And it's wonderful to see everyone back and in such strength. And of course, with your handicap, you are coming to speak. Could it have been otherwise? The notion of someone who does not need an introduction does not apply here. We are always proud to sing the praises of the illustrious because we've had, even when you know their credits better than I do. But you have to come. Who is Professor of history at the University of Texas at Austin, where he teaches modern Arab intellectual history.
He is best known to those of you who haven't had the pleasure of meeting him before through his many wonderful published works. Including his gatekeepers of the era past. Historians of history writing and 20th century Egypt, which California bought out in 2009. And no exit. Eric Is that Arab existentialism, his study of Jean-Paul Sartre. And the colonisation. And that came out with Chicago in 2018.
He is currently at work on a small and unambitious book about 18 chapters, maybe longer after this. You want to add to this talk that will be examining the first Arabs, an intimate history of their struggle for dignity. And the aftermath of the future, which personally is a book that I cannot wait to see. And I hope you all can make me wait too long for it. Tonight, we will be reconsidering the sixties generation and the Arab world and beyond.
Would you all please join me in extending a very warm welcome to Professor? Thank you. And this audience. I can see your slides. Yeah. Thank you for having me. So I got interested in the sixties about 50 years ago, mostly because I wasn't too happy with the histories that I did read, which are very heavy on pan-Arabism or nationalism and very much centres on the 67 war and the defeat of the project.
And in a way, most of the intellectuals and intellectual historians get go to the fifties and then 5060s, not much except pan-Arabism and Nasser ism and then 67 onwards. So I started reading sort of what I thought would be the intellectual corpus, the record from the late forties to the early seventies. Books, you know, treatise, novels, poetry and so on. And that's why I understood that the era is much more nuanced and rich than what sort of the what is buried under the defeat.
One project that came out of it is taking the prism of existentialism, which is a small platform that was able to to get me into the sixties in a more broad way. But then I realised there's there's a bigger story to tell. So mostly today I'm going to go over how I think about the sixties. I would imagine kind of more historiographical about historical, but in general, within this sort of ecology of writing about the sixties.
Part of the problem is that as soon as 911 happened, 67 became the the the the date to defeat the war. That explained why 911 happened, at least in the US. I don't know. In this country, all of post-colonial Arab history was reduced to that defeat. And you know, there's nothing more dehumanising than defeat with the result that you couldn't write, you couldn't see anything else happening.
Then a decade later, the Arab Spring happens and you ask yourself, okay, so where is the fight for dignity comes from?
Where is the. Where is the intellectual genealogy of the history of of come I mean, Sonia and you don't have a book that would help you write it back to the late forties and fifties and sixties even though this intellectual tradition changes the commons and yet it came in 2011, has a strong index to the nineties, not only to the 15th century, but this is a history that needs to be sort of written.
We normally, when you put it, when you think about the global sixties, which I don't know in this country, it's a big deal. In the US for many years now, you see a little bit of a divided kind of a sort of narrative structure.
On the left side is mostly what you can find in histories of the sixties, especially public histories, including actually the biographies that just came out on us, or by Alex Rowell, which was a wonderful book, but you wouldn't know any of that side of the sixties from that book. It is again would give you a sense of personality calls, of insulated ideologies, of empty, empty political speech, the cause of Palestine.
Would, would, would, you know, would be associated mostly negatively, again, divorced from the cause of dignity and everything would be sort of under under the defeat, including the collapse of secularism. Now, if you look at the global sixties elsewhere in the world, you find all of that revolution is as a kind of a self liberation, emphasis on social justice and so on and so forth, including a sort of a critique of patriarchy, sexual liberation.
You're not going to find this very much in the histories of the sixties in the Arab world. So the question is, when you read the intellectual record, you do find a lot of that. So the question is what kind of story, what kind of narrative can bring the Sixties into a more sort of integrated narrative without being apologetic in the sense because, you know, 67, but without reducing it in a way, what I'm saying is that the time is right for a new for a new kind of history.
And we normally write history when we have at least three conditions, Max. First of all, empirically, when we have new evidence, when we have a new corpus of evidence, when you have new theoretical and conceptual frameworks and a new perspective. But these also affect the sources things that. We're not considered to be sources are now becoming sources because we have, you know, new tools in our disposal. And also when the values change, the norms, the the the sentiments, the attitudes.
And especially in the last decade, that allows us to see things in the sixties that before that could not actually come is a subject or it is something that people with literary, literary criticism and poetry and, you know, in the field, they dealt with a lot of this, but otherwise it doesn't cycle into a public narrative, something that people can read like they would read books about 1960s China, Maoism and so on. Right. So that's, I think why I think the time is is ripe for that.
Now. I prefer to tell the story of the sixties through, um, through a group of intellectuals actually have a few dozens. I'm just putting a few here, whether it's Yassine Hafez, who is a very young sort of Syrian ideologue from the Euphrates Valley. His mother is Armenian, survived the genocide. Um, someone who started on the wrong feet by becoming a theoretician of of neo.
Both is that which is as you know was quite was quite violent but then was able to step back from that his say as if in his own biography as is a collective story and of course moved for exile Palestinian theoretician Nadia Loos, you also worked in a novel the press of but she wrote the book and that is one of the first actually people who completely disappeared from from the record with quite many books early sixties that begin to think of of revolutionary Palestinian transformation.
It was still under Nasser ism, but you can already see a little bit of an independent kind of thought somebody will be that you might know him as a translator of and spent on with Gamal Atassi. But this is a very fascinating guy's translating Russian literature He's also having a heart condition. So it makes him a very intimate interlocutor of Gamal Abdel Nasser, who also suffered from a heart condition.
I'll tell you later about Nasser. I'm in the process of assembling his medical follow on was done. And and it's an interesting story together.
Louis, our literary critic, poet of Cambridge, of Princeton, but of course, someone who envisioned a different kind of socialism and produced some of the first critiques of of the socialist system, especially with relation to book production and intellectual circulation and so on, but also responsible for some serious troubles and headache for Palestinian intellectuals in brutal act of exile. Editor of Hey, Well, that is a brilliant cultural magazine.
