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What happened to the MidEast's cosmopolitan intellectuals?
Sami Zubaida, emeritus professor of politics and sociology at Birkbeck College, London:
Sectarian violence, ethnic conflict, religious politics, are all prominent features of the current situation in many Middle Eastern countries. Thriving Jewish communities came to an end in every country after the inauguration of the state of Israel and the subsequent wars. Christian communities, integral to the population and society of many countries, and prominent participants in the politics of Arab and regional nationalism, are now increasingly under pressure, and diminishing in numbers and importance in most countries, due to differential migration and fertility, and, in the case of Iraq, suffering violence and dislocation. Ethnic and sectarian solidarities and conflicts are ever sharper, and the perennial Arab-Israeli quagmire takes on increasingly an ethno-religious garb.

A common theme in public discourse, in both the region and the West, is that these patterns of conflict have deep historical roots in the 'mosaic society of the region, conflicts being only suppressed by imperial impositions, whether of the Ottomans or the British, and subsequently by violent dictatorships such as that of the Ba`th regimes. The current conflicts, then are explained in terms of imperialist manipulation, dictatorial rule and/or recent military interventions.

The cultural and psychological turns of anti-colonial Third Worldism, pioneered by such cosmopolitan intellectuals as Franz Fanon, and supported by Sartre, and later Foucault, as well as a host of Western leftists, found an echo among many intellectuals in the region. Equally cosmopolitan intellectuals, such as Ali Shari`ati in Iran, developed this anti-capitalist, anti-Western search for authenticity, found in an invented liberationist Shi`ism of the martyrs. Many Arab and Turkish intellectuals developed similar trends of thought and culture. Those who followed them did not share their wider universalist visions and proceeded in more insular and fundamentalist directions.

These trends, combined with the regimes that gained power through a series of military coups in the second half of the twentieth century such as those of the Iraqi and Syrian Ba`th, bringing to power regime cliques from poor rural backgrounds, who resented and subordinated the old notable elites that were part of the diverse Middle East. The totalitarian regimes and their popular constituencies sharpened religious and ethnic solidarities and tensions, contributing to the heightening of communal insularity, and, in extreme cases, such as Iraq, to ethnic cleansing.

When your Middle Eastern friends now say to you, in sadness and wonder: Where has all this sectarianism and fanaticism come from? We never knew who was Sunni or Shi`i, did not care who was Copt or Muslim! - the chances are that they are part of the educated middle class, subordinated and impoverished by the totalitarian clan regimes and their cultural apparatus, the lucky ones migrating to the green pastures of the West, where the old Middle Eastern cosmopolitanism thrives in London and Paris.
Posted by: Pappy 2010-07-25
http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=301791