Fouad Mami

Reynolds, Nicholas. 2022. Need to Know: World War II and the Rise of American Intelligence. Mariner Books: New York and Boston. 

Nicholas Reynolds is a historian. Need to Know traces the rise of what ultimately has become known as the CIA, Central Intelligence Agency, perhaps the most famous intelligence body among the eighteen spy institutions in the U.S.

Given the lure and stature the CIA enjoys today, readers may easily think that the process promulgated in creating the spying structure had been smooth or problem-free. After all, why the fuzz as the country needed a professional spy agency like no other and similar to similar agencies in the rest of the world? But the story about the CIA creation is radically different from this perceived wisdom for reasons Reynolds specifically outlines in this exceptional 500-plus pages. Indeed, it makes a lot of sense to grasp the hard knocks of the birth that marked the preliminaries of what is now the solid institution without which the U.S. cannot be imagined.

For beginners in intelligence history, Reynolds's story makes sense only when knowing that before World War II, the U.S. did not have a permanent spy institution for a century and a half of its existence. Strange as it seems now, since its inception, the country's founding fathers have opposed the spying principle. The Puritans' bent on starting the City upon a Hill morphed into distancing their polity from disgraceful and cheap practices of the old world, a situation that U.S. elites and insiders of the establishment throughout U.S. history could not easily untangle until the advent of WWII.

In contrast, with WWII and the U.S. general mood dramatically changing in favour of less isolationism and more involvement in world affairs, the U.S. granted permission to eavesdrop on enemies' communication traffic. All these and more, Reynolds elaborates, showing politicians' extreme caution and suspicion of this change in state policy, precisely the bias, against spying as the backbone underlying state policy for accessing information. In licensing a spying agency, a free hand could have spurred undesired consequences and turned the promise of the City upon a Hill into yet another corrupt and degenerate polity of the old world. 

With this background in mind, we understand the difficulties, the hesitations, and the half-hearted beginnings of what will become during and particularly after WWII, the U.S. intelligence taking an industrial scale. We read that even when he favoured founding a body that could provide answers and offer policymakers an advantage when negotiating with representatives of foreign governments, President Roosevelt had always resisted replicating British or European intelligence structures.

With the ongoing war in Europe, particularly after the fall of France in June 1940 and certainly, before the attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941, FDR authorized Colonel Willian J. Donovan to form what was for him more or less an amateur spy body, compared to the British MI6 and in parallel to already existing institutions such as Military Intelligence Division (MID), Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI) and of course the FBI. A key preoccupation for FDR is the management of the massive traffic, literally the tons of sensitive information reaching his office. The administration is ideally carried out through coordination between the already existing structures. In addition to the coordination task, the Colonel has in mind an additional task dear to his heart, the planning and executing undercover operations.

In June 1941, Roosevelts signed the order to create the Coordinator of Information COI amidst opposition and resistance from the FBI and other intelligence bodies (those of the Army and the Navy). Like with all novel experiences, the established bureaucracies did not welcome the newborn arrival for fear it would dwarf their work as COI was placed directly under the White House. The intrigues in the hierarchy will oblige Roosevelt to transform the new baby into OSS (Office of Strategic Service) under the authority of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Put in charge of the budding institution, Donovan had to work twice as hard as other intelligence organizations to prove to his superiors the usefulness of the new establishment. One must remember that the new establishment was functioning amidst competing and the ever-suspicious Military, Navy, and FBI. Because they could break codes about Japanese diplomatic and military traffic, the Navy and the Army saw little utility in Donovan's body. Besides, they wanted to protect their code-breaking enterprises. This explains how they were mortally obsessed with safekeeping, a substantial advantage over the enemy, thanks to their code-breaking. Hence why they resisted full cooperation with Denovan's agency.

Donovan's tours in Britain gave him the incentive to founding an American equivalent to the deeply entrenched British intelligence services. Ever eager to actively participate in the war, Donovan's early mission as head of the COI had been in China and India after Pearl Harbor and the Japanese invasion of the far east. His collaboration with the British helped enlist American and local sabotage operations behind enemy lines. His real contribution as head of OSS, for which decision-makers in Washington were thrilled, comes in the context of the landing in Normandy, the liberation of France, and the arrangement of German army defection in northern Italy in the early months of 1945.

Still, with FDR's death in April 1945 and the end of hostilities in the European war theatre, Donovan and his structure fell out of favour. Again, the fall was not for lack of pertinent reasons. While the new administration seized on the key role of intelligence in shortening the length of the war and with recommendations from the Navy and Army, it still wanted to restructure OSS by distributing its staff among the Navy, Army, and the State Department. President Truman found out that a real restructuring has to begin with relieving Donovan from his duties while awarding him for the achievements that have given an edge to the Allies' war efforts.

For precision's sake, Reynolds specifies that Truman bore no ill feelings against Donovan or OSS. That policy can be explained only by the old American bias against intelligence which reemerged after the victory in WWII. Truman was afraid that the exceptional success of intelligence could propagate to make the U.S., just like other European democracies, drift in peaceful times toward dictatorship because intelligence could not control its ambitions.

Reynolds' writing in this book is conversational, and as such, it is engaging. His chit-chat style delves into what initially looks like secondary bits or extended biographies, all for exploring pertinent backgrounds. The reading of Need to Know flies because its author is careful about providing the right environment. The extensive endnotes and bibliography entries at the end underline the author's passion, who wanted to translate how a central intelligence structure has never been systematic or planned from the start. Quite the contrary, if anything, Reynolds' narrative illustrates that the process that was promulgated in 1947 to what had become the CIA has been through trial-and-error, accommodating how policymakers variedly (some slowly; others quickly) registered American victory not only against the axis forces but also against America's Allies in 1945. Marshalling the mindset to seize on that exceptional victory had to end in a central intelligence agency in which COI and OSS serve as excellent precursors. 

Fouad Mami

Université d’Adrar (Algeria)

 

 Kraidy, M. Marwan. (2017). The Naked Blogger of Cairo: Creative Insurgency in the Arab World. Harvard University Press: Cambridge, London. pp. 304. 

 Do you want to quell a social revolution? The easiest recipe is to defuse its incendiary social content by simply publicizing it as a quest for the sensational and voyeuristic. Short of ideas? You already have a rich arsenal of Oriental imagery and tropes. Therefore, portray those asking for their rights as unworthy of such demands since they haven't resolved the simplest of concerns; they are still mapping the geography of their second half, women. Diverting attention from demands for "bread, freedom, and social justice", the initial call of the Egyptian Uprising 2011, often works by portraying these revolutions as sensationalist and spectacular demands for gender equality. Worse, the counterrevolutions' best weapons narrate a story about how restrictive and addictive to restrict women's freedom because, as unworthy people, Arabs asking for their rights cannot see beyond their women's vaginas. Hence, they cannot be serious when asking for "bread, freedom and social justice".

 Kraidy is neither naïve nor wicked to synthesize the Arab uprisings as a quest for voyeurism. His premise, however, hinges on the idea that the social uprisings can be approximated as a creative insurgency that is infatuated with, even fixated on, the body. The body has been the most salient trope that marks the creative insurgency, otherwise known as the Arab Spring. To illustrate his point, Kraidy distinguishes between three varieties of artworks, each deploying the body to serve its message. First, there are those incendiary works such as Bouazizi's suicidal self-inflammation, an act that had a domino effect as it deposed several dictators. Second, there are those sarcastic works with scornful references to dictators. Kraidy brings to evidence Omar Abulmaged's April 2, 2014, court sentence in consequence of the latter calling his donkey Sisi and adorning its head with a military cap. The case underlines a situation stretching decades before wherein Egyptians used to deride President Hosni Mubarek as the laughing cow, imitating the famous French cheese commercial brand, La vache qui rit. The third trope combines the serious and the sarcastic through nude art and is spearheaded by the young blogger Alaa El-Mahdy in her 2011 A Rebel's Diary

It is not farfetched to conclude that the early two trope variations pave the way for the third, assumedly the most enigmatic and puzzling. Thus, The Naked Blogger of Cairo "explores the mixture of activism and artistry characteristic of revolutionary expression and tracks the social transformation of activism into Art and ensuring controversies." (p. 5) Towards this end, Kraidy finds that creative insurgency cannot be restricted as an instantiation of one artistic expression or another. A fair analysis of that creative insurgency's emergence must grapple with the one it finds confusing. Interestingly, El-Mahdy's nude photo is compared with other creative expressions from the mother of all revolutions, the French one, zooming on Eugène Delacroix's La liberté guidant le Peuple (1830). 

With the human body as the governing principle for a creative insurgency, The Naked Blogger of Cairo lies in four sections with an introduction and conclusion. The introduction "In the Name of the People" highlights a problem: Why is the body so fundamental to the Arab uprisings? Furthermore, "How does the rise of digital culture complicate our understanding of the body in revolutionary times?" (p. 12) Standing in awe of the naked blogger, Kraidy develops: "by inviting both moral opprobrium and threats of physical oblivion, al-Mahdy's digital nude selfie had immediate rhetorical and physical consequences." (p. 18) Understandably, the sky is the limit for the readers' expectations to find all those rhetorical and physical consequences. 

Section One: "Burning Man" zooms into the visible and invisible dimensions of radical militancy, mostly in Tunisia, namely Bouazizi's act of self-inflammation. Kraidy finds the act has been less directed toward the dictator's stifling renditions of the country and more against his countrymen's approach to that stifling as a fait accomplait. Section Two: "Laughing Cow" invests in the opposite direction of section one. The gradual mode of activism, namely the sarcastic laugher, and mostly in Egypt. Like radical militancy, sarcasm too hinges on the body politics, and Kraidy finds that armed with only sarcasm and laughter, ordinary Egyptians have defied megalomaniacs ever since pharaonic times. 

Section Three: "Puppets and Masters" explains how the human body is often at ease with both moods of expression: the radical and the sarcastic. As a result, revolutionary or creative insurgency chooses to mix the extreme with the gradual, using examples from Tunisia, Egypt, global activism, and the French Revolution. Understandably, the chapter prepares readers to register the content of the following section. With Section Four: "Virgins and Vixens", comes Kraidy's opportune time to sell readers the presumed seriousness of bodily undressing. Through a rhetorical phraseology, the author succeeds in affecting an aura of seriousness by what political scientists qualify as the blind spot of the king's two bodies. The blind spot—understood to be the king's male organ since it is only this organ that puts him on the same bar with other humans—facilitates the acceptance, even the balancing, of naked activism with all political, aesthetic, and ethical militancy. 

"Requiem for a Revolution" or the conclusion asks whether simply women's bodies are engaged in men's political tussles less to liberate women and more to galvanize the populace around what is ultimately men's fixation on power. Women's bodies become tools whereby women are ultimately emptied of subjectivity and the capacity for free thinking and decision-making. 

In order to make space for the voyeuristic and the sensational, Kraidy has to beat about the bush and lecture readers about the uses and abuses of body politics so that his rendering of the Arab uprisings may sound plausible. To buy his idea is to embrace an insult and participate in the still unfolding counterrevolution. There is simply no way whereby one may even begin to compare the conscious and principled acts of either Bouazizi, Shaimaa al-Sabbagh, or the Kurdish Women of Kobani fighting ISIS with the nude selfies of El-Mahdy and her several pretenders. Kraidy does not want to acknowledge that the counterrevolution aims to cast the class struggle as a gender, race, or faith struggle. The further to stay away from the class struggle, the safest the counterrevolution remains. To equate Bouazizi's act with El-Mahdy's is to participate in distortion as perpetuated by the false omnipresent and to ensure that the narrative of the revolutionaries of Tahrir and elsewhere will stay forever tarnished and uninviting.

Quite the contrary, the revolution precipitates a world order that does not call for spectacles and where bodies are loved, caressed, and cared for in dignity and mutual love. Only love is revolutionary and triumphant orders presiding over the false omnipresent always seek to divert attention from true and mutual love. What does El-Mahdy in her diary preach? In a nutshell, she communicates men-hating as if the world is short of hatred. Other than seeking to destroy the pillar of the nonetheless corrupt values of society, her method is hatred. Let us all recall how revolutionary couples married and committed to sacral (not sacred) vows and principled living in Tahrir. Their revolutionary friends congratulated them and savoured the delight of simply witnessing the promise of social love (not just harmony) and larger emancipations come true. Had Kraidy bothered to read El-Mahdy's A Rebel's Diary, he would find ages-old litanies and ill-articulated cliches regarding the alleged oppressive practices of the Orient. 

Again, had Kraidy bothered, he would have found the right parallel to El-Mahdy's selfie, Delacroix's Femmes d'Alger dans leur appartement (1834), and certainly not La Liberté guidant le peuple (1830). It is not rocket science to note that with the latter, the bare-chested woman is a participant in the arduous struggle and an active one, for that matter, against forces of regression. Perhaps, she was among the group of women protestors whom Louis XVI famously ordered croissants au beurre when they were dying for lack of bread, showcasing the sovereign's divorce from reality which ultimately sealed his fate for good. With Femmes d'Alger, one traces a process that eventually propagated into El-Mahdy's selfie: the fetishizing principle, the need for a mysterious form of freedom, and freedom in Capital as slavery since both Algerian or Egyptian men do not know how to handle/to man their women. Hence, the reason why these women are slowly rotting in the harem. Only Capital—the logic in the selfie and the classical painting—is savvy and reliable when extracting value from these oriental women. What is most painful is the self-Orientalizing act that academics and serious academic publishing such as Harvard UP deem liberating and introduce it to the world as such. 

But since the neoliberal order glamorizes El-Mahdy's daring act, Kraidy could see no alternative but to give his final assault and insult "… most revolutionary martyrs-at-large were dead and clothed men, whereas the emergence of women as icons in the Arab uprisings tended to result from their disrobement." (p. 13) How else to read this statement other than a reproduction of the patriarchal mindset that Tahrir revolutionaries brazenly fought against? Besides the insult, disrobement is glamorized because it is the only way to ensure the restructuring of capital forces and the valuation of surplus value. Every rebel-à-la-El-Mahdy labour is further devalued, literally prostituting workers, even those who never heard of El-Mahdy. How else to afford the imagined independence of one's place except through increasingly lower wages?  

 

Fouad Mami

Université d’Adrar (Algeria)

ORCID iD https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1590-8524

fouad.mami@univ-adrar.edu.dz

 Eid Mohamed and Ayman A. El-Desouky (eds.) 2021. Cultural Production and Social Movements after the Arab Spring: Nationalism, Politics, and Transnational Identity. I.B. Tauris, London and New York. 

The keyword for this edited volume is transnational. It deploys the transnational as a cultural output of the Arab Spring, the popular uprisings that swept several countries in the Middle East and North Africa in two waves, the initial one in 2011 and the latest in 2019. Interestingly and to the exception of one single essay by Hager Ben Driss on the poetry of Tunisian Sghaier Ouled Ahmed's incendiary poetry, all contributions seem to be fascinated with works that are either a celebration of multiculturalism or transhistorical. In doing so, their essays are narcissistic projections of what the editors aim for the Arab Spring to be remembered, a culturalist quest for some mysteriously lost and regained identity, the one caught between past and present, modernity or traditionalism. In reality, though, these projections, regardless of how apparently nuanced or informative, stand at odds with the core principle of the uprisings: a class struggle seeking the foundation of an egalitarian society.   

The editors start with the premise that the social explosions, otherwise dubbed the Arab Spring, cannot be explained by postcolonial or nationalistic theories. The latter are anachronistic and unhelpful. The uprisings, they add, far supersede the capacity of a single idea or approach to account for the ideological, cultural, historical, or economic realities "that have unsettled the power structures of state formations and processes of subjectivation…" (p. 1). It is not difficult to note that the book's core question veers into an identity quest imagined to require assimilation to European multiculturalism, or so the material advances of Europe are supposed to be premised. For purposes of lending that quest a heavy and serious endeavour, the book hinges its rationale on "…the deeper reality [that is supposed to have fueled the uprisings, precisely those] …collective modes of knowing, and of knowing collectively, beyond institutional politics, national and postcolonial histories, and the established discursive modes of expert sciences and intellectual discourses." (p. 2) Hence, the preaching of transcultural is almost in tandem with the reigning neoliberal order, which seeks to simultaneously resolve two contradictions: the fall in the rate of profits and the squashing of the class struggle through banalising immigrants and immigration as a free and conscientious choice. With one contribution, Katie Logan, one cannot overlook in her reading of Etel Adnan's 1993 novel, Paris, When It's Naked, an infantile admiration of the European Union and an evocation of reproducing the 'melting pot' in the Arab World.  

  

Western discourses of social mobilisations, the editors trust, cannot account for the recent changes taking place in the MENA region. Social movements such as the ones that spearheaded the studied uprisings are presumed to have become governed by new modes of social mobilisation, namely the internet. Hence, there is little, if at all, historical continuity between past and present struggles in the Arab World. The book lies in four parts, comprising twelve chapters: four in the first and third and two in the second and the fourth. They are contributions by scholars of social and human sciences.

 

The first part trusts that the Arab Spring marks the emergence of a multiplicity: ideological, cultural, religious, educational, class-based, and gender-based. It claims to find and marshal a methodology rooted in the dynamics of the Arab Spring. A methodology that breaks away with the old norms of study "…sublimation of the Other—and especially of the United States as pervasive—has built an idea of fragile Arab communities… [together with] the emergence of the digital citizen opens ways for conceiving oneself differently from decades--, if not centuries—old narratives." (p. 23) Through shuttling back and forth from the mother countries to the hosting places, Diaspora communities are deemed to facilitate the perceived need for change. Thus, the transcultural reality fueled exasperation with the likes of Mubarek and Ghaddafi, and triggered a new mode of digital citizenship that undid censorship and broke rigid borders. Caroline Rooney, in her contribution, proposes that even old enmities (Jewish and Arab) are no longer operative, and the new generations are receptive to the undoing of political manoeuvrings and discourses.

 

Part II investigates a culture's diversifying and assimilative practices that help to re-narrate identity after traumas. At stake in this is a rethinking of the idea of inclusiveness." (p. 5) Negotiating a new, universal identity wherein Facebook plays a key role is what Ben Driss notices in the poetry of Sghair Ouled Ahmed (201). This poet used to write with a universal audience in mind for which he sought not only solidarity but the need to register a different hypothesis or vocabulary with which he, the poet, "…rectif[ies] the Western grammar of revolution." (p. 84) In the name of reclaiming one's history and saving it from the falsifications by victors, Jeanna Altomonte finds the Iraqi artist, Adel Abidin's 2007 interactive installation, Abidin Travels: Welcome to Baghdad a recreation of Iraq and Baghdad's millennial history in Western capitals. With its subversive character to neo-Oriental tropes pushed by heavy Western media, Adidin's installation is supposed to "…promote social and political change in regions affected by war." (p. 102). The logic of the essay goes assumes that the simple fact of living outside Iraq (in diaspora) facilitates new esteem for the Iraqi as a productive and respectable subject. 

 

Part III highlights how migration enforces the sociopolitical collision around issues of cultural identity. As Melissa Finn and Bessma Momani argue, Settling in Canada surveys over 860 Canadian-Arab youth to explore the possibility of a transnational outlook on oneself and others through metissage. Differently put, in being a hybrid, that is, both Arab and Canadian, one leaves the parochial and ravishes inclusive, "…demarcating the inside and outside of cultural boundaries, and choosing positions on an issue-by-issue basis." (p. 121)

 

Part IV stands apart from the other three sections in how it claims that "…identity is a false problematic." (p. 7) and where the staging of the revolutionary/protest act in the artistic work cannot be taken for granted. The Houthi sarkha (scream) is found to be a self-contradiction in movement in the sense that it "serves the Houthi's solidification of power but not without rendering the sarkha's context of the struggle against violations of Yemen's sovereignty meaningless." (p. 206) Embraced as an identity, the chapter finds that sarkha's capacity for galvanising the struggle for life in dignity is a false radicalism because it reduces complex history and culture into a follower of either the Sunni brand of Islam or Zaydi Shia. Hamid Dabashi's essay on the art of protest carries out this section's investigation of falsehood. He finds that radical art is precisely the one that cannot be recuperated and championed by museums and art galleries because that radical art lies at the interstitial and transitory, "specific to the moment of their staging" (p. 236). The 'interstitial' is his term for the truly subversive art as it haunts counterrevolutionary forces, the ones that have feasted on the Arab Spring's propulsion for emancipation.

