the Third Most Holy Shrine, Muhammad's Night Journey and Ascension), not upon the Arabhood of the land. In the final analysis, only religion can generate solidarity.
In effect, in those of his writings directed at a readership from inside the Islamic resurgence, Turabi presents essentially the same concept as Ghannushi:
| The Arab-Islamic reality today consists of separate territorial states with fixed, rigid borders, governed by self-centered regimes which rely upon intermeshing special interests and local-tribal allegiances. Beyond that, there is an Arab framework, predicated upon culture, history, territorial proximity, interests and interaction. And well beyond, there is an Islamic framework, made of peoples who appertain to the community of the believers and share with the Arabs creed, beliefs, and heritage. They are animated like them with a feeling of solidarity as well as by common interests. 31 |
Turabi is explicitly opposed to Arab nationalism as a secular Western import, for nationalism in Europe has developed in the era of Christianity's decline, aspiring to fill in the vacuum created by that process. Still, Turabi differs from Ghannushi in thinking that this is not an inevitable dichotomy but the product of specific circumstances of the first third of the twentieth century. One could, he assumes, win over certain circles of Arab nationalism, particularly as this movement as a whole has lost its self-confidence and many an activist has returned, in various guises and to different degrees, to the True Faith. While Turabi hopes that Arab unification may be a step toward Islamic unity, he knows that both are long-term aims, given the current state of affairs where resurgent Islam is mostly in opposition. And even when Islam takes power in an Arab country, that Muslim regime may not easily export the revolution to neighboring Arab countries and ultimately establish a union with them, as a sort of stepping-stone toward Arab-Islamic unity. For it could very well be that a neighboring non-Arab country may be a more opportune tar get (is he thinking of the Horn of Africa or even West Africa?). In proximate Arab states there may further be complicating factors such as the existence of non-Muslim minorities, suspicious of Islam despite the resurgence moment's protestations of commitment to tolerance. 32
That belief in Islamic solidarity as the major authentic and reliable bond can be heard on the audiotapes as well. Listen to 'Ali Belhadj speak, his voice choking with tears, the audience loudly crying, about the shooting by Israeli police at the esplanade of al-Aqsa. Belhadj bemoans the neglect by Muslims of the question of Palestine. It is the 17th Sura of the Qur'an (al-Isra') that he quotes in order to legitimate the obligation to succor "our persecuted brethren." In the same breath he links Jewish attacks upon Palestinian Muslims to Fundamentalist Indian massacres of Islamic believers. When Bassam Jarrar deals with the same question he praises the aid Indian Muslims gave in the 1930s and Pakistan extends today to "our cause." And he adds acidly that the "Arab rulers" wash their hands completely of any responsibility for the Palestinians' fate. 33 When Belhadj mobilized the Algerian public for Iraq during the 1990-1991 crisis he made sure to distance himself from Saddam and called "for help to Iraq as a Muslim people," whereas "the homeland we must defend is an Islamic homeland; not as a soil but as part and parcel of Dar al-Islam which is permeated by the same creed, the same Divine Law." Another Palestinian Shaykh, Hamid al-Bitawi, responds in kind: the same "anti-Islamic, Crusading onslaught" perpetrated in the Occupied Territories goes on in Algeria where the electoral process has been suspended, the FIS outlawed, its militants persecuted. 34 The Kuwaiti Ahmad al-Qattan, who preaches in favor of "support for the peoples of Lebanon and Palestine," refers in the case of the former country to help for isolated Muslim communities, while with regard to the latter he mocks the attempts to garner aid and solidarity "in the name of Qawmiyya and its hollow slogans;" it is Islamic solidarity with the people of the "land of al-Aqsa'" to which one should appeal; and it will inevitably elicit Islamic virtues such as forbearance (sabr) in times of defeat, etc. 35
Needless to say, it is the fate of the Muslims of Bosnia that today occupies pride of place when the taped speakers harp on the theme of solidarity. Indeed Bosnia serves to illustrate, in the manner Afghanistan used to more than a decade ago, the state of an Islam besieged by the evil forces of modernity. But the tone today is shriller, perhaps due, among other reasons, to the recurrent images of Sarajevo on TV screens in the Islamic global village. Other Muslims in danger (in Burma or the Philippines) may be mentioned, but none can compete today with Bosnia, with its role as producer of a sense of a worldwide Islamic community fighting for its survival. To judge by the sermons, the listeners know what happened there in ample and vivid detail. 36
