ON THE DEFEAT OF 1967 AND YASIN AL-HAFIZ
The defeat of the combined forces of Egypt, Syria and Jordan by Israel in a six-day war sent shockwaves across the Arab world, and initiated, or radicalized existing, intellectual and political transformations.Footnote 1 What came to be known as the Naksa, or the defeat of 1967, heralded a mood of disillusionment that marked a generation of intellectuals who lived the defeat as the end of a project of emancipation, characterized by different articulations of nationalism, socialism and other radical tenets. The reigning mood was aptly captured by the recollections of the Lebanese intellectual and historian Ahmad Beydoun (b. 1943) in his autobiography:
In the last half-century [from the breakup of the United Arab Republic], there has not been for my generation any episode of joy one could remember. Even the success of the Algerian revolution came with its own limitations, and it won't be long for it to be drown in them. And even the support to the Palestinian revolution, which we created as a shelter from the defeat and a protection from despair, was conditioned from the beginnings by many reservations . . . It was half a century that took us from a nakba to another and we became tired from hoping.Footnote 2
What is noteworthy in Beydoun's painful recollection is the dating of this era of despair, which he traced to the beginning of the 1960s, rather than simply to the defeat of 1967. This is not simply a matter of autobiographical recollection or of generational difference. Rather, it is an indication that “1967” stands as a sign for a much longer period of disappointment or disillusionment that saw the gradual yet irrevocable dismantling of the hopes of the postcolonial states of the 1950s and their ideologies. Against reading 1967 through the anaemic lens of the military defeat, the period can be folded in the deeper rupture between, following David Scott, the anti-colonial nationalist and modernist project of the 1950s and “the virtual closure of the nationalist Bandung project” that followed.Footnote 3 What would characterize the production of Arab intellectuals in the post-1967 period, or in the post-Bandung era, was the challenge to rethink their projects, politics and subjectivities in a new context, marked not only by the defeat, but by the loss, in Scott's words, of the “very coherence of the secular–modern project—with its assurance of progressive social–economic development, with its dependence upon the organizational form of the nation-state, with its sense of privilege of representative democracy and competitive elections, and so on”.Footnote 4
Yasin al-Hafiz (1930–78), one of the prominent intellectuals who wrote in the wake of the defeat, similarly took a wider perspective on the turning point and participated in the various moments of this gradual dismantling of the hopes of the 1950s. Included in his conception of the transformation was the breakup of the United Arab Republic (UAR) in 1961, the military defeat of 1967, the death of the Egyptian leader Gamal Abdel Nasser (1918–70), the turn of a significant part of the Arab intelligentsia against Nasser's project in the early 1970s, the political rise of the Gulf monarchies, the shift of a number of Arab regimes toward the United States and the descent of Lebanon into civil war in 1975. Read in this manner, the turning point acquires wider and deeper dimensions, becoming the end of a certain epoch and the beginning of another, rather than simply a reaction to a military defeat. More importantly, al-Hafiz was one of the most important participants in the discussions that marked this period, from the debates around Nasser and his legacy, to that on the Palestinian revolution and its hopes, or the Lebanese civil war and its atrocities. Al-Hafiz lived these transformations not only theoretically, as we will see below, but also politically, as a member of various political organizations. During the radical era of the late 1940s and 1950s, al-Hafiz was a member of the Syrian Ba’th Party, resigning after a short period, and then joined the Syrian Communist Party for two years. Despite being without a party affiliation after leaving the Communist Party, he remained close to the radical movement in Syria in the 1950s. He worked again with the Ba’th Party in the early 1960s, participating in its sixth national congress in 1963, famous for its reorientation of the Ba’th to the left, with al-Hafiz contributing to its final theoretical document. A year later, he was sidestepped and would break completely with the Ba’th, forming, with other intellectuals, a minor radical party, the Arab Revolutionary Workers Party. After a period in Paris and in jail, al-Hafiz settled down in Beirut in 1967–8, where he would live through the aftermath of the defeat. Despite continuing his political activism, albeit in a more modest fashion, his main activity was centred around his intellectual production, which gradually came under the influence of the Moroccan historian and intellectual Abdallah Laroui (b. 1933). He died in 1978. Al-Hafiz published a series of books, most of them collections of essays written between 1958 and 1977, addressing various dimensions of Arab politics, in addition to various editorials and party documents. He would have a strong impact on Syrian and Lebanese leftists, especially after 1967, when he became a staunch critic of many aspects of Arab radicalism.
The intellectual transformation of al-Hafiz during these three tumultuous decades, the subject of this essay, represents one of the many reactions to the defeat, and questions its “negative” understanding as solely a moment of decline, end or exit. Rather, al-Hafiz's reaction illustrates the fecundity of crisis and the positive contributions it can lead to. The essay will analyse al-Hafiz's response to the transformations in the political and theoretical coordinates that marked the period of rupture, presenting his historicist framework as one of the answers to the challenges posed by the change in the structure of political critique. In order to avoid the possible anachronistic pitfalls involved in the reconstruction of an intellectual trajectory, the following section will start by historicizing al-Hafiz's trajectory, locating it in in its own problem-space, characterized broadly by what came to be known as the post-1967 era and the intricacies of Arab radical politics.Footnote 5 As this section will argue, in order to grasp the deep impact of this transformation we need to avoid reifying the defeat of 1967, and unpack it, as not simply a shift in political slogans, but a more fundamental transformation of the coordinates of political and intellectual action. From the contextualization of his transformation, the essay will move to discuss al-Hafiz's specific deployment of historicism, a “historicism of disillusionment”, as this essay will call it. The manifold uses of this notion will be discussed, with the next section zooming in on the mode of appropriation of liberalism that this historicism will open up. His response to the defeat and the end of the hopes of the 1950s took the form of the adoption of a historicist framework that did not simply displace his earlier commitment to nationalism and socialism, but rephrased them in a new stagist narrative. And in this narrative, liberalism, previously dismissed, was justified and incorporated as a stage in the political development of societies. Even though this ideology was no textbook liberalism, al-Hafiz's later rehabilitation of it is one of the many components of a genealogy of Arab liberalism, one that is marked by the end of the hopes of the postcolonial state, as epitomized by the 1967 defeat. Despite the “orientalist” undertones of many of al-Hafiz's historicist claims, the paper will conclude by discussing the reflexive dimension of his historicism of disillusionment. Walter Mignolo has noted, regarding the travel of theory across the colonial divide, that “once the point of arrival [of travelling theories] is tainted by the colonial difference”, theories “face their limits in that new scenario”.Footnote 6 Such limits can be thought of as imposing a reflexivity pertaining to the absence of the preconditions of an ideology, imparting a tragic dimension to political theory in the Arab world and the periphery. The conclusion of the essay argues that al-Hafiz's historicism of disillusionment carries the same ambiguous baggage, setting the stage for a tragic form of reflexivity.