    

In asking what is about the self-immolation of a single man in Tunisia that sparkled the revolution in Egypt and elsewhere, the first section finds that the answer lies with the emergent trans-cultural identities in the Arab World and beyond. What an elusive approximation to a point-black question! Instead of discussing the dictatorial orders as the latter unflinchingly pursued the extraction of surplus value/profit, thus stifling the possibility of mere survival, the contributions in the section project their own biases and jumpstart singing the song of capital, rendering the incendiary radicalism a quest for a transcultural identity and self-referentiality. The fluidity of movements is supposed to combat "the essentialism, ghettoisation and fundamentalism." (p. 14) Any objective reader cannot miss the insult to the sacrifices of the activists who paraded the squares and streets of Egypt, Tunisia, Bahrain, Libya, Yemen, and Syria. It is fallacious to assume that technology (social media) galvanises the rebellious subject. Rather, the burdensome thresholds of exploitation and grab cancelled the possibility of decent living and triggered the way for a social explosion.

 

Resisting the tendency to represent and reproduce the revolutionary act, as with the fourth section, sound like a promising venue to embrace the universal. In practice, though, the area veers into the irreproducibility of the revolutionary act, less to give people the opportunity to register the act and more to fetishise it. The alleged distinction between the act and the reporting of the act reads as infinite masturbation with words. Indeed, how can one celebrate the photo of Shaimaa al-Sabbagh's last breath or the one picturing Kurdish women of Kobani standing up to ISIS as the most radical with the same zeal as the nude photos of Alaa Elmahdy or Goldshifteh Farahani's? Dabashi overlooks how the radicality in each contradicts the other in balancing the two as even remotely comparable. al-Sabbagh's paves the road for the incendiary. At the same time, Elmahdy veers into voyeuristic and spectacle hence, how an authentic work of art has to reproduce the emergency, not just the emergence, of the revolutionary act.

 

Overall, the transnational and transhistorical as championed in this book seek to dispose of the incendiary content of the uprisings surgically. In making the uprisings look like an orgy for metissage, historical and intergenerational continuity is the target since only the one who embraces their history can convincingly shout 'no' to the neoliberal order. One cannot possibly develop the same stance toward their two histories—even if awareness is possible, acting and standing for the two roots is impossible. Sometimes, if not often, the two roots are mutually exclusive. That explains why metissage, transhistorical, and transcultural are the darling ideologies of the current neoliberal and counterrevolutionary orders

Fouad Mami

Université d’Adrar (Algeria)

ORCID iD https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1590-8524

fouad.mami@univ-adrar.edu.dz

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Zegart, Amy. B. 2022. Spies, Lies, and Algorithms: The History and Future of American Intelligence. Princeton University Press. pp. 424

 

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Amy Zegart, in this study, proposes reshaping American intelligence institutions to meet the challenges of the twenty-first century. America boasts of exactly eighteen agencies, but instead of aspiring awe or efficacy, the number should underline the limitations of the current structuring of intelligence bodies. Since each apparatus was added after a major failure, the lingering challenges remain unsurmountable, and the strategic advantage over adversaries is unmet. The challenge facing the intelligence community and America now lies less in half-hearted coordination work between diverse and specialised agencies and more in the fundamental contradiction between business and national interests. The two claims are mutually exclusive and cannot be reconciled. Unless some formula is found to harness business for the nation's benefit, the intelligence agencies' operations will stay largely dysfunctional and bypassed by tenacious adversaries.  

With eighteen intelligence agencies and the result is America is underperforming. Zegart thinks this is a lingering and counterproductive Cold War mindset. In the age of open-source information, with the internet doubling its volume of knowledge every two years, secrecy, the cornerstone of all eighteen bodies, emerges as a certain way towards disaster. Teenagers using Google Earth and other freely available and inexpensive applications can now perform feats that used to consume considerable time and Personale. In this environment where anyone can spy, and everyone with a reasonable set of skills can access sensitive data, secrecy is a liability. And as such, the intelligence community needs to harness the courage to rethink its work. 

To mount her revamp proposal, Zegart deploys ten chapters, introduction and conclusion included. She lays out the problem of her argument slowly in "Intelligence Challenges in the Digital Age: Cloaks, Daggers, and Tweets." The first of these challenges is power. Being powerful translates not only invincibility but also vulnerability. The second is democratised data which the internet revolution has introduced. Satellite images from Google Earth are perfect. Anyone with a computer and connection can monitor what Iran, North Korea, or any other government does not share. No state monopoly over access to sensitive information is possible. This leads us to the third challenge, which is secrecy. In the past, maintaining secrecy gave an advantage in intelligence collection tasks. Now, secrecy is almost detrimental because no government can entirely protect its power grids, financial records, or start-up inventions—all of which can be accessed online—by disengaging or "standing apart from" (p. 8) the world. Hence, why private actors such as Facebook, Amazon, and Google, among others, should be involved in securing America as most cutting-edge technologies can be used and often are used as weapons against American interests. Similarly, this is why secrecy in the old sense translates to disadvantages that severely hurt U.S. interests. A lot of catching up is facing the U.S. intelligence community concerning secrecy. 

Chapter two: "The Education Crisis: How Fictional Spies are Shaping Public Opinion and Intelligence Policy." Here, Zegart addresses the inhibitive impact of Hollywood in the sense that spy entertainment (she calls it: 'spytainment') provides a completely distorted image of intelligence work. Equally damaging, spytainment clouds public perceptions of the real challenges facing America. Fiction maintains the myth that America is invulnerable le whereas, in reality, America is vulnerable. Besides, Hollywood fuels conspiracy theories such as President Trump's conviction of Deep State rhetoric and plotting against his policies. With conspiracy roaming wide, congressmen and judges tend to believe spytainment flat plotlines, featuring "heroes, escapism and the triumph of good over evil" (p. 26) more than intelligence reports they have access to. Clouded in secrecy, the culture of the supremacy of the intelligence agencies set in motion through fantasised decades of intelligence success during the Cold War does not help break the ingrained myths. 

To get a consistent picture of U.S. intelligence, Chapter three, "American Intelligence History at a Glance: From Fake Batteries to Armed Drones." In providing a snapshot of the development of intelligence institutions since Geroge Washington, Zegart aims to remind policymakers and the general public alike that America is vulnerable. In its brief intelligence history, America could not bridge over halted development, organisational fragmentation, and democratic tension. During peace times, before World War II, America had the habit of dismantling its spy bodies. Whatever experience gets accumulated, it is soon lost to the wind. Besides and a latecomer in the spy industry, America should not be engrossed with its Cold War success, particularly when compared with countries such as China, a millennial history of warfare and intelligence. The rules of the games are quickly changing, and America—Zegart never tires of reminding—should not sleep on past feats. Again, Zegart hammers how technological advances are more disorienting than conducive to any strategic advantage. In her opinion, intelligence agencies should resist the temptation to violate their mission as information-gathering bodies, giving decision-makers an informational gift. 

Chapter four: "Intelligence Basics: Knowns and Unknowns" Here, Zegart dispels myths from reality and underlines how intelligence operates in practice. The three core missions: the analytic, the human, and the operational, interact to make any intelligence agency what it is now. The analysis is geared toward giving policymakers an "advantage over adversaries." (p. 79) For successful executions of analytic missions, one has to be aware of the fine distinction between knowns and unknowns. Intelligence now, we find, is not necessarily the amassing of secrets, and as such, it cannot be confused with policymaking. The mission's human side sheds light on various motivations and traits, animating the analyst, the officer, and the informant. We read too about how intelligence officers balance their jobs with their private lives. There is a section on how officers grapple with moral dilemmas. In carrying out their mission, intelligence agencies handle interrogations of detainees. Still, evidence often amounts to no more than a good bet since cases where conclusive evidence can be reached is rare. Zegart finds that the golden rule with intelligence professionals is ways of "…challenging their prevailing hypotheses." (p. 103) 

Chapter five: "Why Analysis is so Hard: The Seven Deadly Biases", is key to the book's overall thesis. Given the abundance of open-source data, the chapter seeks to answer why analysis has become excessively hard. Other than outside compromises, Zegart outlines the sinister role of seven deadly biases. Even when an institution is sure it has neutralised internal endemics such as "bureaucratic turf protection, agency cultures, career incentives, ingrained habits, and a desire for autonomy" (p. 114), not a simple task. However, it can move on to work on the seven biases. These last range from confirmation bias, optimism bias, availability bias, fundamental attribution error, mirror imaging, framing biases, and groupthink, to the secret for super forecasting (p. 136). The key strategy to outsmart these biases lies in encouraging dissent, finding a team of experts that reviews an intelligence case and makes the opposite argument on the devil's behalf. She similarly notes that advances in artificial intelligence can help overcome human limitations. 

Chapter six: "Counter-intelligence: To Catch a Spy", grapples with traitors' motivations and how intelligence officers recruit informants in the digital age. We read that "China, Russia, Cuba, and Iran are among the most aggressive foreign intelligence services seeking to steal American secrets. Of them, China stands apart as the most serious counter-intelligence threat. American military experts have said that there isn't a single major Chinese weapons system that isn't based on stolen U.S. technology." (pp.146-7) The chapter elaborates on early tell-tale signs for suspecting, investigating, and uncovering sell-outs (or molls in intelligence jargon) without compromising trust among intelligence community members. Three counter-intelligence challenges are: trusting too much, paranoia: or trusting too little, and technology that made it possible to recruit assets from afar. Technology makes it equally likely to incur considerable damage if a trusted insider breaches their trust oath. For example, we read how the damage done by turncoats such as Snowden has been irreparable. 

Chapter seven: "Covert Action: A Hard Business of Agonising Choices", studies those undercover operations that aim to serve a certain line of policy but which can either be claimed or officially disowned depending on interest, not on success or failure. The operation that killed Bin Laden counts as one, but so is the CIA's funnelling of money to help Italy's Christian Democratic Party to win parliamentary elections back in 1947. (p. 174) Since only the president can authorise covert actions, the chapter weighs those uneasy choices presidents take or circumvent to serve a policy. When all policy lines have been tried and extinguished, covert actions serve as the last resort. How drone technology and the war on terror have been operating forces policymakers to face how the blurring of intelligence and military mandates is counterproductive. 

Chapter eight: "Congressional Oversight: Eyes on Spies", recounts that as lawmakers, congressmen are not trained or sufficiently motivated to do the oversight work stipulated by the constitution. Zegart summarises three challenges facing congressional intelligence committees in three words: informationincentives, and institutions (p. 198). Given the inhibitive influence of spytainment and the poor payoff from carrying out proper oversight on intelligence agencies, Zegart observes an information and motivational lag beneath successive congressional committees charged with cross-checking intelligence agencies. Besides, she highlights a structural and deeper problem of these committees' culture that does not encourage rigorous second opinions about the work of intelligence agencies. The compounding effect from the three challenges explains the scandals, such as the presumed weapons of mass destruction owned by Iraq. In short, one comes face to face with how policy becomes outpaced by technology. 

Chapter nine: "Intelligence Isn't Just for Governments Anymore: Nuclear Sleuthing in a Google Earth World", further advances the cause of renovating U.S. intelligence. Underneath the chapter lies, a call for humility as "estimating nuclear threats is hard. Assessing the intelligence track record is, too." (p. 230) A new phenomenon, democratising intelligence, breaches governments' monopoly over sensitive information. Low-cost satellites with competitive image capacity than military satellites are routinely put in orbit. Machine learning and computer modelling enhance surface-to-air missile launching site identification for anyone with an internet connection and the patience for tracking terrestrial alterations. Hobbyists using only Google Earth images can chase Iran or North Korea's uranium-enrichment facilities and the activities taking place therein. Once the intelligence ecosystem is widely open to non-governmental actors, intelligence policy has to accommodate the informal branch lest the latter adds salt to injury by encroaching unforeseen and further damage beyond malign actors in the pay of foreign intelligence agencies. 

Chapter ten: "Decoding Cyber Threats" here, the argument runs that cyber-threats have opened the door for a new generation of warfare rooted in deception, sabotage, and misinformation. Hacking and deepfake can sow the seeds of social discord and upheaval. The examples with which Zegart illustrates her point are telling. Shadowy Kremlin-backed organisations armed with automated Facebook accounts or bots sow discord in American cities. The intelligence community registers the 2016 presidential elections as a cyber Pearl Harbor. We read too that "China is believed to have stolen trillions of dollars of intellectual property, including terabytes of data and schematics for the F-35 and F-22 stealth fighter jet programs." (pp. 261-2) Without the cooperation of the private sector with state agencies, such complex intelligence challenges triggered by the digital age cannot be met, and the cost will be American democracy and liberalism. This explains Zegart's initial call to rethink the structuring of intelligence agencies along lines that do not abandon Cold War methods but without overlooking the need to engage with open-source data and other unorthodox initiatives.  

The book draws on thirty years of research experience, advising the U.S. government, and hundreds of interviews with current and former intelligence people. As a career academic, Zegart comes as an outsider, but that counts to her advantage since probably only an outsider can reflect on that, which makes the institution's chances of facing the new threats pretty grim. 

Contrary to Hollywood's overblown portrayals of American invincibility, the records of American intelligence agencies, though professional and functional, are far from adequate to meet cyber threats and other challenges put by the digital age. What Zegart has in mind is the recent failure as America's spy network has been blown, hence, how the call for renovation and accommodation to the new-brave world reality is nothing short of a call for revolution. In outlining, "Today's technological demands, though, are even greater because there are more breakthrough technologies. They're spreading faster and further. They're inherently hard to understand. They're driven by commercial companies seeking global markets, not governments seeking national security." (p. 222), we realise that Zegart has touched on the core of the problem. America is experiencing a self-contradiction in movement: the forces of nationalism against globalism. The American establishment can no longer postpone the question: are they for American capitalism or capitalism without qualifiers? 

All else, such as debates over the competency of congressional oversight, cyber threats, and breaches of secrecy, are secondary and disappear once the earlier question is resolved. Addressing the efficiency of democratic measures in the form of congressional oversight to prevent personal or institutional abuses become a liability, a crippling structure. Because authoritarian regimes are free from similar democratic stipulations in their accountability system, they have an advantage over America. 

Indeed, it is not the lack of patriotism and sense of national service among those heading tech companies (p. 276) that drives the present fixation on U.S. intelligence. Predisposed to markets, tech companies' allegiance resonates with clients, not citizens. To account for this contradiction, Zegart improvises an implicit willingness to sacrifice democracy that "[o]versight has rarely worked well because the sources of dysfunction run deep—in information, incentive, and institution." (p. 224) Other than being a discreet call for jingoism, the problem with the book is that it sees intelligence agencies and the state that these agencies presumably protect as independent totalities. The successes of World War II and the Cold War were dictated by economic miracles as U.S. companies, not the U.S. government, beat up all competitors (foes and allies alike) combined. These companies' hunt for profit now presupposes any allegiance to the state as a mechanism that leads to asphyxiation. Between asphyxiation and global growth, tech companies have chosen the latter. Given this context, the state with its eighteen intelligence bodies can do very little except postpone, not reverse, the collapse of the Westphalian state order. Instead of addressing the major transformation ahead, Zegart contemplates how companies should be loyal. 

 

Fouad Mami

Université d’Adrar (Algeria)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Basu Thakur, Gautam. 2021. Postcolonial Lack: Identity, Culture, Surplus. State University of New York Press, Albany, NY. pp. 276. 

 

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Under neoliberalism, Basu Thakur finds, postcolonial theory has become a race for victimhood, “a brand of culturalism…” (p. xxiii). Following Gayatri Spivak’s specification that subalternity is a position and not an identity, Basu Thakur argues that postcolonialism has drifted into conceiving subalternity as an identity in practice. That explains why it has become anti-emancipatory. Relying on insights from psychoanalysis, Basu Thakur finds that postcolonial writers have to conceive identity as an ontological lack to be truly empowering. Indeed, it does not behove contemporary Indians or Algerians to merely reinstate the Other, the colonial master, by some postcolonial acolytes-disguised-as-authors. This is so because the Other remains rooted in fantasy, functioning as a governing structure that lacks substance. This explains why the best policy for decolonised peoples is neither to disavow nor take the European worldview seriously. Instead of addressing the lack on which postcolonial subjectivity sits as a frightening void, the book encourages readers to view it as a call toward universalism, a step toward revoking both the coloniser and the colonised.   

Basu Thakur proceeds by reconciling what are considered irreconcilable disciplines: postcolonialism and psychoanalysis. He finds that the two fields share common ground more than what each avows. The book is divided into two sections: the first contains three chapters and the second two plus a conclusion. The chapters in the first explain why postcolonial writers cannot counter the ontological challenge posed by the big Other. The second section teases how neoliberal modes of expression perpetuate the colonial/oriental project, thereby testifying to how the colonised/decolonised remains crippled with the same ontological fixation.

Chapter One: “The Subaltern Act of Freedom” distinguishes between acting out, ‘the passage to the act’ and act in Lacan’s theory of the Act in the sense that the first two never challenge the Other because they maintain the fantasy, whereas ‘to act’ is to decimate both the big Other and the imagination. Basu Thakur illustrates this point with one subaltern character, Draupadi, in Mahasweta Devi’s story with the same title, wherein the subaltern abolishes politics by putting the signifier’s symbolic order under duress. The revolutionary dimension in Draupadi’s act is specifically that one that does not solicit recognition; its spontaneous and eruptive unfolding breaks the monopoly over the symbolic framework because the master signifier through the show is deeply shaken. Indirectly Basu Thakur is telling readers that postcolonial texts fall below this bar set by Mahasweta. 

Chapter Two: “Postcolonial. Animal. Limit” revises postcolonial to criticism by claiming that the real animal is the one whose capacities escape humans’ imaginary: it shocks and destabilises the seemingly ever-strong symbolic order. (p. 36) only to learn that all extended orders remain rooted in lack. Only fantasy exhibits the Other’s apparent invisibility. Through a reading of Mahasweta Devi’s story, the postcolonial animal interpreted through a pterodactyl underlies less and less the occasional failures of language by zooming on the expressive shortcomings of language. Encountering the flying demon uncovers the impossibility of representing the condition of subalternity. In as much as it is real, not a symbol, the radical alterity in the pterodactyl remains an insult to subjectivity; it disrupts facile renderings and certainly cancels the capacity of representation to render any experience translucent. The animal’s death drive can be effectively countered through “explosive love” (p. 44), never through desire, allowing readers to confront universally traumatic nothingness.

Chapter Three: “Hysterization of Postcolonial Studies; or, Beyond Cross-Cultural Communication” builds on the Lacanian principle wherein people “…desire to remain in desire without satisfaction…” (p. 68). The author finds that the colonial archiving of knowledge is fundamentally rooted in nuisance or that excessive enjoyment from the dream of controlling the colonised. But this orientalist project wherein knowledge is sought less for its own sake and more for domination remains paradoxically an expression of lack and non-being besetting the master signifier. The evidence from reading Leila Aboulela’s “The Museum” and Tony Gatlif’s film, Gradjo Dilo (The Crazy Stranger, 1997), shows that the archive amassed to qualify for cross-cultural communication miserably fails. Hence, how postcolonial theory, when restricted to answering back, is destined to remain a self-defeating endeavour. Only the willing blind refuses to note that the archive cannot be exhaustive. By extension, a counter archive similarly expresses hysteria that craves acknowledgement from the Other’s symbolic order.

