Islam and Its Discontents: An Interview with Frank Berberich*

ABDELWAHAB MEDDEB Translated by Pierre Joris

Frank Berberich: How can one describe, five days after the events of September 11, the situation in the Arab world? How are the New York events received? The Arab and the Islamic world seem torn, but it is clear that this action has some sympathizers; on the one hand it is certain that the majority of those opinions are opposed to a Western military reaction. On the other, one has the feeling that the manner in which Americans interpret this action ignores that these events are inscribed in a history to which it is indispensable to return. Abdelwahab Meddeb: The Islamic world is complex and multiple. Those who judged this act barbaric and condemned it without hesitation are the Westernized in the Islamic world. And they are numerous, more numerous than one would think—in quantitative terms maybe ten percent; they are Westernized in their minds and in their habits, they accept occidental modernity and have chosen it as their way of living and being. Further, there is a majority that thinks otherwise—without necessarily rejoicing, as was shown in certain Palestinian camps in Lebanon or on a street in East Jerusalem; those manifestations must have been very limited because even if such a feeling corresponds to an immediate emotional reaction, those who have a modicum of political vision very quickly realized the catastrophic scope of such images—for it is also a question of a war of images and the question of the image is central to this whole affair. But everyone thinks that this act is a response to an American foreign policy based on a partisan application of power. This opinion is not only expressed by Muslims or Arabs, I’ve also heard it developed by Europeans. If a country, a people, or a state wants to become the leader of the world, it needs to be equitable in its management. To be clear, I’d say that a choice needs to be made between an imperialist policy founded on war and an

* October is happy to publish this interview that, after the events of September 11, the Franco- Tunisian writer Abdelwahab Meddeb gave to Frank Berberich, director of Lettre international (in Berlin). It was republished in French in the October issue of Esprit (Paris).

OCTOBER 99, Winter 2002, pp. 3–20. © 2002 October Magazine, Ltd. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

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imperial policy that governs peace. And an imperial policy recommends to its promoter to be the arbiter of the conflicts flaring up in the world and nowhere to be both judge and party. Take for example the successful sequences that buttress one of the last historical manifestations of an imperial policy, namely the Ottoman empire under great sovereigns like Mehmet Fatih (1451–1481) or Suleiman Kanuni (1520–1566), who saw themselves as continuators of the imperial structure as applied along the borders of the Mediterranean since its establishment by the Romans and its continuation under the Byzantines. It’s with that mindset that the Ottomans managed the conflicts of minorities and nationalities that have always existed in the Near East. Beyond the emotions felt at the moment, many people realize that an event such as the attack of September 11 was a failure of American politics, which has been imperialistic rather than imperial. Beyond this, what impressed people was the technical and “aesthetic” success of the event. The terrorists used the technical means masterfully and they accurately thought through the relays of the event’s diffusion as image. We have witnessed the optimum use of current means, this quasi- instantaneity between the event and its transmission throughout the world. That is one of the effects of the universalization of technique. One has to insist that it is a matter of technique rather than of science. The Islamic world is not a creator of science but along its fringes it has mastered technique, which implies more a mastering of the functioning of the machine than its invention, or even its production; with technique one is downstream from the scientific process that runs much deeper. Berberich: Why has the Islamic world not been creative in terms of the sciences? Meddeb: This is core. The Islamic world has been inconsolable in its destitution: it has known one very high point of civilization, a very major moment of hegemony; if we go back to the notion of “world capital” as proposed by Fernand Braudel, one can suggest that before its displacement toward Europe, this concept is locatable in the Baghdad of the ninth and tenth centuries, in Cairo in the thirteenth century; after that one can witness its passage to the north shore of the Mediterranean with the Genoa-Venice duo, before it exiles itself, departing ever further from the Islamic world by setting up first in Amsterdam in the eighteenth century, then in London in the nineteenth and in New York in the twentieth century—while hence- forth we probably see a process of migration toward the Pacific coast in the dense activity taking place between Asia and North America. Historically the world-capital has thus moved geographically ever further away from the Islamic space. And suddenly, toward the end of the eighteenth century, the Muslims start to become conscious of the fact that they lag behind historically. It is this lateness, this lag, which caused a number of countries belonging to the

