Arab Marxism and National Liberation: Selected Writings of Mahdi Amel
Simon Conrad
Simon Conrad, PhD candidate in the Department of Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University and contributing editor at Borderlines, sat down with Angela Giordani (trans.) and Hicham Safieddine (ed.) to discuss the book’s recent publication with Brill (2020). Arab Marxism and National Liberation is also forthcoming in a paperback edition on 23 December 2021 by Haymarket Books.
Arab Marxism and National Liberation introduces an English readership to the rich thought of the Lebanese Marxist thinker Mahdi Amel (1936-87). The six translated excerpts are testimony to both the scope and breadth of Amel’s thought, ranging from the vexed question of the Arab Cultural Heritage, Amel’s central concern with colonialism and underdevelopment, to the “Sectarian State” – the excerpt reproduced here is made with special permission by the volume’s editor and translator.
Part I: Conversation with Angela Giordani and Hicham Safieddine
Simon Conrad (SC): You introduce Mahdi Amel as an intellectual for whom revolutionary theory and revolutionary practice were closely linked – and as an intellectual whose memory you seek to keep alive by publishing some of his essays in English. Why did you decide to translate sections of Amel’s writing?
Angela Giordani (AG): The volume was not my initiative, so I’ll let Hicham speak to why he took it on and chose the texts included. He pitched the project to me on a Skype call while I was in Cairo, a few months into my dissertation research, and I gladly got on board. At the time, I was only generally familiar with Amel’s work and ideas. But, I knew enough to recognize what a significant contribution it would be to bring his work into English. I also knew that the archive of Marxian theory in Arabic is massive, rich, and sophisticated and that its authors are for the most part unknown outside of the Arab world unless they wrote substantial works in English or French, as Samir Amin and Anouar Abd al-Malek did. Even amongst Middle East specialists, these are for the most part the only Arab Marxist theorists you see cited (as interlocutors rather than subjects; more on this in a moment). Meanwhile, you have prolific and systematic Marxist theoreticians like Mahdi Amel and Husayn Muruwwah—another Lebanese Communist Party member, who, as it happens, was assassinated only a few months before Amel—and wrote his major works in Arabic. Even in a Middle East Studies crowd, these giants of the Arab Marxist tradition still need introducing. We are now in the midst of a “revival” of sorts in research on the Arab Left that is changing this, evident in recent works like the Arab Left volume edited by Laure Guirguis and Fadi Bardawil’s Revolution and Disenchantment on Waddah Charara and the Marxists of Socialist Lebanon. This literature is doing wonderful work on many fronts. It is very importantly highlighting and contesting the tendency in existing scholarship to read Arab theorists—to quote Omina El Shakry’s recent state-of-the-field piece—as “mere exemplars of Arab thought” rather than thinkers in their own right whose work “generate[s] epistemologies for modern social theory”.[1] For Arabic-language theory to truly become a resource in Western scholarship rather than an object for analysis, however, we need more than a new hermeneutic. We need this theory to be made available in Western languages. And we need it in volumes, not merely anthologies with a few pages-long excerpt of a thinker’s work whose oeuvre is, like Amel’s, thousands of pages long. So we hope that our book is followed by many more of a similar ilk.
Hicham Safieddine (HS): I was invited to oversee this translation by the Mahdi Amel Cultural Center (MACC) in Beirut, which was set up by Amel’s family and friends in the aftermath of his assassination to preserve and disseminate his intellectual heritage in all languages. Amel has been translated into French. The idea of publishing an English translation was rekindled in 2014 thanks to the enthusiastic suggestion by Vijay Prashad, Executive Director of the Tricontinental Institute for Social Research and Chief Editor of LeftWord Books.
I immediately recognized the significance of the project for all the reasons listed by Angela above. Ideally, I would have liked to translate his works in toto. This is more so given his didactic style, which makes it difficult to detach some sections rather than others. But his works at times can be repetitive. Also, translating entire works requires more money and time, and ultimately, we would have to choose a single work. Given that Amel hadn’t been published in English at all, that would have denied English readers a much broader introduction to the rich heritage of Amel in relation to a diverse set of topics. Once an anthology is out, we hope it would prompt further translations of his and other works.
SC: Could you say a word or two about the translation and publication process – the people involved, finding a publisher, selecting, texts, etc.?
