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Copyright by Ahmad Tawfik Agbaria 2018 The Dissertation Committee for Ahmad Tawfik Agbaria Certifies that this is the approved version of the following Dissertation: THE RETURN OF THE TURATH: THE ARAB RATIONALIST ASSOCIATION 1959-2000 Committee: YOAV DI-CAPUA, Supervisor BENJAMIN BROWER TRACIE MATYSIK MOHAMMAD MOHAMMAD THE RETURN OF THE TURATH: THE ARAB RATIONALIST ASSOCIATION 1959-2000 by AHMAD Tawfik AGBARIA Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of The University of Texas at Austin in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY The University of Texas at Austin August, 2018 To Sundos iv THE RETURN OF THE TURATH: THE ARAB RATIONALIST ASSOCIATION 1959-2000 Ahmad Tawfik Agbaria, Ph.D. The University of Texas at Austin, 2018 Supervisor: Yoav Di-Capua Abstract The Six-Day War in 1967 ended an era characterized by cultural exuberance and political optimism, ushering the Arab world into a period rife with economic anxiety and political unrest. Formerly powerful Arab armies disbanded. Firm social conventions were called into question. Radical movements (right and left) were on the rise. Maverick writers, philosophers, poets, and cultural critics authored influential critiques that profoundly undermined the ideals holding Arab society together, including Islamic faith and nationalism. The sea changes triggered by the war, however, resist easy categorization and defy simple historical narration that would attribute them only to the diverging trends of iconoclasm on the Left and traditionalism on the Right. The question of what exactly was defeated in the 1967 war continues to harangue historians and remains as relevant as it was in those tumultuous times. Historians may never stop arguing about which historical currents reignited the new intellectual debates that came to the fore in the wake of the defeat. These debates increasingly focused on the Turāth (roughly defined as the Arab past, cultural heritage, and authenticity) that irrevocably changed the political vocabulary and intellectual frameworks in the contemporary Arab region. v For the vanquished Arab nations, the 1967 war marked two fundamental developments: First, it asserted the growing power of culture on shaping people’s political orientation and social choices. Formerly it was economic disparity that seemed to hold Arab society back. After the defeat, however, it was dated cultural norms, values and mores that seemed to bedevil Arab society even more. Increasingly the military defeat in the Arab- Israeli war in 1967 was conceived as a cultural defeat, steering many Leftist intellectuals to engage in cultural debates that relegated economic and political factors to the margins. Second, the defeat made it clear that the so-called Arab Turāth was not withering away. The war resuscitated Arab intellectuals’ attention to their past, cementing new cultural orientations that increasingly focused on Arab authenticity. While the debate surrounding the Turāth dates back to the late nineteenth century, it acquired new meanings and cultural relevance in the post-1967 era, as intellectuals began to take Arab post-colonial conditions into account. The Turāth challenged certain basic precepts that had been part of Arab culture, especially the faith in Western philosophies, the inevitability of progress, the linearity and homogeneity of time, and the universality of secularism. The Turāth encouraged a search for a forgotten Arab culture and gave rise to words like authenticity (Asalah) and cultural onslaught, which grew increasingly common. The discourse on the Turāth transformed Arab political and intellectual conversations in a variety of ways. It produced major political realignment, creating a coalition of previously left-wing and moderate Islamists in big-cities. It also strengthened North-African scholars’ presence in the post-1967 Arab intellectual landscape, spawning scholars like Jabiri who outlined the Turāth as the defining problem with which Arab intellectuals had to cope. It fundamentally altered the authority of the intellectual tradition that originated in Beirut and Cairo. It transformed the economy of the intellectual debates by introducing new cultural references, such as self-critique, that had been unpopular vi before the war. Above all, it led Arab intellectuals to view the Turāth less as a reservoir of archaic norms, and more as the ultimate protector of Arabs’ human dignity under Arab regimes, which were prone to viewing modern constitutions and legal laws as instruments of power rather than justice. The debate over the Turāth not only brought a new breed of Arab voices into the intellectual