British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies

ISSN: 1353-0194 (Print) 1469-3542 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/cbjm20

Intellectuals and Political Change in the Modern

Middle East and North Africa

Ewan Stein

To cite this article: Ewan Stein (2014) Intellectuals and Political Change in the Modern
Middle East and North Africa, British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, 41:1, 1-7, DOI:
10.1080/13530194.2014.878503

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13530194.2014.878503

Published online: 19 Mar 2014.

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 British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, 2014
Vol. 41, No. 1, 1–7, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13530194.2014.878503

Intellectuals and Political Change in

the Modern Middle East and North
Africa
EWAN STEIN*
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ABSTRACT This article introduces the special issue on Intellectual dynamics in

the modern Middle East. It discusses key themes of the contributions, including
intellectuals as social and political actors, intellectuals, power and the state, and
history, tradition and regional temporality.

More than three years after the beginning of the wave of Arab uprisings, an
understanding of the role of intellectuals in political change across the Middle East
has never been more important. It is thus a timely pleasure to introduce this special
issue of the British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies on Intellectuals in the
Modern Middle East.1 The articles in this volume combine geographical and
chronological breadth and draw on a diverse range of approaches including
intellectual history, political science, art history, social policy and political
philosophy. Taken together, they provide a window into the diversity in
intellectual trends across the Middle East from the early decades of the twentieth
century until the present day. While they do not and cannot provide a complete, or
even representative, picture of intellectual dynamics in the modern Middle East,
they collectively touch on a range of analytical and normative issues that bear on
the role of the intellectual in Middle Eastern politics and society.
As Israel Gershoni and Amy Singer remark in their introduction to a recent
collection of articles on intellectual history in the Middle East, with some
exceptions ‘in recent decades, intellectual history has not been a fashionable field
in Middle Eastern studies’.2 Substantive work that does exist, one might add
(much of which is referenced in the aforementioned article), tends to focus
on individual countries, with Egypt and Iran attracting particular attention; on
ideological ‘schools of thought’ like Islamism, communism or liberalism; or on
specifically ‘Arab’ thought. While it is clearly important to understand the role of
ideas and thinkers in narrower national or ideological frameworks, and to have an
understanding of the most politically salient intellectual phenomena, it is also
*School of Social and Political Science, University of Edinburgh, 15A George Square, Edinburgh EH8 9LD, UK.
E-mail: ewan.stein@ed.ac.uk
1
Earlier versions of the majority of these articles were presented in two workshops on intellectuals in the Middle
East organised by the British Society for Middle Eastern Studies in conjunction with the Centre for the Advanced
Study of the Arab World in Edinburgh and London in May and September 2010.
2
Israel Gershoni and Amy Singer, ‘Introduction: Intellectual History in Middle Eastern Studies’, Comparative
Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, 28(3) (2008), p. 384.

q 2014 British Society for Middle Eastern Studies

 EWAN STEIN

crucial on both normative and analytical grounds to shine the spotlight on less
prominent intellectual trends and break down the often politically imposed
divisions between intellectual dynamics within and between particular ethnic,
religious, national or ideological contexts. There is a dearth of work treating the
modern intellectual history of the Middle East as a whole, and it is hoped that the
current volume represents a step towards achieving a more holistic view of Middle
Eastern intellectual history.
In this introductory article I attempt to draw out some important themes
pertaining to the study of intellectual history in the Middle East that the articles in
the current collection highlight. This is a necessarily schematic picture given the
richness and diversity of the contributions, and perhaps reflects the editor’s biases
more than those of the authors. Each article contains far more nuance than is
possible to capture in this short introduction. There are, nevertheless, three main
overlapping thematic areas that deserve to be discussed: the role of intellectuals as
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social and political actors; intellectuals in relation to political power and the state;
and the position of the intellectual with respect to tradition and history.