HS: I’ll let Angela speak on the translation process. In terms of text selection, I worked in close contact with the MACC’s Redha Hamdan and the late Evelyne Hamdan as well as Alexandre Ammar, who drew on his intimate knowledge of Amel’s works, to help choose significant texts for translation. The MACC were already in touch with Brill who expressed interest. Three things had been lacking: an editor, a translator, and funding. Once I joined as editor, I brought Angela on board and secured private funding, and we were good to go.
AG: As the translator rather than the editor of our volume, I was not actively involved in the work of text selection, solicitation of support, or finding a publisher. But I did watch Hicham handle these tasks, with interest, because I have plans for other, similar translation projects. I think it is worth highlighting the absence of the institutions which typically support our work as historians—whether our home departments or the foundations that support historical research in the North Atlantic academy—from the process of producing our volume. Whatever support we received came from the Mahdi Amel Center and Hicham’s contacts in Beirut. This is of course because, as a translation project, our volume does not qualify as “real” scholarship in the eyes of the Anglophone historical profession. It seems to be somewhat different for our colleagues in literature departments, where translation is a respected, well-theorized pursuit. Amongst historians—of the modern period especially—on the other hand, it would not be an exaggeration to say that a translation project usually works against the scholar who elects to do it, if they are a junior scholar, as such projects do not count towards tenure and take up time that should (so we are told) be spent on projects that do. Giancarlo Casale recently gave an interview where he reflected on how paradoxical it is that historians, in particular, would regard the intense kind of contextualization entailed in translating a text from a different time and place as somehow outside their vocation. Who better than a historian to recognize and honor the historicity of a given text? Who knows better, to quote Casale, “that words from a different time and place do not have quite the same meaning that they have for us”? Isn’t it our training to figure out how to put the particular language of a particular time and place in terms that speak to us today, in their alterity?
There is in my view real urgency to the matter of addressing what Casale politely labels “historians’ conflicted relationship with translation.” It is clearly implicated in the reproduction of the Eurocentricity of our discipline in general, and of intellectual history, in particular. If we are given no professional credit or support for translating modern thinkers and theorists who wrote in non-European languages, it should go without saying, there will be no such thinkers and theorists on modern intellectual history syllabi, and the so-called “global turn” of this still profoundly Eurocentric field will remain superficial and unconvincing.
SC: Let’s turn to Amel’s thought itself. Instead of asking you what characterized Amel’s Marxist thought and action, maybe I could ask you to elaborate on your take on two or three of the many concepts that Amel introduced to his readers. Are there concepts you found particularly thought-provoking?
AG: I would actually like to address the broader question you posed and politely redacted about Amel’s particular brand of Marxist thought and action, because he was very adamant about the importance of defining a “truly sound” (and thus revolutionary) Marxist theoretical practice against what he saw to be the misguided, dominant modes of Marxist thought in the Arab world. He discusses this at relative length in the introduction to his Muqaddimat Nazariyya li Dirasat al-Fikr al-Ishtiraki fi Harakat al-Taharrur al-Watani (Theoretical Prolegomena to the Study of the Impact of Socialist Thought on the National Liberation Movement), which can be found at the start of Chapter 3 in our volume. It’s a remarkable, dense few pages that were exceptionally challenging to translate. What he says there, basically, is that Marxist theory deserving of the name will always take what he calls “pre-formed Marxist thought”—whether class analysis or a particular analytical category, like the petite bourgeoisie—as itself “an object of inquiry.” It will, in other words, never take for granted that a given paradigm or concept, however authoritative, is applicable to “our colonial reality.” This is of course precisely what Amel accuses his contemporaries of doing in their self-proclaimed Marxist analyses of phenomena in modern Arab societies. Rather than fixed Marxist analytics or premises, the “point of departure” for Amel’s “true” Marxist theory is always necessarily “our reality in its own process of formation.” He uses the same word—haraka—to describe both the process of this kind of thinking and the reality of which it produces scientific knowledge. I feel that there is something missed in the idiomatic “thought process” that we used to render “harakat al-fikr.” We did so, however, because “thought movement” or “intellectual movement” of course invokes something different in English than what’s intended when Amel talks about method, for example, as kayfiyyat harakat al-fikr fi i‘tibarihi al-waqi‘ mawdu‘an lahu, which we rendered as “the modality by which the thought process takes reality as its subject.”. I think this particular line nicely conveys—albeit in terms that don’t seamlessly translate—the fundamentally dynamic sort program of thought and action that Amel saw it as his life’s work to produce “in the name of Marxism.”
