Liberalism without Democracy: Nationhood and Citizenship in Egypt, 1922-1936

by Abdeslam M. Maghraoui

Overview

The history of Western intervention in the Middle East stretches from the late eighteenth century to the present day. All too often, the Western rationale for invading and occupying a country to liberate its people has produced new forms of domination that have hindered rather than encouraged the emergence of democratic politics. Abdeslam M. Maghraoui advances the understanding of this problematic dynamic through an analysis of efforts to achieve liberal reform in Egypt following its independence from Great Britain in 1922.

In the 1920s and 1930s, Egypt's reformers equated liberal notions of nationhood and citizenship with European civilization and culture. As Maghraoui demonstrates, in their efforts to achieve liberalization, they sought to align Egypt with the West and to dissociate it from the Arab and Islamic worlds. Egypt's professionals and leading cultural figures attempted to replace the fez with European-style hats; they discouraged literary critics from studying Arabic poetry, claiming it was alien to Egyptian culture. Why did they feel compelled to degrade local cultures in order to accommodate liberal principles?

Drawing on the thought of Lacan, Fanon, Said, and Bhabha, as well as contemporary political theory, Maghraoui points to liberalism's inherent contradiction: its simultaneous commitments to individual liberty and colonial conquest. He argues that when Egypt's reformers embraced the language of liberalism as their own, they adopted social prejudices built into that language. Efforts to achieve liberalization played out--and failed--within the realm of culture, not just within the political arena. Opinions voiced through literary works, cartoons, newspaper articles on controversial social issues, and other forms of cultural expression were ultimately more important to the fate of liberalism in Egypt than were questions of formal political participation and representation. Liberalism without Democracy demonstrates the powerful--and under appreciated--role of language and culture in defining citizenship and political community.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780822338383
Publisher:	Duke University Press
Publication date:	12/04/2006
Series:	Politics, History, and Culture Series
Pages:	216
Product dimensions:	6.13(w) x 9.25(h) x 0.46(d)

About the Author

Abdeslam M. Maghraoui is Associate Professor of Political Science at Duke University.

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Liberalism without Democracy

Nationhood and Citizenship in Egypt, 1922-1936

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By Abdeslam M. Maghraoui

Duke University Press

Copyright © 2006 Duke University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-3838-3

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Chapter One

Colonialism as a Literary and Historical Phenomenon

Liberalism's historical connivance with colonialism to promote free markets and individual liberty overseas contradicts the principles of cultural diversity and self-determination we generally associate with liberal theory. The British Empire's territorial expansions to "civilize" natives in faraway lands found political rationale and moral justification in liberal theorists from Jeremy Bentham to John Robert Seeley. Yet, as Uday Mehta argues, the complicity of British liberal thinkers with colonial conquest was grounded in a genuine philosophical passion and confidence in the possibility of universal human flourishing. Inattentiveness to the contradiction between liberalism and empire in classical liberal thinking lies somewhere else. Mehta identifies what he calls an "internal" epistemological "urge" within liberal theory to convert the "alien" into a familiar image. His analysis of British imperialism is pertinent because it speaks to a crucial debate within colonial and postcolonial studies on the nature of the colonial encounter and its relevance to understanding relations of domination and resistance in general.

Critics and Theorists of Colonial Relations

With the publication of Edward Said's Orientalism, postcolonial theorists such as Homi Bhabha and Gayatri Spivak have privileged the "semiotic field" of language and enunciation as the means by which to conceptualize relations of domination and resistance. But because of their common suspicions of hegemonic, nationalist cultural claims, these authors are ambivalent about the semiotic field of the colonized as a uniform, coherent arena for native resistance and "self" assertion. This oversight, though more applicable to Said than to Bhabha or Spivak, lends credence to the criticisms launched by the more empirically oriented postcolonial writers, such as Abdul JanMohamed, Aijaz Ahmad, Arif Dirlik, and Benita Parry. These critics charge postcolonial theorists with a new form of complicity with colonial discourse for confining the discourse critiquing Western hegemony to "semiotic squabbles" about colonial texts. Postcolonial critics privilege the historical domain, focusing on the daily struggles of the oppressed and breaking away from what they consider a new political agenda of the dominant West, reincarnated in postmodernism and poststructuralism. Such criticism, I hold, is not valid because postcolonial theorists are equally convinced of the importance of local cultures in the process of self-emancipation. The problem with postcolonial theory lies elsewhere. I suggest here that analyses of colonial and postcolonial relations, whether empirically grounded or theoretically oriented, by engaged nationalists or more distant scholars, are acutely aware of the confluence between the cultural and historical production of colonial relations. This awareness is clearly articulated in the writings of theoretically oriented scholars such as Said, Bhabha, and Spivak, and by the early critics of colonialism such as Aimé Césaire and Frantz Fanon. I bring out this convergence in the prolific writings of Fanon, a psychiatrist and militant activist during the Algerian war of liberation, to argue, in opposition to Said and Bhabha, that the use of culture in Fanon's writings cannot be reduced to crude nationalism. Fanon is fully aware of "the pitfalls of nationalist consciousness," to which he devotes an entire chapter in The Wretched of the Earth. In opposition to postcolonial critics who pledge allegiance to Fanon, however, I maintain that while Fanon's critique of colonial relations, especially in Black Skin, White Masks, is based on extensive empirical observation, it is grounded in an abstract understanding of culture as language. The unmistakable theoretical influence of Jacques Lacan's psychoanalytic linguistics on Fanon's thinking allows him to consider culture as constitutive of consciousness and emancipation without falling into essentialism.

