Arabic Culture: Its Background and Today's Crisis

by ALBERT HOURANI

1

The purpose of this collection is to increase the reader’s understanding of the Arab World; but to attempt this is to imply that there is something in the Arabs which needs to be explained — something mysterious and complex and unexpected. Of course this is true in a sense; every people sees the world through the medium of its own language and from the standpoint of its own experience, and its ways of life and thought are opaque to others unless they make an effort of imagination. But can we go beyond this, and find in Arabs, or in Orientals in general, some mystery other than that due to the mere fact of their living in different countries and speaking different tongues? In so far as we find such a mystery, may it not be due to the eyes with which we look at them?

For those who cannot travel, “the Arabs’ figure chiefly as political stories in newspapers. When an American is puzzled by what he reads about happenings in the Arab World, he is tempted to believe that “the Arabs” act in ways difficult to understand because their minds are different from his own. Arabs, he is often told, only understand force and exploit weakness; they are moved by “emotion” rather than reason; they are “xenophobic,” and if they oppose Western policy it is not “really” because of anything in that policy but because they hate the West as such; they are “fanatical” in their attachment to their religious beliefs and dislike of those who do not share them.

Such explanations, I think, are far too facile. They are no more true than many of the easy generalizations that one hears about America abroad. Before a Westerner convinces himself that Arabs act as they do because they are so unlike himself, he ought to be sure that he cannot accept the simpler explanation that they act as they do because they are really so like himself: human beings whose thoughts and acts are directed more or less rationally towards ends, but whose conception of those ends, no less than the means adopted to achieve them, are largely molded by the circumstances in which they live, their convictions and the convictions of those who nurtured them, and their language, the flawed mirror in which they see the world.

It is perhaps in such determining factors, rather than in the human essence of the Arabs, that the explanation should be sought when their acts differ from what is expected. To analyze all of the Arab’s patterns of feeling, would take many books; it will be enough here to mention briefly a few of them, and to start with perhaps the most important, the religion of Islam.

The “Arab World” is a group of about twenty political units peopled by “Arabs.”The original homeland of the Arabs was, of course, the Arabian peninsula. But not all the people now known as “Arabs” are descended from the Arabian tribes. As we shall see, the spread of the Muslim religion over the centuries tended to “Arabize" many other native stocks in adjoining and even quite distant regions, so that today the population of the Arab World is roughly sixty to seventy millions, of which about 90% are Muslims. Among the other 10% are about two million pagans in the southern Sudan, half a million Jews in North Africa, Egypt, and elsewhere, three million indigenous Christians in Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, and Iraq, and something less than two million European Christians in North Africa.

What does it mean to be a Muslim? Muslims believe that there exists one God, the Creator of the Universe; that He intervenes in human history; and that after death He judges all men and gives them their due reward. They believe also that His intervention takes a particular form. His uncreated Word has been given literally to mankind by means of the prophets, through whom the teachings and warnings of the Word have been given to different “peoples.”The last of the prophets, they believe, was Mohammed, who was sent to transmit the Koran — the Word in all its fullness — to the whole world. In the difference between the Word made Man and the Word communicated to men lie implicit all the differences between Islam and Christianity.

The God of Islam is merciful and just, but an infinite distance lies between Him and those He has made. His relations with them are conceived primarily under the aspect of Will, of edict and obedience. Hence the importance of the Law, the minutely detailed code of ideal social and individual behavior, in principle derived by certain rational processes from the Koran and the Traditions of the prophet. Hence too the form of the Muslim community: not a sacramental Church, but a community of believers. Islam does not make Christianity’s theoretical distinction between the temporal and spiritual realms, and it recognizes two lines of authority stemming from Mohammed: the caliphs, who were his successors as executive head of the community, but who possessed neither the prophetic role nor, in principle, any legislative power, since the Law had been laid down forever; and the ulema, the doctors of the Law, who have the skill to interpret it and whose consensus is binding on the community. These concepts have determined the form taken in Islam by the intellectual life, which functions within the limits imposed by the literal word of God, and exists to interpret and define it rather than to illuminate the nature of God; as well as the spiritual life, which is rooted in obedience to God and the prophet and directed to the acquisition, through meditation on the Koran, of the virtues which sweeten the soul — devotion, humility, acceptance.

