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by undeniable changes in the social sphere, the most spectacular, revolutionary and now debated being women’s decision to give up the veil. In politics likewise, the mobilization of societies enabled Arabs to play a prominent role in international affairs: Nasser’s Egypt, for instance, one of the pillars of Afro-Asianism and the subsequent Non-Alignment movement;¹ independent Algeria, the driving force of the entire African continent; or the Palestinian resistance which was called on to further the cause of democratic rights without succumbing to the ideology of victimhood now so prevalent.

      So what checked this momentum, which, even if it didn’t achieve complete success, still heralded a better and seemingly attainable future? How did we become so stagnant? This state may be more intellectual and ideological than material but it still makes us believe that we have no future other than that proposed by a morbid fundamentalism. How has a living culture become discredited and its members united in a cult of misery and death? The following book aims to offer elements of a response to these questions and, by implication, to convey the possibility of finding a way out of the crisis.

      This book makes no claim to be a political programme, nor for that matter the report of an expert witness. It is first and foremost the views of an Arab intellectual, such as could be put forward anywhere in the world: in Paris or Damascus, London or Beirut, Cairo or Casablanca, Algiers or – as has recently become the case – Baghdad. In saying this, however, I am not trying to hide behind a consensus of any sort. There is no consensus and every intellectual’s own political identity informs his or her arguments. Before proceeding, therefore, I must first declare my identity.

      The author of these reflections is an Arab from the Levant: secular, as will soon become apparent, acculturated, even westernized, but with no sense of himself as alienated from a foreign culture and no desire to eradicate those who think differently. He has no desire to try them in a foreign court either: this book has also been published in an Arab edition and, while this may not be a guarantee of universalism, at least it may be seen as demonstrating the possibility of conducting a debate that is both about Arabs and for Arabs.

      Beirut—Paris, July 2004

       I

       THE ARABS ARE THE MOST WRETCHED PEOPLE IN THE WORLD TODAY, EVEN IF THEY DO NOT REALIZE IT

      DO WE NEED to describe the Arab malaise? A few statistics should be enough to convey the seriousness of the impasse in which Arab societies find themselves: chronic rates of illiteracy, inordinate disparities between rich and poor, overpopulation of cities and desertification of land. You might say that this is the shared plight of a large proportion of what used to be called the Third World, and that, in any case, there’s considerably greater poverty on the streets of Calcutta, for instance, or inequality in Rio de Janeiro. No doubt you would be right. Yet there’s more to the Arab malaise than simply persistent under-development, nor is it tied in with social class or even lack of education.

      What’s distinctive about the Arab malaise is that it afflicts people who one would imagine would be unaffected by such a crisis, and that it manifests itself more in perceptions and feelings than in statistics, starting with the very widespread and deeply seated feeling that Arabs have no future, no way of improving their condition. Faced with the protean and apparently incurable evil eating away at their world, the only remedy would be individual flight, if such a thing were possible. But the Arab malaise is also inextricably bound up with the gaze of the Western Other – a gaze that prevents everything, even escape. Suspicious and condescending by turns, the Other’s gaze constantly confronts you with your apparently insurmountable condition. It ridicules your powerlessness, foredooms all your hopes, and stops you in your tracks time and again at one or other of the world’s border-crossings. You have to have been the bearer of a passport of a pariah state to know how categorical such a gaze can be. You have to have measured your anxieties against the Other’s certainties – his or her certainties about you – to understand the paralysis it can inflict.

      Still, you could conceivably overcome, or even simply ignore, the Western gaze. But how can you avoid returning it, and measuring yourself against its reflection? You don’t have to go so far as to draw a comparison with a West that, while still the dominant global power, is based on a citizenship that is grounded in habeas corpus and human rights, and open enough to question and oppose periodic attempts by the state to control it. Nor need you despairingly contemplate that gulf between a civilization that constantly generates technological revolutions and your world, in which large numbers of people are still living in a preindustrial age, while the elite merely consume the innovations of other societies. More modest comparisons are astonishingly enough – with Asia, for instance, where economic growth has spawned a multitude of’ Tigers’ and ‘Dragons’. Or Latin America where democratic change appears to have acquired an unstoppable momentum. Or even Sub-Saharan Africa where, against all the odds, experiments in democracy coexist with traumatic civil wars. These regions, which until recently seemed to share with the Arab world a common fate of underdevelopment and authoritarian politics, are far from achieving parity with the industrial, democratic North, but they at least offer compensations which militate against despair. Some are making genuine steps towards democracy, others show economic growth or a degree of technological accomplishment that is the envy of Europe, others still are taking the initiative in international affairs – sometimes all of the above at once. By contrast, the Arab world suffers from a thoroughgoing lack of achievement in all these areas.

      When you are thrown off course by the Other’s gaze, or by the comparison of yourself to the Other, self-awareness is not a great help. The Arab sense of self has become so undermined that the slightest thing is enough to distort it. In some cases – and this is perhaps the Arab malaise’s cruellest characteristic – one can feel innately deformed, without access or reference to anything outside onself. Admittedly, the deep sense of powerlessness at the malaise’s core seems to be fuelled by unassuaged grief for past splendour. A historical paradigm appears to be invoked: Arabs’ current impotence is all the more painful, the logic seems to be, because they have not always suffered from it; or, more precisely, the Arabs’ malaise stems from their inability to regain the power and global status they once possessed. But unfortunately this doesn’t accurately describe what Arabs feel anymore. Mourning past glories, which played such a part in modern nationalism and liberation movements, has ceased to be a spur to action. The Arab malaise has had such a debilitating effect that Arab history has been entirely hollowed out. What remains is a state of permanent powerlessness that renders any chance of a revival unthinkable.

      The Arab people are haunted by a sense of powerlessness; permanently inflamed, it is the badge of their malaise. Powerlessness to be what you think you should be. Powerlessness to act to affirm your existence, even merely theoretically, in the face of the Other who denies your right to exist, despises you and has once again reasserted his domination over you. Powerlessness to suppress the feeling that you are no more than a lowly pawn on the global chessboard even as the game is being played in your backyard. This feeling, it has to be said, has been hard to dispel since the Iraq war, when Arab land once again came under foreign occupation and the era of independence was relegated to a parenthesis.

      It’s not important here whether you were for or against the war. For those who were against the American war on nationalist grounds – not to be confused with the millions of people who came out on the streets of Europe and America to publicly reject the United States’ diktat – powerlessness is self-evident. It can be summed up in the simple, yet nonetheless bitter, acknowledgement that there was nothing they or anyone could do to prevent a foreign power – the greatest in human history though it may have been – deploying its troops thousands of miles from its borders to intervene as a policeman in your homeland, and in a matter of weeks put paid to a state that was much feared, at least by its own citizens and neighbours. Further proof of Arab impotence lies in the even more mortifying realization that if any opposition could have delayed the American occupation, it wouldn’t have come from the ‘Arab masses’ but from the international civil society being put in place by the antiglobalization, or alterglobalization, movement, in which Arabs have only a very minor role. And even if the difficulties the American

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