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Islamic territories to be colonized because they found themselves in the situation of the colonizable. The one who claimed superiority or at least equality cannot grasp the process that has led him to such weakness when faced with the century-old opposite, enemy or adversary. In relation to the Occidentals, ressentiment will henceforth arise in the Arabs and the Muslims. I’m taking up the very useful concept of ressentiment as developed by Nietzsche in On the Genealogy of Morals. Nietzsche himself thought that the Islamic subject was a subject that belonged much more to aristocratic morality, the morality of affirmation, which glorifies the one who gives without trying to receive; while the nature of resentment is to be in the position of the one who receives but who does not have the means to give, the one who is not affirmative. Thus the Islamic subject is no longer the man of the “yes” that illuminates the world and creates a naturally hegemonic being; from sovereign being he has become the man of the “no,” the one who refuses, who is no longer active but only re-active. This sentiment, initially unknown to the Islamic subject, will imperceptibly grow in him and take over his center. I believe that the fundamentalist actions whose agent is the Islamic subject can be explained by the growth of the latter’s ressentiment, a state that had historically been unknown to him since he had come upon the scene of history as a subject. This evolution, which lies at the point where psychology and ethics cross, is due to the end of the creativity, the end of the contributions that made Islamic civilization. The Islamic subject has become inconsolable in its destitution. During the colonial period, the Islamic subject had not been creative for several centuries in the scientific domain nor was he a master of technique. It took him more than a century to master technique, that is to say that which belongs, finally, to the level of consumption and functioning, and not to that of production and invention. One is not involved in the conception of the airplane, nor in its invention, nor even in its production, but one can very well steer the flying machine, and de-turn its usage. Berberich: Can this lack be explained by the absence of a period corresponding to that of the Enlightenment in Europe? In the history of ideas, is there a moment equivalent to the French eighteenth century, which produced a critique of the concept of God combined with a glorification of the individual in society and the strengthening of the natural sciences? Meddeb: The great things happened very early on in Islam. But that process was interrupted too quickly. The very beginning of the ninth century saw the birth of a rationalist movement animated by those whom we call the Mu’tazilites (one of the great specialists of this movement is the German scholar Joseph Van Ess at the University of Tübingen). These thinkers tried to disrupt two then-dominant ideas: they criticized an Islamic dogma that states that the Qur’an is uncreated and has come down from heaven

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as it is in itself and in eternity; their answer is that, indeed, the Qur’an is of divine origin, but that the concretization of the Holy Writ in a terrestrial language can only happen at the moment of its Revelation. The inspiration may be divine, but the work involves a human operation. These Mu’tazilites also removed God from the world, they gave him back to his unknowability, they neutralized him in a transcendence that liberated mankind from predestination and gave it full responsibility for its actions. This theological movement became the official state ideology—the caliph himself wanted to impose it on all his subjects—and a rather violent inquisition was set up to attack the contemporary literalist school and its most eloquent representative, Ibn Hanbal (780–ca. 855). It is important to remember this moment in history because in the genealogy of fundamentalism it is impossible not to go back to this ninth-century personage, who was subjected to the worst tortures because, in the name of his literalism, he refused to accept the theses of the Mu’tazilites. Yet this rationalist movement of the Mu’tazilites did not evolve into an Enlightenment. First, because it wanted to impose its point of view through extreme violence, using the means at the disposal of the Oriental despot, and then, because orthodoxy was eventually reestablished at the center of power and the Mu’tazilites had in turn (and to their end) to suffer what they had made their adversaries suffer— who not only survived them but prospered. Thus the exercise of reason, in its triumph, was not accompanied by freedom, which has remained the great unknown. In this Baghdad of the first part of the ninth century a poetic revolution was born equivalent to the poetic revolution that took place in France in the nineteenth century. There were poets who were the equivalent of Baudelaire, Verlaine, Rimbaud, and even Mallarmé; through their poetry one can witness the emergence of the rebellious individual making use of transgression as the engine of the poem. Abu Nuwas (762–ca. 813) was one of the most important figures of this poetic revolution: an Arabo-Persian poet writing in Arabic who, in a very provocative manner, sang the praises of wine (forbidden in Islam) and homosexual love. One reads this poetry come to us from the high Middle Ages as if it had been written yesterday, as if the ink had not yet had time to dry. Just imagine those spectacular moments of creation happening in that workshop opened in Baghdad in the ninth century! You see, the attempt to renovate took place very early on, but it was aborted.

The Saudi Paradox

The other element one could foreground is probably the spirit of Islamic civilization and its materiality as it was able to realize itself through its artifacts and minor art objects as well as through its monumental art.

