Cultural Healing After Tragedy

Timothy Boudoumit 

 A Master of Arts student at the Department for Near and Middle Eastern Civilizations at the University of Toronto, and a recipient of a Canada Graduate Scholarship for 2022-2023. His research focuses on identity formation and the growth of intellectual activities in the Levant during the late Ottoman and Mandate periods (1840-1940).

This article is part of the“The Arab Renaissance in Contemporary Eyes” project, which is the fruit of cooperation between Henna Platform and The Department of Near and Middle Eastern Civilizations. In this project, Henna team provides editorial assistance to the graduate and undergraduate students to publish their final papers on Henna’s website. You read in this series of articles: Intellectuals of the Modern Arab World by Jens Hanssen,Taha Hussein and the Dialectic of Arab Enlightenment by Quinn Teague-Colfer, The Arab Nahda from Feminist Perspective by Sara Molaie, The Importance of Being Wrong by Shauna McLean, and Self-definition in Changing Worlds by Mosab Alnomire. 

Translated to Arabic by Mosab Alnomire

“Defeat goes deeper into the human soul than victory.” Albert Hourani, the scholar who labeled 1798 to 1939 as the “Arab Liberal Age,” claimed that defeat “is a conscious experience which induces doubts about the ordering of the universe.” In other words, it leaves people searching for a new way to order their lives. At the same time, Hourani claimed defeat is “[forgettable] by those who have power” since they could “invent or adopt ideas to justify their possession of [power]” and “assume [it into] the natural order of things.” (Hourani, 2013) Hourani juxtaposes the “universal” effects of defeat on the “human soul” with its seeming inability to impact those with power. What could Hourani have meant by this curious juxtaposition? He contends that those who control history can turn tragedies, which are distinctly local realities, into universal defeats. 

But how did tragedies become universal defeats? Despite what seems intuitive, tragedies are not automatically “defeats.” Tragedies are, by their nature, experienced differently across space and time in the modern Arab world. By contrast, the intellectuals who led the Arab literary renaissance, called “the Nahda”, characterize “defeats” as universal to all Arabs – these intellectuals form a group that English-language historiography calls the Nahdawis. (Hanssen & Weiss, 2020) 

Defeats are thus a kind of forgettable consciousness shapeable by power, and particular “Arab defeats” emerge from the political visions held by Nahdawis. The historiography of the Arabic Nahda characterizes the movement as being predominantly an elitist project, whereby Nahdawis used their political power or influence to advance “visionary projects.” (Takriti, 2018) It seems to me, though, that Nahdawis’ also advanced narratives of defeat that turned calamitous events like civil strife into tragedies in order to frame, motivate, and stress the urgency of reform on the reading public. If defeatism was indeed a narrative strategy rather than, say, self-Orientalization, this would call for the historiography of “the Nahda” to take the function of tragedy more seriously. My short essay explores the writings of two Nahdawis, namely Butrus al-Bustani and Taha Hussein, writing in different times and places claimed by “the Nahda”, to suggest this redirection of scholarship.  I propose that the legacies of “the Nahda” are still with us today, not as the remnants of a decline, but as a tool for political unity used in response to tragedy and interpreted in unorthodox manners according to where it is needed. One quite recent use of “the Nahda’s” legacies was during the 2011 Arab uprisings, and the Arab world is once again entering a period of popular upheaval that may call for “the Nahda’s” return.

Defeats and visionary projects

I draw on Bell Hooks to understand the theoretical connection between “defeats” and “visionary projects.” Bell Hooks argues that tragedy forms an integral part of a revival since her healing experience began when she could “not understand why she experienced hurt, discrimination, and rejection” from people she valued, including family, friends, and other Black and Feminist activists. (Hooks, 1991) It is from this low point her theories rebuilt her confidence, growing on the particular defeats she faced in her activism circles. Nahdawi projects seek to avoid a dark age through large-scale reforms aimed at attaining cultural refinement, and tragedy forms an integral part of such projects since Nahdawis use past and future threats of tragedy to frame, motivate, and stress the urgency of reform. Therefore, writing a history of cultural healing for the “Arab world” requires considering the function of tragedy and defeat more prominently. 