In comparison, Arab solidarity may be pooh-poohed as an insignificant sociopsychological force, having proven (in the words of al-Qattan) "its utter futility and impotence in the face of our enemies," 37 as was evident during the Kuwait crisis. This is not to say that the Islamic militants are complacent vis-á-vis the Arab cultural dimension. They may, on the one hand, call for the further extension of the reach of Arabic, for instance as a teaching language in the exact sciences and medicine, or in institutions of higher learning (instead of English or French). 38
On the other hand, they worry that the growing Arab "communications common market," pushed by technological and marketing progress and facilitated by the rapid evolution of the median language, has created a powerful tool for the spread of modern, Western-infatuated, hedonistic, individualistic modes of thought. These attitudes are easily accessible by the masses through films, TV, soap operas, songs (diffused by radio and audio/video tapes), popular magazines etc. "Muslims the world over are indifferent to the death of thousands of Jihad fighters while the whole of the land of Arabism [ard al-'uruba] is in deep mourning over the death of one songstar," scoffs a Palestinian preacher. 39 Marketing Arab-language artifacts is easier now and becoming more so every day, but the contents of these products is almost to a fault un-Islamic, nay even anti-Islamic. They represent "an artistic rot" (the title of a popular audiotape series). 40 The very term "butula," conferred upon so-called heroes of movies, TV series, and plays, makes them into icons that in a subliminal fashion attract tepid and none-too-sophisticated believers into the orbit of secularism and profanation. Lifestyles of rich-and-famous artists are paraded as a sort of vicarious gratification for underemployed, unemployed, badly housed youth--not merely in Egypt where this 'afan fanni is produced--but in any other Arab country where the masses devour these artifacts (vehiculated in median Arabic). The loose mores of Egyptian and Algerian stars (sex, alcohol, drugs, family violence) are laid bare in the media for all to hear and see. And it is typical of militant Islamic spokesmen's frame of mind that they detect the hand of the regimes' security services in the performance (or marketing) of licentious songs, designed to lull disgruntled youth and lead them astray. By the same token activists see the fingerprints of a Hollywood-based, "Judeo-Masonic" conspiracy to de-Islamize the umma in the production of movies, soap operas, shampoo ads, based on foreign artistic themes and techniques but adapted to the cultural norms of an Arab-language public.
If in the past dangers lurking with regard to Arabic concerned literary attempts to infuse it with colloquialism and use diglossia so as to divide the Arabs, now it is the median language that constitutes the threat. As for consumption by a more educated public, Yusuf al-'Azm waxes nostalgic about "problematic" writers such as 'Aqqad and Taha Husayn. Whatever their faults, notably the "ivory tower syndrome," they at least wrote in a pure classical style immersed in the Islamic heritage and did not decry classical Arabic as incapable of adapting to the modern age. Now people tend to write in a debased journalistic style with few traditional resonances. Modern Arabic poetry is even worse, for it endeavors to subvert the classical norms and ape the latest Western fashions. 41
What is at stake is not just the peril of contamination of Muslims through the very language that had been the vehicle of Islam. Muhammad Husayn Fadlallah and Yusuf al-'Azm concur that the Islamic resurgence movement has greatly contributed to this state of affairs. Preoccupied as the movement was by political and organizational tasks it never developed a meaningful activity in the cultural sphere, in the manner that Arab and Iranian Marxists, or Arab nationalists had done (quite successfully) for a while. With the collapse of pan-Arabism and Marxism, the Islamic resurgence did not attempt to fill in the cultural void, by providing products such as Ahmad Sadiq al-Rafi'i's in the interwar years. The void is being filled by market-oriented popular entertainment and, at an upper level, by modernist (implicitly or explicitly secular) poets and writers such as Nizar Qabbani. The battle for the hearts and minds is on. Arabic, a dimension of that potential 'uruba, which is decried by Jarrar, is a major weapon in the hands of the secularists. Islam should be on the alert and strike back. 42
The dangerous world that Islamic militants live in is, however, not that of Arabism but of nation-states; a fact becoming all the more entrenched in the post-1989 New World Order, which preoccupies many a preacher. 43 The watani (territorial state nationalism) dimension of identity does not seem to them alarming as such. "The notion of an Arab or Persian is illegitimate," but the watan, says 'Ali Belhadj, "is legitimate, signifying as it does respect for the fatherland and its traditions and culture." Any so-called watani who does not hold his religion in awe, respects nothing else. "Look at France and England, they have a sort of wataniyya which is irreligious and this is why they apply human rights merely to their own nationals and within their own borders, as we Algerians have learned during the years of French colonial rule. Islam, on the contrary respects Man everywhere." 44 And it is as an Algerian and a Muslim that one must support Afghanistan.