We are exposed to the fact that they got money from the Cultural Congress, you know, the CIA, essentially. And that was the end foot of exile. His brother, Fi say, is one of the first to its existentialist philosophy, but one of the first to actually understand the plight of of of this generation in ontological terms, but also one of the first to actually write about the colonisation of Palestine and of Zionism in in in terms that will be familiar to you today in terms of settler colonialism.
He put one of the first books out there. It was a big hit at the Times. Well, it was editor of Eldar probably doesn't need much of an introduction. Lutfi holy of the Egyptian but as well a lawyer, a poor playwright, an editor, but also Jean-Paul Sartre as interlocutor. Someone was actually trying to write the Sixties into some form of universal ethics of liberation that Sartre was interested in articulating before started turning its back on this on this group MOTUs Suffering.
Abdallah At the time you might not know them, but they are. They are pedagogues. These are philosophers, ideologues, people who put books together, but they are really focusing on creating explain later a new kind of subjectivity. La la Belle Becky passed two weeks ago, and other Somali novelists, literary critics, poets. Their argument is very interesting. Essentially they're arguing that they're writing about sexuality.
They are concerned with sexuality. Not for the sex of sexuality as much as for the sake of corporal sobriety serenity over one's body. And that's an argument for decolonisation. And they're extending a line of argumentation, which is patriarchal and which will later, especially in Simone's case, would actually use as a critique of asserting the revolutionary subjectivity that is emerging in the late sixties. Very patriarchal. You might know her from her affair with a son Kanafani.
She published the love letters. I read them, but eventually she married Bushido, the guy below. And so these are some of the people I'm looking at. And, um, um, and these are some of their books. This is how I mean, I didn't talk about him, but that's, that's a person whose begins to, to, to actually articulate conceptualise a certain condition that I'll talk about in a second of a certain kind of total crisis of, of being that is important.
This one in the Hobbs Malkia Hannah. This is a use of Silo, the brother of AFIS and Offic, that's the dedication page that he dedicates this book. But he's, he's an economist and already there this is 61 and already then the idea of of of of dignity of karma gets a centre stage in the intellectual consideration of this generation. Um, other people are interesting is that Ali Shukri, the Egyptian literary critic, he writes about radical Somalis.
Well, a very nice book, rather, is Man Without Wings because a lot of her was not only what she wrote, but the way she was. She would drink whatever she wanted to do, whatever she wants, sleep with whatever she wants. And it was very difficult for the other men there and the term to compute that, but rather she could understood that we a certain authorisation. And you wrote about her, but you also wrote other Bill Mukoma which you might know from from from Kanafani.
But that's kind of a much more broader consideration of it in a way that transitions Arab thought over time from the politics of elitism to that of mukoma, which is a big change that I'll talk about towards the end. This is Layla by Becky. You might know this novel, existentialist novel, when she writes, Look, I don't care very much about, you know, Vietnam and and Rhodesia and other problems. I kind of paraphrase. What I care when I get up in the morning is I'll go across the street.
There are seven centimetres high heeled shoes without without crashing. And, you know, it's not that it's kind of nihilism as much as she's actually trying to bring back herself, her subjectivity, her about the visa vis the national right, where to salvage that. There are other books that you know suffer digital and out. I mean, you can see how this is a you know, a combination of barbarism and existentialism, but these are some of the books that are coming up.
I deal with hundreds of these books, not not not just this, but essentially, if it's time to write these days of this era, using these intellectuals, using these books, the magazine, this corpus, which is actually a new intellectual corpus, normally, you know, now, I don't know, again, in this country, back in the US, everything is an archive, alternative archive.
An archivist drives them crazy. But you can talk, you can actually conceptualise the corpus of this generation as a kind of intellectual archive that heaven haven't got much attention as as a body of work with coherency. Now when you read it, there is a ground zero there that goes back to the late forties, which is actually what makes the sixties the sixties here, first of all.
There is the material crisis of of of wretched poverty, of hunger, of disease, and the fact that life expectancy in Egypt is in the late thirties to about 35 for women and 32 for men. We are talking about people living their entire lives when they're sick. So there's this crisis, but there's the crisis of serenity and authenticity in the sense that the crises of being that are also, you know, a political crisis in the sense of fragmentation, not only of the.
You know, the way the Arab world was put together after World War One is, you know, this artificiality of the region. It's mirrors that artificiality of a destroyed or disfigured self. So it's an internal internalisation of a certain fragmentation. The term tragedy really speaks above that. It speaks about this fragmentation geographically and geopolitically, but it speaks of the internal fragmentation.
You find it a lot in the language of the Baath, but basically when you take all these things together, as in Amina's memoir, where they steal their sister for essentially domestic slavery so they can make a living because they can no longer make money from silkworms due to what was it, I think, synthetic Japanese replacement of some sort. But all of them speaks of some kind of subhuman existence, a total crisis, the one with this material, but also with the physical and the logical.
That's the ground zero. And it's very important to connect to this this descent, because the solutions you find in the late forties coming out of, you know, the politics of liberalism speak a lot about, you know, social justice. Everybody is writing about social justice in the late forties, no matter where they come from. So I could write about it. Right. But what you have is this social contract in which they expect the state to actually kind of mediate.
This is a known language and some of it does carry forward into the 15 to 16. What is unique about the fifties and sixties, I think in the Arab world is actually that both pacifism and not surprising just take it about nationalism and all of this. What they do they do try to provide is liberation theology is actually a certain kind of of of a solution to this total crisis, not just a political nationalist solution.
So the question is, if they're trying to to to sort of offer a liberal liberation theology, how does it work? What is this liberation theology? What are the terms that that underscore? How come it became an article of faith for an entire generation? And why were they willing to choose one leader and follow one leader again in the old narrative?
If you think about, you know, personality cult, the people appeared quite dumb, like, you know, they're marching, you know, behind an idol for what they do, which they're stupid, they're passive. But if you think about it as liberation theology, there is there is a logic to it, even if it fails in the end. So within this liberation theology, it becomes quite clear that the term dignity karma becomes centre stage.
