If you are still inebriated from drinking the blood of your brothers in the nation and dazed from the calamity of the catastrophes that have befallen you, do not fear, you will soon awaken from this loss of consciousness and recognize the meaning of this advice, and the importance of your own public interest.
Buṭrus al-Bustānī, Nafīr Sūrrīya, 1860
Any man who is of no use to another, has a useless existence altogether.
Buṭrus al-Bustānī, Nafīr Sūrrīya, 1860, and al-asfār al-kurrūziya, 1860
From within the processes of integration of the Ottoman Empire into the world market and in the aftermath of the 1860 political violence that had ensued in Mount Lebanon and Damascus emerged a distinct form of liberal nationalism in the works of Buṭrus al- Bustānī, a central figure in the nineteenth-century Nahḍa intellectual movement.Footnote 1 By the late nineteenth century, the Ottoman Empire had begun to sow the seeds of its tanzimat reforms that were largely liberal in nature and had transformative implications for property rights, legislation, and governance, as well as taxation and military conscription. The peasant uprisings of Mount Lebanon (1820s, 1830s, 1841, 1845, and 1860) occurred in the context of drastic land reforms and the encroachment of private property and industrial capital on the premodern tax-farming system, as well the institutionalization of waged labor. This was concomitant with the rise of the Maronite Church as a landowning power, and the demise of the traditional power of Druze and Christian feudal overlords in light of the influx of European mercantile and industrial capital, the establishment of wage labor through trade and the silk industry, reformed Ottoman property and tax laws, Ottoman–Egyptian commercial rivalry, and the rapid urbanization of Beirut and Damascus.Footnote 2 It is from within this historical context that the nation form, or waṭan, surfaced in Bustānī’s writings as a regulative ideal for society in crisis. The conversion of the political violence into the paradigm of “civil war” within one nation rendered a natural history of the nation in a way that made it appear as history's point of departure rather than as the result of a historical process.
Commenting on the 1860 events, Bustānī wrote a series of eleven nationalist pamphlets signed anonymously “loving patriot,” muḥib lil waṭan, entitled Nafīr Sūrriya, “The Clarion of Syria,”Footnote 3 and in that same year a translation of Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe.Footnote 4 Throughout these pamphlets and using Crusoe's story as an allegory for civil society in a postwar temporality, Bustānī formulated a form of liberal nationalism in defense of “true religion,” diyāna haqīqiya, Protestant in spirit and corresponding with a political economic logic that ties it to the history of capitalism.Footnote 5 This wedding of religion and political economy is most strikingly evident in the way the concepts of guilt and debt were used to separate out a universalistic conception of religion from sectarian political identities, according to which Bustānī’s conception of nationality rendered the moral guilt accumulated in the wake of sectarian conflict into a quantifiable debt that underpins a project of national revival through cooperative labor. The political theology that underlies Bustānī’s liberal logic, and which will be the focus of the analysis throughout this article, raises the question of the nature of the rule of law in relation to violence; in other words, it exposes the fine line between lawmaking violence and law-preserving violence. Further, Bustānī’s worldview provides us with an understanding of the kinds of symbolic investiture that iterate the performative nature of rites of initiation into community in fin de siècle Beirut, ones that restrict the potentialities of politics from within a “psycho-theological” framework.Footnote 6 Psycho-theology, formulated as an analytic tool by Eric Santner, points to the “theological excess” that underpins modern life, one which informs everyday subjectivity. Reversing the Freudian reading of religion as a psychological state imposed on the outside world, Santner suggests that the question of culture difference, what makes an Other a stranger, is experienced theologically, as an interjection of an alterity into the self, and is a process that is entirely irrational and excessive, and has the structure of a fantasy.
Bustānī has received much attention in the historiography of Nahda since Albert Hourani's Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age, and it has been well established in scholarship that Bustānī represents a liberal and reformist strain of Nahda thought. Historian Usama Makidisi has argued that Bustānī represents a prescient discourse of “ecumenical humanism” through his call for religious tolerance and co-existence during the outbreak of sectarian violence.Footnote 7 He reads Bustānī’s discourse at the time as one that is recalcitrant to the adoption of “Eurocentric understandings of modernity” by arguing for the maintenance of “religious co-existence” in the face of the 1860 events.Footnote 8 Makdisi writes, “Presciently, Bustānī asserted that the mixture of religion and politics would lead to an inflexible political system that could not adapt to new realities, anticipating almost word for word modern-day criticisms of the sectarian political system that dominates Lebanon.”Footnote 9 Refuting modernization theories’ claims regarding the primordialness of sectarianism, and presenting Bustānī’s liberalism as a visionary solution, Makdisi argues that sectarianism is indeed modern and can only be overcome by the proper separation of religion from politics, one that Bustānī “presciently” adopted early on.Footnote 10 This reading remains to be merely descriptive; it prescribes his logic rather than analyzes it, for it accepts the liberal antinomy of religion and politics as it is laid out in Bustānī’s writings and does not analyze it. This article argues that Bustānī’s “secular” stance is based on a politico-theological worldview that in turn is premised on an idea of universal religion: it is a form of liberal nationalism that binds political economy with religion while propounding the separation of religion from politics.
Makdisi shows how Bustānī formulated quandaries regarding memory work precisely because he deemed the 1860 events civil war within the boundaries of one nation.Footnote 11 But what Makdisi misses is the problematic logic of “civil war”—one that Bustānī propounds—as a category of analysis itself, and of the return to “national co-existence” and the rule of law as the solutions for violence. Makdisi represents sectarianism as an unfamiliar interruption of existing social relations, one born out of foreign European interferences and from within Ottoman liberal reforms (also read as external interferences in Mount Lebanon), both premised on an orientalist perception of Mount Lebanon as premodern. However, this does not explain the impulse to abstraction that characterizes liberal “anti-sectarianism” as exhibited in Bustānī’s writings—an impulse that cannot be analyzed without attention to political economy largely defined as the symbolic system of relations of exchange and production in society. Why sectarianism emerges hand in hand with a liberal universal conception of religion, and how they both become constitutive of the social bond itself within a national sphere go unaddressed in existing scholarship.