Belhadj is steeped in Algerian history: talking about the War of Liberation (and its "Islamic spirit which assured us of victory"), of pre-war French atrocities, the role of the Reformist Ulama Association in preserving collective identity and paving the way for the Front de Libération Nationale (FLN). Yet the order of precedence is crystal clear. He retorts sharply to the declaration by an Algerian Minister of the Interior, according to whom "we do not want an imported religion, we want an Algerian Islam," implying that the neo- Hanbalite bent of the FIS has no basis in Algerian religious tradition that accepts only the Malikite school of Law; the FIS is alleged to hark back to Wahhabi puritanism and Saudi influence (the latter epithet being particularly derogatory). "There is no Algerian Islam," thunders Belhadj in rebuke; there may be local (watani) variations, and certainly attachments to one's place of birth, but Muslim cultural tradition is built upon a constant exchange of persons and ideas, intermeshing to create one whole. Neo-Hanbalism is no cause for shame: it was founded by Ibn Taymiyya and Ibn Kathir, who are respected everywhere in Dar al-Islam. Neither should one be ashamed of the connection with the Arabian Peninsula. The founders of the Ulama Association (al-'Uqbi, Brahimi, al-Milli), whom the FLN itself claims to cherish, had studied there; and as for the major figure of the Association, Shaykh Ben Badis, he studied not in Algeria but in the Zaytuniyya in Tunis. Claims that one should be at least Maghribi, not Middle East (Mashriq)-oriented are likewise scoffed at. Although Belhadj who is very learned is amply aware of the political theory of Ibn Hazm of Cordova, which goes much further than Ibn Taymiyya (for example, on the right of revolt), he relies almost exclusively on the latter medieval thinker, a Syrian. 45
The same note can be heard among the Palestinians, another well-defined wataniyya. After quoting, as is the norm, Qur'anic verses on the Night Journey to Jerusalem, a Shaykh harangues his audience: "The land [of Palestine] that we should fight for is a mosque, neither a soil nor an orange tree." 46 And another Shaykh remarks that surely Palestine is a positive value, but when the battle for Palestine is not enjoined in the name of Islam, no wonder it ends up in "khiyana wataniyya" (national treason) at the time of the Madrid Conference. For not everything can be justified in the name of the watan as the present Palestinian leadership, erratic and secular, loves to do. 47
Major Islamic thinkers draw further conclusions from these premises, which they share with the preachers. The nation-state is a fact of life, the standard unit of world politics, but one should beware, warns Turabi, of accepting its self-representation as a sort of eternal entity, coming to self-awareness in our times through the awakening of a primordial collectivity. The nation-states are after all a product of history, of the millennium of dissolution of Islamic unity and of the introduction of Western ideas. Or, as Yasin puts it, "there is one Islamic umma across the borders created by the fitna (internecine wars)." 48 One should strive to make this cultural and affective unity into a political reality first by greater coordination between militant Muslim movements, and second by avoiding the ritualization of the political unity slogan as a mere long-term goal. For this may lead to unity being discarded to oblivion, warns 'Adil Husayn (a former adept of another supranational creed, Arabism). Whenever a movement comes to power it should strive to form a union with a neighboring state (not necessarily Arab, remarks Turabi in a similar context; for it may be black African and the supranational creed may be Pan-Africanism). 49
Still, not everyone is convinced of the feasibility of the second goal. Jamal al-Banna wonders whether the restoration of the Caliphate has not been the wrong path to follow in this century. Given its size, the Ottoman Caliphate could have survived solely through decentralization; it may be that to this extent the early paragons of Arab nationalism (ahrar al-'arab), among whom he places al-Kawakibi and Rashid Rida, were right. Their campaign was aborted when Pan-Turanian concepts prevailed with the help of the Young Turks. (The slide of Arab nationalism toward secularism thus begins only on the eve of World War I and is a reaction to external stimuli.) Given the climate of the New World Order, which is hostile to Islamic unity, the lessons of the Caliphate's fall are more poignant today than ever before. The Islamic Resurgence movement may survive only if it is deliberately organized in a pluralistic, decentralized mold; no one group (or regime, if one comes to power) may be allowed a position of hegemony--flexible collaboration and solidarity based on mutual interests should be the watchword. 50
The challenge that Resurgent Islam presents to nation-state identity may seem less direct than the manner in which it defies pan-Arabism. Yet it remains a challenge. This is particularly true regarding the criteria for inclusion in the community. For if the sole legitimate case for wataniyya is Islam, local Christians may not become fully fledged members of the nation, both as dhimmis and as twentieth-century advocates of Western ideas. Needless to say, such a concept constitutes a head-on attack on the standards of inclusiveness, or norms of citizenship, of Arab nationalism.