Intellectuals as Social and Political Actors

The intellectual’s position in, and attitude towards, society has generated sustained
debate within the sociology of intellectuals as an academic field, as well as in
much intellectual discourse itself. Whether the intellectual speaks for, or on behalf
of, a particular class or group; occupies a position above class or other divisions; or
belongs to a discrete ‘intellectual class’ forms the crux of much of this debate.3
A further dimension of the debate, which overlaps with the related field of the
sociology of knowledge, concerns the provenance of ideational frameworks
themselves in relation to inherited traditions and discourses, on the one hand, and
contemporary political and social factors, on the other.
The ‘interaction between the intellectual and society is explored in the two
articles on Shi‘i intellectuals. Adham Saouli’s contribution on Muhammad
Hussein Fadlallah and Hizbullah stresses the importance of a transnational Shi‘i
Islamic intellectual field to which both the intellectual and the activist group
belong. For Saouli, however, this does not make Fadlallah an intellectual ‘class-
bound’ so much as bounded by, on the one hand, his religious orientation which
influences ‘the development of his ideas, interpretations, concepts, political
frames and perceptions’ and, on the other, ‘the popular grievances of his social
movement’. Saouli stresses the ‘limits of Fadlallah’s ideas’ in shaping the
worldview and behaviour of Hizbullah. Feder, who also examines the
contributions of a prominent Shi‘i intellectual, analyses how Muhammad Baqir
al-Sadr was able to adapt an existing Shi‘i narrative on Fatima to the Iraqi political
context prior to the revolution that toppled the Hashemite monarchy in 1958.
Mirroring Saouli’s analysis, Feder points out that Sadr’s ‘attempts to articulate
communal and political identity and engage with leftist currents were profoundly
constrained by the conservative religious establishment, which generally was
3
Charles Kurzman and Lynn Owens, ‘The Sociology of Intellectuals’, Annual Review of Sociology, 28(1) (2002),
pp. 63– 90; Karl Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia: An Introduction to the Sociology of Knowledge (London:
Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1960); Alvin W. Gouldner, The Future of Intellectuals and the Rise of the New Class:
A Frame of Reference, Theses, Conjectures, Arguments, and an Historical Perspective on the Role of Intellectuals
and Intelligentsia in the International Class Contest of the Modern Era (London: Macmillan, 1979).

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 INTELLECTUALS AND POLITICAL CHANGE

averse to political involvement’. Each of these depictions of the intellectual raises

questions about the ‘organicity’ of the intellectual to political movements, and the
extent to which the intellectual’s social milieu and cultural references interact to
shape ideas.
Intellectuals, moreover, do not engage with fully formed ‘actually existing’
communities. Contributions to the volume provide insights not only into the
‘organicity’ of the intellectual but also the role of the intellectual in creating group
identities and solidarities in the first place. Tilde Rosmer’s article discusses both of
these aspects of the intellectual’s social role. The thinkers associated with the
Israeli intellectual movement HaKeshet belong, largely, to an ‘Eastern’ Jewish
academic elite but purport to speak for a broader Mizrahi community that,
according to many, lacks a sense of itself. As such, HaKeshet intellectuals have
advanced versions of Mizrahi identity, variously centring on the Mizrahim as
internal ‘other’, or as Israeli Jews with an emotional connection to an Arab
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identity, or as an assertive political force ‘not with an ethnic definition, but as

