Historical Regression: A Call for the Birth of the Self
By Dr. Ahmad Barqawi
Throughout the history of societies, the intellectual elite has occupied an influential position in shaping people’s lives and consciousness. This is because intellectuals concern themselves with the worries of humanity and its future without being commissioned to do so, as Sartre observed.
The Arab intellectual elite was no exception to this role. Its preoccupation with what ought to be — with the hoped-for world, with the historical antithesis of existing reality — led it to formulate all the major ideologies known to modern Arabs. Philosophers and thinkers who borrowed from the West ideas of progress, freedom, modernity, secularism, science, citizenship, and democracy, and who attempted to root these concepts within pre-modern societies, are now almost absent from the arenas of contemporary struggle — and they should not be absent.
In Egypt, the foremost incubator for importing and reformulating ideas in a local context, hardly anyone now remembers Zaki Naguib Mahmoud, whose voice grew hoarse and whose pen wore thin while advocating science, scientific ethics, the abandonment of illusions, and the use of reason. Nor did Abdel Rahman Badawi — author of dozens of works on heritage and a passionate advocate of existentialism — leave a meaningful impact on the consciousness of Egyptian youth. The same could be said of many others.
Mohammed Abed al-Jabri, who exhausted heritage studies in search of a critical rationalism uniting Ibn Rushd, al-Shatibi, and Ibn Hazm, died without leaving behind anyone capable of carrying on his “heritage illusion,” much like other traditionalist thinkers who began excavating graves after the June defeat, seeking salvation in the past in hopes of resolving the conflict between old consciousness and modern awareness.
The Marxists of that era attempted to affiliate themselves with their own reality through al-Kindi, al-Farabi, Ibn Sina, and Ibn Rushd — through “Marxifying” what could not truly be Marxified.
Then came Perestroika, which diminished Arab Marxism to the point that it became alien to the Arab cultural field. Mahmoud Amin al-Alim and Samir Amin no longer occupied public attention.
The personalism of Mohamed Aziz Lahbabi, influenced by the French philosopher Emmanuel Mounier and which Lahbabi sought to Islamize, left no lasting scar on either Arab or Western consciousness. Hassan Saab, author of Modernizing the Arab Mind, died leaving behind a populist Arab mentality.
Indeed, after the Egyptian youth revolution, there emerged great caution regarding the use of the term “secularism,” replacing it instead with “civil state.” Some fundamentalists educated in the West themselves began attacking anyone who spoke in a rational discourse, transforming such intellectuals into targets for destruction.
Iraq, once among the greatest consumers of books, is now consumed by Ashura rituals and the treatment of thousands injured by bodily explosions. Lebanon, once an oasis of publishing and journalism, is controlled by a fundamentalist party in the name of “resistance.” What happened?
Egypt, Iraq, Syria, Morocco, Lebanon, and Tunisia — the lands of the early Arab renaissances of the nineteenth century — are experiencing a catastrophic historical regression and thinking outside the mentality of transcendence and progress.
Where does the problem lie? Is it rooted in a reality resistant to change, or in ideas disconnected from the region’s history and social fabric? Or perhaps in both? And how should we understand the current revolutions in light of these questions?
The problem, as I see it, lies in the “historical broom” that failed to free itself from the very historical filth it sought to sweep away — particularly its attachment to reckless authority. It failed to clear the road for history by enabling ideas to triumph and become a way of life and a vision of existence and humanity.
By “historical broom,” I mean those social classes that appointed themselves to the task of social transformation.
The establishment of the “nation-state” in the Arab colonies was an unprecedented event. The newly born state had immense economic, cultural, and institutional needs in order to resemble the modern state. Yet the السلطة that fell into the hands of urban and rural aristocracies adopted the outward form of Western democracy without the deep political and economic transformations that had historically produced it in Europe. Instead, these authorities attempted to create such transformations without history itself — and this became one of the greatest historical obstacles to modernization and to the “historical broom.”
Rather than being the product of historical evolution, capitalist development, and the mission of a mature bourgeoisie, authority sought to accomplish in a short time what Europe had achieved through centuries of historical development.
Consequently, the emerging authority, as a “historical broom,” retained features of the very history it aimed to sweep away. The middle classes that grew rapidly and replaced the urban and rural aristocracy, along with segments of the nascent bourgeoisie, never completed their intellectual emancipation into modernity. They carried with them traditional social perceptions of life. Once they came to power, they attempted to achieve modernity through traditional tribal loyalties — one of the most tragic paradoxes in modern Arab history.
(This analysis does not apply to the Arabian Peninsula countries and applies only partially to Yemen.)
At the same time that aristocratic semi-bourgeois regimes emerged and succeeded in creating middle classes — teachers, professors, lawyers, doctors, engineers, bureaucrats, military officers, and similar professions — and while they helped produce an intellectual elite with a modernist vision inspired by Western thought, these same middle classes later died politically after parts of them seized power.
While Egyptian, Syrian, and Iraqi aristocracies had laid the foundations for political life and party formation, the middle classes — which were expected to accomplish what the aristocracy had failed to achieve — instead destroyed political life and undermined the ability of ideas to shape modern spiritual consciousness.
This happened because these middle classes, rooted largely in peasant origins, lacked an authentic urban upbringing and never internalized the achievements of revolutionary bourgeois modernity in the historical sense. As a result, they positioned themselves against the urban and rural aristocracy not from a genuine class standpoint, but from a ravenous desire for power, reinforced by ideologies that soon became tattered slogans blown aimlessly by the wind.
