Arab awakening and Islamic revival : the politics of ideas in the Middle East

306 Pages·2011·1.95 MB·English

by  Martin Seth Kramer

ArAb AwAkening And
islAmic revivAl
The Politics of Ideas in the Middle East
martin kramer
Transaction Publishers
New Brunswick (U.S.A.) and London (U.K.)
Second paperback printing 2009
Copyright © 1996 by Transaction Publishers, New Brunswick, New Jersey
08903.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright
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Library of Congress Catalog Number: 96-18312
ISBN: 978-1-56000-272-7 (cloth); 978-1-4128-0767-8 (paper)
Printed in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Kramer, Martin S.
Arab awakening and Islamic revival : the politics of ideas in the Middle East
/ Martin Kramer.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index.
ISBN 1-5600-272-7 (alk. paper)
1. Nationalism—Arab countries—History. 2. Islam—20th century.
3. Middle East—History—20th century. I. Title.
DS63.6.K73 1996
320.5'4'09174924—dc20 96-183123
CIP
To Bernard Lewis
master, mentor, mensch
contents
Acknowledgments vii
Introduction 1
Part i: Arabism and Friends
1. Arab Nationalism: Mistaken Identity 19
2. Arab Pen, English Purse:
John Sabunji and Wilfrid Scawen Blunt 53
3. Arabistik and Arabism: The Passions of Martin Hartmann 63
4. The Sharifian Propaganda of Eugène Jung 87
5. The Arab Nation of Shakib Arslan 103
6. Ambition, Arabism, and George Antonius 111
7. Prisoner of Love: Jean Genet and Palestine 125
8. America’s Arabists 133
Part ii: islamism and the west
9. “Islam is the Power of the Future” 141
10. Khomeini’s Messengers in Mecca 161
11. Syria’s Alawis and Shi‘ism 189
12. Hizbullah: The Calculus of Jihad 209
13. Sacrifice and “Self-Martyrdom” in Shi‘ite Lebanon 231
14. France Held Hostage 245
15. Islam and the West (including Manhattan) 255
16. Islam vs. Democracy 265
Conclusion 279
Index 287

Acknowledgments vii
Acknowledgments
This volume brings together sixteen separate but closely related stud-
ies, bound together by an introduction and conclusion. Chapter 9 is a new
study; all other studies have been previously published, and are reprinted
here by permission. Chapter 1 appeared in 1993 in Dædalus, a journal
published by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, in the issue
entitled “Reconstructing Nations and States.” Chapter 2 appeared in The
Islamic World From Classical to Modern Times: Essays in Honor of Ber-
nard Lewis, edited by C. E. Bosworth and others, and published by Darwin
Press in 1989. Chapter 3 is a revised version of an article published by
Middle Eastern Studies, a Frank Cass journal, in 1989. Chapter 4 appeared
in The Hashemites in the Modern Arab World: A Festschrift in Honour
of the late Uriel Dann, edited by Asher Susser and Aryeh Shmuelevitz
and published by Frank Cass in 1995. Middle Eastern Studies published
chapter 5 in 1987, and chapter 6 formed a part of The Great Powers and
the Middle East, 1919–1939, edited by Uriel Dann and published by Hol-
mes and Meier in 1988. Commentary published chapters 7 and 8 in 1994.
Chapter 10 is an updated version of an article that appeared in Religious
Radicalism and Politics in the Middle East edited by Emmanuel Sivan
and Menahem Friedman and published by the State University of New
York Press in 1990. Chapter 11 originally appeared in Shi‘ism, Resistance,
and Revolution, a collection edited by myself and published by Westview
Press in 1987. Chapter 12 originally appeared in Fundamentalisms and
the State: Remaking Polities, Economies, and Militance, edited by Martin
Marty and R. Scott Appleby and published by the University of Chicago
Press in 1993. Chapter 13, published here in a slightly abbreviated form,
appeared in Violence and the Sacred in the Modern World, edited by Mark
Juergensmeyer and published by Frank Cass in 1992. Terrorism and Po-
litical Violence, a Frank Cass journal, published chapter 14 in 1990, and
Commentary published chapters 15 and 16 in 1993. I am grateful to the
publishers of the above for their kind permission to reprint.
I wrote nearly all of these studies at Tel Aviv University’s Moshe Dayan
Center for Middle Eastern and African Studies, which I now direct. I am
vii
viii Arab Awakening and islamic revival
indebted to the two past directors, Itamar Rabinovich and Asher Susser, for
opening wide space for thinking, research, and writing. I owe another debt
to Martin Indyk and Robert Satloff, the previous and present directors of
the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, who encouraged my broader
inquiries into the nature of Islamism. I gratefully acknowledge Irving Louis
Horowitz of Transaction Publishers, whose suggestions helped to give this
book its final form. My gratitude goes also to my parents, Anita and Alvin
Kramer, in whose wooded retreat I prepared this book for publication. Fi-
nally, I embrace in thanks my wife Sandra and our children, who stoically
bore my long absences as I pursued leads wherever they led.
introduction 
introduction
For the Middle East, the old appellation of the Ottoman Empire—the
“sick man”—still seems apt. The social and political order in the Middle
East seems as afflicted today as it appeared to observers a century ago,
and many of the symptoms have not changed. Paul Kennedy, author of
Preparing for the Twenty-First Century, has provided the kind of trenchant
summation perhaps only a complete outsider can dare to offer:
Far from preparing for the twenty-first century, much of the Arab and Muslim world
appears to have difficulty in coming to terms with the nineteenth century, with its
composite legacy of secularization, democracy, laissez-faire economics, transnational
industrial and commercial linkages, social change, and intellectual questioning. If one
needed an example of the importance of cultural attitudes in explaining a society’s
response to change, contemporary Islam provides it.1
Some historians and political scientists of the Middle East would recoil
at this hint of cultural determinism, and most Arabs and Muslims would
blame colonialism instead. But the Arab and Muslim world’s “difficulty
in coming to terms” is undeniable.
This book is a critical assessment of two attempts to overcome that
difficulty: Arab nationalism (or Arabism) and Islamic fundamentalism
(or Islamism). Believers in each have tried to remake the modern Middle
East into a seat of power and prosperity. So far they have failed, in many
instances producing even more serious complications. While Arab na-
tionalism seems finally to have been abandoned, Islamic fundamentalism
remains the most widespread alternative to the resolute pragmatism of the
“new Middle East.” Whether it will prevail is one of the great preoccupa-
tions of our own fin-de-siècle.
But this is not a future study. It is a book about modern history and
contemporary politics, looking back over a troubled Arab century and a
difficult Islamic decade. Like Europe, the Middle East has been buffeted
by ideologies. Admittedly, their effects have not been as devastating in the
Middle East; Europe paid for its nationalism with two terrible world wars,
and then paid again for its communism with over forty years of threat and