Episode 30: How the Middle East broke, a conversation with Hussein Aboubakr Mansour

Summary

Podcast Summary: Ask Haviv Anything – Episode 30: How the Middle East Broke, a Conversation with Hussein Aboubakr Mansour

Introduction

In Episode 30 of "Ask Haviv Anything," host Haviv Rettig Gur engages in a profound and intellectually stimulating conversation with Hussein Aboubakr Mansour, a distinguished writer and researcher specializing in Middle Eastern studies, Islam, and Jewish affairs. The episode, titled "How the Middle East Broke," delves deep into the historical, ideological, and philosophical underpinnings that have contributed to the current crises facing the Arab world, including instability, extremism, and societal fragmentation.

Arab Ideological Development

The discussion begins with Haviv posing a critical question about the prolonged instability and extremism in the Middle East, questioning the sources of these deep-rooted issues. He references Bernard Lewis's influential essay "What Went Wrong?" which attempts to explain the decline of the Arab world post-World War I.

Hussein responds by acknowledging the multifaceted nature of the problem, emphasizing that the region's brokenness is not solely attributable to external forces like the United States or Israel but also to internal ideological developments. He states:

"The region is broken. Lack of democracy, lack of freedom, all of these atrocities. But ultimately it's the United States and Israel who are to blame for." ([06:24])

However, Hussein critiques this dominant narrative, arguing that it oversimplifies the complexities of Middle Eastern socio-political dynamics.

Critique of Bernard Lewis's Thesis

Hussein delves into Bernard Lewis's civilizational thesis, which posits that the inherent flaws within Islamic civilization, when confronted with modern Western society, led to its failure to modernize effectively. Lewis suggests that this failure engendered extremism and a return to violent interpretations of Islam as a response to Western dominance.

Hussein critiques Lewis's approach by highlighting its deterministic view of civilizations as monolithic and inherently flawed:

"Bernard Lewis thesis basically is civilizational. It follows certain 19th century cultural historicist methodology that basically sees history as the unfolding of those individualities." ([09:19])

He argues that while Lewis's analysis holds some validity, it neglects the agency of Middle Eastern societies and their capacity to engage with and transform external ideologies.

Transformation of Islam through European Ideologies

One of the core arguments presented by Hussein is that the ideological crises in the Middle East are not merely a result of internal dysfunction or Western imperialism but stem from the region's adoption and adaptation of European philosophical and ideological frameworks. He explains that modern Middle Eastern thought has been heavily influenced by German romanticism and historicism, leading to a radical transformation of Islamic discourse.

"The second half Islam of the 20th century is radical, subversive, destabilizing... But Islam today is something new that is entirely shaped by Western discourse." ([44:20])

Hussein elaborates on how concepts like jihad have been reinterpreted through the lens of European ideas of struggle and conflict, transforming traditional Islamic concepts into tools for modern political movements. This syncretism has led to ideologies that resemble European totalitarian systems, such as fascism and communism, but are cloaked in Islamic symbolism.

Zionism's Current Standing

Transitioning to the topic of Zionism, Haviv seeks to understand Hussein's perspective on its evolution and current status. Hussein argues that Zionism, once a "darling" of both leftist and rightist ideologies, has become ideologically homeless in the postmodern era where traditional philosophical justifications have eroded.

"Zionism represents a stubborn exception to the prevailing sensibilities that favor boundary blurring and universal identities." ([65:52])

He suggests that as liberalism and other grand narratives have lost their intellectual ground, Zionism no longer fits neatly within established ideological frameworks, rendering it without the robust support it once enjoyed. This homelessness presents an opportunity for Zionism to redefine itself independently of external ideological influences.

The Collapse of Grand Ideologies and Path Forward

A significant portion of the conversation revolves around the collapse of grand ideologies—Marxism, fascism, and liberalism—and the resultant epistemological vacuum. Hussein posits that this collapse is beneficial, as it frees societies from the constraints of these outdated frameworks, allowing for new forms of self-definition and political organization.