being for all those who believe in the struggle for social justice, cultural freedom
and the integration of Israel into the Middle Eastern area’. Rosmer’s work on
HaKeshet demonstrates the malleability of ethnic, religious and nationalist
identity and addresses the role of intellectuals in defining these identities, in at
least some senses as a precursor to establishing their own ‘organicity’ to a
particular social group.
An additional tension centres on the identity of the intellectual as a ‘leader’ of a
community versus a conduit through which societal concerns and aspirations may
be expressed. This issue assumes critical importance in times of revolutionary
transition, as has been discussed in a recent research article on this topic by Azmi
Bishara.4 There is perhaps always a combination of the two dynamics (leading
versus responding to society) at work. As Gramsci noted, the philosopher finds his
historical personality in ‘the active relationship which exists between him and the
cultural environment he is proposing to modify. The environment reacts back on
the philosopher and imposes on him a continual process of self-criticism. It is
his “teacher”’.5 Lebanese intellectual Elias Khoury reaches a similar conclusion in
the wake of the Arab uprisings, as Elizabeth Kassab recounts: ‘intellectuals should
be humbled by these socio-political movements and show modesty and respect . . .
Sometimes fathers should learn from their children’. In the wake of the Arab
uprisings, which, initially at least, appeared to achieve much without need for the
ideologies hatched over the preceding decades by older intellectuals, many argued
that the time for top-down intellectual leadership had passed and that intellectuals
should instead ‘listen to the street’. The influence of previously articulated ideas
on the uprisings is, however, yet to be systematically explored.
Another key issue pertaining to the intellectual’s role as a social actor concerns
the intellectual’s capacity to reach the public. This relates both to the nature, or
‘resonance’, of the ‘message’ as well as the available media of communication.
Rosmer notes that the highbrow nature of HaKeshet discourse consigned the group
to the margins of public discourse, conforming to the classic ‘Ivory Tower’
reputation of academic intellectuals. On the other hand, Michelangelo Guida’s
4
Azmi Bishara, ‘On the Intellectual and Revolution’, Arab Center for Research and Policy Studies, June 2013,
http://english.dohainstitute.org/release/9bb30f22-06be-42de-ba75-2bb45c22642b.
5
Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci, ed. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey
Nowell Smith (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1971), p. 350.

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 EWAN STEIN

discussion of Turkish Islamist İsmet Özel suggests that reaching a wide audience
entailed intellectual compromises. Guida notes that writing short articles
addressing Islamic themes using Marxist language allowed Özel to connect with
a broad public, but resulted in a simplification of his arguments.

Intellectuals, Power and the State

There are, moreover, often trade-offs involved in balancing exposure with
integrity. The ability of the intellectual to connect with a public is heavily
dependent on the attitudes of the state. Kassab relates the views of Syrian
intellectual Michel Kilo on the differences between regime and opposition
intellectuals: ‘the regime intellectuals benefited from all forums made available to
them, but served as the regime’s apologists and propagandists’, while the
opposition intellectual had more integrity but lacked access to the wider public.
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Combiz Moussavi-Aghdam observes that most Iranian artists in the 1960s staked
out a middle ground between co-optation and critique: ‘although they
sympathised, if they did not cooperate, with oppositional mainstream intellectuals
. . . they enjoyed the support from the government to improve their career and
build up a type of Iranian modern art’. This important observation about the role of
the state and media in facilitating and shaping public discourse should be borne in
mind when studying and assessing the political salience of any ‘mainstream’ or
prominent intellectual phenomenon in the Middle East, as elsewhere.
The oft-repeated mantra that the intellectual should ‘speak truth to power’ has
not always been observed, and the line between ‘regime’ and ‘opposition’
intellectual often shifts. This was underlined, as Kassab discusses, with the
veteran—and once radical—Syrian intellectual Adonis’s ‘open letter’ to President
Bashar al-Asad. While many may have expected Adonis to throw his substantial
prestige behind the revolutionary movement, instead he adopted a mild and
collegial tone vis-à-vis the Syrian regime, to the dismay of those who supported
the revolution. Closeness to the regime was associated, for many, with being out of
touch with the people and the revolutions that were unfolding across the Arab
World. Conversely, Moussavi-Aghdam’s analysis demonstrates that the state’s
attempts to shape intellectual life do not always lead to the most auspicious
outcomes from its own perspective, not least because the state is rarely if ever a
unified actor. In much the same way as the Egyptian regime’s nurturing of
Islamism in the 1970s would come back to haunt it, in Iran ‘governmental support
of certain artistic and intellectual activities helped the development of reactionary
nativist views’. This, combined with the fact that ‘some sectors of the state . . .
provided safer places for many left-wing figures to cooperate’, undoubtedly
contributed to the conditions that led to the overthrow of the shah’s regime in
1979.
The state continues to exert an overweening influence within domestic public
spheres, through the direct or indirect control of intellectuals and their ideas. State
support for political movements internationally also has a powerful influence on
the kinds of ideas likely to be adopted by such movements and associated
intellectuals, and can concurrently overwhelm or obscure other, perhaps more
‘local’, idea systems. This was certainly the case with communist movements in
the Arab world. It is no accident that the decline of Soviet influence in the region
went hand in hand with the rise of Hizbullah and Iranian-style Islamism as the