AN INTELLECTUAL TRANSFORMATION: 1967 AS A TURNING POINT
Al-Hafiz's early writings: a revolutionary horizon of politics
Without overstating the case for a radical transformation in his political orientation, al-Hafiz's political horizon was gradually transformed from the mid-1960s onwards. His initial political intervention was framed around a revolutionary horizon of politics, guided by a combination of Marxism and Arab nationalism, with the “masses” acting as the grounding of politics. This political outlook was elaborated in a series of essays, published in Hawla Ba’d Qadaya ath-Thawra al-‘Arabiyya (On Some Issues Pertaining to the Arab Revolution). The essays were written in the period between the late 1950s and the early 1960s, in a multi-layered context of political upheaval. The general parameters of the context were provided by the Egyptian–Syrian unification of 1958 and its break-up in 1961, with the ensuing intellectual debate on the nature of nationalism and its progressive potential. The period was similarly characterized by a general drift to the left of the Arab nationalist movement, illustrated, for instance, in the adoption of a socialist language by the Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser in his National Charter of 1961–2. These developments trickled down to and were played out in Syrian political and intellectual fields. If the debate on nationalism pitted the Syrian Communist Party against the unionist forces and the Ba’th Party, with al-Hafiz siding with the latter in his defence of Arab unity, the question of socialism would be directed at the internal debates in the Ba’th Party, and the internal dissension between a leftist wing and a more centrist wing, under the leadership of Michel Aflaq (1910–89), the leader and founder of the party. This debate would culminate in the sixth national congress of 1963, and the rise of a new radical leadership in the party.Footnote 7
The book was a two-pronged critique of the progressive forces, framed as a critique both of “Stalinist” or “traditional” leftism on the one hand and of various forms of Arab nationalism influenced by a petty-bourgeoisie ideology on the other, with the aim, as al-Hafiz wrote in the introduction to the book, to “provide the unionist struggle with a socialist scientific content” and to “direct the socialist struggle in a unionist direction”.Footnote 8 Al-Hafiz's synthesis had to engage with the then important debate on the relation between the social and the national question, and the character of nationalism as a progressive or reactionary force. Against the background of the deteriorating relations between the Ba’th Party and the Syrian Communist Party, and the latter's negative position regarding unification with Egypt, al-Hafiz lambasted what he saw as “Stalinist Marxists” for their inability to comprehend the centrality of the question of unity in the Arab world. Al-Hafiz argued, in two essays written in 1958, on the eve of unification, that Arab nationalism differed from its European counterpart, being grounded in a subjective feeling of common destiny, spurred by the struggle against imperialism, hence criticizing the economistic Stalinist conception of nations. Grounding nationalism at a subjective level and linking it to the anti-colonial struggle allowed al-Hafiz to shortcut the debate on the material preconditions of nations and to provide an avenue for the introduction of socialism at the core of the nationalist question.
But the goal of synthesizing socialism and Arab nationalism would not have been possible without a similar critique of the existing understanding of nationalism, which al-Hafiz linked to the dominance of the petty bourgeoisie, a category that was central in the critique of nationalist regimes and parties by their Marxist opponents. In three articles written between 1963 and 1965 in the wake of the breakup of the UAR in 1961, and amidst the conflict in the Ba’th Party between a leftist wing and a more traditional wing, al-Hafiz critiqued the petty bourgeoisie as a harbinger of reactionary and fascist thought, drawing on Frantz Fanon's critique of the fascism of some nationalist trends.Footnote 9 The political critique of the petty bourgeoisie was accompanied by a theoretical critique of the Soviet thesis of “non-capitalist development” and the supposed role of the “national bourgeoisie” in consolidating national independence, and developing the material forces of production as the road towards socialism.Footnote 10 Al-Hafiz rejected this thesis based on the reactionary nature of the national bourgeoisie in the Arab world, whose “mother is feudalism, and fathers the usurer, the monopolist and the smuggler”, as he wrote.Footnote 11 These debates culminated in the sixth national congress, held in 1963, which witnessed the emergence of a strong leftist trend.Footnote 12 Al-Hafiz's writings were instrumental in shaping the final document emerging from this conference, known as Ba’d al-Muntalaqat an-Nadhariyya or Some Theoretical Principles, which cemented the leftist turn of the Ba’th, and weaved nationalism and socialism in a tighter manner.Footnote 13
Al-Hafiz's goal of a synthesis between nationalism and socialism seemed for a moment to have become the dominant position of the party ruling Syria after the coup of 1963. But the main characteristic of al-Hafiz's early position was not solely in its substantive claims. Rather, it was in the manner in which these positions were woven into a political intervention, or the manner in which the political and the theoretical were articulated. Al-Hafiz was writing from a very specific position, located in the radical forces, to a well-defined audience composed of the radical parties of the 1950s and 1960s, and with a clear political goal, whether defined in terms of the relation between the Syrian Communist Party and the Ba’th Party or in terms of the struggling wings of the latter. The theoretical was mapped onto these political conflicts, endowing theory with a clear political edge and transforming politics and its conflicts into an episode of theoretical debates. The political, the theoretical and the masses were, in this moment of political radicalism of the 1960s, united in one struggle. Liberalism and historicism were not yet on the agenda.
Al-Hafiz's later writings: backwardness displaces the revolution
The clarity of al-Hafiz's position would not last for long. In his subsequent books, he gradually departed from his early revolutionary project, adopting a historicist position that displaced the urgent project of a revolution with the equally urgent goal of progress. Even though the defeat of 1967 was the broad headline for this shift, it was not simply the military defeat that transformed al-Hafiz's political horizon. Rather, the transformation was the result of a series of political events that took place from 1961 to 1975, as described earlier in the essay, which comprised the transformation captured by David Scott as the end of the Bandung project and the withering of the anti-colonial utopias into postcolonial nightmares.Footnote 14 The transformation was not a simple shift in political slogans, but involved a deeper transformation of the grounds of political and intellectual action. During this period, al-Hafiz's political role was transformed as a result of the new political structures emerging. Following the sixth national congress, and the retaliation by forces close to Aflaq, he was sidestepped, and formed a new party. The Ba’th Party was torn between conflicting wings, with the division ending with the violent coup of February 1966 led by Salah Jedid (1926–93). The ruling regime quickly descended along an authoritarian path, fuelled by personal rivalries. In such a context, the ideological coloration that al-Hafiz provided was no longer needed, with a certain disillusionment with radical politics starting to seep through. This disillusionment culminated in the jailing of al-Hafiz and the repression of his party by the ruling Ba’th in the late 1960s. Following this event, al-Hafiz relocated to Beirut, and played a minor political role, despite his growing intellectual stature.
