Improvised Recollections
The reader who opens Abdelwahab Meddeb’s Contre-prêches (Counter-Sermons) will no doubt be surprised to find, on the reverse of the cover page, two magnificent reproductions of fourteenth-century illuminations. The lower one is an Annunciation; the upper one represents Muhammad receiving the first revelation from the Angel Gabriel. What the reader does not know is the reverse of this reverse: this figuration of the Prophet, Meddeb had wanted to make it the cover of his book, which the publisher refused. The “Muhammad caricatures” affair was still on everyone’s mind: out of prudence, out of concern, no doubt, for the safety of its author, the illustration had been relegated to the folds of the work. Meddeb had been grieved by it. It was so important to him to show that the famous “prohibition” of representing the Prophet had not always assumed the absolute character that is now ascribed to it. As for the risks, he accepted running them: for years, Islamists had placed him on their blacklist. That was Meddeb: culture, and panache. A sense of honor: his own, that of his Islamic heritage, and above all that of man.
Today, still under the shock of his brutal disappearance, I reopen certain books that he had had the kindness to inscribe to me. “For Philippe, these Contre-prêches where our paths cross, in friendship”; “for Philippe, present in this book, in friendly homage”; “for Philippe, this Pari de civilisation (Wager of Civilization), which passes through Jewish recognition, a very friendly homage”… Let me be forgiven for giving these lines an unusually personal turn. But in Abdelwahab Meddeb, I lost a friend. I had met him in the mid-nineties, when we were both temporary research assistants. Older than I, he was then known above all as a writer and poet — Phantasia, 1986; Tombeau d’Ibn ’Arabi (Tomb of Ibn ’Arabi), 1987… — and as a director of journals — Intersignes, then Dédale. I found him again as a colleague at the University of Nanterre at the start of the 2000s, where he had been elected senior lecturer five years earlier. He was on the eve of what would be, in the immediate aftermath of “September 11,” years of extraordinary fecundity. La Maladie de l’islam (The Malady of Islam) (2002), Face à l’islam (Facing Islam) (2004), Contre-prêches (2006), Sortir de la malédiction (Leaving the Curse Behind) (2008), Pari de civilisation (2009) constituted key moments of our intellectual life. This written production was accompanied by his memorable program Cultures d’islam (created in 1997) on the airwaves of France-Culture, a feast of intelligence and pluralism.
In 2007, I had accepted his invitation to speak with him there about Nathan der Weise (Nathan the Wise) — a play by Lessing on the dialogue of the three monotheisms, an antidote to all fundamentalisms — and about Le Fanatisme ou Mahomet le prophète (Fanaticism, or Mahomet the Prophet). For that too was Meddeb: he loved Voltaire, he savored controversy, he detested anathema. Voltaire made the Prophet of Islam a monster? So be it, but he also drew up a clinical portrait of fanaticism that had lost none of its pertinence. And to hell with those who, in Geneva or elsewhere, cry sacrilege and call for censorship.
His retirement from the university in 2011 had in no way signified the end of this feverish and inspired activity. He followed with passion — and an enthusiasm that never made him lose his vigilance or his lucidity — the Tunisian revolution (Printemps de Tunis, la métamorphose de l’histoire (The Tunis Spring: The Metamorphosis of History), 2011). After the publication of his monumental Histoire des relations entre juifs et musulmans (A History of Jewish-Muslim Relations) (2013) with Benjamin Stora, the news of his imminent death came to seize him at the end of the summer of 2014. He still found the strength to call for a vote to bar the Islamists in the Tunisian elections, to record his last broadcasts, to revise the proofs of his last book, become a testament: Portrait du poète en soufi (Portrait of the Poet as a Sufi).
Since 2011, we had somewhat lost touch, but he had never left my mind. I continued to follow with affection and admiration his every intervention; I pursued a silent dialogue with him, and each time I ventured an opinion on our common subjects, those subjects where our paths “crossed” — he, the unbelieving Muslim, I the unbelieving Jew, he the agnostic concerned with Islam, I the agnostic concerned with Judaism — I asked myself what he would have said about it, what he would have answered me. He was what is called a “vital contemporary”: the interlocutor par excellence, the expression of his century and of its founding tensions.
