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. Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/016228702317274611 by guest on 27 September 2021 4 OCTOBER 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 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/016228702317274611 by guest on 27 September 2021 Islam and Its Discontents 5 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 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/016228702317274611 by guest on 27 September 2021 6 OCTOBER 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.