The post-1967 transformation was the result of the systematic and inexorable dismantling of the radical agendas of the 1950s, and implied for al-Hafiz the need to recognize a new problem, one linked to the backwardness or delay (ta’khur) of Arab societies. Drawing on Bernard Yack's analysis of political critique, the end of the Bandung hopes implied a reformulation of the object of discontent and the identification of new obstacles to political desires.Footnote 15 For al-Hafiz, the new obstacle was no longer imperialism, political oppression or economic exploitation, but more importantly the social and cultural structures of Arab societies. As he wrote in the introduction of his next book al-La’aqlaniyya fi as-Siyassa al-‘Arabiyya: Naqd as-Siyasat al-‘Arabiyya fi-l-Marhala ma Ba’d an-Nasiriyya (The Irrationalism of Arab Politics: A Critique of Arab Politics in the Post-Nasser Period),
Regarding Arab politics, we are not just facing mistakes, but we are facing backwardness, we are not just facing right-wing policies but irrational policies, and we are not just facing the backwardness of the hegemonic minorities but the backwardness of the whole political structure. In other words, it is a politics of villages in a world of cities.Footnote 16
The promotion of the social and cultural structures of the Arab world as the main obstacles to emancipation radically transformed the shape of the critique and its target, and the manner through which the theoretical and the political were articulated. An immanent critique, one that connected the social dynamic to a political project, was replaced by a different form of critique, based on the impossibility of politicizing the social, and finding in historicism the coherence lost in this transformation. The revolutionary language was displaced by a historicist one, with the analytical discussions of the early period giving place to a more normative assessment of the Arab world. The loss of faith in the analytical tools inherited from the radical era translated politically in a loss of faith in the current anti-imperialist struggle, replaced by an inward critique of the culture and social structure of Arab societies.Footnote 17 And the masses, previously the guidepost of the struggle, were demoted to a mere object of reforms. This shift in the horizon of politics, from a revolutionary horizon to one of catching up or of re-enacting the already existing, similarly altered the grounds from which the critique was enacted. Al-Hafiz's position would slowly be more removed from the existing political forces, to become one of a “detached critical intellectual”, addressing Arab societies in their totality. The consistency that characterized the radical era would give way, in the case of al-Hafiz, to an exit from politics, and a search for a new consistency in this exit.
The historicist reaction of al-Hafiz was not the only possible conclusion to be drawn from the post-1967 transformation. Many of his “comrades” reacted to these political developments through an increased radicalism, spurred by the Palestinian revolution and the hopes pinned on guerrilla warfare. Al-Hafiz resisted this temptation, at the expense of finding himself cornered between two sets of alternatives he rejected: the more-than-eager “popular war of liberation” of the Palestinian revolution and the more-than-reluctant conventional war of the existing regimes, or the adventurism of the new radical forces and the traditionalism of the existing communist parties. In an essay written in 1969, “Munaqashat fi al-Aydiyulujiyya al-Falastiniyya” (A Discussion of the Palestinian Ideology), al-Hafiz explicitly rejected the Cuban, Vietnamese and Algerian path of a popular struggle in the Arab world, preferring instead the alternative of building modern conventional armies, and resisted the reversal of the slogan “Arab unity as the road toward Palestine” with the slogan “Palestine as the road toward Arab unity”. Al-Hafiz's argumentation was based on the different requirements and conditions between these cases, and the necessity to build a modern basis for the popular struggle, one that, if achieved, would be tantamount to building modern conventional armies.Footnote 18 As al-Hafiz wrote in al-Hazima wa-l-Aydiwulujiyya al-Mahzuma (The Defeat and the Defeated Ideology):
The historical experiences of popular struggle have shown that the conventional war remains the ultimate goal of any non-conventional war, and the only way to ensure a final and complete victory. The claim that the popular struggle is the only path has become, for some Arab regimes, a way to mask its fear of facing Israel and a revolutionary excuse to avoid the battle.Footnote 19
In other words, the Palestinian revolution, for al-Hafiz, was the answer to a question that had been invalidated by events. From the perspective of his new formulation, the feda'iyyin looked more like part of the problem than like the solution to it, or like part of the obstacle to the satisfaction of political desires rather than simply part of those desires.
THE IMPLICATIONS OF A HISTORICISM OF DISILLUSIONMENT: BACKWARDNESS
Historicism and backwardness
In the early 1970s, al-Hafiz started deploying a historicist vocabulary of anachronism (mufawwat) and backwardness or delay, in order to make sense of Arab societies. In al-La’aqlaniyya fi as-Siyassa al-‘Arabiyya, al-Hafiz deployed the notion of delay to qualify political structures, while maintaining a belief in the capacity of the masses to play a progressive role. This tenuous position was replaced by a more radical reach of the notion of backwardness, encompassing the totality of Arab societies. In his next book, published in 1976, al-Tajriba al-Tarikhiyya al-Fiyetnamiyya: Taqyim Naqdi Muqaran ma’ al-Tajriba al-Tarikhiyya al-‘Arabiyya (The Vietnamese Historical Experience: A Comparative Critical Evaluation with the Arab Historical Experience), al-Hafiz provided the clearest exposition of his new theoretical framework, based on Laroui's historicism, using the Vietnamese national movement and its successes as a contrast to the failures of the Arab national movement.Footnote 20 What would emerge as the main characteristic of Arab societies was their cultural and social “anachronistic” traditional structures, which, even though disintegrating (and al-Hafiz would later revise this idea to assert a re-traditionalization of the Arab world, in line with Laroui's analysis), were not allowing the emergence of a new society, one contemporaneous with advanced societies, especially in terms of upholding the values of “rationality” (‘aqlaniyya), “utilitarianism” (fa’idiyya) and a “future-oriented outlook” (al-‘aysh bidalalat al-mustaqbal).