Chapter Four: “Fictions of Katherine Boo’s Creative Non-Fiction, or, The Unbearable Alterity of the Other” reads an American journalist’s Behind the Beautiful Forever: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity (2012). Basu Thakur finds that neoliberal accounts have remained consistent with colonial narratives regarding how oriental spaces remain marred in poverty. Instead of chastising capitalism for the proletarization of India’s undercity, the report underlines postcolonial mismanagement and the elites’ corruption. White supremacists remain incapable of noting that the impoverished multitudes in Calcutta and other cities are essential to the prosperity of residents of upscale neighbourhoods in Mumbai or New Delhi in the sense that the two antagonistic sights go together. Narrative accounts wherein poverty is humanised, such as in Boo’s, risk “gutturalising the politics of globalisation by strategically redrawing the phantasmatic screen of third world abjection over the real conditions of global inequality suffered in the third world.” (p. 108). The argument wherein only in India (or other decolonised spaces) where corruption explains sights of depravation fortifies the idea that the West cannot tolerate despicable depravities because only the West/Other knows how to address gross economic inequalities systematically.

Chapter Five: “Political Correctness Is Phallic: Idaho Politics, Black Panther, and Gran Torino”, considers how representational politics, as shown in these films, facilitates disengagement from reality and remains complicit with neoliberalism. As displayed in these films, the conflict between communities is geared less toward provoking audiences to register the injustice of political choices but is precisely directed toward culturising injustice. The films serve as an ideological apparatus obfuscating the precariat’s chances of reversing their misfortunes by feeding them the illusion that solid opportunities are waiting for them just around the corner if they only stay patient. Meanwhile, the neoliberal order remains untouched. Instead of highlighting institutionalised segregation or the ensuing discrimination that followed the formal abolishment of slavery, Black Panther reverses the typical image by showing the imaginary African republic of “Wakanda as a site of pure plenitude.” (p. 148) But the technologically advanced Africa and Africans are nowhere nearly helpful or emancipatory as ‘Africa-as-the-heart-of-darkness’ since it is still through fantasy that the West mediates Africa. Readers reach this understanding that whoever seeks an acknowledgement from the master signifier is counterrevolutionary.

The Conclusion: “Particular Universal” underlines how postcolonial writers’ penchant for competing representations of misery and victimhood subscribes to the logic of illogic wherein gratification is expected and generated from the Other’s acknowledgement. Besides illustrating how this logic is sick, the conclusion claims how this logic enforces the other’s phallic image and justifies postcolonial oppression. Differently put, no matter how exhaustive the native informants’ knowledge of the subaltern will be, that knowledge stays rooted in lack and has to be mediated through fantasy. The subaltern cannot be reduced to any set of archives or manuals. The particularity of the urban precariat stands for the new universal. Following Žižek, Basu Thakur credits Malcolm X for accurately seizing on the radical understanding wherein “…the only possibility of moving forward lies through embracing the negation, claiming it as part of one’s identity, hence the ‘X’ in his name.” (p. 192)

When reading Basu Thakur’s volume, the reader cannot avoid the question, why would one seek to fix a theory by invigorating it with another one? But lest one precipitates, what seems like a fixation on the palliative is found out to be indeed revolutionary. Similarly, there are several instances of convoluted writing like in: “This is not freedom in the sense of Liberty as a metaphysical attribute. But, rather, freedom here is action illuminating the lack of freedom.” (p. 28), where they attempt to follow through the prose becomes a challenge. But soon, Basu Thakur’s discussion of his selected fiction comes to the reader’s rescue, convincing us to remain glued to the book. Indeed, Basu Thakur’s reading of Mahasweta’s Draupadi reads to me (at least) like the Tunisian Bouazizi, the man who inflamed himself in December 2010: an act that deposed several dictators. I could not overlook this quote: “By erasing their bodies to correspond with their already erased speech, that is, unravelling the body as an object of speech, the subaltern shocks the big Other. Their wanton disregard for the body delivers a traumatic truth. Namely, there’s a difference between having and being a body.” (p. 7). Insights such as these underline the author’s insistence on historical totality and the class dimension in the precariat’s misfortune with which he reinvents communism from the debris of postcolonialism and neoliberalism. How can readers afford to bypass Basu Thakur’s insights as to the latter recall Marx and Engels’ underscoring of the class struggle? Only that Postcolonial Lack deploys a different approach to solve the same theorem.

 

 

Fouad Mami

Université d’Adrar (Algeria)

ORCID iD https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1590-8524

fouad.mami@univ-adrar.edu.dz

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Colonists Exact Stakes and the Untold Story of Algeria’s Independence

 

 Albert Camus (1913-1960), a Nobel Laureate for literature, was born and raised in colonial Algeria. He is largely considered in independent Algeria as the spokesperson of white settlers, perhaps even the pride of a social class better known as Les pieds noirs. The latter underlines the descendants of white settlers or colonists (French but also other Europeans) who joined the colony after the conquest of Algeria in 1830. Almost all of them acquired the most fertile land at a fraction of the cost following the decimation of Arab tribes and the ruinous policies that led to the dispossession of the remaining inhabitants from their communal lands. In the literature about the period, the first colonists are branded as pioneers. They worked the land and rendered it extremely productive.

It was rumoured during the 1930s that if America was proud of California, then France was proud of Orléansville, today’s the governorate of Chelf and the region around, spreading from Oran in the West to Médéa in the East. True, these colonists were industrious, but they too exploited the dispossessed native population. Russian convicts, who lived through the reign of the last Tsar and were serving prison terms around the 1910s in Bône (today’s Annaba), were shocked to find that the colonists treated Algerians worse than sheep.[1] With the end of military rule in the 1880s, colonists (not Metropolitan France) were responsible—through exclusionary practices—for literally sending Algerians behind the sun. Understandably, by the time the Algerian revolution broke out in November 1954, everything the colonists fought and stood for became at stake. Most of them, at that point, had been four generations in the colony.

To give non-Algerian and non-French readers a foretaste of la déchirure or the disheartening misfortune of these colonists brought about by Algeria’s independence in 1962, consider this analogy. In South Africa, Nelson Mandella was awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace simply because he did not repeat the Algerian tragedy. Mandella kept intact the economic privileges white colonists enjoyed during the apartheid. He did not start a policy or propagate a process leading to their eventual eviction or dispossession. White liberals and their media adore Mandella for not doing what the FLN is thought to have done with white colonists three decades earlier.

Here enters Camus’s conciliatory discourse during Algeria’s war of independence. He is notoriously famous/infamous for adopting his mother’s point of view at the expense of justice.[2] Because I hailed from the very people sent behind the sun by Camus’ ancestors, I find any engagement with that ‘justice versus mother’ discussion’ a dead horse. How so? The terrorism Camus refers to in the quote was not terrorism; these were some people’s deliberate actions of emancipation to re-enter history after more than a century of denial. Hence, the euphoric reactions captured through Algerian songs and other cultural artefacts such as: “يا محمد مبروك عليك الجزائر رجعت ليك[3] While a student during the 1990s at Algiers University, I grew up having a part in several discussions regarding whether or not Camus was a misunderstood universalist or bloody racist. I can say now that lyricism does not even begin to approach, let alone solve historical necessities. Reading Camus may make one more sensible and more sensitive to certain complexities, but at the end of the day, poetic formulations of his and his like (Mouloud Feraoun, for one) do not advance the cause of emancipation a single centimetre. Lyrics and poeticism are what the French brilliantly capture through the expression: des masturbations a l’infini.

That explains why there exist perhaps a few solid reasons why the world will want to read one more book about Camus. Advancing this position, I am aware, comes at the risk of effecting a major offence to liberal sensibilities since Camus has been the darling of this class. It is worth knowing that Camus did not hail from these classes, but he had been accultured—appropriated, if you will, not without his tacit approval, though, and as such, he becomes an idol for anyone who wants to change their social skin. With class as a matrix for meaningful analysis, the methodological line is drawn for what comes below.

Similarly, it is worth recalling that with the conclusion of the Evian Agreements (Accords d'Évian), colonists became personas non grata, undesired in a country they called theirs. Many of them knew no other country to call theirs except Algeria. Most Algerians perfectly understand and even sympathise with their misfortune. Strangely, the Evian Agreements guaranteed the colonists’ right to stay. But it is they who sealed their fate in calling for and acting to keep Algeria French. Long story short, had they stayed, I and my kind (practically sons of peasants with living standards barely different from feudal times) would never have had the chance to make it beyond primary school. Like our forefathers, we would have been condemned to remain subservient to colonists, the lowest class on the social ladder. My father was coerced to leave school at the age of 10, and that is what France was able to offer him and his generation.

Meanwhile, it is no exaggeration that by literally enslaving Algerians, not a small number of colonists used to live like royalty. Hence the nostalgia and the rumination over a French Algeria in contemporary France has been more of a re-memory than a memory, properly speaking. Knowing that originally these colonists hailed from peasant and working-class backgrounds, it is understandable what they have gained and lost. Camus is an icon for everything they aspire to, the self-made entrepreneurial model.

Now, concerning how independent Algeria has fared without colonists, that is less significant to colonists and more appealing to capitalists. Volumes can be written about dysfunctionalities, imagined or real corruption, and money laundering. But for the sake of fairness, every Algerian is entitled to free education, health insurance, dignified lodgings, etc...… Only those blinded with unsurmountable hatred can deny these relative material gains. Still, the class struggle remains the perfect arbitration for any measure of success or failure.

The predominant nationalist discourse prevailing after independence only seeks to asphyxiate the class war. Through several slogans, Le hirak (peaceful uprising) of February 2019 articulated that class dimension. Still, the triumphant narrative tried and succeeded in portraying it as only an exasperation with Bouteflika and his cronies. Rather, le hirak expresses an incendiary insurrection against the entire setup of postcolonial order, not just about the Bouteflika episode. The muffled class war has its explanation, which is further elaborated below, but the class dimension after independence remains there for all to see.

This leaves subaltern Algerians with no hatred against France or at least they do not hate France, les français de souche. In this connection, it is worth recalling that no hatred or admiration exists outside space and time. Sales of French cars do not compare with Asian ones; Algerians cannot resist French brands. So is the case with French cheese, delicacies, language, etiquettes, and above all, the French love for life! For most Algerians practically leading their daily lives (not when some journalist pushed a microphone their way), what happened happened, and one cannot sit around crying over spilt milk or reinvent the wheels of time. Algerians trust in the Hegelian law of historical necessity (not they know Hegel), through which he means: that what happened could NOT happen. Still, for historical accuracy and fairness in judgment: the colonists kept Algerians outside time. This is not some nationalist ruminating over colonial atrocities to cover for his postcolonial shortcomings and even crimes!

Ever since the end of military rule toward the end of the 1880s, the colonists and their offspring dominated the colonial administration. They made everything in the book to block the scanty metropolitan policies that aimed to provide, care for, and ‘civilise’ the native (Algerian) populations regarding schooling and caring for the health of Les indigènes. Who stood against the progressive policies of the French state? None but the colonists. In 1962 these colonists got what they have historically always deserved. Outlining this does not make Algerians blind to the fact that several colonists served in FLN ranks and openly supported decolonisation. The violence during the revolution settled scores; that violence, as Frantz Fanon brilliantly puts it at the beginning of Les dames de la Terre (The Wretched of the Earth), has purifying effects. No one, no matter how Zen or humanist, could undo that violence and bloodshed.

To counteract the sweeping lyricism in Camus’ prose, I always refer for the benefit of students (most of whom are historically removed from the colonial context) to the first page in Kateb Yacine’s Nedjma. Reading Nedjma’s first page, one will see how Camus has been out of touch with reality. Camus’ lyricism perfectly fits a middle-class sensibility full of: ‘either and or’, indecision, and mental fogginess. The first page of Nedjma saves readers from that fogginess and makes them fully register the class struggle. One will realise how acute Algerians’ living conditions after 1945 were and how they were aware of the necessity of bloodshed and violence, not that they liked it, but because they were squeezed out of options. Kateb Yacine remains a master had he written only that first page in his career. For there, one captures Algerians’ logos, the reflective consciousness that looks at the abyss but is not afraid to tease it out and distil the sensible course of action. Perhaps, it is not an exaggeration to conclude that Camus does not even begin to compare with Yacine. If literature is but another means of changing the world, not just an instantiation of the bourgeois hunt for the beautiful, then it is Yacine who deserves recognition, not Camus.

Now, after 1962 and as outlined earlier, one does not need to be an apologist for the FLN and their misrule. But it is unquestionable that materially speaking, Algerians fared well under post-independence rule than during colonial times. Regarding present Franco-Algerian relations, they too cannot be stripped out of context. Not all the criticisms one reads in the French media are accurate or innocent or not propaganda. It is not news that there exists corruption in reporting corruption in Algeria. Many observers recall that the French media were the first people who brought public attention to overpricing the 1200 km highway in 2006. Why? French companies, like American, Japanese, and South Korean, made their bids. But the project was contracted by three large and state-owned Chinese construction companies and one Japanese. How so? Simply because Algerian bureaucrats did their job. They handed the project to the lowest bidder. Like everywhere in the world, the initial fund meant to cover the construction was not enough, and the contracted companies asked for what was legally theirs. The highway is not Germany’s Autobahn, but its cost is reasonable. And the delivered infrastructure is not bad, as is often reported. Likewise, the French media became furious when the authorities handed the contract for building the largest damn in the Maghreb, that of Beni Haroun, in 2001 to the Chinese. The contract was mouthwatering, and soon the usual media faultfinding started. Bouteflika’s reign has been no short of objections, but it remains a duty to be fair.

Big contracts for building key infrastructure such as the one outlined above are a handful of examples of why tensions have always governed the relationship between independent Algeria and France. The cultural explanation proposed by the Algerian establishment often aims to confuse, justify, and never explain. The tension has deep roots in material history and the meaning of primitive accumulation. The tendential fall in the rate of profits [as specified by Karl Marx in volume three of Capital] obliges French companies to compete against more vibrant American and other competitors from around the world for parts of Algerian markets that dictate the tension. The corruption in corruption-related discussion seeks to cover that public officials and their cronies’ swindling of assets, large or small, cannot significantly account for the contradictions in international trade. And that these contradictions in international trade cannot be resolved through globalisation (Global Market) since the latter precipitates an equal standard when contracting from among national capitals—a situation that remains full of odds and engenders tensions among competing capitalisms making international trade. To provide a taste of this contradiction, Algeria’s decision to nationalise its energy sector in February 1971 gave leverage to American companies at the expense of French ones.

That explains that if one aims to address the subterranean forces that shape Franco-Algerian relations, then one has to read and consider the underlying thesis proposed by Gregory D. Cleva in JFK Algeria Speech (2022). It is not as if we only want to read the book, but we have to. The gist of it is how in the wake of that speech, a pattern was set for the relationship not only between the U.S. and Algeria or the U.S. and France but between Algerian and French establishments. (the two peoples here are outside the power equation) Leaving the ephemeral (that which French media deems newsworthy) and embracing the essential, the JFK Algeria Speech is the way to go. The intricate web of connections is barely highlighted, let alone sufficiently addressed neither by staunch Algerian nationalists nor by largely nostalgic French journalists and academics.

For a large sway of ordinary Algerians, the FLN eventually won because it forced de Gaulle to accept negotiations. Under the carpet, however, is how the FLN, by the time JFK made his speech, was militarily defeated. Remember, it was in the context soon after the battle of Algiers and when FLN masterminds were chased down, nearly all of them were decimated. French generals’ strategy to defeat the insurrection started bearing fruits. And still, the FLN, in the final analysis, got what it wanted! Strange. Some other forces were working against French policymakers of the time and in favour of the FLN, not necessarily in favour of the Algerian people or the revolutionaries. We read in Cleva’s account that American general consuls in Algiers serving from 1942 to the late 1950s each and all of them played key roles by accurately reporting the pitfalls of French colonial policies. As a member of the Senate’s committee for foreign policy and thus a likely candidate for the presidency, JFK formalised what the American establishment, up to that point, had always wanted and discreetly planned.

The U.S. did not emerge from WWII victorious just like that. The world still remembers how President Donald Trump, in November 2018, reacted to French President Emmanuel Macron’s allusion to the need to create an independent European army, a framework outside NATO. Trump angrily retorts: “Without the U.S. help in two world wars, today’s Parisians would be speaking German.”[4] It is no secret that between the two world wars, the French establishment was quickly ageing and bitterly divided. To further explore this topic, here is a 2006 study: Le choix de la défaite: Les élites françaises dans les années 1930 by an imminent scholar, Annie Lacroix-Riz. The point here is that while the French generals and army overwhelmingly succeeded in suppressing the insurrection in Algeria, French politicians could not capitalise on that success because Washington wanted otherwise. The latter embarked on a decolonisation policy, and not even Britain was immune. India, the jewel of the empire, won its independence! So, who could openly say no to Washington? Who could dare? Not even de Gaulle.

With his return to power in 1958, le generale tried his best to secure Algeria as French, but eventually, he knew his manoeuvres would amount to a little showmanship. In mounting a rebellion, the FLN’s gamble, for that is what it was, somehow ironically paid off. U.S. geostrategic interests wanted an end to colonisation, lest upheavals and insurrections in the colonies would break the capitalists’ new orders. Decolonisation as a policy was meant to contain the colonised, regardless of how on the surface, it gave them better terms (not the best) to negotiate their fate and future emancipations. For Indians, as much as for Algerians or Kenyans, the colonised’s national independence, besides the pains and sacrifices, has been largely decided elsewhere, although it is disrespectful to presume that battlefields did not matter.

This gives us an accurate picture of how the French establishment views Algeria today. Perhaps less so than how Britain views India, France sees Algeria as a bitch that got tired of sleeping with Paris and decided in a fit of anger to go to bed with Washington. All other approximations to those relations are meant to confuse, perhaps justify, never to explain what the French establishment to this day cannot overcome what it considers as the impossible loss! Now for Algerians, both the establishment and ordinary people, severance of ties with France spelt good riddance with an abusive and unjust colonial system. But it is precisely here where Algerians prefer to overlook the American role and attribute victory exclusively to their forefathers’ sacrifices. Worse than a taboo, the refusal to acknowledge the American role spells the bewilderment of Algerian elites since they are not even aware this pivotal role exists. Perhaps apart from a handful of core FLN negotiators all perished by now, a few—if any—realise the U.S. part in Algeria’s independence.

 

 





[1] Owen White, 2021. The Blood of the Colony: Wine and the Rise and Fall of French Algeria. Harvard University Press. Please refer to my review of the book. https://www.theleftberlin.com/review-owen-white-the-blood-of-the-colony-wine-and-the-rise-and-fall-of-french-algeria/

[2] “I have always denounced terrorism. I must also denounce a terrorism which is exercised blindly, in the streets of Algiers for example, and which someday could strike my mother or my family. I believe in justice, but I shall defend my mother above justice.” Herbert R. Lottman, Camus, A Biography (1979)

[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DT29_wJJmvU or consider this largely forgotten one now “Fransa mellat” by Cheikh Bouregaa decrying how colonial France treated Algerians as sub-humans as well as the latter’s fight for their own self-respect during the revolutionary war 1954-1962: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0gmvUlFr-Aw

[4] https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/french-would-be-speaking-german-without-us-trump-tells-macron-cw668ssdw#:~:text=The%20US%20president%20told%20Mr,higher%20tariffs%20on%20French%20wine

 

 

 

 

 

 

Shirk, Mark. 2022. Making War on the World. How Transnational Violence Reshapes Global Order. Columbia University Press, New York. pp. 256

 

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Description automatically generated with medium confidenceFor Mark Shirk, "the idea that the state is receding in the face of globalization or that it is no longer as important as it once was is a straw man." (p. 147) For him, the Westphalian state has undergone several transformations, and the current global capital attack on the state is but a convoluted way of registering transformation. In short, Shirk finds that the state endures. Only that one's understanding of it has to be broadened and démodé conceptions abandoned.

