The Long Revolution of the Global South. Samir Amin

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      1

      THE ARAB WORLD

      Nationalism, Political Islam, and the Predicted Arab Revolutions

      I am prefacing this chapter on the Arab world with five introductory documents: 1) the contemporary Arab world’s historical trajectory; 2) the failure of the Nahda; 3) modernity, democracy, secularism, and Islam; 4) the deployment of the United States military project; and 5) the Palestinian question.

      These documents should allow the reader to pinpoint my position within the larger context of the Arab debates I am going to summarize. The Arab scene is the site of an ongoing conflict between three groups of political positions that, in turn, leads to three different future possibilities: 1) bourgeois modernism, certainly comprador, but nevertheless motivated by the intention to build “modern” though not necessarily democratic Arab states; 2) reactionary political Islam propagated by the archaic monarchies of the Gulf, the Muslim Brothers, and the Salafists; and 3) a possibly universalist Arab left, which would be part of a movement toward socialism.

      We need to examine first what the real reasons are for such fault lines before looking at how they are manifested in current debates. These underlying positions recur with nagging frequency in all Arab debates.

      1. THE HISTORICAL TRAJECTORY OF THE CONTEMPORARY ARAB WORLD

      The Arab world has gone through three important stages over the past halfcentury. Nasser’s Egypt, Baathist Syria and Iraq, and Boumediene’s Algeria were, from 1955 to 1975, major participants in the nonaligned movement and its expansion into Africa. The first conference of African liberation movements took place in Cairo in 1957; it led to the establishment of the Organization of Solidarity with the People of Asia, Africa, and Latin America. The proposed New International Economic Order—the swan song of the non-aligned movement—was drafted in Algiers in 1974. None of these are chance occurrences.

      But while the socially positive effects of the “Arab revolutions,” which I have called “national populist,” were exhausted in the brief time of a decade or two, rising oil profits became dominant after 1973 and encouraged the illusion of an easy modernization. The play on words known by all Arabs, al-fawra mahal al-thawra (the spurt, meaning oil, in place of the revolution), captures this transfer of hopes, which is simultaneously the transfer of the center of gravity of strategic decision making from Cairo to Riyadh. Ironically, this occurred at the time when we began to see that this nonrenewable resource was on the way to exhaustion. Within this context, the United States began the implementation of what would become the project for military control of the world, a means for it to ensure exclusive access to this irreplaceable energy resource for its benefit. From 1990, the armed intervention of the United States, now become a reality, completely transformed the nature of the challenges confronting Arab and other societies.

      Mired in the infitah, the “opening” connected to the petroleum illusion, Arab governments lost the legitimacy from which they had benefited until then. Political Islam rushed into the political void, where it has been in the forefront ever since. As Antonio Gramsci once said, “The old world is dying and the new world struggles to be born; now is the time of monsters.”

      For someone my age, who has lived through these three periods, the involution associated with this sequence necessarily called for in-depth consideration of the reasons for this dramatic failure. Having experienced this from the inside, I put forward written analyses on the issues involved, which the reader will find elsewhere. I attributed the involution to two sets of causes: those related to the limitations and contradictions of the Nahda, the Arab “Renaissance” initiated in the nineteenth century, which were behind the longevity of the political model called the “mameluk regime,”¹⁰ and those related to the world geopolitics of the new collective imperialism of the triad (United States, Europe, and Japan) under the leadership of the United States.¹¹

      2. THE FAILURE OF THE NAHDA

       Modernity and the European Renaissance

      Modernity is based on the principle that human beings, individually and collectively, make their own history, and to do that, they have the right to innovate and not respect tradition. The proclamation of this principle was a rupture with the fundamental principle that governed all premodern societies, including those of feudal and Christian Europe. This principle called for renouncing the dominant forms of legitimizing power—in the family, in communities within which ways of living and modes of production are organized, and at the level of the state—that were based up to then on a metaphysics with a generally religious expression. It implies, then, a separation between the state and religion, a radical secularization, which is a condition for the development of modern forms of politics.

      Modernity is born with this declaration of principle. This is not a question of a rebirth (renaissance), but a birth as such. The characterization Europeans themselves gave to this moment of history, the Renaissance. is thus misleading. It is the result of an ideological construction in which Greco-Roman antiquity was already supposedly familiar with the principle of modernity, buried during the Middle Ages (between ancient modernity and new modernity) by religious obscurantism. This is a mythical understanding of antiquity, the basis for Eurocentrism, through which Europe claims to inherit its past and “return to the sources,” hence re-naissance, while in fact this renaissance is actually a rupture with its own history.

      The concomitant birth of modernity and capitalism is not accidental. The social relations that characterize the new production system implied freedom of enterprise, free access to markets, and proclamation of the inviolable right to private property, which is made “sacred.” Economic life, freed from the type of supervision by political authorities that characterized the premodern systems, developed into an autonomous area of social life, driven by its own laws. In place of the traditional determination in which power is the source of wealth, capitalism substitutes a reverse causality in which wealth is the source of power.

       The Arab Islamic Nahda

      The European Renaissance was the result of an internal social dynamic. It was, in effect, the solution provided by the invention of capitalism to contradictions specific to Europe in that era. In contrast, what Arabs called, by imitation, their Renaissance—the Nahda of the nineteenth century—was not that at all. It was the reaction to an external shock. Europe, made powerful and victorious by modernity, had an ambiguous effect on the Arab world. It was a cause of both attraction (admiration) and repulsion (through the arrogance of its conquest). The Arab Renaissance took the qualifying term literally. It believed that if, as the Europeans had done (and this is what they themselves said), the Arabs “returned” to their sources, a disparaged time, they would rediscover their greatness. The Nahda СКАЧАТЬ