Major Islamic writers proclaim adherence to notions of equality before the law and of human rights and are constructively ambiguous on the problem of making such notions compatible with the dhimma. 51 This is not what one hears from the preachers. Listen, for instance, to the popular Egyptian Shaykh Ahmad al-Mahalawi: "Before this Friday sermon, an official of the Religious Endowments Ministry came and gave me a paper containing instructions to preach on Islamic tolerance towards Ahl al-Dhimma. I protested against such dictates but I'll readily tackle the subject. Verily Islam is and has always been tolerant with regard to Dhimmis, yet on the condition that they know their place." In Egypt the Copts do not fulfill this condition and the state gives them free reign. If Egypt has anti-Coptic riots, Mahalawi goes on to say,
The paragon of this Christian arrogance [ghatrasa] is Butrus Butrus Ghali, among whose other sins are the Camp David Accords and the Bosnian tragedy. 52
For Shaykh Kishk such arrogance is personified by Pope Shenouda III, that "American agent," and his assertive politics. Like other preachers, Kishk delves into the past: there were no Christians among the political prisoners in 1955, 1965, 1974, and 1977, only true believers (namely the Muslim Brotherhood and its radical offshoots). Yet there were many Copts on the staff of the military prisons. When Kishk was arrested in 1965, a Coptic prison doctor mocked him: "How come you have pains in your joints if you pray?" Earlier crimes soon come to the preacher's mind: Coptic (and Syrian Christian) collaboration with imperialism, subversion of the Ottoman Empire (inter alia through Arab nationalism and missionary work), their aid to the Crusades in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and so on. 53
Ultimately the Egyptian, Palestinian and Kuwaiti Shaykhs reach back to the original discord: Muhammad's disputation with fellow monotheists, where it is evident, according to al-Qattan, that the "Christians are in a pretty bad way, though not as bad as the Jews." To prove this point both he and the Egyptian Muhammad Hasan sort out the Qur'anic polemics against Christianity: the spuriousness of the Trinity, the Resurrection, the Second Coming. The Crucifixion is claimed to be a punishment meted out to Jesus because his disciples attributed divinity to him. 54 Hasan hastens to draw what for him is the logical conclusion: as nonbelievers but monotheists Christians are entitled to our forbearance, but should live on sufferance and pay the polltax as a sign of their second-rate position. In that he is joined by the Palestinian Tamimi: "We are not against the Christians; they will have their rights and duties according to the Pact of 'Umar." The Maronites who have transgressed the pact get their retribution at the hands of Hizbullah. 55
Or listen to another popular cassette (and TV) star, who occupies the gray zone between dyed-in-the-wool Fundamentalists and conservatives, Shaykh 'Umar 'Abd al-Kafi. In a lesson delivered in his Cairo mosque he gives a detailed fatwa in response to a question about when and how one should salute Coptic neighbors and fellow workers. "Never be the first to salute," he advises, "and when you do salute, just use the perfunctory sabah al-khayr/sabah al-nur, and not a more effusive salutation. And above all, never, never go out of your way and give them your good wishes on their holidays, especially not those related to false beliefs such as Resurrection Day." Sociability should be kept to strict minimum. In a meeting with women, he anwers in the negative a question by a student who shares a room in a dorm with a Coptic girl as to whether she can undress before her at night. Says 'Abd al-Kafi: "This is haram, for it would be tantamount to male gaze being set upon you; it is an affront to your chastity." 56 Such pieces of advice obviously fly in face of the wahda wataniyya so dear to the regime's heart.