HS: Amel’s method of analysis, which Angela has just described, led him to coin new terms and develop new concepts in order to explain colonial social reality. I discuss several of those in brief in the introduction to the anthology and in more detail in my recent journal article about Amel’s articulation of hegemony in a colonial and sectarian context. Two major concepts are the colonial mode of production (CoMP) and a sectarian hegemonic balance. The former is a foundational concept in Amel’s theoretical universe. Amel defines the CoMP as “the form of capitalism structurally dependent on imperialism in its historical formation and contemporary development.” Contradictions that shape and drive class struggle under a CoMP operate at the level of the interaction of the two interdependent structures of capitalist and colonised social formations. This creates multiple and complex layers of contradictions. Its shortcomings notwithstanding, the CoMP is a powerful tool to centre capitalism as the driving force of modern colonial history without falling into a Eurocentric interpretation. The concept of sectarian hegemonic balance is deployed by Amel to explain the power-sharing arrangement in Lebanon. Amel argues that the idea of equal participation of sects is an illusion of non-hegemonic factions of the Lebanese bourgeoisie seeking a piece of the power pie. One sect must always exercise hegemony. Otherwise, the central state would risk decentralisation. Writing in the 1980s, the idea of a sectarian hegemonic balance can still be useful to explain the political deadlock facing Lebanon today.
SC: Let us briefly turn to the extracts you generously agreed to publish with borderlines. In the excerpt, Amel calls for a historically empirical analysis of the ways in which ‘sectarianism’ is produced. Could you elaborate on the importance Amel attributes to historical research?
HS: Ussama Makdisi was the first scholar in Anglophone literature to produce an authoritative and transformative historical study of sectarianism in which he historicizes the concept and labels it as modern and labels it as political rather than ancient and primordial. Much earlier, Amel theorized and historicized sectarianism along similar lines, although he posited a full rupture between pre- and post-19th century phenomena labeled as sectarianism and made a categorical distinction between sectarianism as a political system and religious identity. In general, however, Amel did more theorizing and less historicizing. He was in fact criticized by his peers for being too abstract. His response was that he is a theorist, not a historian, and invoked the latter to the extent that it helped him to better articulate his theory. But by Amel’s own standards or methodology outlined above, empirical reality, and therefore concrete history, must be taken into account in order to test the validity of Amel’s theories and concepts. Knowledge is never an individual project. Amel labored over the theory. It is incumbent on others to adopt or challenge his work in light of historical evidence and developments.
SC: This interview and extract is part of borderlines’ series on ‘worldmaking’ – a term that has recently been applied to post-imperial political transformation in decolonizing societies, but a term we at borderlines think might just as well be applied to intellectual, cultural, and artistic transformation at the time. In what respect – if at all – would you say Amel was engaged in ‘worldmaking’?
AG: It’s an interesting question, not least of all because there is not really a word for “decolonization” in Arabic. The operative terms are, rather, tahrir and taharrur, both words for “liberation.” These are the terms Amel uses, as in the title of his opus, Theoretical Prolegomena to the Study of the Impact of Socialist Thought on the National Liberation Movement. It is difficult to overstate the significance of national liberation movements born of anti-colonial struggle in Amel’s thinking. Such movements are, he argues, the major motive-force in global history after World War II when it becomes clear to him that the socialist revolution cannot obtain in the West or anywhere else without the success of the national liberation project in the Third World. So for Amel, decolonization/anticolonial liberation is the precondition for any truly transformative sort of “worldmaking” worthy of the word, and this is why he committed his life to fighting for it, in theory, and practice.
HS: In addition to Amel’s focus on national liberation as the motor of 20th century world history (he explicitly criticized the use of “decolonization” by Jacques Berque or Frantz Fanon), Amel emphasized throughout his work the interplay of the universal and the particular – in classical Marxist fashion. This enabled him to universalize Arab history as part of global history as well as retheorize Marxism itself in a colonial context. In other words, he offered us a universal theory of colonialism. That is worldmaking in the realm of ideas.