The gist of the book is that state and anti-state actors or structures reinforce each other, all for the benefit of the former. The latter could be early eighteenth-century pirates, late-nineteenth-century anarchists, or early twenty-first-century jihadists. In each example, Shirk takes, the state's initial response is largely inadequate. Eventually, the state learns its lesson through dynamics, which he calls: shattering and reinscribing. In exhausting its resources, the state causes some dysfunctionalities, but it gradually harnesses the courage to defeat the challenge. But the state neutralizes threats once ingrained habits, those thought useful for bypassing the threat are challenged. Only new and transboundary practices reinvigorate the state to the point that the state itself is transformed, almost beyond recognition, particularly for observers reared on entrenched practices. With each violent crisis, Shirk illustrates three he deems pivotal. It is not exactly the concept of the state but rather an outmoded understanding of its nature and role, which must be left behind. In the end, "boundaries have always been shattered and reinscribed; change is constant and the state [emerges] as a project, a process." (p. 146)

In "Change and Continuity in Political Order", the definition of state actors has to accommodate what we currently call the private sector since the latter operates in a state ecosystem. Because threats are transboundary, like with three examples treated in the issuing three chapters, old theories (such as geographical sovereignty and state competitions) are bypassed in understanding the evolution of the concept of statehood in practice. In conclusion, we read that borders are fluid (defined by surveillance, not by exclusion), and sovereignty is almost ontological. It comes irrespective of territory or citizens' acquiescence.

In "The Golden Age of Piracy and the Creation of an Atlantic World", readers find that from 1710 to 1730, piracy around the Caribbean Islands and the costs of what is today the United States constituted a major threat to the mercantile economy and the chances of European emerging capitalisms for expansions. Only by relocating judicial power to the periphery (the colonies) piracy was finally extinguished, and commerce resumed. Britain (not France or Holland) emerged as the biggest winner, less through design and more by accident.

In "'Propaganda of the Deed,' Surveillance and the Labor Movement", we read that by the end of the nineteenth century, radical socialists or anarchists called for a stateless order. Their means to achieve such an objective is the assassination of monarchs, heads of state, and lesser state representatives. States' repressions followed, but efforts to quell anarchism only succeeded when state legislators introduced the welfare state and the eight-hour working day. The state funnelled the anarchists' energy into labour movements. 

In "Al-Qaeda, the War on Terror, and the Boundaries of the Twenty-First Century", Shirk observes that following 9/11, the policies the U.S. took, such as the invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq, did not pay off. Such responses were more expressive of anxiety and confusion than judicious countermeasures. In the following decade, targeted killing by drones and data surveillance succeeded in illuminating terrorists' threats. Data surveillance, in particular, has irrecoverably transformed the state in the sense that liberal democracy that guarantees the individual's (citizen and alien) privacy is fundamentally challenged.

One cannot agree more with Shirk's proposal. Topping the three illustrative scenarios lies perhaps marron communities and Marronage as an anti-state institution. Those slave escapees who established independent communities at the top of mountains and other inaccessible localities and challenged empires could only be destroyed once the technology became available. But what dictates the transformation of the state is that situation where capital takes over from the state because it no longer needs a state, at least the one that is paternalistically understood.

Leaving the issue of the teleological unfolding of the process of state transformation to others, I choose to dwell on the book's approach. The practice theory unveils itself as anti-historical. Instead of universal principles, we read that "…it is situations that determine the meaning and outcome of the event." (p. 139) Even when deploying three historical situations, Shirk's proposition cancels historical destiny, that is, people's aspiration for freedom from state orders, the way the pirates, the anarchists, or jihadists dreamed of. So why deny that history has a sense, a universal principle called emancipation? Shirk's argument can be confused as the trust that there is neither right nor wrong outside space and time, but it is not. For him, that which is working (not that which works) has to be right is an ideological imposition, seeking to eradicate the subaltern's (the wretched of the world) resolve to challenge the state because the latter is presumed to be too invincible and as such cannot be successfully challenged.

Fouad Mami

Université d’Adrar (Algeria)

ORCID iD https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1590-8524

fouad.mami@univ-adrar.edu.dz

 Bessinger, Mark. R. (2022) The Revolutionary City: Urbanisation and the Global Transformation of Rebellion. Princeton University Press: Princeton and Oxford.

 

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Mark Beissinger is a political scientist from Princeton. His latest book, The Revolutionary City, surveys revolutions from 1904 to 2014. He finds that within this time framework, revolutions started in the middle of the nineteenth century in cities. Think of 1848 waves against several European monarchies, and perhaps the most famous of all—the Paris Commune 1871. Revolutions have been ruralised, given the state’s capacity for lethally coercive power. Most of these, Beissinger calls social revolutions: against absolute monarchs or for regaining independence. But by the end of the twentieth and the beginning of the twenty-first centuries, revolutions have relocated back to cities. True, unlike their antecedents, revolutions are now civic (non-violent), understood as “a mass siege of an established government by its population with the goals of bringing about regime change...” (p. 3) 

The relocation to the city presupposes the proximity of revolutions to the nerve centres of state power, a situation that has impacted—even sometimes dictated—not only the tactics but their scope. Fueled by the power of numbers or the capacity to mobilise huge crowds more than well-defined ideological convictions, urban revolutions are revolutions against corrupt and wasteful elites within the state. This logic of negativity specifies that, unlike social revolutions, urban revolutions are more likely to lead to less enduring achievements and legacies. Because they tend to unfold in relatively shorter stretches: over weeks, when compared with social revolutions, which usually take years, activists have to build consensuses and forge coalitions. The problem with coalitions is how they cause urban revolts to fail even when they succeed in ousting incumbent regimes eventually. It is precisely when they oust their nemeses that urban revolutions become less likely to survive post-revolutionary scenarios (upheavals for which they have inherited: marred living conditions that convinced people to revolt in the first place). Beissinger reminds us that with social revolutions, coalitions and compromises are significantly less common, often unthinkable.

Unlike social revolutions, urban civic revolutions remain, more often than not, unable to bypass the societal cleavages animating urban revolutionaries and activists. Such cleavages translate into an inherent inability to stabilise society and smoothly lead it to meet its aspirations: good services and a functional economy. Urban civic revolutions are at heart geared toward anti-political movements, and they display a deep distrust for political elites and frameworks.

The Revolutionary City has ten chapters, the conclusion included. The statistical method builds on data from across the globe and covers the period between 1904 to 2014 with sensible projections beyond these dates. The text comes peppered with statistical illustrations, charts, and tables; they can be at first intimidating for readers who are unused to quantitative approaches. But lest these readers rush to close The Revolutionary City prematurely, it becomes particularly rewarding to note how numbers and statistics speak the truth and common sense regarding the uses and abuses of revolutions. The razor-sharp distinctions save scholars hailing from Marxist and phenomenological backgrounds from the lyricism regarding what revolutions are and how they propagate. Besides, the text is followed by four major appendixes for those who want to check to further the data from the survey experiment Beissinger conducted. This priceless data may look like heartless commodification of human lives and legitimate aspirations for better lives to the realm of quantifiable at the expense of the qualifiable. Readers again should resist the temptation to disengage from its findings or method because these numbers tellingly underline human experience. The data is similarly available on the author’s website.[1]

The first chapter: ‘A Spatial Theory of Revolution’, underlines how the spatial relocation of revolution leads to the proximity dilemma. What is solved through galvanising large crowds and the power of numbers is lost through the critical need for coalitions. The latter involves ideological dilutions that haunt urban civic revolutionists once they succeed in ousting the contested power in terms of murky performances, precipitating upcoming societal upheavals.

The second chapter, ‘The Growth and Urbanization of Revolution’, specifies an increasing frequency of revolutionary episodes around the world. He finds that the massive shift of people from rural places to cities, the consolidation of states during the Cold War, and the rise of the unipolar world order dictate the rise of urban revolutions.

In the third chapter, ‘The Urban Civic Revolutionary Moment’ Beissinger sets the stage for his probabilistic approach. Instead of presuming causes (falling into biases), he proposes exploring factors that mark urban civic revolutionary episodes. He calls these factors ‘structural conditions.’ Because conditions such as inequality, poverty, and underdevelopment are associated with social revolutions, Beissinger finds that urban civic revolutions do not correlate with such conditions. Structural conditions explain the break between the unfolding of revolutions past and present. Meanwhile, the conditions crystalise the methodological cost when considering contemporary revolutions as a continuum of past ones.

Chapter Four, ‘The Repression-Disruption Trade-off and the Shifting Odds of Success’, stipulates how the chances of revolutionary success have never ceased of augmenting thanks to urbanisation and proximity to power centres. This does not mean that with each revolutionary scenario, the task of unseating regimes is more frequent and predictable than failures.

As outlined in the fifth chapter ‘Revolutionary Contingency and the City’” it is challenging for both incumbent regimes and their contestants to steer the next move and respond to rapidly unfolding updates. Mistakes or missteps from either party become acutely magnified, with direct and often irreversible consequences. This is the impact of what Beissinger brilliantly underlines as ‘thickened history.’ Mistakes, even outright blunders, used to be contained and remediable with social revolutions, which is never the case with urban revolutions.

The sixth chapter, ‘Public Space and Urban Revolution’, reiterates the far-reaching impacts of the unfolding of revolutionary work in cities and capitals. Cities like Paris were initially rebuilt to facilitate the quelling of revolts and popular movements. Beissinger, in this chapter, finds that the physical location and the symbolic value in the design of cities can be redefined to serve urban revolutions.

Beissinger, in the seventh chapter, ‘The Individual and Collective Action in Urban Civic Revolution,’ finds participants widely diverse. That explains the fundamental disagreements once the contested regimes fall and revolutionaries assume the steering wheels of the state apparatus. Limitations in leading smooth post-revolutionary scenarios underline how, irrespective of massively circulating narratives and “judging from motivations mentioned by participants themselves, these were revolutions not for democracy, but against the corrupt and abusive rule.” (p. 304)

Chapter eight, ‘The Pacification of Revolution’, finds that the data from the past century indicates that even with the ever-increasing number of revolutions, revolutionary situations have become significantly less lethal. Urbanisation ranks among the top causes of the decline of lethality. The decline should not lead us to assume that seating powers have grown ethical. Rather, regimes are mortally worried about the backlash from deploying pacification forces to control unruly or seditious crowds. 

‘The Evolving Impact of Revolution’ or chapter nine, contrasts the achievements of social revolutions against those of urban civic ones. Testable achievements are scaled down to five: political order, economic growth, inequality, political freedom, and government accountability. Orders emerging from urban civic revolutions last less in power than their counterparts from social revolutions. Even when they introduce a substantial increase in political freedom, urban civic revolutions fail to deliver on economic growth or fight inequality. These shortcomings—Beissinger finds—are never the fault of urban revolutions. The latter inherited the state with its embedded networks of corruption and nepotism. 

The last chapter, ‘The City and the Future of Revolution,’ concludes its historical perspectives by predicting that revolutions, as they have substantially changed in style and delivery during the last three centuries, will continue evolving. The internet already displays new mobilisation techniques and counterrevolutionary and surveillance potentials. In a nutshell, there is no end to the possibilities for revolutionary regime change.

Sometimes Beissinger’s designed abstention from qualification as with ‘coupvolution’ defined as “a mass siege of government aimed at regime-change that precipitates a military coup” (p. 29) sacrifices complexity for the smooth unfolding of a theory, for there are situations where revolutions and counterrevolutions are so close to each other and unfold in a confusing attire. Likewise, Beissinger’s approach, built on la coupure or rupture between social revolutions and urban civic revolutions, can be deployed by counterrevolutionaries to rationalise historical discontinuity, that is, to discourage people from looking at historical antecedents to carry out unfinished emancipations. 

These two remarks aside, policymakers and democracy activists will find the book particularly rewarding. Busy readers may limit their engagement to the introduction since Beissinger has squeezed the gist of his book in a nicely accurate synthesis there. Even counterrevolutionaries will benefit from The Revolutionary City. Quite an irony but true! Indeed, the quantitative method convincingly explains why certain post-revolutionary situations such as Tunisia, Egypt, or Libya are stuck in loopholes. Beissinger’s method leaves no space for self-flagellation (a path taken by several activists and pseudo-historians). Again, the method enables readers to register that every eventuality subscribes to the Hegelian logic of necessity where all that exists could not have existed. The Syrian nightmare remains the exception that proves Beissinger’s case: the more time it takes to defeat the incumbent and the bloodiest the struggle, the more enduring will be the fruits for the proletariat.

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[1] Please check it at: https://scholar.princeton.edu/mbeissinger/software--

 

Fouad Mami

Université d’Adrar (Algeria)

ORCID iD https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1590-8524

fouad.mami@univ-adrar.edu.dz

 

 

 

 

 

 

Two Book Reviews On The Muslim Brotherhood-  by Fouad Mami

 

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Victor, J. Willi, 2021. The Fourth Ordeal: A History of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt 1968-2018. Cambridge University Press. Hardcover: $90.76; Paperback: $30.45; ISBN-10:  1108822452; ISBN-13:  978-1108822459; pp. 588.

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Lorenzo Vidino, 2020. The Closed Circle: Joining and Leaving the Brotherhood in the West. Columbia University Press. Hardcover: $80.51; Paperback: $30.00; ISBN-10: 
 023119367X; ISBN-13:  978-0231193672; pp. 296.

 

 

 

Can one emancipate with a structure that is largely non-emancipatory? And what is the exact role of the Muslim Brotherhood in the context of the massive insurrections known as the Arab Spring? Several observers underline a situation where the revolution has been present, whereas the revolutionaries have been largely missing (Bayet 2017, Traboulsi 2014). Others note that both the revolutionaries and the revolution have been active, but the reversal of the Brotherhood's fortunes indicates a cycle wherein the counterrevolution has gained the upper hand and that ascendency has not spared the Brotherhood, even when the latter has always "avoid[ed] revolutions and revolutionary change [as they are thought to] lead to unexpected consequences." (al-Anani 2022, 2) Still, the predomination of the counterrevolution does not in any sensible way guarantee that history will work in favour of the counterrevolution indefinitely. Much has been at play, and the following review essay accelerates the magisterial findings in both books to go beyond what each one highlights.

To begin with, Willi's The Fourth Ordeal presumes that the demise of the Brotherhood—its fall from grace—in the coup of July 2013 is a tactical error. Differently put, had the proponents of the Society's fourth Guide (el-Tilmsani) prevailed, the Qutbists (a vanguard subgroup within the Society that follows the ideology put forth by the radical jihadist Sayyid Qutb (1906-1966)) would have little chance in fragmenting the Brotherhood both just before the surge of the Arab Spring and after the group's victory in the presidential elections in June 2012. In what follows, I will show that rapid ascendency, while plausible, remains untenable in the case of the Muslim Brotherhood. In other words, the demise of the Society could not have been avoided regardless of which competing wing within it had been in control. The demise of July 3rd, 2013 and the subsequent fragmentation had not been a tactical miscalculation. And rather, it has been the undistorted translation of the motoring principle within the soon-to-be a century-old movement.

My contention presupposes an unbridgeable methodological divide between strategies of and for reform and those of revolt. Since Egypt was caught amid a radically incendiary situation, the means and the mindset of reform subscribe more to the prerequisites of the counterrevolutionary moment and its demands. This is different from ascertaining that the Brotherhood is categorically (as a matter of principle) a regressive or restorative force like, say, the military. Rather, it is the Society's pseudo-revolutionary dynamic, its political duplicity that borders on naivety, which is another facet of its theoretical poverty and distrust of radical youth forces that dictated its vulnerability to counterrevolutionary forces. The combination of all these shortcomings has dictated its fourth ordeal.

This review essay pleads for a radical distinction between the social means of a revolution, seeking a rupture with the manners of the past, and those tools aiming at reform, stressing gradualism and long-term change. Once this distinction serving a methodological axiom is set, the Brotherhood's performance in the revolutionary situation put forth by the post-2011 situation cannot be mistaken. This distinction also serves in reading Vidino's The Closed Circle as it zooms in on what he chooses to study: the Brotherhood's international branch, meaning: the Brotherhood's affiliates in Western Europe and the U.S. Perhaps to no one's surprise, both the original/Egyptian Brotherhood and its structure in the West (Western Europe and North America) are reformist. And unlike Willi, Vidino seizes on the logical implications when opting for a reformist track, taking part in the political game and hence the reverse of fortunes coming with the impasse of its project in both Egypt, Tunisia as well as in France, Denmark, Sweden, the U.K. and, certainly, the U.S.

Both Willi and Vidino, from the start, embraced the method of oral history: conducting not a small number of interviews with rank-and-file members of the Brotherhood and certain leadership figures and dissenters both in Egypt and abroad. This method the authors contrast with the approach that reads the Brotherhood as a social movement. The advantages they advance are multiple. For interviews-based approach facilitates seeing the movement less like a solid structure and more as a social actor in the real world, combined with a heterogeneous pool of opinions across the movement's hierarchal spectrum. In contrast with Vidino, the interviews Willi conducts are massive, and so are his readings of memoirs, brochures, and news updates on blogs and websites. Still, both authors' command of Arabic boosts their grasp on the thematic they engage with. The result shows in a plethora of details that corroborate their thesis rooted—unfortunately in Willi's case more than Vidino's—more in speculation than in a solid historical reading of these facts they amassed.

In Chapter I: "The Society of the Muslim Brothers", Willi stresses that the niche for his study lies in the lack of serious, reliable, and unbiased literature addressing the Brotherhood. Most of what exists is produced by attention-grabbing pseudo-scholars and think-tanks. Against a background rampant with simplistic studies and severely lacking in written archives, Victor's project of doing oral history explains the importance of spelling out the details of the "great saga" (12). He does this by zooming in on al-Banna's project of reviving the faith within a colonial context in which Egypt was a British protectorate. Contextualization is vital in beating up cliches. Willi then considers Banna's precursors in the political revival of Islam: Mohammed' Abduh, Jamal din Afghani and Mohammed Rachid Rida. The book does not overlook the Sufi elements in the Banna's vision serving as a 'pure' fountain for the reactivation of the faith in the sociopolitical order of the 1920s and 1930s. Later, the reader encounters al-Banna's organizational seven-step blueprint and the basic literature of the movement. He ends the chapter by reassuring Western audiences that al-Banna's idea of the caliphate is more of a metaphor, "a catchphrase" (33) for founding a Muslim parallel to the European Union or the United States of America.

Chapter II: "The Second Founding (1968-1981)" invokes the post-1954 incarceration of the Brotherhood's leadership under President Nacer. The latter almost cancelled the Society from existence. However, in the wake of the Arab defeat of 1967 in the war with Israel and the Student Protests of 1968, the leaders of the Brotherhood were freed from prisons and connived into Egyptian social life. But it was until President Sadaat's tenure that Brotherhood members were grudgingly tolerated a political role. 'Omar al-Tilmsani became the third Guide officially in 1973 and it was his gradualist approach as specified in his book, Preachers, Not Judges (1969), resonated with President Sadaat's policy of appeasement on two levels. The first comes in the context of a rival group, Jama'at al-Muslimin (Society for Muslims). The latter aligns itself with a radical jihadi ideology as outlined by Sayyid Qutb, which was then on the rise and threatened to destabilize the country. The second, which is no less important but overlooked by Willi, is the prominence of socialist and communist parties, exerting pressure on the powers of the time. Thus, al-Tilmsani's rendition of the Brotherhood and his balanced approach served Sadaat's policy of personalist rule. Sadaat's rapprochement with Tel Aviv and his eventual assassination in 1981 dictated that this arrangement with the state becomes now lacking.  

Chapter II: "The Rise of the Vanguard (1981-1991)" refers to how al-Tilmisani's adherents (proponents of gradualism in dealing with the powers that be as well as in the decision-making structure inside the Brotherhood) started losing currency to the more radical elements. Instead, it is now the vanguardist approach, those followers of Sayyid Qutb's ideology as specified in the latter book, Signposts on the Road (1964), who are gaining momentum. Other than the takfiri and jihadi articles of faith, the vanguardists trust in the Qutb's philosophy of jahiliyyah or modern-day structural ignorance whose raison d’être explains Society's need for the vanguards, those people "who engage with society while practising mental and emotional withdrawal from it." (107) With the vanguards in charge, the Brotherhood expanded both nationally (to all governorates in Egypt) and internationally (literally, worldwide). Meanwhile, it expanded into all professional syndicates and won an important number of seats in parliament. 