That the wahda is often called into question is evident in the popularity, as attested to by Cairo shopkeepers, of audios that claim to expose the "secrets of the Coptic church" (moral turpitude, conspiracies with foreign agents and missionaries), coming from the mouths of recent converts to Islam (like that Sam'an al-Sisi who has become Fu'ad al-Mahdi). And on a more strident note, the extremist Shaykh 'Umar 'Abd al-Rahman seems to have rendered licit, in a fatwa, the robbing of Coptic jewelers in Upper Egypt in order to finance Islamicist operations (it is a moot point whether he also legitimated the killing of "Coptic zealots"). The Fatwa Commission of HAMAS is given to like-minded preoccupation with regard to boundary setting. In spring 1994 it ruled, for instance, the Christian militants (PFLP/DFLP) killed during the Intifada may by no means be deemed shuhada. Their sacrifice for Palestinian nationalism is devoid of religious significance. 57
In the everyday Islamic market of audiotapes, these theological disputes and responsa circulate widely in Sudan, Egypt, Jordan, the Occupied Territories, the Gulf, Muslim communities in Western Europe, and perhaps elsewhere. They are harbingers of the battle for cultural hegemony being waged today in the matter of collective identity--its nature, standards, history, and practical applications.
Notes:
Note 1: Cf. Jalal Amin, al-'Arab wa Nakbat al-Kuwait (Cairo, 1991); Salah al-Din Ibrahim, al-Khuruj min Zuqaq al-Ta'rikh (Cairo, 1992); Burhan Ghaylun, Mihnat al-'Aql (Beirut, 1985); idem, Le malaise arabe (Paris, 1991); al-Bahith al-'Arabi, (London), March 1994; al-Fikr al-'Arabi (Libya), 57 (Winter 1994); al-Mustaqbal al-'Arabi, April 1994; al-Manabir, (Beirut), March 1994, 73; Fi al-Mas'ala al-Qawmiyya wa al-Dimuqratiyya (Beirut, 1993); Arab Unity Research Center (ed.), Wahdat al-Thaqafa al-'Arabiyya, (Beirut, 1993). Back.
Note 2: Cf. W. J. Ong, The Presence of the Word (New Haven, 1967); idem, Orality and Literacy (London, 1982); idem, The Interfaces of the Word (Ithaca, NY, 1977). Back.
Note 3: 'A. 'Azzam, al-Ghazw al-Fikri, audio (nos. 1, 2); idem, Ma'sat al-Sultan 'Abd al-Hamid, audio. Back.
Note 4: Y. al-'Azm, al-Ahzab al-'Arabiyya wa-Qadiyyat Filastin, audio; idem, Aqlam Qadiyyat 'Arabiyyat al-Huruf Ajnabiyyat al-Wala', audio; S. Abu Isma'il, al-Mukhatatat al-Isti'mariyya lil-Qada' 'ala al-Islam, audio. Cf. on Ba'th nationalism: Mu'ahadat al-Khiyana, Abu al-Qasim (Syrian Muslim Brethren), audio. Back.
Note 5: A. B. al-Tamimi, audio of sermon in Amman (1983). Back.
Note 6: 'A. Belhadj, sermon audio no. 6. Cf. Mustafa Mashhuri (Egyptian Muslim Brethren), Ummatuna wa Wahdatuna, audio. Back.
Note 7: Tamimi, audio of sermon in Amman. Back.
Note 8: A. Nawfal, al-Tariq ila Filastin, audio; A. al-Qattan (Kuwaiti), Maqtal al-Islambuli wa-Rifaqihi, audio; 'Azzam, al-Gazw al-Fikri, audio no. 2. Back.
Note 9: Cf. Minbar al-Sharq (Egypt), no. 7 (May 1993), 132 ff. Back.
Note 10: S. Hawwa, Hadhihi Tajribati (Cairo, 1987); R. Ghannushi, interview with Egypte/Monde Arabe. Back.
Note 11: 'Issam al-'Iryan speaks of Tilimsani's impact upon him in his videotaped lecture al-'Amal al-Tulabi al-Islami; S. al-Hawali, Qira'at min al-Dasatir al-'Arabiyya, audio. Back.
