When opening a work of historical fiction—whether it’s A Tale of Two Cities or the latest paperback—the reader immediately understands the basic parameters of the genre and its assumptions about mankind and reality. The same is true of other forms, including the political essay, which emerged in the 18th century as the basic means of addressing the problems of government and society.
Historical fiction came to the Middle East thanks to Jurji Zaydan, a Beirut-born Christian who settled in Cairo. In 1892, he founded the magazine The Crescent, in which he serialized his literary efforts. Altogether, he wrote 22 historical novels from the material of Islamic history with the devices Walter Scott had invented some 80 years earlier for portraying the Scottish past: private lives caught up in public events, a hero of modest rank rather than a prince, a period depicted with its distinct manners and forms of speech. Zaydan sought to enliven history, making it vivid and compelling to the general reader. He succeeded: generations of Arab readers learned their early Islamic history from his novels. But his work did more than that: it also conveyed a new understanding of history itself.
The premodern Arabic chronicles simply record events: in a given year the Nile rose to such a height, a governor was appointed, a plague came, a noted scholar died. There is no sense that these years fell into particular epoch, and no overarching patterns of progress or development. A reader of Ivanhoe, by contrast, presumes that he is reading about a different time—the Middle Ages—with its own ways of doing things. Zaydan taught Arab readers to think of the past as history, not as mere chronology.
Zaydan’s borrowing was one part of a much larger act of cultural translation, one that began with Rifa’a al-Tahtawi, a Sunni cleric sent to Paris in 1826 as chaplain to the first Egyptian student mission. Five years later he published An Overview of Paris, a work that fits no earlier Arabic category—part travel record, part constitutional description, part appalled inventory of French manners. He spent the decades that followed running a school of European languages, where generations of Egyptian officials learned to turn French administrative and legal prose into Arabic.
In 1847, Marun al-Naqqash, a Beirut merchant who had attended the theater in Italy, adapted Molière’s Miser and staged it for an audience in his own house, thus beginning Arabic drama. Butrus al-Bustani, a Maronite convert to Protestantism who worked with the American missionaries in Beirut, produced a dictionary and then embarked on an encyclopedia, a new form whose ambition was to delineate the fields of knowledge, and to indicate which of them a modern, literate man was expected to have opinions about. In 1913, a lawyer named Mohammad Husayn Haykal published Zaynab, and Egyptians have argued ever since about whether or not it should be considered the first Arabic novel.
In poetry, the neoclassicists revived the ode as it had been written in Baghdad a thousand years earlier; the critics attacked them with Coleridge and Hazlitt in hand. Mikha’il Naimy, a Lebanese emigrant in New York, published a volume of criticism in 1923 called The Sieve that judged Arabic verse by standards taken from Russian and English criticism; and in Baghdad, at the end of the 1940s, Nazik al-Mala’ika and Badr Shakir al-Sayyab broke the double-hemistich line and the single rhyme that had governed Arabic poetry for thirteen centuries, with al-Mala’ika explaining what she had done by using another recent European acquisition: the preface.
The language itself had to be rebuilt before it could carry any of this. Like many other languages, classical Arabic came with no punctuation to speak of, no equivalent of the paragraph, and no words for parliament, revolution, political party, public, class, society, consciousness, or nation in the European sense. Its prose favored verbs that preceded their subjects and was built by coordination, baroque chains of and and then that suit a text meant to be recited aloud. Influenced by European styles, a new generation of Arabic writers began crafting shorter sentences with subordinate clauses, which required conjunctions that had to be developed for the purpose; the passive voice was widened and acquired a new construction with no classical precedent; punctuation was adopted outright from French, along with the paragraph; and terms were coined at a rate that by 1932 required an academy in Cairo to bring order to a rapidly expanding lexicon.
And it wasn’t just words and grammar that were imported: whole idioms came across intact in Arabic vocabulary—to play a role, to take into consideration, on the other hand—so that the borrowing lodged in the shape of the sentence rather than merely in its lexicon. What resulted keeps the morphology of the old language, its roots and patterns and case endings, and therefore keeps the appearance of continuity: an educated man moves between the Quran and a newspaper without learning a second grammar. Underneath these appearances is a 19th-century instrument, built through translation specifically to receive.
