The Arab Predicament: Arab Political Thought and Practice since 1967

by Fouad Ajami

How have Arab political ideas and institutions evolved since the 1967 War? How have the Arabs contended with the external influences to which their wealth has exposed them? What are the implications of the rise of Islamic fundamentalism? Fouad Ajami seeks to answer these and related questions in his illuminating study of the constraints and possibilities facing the Arab world today. This book documents the political and intellectual response to the defeat of 1967 and surveys the choices facing the Arab world as exemplified by the case of Egypt. It seeks to explain the resurgence of Islamic fundamentalism and locates its roots in the failures of the dominant political order, and the stalemate of secular political ideas. This revised 1992 edition of Ajami's acclaimed study has been updated and renews the book's status as an indispensable guide to the politics of the Arab world.

Genres: Middle East, Politics, History, Nonfiction, Sociology, Israel, Philosophy

300 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1981

Reviews

[Joseph Stieb · Rating 3 out of 5]

Ajami's work is always a little bit fascinating and equal parts frustrating. He tends to write in long, disorganized, elliptical, often somewhat cryptic chapters that feel almost like a stream of consciousness analysis. This book is a little more readable and organized than some of his later work, and there are some important ideas in here for understand Arab politics in from the 60s to the 80 as well as Ajami's later influence on US foreign policy.

The main goal of this book is to explain how Arab thinkers and politicians responded to the defeat of 1967 and the quasi-victory of 1973. You have to extrapolate a bit from his somewhat meandering style, but overall Ajami believes that the Arab predicament is that they have tried to import various socio-political models (liberalism, Marxism, nationalism) as panaceas to the larger problem of how to adapt the Arab/Islamic world to Western-created modernity. That modernity is the central fact that confronts the ARab world for Ajami and indeed the entire global South, and it has created a resentful inferiority complex there that is a primary obstacle to real change.

The Arab political scene has lurched from model to model, finally moving by the late 1970s to Islamic fundamentalism, which Ajami portrays as supposedly more authentic/indigenous but not necessarily more promising. Each of these models, for Ajami, was really an act of cultural self-consolation, a way to explain or explain away the decline of the Arab/Islamic worlds, a way to find scapegoats (capitalists, imperialists, Zionists, the US, etc) rather than face up to more central problems of social and economic life: the lack of freedom, the muzzled press, mass poverty, poor educational system, an elite seeking to flee to the West, state-bound economies. His main critique is that you can't import the stuff of the West (technology, education, media, communications) without bringing in the underlying culture of what Jonathan Rauch later called "liberal science," or an attitude of the open exchanging and testing of ideas within a larger marketplace that's largely unregulated by the state.

Ajami, at least at this point in history, is not a pure universalist who thinks that Western ideas and
structures can be applied in the Arab/Islamic worlds if only the right leaders are put in charge. However, he disappointingly doesn't offer much about how to resolve this predicament. It will be interesting to see over the course of his career how he repackaged and adapted this predicament and its solutions as his notoriety in US political and intellectual circles grew.

I think the most interesting way to look at Ajami is as a thinker not just about the Arab and Islamic worlds but about the entire global South. To me, he's a cultural and intellectual interpreter of this world to the power structures and intellectual circles of the West, and he does this interpreting in a way that generally flatters the West. The predicament he describes is essentially that the West created the vast majority of the ideas, technologies, economics, and power relations of modernity and then, one way or another, compelled the rest of the world to adapt, adopt, or reject to some degree. The power of the West was unquestionable, and it raised questions for anyone in the GLobal South: Why did my civilization and culture fail to produce what the West did? How did things go wrong? How did we get conquered or subjugated? This obviously isn't the only way the peoples of the GLobal South responded to Western technology, but it's hard not to see the ARab world seeing itself in this light to an extent. The extreme fixation on the state of Israel as an imperialist usurper and conquerer, a stinging reminder of the superiority of Western ideas/power/technology that the Arab states failed to conquer, speaks to this larger theme of responding to inferiority (in power relations and influence, not inherent cultural or racial hierarchy). I want to study Ajami as an interpreter of the Global South, especially the roots of anti-Western extremism of many kinds, as the US and that world came into greater conflict in the late 20th and 21st centuries.

This is really only a book for scholars interested in Arab political thought or some of the themes I've described above. It's dense and you have to know a lot of Middle Eastern history to understand it, so I don't really recommend it to general readers, or even to other scholars.

[Jerry · Rating 5 out of 5]

We are free to choose the symbols we wish to fight others with, but the symbols we use make their own demands.

This is a historical perspective of Arab politics from only a few years later. Specifically, the decline of pan-Arabism after the decisive Israeli defeat of the combined attack on Israel in 1967.

However, besides being useful in understanding the politics of the Middle East, this is as much a general discussion of how a disconnected elite can lose a culture as it is a specific discussion of trends in the Arab world.

In the words of Albert Hourani, this disconnection “reveals itself in lostness, pretentiousness, cynicism and despair.”

As do many commentators in other quarters, Ajami does not see a rise in Islamic fundamentalism so much as a weakening of the power of the elite to control the masses.

The Islamic world is no more Islamic today than it was a decade or a quarter century ago. It only seems more so, because mobilization has succeeded in bringing into the political arena classes and individuals traditionally cowed by political authority and convinced that power is the realm of people other than themselves.

One insightful claim, in my opinion, is that the elite on all sides viewed religion as the dead hand of the past and safely ignored. The insightful part of that observation is that:

This is not an analytical judgment on the part of secular ideologists, but, paradoxically, an article of faith that is adhered to with the same intensity with which religious beliefs are said to be held.