"All of this collapse is good because it's finally cracking out of these epistemological and philosophical prisons that we've been imprisoned in." ([66:26])

He draws parallels between the intellectual crises in the Middle East and those in the West, emphasizing that both regions share a common Western philosophical heritage that has shaped their current political landscapes. Hussein advocates for a movement towards authenticity, where societies define themselves based on their intrinsic values rather than imposed external ideologies.

Hope for Reconciliation and Redefinition

Towards the end of the episode, Hussein offers a hopeful vision for the future, suggesting that historical conflicts can be transcended by recognizing and moving beyond ideological identities.

"There always be conflict between humans. But we want to get passed over is for these conflicts to be these world determining worldviews." ([78:33])

He underscores the importance of practical politics over ideological rigidity, citing the Abraham Accords as an example of attempts to depoliticize and humanize relationships, moving away from entrenched ideological conflicts.

Conclusion

The episode concludes with Haviv encouraging listeners to engage with Hussein's essays and substack, "The Abrahamic Metacritique," to further explore these complex ideas. The conversation leaves audiences with a nuanced understanding of the Middle East's plight, emphasizing the interplay between internal ideological transformations and external geopolitical forces.

Notable Quotes

• Hussein Aboubakr Mansour [06:24]: "The region is broken. Lack of democracy, lack of freedom, all of these atrocities. But ultimately it's the United States and Israel who are to blame for."

• Hussein Aboubakr Mansour [09:19]: "Bernard Lewis thesis basically is civilizational. It follows certain 19th century cultural historicist methodology that basically sees history as the unfolding of those individualities."

• Hussein Aboubakr Mansour [44:20]: "The second half Islam of the 20th century is radical, subversive, destabilizing... But Islam today is something new that is entirely shaped by Western discourse."

• Hussein Aboubakr Mansour [65:52]: "Zionism represents a stubborn exception to the prevailing sensibilities that favor boundary blurring and universal identities."

• Hussein Aboubakr Mansour [66:26]: "All of this collapse is good because it's finally cracking out of these epistemological and philosophical prisons that we've been imprisoned in."

• Hussein Aboubakr Mansour [78:33]: "There always be conflict between humans. But we want to get passed over is for these conflicts to be these world determining worldviews."

Final Thoughts

This episode of "Ask Haviv Anything" offers a deep dive into the intellectual and ideological transformations that have shaped the modern Middle East. Hussein Aboubakr Mansour provides a compelling critique of existing narratives, urging a reevaluation of how ideologies are adopted and adapted within different cultural contexts. The conversation challenges listeners to think critically about the sources of societal issues and the potential pathways to reconciliation and authentic self-definition.

For those interested in exploring these themes further, Hussein's essay in Mosaic Magazine and his substack "The Abrahamic Metacritique" are highly recommended resources.

Transcript

[A]