Fiction and poetry can absorb this sort of borrowing at no cost, and often to good ends. Zaydan wrote good novels, and ultimately they must be judged on their literary merits rather than on their philosophical propositions. But political prose has no such insulation. Its underlying assumptions are part of its argument.
European political prose reached Arabic in several forms at once, and, like all forms, each carried its assumptions in its structure. The treatise assumes a patient reader willing to follow an argument that slowly builds rather than explodes onto the page. The pamphlet assumes a quarrel already underway and a reader who has chosen a side before opening it. The manifesto speaks as we on behalf of multitudes who have not been consulted and are expected, on reading it, to discover that it speaks for them. All of these were available, in French or in translation, to any Arabic writer of the late 19th century who wanted them, and all of them found occasional Arabic practitioners. Yet none of them became as ideologically universal and as continuously productive as the diagnostic essay.
Jamal al-Din al-Afghani and Mohammad Abduh, two Muslim scholars in Parisian exile, brought out a periodical titled The Firmest Bond in 1884 and published eighteen issues before the British authorities in Egypt and India banned it from the postal system. Another journal, The Selection, founded in Beirut in 1876 by two graduates of the Syrian Protestant College and later relocated to Cairo, carried natural science, medicine, and political commentary to a general readership for six decades. Al-Ahram began the same year, and remains Egypt’s most widely read newspaper to this day. Zaydan’s own The Crescent began in 1892. And in 1898 Mohammad Rashid Rida, a Syrian who had come to Cairo to sit at Abduh’s feet, founded The Lighthouse, a name whose 18th-century European connotations are unmistakable, which presumes a dark coast and vessels already in trouble.
Within a single generation, an Arab reading public came into being that expected, at monthly intervals, an essay—another new form—taking the condition of the Muslims as its subject and reporting on how that condition stood.
The 19th-century political diagnostic essay takes a whole people as its patient. Just as the sonnet has fourteen lines, the diagnostic essay has one constitutive convention: it opens by announcing that the patient’s condition, at the moment of writing, is critical. The diagnosis that follows can be secular or theocratic, socialist or monarchist, a program of translation or a program of martyrdom—because the crisis is a device of the form and never a discovery by the writer. No practitioner has ever begun an essay by examining the patient and reporting that the condition is stable. The genre no more permits it than the elegy permits a happy ending.
What is distinct about the periodical is that it does more than create a reading public. It imposes a schedule. A treatise can aspire to finality; a book may claim to have settled a question. A periodical must return next week or next month. It requires a present that is perpetually new but never complete. Thus crisis is its ideal political form: every event can be presented as a new manifestation of a condition that remains unresolved.
While this convention holds true across cultures and languages, it seems particularly true of Arab journalism. In 1948, just months after the Arab defeat at the hands of the nascent state of Israel, Constantine Zureiq, a Damascene from a Greek Orthodox family and Princeton-trained professor, published The Meaning of the Disaster, a stand-alone pamphlet that was merely an extended diagnostic essay. It began by declaring the defeat a catastrophe (nakba) in the fullest sense of the word, among the harshest trials the Arabs had suffered in their long history—its meaning, he argued, reaching far beyond the battlefield into the deepest structures of Arab life, which stood revealed as unfit for the modern world and requiring transformation from the root.
Sixteen years later Sayyid Qutb, the founding theorist of Islamism, writing Milestones in an Egyptian prison, opened by placing all of mankind on the brink of a precipice, drained of the values that make life worth living—the Western experiment bankrupt, and the remedy a vanguard that would withdraw from the surrounding barbarism and reconquer the world for God. The movements Zureiq and Qutb unleashed, secular Arab nationalism and jihadism, spent the following decades at war with one another; the men themselves would each have regarded the other’s program as the very disease itself. Yet their first pages are identical. Each stands at the bedside, holds the totality in view, finds the totality failing, and locates the failure at a depth the patient cannot reach without his assistance.