Fanon is certainly the most distinguished of the first colonial writers, but he was not alone in inferring colonial practices from colonial texts and culture. Writing in the 1950s about French colonialism, Aimé Césaire explains that colonial regimes survive by resorting to two strategies: brute force and dehumanization. He sees the relationship between the colonizer and the colonized as one of violence, brutality, and punishment (20-21). But advocacy of naked repression in the colonies, Césaire argues, is not the exclusive domain of colonial soldiers; it is legitimated in the writings of politicians, humanists, and idealist philosophers as well. His extensive references to Carl Siger and Ernest Renan, among others, as well as to less prestigious texts and practices drawn from his native Martinique, highlight Césaire's attentiveness to colonial writings and colonial policies. More importantly, many of the writings illuminate a general predisposition to violence and prejudice that has nothing to do with practical political problems such as establishing institutions of representation and emancipation in "illiberal cultures." He quotes, for example, Carl Siger, a colonial autocrat and author of Essai sur la colonization (1907), whose justification of violence in the colonies reflects a wider cultural complicity that recalls impulses behind the torturing of Iraqi "hajis" in Abu Ghraib:

The new countries [colonies] offer a vast field for individual, violent activities which in the metropolitan countries would [be forbidden] but in the colonies ... arm their worth. Thus to a certain extent the colonies can serve as a safety valve for modern society. Even if this were their only value, it would be immense. (21)

Now consider the sentiments expressed by Ernest Renan, whose justification of colonial conquest is rooted in a quest to validate the superiority of certain European races and languages. Césaire quotes from Renan's La reforme intellectuelle et morale de la France (1871):

The regeneration of the inferior or degenerate races by the superior races is part of the providential order of things for humanity. With us, the common man is nearly always a déclassé nobleman, his heavy hand is better suited to handling the sword than the menial tool.... Pour forth this all-consuming activity onto countries which, like China, are crying aloud for foreign conquest. Nature has made a race of workers, the Chinese race ... a race of tillers of the soil, the Negro ... a race of masters and soldiers, the European race.

Siger and Renan may well represent extreme rationalizations of colonization. But Césaire situates these extremist views in the general trend of humanist philosophy whose advocates claimed to defend universal human values. These advocates defended the colonial project in the name of eliminating absolutism but did not mention the colonial authorities' cooperation with local tyrants. They applauded colonialism for introducing progress and rationality to the indigenous populations but never considered the immorality or consequences of destroying local cultures. They listed the number of roads, schools, hospitals, and factories that the mother countries built, but never noticed that the colonized peoples were largely deprived of services provided for the European communities. Anticipating future works by Said, Bhabha, and other critical theorists, Césaire also argues that the philosophical links between Western liberal democracy and totalitarian ideologies-he refers specifically to fascism-are less shocking when we examine Renan's racial categories and consider the ruthless exercise of power in the colony. Thus Césaire's Discourse on Colonialism, though largely ignored by theorists of colonialism, inaugurated a field of research devoted to exposing not-so-subtle complicities in the cultural domain, a domain that operates simultaneously as the symbol of oppression in the colony and the repository of enlightened reason and individual emancipation in liberal thinking.

Césaire's critical reading of the prominent role of culture in the colonial context cannot be dismissed as an ideological, nationalist diatribe that viewed colonial relations in simplistic, clear-cut binary oppositions. Situated within the same critical tradition as Césaire, Fanon, C. A. Diop, and G. G. M. James, the analyses of W. E. B. Du Bois and Albert Memmi, who both agonized greatly over their national identities, are no less attentive to culture as a privileged domain of resistance and domination.