Gamal Abdel Nasser was perhaps the only figure capable of radically “sweeping history clean” due to his project, charisma, and mass popularity. Yet he sought modernization and modernity without a political society, without democracy. In doing so, he deprived Egyptian society of its modern historical inheritance. Consequently, after his death, Egypt reverted to a pre-Nasserist condition — albeit in a caricatured and corrupt state form.
As the middle classes themselves became obstacles to democratic modern transformation, the ideas of the intellectual elite lost their practical and effective social role. Intellectual discourse retreated into narrow circles and closed seminars, unable to perceive what was occurring beneath the surface of reality, where people returned to traditional inheritances for protection against an authority alienated from both local reality and world history.
I believe the current revolutions will once again establish a struggle of ideas, and the Arab intellectual may recover the role once played during the Nahda and the interwar period. However, such a role is impossible without filtering ideas, shaking certainties, and possessing the courage to push thinking to its furthest limits.
I believe the birth of the “Self” is the most important outcome of modern historical processes. Therefore, the call for the triumph of the Self and the struggle to transform it into an active subject is now the true project of philosophy — if philosophy is to fulfill its essence within lived reality.
Philosophical discourse on the “Self” is a genuine awareness of the human problem in the Arab world. Some may see it as abstract philosophical language, and indeed it is. Yet its deepest concern remains the human being in relation to history and reality.
History is made only by conscious selves aware of their role in this world. History is made only by a human being aware of his or her individual value.
The human being in the Arab world has not died because he has never truly lived in order to die. He has not ended because he never truly began in order to end. He has not disappeared because he was never fully present to begin with.
The triumph of the Self is a call for the birth of the human being — a defense of the individual “I” against the oppressive “We,” against the herd that strips human beings of their most essential existential element: their individuality.
When the “I” triumphs as a self-conscious awareness of uniqueness, the plurality of selves becomes a driving force toward making conscious history. Why? Because once the human being reaches the stage of the “Self,” they become aware of their freedom in action, practice, and expression without fear for their own existence.
The Self cannot exist outside the realm of freedom. Outside freedom, the human being becomes merely a thing — and a thing is devoid of agency.
The “I” can only become an active subject within freedom. How can one imagine a will rising in full consciousness without being a free will — the will of free selves?
Yet freedom is not merely a feeling; it is a feeling that leads to action. Such awareness emerges only when the Self recognizes the reality of lived oppression.
The Self is inseparable from subjectivity. What distinguishes the “I” from the subject? The subject is the “I” transformed into a maker of the world. In shaping the world, it does so according to its own liberated vision, freed from herd instinct.
Thus, the world of free selves is a world of “rams” only — not a world of “one ram and many sheep.” Hence the powerful statement of a British philosopher: “Freedom is the fair distribution of power.” Based on such a statement, “the best societies are societies of wolves, where every Self is a wolf, not wolves and sheep.”
Is there any horizon for the emergence of such freedom in our Arab societies? Is there any possibility for the birth of active selves? And what prevents the emergence of the “I” in our world?
What prevents the birth of the Self is what I call the “system transcending the Self” — a system that suppresses the emergence of individuality.
This system consists of:
A political order founded upon backward militaristic despotism that sees society only as “one ram and a flock of sheep.”
Around this ram gathers a circle of people stripped of every value connected to human dignity and the rights of others, relying solely on violence to preserve the structure of “the ram and the flock.”
Violence destroys human dignity to prevent individuals from defending themselves.
Added to political authority is religious authority — represented by those who glorify the ruler and embellish his “wisdom and greatness,” or those who police every movement and stillness of the Self, imposing upon it the limits of their ignorance.
When religion merges with politics, it creates a power even more brutal than militaristic authority — especially rural militarism.
Likewise, the inherited social value system and traditions suppress the emergence of the Self by forcing individuals to conform to outdated values without regard for changing circumstances and times.
To transcend this oppressive system, new social groups must emerge possessing self-awareness of their ability to transcend and destroy the old world. This is what the bourgeois revolutions accomplished in Europe, and what could have occurred in the Arab world during the 1950s and 1960s.
However, the historical regression since the 1970s has halted the process of birthing the Self. The deeper reason is that the middle classes, whose consciousness had begun to form, failed to become radical enough to sweep away history itself. Their defeat meant the defeat of the conditions necessary for the birth of the Self.
This means we must work tirelessly to create self-aware classes — classes that see themselves as conscious selves rather than as a herd.
To speak of the Self is not merely philosophical; it is profoundly political — a philosophy of politics. One cannot truly speak about politics without philosophy, because political discourse inevitably offers a universal vision.
Is the triumph of the Self possible? Yes.
But this possibility confronts an oppressive authority — politically and morally — that does not want the Self to prevail. Therefore, spreading awareness of oneself and one’s world, in a way that exposes the hostile relationship between authority and the Self, is of utmost importance.
Authority survives only through the herd. That is why it fears the Self. It fears freedom, and because it fears freedom, it fears the human being capable of becoming an individual — an “I.”
The Self must experience alienation in order to transcend the world. Alienation is necessary for the intellectual and the social actor alike, because one cannot transcend a world without first feeling alienated from it.
If one is fully reconciled with the world, why would one seek to change it?
Thus, an intellectual who is not alienated from lived reality is not truly an intellectual in the Sartrean sense of the word.
And when the intellectual himself becomes part of the herd, how can he ever become an active Self? In such a case, he becomes merely the concentrated image of the herd — in both consciousness and behavior.