Jeffrey Sacks, in a more recent reading of Bustānī’s work, recognizes a relation between religion and the body politic; however, it is one that is premised on a structure of loss and mourning: “the text [Nafir] remarks its relation to loss—it repeats the losses, by telling us that it has lost the capacity to represent them.”Footnote 12 Sacks offers a parallel reading to Makdisi, for he analyzes Bustānī’s demand for the separation of religion and politics as one that “enacts and obscures the linguistic, epistemic violence” of modernity.Footnote 13 While Makdisi praises Bustānī’s liberal humanism, Sacks suggests that his humanism was always already an interrupted project that points to the impossibilities inherent in representation or in “the finite event language is.”Footnote 14 Neither of these readings takes account of the politico-theological or ideological element implicit in Bustānī’s liberal secularism. Further, a close reading of his works shows that the representation of loss incurred by civil war did indeed occur, but through a logic that converted the material losses into moral gains, one that placed the citizens of the nation in a position of eternal indebtedness to both the “civilized world,” al-‘ālam al-mutamaddin,Footnote 15 and God.
POSTLAPSARIAN NATIONALITY
Bustānī in 1860 proclaimed the political violence a “black mark on the nation's history,”Footnote 16 as a testament of sectarianism and “partial interests.”Footnote 17 He called for a universal religious sentiment, a “true religion,”Footnote 18 to cure the ailment of partisan interests; however, the ailment and the cure in this case prove to be identical. True nationalism, like true religion, was essentially a guiltful relation: Bustānī posited the idea of a perpetually indebted national subject as the only penance for the “barbaric” and “uncivilized” political violence.Footnote 19 As such his demand was for equality across religious groups—and not within them in contrast to the peasant's demands in 1860—under the claim of safeguarding public interest, al-huqquq al-‘umumiya.Footnote 20 This demand for coexistence and national reconciliation accepts the logic of sectarian division as long as it is a relation between social groups within one nation. Consequently “civil war,” ḥarb ahliyā,Footnote 21 was characterized as a natural catastrophe, an aberration to the normal order, and as a direct result of God's punishment:
Yā abnā’ al-waṭan, the vilest of all things in this world, is war, and the evilest and foulest of all wars is a civil war between citizens of one nation. This type of war usually results because of petty causes and lowly desires. Not only does it oppose the principle of justice and impose on the rights of the guardians of society, it also counters and refutes all the good, honest, and dignified rights and sensitivities of humankind, such as the rights of neighborliness and national fraternity; and gratitude, familiarity, and unity that are directed to the neighbor, brothers in the nation, and anyone who deserves the rights of man and the rights of humanity.Footnote 22
In the same manner by which a father strikes his son with one hand and embraces him with another to dispel vengeance and promote love, so has God almighty done to the nation.Footnote 23
Entitling the eleven Nafīr Sūrrīya pamphlets as waṭaniyāt, nationalist pamphlets written in response to the unprecedented “civil war,” Bustānī addressed the citizens of the nation, abnā’ al-waṭan, whom he depicted in the image of Cain, “the murderer of his own brother, wandering and lost with no one in his pursuit.”Footnote 24 Presenting the “civil war” as an act of fratricide, Bustānī drew out a covenant of blood as the basis for the waṭan or nation to come after sacrificial violence, for the war had rendered everyone to a state of homelessness, seeking God's kindness and mercy, al-luṭf w al-raḥma.Footnote 25 Unrequitable mercy was God's alone and all other acts of charity were to be considered requitable debt, “to be paid back from the account of the nation,” min kīs al-waṭan.Footnote 26
Bustānī warned his readers to beware of perceiving their postwar state as a repetition of the experience of the Israelites in Exodus: “The blinded heart of the Israelites in Exodus is not an example to be followed but a lesson from which you must learn.”Footnote 27 In the pamphlets, he drew out a scene of conversion, from hatred (of each other) to love (of the nation and God) and from fratricide to sociality. These same Nafīr pamphlets were reprinted in 1990 after the end of the Lebanese civil war by another “anonymous patriot,” muḥib lil waṭan, who argued in the preface that Bustānī’s proposed diagnosis of society's ailments and its cure still holds true for post-1990 Lebanon.Footnote 28
The anonymity of the signature, both of Bustānī and of the editor of the reprints, attests to the recognition that the sole author for the discourse of nationalism is the abstract figure of the citizen who shares equal rights and duties with others. The anonymous signature of the text functions here as a “performative utterance,”Footnote 29 as a “speech act,” as J. L. Austin defined it; it is performative precisely because its meaning is not garnered from the author's intentionality but because it is posed as a constative utterance: the anonymous patriot calls forth at the beginning of every pamphlet the presence of a “we,” a body of citizens, yā abnāʾ al-waṭan. But who is this we that is hailed forth? The foundational nature of the Nafīr asserts this “we” through a calling forth of a civil society forged in the name of the people. It beseeches in the anonymous signature the laws of nature (the need for self-preservation, the division of labor) and the name of God.Footnote 30 Civil society in its liberal rendering has to be normatively declared against society: “it is a society against society, that is an association of dissociated and continuously dissociating egoisms, that is thus a paradoxical union of desocialization held together through competing property and profit interests.”Footnote 31 It is thus not surprising that citizens are depicted in these pamphlets as independent animals that require a division of labor for sustenance:
Yā abnāʾ al-waṭan, sons of the nation, the bountiful season of summer has now passed, and the little needs that you had during it shall now increase. You can no longer suffice by sleeping in the wilderness and using trees as your cover and bright stars as your guards . . . the frugal season of winter is here, and it will present you with endless needs to survive its cold, snow, and blizzard.Footnote 32
Yā abnāʾ al-waṭan, the ants have gathered harvests for the winter and built tight fortresses for protection from its dangers. The bees have as well done the same and prepared intricate dwellings abundant with nourishment . . . while our fellow humans, the sons of Adam, can barely gather what is required for the fulfillment of their daily needs. They are homeless with no abodes to dwell in, and no garments to protect them from the harshness of cold weather . . . A consideration of their future state is crucial as well as distressing!Footnote 33