Du Bois, who was acutely aware of the material estrangement of Diaspora African Americans from the daily experiences and political struggles in Africa, recognized the difficulty, if not the impossibility, of escaping the African cultural heritage. More than a color-based nationalism, Du Bois's description of two conflicting souls-one African and oriented toward communal identity, the other American and reflecting national identity-represents the continuing, and perhaps never ending, cultural investing of political identity. Beyond formal political status and civil rights concessions, Du Bois saw in African American culture an affective political force that does not erode with the passage of time or estrangement from Africa's material life. Thus Du Bois associated African American emancipation not only with formal political emancipation in the "host" country but more importantly with the freeing of African cultural heritage as a whole from European colonialism in Africa.

Memmi, a Tunisian Jew whose identity in French North Africa is neither colonial nor nationalist, displays a sense of ambivalent allegiance similar to Du Bois's "two souls." As a Jew in a colonized Muslim society, he belongs to a relatively privileged group. Yet Memmi's privilege depends on a colonizer who gives the "hope" of integration into European society while denying the actual possibility of that provisional concession. Memmi captures this colonial economy of inclusion and exclusion in the realm of culture. As a young student of philosophy at the Sorbonne, he heard rumors that he would not be allowed, as a Tunisian, to sit for the examinations. When he asked the president of the jury to let him take the exam, he was told, "It is not a right. It is a hope. Let us say it is a colonial hope." Tunisian Jews, like all other Tunisians, were treated as second-class citizens, excluded from basic civil services and deprived of political rights. But unlike Moslems, Tunisian Jews aspired to identify with the French. What made that "hope" possible was not material privilege, which was derisory, according to Memmi, but cultural initiation and resolve: learning to speak and write in French, wearing Italian clothes, adopting European social habits, and carrying on even when these attempts were often laughable within the Jewish community, duplicitous in the eyes of fellow Tunisians, and ridiculed by the colonizer. One might add, with Memmi, that these cultural efforts are consequential political acts that redefined political boundaries and challenged both native and colonial authorities.

The culture-focused anticolonial views of Césaire, Du Bois, and Memmi are neither exhaustive nor necessarily analogous. But their diverse grounding of colonial relations in cultural efforts reflects a concern with a common human condition that is deeper than the familiar nationalist impulse: it concerns the tortuous, painful, and often complex process of self-emancipation. The elements, workings, hesitations, and bitter conflicts that characterize this process of self-emancipation are, I believe, at the center of recent colonial and postcolonial theorists from Bhabha to Said. In this critical theoretical tradition, analyses that focus on language, whether in psychoanalytic or literary studies, are particularly insightful because they are less inclined to dismiss demands for cultural recognition as a rudimentary nationalist impulse.

Building on the psychoanalytic tradition of Fanon, Memmi, and Octave Mannoni, Ashis Nandy, a psychiatrist and social critic, studies the cultural and psychological distortions of colonialism on the colonizer and the colonized beyond the formal retreat of empire. For Nandy, the conflicting logic of colonial relations is most palpable not in the political system or the economy but in minds and cultures. He identifies the complex and surprising workings of colonial logic in two contrasting sets of biographies and literary and historical commentaries. On one side, the biography of Rudyard Kipling, who repressed memories of his Indian childhood to pass for an "authentic" Englishman, untainted by native culture, represents the maturity and masculinity of British rule. The British in India, argues Nandy, rationalized their imperial hegemony on the basis of two exaggerated polarities: masculinity versus femininity and adulthood versus childhood (4-16). Through a fascinating juxtaposition of Kipling and Indian texts, Nandy shows that the colonized were also trapped in the colonial construction of natives as feminine and childish (51-62). He focuses on the works of Indian writers such Madhusudan Dutt, Bakimchandra Chatterjee, and Rammohun Roy to show how they reinterpreted Hindu traditions to counter colonial discourse, emphasizing themes of masculinity, martial valor, and monotheistic divinity in the Indian texts. Nandy shows that the reformulation of India's traditions under pressure to be the manly obverse of the colonizer is a cultural trap that reproduces, though in a different way, the colonial narrative. He notes that colonialism "colonizes the minds in addition to bodies and it releases forces within the colonized societies to alter their cultural priorities once and for all. In the process, it helps generalize the concept of the modern West from a geographical and temporal entity to a psychological category. The West is everywhere, within the West and outside, in structures and in minds" (xi).

Yet Nandy does not surrender to the power or ubiquity of colonialism. A more promising counternarrative to colonial cultural construction, he argues, is represented by the biography of Aurobindo Ackroyd Ghose. A native of Bengal whose parents gave him an English middle name and sent him to be schooled in England, secluded from indigenous culture and language, Ghose rejected his English "self" to become a mystic revolutionary in the Hindu tradition. Nandy suggests that Indians who worked within local values and strove for cultural authenticity (e.g., Ghose, Mahatma Gandhi, Ishwarshandra Vidyasagar) provided a more creative and defiant response to colonial and postcolonial cultural domination. Yet their locally based cultural response was neither culturally exclusive nor incompatible with the West (48-51). Gandhi, the most eloquent representative of Indian authenticity, advocated simple human values and was not the antithesis of the English. Rather, he brought forth "the soft-side of human nature, the so-called non-masculine self of man," repressed in Christianity and censured in "Western self-concept" (49).