Note 12: See the articles by left-wing contributors to the Cairo monthly Minbar al-Sharq (published by Hizb al-'Amal). Back.
Note 13: S. Abu Isma'il, al-Mukhatatat al-Isti'mariyya, audio; 'A. Kishk, audios nos. 422, 515/516. Back.
Note 14: Kishk, audio no. 373. Back.
Note 15: A. al-Qattan, al-'Afan al-Fanni, audio no. 4 in the series; idem, al-Fasad fi Kuwayt, audio; idem, Tarbiyyat al-Abna', audio no. 5 in the series. Back.
Note 16: A. al-Qattan, Khutbat al-Mu'tamar al-Islami fi Amrika, audio. Back.
Note 17: A. B. Tamimi, Fada'il al-Ard al-Mubaraka, audio. Back.
Note 18: 'A. Belhadj, audio no. 34; B. Jarrar, Khutbat Yawm al-Isra', audio. Back.
Note 19: N. al-Albani, Ahdath al-Khalij, audio; Kishk, al-Kabira al-Thalith, audio. Back.
Note 20: A. Nawfal, Utruhat, audio; H. al-Bitawi (HAMAS), Humum wa Ma'asi al-Muslimin al-Yawm, audio; R. Salah (Israel), al-Quds wa l-Aqsa, audio; B. Jarrar, Thawrat al-Buraq, audio. Back.
Note 21: F. Shqaqi, sermon, audio. Back.
Note 22: Introduction to his Aqlam 'Arabiyyat al-Huruf, audio. Back.
Note 23: A. al-Jundi, al-'Uruba wa al-Islam (Beirut, 197(?)); 'A. al-'Ulwan, al-Qawmiyya fi Mizan al-Islam (Amman, 1982); 'A. B. al-Baz, al-Qawmiyya wa al-Islam, (3d ed., Beirut, 1978). Back.
Note 24: R. Ghannushi, "al-'Uruba wa al-Islam," Minbar al-Sharq (May 1993). Back.
Note 25: R. Ghannushi, al-Hurriyyat al-'Amma lil-Dawla al-Islamiyya (Beirut, 1993), esp. introduction. Back.
Note 26: A. Yasin, al-Manhaj al-Nabawi (3d ed.; Beirut, 1994), quotation from 151-152. Back.
Note 28: Introduction to the 2d. ed. of al-Harakat al-Siyasiyya fi Misr (Cairo, 1982); Interview with Egypte/Monde/ Arabe, (CEDEJ, Cairo), 7 (1991): 128-129. Back.
Note 29: Interview with al-'Alam, March 1994. Cf. M. al-Sulh, al-Islam wa Harakat al-Tahrir al-'Arabiyya (Beirut, 1973, and introduction to the 1979 edition); A. 'Abd al-Malik in a discussion published by al-Mustaqbal al-'Arabi, December 1980. Back.
Note 30: Interview with al-'Alam, July 3, 1993 and cf. al-Da'wa (Pakistan/Egypt), February 10, 1994, 33. Back.
Note 31: Interview of Turabi in Qira'at Siyasiyya, 2/3 (Summer 1992); resolutions of the 2d Congress in al-Ra'id (Syrian Muslim Brethren), 158 (January 1994). Back.
Note 32: H. al-Turabi, "al-Sahwa al-Islamiyya wa al-Dawla al-Qutriyya fi al-Watan al-'Arabi," in al-Sahwa al-Islamiyya: Ru'ya Naqdiyya min al-Dakhil (Beirut, 1990), 75-108 (quotation from 104). Cf., idem, "al-Bu'd al-'Alami lil-Haraka al-Islamiyya: al-Tajriba al-Sudaniyya," in 'A. al-Nafisi (ed.), al-Haraka al-Islamiyya: Ru'ya Mustaqbaliyya (Cairo, 1989), 77-98. An analogous viewpoint is presented by Rif'at Sayyid Ahmad, former Nasserist turned Islamic militant, in the Egyptian Labor party and director of its monthly Minbar al-Sharq. Ahmad admits, however, that his views of the compatibility between Islam and Arabism-as-cultural-component diverge from those of radical Muslim associations, e.g., the Jihad organization. See his al-Harakat al-Islamiyya fi Misr wa Iran (Cairo, 1989); and his paper translated in Egypte/Monde Arabe, 15-16 (1993): 407 ff. Back.