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 INTELLECTUALS AND POLITICAL CHANGE

embodiment of Shi‘i aspirations in Lebanon. As Saouli points out, ‘Hizbullah’s

commitment [to wilayat al-faqih ] is not a mere ideological and/or intellectual
stand. In addition to being an ideological patron, Iran is a strategic and external
ally that supports Hizbullah’s resistance against Israel’.
Related to the powerful influence of the state is the role of master narratives of
nationalism that have acted over time to swamp or overwhelm other versions of
communal identity. This is clearly demonstrated, in a historical context, in the
work of Moshe Behar and Zvi Ben-Dor Benite. These authors recall the ‘road not
taken’ that was elaborated by Mizrahi intellectuals prior to the formation of the
State of Israel. Hayyim Ben-Kiki and other intellectuals proposed a ‘path to our
national home that is free from any sense of enslavement—not of ourselves and
not of others’. This vision of Israel that did not seek to ‘negate the East’, but
instead sought integration with its Arab environment, was systematically
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eliminated from the official Zionist narrative prior to and following the
establishment of the State of Israel. The relegation of this Middle Eastern Jewish
thought to obscurity has been assisted by academia’s obsession with master
narratives, particularly Arab nationalism and Zionism, in line with the political
winds blowing in the region. As the authors note, ‘that such an (untaken) path
seemed natural to early-twentieth-century Jews may appear nowadays tragically
misguided. Yet no-one can negate the historicity of Ben-Kiki’s thesis’. That such
alternative versions of Middle Eastern realities were not realised is not testimony
to their implausibility so much as their inability to compete with dominant,
typically state-sponsored, narratives.
States and societies in the Middle East do not exist in a vacuum and geopolitical
realities need to be factored into analyses of intellectual life in the region. Sources
of external support have important impacts on intellectual dynamics. In a less
direct but no less important way, processes associated with globalisation have
affected the intellectual sphere in states around the world, including the Middle
East and North Africa. As Shana Cohen notes, ‘development funding and
neoliberal influence over policy in Morocco have undermined the contribution that
academic research in the social sciences and humanities and academics
themselves as public figures can make to social change’. Many, to be sure,
would not define specialist academics, necessarily, as intellectuals. Yet, as Edward
Said noted in his famous treatise on the intellectual,
In the end, one is moved by causes and ideas that one can actually choose to support
because they conform to values and principles one believes in. I do not therefore consider
myself bound by my professional training in literature, consequently ruling myself out
from matters of public policy just because I am only certified to teach modern literature.
I speak and write about broader matters because, as a rank amateur, I am spurred on by
commitments that go well beyond my narrow professional career. Of course, I make a
conscious effort to acquire a new and wider audience for these views, which I never
present inside a classroom.6
6
Edward Said, ‘The Reith Lectures: Speaking Truth To Power: In his penultimate Reith Lecture, Edward Said
considers the basic question for the intellectual: how does one speak the truth? This is an edited text of last night’s
Radio 4 broadcast’, The Independent, 22 July 1993. http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/the-reith-lectures-
speaking-truth-to-power-in-his-penultimate-reith-lecture-edward-said-considers-the-basic-question-for-the-
intellectual-how-does-one-speak-the-truth-this-is-an-edited-text-of-last-nights-radio-4-broadcast-1486359.html
(last accessed 25 February 2014).