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Art is always supported by the state of science and technology. There is always a relation between, for example, architecture, engineering, and the knowledge of geometry, i.e., between a speculative science and its inscription into matter. One can say that if one refers simultaneously to science, the state of technology, and the state of the arts, Islamic civilization was contem- poraneous with what was happening in Europe until the baroque and classical eras. There is indeed contemporaneity, even if what happened in Islam in the eleventh, twelfth, or thirteenth centuries is equivalent to the spirit of the European seventeenth century; at that time Islam is very close, I would say, pre-Cartesian, pre-Copernican, pre-Keplerian. And then, out of the seventeenth century and those three great revolutions will arise the spectacular movement of the eighteenth century, that Enlightenment that will detach Europe from the other great civilizations, from the Islamic as well as from the Chinese and from the Indian civilizations. It is the eighteenth century that will cause the separation of the Occident. And in this eighteenth century founded essentially on the emergence of the concept of freedom, on the profound strengthening of the idea of the individual and the rights of men, the other extremely important idea is the explosion of the consubstantiality of the political and the religious. One could argue that the problematic that will bloom, crystallize, and propose the solutions that the European eighteenth century will know and on which the ensuing era will be built, that the process of this problematic will be located by the historians as originating in an Arabo-Occidental text, Averroes’ famous text on the relationship between religion and philosophy, between theology and technique—philosophy being perceived as a technique (the very term in Arabic is called ela, i.e., the instrument, the organon, the instrument of thought as inherited via Aristotle). That’s where the beginning of the problematic lies, and its evolution will go through the Averroists, the European ones, notably. In Islam we truly have the same perspective as the Occidental perspective, but it is an arrested perspective. What follows is the boom of fundamentalism and the global, planetary dimension it has taken. At any rate, the event we just witnessed is caused by the mutation of the Occidental model as it passes from the European to the American model. The European model in which I grew up, the one that arose from the French Enlightenment and was formative for me in both the Arab and the European traditions, this model no longer holds any attraction. I felt the shock of that when the question of the veil, so highly symbolic in Europe, came up. During my childhood in the fifties in Tunisia, that stronghold of Islam, I witnessed the unveiling of women in the name of Westernization and modernity. But I felt an even greater shock when the re-veiling of women came back to haunt me in one of the strongholds of freedom and Occidental culture, i.e., in Paris, France. I had thought that we were engaged in an irreversible process of Westernization

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of the world, including the territories of Islam. Later, after spending more time in the Arab Orient (because Tunisia is very Westernized and I, myself, though belonging to a traditional family of Islamic theologians and scholars, received a Westernized education), I discovered to my great astonishment and in one fell swoop the cohabitation of American-style consumerism and of a simplified, schematic, traditionalist thought—and that the fact of participating in consumerism does not necessarily imply a reformation of the soul. The best example of this paradox that seems to me truly insane is incarnated in a spectacular manner by Saudi Arabia, a country profoundly Occidental in its alliances, profoundly pro-American in its urban landscape, and which simultaneously extols a kind of Islam that is not even a traditional Islam but an Islam that is so puritanical, so schematic and simplistic that it is an Islam that founds its belief on the annihilation of Islamic civilization. All that’s great in Islamic culture, all that’s beautiful, came about not by the application of the Islamic letter of the law but rather through the transgression or at least the skirting of that letter, in a will to forget and ignore it. And if one wants to go back to the Islamic letter, one will have to burn the Sufis and the theosophists who dared to think freely, like Ibn Arabi, or to put them on the index and forbid them; one would have to destroy that famous poet I mentioned earlier, the great libertine of ninth- century Baghdad, Abu Nuwas; one would also have to burn The Thousand and One Nights, and so on. One has to realize that the emergence of this purified Islam was always already directed against Islam itself as a civilization and culture. What is very surprising is this cohabitation in fundamentalism of archaic regression and of entry into the era of technique and technology. If I have cited the case of Saudi Arabia it is because those people are now at the core of an immense aporia: while being part of the Western alliance, while wanting to be part of the Pax Americana, they have fueled the real or virtual civil war that is threatening the whole of the Muslim world. It is they who have financed, who have backed, who have restored this idea of a return to the pure letter, to the application of the letter of Islamic law, and who are trying to put the Qur’anic letter at the very foundation of the law down to the use of corporeal punishments corresponding to the scriptural imperatives. Earlier on we mentioned the eighteenth century. I also brought up the ninth century and Ibn Hanbal, one of the protagonists of what happened in Baghdad at that time. One must not forget that Saudi Arabia and its ideology possess great historical depth. Remember that it was this Ibn Hanbal who created one of the four schools of jurisprudence of Sunni Islam and who insists most vehemently on both a return to the purity of the letter and on a return to what is called the “Ancients of Medina,” which boils down to trying to apply to each century the idealized model of

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Medina. What is forgotten (and it’s weirdly comical) is that the model of Medina, the one that in the seventh century saw the birth of the Prophet’s politics, was a bloody civil war. The whole history of Islam took place in the violence of civil war and in the violence of the contestation of the legitimacy of power, similar to the struggle between the literalists and those who want to free themselves from the empire (of the violence) of the letter or at least try to keep the letter at arm’s length. Between that man, Ibn Hanbal, who preached the return to the letter, and what happened in the eighteenth century, we can make out an intermediary link, at the very foundation of Saudi ideology, Wahhabism. Before Wahhabism another very important link would be the theologian Ibn Taymiyyah (d. 1328), a Syrian whose life spans the end of the thirteenth and the beginning of the fourteenth century, a difficult and perilous moment for Islam—because this type of radicalism emerges only when the entity to which one belongs is under a major threat. One must not forget that we are then in the context of the Mongol invasions, of the sacking of Baghdad, and the end of the caliphate, with the questions posed by the Crusades barely closed: an extremely dangerous, even apocalyptic context for Islam. This theologian, gifted with exceptional intelligence and work power, spent his life lying in wait for anything he perceived as an intrusion into Islam in terms of the purity of the letter. He set himself the task of restoring this purity by freeing Islam from the contamination caused by Greek philosophy via Sufism, which he perceived as a Christic, incarnationist element circulating inside Islam itself and thus in fact much more dangerous than Christianity as such. Then, in the eighteenth century comes Mohamed Ibn Abdel Wahhab (1703–1792) at the origin of what will be called Wahhabism and who will try to preach a cross between the theory of Ibn Hanbal and that of Ibn Taymiyya in the very interior of the Arabian Peninsula, where he establishes ties with the tribe of Saud, tries to take over power, and fails. But at the very heart of the eighteenth century, contemporaneous with the Enlightenment, lies this puritanical movement that will be at the origins of Saudi Arabia. I would like to introduce here a quotation by the Marquis de Sade, from his Cahiers Personnels, his personal diaries, and you will see how this man reacts to the Wahhabite movement that was contemporaneous with him: And once again wars of religions are ready to devastate Europe. Boheman, leader and agent of a new sect of “purified” Christianity, has just been arrested in Sweden, and the most dis- astrous plans were found among his papers. The sect to which he belonged is said to want nothing less than to render itself master of all the potentates of Europe and their subjects. [This Boheman is somewhat the equivalent of our Bin Laden.] In