Nationality in this specific sociohistorical context is depicted as a form of artifice that in a postlapsarian age requires religion, labor, industriousness, and exchange to survive as a social contract. “Civil war” exemplified a return to a state of nature that had to be amended by a return to the laws of nature and seeking refuge under the name of one God. The social contract, articulated in these Hobbesian terms, could only be sealed through the recognition of natural laws as the foundation provided by God. In other words, in the moment of founding the social contract, of calling forth the abnā’ al-waṭan, God is beseeched as the last instance: the creator of nature, and the external guardian of the act of foundation that the Nafīr declares. Jacques Derrida's analysis of the function of God as a signifier in declarative acts that found institutions is important for understanding Bustānī’s formulation, for “God comes, in effect, to guarantee the rectitude of popular intentions, the unity and goodness of the people. He founds natural law and thus the whole game which tends to present performative utterances as constative utterances.”Footnote 34
In the Nafīr pamphlets, God is invoked at every juncture as the events are folded into a praise of his abundant mercy and grace: the violence must breed forgiveness and compassion, and, most importantly, the violence binds its survivors into an eternal symbolic debt to God. In turn the violence is given a mythical diagnosis, it is al-gharaḍ al-a‘mma,Footnote 35 “the blind drive,” al-maraḍ al-khabīth,Footnote 36 “the malignant disease,” and wiswās alqāh al-shayṭan,Footnote 37 a “satanic haunting,” an evil apparition. Sectarianism, the assumed cause of the violence, is portrayed as a spectral apparition, and Satan's evil is presented as a necessary supplement to God's good.
Through the identification of sectarianism as the specific form of transgression of the laws of community, the nation emerges in Bustānī’s writings as a religious community of faith from within which those with partisan interests ought to be forever banned.Footnote 38 In other words, the incitement to transgression (sectarianism) is circumscribed in the very logic of the law (nation as a religious community of faith); it is constitutive of the function of sovereignty, not an exception to it; there is an element of excitation to the function of the law of community, not only repression. Moreover, the socio-symbolic order of community is directly constituted by “the psychic agency that sustains our attachment to the norms of a community,” that “functions not so much as the level of belief as in the form of a pressure or urgency that can, in turn, incite transgression of and, thus, apparent distance to, those very norms.”Footnote 39 The pamphlets iterate the urgency of love for the nation lest violence erupts in its ebbing:
We have frequently mentioned the nation in our pamphlets because it is the most resonant of words to the ear of a loving patriot, and one of the most beautiful muwalada words in Arabic. Surriya, otherwise known as barr al-sham, and Arabistan, is our nation, its expanse being its valleys, fields, coasts and mountains. The people of Surriya from different faiths, kinds, races, and divergences are the people of our nation. The nation is like a great chain connected by its many links: its beginning is our home or place of birth and whomever it includes; its end is our country with all those in it. Its center of gravity is our heart and the center of our heart's gravity is it.Footnote 40
Drawing out the socio-symbolic community of this nation, Bustānī described its force of traction, “it reaches out and grasps and encircles its sons with great force and gravitational pull, forcing them towards it when they are estranged from it.”Footnote 41 The symbolic order of the nation— posited contra sectarianism—both binds the subject into solidarity with the family/community/institution in a direct covenant with God, and opens the real possibility for his or her own transgression of these bonds. “We call for living watchful religions . . . that lovingly and considerately perceive of sects as members of one family, their father the nation, mother the land, and sole creator God.”Footnote 42 This form of religious faith in the nation posits sectarianism as a transgression through its very prohibition. In other words, the nation is understood not only in terms of territorial sovereignty but also in terms of a forging of a social contract, a body politic, that must relinquish its right to kill for self-preservation to the law.
Comparing the war-ridden society with the Isrealites in exile, Bustānī warned the citizens of the nation of the threats lying in wait.Footnote 43 Yet the only revelation to come out of this Exodus was the acceptance of guilt as the sole horizon for the citizen subject. It is only God with whom the citizen, represented by the figure of Cain, can have an immediate relationship, yet not even God can offer atonement for the guilt, for he can only predestine it. Atonement is only to be garnered in the daily pursuit of bread and from the expenditure of flesh and bone: Bustānī repeated again and again, “you must only accept to live from your own toil and sweat,”Footnote 44 “unemployment and indolence are the worst of vices.”Footnote 45
While urging his fellow citizens to return to labor in the aftermath of war, Bustānī contended that the urgency of production did not simply come about from the “measure of time in terms of gold,”Footnote 46 or wealth, but from the measure of life itself in terms of time: “Life is worth time itself.”Footnote 47 Bustānī’s writings draw out a postwar temporality in which the weight of flesh and bone becomes the subject of a political economy that is to be measured in abstract time. His call for “love of the nation as an act of faith” urges citizens to act as if the nation already exists, as if the economy exists as a self-contained sphere, in order for society to progress in time. Every now moment in the temporality he drew out owes itself to another now, thus the now is constantly passing over into the past and every now is frozen in an act of reproduction of a schema of debt. This perception of the economy as an objective sphere allows for the separation of the political from it, for politics appears as a corrupting force, an aberration to the natural equilibrium of liberal economy.
Moreover, the time that had been “wasted” in “civil war” was to be incurred as debt in the national ledger of gains and losses, khasāʾir wa arbāḥ al-waṭan, which were calculated in the pamphlets under two headings: the “moral losses of the nation” and the “material losses of the nation.”Footnote 48 The losses were calculated in direct monetary costs and as moral losses, khasa'ir maddiya w adabiya. Despite all these losses, however, Bustānī urged the nation to emerge from sacrifice for it had received a “blow from the hand of God,”Footnote 49 one that is comparable to a “father striking his son.”Footnote 50 The lesson of the violence, or what Bustānī deemed to be the gain from it, was a sacrifice made to God, one that has opened a path of linear sequential time along which the nation must progress following the call of a “true religion.”