SC: A question or two on translation, if I may. You mention the “apparent opaqueness” in Amel’s writing, a shortcoming that can be found in the texts of European philosophers, too. Could you describe this opaqueness? And how did you deal with the opaqueness when reading and translating Amel? What else is particular about Amel’s language and style?
AG: This is something I spoke about for the entirety of my presentation for our recent book symposium. And I felt it was important to deal with because readers might be tempted to take Amel less seriously due to his famously (or perhaps infamously) difficult style, when in fact I think it is a very deliberate and self-conscious approach to theory that deserves our attention, especially those of us who practice and teach theory. I think his idiosyncratic style, in its remarkable (and at times maddening) reflexivity, very aptly actualizes his methodological commitments, which are stated most directly in the excerpt of his Theoretical Prolegomena included in Chapter 3 of our volume. I’ve already talked about how Amel understands “sound” Marxist thinking as constituted by relentless self-critique and interrogation of pre-formed thought. That such thinking would result in repetitive, dense writing—where a theory or concept is rehashed or re-tested in light of a different historical example or context—should not surprise us. For Amel, this is how theories and concepts “prove” their efficacy, and it guides his revision of Marxist concepts and theories to account for the facets of our colonial reality of which Marx was unaware.
SC: Let’s turn to the recent reception of Amel’s writing. You hint at a renewed interest in his life and thought and reference the revolutions of the ‘Arab Spring’ while noting that recent studies of Amel are in some cases colored by “postmodern inflections or romanticized generalizations”. Could you elaborate on this recent engagement? Why do you think it resonates with the lives of its more recent readers?
HS: I do reference the “Arab uprisings” to be precise. I think Amel’s unfinished project of revolution is what makes his statements attractive to the lives of the current generation.
Recent engagements with Amel can be, for the sake of analytical clarity, divided into popular and intellectual engagements. The former is welcome, even if they are generally romanticized and taken out of context, without necessarily failing to speak to current realities. Mass protests across the Arab region witnessed a cultural revival of leftist slogans. Murals, memes, and other forms of expression borrowed Amel’s aphorisms to express contemporary conditions of struggle. These include “you are not defeated as long as you resist” and “how can revolution be pure when it is born out of the guts of the present, soiled by it.” The latter was particularly invoked at times to justify or explain reactionary elements within forces identified with the revolution, for instance in the case of Syria or Lebanon. But such invocations forget the second half of Amel’s adage, namely that the revolution is supposed to “destroy this present and cleanse itself with the promise that humans are beautiful and free.”
The intellectual engagement with Amel has been less productive in my opinion. It is part of a swell of interest in Marxism post the uprisings, which is great. But at times, and in relation to Arab Marxism, it turned into a fetish, or trend, with superficial or cynical analysis. There is a new and worrying trend of intellectual pessimism among rising scholars of Arab thought that reproduces tropes of a defeated Arab progressive culture in a reductionist and at times orientalist manner that Amel himself opposed. A case in point, although it doesn’t treat Amel except tangentially, is Fadi Bardawil’s book that Angela referred to earlier. Bardawil, as Nate George’s excellent book review recently illustrates, focuses on a marginal and reactionary ex-Lebanese leftist, Waddah Charara, to make sweeping conclusions about the “disenchanted” Lebanese left. My point is that we must first excavate a lot more of the Arab Left before we can make a proper historical judgment of its role and contribution, and when we do so, we must go beyond celebratory rhetoric and engage in critical but respectful debate about the material at hand.
SC: Now, for the first time and thanks to your translation and edition, Mahdi Amel will have an English readership, too. What advice would you give Amel’s new English readership when it comes to reading his essays?