Meddeb’s position never ceased to arouse misunderstandings. It is true that it was complex, and that by its very complexity it lent itself to the misreadings of those who, on one or the other edge of the political or religious spectrum, like to file thinkers away into boxes. At the crossroads of poetry, philosophy, history, and the essay, he made his honey from Sufi mysticism as from pre-Socratic thought, quoted the Thousand and One Nights at the same time as Jacques Derrida or Jean-Luc Nancy, the Quran, Dante, Raymond Lull, Spinoza, and Joseph Conrad: nothing that was profound was foreign to him. Some believed him a theologian, on account of his dizzying erudition, his delight in exploring the ancient disputations, in feeding on the medieval controversies, in returning to the Quranic sources. This was an error: an unbeliever, a lover of fine wines, Meddeb did, to be sure, call for the birth of reformers of Islam — “Islam,” he wrote, “awaits its Spinoza to initiate it into the free examination of the Scriptures which, in its very prudence, dismantles the prejudices of the theologies; and […] its Moses Mendelssohn, who sought to reform Judaism while remaining faithful to the Aufklärung and to its philosophical alliance with Lessing”1 — but he was himself too free to enter into the rut of a confession. Islam was for him quite other than a personal faith: an imaginary, a spiritual soil, a family memory, a culture many centuries old whose riches, summits, and abysses a single life did not suffice to explore. His passion for the Islamic matter was equaled only by his humanist intransigence, his refusal to leave this cultural heritage in the hands of the ignorant, the bigots, and the fanatics.
His enemies, moreover, were not fooled. They were numerous. On the side of those who, generally on the far right, remain convinced that nothing good or great ever came or could come out of Islam, one mistrusted this intellectual who evoked the glorious hours of Islamic civilization: those people assuredly held it against him for thwarting the Manichaeism that serves them as thought. From there to suspecting him of being a kind of double agent, an adept of taqiyya2, an obliging and deceitful quartermaster of the Muslim conquest of Europe, there was but a step that ignorant stupidity did not hesitate to take. But his enemies came above all from the other side: that of the avowed fundamentalists, the fierce or wily Islamists, the beatific Islamophiles, the inconsolable third-worldists. Those did not hesitate to strike very low. For them, Meddeb was a traitor, a sellout, a nostalgic cantor of French colonization — for Vincent Geisser, his celebration of “the Islam of the Enlightenment” or “Islam light” (sic) “is sometimes reminiscent of the strongly assimilationist accents of certain pro-French native elites during the colonial period.”3 A further step in malevolence is taken by Alain Gresh (targeting in a single stroke Meddeb, Tahar Ben Jelloun, and Abdennour Bidar):
“Fortunately, there is no shortage of candidates to occupy this place of the ‘good Muslim,’ the one who says what we want to hear, and who can even go further still in the criticism, for he, being a Muslim, could not be suspected of Islamophobia. The Anglo-Saxons have a pretty name to designate these characters, ‘native informant,’ someone who, simply because he is Black or Muslim, is perceived as an expert on Blacks or on Muslims. And above all, he has the advantage of saying what ‘we’ want to hear […]”4
What else to expect from the political friend of Tariq Ramadan? As for the latter, he had ended up becoming Meddeb’s elective antagonist. I remember how affected Meddeb had been the day after a televised debate in which he had been entrapped by that formidable rhetorician and manipulator. It was more than a personal wound: every media victory of the Islamist preacher was for him an additional blow dealt to the honor and the future of European Muslims.
Geisser, Gresh, Ramadan: tell me who hates you and I will tell you who you are. Such enemies constituted for Meddeb a roll of honor. When, in 2012, at the hour of the Tunisian revolution, I sent him a new venomous article by that same Alain Gresh reproaching him for his past silences on the Ben Ali regime (a rather piquant reproach on the part of the director of Le Monde diplomatique, whose indulgences toward the otherwise bloody atrocities of a Hafez al-Assad or a Saddam Hussein are well known), Meddeb answered me, lapidary: “Nostalgic for the Moscow trials: leftist/Islamist solidarity through anti-Westernism. Greetings from a deeply divided Tunis: effervescent.” It was one of our last exchanges.