Further,

…the consensus on the obsolescence of traditional orders has been so overwhelming that those who hold it have felt no obligation to supply proof or to look into the tradition in question. In simplistic fashion, tradition and modernity are seen as two radically different worlds. The supremacy of modernity is an article of faith.

The resurgence of fundamentalism in secular life is helped by the tyranny that permeates secular life in most Arab countries.

The fundamentalist call has resonance because it invites men to participate—and here again there is a contrast to an official political culture that reduces citizens to spectators and asks them to leave things to the rulers. At a time when people are confused and lost and the future is uncertain, it connects them to a tradition that reduces their bewilderment.

Paraphrasing Lawrence Durrell, I think—the book is very dense, and concepts quickly flow one to the next—Ajami directly addresses the importation of Western technology without importing the Western ideas that made them possible, in effect jettisoning Arab culture, mimicking Western culture, and then putting the trappings of Arab culture back on to cover the void.

Without the human energy to accomplish tasks, civilization becomes a fraudulent wrapping, a pathetic act of mimicry. Cut off from its roots, alienated from its locale, civilization turns into a nauseating pretension. Then it awaits its death, as less sophisticated, less polished people—claiming authenticity, more connected to the earth—push it into its grave.

It doesn’t help that some of the western ideas that were imported were fascism.

The Germanization of Arab nationalist thought occurred at a time when liberal notions of nationalism were on the wane in the Arab world. If liberal nationalism was too individualistic, associated with domestic privilege and with the colonial powers, then why not an integral, collectivist notion of nationalism?

The Saudis especially have attempted to wield religious control in order to maintain power. But:

The turn that Islamic fundamentalism took and the attack on the Grand Mosque in Mecca in November 1979, showed them that the weapons and ideas one brandishes take on a life of their own and are often subject to hostile interpretations, that the forces people unleash and pay homage to can be turned against them and that one can die at the gallows one sets up for others.

This book is in a sense a sequel to Ajami’s The Dream Palace of the Arabs. Its three sections cover the general change in cultural thought following the Six-Day War; Egypt’s attempt under Nasser and then Sadat to maintain its eminence in the Arab world; and finally the sort-of restoration of Islam as a nationalist, even totalitarian (in its original sense), movement. It packs a lot of information in a short space.

[Oliver Thomas · Rating 4 out of 5]

An impressive work of intellectual history, following the failures of Liberalism, Marxism, Pan-Arabism, and the rise of Islamism in the Arab world. The book also has a lot of interesting and worthwhile things to say about the more general relationship between tradition and modernity. Ajami's analysis is wide-ranging, making use of news stories, intellectual history, poetry, novels, and government propaganda, and places the Arabs as active players in their history.

[David Karlsson · Rating 4 out of 5]

A good and sometimes heavy read on political thought in the Arab world post the 67 debacle of the Arab powers against Israel.
Ajami lays out the failures of liberalism, Marxism, Arabism and Nasserism. The first edition of the book is published in the early 80s hence a decade had passed since the 67 setback. According to Ajami, the Arab predicament is the conundrum that the Arab world is in where seemingly all ideologies has been tried and found wanting. What he observes on the horizon is the rise of radical islamism and he warns of the dangers and limitations.

[Noora · Rating 4 out of 5]

A great work of intellectual history. Very useful in it's discussion of political Islam.

[Dan · Rating 5 out of 5]

There are are few books that I can recommend as highly I will recommend The Arab Predicament. The author, Fouad Ajami writes with vigor, wisdom, and real understanding of nations.

He pulls together intellectual history, news stories, and foreign affairs to tell the story of the Arab world in the second half of the 20th century. Ajami starts with a crisis of legitimacy in the Arab states after the failure and despair of the Six Days War against Israel. The narration ends shortly after the US intervention in Kuwait. However, this is not a shallow retreading of recent history. Intermixed is theory pulled from political science and sociology and a good deal of Edmund Burke's ghost. More than a political history, this is a look at attempts by individuals and nations to deal with the world in which they suddenly find themselves.

Unlike so many terrible books, nations in The Arab Predicament are not actors in some world-historical epic. Foreign policy and war are revealed as the product of domestic and international needs and forces. For example, Ajami portrays the October, 1973 war as a tool for Sadat to appear legitimate and powerful to his own people.

Also, Ajami is wonderfully quotable. These are a few of my favorites:

“We are free to choose the symbols we wish to fight others with, but the symbols we use make their own demands.”

“...the weapons and ideas one brandishes take on a life of their own and are often subject to hostile interpretations, that the forces people unleash and pay homage to can be turn against them and that one can die on the gallows one sets up for others.”

“Fundamentalism symbolized the revolt of the civilization they left behind; it was a desire to close the glaring gap between the claims of authenticity and the realities of everyday life.”

[Muhammed Abdelmoteleb · Rating 5 out of 5]

Just finished reading this. One of the best books I've ever read on the Arab condition and malaise. Ajami is now the darling of the neo-cons and infamous champion of the disastrous war in Iraq, but this was written before he turned to the dark side.

Contains genuine insights into the Arab religious, political and intellectual response to the 1967 war.

A must read for those wanting to get to grips with the modern Arab situation.

[Yas · Rating 3 out of 5]

good analysis. Ajami understanding that both Liberalisim and Marxism failed in the arab world cause they never felt indigenous to arab societies....unlike of-course the language of Islam is on the point. having said that, the book does contain plenty of repetitions and the whole back and forth to the idea cycle.

[Ali Al-Birminghami · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good insight into the roots of Arab nationalism and the rise of Ba'thism.