AG: As I mentioned earlier, I translated these essays in parallel with writing my dissertation. So I was actually thinking a lot about the question of readability at the time. As I addressed at length in my response to an earlier question, Amel’s style is anything but easy. Hicham would often use the words labyrinth and algorithm to describe Amel’s sentences. Both words are perfectly apt, in large part I think because both name something consciously constructed that comprises several steps or components and becomes comprehensible as a whole only after you’ve really mastered it, or gone through it several times. I think this is precisely what Amel is trying to do—to lay down new paths and formulas for thinking to get us from where we are to someplace we can’t anticipate. This is not easy work, so it’s not surprising that the sentences that lay these paths are not easy. As David McNally has aptly observed, there is a very experimental nature to Amel’s thinking, such that you feel like you are in an idea laboratory where concepts are being tested, compounded, and stretched to their limits. Yet it’s not a reckless sort of experimentation. On the contrary, each step of Amel’s “thought movement” is painstakingly examined, and every concept or paradigm introduced is done so only provisionally until it proves its worth. I would often think about how difficult it would be to write this way, with constant attention to the historicity of my terms and suspicion of the validity of not only my arguments, but my questions. This is of course the very sort of attention and suspicion that we try to teach undergrads in our “introductory to theory” courses. But I don’t think it’s something we see practiced in most of the texts taught in such a course with the level of rigor we see in Amel’s work.
HS: I would simply add a few more pieces of advice. The first is to read him in the context of his own times, which means situating him in the long trajectory of the evolution of Marxist thought in the 20th century and avoiding post-modern interpretations of his work. The second is to be patient when reading him. Some of the most illuminating insights are buried in the middle of his dense writing and appear after elaborate introductory remarks. The third is to read his work as an indivisible whole. The big picture is only visible after bringing together all the pieces of the puzzle. This means that the current anthology is not the whole story.
Part II: Excerpt from the translation
Book Title: On the Sectarian State
Beirut: Dar al-Farabi, 3rd edition, 2003. (First published in 1986).
Chapter 5: The Question of History
Section 8: Materialist Thought and the Sectarian Question
The problem is clearly the following: can we view sectarianism through the lens of class analysis? Are the specific conceptual and theoretical tools of materialist thought capable of producing a concrete knowledge of a concrete situation known in Lebanon as ‘sectarianism’? In producing such knowledge, it is impossible to reconcile this [materialist] thought with its antithesis, i.e. dominant bourgeois thought in its sectarian form. The only way to produce such knowledge is to radically and rigorously refute this dominant thought. This refutation starts by drawing a clear epistemological distinction [between dominant bourgeois thought] and materialist thought. Failing to establish such a separation is perhaps the basic mistake made by most adherents of materialist thought who have treated this problem [of sectarianism]. As a result, the question of sectarianism became confused. The premises of materialist thought were conflated with those of its sectarian antithesis, and the process of refuting the latter was thwarted.
Our refutation begins with defining sect and then sectarianism. Either the sect is an independent stand-alone entity, as it is in bourgeois thought, or it is a determined political relation embedded in a particular political system, as it is in materialist thought. In producing knowledge, we must adhere to a self-consistent thought process from start to finish. It is therefore imperative that we define sectarianism in accordance with materialist thought and class analysis: Sectarianism is the particular historical form of the political system through which the Lebanese colonial bourgeoisie exercises its class dominance within a relation of structural dependency on imperialism. Does this mean that ‘sectarianism’ is particular to this colonial social structure (i.e. dependent capitalism), not to be found in other social structures that preceded it? The answer to this question is a definite yes. But it is only so if we take the concept of ‘sectarianism’ in this sense as I define here, and not in the widely-held sense – which is vague, murky, and imprecisely defined – that it has acquired in its bourgeois conceptualization. It is quite obvious that ‘sectarianism’ would be particular to dependent capitalism if this sectarianism were as I define it: the political system of bourgeois domination. For how could this bourgeois political system exist in structures which preceded the existence of the bourgeoisie itself as a dominant class? We have uncritically inherited the concept of ‘sectarian- ism’ from bourgeois ideology. This is why I was met with astonishment by those who objected to my assertion that ‘sectarianism’ must be situated in the structure of colonial relations of production as a bourgeois political system-specific and suited to this structure of relations. My [concept of] sectarianism is different from the widely-held meaning these [detractors] had inherited. This is why it is necessary to refute the concept of ‘sectarianism’ by drawing an epistemological distinction between bourgeois thought and its class negation. With that, I repeat my previous question: Does what I have said mean that the social structures which predated capitalism, such as those of 19th century Lebanon or prior, did not know ‘sectarianism’? What about the civil strife of 1860?
I argue that ‘sectarianism’ – or what is named as such in a language that has come to lack the bare minimum of precision – in those pre-existing structures is something other than what it is in colonial social structures. The material basis of this difference is, specifically, the difference between the former and latter [structures]. It is time for thought, if it truly seeks to produce knowledge, and be therefore materialist thought of a consistent nature, to formulate two different concepts for two different historical realities, or at least to distinguish between two different meanings (or contents) of a single concept (like the concept of ‘sectarianism’) that differ according to the difference between these two realities signified by that concept.