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Arabia new sectarians are emerging and want to purify the reli- gion of Mahomet. In China even worse troubles, still and always motivated by religion, are tearing apart the inside of that vast empire. As always it is gods that are the cause of all ills.

Thus the divine Marquis, who had understood the danger of that movement at the very moment of its inception—and note with how much discernment Sade does not associate this problem only with Islam: he made it into a universal problem posing a threat as soon as one tries to create a revolutionary and insurrectional movement in the name of the letter, whatever the religion. To return to the case of Saudi Arabia, the political takeover failed but the ideology had been sown. The project of the tribe of Ibn Saud to take over power, articulated on this purist ideology, was reactivated toward the end of the nineteenth century and thirty years later managed to take over power in the Peninsula, to pacify all the tribes, and to create the Saudi state in the name of Wahhabite ideology. The power of the petrodollar combined with this ideology preaching a schematic Islam has allowed the Saudis—I don’t know if today they regret it or not—to cause much ill to Islam itself by spreading a purist ideology that negates Islamic civilization in all its creative dimensions, in its anthropological, ethnological, and popular space as well as in its aspects of a sophisticated and scholarly civilization, that dared the adventure of Being and of paradoxical thought not afraid to advance in the shadow of the forest swarming with aporias.

On a Few Common Places . . .

Berberich: How did that ressentiment develop through the years after the Ottoman empire? There existed an Arab nationalism following the European model; there were attempts at secularization, for example in Kemal Attatürk’s Turkey. Does the failure of these attempts at secularization and of the idea of an Arab nationalism play an important role? Concerning Saudi Arabia, if the combination of petrodollars and Puritanism isn’t easily imaginable, isn’t that because the structure of Kuwait or of Saudi society is nearly completely integrated into the circulation of the capitalist world? Meddeb: We went from Europeanization to Americanization, from traditional European colonialism to the phenomenon of the modern protectorate where one shares a large part of the riches with those whom one protects. In Saudi Arabia or in the United Arab Emirates one is impressed by the material richness of cities that are the pure product of the Americanization

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of urban space, while the modernization that had happened until then in the tradition of the Islamic countries had been a modernization based on the European model, like that of Kemal Attatürk in Turkey or Habib Bourguiba’s in Tunisia a generation later, which was specifically animated by the profoundly French and “Third Republic” drive to found a secular state and a secular society. Even if all those experiences were closer to Hobbes than to the French Third Republic. Even in the most advanced constitutions, like the Tunisian one, Islam is given as the religion of the state; so that in fact the subject is not free to espouse the faith he wants, but has to conform to the faith of his prince. Furthermore, something of the order of the theologico-political—I’m using Carl Schmitt’s concept here—had haunted these experiences through a more pregnant incarnation of the state in its leader. Whatever the state that was created, whatever the principles on which it was based—I’m including even Attatürk here—the modern states and the emergence of the nation-state have unconsciously done nothing else than modernize and reshape the tradition of the emirate as theorized by Mawardi (d. 1058), who granted legitimacy to the usurpation of power by force (imârat al-Istilâ’), if this avoids rebellion or secession. That is why one is still in the cult of the leader, in the incarnation of a state much more powerful from a theologico-political point of view than the tradition of a truly republican and democratic state would demand. Concerning the nearly systematic power takeover by the military, the model for this is not that of the Latin-American caudillo. Its genesis has to be located in the figure of the emir. Here too we are dealing with a traditional concept of Islamic history; especially after the end of the caliphate or in its weakening phases, the military militias suddenly become conscious of their strength and power, of their ability to take over the state apparatus, and decide to do so and rule themselves. Thus did the emirates arise on the ruins of the caliphate. The facts of the material history of Islam help disprove something usually perceived as dogma, namely the concept repeated everywhere again and again according to which Islam is in its essence articulated on the structure of authority based on the consubstantiality of the religious and the political. Many European Islamologists share this belief with the fundamentalists; it is an idea that haunts the press and the media. But it is false! Historical fact does not verify it. Political power has very often been exercised by the military man who becomes emir. And who then had to negotiate the kind of relationship he will have with the man who represents religion, the one called the ’alim, the scholar in theology, who represented the juridical-theological instances. When one has an essentialist vision of things, one invokes the Prophet of Islam who was a warrior-prophet, founder of a political society;

