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2 Are the Arabs already
extinct? By Spengler
"We [Arabs] have become extinct," said
Syrian poet Adonis in a March 11 Dubai television
interview transcribed by the Israeli media monitor
MEMRI, [1] but ignored by the mainstream Western
media. The prognosis by Adonis, the only Arabic
writer on the Nobel Prize short list, for the Arab
prospect has become more bleak over the years, and
his latest pronouncement has a Spenglerian
finality.
"We have become extinct ... We
have the masses of people, but
a
people becomes extinct when it no longer has a
creative capacity, and the capacity to change its
world ... The great Sumerians became extinct, the
great Greeks became extinct, and the Pharaohs
became extinct," he said.
Poets are given
to hyperbole, to be sure, but Adonis (the pen-name
of Ali Ahmad Said) makes a deeper point in his
writings on Arabic poetry. He argues that Islam
destroys the creative capacity of the Arabs, who
in turn do not have the capacity to become modern.
What he calls the "hell of daily life" is the
subject of his poetry, of which a representative
sample is available in English translation. [2]
Adonis devoted a long career to creating a
literary modernism in Arabic rooted in medieval
Arab poetry, leaving a long trail of enemies both
among Islamists and secular Arab nationalists. He
is reasonably well known in the West. The
Arab-American scholar Fouad Ajami profiled him in
the widely read Dream Palace of the Arabs,
and Thomas Friedman gave him a brief mention in
the January 27 New York Times. Evidently Western
analysts do not quite know what to make of this
most recent apocalyptic pronouncement and averted
their eyes. It is easy, but misguided, to dismiss
Adonis' doom-saying as an old man's exasperation,
for Adonis sees the decisive issues with great
clarity.
Nothing less than the
transformation of Islam from a state religion to a
personal religion is required for the Arabs to
enter the modern world, Adonis told Dubai
television:
I oppose any external intervention
in Arab affairs. If the Arabs are so inept that
they cannot be democratic by themselves, they
can never be democratic through the intervention
of others. If we want to be democratic, we must
be so by ourselves. But the preconditions for
democracy do not exist in Arab society, and
cannot exist unless religion is re-examined in a
new and accurate way, and unless religion
becomes a personal and spiritual experience,
which must be respected.
The trouble,
he added, is that Arabs do not want to be free.
Asked why Arabs glorify dictatorships, Adonis
responded as follows:
I believe it has to do with the
concept of "oneness", which is reflected - in
practical or political terms - in the concept of
the hero, the savior, or the leader. This
concept offers an inner sense of security to
people who are afraid of freedom. Some human
beings are afraid of freedom.
Interviewer: Because it is
synonymous with anarchy?
Adonis:
No, because being free is a great burden. It is
by no means easy.
Interviewer:
You've got to have a boss ...
Adonis: When you are free, you
have to face reality, the world in its entirety.
You have to deal with the world's problems, with
everything ...
Interviewer: With
all the issues ...
Adonis: On the
other hand, if we are slaves, we can be content
and not have to deal with anything. Just as
Allah solves all our problems, the dictator will
solve all our problems.
The fact that
the Arab world's most distinguished man of letters
has rejected the premise upon which US policy is
founded - that traditional Islam and democracy are
compatible - one would have expected from American
critics a better response than silence. This is
particularly true given how large Adonis looms in
the Arab world, which translates only a fifth as
many books per year as does Greece, with a 30th of
the population. Arab writers of global stature are
a tiny number, and their importance is
disproportionately great.
I do not read
Arabic, and have no idea whether Adonis' poetry
merits the Nobel Prize (on earlier occasions I
argued that a novelist from a Muslim country,
Turkey's Orhan Pamuk, well deserved the 2006
award). But I doubt that anyone in the West will
make sense of the spiritual condition of the Arab
world without Adonis' assistance, and not because
what he has to say is difficult: on the contrary,
he has the courage to say the obvious: the Arabs
do not want freedom because their lives are
intolerable. Islam not only suppresses the
possibility of poetic expression, Adonis argues,
but with it the capacity of the individual to have
a personality. It is an astonishing, terrifying,
and absolute indictment of his culture.
As
a poet, Adonis does not describe the spiritual
state of the Arabs, but rather evokes it
existentially. The available literature on Islam
consists mainly of a useless exchange of Koranic
citations that show, depending on whether one is
Karen Armstrong or Robert Spencer, that Islam is
loving or hateful, tolerant or bigoted, peaceful
or warlike, or whatever one cares to show. It is
all so pointless and sophomoric; anyone can quote
the Koran, or for that matter the Bible, to show
whatever one wants. With Adonis one gains access
to the inside of the Arab experience of modernity.
It is a terrible and frightening one, not
recommended for the faint-hearted, but
indispensable to anyone who wishes to get beyond
the pointless sloganeering of the pundits.
"The Arab poet," he writes, "speaks ever
of freedom and democracy as illusions. I say
'illusion' because life itself comes before
freedom and democracy. How can I possibly talk
about life when I am prevented from being myself,
when I am not living, neither within myself nor
for myself? [3]
"To be means to mean
something," Adonis explains. "Meanings are only
appreciated through words. I speak, therefore I
am; my existence thus and then assumes meaning. It
is through this distance and hope that the Arab
poet attempts to speak, ie, to write, to begin."
Life is not possible without meaning, and
meaning does not exist outside of culture,
especially for a people defined not by political
circumstances or territory but by language, namely
the Arabs. In his essay "Poetry and Apoetical
Culture", Adonis makes the remarkable claim that
the nature of Koranic revelation destroys the
possibility of poetry, and with it the possibility
of life. Before Islam, the Arabic language was
rooted in poetry; after the advent of Islam,
poetic language became impossible.
When this divine Revelation came to
take the place of poetic inspiration, it claimed
to be the sole source of knowledge, and banished
poetry and poets from their kingdom. Poetry was
no longer the word of truth, as the pre-Islamic
poets had claimed it was. Nevertheless ... Islam
did not suppress poetry as a form and mode of
expression. Rather, it nullified poetry's role
and cognitive mission, endowing it with a new
function: to celebrate and preach the truth
introduced by the Koranic Revelation. Islam thus
deprived poetry of its earliest characteristics
- intuition and the power of revelation and made
it into a media tool.
... Poetry in Arab
society has languished and withered precisely
insofar as it has placed itself at the service
of religiosity, proselytism and political and
ideological commitments. [4]
Adonis
adds:
In part, this explains the dominance
in the Arab mentality of what I call "pastism".
In the context of this inquiry, pastism means
the refusal and fear of the unusual. [5]
This is true, Adonis explains,
because the Koran offers a
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