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Intellectuals have always been a subject of controversy in the Arab world, and the intellectual’s role in society and politics remains a point at issue among the educated classes there. The Gulf crisis, precipitated by the invasion of Kuwait by Iraqi forces in August 1989, served only to intensify the debate, as some academics and writers took sides in favor of this party or that. In Egypt, especially, intellectuals came under heavy fire—and from all directions. Groups and circles opposed to Iraq’s move assaulted those who showed sympathy or even leniency toward Baghdad, while they in turn tried to defend their stand as best they could, considering they were swimming against the stream and against their country’s stand. More instructive were the sharp exchanges between the intellectuals themselves. Mutual recriminations and accusations were thrown around, and people on both sides brandished Julien Benda’s famous work on “the treason of the intellectuals” as proof and justification for their particular stands. Things came to such a pass, indeed, that a respected Egyptian historian found it fit to start an article he wrote on the failure of the Arab left with a disclaimer: he announced that he had never worked for or been associated with any Kuwaiti institution—academic, governmental, or journalistic—the implication being that in opposing Baghdad’s seizure of the emirate, he had no ax to grind. “part of the ar ab predicament” The subject was also tackled in calmer and more academic ways. “Defined in any way one chooses, the Arab intellectual is part of the Arab predicament ,” says Saʿdeddine Ibrahim, a professor of sociology at the American University of Cairo and an active and outspoken Egyptian intellectual. fourteen the intellectuals the intellectuals 171 “As intellectuals,” Ibrahim added in an interview published in the Cairo weekly Rose el-Yousuf, “we may have erred sometimes, perhaps most of the time. Perchance we lacked courage and thus betrayed our people, being their vanguard and consciences; perhaps we failed in our analyses and our perceptions of our present condition, allowing this to blur our vision and paralyze us; it may be too that we have traded our integrity for a livelihood, freedom for social justice, independence for material growth, traditionalism for modernity . . . Perhaps, perhaps.” On the tricky subject of relations between the intellectual and the powers that be, Ibrahim was far more wary. Writing in the learned, Cairo-based Arabic quarterly Al-Fikr al-c Arabi in August 1991, he wondered what an intellectual ought to do when he disagrees with what the regime asks him to do. His answer: “Let him excuse himself, politely and without undue fuss in the media.” In furnishing such an easy way out, however, Ibrahim seemed to be strangely unaware of the assumption implicit therein, namely, a ruler can expect an intellectual to do his will only if the latter has been safely “establishmentized .” This, in fact, was the thrust of the argument made by Mahmoud Amin al-ʿAlim, an Egyptian intellectual of the left, in an article in the same issue of the quarterly. “The majority of Arab intellectuals today,” al-ʿAlim writes, “have, consciously or subconsciously, become court poets, apologists for monarchs, and tools for justifying, guiding, and helping pass policies and measures imposed by the present Arab regimes and give them a false air of legitimacy.” Not that Ibrahim was not aware of all this; he was only much more careful . “As a rule,” he told his Rose el-Yousuf interviewer, “government does not heed what intellectuals say—which is part of the former’s problem, rather than the latter’s.” The intellectuals, he added, were not called upon “to draw an Arab strategy for the future.” What they ought to do is just “to visualize situations in the far future”—visions that would become blueprints and strategies. Viewing them in this way, the Egyptian academic found that Arab intellectuals had done their bit—witness the multitude of future blueprints and strategies they had proposed since the late 1960s in the economic, educational, technological, and military spheres. The trouble, however, was that “while intellectuals generate ideas, the rulers generate venom.” A great gap thus yawned between thinker and political authority, and Ibrahim said he himself was trying to contribute toward bridging that gap by organizing the prestigious Arab Thought Forum. The Arab Thought Forum, an all-Arab think tank set up and financed by Jordan and acting, since 1981, under the auspices of Jordan’s...

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