landscape, but it also led to the creation of the first anti-Turāth movement in the Arab world. The Arab Rationalist Association, a constellation of Arab intellectuals who gathered around Syrian writer Jūrj Ṭarābīshī in Paris, formed in protest against the cultural obsession with “things authentic.” These intellectuals argued that the Turāth literature was a mere means of escapism, distracting Arabs from their real and pressing problems, reinforcing older values, and dampening political radicalism. For these cultural critics, the Turāth literature is not politically neutral, but rather a literature that fosters cultural sensibilities that antagonize difference and look suspiciously at Western philosophies. The Arab Rationalist Association questioned everything from false attempts to fashion modern forms of reliving the past, to moderate Islamic moral codes, through different forms of patriotism. Who were the members of the association? What are the cultural and social concerns that banded them together? Why did they reject the Turāth and to what ends? This dissertation illuminates why the Turāth gained more traction in post-colonial society and how it changed the Arab intellectual conversation. vii Table of Contents INTRODUCTION .............................................................................................................1 CHAPTER I: COUNTERING THE TURĀTH: THE RISE OF THE ARAB RATIONALIST ASSOCIATION............................................................................................................... 27 CHAPTER II: THE EMERGENCE OF A NEW FIELD ............................................................. 57 CHAPTER III: THE MAKING OF A SECULAR CRITIC: JŪRJ ṬARĀBĪSHĪ ................................. 83 CHAPTER IV: FROM THAWRAH TO TURĀTH: THE REVIVAL OF THE 19TH CENTURY LIBERAL THOUGHT .................................................................................................................. 120 CHAPTER V: LAFIF LAKHDAR: REORIENTING THE TURĀTH ............................................ 149 CHAPTER VI: YOUNG RADICAL: RAJA BEN SLAMA AND THE NEW ARAB WOMEN FACING THE TURĀTH .............................................................................................................. 179 CONCLUSION ............................................................................................................. 208 BIBLIOGRAPHY ........................................................................................................... 215 viii INTRODUCTION In June 1970, Morocco celebrated the graduation of the first student in the country’s history ever to be granted a Ph.D.. Moḥammad ʿĀbid al-Jābirī was 34-years-old when he defended his work for six hours in front of a committee of five professors. The first recipient of a doctorate, Jābirī would soon rise to national prominence in a post-colonial state longing for national pride, a country that long suffered from French colonialism that inflected it with a legacy of cultural inferiority. Though a limited number of Moroccan students had previously attained doctoral degrees- in France- Jābirī’s was different. Defying established protocols, he insisted on writing his dissertation in Arabic, signaling the rise of a generation eager to explore its lost, unwritten history. Jābirī surely gave evidence to that unspoken cultural ambition when he wrote on Ibn Khaldūn, one of the eminent medieval Arab philosophers of North Africa.1 Jābirī’s dissertation would not have stirred much intellectual commotion had it not signaled the profound change Arab thought was intensely undergoing. It gave a clear expression to a growing emphasis placed by rising intellectuals of the post-colonial state on what is called Arab and Islamic Turāth.2 Perhaps more than any other Arab intellectual, Jābirī illuminated the new modes in Arab thought, reinforcing its newfound anxiety with the Turāth. Soon thereafter, numerous works of Arabic literature would propose new ways to write Arab and Islamic history that disrupted the boundaries once separating the past from the present. Though the debate on the Turāth preceded Jābirī’s, his writings had immensely influenced the way the Turāth was examined and conceived, casting it as the chief problematique (Ishkāliyyah) in post- colonial Arab experience. When Jābirī published Nahnu wal-Turāth (We and the Turāth) in 1979, a book that elaborated on the diverse ways current Arabic speakers are emotionally related and existentially attached to the Turāth, his work struck a chord with many readers. The remarkable reception of this book signaled that an age in Arab thought had begun just as the old era of detesting the Turāth faded away. Previously it was 1 Muḥammad