In order to reach this conclusion, al-Hafiz adopted a historicist framework, albeit one of disillusionment, as this essay will argue. Al-Hafiz defined historicism (tarikhaniyya) as follows: “an approach that asserts the objectivity of the development of societies and the law-like character of their natural development”. And to avoid the charge of traditionalism, al-Hafiz, again following Laroui, distinguished
between a right-wing or conservative historicism and another, left-wing or revolutionary: right-wing historicism rapidly blends with tradition and regress to a pure evolutionism, and this because it denies the will to shorten the birth pangs. Left-wing historicism or the historicism of praxis leads, in the case of backward societies, to liberalism, and justifies it.Footnote 21
What was crucial for al-Hafiz's historicism was the notion of stages of development and the ensuing telos of history. His historicism was predicated on the law-like development of societies, which provided him with the capacity to set a telos for social and political action while being able to grasp his society as a totality, or, in other words, to set a telos from outside Arab societies as a vantage point from which to grasp them as self-enclosed totalities. This understanding of historicism, in turn, provided for the possibility of his critique of the anachronistic nature of Arab societies, with anachronistic societies defined as
those whose existence in a certain age is a historical mistake or paradox, due to the fact that they are still living in a historical stage bypassed by other societies, who defined the era and imposed themselves on it. Anachronistic societies are the past lying on the edge of the present or the contemporary, those living outside their age.Footnote 22
And his framework concluded with the opposition of two forms of “historical consciousness” (al-wa’i al-tarikhi), a traditional historical consciousness, which refuses the “rationality of history”, and an “adequate” one, “which can only be formed on the grounds of a realistic truth, and forms the condition for a rational revolutionary practice”.Footnote 23
This new perspective on Arab societies provided a lens that allowed al-Hafiz to reread political developments in a consistent narrative of delay and backwardness. In al-Hazima wa-l-Aydiwulujiyya al-Mahzuma, al-Hafiz stretched the explanatory reach of his new historicist framework to explain the successive Arab defeats in the Arab–Israeli struggle, from the Balfour declaration of 1917, to the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948, to the defeat of 1967 and the “negative victory” of 1973. Going back to the establishment of the state of Israel, al-Hafiz rejected the various conspiracy theories that explained this event, blaming instead the backwardness of Arab societies for their inability to tilt the local balance of power to their advantage. Generalizing from these events, al-Hafiz read the defeat as a
balance sheet of what the Arabs have achieved in the last twenty years since the first defeat. And this balance sheet includes the political, economic, technological, cultural and military dimensions . . . [The defeat] was a test of the “socialism” we are building, the “development” we are achieving, and the “new society” we are extolling. In summary, this swift war was a test for the “revolutions” we are building, and as such a test of the ideology that is guiding these “revolutions” and the classes that led them.Footnote 24
Historicism displaces social class analysis: the normative replaces the analytical
Al-Hafiz deployed historicism in order to enact various theoretical and political interventions. One of them was to investigate the tenets of the existing radical discourses, deemed to have lost any analytical purchase on reality. In other words, the balance sheet imposed by the defeat included a re-examination of the ideologies that led to it. In line with the historicist claim that events cannot be comprehended outside their historical context, al-Hafiz rejected any attempt at grasping the realities of the Arab world through the modern notion of class, individual or revolution, hence giving some justification to the anti-universalist streak in historicism. This is one moment of the historicist gesture, what Hamilton calls the hermeneutical moment.Footnote 25 The state of backwardness and the historicist framework implied for al-Hafiz that modern theories and ideologies have no analytical hold on the situation, being mere ideological illusions, or dogmatic imposition of theories on an otherwise refractory reality. The main example of such a transformation of analytical tools into dogmatic illusions is illustrated in the category of “class”. Despite using this category himself in his early writings, in his later writings al-Hafiz lambasted class analysis as a case of dogmatic imposition of categories on a backward society or a pre-class society. As he wrote in his autobiography, “Tarikh Wa’i aw Sira Dhatiyya Awdiyulujiyya-Siyasiyya” (Chronicle of an Awakening: An Ideological–Political Autobiography), published in al-Hazima wa-l-Aydiwulujiyya al-Mahzuma,
I started to doubt the perspective positing class as the key for understanding the development of Arab societies and their struggle: since these societies did not witness a development similar to their Western counterparts, classes, in the real and broad sense of the term, did not develop. Our classes were “caricatures of classes”, since a class is not simply an economic category, but also, and as importantly, an ideological, political and sociological category.Footnote 26
Similarly, regarding the interpretation of the 1967 defeat, al-Hafiz rejected the class interpretation of this event, writing,
Reactionary bourgeoisie, petty bourgeoisie. Let's say that these classes were responsible for the defeat, its cause. This is true, but not enough. Let's ask: what were the classes that led Israel? Wasn't it the bourgeoisie, the petty bourgeoisie? Why did their petty bourgeoisie win, and ours lose? Why did their petty bourgeoisie succeed in organizing and modernizing Israeli society, and our petty bourgeoisie only achieve the stagnation of Arab societies, maintaining them in a state of backwardness? In such a situation, an incomplete answer becomes misleading.Footnote 27
And it becomes clear at which target this notion of backwardness was aiming. It was first directed against conventional class analysis, impossible in societies lacking classes, and second against the economistic conception of progress, which exonerated Arab culture and ideology from critique.Footnote 28 Yet al-Hafiz did not simply relinquish his earlier theoretical commitment, but transformed them from analytical tools into normative goals. As he wrote in al-La’aqlaniyya fi as-Siyassa al-‘Arabiyya,
class struggle, in its broadest political sense . . . is not simply a way to give justice to a certain social group and save it from destitution and a marginal political existence, but it is much more than that (especially in the current stage of modernization of Arab societies). It is the process that provides Arab societies with their dynamism, rationality, cohesion and integration. In other words, it is the “evil” that would engender the good, the “fragmentation” that would create integration, the future that is brewing in the present.Footnote 29
Class and class struggles are no longer a mode of analysis and social realities, but become a normative demand for a future-oriented outlook, a sign of a modernity to come, rather than a lens for interpreting the world. And the fate of these theoretical categories would stand as an example for the fate of modern ideologies in general in the Arab world. Marxism is transformed from a world view that has an analytical purchase on reality into an ethical orientation toward the future. Being a Marxist, for al-Hafiz, no longer meant adopting Marxist tools of analysis, but implied a certain yearning towards being able to use such tools of analysis in the future. Marxism, as a political identity, would become a forever-deferred identity, one that was pending on the modernization of the rest of society.
Political grounds transformed
Through adopting a historicist framework, al-Hafiz constructed an external vantage point through a scathing critique of all existing political alternatives, radical and reactionary alike, continuing the work of questioning the analytical validity of radical theories. By deploying a historicist framework and positing backwardness as the structuring principle of Arab societies, al-Hafiz flattened the Arab world into the dichotomy of traditional and traditionalization on one hand, and modernity on the other. This methodological premise had political implications, in the short-circuiting of the existing political oppositions, and their reframing as superficial variations over a common core. And the main opposition to be discarded was the one pitting the so-called “progressive” and “reactionary” forces, or left- and right-wing forces. Al-Hafiz coined the terms ta’akhurakiyyat (backward socialist states) and ta’akhuraliyyat (backward liberal states) to describe the various Arab regimes, drawing, as would become fashionable in the post-1967 era, similarities beneath the differences in their rhetoric.