Of capital interest in understanding the fourth ordeal of the Brotherhood is the section titled: "The Brotherhood's Neoliberal Turn" in Chapter IV: "Brotherhood Incorporated (1991-2001)." The section traces the rise of the business-minded cadre in the Guidance Office, the likes of Khairat al-Shamir, who, while a vanguardist and jihadist, is similarly a business tycoon and strategist. The rise of al-Shamir and his cliques, Willi outlines, echoes the Brotherhood's overall change of perspective where "Quranic ideals with newly acquired market economy concepts…the emerging Islamic discourse embraced the modern business corporation as a model through which one could articulate specifically Islamic policies and objectives." (157)  A subsequent section bearing on the consequence of the seismic turn marks the "Transformation of the Social Base" within the several-decades long Brotherhood, ending in a quasi-class struggle within the movement. Therefore, the decade preceding 9/11 not only witnessed the break up between various Brotherhood national Chapters over the first Gulf War but a rupture with classical Brotherhood formation in Egypt itself.

Chapter V: "Struggle for Leadership (2001-2011)" carefully reads the decade spanning the period between 9/11 and the kick-off of the Arab Spring as it marked a further split between the gradualists and vanguardists groups within the Brotherhood. The denialist narrative of 9/11 by people introducing themselves as members of the Society complicated the relationship with the U.S., given how neoconservative orientalists branded political Islam. The Guidance Office started a public relations campaign denying allegations of its alleged static disposition and succeeded in establishing a rapprochement with the U.S. administration. On the eve of the January 25th Revolt, Willi specifies that the Brotherhood spearheaded by the vanguards was never in its best shape. The author lists several strategically fatal decisions paving the way for its fourth ordeal.

Chapter VI: "Revolution, Rise, and Fall (2011-2013)" enumerates several strategic miscalculations that resulted in the fourth ordeal of the Brotherhood. Chief among those several miscalculations, in Willi's opinion, is the inability of the Vanguard group to register the steam and the scale of the real and unexpected change that the revolutionary situation of post-January 25th has made possible. Victor notes a mental lag between the old school activism that marked the leadership on the one hand and the Brotherhood's youth revolutionary zeal and ardour. Against the specific warnings of the Brotherhood's youth, the leadership harried toward a hasty and farfetched alliance with the Egyptian military, expecting to be rewarded for its allegiance with power (al-Aswany 2021). The fiasco illustrates not only how (contrary to its youth) the negotiating cadres of the Brotherhood showed a lack of imagination but deep-seated duplicity, as shown in incidents such as the Maspero and the Blue-Bra Girl. The race for power for its own sake sealed the Brotherhood's unfortunate fate.

Chapter VII: "The Beginning of the Fourth Ordeal (2013-2018)" starts with how General Sissi's cracked up on the Brotherhood sit-ins in both Rab'a and al-Nahda Squares in August 2013 instead of uniting the remaining leaders, those who managed to escape or go underground in time, had fragmented them further. The crack-up, Willi finds out, has been unprecedented in intensity since Nassers' times in the 1950s and 1960s. Naturally, the second rank leadership had its chance in steering the Brotherhood. But the vanguard group, both from prison and exile, refused to secede important prerogatives, resulting in a feud, which, whether motivated by ego or by ideology, Willi does not specify. However, he specifies that a non-negligible section in the Egyptian leadership of the Brotherhood has propagated towards the necessity of the revolutionary path, including the armed struggle against General Sissi's dictatorship. But with the execution of Mohammed Kamel in October 2016, the revolutionary path lost currency. Rivalry and division remain, however, endemic, marking the Brotherhood to this day (the first half of 2022) even when the book closed its study in 2018.  

Even if Vidino's The Closed Circle approaches the Western chapters of the Muslim Brotherhood, it does not substantially differ from Willi's monumental gathering of facts and analysis. Eternalization of politics and duplicity in using it or the unprincipled deployment of religion rank supreme among Vidino's critique of the Western Brotherhood. The seven testimonial chapters are sandwiched between two introductory chapters varying between definitions and hypothesizing and two concluding ones as they synthesize the findings and read those findings beyond the amassed evidence. Hence, concerning Vidino's volume, I am saving the readers the middle chapters because all the seven testimonies (in the seven middle chapters) are squeezed into the synthesized findings and the methodological readings that go beyond the evidence. 

Chapter I, "What is the Muslim Brotherhood in the West?" starts with a methodological note regarding the sea of confusion in identifying Brotherhood organizations in the West. The reasons are multiple, but chief among which is the stigma the name recalls, given the 9/11 attacks and the steeped Orientalist portrayals that often present the movement outside space and time. Therefore, policymakers in the West are indeed in the dark, and Vidino's volume sells its credentials to facilitate practical ways of dealing with not a small number of Brotherhood offshoots in the West. While invariably sharing the belief that Islam is complete in and for itself, the Brotherhood groups do not seek to Islamize Western societies, aiming to facilitate the integration of Muslim immigrants into these societies. Vidino identifies three major categories of Brotherhood organizations. He counts a- pure Brotherhood bodies, which prefer non-public or secretive networking; b- Brotherhood spawns where affiliated members maintain an emotional link with the original organization but are not structurally tied to it; c- there are those groups who are only distantly influenced. All the three varieties have a vested interest in being representative of Muslim communities and collaborating with governments bodies in a way that channels partnerships over funds and political capital in the countries where they are based.    

Vidino outlines in Chapter II: "Joining and Leaving the Brotherhood" the criteria for selection of members and subsequently the reasons for these recruits' disillusionment which are inducive for parting ways with the movement. As to joining, the Brotherhood selects its cadres, not the other way around. No application in the classical sense is reported. The selection criteria have to do more on signs that promise piousness and obedience. Now, concerning leaving the movement, Vidino zooms in on two principal reasons. The first is disenchantment with the leadership and or dissatisfaction with the inner workings of the Society. The second specifies the group's ideology, particularly the Brotherhood's gradualist approach and its political duplicity. At the end of the chapter, Vidino broaches upon the dissenters' own life after leaving the Brotherhood, often reported as tough as the former members had had little, if at all, social life outside the movement.  

All the seven chapters from the III to the IX examine those moments of recruitment in detail. They contextualize both the joining and the leaving and provide reasons for each. The format used is a testimony that the author recomposes from face-to-face interviews and email correspondence. The common thread is the appeal or radiance that the Brotherhood holds, the enchantment of the early days and months, even years, and the expectations of serving in a larger-than-life cause in a movement whose name inspires owe and pride. No less common is the stifled dissatisfactions stamping the secretive nature of the Society's inner working, which the dissenters find no solid reason for maintaining except perhaps due to greed for power and manipulation of the lower and mid-ranking brothers. Most of the common testimonies Vidino brings note how the penchant for secrets could be quite an in place when working under or dealing with autocratic governments such as Egypt, Jordon, or Syria but certainly out of context when operating in Western democracies. Likewise, the testimonies note that leading Brothers, those involved with the real decision-making, rarely bother to read the languages of the Western societies they live in, say little as to genuine attempts at understanding these societies' histories and complex dynamics.     

Chapter X: "Joining and Leaving: What the Evidence Suggests" underlines a methodology in reading the problem of dissenting from the Brotherhood. Most dissenters left because they thought "current leaders have strayed from Hassan al-Banna's original message." (179). Others raised the concern of secrecy and doublespeak in the proceedings, which is thought to serve only "a small nomenklatura of interconnected activists, an aristocratic elite." (179) Differently put, ideological convictions are hardly the reason. Only a tiny minority of the dissenters (Ahmed Akkari, Mohamed Louizi, and the American Brothers) zoom in on the motoring principle behind the various chapters of the Western Brotherhood and find it problematic. They list the leaders' duplicity in playing politics with the powers that be. The face-saving infuriation concerning the Danish cartoons that featured Prophet Muhammed from 2003 to 2007 reveals how the key leaders can go in trading with their presumably principled defence of the faith. Other less fatal problems are listed in the chapter.

The last chapter: "The Western Brotherhood's Future: From the Arab Spring and Beyond." The video draws the picture of the Western Brotherhood transitioning toward post-Islamism. Contrary to Western governments' lack of policy, Saudia Arabia and UAE cracked up on their local chapters and tagged the principal Brotherhood in Egypt (following the July 2013 coup) with its Western wing, a terrorist organization stipulating a major geostrategic turn. Adding salt to injury, as soon as the Arab Spring started, Western Brothers joined Egypt, Libya, Tunisia, and other places (their countries of origin) to assume leading positions there. Still, they left their former positions in the West empty. For converts and those Muslim staying behind in the West, that move, like Ghannouchi's, dealt a serious blow to the image of the Western Brothers, pilling evidence of the opportunism of these leaders and the uncertain future of the Western Brotherhood as a whole. Vidino suggests that the scene is perhaps ready for post-Ikhawanism, like post-communism during the 1970s and the 1980s.  

The extensive details about the extremely divergent pool of opinions between the Brotherhood's inner circle, the small group of decision-makers, and their contestants, as well as the dissatisfactions, even the dissenting voices of second rank leaders in the provinces, as brilliantly displayed in Willi's study, however, are never a waste of time for the perceptive reader. Such details specify that Willi has actually spelt everything except the essential, or perhaps he has gradually broached upon that essential. For if they amount to anything, these extensive details remain food for thought because they confirm how a structure or movement founded for reform cannot by any stretch of the imagination propagate towards reform's antithesis: revolution. Such a situation does not result because of the overblown narcissistic drives of certain leaders or the fact that an ageing leadership in the Guidance Office was cut off from rapidly evolving reality, the way Will tries to convince us.

With a rapidly evolving revolutionary situation or overblown egos, leaders' out-of-touch are solid empirical factors. However, as the historical experience of the long durée shows, they remain marginal because each of Willi's listed factors enjoys no autonomous scenario of its own. The fact that the radical Qutbists won over the al-Telemsani-influenced members of the Shura council or became dominant in the Guidance Office does not alter the situation that the Brotherhood remains marred in theoretical poverty as literally not a single figure among its presumed thinkers dares to question the bedrock of the world's political economy. The Brotherhood's early bidder for the presidency before Morsi was Khairat el-Shatir, a proponent of the Qutbist ultra-conservative approach but equally an ambitious business conglomerate with literally billions of dollars. As his asset! The contradiction in combining piety and worldly success in a world deemed by Qutbists corrupt to the marrow is worthy of a study all on its own. That study can explain how the Brotherhood has had no qualms over sending emissaries to Washington DC and freely giving assurances concerning Israel's future security. Not a small number of observers mistake this Brotherhood's maneuverer as realpolitik. It offers a death blow to ordinary Egyptians' expectations for a substantial rupture from Mubarak's era. This is an example of Willi's impressive display of facts minutely scanned but are not pressed enough to yield and distil a solid historical reading showcasing that reform cannot befriend and accommodate revolt, in the sense that it cannot meet the people's minimum expectations in the wake of ousting an enduring dictator such as Hosni Mubarek.     

The Brotherhood's appeal to the U.S. establishment specifies two issues, not one. Apart from showcasing the leadership's lust for political power (al-Anani 2022, 10), its readiness to play with the available-but-abusive so-called 'rules of the game' indicates the extent to which the movement suffers from a severe theoretical confusion. The stipulation of the theoretical clarity stands at odds with Willi's broodings over tactical issues such as the Brotherhood's decades of incarceration and overall underground work carried out as an opposition entity made the movement apathetic to, not just, unready to assume political rule. All these are true but theoretical muddiness made the Brotherhood it is own worst enemy because that muddiness renders it incapable of embracing its historical responsibility. Indeed, the shallowness of its theoretical foundation largely decides its incapacity of spotting an alternative to the post-1945 American order. The combination of putting people of the like of al-Shatir's calibre in key positions in the movement illustrates that they take the laws of the market economy for granted. Similarly, their unconditional readiness to compromise on matters both delicate and of principle, such as the Palestinian Question, confirms those readings which trust in the Brotherhood as a radical alternative to Mubarek's corrupt ways are not only slightly mistaken but fundamentally false.

Suffice it to note that ever since its inception in 1928, the Society has never introduced itself except as a fundamentally reformist movement. Why pity the Brotherhood against reformism, the reader legitimately asks? The short answer is that Islam is either revolutionary or it is not. In this context, it is worth noting that Prophet Muhammad did not rub shoulders with the Meccan capitalists of his own time, not because he was not capable or that the opportunity did not present itself. For historical accuracy, the Meccan lords pleaded with him to preside over them. And it is he who did not accept because he knew he would be serving their caravans and businesses, and he was looking for a world without caravans and businesses. In the case of the Brotherhood, as Willi's succinct study brilliantly shows but rarely seizes on the fact that the Brotherhood had never been missing committed activists with exceptional talents and organizational skills. Therefore, to blame one faction or pity one subgroup against another is to participate in confusing, not elucidating, Egypt's revolutionary/counterrevolutionary situation.

Vidino's synthesis from the interviews and email exchanges puts its hand directly on the spot where it hurts the Western Brothers the most, that is, on the future of the movement as a whole. I learned how the multicultural Society envisioned by Western Brotherhood is exactly the opposite of what Western governments have in mind or plan for their nations. Pierre Durrani and Mohamed Louizi's testimonies both note how the Brotherhood flouted multiculturalism to maintain its parallel societies or ghettos: anti-universal Muslims communicating with like-minded Muslims and cheating the hospitality extended by Western societies. For anti-universal Muslims nurse the illusion that they can conquer Rome from within one day. Rome here is that mythical Western capital in the prophetic tradition. Despite Vidino being bemoaning how Western governments lack a long-term and consistent approach to the Society, this very duplicity in bending laws and abusing multiculturalism could be behind the U.S. policy planners' decision to let Morsi and his government down. Likely, U.S. planners did not want another heart-breaking Islamic republic, à la Iran. And in cutting the head of the mother movement in Egypt, its Western offshoots will be automatically powerless. In this context, we can read the ongoing feuds between Brotherhood leaders inside and outside Egypt, Ghannouchi's statement in favour of post-Islamism, and the assassination of Mohamed Kamel, rendering the Brotherhood's revolutionary bid into nought.   

The powerful point of the two books is how they allow Brotherhood members to speak and allow several voices and insiders' informed opinions to sketch the readers', not necessarily the authors', final analysis. The fact that the two authors speak and read Arabic, along with other languages, is an asset and facilitates their intentions to translate their humility and patience (unlike attention-grabbing Orientalists carrying out pseudo-scholarly works) to learn from the materials and synthesize their learning in these two books. The two authors are likely to transform how Islamist movements are approached and understood through such studies. Willi's study, in particular, highlights the role of functional social movements (in a similar vein to functional states) as the American establishment does not want to divulge the Brotherhood from a functional role, namely: quelling genuine revolutionary movements or those that can propagate toward upsetting the post-1945 world order. In The Fourth Ordeal, readers find that "U.S. strategic planners used an active and conscious policy of mobilizing political Islam to crush ideologies unfavourable to U.S. interests." (117). Unfortunately, Willi overlooks this methodological thread where he has failed in his critical observation, for the Brotherhood was specifically founded to suppress the nationalistic aspirations that emerged in 1920 (Soueif 1999, 224).

Speaking of the number of ordeals and given the reformist agenda of the Brotherhood or, more precisely, its lust for power, it is unlikely that the Brotherhood will cease playing with fire from which it bitterly tasted four times so far. Other ordeals will follow suit because, at the moment of composing these lines, reliable news reports circulate that the Brotherhood has been repeatedly involved in direct talks with representatives of General Sissi's government, the very person who caused the Brotherhood's demise. The fact that the Brotherhood is even willing to sit and consider proposals by Sissi's representatives is evidence of its political naivety. Many will rebut that aspiration to play a role in the future of their country. The number of ordeals, and the vocabulary itself, as the word mihnā or ordeal in Arabic stipulates a momentary but also necessary hardship from which a positive situation will eventually follow, expresses a willingness to impersonate the naïveté of an idiot and cancel ordinary Egyptians' historical destiny.    

References:

Al-Anani, Khalil. Ed. 2021. Islamism and Revolution Across the Middle East: Transformation of Ideology and Strategy after the Arab Spring. I.B. Tauris.

Al-Aswany, Alaa. 2021. The Republic of False Truths: A Novel. Knopf: New York and London. Trans. S. R. Fellowes

Bayat, Asef. 2021. Revolutionary Life: The Everyday of the Arab Spring. Harvard University Press: Cambridge, Massachusetts & London, England.

Bayat, Asef. 2017. Revolution without Revolutionaries: Making Sense of the Arab Spring. Stanford University Press.

Soueif, Ahdaf. 1999. The Map of Love. Bloomsbury Publishing, London and New York. 

Traboulsi, Fawwaz, 2014. thāwārt bilā thouwār. (Revolutions without Revolutionaries) Dar Riad al-Rais for Publication and Distribution, Beirut, Lebanon ISBN-139789953215723

 

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A Critical Political Economy of the Middle East and North Africa. By: Beinin, Joel. Haddad, Bassam and Seikaly, Sherene. Eds. 2021. Stanford University Press. Stanford, California. 2021; pp. 344; Paperback: $28.00. ISBN-10: 1503614476; ISBN-13: 978-1503614475

 

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Joel Beini et al.’s volume is premised on the idea that ‘Rentier State Theory’ (RST) can no longer serve as an explanatory principle in analyzing state dynamics in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). The editors presuppose that only a methodology rooted in critical political economy can explain the fortunes of MENA peoples in their respective polities. 

Class used to be swept under the carpet, but not anymore in this volume. A Critical Political Economy of the Middle East and North Africa prides its credentials on reversing the trend put in place by RST. Given the neoliberal domineering order, marshaling the courage to discuss class is certainly an added value. Nevertheless, what is troublesome is the rejection of causality in this volume. The editors follow Louis Althusser’s structuralist approach where “…causes are simultaneous effects; all events are situated in a relational matrix; all social hierarchies are subject to contestations. (p. 1) The flattening of causes by equating them with effects and presupposing both as free-roaming enunciations explain the revival of classless for tracing classes’ role in deciding the destinies for emancipation and more towards stultifying the dynamics of social change.

The editors claim that developmentalism is a colonial and postcolonial paradigm par excellence. Developmentalism has been responsible for the reintegration of precapitalistic modes of production into global capitalism. The contributors show that indeed, postcolonial regimes share with their respective colonial antecedents more than the former are willing to admit. Applying units of measurements such as GPDs not only hides how measurements remain littered with ideological biases but that the sophistry of numbers can replace analysis. The oversight paves the way for what the editors seize as “the triumphalist account of the European Miracle” (p. 10) which is nothing but an ideological imposition of the imperial modes of production. Developmentalism sells the illusion that peoples of the MENA region may one day become the replica of Europe.

The book is divided into two uneven parts: Part I: “Categories of Analysis” has four chapters. Kristen Alff in Chapter One illustrates how diverse practices of land tenure under the Ottomans, and contrary to Orientalist allegations, have never been a hindrance to capital accumulation. Mercantile activities have been predominant in the region but the wide-ranging practices of Middle East elites have not been capitalistically-driven. The imperialists who came by the end of the nineteenth century and all through World War II coerced Egyptians and peoples of the Levant into capitalism (p. 26). But according to Alff, the imperialists simply pressed through various Oriental regimes such as the corvée system that was already there to enforce capitalism. The only violence that capitalism introduces in the Middle East, Alff finds, is the commodification of labor (p. 42).

Max Ajil, Bassam Haddad and Zeinab Abul-Magd in Chapter Two trace the fortunes of developmentalism in Egypt, Tunisia, and Syria. The 1967 defeat before Israel brought a coup de grace for Egypt and Syria’s developmental projects. But the coup de grace implies that subterranean forces, varying between class antagonism and cold war politics (stretching to the developmental policy of careless borrowings of Muhammad Ali’s successors, a century before) had been at work. Again, it is large-scale debts that were meant to fund development that decided the fate of Arab Socialism in Egypt and Syria. (p. 61) While Egypt succumbed immediately to the infitah policy, Syria resisted but not without a considerable cost to the material well-being of its population. Tunisia’s nationalist movement was only pitted against European settlers’ supremacy. The moment that supremacy was reversed, President Lahbib Bourguiba was happy with just replacing, not undoing, the colonial system (p. 51). The contributors explain the persistent infightings in Syria today on the ground that “…the war simply is too lucrative to dissolve.” (p. 67).