You again, you have to read for many years and a lot to do to see how this concept becomes very dominant. It is not only Nostra speeches but elsewhere in the region, and the story is actually not that. The other problem with the story is that it's an Egyptian story that imposed on everybody else in the region. Now, that's the reason is, of course, the Egyptian phenomena, but also why why there is a significant dosage of of of both these minutes. So that's what I'm trying to kind of understand.
Now, when when you find that the society is trying to create consciously a new type of subject, a new kind of person, you know, there is a revolutionary thinking at play. There are marks of what is a revolution. And, you know, from the history of the 1560s that normally the tendency is to reduce the revolutionary period to coup d'etat, because that was the vehicle towards power, undeniably.
But immediately you begin to see that immediately take two, three years, that their ambition is to create a new kind of subject. And that's a mark of a revolutionary thinking. It's a new are a men and women that the feminist would think would be that it's really about men and that the feminism is kind of an ossified state feminism. But regardless, there is this idea of a new subject.
You can see it in this caricature of this, you know, self-assertion independence initiative, everything that the the, the colonised subject of previous eras, this fragmented, this incoherent, defeated subject, the. That have they are creating this just the idea that that's kind of part of of of the ambition of this liberation integrates a dignified subject. But you can also trace it being there in the poetry of Adonis, in the fact that a mere anti-masker away when he's writing.
And it's interesting about this new subject, right? He's the wind that blows without to retreat, the water that won't return to its source he creates. He's he's kind in his image. He has no ancestors, no roots, or always roots are in his footsteps, vast as the wind. He walks in the abyss. Right. This is this new revolutionary kind of subject. And of course, it's very problematic. His roots are in his footsteps. That's would bring very serious critique later on from Islam.
It's about to rough about about patrimony, about cultural heritage, but not and Adonis would walk back on these immediate weeks after June 5th. But he walks in that beast and remember this term, the abyss, because this total crisis with which I started this ontological metaphysical crisis could be theorises the abyss. The term returns again and again. But that's if we accept this kind of, you know, theological reading. Now, look, Affleck is important here.
If you if you know something about Affleck, when you read when you read Affleck, most of what you read about him is kind of that if you say, okay, he's writing in a language nobody can understand, the language is weird is the suits are too big on him is wearing pyjama have the dare he's not charismatic is weird you know what what exactly?
You know, how can this guy become, you know, the focus, the intellectual focus on the youth, including Yasin Hafez, this young guy who meets them in in in the Euphrates Valley when he visits, but later kind of moves away from this. So there is something about the language of baptism, which is important. One could add you here even Anthony inside that which interfaces it in interesting ways, but it's not that important now very much.
You look at the language of baptism. He writes about love, about faith. One This in turn is the one. This is the the antidote to the tragedy after the fragmentation and hence of unity later this idea of salvation, but rebirth. Affleck wants a new subject. He wants a new kind of person to emerge there very slowly. He doesn't want to rush it. It's not about power. It's not about capturing the state.
When they tell him, look, what about, you know, okay, you've been writing for 20 years about this and this. What about capturing the state is a vehicle for transformation. So that will come first, will transform the you will create. And it's kind of like a Greek Orthodox slow disclosure of God in a way where Sufi process sort of, if you will, that is very meaningful for for for young people to follow. It's extremely meaningful. But you have to be able to read and understand this language.
Otherwise you are kind of excluded, sort of void. And the Syrian officers of the sixties with their coup d'etat had a hard time connecting to it and they look down on that eventually. But what is missing from our flag is sovereignty. It's the action is the power. It's the actualisation of this subject that doesn't seem to that is tacitly waiting to be transformed in a way. But all of this language existed for about 15 years in a in a serious way before Nasser.
And severe energy becomes something of a preoccupation. You don't find it in the twenties, thirties and forties. You find general talk about mystical, but not Ziada, not serenity. And so becomes an important focus here because it's being imagined as of course, the main element that would actually bring freedom and dignity, but also the fact that as long as you don't have sovereignty, actually you remain a slave remaining this abyss in this in this situation.
So you have to become sovereign not only as a nation or as a collective, but as a person on your own affairs. And that includes these the Stalinists who took it to a completely different direction than the man expected. But it's the same argument, essentially. But the idea that life be force of reality does not is is life not worth living?
It is actually a. GILDEA That's actually also I'll mention sad later if you think about about he mirroring this in his language right so there is a drive towards serenity and this is not coming. It came from Anton Sadler when he was executed, but it is not coming from Baathist. And without this, there is no freedom. Right. So the question becomes the vehicle towards towards freedom.
Now, here, if we accept this kind of a theological reading, it is political theology basically as an effort to read it, I would argue that. This argument in in an article forms already about about is decolonisation as an experience of the sacred rights as an experience of liberation. The active liberation. Will explain exactly what creates this effect of of sacredness of of transcendental experience that you are part of something bigger.
But the interesting thing is that this theology of liberation, it it marries the theological and the political, which is the main sign of the faith in the sixties and the tragedy of and the difficulty of separating them after after Joseph. Now, look at the language of nationalism. This is a language of nationalism, and both ism are combined. You begin to find these terms circulating in various speeches with relation to each other and always with relation to the ultimate goal of dignity.
And it's language that it's a it's a new political language that did not existed before. If you just listen to this for a very long time, this language was seen as this empty talk at this like, you know, rhetorical blather or something of that sort. But it was not thought of as a sacred speech. It's actually a speech that has emancipatory properties that are critical for this generation, young generation of this. Then people begin to also divest from this language after after 67 slowly.
But at this point, this language, which is a fusion of of of of body language and Nasserist language, again, the basis of first to think about this is is emerging. And for Nasser, you know, if we think about if we think about this language is part of you know, is a sacred you know, is a sacred language. The question, how does it function? Like, how does it liberate? What does it actually what is it?