Scholarship on “the Nahda” has either been silent on the distinction between tragedy and defeat or proposes that tragedy cannot exist alongside flourishing. Traditional narratives view “the Nahda” as a sort of awakening or revival of an authentic Arabic culture out of a Dark Age that was ended by a defeat, as seen in the works of Albert Hourani, Abdallah Laroui, and Muhammad ʿAbid al-Jabiri, to name a few. (Hanssen & Weiss, 2020) Even revisionists, such as Ahamd Dallal and Joseph Massad, suggest that “the Nahda” was an intellectual defeat to Europism at the expense of a prior age of flourishing, catering to a non-European horizon of expectation. (Dalal 2018, Massad 2007) Instead, I draw on frameworks, such as those presented by Marwa Elshakry, Ussama Makdisi, and Ilham Khuri-Makdisi, arguing that the ideas and practices of “the Nahda” were not codified, standardized, or homogenized, leaving room for competing identities to exist alongside each other and become layered over time and space. I propose that the presence of tragedy alongside flourishing in Nahdawi thought can be reconciled by interpreting defeat as an omnipresent factor motivating reform, whereby Nahdawis suggest their reformist ideas as cultural healing to their audiences.

IMPENDING TRAGEDY AND LONG-TERM HEALING: BUTRUS AL-BUSTANI

Despite the historiography’s relative silence on the coexistence of tragedy and healing, Nahdawis are anything but discreet about their tragedies. One example of note is in the work of Butrus al-Bustani, an intellectual, polymath, and patriot, who wrote Nafir Suriyya, eleven pamphlets that call for patriotic healing after the tragedies occurring in Damascus and Mount Lebanon in 1860. Bustani opens each pamphlet by highlighting his lived experience of tragedy. While highlighting different threads of the broader tragedy in each pamphlet, he often claims that “for a number of generations, our country has been afflicted by the corruption of uncivilized segments of its people. That is why you see it lagging behind other countries and becoming even more backward.”  (Elshakry, 2013) He goes on in the subsequent pamphlets to describe all the different kinds of losses the country incurred, from moral to physical ones. (al-Bustani, 2019) However, after every tragedy, Bustani outlines his solution. He implores his readers to trust in the powers restoring peace and in the ancient spirit of wisdom present in Syria that “will [bring] great goodness and usher in a new age for Syria.”  Bustani thus transformed the tragedies he witnessed into “defeats” for Syria, and warned that these might return without his proposed solution. Al-Bustani used these defeats to frame, motivate, and stress the urgency of reform to his reading public affected by tragedies lived through and addressed by his work.

LONG-TERM TRAGEDY AND IMPENDING HEALING: TAHA HUSSEIN

Other Nahdawis, such as the Egyptian professor, literary prodigy, and reformist intellectual Taha Hussein, employ tragedies in similar ways to Bustani, but these tragedies are largely reconstructed historical narratives that he turned into defeats. Hussein’s narration of Egypt’s history of tragedy is drawn from European Orientalists, such as Ernest Renan, who often accused the Arab world, and Egypt in particular, of having lost its ancient and medieval-era glory to Islamic decadence and fundamentalism. (Renan, 1883) Indeed, many Nahdawi responses to such accusations were conditioned by the hegemonic knowledge production of Orientalists and used by them to buttress their arguments. Hussein argues that “had Egypt not neglected culture and science […] she would not have lost her freedom [and] spared the struggle to regain them.” (Husayn, 1954) His long treatise on the future of culture in Egypt uses the specter of former and potential future subjugation to spur his political program, which includes free education at certain levels. (Husayn, 1954) While Bustani mobilized immediate tragedy to avoid long-term defeat, Hussein mobilized the immediate threat of tragedy to avoid what had been, allegedly, long-term past tragedies. Thus, despite the variety of ways Nahdawis employed tragedy, Nahdawis are tied together by the common narrative arc, which weaponizes tragedy as a “defeat” in order to frame, motivate, and stress the urgency of reform and propose a vision for healing political pursuits.