2

WHAT I have sketched is the strict tradition of “orthodox" (Sunni) Islam. But throughout Islamic history other trends of thought have led away from it, and orthodoxy has reacted in two ways: by sharp rejection of innovation, and by incorporating into itself as much of the new tendencies as it could reconcile with its own beliefs. Thus the attempt to state the doctrines of Islam in terms of Greek philosophy in the ninth and tenth centuries carried with it the danger not merely of introducing ideas clearly opposed to the teaching of the Koran, but of turning faith in God and His actual message to actual men into an abstract theory about Being. Some orthodox Muslims rejected the Greek influence out of hand, but others, such as Ashari (died 935) and Ghazali (1059-1111), learned how to use the concepts of Greek metaphysics and the methods of Greek logic to formulate the doctrines of Islam in a way which remained faithful to the Koran.

A second tendency was that of Shiism, which began as a political movement in the seventh and eighth centuries and ended as a system of doctrines. The Shiites believe that only Mohammed and his successors, the Imams, had the infallible power of interpreting the Word of God aright and guiding the community; obedience to the Imam was the root of virtue. From this position sprang a certain cult of Mohammed and his family, particularly of his son-in-law and immediate successor, Ali; and in some sects which grew out of Shiism (Alawis, Ismailis, Druzes) the prophets became emanations of God, not only mediators of His Word but part of His creative process. Sunni Islam rejected such beliefs, and persecuted those who held them when they became a danger to the state; yet in its fully developed form it has been deeply marked by the cult of the prophet and his family.

The third great force in Islam has been mysticism (Sufism). Sufism began with the practice of meditation on the Koran and insistence on the importance of the inner life as well as external obedience to the Law, and gradually worked out a whole doctrine of the mystical life and the soul’s approach to God. Love emerged as the primary relationship of God and man; the infinite distance between them was bridged by the unity of substance; and Mohammed became the “perfect man,” the archetype from which mankind was made. Here again, the mystical emphasis on God’s love, and on intentions as well as acts, was finally incorporated in the structure of orthodoxy by the genius of Ghazali. In the tenth century brotherhoods of mystics gradually grew up, groups bound together by common practice of the mystical life in accordance with the teachings of one of its recognized masters. Those brotherhoods played an essential part in the Muslim community, extending its frontiers and linking together the different classes, regions, races, and sexes of which it was formed.

On another level, the popular cult of awlia (“friends of God,” local saints or masters of the devotional life) softened the sense of God’s distance. Every traveler in Muslim lands knows the whitewashed domes on the outskirts of villages, centers of local devotion and pilgrimage; periodically some movement of protest has arisen to reaffirm the uniqueness of God and destroy the tombs of the saints, but they have kept their place in the popular heart of Islam.

From the very beginning Mohammed situated himself and his doctrines in the religions perspective opened up by Judaism and Christianity, and the consciousness of a profound but complex spiritual relationship between the three religions is of the essence of Islam. Muslims regard true Christianity as formally identical with Islam: “the prophet Jesus” taught the same message as Mohammed; he is therefore one of the line of true prophets and his followers are “People of the Book,” to be tolerated and protected by the Muslim state. But Christians are thought to have corrupted their scriptures by turning their prophet into a God; Islam rejects the ideas of the Crucifixion, the Incarnation, and the Trinity. Although in so doing it rejects the essence of Christianity as Christians conceive it, the doctrines and life of Islam have been deeply penetrated by Christian influences; in some of the mystics (notably Hallaj) Jesus replaces Mohammed as the human exemplar and object of devotion. Moreover, the complex spiritual relations of the two faiths are twisted and intertwined with the political relations of the two communities. Between Muslims and Christians lies the shadow of old and recurrent enmity: the Muslim conquest of Christian lands, the struggle between the caliphate and Byzantium, the Crusades, the modern expansion of Europe.