Hello, everybody. Welcome to a special new episode of Ask Aviv Anything. I think I've called every single one of these episodes special, but this one I've really been waiting for for a while. I'm going to be talking today to Hossein Abu Bakr Mansour, one of the most interesting writers on the Middle east, on Islam, on the west, on Israel, on Jews that I know. He comes at it seemingly from an outsider's perspective in every single one of the arenas in which he swims. I'm going to be asking him about that and we're going to be tackling this conversation as an extension of things that anyone who's listened to this podcast or any of my talks online has already heard a lot about, which is the theological lineage, the intellectual lineage, the ideological lineage of groups like Hamas, like Al Qaeda. What is the source of the great crises that afflict the Arab world? The instability is the extremism, how we should understand it all. The podcast will be divided into two parts. The first part, we're going to talk about Arab ideological development, how we got to where we are today, what it all means. The second part, we are going to talk about Zionism and Jews, where the analysis is once again fascinating, interesting and new in a sense, certainly new to me. And so I'm very excited about this conversation. Let's get to it. Hussein is a researcher at iscap, the Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy, a fellow at the Jerusalem center for Foreign affairs, and the author of the Extraordinary Abrahamic Metacritique Substack. Very highfalutin words in there. A little bit of an academic viewpoint. I forgive him for it because what he says is actually original and deeply serious, which is not true of a great many people who have adopted, you know, academic vocabulary. So he has the Chaviv stamp of approval, if that, if that helps. I don't, I don't know, Hussein, if that's going to help, but on the assumption that that brings a couple of people. Before we get into it, I want to just tell you that this episode is sponsored. Is co sponsored by Tovit and Mike on behalf of their son Rafi and his unit, Battalion 202 of the Paratroopers and all of our brave IDF soldiers protecting our country and fighting our enemies. And it was also co sponsored by the family of Larry from Encino, California, in honor of his birthday. They asked to dedicate the episode to the IDF's reservist pilots who 10, even 20 years out of active service with families and full time jobs continue to serve with incredible selflessness. Their achievements during the Iran war were nothing short of heroic. Folks, we're all going through this together. This has become a community. Thank you for these sponsorships, obviously, and thank you for these dedications, which I think mean a lot. Let's get to it. Hussein, how are you?

[B]

I'm good. Thank you for having me. It's a. It's a great pleasure.

[A]

Yeah. Well, now I've talked you up, right? And the problem with starting a talk, having been talked up like that, is you can only fail. Where do you go from being talked up that way at the very beginning? I want to. I want to dive right in. You have this extraordinary essay in Mosaic magazine, which is, I think mosaic magazine.com is the address. And it's an essay that I can't. Honestly, I finished it. I didn't know if it was coming in from the left, from the right. It threw everything up in the air and everything fell down a little bit in new ways. Let me let you tell the story. So I'll just set up the shot with one question. The Middle east feels to many people for generations now like a deeply broken place. Failed states, countries at civil war, ideologies of horrific, unbelievable extremism. The caliphate has a bad name now, you know, it's not. If early Rashid rida in the 1890s mentioned the word caliphate as some kind of enlightened thing that would build universities by the end of Rashid Rita's own career, that's not how he was talking. But also today, certainly nobody who said caliphate in the last 30 years meant that. Why is it so broken? Why does Syria look like it looks? Why have we seen so much extremism in this region? We're talking about 150 years of what, by any measure that any serious person would adopt, I think you would count as failure. Cultural failure, intellectual failure, even religious failure. What is the source of that? And just to tee it up, you take a very different tack to the great Bernard Lewis.

[B]

Right. Well, of course, first of all, thank you for the question. Of course, that is actually the question, as you said, and has been the question for quite some time. And the eminence, scholar Bernard Lewis is known to have mastered a formulation of one answer of this question, most notably in his essay what Went Wrong? Which was published immediately after 9 11. So, of course, there was a lot of pressure, truly a lot of curiosity about the answer to this question. So there are, as you said, the question is real. Obviously, that region is broken. I myself came to the United States originally as an asylum seeker from Egypt. Exactly because of that brokenness of that region. We've seen what happened in the Syrian civil war, the waves of refugees, massacres, isis, not just destabilizing the region, but destabilizing the whole world. European politics are still in shambles today to a large extent, thanks to what happened in the Arab Spring, the waves of refugees, migration, so on, so on and so forth. So of course the question is real. And as we said, there are multiple answers. Bern Lewis is one of the major articulations. Each of the answers available became a world on its own, that is became a huge intellectual industry, institutionalized. So you have a left wing answer that primarily, for example, blames it all on capitalism and imperialism, the United States, Zionism, so on and so forth. This one now became the most dominant answer, especially because of the radical takeover of the academy. So basically, yes, the region is broken. Lack of democracy, lack of freedom, all of these atrocities. But ultimately it's the United States and Israel who are to blame for.

[A]

Let's, let's pause on that. Yeah, make it, make it, make it sound reasonable.