Yes, certainly, haunted as he was by the horror of fundamentalism, he could show understanding for regimes that, like those of Ben Ali, drew what remained of their legitimacy from the barrier they claimed to oppose to Islamist designs. Yes, the horror of the FIS or the GIA made him prefer, despite his profound antipathy for a liberticidal regime, the violence of the Algerian “eradicators” to that of the religious fanatics. He knew, with Paul-Louis Landsberg, that to commit oneself is “to decide for an imperfect cause,” but he had chosen his camp in the name of the exigencies of the hour. This never made him either a flatterer of dictatorship or an apostle of neoconservatism, on which he pronounced judgments without appeal. He who did not hesitate, iteratively, to speak of “Islamist fascism”5 — while refusing the amalgam wrapped up in the expression “Islamo-fascism” — crossed swords with Norman Podhoretz6: favorable to sanctions against the Iranian regime, he remained resolutely hostile to the bombing7 of a country which, in his eyes, would sound the death knell of an alliance between the West and the Iranian people — an alliance that could not fail to come about the day the latter had rid itself of its theocracy. More recently, he had become alarmed at the American diplomatic turn in favor of the Muslim Brotherhood, encouraged by the academic Noah Feldman — inspirer of the Iraqi and Afghan constitutions — because he saw in the notion of “Islamic democracy” a chimerical and dangerous oxymoron.8
In the name of a “wager of civilization” (which he opposed, as a challenge, to Huntington’s “clash of civilizations”), Meddeb supported the efforts of Arab civil societies to free themselves truly from the despotic dead weights of tradition. Westernization was not for him synonymous with alienation and imperialism. Acculturation, bastardy, hybridity were not a curse, but a chance: that of a modernity — instrumental, but more essentially critical — that the lands and subjects of Islam had to seize hold of, on pain of remaining tragically apart from the very movement of civilization.
The Battles of a Man of Honor
Complex, yes, tense, contradictory, like History and like humanity, but of a coherence and a constancy that command admiration, were the battles of Abdelwahab Meddeb, “right up against” Islam, by virtue of what he liked to call his “double genealogy.”
A first battle, of an archaeological order: to revive in European culture the memory of its Muslim history. This cause was never abandoned, even in the worst political moments. To recall the European part of the Islamic heritage and the Islamic contribution to European culture, returning obstinately to what he liked to call the periods of “convivencia” and dialogue, where Greek, Jewish, Christian, and Muslim thought mutually fertilized one another. The Andalusian sequence will certainly have been the most glorious, but not the only one. No angelism, however, in these evocations of a “happy” memory. Meddeb sought neither to minimize the tragedies nor to spirit away the fundamental asymmetry that often presided over these exchanges — whether under Islamic hegemony or under colonial tutelage. But even conflicts cannot efface debts — nor spirit away the Islamic heritage of Dante, nor prevent the Thousand and One Nights from fertilizing Europe, nor make us forget what the Arab philosophers and scholars owe to Greek philosophy, or what medieval philosophy owes to the Arab scholars, or again the role of go-betweens that the Arabic-speaking Jewish thinkers played between worlds…
Meddeb refused all simplifications, both the “golden legend” that some seek to impose in the name of the politically correct (the idealized image of the Spain of the “three religions” and of “Islamic tolerance”) and the “black legend” that is awakened today by virtue of biases just as pernicious, and that would reduce the whole history of Islam to a horror film. To explore these exchanges, this commerce, this circulation among languages, cultures, religions, is not to wallow in a mawkish nostalgia, still less to seek in it a model; it is to refuse the trap of the dogmatic freezing of identities, to recover that porosity to the other which constitutes the condition of an authentic cosmopolitanism.
