On the Culture of Vengeance – by Najeeb G. Awad

At the end of the fifth century BC, the city-state Athens collapsed, Sparta defeated it. After the famous victory against the army of the Persians, and as they were about to rule over and unify the various city-states of the Greeks under a philosophically based and democratically ordered polity, the Spartans devastated the Athenians. Usually, historians construe this historical event as the beginning of an intellectual clash between two cultural visions in the ancient world. On one hand, there was a culture that was designed to generate a society of worriers; a collectivist culture that was clearly hegemonic and rigorous in applying an educational system that venerated obedience and rigid disciplining (Sparta). On the other hand, there was a culture that emphasized personal freedom, fostered self-knowledge and enhanced a passion for understanding the origin and nature of human existence (Athens).

Scholars ponder about the decision the Athenians made in their attempt to restore their city and rebuild their society after their defeat. At the beginning, the Athenians thought that they should adopt the cultural values that made the Spartans victorious. They, nevertheless, gradually perceived that victory does not mainly lie in military power and cannot be achieved by seeking military domination. It rather lies in the cultural sphere that intellectual knowledge and free education combined create.

The Athenians opted for re-building the post-war Athenian society based on their critical learning from the lessons of the past. They tried to structure a culture and an education system that seek the truth and structure knowledge departing from a perennial question like the following: what does it exactly mean to be an existing human being? The answer they developed was the cornerstone of a new cultural identity; a culture that in the following centuries guided the steps of the Athenian generations in their search for a knowledge, stability and prosperity.

When, for instance, we read Plato’s The Republic, we find a philosophical elaboration on this event in Greek history. We read that the Athenians refused a dictatorial state system that monitors culture, controls education and twist knowledge to accord with the private wishes and interests of the ruling class or to support the rulers’ exploitation of any public tendency to domination, power or violence. They supported instead a cultural identity-free state; a state system, that is, free from any ideological imposition the ruling, or any other, class can exert on people. The Athenians desired a city-state where the role of the decision makers is restricted to serving the growth of the scientific, educational and intellectual life of the nation without interfering in its process, coloring its appraisals or by any means try to control its ethos and telos. The Athenians were convinced that a cultural identity-free ruling class is alone capable of offering a society the conditions it needs to nurture the soil of this society in the values of truth, goodness and beauty, as Plato affirms at the end of The Republic.

The description of the re-construction of the Athenian culture came to my mind a few months ago as I was watching a program on the September Eleven terrorist attack on The National Geographic space TV channel. The program’s directors did not focus on the details of the operation as such. They developed a panoramic description of the characters of the three terrorists who accomplished the criminal attack. By introducing the audience to their cultural and social background, we knew that the three suicide bombers similarly belonged to the middle class. They lived a life of affluence and freedom without oppression or poverty, the factors which are generally considered the main breeders of fanaticism and terrorism. They had academic degrees from Western universities, fluent in more than one language, and highly cultured; far from any recognized, categorical failure situation that is thought of as the normal breeding ground of terrorism.

The description of cultural and personal identities of the 11^th of September’s terrorists caught my attention and occupied my thought as I watched the program. I wondered what shaped and influenced there young men and their mission? What influenced the dentist among them who had studied and lived in Germany, to write a letter to his wife shortly before the operation’s zero hour in which he revealed his eagerness to desert earth and go to paradise, begging her to praise the nobility of his action? What made such a person end up hating life in the world to this catastrophic extent?

These are not new questions. They have been studied in different academic, military and political circles around the world. For me, however, they actually lead to another inquiry about the intellectual convictions and sociological presumptions of these terrorists, who were Arabs in culture and identity. What made these Arabs do what they did and become who they were? Is it possible that the Arab societies could be, intentionally or unintentionally, fostering particular values and world-views that can eventually lead to violent conduct and to an appeal to death? What has the fact that most of the influential leaders of terrorism and religious fanaticism come out of the Arab world to do with the Arabic culture itself? Is it possible that there are certain elements in the Arabic public mentality that can make people wholeheartedly believe in death as a solution, destruction as an influential language and vengeance as a cultural value?

There isn’t enough space to embark on a detailed and comprehensive analysis of Arabic societies and culture in this article. In my opinion, if one would pursue such a study, one should trace back the impacts of the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948 on the Arab world and on the following Arab-Israeli conflict. One should, more specifically, concentrate on the implications of the famous defeat of the Arabs by Israel in 1967; to ponder the consequences of this defeat on the Arabic societies and its influence on how the Arabs tried to rebuild a post-war cultural identity, whether they succeeded or failed in doing this and whether was born out of this attempt is positive or negative .

