Grietje
01-09-03, 12:00
Affiliation To The West: Achilles' Heel Of Arab Liberalism
Khaled Al Haroub Al-Hayat 2003/08/30
Every time Arab liberalism calls for adopting Western values and its intellectual and theoretical framework, it causes prejudice to its cause, and strangles its project with its own hands. The more this liberalism disregards a solid truth, which is the fact that the Arab political relations with the West is extremely sensitive because of its historical experience, the more this liberalism becomes further marginalized.
If someone says for instance, that the U.S. is currently the haven, center and guardian of liberalism, he wouldn't be only hurting himself, but he would also be fostering doubts about the very notion of liberalism, among the overwhelming majority of Arabs, who view the West only through the lens of the past Western imperialism and present American one. By linking every notion of liberalism to the West, deliberately or not, is equal to burying this notion in record time and curb the salvation of many sectors of the Arab societies.
The purpose here is not to attack liberal and modern ideas such as freedom, forgiveness, plurality, individualism, and separation of religion and state. It is rather meant to defend these ideas by stressing the need to separate the theoretical link between these ideas and the West. The Arab societies are in a pressing need for huge flow of such ideas, but this flow always clashes with the "identity" of these ideas and their belonging to the West, which limits their impact.
What matters most here is that the extremely rich history of the Islamic Arab civilization offers a fertile ground for ideological and theoretical foundations for a genuinely Arab liberal project, which wouldn't be attributed to the West or interested in its objectives and allegiances. When this project stems from a cultural foundation, even if enriched with foreign adaptations, it would enjoy a local recognition, a decisive factor of success. No matter how boring the saying "renewing from the inside" might seem to many people, it is the only one that can succeed even after a long waiting period.
In general, there is no need to explain how observers of Arab history, whether at the social, political or cultural level, are surprised to find out the open horizons of internal and foreign enrichment that existed, and the plethora of ideological and behavioral frameworks, unlike our situation today and the interaction of all this in the context of people's daily lives. This indicates the existence of many possibilities and probabilities of producing a renaissance project that would bring the present out of its backwards situation.
If separating between an Arab liberal project and the West can cause damage, there is no implicit assumption that this project, or any other ideological project, be hostile to the West, in its blind definition. Blind hostility is no different than blind loyalty. They are both removed from rationality but similar in their blindness. The relation with the West, whether a confrontation or cooperation or adaptation, would move closer to a type of healthy relation, which stems from self confidence that controls the current situation, and differentiates between one West and another, considering each case separately, and avoiding generalizations and "reversed Orientalism."
Naturally, there is a deep-seated cognitive-historic problematic towards drawing a healthy relation with the West, related to the temporal and hierarchal balances of power, which cannot be dismissed as easy to overcome. The relation between the defeated and the victorious is extremely complex and ambiguous; and many a times, it doesn't fit the description made by Ibn Khaldun, which seems superficial when it claims that the defeated power always tends to imitate the victorious power. This imitation is not applicable on some facets of the social and political life, whereby it seems naïve and most of the times radical, but other facets of that life are governed by the logic of opposition and resistance, which sometimes comes through a violent and radical way. In this sense, what happens is that the logic of imitating the West and that of opposing it become extremist and at two opposite ends, and they almost turn one entire circle in their radicalism, so they meet at the extreme ends of radicalism, but turning their backs to each other.
When one force or civilization is victorious and feels it is equal to the other forces, it enjoys greater confidence and addresses the issues of adaptation and resistance to the other forces - civilizations, as opposed to the superficial logic of Ibn Khaldun. Examples from the Islamic Arab history corroborate this, for the movement of adaptation, translation and imitation of the Persians, the Romans or the Greeks reached its peak when the interaction with the Islamic Arab civilization reached its highest point as well. On the contrary, the movement of benefiting from the others, or even dealing with them openly and freely reaches its lowest point when the Islamic Arab situation reached its lowest point and stagnation reached its worst level.
The relation between Arabs and Muslims with the West is extremely tense and is constantly being pulled back and forth between adaptation, choice, opposition and refusal, and all that is only natural, predictable and rather positive. But the pulling has two extremes, the first is the logic of blind loyalty, the second is the logic of blind hostility, each is all but rational, and is incapable of reaching a reasonable unanimity. Whatever the idea occupying one of the two extremes, the two limits of radicalism, it leads itself to being marginalized and failing. Arab liberalism, which views the West as its role model is hence in a position of one of two extremes and is far removed from unanimity and harms itself by being on the margin. The current marginalization of liberal ideas in the Arab societies is not caused by "a substantial opposition" in these societies to this kind of ideas, but rather to the strong doubts about these ideas' perception of the West and its unnecessary and unpractical allegiance to it.
If liberalism that calls for rationalism, directional understanding and pragmatism are the main foundations to introduce a change, then the Arab societies' perception of the West is one of the strongest elements, and is not devoid of bases and offers highly convincing reasons. Thus, this liberalism should join the middle stance, without insisting on occupying the orthodoxy of one of the two extremes, if it wishes to survive and have an impact on Arab societies. It also has to present itself as an Arab national project and not as a means in the hands of the foreigner, coupled with deep-seated doubts and questionings about the origin, identity and references.
