Elias Khoury (Photo: Ayman Hafez)
The panel discussion that Elias Khoury led on Tuesday as part of the AUC’s summer lectures programme revolved around intellectuals and their role in revolution.
The first challenge Khoury posited was that of defining intellectuals. "This new momentum is still vague: can we speak of the culture or intellect of this revolution? This will probably need more time and more revolutions, despite all the books being published and other such cultural production," he said.
A new phenomenon is in the process of being born, decentralised and diverse, opening the way to a new approach in culture and production. What's important is that these new elements can open the way to the emergence of independent intellectuals, such as those described by Edward Said, who can be critical of the conditions in a given country.
"From the age of renaissance, the new idea of the intellectual and their relationship with the state apparatus existed. This includes [the pioneering renaissance figure] Refa’a Al-Tahtawy, whose attempt to modernise the state played a role in reform. This huge legacy has made an impact on the description of the role of the intellectual, especially on Egypt. There is no one simple scheme but various paradigms: being part of the state apparatus or the voice for the voiceless."
Speaking of the challenges facing Arab intellectuals over four decades, from Iraq to Syria to Egypt to Palestine, Khoury explained that in each there is something specificity yet still intellectuals who wanted to be citizens had to pay a price; they had to suffer and were silenced, with late scholar Nasr Hamed Abu Zaid being a model of the intellectual exile.
"I was asked about difference between oppression in Syria and Iraq, and I said that both are Baathist; in Iraq they persecuted writers, in Syria the readers," Khoury said, referring to the role currently played by the Syrian writer and intellectual Yassin Haj Saleh who is still in Syria, analysing and theorising on the revolutionary process.
How can we break down the dichotomy of Islamists vs. intellectuals was the next question Khoury tried to tackled: "The challenge in this is to use the intellect to justify Islamists being in power and their dictatorship! They don't want dialogue and we must push for it – to reformulate our ideas and create new paradigms." Khoury explained how once a journalist from Hezbollah asked him why there was no novel about them, and he replied that they don't read or produce literature! "Without producing literature no movement will ever survive. Destroying this dichotomy takes effort. I am a committed citizen, not a committed novelist; when I write I write beautiful novels," Khoury explained.
The word committed brought to mind Sartre’s arguments about engagement; and the debate, as Khoury saw it, was how that was seen in the Arab world – as the need to give the regimes of the time a beautiful picture: "This was destroyed in the 1960s by Egyptian writers who were all communists themselves and who departed from the novel whose aims is to promote the kind of communist change that was popular at the time. Elias Farah in Iraq invented the Baath aesthetics. The combination of being good artists and good citizens is what makes us intellectuals."
As Khoury sees it, the challenge of Egyptian intellectuals today is a political issue – not an intellectual one, since all we have remaining in the political sphere is politics of identity, while the challenge is about social conditions and we have to push forward this debate, instead of arguing with Islamists with whom we have no common ground. "We must push the debate outside identity; and here we need a political apparatus and where intellectuals can play a role. Egyptians don't know how to do it and we need to learn and engage in the process; though it will take time, we have to do it.
"Without this, we'll end up with new kinds of dictatorship. If they don't understand the value of democracy then it's a hopeless case! Democracy, social justice and balance are a must. Intellectuals with political groups will be efficient because they will remind everyone of the essential issues; while in politics we make compromises, it is fascism if we must destroy everyone else to survive."
On the issue of whether in today's information world there's a new type of mass intellect that produces and matters more than individuals, Khoury saw that precisely because of machines intellectuals are now needed more than ever to differentiate between the information and knowledge.
"There's something now emerging and there's new role for the intellectuals and they must be humble to understand the developments taking place and our role in them," Khoury concluded.
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