In this levelling-down of difference, which implied the exit of al-Hafiz from the political field, a new target of critique started to emerge in his writings. As discussed above, in his first book, Hawla Ba’d Qadaya ath-Thawra al-‘Arabiyya, al-Hafiz had as his targets “Stalinist Marxist” and “petty-bourgeois” understanding of nationalism, united under the umbrella of the struggle against imperialism. But gradually the notion of backwardness started to shift the target of al-Hafiz's critique. In al-La’aqlaniyya fi as-Siyassa al-‘Arabiyya, the backwardness of political sstructure formed his main target, these structures deemed to be more backward than other levels of Arab societies. But this position, precarious as it stood, quickly became an indictment of Arab societies in their totality, and not only of their political structures. If in the early 1970s al-Hafiz could combine a critique of Arab society based on its backwardness with a hopeful stance regarding the masses, such an alternative would gradually become impossible to sustain. In his introduction to al-Tajriba al-Tarikhiyya al-Fiyetnamiyya, he contrasted the steadfast resistance of the Vietnamese population and the backward behaviours of their Arab counterparts:
when the people, afflicted by the curse of backwardness, cease to smoke water pipes when in a state of war . . . in other words, when the masses of the common people are elevated from the depth of escapism and indifference and of the personal pursuit of salvation, even if it is at the expense of others . . . only then will the masses have reached a stage that qualifies them to exit the state of backwardness.Footnote 30
Moving from the critique of a particular ruling elite to one of Arab societies in general implied that al-Hafiz had lost his previous political ground, understood as one of the existing alternatives in the political field, and was now addressing his society from the perspective of an isolated critical intellectual. What al-Hafiz undertook was to postpone his “revolutionary Marxism” and his political goals until an ulterior stage, a stage that would follow a historicist moment of exit from backwardness. From his new position of a critique of a backward society, the early political distinctions were not simply made irrelevant, but made conditional on the achievement of a minimum level of modernity, prior to which such theories and ideologies were at best irrelevant and at worst dangerous.
Historicism of disillusionment
The hermeneutical moment, and the resulting questioning of radical theories, was not deployed in order to assert a relativist understanding of history or the superiority of the society under study, hence falling into a nativist position, but rather to lock Arab societies in a stagist narrative, in which they represent the backward end. Hence the second moment of al-Hafiz's historicism is a “teleological” one, not in the sense of a narrative of progress, but rather of one of a stalled progress. In the interplay between these two moments, the hermeneutical and the teleological, the notion of disillusionment resides, and hence this essay's qualification of al-Hafiz's historicism as one of disillusionment. The deployment of a historicist framework by al-Hafiz was more akin to the “crisis of historicism” than to historicism proper, if we can make such a distinction. Describing this crisis, Georg Iggers writes, “a more fundamental challenge to optimistic historicist thought occurred among thinkers who accepted the basic epistemological premises of historicism . . . but gave up the belief in the coherence of the historical process and with it their confidence in the quality of modern Western culture”.Footnote 31 The crisis, then, is the result of the disjuncture between the historical and the normative, and the ensuing
perceived loss of meaning or at least a threat to the possibility of meaning. Whether such meaning is defined as absolute truth, scientific certainty, epistemological objectivity, historical progress, or the life, the expectation is that science, epistemology, history, and so on should have meaning, even as our practical experience teaches us that they do not.Footnote 32
In this disjuncture between a historical and a normative moment lies al-Hafiz's disillusionment. His historicism was one that focused not on progress, but on its negative, backwardness. In other words, it was a historicism that aimed at chastising Arab societies and stripping them of any of their modern garb, acting as a reminder that this is still a land of tradition. Al-Hafiz's crisis emerges not from the maintenance of the hermeneutical moment while eschewing the normative, critical one, but the reverse, from the assertion of the normative moment leading to a disappearance of the hermeneutical; for the internal consistency of the story to function, the Arab world needs to lose its historical distinctiveness and merge with the modern West, or remains as it is, but history itself would then be blocked. It was, then, a historicism of disillusionment, heralding the end of history and the impossibility of escaping it at once.
It was a historicism of disillusionment in a different way, in the closing off of any possibility of organic transformation that it led to. Arab traditional historical consciousness is “historicist” in the sense that it emerges from the anachronistic society that is Arab society. In that sense, it is “adequate” and represents intellectually the material structure of traditions. But on the other hand, adequate consciousness for al-Hafiz is one that is able to capture that society, as an anachronistic one, therefore rooted in a universal, or more advanced, point. Hence it is exactly because Arab consciousness is emerging from an anachronistic society that it cannot grasp its backward situation, and it is exactly because critical consciousness is in rupture with its own society that it can see its backwardness. For al-Hafiz, liberalism, nationalism and Marxism are stages in the development of an adequate consciousness but they do not correspond to transformations in the material situation of Arab societies or to the state of Arab intellectuals. In other words, there was no position from inside the history of Arab thought that could allow for critique to develop, making it necessarily dependent on its externality to this history.Footnote 33 Or, to put it differently, an immanent critique was impossible in the Arab world, for the historicist al-Hafiz. A critical intellectual, it follows, is condemned to be alienated not only from his backward society, but also from his history, a frozen process of traditionalization that cannot sustain any narrative of progress. And despite the focus on praxis and its relation to historicism, one of the hallmarks of Laroui's deployment of this notion in the context of the Arab world, al-Hafiz was gradually reaching the conclusion that there was no agent for translating this notion into action.Footnote 34 In this “disappointed reading” of historicism, al-Hafiz heralded a specific post-1967 adaptation of Western theories, one that would apprehend them as theories of impossibilities, reading in them a catalogue of the various lacks and absences in Arab societies. And it is in this backwardness that al-Hafiz would start bridging the gap between socialism and liberalism, seen now as two “modern” ideologies, trying to take root in a backward society.
POLITICAL IDEOLOGIES IN THE ARAB WORLD
We are all liberals: the pragmatic turn towards liberalism
Al-Hafiz's historicist synthesis of socialism, liberalism and nationalism was not an isolated instance of ideological fusing or trespassing. Rather, the practice of blurring different ideological stances is common in the modern history of political thought in the Arab world, and can be seen, for instance, in the various episodes of conversion from and to Marxism, or in the passage from Arab nationalism to various forms of liberalism.Footnote 35 Individual conversions were not the only instances of trespassing, which include also exercises in ideological hybridization, such as the various attempts at establishing different forms of “Islamic leftism”. This ideological creativity has raised considerable historiographical challenges pertaining to how we write the intellectual history of the Arab world, with which historiographical models and based on what assumptions, as can be seen in the difficulty involved in narrating the history of liberalism in this part of the world.Footnote 36
One of the main episodes in the story of negotiations and conversions that characterized modern Arab thought has been the drifting from Marxist and Arab nationalist backgrounds towards liberalism in the closing decade of the twentieth century, a drifting that is not limited to the Arab world, but has taken place globally under different guises. Even though the conversion to liberalism does not imply that this ideology has become a credible political force, as the elections in the post-revolutionary Arab world illustrate, it points to the rise of a liberal horizon of politics, with different liberal tenets combined with other existing ideologies. The conversion to liberalism in the late twentieth century mirrors a previous episode of conversion, not so much to liberalism per se, but under the constraints and influences of the “liberal age”, as described by Albert Hourani in his foundational Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age.Footnote 37 And as with the latest wave of conversion, what is noteworthy in Hourani's account is the absence of intellectuals explicitly referring to themselves as liberal, or the absence of the adoption of liberalism as a philosophical and theoretical world view. Liberalism emerges as a neutral plane for otherwise opposed perspectives to meet, or the political counterpart of the requirements of the age.
