My Explaining Postmodernism has been translated into Persian by H. P. Safir and published by Qoqnoos Publishing House in Tehran, Iran.
I’ll update when an online link is available. In the meantime, here is the information page for available editions and translations.
Wonderful! Iran and the rest of the Middle East have been among the greatest victims of the ideas this book identifies and critiques.
More than any debacle of imperialism, colonialism or foreign policy the essential failure, even betrayal of the Middle East by the West in the modern era has been philosophical. Far from unreceptive to Western ideas, not understanding the profound schisms that lay in Western thought, the tragedy of the Middle East has been that it was too uncritically eager to assimilate them.
Its elites understood their society had fallen behind the West in every respect and turned to it – particularly its ivory towers – for guidance in their efforts to modernize. No stone was left unturned.
But rather than the tradition that had underpinned the Western Enlightenment revolution and modernity Middle Eastern scholars searching for the secret of Western power, particularly in the humanities departments of the European ivory tower in the latter decades of the 19th century and throughout the 20th, found and absorbed the reaction to them – the reaction ‘Explaining Postmodernism’ spotlights i.e. the German centered Counter-Enlightenment dominated by Kant and Hegel.
This reaction was marked by its hostility to every core Enlightenment value – by its anti-rationalism, anti-individualism, anti-liberalism, statism, militarism and enmassment of society by collectivism – from socialism and communism on the left to the racist, nationalist völkisch movements of the right.
So hopefully imported these ideas were no more successful implemented in the Middle East than elsewhere. Ultimately they served to undermine every effort at political, economic and social reform in the region, creating a vacuum to be filled by it most reactionary elements.
Instead of John Locke and Thomas Jefferson the Islamic peoples got Karl Marx and Saddam Hussein: the latter two coming to embody secularization and Westernization in their minds. They rightly sensed that something mysterious and sinister had entered their culture from the West and that its promises had not been delivered.
‘Explaining Postmodernism’ offers an invaluable guide to spotlighting this reaction and identifying its fallacies, which will be of critical importance for Middle Eastern society in bringing itself to health i.e. liberty, prosperity, dignity and power.
The Islamic peoples won’t fair any better as long as they keep Shariah, no intrest unBiblical finance practices, supremacist ideology, forbidden and allowed morality, mistreatment of the woman, abuse of the child, and slavery. Not even objectivism, which stands in contrast to Islam on multiple levels, can survive the Shariah. Your blame of The West, and victimisation of “the Islamic peoples” makes me wonder if you even got the translation correct. Ayn Rand was Jewish, gasp. Muhammad would not approve.
I agree with your first sentence Liz. But I think the only force powerful enough to challenge the dogmas of the region’s past was the Enlightenment. And more, it was a process that was unmistakably occurring – as long as the Enlightenment was around.
But the Islamic peoples were slowly robbed of it by the Western ivory towers as they adopted a radically different philosophical tradition. It is the latter I blame, not the Western peoples at large who were even more victimized by them.
Scholars such as Albert Hourani in ‘Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age, 1798-1939′ chronicled the confrontation of Middle Eastern intellectuals such as Egypt’s Ahmed Lutfi el-Sayed with Western ideas as they grappled with and increasingly came to appreciate the power of Enlightenment concepts such as individual rights, free expression, limited government, secularism and economic liberalism. But in the latter decades of the 19th century and into the 20th a profound ideological shift was occurring in European universities.
Middle Eastern scholars zealously adopted the latest trends. From the early decades of the 20th century political and revolutionary parties based on Western collectivist ideologies – Fascist, Nazi, socialist and Marxist – proliferated and swept the Middle East, shaping the ideologies, strategies and rhetoric of the struggle of its peoples for liberation. Those with a more secular bent initially prevailed, probably a manifestation of the drive to equal Western power. But Islamist movements such as Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood were also affected. Islamist thinkers like al-Afghani, Mohammad Iqbal, Ali Shariati and the Brotherhood’s founder Hassan al-Banna were deeply influenced by the new Western ideologies and attempted to fuse them with movements of Islamic renewal. But nowhere amongst them was there to be found a Locke, Jefferson or Enlightenment party.
Particularly paradigmatic were the quasi-Nazi Arab political parties of the thirties and forties such as the Syrian Social Nationalist Party (SSNP) founded in 1932 by Anton Saadeh, an ardent admirer of Adolf Hitler; and Egypt’s Young Egypt party, also consciously modeled on the German Nazi party, replete with torchlight parades, mass rallies and adoption of Nazi slogans like “one people, one party, one leader”; it also adopted Nazi anti-Semitism with attacks on Jews and Jewish businesses. In the 1920’s and 1930’s Sati’ al-Husri, Iraq’s minister of education and founding theoretician of pan-Arabist thought, undertook to shape Iraq’s future along nationalist collectivist lines influenced by a careful study of Fichte. Michael Aflaq, founder of the Arab Socialist Ba’ath Party was educated in the Sorbonne. After World War II fascination with Nazism and Fascism quietly subsided and members gravitated to more palatable parties, which almost invariably meant socialist e.g. Marxist, Arab Nationalist – which was anti-Marxist, inclining towards a more “Arab socialism” – or socialist-reformist Islam. But, as Bernard Lewis reminds us, these were successful in only one respect: “…in underpinning a series of ruthless and pervasive dictatorships in which both the decencies of the traditional Islamic order and the liberties of the new Western order were undermined and destroyed.”
Why did the Islamic peoples look to the West and its ideas?
Because it had decisively vanquished them time and again. The lure of its ideas was not their perceived justice or truth – though the Middle Eastern peoples were not necessarily indifferent to such ideals – but their perceived power.
Radical Islamism was not the first response of the broad masses of the Islamic peoples to the challenge of the West but in my view a raging, despairing default: Born of the bitter humiliation of a proud and accomplished people who felt they had expended every effort to end in abject failure.
I think it is important that they understand that the cause of their failure was not a mysterious innate deficiency on their part – any more than it was for Westerners when they languished in their Dark Ages while the Islamic civilization reigned preeminent – but the ideas they had so incautiously rushed to assimilate from the West.