Disordered World, page 17
As the lot of the Arabs progressively deteriorated on the ground, and as their armies were beaten and their lands occupied, and as their people were persecuted and humiliated and their enemies behaved arrogantly as though they were all-powerful, the religion which they have given the world became the last refuge of their self-respect. To abandon it would be to renounce their main contribution to universal history; in a sense, it would be to renounce the very purpose of their existence.
As a result, the question which arose and still arises in Muslim societies in this age of pain is not so much about the relationship between religion and politics as between religion and history, religion and identity, and religion and dignity. The way in which religion is lived in Islamic countries reflects the historical dead end in which these people found themselves trapped until recently, and from which they are only just beginning to emerge; if they succeed in freeing themselves from depotism, subjugation and humiliation, they will find verses which accord with democracy, modernity, secularism, coexistence, the primacy of knowledge and the glorification of life; their relation to the scriptures would become less nit-picking, less sensitive and less rigid. Forgive me repeating once again: the problem does not lie in the texts; nor does the solution.
There is no doubt that since the beginning of the twenty-first century the Muslim world’s historical impasse has been one of the most obvious symptoms of the decline towards which a blindfold world seemed inevitably to be heading. Was it the fault of the Arabs, the Muslims, the way they live their religion? In part, yes. Is it not equally the fault of the West and the way it has for centuries managed its relations with other peoples? Yes, in part. And in the course of the past few decades, have the Americans and Israelis not borne a more specific responsibility? Probably. All these protagonists must radically change their behaviour if we are to see an end to a situation which starts from the open wound of the contemporary Middle East and is beginning to spread its gangrene to the whole planet, threatening to undermine all our civilisation’s achievements.
That is a statement of the obvious which sounds like a pious wish, but it cannot be dismissed with a shrug. Is it already too late to put in place a historical compromise which at the same time takes into account the tragedy of the Jewish people and of the Palestinians, the Muslim world, the Eastern Christians, and also the impasse that the West has got into?
Even when if the horizon seems dark and the protagonists’ demands seem irreconcilable, we must keep looking for traces of a solution.
One such, which could be promising, would be if the Jewish and Arab diasporas, instead of replicating the exhausting, sterile conflict which debilitates the Middle East, took the initiative to create a healthy rapprochement with the support of international diplomatic efforts.
Is it not much easier for an Arab and a Jew to meet and talk calmly, to share a meal and socialise, if they live in Paris, Rome, Glasgow, Barcelona, Chicago, Stockholm, São Paulo or Sydney, rather than in Beirut, Algiers, Jerusalem or Alexandria? In the wide world where diasporas coexist, couldn’t they sit down side by side, begin to forge links and reflect together on an alternative future for the people they hold dear in the Middle East?
That is happening already, one might reply. Perhaps, but much less than it ought to. On this crucial subject, I shall say what I have already said about several others: the question is not whether the Arabs and Jews talk to each other a bit more than they used to, or whether links are being made between people. The question is whether they will be able to resolve an endless conflict which is poisoning their lives and contributing to a disordered world.
Chapter 8
The wish I have just expressed about the role of diasporas is linked to a wider hope that concerns all migrant populations, wherever they are, wherever they are from and whatever their history has been.
They all have powerful ties with two worlds at once, and they have authority to be communication channels, interfaces in both directions. If it is natural for a migrant to defend an attitude which comes from his home country in his new one, it should be just as natural for him to defend an attitude he acquired in his new country in his homeland.
It is sometimes said that if the Arab-Muslim immigrants of Europe formed a nation, it would be bigger than most member states of the EU, younger than all of them, and certainly the fastest-growing. What this overlooks is that if this population were an Eastern nation, it would not be negligible in terms of its size either, and it would be right at the top of the scale of all qualitative measures: its level of education, its spirit of enterprise, its experience of freedom, its active familiarity with the material and intellectual tools of modernity, its daily practice of coexistence, its ability to know widely varied cultures intimately, and so on. All of this gives these migrants a potential influence possessed by no other population in the East or the West.
It is an influence that they should exercise much more than they do — with confidence, pride and in both directions at once.
It is too readily forgotten that an immigrant is first of all an emigrant. This is not just a banal shade of meaning; the person really is double and lives as such. He belongs to two different societies, with a different status in each. Take the graduate who does a menial job in the city where he is an exile, yet who in the village he comes from may be a person of note. Or take the Moroccan worker who on the building sites in the North speaks only timidly with his eyes lowered, yet turns out to be a confident, voluble storyteller who makes expansive gestures when he is with his own people and is at last able to speak his language proudly. Or the Kenyan nurse who spends her nights in a suburban hospital and makes do with lukewarm soup and a piece of bread for her meals, but is revered in her home province because each month she sends back enough money to feed twelve family members.
