[I would like first of all to thank the Provost, Professor Ahmad Dallal, for launching this project, and to my co-panelists for doing most of the organizing and most of the thinking. My deepest thanks go to the women and men of the Arab revolutions , to those common heroes, struggling anonymously for the dignity of all.]<\/p>\n
History is notoriously difficult to define. Uniquely among modern fields of knowledge, its very name refers to both a discipline and its object of analysis: history can be both past reality itself as well as its representation. From this ambiguous homonymy emerges much of the difficulty in determining what history (the discipline) actually is, for what most modern historians claim to be doing is simply letting reality speak for itself through their narratives. From the early nineteenth-century onwards, the basic tenor of the historian\u2019s craft has been to say \u2018I present to you the past\u2019 and here follows its autobiography. The historian was simply a vessel, a vehicle, which, grounded in the appropriate source criticism, would achieve a certain neutrality and allow history to speak for itself. The name of this discourse is historicism, and its modus operandi is the principle of cause and effect. And it remains the fundamental parameter according to which professional historians write history. Of course, there are, and have been from the very start, great debates and dissensions within the community of historians (grossly mappable along the more general divide between empiricism and rationalism), but the basic signposts are shared. (There have also been rather special exceptions, but they have tended to have only little effect on the sovereignty of history as the queen of the disciplines.) <\/strong>The grand organizing pillar of historicism, then, is the progressive passing of time along which to place moments and events of significance for this or that place. To use Marxist parlance, historicism is anchored in the fetishization of the concepts of time and place: what are fundamentally variable and unstable products of social, political, ideological processes but appear as fixed, natural and objective.<\/p>\n I was asked to participate in this panel today specifically as a historian, that is, to provide a historical perspective and context for the momentous events of recent months. The diktats of historicism would require of me to present you with the conditions (economic, social, demographic, political, etc) that have led to the revolutionary situation of the Arab world today. I seek to do no such thing. Experts more knowledgeable than I have already provided elements to this end. Besides, part of what I would like to submit to you today is that such an analysis would in fact constrain the very creative potentialities sparked by the revolution. Instead, I should like to present three possible theatrical scenarios, three narrative plots, by which to read this special moment.<\/p>\n I derive my inspiration, quite fittingly, from the little, and in fact rather mediocre, essay signed by Gamal \u2018Abd al-Nasser and entitled The Philosophy of the Revolution<\/em> (falsafat al-thawra). I say mediocre because it reads (especially to a historian) as awfully outdated and quite simplistic in its formulation (he does speak, after all, of the jungles of the Dark Continent and of the \u201cDark centuries\u201d suffered \u201cunder the hoofs of the Mongol and Caucasian tyrants\u201d). What Nasser does sense here quite brilliantly, however, is the idea that space is not a unitary, stable concept that can be divided into so many impermeable subjects of history (nation-states usually). Egypt\u2019s revolution, he famously argues, is to be inscribed within three, partially overlapping but distinct, spatial circles: the Arab world, Africa, and Islam. We should not be hypnotized, he warns, by conventional, political notions of space: “If anybody tells me that place for us means this capital where we live, I differ with him. And if anyone tells me that place for us means the political boundaries of our country, I also differ.” No, space is multiple and variant, and this diversity of planes will inevitably effect the fate of the Revolution. A nation\u2019s identity, he seems to be saying, is fundamentally plural and that is a strength, not a weakness. (This is of course my partial reading of the text, which, elsewhere peddles precisely in the opposite, in the reification of a homogeneous totality). <\/strong>The same critical approach is unfortunately (but understandably, considering the global hegemony of historicism alluded to above) not extended to the concept of Time. Time, in Nasser\u2019s perspective, is absolute and unitary \u2013 it\u2019s one time for all, and it completely determines all of the past, present and future. Its trajectory is fixed, and indeed, it has already been traced (by Europe of course). It even has a name: progress, and a pre-set goal: modernity. All that remains to be done is simply to follow in the footsteps, to produce the appropriate objective conditions for the proverbial cause to have the desired effect. \u201cWhereas the Europeans,\u201d he writes, \u201chad evolved by an orderly process, gradually bridging the gap between the Renaissance which followed the Middle Ages and the nineteenth century. The stages of evolution there came naturally. But with us everything came as new and strange.\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n Instead, I would like to pursue Nasser\u2019s spatial insight into the realm of time, and present to you three circles of temporality within which these revolutions are inscribed. Remember however, these are not to be understood as antecedents or causes (in the language, that is, of objective realism, of historicism), but rather as plots or scenarios (more in the realm of the imagination and of writing). I may in fact here too find inspiration in Nasser\u2019s text itself, which closes with the following words: \u201cAnd now I go back to that wandering mission in search of a hero to play it. Here is the role. Here are the lines, and here is the stage. We alone, by virtue of our place, can perform the role.