Changing Arab Societies - Adonis.. Once Again-

In his interviews and writings, Adonis is accustomed to making statements that carry definitive and decisive implications, which actually establish one-dimensional criticism and demand “change” and “revolution” from his point of view, because Arab Islamic society, from the time of the Muhammadan mission until today, is backward, and its history is a series of blood, conspiracies and bitterness, according to his statement.

As I reviewed the lines issued by Adonis, from his article in the Lebanese newspaper As-Safir on July 13, 2011, until his statement a few days ago in Paris, I felt compelled to repeat what I said; that the man covers the crisis of his cultural content with a cover of philosophy and historical selectivity, and falls into the mire of contradictions. With his historical selectivity, he drags one case upon another completely different case, because he wants the “revolutions” to be a carbon copy and literal copy of the West’s conflict in the Middle Ages with the dark church at that time. He wants us to uproot the intellectual and cultural system that shaped our Arab identity, over the course of fourteen centuries, in order to achieve the process of severing ties with our history and roots. And severing ties here, too, is an idea imported from the West, and out of context in its mission with our history, because it belongs to the same stage that he cut off from Western history, which is the Middle Ages. It is clear that his philosophical and terminological immersion did not serve him much, and did not intercede for his ideas in marketing the idea of the "continuous past", because the most important confirmed facts in the social sciences are that the variable is the only constant, and there is no continuous past intellectually or philosophically. This, again, is one of Adonis's many sophistries, which appeared clearly in his previous letter to his "elected" fugitive president Bashar al-Assad in 2011! As long as we are in the context of the social sciences, Adonis, despite his size and output, makes mistakes in the simplest definitions related to society, homeland and state. Society is a group of people living on a land that has a common history, "one collective memory", and has common goals, and Arab society does not lack any of these pillars. As for the issue of contradictions between social classes, it is one of the manifestations of human gathering. Are Western societies in their medieval and modern ages free of contradictions? So, what is diversity? Adonis is not allowed to formulate the components of nations and their cultures as he pleases, because they are the product of the interaction of the individual/society with enormous and multiple historical factors that are not interrupted, or abstracted in Adonis’s way, and citizenship is not an alternative to religion or contradictory to it. If you like, the definition of civil society is the group of institutions and organizations that arise voluntarily, separate from the state, and voluntariness here is a basis and a condition, while for Adonis it is coercive and involuntary.

It is arbitrary in Adonis's views to begin with the denial of the Arabs and their failure, throughout their history, to build a civil society. The term is essentially modern and dates back to the second wave of democratic change in the West, while it is authentic and deep-rooted in Arab-Islamic thought, from the state of Medina and the twenty-one points that the Prophet Muhammad - may God bless him and his family and grant them peace - began with, which were based on contracting and not coercion, fourteen centuries in advance, which the great thinker Adonis mocked, and passing through Cordoba and Andalusia at their peak, as well as the era of Harun and al-Ma'mun in Baghdad, since social justice is the practical essence of the civil state and civil society. The conflict, against the backdrop of which the Arab revolutions erupted, was not free of suspicious interventions, but it began, and it cannot be reduced to a mere political conflict over rule and authority, because it arose against a backdrop of injustice and the absence of social justice, and an economic, intellectual and cultural interaction that seeks freedom, dignity and equality, regardless of its consequences.

I do not deny that the scene in the midst of the transformation process was ambiguous for everyone, and perhaps the chaos, suspicious interventions and destruction during and after the change contributed to confusing understanding, and perhaps people were repelled by the entire change process because of its color, discourse and connections, and perhaps they preferred the continuation of injustice, oppression and dictatorship over freedom coupled with destruction, chaos and the absence of security.. which requires those who are responsible for the current and future change to be up to the enormous challenge facing everyone, or else!