I could go on quoting examples indefinitely. What I am trying to say is that we miss something essential when we fail to see the emigrant behind the immigrant. And we commit a major strategic error when we calculate the status of immigrants according to the place they occupy in Western societies, which is often at the bottom of the social ladder, rather than the role they play — and which they could play much more effectively — in the societies they come from, that of vectors of modernisation, social progress, intellectual liberation, development and reconciliation.
Because, I repeat, this influence can be exercised in both directions. You can live in Europe and endlessly dwell on the conflicts in Algeria, Bosnia or the Middle East, but equally you can convey to the Middle East, Bosnia or Algeria the European experience of the past sixty years: that of Franco-German reconciliation; the building of the Union; the fall of the Wall; the miraculous, definitive end to the era of dictatorship and colonial expeditions; the era of bloody butchery, massacres, genocide, centuries-old hatreds, leading towards an era of peace, harmony, freedom and prosperity.
What would have to happen for such a change in the way influence flows to come about? Migrants would have to want to transmit a constructive message to the societies they came from. That is easy to say, but difficult to put into practice, because it demands a radical change in our habits of mind and our behaviour.
So, for immigrants to want to become advocates for the European experience, they would have to fully identify with it; they would have to cease to be the targets of discrimination, humiliation, paternalism and condescension every time they show their ‘typical’ faces, utter their names or speak their language. They would have to identify spontaneously with their adoptive society and feel invited to immerse themselves in it body and soul.
But it is not enough for a migrant to identify with his adoptive country; in order for him to influence the society he comes from, it too has to continue to recognise him and recognise itself in him. Which entails that he will be able to assume his double identity with equanimity as fully as possible. Today that is not the case, neither in the French nor in the British approach to the question, to return to these two illustrative examples.
In France, the idea that governs the treatment of the immigrant question, as formerly with colonial peoples, is that every human being is capable of becoming French and must be helped to achieve it. A generous idea, born in the Enlightenment era, and one which would have changed the face of the world if it had been honestly applied in territories as diverse as Indochina, Algeria and Madagascar. It is an idea which more than ever remains respectable in its essence and even indispensable. From the moment when someone decides to live in a country other than the one he was born in, it is important that he is absolutely clear that he and his children will shortly be able to belong fully to the host nation. This aspect of the French approach consequently strikes me as having universal value; I certainly personally prefer this message to the British one, which tells the immigrant that he can keep his culture and customs, and that he will benefit from the protection of the law, but will remain an outsider in the nation which receives him.
In practice, however, neither of these approaches seems to me to suit our century; neither seems to me capable of assuring harmonious coexistence in the long term. Because in spite of their differences, these two policies start from the same supposition, namely that a person cannot belong fully to two cultures at once.
The immigrant in this new century needs to hear an entirely different message. He needs to be told in words and through attitudes and political decisions, ‘You can become fully one of us without ceasing to be yourself.’ That means, for example: ‘You have the right and the duty to study our language in depth. But you also have the right and the duty not to forget your own language, because we, your adoptive nation, need people among us who share our values, understand our preoccupations and can speak Turkish perfectly, or Vietnamese, Russian, Arabic, Armenian, Swahili or Urdu, all the languages of Europe, Asia and Africa, every single one of them, so that we can make ourselves understood to all the people on the planet. You will be an invaluable intermediary between them and us in all domains — culture, politics and business.’
What an immigrant hungers for above all is dignity. And to be even more precise, cultural dignity. Religion is one element of this and it is legitimate for believers to want to practise their faith peacefully. But the most vital element of cultural identity is language. It is often because a language is neglected, including by an immigrant himself, and his culture discredited, including by himself, that an immigrant feels the need to show signs of his belief. Everything pushes him in this direction: the global atmosphere, the action of radical activists and also the behaviour of his new country where the authorities, obsessed with the immigrants’ religious allegiances, fail to take account of their hunger for cultural recognition.
Sometimes it is even worse, since there is more mistrust towards linguistic pluralism, which is usually benign, than towards religious communitarianism, which for all pluralistic societies has constantly turned out to be a contributory factor to fanaticism, tyranny and disintegration.
I use the term ‘communitarianism’ deliberately. For me, it has a negative connotation, whereas ‘pluralism’ has a positive one. Because there is in fact a difference of kind between these two powerful identity factors, religion and language. Religious identity is exclusive; linguistic identity is not. Every human being is entitled to assemble within him- or herself several linguistic and cultural traditions.
I will not deny that my instinctive mistrust of religious communitarianism is linked in part to my origins. The Lebanon of my birth is probably the most emblematic example of a country dislocated by ‘confessionalism’, and as a result I feel no sympathy for this pernicious system. Perhaps it once was the answer to an ill, but in the long term it has turned out to be more harmful than the malady itself, like a drug that was administered to a patient to calm his suffering, but which created an irreversible addiction, which debilitated his body and mind a little more each day, to the point where it repaid him a hundredfold for all the pain it had temporarily spared him.
