Newsletter #96: Understanding 20th-Century Arab Radicalism w/ Abdel Razzaq Takriti

By Ben Mabie

Stretching over thirty hours so far, “Thawra” has grown into the audio equivalent of a doorstop of a monograph: the audible equivalent of a truly massive six-hundred-page volume. That space — unprecedented even for our notoriously long interviews at The Dig — has given listeners the chance to both track richly described historical sequences and to see the unfolding of one or another political wager in the region (such as the bets placed by Hassan al-Banna, or the burrowing of Baathist forces into the military core of Syria and Iraq, or the Arab Nationalist Movement’s gravitation toward a figure like Gamal Abdel Nasser).

Moreover, though, through the course of the series, we’ve also had the unique opportunity to see the habits and red threads of Abdel Razzaq Takriti’s own thought become more conspicuous as it unspools across each episode. In an effort to make sense of not just this remarkable history of twentieth-century Arab politics but the position of the historian, to better locate the events as well as the historiographical stakes of their presentation, I wanted to try to compile my own index of core themes, reflexes, and preoccupations of Takriti, as I’ve observed them so far.

The anti-imperialist united front: Takriti has broad sympathy for the many gradations of what we might call an anti-imperialist front, careful to avoid a politically sectarian characterization of the priorities or political practices of groups far from the core precincts of a left-wing audience. Early in the series, for instance, Abed defends the earnestness and seriousness of the Muslim Brotherhood in the Arab Revolt of 1936–39. He signposts the early contributions of Islamists in Mandate Palestine, such as Izz ad-Din al-Qassam. He even encourages us not to discount the seriousness of relative “elites” of the Arab world for their anti-imperial bona fides, urging us to avoid the condescension of distance. Though compelling, such a historiographical judgment is hardly universal: it appears to put him on the other side of Rashid Khalidi. This anti-sectarianism — and more broadly a generous posture toward various non-Western forces — seemingly translates into a similar posture within the national and solidarity movements of a more recent vintage: Takriti reserves some of his harshest criticism for the mutually destructive civilian and martial conflict between Communists and Baathists in Iraq following the junior officer coup.
Demolishing the explanatory power of sectarianism and theological disputes: No three hours pass without a characteristic warning from Takriti to not fetishize sectarian differences, or elevate them into a primary cause of one or another conflict or political phenomenon. He argues that such a move took hold of the Western imagination in the course of the Iraq War, but it remains unhelpful, anachronistic, even painfully Orientalist to project it back onto most social conflicts in the region, which have both other bases and distinct mediations. This reflex extends to his analysis of the composition of the Iraqi Communist Party and the uneven response of the working class to the turbulence of the early 1960s; the outlines of this principle can also be seen early on in the discussion of Saudi Arabia, where Abed tells us to not mistake the central logic of the regime as a theological or religious one — the decisions of its ruling class are primarily derived from the monarchical pressures of managing patrilineal succession in the context of a robust and roiling clannish royal family. When discussing ethnic conflicts in Iraq, Lebanon, and Syria, the extra-ethnic and sectarian dimensions are stressed. Here you can see Pan-Arabism in Takriti’s hands as a universalistic and broadly inclusive political framework.
For these movements, Abed finds their primary or principal antagonism as lying with Western, imperialist powers. This appears even in unexpected places or moments, such as when he is discussing the Trucial States: modern inventions, largely functioning as the “emirates of capital and empire.”
Politically, there’s a recurring instinct about the efficacy of tapping into the existing networks and structures of social mobilization, stressed often against the historical backdrop of a Left reaching for a more total social rupture. This is how Takriti characterizes Yasser Arafat’s political genius: his ability to combine modern, younger, and post-Nakba generational instincts with the old networks of pre-1948 politics in Galilee and the Levant. Similarly, the success and durability of the Muslim Brotherhood is attributed, in part, to its work within the religious framework and semi-autonomy of mosques. And elsewhere, a frustration with younger radicals’ inability to integrate into the institutional reservoirs of Arab masses is detected.
These perspectives crystallize or converge in his theoretical accounting for “the Palestinian revolution,” which, as he reminds us in these concluding episodes of “Thawra,” is for him not reducible to the overthrow or replacement of a regime, so much as the development of a struggle — which takes multiple forms and undergoes countless mutations — against Zionism, imperialism, and other local reactionary forces. There’s a related idea of mass politics that runs throughout the show: one that we can detect in Abed’s conversations about Nasser and his appraisal of the Communist Party — what provides people with a common idiom of politics, what centrifugal forces open up space, are figures and organizations that can successfully articulate a broader horizon and integrate that horizon into the daily aspirations of everyday people.