Crisis Of Our Liberalism Sharper Than That Of Westernization

Wahid Abdulmajid     Al-Hayat     2003/09/8

Khaled Haroub has a great capacity of surprising his readers when he discusses an issue of his choice, based on hypotheses he formulated, and then turns into given facts without proving any of them.  

In his article published in Al-Hayat on August 30, he tried to discuss the contemporary problems of Arab liberalism. There are many and complicated problems, just like with all the other Arab political thoughts, especially Arab Marxism and pan-Arabism. If Arab political Islam found a platform in the present reality, it is not because its ideological foundation is better, but because it exploits the confusion between it and the Islamic doctrine.

Nevertheless, let us remain with the issue of Arab liberalism, which is embroiled in a deep crisis, but for reasons that have nothing to do with the three hypotheses suggested by Khaled Haroub, which he considered to be axioms even though he failed to prove any of them.

First, he supposed that calls for liberalism are closely affiliated to the West, and assert its intellectual and theoretical reference. I did not understand what calls are these. Is freedom, which is considered to be humanity's legacy - to us as well, unless we are not part of the humanity's history - in addition to the fact that such calls have become a common factor between the various ideological trends in the Arab world, just like democracy and civil society. Or is it secularism, supported by the Arab Marxists and Leftists in general, in addition to a considerable number of Arab nationalists? Even calls for market economy and private property are widely spread in the Islamic thought.

Second, he maintained that Arab liberalism considers the U.S. as the refuge and guardian of liberalism. I think this is the weirdest supposition, because the conservative and extremist forces controlling the U.S. politically and ideologically are the primary enemies of liberalism in the world today. Even the Democratic party, in which the American liberalists represented the most important group, have become marginalized with the rise of a rightist trend that considers them a weak point hindering the party from restoring its role after the neo-conservatives succeeded in obstructing their ideas regarding social welfare domestically, and opposing the arrogance of force in dealing with the international community.

If liberalism is subject to a random war in the U.S. today, how could we expect those fighting it to be its guardians?

This is about the internal situation in the U.S. As for its current foreign policy, it is destroying whatever is link remains between the Arabs and liberalism and modernity with all the positions biased to Israel and contrary to the principle of self-determination, which the U.S. introduced to the world around a century ago.

All that Arab liberalism got from the West in general was a series of disasters. What the U.S. is doing today is exactly what Britain did with its former colonies. It had closed the horizons for liberal development in most of them, when it took its time to ratify their right to full independence. In Egypt for instance, Britain is responsible for the collapse of the quasi-liberal regime and for the 1952 revolution, which marked the beginning of the entire Arab liberal crisis.

In his third hypothesis, Haroub said that Arab liberalism did not present itself as a national Arab project, which made it a tool in foreigners' hands. I do not know either why he considered that this hypothesis is a given fact. Did he, for instance, conduct a study or analyze the writings of all the Arab liberalists and concluded that most of them did not present their ideas as a national project? Certainly, some just copied ideas and concepts, just like many Arab Marxists did, and went even further in this regard. But many Arab liberalists adapted the ideas they believed in to the Arab reality. Transferring ideas could be a sort of creative interaction, such as Arab nationalists' transfer of the German nationalist ideology, and Arab Islamists who adopted political Islam from India and Pakistan.

The adoption of Western liberal philosophies started when the Arabs interacted with Westerners, following the French campaign in Egypt and the educational expeditions. Rifaat Tahtawi was a pioneer in this field. However, he placed these transfers within the framework of a national project, to the point where he was criticized by those who considered him as a conspirer. The last article I  read in this regard was an article by Lebanese Jamil Qassem, on December 10, 2002.

If we look back at the beginning of the 20^th century, when the liberalist ideology was in vogue in Egypt, we see that one of its pioneer, Dr. Mohamad Hussein Haykal, was careful to differentiate between the advantages and disadvantages of liberalism and its experiences in Europe ever since he went to Paris to get his PhD, and he was the first Egyptian to obtain such a degree. He explained that not everything he saw in Paris was good.

It was freedom that attracted him… the freedom of the individual and the freedom of the nation. He nonetheless took into consideration the prevailing circumstances, despite the fact that the Western trend was widespread in the Arab world at that time. This fact, as well as many others, come to refute the common point between Haroub's three hypotheses, which is that Arab liberalism is "imported" and that its importers did not "nationalize" it, and had to look for something that could be similar in our historical experience. Talk about importing ideas is not new; however, it is political talk and not an intellectual one. He resorted to an accusation, which Arab Marxists suffered more than anyone else. After Arab ruling regimes invented the accusation of imported ideas in order to undermine the Left specifically, some Islamists and nationalist intellectuals adopted a classification originally based on this accusation, dividing ideas into two main categories: one inherited or original category (political Islam and pan-Arabism) and the other, which is imported (liberalism and Marxism).

This classification is wrong, or at least debatable, because to consider ideas as importable goods means that all the ideas are originally from the West. Moreover, the foreign element in the Arab nationalist ideology is much greater than in any other Arab ideology. Marxism is based on a principle existing in our legacy and that is justice. Another element in liberalism that exists in our tradition is freedom. However, pan-Arabism is entirely built on a Western ideology that does not exist in our tradition: the national state.

India and Pakistan are also among the most important countries that export their ideas to Arab political Islam. If ideas are to be considered as goods, then everybody works in imports. But it is more right to say that everybody is in the same crisis and nobody is seriously trying to face the real source of its crisis.

The crisis of Arab liberalism is greater and deeper than merely a question of being affiliated to the West or not. Liberalism is hindered where there is a tendency towards radicalism, fanaticism and isolation. It is facing a developmental crisis, because it happened at a period when the world moved from agriculture and feudalism to industry and capitalism. Moreover, the world has now moved on from the first and second industrial revolutions and entered the third one, where economic development is based on information much more than on capital and resources. It is true that the idea of market economy still prevails, but information has become the most important player.                    

This is a new era, where the world is moving beyond the objective bases of liberalism, which are anyway facing a developmental crisis. The new era in which liberalism might, or not, exist, depending on the possibility to renew itself through an increasingly important intellectual creativity. Until the Arab liberals acknowledge this, they will remain locked in another world, wasting their time in debates dating to the 19^th and 20^th centuries about capitalism and socialism, while others are busy with issues such as identity and the authority.

*Mr. Abdulmajid is an Egyptian writer and the assistant director of Al Ahram Center For Political Studies.