When I was young, I would have been more reticent about dwelling on this point, given that communitarianism seemed to be nothing more than a curious Levantine relic. Today, the phenomenon is global and sadly no longer looks like just a relic. The future of all humanity may well have its odious colouration.
For one of the most harmful consequences of globalisation is that it has globalised communitarianism. The rise in religious affiliations at the same time as the globalisation of communications encouraged the regrouping of people into ‘global tribes’ — an expression which, though it may seem like a contradiction in terms, is nonetheless a faithful reflection of reality. This is especially the case in the Muslim world, where there has been an unprecedented wave of communitarian particularism, which found its most bloody outlet in the conflict between Sunnis and Shi’ites in Iraq. But there has also been a sort of internationalism, which means an Algerian goes willingly to fight and die in Afghanistan, a Tunisian in Bosnia, an Egyptian in Pakistan, a Jordanian in Chechnya or an Indonesian in Somalia. This double movement of compartmentalisation and decompartmentalisation is not the least of the paradoxes of our times.
This is a worrying change, which it seems to me is explicable by the combined effect of major upheavals such as the failure of ideologies, which favoured the rise of assertions of identity and of those who advocated them; the computer revolution, which enabled solid and immediate links beyond all borders to be forged across seas, deserts and mountain ranges; and the rupture in the balance between power blocs, which posed a sharp question about power and its legitimacy at global level. In addition, the emergence of one dominant superpower, long seen as the champion of a single ‘tribe’, probably contributed to giving strategic rivalries a strongly identity-based association.
It is in the light of all of these factors that I can say, thinking in anguish of Lebanon, my homeland: ultimately, communitarianism was a dead end. Our fathers’ generation should never have got swallowed up in it. Then I add in the same breath, this time thinking of France, my adoptive country, and of all of Europe, which is today the land of my last hopes: it is not in ‘communitarianising’ immigrants that you will facilitate their integration and escape the clashes which are looming, but by restoring social dignity, cultural dignity, linguistic dignity to each person, and by encouraging him to adopt his dual identity and his role as a link with equanimity.
Chapter 9
More than once without dwelling on it I have criticised the notion of a clash of civilisations. Perhaps I should now pause a moment for a fairer, more balanced assessment.
What is problematic in this theory which has had so much media attention is not its clinical diagnosis. Its interpretative framework does allow greater understanding of events since the fall of the Berlin Wall. Since identity politics gained the upper hand over ideologies, human societies have often reacted to political events according to their religious affiliations: Russia has become openly Orthodox; the EU sees itself implicitly as a group of Christian nations; the same appeals to combat reverberate in all Muslim countries. Consequently, it is not unreasonable to describe the contemporary world with reference to spheres of civilisation which are in conflict.
In my view, where supporters of this theory go wrong is in departing from their observations of the present to construct a general theory of history. To explain to us, for example, that the current predominance of religious affiliations is the normal state of the human species, to which it has returned after a long detour through a series of universalist utopias; or that the clash between civilisations is the key which allows us to decipher the past and predict the future.
Every theory of history is the child of its time. It is highly instructive as a tool for understanding the present. When applied to the past, it reveals itself to be approximate and partial. Projected on to the future, it becomes risky and sometimes destructive.
To see in today’s conflicts a clash between six or seven great civilisations — Western, Orthodox, Chinese, Muslim, Indian, African, Latin-American — is enlightening and intellectually stimulating, as is evidenced by the number of debates it has given rise to. But this key does not help us much to understand the great conflicts of human history: think only of the First and Second World Wars, which were principally quarrels among westerners and which nonetheless shaped the world we all live in. And it does not help us to explain monstrous phenomena which have weighed on our contemporary moral consciousness, such as totalitarianisms of the left as well as the right, or the Holocaust; and that is not even to mention the great global confrontation between capitalism and communism which — from Spain to the Sudan, and China to Greece, Chile and Indonesia — has profoundly divided societies belonging to all civilisations.
More generally, when you look at various episodes of the recent or distant past, you find in every period events such as the crusades, which do indeed seem to reflect a clash of civilisations. But you also find that many others which are just as significant and just as deadly occur within the Western cultural sphere, or the Arab-Muslim, African or Chinese one.
Even in our own era, which seems by and large to conform to the academic schema of a clash of civilisations, an event like the Iraq War clearly has several different facets: that of a bloody conflict between the West and Islam; that of a yet more bloody conflict within the Muslim world itself, between Sunnis, Shi’ites and Kurds; and that of a clash between great powers around the question of global hegemony.