The political, cultural and ideological trends of thought that are prevalent in the present Arab world say to me that radical and unprecedented changes took place in the Arabic culture ever since 1967. Most crucially still, it shows that the dominant cultural thought form that has been developed since 1967 till now is, unfortunately, a culture of vengeance. The Arab political regimes that appeared after 1967, if not because of it, did not spend noticeable efforts on analyzing the phenomenon of ‘the zeal for resistance’ that obsessed the Arab people after that devastating defeat. The last thing these regimes wanted to spend time on was unveiling the core of such zeal. Faced by the irresistible prevalence of the passion for fighting back and scoring a counter-win, these regimes did not even proposed alternative forms of resistance the history of human heritage is full of. They mainly focused on promoting and fostering the one of vengeance. They preferred to exploit this dominantly occupying vengeful attitude in the service of their own internal tyrannical and corrupted lust for power.

The best marketing tools for such a political plan, as these regimes soon realized, was the cultural and intellectual pulpit of the Arab educated segment of society. Those who were usually called in the Arab countries “the intellectuals of the rulers” were the agents who ideologized this culture of vengeance in the most influential and long lasting way. They did this by reviving and emphasizing the notion of ‘honor vengeance’, which is inherent to the native tribal background and origins of the people of the region. What was traditionally connotative of the protection of ethical honor in the traditional tribal system of values became now the expression of a violent, armored confrontational political and patriotic position shaped by the principle of ‘eye for an eye and blood for a blood’, and demonstrative of a conviction that what was raped by force and death is irredeemable except by equal, if not by more rigorous, force and destruction. The political regimes in the Arab countries equipped their intellectual spokesmen with all the necessary tools to nurture people on the sublime value and efficiency of vengeance in recuperating ‘dignity and honor’. None of this cultured class was expected, or even allowed, to ponder the possible side-effects and destructing consequences of this violent, mainly phallic culture on the human nature, the existential consciousness and the moral of the members of the Arab societies. Only very few of these intellectuals dared to declare (paying their freedom, or even life sometimes, as a price) the fact that pursuading the members of the society of the efficiency of force in gaining one’s own rights would not ultimately succeed in producing un-corrupted citizens who abide with law or value civil rights, commitment to moral conducts and legislations. Power became the law per se, vengeance became the cause.

Generations after generations of Arabs in the following decades of the last quarter of the twentieth century were raised within a culture that states that fighting for the sake of your religious and racial brothers, whether justly or unjustly, is an authentic sign of righteousness on earth and a credible guarantor of purity that rewards one with a place in the paradise of heaven. The notion of ‘the other’ could not find a real influential existence within this cultural view. Co-existence with, and openness toward, the different other could not prove themselves attractive means for helping man to understand that truth has no identity, religion or race. The effectuation of justice is now subjected to man’s ability to apply this justice by force. Openness and tolerance toward others is now conditioned by the factors of blood, religion race and lineage. The considerable and acknowledged ‘other’ is only the one who supports my cause, who fights for me, who basically belongs to my cultural cocoon. The basic proofs of loyalty are now to be blindly obeying the preconditions of the larger community, slavishly trusting the leaders of the society and passively succumbing to the collectivist best interest of the representative patriarchs of the nation. Any individual awareness of personal particularity and willingness to critique the given cultural bearers was inevitably deemed treason to and jeopardy of the security and the stability of the society.

The obsession with redeeming the ‘raped honor of the nation’ swept the Arabs’ mind far away, so that the intellectual contribution of the people of the Middle East, with minor exceptions now and then, to the international society in the last five decades or so was dominantly characterized with multi-faceted incarnation of violence and anger because it was a culture that undermines reason and fears criticism. Reason and criticism were believed to threaten the stability of the nation and feeble the strength of the so-called ‘resisting’ regimes. Reason was avoided lest it deconstructs the achievement of the purposes of the resisting retaliation. Criticism, on the other hand, was rejected lest it reveals that the first thing a vengeful form of resistance damages and deflects is the human being of the resisting person himself: it transforms man into a violent killing machine that eventually leads to self-termination. Realizing this negative side-effect was not what the Arab resisting regimes were ready to allow criticism to make clear before the eyes of the people. The consequences of such awareness on the political status of the Arab rulers were, in their view, not at all affordable.

Being totally driven by the obsession of vengeful resistance and suicidal retaliation, the Arabic societies were emptied of almost all rational cultural ammunitions that could arm the Arab world with efficient sources of knowledge and with sciences that could make the Arab countries beam with free, modernized and prosperous civil societies. All the rich human, economic, geographical and natural resources of the region were hardly invested in supplying the Arabs with the necessary and fundamental intellectual, economic and scientific infrastructures any nation inevitably needs to rise up from the ashes after a radical collapse.