Islam regards Judaism too as formally identical with itself, and as having been corrupted by the Jews. The penetration of Judaism into Islam was less than that of Christianity, but on the other hand the hostility of Jews and Muslims may have been less. It is only lately that the establishment of a Jewish state by force, in a land mainly Muslim and Arab for twelve hundred years, has thrown across the relation of the two faiths the shadow of political conflict.

3

IN THEORY, the whole Islamic world is one community. This unity is based on acceptance of a single God, obedience to one Law, the equality of all men in the eyes of God and the Law, and the insignificance, in the light of this equality, of all merely human differences. Although this ideal of a community of equals ruled by Law has profoundly influenced the spirit and structure of all the Muslim countries, it has, in practice, been only imperfectly realized. The religious Law was respected, but it could never dislodge, although it could gradually modify, customary law; nor could it wholly control the acts of governments forced to lake account of expediency and the changing needs of a changing world. Similarly, within the unity of the Islamic people there persisted purely human differences and notably the difference of the great ethnic groups which between them carried the burden of Islamic history — the Arabs, the Persians, and the Turks.

After the first few centuries following the death of Mohammed in 632 the Arabs were no longer the political masters of Islam, but they were always in a sense a privileged group. The prophet had been an Arab; the Koran, in its own phrase, is “an Arabic Koran”; Arabic is the main language of devotion, theology, and law. The expansion of Islam in the seventh century facilitated the expansion of the Arabs, not only in the obvious sense that Arab tribesmen emigrated from Arabia into other Muslim countries — Syria, Iraq, the Nile Valley, the North African littoral — but also because where Islam spread, the Arabic language went too, and thus peoples of other ethnic stocks were gradually Arabized. This process (which can still be seen at work in parts of Africa) has created what we now know as the Arab people. In the Arab countries outside the Arabian peninsula, a large part of the population must be of other than Arabian origin, but they mostly speak Arabic, and that is primarily what is meant by calling them “Arabs.” Of the sixty to seventy million inhabitants of these countries, between 80 and 90% are Arabs. Of the others, there are about a million Kurds in Syria and Iraq, about two millions who speak various African languages in the Sudan, nearly two million Europeans in North Africa, and, also in North Africa, some millions of Berbers who have not been Arabized but retain their own dialects.

With the language, those who have become Arabs have absorbed a whole ethos which must be briefly and crudely described. The Arab family tends to be endogamous and patriarchal in its explicit authority, although behind the patriarch one can often see the shadowy figure of some tremendous matriarch — mother, grandmother, or sister more often than wife. Social loyalty is given to a series of concentric groups — family, clan, section, tribe — whose unity is symbolized by real or imagined descent from a common ancestor, and whose solidarity grows weaker as the group grows larger. The loyalty of the group is crossed by the spirit of faction: each group tends to divide into more or less equal factions, and so the individual is able to hold out a little against the pressure of custom and blood ties.

Where the Arabic language comes there comes too a certain imagination. Arabs love fine and sonorous words for their own sake, and care for poetry and rhetoric more than other arts. They love heroic gestures and tend to see acts in themselves, as fitting an occasion rather than as links in a chain of cause and consequence. Their vision of the world has a hardness of outline; it is a vision in black and white. Through language and imagination again there enters an ethical system which exalts the heroic virtues: loyalty to friends, family, and tribe; the sense of personal and family honor; hospitality; the magnanimity of the strong man who does not always insist on his rights.

This is the structure, these the virtues and qualities, of a nomadic people, which have been carried by the Arabic language to sedentary folk. The tension between nomadic breeders of livestock and sedentary cultivators of the soil runs all through Arab life. In the fertile areas on the margin of the steppe and desert both pasturage and agriculture are possible, and nomads and peasants are engaged in a struggle to possess them, and to control one another. The intervention of a strong government can be to the advantage of the peasant; but even when this happens, and the area of cultivation and settled life expands (as it has done in the last three generations), the conflict continues on another level. In society and the individual, the nomadic ethos struggles with the traditions and needs of the countryfolk and townspeople who form the majority of the Arab people today. In North Africa the Arabized Berbers still preserve remnants of another social tradition; and in Egypt the Arab spirit has never wholly taken possession of that most sedentary of peasants, the timid, humorous, gentle, and devious fellah. At the same time there is a tension between the nomadic system of morals, based on personal honor and exclusive loyalties, and derived from the Jahiliya (the pagan and heroic age which was ignorant of Islam), and the moral system of Islam, grounded in obedience and with the whole world as its field.