This conclusion has led many, such as Christoph Schumann, to conclude that the concept of ideology, as a reified, coherent and exclusive set of political notions, might not be the most appropriate definition for studying the development of political ideologies in the Arab world. One of the implications of disturbing this conception of ideology is to delink liberal ideas from the political groups supposedly associated with them: “In principle, liberal ideas and values can be found throughout the ideological camps, political organizations, and social milieus, even if not as the mostly dominant force”, Schumann writes, concluding that a history of liberalism understood as the history of “self-declared liberals” “will be predictability short and fragmentary”.Footnote 38 This methodological premise is followed by a historical claim regarding the birth of liberalism in the Arab world. As he writes, “Liberal thought arises, in most cases, not from a direct encounter with Western liberalism but, rather, from negative personal and collective experiences with authoritarianism”, concluding that “[t]hese experiences are universal, and they make liberal thought intrinsic and authentic in any culture”.Footnote 39 By disjoining the fate of liberal thought from that of its self-declared protagonists, and by denying the consistency and coherence of this intellectual tradition, Schumann opens the way for the study of liberal insights, ideas and sensibilities in various intellectual contexts, rejuvenating the moribund history of this ideology, and setting the stage for a different genealogy of liberalism.
The prevalence of episodes of conversion and the various combinations of otherwise disconnected political notions alert us to the rigidity of some definitions of political ideologies, and to the limitations of a history of Arab political thought that takes these categories as unproblematic givens. And in this respect, Schumann's contribution is extremely important in displacing reified accounts of liberalism, by reintroducing the various shifts, negotiations or collages of ideologies that make liberal political thought in the Arab world. But there is a double risk in such an account: first of dehistoricizing liberalism (or any other ideology), conceiving it as a quasi-universal reaction to experiences of cruelty or as a “neutral” plane for otherwise opposed ideologies to meet; and second of imposing our present relation to ideologies on previous understandings of this form of political belonging. Ideological conversions and negotiations of the mid-twentieth century are different from those of the post-Iranian revolution or the post-1989 era, each with its own stakes, constraints, challenges and goals. Historicizing this process requires a deeper excavation of ideologies, of the relation of ideologies to their political and intellectual context and to their thicker layer of justifications, the genealogy of which is eluded by the history of liberalism as a “political” force. It is at this level that we might capture part of the complexity inherent in the process of translation across the metropole–periphery divide, for lack of a better term, and account for some of the transformations in the liberal framework adopted that such rethinking entailed.
Are we all liberals? The theoretical failure of liberalism
When we shift to the theoretical or philosophical dimension of liberalism, away from liberalism's practical political demands, its fate in the Arab world takes a gloomier perspective. Putting aside the political reasons for the inability of this ideology to take root in Arab soil, it seems that there is some congenial incompatibility between liberalism and its new context. For instance, Abu-Rabi’ deems Arab liberalism a failure, being “a cheap imitation copy, for it lacked the objective conditions that made European liberalism viable”.Footnote 40 In a similar vein, Laroui writes of the liberal intellectuals as “the only group of intellectuals to live in a situation bordering on the tragic”, due to the “the fundamental inadequacy of the liberal system for a society that did not engender it”.Footnote 41 This contradictory evaluation, between an inescapable liberal horizon of politics and a discontent with its theoretical roots, was captured in a different context by Raymond Geuss, who wrote,
On the one hand, we seem to have no realistic alternative to liberalism; that is, we know of no other approach to human society and politics that is at the same time as theoretically rich and comprehensive as liberalism and also as remotely acceptable to wide sections of the population in Western societies . . . On the other hand, there are signs of a significant theoretical, moral, and political disaffection with some aspects of liberalism.Footnote 42
The ambiguity described by Geuss as one generated by the political dominance of liberalism and its persistent critiques took the form in the Arab world, as can be seen from the previous discussion, of an opposition between its dominance as a political horizon and its incompatibility due to its origins. One can argue that such a conclusion is not necessarily warranted, and that liberalism, understood as a set of loosely defined political institutions and mechanisms, could exist in a context different from its area of origin. This “eclecticism”, to use the words of Laroui, might be the fate of modern ideologies in the periphery. But in itself, such a conclusion raises more questions than it answers, concerning the process of travel, translation and appropriation of ideologies in the periphery. And such questions cannot be answered without, on one hand, historicizing this process of appropriation and adaptation, and, on the other, probing the internal interplay between an ideology and its “conditions of possibility”, an interplay that has often been ignored in studies of liberalism. In other words, historicizing liberalism, rather than defining it, might offer more insights into its location in Arab thought. This “non-definition” offers a perspective to capture al-Hafiz's specific iteration of the dilemma posed by the specification of ideologies to the Arab world, and more specifically liberalism. Clearly, al-Hafiz's synthesis is one of the possible ways of bridging the gaps between different political ideologies, and there would be other currents to uncover to have a complete picture, with the resulting story not necessarily being coherent or unitary.
A relevant, and somehow paradoxical, starting point for the discussion of the latter is the relation between liberalism and empire, or the liberal justification of empire, as a form of self-reflection on the conditions of possibility of liberalism.Footnote 43 Two arguments, not necessarily unrelated, were made to frame the affinity between liberalism and empire. The first argument is based on the limitation of liberal values to certain societies, and the second on the provisional character of the non-European societies, and hence their civilizational inferiority, the two moments connected by a teleological vision of progress. The relation of tutelage was not simply a cynical justification of vested interest, but was, even if in a reversed manner, an attempt at thinking the conditions of possibility of a liberal society. As Mehta writes regarding the location of India in the liberal imagination,
It is not that the engagement with India somehow exposes all the synaptic links in liberal thinking. But it does, as it were, often strain the conscious to the point where liberals are forced to bring to mind what otherwise remained unconscious. Here India does to liberalism what the unfamiliar more generally does to the instincts of thought and practice—it induces reflection.Footnote 44
And this reflection, undertaken, one has to note, from a position of power, relied on historicism to open up a space where liberal thought could simultaneously assert its commitment to the universal principles of liberty, tolerance, self-determination and individual rights and its support for the opposite policies of the empire: it is “in the temporizing between educating Indians but not yet deeming them worthy of autonomy, in the penumbra between crafting responsible government but not yet giving Indians self-government” that one can find the justification for the empire as an “instrument required to align a deviant and recalcitrant history with the appropriate future”.Footnote 45
Irrespective of the political conclusions of such an interpretation of liberalism, this reading has the advantage of highlighting how certain liberal authors thought about the process of adopting liberalism to the periphery, by combining it with historicism, as its conceptual basis. This was not the sole way through which liberalism was adapted to the periphery, but such a path can be seen among some modernist Arab intellectuals, who struggled with the distance between their “realities” and the ideals of their professed ideology. Yasin al-Hafiz was one of them.
