Reflections on the role of Arab intellectuals in Mahjar: Hisham Sharabi and Halim Barakat

This meeting is held for the purpose of contemplating self-knowing and knowing the Other. If self-knowing requires a form of separation, knowing the Other requires something of its opposite; of communication, a deep empathy. Man, on this level is both “knowing” and  “coming to know”. With this in mind a number of Arab intellectuals and writers have been selected, ones which we believe, each in his own field, can realise this coming to know; i.e. a movement of simultaneous separation-communication for self-seeing, away from whims and prejudices, especially ideological ones; to co-exist with other’s own intellectual activity – his language, innovations, daily life.

These remarks made by Adonis, the Syrian poet and intellectual, in the opening session of The First Meeting of Arab Intellectuals and Writers in Mahjar (lands of migration), held in Paris in 1986, outline one of the most important vocations of Arab intellectuals and writers living outside the Arab world. Adonis’ reflections seem to echo Edward Said’s notion of “intimacy and distance” put forward in his book “Orientalism”. Contemplating the benefits that may accrue from one’s exposure to a foreign culture by living in a foreign country, Said writes: “The more one is able to leave one’s cultural home the more easily is one able to judge it, and the whole world as well, with the spiritual detachment and generosity necessary for true vision. The more easily, too, does one assess oneself and alien cultures with the same combination of intimacy and distance.” 

The title of the paper presented by Hisham Sharabi at that conference is “How do We Understand the West?” In this paper, Sharabi presents a perceptive analysis of three paradigms in Arab culture: Patriarchy, neopatriarchy and critical discourse. He argues that the basic principles of patriarchy derive from Islamic fundamentalism which tends to view the East as being superior to the West in terms of its celebration of spiritualism in comparison with the West’s worship of materialism. Whereas neopatriarchy is based on a form of reconciliation between West-inspired secular ideas and traditional cultural heritage derived indirectly from Islamic precepts. Sharabi maintains that patriarchy has a long history in Arab Islamic culture, whereas neopatriarchy came into being as a result of the marriage between Arabic culture and imperialism in the first part of the 20th century. In comparison with the prevailing and overwhelming force of these two paradigms, the third paradigm of critical discourse, Sharabi argues, has failed to strike roots in Arab culture, that is in contrast with the deeply rooted critical discourse in Western culture. 

For Sharabi, neither patriarchy nor neopatriarchy succeeded in “developing a genuinely independent critical and analytical discourse in which the problematics of identity, history, and the west could find effective resolution”. He argues that it is part of his vocation as an Arab intellectual to dismantle and deconstruct patriarchy and neopatriarchy to pave the way for modern, critical discourse, to prevail in the Arab World. 

In his book “Al Naqad Al Hadari”, Sharabi makes no secret of the fact that he owes his personal liberation from hegemony of patriarchal and neopatriarchal views and turns of thought, which have had tremendous impact on the formation of his personality in the early stages of his life to his adoption of modernism (particularly its major attribute of critical discourse) as a personal creed in the émigré environment of America. And this modernism is by no means, Sharabi never tires of affirming, incompatible with upholding traditional heritage. 

Sharabi’s description in his article “How do We Understand the West?” of the major structures of Arab culture is comparable with Bara ’s identification of three types of cultures prevalent in the Arab world. Halim Barakat’s views in this respect are put forward in his contribution to the same conference titled “The Implications of Conflict and Multiplicity Within Cultural Entity: The Principles of Confrontation in the Relation between the Arabs and the West”. 

In this contribution, Barakat argues that there are three types of culture in the Arab world (which somewhat corresponds to Sharabi’s three paradigms: First, the common culture in which religion and fundamentalist principles play a vital role in controlling people’s lives and modes of thinking; second, minor culture whose force is based on tribalism, clan ties, ethnicity and social class; third, a critical liberal culture marked with modernist trends and progressive views on the ideological level, thus it stands in oppositional relationship to the first type of culture. Western society, according to Barakat, has somewhat similar categories of culture. In both the West and the Arab world, the first two types of culture lack the important attribute of critical consciousness necessary for objective evaluation of Self and Other which may keep the door open for interaction and mutual understanding between them. The absence of criticism in these two types of culture and their characteristic propensity for inward looking, according to Barakat, make it impossible for dialogue between them to develop. He goes on to add that dialogue between the West and the Arab world can take place only on the level of the third type of culture. This controversial issue generated a great deal of discussion at the conference. Most of the participants did not subscribe to Barakat’s theory, but for him initiating dialogue and communication between the third type of culture in the West and its equivalent in the Arab world was one of the main functions of Arab intellectuals in Mahjar.

Barakat’s and Sharabi’s common attraction to modernism, especially in its celebration of freedom, independent thinking, and human progress, stems from their paramount concern for the development  of an Arab modernity. For Sharabi, Arab modernity is a preliminary step towards the revival  of a new Arab Renaissance that would complete the project begun with the first Arab Renaissance at the beginning of the 19th century.

Shararabi’s and Barakat’s shared vision that people in the East and the West should transcend binary thought and reductionists cultural categorisations as a means towards achieving better human understanding, tolerance, and healthy transformation brings to mind Mustafa Said’s “Dedication” at the end of “Season of Migration to the North”. The dedication  highlights the primary source of Said’s painful conflicts and his eventual tragic death as a hyphenated person living between two cultures without being able to achieve a harmonious reconciliation between them: “To those who see with one eye, speak with one tongue and see things as either black or white, Eastern or Western.”