*Mr Haroub is a Palestinian writer based in Britain
Khaled Al Haroub Al-Hayat 2003/08/30
Every time Arab liberalism calls for adopting Western values and its intellectual and theoretical framework, it causes prejudice to its cause, and strangles its project with its own hands. The more this liberalism disregards a solid truth, which is the fact that the Arab political relations with the West is extremely sensitive because of its historical experience, the more this liberalism becomes further marginalized.
If someone says for instance, that the U.S. is currently the haven, center and guardian of liberalism, he wouldn't be only hurting himself, but he would also be fostering doubts about the very notion of liberalism, among the overwhelming majority of Arabs, who view the West only through the lens of the past Western imperialism and present American one. By linking every notion of liberalism to the West, deliberately or not, is equal to burying this notion in record time and curb the salvation of many sectors of the Arab societies.
The purpose here is not to attack liberal and modern ideas such as freedom, forgiveness, plurality, individualism, and separation of religion and state. It is rather meant to defend these ideas by stressing the need to separate the theoretical link between these ideas and the West. The Arab societies are in a pressing need for huge flow of such ideas, but this flow always clashes with the "identity" of these ideas and their belonging to the West, which limits their impact.
What matters most here is that the extremely rich history of the Islamic Arab civilization offers a fertile ground for ideological and theoretical foundations for a genuinely Arab liberal project, which wouldn't be attributed to the West or interested in its objectives and allegiances. When this project stems from a cultural foundation, even if enriched with foreign adaptations, it would enjoy a local recognition, a decisive factor of success. No matter how boring the saying "renewing from the inside" might seem to many people, it is the only one that can succeed even after a long waiting period.
In general, there is no need to explain how observers of Arab history, whether at the social, political or cultural level, are surprised to find out the open horizons of internal and foreign enrichment that existed, and the plethora of ideological and behavioral frameworks, unlike our situation today and the interaction of all this in the context of people's daily lives. This indicates the existence of many possibilities and probabilities of producing a renaissance project that would bring the present out of its backwards situation.
If separating between an Arab liberal project and the West can cause damage, there is no implicit assumption that this project, or any other ideological project, be hostile to the West, in its blind definition. Blind hostility is no different than blind loyalty. They are both removed from rationality but similar in their blindness. The relation with the West, whether a confrontation or cooperation or adaptation, would move closer to a type of healthy relation, which stems from self confidence that controls the current situation, and differentiates between one West and another, considering each case separately, and avoiding generalizations and "reversed Orientalism."
Naturally, there is a deep-seated cognitive-historic problematic towards drawing a healthy relation with the West, related to the temporal and hierarchal balances of power, which cannot be dismissed as easy to overcome. The relation between the defeated and the victorious is extremely complex and ambiguous; and many a times, it doesn't fit the description made by Ibn Khaldun, which seems superficial when it claims that the defeated power always tends to imitate the victorious power. This imitation is not applicable on some facets of the social and political life, whereby it seems naïve and most of the times radical, but other facets of that life are governed by the logic of opposition and resistance, which sometimes comes through a violent and radical way. In this sense, what happens is that the logic of imitating the West and that of opposing it become extremist and at two opposite ends, and they almost turn one entire circle in their radicalism, so they meet at the extreme ends of radicalism, but turning their backs to each other.
When one force or civilization is victorious and feels it is equal to the other forces, it enjoys greater confidence and addresses the issues of adaptation and resistance to the other forces - civilizations, as opposed to the superficial logic of Ibn Khaldun. Examples from the Islamic Arab history corroborate this, for the movement of adaptation, translation and imitation of the Persians, the Romans or the Greeks reached its peak when the interaction with the Islamic Arab civilization reached its highest point as well. On the contrary, the movement of benefiting from the others, or even dealing with them openly and freely reaches its lowest point when the Islamic Arab situation reached its lowest point and stagnation reached its worst level.
The relation between Arabs and Muslims with the West is extremely tense and is constantly being pulled back and forth between adaptation, choice, opposition and refusal, and all that is only natural, predictable and rather positive. But the pulling has two extremes, the first is the logic of blind loyalty, the second is the logic of blind hostility, each is all but rational, and is incapable of reaching a reasonable unanimity. Whatever the idea occupying one of the two extremes, the two limits of radicalism, it leads itself to being marginalized and failing. Arab liberalism, which views the West as its role model is hence in a position of one of two extremes and is far removed from unanimity and harms itself by being on the margin. The current marginalization of liberal ideas in the Arab societies is not caused by "a substantial opposition" in these societies to this kind of ideas, but rather to the strong doubts about these ideas' perception of the West and its unnecessary and unpractical allegiance to it.
If liberalism that calls for rationalism, directional understanding and pragmatism are the main foundations to introduce a change, then the Arab societies' perception of the West is one of the strongest elements, and is not devoid of bases and offers highly convincing reasons. Thus, this liberalism should join the middle stance, without insisting on occupying the orthodoxy of one of the two extremes, if it wishes to survive and have an impact on Arab societies. It also has to present itself as an Arab national project and not as a means in the hands of the foreigner, coupled with deep-seated doubts and questionings about the origin, identity and references.
*Mr Haroub is a Palestinian writer based in Britain