What does it actually do that people or even protagonists in the novels, you can see this, you know? You know, like in the Open Door, a young teenager feels liberated by by a speech, actually by a by the nationalisation speech of 56. So the question, how does it happen in the centre for for understanding this is this idea of sacrifice.
First of all, the fact that you're willing to take the cause of your own freedom and do something about it, because only then you beginning to transcend your situation as a slave when you basically recognising the situations and you're willing to do something and this something is attached to a cause. So when I say I'm willing to die for, for a cause, right, I sacrifice the cause essentially, especially if it has an intrinsic value, a deep intrinsic value.
If that relates to liberation nationalising the Suez Canal or liberating Palestine, but not Yemen, for example, not the war in Yemen, 60 to 65, that's that's a cause. It has low, low, low intrinsic value in terms of emancipation. But once you once you commit to the cause and you're willing to to die for it, and if you succeed in your cause, then the result of this is the experience of transcendence.
So, of course, collectively, you can imagine of the 56 nationalisation of the society as the beginning of that. That's what this language for the first time comes together And Nasser overnight metamorphoses into Nasser ism. Right. But you don't that transformation tells you that that actually something is happening.
But right afterwards this language is applied to small and big things like the inauguration of a new school or of course, the whole kneel in the Suez you know, in the in the as one then the actual building of the US on them is a very nice dissertation about this from Ali Abu Salim about the sacredness, the sacredness of building the dam, about the experience of people that she interviewed decades later. Talking about the metamorphoses is a laboratory for this in San Jose.
It's a place where you are being rebuilt when you have a cause that is a worthy cause. So the sacrifices are not, I don't think, military sacrifices. Every small act just being a good, you know, a nurse in a hospital and do your work and so on. It's a revolutionary act. It's a small to small act, but it's an act that is embedded with this kind of of meaning. So this is this is the kind of ethos that is slowly emerging.
And this is why Nasser, who basically put it together, is as an as a political act, slowly emerged as a kind of of of demigod. Now, for him at the centre of it is this idea of willpower. In liberalism you have a. Right. You know, the government is getting your vote and in return, we'll give you this and this and that. But between you and the government, there's the law. That's the contract in. That's the reason he is the law. His speech is the law because he creates the norm.
Which creates the norm because his norm is the exception. Think again about the nationalisation speech. Nobody knows he's going to nationalise. A few people know he's not going to nationalise. He announces the nationalisation on the you know, on stage it's broadcast live. It's, you know, teams in the Swiss canal hear this on the radio transistors right the internet of the fifties and physically go to the see is the installation of the Suez Canal.
So his words these speech activate is to actually does things and in that it creates it's an exception. It creates this this new norm. And I think that's also the power of instance of. Right. The it's something Aflac never had the good the guy couldn't do anything. You know. So this is this is a again, a cycle of of of exception action exception and norm.
The term Nasser's actually in the states in his in his image as this is the centre of transcendence is the locus of transcendence, which of course if you're an Islamist you're not going to like it because he stole sovereignty from God, because it's not it's not for the states to take this. Um, but in general, I think we can think about this liberation theology as a measure of decolonisation, as is a way of looking at decolonisation.
Also beyond the Middle East. It's not the only place where you find this. You find it in African history within you. When you African men and woman you find these demigods already the sick all over the sixties. And now when you think about it in such terms of the global south, the Arab experience is not that exceptional. In the end of the day, all all Third world. So to the generations, first generation regimes have been defeated in the late sixties.
It's not only the 67, right? So what what is this phenomena of it does happen. There a lot of lessons here that could be could allow us to think about the sixties, I think sort of more broadly. Um, relating to the unity look in most of the narrative. Again, it's Arab unity that is the key as a function of pan-Arabism. And if you unite two states together and that's this kind of give you this sense of, of, of liberation. And if they are not united, everybody is is falling apart.
It's a little bit reductionist, sort of a view. It's not about the political project. It's not about the actual unification of of entities as much as the internal unification that happens with it, this newly found. And of course, for them, you know, they thought, look, if you're really going to unite the Arab world, it's going to be bigger than the US and it's going to be bigger the Soviet Union. Right.
So within their imagination, there is like an enormous block waiting to be not simply revealed, but reinvented. So that that's part of it. And as you know, in 58, it was not on the books of Nasser. It's devices to take the aeroplane without asking the president landing in Cairo and offering unification. They landed on Nasser's birthday. That's not the present expected. There is fuse to see them actually for a first date. He refused to see them and eventually he dictates the terms.
And the unification itself is not, as you know, very successful the way it was carried. But the the emancipatory message of it was was enormous, especially for Palestinians who are waiting to be integrated into it in some form or another. And we will talk about the Palestinians in a second because they are the first kind of to move away from this.
So, okay, I think I've covered this, The transition of Nasser into this demigod, into this liberator is not something that could be understood in terms of charisma or, you know, in terms of, you know, the mass reaching the masses in in some sort of general way.
It should be understood in terms of, I think, this liberation theology now, all of this or what they call in in in in Egyptian Zafer look at this that you know so if you only wrote about nicely the sense of March, right the sense of this march towards liberation, which is again, it's small things and big things, right? When it begins to be applied towards the mid-sixties to Palestine, Nasser is not on board. He was not ready to go to Palestine. He was not ready to liberate Palestine.
And it made a lot of excuses all along. He is being shamed actually into he is being shamed into a sacrifice for Palestine specifically is being shamed for his unwillingness to sacrifice, which again, is is is is difficult to it's actually undoing his whole is all persona as a liberator. This is the ultimate cause. This is the cause that left. It's more important than Yemen. There's intrinsic value to it. People in the region wanted it is that it's a just cause.
So how come you're not committing? How come you're not doing anything about it? There is a reading that I do in the book about how he looks back on his refusal and his being kind of shamed into action. But already before that, you know, the war happens and so on. And there is this argument that you also find in the literature about the fact that, well, the war happened and now they discovered self-critique, now they're criticising this is the record actually completely denies that and at me.