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one says that in the very genesis of Islam, at its very foundations, one detects the consubstantiality which, indeed, existed and which continued with the creation of the figure of the caliph, the successor, the delegate of the Prophet. This caliphate is characteristically Islamic: one succeeds the Prophet in the fullness of His functions, as leader of the community. That is the ideal figure of the caliph, as it existed for a brief period of time. Very early on, starting with the first Arab empire centered in Damascus, with the Umayyads (640–750), the caliphate could have been tempted to resolve this problem of the legitimacy of power by a separation between the temporal function (assumed by the Meccans of Koraish) and the spiritual function (assumed by the imam, the descendant of the Prophets). I locate these premises in a poem by the official poet Farazdak (d. 728), which separates these two figures, attributing temporal prestige to the one and spiritual charisma to the other. Add to this that the very concept of the caliphate had been emptied of its substance by the end of the tenth century, the era of that institution’s decline, which saw the extension of the caliphal function to three figures: besides the caliph of Baghdad, two others declared them- selves caliphs, namely the Umayyad prince of Cordoba and the Fatimid Mahdi of Cairo. This function, after having become an empty shell invested with various utopias, will be restored by the Ottomans, but in a totally symbolic manner, precisely to signify that the religious function comes to add itself as a supplement to the figure of the sultan, whose first function is imperial. We can find a useful indication in the monograph Ernst Kantorowicz devoted to Frederic II, Germano-Roman emperor (1212–1250), who had major conflicts with the papacy and especially with Innocent III. Toward 1220 one of the great questions was to know who, the emperor or the pope, was the vero imperator. This conflict led to a civil war that lasted the whole of the thirteenth century, with various ups and downs. Dante himself both witnessed and was part of it: Florence was divided between the whites and the blacks, partisans of the pope and partisans of the emperor, Guelfs and Ghibellines, and Dante, backing the emperor, was expelled from Florence and had to live in exile. These elements pervade his work and he composed a major theoretical essay, De monarchia, which tries to think through that will to create two courts, separated but linked by a network of causalities—the court of the emperor and the court of the pope. The problem of the separation of the spiritual and the temporal is thus a problem common to Christianity and Islam. The same Frederic II, as leader of the sixth crusade (1229), negotiated with the Ayubides, the descendants of Saladin, in Jerusalem, Palestine, and he was given royal authority over Jerusalem, Bethlehem, and Nazareth. He then negotiated with Fakhreddine, the local governor of the Ayubid sultan Al-Kâmil who was in Cairo, and came to a peaceful understanding. At that time the

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caliph in Baghdad was a totally symbolic personage and was considered by Frederic II as the equivalent of the pope because he no longer had any political or military power. This caliph protested loudly and vituperatively against the treatise but he had no means of coercion. And Frederic II is reported to have exclaimed: “It’s extraordinary, their pope protests in vain!” For indeed his protest had no effect whatsoever; the emperor treats military and political questions with the military and political powers, and “their pope” is completely powerless. Frederic II was dreaming of nearly the same thing for the Occident. You can see that if we take historic facts into account, it is at least necessary to complexify the so-called dogma of the consubstantiality of the political and religious. But fundamentalism and Wahhabism restore the idea of the consubstan- tiality of the political and religious by recalling the mythic model of Medina, a model that factual history contradicts and dismantles. And of course when every political action is determined by religion, the effect is devastating. For politics, which is a human endeavor, by becoming a divine endeavor turns more dogmatic and intolerant. God is never wrong. Berberich: Why could such a ressentiment grow so incredibly in the last twenty or thirty years? Meddeb: Something that impressed me deeply when I came across it—on a Cairo street, for example, but also in the Emirates—is the following idea that has spread like wildfire and become a stereotype. It is the idea that we are two different, irreconcilable cultures: over there, Western culture, godless, debauched, and with a kind of self-authorized, total freedom in matters of love and sexuality; and over here, we, a society governed by God—and these two societies cannot meet. It’s very impressive. This stereotype is everywhere and deeply rooted, even though its propagation is quite recent. My friend Christian Jambet, one of the very few who has mastered the Western philosophical tradition and the Islamic, Arab, and Persian one (his specialty is the neoplatonists of Iran) teaches at HEC. There are many foreigners in this school, mainly from francophone countries such as Morocco and Lebanon. When Jambet presents a range of medieval thinking, and especially the hermeneutic tradition of Islam, very often those students, future managers of the “great capital” who will be part of the world market, interrupt him to tell him that they are shocked and that such doctrines cannot be Islamic. These amnesiacs of their own culture believe themselves to be the deposi- taries of true Islam; these future cadres of international finance of Muslim origin are themselves marked by this simplistic Islam cut off from its roots, and propagated by Saudi Arabia and its petrodollars . . . that Islam is a threat to the world at large as much as to Islamic civilization itself! Berberich: Why has this simplified Islam wrapped in anti-Occidentalism taken hold of the masses so much in these last twenty or thirty years? Have certain events helped trigger this?