4

EVEN after the unified caliphate of early days broke up (in the eighth century), most of the Muslim world remained under Muslim rulers, and in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries its political unity was largely remade by the Ottoman Turks, whose Empire included most of the Arab countries and lasted until the present century. Although most of the Muslim world was autonomous, it was not isolated. We should not think of the Ottoman Empire as living like the Chinese Empire shut off behind the ramparts of power, pride, and distance. Between the Ottoman world and Europe there was always exchange: the flow of goods was managed by the European merchant companies, and by Oriental Christians and Jews; ideas and know ledge moved in both directions — the Western tradition of Oriental studies is old, and there were always Ottomans who were deeply interested in Western culture, like Sultan Mohammed, the conqueror of Constantinople, who had Greek philosophers and Italian painters at his court, and caused Ptolemy to be translated into Turkish.

Until the seventeenth century the Ottoman government was in a position to control these exchanges. It could decide the form of its relations with the European states, supervise the flow of trade, and even determine which European ideas would be allowed to enter. The military inventions of the sixteenth century, for example, were speedily adopted, while printing in Arabic and Turkish was not allowed until two hundred years later. By this time the strength of the Empire was declining. The tendency to disintegration inherent in so large and varied a state, restrained for two amazing centuries by great sultans and great institutions, reasserted itself and brought with it the gradual decay of the economic and social system. At the same time, the scientific and technical revolution of the modern age increased the military and economic power of the European peoples. The stream of European influences in the Ottoman world grew wider, and that world was less able (at least in the first instance) to control its course.

The record of modern Western influence on the Arab World can perhaps be divided into four phases. In the first, roughly covering the eighteenth century, the military and diplomatic balance was overturned, and European states acquired an increasing influence over the government and some of the peoples of the Ottoman Empire. In the first half of the nineteenth century the same process continued but others were added to it. The flow of European goods increased (by 1830, for example, the Bedouin tribesmen of the Syrian desert were wearing English cloth), and trade opened the way for ideas and techniques. Sultan Mahmoud II in Turkey and Mehmet Ali, the governor of Egypt, both attempted to reform the military and administrative systems, opening new schools to train an elite of officers and officials. In the second half of the nineteenth century both these movements began to reveal their implications. Western economic penetration, while it raised the standard of living of a certain class, tended to destroy the old economic organization and the social institutions which had been based on it.

Interest in reform began to spread beyond the ruling group. There appeared an intellectual elite, formed in the professional schools or else by French and American mission schools, which was aware of certain Western ideas. New political forms were suggested and attempted — apolitical parties, the political press, constitutions. The externals of life began to change in the upper and middle classes. The emancipation of women was advocated by reformers, such as Qasim Amin in Egypt. In the first half of the present century, the modernizing movement reached the masses. The media of mass education were developed — the popular press, the cinema, the radio, and national systems of schools. At the same time irrigation and agricultural development were raising standards and changing ways of living in the countryside, and the foundation of industries created a new sort of town. Women were emancipated, in varying degrees, throughout a wide section of Arab society. The imposition of foreign rule, as the British and French took over parts of the Middle East, while it helped on these social changes, also quickened political consciousness and gave it its first form, that of mass nationalism; and nationalism in its turn led to the emergence of a new sort of independent state.

In all phases of this modernizing and Westernizing process there was a time-lag between different types of development. Constitutions, for example, were established before there existed the political education to make them work properly. This produced tensions which were augmented by conflicting attitudes toward the idea of change: on the one hand acceptance, with more or less eagerness, on the other rejection or reluctance to accept, springing not so much from “xenophobia” as from a sound instinct, the unwillingness to give up something old, familiar, and tried. The tension between acceptance and rejection became explicit in Egypt in the late nineteenth century, and it is in Egypt above all that the problem of “Westernization” has been posed. What is the West, and what the secret of its strength and prosperity? What should we accept from it? If we accept Western ways shall we not lose something of value — our customs, our religion, ourselves? From such questions has sprung a whole movement of thought.