The rest of the tradition fills in around them without disturbing the form. Shakib Arslan, a Druze prince writing in 1930, put the whole crisis into a single question—Why Did the Muslims Fall Behind While Others Advanced? The question-mark changes nothing, since the crisis of falling behind is settled in the asking; the reader is invited to deliberate about causes, never about the condition.
Michel Aflaq, founder of the Baath party that later came to power in Syria and Iraq, did not need an opening paragraph, having put the diagnosis in the party’s name, which means resurrection: one does not resurrect the living. Malek Bennabi, an Algerian engineer, performed the subtlest operation of all: he moved the pathology inside the patient, coining colonizability—the Arab condition of being susceptible to conquest.
By mid-century the literature of crisis was the whole of Arab political writing, and ideology decided nothing about it. Liberals wrote it and Marxists wrote it; Nasserists wrote it against the Baath and the Baath against Nasser; the Islamists wrote it against all of them. After 1967, a generation of secular self-critics—Sadiq Jalal al-Azm’s Self-Critique after the Defeat is the exemplary title—wrote it against the men who had written it before, turning the instrument on its previous operators but never abandoning it. To write politically at all was to open with the patient in danger, and 130 years of mutually annihilating programs share, to this day, a single first page.
The Arabic word for crisis is azma, and it did in Arabic what its cousin had done in European languages: it stopped being a word and became a category, one of the organizing terms on which political thought depends. In 1967, Abdallah Laroui announced The Crisis of the Arab Intellectual; there followed, from every school and against every school, the crisis of Arab thought, the crisis of Arab civilization, the crisis of the Arab mind, the crisis of Arab reason, the crisis of democracy in the Arab homeland, the crisis of the Arab left, the crisis of contemporary Islamic thought—but always a crisis.
Nor did the form retire with the generation that perfected it. When the Arab Spring came in 2011, the commentary that rose to meet it reached, on every side, for the same instrument: the crisis finally erupting, or the crisis betrayed, or the proof that the crisis ran deeper than any diagnosis had reached—and when Egypt returned to the officers and Syria descended into civil war and Islamic State, the wreckage became the newest confirmation of the oldest verdict. Al Jazeera’s roundtables and the annual development reports all sang the same tune: the crisis of the Arab state, the crisis after the Arab Spring—the temperature of the patient taken now in real time, around the clock, by a bedside that has expanded to the size of the discourse itself. A form that arrived in the luggage of the 19th century runs today on its own momentum, and no event has yet been produced that it could not convert into more of itself.
It would be an error, though an understandable one, to ascribe all this to Arab peculiarity. The Arabs imported the form from revolutionary Europe—France above all, where salvation by way of catastrophe was developed into a popular writing device: the Jacobins gave the Terror a regenerative office, Joseph de Maistre answered from the counter-revolution that providence itself worked through bloodshed, and between them the two parties of France disagreed about everything except the redemptive power of catastrophe. As the revolution’s influence detonated outward across Europe, the form traveled with it, surfacing among radicals and socialists everywhere, until its perfection in the writings of Karl Marx, the only writer of genius the device ever had. Like Hamlet on the ramparts, haunted by his father’s ghost, Marx opens the Communist Manifesto with a specter haunting Europe, and the old powers—pope and tsar, Metternich and Guizot—in a holy alliance to exorcise it. The pamphlet keeps faith with its opening scene to the last page. The bourgeoisie appears as the sorcerer who can no longer control the powers of the netherworld his spells have summoned; the commercial crises return as visitations and the drama closes at the graveside, since what the bourgeoisie produces, above all, are the diggers of its own grave.