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Meddeb: Yes. Primarily the failure of the nation-state and of nationalism. A terrible failure, first in that independence and nationalism did not manage to solve the societal questions, nor did they manage to eradicate poverty: they did not bring a good school system, they did not bring hospitals, nor improve the health of the people. Furthermore, they wallowed in violence, in authoritarianism, they did not propose a new model of authority (still remaining enthralled by the powerful figure of the emir), and they did not turn out to be pedagogues of democracy. The postcolonial state was authoritarian and violent. On top of that there existed a hiatus between discourse and reality—just look at the corruption of the politicians. So the model became identified with the perversion that caused it to fail. There was, furthermore, and latent everywhere, this will to tell oneself: why not try to come to modernity through our own means and by following only our own path, according to our own principles? As well as this will to ignore that there is a contradiction in terms between a traditional society and the project of a modern society if one does not accept certain ruptures, if one does not critique one’s own tradition. Add all that to the fall of the Shah and Khomeini’s success. . . . But Iran is a great and complex nation; it is not a new nation born from the desert like Saudi Arabia or the Emirates. What is happening in Iran right now permits one to think that a modern culture is in the process of being born through its own means and rhythms—just look at Iranian cinema, Iranian photography. This new culture can lean on a social base and a popular legitimacy much greater than that of the Westernized elites under the Shah. Iran is in the process of escaping the fundamentalism that refounded it. Yet the effect of Khomeini’s success was stimulating for militant and warring Islam.

The Palestinian Indicator

Another effect of extreme gravity is the responsibility of the United States, in alliance with Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, for the manner in which the struggle against the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan was organized, and the fact of creating an international brigade of fighters of Islamic origin, shaped and managed by the CIA with Saudi money. At the end of that war, thousands of fighters marked by Wahhabite ideology became suddenly available. One must not forget that the Algerian disaster was fueled by the influx of “Afghanis”—those Algerians who went from the maquis of the Hindu-Kush or the Pamirs to the maquis of the Aurès. Everyone in Algeria was impressed when they arrived back home at the end of the Afghan war wearing a costume—those ample robes and untrimmed full beards— unknown in Algeria. They came back to their country as carriers of a new habitus symbolizing a hitherto unknown violence; let’s not forget that it is

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those who were called “the Afghanis” who created the Armed Islamic Group. Bin Laden is a product of that same sequence of events. Berberich: What is the importance of the Palestinian experience? Meddeb: The Palestinian experience is an indicator of what I call the discontent of the West in contrast to the discontent of Islam. Islam’s discontent is this idea of wanting to return to the letter and its purity. Historically this has been disastrous, but very often those radical movements run out of steam after one generation, disappear, and the polis finally rediscovers its music, its poetry—that’s why Islamic civilization was able to carry on and create the diachronic accumulation that constitutes it. When those movements arise and take power they want to impose the purified letter. There are several historical examples, such as the Almoravid and Almohad Berber dynasties that took power in Andalusia in the name of a return to the purity of the letter. The first thing such movements order is the destruction of the libraries and the musical instruments, ensuing in autodafés and bonfires. But their descendants quickly rediscover the pleasures of the city and of civilization. The movement runs out of steam and the founding ideology is forgotten. As far as Palestine is concerned, what needs to be pointed out is the scandal of what has always been called “two weights, two measures.” When Iraq does not obey a resolution of the UN it is immediately punished and bombed; Israel, which has dismissed all UN resolutions, remains in impunity, because it is protected. And the very latest Palestinian sequence— which, without being planned, happens to be in synchrony with Bush’s retreat from the theater of the Middle East and the impression he gives of giving Sharon a totally free hand—has further fueled the anti-American fury of Arab and Muslim public opinion. It is evident that the resolution of this conflict on a just base, resulting in two real states, with security for the one as for the other, with the retreat of the Israelis from all the occupied territories, would be the beginning of a solution. A United States of America applying an imperial rather than an imperialist politics, i.e., the politics of arbitration rather than of part and jury, could disarm if not eliminate a number of the arguments that feed present anti-Americanism. Berberich: Concerning those people who attacked the United States, one gets the impression that beyond ressentiment one begins to witness the apparition of an aristocratic morality. You said: “They have nothing to offer,” and yet, they gave their lives—doesn’t that correspond more to a master than a slave mentality. . . . Meddeb: I do not think that one can invoke an aristocratic morality for a gesture that remains the gesture of the weak, of the one whose wounds have not healed and who furthermore acts in the darkness of the shadows. Yet it is not wrong to assert that this event, with its tragic dimension, is also an event that imposes Islam as an entity that needs to be taken seriously, that