On the whole the tendency towards acceptance of the West has prevailed. “Egypt is part of Europe” — this phrase of the Khedive Ismail (1863-1879) sums up the consistent policy of the family of Mehmet Ali (1805-49), of the Nationalist Wafd party in its great days in the 1920’s, and of a whole series of interesting books which culminated in Taha Hussein’s Future of Culture in Egypt. Even those whose thought moved within Islamic limits, like Sheikh Mohammed Abdu and his disciples, conceived of a modern Islam, with its basic principles unchanged but its law and customs adapted to the needs of the times. It is only in the last twenty years that there has appeared an important movement of rejection: the Muslim Brotherhood, which on the one hand springs from something permanent in Islam, the desire for social justice and the purity of the faith, but on the other expresses for the first time the political and social longings of the new half-educated classes who know little of the West but know their own grievances and frustrations. These same classes however have produced also their own movement of acceptance; in the writings of Khalid Mohammed Khalid and the policy of Gamal Abdel Nasser can be seen a reflection of modern Western “progressive” thought.

5

IN THE last few generations all the Arab countries except Saudi Arabia and Yemen have known Western political control, direct or indirect, and for a longer or shorter period Morocco was partly a Spanish and partly a French protectorate, Tunisia a French protectorate, and Algeria officially regarded as part of France; Libya was an Italian colony, Egypt was under British occupation for three generations, the Sudan was until last year an AngloEgyptian condominium administered by the British; Palestine, Trans-Jordan, and Iraq were British mandates, Syria and Lebanon were French; the small countries of eastern and southern Arabia are under different forms of British tutelage.

Direct control of Arab countries by Western powers is now ending, but some remote control will probably continue as long as the disparity of strength is great. There is a natural tendency for power to expand; but there is also a tendency for its expansion to have certain effects both on those who possess it and those who lie at its mercy. The powerful ceases to regard those who lie within his power as human beings standing outside himself and on a level with himself. He thinks of the stream of actions as flowing out from him to them, not back from them to him. He regards their interests as nonexistent or else in necessary harmony with his own. He even forgets that he has power, unless it is challenged. The powerless for their part resent their position and the inequality it entails; they are always conscious of it. They see the hand of the powerful everywhere, and explain everything in terms of it. They use each partial gain to demand something more. Not having responsibility they lose the sense of community, and regard each other with distrust; in the end they even regard themselves with distrust. Of course to speak like this is to speak abstractly, and in any particular case these tendencies may be balanced by others making for a different relationship. But that they have been present in the Arab World in this century cannot be denied, and it is equally clear and not surprising that they should continue to affect the relations between the Arab countries and the West even now that the cause of them is being removed. Nor is it surprising that in some minds the resentment against Western power should have gone to swell the reaction against Western civilization. The desire not to lie under Western power, and the belief that the Muslim world can revive its social and intellectual life from its own resources, support and strengthen each other in such movements as the Muslim Brotherhood, or such books as Saved Kotb’s Social Justice in Islam.

A relationship of special complexity exists where Western settlers have been planted in the midst of Arab communities, such as the Europeans in French North Africa or the Jews who came into Palestine with the help of the British mandatory government. In these situations there is an accumulation of hatred such as exists in no other: a hatred born of the struggle for power in a mixed community and the absence of any moral or natural link between the two groups. The settlers are faced with a terrible problem. Their superior technical skill and solidarity give them power, but as time goes on they become increasingly aware of their weakness. Ultimately they depend for the maintenance of their position on external forces which may not always support them. The world situation is changing around them, and those moral, technical, and diplomatic advantages which they possess over their Arab neighbors they may soon possess no longer. Searching for a way of escape, they may try to ally themselves with those external forces which are opposed to the Arabs, or resort to acts designed to demonstrate their strength, and to seize what they need while there is still time. Such policies, however, only deepen the moral gap without halting the inexorable shift in the balance of power. The only way out is by some re-establishment of the moral link. This is difficult, not only because of bitter memories and mutual distrust, but also because there can be no new moral link unless there is a surrender of power — at best a difficult operation.