\u201d<\/p>\n The first circle that I paint is the very short term, about, say, the last 25 years, and involves the roller-coaster saga of what one commentator suggests we call the long Palestinian uprising, marked by the two intifadas of course, but also by explosive elections and continuous resistance both inside and out. The coherence of this scenario is easy to sense: the Palestinian struggle has galvanized activists\u2019 attention on a global scale and especially in the Arab world and shown from the outset in December 1987 how an unarmed people can suddenly divest itself of fear. Some commentators identify the roots of the recent massive demonstrations in Egypt as lying in the demonstrations in solidarity with the Palestinians during the savage Israeli suppression of the al-Aqsa intifada, which had for the first time in decades brought significant numbers of people to the streets throughout Egypt. Solidarity with the Palestinian struggle has been one of the most dynamic channels of activism in numerous places, most importantly in the Arab world Moreover, the very aesthetics of the demonstrations in Tunis and Egypt (at least at the beginning) but also more globally, in Argentina, Greece and even France in 2005 for example, clearly conform to the aesthetics and ethos associated with the Palestinian intifadas (of course this is not to say that any people own this or that aesthetics, but simply to point towards structural resemblances). Most importantly, the persistence of the Palestinian question forms an integral and crucial part of the concerns of the participants in the Arab revolutions. Important as well in this regard, and of course not disconnected to the long Palestinian uprising, is the liberation of South Lebanon from Israeli occupation in 2000 and, perhaps even more importantly, the defeat of the Israeli (US-backed) invasion of Lebanon of July 2006. This sounded the final death knell of the pernicious and enduring double myth of Israeli might and invincibility and Arab meekness and passivity. Finally, the explicitly dual object of attack on the part of the Palestinian uprising, that is, against both external occupation\/interference and against internal nepotism, corruption, authoritarianism, incompetence will be followed in similar pattern in today\u2019s Arab revolutions.<\/p>\n The second circle envelops approximately the past century and concerns primarily the constant and heroic struggle against European colonialism, ranging from the numerous uprisings immediately following the First World War (notably in Egypt) or even before with intellectuals such as Jamal al-Din al-Afghani to the destruction of apartheid in South Africa and the already raging Palestinian struggle. [These circles are obviously not mutually impermeable, much the opposite: they overlap and spill over in interesting ways. It goes without saying that Palestinian resistance against Zionist settler colonialism also belongs to the second circle.]<\/strong> The contours of this circle are too numerous, and too well known to you all, for me to describe them, but of course, it is worthy to point out that Gamal \u2018Abd al-Nasser plays an important role on this stage, both locally (in Egypt), regionally (in the Arab world), and globally (most famously for his participation in the creation of the non-aligned movement along with Tito, Nehru, Nkrumah, and Sukarno). This was the age of Che Guevara, Fanon and Cabral, of the Bandung conference and the Tricontinental conference in Havana, of the Algerian and Vietnamese wars with their millions of martyrs, etc. It is also the age of Mai \u201968 in Paris and of the Black Panthers in the US. The characteristic of this age is the accession of the colonized to a platform previously reserved for white Europeans (and their extensions in North America, South Africa and Australia): politically speaking of course but also discursively speaking. The colonized were no longer seeking a permission to narrate from colonial masters, they were just speaking loud and clear. This shattered the fundamental racism that lay at the very root of the colonial era, but it effected it by espousing much of the discourse of colonial Europe (its language, its concepts, its assumptions, its implications), grounded in the master-narrative of progress and modernity (and its correlates of course, the uncontested hegemony of the nation-state form, the centrality of the military, the ideology of development, the primacy of industrialization, etc). I have already mentioned how this reveals itself in Nasser\u2019s text. He was of course not alone in this among his contemporaries.<\/p>\n The third circle is the longest, running back to the consolidation of industrial capitalism and colonialism, and the consequences of and resistances to their brutal expansion. This circle brings center stage 1848, the printemps des peuples<\/em>, those revolutions that ran riot in much of Europe (and for which, let us not forget, The Communist Manifesto <\/em>was commissioned). This circle is of course the Age of Revolutions par excellence as Eric Hobsbawm\u2019s famous title affirms. It is the spring of the people, the moment of rise of the idea of universal rights of man, at first political mainly (self-determination, right to vote, etc) but also social and economic. It is also the era of the nascent socialist and communist movements, inspired increasingly by the writings of Marx, whose influence will go ever-increasing and ever-expanding (until recently at least, although even then it is arguable). Now that is in Europe, and sadly, these lofty happenings were taking place just as increasing swaths of the world were being colonized by European powers. Indeed, the greatest liberals of the period (say, J. S. Mill and Alexis de Tocqueville for example) were also savage imperialists, who justified the colonization of inferior races by any means possible \u2013 it was for their own good after all, wasn\u2019t it?