But ten years ago I went to interview Sadiq Al-Azm, the Syrian philosopher, about something else, and we talked about the other thing. And when that conversation ended, we, we kind of transitioned though generally about the sixties. And he said, you know, he said something interesting. He said, to be honest, everything that, you know, he wrote self-critique, you know, negative that about LACMA. He wrote, you know, the self-critique. So others took it.
He said, listen, everything was kind of there before we kind of knew we wrote about it. He made a few recommendations for me to read. They send me to the Saudi Arabia, which is the magazine that was a dog starts, but a dog starts this magazine and he starts that elderly revolutionary, a revolutionary publishing house similar to Jean-Jacques internally in in Egypt or to most people, this is the kind of things he publish.
But he also publishes in 65 the result of a year by Mary saying, listen, we need we cannot just have general talk about things. We need studies. We need to. Facts. We need analysis. So he that's what he's is. And it is there that static doesn't begin to make some of these arguments. In fact, if you read the literary magazine, literary criticism are also this especially liberal, because as Louis Atwood said at this point in Cairo, it's kind of suffocated by by by state thinking.
But especially in Beirut, you find all aspects of critique that are scribe After 67, you find them, you find them before. Quite significantly. It's not news for people who do literary criticism. For those of you literate criticism, I'm sure you've seen that. But otherwise it's in most narratives. It's being ascribed to something that happens after this. Now, I also don't think that self-critique is not a big deal.
Again, it existed all the time. The issue about the issue, about the self critique of a self criticism is that it claims a political space. It's the struggle over the political. And it's and it's the fact that it is married to to laughter and to feel to the theology of liberation. That's that's what suffocates the meaning. And here I'll give you a two example of this.
Everybody knows Nasser's resignation speech on June 9th, where he came to the television and said, you know, we've been together in good time at all times, but I'm actually living I'm resigning, returning to the ranks of the people who experience a setback and so on, and how the people are calling back and refuse the resignation. And the next day he received this resignation. What is less known than a day before? Maybe. Professor obviously knows that.
But the day before King Hussein actually comes with his own resignation speech that you'll be very is very difficult to find out. Actually, took me a long time to find this speech. It's not translated. It is somewhere actually, Palestinians reproduced it in 1969. This I found it basically says we've been defeated, but the war goes on. If you listen to the radio outloud, you know they're still winning.
But for Hussein, it's all over. Nobody stopped the war after King Hussein said, We are being defeated. It's where Nasser comes. And Nasser was forced to come because of King Hussein. Nasser comes the next day. And and what he tries to do is basically to separate the political, the theological, so to speak, take responsibility. A lot of my colleagues, they created Nasser. We try to take responsibility.
Khalid Fahmy is one you say, you know, some of his lectures said, well, you know, he's taking responsibility, but I don't think he's taking responsibility. I think he's running away from responsibility. This is not, again, a liberal contract where, oh, I'm sorry, I screwed up. I returned the mandate. You vote anew. There is no other system. He's the system. He's the norm. He's the law. What are you resigning from? And this is indeed why the people cannot fathom this separation.
The separation of the political from the theological is the return to the abyss. It's a return to this to the situation from which, you know, the post-colonial project is trying to emancipate them from. So this is not the right time to separate the two. And there is a major force not to separate the two with uncontrolled. So perform immediately goes on a series of concerts.
I studied very carefully for this book concert in Paris, and I interviewed the person who managed to kind of put it together and in Somali is the guy that brought Sartre to to Egypt at the time. And you would not believe you would not believe there's a new book about it by an Egyptian writer. Very, very nice about all her all her three years until Nasser's death of how she refuses the defeat, refuses the refusal of the defeat is the refusal of this kind of separation.
And you would not believe this concert she is giving in Paris. Everybody's like from all over Europe. People did they ask welcome tones of Algerians? And you have to remember, six years later, the Algerians have been massacred in the streets of of Paris when they demonstrated with wrong do the same. This is a time for them to talk about it, to acknowledge it comes five days after the theatre basically betrayed them.
There was very close interlocutor of of these people and it came up in support in Israel a few days before the war. So there's a sense that the city betrayed them. This universal emancipation that was imagined was not it was universal. So it's not only a new Arab subject. They would be, you know, subjects of the world, you know, with the same rules will apply to. They must do. Everyone else so hurt her.
And the first time she leaves abroad and perform her her a concert where she performs at land for the first time. Also when the ruins. It's about love, but when the ruins are the ruins of the project. So there is there is this very strong emotional. Now everybody is coming to this conference. Shopkeepers, but also King Hussein comes in disguise. It's just it's there on the first. On the first front comes. Let people identify him.
There's the second, the third culture, the in the in the second or the third. Actually, someone jumps and she falls to the ground. It's. But she you know, they said that if the end of the show, she insists of going back there is this defiance to the defeat and and defiance to see Nasser sort of, you know, castrated, humiliated and so on. There's also a lot of writing against it until some of one of those who write against their for to,
you know, the project of maintaining this disunity. And by now they have critique of this whole language. This is a coded language. That language to the sun kind of funny does that. Others, among others, do this. But the question is, the fear is that if Nasser is going to go, they're going to be back in the abyss. And Nasser himself, to one of his speeches says, I feel like a working and walking in the abyss, lost in the sense it's a sense of, you know, a profound sense of disorientation.
You're not right. It's it's and this is exactly the sense that the activist would respond to. I'll say more about this later on. But the question is, you know, to to read the is this return to this abyss. Now, another way of reading or is or maybe before that, just kind of connecting it a little bit to where Palestinians are. Palestinians are the first actually to divest from Nasser. To understand that not only they had to beg for this liberation, it's also not going to happen.
On on on these terms, they have to take their own cause of liberation in their own hands. And this is the power of self liberation. But they don't do it just with the gun. They do it with the gun in the pen, which is very which is what really puts them apart.
You can map Palestinian thought. And there are people who do this Palestinian history in general, as you know, was assumed that to really intellectually exist from 48 to 67 because in the last decade and a half and so on, this is an old of you already know you have works like those of Odile more than that actually show how much happened in terms especially of of this critical literary thought that is transitioning into the into the political force.
