יום ב' ,10.5.2004, 18:00 - 20:00
חדר 496 בנין גילמן

פרופ' ישראל גרשוני, אוניברסיטת תל-אביב

תיאוריה של "משבר" ומשבר בתיאוריה:
היסטוריה אינטלקטואלית בחקר המזרח התיכון במאה העשרים

המאמר המלא

Intellectual history, as a sub-discipline of Middle Eastern studies, seemed to be blooming in the middle of the twentieth century. In the 1950s and 1960s in particular, intellectual history and the history of ideas were fashionable and attracted attention from some of the more prominent historians and scholars. Perhaps the major paradigm that guided intellectual historians was the theory of “intellectual crisis”. From the viewpoint of the academic researchers of the 1950s and 1960s, who reviewed the era from the end of the nineteenth century through to the middle of the twentieth -- the formative era of the emergence and evolution of modern intellectual movements and ideologies in the Arab Middle East -- many of the intellectual historians seem to have shared the same narrative of intellectual crisis. According to this crisis narrative, individual intellectuals and intellectual élites perceived their major role to be as mediators between modern, European culture and local, Middle Eastern cultures. They took upon themselves the mission of transmitting European cultural products, ideas, practices, and institutions to their own Arab-speaking societies and cultures. They assumed that they could reproduce European culture in their own societies, and that it would replace the local, Islamic and Arab cultures which were perceived as being “traditional”, and therefore in sharp opposition to the modern era. However, in spite of the enormous efforts on the part of intellectuals and intellectual movements to bring about progress, modernization, westernization, and secularization -- sometimes labeled “liberalism” by intellectual historians -- they failed. The intellectuals did not succeed in producing western culture in their own countries, and their attempts to diffuse it throughout broader sectors of their societies were simply rejected by major, local communities of cultural consumers.

This failure led to what has alternately been called a “crisis of orientation”, an “intellectual crisis”, and a “crisis of liberalism”. This crisis originated, according to some interpretations, in the failure of intellectuals to foment liberal, modernist revolution in their societies, or, according to other interpretations, from their growing awareness of their own weakness and impotence. Regardless of the causes, one of the results of this profound crisis was a sort of intellectual “anarchy”: a panicked and uncritical retreat to Islam, the Islamic past, and to a whole repertoire of traditionalist, Islamic texts and symbols. At times, this “intellectual betrayal”, as it has been called, was presented as a lack of commitment on the part of intellectuals to their modernist ethos, a lack of commitment which helped, directly or indirectly, to promote the blooming of radical, Islamicist, “reactionary” movements. This withdrawal from an European worldview has also been perceived by intellectual historians as an act of despair on the part of Middle Eastern intellectuals and a manifestation of their loss of control, disorientation, confusion, and cultural disarray. Some who narrated this crisis narrative even saw in the modernist intellectuals’ helplessness a factor which contributed to the emergence of the army-led revolutions in the Middle East, and the formation, from the 1950s on, of republican, radical, populist regimes.

This paper attempts to problematize and deconstruct the “theory of intellectual crisis”. First, it will try to demonstrate that this narrative was shaped by modernization theory-oriented scholars, who held the impatient expectation, eurocentric and orientalist in its essence, that “their” intellectuals would establish western culture in the modern Arab Middle East. The crisis of expectations of western scholars caused them to read the intellectuals’ evolution, bodies of thought, and patterns of behavior in absolute terms, as a “crisis”, “retreat”, “anarchy”, and “total failure”. Second, it attempts to show that in the intellectuals’ self-image and self-narration, there was neither the perception of being in the midst of a crisis of orientation nor of the existence of a culture in disarray. Third, it attempts to prove that the intellectuals’ interest was focused, in many instances, on a collective effort to reconstruct, or “invent” traditions, seen as the only effective means to produce a modernist, local culture that would blend European symbols and materials with Islamic, Arab, and local, territorial, national elements. The intellectual strategy strived to establish forms of cultural discourse and production in which modernist elements would negotiate and dialogue with the local reservoir of traditional texts, materials, and symbols. Fourth, we try to show that the status of the intellectuals in their societies, cultures, and politics remained basically intact, despite undergoing changes with the times. Moreover, their cultural authority among broader communities of readers and cultural consumers remained strong. Their intellectual and literary productions were consumed by these wider communities and were sometimes received with great enthusiasm, to such an extent as to call into serious question any claim that the intellectuals were alienated from larger segments of society. Fifth, these intellectual groups remained basically committed to the ethos of modernity, which included a clearly liberal component. And finally, as cultural producers throughout the twentieth century, these intellectuals and their artifacts succeeded in creating a large and rich repertoire of genres and forms -- fiction, short-stories, plays, poetry, popular music, the fine arts, journalism, and later, radio, cinema and television -- which became the principal basis of the modern print culture of the Arab Middle East.