<\/strong><\/p>\n Thus, this age is also the moment of the heroic resistance against modern colonialism and racism, from the Haitian revolution of 1804 to the \u2018Urabi revolt of 1882 and beyond. It is the age of the heroic resistance of the Emir \u2018Abd al-Qader to the French invasion of Algeria, finally suppressed by the massacre of perhaps one third of the existing population. It is the age of the Great Rebellion of 1857 that shook British authority in India to the very core (it too was repressed with enormous loss of life). The particularity of these various movements is that they emerge before the complete hegemony of colonial-capitalist Europe over discourse. Thus, they may provide interesting avenues for fresh formulations outside of the dictates of modern times.<\/p>\n Thus must I close my last circle, only with great reluctance. The exercise has proved fruitful to me, despite early misgivings \u2013 I hope it has provided some food for thought to you too. It has brought to my mind further potential circles (such as the struggle over Ottoman state and society in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries between the centralized absolutism of the sultan and his court, usually referred to in the literature as a modernizing drive, and more decentralized, pluralist but non-egalitarian factions represented most forcefully by the Janissaries; as well as the early formulations of pan-Islamic solidarity as early as the late eighteenth century expansion of the East India Company), perhaps you can think of others. <\/strong><\/p>\n And now no doubt you have reached the \u2018so what\u2019 question. The answer is counter-intuitively simple. And it goes something like this. For too long we have depended on concepts and theories to guide the march of our varied histories (and inevitably, these concepts and theories have tended to be European in content and form). Amilcar Cabral, the greatest anti-colonial fighter of our second circle, summed up perhaps best this long-held and quite sensible refrain in his brilliant intervention at the Tricontinental conference in Havana 1966: \u201cif it is true that a revolution can fail even though it be based on perfectly conceived theories, nobody has yet made a successful revolution without a revolutionary theory.\u201d (In fact, it seems to me that in the rest of the text, he demonstrates precisely the opposite by arguing that history does not begin and end with the formation of European-style social classes \u2013 but that is another question.) <\/strong>If this were the case \u2013 and this has been the dominant position from the end of the nineteenth century to this day throughout the enlightened world \u2013 then the recent events in our region would be doomed to fail miserably. Not only do they clearly not have a revolutionary theory to accompany them, they contain barely any elements of ideology as we know it, and certainly no political party that may serve as vanguard. But what if this was not actually the case? What if this proposition that seems so reasonable turned out to be off the mark This is, in fact, what the French philosopher Michel Foucault would suggest only a few years later in a discussion with high-school students in the aftermath of Mai \u201968. In this series of fascinating exchanges, Foucault argues that to attempt to imagine another<\/em> system is in fact perpetuating the participating in the current system. The need for theory and general discourse, he continues, still partakes of the very system that we seek to eliminate. If instead of existing official institutions we imagine another institution that performs the same functions better and differently, we are still in the same dominant system. By contrast, he affirms that a genuinely revolutionary undertaking is directed not only against the present, but against the \u2018until now\u2019 (\u201cune entreprise r\u00e9volutionnaire est pr\u00e9cis\u00e9ment dirig\u00e9e non seulement contre le pr\u00e9sent, mais contre la loi du jusqu’\u00e0 pr\u00e9sent.\u201d)<\/p>\n It is then in echo of Foucault reflecting on Mai 68 that I put forward these thoughts. There is something liberating in the idea that future events need not replicate the same pattern. That is why I am insistent on not reading the above temporal circles as precedents or historical parallels, but simply as imaginative, potential plots. Revolutionary action is directed not only against the present, therefore, but also against the very idea of the precedent, against the very principle of cause and effect.<\/p>\n It is in this way that I see the flooding of the gates of time suggested here as participating in the revolutionary moment. The deconstruction of the sovereignty of historicist time will participate in opening the space for the true expression of diversity, for the realization of the creative potentiality of the present, for the imagination of possible futures. Just like the multiplication of space circles reveals a plural identity, so will the diversification of temporal circles.