Chapter Three by Timothy Mitchell dispels roaming myths regarding the role of oil both in the MENA region and the world at large. Oil supply—readers find—is governed by conglomerates whose concern is not ensuring the supply of hydrocarbons but rather the control of production and circulation for the sake of cashing in monumental profits. Once ExxonMobil, Shell, BP, and Chevron become the principal players in the market, their efforts are geared toward the orchestration of scarcity: maintaining the illusory combination of risk and rarity whereby “…earnings stretch far into the future” (p. 73). No less consequential is Mitchell’s observation that, unlike coal which helped to create mass democracies, oil accelerates regressions towards inegalitarian polities. Labor has not challenged oil conglomerates, only nation-states have. The unfortunate side of this equation is that these states become resistant to coups (p. 77). Perhaps it is better to underline how MENA states have become resistant to democratic change since by exempting populations from taxation, governments could elide the maxim of no taxation without representation. Again, RST is found to be reductive because states benefiting from oil revenues have integrated the newly generated wealth into other business ventures and created independent assets, spelling rapid growth.  

Shana Marshall in Chapter Four finds that the endurance of say, Egyptian, Syrian or Algerian militaries in power despite popular contestations can be explained through the latter’s congruent connections with the global military-industrial complex. Such regional militaries are not simple to state functionaries but form a powerful class whose interests explain the need for a powerful metropolitan class for growth through expanding arms sales. In recycling oil money in Western economies, the MENA militaries become indispensable, even, invincible for the world order as it is, making a radical change exceptionally challenging. Suffice it to know that “[m]ajor arms exporters and their host governments were often at the forefront of efforts to pressure the international financial institutions to rescind demands for sharp reductions in defense spending.” (p. 91)

Part II: Country/Regional Studies: comprises seven chapters of which I am zooming only on two as they best illustrate the editors’ stance vis-à-vis class. Adam Hanieh’s fifth chapter rejects Hossein Mahdavy’s RST whereby Gulf governments have been classically approached. Hanieh posits that state and class are phenomenologically interlinked. Therefore, reliance on oil may have initially served, even fueled, consumptive habits but in the long run, it has facilitated the diversification of Gulf economies, creating a wealth-generating class, not crooked elites. This position contradicts standard accounts of the Gulf. Meanwhile, Hanieh never undermines these economies’ heavy reliance on non-citizens as this labor regime can be fatal.

Chapter Eight by Muriam Haleh Davis follows Jacques Marseille’s presupposition that starting from 1930 onward France was overburdened by her colonies, and that the idea of metropolitan France enriching itself from the colonies is but a myth. Davis posits that no rupture exists when moving from colonial to postcolonial modes of production (p. 164). What can be considered as a rupture is between pre-colonial and colonial modes of production in which the appropriation of tribal lands not only explains the proletarianization of large sways of the Algerian population but the foundation of a system that systematically worked against the historical owners of the land.

Indeed, the importance of class is not news. Nevertheless, the book stays fixated on one class: a single-player; the one that is holding power at this point. Nowhere do readers see the strife that usually accompanies competing classes, a situation that leaves the same readers wondering if editors consider lesser classes unworthy of attention or whether attempts to alter the present configuration of classes in the region are simply naïve and wasteful. Such a stance explains a static account of class; an account divorced from regimes of land tenure, oil production and circulation, arms dealerships, state control, and the challenges facing labor. The integration of class in understanding the tapestry making the MENA political economy is not there yet. Various contributors, including the last one, zoom in on the role that the lesser classes or the subaltern may play in reshaping the political economy, but overall, the contributors treat the subaltern as an immobile category: only the imperialists, the capitalists are rendered as agents of history.   

Regarding the rising fortunes of capital in the Gulf, it remains a mystery how the emergence of the capitalistic class which the contributors claim to be independent of rent has neither flattened the state’s capacity for coercion nor forced it toward democratization. Such a state of affairs leaves interested audiences wondering how could such feudal monarchies maintain their grip on power if indeed there exists a solid capitalistic class, as Hanieh advances. Indeed, the crash of the real-estate sector in 2009 offers a reflective insight into how privately owned businesses could be after all a bubble as they cannot survive without state patronage because they are concentrated in non-productive sectors. The thesis of the state playing the role of “a midwife of capitalistic class formation …” (p.121) cannot stand up to scrutiny. Similarly, Chapter Eight makes it look that Algeria’s independence was a charity from the capitalists. This is no different from squeezing facts to meet a theory. All these untenable conclusions result from confusing causes with effects. 

While the book traces a progressivist line from Orientalism and modernization theories, the overall approach is non-emancipatory as it is geared toward justifying the triumphant status quo, the one that emerged after the 2011 popular uprisings. With this conservative outlook, it becomes unsurprising to find the three contributors of Chapter Two concluding that these uprisings subscribe to classical bourgeois revolutions (p. 66). They do, but only when flattening cause and effect, that is, when refusing to register that the uprisings initially started as incendiary but the revolutionary momentum was crushed in consequence of the counterrevolution coercive policies, the least of which has been physical violence. Thus, the book’s approach is geared towards confusing, not explaining what indeed took place. This underlines the extent to which a triumphant regime of political economy pretends to provide a critique by simply promoting capital’s counterrevolutionary moment.   

 

 

Fouad Mami

Université d’Adrar (Algeria)

ORCID iD https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1590-8524

fouad.mami@univ-adrar.edu.dz

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Sneed, A. Roger. 2021. The Dreamer and the Dream: Afrofuturism and Black Religious Thought (New Suns: Race, Gender, and Sexuality). Ohio State University Press.  $ 99.95

 

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Is it possible to rework a religion in order to serve emancipatory ends? From the outset, the project seems not only futile but self-defeating. But less one precipitates, Sneed’s proposal does not apply makeup on some old synthesis. For Black religious thought has been classically a contradiction in movement: a white God can only service white supremacy, exacerbating African-Americans’ extended slavery and misery. With science fiction (novels and films) and experimental music, there emerge promising conceptions of God and religion that are subversive to white supremacy. Artistically, Sneed qualifies these conceptions as Afrofuturism. The book does not claim that blueprints are ready or that meaningful liberation is imminent. Rather, Sneed claims Afrofuturism “disrupts pervasive marking of race and destructive coding of Black bodies and existence as inferior” (p. xii). It is a field of reflection that promises to propagate toward a revolution. 

The book lies in eight chapters. Chapters one and two are an expansion of the introduction. Chapters three to six are the blood-pumping parts of the argument. Seven and eight are an extension of the conclusion and the postscript. The first chapter examines how mainstream science fiction has built quite a reputation for avoiding Blackness, a metastasis of slavery and colonialism, and how Afrofuturism struggles to redress that avoidance. Sneed observes that the science fiction genre remains condescending to Black authors and audiences. And this repurposing functions in ways that are more than just reversals of white supremacy.

The second chapter clarifies the understanding that Black religious thought and Black popular culture are not mutually exclusive or simply different endeavours. It is precisely through Black popular culture that one can understand the evolving practice of Black religious thought. Differently put, Afrofuturism helps set a progressive Black religious thought. Ideologies such as Black liberation or womanist theologies should be viewed as Afrofuturist endeavours seeking to negotiate an empowering Black religious thought. Afrofuturism cannot be dubbed as naively utopian.   

The third chapter finds Octavia Butler, an architect of intersectional Afrofuturism. With the dystopian moments that her Parable series accentuate, women characters, like Olmania, ensure historical continuity and exasperation with heterosexual norms. According to Sneed, Butler galvanizes Black people through Earthseed, a holistic religion that dares to revise sedimented conceptualizations of God. The trickster God proposes openings for integrating Afrofuturism into humanism.

Queerness in chapter four operates as salvation. Janelle Monáe’s select albums and androids critically target misogyny, homophobia, racism, white supremacy, and classicism. The pansexuality that defines her dramatis personae Cindi Mayweather is her signature for reinventing the world so that pathologies damaging Black experiences are reversed through Afrofuturistic imageries. The disturbing recollections that viewers experience in slave auctioning her androids as in: “Many Moons” underline the commodification of bodies; queer dance becomes her blueprint to bypass prevalent instantiations of slavery.

Chapter five specifies how Deep Space Nine (DS9) alters the trajectory set by the Star Trek franchise. With Captain Benjamin Sisko, the protagonist of DS9, Black life is no longer unidimensional. Through his “encounter with the Prophets (or wormhole aliens)” (p. 78), Benny Russel or Sisko offers a sustained critique of Black religious lives who trust in a God who is not outside space and time.

Chapter six interrogates possibilities of emancipation in Black Panther, a 2018 film, where Africa and Africans, through the imaginary republic of Wakanda, have experienced neither slavery nor colonialism. Here, too, men lie beyond salvation while women are saviours. Like her name suggests in Arabic, Nakia stands for pure plentitude. Featuring Afrofuturistic films, western monotheism and toxic masculinity are the invisible enemies.

As with every sedimented concept is contested, Sneed examines in chapter seven those creative attempts by Black liberationists to cancel time in order to undo Christian eschatology. He notes how linear temporality sets Blackness for defeat. In projecting the mythological content of Ancient Egypt into space, Afrofuturists can conceive of an eschatology that targets the destruction of white supremacy. Chronological time coerces African Americans to embrace false history as the authentic ones. 

Chapter eight teases out the possibility of pressing Black science fiction to yield an Afrofuturist identity and an Afrofuturist religious identity outside the church to expand Black emancipation. The chapter reconnects the dots: Afrofuturism and Black religious thought, focusing on the Afrofuturist doing the job of bridging the gap. The conclusion showcases brief excursions into current development and productions to outline future directions for Afrofuturistic religious thought.

In stressing intersectionality (the rejection of hierarchization of oppressions) as the way forward for Afrofuturism, I am afraid that Sneed has not well registered Toni Morrison’s warning that racism functions as a distraction for the work ahead. One cannot miss the postmodernist stance of rejecting causality in intersectionality. Since equal preoccupation with gender or race flattens serious engagement with the class. Besides, it is unclear how readers process Butler’s mythical creation of Earthseed as intersectional and not as foundational. It is one way of claiming that God “…does not need to break into history, as it does not exist outside of history.” (p. 52) and is completely different to say that God is the embodiment of change or a trickster and where adherents have to develop an adaptive belief system literally. The first claim is that Butler sees nothing new under the sun because the core principle that defines humans is timeless. In the second, there is no core principle to begin with. Likewise, deeming “Monáe’s resistance to male consumption [as] not simultaneously resistant to capitalist consumption” (p. 66) questions the relevance of intersectionality as a tenable approach for Afrofuturism.

I cannot agree more with Sneed’s distinction between the erotic and pornographic in Monáe’s Dirty Computer since “Cindi is less Frankenstein’s monster and more the incarnation of the divine in cybernetic form.” (p. 68). Here, radical love becomes accessible through radical alterity à la Hegelian Christ. But while queerness is surely subversive, it cannot be revolutionary. When reading that capitalism is not the enemy, and only white supremacy and heterosexism are, then wonders if Monáe has truly seized why the capitalistic mode of production values estrangement in and for itself. This mode of production cannot stand heterosexual norms because it is precisely in heterosexuality where a real potential for bypassing capitalism lies. Historical continuity dictates the historical necessity to undo the über oppression and class exploitation. That is why eschatological destination, as elaborated in chapter seven, remains nowhere as nearly helpful. Sun Ra’s film points toward the posthuman. But restarting life on another planet is exactly what white supremacists want Blackness to do. This explains why Afrofuturism should avoid apocalyptic preoccupations and the celebration of estrangement lest it engages in half a revolution.  

 

Fouad Mami

Université d’Adrar (Algeria)

ORCID iD https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1590-8524

fouad.mami@univ-adrar.edu.dz

Ford, Joseph. 2021. Writing the Black Decade: Conflict and Criticism in Francophone Algerian Literature. Lexington Books: New York and London. Kindle $ 45.00

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Description automatically generated with medium confidenceIn studying Francophone Algerian Literature of the 1990s, a period otherwise known as the Black Decade or la Décennie Noire, Ford finds out that the literary outputs reify it instead of clarifying the conflict.  Indeed, literary outputs published by celebrity figures both during the 1990s and after not only stay neutral before the ideological struggle between the secular-and-military status quo on the one hand and their Islamist contestants on the other but deem it their mission to testify for posterity. 

That war was tagged cultural and simplified to the point of pitting progressivists against depressives. Such a binary portrayal gained currency during the post-Cold War context, where ideas of the clash of civilizations became the Modus Operandi. Generations of Algerian authors, Ford specifies, have uncritically fallen to that categorization less because they were complicit with the state’s narrative but more due to channels of reception in France. Often, those channels recourse to timeless portrayals that reactivated the spectacle (never the essence) of Algeria’s war of independence: enlightened Algerian democrats as Les pieds noirs against bearded medievalists, reactivating FLN recidivists. Only from February 2019 onward, the literary scene starts to disentangle this framing, counting some writers who dare to explore the black decade with less bias and a satisfying complexity.     

In discussing Francophone Algerian literature, Ford follows a chronological approach. Chapter One studies testimonial novels by authors such as Rachid Mimouni. Written in realism, Mimouni’s novels, like Rachid Boujedra’s, have been behind instituting the binary and reductive approach. To their credit, Assia Djebar and Maïssa Bey practised restraint, specifying that they prefer not to subscribe to either representation or testimony.  

Chapter Two explores the writings of Salim Bachi as the latter recourses to myth, a promising mode of writing that breaks with Mimouni’s testimonial fiction. The mythical undertaking registers his embrace for historical readings of the Black Decade. But 9/11 sees him falling on the trope of the clash of civilizations.    

Chapter Three focuses on imaginative outputs by Habib Ayoub. Here grotesque renditions of leaders deconstruct the ways ordinary Algerians become complicit in orchestrating their own apolitical lives. Both leaders and the subaltern equally evoke the language of heroism besetting the war of independence.  

Chapter Four examines Kamel Daoud’s Meursault, contre-enquête and finds that contrary to the nuanced approach besetting the work, the framing of the work and its reception by heavy French media and the polemics marking Daoud’s journalistic writings have been behind a resurgence of the old binary lenses.   

Chapter Five reviews Mustapha Benfodil’s Archéologie du chaos (amoureux). Fords find this work a bold statement elucidating its author’s dissatisfaction with the testimonial mode and his radical disentangling from simplistic reading. Ford assumes that conceptual experimentations such as ‘wild readings’ or les lectures sauvages do reverse political power because complicity with the powers that be is thought to be rooted in mistaken readings.     

The transition of the Algerian novel that addresses the Black Decade from the realist to the mythical to the grotesque to quasi-historical to the modernist mode of expression illustrates promising progress. Undoing the complicity of oppositional discourses with the status quo can only be possible through undoing the binary matrix that has stigmatized both the practices of power and society throughout the Black Decade and since.

Ford seems to be in awe of Benfodil’s experimentations and is somehow satisfied with the overall evolution of Francophone Algerian authors’ perception of what took place during the 1990s. Perhaps, he should read these experimentations for what they are: mere lexical excitations. Benfodil’s spectacled readings cannot allow him to fundamentally grasp the Black Decade or even the hirak of February 2019 as a class struggle. Grappling with Daoud’s fiction and journalism remains a promising path for approximating that struggle irrespective of media framings.    

Fouad Mami

Professor of English

University Ahmed Draia—Adrar, Algeria. 

fouad.mami@univ-adrar.edu.dz 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Vitalis, Robert. 2020. Oilcraft: The Myths of Scarcity and Security that Haunts U.S. Energy Policy. Stanford University Press; pp.  240 pages; Paperback: $22.00; Hardcover: $22.47; ISBN-10 :1503632598; ISBN-13: 978-1503632592

 

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The premise of Vitalis' book is that oil cannot be the bloodline of the U.S. economy, least of all, of U.S. national security. There are several minerals (a little over seventy) which the industrial world badly needs a constant and secured supply of and which civilization itself cannot do without, but they are not treated as important as oil. Such a state of affairs serves us in questioning contents spread by news cartels! At least, the average observer has never heard that this or that country has waged war or is willing to wage one to ensure reliable shipments of aluminium or copper. What is it so special, then, with oil? Precisely, what is at stake when it comes to oil?

According to Vitalis, oil is less the story of oil, the crude matter, and more the story of cooked data and produced-under-demand type of evidence. Powerful interest groups and lobbies inside the U.S. corridors of power steer such data and evidence toward selling the myth which nearly all people are born to embrace as self-evident. Indeed, the fear of failing to ensure a constant supply of oil (and strangely only) from the Persian Gulf is supposed to spell a trauma. The myth sits on another no less powerful and enduring myth. Both science and reason ensure that there has never been a dwindling supply of oil or any other natural resources. As technology advances, enough reserves of all types of minerals are constantly discovered. The only way to free the U.S. democracy, nay, the very political system and ensure a solid role model for the rest of the world is to shed off these myths. They cripple U.S. policy planners and ruin the U.S. reputation in the world.  

The book comprises five chapters wherein the first serves as an introduction and the last as a conclusion. Chapter One "Opening" sets the stage for revisiting President Bush's conquest of Iraq in 2003. Since both then and now, the argument goes that the U.S. acted on behalf of large Oil conglomerates. If so, Vitalis rebuts. The proper and easiest way for the U.S. to access that oil was to lift its own 1990s sanctions on Iraqi exports. Like this, oil companies would have entered the market and the problem resolved. Besides, with the rise of prices in the early 2000s, the abundance of hydraulically-fractioned oil has made the U.S. a major producer of oil itself. The U.S. import of oil from the Middle East is around 18 per cent.

Nevertheless, "Junk social science" (p. 5) keeps the scary narrative aflame. In a context where luminaries and public intellectuals are fixated on their myth of 'oil-as-power', the term 'oilcraft' recalls witchcraft more than statecraft. Vitalis' analogy is a call towards dispelling confusion and talismanic obsession by promoting a rationalized understanding of decisions about energy policy. When the only evidence 'junk' social scientists provide is the rising of prices, then one comes face to face with what Roger Stern ably calls 'oil-scarcity ideology' (p. 6). Vitalis stresses the method whereby every statement we encounter in the archive should be taken with a grain of salt.

To counter such an erroneous methodology, he proposes that readers must not overlook three facts: 1- the world is rich in minerals; anyone has access to raw materials. The possibility of oil-as-weapon is at best incorrect and a 'chimaera' (p. 14). Instead of embracing the confirmation bias, the abondance should incentivize us to question what lies beyond the phenomenal; 2- the imagined threats to oil supply—even when real—cannot be addressed militarily; 3- oil prices are dependent on other raw materials. A simple comparison of oil prices against other minerals in the long durée—as Roger Stern does—will conclude that oil cannot be the lifeblood of the American way of life.     

Chapter Two, "Raw Materialism", posits that the idea of a single source being of critical importance for a given national economy is reductionist at best and misleading at worse. Vitalis brings to evidence proponents of the early twentieth century Columbia School (scholars like Edward Mead Earle and William S. Culbertson) wherein the latter notes that U.S. policy since 1918 has been rooted in "bogeys" ranging from rapid depletion of natural resources to British monopoly of these resources (pp. 26-7). Back then, like now, there existed an industry behind the studies fueling these bogeys, infuriating the public and policymakers alike about such imagined threats. Vitalis finds that the idea of " 'control' of foreign oil fields" (p. 29) becoming a priority for the U.S. economy has been sown in Americans' unconscious fairly recently, during the 1990s. Culbertson finds that wars do not emerge from the need to control or ensure extended supplies of raw materials but from the need for markets to commercialize industrialized commodities. (p. 32) That is how embracing mid-nineteen century protectionism triggers bouts of scarcity syndrome. But a generation or two later, these findings made during the 1920s were all forgotten. The Cold War context made it more likely that the Soviets could threaten U.S. access to Middle East oil. Vitalis adds that even Noam Chomsky falls into confirmation bias wherein "the progressives of the 1970s were a pale imitation of their 1920s ancestors." (p. 55) as they just kept parroting criticism of American foreign policy without registering the immanent discourse on oil or where that criticism might be heading.

