The Rebirth of the Far West



Franck Salameh writes:
Arab nationalism was never the strong suit of Egyptians; at least not the Egyptians outside the gilded gates of the military and the autocrats. For the average Egyptian, Arabism remained extraneous and superficial at best, pragmatically, not ideologically driven. Until his dying day, Taha Husayn (1889-1973), considered by many the doyen of modern Arabic literature—and for some time the Arab nationalists’ and Sati’ al-Husri’s bête noire of choice—scorned the faintest notion of an “Arab Egyptian” identity. He held Egypt’s roots to be Pharaonic, not Arab; maintained Egyptian culture and mentality to be closer to the ways of modern Greeks, Italians and Frenchmen than to those of Arabs; and considered his own use of the Arabic language to be immaterial and irrelevant to his Egyptian authenticity. . . .

There were others still, besides Husayn and al-Sayyid, in Lebanon, in Syria, and Iraq; Middle Eastern intellectuals who celebrated diversity, and poured sharp criticism on the Arab nationalist ethos, on its illusions of authenticity, on its imagined particularism, on its fear of diversity, and its lack of introspection. Arab culture, claimed Syrian intellectual Adonis (b. 1930), is one “completely closed on itself,” utterly incompatible with modernity and loath to the Middle East’s richly textured multiple identities.

Lasting peace will only come to the Middle East when the drive for Arab/Islamic homogeneity is replaced by regional pluralism. This means each country embracing its historical, pre-Arab/Islamic identity where it exists: Phoenician (Lebanon), Assyrian (Iraq), Berber (North Africa), indigenous Egyptian/Copt, and so on. Abolish the Arab League and replace it with a Semitic League, to work in close cooperation with the European countries of the Mediterranean basin.

The region that gave birth to monotheism and preserved Greco-Roman learning for centuries should not rival the West; it should be an equal partner making up the West, as surely as most Middle Easterners are Caucasians. The West is the inheritor of Rome, and nearly the whole Middle East (excepting, signficiantly, inner Arabia) was an essential part of Pax Romana: home of Philo the Judean, Philip the Arab and Augustine the Berber. Scratch "Middle East." The future of the region is as the Far West, to be led by the vanguard of organic Semitic Occidentalism, the Jews.

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