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can no longer be treated with contempt and excluded. If one continues on the path of contempt, one will fuel the war and move in the direction of Huntington’s famous “shock of civilizations,” while there exists, it seems to me, the means to neutralize the conflict, for one of the traumatisms that constitute the wound of the Islamic subject is exactly his exclusion, in that will to want to bring him back to Ishmail, to the myth of the excluded orphan (in the Jewish tradition one called the Arabs of the Middle Ages, dominant and triumphant, the Ishmailites). Concerning sacrifice, Michaël Prazan reminds us in the newspaper Libération (September 14, 2001) that the first kamikazes to appear in contempo- rary Middle Eastern history were in fact the famous three militants of the Nihon Sekigun (Japanese Red Army) who, on May 30, 1972, led a suicide attack at Lod Airport; they were the very first to have acted thus in the region. Kadhafi even asked the following day why the Palestinians had not used this method themselves. But one can obviously look at the question of the “martyr” from the point of view of Islamic history. The martyr is the one who falls on God’s way; he is a shahîd, that is, a “witness.” Witness of what? Maybe of the face of God that is the sign of beatitude, and he will go directly to paradise. There is also a Qur’anic verse (3: 169) which says that those who die on God’s way are alive with their Lord. But one still has to know what is meant by “God’s way.” What can be said is that there exists a scriptural basis for all and any manipulation toward the construction of a mythology of the martyr. This idea of the martyr was instrumentalized at the time of the Algerian war of independence. It is thus punctually instrumentalized and can be founded on scriptural legitimacy. Berberich: What role does the model of the martyr’s death play for the Shiites? Meddeb: The Shiites perceived themselves as the oppressed of Islam and felt that they suffered the violence of injustice. The concept of the martyr is exacer- bated for them because they had as model one of their most venerated imams, Hussein, one of the sons of Ali, who was massacred in Kerbala with his family in a most abominable way on October 10, 680. This massacre is considered by the Shiites as their founding event and celebrated annually. The Shiites have the cult of the martyr, in the Christic sense. It is a martyrdom that entertains the guilt of not having been ready to defend the imam and avoid his massacre. But the notion of redemption and atonement exists in this martyrdom too; what is celebrated on the occasion of this martyrdom is the guilt of nonaction and the fact of living while the imam sacrificed himself by engaging in an unequal fight. Berberich: It seems as if that figure of the martyr has gained much in popularity these days. . . . Meddeb: That’s the least you can say. In the case of the Palestinians, this gesture in its very horror represents the weapon of the weak, of despair, amplified

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by the pent-up hatred born of impotent rage. Israel, that entity composed of few people, great masters of technique and science, perfect subjects of modernity in the heart of the Islamic and Arabic scene, becomes the crystal through which the Arab failure is seen and in which the accumulated hatred is refracted. With the Palestinian subject, we are still and always in the tradition of ressentiment. The New York event is of a different nature because it is an event that is not caught in repetition: never seen before, unheard of, unparalleled, it could constitute a rupture from which the destiny of nations could be redeployed and reoriented. For the Muslim fundamentalists using the weapons of their adversaries, this event and its media exploitation gave the possibility of reoccupying the center of the world, of moving from the periphery to the center. The terrorists wanted to return onto the stage of that culture that is henceforth the world’s culture. But this culture of the image shared by the Islamists and the Americans does not occult the fact that one is facing two very distinct cultural visions. Very often traditional cultures emanate from societies that do not show, that hide, while what founds Western culture is the see-all, the show- all, a certain exhibitionism that I would link to the birth of autobiography. What founds the autobiographical act are Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Confessions, which attach great importance to childhood, something that hadn’t been done before, even though we do have a few autobiographies in the Oriental tradition. I can think of at least three: the one of the Maghrebian historian Ibn Khaldûn in the fourteenth century; the one by Usamah, a Syrian protagonist of the Crusades of the twelfth century; and the third one, the Book of Babur, written by the founder of the Moghol dynasty. These autobiographies can be likened to a literature of witnessing for an epoch, or for specific events, like the meeting between Ibn Khaldûn and Tamerlaine at the gates of Damascus. It is not a literature of introspection that tries to say everything, to show everything, and that would before all dare to speak of the subject’s interior unease, the problem of evil and error. This will to make one’s confessions public lies at the origin of the say-everything of Western modernity. Add to that the mutation brought about by the culture of the spectacle. Those coming from a culture of silence and dissimulation have occupied this stage for an instant. A crazy strategic de-turning. Berberich: Does the history of Islam have a tradition of spiritual, aesthetic, or strategic clandestineness? Are there traces of hidden, clandestine groups whose actions were important in the history of Islam? Meddeb: There is a spectacular, very well-known case that many have recalled in the context of today’s Middle Eastern terrorism: that of Hassan I Sabbah (d. 1166), called “the old man of the mountain,” founder of a sect that became known under the name of the “Assassins,” and of his fortress Alamut on top of an inaccessible rock in the Alburz mountains. But it is a