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 EWAN STEIN

The university in general can provide an environment for intellectual creativity

and critique, even if the academic specialists themselves may not, in their
professional capacities, meet the notoriously slippery definition of ‘intellectuals’
per se. As Bishara notes, the public intellectual moves beyond his or her area of
specialisation to ‘engage directly with the public on issues concerning state and
society’. Indeed, technical or specialist knowledge may increasingly be a
prerequisite for earning the title of ‘public intellectual’. Bishara continues that ‘the
intellectual of our age can no longer do what philosophers of past eras did by
departing from the general to the particular; instead, the development of
knowledge and the disciplines necessitates that the departure takes place from the
particular to the general’.7 The declining dynamism of academic life in Morocco,
and the gradual surrendering to the priorities of international donors, as well as the
proliferation of ‘think tanks responding to policy initiatives and research
programmes reflecting international agency concerns’ has thus had effects on
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intellectual life beyond the university. A key negative consequence, for Cohen,
has been the decline of critical thinking: ‘the same cohort of academics that
engaged with nationalist and Marxist ideas have taken on consulting contracts, in
part for the funds, but also for the prestige and status of working within
international networks and close to government officials’. These dynamics
undoubtedly apply to other parts of the region, and certainly beyond.

History, Tradition and Regional Temporality

A final theme that runs through many of the articles in this volume concerns the
role of the intellectual with respect to history, tradition and regional temporality.
Many, if not all, intellectuals have grappled in some way with notions of
‘tradition’. To paraphrase Talal Asad, intellectuals construct readings of the past
and visions of the future, with reference to present realities.8 Guida’s discussion of
İsmet Özel provides a good illustration of how ideas about ‘tradition’, history and
‘authenticity’ can form the basis of oppositional discourses in the contemporary
Middle East. Özel drew on a reading of Turkey’s Islamic past to construct an
‘authentic’ critique of capitalism, imperialism, Kemalism and, latterly, ‘moderate
Islamism’. A similar creative engagement with tradition is evident in Rachel
Kantz Feder’s examination of the work of Muhammad Baqir al-Sadr. Sadr recasts
the figure of Fatima in such a way as to place the Islamic tradition in the service of
revolutionary change in contemporary Iraq: ‘if in other accounts Fatima is
devastated by Muhammad’s death to the extent that she is debilitated and
paralysed by her emotions, in Sadr’s version it is her grief that procures her
inspiration to embark upon revolutionary action . . . The extent of divergence on
this point is extreme’.
Conversely, Moussavi-Aghdam argues that the ‘revitalisation of so-called
traditional elements and thoughts’ in Iranian national art did not contribute to the
revival of modern Iranian society precisely because these ‘nativist’ elements were
largely inspired by Orientalist discourse originating in the West. This parallels,
in some respects, the interest in Pharaonic or Phoenician symbols in the Arab East
7
Bishara, On the Intellectual and Revolution, p. 9.
8
Talal Asad, ‘The Idea of an Anthropology of Islam’, Occasional Papers Series, Center for Contemporary Arab
Studies, Georgetown University, 1986, p. 20.

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 INTELLECTUALS AND POLITICAL CHANGE

Mediterranean, which was criticised in similar terms prior to the revolutionary

period of the 1950s and 1960s.
The common historical heritage of the Middle East is not simply a question of
Islam or the distant past. Parallel dynamics, as well as common perceptions of
temporality and critical junctures, persist throughout the modern period. Özel’s
intellectual migration from socialism to Islam has analogues elsewhere in the
region (one thinks of Adel Hussein or Abdel Wahhab Elmessiri in Egypt), and
provides an important reminder of the need to contextualise intellectual trends on a
regional basis. Similarly, for Cohen and Moussavi-Aghdam, the 1950s and 1960s
represented the heyday of creativity and dynamism in Moroccan and Iranian
thought, respectively, due to a number of common factors (the rise of a new
educated middle class, the influence of Marxism, to name but two). The period is
often viewed as the golden age of revolutionary Arab thought in general, and the
time in which the well-known thinkers discussed in Kassab’s article came of age.
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Kassab specifically notes the parallel between 1967 and the 2010– 2012 ‘Arab
Spring’ as political ruptures producing parallel shifts in intellectual life and draws
attention to the widespread perception that the Arab uprisings represented the
‘moment of a generation’ in which ‘the people has found itself’. Much as
the ideological movements of the 1950s and 1960s gave meaning to political life
across the region, so too can we expect that the recent Arab uprisings will form a
critical juncture—and a tradition—for Arab and non-Arab intellectuals in the
future.