Meddeb’s second battle was to take the measure of the Islamist peril and to denounce it relentlessly. Abdelwahab Meddeb had chosen his camp, and it was that of the secular democracies. He knew fundamentalism up close — its logics, its ruses, its strategies, its texts. One could not pull the wool over his eyes. He was dismayed by the naivety, the ignorance, or the irenicism of certain Westerners. In his public commitments, this Voltairean never defaulted on this terrain of liberties and of the struggle against “the Infamous”: struggle against religious coercion (the destruction of the Buddhas of Bamiyan, the Islamic veil and the freedom of women, of homosexuals, of atheists, of apostates, of religious minorities…), denunciation of fundamentalist oppression in its state forms (Iran, Pakistan) or non-state forms (FIS, GIA, Hamas, al-Qaeda, Daesh…). On all these subjects, Meddeb spoke clearly, spoke bluntly.
Examples wanted? On terrorism, well before September 11, he had set the tone, inscribing himself in a Camusian filiation:
“As for terrorism and Islamist extremism, I will be trenchant: both represent for me the unacceptable, nothing can legitimize them […]; I combat them and will continue to combat them by the means that are mine. […] I appropriate the descent from Camus, who was one of the rare ones to have had the lucidity to refuse this barbarism, whatever its cause; it was, remember, in the fifties during the Algerian war; and Camus was isolated in the Parisian intellectual arena; and I myself, twenty years earlier, assimilated myself to his detractors; and it is not out of infidelity or out of a cult devoted to recantation that I changed position; only, time is a developer that does justice to those who kept their lucidity in exception and solitude. […]”9
On the Muhammad caricatures: after having regretted the mediocrity of the Danish caricatures, having expressed his revulsion before the calls to murder and the fundamentalist demonstrations, Meddeb adds, concerning the henceforth famous cover of Charlie Hebdo, drawn by Cabu, where one sees the Prophet lamenting “being loved by idiots”:
“These furious crowds protesting by fire and blood against by-products of caricature are indeed comparable to people of crass stupidity; and I subscribe to this drawing, for I desire to see Islam detach itself from those who make of it a stupid and detestable entity, so that it may be what it can also be: an intelligent and amiable configuration.”10
On the sharia, he will be no less incisive:
“Many of its provisions are in flagrant contradiction with the Declaration of the Rights of Man […]. The choice seems to me divinely simple: either keep this incompatibility alive, or confront the contradiction […] in order to elaborate a juridical problematic calling the sharî’a into question — its letter, the limits of its interpretation — and to declare its inadmissibility if the legislator decides to be coherent with the spirit of current law and the ethical values that underpin it.”11
It is here that his third battle begins, the one that no longer pertains merely to intervention in the public space but to the labor of thought. Moral denunciation does not suffice: one must think fundamentalism. To have a concern for Islam, for Meddeb, was not to defend it primarily against those who feared it (for there are often good reasons for this fear); it was above all to attempt to wrest it from the grip of the fundamentalist reading defended by its zealots.
How to foil fundamentalism? How to confound the fundamentalists? An interminable task. On the one hand, it is a matter of showing, either through the resources of one’s own exegetical or philological inventiveness, or through recourse to forgotten or occulted exegeses, that the fundamentalist interpretation is not self-evident. “The task, for those who are within Islam as well as outside it, is to carry out the critical labor that helps restore the complexities, the subtleties, the nuances that throb in certain of the letters that nourish its foundations.”12 Hence too his passion for Mu’tazilism (a third theological school, neither Shiite nor Sunni, of “rationalist” inspiration, which survived until the thirteenth century), Sufism, and other minority or heretical currents.