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bad example, because in relation to Hassan I Sabbah we are dealing with an eschatological insurrection philosophically thought through. Behind his movement lies a very profound and esoteric philosophy based on initiation, necessarily using clandestineness as it is based on the notion of keeping secret, on the principle of the hidden. The essence of esotericism is that one cannot divulge the body of the doctrine, the truth of the doctrine, except to those already initiated. And at that time there was a project, if not to take over power, then at least to create trouble for the current power structure. Members of the sect led by Hassan I Sabbah were sent to commit political assassinations against the Sunni power on one hand (the people of Alamut were Ishmailian Shiites), and against the crusaders on the other. They used the suicide attack to hasten the advent of messianic times. The enemies of the Palestinians have utilized and instrumentalized this reference and try to locate an Islamic cultural specificity in the use of suicide attacks. Certain pro-Israelis have written whole dissertations trying to prove that such assaults belong to the tradition of Islam. But no, this is not a characteristic of the Islamic tradition. What remains central to the tradition of Islam is what corresponds to the heroism of the first conquests based on frontal assault and the mobility of mounted riders. A knightly exaltation of self-affirmation in broad daylight and in wide-open spaces— which has nothing to do with basement conspirators. The question of clandestineness did exist in relation to this sect of the Assassins and fascinated those who felt a desire to promote insurrection in their literary projects—I remember a book by William Burroughs, Cities of the Red Night [1981], in which the author imagines an America in the hands of libertarian pirates. In that fiction Burroughs has recourse to the figure of the “old man of the mountain,” Hassan I Sabbah, master of the Assassins. It has become a live literary myth, with other texts also making use of it. I prefer to refer to Burroughs’s text as it is very beautiful and speaks much more to me than the less-inspired book by Amin Maalouf on the same subject. Another element concerning clandestineness is a fatwa formulated by a juridical consultant in Oran and which recommended to Muslims to hide their Islamic faith after the end of the Muslim state’s authority in Spain. This is called the takiya in Arabic, a noun derived from a verbal root meaning to protect, to keep, to conserve. When you are not in a situation that permits you to practice your religion openly, it is recommended that you dissimulate your belief, in order to keep, conserve, protect your faith. That is what happened with the Morescos, the last of the European Muslims (expelled in 1609), when the Catholics, at the instigation of the fanatic Ximenès de Cisneros, decided in 1499 to no longer apply the clause of the treaty of January 2, 1492, which gave the Muslims the right to practice their religion. Henceforth, Muslims had to convert to Catholicism or leave

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the country. By following the recommendation to dissimulate, these Muslims became Catholic in appearance but kept on practicing their religion in the secret of their hearts and homes. But Catholic suspicion was convinced that these new Christians (as they were called) were in fact crypto Muslims. This feeling—this distinction between two cultures, this hatred for the West—in a country I spent time in recently such as Egypt, is profoundly present in the minds of the people. The only difference is that acting on this feeling is extremely rare and very much disapproved of. I remember being in Egypt during the Luxor attack. When I told my Egyptian inter- locutors, “But these terrorists simply practiced what you think!” their response was a scandalized denial. They believe that their thinking can be satisfied within a pious relation to God, and does not have to result in a relation of war. Berberich: What can one expect from the near future? Meddeb: Fundamentalism is a danger. It is perilous for Islam itself to let the Islamists prosper. Now that this peril concerns the whole world, there is an obligation to mobilize, intelligently, and to do everything to fight these fundamentalists wherever they may be. But my problem with the West is always the same: it is this question of “two weights, two measures,” this problem of the gap between the principle and the fact, this will to ignore the principle when self-interest demands it. At one point I did not make public a specific stand I took, but a stand I would like to speak to now: we recently missed a dream occasion to make the right of interference a viable and legitimate reality, much more so than at the time of the Gulf War (which smelled too much of oil), no matter how much Iraq was the attacker. I come back to Kant and his Perpetual Peace. Something of the Kantian principle had been breached, and so intervention was necessary, as the frontiers of an already established country had been denied. But the discourse that accompanied the war against Iraq was a discourse that kept insisting on the principle but kept silent about what really made it operative. On the other hand, when the Taliban attacked the Buddhas, I would have actively supported the right of intervention. Why? Those Buddhas do not belong to Afghanistan, they belong to our universal heritage, they belong to all mankind, and we needed to go and protect them militarily. At that moment one would have had a much stronger legitimacy to go and get Bin Laden in his lair than now. It would have happened in the name of art, that is to say of that irreplaceable part that remains symbolic and that does not materially enrich the nations and the peoples. The image of the aggression of September 11 is so spectacular that a counter-image imposes itself. For “aesthetic” reasons, America has to act and will act, in a manner I foresee as very violent, and there needs to be counter-images of the same type. Will the United States accept to lose this war? Beyond that spectacular fact that will belong to the society of the

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spectacle which we are, there exists the possibility of organizing an interna- tional armed force in which it would be essential that there be elements of Islamic origin, to take the war to the Islamists and to all fundamentalisms. Would that be utopian?

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