The Arab Inheritance

Fouad Ajami

From Foreign Affairs, September/ October 1997

Article preview: first 500 of 5,894 words total.

Summary:  The Arab world has squandered its political inheritance of secular nationalism. In the 1980s, autocracy and young theocratic brigades overtook and exiled the older generation of liberals. The rise of political Islam was accompanied by severe economic decline in the region. But the Middle East is ripe for a post-Islamist era. A modernist Arab alternative requires large-scale economic and political reform and a coming to terms with the two bogeymen -- America and Israel.

Fouad Ajami is Majid Khadduri Professor of Middle Eastern Studies at the School of Advanced International Studies, Johns Hopkins University.

It is time that Saturns ceased dining off their children; time, too, that children stopped devouring their parents . . .

by Alexander Herzen

It was a generation ago, in the mid-1980s, that a whole world slipped through the fingers of the Arab elite, formed on the secular ideals of nationalism and modernity. A city that had been their collective cultural home-Beirut-was lost to them. A political culture of nationalism that had nurtured them had led to a blind alley, and been turned into a cover for despotism, a plaything of dictators. A theocratic temptation blew into the political world like a ferocious wind, and the secular Arabs were left thrashing about. Nothing today, no ship of sorrow can take these men and women of the secular tradition back to the verities of their world. A political inheritance has been lost.

Modern Arabs came into that secular inheritance with relative ease. It came to them the way dominant ideas are transmitted and received when they are ascendant. The labor that had gone into that grand edifice reached back into the late years of the nineteenth century. In the academies and the barracks, in al mahjar, the lands of emigration in Europe and the New World, and in Cairo, a national movement had taken shape, a product of the cities and of the intellectual class. And though anti-Western in its rhetoric, it was given force and expression by thinkers who had been formed by the ideals of the West. When George Antonius gave this national movement its manifesto, The Arab Awakening, in 1938, he was true to all that: he was a son of Mount Lebanon, a Greek Orthodox from a trading family, raised there and in the polyglot world of Alexandria, and educated at Cambridge. He had behind him years of service in the British colonial administration. He had written his famous tract thanks to the financial patronage of Charles R. Crane, a Chicago industrialist and philanthropist, a dilettante and crank who always seemed in search of exotic causes in distant lands. It was for an Anglo-American audience that Antonius had written his book. He had told that defective tale of Western betrayal that lies at the heart of Arab nationalist historiography-the partition of the Arab world in the diplomatic settlement that followed the First World War-but he had written it as an appeal to the judgment of the West. It could not have occurred to him that a way-or a world-could be found beyond that of the West. It was in the schools of the Anglo-American missions, and in the flagship of those missions, the Syrian Protestant College (later renamed the American University of Beirut) that Arab nationalism had its start.

The dream of that national "awakening" had been a dream of social emancipation as well. Ten years prior to the appearance of Antonius' book, a Muslim woman of Beirut, Nazira Zayn al-Din, a child of the upper bourgeoisie, had written a daring book of her own, al ...

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