[B]

Make it sound. Okay. Reasonable would be. Well, okay. The Middle east has been strategically important for Western powers and for global capitalism primarily because of the energy resources in the region. So capitalism always had an interest to ensure direct, immediate access to all the resources and the strategic geography of the Middle East. And the only way to do that is to ensure that no major power rises in the Middle east and the west dominates the Middle east indefinitely. And the way that they do that is through establishing a forward operating base that's called Israel, basically Zionism. And for the Jews, basically they made some sort of a Faustian deal. They needed a solution for their anti Semitism. So basically the imperialism gave them that solution. You're going to act as our agent in the Middle East. We'll give you weapons to protect yourself. So it's almost a tragic. I'm here, by the way, also, this is the most charitable radical reading for the situation of the Jews. Like as a, basically a tragic figure that in order to solve their own problem, had to become the malevolent agent of all the world evil. And by establishing Israel in the Middle East, Israel can go ahead and ensure that no major power rises. Destroying Nasserism, for example, shaking Syrian power when Assad was in power, bombing Saddam Hussein, as you remember, and then finally Iran. Right, because all of these supposedly would potentially, these would have been potentially revolutionary projects that nationalize the resources of the Middle east and basically Help to overcome capitalism. I hope that I made it somewhat reasonable within that worldview.

[A]

Right. And there's a lot of talk there about how the very fact that the British and French drew a lot of the lines in the Middle east keeps the Arabs down. And Nasser's project was the unification across those borders and they created the United Arab Republic and all that stuff.

[B]

This historical narrative usually starts from Sykes Picot agreement post World War I. That's considered kind of the fall, the original kind of smoking gun of this colonial hand that then was inherited by.

[A]

American imperialists, right, where the French and British divide their sections of power in the Middle East. And then we have the Bernard Lewis analysis, right, which is a sense that there's this civilization. A sense arises among the Arabs, beginning maybe with Napoleon's arrival in Egypt, that there's this civilizational weakness in the face of insane European strength and scientific advance. And that creates, I guess, tell us the Bernard Lewis theory.

[B]

So the Bernard Lewis theory, which is major, it had its own major moment. Now, first of all, of course, it's a pariah in the university, which is considered Orientalism, racism, so on and so forth. However, it's actually popular in the Middle east, unlike many people would think. A lot of Arab intellectuals, secular Arab intellectuals, definitely embrace it. I myself consider, despite that I start from critiquing Bernard Lewis. I actually consider myself standing on his side because I think it's much more. Despite that, I find the thesis very flawed, but I think it's much more respectful of the agency and the humanity of these societies. Bernoullis thesis basically is civilizational. It follows certain 19th century cultural historicist methodology that basically sees history as the unfolding of those individualities. So you have historical individualities that are called civilizations, you have Western civilization, you have Chinese civilization, and then you have something called Islamic civilization. These civilizations are. They start from an initial moment of articulation of a decision and a worldview. Basically a series of yeses and nos, yes to freedom, no to oppression, or vice versa, so on and so forth. And that kind of DNA that was written at the founding moment of a civilization then gets articulated or kind of unfolds throughout history and gives that civilization all of its characteristics, so all of its manifestations. So ultimately, Bernard Lewis thesis is that Islamic civilization was deeply flawed. These flaws became self conscious with basically the meeting with the modern west kind of served as a mirror in which Muslim societies saw their own failures. They decided to try to modernize and secularize in order to compete and not be dominated with the West. This Project failed and this failure ultimately caused. There are two ways to see this. Either a regression to the kind of violent origins of this civilization. So that's a more of a psychoanalytic take. There are intellectuals who frame it that way or basically the explosion of wrath and anger. And of course he has his famous Atlantic essay. I think it came in maybe in the 90s, Muslim rage, right. The origins of or the roots of Muslim rage. That basically this anger and rage of the Muslim world against the west is about their own failure to ultimately self realize in modern society and modern states. And from out of that rage came Al Qaeda, 9, 11, all of this terrorism and the antisemitism that characterizes much of Muslim societies.