Bustānī’s political theology relegated the political violence into the past and affirmed the historicity of both God and religion. “It is not in our benefit to look back at the past, rather we must focus our attention and energies on the future for the purpose of alleviating the bad effects and unwanted results of the atrocities.”Footnote 51 This political theology reaffirmed an understanding of history as a plot or an unfolding narrative; in order to allow time to move on, citizens had to maintain a faith in a conception of community as that which comes after sacrificial violence.
Given that the citizens of the nation had been sacrificed through the political violence, they can now emerge as innocent victims who have been spared the wrath of God. The result of this survival can only be to profess love for the neighbor—“be protective fortresses for each other rather than enemies”Footnote 52—for God and the nation, and forever repress hate. In a true expression of the spirit of Protestant ethics,Footnote 53 Bustānī urged his fellow citizens to love the nation and love each other, lest they hate God in light of all the cruelties that had appeared in society. Ultimately, his depiction of the political violence draws out an image of concluded struggle, the aftermath of which is a secular temporality (the birth of the nation) during which citizens will recognize the moral transformation that had already been put into place.Footnote 54
DIYĀNA AND DAYN: TRUE RELIGION AND DEBT
Not coincidentally, the words diyāna, religion, and dayn, debt, both echo the meanings of indebtedness, duty, and obligation.Footnote 55 Bustānī’s proposition of a universal conception of religion as the sole ground for shared communal living was tightly wedded to a projected eternity of reproduction of guilt and debt: “If these events have incurred further animosities and hatred in your heart, then be certain that God will add spiritual atrophy to temporal atrophy.”Footnote 56 If people choose to ask for atonement from God, he argued, than their losses would be lessened and spiritual blessings imparted to them. Regardless of this spiritual atonement, however, the temporal catastrophe would remain irredeemable.
Consequently, the political violence could only be redeemed through the constant reaffirmation of symbolic debt. Relegating all private losses—the loss of lives, property, and security—to a collective and social guilt leger, Bustānī’s discourse universalized guilt. This consciousness of guilt characterizes capitalist modernity, for it reaches to the collective cult not for atonement but only for the universalization of guilt itself.Footnote 57
In this light it is important to look closely at Bustānī’s gesture of positing religion, din, versus sect, ṭā ’ifa in the Nafīr. The path to national reconciliation has to go through the affirmation of “religions that are living, vigilant, and educating their followers in tolerance.”Footnote 58 These different religions are portrayed as “members of one family, its father the nation, its mother the land, and its creator God.”Footnote 59 Religious tolerance is thus based on understanding all religions as “sectarian” variants of one monotheistic faith and on a humanistic conception of one spiritual essence of man.
Invoking a saying pertaining to Luqmān al-Hakīm, Bustānī described the human as a being defined by its essential organs, the tongue and the heart, inā al-insān bi aṣgharayh.Footnote 60 Religion (the heart) and politics (the tongue) must remain separate. If all humans are God's creations, their father the nation and their mother the earth, then the reasons for their competition and rivalry should be “science, piety, reason, virtue, and respect for the neighbor, as well as the rights of man, and not lineage or belonging to one partisan group or another.”Footnote 61 In order to neutralize religious difference for political concord, religion is relegated to a specific form of faith, one of the secondary traits of man: the superficial skin that, once shed, reveals the essence of humankind, that being God-given mind and spirit:
As long as our people cannot understand that religion is a relation between the creator and his slaves, while civitas, al-madanīyat, is between the individual and his fellow countryman, or between the individual and his government; and as long as they don't realize that it is only on the basis of civitas that the social body and political forms are erected; and as long as they don't separate these two principles, religion and politics, in matters of behavior and belief, they shall never succeed in either of them if not in both of them altogether.Footnote 62
The equivalence that is established between the relationship between citizen and his government and between citizen and citizen reveals a strong shift in discourse in relation to sovereignty. Sovereignty, previously reserved for the body of the king, the Ottoman Porte and its representatives, has now been placed in the hand of the citizens, in their smallest body parts, the heart and the tongue. We can see here an utterly modernist shift, from the political theology of Ottoman sovereignty to the biopolitical pressures or psycho-theology of popular sovereignty, from the body of the king to the other body of the king, the body of citizens.
With this discourse the logic of politics is elevated above confessional affiliations and practices, yet remains to be sustained by theological values and concepts. Laboring flesh and bone, the subject matter of political economy, do not enter this form of reconciliatory worldview, and individual flesh and bone must be consistently sacrificed for the social good, al-ṣāliḥ al-ʿumūmiyy.Footnote 63 The main condition for reconciliation is “a system of contractual laws and just reforms” that would recognize subjects as equal citizens with equal “civil, religious, and moral rights.”Footnote 64 For “the citizens have duties towards their nation as the nation has duties towards its citizens.”Footnote 65 Rehearsing the classical liberal abstraction of individual rights, we can see Bustānī reaffirm the practical abstractions of commercial society.