Trends and Conclusion

Nahdawis employed a rhetoric of tragedy since it was a powerful force for reform. The Arabic reading public had their lives shaken by tragedy, which “induced doubts about the ordering” of their former visions of the future, called a “horizon of expectation.”  (Osborne, 1992) “The Nahda” is a type of movement taken by Arab intellectuals that both understands the public’s disenchantment regarding their former political system and speaks to an alternative horizon of expectation proposed by European modernity, the dominant alternative of their reading public. At stake for the Nahdawis was revitalizing their political culture, and they marshaled tragedies toward this political end. However, “the Nahda” was just as multivalent as the tragedies to which they were speaking: their reading public’s experiences of tragedies were fractured by the specificity of tragedy occurring across different regions and times across the Arabic-speaking world. This process necessarily sidelines certain tragedies that do not speak to the author’s reading public or push for reforms outside their political territory. For instance, Bustani’s concern is to rebuild his “watan” (homeland) and necessarily does not speak to what Renan and Hussein identify as “Egypt’s neglect of culture and science” in the preceding three centuries. Hussein likewise does not reference the tragedies of 1860 in Damascus and Mount Lebanon. It is for this reason that this short exposé calls for a re-centering of tragedy in “the Nahda’s” historiography as a commonality among Nahdawis, which carries some implications I flag by way of conclusion.

In English, “Nahda” is losing its sense of Nuhuud in Arabic, which biases our understanding of “the Nahda” as an object in a paradigm of definiteness rather than a contingent series of loosely connected actions across space and time. In seeking to preserve its meaning in Arabic, Elias Khoury and other scholars solidify the action implicit in the Arabic Nahda into a fixed English noun, “the Nahda,” to study. (Khoury, 2001) In keeping with Khoury’s spirit, re-examining “the Nahda” is a call to talk about the period encompassed by “the Nahda” as several layered actions influencing and being influenced by political ambitions. Moreover, to turn this proposition onto itself, it is also a call to view the narrative of the end or decline of the Nahda as being itself a narrative of tragedy and defeat, used by different movements in the name of calling for a reawakening of the Arab spirit.

Bibliograpgy

Buṭrus ibn Būlus Bustānī. The Clarion of Syria: a Patriot’s Call Against the Civil War of 1860. Translated by Jens Hanssen and Hicham Safieddine. Oakland, California: University of California Press, 2019.

Dallal, Ahmad S. Islam Without Europe: Traditions of Reform in Eighteenth-Century Islamic Thought. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2018.

Elshakry, Marwa. Reading Darwin in Arabic, 1860-1950. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2013.

Hanssen, Jens, and Max Weiss. Arabic Thought Against the Authoritarian Age: Towards an Intellectual History of the Present. Edited by Jens Hanssen and Max Weiss. Cambridge, United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press, 2018.

Hanssen, Jens, and Max Weiss. Arabic Thought Beyond the Liberal Age: Towards an Intellectual History of the Nahda. Edited by Jens Hanssen and Max Weiss. Cambridge, United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press, 2016.

Hooks, Bell. “Theory as Liberatory Practice.” Yale Journal of Law and Feminism 4, no. 1 (1991): 1-12.

Hourani, Albert. A History of the Arab Peoples. London: Faber and Faber, 2013.

Ḥusayn, Ṭāhā. The Future of Culture in Egypt. Washington: American Council of Learned Societies, 1954.

Khuri-Makdisi, Ilham. The Eastern Mediterranean and the Making of Global Radicalism, 1860-1914. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010.

Makdisi, Ussama Samir. Age of Coexistence: The Ecumenical Frame and the Making of the Modern Arab World. Oakland, California: University of California Press, 2019.

Massad, Joseph Andoni. Desiring Arabs. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007.

Osborne, Peter. “Modernity is a Qualitative, Not a Chronological, Category.” New Left Review, 192 (March/April 1992), 65-84.

Renan-Afghani Debate, Paris, 1883. Copy provided electronically through Jens Hanssen, “Intellectuals of the Arab World,” (University of Toronto: NMC2173 Graduate Seminar Week 4, 2022).

Said, Edward W. The World, the Text, and the Critic. Cambridge. Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1983.

Scott, David. “Criticism after Postcoloniality.” Refashioning Futures (Princeton, 1999), 3-20.

Takriti, Abdel Razzaq. “Political Praxis in the Gulf: Ahmad Al-Khatib and the Movement of Arab Nationalists, 1948–1969.” In Arabic Thought Against the Authoritarian Age. Edited by Jens Hanssen and Max Weiss. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2018. 86–112. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108147781.007.

Tavakoli-Targhi, Mohamad. “Ahmad Kasravi’s critiques of Europism and Orientalism,” in Persian Language, Literature and Culture. Edited by Kamran Talattof. London: Routledge, 2015.