After 1967, the Arab world was no more dragged into another military defeat from Israel (actually, the Arabs claimed a winning over Israel in 1973). After 1967, the Arabs defeated themselves when they did not start building a modernized, humanitarian and ethical culture based on reason, human rights and freedom; a culture acknowledges the particular humanity of every individual and stimulates her to pursue a personal search for truth, goodness and beauty; a culture, that is, that protects people from resorting to the option of death and destruction and from caving into anger and despair. The post-1967 Arabic cultural world-view produced the suicide bombers of September 11. Instead of Plato and Aristotle, we have Ben Laden, Al-Zarkaowi, Al-A’bsi and Al-Zawaheri

In his book, The Historical Impasse: Why Enlightenment Failed in the Arab World, Hashim Saleh asks the following: “is it the destiny of the Arab world to be ruled by dictators forever, or is there a tiny glimpse of hope at the end of an endlessly dark tunnel?” Saleh responds to this question by arguing that the only hope for a better future for the Arab generations is “the state of law and truth, the liberal, constitutional state that guarantees the rights of free thinking, expression and publishing; the rights of believing and disbelieving, of founding private institutes and fellowships…and of other individual rights.” It is noticeable that what Saleh calls for has nothing to do in depth with any options related to the political game of power-share. At the bottom line, his call is not politically but rather culturally oriented. And, in this he is absolutely correct.

Some may wonder if Hashim Saleh would summarize his proposal by just laying the hope for a better future in the establishment of Arabic democratic states. As I read his argument in this book, Saleh would answer to this by an affirmative ‘no’. Saleh believes correctly that democracy as such “does not lead automatically to freedom.” In this I agree with him. This is the more accurate in the context of the Arab world. In the traditional, tribal and collectivist Arab context –where, that is, the ‘many’ is reduced to, and imprisoned in, a hegemonic ‘one’ –democracy may just turn into a tool for reinforcing hegemony, dictatorship, subordination and suppression of freedom, no matter who owns power or rules: the Arabists or the Marxists, the Nationalists or the Islamists, the Communists or the Secularists. The hope of the Arab generations lies, in fact, in more profound and substantial a factor than mere political movements or regimes-change. It lies in the nature of the cultural foundations, upon which the needed democratic political systems and the civil, societal structures are to be built. Ultimately, the Arabs need another culture.

What gave birth to the phenomenon of Ben Laden and other Arab terrorist figures was not necessarily political suppression, the economic factors of poverty and destitution or even religious/sectarian or ethnic subjugation per se. At least this is not the story of the leaders of the terrorist operations, who are evidently capable of feeding up their terrorist operations with gigantic financial and artillery mass of resources. What generated this phenomenon was something more ontologically basic: a culture of violence, a vengeance ideology that celebrates death and suicidal martyrdom; a culture that recognizes death as the one and only language of redemption and considers blood-shedding alone the first route for justice.

The Arabic culture we inherited from the first generation after the defeat of 1967 is the culture of Sparta and not of Athens: a culture of force, not of knowledge; a culture of anger, not of peace; a culture of termination, not of competition. Contemplating the major milestones of the Arab-Israeli conflict makes it clear that the Arabs throughout the past decades were not actually resisting the iniquity and savagery of their historical enemy. They were over-projecting their anger and violence over each other, leave alone over the imagined evil called the ‘colonialist West’. This is what we hear, for instance, the Iraqi-Kuwaiti, Syria-Lebanon, Syria-Iraq, Libya-Saudi Arabia conflicts scream right into our faces. The more the level of anger and violence between the ruling sides, and the more the conflict of interests between the regimes, of the Arab countries, the faster is the transformation of the Arab societies into industries that manufacture fanaticism, nihilism, void and despair; the ideal fertilizers of an eagerness for escaping from the present world and throwing reality into the lab of death. These factors do not paralyze the Arab people from-without. They are, rather, re-produced sociologically and intellectually from-within.

The Western world and the American nation can still see the ghosts of the operators of September 11 wondering around their cities. Their thinkers and intellectuals, meanwhile, have exhausted, and still, this drastic event with analysis and drew from it enumerable conclusions and lessons. They have fanatics and narrow-minded communities, like any other nation around the world. Yet they also have those who are keen on re-scrutinizing the Western cultural and societal values and critiquing their own socio-political structures. What are the Arab intellectuals and the Arab regimes doing to deal with a drastic modern Arabic history that is loaded with tons of lessons and examples?