Further, “true religion” is intrinsically linked to the decree that “all private losses are indeed public ones.”Footnote 66 In the Nafīr pamphlets, the “material losses” of property, labor, and time that had been incurred through violence are calculated as losses of the nation, as public losses. Diyāna and dayn, religion and debt, once read through Bustānī’s rendering of a guilt history in the Nafīr, reveal that the positing of ecumenical religions versus sectarianism is far from being the solution to political violence, as some historians have argued.Footnote 67 For it is the very category of universal religion, diyāna, that is employed by Bustānī to promote a liberal understanding of subjectivity, one that is based on valuing socially productive labor as a means to pay off the symbolic debt incurred by the lapse into violence and “barbarism.”Footnote 68
Bustānī’s calculation of society's “moral and material losses and gains,” al-khasāʾir al-mādiyya w-al adabiyya, necessitated an understanding of religion as universal, for “God cannot be abandoned because of the calamity of war.”Footnote 69 Rather, the events are themselves effects of God's direct intervention, of his will,Footnote 70 and they are a lesson taught by a merciful God.Footnote 71 This universal conception of religion was constructed through a guilt-and-debt nexus, or a guilt history from which the sons of the nation can never escape. Bustānī’s conception of a “true religion” as an end in itself, versus “false religion” as a means to end, is intrinsically linked to his argument for the “love of nation as an act of faith,” a phrase that is said to have been in the Hadith—no doubt adding to the symbolic value of nationalist sentiment in this historical moment.
THE LIBERAL FANTASY OF A PURITAN NATION
The argument for universal religion was coincidental with the call for the division of labor as the only natural means for the satisfaction of needs in society. This position was elaborated on in the translation of the story of Robinson Crusoe, which was proposed as a motto of instruction for the nation.Footnote 72 Bustānī claimed that he translated Robinson Crusoe “within a span of five months of hard work” because the story was of “utmost importance for society.”Footnote 73 The story of Robinson Crusoe, the man who was of no good to anyone but himself and thus had to be punished with a solitary guiltful existence, the lone body on an island emaciated by endless labor, has been analyzed as the story of liberal political economy.Footnote 74 Crusoe speaks to the images of solitary figures that Bustānī had painted into the natural landscape of the nation; like Bustānī’s nation, Crusoe was born anew only after his shipwreck on an island. The link between Crusoe and Bustānī’s larger political project is further affirmed by his use of the same Arabic stanza in the introduction of the Crusoe and the Nafīr pamphlets: “he who is of no use to another has a useless existence altogether.”Footnote 75
Bustānī’s appeal to piety, to “the love of the nation as an act of faith,”Footnote 76 and his call to return to labor and employment, can be read as an attempt to renew the social foundations of a liberal polity, instilled by the Ottoman tanzimat reforms in an age when political power was less bound to property qualifications.Footnote 77 In the direct aftermath of 1860 Bustānī called for the necessity of labor for society, labor that had to be expended to pay off symbolic debt and beyond which individual and moral worth are deemed valueless. In pamphlet after pamphlet, the nation is warned of leaving both land and human labor power to waste, for this waste or excess itself would translate into material debt. Even the national ledger that Bustānī drew up of national losses calculated “wasted labor time” next to “uncultivated land.”Footnote 78 Not coincidentally, this argument was concomitant with the establishment of money as the universal regulator of all values in the empire.Footnote 79 In a revealing moment in the text, Bustānī calculated the monetary equivalent of potential laborers killed in the violence: “600 million Francs at the least.”Footnote 80
Crusoe's lesson was that shipwreck is the fate of any attempt to break the social contract normatively assumed by liberal thought. His shipwreck on an island that led him to live a brutish isolated life sets the stage for a conversion into both Christianity and civil society. Robinson Crusoe is, in fact, the story of “anticipation of civil society”;Footnote 81 it depicts the social state of humans as being based on relations of exchange as the ideal of social relations. Crusoe's story naturalizes the transformation of uncultivated resources into private property through the expenditure of labor; i.e. the island presents him with a state of existence for which he has tools in another time, in the time of civilization or industrial society. The state of nature for both Crusoe and Bustānī’s war-ridden society is the source of the laws of nature on which is based the social contract. Bustānī wrote in his introduction to the translation of Defoe's novel,
Read the story of Robinson Crusoe and you will see how much he suffered to find sustenance on the island on which he was destined to isolation. Then it will become clear to you that the individual necessarily needs others to aid him in fulfilling his needs and that this necessity is what made human society in the first place. One person cannot simultaneously be farmer, weaver, tailor, builder, carpenter, student, teacher, king, sheikh, and priest at the same time.Footnote 82
This national imaginary posited the violence as a rupture from a preexisting uniform and linear history of an imaginary nation, a natural history of the nation, defined primarily in terms of socially determined individual production. By calling unto the “sons of the nation” to return to labor and production and to learn from the “true story of Crusoe,”Footnote 83 Bustānī made it seem as though the laboring individual born out of the ruptures of the tax-farming system was in fact an ideal that is to be projected onto the past. Like the Robinsonade tales of the Enlightenment, the individual subject to whom Bustānī addressed his pamphlets is made to seem the point of departure of history rather than the conclusion of specific historical forces. Bustānī warned his readers that if society did not go back to socially necessitated production—which is presumed to have always been in existence before the breakdown of the feudal system—to the abstract and normative ethics of labor, it would collapse. The story of Crusoe, the man who was of no good to anyone but himself, speaks to the isolated individual who is of no utility, of no contract of exchange with others. He is a figure who is not only outside the nation, but also outside the definition of humanity that Bustānī adopted. Crusoe is a lesson to be learned from, a modern Cain, with no one in his pursuit, left to recognize the laws of God and nature in seclusion.
This argument cannot but remind us of Adam Smith's description of isolated man in comparison to productive individuals in civil society. Bustānī, like Smith, posits the division of labor and socially necessitated labor time as the natural conditions of social existence for individuals. The story of Crusoe allowed Bustānī to formulate an abstract, yet concrete, conception of time, one that is equivocated to the flesh and bone of the labor force: “While for the European time is worth gold, for us now time is worth life itself.”Footnote 84 Political violence had somehow reset the historical time of society back to a state of nature in which time is worth life itself. It is not only in such a state of nature that a pound of flesh is offered as payment of debt, but also within the temporality of the nation in which labor and toil provide the sole means of paying the debt. When Crusoe first arrived at the island it was as though he had arrived anew into the world as a whole, guilt-ridden, fearful of the punishment that he would face. This guilt, very much like the guilt called forth in the Nafīr series, made Crusoe work to establish his own puritan monarchy, his own puritan nation on the island. Defoe's Crusoe provides the national subject with an image of man destined to create his own social bonds in liberal forms. In the novel, Crusoe's isolation gradually makes him resort to the same ways of civilization: he takes for himself a private property on the island, farms a plot of land, makes straw baskets, takes on a slave he names Friday, and teaches him language. On the island alone he creates for himself a labor schedule about which he writes in his diary until his “ink runs out.”Footnote 85 By the time Crusoe left the island it would be ready to be turned into a productive colony.