On the other hand, it was also a matter for him, refusing all apologetic bias, of identifying the specific sources of Islamism, the intrinsic springs of fundamentalism. To recognize that there is no Muslim innocence, that there is in the founding texts what is needed to feed the manufacture of God’s madmen, such was also the responsibility of the intellectual he was. In La Maladie de l’islam, an enlightened repudiation of Edward Said’s positions is thus articulated — Said being too anxious, in his eyes, out of fear of “essentialism,” to exonerate Islam of its terrorist drifts:
“As much as I put my steps in those of Edward Said when he recalls Islam’s contribution to universality, so much do I diverge from him when he spirits away the part of the specific necessary to understanding its drifts, if not its malady. […] I can only condemn the racist and imbecilic remarks of Silvio Berlusconi, which does not prevent me from reflecting on ‘the disorders inherent in Islam’ which, incontestably, exist. This book has sought to identify and analyze them.”13
In Sortir de la malédiction, Meddeb thus identifies four trials, or four “stations,” necessary for the “cure”: “the duty of separation” (because there is “no subject except the separated, the cut, the bearer of wounds,”14 hence the necessity of breaking the consubstantiality of the spiritual and the temporal, of the religious and the political, of religious truth and scientific truth); the duty of the definitive abrogation of “jihad” (“the perversion of the notion has so contributed to legitimizing crime that the notion finds itself forever ruined”15); the trial of “the alterity of women” (to have done with inequality, seclusion, and the veil, “sign of enslavement and inferiorization” erected into a “banner” of antimodern reaction16); the recognition of “the truth of the foreigner,”17 which implies a sharing of the origin, a genuine pluralism founded on the emulation of differences.
But the condition of conditions is that what he calls “the Quranic taboo”18 be broken. This last point merits examination. The sources of Islamist violence are multiple. One would need notably to distinguish between warlike violence (that of jihad) and juridico-political violence (statutory inequalities between men and women, Muslims and non-Muslims, limitation of individual liberties). Yet none of these fetters would be impossible to lift if all were not subsumed by a violence in some sense anterior, a metaphysical violence, a transcendental violence (in the Kantian sense, inasmuch as it bears on the conditions of possibility of religious revelation)19, which holds to the weightiest theological postulate: the one that attributes the very letter of the Quran to God:
“What imprisons the Quran in its negative particularity is therefore not its meaning, but rather the status that sanctifies it by associating its letter with the incarnation of the word, by identifying its words with the very speech of God, uncreated and eternal. It is this taboo that must be broken as a precondition for a free examination, mobilizing both the art of interpretation and historical investigation into the constitution of the text.”20
Hence the necessity to
“reread (the Book) in a perspective that neutralizes the violence it harbors, that very violence which is privileged by the Islamist enemies. And such a neutralization cannot operate outside a reading that envisages the historical circumstances of its advent, in order to distinguish in the Book its obsolete, lapsed part and its perennial, permanent part.”21
Meddeb goes seeking the first remedies even in certain forgotten currents of the Islamic tradition (Mu’tazilism, partisan of the thesis of a “created” Quran). An exhumation in the form of a hope: these precious archives could become, in better times, supports of a new legitimacy. An indispensable process of “anamnesis,” a “lifting of forgetting” that bears as much on the first centuries of Islam as on certain major references of modernity occulted by the official powers. To put these texts back into play is to put some “play” back into the “fixist” vision of Islam, which “paralyzes Islamic common sense”:
“I repeat it once again: the Quran carries in its letter violence, the call to war. The recommendation to kill enemies and the recalcitrant is not a malevolent invention; it is in the very text of the Quran. But I have already demonstrated that, on the one hand, this violence is not proper to Islam, which, on this question, reveals itself mimetic of the Bible; and that, on the other hand, Islam is not reducible to this violence. The interpretation of the meaning given to the letter depends on the reading one makes of it and on the priorities accorded to prescriptions emanating from diverse domains (metaphysics, experience, laws, rites and cults, the theologico-political). In our days, we confront blinded literalists who interpret to the letter the famous verse of the sword […]”22.
One will have understood: the whole of Meddeb’s labor comes down to having done with the “closure of interpretation,” with the “closing of the gates of ijtihad.” His approach can, it seems, be summed up in three stages — the spirit of which is, moreover, not fundamentally different from the one that animates the modernist and liberal currents of other religions, beginning with Judaism.
— It consists first of all in deconstructing the fundamentalist approach: in showing under what historical and intellectual conditions the doxa was constituted, the reductive and univocal capture of the founding texts by the dominant currents; in going to recover, within the Quranic texts themselves, what might come to thwart the petrifying interpretation of fundamentalism. This is the archaeological and philological dimension.