Section 9: On the History of Sectarianism
There is another question that must be asked: Does what I just said do away with history? Every phenomenon has its history. Does ‘sectarianism’ not also have a history, one that [Lebanese historian] Massoud Daher and others have attempted to examine? When it comes to this aspect of our subject, the most important task, I argue, is to define both the historical question and the way of posing it, or the form in which it should be posed.
Discourse on the history of sectarianism is meaningless if the sect is not defined in a precise manner. If it were defined in its present reality as the political system in which the Lebanese colonial bourgeoisie exercises its class dominance, then its history would be the history of this very system. In this regard, it is necessary to distinguish between this system’s history and the history of its formation, as one is not the same as the other. They do not belong to the same era but, rather, each exists in their own time period. The two are not separated in empirical historical reality by a particular date or event. These histories and eras, moreover, may overlap, and the duration of [the] transition from one to the other may vary depending on specific circumstances. Despite the difficulty of empirically separating between the two, it is imperative to distinguish between them. This distinction is epistemological because it is material. In light of this, perhaps it was the year 1926 when the Lebanese constitution was promulgated during the [French] mandate, that marks the historical beginning of this political system as a sectarian system for bourgeois domination. Perhaps this signpost was the year 1943 when Lebanon became politically independent under the leadership of this bourgeoisie. There is evidence and justification for adopting either of these approaches to identify the beginning of the history of the bourgeois political system as a sectarian system. I will not go into the details of this now. Rather, I want to emphasize the following, namely that if the French Mandate, thanks to the 1926 constitution, laid the (sectarian) foundation of this system, then the Lebanese bourgeoisie subsequently completed this system’s construction and strengthened it. It did so over at least the quarter of a century that followed independence – from 1943 to 19671 – by establishing institutions for sects that connected the latter to the state in a manner that would guarantee the sects’ independence. This means that the sects’ institutional existence, which is in effect their existence in a dependent relation to the state, is what guarantees them independence from the state. In this institutional existence and by virtue of it, they appear to be self-sustaining.
In other words, in their very institutional existence, sects are not self-sustaining except through their relation to the state. Their existence as such is the product and historical result of this political system. The history of sectarianism is thus the history of this very system. It is also the history of the class practices – political and ideological – employed by the dominant bourgeoisie with the goal of perpetuating the system of its class dominance. This very history – of this system and these practices – is in its inner movement inseparable from a counter-history, namely the history of class struggle against this bourgeois class order and these bourgeois class practices. The relation of contradiction between bourgeois history and its counter-history, as it manifests itself in the history of sectarianism, is none other than the relation of contradiction, in the history of class struggle within the Lebanese colonial social structure, between the following: the ruling bourgeoisie on one hand – with its sectarian system (which is the system of its class dominance) and its sectarian practices (which are its class practices) – and the toiling classes on the other hand (the working class and its allies) with its class practices, whether in opposition or in submission to that system.
The history of sectarianism is therefore the history of the transformation of this relation of class contradiction. It is not strange, therefore, that our examination of the history of sectarianism as a history of a bourgeois political system and of bourgeois class practices leads us to examine the history of the class struggle against the bourgeoisie as a history of struggle against this [sectarian] system and these practices. In fact, it is necessary – [rather than strange] – that this history of sectarianism is simultaneously a history and counter-history. This is so because this history of sectarianism is itself the history of the class struggle, and of the forms taken by this struggle and its instruments in the Lebanese colonial social structure. The movement of contradiction in this history is therefore between the bourgeoisie and the working class, or we could say the dominant and toiling classes in this structure. It is a contradictory history. This is because this history is viewed differently from the standpoint of the dominant bourgeoisie compared to the standpoint of the working classes. In the former’s view, it might be as I said a history of a system and of institutions, and maybe a history of sects as well. Because it is such, it is a history that recedes into what preceded the colonial structure. It is an extension of what came before by which the present is identified with the past without distinction, i.e. in a manner [that] necessarily conceals the perpetuation of the existing bourgeois system. This is the concealment of both the relation of class dominance specific to the colonial bourgeoisie and of the system of its rule, whose renewal is conditional on the structural relation of dependency to imperialism (the colonial relation). In the second case, i.e. when this history is viewed from the standpoint of the working class, it is necessarily a history of class struggle against this system and its institutions, i.e. against sects and the bourgeois system of these sects’ institutional existence, a system that is one and the same as the political system for bourgeois rule. This, precisely, is the history of sectarianism, which has no other history, except for what resides as illusions in dominant bourgeois ideology.