The national subject post-1860 was in a similar state to that of Crusoe: banished outside society, “wretched and alone,” and like Crusoe it ought to think only of production and labor. Translating Robinson Crusoe and presenting it as a “true story,” Bustānī made a necessary connection between a natural condition of mankind and a social one; in both Crusoe and the Nafīr, the state of nature is the ground from which civil society would emerge. This epistemological move (of naturalizing liberal political economy) inscribes the natural history of the nation; i.e. the opposition created between a state of nature and state of society constructs a natural state to which a specific form of society owes its existence.
The positive outcomes of the political violence that were deemed in the Nafīr to be the “gains of the nation,” are that they had induced the people of society to convert into citizens of a nation. As in any other act of conversion, the key to its immanence is its irreversibility and its reliance on the omnipotence of God. Bustānī establishes an analogy between the convert who places all aspirations in God and the citizen who places all aspirations in the nation.Footnote 86 If, after the violence, they accept the nation as their only refuge, it in turn promises them the avowal of guilt for what has “happened” as well as escaping punishment for crimes that they did not commit.Footnote 87 The nation, born out of the pangs of “civil war,” comes to embody the fantasy of reconciliation and liberal subjectivity.
The nation in this sense functions as a regulative entity that will always come in a future time as a solution for the contradictions in the present. It is this nation that beseeches a distinct universal religious sentiment through invoking moral guilt as the binding force for national subjects. Guilt becomes the reason for the lacks of society: the source of its torments that binds the subject in a guilt history, in relations of debt that in turn structure social relations: every individual action is linked directly to God, who is vigilantly watching over the national subjects. Every stance and action was assigned a rating in the salvation economy drawn out by Bustānī; his logic, however, does not offer atonement, but only functions by accruing guilt.
SENTIMENTS OF EXCHANGE: RECIPROCITY AND GUILT HISTORY
In the wake of 1860 there was an urgent need to “return to labor, exchange, trade, and commerce” and “to return to a state of harmony and fraternity”Footnote 88 that had been shattered by the political violence. A call upon nationality, waṭaniya, as a sentiment of reciprocity—as love, mahaba, fraternity, ʾukhuwwa, neighborliness, al-jīra, and familiarity, ʾulfa—was a call for recognizing certain forms of exchange as sentiments as against others that weren't.Footnote 89 These sentiment exchanges were to be based on an obligation to reciprocate and indebtedness to both the internal Other in the nation and its external one (those who had survived the violence and those who had sent humanitarian aid from the “civilized world”).
The calamity of 1860, according to Bustānī, was that it was a “temporal catastrophe,”Footnote 90 kharāb zamaniy, which had caused society to lose time, in comparison to progressive productive time, and had placed it in a position of indebtedness to human civilization as a whole.Footnote 91 This view of time is characteristic of the modern view of history as a progressive sequence of time, one that moves from past, present, to future. Guilt history is this fateful movement of time, the generative process by which guilt is incurred and which blocks history proper; it categorically excludes the possibility of leaving the chain of events.Footnote 92 If the political violence was a deemed a source of guilt from which there would be no atonement except by labor and dutiful existence, then every individual activity in society had to be undertaken with regard to an economic index of productivity: both sensuous and intellectual activity had to be essentially productive, working to pay off the debt incurred by “civil war.”
The people of the nation in the analogies drawn in the Nafīr are like Cain and the Isrealites; in perpetual exile with literally no one to help them, in a twist of faith they had been left to their own will. Even God, whom Bustānī deemed to have had predestined 1860 by a strike of his hand, is not absolved of the guilt: the only answer is to embrace the guilt, to remain chained to the debt through acts of faith, and it is in fact only the state of debt that will enrich the people of the nation.Footnote 93 Bustānī equated the “gains of the nation” that had been procured from these events with “moral gains.”Footnote 94 The civil war had rendered society unproductive and thereby in a state of crisis that could only be amended through a return to production, to labor, to moral uprightness, and to duty; thus the public debt, debt to the “civilized world,”Footnote 95 is translated into moral gain. Characteristic of the “metamorphosis from secular economic credit into the sacramental credo,”Footnote 96 this logic equates blasphemy with not remaining faithful to the public debt, the debt of the nation. The theogeny of value to be incurred from debt is similar to God, who creates guilty images of him in the world: paying off God, paying off the creditors of the nation, does not seal the debt but rather transforms it into gain.Footnote 97 That is the structure of this national fantasy: the citizen must sacrifice himself for the love of the nation and in turn the nation will sacrifice them for more credit. Bustānī’s rendering of the guilt into the moral domain is an attempt at averting the logic of material debt by dividing the gains and losses into both material and moral ones: the king could easily redeem the material losses, although in the form of a debt that the citizens of the nation must pay back, while the moral losses would be projected as eternal debt to God.Footnote 98 The material losses were calculated by adding up the estimated values of the number of houses and farms and the harvest burned, in addition to the number of unemployed workers and the labor force (both potential and actual) killed in the violence.Footnote 99 Meanwhile the moral losses—broken families, loss of dignity, honesty, well-being, solidarity, communal bonds, and fraternity—are losses that “only God has the restitution for, and not the King.”Footnote 100
Although morality is often seen as unrelated to exchange values, Friedrich Nietzsche, Karl Marx, and Max Weber—each differently—show us that in fact it is related to economic structure. Guilt emerges from debt: it also emerges in relations of reciprocity. Advocating the first ever American and European humanitarian aid to Mount Lebanon in 1860, Bustānī calculated the national debt as twice the value of the aid at least: “blessed be the one who gives more than one who takes.”Footnote 101 The one who gives is thus less guilty than the one who takes; however, the relation of debt can only emerge out of this form of reciprocity in which a bystander is saved from the guilt of being a beneficiary by anguishing over the victims.