Chapter Three, "1973: A Time to Confuse", rereads the much-mediated event of October 17, 1973, or the alleged OPEC oil embargo. Upon checking the evidence, Vitalis finds the event was anything but a spectacle. Under no stretch of the imagination, the event can be seriously called or even approximated to a threat of cutting supplies, let alone an embargo. Back then, "only 7 per cent of U.S. oil imports originated from the Middle East" (p. 57). Besides, Arab nationalists only expressed a half-hearted and face-saving gesture in the wake of their humiliating defeat against Isarel in June 1967—gestures meant for popular consumption at home only.

Nevertheless, the scarcity-thesis driven by media and the cult of trusting experts and intellectuals for gaining monopoly made it look as if scarcity is imminent and can usher at the end of the world. Vitalis discusses the five hundred pages report by David S. Freeman's A Time to Choose, released when Americans were experiencing long lines in gas stations. The report makes it super easy to jump to the conclusion that the long queues were a reverberation from the much-publicized shock that spelt serious disruptions of supply and all presumably orchestrated by the Arab Embargo. In reality, though, OPEC "sought a fairer share of the windfall." (p. 64) In its effort to protect local crude producers from the effects of the unstable market, the U.S. government used a preferential tariff with local crude producers. However, the Nixon Administration decided in 1971 to reverse the preferential tariff policy and open the U.S. market to non-American producers. This new policy, not OPEC's action, explain the interruption in supply and long queues; the embargo was only a surrogate. Far from disrupting supply, Arabs were terrified of losing their market shares.

Chapter Four, "No Deal", elaborates on the motoring principle behind the myth that stipulates the invisibility of oil for the American policymaker. It is the key chapter as it uncovers the motive behind portraying oil as the bloodline of the American economy. Vitalis notes that this myth could not become as intense as now without the fantasy-embraced-as-history. Given their nefarious stature in consequence of 9/11, the Saudis, or Al Saud, more exactly: the ruling oligarchs of Saudi Arabia, have invested heavily to paint themselves as peace-loving and reliable suppliers of oil for the U.S. economy. They invented a genesis for a presumed memorandum of understanding or a deal between King Ibn Saud and President Franklin Roosevelt on board the destroyer U.S.S. Qunicy near the end of World War II. The presumed deal which the author finds no trace in the archives or the records hypothetically listed that the Saudis will ensure reliable shipments of crude and the U.S., on its part, will guarantee the protection of the king and his dynasty after him. Vitalis adds: "The only problem is that no account of U.S.-Saudi relation for the next fifty years said any such thing." (p. 87), underscoring a situation that leads anyone to conclude that "The Saudis, the P.R. firms, and their many friends in Washington would milk the meeting with F.D.R. for all it was worth after 2001". (p. 91) Indeed, Vitalis is aware that this Saudi fabrication counts among the latest in the arsenal of forgeries specifying the invisibility of oil. Differently put, the deceit and the fable could not go unnoticed without interest groups at home. These interest groups profit from recycling oil dollars in the U.S. economy through purchases of U.S. treasury bonds, consumer goods and, of course, armament bills with astronomical price tags attached to them. That is how it is for the long-term interest of the U.S. to distance itself from a retrogressive and degenerate monarchy. That proximity does considerable damage to the status of the U.S. as a superpower. The crumbling of the Saudis' rule will be an event that will boost, not hinder, U.S. supremacy or at least its leadership credentials.

Chapter Five, "Breaking the Spell", concludes Oilcraft by reclaiming each chapter's key pieces of the argument. Vialis starts with underlying that "[p]opular and scholarly beliefs about oil-as-power also have no basis in fact" (p. 122). But the irony that the myth posits is that policymakers who sincerely want to break from this fixation can do little to break the immanent structure whereby oil is received as invisible. The assumptions are that powerful that any attempt to go against them ends in discrediting, if not ridiculing, the credible policymaker. Hence, the first step of leaving that fixation starts with getting the scholarship correct, never allowing unchecked opinions to go for knowledge. Knowledge starts by first making sure that crude producers have no choice but to sell their outputs. Before harming the U.S. economy, cutting supplies will strangle their economies and destabilize their hold on power. Second, one needs to be certain that besides the fact that deploying an army to protect crude supplies cannot be tenable and efficient, the deployment itself raises tensions and causes supply interruptions. Third, the Middle East is a volatile space, and it does not behove a superpower to be constantly dragged into the mess out there. Fourth, by the same depleted logic of scarcity, why does not the U.S. go and chase bauxite, tungsten, tin, rubber lest other powers appropriate them? Fifth, there lies the fallacy with which the degenerate left sells its credentials: as soon as the U.S. steps out of the Middle East, "the fossil-capital-led order" will fall all on its own hence an era of plenitude automatically emerge. In the end, Vitalis notes that "Oilcraft today [has] hijack[ed] the mind of the scientifically literate" (p.128), speaking less of the average person whereby oil passes as an explanation for almost every that is wrong with the world today. Sixth, Saudis' money should not be allowed to finance studies. Funding (Vitalis rightly calls it "the paid-to-think-tanks" p. 131) will only bring about pseudo-science whose consequences are more confusion and befogged policies, but the propaganda which the funding generates will cover for the asphyxiation of liberties in the Middle East and the world at large. In the end, Vitalis rightly addresses the U.S. policymaker: "why fear an Arabia without Sultans?" (p. 133)

Vitalis finds that well-intentioned and respectful policymakers and advisers stay disabled in the face of the enduring myths. Over the decades, these myths have taken a larger dimension than life. He is correct that the journey to undo their effect starts with unbiased research. But there are instances where Vitalis' reliance on Posen's suspicion of the ideology that oil is all but powerful recalls the theory that colonies cost metropolitan centres more than what the latter could squeeze value out of them. But his subsequent elaboration that correlation does not necessarily lead to causation lifts the confusion.

Perhaps what remains missing in Vitalis' discussion of Columbia scholars' findings of the 1920s regarding those in favour of open trade and their opponents is how during the time where capital expansion needed nationalism, oil was treated (and for good reasons) as the lifeblood. Vitalis indirectly calls for updating sedimented thinking since capitalistic growth since the 1920s (exactly after WWI) is not conditioned on the old mystique view of oil-as-bloodline, given the abundance of supply. Producers cannot afford to withdraw crude from buyers lest they risk losing their share in a highly competitive market. Similarly, no major power can hinder access to oil because oil remains evenly available everywhere.

At play, there have been two temporalities of capital accumulation, not one: formal and real dominations. The two temporalities explain why Moon notes the necessity (which is, in fact, Karl Marx's) that animate these temporalties wherein occupying a colony becomes financially inhibitive after WWI. Self-less or anonymous capital is self-regulating at an advanced stage of primitive accumulation. Differently put, during the era of real domination (post-1918), there cannot be a need for a class of bourgeois pioneers to intervene. That explains why the bourgeois class has disappeared. In its place, there emerged a capitalistic class who controlled nothing yet. They pretend they are in charge of managers/administrators (C.E.O.s) appointed by shareholders to speak on behalf of the latter interest. Hence in this context, we read of Parker T. Moon's quote where "raw materials are colour-blind." (p. 36) and that colonies are a burden to maintain.

Likewise, Vitalis' analysis in Chapter Four dwells on the corruption of the Saudis, and their dizzying pace of change 'from camels to Cadilliacs' (p. 95) paid for by oil rent may sound racist stays inconsequential in the overreaching impact of oil wealth. For that, oil wealth decides less their conservative outlook but more significantly intensifies their adamant predisposition against the founding of the semblance of an egalitarian polity all over the MENA (the Middle East and North Africa) region. The counter-revolution that quelled the uprisings of the Arab Spring both in 2011 and 2019 have been fueled and financed by their medieval outlook. On the aside, Vitalis notes that with recycled petrodollars, the Saudi acquired F-15 jets that have been since March 2015 bombing civilians in Yemen. But he could have pushed his liberal outlook a little further by noting that worse than the F-15s lies the regressive and ultra-conservative brand of the faith whose sole agenda appears to be the crashing all social movements that promised to propagate towards a lifestyle free from the dictatorship of oil.      

Overall, there are instances where Vitalis' debunking of myths such as 'oil-as-power' falls into the right, and there are other instances where the same debunking falls more into the left. Still, sometimes he can be counted even as a devout communist. But the undecidability of classification is the quality of great scholarship, where he passionately elucidates his points regardless of class or ideology. Indeed, Vitalis embraces his mission to eradicate facile portrayals because masquerading beneath so-called 'self-evident conclusions' lies not only the perpetuation of mistaken decisions but the squandering of the U.S. taxpayers' savings as well subaltern of the MENA chances for a future in dignity.   

 

Fouad Mami

Université d’Adrar (Algeria)

ORCID iD https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1590-8524

fouad.mami@univ-adrar.edu.dz

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Moore, Wayétu. 2018. She Would be King: A Novel. Graywolf Press, Minneapolis, Minnesota. 311pp. Hardcover: $15.99. ISBN-10: 1555978177; ISBN-13: 978-1555978174

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It is less of a tautology to claim that orthodox historians to this day have read the abolition of slavery, a step first taken by Britain in 1807 and followed later by other powers, as the event that ushered in a reversal of chattel slavery. Nevertheless, the end of chattel slavery for Wayétu Moore in She Would Be King (2018), underlies a regression towards wage labour, a policy deemed far worse than slavery, ensuring not only a second life of the nefarious institution but also the foundation of a system wherein workers prostitute themselves every single working day in contrast to slaves who were sold once or twice in a lifetime.

In the author’s eye, wage labour stands for that descent into the proletarization of people and communities, their systemic impoverishment through the appropriation of their labour time, amounting to civil wars and overall societal unrest. Readers may recall that Moore’s stated objective from writing the novel has been her attempt to specify the reasons that lead to Liberia’s civil war (1989-1997) during which she, a toddler (born in 1985), and her family were forced to flee the country and settle in the US. It is worth recalling that Liberia is the first nation-state in Africa. Its independence dates back to 1847, well before countries such as South Africa, Egypt or even Ethiopia. But the country has remained largely unstable and the advantage of Moore’s novel is that it promises to take its reader to the motoring principle behind that instability and violence, that is, to the foundation of wage labour system.

Moore’s early attempts in fiction writing is a children book titled: I Love Liberia (2011). She similarly champions a non-profit business adventure called ‘One Moore Book’. Note the pun in ‘Moore’, highlighting both the word ‘more’ and the author’s last name. The project aims at circulating “… culturally relevant books to children who are underrepresented and live in countries with low literacy rates.”(1) Besides, Moore’s faith in the universal extension of knowledge to unfortunate young minds underscores her initial cause of dispelling illusions and falsehoods, including those that have put Liberia on the road of misery, impoverishment and interminable wars.

Several observers and experts will keep reiterating that behind that generalized instability and descent into bloody civil wars lies the same people’s backwardness, incapacity to found an enduring social contract and endemic divisions between multiple social components. All these factors should perhaps be approached with a grain of salt because the listed ‘reasons’ subscribe more to the logics of justification, not explanations. Indeed, such arguments are culturalist in nature and all they succeed in achieving is to blame the victims and, in the meanwhile, lift the blame from the real harm-inflictors, both people and structures. The present essay underscores the need to consider the author’s approach and setting of the story, since taking that into consideration, I claim, can be conducive to register exactly what happened, and the way in which what indeed happened (not that which is fancied as what happened) had ushered in in the long term the civil war of the 1990s.

The differential between that which indeed happened and that which portends to have happened is a historiography that promises to propagate towards universal emancipation. Leaving that which triggered the author’s own exile unexamined is to remain stuck in superficialities-sold-as-histories, with the cost of ensuring that cycles of violence will not only keep emerging but those cycles’ rhythm will have to be confronted with a telling regularity.

Before detailing on wage labor, there exists the need to broach first on several social players of modern Liberia as traced by the author in She Would be King. We find at least two main components:  the first is the Vai and other indigenous communities as represented by Gbessa’s story in the early part of the novel, offering a window into precolonial life in an African village before European intrusion. Through the stigmatization of Gbessa on the ground of her ‘ill-fated’ birth date, Moore illustrates that precolonial life, that is, well before the incursion of European powers into the continent’s interiors, life in Africa was far from being either idyllic or perfect. Readers find that Gbessa is cursed simply because her birth date coincides with an event interpreted as a bad omen. Through no fault of her own, and at the age of eight, Gbessa is sentenced to die by abandoning her in the deep jungle. Her parents are ostracized for bringing a child on a ‘wrong’ day, overlooking how the wrong day is wrong only in the calendar of alienation!

The second category of social actors are returnees, victims of slavery but who found themselves obliged (like June Dey) or entreated (like Norman Aragon) to return and find peace in Monrovia. Let us recall that these last two characters are themselves descendants of enslaved Africans who do not necessarily come from Libera, or even nearby localities such as the Ivory Coast or Ghana. Throughout the decades and even the centuries, the first enslaved people died and their enslaved descendants simply retained “Africa” or its idea less as their place of origin and more as a place where they used to be free, their humanity round and unquestioned. It should be noted that places such as Cameroon, Nigeria, Tanzania or the Congo are recent inventions that come with colonial expansionist plans and labels since by the time chattel slavery become generalized, these appellations (not places) simply did not exist.

In She Would be King, we find this affinity with Africa, less as a geographical space or biological affiliation and more as an existential attachment to a promise for emancipation with Nanni, Norman’s mother. Despite having the choice to live among several Maroon communities in Jamaica, Nanni always feeds Norman, her son, the obligation to leave Jamaica and to re-join Africa. To seize on her steadfastness in bonding with Africa, readers cannot miss how she endures Callum’s pseudo-scientific whims, slavery and even rape, all for the sake of earning a boarding passage to Africa. Africa, she seizes, is both the physical territory and mental space conceptualized as existential freedom, a radical breach with the reductionism of one’s humanity that underlies her life as a slave. Nanni, Norman and June Dey, as elaborated below, are Pan-Africanists avant la lettre. Well before the foundation of the early to mid-twentieth century movement of Pan-Africanism, we read that slaves in the Americas entertained not only exalted dreams but elaborate plans to equally find and found freedom in Africa. Alternatively, freedom became synonymous with their idea of Africa. The two are intricately attached so much so that they serve as a prerogative for Africa-as-freedom and freedom-as-African.

The runaway slave June Dey similarly comes from a tobacco plantation in Virginia, named Emerson. His biological father is a slave from a neighbouring plantation who was cheaply sold to the Emersons in the hope of saving the crumbling plantation capital and helping it regain its former wealth and glory. We read that June Dey’s father, June, killed the overseer in his last incarcerating place because that overseer had killed his wife and baby. June is subsequently killed in Emerson because he dared to defend his second family, the one he founded after arriving at Emerson and from this union June Dey is born. June Dey’s biological mother, Charlottes, occupies a mixed space between a domestic and field hand. During the day she serves in the mansion but at night she sleeps in a shack with other field slaves. She too was brutally murdered soon after getting rid of June. Their baby christened Moses, was trusted to Darlene, a domestic slave and another victim of the infamous system. Even when no one dared to divulge a single word in respect to his father’s feats, June Dey or Moses truly stands to his biblical sake name. The insurrectionary spirit becomes contagious and is transferred from father to son nevertheless. He was raised as a domestic, but when Mr Emersons decides to dispense with some slaves in order to raise funds for a second nearby plantation that would plant cotton, June Dey leads the insurrection that brings the Emerson plantation and its expansionist plans all down.Indeed, we read that the two June Dey and Norman Aragon are repatriated to Monrovia: Norman because that was his mother’s dying wish but for June Dey the trip was totally unplanned. After his spectacular fight against the masters of Emerson, the opportunity presented itself as the runway June Dey is knocked out of consciousness and finds himself in a ship, run by the famous American Colonization Society (ACS) and is bound for Africa. All over the 1840s, the ACS used to raise resources from the US Congress to secure the repatriation of both free and freed Africans to Liberia. Meanwhile, the ACS established a footing for US imperial planners during the heated race for colonies.

When knowing that even Gbessa too had been in exile as she was excommunicated from her village on the pretext of being cursed, the three characters conceive of Africa less as a place of origin and more as a promise for greater, that is, communal emancipation. This suggests how readers are invited to favour ideological affiliation, not biological association. Indeed, Norman and June Dey meet outside the Monrovia prison searching for ways of reaching Freetown which is much of a mythical land and which involves how it is less a physical territory and more of a life journey.

Why underlying the symbolic meaning of the land? Lest Africa is fetishized, the simple act of setting foot in Africa registers as just the beginning of the journey, the commencement of the arduous work, neither an end in itself nor a call for passive resignation. Moore’s vision for Africa serves the facilitation of encountering like-minded individuals to unite the efforts and beat up against intruders for collective and communal emancipation. Encountering Gbessa when she is literally on the verge of death (she has been beaten by a snake), Norman has been at that point looking for a medicinal herb (significantly, a living root—not one that is cut) to attend to June Dey’s terrible stomachache. Instead of caring for one, Norman has now to attend to two patients whom he barely knows. He could have simply abandoned them to their fate and carried out his journey alone. But he realized that a journey is meaningless without companions and fellow travellers. Once this initial task of caring for the physical well-being of committed Africans is successfully carried out, facing intruders both local and foreign is next on the agenda. The three face French soldiers as the latter are burning villages and driving the inhabitants into the slave market. Unparalleled feats of success are achieved as Norman and June Dey save the villagers and they all eventually mount a rebellion against the French enslavers. Historically, France was a latecomer in the slave trade and France grudgingly abolished slavery as late as 1848. French enslavers take Gbessa a prisoner; later, she is stabbed and is left bleeding. But Gbessa’s curse specifies that she cannot die. She stands for the undying spirit of insurrection, which explains why soon enough, we meet Gbessa in Mr Johnson’s mansion, taken care of by Maisy, a servant. Understandably, Mr Johnson plays a prominent role in the young and independent republic of Liberia.

By then, the narrative may look like it slides into insignificant preoccupations: Gbessa’s marriage with a prominent army lieutenant, Gerald Tubman, in the then newly founded Liberian army. The union starts as a marriage of convenience but eventually becomes rotating around love. The new elites of settlers badly desire peace. How else to achieve that peace and trust with the unruly tribes of the interior except through a marriage with Gbessa? The union stands as a pledge, not a testimony, that Liberia will hopefully remain a single and functional entity. June Dey and Norman are now mixing with the crowds. But the mixed marriage should not lend a superficial reading of the novel. Already, readers notice that within early Liberian high society, composed of individuals who themselves had been slaves or had experienced slavery at a close range in pre-civil war America have themselves resorted, however indirectly, to enslaving practices in the form of wage labour.

Maisy’s fate, when closely considered, speaks volumes. Kidnapped is one of the last enslaving raids, her entire tribe was annihilated. As a sole survivor, she is now a servant of Mr Johnson. The latter is presumably a popular leader of the young nation but in fact he is the spokesperson of the settlers, those now powerful people repatriated by the ACS. In a dialogue between prominent ladies, Miss. Ernestine raises the remark that in being a house servant Maisy brings unhappy reminiscences regarding the fate of domestic slaves on plantations in the antebellum United States. The snide remark is swiftly answered with a tinge of irony where Mrs Johnson points at the rumours which circulate how Miss. Ernestine could be abusing the native inhabitants in her coffee plantations, treating them like field slaves, implying that she perhaps should mind her own business before attending to others.

The conversation between the ladies, however calm in tone and seemingly casual, even friendly, remains eye-opening. What cannot be missed, however, is how these early founders of the Republic of Liberia were not only conscious of the cultural divisions between the inhabitants but were also aware of the long-term consequences of these divisions. The bombastic and celebrations attitudes of starting a social order that promises to be a rupture with the practices of the past and its institutions, such as slavery, is now increasingly challenged. The ladies, as the exchange illustrates, are in no way fooled by the promises of new or egalitarian beginnings, allowing us to fundamentally question the chances of new beginnings or how the idea of new beginnings serves as a strategy to fool idiots and simpletons. Engrossed in their thriving businesses, the founding elites were aware that they were leaving behind other social actors and that marginalization would be a time-bomb, which if not immediately addressed, social unrest and even generalized instability will transpire into the future. Nevertheless, each selfishly clanged to short term interests and business calculations. Interests and calculations turned out in the long run to be costly miscalculations.