SOCIALISM, LIBERALISM AND HISTORICISM
Socialism is liberalism
Al-Hafiz's path to a certain liberalism, or at least his rehabilitation of liberalism, was peculiar to the questions and challenges, or to the problem-space, of his generation. In the middle of the 1960s, like all radical authors, al-Hafiz did not value liberalism, or liberal forms of political systems.Footnote 46 As he wrote during his radical period, liberal democracy belongs to the fantasies of bourgeois intellectuals, and is nothing but, in the last instance, a way to adapt to the status quo.Footnote 47 Against parliamentary democracy, deemed too weak to dislodge vested interests, al-Hafiz, like many of his radical contemporaries, proposed the idea of “popular democracy”, with its connotations of socialism and radicalism.
With the gradual development of his historicist framework, modern ideologies started to coalesce in their structural affinities and oppositions to traditional thought. Historicism provided the vision that would allow for a rethinking of the role of ideologies in creating the path toward modernity. In his book al-La’aqlaniyya fi as-Siyassa al-‘Arabiyya, al-Hafiz noted that there is a “common basis” (asas mushtarak) that unites both bourgeois and socialist regimes alike, one that is modern (‘asriyya) and the basis of their “realist politics” (al-waqi’iyya as-siyasiyya). And the proof of such affinities came from the radical thinkers themselves. As he wrote in this respect:
The appreciation that Engels had toward Machiavelli, as the founder of modern political science, Gramsci's reading of him as the teacher of the ascending ruling classes, and the Leninist tactics that can be considered an application of his theories—all confirm that there is common basis to both the bourgeois and socialist policies.Footnote 48
And he quickly added that this common basis is needed even more in the case of revolutionary states, always under the threat of ideological utopianism. Without recognizing this collective basis, any socialist experiments will not result in the modernization of Arab societies, but in a state of taʾakhuriyya; in other words, a state of backwardness. As he wrote,
it is only possible for the socialist, whose country has achieved a bourgeois democratic revolution, to criticize bourgeois democracy, to attack it, to attack the role played by the monopolists in corrupting and distorting the democratic system, and to call for the transcendence of this system. But when he does that, and he is expected to do this, he should undertake such critiques from bourgeois grounds, conceding that it is due to this bourgeoisie and from it that he can criticize it, without which he could not hope for a deeper, fairer and more encompassing democratic system, a socialist democracy.
And he continued, regarding the socialists in backward societies who cannot criticize bourgeois democracy since they would be criticizing a system far more advanced historically than their own, “The socialist in backward countries, if he is really a socialist, cannot but appreciate the bourgeois democratic achievement, even if, in the imperialist era, he has to struggle to transcend it, in the Hegelian sense, i.e. to achieve and transcend at the same time”.Footnote 49 And to return to the first essay in the book, “as-Siyassa al-‘Arabiyya Maza Tashku: al-La’aqlaniyya am al-Khata’?!” (What Is Wrong with Arab Politics: Error or Irrationalism?), socialism was deemed to be a transcendence of the bourgeois state, one that departed from similar grounds:
Marxism never denied the rationality of the bourgeois state . . . socialist democracy is not a negation of the bourgeois democracy, but, on the contrary, stands on its grounds and starts from it in order to resolve its incompleteness and to transcend it through resolving the contradiction between the individualized self and the social self, with the latter gaining prominence.Footnote 50
Bourgeois democracy and rationality are now conceived to be prerequisites of any real socialism, and not alternatives to them. This periodization would be confirmed in his later writings. In al-Tajriba al-Tarikhiyya al-Fiyetnamiyya, al-Hafiz drew an even more enmeshed matrix of relations between these two ideologies. The lesson he deduced from the success of the Vietnamese experience was the necessity of an initial liberal moment as a condition for a more radical position: “liberal influences fertilized the Vietnamese soil and prepared it to the arrival of Marxism”,Footnote 51 with al-Hafiz defining liberalism as
the system of ideas, values and principles that was formed in the West during the seventeen and eighteenth centuries, and which was deployed by the rising bourgeois class to fight the ideas, systems and values of the medieval and feudal age. This liberal system, or liberal ideology, is what changed medieval Europe, either though gradual change or revolutionary change . . . In other words, it forms the basis of modern society and thought.Footnote 52
And he concludes his definition by opposing it to a “medieval ideology”:
Against an otherworldly orientation, it asserted the objectivity of nature and matter. Against revelation and metaphysics, it asserted rationality and science. Against despotism, it asserted freedom. Against the crushing of the individual and its dissolution into collectivities, it asserted its primacy. And against the idea of abstinence and sin, it asserted the idea of happiness. Hence liberalism cannot be reduced to an economic theory. It goes beyond the simple call for economic freedom, which is only one of the instantiations of its general political programme, defined by its position regarding the freedom of the individual.Footnote 53
Such a liberal context was not available for Arab Marxism, which remained entrapped in a traditional context and a traditionalist ideology. What Arab Marxists did not understand was that in pre-bourgeois societies, according to al-Hafiz, the struggle was twofold, liberal and socialist, transforming his earlier twofold characterization of the struggle as Marxist and nationalist into one that is modern, hence including the socialist, liberal and nationalist moment.Footnote 54
In his early writings, al-Hafiz tried to mesh socialism and nationalism in a radical synthesis. In his later writings, he added to this couple the notion of liberalism, to devise a modernist synthesis, in which all modern ideologies became different facets of the same modernist orientation. Al-Hafiz started with a position that would deem bourgeois ideology as the opposite of Marxism, an inferior theory, and one that was unsuited to the realities of the Arab world. But he gradually started shifting position, first by acknowledging the similarities between these apparently opposed ideologies, or their common basis as both belonging to the rational modern world, then by asserting the liberal prerequisite of socialism. With the prospect of a socialist revolution receding, al-Hafiz became more concerned with its conditions of possibility, which he found in liberal ideology, without necessarily denying the thesis of transcendence, the crux of his argument shift to ensuring the conditions for a modern rational Arab Marxism. And with the deepening of its historicist bend, and its ensuing stagist conception of history, liberalism would form the necessary stage in a transition towards modernity, one that set the stage for a later revolutionary thought and its transcendence towards a socialist revolution.
