Being Arab
By Samir Kassir
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About this ebook
Samir Kassir
Samir Kassir (1960-2005) was a columnist for the daily newspaper An-Nahar, wrote regularly for Le Monde Diplomatique, and published a number of important works in French as well as Arabic. He was killed by a car bomb in Beirut on June 2, 2005.
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Being Arab - Samir Kassir
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