Changing the ruler was not a priority, and it was not a goal except to the extent that his absence achieves the presence of rights and the restoration of free space, justice, democracy, and changing the social, economic, and political reality. Religion was not the reason for the components of oppression, injustice, selling wealth to the West, and defeat in the face of the power of arrogance. Rather, it was carried out by wicked, authoritarian regimes that were linked to our opposite and were dedicated to serving it. Perhaps the people’s raising of the slogan of the civil state means that they realized with their awareness, and not with the theorizing of “Westernized thinkers,” that the civil state is a state that does not only serve difference, but also establishes it and accepts its practice. It thus fuses social diversity into a single national identity governed by a contractual relationship based on the law of citizenship.

What is happening in the Arab world is broader than the struggle for power. Rather, it establishes a massive, deep and broad transformation in the local, regional and international reality, and places the Arab peoples in the face of their local, regional and international usurpers.

In Adonis’s defense of minority rights and identity, he made a methodological mistake in an issue related to democracy, because the essence of democracy is based on the authority of the people, regardless of their thought, belief, gender, and color. Adonis thus lost the majority and the minority when he erased the right of the majority and put it in a contradictory formula intertwined with the minority, while in reality it goes back to the contractual relationship between individuals and the state, as citizenship is a law that includes everyone. Coercion in the Western democratic model is a thorny intellectual issue that is still an arena for discussion, dialogue, and criticism among thinkers; liberal democrats and non-liberal democrats. Applying this issue to the Arab countries, which have not yet established their democratic model, is an out-of-place preemption. Dyeing Arab-Islamic history with one color, which is blood, violence, and oppression, indicates unnecessary blindness or suspicious selectivity. Arab history, which gave human civilization much of its luminous cargo and treasures; It did not witness the emergence of fascist or Nazi phenomena in its lap - as happened in the West - and Muslims and Arabs did not commit the genocide of millions in the New World, nor did atomic bombs, the Inquisition, two world wars, and McCarthyism. Rather, Arab and Islamic history resembles the history of positive civilizations that were right and wrong, and its product must not be reduced to one bad, offensive characteristic that characterizes it with criminality, backwardness, and blackness.

Conflict is a historical phenomenon, and many consider it a driving force of history, while bloodshed is an individual tendency or the result of social and economic crises that do not mark the face of history for any people. I am not calling for the purification of our history, as much as I am calling for objectivity, and for us to mention the flare-ups along with the failures. Adonis has fallen into stereotyping and repeating ready-made, unjust sayings, without examining or scrutinizing, as he deliberately and easily repeated Western, Orientalist sayings about Arabs and Muslims.

We ask: Why did Adonis not mention the horrific and terrifying brutality of the Syrian regime, and what the “civilized” West is doing in Gaza while supporting and appeasing the genocide? And why did Adonis not condemn this resounding holocaust, with a single word?! Or does he take into consideration the feelings of those who present him with awards? And why does he criticize the opposition because of its ideological color, and take it to the closed wall?!

From all of the above, it appears that Adonis’ revolution is limited to one concept, which is the necessity of ruling the nation from outside its culture.

On the other hand, I realize that there is a cultural discourse that has chosen to stand on the sidewalk, and it will certainly not be able to comprehend the past, identify the dangers, and triumph over them, because it has simply stopped thinking and working. Our cultural discourse, today, is similar to our situation, and is not much different from our reality. In other words, the colonial West’s action, which aims to keep us in a state of loss, fragmentation, nihilism, ignorance, plunder, alienation, conflict, difference and division, has succeeded to a large extent, not only because it is strategic, continuous, comprehensive and supported, but also because we have not created the theory capable of creating a greater action to absorb and confront those decisive strategies, and I mean, at least, creating a cultural and intellectual action that is capable of exposing the conspiracy, its components and parties, and reviving the factors of survival, unity, identity, belonging and presence, on the land of freedom and natural pluralism that enriches, and on the principle of experimentation and modernity connected to the origin and the root, and from the perspective of criticism as a permanent state and a corrective goal, far from execution or accusation or falling into the sayings of Orientalism, or adopting ready-made or populist or pre-prepared ideas.