— It consists next in going to exhume other texts, from other theologians, capable of countering the doxa.
— Finally, when neither the founding texts nor the peripheral theological debates permit this vivifying and humanist rereading, Meddeb does not hesitate to declare himself for pure and simple abrogation, for an uncompromising aggiornamento. We have seen it for the notions of jihad or sharia, decidedly too compromised in his eyes.
An example will show his extreme intellectual honesty. It concerns Sura IV, called the “Sura of Women,” which authorizes a man to beat his wife. After having been indignant that a German judge had seen fit, in the name of respect for cultures, to refuse the complaint of a battered Muslim woman who was asking for a divorce23, Meddeb reports a philological debate. A renowned Islamologist, Laleh Bakhtiar, is said to have given the verb translated as “beat” or “chastise” in the Quran an entirely other meaning: that of “to send away” — which, one suspects, would be of no small consequence. There where, however, an apologist would lazily have seized the windfall of so liberal a reinterpretation, Meddeb has the honesty to affirm, on the basis of a grammatical expertise, that this reading is untenable — the meaning of the verb, in the verse, is indeed that of violence. Too eager to embellish the Quran or to better the lot of her sisters, Laleh Bakhtiar is said to have “manipulated the meaning,” seeking “at all costs to save a bad letter”:
“Despite all the sympathy I feel for Laleh Bakhtiar, I must warn of the danger that the manipulation of meaning entails, even if it inflects the interpretation toward a liberal and modernist horizon. I prefer to consider the obvious signification and to deem that […] this verse belongs quite simply to the obsolete, lapsed, circumstantial part of the Quran. […] Humanity has evolved, and the anthropological stage of certain Quranic prescriptions belongs to an earlier stage of human evolution. This is what good sense brings us back to, and exegetical technique must submit to this procedure rather than divert the interpretation in the direction of its desire.”24
A fine lesson in probity. To go as far as possible in the search for a conciliation between ethical standards and Muslim prescriptions, such is Meddeb’s effort; but when this conciliation reveals itself decidedly impossible, it matters always to give priority to the ethical response, without rigging the texts. To admit that there is the unsalvageable. To cut one’s losses. To help die what must die, without mincing words. At the risk of shocking millions of the faithful, Meddeb did not hesitate to advocate the end of certain archaic rites, such as that of the throat-slitting of the sheep during the festivals of Eid:
“I dream of a going-beyond of this rite consented to spilled blood and dismembered flesh […]. Already when I was a child, I lived the nightmare of my own identification with the ram when the sharpened knife slit its throat. How not to think that this ceremonial around spilled blood inclines toward the gesture that cuts the neck of man?”25
Concerning the status of dhimmi, Meddeb was likewise of an exemplary clarity. No doubt, he conceded, this status was a progress in its time, in the sense that it accorded protection to recognized minorities (Jews, Christians, Zoroastrians) by allowing them, in exchange for tributes, the free exercise of their cult. But in the democratic era, this asymmetrical, revocable, in a word humiliating juridical protection has become de facto and de jure untenable: to cling to it as to a model was to forbid oneself from understanding the enthusiasm with which the former dhimmis embraced the European political modernity that made of them full-fledged citizens.
Jews and Muslims: Crossed Destinies
Among these former dhimmis there were, as everyone knows, millions of Jews. It pleases me that one of Meddeb’s last great works was this Histoire des relations entre juifs et musulmans, directed in concert with his friend Benjamin Stora. It would take too long to broach here the rich, complex, demanding, but fundamentally fraternal relation that Abdelwahab Meddeb managed to weave with Jewish memory and the Jewish world. On the denunciation of antisemitism — including under its Muslim, anti-Zionist, or conspiracist masks — he will have remained of an absolute intransigence. He was one of those whom the end of the Jewish presence in the land of Islam grieved. Everything predisposed him to it: his Tunisian origin (which did not fail, moreover, to bring us closer, for he liked, smiling, to call me his “compatriot”), his knowledge of the long history as well as his sharpened understanding of the recent convulsions.