Thus Bustānī’s saw the rule of law and a reformed state as the sole refuge from human atrocity and argued that the only way to make sense of the violence was for the nation to accept its guilt: society had been placed on a path of predestination that binds it to guilt and obligation. In this sense, the 1860 violence was read as the nation's formative original sin. Social relations, based on utility and exchange value, were tightly wedded to a religious ethos: al-diyāna al-haqāqiyya al-khāliya min al-gharaḍ,Footnote 102 because true religion is devoid of utilitarian interest, and it is antithetical to “sectarian belonging” (al-ʾintimāʾ ila ṭāʾifa aw ilā fiʾa). Bustānī’s ledger of gains and losses of the nation, and his call for a return to relations of labor, were an essential component of this theological worldview. Ultimately, the nation was born into debt, symptomatic of the onset of a cash economy and fiscal integration into the European banking and finance system, as well as the first recorded humanitarian aid bestowed on Syria and Mount Lebanon by both the Ottomans and Europeans. The nation was in debt ex nihilo.Footnote 103 What irked Bustānī was the moral debt, the guilt and shame caused by the political violence: “while the nation may be relieved in the future from the material debts incurred on it by the calamities, it will forever be indebted morally to the nations of the world.”Footnote 104 This focus on morality in Bustānī’s works is born out of the growing distance between politics and economy in late nineteenth-century liberal thought, whereby morality takes precedence over politics.Footnote 105
Thereby the perception of nationalism as an “act of faith,” as a relation that one accepts as if the nation were already there, required a leap of faith. Thus nationalism in this context was not essentially normative: it is not there because the nation already exists, but precisely because it doesn't. The citizen's relationship with the nation has to be sacrificial and based on faith: “Belonging to the nation is an obligation in this world and a promise in another.”Footnote 106 In other words, nationalism emerged as a sentiment that lives in borrowed time. This borrowed time, or the time of nationalism, becomes the only liveable time. The gap between political struggle and economic struggle is irreducible to either position, as the Nafīr Sūrrīya pamphlets reveal, and it is from this gap that Bustānī constructed a discourse on guilt and morality: the guilt cannot be atoned for and morality is the only response to the violence of politics and the blindness of economy. In recognition of the perpetual life of this economy of guilt, Bustānī exclaimed, “the future can only be dark and foreboding.”Footnote 107
Although the nation emerges as an ideal form in comparison with existing material conditions, as it does in our case here, its materiality is consolidated in its articulation in concrete relations of exchange as well as of production. As a sentiment of exchange, a guiltful nationalism introduces measure into the community, by which every individual assumes a position in the world of relations of exchange in the social world. However, this is only a zero-sum equation from the perspective of the nation form, and debt is not the only remaining surplus of capitalist modernity: sectarianism itself projects out of the unidirectional stream of history as a perpetually unresolved antagonism.
In Bustānī’s words, sectarianism forever remains as both a “satanic haunting” and a result of God's direct intervention into history, a lesson to be learned from while it is God's mercy alone that has saved the innocent citizens of the nation, and to which they are all eternally indebted. “We lament our age for these flaws, while we are the source of them; indeed, we are this age's sole flaw.”Footnote 108 The most valuable “moral gain” of the nation is “repentance to God,”Footnote 109 for “salvation will only be possible if you refrain from sacrificing the goods of the spirit on the altars of bodily goods.”Footnote 110
In the spectral presence of sectarianism's Other, a nation forged under the tenets of universal religion, society is to be organized around relations of exchange that perpetuate sentiments of guilt. Bustānī’s political theology, however, leaves little room for questions pertaining to immediate justice. Indeed, his political theology rereads the historical rupture in terms of a periodic crisis: one that can be overcome with time and not in time. The past will always be unjust—recall all the images in the Nafīr: Cain and Abel, the Exodus, the Fall— and the possibility of exterminating the neighbor and the brother is always around the corner.
NECROMANCY AND THE LOGIC OF SACRIFICE
The discourse of rights formulated via the diagnosis of the violence as a fratricidal civil war lends itself to a repetition compulsion: the nation always arises victorious from violent crisis, from the sacrifice of the innocent who in turn are essential for the structural renewal of the nation as a historical form. Indeed the nation portrayed in the Nafīr is characterized by a necromancy: an indebtedness to the dead in this world and the promise of the dead in the other—“beyond the grave,” as Bustānī had put it. It can in fact be argued that the 1860 events institute a historical structure of repetition in a manner similar to the coup of Louis Napoleon of 1799. In both instances there was a social struggle led primarily by a peasant class against an absolutist monarchy, and in both instances we have the emergence of the nation form as the proposed cure.Footnote 111 The nation is posited as the antidote to the violent events and all that remains in memory from the social struggle is the extreme violence of the events. However, historical repetition is never a repetition of similar events, but of historical forms and structures that return in the present. What is this return of the repressed if not the return of the banished monarch under the guise of a representative state?
The Nafīr pamphlets present us with a formulation of the social contract as being based on “the exchange of rights and duties, the drafting of just and liberal laws that would respect the multiplicity of religious faiths, the appointment of decision-making ‘sovereigns,’ ‘ḥukām,’ as representatives of the people, ‘ahali,’ and an adherence to the universal rights of man.”Footnote 112 In a comparable manner to the coup of Bonaparte, the 1860 events were watersheds for the eradication (and simultaneous repetition) of absolutist monarchy and its replacement by the logic of the modern nation-state. What emerges as an essential element of the latter is of course the crisis of representation: how should a divided society be represented? How to fill the stark gap or hole left by the receding body of the king, or Sultan in our case? If the events of Mount Lebanon, as other similar events in the Balkans, Greece, and other sites of the empire, signaled the pangs of Ottoman integration into capitalism, then Bustānī’s Nafīr urged the coming of the new in the guise of the old: the social contract to replace absolute sovereignty.