The problem of the settlers is a problem also for the Western powers which enabled them to settle, in the past the very weakness of the Arab peoples which made it possible for the Western powers to support foreign settlements made it essential for them to do so if they were to find a solid basis for their interests. Now however they can only protect their interests through a new relationship with the Arabs; they must at all costs avoid being so exclusively tied to the settlers that such a relationship becomes impossible, but on the other hand they cannot easily abandon those whom they encouraged to settle. It is possible that the French in North Africa will just be able to save the situation by their new policy of a surrender of power to the Arabs. In Palestine, however, the problem has already passed into a later and more difficult phase. Hatred and suspicion have been embodied in facts and institutions. With outside help the Jewish settlers have been able to set up their independent State of Israel, and in the process three-quarters of the indigenous Arab inhabitants of Palestine were forced to leave their homes. The moral gap has become a physical gap, and Israel has no relations with the surrounding Arab World.

6

SO FAR we have spoken of “the Arabs” or “the Arab World” as a whole. But the Arab World, although united at a profound level, is divided politically into a dozen major units and as many minor ones. Between them there are almost no natural frontiers based either on clear geographical distinction or on long historical tradition; and it is not only in regard to frontiers that there seems to be something artificial and puzzling about Arab political life. New states suddenly emerge, like Saudi Arabia a generation ago or the Sudan in the last three years. Economic and human units are divided between different states (for example, the partition of Morocco into French and Spanish zones) and most states contain ethnic and religious minorities. Ruling groups appear and disappear — where now are the leaders who led the Syrian struggle for independence, and who had heard of Gamal Abdel Nasser in 1951? Citizens change their residence and nationality with ease.

Such facts as these can only be explained if we know something of the process by which the existing states have emerged in the Arab World. Most of them have been created out of the dying body of the Ottoman Empire, and by the interaction of five forces. First, of course, geography as always has played some part in determining political divisions and units. Next, religion has been the basic social determinant in the Near East since the Roman Empire became Christian, and the religious basis of most states in the region is still clear. The idea of nationalism has also played a dominant part in the emergence of Near Eastern states ever since the Greek revolt of 1821. Certain dynasties, notably the family of Mehmet Ali in Egypt and the Saudis in Arabia, have helped to shape the political structure of the modern Arab World. Last, but not least, that structure reflects the interest and rivalries of the Great Powers, not necessarily as they are now but as they were at some time in the past. Political institutions are more rigid than political ideas, and the division of Morocco, the unity of Tripoli and Cyrenaica, the separation of Jordan from Syria, the independence of the sheikhdoms of the Persian Gulf are permanent memorials of a past moment in the policy and relations of the European powers.

It is largely because the divisions between Arab states are new and artificial that their political life tends to be artificial. We should not think of them as political communities but rather as centers of power, produced by the interaction of the five historical factors cited and maintaining themselves or extending their radiation in virtue of two forces: first, the vested interest of a ruling group which somehow has obtained control of the machinery of government; and secondly, an ideology which that group is able to use to establish for itself a certain moral claim on the population. In the theocracies of Arabia this ideology is religious, but elsewhere it is mixed. Nationalism is the “official” ideology of the new Near Eastern states, but it was grafted on to an older political conception, that of the religious state, and in almost all the Arab countries there is still an intimate connection between religion and nationality. Most of them have a Sunni Muslim majority, and this affects their laws, their constitutions, and political atmosphere; there is still a sense in which members of minorities are not full members of the community of the state. But in almost all of them the general movement of opinion is toward a secular concept of the nation and the state; and in some of them the experiment is being tried of an equal partnership between those of different religious beliefs. Thus Iraq rests on a balance between Sunnis and Shiites, the latter a majority but the former politically dominant until recently; in the new state of the Sudan, a government which is predominantly Arab and Muslim is trying to incorporate into the political community the southerners who are neither. In Lebanon, many sects of Muslims and Christians live side by side; actually, Lebanon was established to satisfy a Christian demand for autonomy and freedom but there has emerged in recent years the concept of a Lebanon where adherents of different faiths can live together in national unity.