On the plane of the Israeli-Arab conflict, he had very long since subscribed to the essential: “a reasonable solution between Israel and Palestine, in the logic of two sovereign states, whose territories would be circumscribed by an international legality recognizing the legitimacy of Israel within the contours of the pre-June 1967 borders and the sovereignty of Palestine in a viable geographical continuity and with Jerusalem, a shared capital” — a solution that passed through the renunciation “of the right of return of the refugees inside Israel, while legitimizing their return inside the Palestinian State, doubled by a substantial financial compensation,” and through the Israeli recognition of the harm suffered by the Palestinians on account of the founding of Israel26. A line maintained without flinching. The severe judgments he passed on the policy of the Likud, on the development of racist parties and discourses in Israeli society, the measured support he brought to the Palestinian cause, never translated into any complacency whatsoever toward terrorism, nor even into that anti-Zionist obsession one encounters too often among Arab intellectuals. There again, and to cite but one example to his measure, his discourse seemed of an altogether different vein and an altogether different clarity than that of an Edward Said, who had never managed to hide his unease with respect to the Jewish national fact. To tell the truth, I never knew a man as foreign as Meddeb to the logic of resentment.
Nothing will make it better understood than one of the most poignant chapters of Sortir de la malédiction, entitled “the departure of the Jews,”27 a literary masterpiece where everything is said in few words. The scene is set in Tunis in 1967, at the time of the Six-Day War. Abdelwahab Meddeb depicts himself there, in the midst of a group of Tunisian students, eyes fixed on the imminence of a war in which Nasser “seemed ready to wash away all prior affronts.” On Monday, June 6, while the Arab press publishes deceptive communiqués of victory, the Tunisians learn through the European press of the Egyptian rout and the Arab disaster. That same day, Tunis is “ablaze”: the crowd, drunk on reprisals, attacks the city’s last Jewish quarters: “A pogrom was taking place before my eyes in my city […] the demonstrators, it was said, even attacked the apartments […] one of our former high-school teachers, much beloved, Mr. Pérez […] came out of the great synagogue in flames carrying scrolls of the Torah that he was saving from the fire; he was dazed, in tears, stammering I know not what words filled with stupor, protected by a circle of former students who had come to extract him from a hysterical horde seized with delirium.”
After having raised a few hypotheses about the equivocal behavior of the authorities, Abdelwahab Meddeb evokes in these terms the memory of a “young Jew” of Tunis who, the day after the Israeli triumph, did not hesitate to come and defy his compatriots:
“Arguing with us, courageous, accusatory, irreconcilable, trenchant, radical, braving the majority ardors, denouncing the cowardice of those who had attacked defenseless Jews […] while, on the military front, in the face-off of arms, those who claimed the same cause were taking off their shoes and fleeing like cowardly rabbits, barefoot […]. Some, hysterical, restrained themselves from forcing him into silence, others, confused, drank to the dregs the cup of shame. Evidently, for this Jew, this face-off was a word of farewell to the native land. The violence undergone left him no more place, no more space to move without straying from his present and future truth.”
Infinitely better than any conceptual analysis, this account makes us penetrate intuitively into the most intimate springs of the Judeo-Arab dispute and its current metastases. Meddeb gives us there to read what certain Tunisians, even the best-intentioned, still endeavor today not to understand concerning the departure of the Jews, in which they are not far from seeing a desolating ingratitude. And this capacity to turn back upon oneself, this formidable aptitude too to apprehend the lived experience of the other, to give access to his truth, in its share of the irreducible and the irreconcilable, also makes us grasp, in return, what a man (and what a writer) Abdelwahab Meddeb was. He who knew how to go so far in the exit from self, in the encounter with others, in the uncompromising examination of his own collective myths, has won forever the right to demand of the other the same honesty, the same audacity, with respect to himself and his own.
The event, Meddeb concludes, will have definitively vaccinated him against Arab propaganda and its lies; it will also have been at the origin of the “last Jewish bloodletting that the city will know,” an “irrefutable loss” that deprives the Arabs of that “stimulating and necessary trial of alterity, the one that puts at stake the truth of the foreigner and measures the health of cities.”