Bustānī’s response to the breakdown of the social order began by disavowing the political violence as a peasant struggle, and reading it in familial fraternal terms. Thus political enmity in its fratricidal form must be countered by a love for the enemy on one hand,Footnote 113 and by faith in the nation on the other.Footnote 114 The underlying premise of the Nafīr is a call for the national community to convene on holy ground because the death of “the innocent” (al-abriyāʾ) is the scapegoat that is necessary for mutual agreement and collective sentiment (ʾulfa) to be reestablished. This national sentiment replaces the body of the Sultan with a community held accountable to codified law, ahkām ṣarima; firm laws, sharī ʿa mutafiqa; consistent laws, tandhimāt ʿādila ghayr mumtazija bil sharāʾi”Footnote 115—just reforms that are clearly separate from religious credo, as well as being responsible directly to God's mercy and grace, shafaqa wa raḥma.Footnote 116
The Arabic word nafīr is used to designate the last two days of pilgrimage, specifically the days that follow the sacrifice, al-naḥr.Footnote 117 It is certainly not a coincidence that Bustānī chooses this word as the title for his eleven public addresses. Some scholars have suggested the English word “clarion” as a translation of nafīr, a call to alarm, a golden horn, a trumpet declaring the urgent and holy need for congregation.Footnote 118 But if we trace the Arabic etymology of the word we cannot ignore its specific post-sacrificial connotations. If the political violence of 1860 is to be read as a founding sacrifice for a national community, in the form of fratricide, as Bustānī tells us, then his Nafīr beckons a holy congregation, and seeks to seal the covenant of blood with what René Girard has called the “mimetic desire underlying the scapegoating mechanism at the origin of all violence.”Footnote 119 It would, of course, be easy to analyze Bustānī’s gesture in terms of this Girardian schema, in which his Nafīr speaks for the desire to identify with the innocent, with Abel and not Cain, with the Isrealites but not with exile. In these Girardian terms, Bustānī’s discourse accepts a certain benefit from victimhood, a renewed faith in the nation, as long as the violence is not repeated right away. Describing the events as “a strike from the hand of God,” Bustānī left open the possibility of the recurrence of violence at any time. Indeed, it can be argued that this sacrificial logic extends and intensifies the enmity, for it doesn't distinguish between being sacrificed and being used.Footnote 120 What I mean by this is that the violence was not originally senseless, but only becomes sensible for the national imaginary by being read as a form of sacrificial violence.
René Girard explains the origins of cultural and religious systems through the mechanism of sacrificial victimhood. This mechanism is driven by a mimetic impulse: “there is nothing, next to nothing, in human behavior that is not learned, and all learning is based on imitation.”Footnote 121 Girard's Aristotelian schema, which Bustānī captures, proposes that mimesis and rivalry are the constituting basis of all sociality; “Because the victim is sacred, it is criminal to kill him—but the victim is sacred only because he is to be killed.”Footnote 122 The group can only be erected by the passage from mimetic disorder, rivalry and desire, to a sacrificial order. However, Bustānī’s call to the citizens to turn to nature (to mimic industrious ants and bees) for a reaffirmation of social bonds keeps open the prospect of the return of violence at any moment. Although the sacrificial logic of national sentiment aims at suppressing intercommunal rivalry and vengeance, it in fact eternalizes the conditions of enmity. In other words, reading the violence as a sacrifice of the innocent does not wash away the foundational guilt because a relation is ultimately established between sacrifice and God's mercy, and the mercy of God remains forever an un-requitable debt: “If you obey me and guard my commandments, the Lord says, you shall have the bounties of the land, and if you do not obey me, you shall be punished by the sword.”Footnote 123
Bringing religious law into his address, Bustānī linked the saving of his fellow countryman to God's law, and in order to be saved they must have knowledge of what is to be believed, of what is to be desired, and of what is to be done. The explication very much follows in line with the classical understanding of the fourfold nature of the law as laid down by Aquinas. Bustānī acknowledged two impediments to knowledge of what is to be believed: the Devil had sown in man the disobedience to reason—“desire has overcome reason”Footnote 124—and the devil had interfered through inciting “blind partisan interests,” al-gharaḍ al-aʿma: “No doubt the site of the calamity is frightening and distressing; what are its reasons, who are the ones who aided the Devil in causing so much moral and natural tragedy?”Footnote 125 The withdrawal into sin is thus a withdrawal into barbarism and savagery, a withdrawal that can only be cured by true religion and civilization.Footnote 126 A homeostatic political economy of the passions was required to counter this evil and structured along these lines: in order to motivate the return to God's grace Bustānī employed the element of fear; the citizens of the nation must fear not only what has happened but also its possible recurrence by the will of God. As the pamphlets unfolded, the trope of love was introduced to counter that of fear alone, and divine love was equated with the commandment to love thy enemy read through the love of the nation as an act of faith. The nation was consequently understood both as a social contract of duties and rights, and as a nation of faith in God: “We warn you with regard to an important matter: man has no real nation in this world, the only true nation is to be found beyond the grave . . . The reasons for dying are many but death is one; we can only prepare for that day to come and that nation.”Footnote 127
In conclusion, it is clear that the nation embodies a vexing demand for identification, one that faces the subject directly with immanent death, and despite its retroactive projection of a sacrificial origin, and its binding of the citizen subject into debt in this world and the other (to the creditor, philanthropist, kings of the world, and humanity at large), the nation appears to only be attainable in God and outside “us.” On the other hand, the excessive flesh that the citizen has to carry, whatever is accrued over the heart and the tongue, must be managed through sentiments of exchange, through morality and symbolic debt. What waits to emerge from the endgames of this political theology of the hereafter, of this guilt-history, is a politics of the now.