Note 33: 'A. Belhadj, audio no. 38 (also no. 1); B. Jarrar, Thawrat al-Buraq, audio. Back.
Note 34: 'A. Belhadj, audio no. 19; H. al-Bitawi (HAMAS), Humum wa Ma'asi al-Muslimin al-Yawm, audio. Back.
Note 35: A. al-Qattan, Nusrat Sha'b Lubnan wa Filastin, audio. Back.
Note 36: Cf. Majzarat Sarajevo wa al-Bosna (sermons and songs), audio. R. Salah (mayor of Umm al-Fahm, Israel), Majazia al-Sirb; 'A. 'Azzam, al-Gazw al-Fikri. Cf. J. Shabib on Bosnia in Filastin al-Muslima, May 1994, 54-55; Sawat al-Haqq wa al-Hurriyya (Israel), 1992-1994, passim. Back.
Note 37: A. al-Qattan, Maqtal al-Islambuli, audio. Back.
Note 38: M. al-Hashimi al-Hamidi, "al-Ta'rib Qadiyya wataniyya wa-Islamiyya," al-'Alam, Sept. 15, 1993; H. Sabra, al-Shira' (Beirut), Aug. 15, 1994. Back.
Note 39: . B. Jarrar, al-Quds wa al-Aqsa, audio. Cf. A. M. al-Gharib, "Awda Ila al-Islam min Jadid" (Cairo, 1992) presents the jama'at arguments against TV and the movie industry. Back.
Note 40: A. al-Qattan, al-'Afan al-Fanni, audio, esp. nos. 3, 4. Back.
Note 41: Y. al-'Azm, Aqlam, audio. Back.
Note 42: Ibid.; M. H. Fadlallah, interview with al-'Alam, March 1994. Back.
Minbar al-Sharq. Ahmad admits, however, that his views of th
Note 43: See A. Nawfal, al-Nizam al-'Alami al-Jadid, video. Cf. J. al-Banna, "Nahwa Atar la-Markazi," Minbar al-Sharq (March 1993): 94-101. Back.
Note 44: 'A. Belhadj, audio no. 6. Back.
Note 45: Idem, audio no. 41. Back.
Note 46: A. Nawfal, al-Tariq ila Filastin, audio. The orange tree is a PLO (and leftist) symbol, e.g., in the literary work of Ghassan al-Kanafani. Back.
Note 47: B. Jarrar, al-Sakina, audio. Cf. his al-Quds Qalb al-Sham, audio. Back.
Note 48: "Al-Dawla al-Islamiyya wa al-Dawla al-Qutriyya," 97-98, 102 ff; Yasin, al-Manhaj al-Nabawi, 26. Back.
Note 49: Husayn, interview with al-Fajr (Tunis), Feb. 28, 1990. Back.
Note 50: J. al-Banna, "Nahwa," esp. 99-100. Back.
Note 51: See Ghannushi, al-Hurriyyat al-'Amma, chapter 2. Back.
Note 52: A. al-Mahalawi, al-Fitna al-Ta'ifiyya fi Misr, audio. Back.
Note 53: Kishk, audio nos. 410, 422; Jarrar, Thawrat al-Buraq, audio; 'A. Belhadj, audio no. 38; J. 'Abd al-Hadj, Akhta' fi al-Ta'rikh, audio; 'Azm, Aqlam. Back.
Note 54: Qattan, al-Tasammun fi Filastin, audio; idem, Hiwar ma'a Nasrani, audio; M. Hasan, Salb al-Masih, audio. Back.
Note 55: Ibid.; Tamimi, sermon (1983), audio. Back.
Note 56: Shaykh 'Umar 'Abd al-Kafi, al-A'yad, audio; idem, Dars lil-Nisa', audio. Back.
Note 57: I'tirafat Qasis, 3 audios; Fawzi al-Mahdi, Kuntu Nasraniyyan, audio; Shaykh 'Umar 'Abd al-Rahman, Tafsir Surat al-Kahf, audio; M. Fawzi, 'Umar 'Abd al-Rahman (Cairo, 1993), 61-62. The attitudes of the various radical currents on the Coptic question are presented in M. I. Mabruk, Muwajahat al-Muwajaha (Cairo, 1994), 140-175. Back.
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