We know it mostly through Kanafani, but actually there are a lot of other people who do this and they are the ones who are transitioning. To do things. First of all, they are abandoning the concept of leftism, which is associated with Nasser ism and moving to move mukoma what it does it actually for. And now for the first time when they do this, the work of alone makes sense because it was translated immediately when it came out.
Nobody read it. It was not a big deal. When though publishes it for the movie, it didn't sell very much initially. It wasn't a blockbuster it will become. Right. Even though the intro by start there tells you theorises that right? It theorises when you take a guy to liberate yourself, you emancipated. Of course, it's more complicated than that also for Fanon because when you take a gun and kill someone, you also get PTSD and likely and Fanon.
So both things in his clinical work, it is theoretical work, it is clinical work our intention here, but this is something that will be elaborated and written on, but they begin to take this kind of thing away from away from Nasser. They're not waiting to be emancipated. And actually the giving Nasser a lot of hate. They cannot control the rise of Palestinian resistance after 67, especially when they're also trying to liberate the language.
They are thinking this is a dead language. All these they acquire and all of these, you know, the Salah Khalida and and all of this language. And with this they become also makers of the of the new Arab left. It's it's a left that is transcend the Middle East. It connects to, you know, other locations other organisations it's a it's a global sixties moment. I wrote about it separately. Specifically with relation to Paris to show how the course of Palestine in Paris became a cause.
And what allowed me to do this and to show how it happens in Paris is that I found that the Israeli the Israeli Israeli diplomat, but also the Mossad, was very concerned. Early sixties. They noticed the students in Paris begin to not take Nasser very seriously and begin to talk about liberation in ways that were not familiar and concerning to them. So they asked the Israeli students in Paris to spy on all the other students, and they had a program for about two or three years.
And I got the file of the program with everything they collected, all the manifestos, all the solidarity, all the events. And you can see for three years how slowly they begin to talk about Palestine. I think in the same way in which is being discussed today, is very familiar to us today, but not in the sixties.
Right. How they how they build it. This is also something that is happening here and not happening, especially not from Syria, which is a newer bath that is very sectarian and very violence. Already old is intellectuals are moving out of Syria, but also doesn't happen in Syria. So there's an alternative sort of cause that is a vector that is happening here that intersects with Nasser ism only one in 1969.
Nasser negotiates for the Lebanese to allow Palestinian resistance to Israel from within within Lebanon. And that starts a different story of the Lebanese civil war and so on. That is kind of projected forward, but it's tied to really what I'm trying to do. I like the first thing we just showed you, the people on electricity poles and so on was for NASA's funerals. I begin the book with taking the reader to NASA's funeral, but not only in Cairo.
There were funerals all over the Middle East, every village, every town. So I go to all of these small funerals in Lebanon, in Palestine, Syria, just kind of this is kind of how it starts, but ends with Nasser's very slow death. Nasser died over of three years beginning in 1967. From diabetes. Yeah, diabetes since the 1950s, but it was more or less under control. One shot of insulin at 9:00 and more or less is okay. That stopped being the case with the stress of the June war.
I have his blood work from before the war and after the war. So you can actually see. And when the CIA doctor, the CIA stole it, I mean, Ashraf Marwan stole the blood work and gave it to the CIA satellite. I'm quite sure of that can explain later on why I think a team and what they saw in the documents. But when I realised that that, you know, the CIA says look at the bloodwork is that this person is on the verge of that coma.
It's not sustainable life. And when you understand that the next three years in Egyptian history is horrible things up, it's the attrition war and that this attrition war is actually is considered in Egyptian history is the thousand day war. So what you think about the 67 to 6 days to begin with is not it is no no reason to think about it only in five days. It's actually a thousand days. It it continues until Nasser's death. So I decided to assemble this entire medical file doctors.
I have diets, everything. And when you look at this medical file and especially it's interesting, diabetes. Diabetes is a is a is it is a condition that you cannot treat very well. In the late sixties, there was not yet even artificial diabetes is not synthesised yet. That's happens only much later in the eighties. A lot of the slow release that we have today did not exist then was extreme.
It was almost like a death warrant was extremely difficult to to type one diabetes was extremely difficult to to manage. And you are very you're prone to stress because when you are on the condition of stress, you have a lot of cortisol and adrenaline and stress hormones coming into your blood to initiate this kind of fight or flight response. And they flood your arteries, essentially your system with with glucose.
So you can actually and in a system where the insulin cannot deposit the glucose in the muscles as fuel, that that resulted in a coma. So there's a lot of each time there is stress in Nasser's life during these three years, his blood works show that but he accumulate. These are all the conditions that doctor helped me with exactly what they. So you're right, I'm not that doctor. But essentially there are Germans Danish, British.
And of course, Soviet doctors that are trying to help him is also, as you know, he's smoking 80 cigarettes a day. Dobie's daughter tried to help him quit. He doesn't, but he smokes, though. He smokes actually American cigarettes while he's anti-imperialism, by the way. He started with actually very bad cigarettes when he was a field officers, but he upgrades anyway.
He's not he's not very healthy when you when you look at the attrition war at the political military chart and his medical chart, you see how they mirror each other. So in 69, when the Israelis cross the Suez Canal into Egypt and managed to sever a significant part of the country, fought for more than 24 hours, Nasser has no idea what is happening there, and he's learning about that from the international press.
His response is a heart attack. And in this medical tradition of the time, they don't tell him you had a heart attack, then get a flu. They don't tell anybody is a heart attack. Only the doctors know his heart attack. There's a tradition of you don't want to burden the patient with the disease, the environment takes the burden on, but it begins to understand that things are wrong. So what I do, I actually read he the way embodies the defeat.
Because eventually the only thing that's going to separate the political this theological is the is there is the death of the subject. And this is why his death is this mass. And this is why they, the Egyptians and Arabs in general, said two things, said, first of all, June 5th killed him, which medical is true? And that is that he's heart he gave his heart for, you know, for the cause, which is also medically, which is also medical.
