Arabs retreat from modernity as the West forges on

Modernism is both a philosophy of life and expression. It is a revolutionary movement that advocates change at various levels and in various forms, based on the idea that civilisations progress through constant change and that intellectually sterile civilisations that stick to outdated ideas and resist change are doomed to fade and disappear.

Modernism has had a tough fight in the Arab world. Even the rigidity of the Catholic mind in the Middle Ages did not resist modernism in the same manner it has been resisted in Arab society. Yet despite a long and bitter battle, the ideas of progress and enlightenment were able to gain a deep foothold in Arabic poetry and literature, especially in the 1950s and 1960s.

In sociology, politics, and economics, these ideas were distorted and aborted, and modernism was mixed with other concepts such as Marxism, secularism, atheism, liberalism and radicalism.

Modernism was fought as it was seen as an intellectual luxury far removed from the struggles and challenges Arab societies were facing in the era of Arab revolutions, de-colonisation, and the conflict between emergent revolutionary regimes and the West.

Oppression

This was to be expected. Poets and writers wanted to express the pains of Arab individuals inflicted on them by the oppression of Arab oligarchies and dictatorships. Their poems and novels galvanised young Arabs and spoke to their suffering and their longing for freedom.

However, this time, this meant freedom not from the foreign colonialists - the subject of the Arab enlightenment in the early 20th century - but freedom from the shackles of authoritarian and totalitarian regimes and rulers.

This is what we sense in the poems and writings of people such as Nazik al-Malaika, Salah Abdel Sabour, al-Sayyab, al-Bayati, Nizar Qabbani, and Ahmed Matar.

Modernism cannot succeed when it mimics others' experiences, when it is far removed from the reality of society.

But the crises of Arab societies soon overshadowed the crisis of freedoms, and grew into a number of related dilemmas and contradictions.

In the final decades of the past century, poverty, exploitation, ignorance and repression overshadowed all else. As a result, political regimes were no longer the sole enemy of modernist ideals; a religious oligarchy that relies on extremist ideas and Salafist forces coalesced into the most formidable enemy that modernising ideas had yet seen.

The rhetoric these reactionary forces used resonated with the poor and ignorant, and grew louder with the catastrophes of Arab politics. As a result of these frustrations and defeats, the appeal of Arab modernists collapsed, their optimistic slogans turned into self-flagellation, disillusionment and disappointment.

The failure of modernism

So this is the conundrum: why has modernism failed to change Arab society?

Was it because, as Adonis, the pioneer of modernism in Arab thought, described it, modernism in the Arab context was built on delusions and misconceptions? Adonis, Khalida Said, and many others tried to interpret and analyse this, but they themselves ended up falling into the trap of delusions.

Or was it because Arab intellectuals drowned in romanticism and failed to live in the Arab reality? If they had lived in reality, their ideas could have flourished. This happened with the Western pioneers of modernism - Max Weber, Lorca, Neruda, Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir and generations more.

In contrast, Arab modernism evolved in poetry and literature but failed to provide solutions for real-life crises, and did not become a force for scientific, economic, and political change in the Arab world.

Did Arab intellectuals conflate the concept of modernism with others, such as change, rejuvenation, and revolution?

Did they link modernism to the western experience, and did they made it a condition for the transformation of Arab societies in the manner western societies had themselves transformed, producing mongrel experiences ultimately rejected by Arab societies?

Modernism cannot succeed when it mimics other people's experiences, when it is far removed from the reality of society. Turning any philosophical idea into reality depends upon the environment surrounding it, and people's acceptance of that idea.

All these factors contributed to the collapse of modernism in Arab thought. Modernity was nothing more than an illusion, a mirage, which Arab intellectuals and young people pursued for long decades to no avail.

The only fruits it bore were in poems, novels, and literature.

Today, when we examine this heritage, we wonder how all that creativity amounted to nothing, how it vanished, how instead of creating a generation of enlightened people, it created a generation of unemployed, marginalised, displaced and dispossessed people, at home and in the diaspora.

Modernism collapsed, and along with it all the ideas it was linked to, and the political and philosophical projects that stemmed from it. Yet this collapse did not give way to something more developed, it just signalled the abortion of the development of Arab thought and societies. This led to the vacuum we see today in Arab culture, society, politics, and the economy.

Ignoring the 21st century

Today, we are in the 21st century. The West has outgrown modernism and entered a post-modernist or post-structuralist phase. This is an intellectual revolution based on the premise that humans are the benchmark of everything, and that human intellect controls the material universe.

Knowledge, and everything else with it, is relative. There is no such thing as absolute truth. The result was a revolution in Europe and the United States in architecture, technology, art, and philosophy - though politics in the West remains trapped in the modernist era for structural reasons.

While modernism advocated notions such as identity, unity and atheism, post-modernism was linked to notions like contradiction, competition, and scepticism.

Post-modernism was also linked to an important development, namely the belief in the importance of religion as expressed by JM Thompson, in his 1914 article in the Hibbert Journal.

"The raison d'etre of post-modernism is to escape from the double-mindedness of modernism by being thorough in its criticism, by extending it to religion as well as theology, to Catholic feeling as well as Catholic tradition," he wrote. 

In other words, post-modernist thinkers tried to find a counter-model, whether in arts, literature, or science.

Modernity was an illusion, a mirage Arab intellectuals and young people pursued for long decades to no avail.

Western society has seen revolutionary developments in the wake of the post-modernist revolution. Intellectual debates continue to thrive and flourish, producing changes in the paradigms and relations of western societies.

However, the most important arena for post-modernism has been the revolution in information and communication technology, as well as engineering, medicine and space sciences - unlike modernism, when the main arena was philosophy and literature.

It is possible to say that this is one of the reasons why post-modernism remains far from discussions about Arab intellectual and cultural progress, where modernism is still the main theme being debated.

Because intellectual advancement is a cumulative process, and because we in Arab societies have failed to modernise our intellectual and philosophical experience, and chose to stone modernism and bury it instead of analysing it, deconstructing it, and benefiting from it, we are now in the era of fundamentalism and Salafism.

Our intellectual, social, political, and literary experiences were impaired, and instead of crossing into post-modernism as producers, we crossed over as consumers of the material and intellectual products of both modernism and post-modernism.

We buy them ready made from the mega-corporations that turned ideas such as relativity and interactivity into appliances, equipment, art, literature and films and sold them to the intellectually bankrupt East, where the rich buy the newest products and the poor get the leftovers.

Opinions expressed in this article remain those of the original author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of al-Araby al-Jadeed, its editorial board or staff.

This is an edited translation from our Arabic edition.