Historicism, socialism and liberalism
Accepting liberalism as a precondition did not imply accepting the conventional history of Arab liberalism: al-Hafiz adopted the perspective of the “compatibility between liberalism and Marxism in the context of the historical state of Arab backwardness, despite their contradiction in the actual Arab historical context”.Footnote 55 Arab liberals, by lacking the socialist and nationalist horizon, could not be truly Arab liberals, in the same way that socialists, lacking the liberal precondition, could not be truly Arab socialists, with this temporal rather than cultural definition of “Arab” requiring historicism as the key to unblock history. Such a standpoint implied accepting liberalism without accepting the lineage with the early liberals of the Nahda. Al-Hafiz was consistent across his writings in his denigration of the experiences of early liberals, such as Lutfi as-Sayyed (1872–1963) or Taha Husayn (1889–1973), whom he lambasted as a representative of a “reformist liberalism, politically accommodationist with a superficial westernization”.Footnote 56 He would deem this episode to have failed, due to their reconciliation with tradition, their accommodation with imperialism, the weakness of the Arab bourgeoisie, and their reformist understanding of social progress as a gradual process.
If liberalism is the prerequisite of the socialist horizon, it cannot stand alone as a political alternative, which is the mistake that the Nahda liberals committed, according to al-Hafiz. The conundrum is how to secure the much-needed liberal culture in a context that did not create it. Historicism intervenes at this juncture, as the process of moving from a traditional ideology to a socialist one, and is the more particular move from a traditional ideology to liberalism, where revolutionary thought is responsible for moving from liberalism towards socialism:
Historicist thought is aware that socialism cannot be built on the basis of traditional concepts and systems, but only on a liberal basis. Moreover, historicist thought prepares Arab revolutionary thought, in a historical context where the chances of a formation of a true bourgeoisie are nil, to absorb liberal culture and advances before and without a bourgeois stage.Footnote 57
Historicism, which was the awareness of the backwardness of Arab societies, acquires a more positive dimension, as the mode of thought that could allow for the jump-starting of a history that refuses to flow naturally. Yet this jump-starting is predicated on this exact impossibility, i.e. on the absence of the social actors that could lead this history to its end point. This historicism acquires a disappointed dimension here in a another sense, the deception of all of the theories of automatic transition to modernity, which, by the time of al-Hafiz, had started facing their limits.
Al-Hafiz's rehabilitation of liberalism, in opposition to what he saw as an ahistorical radical alternative on the one hand, and an even more ahistorical traditional path on the other, was written in a very specific period. It was marked by the defeat of 1967 and what it represented in terms of the demise of the radical project of the 1950s and 1960s, a demise that had taken the form of bitter and violent divisions among the radical forces and a general descent into authoritarian forms of ruling. It was not yet the period of the liberal “end of the ideological age”, and it was heavily marked by the sense that the historical agent in charge of modernizing Arab societies had just died. Still committed to his political radicalism, albeit one he considered to be rational, liberalism could not be the sole political horizon, even more so in an area suffering from problems that were outside the purview of this ideology. Al-Hafiz would avoid the facile universal liberalism to reassert it as a stage in a universal sequence, tending towards socialism. Located in the Arab world in a specific political and intellectual juncture, liberalism could neither be taken for granted nor justified on its own terms, yet it could not be ignored, in view of the danger implied in such possibility. As such, the ambivalence of al-Hafiz is an ambivalence that is implied by the opposition of liberalism to the existing political traditions, while at the same time undercutting it by making it conditional on a historicist starting point and a socialist end point.
FROM A HISTORICISM OF DISILLUSIONMENT TO A TRAGIC REFLEXIVITY
Al-Hafiz would remain silent as to how to translate socially and institutionally his historicism, the belief in the state as a modernizing actor having become obsolete, his belief in the role of the masses gone in the vicissitudes of his historicism, and his having lost all faith in the avant-garde revolutionary movements. His historicism was not geared to sustain political actions and interventions. Rather, it was one of disillusionment. Through the historicist lens, al-Hafiz flattened the existing political differences between competing ideologies to replace them with a new principle of structuration, one that is rooted in their relation to modernity. From that perspective, liberalism and socialism become two sides of the same coin, what unites them being much more relevant than their differences, which are postponed to the post-backward era. But this new position did not imply a simple rehabilitation of liberal thought in the Arab world. Al-Hafiz remained critical of early Arab liberalism. His liberalism was one justified on its own terms but also as a stage towards a socialist society, the necessary condition for al-Hafiz to be able to be a Marxist in the full sense of the word. Moreover, the path towards liberalism required historicism, a position reminiscent of the discussion of the relation between colonialism and empire in the introduction. In other words, an ideological fusing is enacted, one that minimizes the differences between socialism and liberalism, when faced by “traditional” societies and ideologies, and draws a common genealogy for both liberalism and socialism.
The attempt by al-Hafiz to deal with the structural transformation in his intellectual and political field, and his experimentations with competing ideologies, shed some light on a period that is starting to receive the attention it deserves in the study of the intellectual history of the Arab world. This moment of disillusionment is not simply a moment of decline and exit, as it has often been portrayed, but can be read as a moment of theoretical maturity, with positive contributions to the political theory of the region. An example of such contributions is al-Hafiz's tortuous road towards rehabilitating liberal thought in the Arab world, and his critique of the naive appropriation of this political world view, which can be read as an acknowledgment of the difficulty faced by this tradition when having to account for its own conditions of possibility. When faced with its historical or geographical boundaries, liberal thought has often relied on external theories, unaccounted for by the main tradition. For al-Hafiz, this addition was Marxism, and more specifically a historicist Marxism, one that could justify the liberal principles and provide them with an interpretation of their conditions of possibility. This focus on preconditions, and hence the whole non-liberal path towards liberalism, is a sign of a certain reflexivity, one that is grounded in the distance between the metropole and the periphery and its resulting historical gap, but also triggered by the end of the optimistic teleologies of the mid-twentieth century. One needs to avoid the postcolonial knee-jerk reaction of lambasting historicism as a simple shorthand for colonialism, even though the case for their affinity has been made. In the case of al-Hafiz, writing from a position of an intellectual in the Arab world, this historicism has been an entry point for a reflexive investigation of modern ideologies in the Arab world.
Al-Hafiz's reflexivity was not unique, but can be read as a symptomatic characteristic of postcolonial intellectuals. And his reflexivity did not escape the general colouring provided by the post-1967 turn. This was a reflexivity of defeat, a tragic reflexivity, rather than an epistemological reflexivity or a reflexivity of struggle, as would become fashionable in Western academia during the same period. It was a reflexivity aiming at understanding why ideologies and theories failed or cannot be applied, while being on the side of these theories and ideologies. It was a reflexivity torn between the knowledge that it produced and the inability to act that it led to. And it was a reflexivity that suddenly transformed the corpus of Western theories from a guide to reflection and actions into a catalogue of impossibilities, leaving a modernist intellectual like al-Hafiz stranded, in a society that stubbornly refused to move toward the receding goal he started his career defending.