The book ends with the reader sort of experience this kind of slow death, the slow death of of the cause. Now, the question I will just finish with this. Okay? What what you know, what are the some of these kind of post-colonial lessons to other areas and so on. The total crisis of being with which I started exist exist elsewhere in the Global South, essentially different different forms, different configurations, but various responses.
I think, you know, we can give away a little bit of these mass political personality card cards for the act of the individuation of sovereignty, the way he he took sovereignty and embodied it. This aspect of of this liberation theology should transition us to another aspect that is debated at a time. You know, there's a sense of nationalism in baptism. We're secular and then it collapsed and you've got religion, right?
But really, it's not so much about secularism and religion as much as a struggle over a transcendence, the sacred who can create this experience, the state or actually simply the fact that you are praying that you are part of a religious community, that you are part of a practice whereby sovereignty belongs to God, and it's being interpreted by those who could read the, you know, the legal corpus.
Now, this is this is important because it allows us to rethink a little bit about the birth of Catholicism as a mirror, though some of it is for us eulogies does it in his book, he basically says, look, cool to be nastier. They knew each other. There are mirror image of each other. They both wanted the same thing. But he determines the theological terms about which they argue are not to argue about the exact same thing.
The both of the concept of jealousy of nothing before. So their entity, they both talk about sovereignty for not sure it's individuated it's he controls it for for good of this is blasphemy because the belongs to God. But they also argue about sacrifice. They both have a notion of sacrifice and the notion of sacrifice that wisdom has. He's not that different than what is being offered by Nasser is him. And it is. And it also privatised for cultivating its privatising the notion of jihad.
The notion of jihad is being remade in the fifties and sixties, so that the same notion that the 19th century, it is exactly that of taking your destiny in your own hands and doing something about it. And this is why in prison, as you know, the Muslim Brotherhood who died in response to this, he responds very strongly to to that reaction. The Muslim Brotherhood do not did not make this this slip. So there is a way of reading of reading that. And there is a very interesting.
There's a chapter where, you know, Zeinab, Zainab Ali is an activist, Islamic feminist, the sister of the Muslim Sisterhood. She becomes activist, she transitions. And she, you know, a memoir recounts her interrogation. When you read the script of her interrogation, you immediately have said this is not an interrogation. What do I mean? There's no intelligence to get out of her. There's no like what you can she give them?
She cannot give them anything. Not where the weapons are hiding. This is an inquisition where they tell her, you know, you want the torture to stop. You have to go to Nasser. Where is your God now? Who is bigger, God or not? That's really what it is for them. But she's very clear about that. And the script of her torture, of her inquisition, that in the way she narrates June 5th, I think supports kind of some of what I'm trying to do here.
Finally, I and I don't know if it's related to to so graphic debate you have here, but in the U.S., there's this manufactured, I think, quite artificial debate about if you write in a theoretical mode or in a narrative mode. Right. With most of the graduate students, I want to theorise this and this and that which is which is, of course, a very nice in that narrative. So first of all, I, I reject this dichotomy. I write.
I write the story. Going to meet the people and you write it in their their various reasons for doing this theory doesn't humanise the problem of the Arab intellectuals here is that from the intellectual record, it doesn't matter if it's Aziz or Muhammad or Ahmed. It's almost like separate from their life. You actually don't know. You don't know their lives. You don't know the love lives.
Do not come with fully fledged human beings the way you read, you know, in European intellectual history narrative sort of does that. But beyond that narrative has no problem whatsoever for account for, you know, a political theology in terms of theory, a theoretical into any other. It's kind of a false dichotomy, which is interesting because those are two theorists in the US, of course, against dichotomies, right?
That's the the big postmodern thing. But that's the only dichotomy. The whole two is narrative versus theory, which is. So, so I am trying to, to, to, to write something that that people can relate to kind of in academe. It's not a trade book. And that was explained to me painfully by civil agents immediately. Well, I tell you later. But anyway but it is a story that people who don't know anything about the region necessarily should be able to read this.
The generation of the first Arabs, their story. And when you go to actually study their lives, they're quite different. They're quite remarkable. They're very rich, they're very nuanced. And if what you care about are affairs, there are plenty of these, too, and they're actually intellectual and are meaningful in other ways. Right? So that kind of like the big project that I'm kind of trying to undertake and stuff here. Yeah, I think. Okay, Yeah. Thank you. I'll bring something.
Just your. Thank you. That was really intense. I'm not entirely sure Any ten spirit? Yeah, I'm not entirely sure where I been. There were whole parts of what you were saying that were going right over my head. Couldn't connect other bits that were, like, going straight into the bloodstream. I was like, Oh, my God. If only I could have had you for today's tutorials.
Anybody who's been in tutorial with you today is going to feel like you've just lived all of this because we were talking about this book and we're looking at the other half of the stories.
We're looking at the aftermath of 67. And so, you know, so much of what you were saying seems to feed straight into the concerns as we try and bridge between where what is strictly historical leaves off and where the realms of our brothers in political science picks up and analysing the political fortunes of a region that follows after the intellectual and cultural strains that you are looking at. It is so clear that you have been deeply immersed in this world.
What are we talking about? Seven, eight years you've been writing this book? Yeah, he just comes pouring out because you just are able to assert without ever having to revert back to the source about what is going on in the intellectual life of a diverse region with many different strands and many different. And the point that I connected to initially was it took me back to Samir Cassius examination of the Arab malaise in the first decade of the 21st century.
And he's contrasting a moment in which the Arabs have kind of lost their sovereignty to being reduced to being just a pawn on the global chessboard, and that powers are able to act in their region without anyone in the region being able to stop them or assert their own will in the way that the Americans could, without U.N. sanction, assemble an army to go and topple a dictator, that the Arabs themselves that, all right, mindedness should have done for themselves,
but they couldn't even in their own backyard, act on those against whom the loss of sovereignty was to be blamed. And he contrast that with a notion of nada. Yeah. Another to those of us with 19th century obsessions, there's always going to be people starting in the 19th century, leading up to the First World War. But to him, that wasn't enough matter at all. His not as much closer to what you're looking at.