The natives, non-educated members of the interior tribes, were treated by returnees from Jamaica, the US and other places (who were mostly enslaved) as second-class citizens. Reading the history of coups in Liberia, it is these two social players that constantly seek to undo and cancel each other. Even in the civil war that pushed the author’s own parents to leave for the US, it was Charles Tylor ousting Samuel Doe. The latter comes from the Krahn ethnic group, whereas Tylor is a descendant of the socially upscale minority, a descendant of nineteenth-century returnees from the US. The feud is more about who holds monopolies over-extraction licenses for foreign companies to mine gold and diamond. Still, the feud is exacerbated by the historical divide that goes back to Liberia’s unhappy foundation. This divide ushered in yet another cycle of violence and looting for diamonds and other valuables. Both Tylor and Doe met with a violent end and both were re-enacting the feud between on the one hand descendants of former slaves, who to this day think themselves more entitled to rule since they have been more civilized and on the other descendants of native inhabitants, who excel in selling their credentials as the eternal victims of the brain-washed former slaves!

This brings readers back to She Would be King where lieutenant Gerald suggests at first and later instructs Gbessa not to manually work in the farm, and to call for the help of the plenty servants he is hiring so that she can lead a life of a lady. As the wife of a dignitary in the young republic, he wants her only to supervise the workers simply because Gbessa is now a society woman and her social manners should reflect the social pomp of members of the high class. Any other Gbessa’s reaction, Gerald reasons, reflects poorly on him, his social status as well as his chances of promotion. Naturally, his eye lies on more prominent roles in the leadership of the young nation. In his mind, he did not marry Gbessa to remain ‘stuck’ with a secondary role in the army or administrating the barracks. Readers may evoke how Gbessa reacts: despite the plentiful abundance of servants/slaves, she adamantly rejects and prefers to carry out domestic duties, both indoors, in the garden and the adjacent field, herself. Readers find out that Gbessa was particularly mindful not to charge the numerous servants and workers with any task, domestic or otherwise. For her, the practice however inadvertent summons slavery. No one can pretend that the fresh memory of the inhuman practice is not overshadowing people’s everyday interactions. Closely considered, the practice itself, not just its fresh memory, casts its gloomy footprints on wage labour, rendering the latter anti-egalitarian. Thus, wage labour sows the seeds of socio-political fragmentation and disharmony.

Bourgeois economics specifies that hiring aids and workers falls into the eternal norm of the division of labour where each individual works according to his or her skills set and fairly receives remuneration according to the tasks executed. Only the division of labour—through wage labour—found the basis of civilization, according to the same bourgeois theoreticians. But in line with Karl Marx’s elaborations on the division of labour in The German Ideology (1848), Gbessa categorically rejects this commonsensical presupposition and deems it in service of justification, not an explanation.Indeed, the system of labour does not consider the worker’s actual coercion to grudgingly accept a wage in exchange for the task performed. In addition to seeking excellent and skilled performances, the division of labour primarily shuts means of independent subsistence, of that genuine aspiration of making a living without being forced to work for some boss or a hiring institution. Thus, wage labor, Gbessa reasons fuels inequality and sows seeds of generalized instability. 

Readers of the novel note how Gbessa’s soulmate, Safua, raises a rebellion against the leaders of the new republic because of the communal values which the wage system has been busily destroying. The Vai community–like several in the pre-colonial setting—cherish communal freedom. The Vai resisted the appropriation of their grazing lands and fiercely rejected domestication through wage labour. Now it is Safua’s son who is in charge of resistance. Readers close reading Moore’s novel wherein Gbessa hopes against hope to stop the bloodbath, making sure not to pit the Vai against the settlers who are now the de facto rulers in Monrovia. Hence, the idea of Gbessa being king, as suggested in the title, should be taken as a pun: both a king and its negation, since Gbessa is a woman and the right expectation is rewarding her with the title of queen, not king, for active attempts to lift violence and foster the sense of citizenship among suspecting and uncooperative interior tribes. Indeed, Moore’s title squeezes her project as one that is radically egalitarian. In refusing to call the aid of workers and domestics, Gbessa rejects the title of king or queen. She views the title not only as the expression of an unearned or undeserved privilege but simply as the formalization of wage labour, the essence of slavery and disharmony.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Fouad Mami

Université d’Adrar (Algeria)

ORCID iD https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1590-8524

fouad.mami@univ-adrar.edu.dz

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Way%C3%A9tu_Moore

 

 

Al-Aswany, Alaa. 2021. The Republic of False Truths: A Novel. Knopf: New York and London. Trans. S. R. Fellowes; pp. 416; Hardcover: $ 24.49; ISBN-13:  978-0307957221by Fouad Mami

 

 Theoretical Clarity and Revolutionary Change: The Arab Spring in Fiction

Alaa Al-Aswany’s fictional engagement with the events known as the Arab Spring may easily seem pointless, cliché or commonsensical given the tons of films, novels and studies on the topic. But it is exactly what the title underscores for English reading audiences in his recently translated novel, The Republic of False Truths (2021) that raises his work above the waters of cliché and commonsensical. Unlike its Arabic title which connotes the farcical element in the quasi-republic, the English title zooms on the false omnipresent that applies uninterruptedly on everyone in that republic, irrespective of class or gender. Known internationally for The Yacoubian Building (2002), the recent addition explains (and never justifies) the existential need to grapple with precisely that which most people uphold as unmistakably self-evident. Indeed, when presumably unbiased research articles, speak less of private blogs or contents in either heavy or social media outlets, find the social uprisings that led to the decapitation of the likes of Mubarak “decisively deprived of traditional narratives and are haunted by the theme of death…”[1], then the self-evident is no longer that self-evident. More often than not, resorting to abstractions—as with this presumable research piece—is triggered by this authorless for exploring the essence of the experience and more to evaporate that experience from the radar of the social field. Indeed, this academic facilitates the expulsion of reality from history by borrowing from a preexisting pool of vocabulary and set of thinking structures that masturbates endlessly on death, the limits of narrative’s agency or the Kantian sublime.   

In this connection, Al-Aswany’s The Republic of False Truths serves in reversing similar masturbations and lies. Lest they fall to collective amnesia, the novel recreates the events leading to the euphoria of Tahrir Square in 2011 and 2012, the decapitation of the dictatorship’s head and a few swirling events afterwards. In answer to anyone doubting the relevance from synthesizing those events in a story, just ask that person: where is Tahrir Square today in the map of Cario? Of all seventy-three chapters comprising the novel, chapter thirty-one explicitly answers: “Tahrir Square has been transformed into a small independent republic—the first parcel of Egyptian land to be liberated from the dictator’s rule.” (184) Little wonder then how now it has become an interminable construction site with the specific objective of eradicating from collective memory the very possibility of massive gathering which may or may not propagate into a revolt. If a physical space has garnered such a monumental level of hatred and revenge, then unbiased rationalizations of historical reality, let alone activists’ narratives of the popular uprising, remains an unaffordable indulgence. Not for nothing, the early twentieth-century French philosopher/ activist Simone Weil (1909-1943) finds: “Official history is a matter of believing murderers on their own words…”[2] For if events that unfolded in most readers’ own lifetime, that is, only the other day, are decreed disconcerting and are now being falsified, there is more reason to distrust official reporting of incidents that happened where we were less aware or not on this planet yet. It is never a tautology to underscore that history writing is thus no joke.

In this context, Al-Aswany’s novel does not shy from the task of setting things, events and people in their correct historical order. It measures these actors as variables in the scale of the experienced unfolding, not mythical or ideological unravelling. There will be people who may find that measurement missing in the scale of revolutionary ardour and passion, but what can be more radical and subversive than an honest elucidation of that which actually happened and happens. Understandably, there exist vested interests to report on that which took place in Tahrir from bourgeois’ perspective, and to justify the counterrevolutionary status quo of the present. Hence, the explanatory (never the justificatory) demand for a methodological axis serving also an existential matrix whereby falsity (false truths in the title) can be distinguished from truth. Al Aswany’s theoretical coordinates have been history’s inevitable ‘class struggle’.

The term ‘class struggle’ comes from a glossary that for better or for worse has been antinomic vi-à-vis the current counterrevolutionary climate of post-2011 Arab World. Let us recall that several Arab cities and capitals witnessed exhilarating agitations and marches in millions against dictators only to be disappointed in the following months and years. The term ‘class struggle’ is not just an ideological milestone for those activists of social movements on the left; it is a methodological eye-opener for registering and thus seizing the real movement of the world, according to the nineteenth-century German philosopher Karl Marx[3]. The concept expresses a historical continuity with uprisings and revolutions of the oppressed from all over the world and from times both past and to come, and if enough oppressed people embrace the class struggle as a milestone for consciousness, the current world order will be not just shaken but redefined. Hence why the powers that be have always had a vested interest in sweeping the term ‘class struggle’, speak less of the concept, under the rug.

Through mostly written entries and dynamic interactions between a set of characters and via reading mostly their entries: Ashraf Wissa, General Alwany, Seikh Shamil, Asma Zanaty, Mazen Saqqa, Madam Nourhan and Essam Shaalan along with others readers will gain a solid understanding of what took place in Tahrir. Each character emerges from diametrically opposing backgrounds, and the novel reflects the class dimension of the uprising. Only when considered from the point of view of the class struggle, readers unveil how the counterrevolution justifies the present status quo in effusive abstractions and unabashed crusades for chasing smokescreens: death and the presumed wisdom of/in extinction!

Given this connection, The Republic of False Truths (2021) resuscitates the concept of the ‘class-struggle’ for purposes of underlying needed, if not urgent, theoretical clarity. Part of Al-Aswany’s demystification showcases that well before the restoration (July 2013) formally triumphed, most rank-and-file Egyptians expressed varying levels of exasperations at revolutionaries. Perhaps, apart from the heady eighteen days leading to the abdication of President Mubarak and which were marked by euphoria and spectacle, the following weeks and months witnessed a steady decline in the supply of people living in impoverished and destitute neighbourhoods since most of these people become disenchanted from the revolutionary project. Ironically, those people beset by black misery themselves turned hostile of the very process that promises the breaking of their chains. Counting as the evidence for this state of affairs is how the oppressed accuse the revolutionary youth of jeopardizing their security by conspiring against the country.

When Ashraf Wissa and his team display the atrocities of the military through a moving cinema project across impoverished Cairo neighbourhoods, he and his tiny group of activists were attacked, their gadgets broken and themselves are accused of bringing disaster. Instead of despair, Al-Aswany’s unorthodox conclusion zooms on a needful theoretical clarity, the one that attributes the failure of the revolution less to coercion by the repressive forces and more to the oppressed own conservatism, nihilistic resignation and detachment from revolutionary agitation. In the interest of fairness, Al-Aswany shows that the military intervened only when the majority was fed up; repression came to formalize what the oppressed themselves desired to restore: security. Without a precise reading regarding the role of various actors, revolutionaries will remain befogged with myths and self-pity. Even if repression has been behind the resignation of the oppressed, and not the other way around, a legalistic and procedural response will be still inconsequential. By pushing for an unsubstantiated narrative (confusing cause with effect), Al-Aswany unveils the plans of counterrevolution. Once activists’ attention is sidetracked toward the legalistic, as when denouncing human rights abuses, the revolutionaries pronounced their own death sentence. No one else did.

Still, mounting criticism in regard to the ways in which the revolutionaries responded does not mean that Al-Aswany favours the culturalist approach, whereby the oppressed are blamed for their own misery. The Republic of False Truths hinges its revolutionary project on a deeply entrenched historicist approach. The narrative has been careful with its vocabulary and plot details lest it embarks on blaming the victims, and thus falls into justification, not an explanation. Little wonder how this revolutionary-counterrevolutionary arch spells the fortunes and misfortunes of not only the Egyptian revolution but nearly of all Arab socialist uprisings. Certainly, Al-Aswany’s remarks connect directly with the Egyptian scenario, but in essence, his remarks mirror most, if not all, Arab revolutions post 2011.

Pushing for a culturalist approximation of events counts among the reactionaries’ toolkit in a preexisting arsenal to regain hegemony. Given the brutal violence that marked the Egyptian revolution, the one which many activists fail to register as the formalization of the subaltern’s dissatisfaction with the revolution, it is not surprising to mistake The Republic of False Truths as an exercise in oriental despotism. Female activists, like Asma, and after experiencing beatings and sexual abuse, utters statements that read more like self-pity. For her, it is hopeless to count on ordinary people as Egyptians are submissive by nature. Other characters too do not restrain themselves from drawing similar generalizations outside space and time as they express doubts vis-à-vis revolutionary change in a country where large sways of the populations are doubtful in the betterment of their lot. Asma’s letter to Mazen, sent from London after the former’s exile is probably the type of ranting that every revolutionary succumbs to in the face of adverse situations. Such despair risks eternalizing oriental despotism because it overlooks the dynamic of history. Despaired readings find the cliché of Oriental despotism comforting.

Al Aswany, not only rejects timeless generalizations. His spokesperson is Mazen who from beginning to end underlines a historicist approximation as to why ordinary Egyptians—even well before instantiations of violence—traded security for freedom. Nevertheless, the heavy investment in media and the latter capacity for brainwashing rank-and-file Egyptian and demonizing the revolutionary youth—as specified by General Alwany’s explicit instructions—have simply born its fruits. In an exchange with the Interior Minister, General Alwany explicitly outlines his strategy: “Our goal is to tell the ordinary citizen, ‘Either you side with the demonstrations and lose your security, or you side with the state, in which case, it will protect you.” (142) Readers find that the business tycoon and media mogul, Hag Muhammad Shanawany, as per request of the Security Apparatus, have invested enormous funds and resources to ‘redirect Egyptians towards ‘the right path’: family values and the wisdom of the tested and tried’. His media prodigies go as far as uncovering imagined CIA plots of destabilizing the country and creating chaos! Readers registers how Madam Nourhan, the celebrity broadcaster, has been hailed by Apparatus not only for literally abiding by the instructions set by the supervising army officer (set in the premises of every TV and radio station), but for her ‘innovative’ ways and quasi-effortless commitment in defaming revolutionaries, presenting fabricated testimonies that cast democracy activists as spies on the pay roll of foreign secret services. Through no fault of their own, the revolutionary committee realizes never without a cost that exclusive campaigning through Facebook and Twitter has its limits as large sways of Egyptians remain hooked up to newspapers and TV. By the time revolutionaries such as Ashraf started touring neighbourhoods and featuring human rights abuses committed by the military, it has become crystal clear that it was too late. Therefore, any sensible reading cannot overlook that the triumph of the counterrevolution has been the result of a steady and deliberate effort to rewrite history in favour of the counterrevolutionaries since they can afford this rewriting.

In the final scene Madany (literally signifying passivism in Arabic) or Khaled father’s, takes revenge from the police officer who killed Khaled. Al-Aswany through that scene kills two birds with one stone. On the first level, he breaks away with the liberal stance of situating revolutionary work entirely in passivist forms of agitation. His stance corroborates, however, with the inevitability of the class struggle, demonstrating an affinity with Frantz Fanon’s ideas on the necessity of violence: where history simply takes its own course and classes become involved in a dynamic of cancelling each other. On the second, a milestone of theoretical clarity is gained from the failure of the legalistic and procedural path and where justice fails to see the day of light. The crooked justice system in Egypt facilitates regaining that incendiary form of clarity. Not only the bereaved father refuses religious authority personified in Sheikh Shamil’s mediation as when the Sheikh visits Madany with a sack of cash in exchange for closing the case in court. Madany similarly indulges Khaled’s university colleagues for a while, agreeing with their plan of taking the murder case to court. Danaya, General Alwany’s daughter and Khaled’s close classmate and eye witness to the murder, asks Madany to relieve her from witnessing in court. Despite enamoured admiration of and attachment to Khaled and his ideals, in the end, her admiration and attachment could not expand toward a revolutionary consciousness in the sense of a rupture with undeserved social status and privilege. That is how we read in the ultimate scene that the father hires thugs to kill the police officer. And that is how readers are not surprised as Madany successfully reverses the crooked justice system by taking justice (not just trying to) into his own hands.

The message from that scene helps readers seize the realization that revolutionary work cannot be a cerebral undertaking. It is and remains a spontaneous eruption and, in his circumstances, no one can convince Madany not to recourse to violence. He spontaneously takes that road not because he thinks only violence brings him a satisfying closure, but despite all rationalizations to the contrary. Readers find Madany has lived his entire life as a slave, literally from hand to mouth. But that dreadful experience subscribes in direct opposition to appearances. Galvanized by his prodigy, Danya asks Khaled: “When did you read all these books?” Khaled answers: “The credit should go to my father who noticed that I liked to read when I was small, so he gave me a subscription to the palace of culture. I began borrowing books, reading and returning them. Imagine that a simple, uneducated man could value reading so much!” (83) If there exists one hero in this novel, it is Madany because when catastrophe hits, he rationalizes light years better than university professors! As will be developed below, Madany deserves the title of Spartacus defying the decadent Roman empire.     

Madany’s decision is different from poetic justice in the sense that the latter is bourgeois whereas the former is prehistoric and can only be embraced by the subaltern. Both religious and civic authorities scold individuals from taking justice in their own hands and thus encourage people stripped of their basic rights to aggravate servitude by seeking institutional mitigation of justice. In line with Hegel’s reference to deep history whereby he relativizes political and cultural time[4], Al-Aswany shows that institutional mitigation other than being essentially pointless, given how justice is administered under dictatorships, remains counterrevolutionary. Not only the police officer was not arrested in preparation for the trial, but he also wasn’t even suspended from work or put on probation during the months leading to the final sentence which unsurprisingly finds him not guilty. For the benefits of theoretical clarity again, Al-Aswany illustrates that Khaled’s killer’s show trial has to be read specifically not as a dysfunctionality of the justice system either in Egypt or elsewhere. Rather, it has to be read as part of an immanent logic of dictatorships, and which Khaled’s father clearly registers, acts upon and professionally executes.

Indeed, that last scene can be disturbing because Al-Aswany masterfully positions it in gothic aesthetics. In displaying the inevitability of violence, Al-Aswany brings a satisfying closure from the perspective of the class struggle to that other gothic scene that triggered the finale. In chapter forty, we read how Madany in his own hands puts pieces of Khaled’s brain back in the hole caused by the pistol shot. Khaled has been a principal organizer of a field hospital near Tahrir Square charged of providing first aid to demonstrators. The officer aims to kill because Khaled dares (note the word dare in Kant’s definition of the Enlightenment) to reject the officer’s insult. It is a scene that comes to shake passive readers from their reifying experience and keep these audiences forever invested. That gothic structure generates a movement within the consciousness of individuals of the middle class or who identify as middle class. It is a movement that renders that consciousness receptive (hospitable) to a prehistoric form and logic of justice, the primitive law: an eye for eye! All else becomes synthesized by the same invested audiences as alienation, domestication and obviously, counterrevolution.

The way Fanon theorizes revolutionary violence suggests how Al-Aswany cannot be stigmatized by calls that organically propagate beyond the accepted perimeters of passive resistance. By raising a credible threat over life, speaking and executing a language that truly hurts the ruling classes, the revolutionary ardour of Tahrir Square reaches the tipping point in the Hegelian system, whereby quantity metamorphoses to quality. Violence, Fanon specifies, remains purifying in the sense of ridding oneself of hesitations and doubts, thus crystallizing practical predispositions to register false truths for what they are. What else do today’s revolutionaries hope to gain?    

 

 





[1] Walid El Khachab, (2021) “Death of the Revolution, Death of the Event: Cinema and Politics in the Aftermath of the Egyptian Spring.” Journal of the African Literature Association, 15:3, p. 525.

[2] Simon Weil, An Anthology. Penguin Modern Classics. 2005. p.105

[3] Karl Marx, The Communist Manifesto. Trans. Samuel Moore. The Merlin Press (2015), p. 3

[4] Hegel, Philosophy of Right