Meddeb, an Arab intellectual? a Muslim intellectual? What does it matter, in the end, provided one perceives in the tension between these terms the taste of a fidelity and the imperative of liberty. It is courageous to be faithful to one’s heritage in spite of and against all the exhortations to desert it — to maintain it, to explore it, to cultivate it. There is another courage, which is to free oneself from it, beyond all intimidations and blackmails — to criticize it, to play with it, to burst its limits and its prohibitions. We are often asked to choose between these two courages: Meddeb, for his part, possessed both and traveled in both directions the steep path that goes from the old to the new, from the Orient to the Occident, from his homeland to the universal, from the love of his family to the encounter with the foreigner. There was something elitist in his approach — he would have preferred to say “aristocratic” — and only those could join him on this ridge path who had already accomplished, like the Nathan the Wise he so loved, a step aside with respect to their own allegiances. It is in this that his voice already fails us. It is in this too that this great Muslim intellectual remains a possible model for the Jewish intellectual to come.
Enlarging the Straussian notion of the “bad Jew,” he had written that it aroused in him “the desire to create the circle of the bad: perhaps it is the solidarity among the bad Jews, the bad Muslims, the bad Christians, and still other bad ones that will know how to limit the malignancy of the evil that corrupts the world along with the humans who inhabit it.”28 If, in the heaven of unbelievers, in the quarter of the Just, there exists a bistro called “The Circle of the Bad,” I would dearly love to go and find Abdelwahab Meddeb there again, to argue with him some more.
December 24, 2014
Notes
Face à l’islam. Entretien avec Philippe Petit, Textuel, p. 134.↩︎
This is how one designates in Islam the necessity of dissimulating or falsifying the principles of one’s faith in order to lead the enemy astray.↩︎
http://blog.mondediplo.net/2012-03-25-Bidar-ces-musulmans-que-nous-aimons-tant↩︎
Sortir de la malédiction, op. cit., pp. 95 and passim, Contre-prêches. Chroniques, Seuil, pp. 82-88…↩︎
Sortir de la malédiction, p. 98.↩︎
Ibid, p. 100.↩︎
http://www.leaders.com.tn/article/abdelwahab-meddeb-les-fondements-theoriques-du-soutien-americain-a-l-islamisme?id=13109↩︎
Abdelwahab Meddeb, “Le partage,” Dédale, Multiple Jérusalem, no. 3-4, 1996, p. 18.↩︎
Sortir de la malédiction, op. cit., p. 127. These lines of homage to A. Meddeb were written in December 2014, before the carnage of January 7, 2015 at the offices of Charlie Hebdo. A sad consolation: Abdelwahab will have died before seeing that. But more than ever his voice fails us. (Note of January 11, 2015.)↩︎
Ibid. p. 68↩︎
Face à l’islam, op. cit., p. 140.↩︎
La Maladie de l’islam, Seuil, 2002, chapter 31, here cited in digital version (Kindle), location 3088.↩︎
Sortir de la malédiction, op. cit., p. 13 and pp. 27-80.↩︎
Ibid., p. 14 and pp. 80-154.↩︎
Ibid., p. 15 and pp. 155-198.↩︎
Ibid., p. 15 and pp. 199-268.↩︎
Ibid., p. 16.↩︎
I do not know whether Abdelwahab Meddeb ever used this notion, by which I take the liberty of translating his thought.↩︎
Ibid., p. 17.↩︎
Ibid.↩︎
Face à l’islam, op. cit., p. 145. Let us recall that the “verse of the sword,” in Sura IX, is the one that prescribes killing the enemies of Islam, including Jews and Christians.↩︎
Sortir de la malédiction, op. cit., p. 191.↩︎
Ibid., pp. 194-195.↩︎
Ibid., p. 128.↩︎
La Maladie de l’islam, op. cit., chapter 22, location 3371.↩︎
Sortir de la malédiction, op. cit., pp. 217-221 for the citations that follow.↩︎
http://www.leaders.com.tn/article/abdelwahab-meddeb-les-fondements-theoriques-du-soutien-americain-a-l-islamisme?id=13109↩︎