Generations of leftists, intellectually conservative as they are, have made the form an undisputed tradition. In 1970 the Marxist philosopher István Mészáros opened Marx’s Theory of Alienation by announcing a global structural crisis, a standard feature of the literature of the left, and would later refine the concept into a crisis explicitly chronic rather than acute—the decisive hour abolished, its urgency retained. Today much of the literature of the left opens by announcing a planetary ecological crisis, and the logic has not changed: the catastrophe is the threshold, and the salvation—degrowth or revolution, according to the writer’s church—is what the catastrophe alone makes available.
Crisis is the secular form of apocalypticism. Borrowed from the Greek, the word descends from the verb krinein—to sift, to separate, and therefore to decide. In Greek medicine it was the turning point of a disease: the point at which the fever breaks and the patient either recovers or dies, bringing the disease to an end one way or another. In the law, it was the verdict that closes a trial. In Scripture it is Judgment; the Greek translators of the Bible reached for it to render the Hebrew day of judgment. In the Gospel of John it stands at the center of the drama: now is the krisis of this world—a judgment already underway, although no man knows the hour when the sentence will be handed down.
In his book Critique and Crisis, the German historian Reinhart Koselleck reconstructs the post-Christian transformation of the concept of crisis. He begins from the kinship of the two words: both descend from the same Greek root; the critic and the crisis are the judge and the judgment. The idea of criticism originated with the educated class of European Enlightenment—the salons, the republic of letters, Bayle and Voltaire and Diderot and their imitators—which saw its role as passing judgment. First it judged books, then morals, then religion, then the state that had guaranteed its freedom to judge, until nothing stood outside its jurisdiction.
Unlike actual judges, the critics held no office and bore no responsibility for the judgments they passed. A minister who misjudges falls; a critic who misjudges writes another essay. Judgment without consequence has no reason to restrain itself, and so critique expanded until the object on trial was the age itself. By putting the whole existing order in the dock, the critics had put Europe into a condition their own language could only call critical. The critics did not discover the crisis of the old regime; they manufactured it.
A permanent crisis, clearly, is a contradiction in terms. The classical crisis was a moment of decision: the fever breaks, the case closes, God renders his Final Judgment. A fever that never breaks names a different condition—grave, chronic, degenerative, perhaps mortal, but no longer critical. Modern political language kept the urgency of the decisive hour and discarded the hour, yielding the most serviceable instrument political rhetoric has ever possessed: the moral intensity of apocalypse without the inconvenience of an end.
The crisis genre invests its writers with authority. Its enabling premise is an asymmetry: the people cannot read their own condition, and the intellectual can. If collective experience carried its own intelligence, diagnosis would be superfluous and the diagnostician unemployed; his stature therefore rises with the depth of the disease, and the genre obliges by finding the disease bottomless. From this asymmetry follows the constant of the whole crisis literature: the people is everywhere its subject and nowhere its agent. “The Arabs,” “the Muslims,” “the nation” govern every sentence and act in none—patient, sleeping body, colonizable mentality, mass awaiting a consciousness to be delivered from above. The people is the grammatical subject of Arab political writing but its epistemological object.
The construction is sealed against evidence. If the revolution fails, the crisis ran deeper than anyone measured. If reform succeeds, the success was cosmetic and the disease untouched. If the revolutionary vanguard turns tyrant, the old mentality has captured it. If the people reject the program, the rejection is itself the symptom. Every outcome confirms—which is why ideologies that spent decades annihilating one another never weakened the form they shared, each collapse arriving as fresh evidence for the next diagnosis.
The myth of crisis has imprisoned Arab political thought, and the prison is built of a single relation to time and to authority. It promises decision and reproduces suspension. It invokes the people and denies the people competence. It makes total diagnosis the precondition of any act, so that ordinary, mundane politics—the budget, the courtroom, the municipal election, the maintenance of infrastructure—looks trivial by comparison with the required transformation of everything. It converts defeat into pathology and victory into reprieve. It has allowed every ideology to present itself as a rupture while leaving intact the one relation no doctrine ever disturbed: the writer above, reading the sentence; the people below, standing on the docket. The crisis genre presents itself as the instrument by which a people awakens. Its survival requires that the people never fully wake but sleepwalk through a century of political tragedy.