As for the history of the formation of sectarianism, it is the history of the formation of the bourgeois political system, which is inseparable from the history of the formation of the Lebanese social structure as a colonial structure. This system arose and was constituted as a sectarian order within this structure and its own formation. The movement of this formation is complex. It is the [twin] movement of the dismantling of the previous social structure – let us call it the feudal structure – and the building-up of the new capitalist structure. These two connected movements comprise a single, complex movement in which each of the two defines and is defined by the other. The dismantling of the feudal structure is conditional on the formation of new capitalist relations, a process that is [in turn] conditional on the dismantling of the previous structure. The sectarian question brings us back to the conditions of this single, complex historical movement of the dismantling of the old and formation of the new. This question is as follows: What are the specific historical conditions in which the Lebanese bourgeois political order formed as a sectarian order?
Perhaps it is wise to pose another, broader question. First, namely, why did the Lebanese bourgeois political system turn out to be sectarian? This question straddles the structural and the historical, so to speak. Its answer is as follows: This order came out as a sectarian order because it formed under specific historical conditions that explain its specific formation. The historical question at hand thus takes the following form: Which conditions explain the bourgeois system in its sectarian form? The basis of such an explanation, in the final analysis, is that capitalism in Lebanon entered its crisis phase as it entered its formation phase. Capitalism began to form in Lebanon during the crisis phase of the capitalist mode of production, namely its phase of transition to imperialism. Thus we find that the crisis of the development of imperialism, which is the crisis of capitalist development, lies at the basis of the formation of the bourgeois political order as a sectarian order. The organic link between sectarianism and imperialism appears, therefore, in the formation of the Lebanese social structure as a colonial structure. The history of the formation of sectarianism, as outlined above, traces its beginnings to the mid-nineteenth century. By that, I am not saying that this history began with some specific event or set of events, such as those of 1860. What I mean, rather, is that it is traceable to a structure in-formation, specifically to the beginning of the formation of capitalist relations of production under the aegis of capitalist-imperialist penetration, the disintegration of feudal relations – in a relative, distinct historical form – and the breakup of the Ottoman state. Tracing this history to what existed before these relations of production, without distinguishing between the different social eras before and after their formation, leads to nothing but ambiguity when treating the sectarian question, especially its historical dimension.
Note:
[1] Omnia El Shakry, “Rethinking Arab Intellectual History: Epistemology, Historicism, Secularism,” MIH, (2019): 4.
Angela Giordani is an Abdallah S. Kamel Resident Research Fellow at Yale Law School. Her research focuses on the intellectual history of Islam and philosophy in the modern Arab world. She is currently developing a book manuscript, Scions of Ibn Sina: Arab Humanists and Islamic Philosophy in the Twentieth Century, based on her dissertation. Her translations and articles have also appeared in Jadaliyya, The Legal Agenda, and the MLA's Arab Renaissance Anthology.
Hicham Safieddine is a Lecturer in the History of the Modern Middle East at King’s College at the University of London, where his current research explores the history of financial colonization, including the creation of central banks, across the Global South with particular emphasis on Arab societies and states. Recent publications include Banking on the State: The Financial Foundations of Lebanon (Stanford University Press, 2019) and an edited volume co-published with Jens Hanssen, The Clarion of Syria: A Patriot’s Call to Overcome the Civil War of 1860 (University of California Press, 2019). In addition to his academic research and teaching, Hicham is the co-founder of e-zines Al-Akhbar English and The Legal Agenda’s English Edition. His public writings have appeared in The Toronto Star, Al-Jazeera English, The Monthly Review, Le Monde Diplomatique, Al-Adaab, Middle East Eye, Egypt Independent, Assafir, Jadaliyya, and Al-Ahram Weekly.
Prepared with the editorial assistance of Nishat Akhtar.