Of Afro Arab. It's that list you had of what gets left out of the story of the global sixties in the Arab world. The kind of liberation movements and social justice that was going on. And to two Americas. Here it is, you know, Afro Arab unity. It is the role of Arab cinema in conveying a notion of a new person. It's stuff going on in middle decades of the 20th century. And if anything, it's an agenda being driven by the kind of people you're looking at.
This is leading to a question. Eventually we get to him, which is then as I look at the list of the intellectuals that you focus on, I am struck by how many of them are cultural rather than political in their in the medium. These are novelists. These are poets. I mean, there are political philosophers of exchange and whatnot. Cassirer was very taken by the role of the novelist, the poet, the filmmaker, the creative thinker.
And I'm wondering whether in your analysis that the agenda of liberation and the notion of sovereignty passes from those who lost the trust politically, the Baathist and the Masters and whatnot, and is taken up instead by those who better capture an Arab vision. Through cultural expression. Or whether that's a misreading of where you're going in the kind of place. So it's a you know, he started with something like a SEAL. First of all, he's writing, you know, is of it is a very Lebanese Nahda.
But is is not the is indeed not the 19th century. It's the 1990s. Eliot who also writes about it. He has a nice essay about the 1980s and the effort to reenergize it. Can you say that the the you know, the Arab world it's the Lebanese civil war ends up and there are there's there are a class of intellectuals in Lebanon who are actually trying very actively to reinvigorate the Nahda in the form also of neo liberalism and so on.
It's very controversial. But that's not his agenda, certainly not the neo liberalism. No, but but the. Elizabeth Kassab writes about it. Also a little bit about the return of the return of the Nahda in the nineties. It's it's a kind of a broad spectrum, but it's a moment like this because it's a moment of globalisation, so it's rife with possibilities, it's rife with potential. Now the intellectuals of the fifties and sixties and for him a lot of it is again to get the Syrians out.
There is an issue of sovereignty here, but you know, the fifties, the intellectuals of the 1560s are not fringe intellectuals. This is the era in which intellectuals were deemed critical for the collective project. They are not the intellectuals that emerge after 67, who's a very good critic, is a very good, you know, but in exile and out of the 67 would come the problem of the problematic of moussaka for Sultan and so on.
But in the fifties and sixties, these are people who are constitutive of the project. Even in Syria, when Assad and is no new Baathist, they wanted to participate in power. They needed to be able to speak a certain ideological language. And they are being trained because to be trained in the Baath, it took many, many weeks, months of preparation, of cultivation, of intellectual cultivation.
It's not what the new above does, is there said, all right, we'll bring all our friends from the provinces, forget about these long ideological preparations so they can stuff the party in our practice and get the votes and and ask the intellectuals. The defeat of the intellectuals in 67 is very important here. And I think that, you know, the people are writing about, you know, they disappeared from our record here in the West, but not from the record of the region.
Like, you know, when you think about, okay, an intellectual, all these work of, you know, the fifth in the sixties, it's again. Muhammad Husni an icon like everything is Heikal an icon, an icon. And, you know, so so this is this is a but my question really was, are you looking to cultural figures to be able to articulate the notion of social justice in the 1960s Arab world when, as you're saying, baptism is reduced to empty slogans only in 66.
So, I mean, is this to the turn you make in your cultural study is that it's going to be happening more in the creative arts of the Arab world, where you'll find the kind of I don't accept the separation and I don't think they have accepted the separation. I don't think there was a creative and these literary critics, Nasser reads them. He's really upset when they begin to publish in Beirut. And you asked him, why do you publishing the Loyola? Why do you publish in Beirut? Why not? Why not here?
Right. Look how many publishing houses we have. This I was look, look at how it looks. You know, these these these are not people who do these small things out there. They are critical. I don't mean to do. No, no, I know, but you know how the delivery is. Say we. The literary figures are bringing consciousness back after the opium of the political slogans. Yeah. And who writes it? Offical Hakim, who's actually an older generation of these guys and you know, has much to kind of repent I guess.
But he wants he wants back. He wants back a liberal language. This generation divested divested from the liberal contract he did not provide to the they supported the revolution. This is a generation that have no problems giving all the liberal freedoms for this notion, for this sense of emancipation. It was worth more than the liberal freedoms after 67. They want some of it back. It's true. And why don't people like philosophers?
You know, you interviewed Sadiq Khan, another you know, why doesn't he feature? He is, after all, you know, one of those self critical thinkers. Why does he not feature in your list of the kind of intellectuals who defined this vision was well known. So I didn't want to kind of. Focus on him very much here in a. And I also I also found the kind of critique that he's bringing very it's kind of it's kind of very modernistic and rigid, right.
In that sense. It's about the defeat. It's a critique of the defeat of the Arab subject. And his defeat is very similar to the Israeli critique. I found the file that is still classified in Israel. They don't let me read the whole thing, but I got the executive summary and I got someone who read the whole thing. After 67, right afterwards, the Israelis had 5000 P.O.W.s, mostly Egyptians. So they decided to study them. Like, who is this new? Who is this person that went to war? Who is that like?
How can we? They were not sure. How did they triumph in such a way? Because what you have here is the new Zionist person, which is also a new project of new subjectivity going against the new Arab man. Right? So they wanted to see why did we win. So they brought the anthropologist and psychology psychiatrist a battery of all experts in the state to study deeply these hundreds of P.O.W.s out of the 5000 and issue a study and subject them to a battery of tests.
And basically the there is the conclusion was that the Egyptian subject failed to modernise and on this counts. It's exactly what Azzam says on these cards. He doesn't separate religion, you know, he's superstitious. He doesn't you cannot tell fact from fiction and so on and so forth. You talked about this. I guess to me it's very much the thought of the time. Right. And it's unsurprising that Israelis and a philosopher trained in the German tradition.
Right. Even if he's a Syrian. Right. Might have reflected. So there is something very similar in the way both of them thought thought about this project. But, look, Palestinians don't think that's weak. They're not at all. Yeah, that's right. They're taken off their fly.