Nandy's intricate thesis is insightful because he explores the emancipating role of local cultural traditions within the critical philosophy of Foucault, Derrida, Kristeva, and Lyotard, whose works radically subvert Western cultural self-representation. In this sense, Nandy's two essays reflect a paradigmatic transition from the early historical treatments of colonialism to postcolonial theorizing heavily influenced by French radical thought.

But it is Edward Said's Orientalism that most symbolizes this paradigmatic shift. Drawing insights from the writings of Michel Foucault, Said was a pioneer in attempting to systematically locate historical imperialism in literary practices. He employs Foucault's notion of discourse to study Orientalist texts as a set of "discursive formations" that display two main characteristics: a dubious relationship to empirical reality and a built-in will to dominate. Said defines Orientalism as a "style of thought based on an ontological and epistemological distinction made between the 'Orient' and ... the 'Occident.'" This imaginary binary opposition between East and West has informed a large mass of European works, not only in academic disciplines and administrative documents but also in the arts, literature, and the media. Said makes it clear, however, that the connection between Oriental scholarship and imperial power is direct and concrete. He methodically deconstructs Orientalists' texts to show how Orientalism has been at the service of Western governmental policies and institutions since the early twentieth century. He focuses on the strategic dissemination of a "discursively produced Orient" via universities, professional societies, geographical services, and various circles of cultural influence. In parallel, he documents the appointment of prominent Orientalist scholars, travelers, and "experts" on the Orient as advisors and administrators in various positions of power. By the late nineteenth century, the Orientalist whom Said portrays is a "special agent of Western power" who had managed to get "beneath the films of obscurity" surrounding the mysterious East. For Said, then, Orientalism as an academic and literary tradition cannot be separated from the political strategies of the colonizer or imperialist. There is an unmistakable Orientalist imprint in the production of a "broadly imperialist view of the world" (15).

Said does not claim that all Oriental studies-a composite field of scholarly research dating back to the Middle Ages that includes history, philology, ethnography, and the study of Oriental texts-are unequivocally driven by conquest. But he argues that since the late eighteenth century, Oriental studies, specifically in France, England, and the United States, have become overtly complicit with colonial and imperial schemes in North Africa and the Middle East. Behind the claim to scientific knowledge and intellectual objectivity, Orientalist scholarship has systematically used pseudoscientific theories about race and human biology to validate the cultural notions of Oriental inferiority:

Thus the racial classifications found in Cuvier's Le Regne animal, Gobineau's Essai sur l'inegalite des races humaines, and Robert Knox's The Races of Man found a willing partner in latent Orientalism. To these ideas was added second order Darwinism, which seemed to accentuate the "scientific" validity of the division of races into advanced and backward, or European-Aryan and Oriental-African. Thus the whole question of imperialism ... carried forward the binary typology of advanced and backward (or subject) races, cultures, and societies.... Since the Oriental was a member of a subject race, he had to be subjected. (206-7)

(Continues...)

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Table of Contents

Preface ix

Acknowledgments xix

Introduction 1

1. Colonialism as a Literary and Historical Phenomenon 14

2. The Colonial Encounter in Egypt 37

3. Defining the Boundaries of the Political Community 64

4. The Cultural Preconditions of Citizenship 87

5. Egypt’s Liberal Experiment in Comparative Perspective 118

Conclusion 141

Notes 149

Selected Bibliography 171

Index 181

Editorial Reviews

This is a valuable book. [This is not] simply a thorough, detailed study of Egyptian politics. . . . [It] is much more than that. It is relevant to the present American misadventure in Iraq and to Western imperialism more generally. . . . Perhaps no one else has thoroughly documented, as well as Maghraoui, the extent to which some “liberal” writers tried to mimic the West. The author has provided much compelling evidence to support the ideas of those scholars who decry the confusion between modernization and Westernization.

Middle East Studies Digest - Glenn Perry

Liberalism without Democracy raises fundamentally important issues and is incredibly timely and relevant to current debates in the Middle East about democratization and foreign intervention.”—Diane Singerman, coeditor of Cairo Cosmopolitan: Politics, Culture, and Urban Space in the New Globalized Middle East


“Abdeslam Maghraoui’s book is among the more cogent recent explanations of the reasons liberalism failed in the Middle East. Through its examination of the role of language and culture in Egypt, Liberalism without Democracy sheds light on a central weakness of liberalism—its commitment to individual liberty and colonial conquest.”—Edmund Burke III, coeditor of After the Colonial Turn: Orientalism, History, and Theory

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