<\/p>\n Do notice, please, that none of the story-lines that I have plotted for you today contain closure, without which no historicist history is deemed proper (remember, cause-effect along a stable space and a linear time: that is the narrative arc traced by the historicist principle, with a beginning, middle and, most importantly perhaps, an end). I have declined to propose closure, I have not delineated here any relation of cause to effect, and its potential outcome. And that is why I have insisted, against the express advice of my colleagues, to call the recent events in the region a \u2018Revolution\u2019 \u2013 a revolution, that is, not because it has achieved particular ends that we experts identify or do not identify as constituting a revolution, but rather to the contrary in the sense that this is a moment of great potentiality, precisely because of the breakdown of our special analytical criteria and concepts, precisely because it is a moment when the voiceless masses make us<\/em> experts voiceless, forbidding us to provide a pretentious closure to our analysis. Moreover, the participants in these events, in Tunis, Egypt and beyond, speak of what they are performing as a \u2018revolution\u2019 \u2013 why so easily accuse them of terminological confusion? In fact, perhaps the greatest lesson of the ongoing Arab Revolution is that we need to rethink, and perhaps let go of, the conventional understanding of the analytical concepts we use, such as the idea of the political revolution, in which the take-over of the machinery of the state is the be-all and end-all in the engineering of a new phase, of a new society. [There is in fact a significant contradiction in the idea: performing a radical transformation using the very same tools of the old regime.] <\/strong><\/p>\n Finally, and more simply, I use revolution also in the sense intended by the great Caribbean poet Aim\u00e9 C\u00e9saire, of the ongoing effort by the rising peoples of the region to create enough room for all at the rendez-vous of victory.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" [I would like first of all to thank the Provost, Professor Ahmad Dallal, for launching this project, and to my co-panelists for doing most of the organizing and most of the thinking. My deepest thanks go to the women and men of the Arab revolutions , to those common heroes, struggling anonymously for the dignity […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":"","_wp_rev_ctl_limit":""},"categories":[],"content_type":[529],"themes":[305,314],"country":[421],"language":[66],"archive_type":[113],"archive_author":[246],"media_type":[],"keywords":[595,643,653,659,669,766,819,838,948,954,1663,1678,1301,1364,1606,1497,1599,1559],"ft_dossier":[3352],"ft_categories":[],"published_in":[439],"class_list":["post-801","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","content_type-lectures-conferences-en","themes-history-en","themes-politics-en","country-arab-world-en","language-english","archive_type-by-ft-en","archive_author-fawwaz-traboulsi-en","keywords-american-university-of-beirut-en","keywords-arab-nationalism-en","keywords-arab-revolutions-en","keywords-arab-spring-en","keywords-arab-world-kw-en","keywords-colonialism-en","keywords-democracy-en","keywords-egypt-kw-en","keywords-historical-narrative-en","keywords-historiography-en","keywords-history-kw-en","keywords-philosophy-en","keywords-political-theory-en","keywords-revolution-en","keywords-socialism-en","keywords-tunisia-kw-en","keywords-urban-history-en","keywords-youth-movements-en","ft_dossier-arab-revolutions-en","published_in-conference-en"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fawwaztraboulsi.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/801","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fawwaztraboulsi.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fawwaztraboulsi.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fawwaztraboulsi.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fawwaztraboulsi.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=801"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.fawwaztraboulsi.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/801\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fawwaztraboulsi.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=801"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fawwaztraboulsi.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=801"},{"taxonomy":"content_type","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fawwaztraboulsi.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/content_type?post=801"},{"taxonomy":"themes","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fawwaztraboulsi.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/themes?post=801"},{"taxonomy":"country","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fawwaztraboulsi.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/country?post=801"},{"taxonomy":"language","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fawwaztraboulsi.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/language?post=801"},{"taxonomy":"archive_type","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fawwaztraboulsi.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/archive_type?post=801"},{"taxonomy":"archive_author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fawwaztraboulsi.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/archive_author?post=801"},{"taxonomy":"media_type","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fawwaztraboulsi.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media_type?post=801"},{"taxonomy":"keywords","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fawwaztraboulsi.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/keywords?post=801"},{"taxonomy":"ft_dossier","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fawwaztraboulsi.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/ft_dossier?post=801"},{"taxonomy":"ft_categories","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fawwaztraboulsi.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/ft_categories?post=801"},{"taxonomy":"published_in","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fawwaztraboulsi.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/published_in?post=801"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}