The most stable states of the Arab World are those in which the ruling group is relatively strong and coherent, and is able to harness to its purposes the mixed religious and national ideology, and in which the object of national feeling roughly coincides with the frontiers of the state. These conditions exist most fully in Egypt, where there exist social classes broad and coherent enough to form the basis of an effective government — the industrial middle class, the technicians both military and civil, and the richer peasants — and where the prevailing nationalism is fundamentally Egyptian. In other Arab countries, however, ruling groups are comparatively weak and derive their power from no stable, progressive social class; and, except in the core of Lebanon, with its long tradition of autonomy, the frontiers of the dominant ideology and those of the existing states do not correspond. For Near Eastern nationalism the object of loyalty is not, in general, the territorial unit but the linguistic and cultural group. In the Arab countries, national feeling is directed towards the Arab people as a whole rather than any limited section of it, and unity is no less important an aspiration than independence.

It is too early to say what form political life will take in the Sudan and North Africa, but in the Arab countries of Asia, with the possible exception of Lebanon, the existing states cannot, serve as a nucleus around which a nation in the full sense will grow up. The minds and imaginations of men are bursting out of the present political structure. What is no less important, the new social and economic development of the Arab countries cannot be contained by it; sooner or later, the needs of life will create a new structure.

The tension between the need for unity and the institutions which embody disunity is only one expression of a more general problem. Everywhere in the Arab World we find, to some extent, two facts: far-reaching social and economic progress and political ineffectiveness. The progress of the Arab countries in every aspect of the material ordering of life is incontrovertible. Almost everywhere (but more of course in the more mature states than in the less mature, and more in those which have oil royalties to spend than those which do not) we find today more schools, more hospitals, more roads, new towns, new land brought under cultivation, new irrigation schemes, modern factories, social welfare centers, the beginnings of trade unions and co-operatives. The Arab peoples have discovered a self-conscious energy such as they hav enot possessed for centuries. But in the modern world real social and economic progress cannot be fully achieved or maintained except with the help of governments, and on the whole Arab governments are not adequate to their task. Partly their failure is technical: they have not yet acquired the administrative skills which modern governments must have. More deeply however the problem is moral. In governments and peoples alike, there is an absence of those political ideas and convictions on which, in the last resort, the strength and even the survival of states depend.

Here again we must not too readily assume that the Arabs as such are incapable of political life. We can explain their political weaknesses in ways which do not imply an essential inferiority. On the one hand, the flood of new ideas from the West has overwhelmed the old political convictions and loyalties, and so far put nothing as satisfying in their place; on the other, the social and economic changes of the last hundred years have destroyed the traditional institutions through which convictions and loyalties expressed themselves. The Universal Sultanate, the local dynasties, religious communities, religious law (except in the narrow sphere of personal status), craft-guilds, mystical brotherhoods, town-quarters, tribes — in all, the process of irresistible and unending change has either destroyed them or weakened their hold on society and the hearts of men.

Whatever the causes, the crisis of the Arab mind today is clear. All around is a sea of nihilism: the cynicism of men cut off from their own past, deprived too long of responsibility for their own fate, tied too long to a decaying Empire, exposed too soon to the corruptions of wealth and power. Within the sea are four or five rocks which seem to offer the safety of a sure belief: secular nationalism, secular social democracy, liberal Islam, fundamentalist Islam, communism. To find and appropriate a political belief is not easy, because social ideas have no strength of their own. They derive their power, on the one hand from human experience, on the other from those final conv ictions about God and man and the universe which no man can be without. The political beliefs and forms which emerge among the Arabs will depend partly on their experience of the world, particularly of that West which still (perhaps more than it knows) sways their fate. It will depend even more on the movements of the Arab mind around its own deepest problems. Here we come back to the point from which we started: the fact, and the problem, of Islam.