[A]

I interpreted that as a cultural question. You used very sophisticated words that by the way are all have bookshelves written about them and are important. But in other words, Islam has a self awareness. There is such a thing as an Islamic world in the view of the vast majority of Muslims. And Islam has a sense of its own history and self and where it comes from and where it's headed and they're written into, whether it's the canonical text or it's the historical development in text. And everything that has happened essentially since the beginning of the collapse, the slow collapse of the Ottomans in what, the 18th century, everything that has happened since seems to fly in the face of that necessary religious, theological progress of Islam. And therefore there is this sense of urgency and rage that it's failing and this deep need to overcome Islamic weakness. And by the way, hatred of Zionism because it is the weakest thing to have pushed Islam back, which is something mentioned by some of these, you know, heirs of Rida, etc. So there's this. I don't know if this is, if I'm. If I'm on like exactly on Bernard Lewis. I think I took a couple ideas of Bernard Lewis that helped me explain what I was seeing around me. But it's this basic idea that there is this civilizational weakness. And the response to that weakness built a lot of what we see, there's this self awareness of weakness. And that's a lot of what we see in Islam today. Islam is a huge word. Indonesia and Egypt are very different places. But nevertheless, just so that we can talk, we'll use these words a little bit loosely. And so we have the liberal sense that this is Western nefariousness trying to dominate the Middle east mainly because of its resources, mainly because that's how empires generally behave. And then there is this. We'll Call it a conservative view that says that the story is actually an internal Islamic Arab story about responding to discovering their own weakness after 400 years of Ottoman rule. And then what other options are there? Where. Where should we be looking?

[B]

Well, first, of course that that latter thesis also became huge after 911 because of a lot of. Also after the Cold War in general. I mean, they had. Bernard Lewis used that term clash of civilization, that then Sam Huntington made it into a whole book and a whole worldview that I think was very important for liberal societies after Cold War, after the end of the. That polar ideological battle between freedom and unfreedom of communism. And after that was over, kind of. That was a necessary new worldview to kind of organize the world on. Well, there are, I think those are the two actually major, major answers. There are other, I would say most post kind of almost postmodern answers which basically deny that there's a problem altogether. So there is nothing actually cohesive in any of this. All of this. These observations are really just ideological projections. Then the Middle east is just. These societies are just like any other societies. So that's obviously a complete denial that there are any issues. I personally don't engage with these because I just don't find them respectful. Just. We can't even start a conversation if we don't agree what was going on. So the Middle east is not really. Yeah.

[A]

How do these people. I mean, you have a world that produces isis, where states collapse routinely, where the Yemeni catastrophe just happened. Not that anyone in the west noticed or cared. That's too far. I apologize. But not enough in the west noticed or cared to a quarter million people starving to death. But that is a Sunni Shia war instigated by Iran fought by the Saudi. You know, it's. It's all of this and that's nothing. There's nothing to know there. The only thing to know there is that it's just civilizations pottering along, doing their thing.

[B]

Societies. Yeah, political. Political conflict because of political interest. And it's just, it's nothing to worry about. Certainly some Arab regimes like to adopt this because for clear political reason. I mean, it's probably the most politically helpful narrative because it really leaves. And I don't blame them for that because it's really all of this ideological. So all of the attempt to find the meaning and the history and these are endless questions that have really. I would say they play no role in practical politics. So that's why also kind of Arab regimes like to fund or push this kind of view. That doesn't actually deal with these issues at all. Part of it because they don't want to deal with it for kind of for, for their own non democratic reasons. But there is a part actually that I agree with which is when you are dealing with practical questions, it doesn't matter really these, these answers, but these, these are basically, I think the two answers. The left wing answer of colonialism and imperialism and the problems of Islam as a problems of Islam. Those are the two main established answers and the ones that you're going to see today in the media, social media definitely that most people are familiar or subscribed to either one or the other. Either Islam is a deeply problematic religion and civilization, that's the problem itself, or that no, the west is the problem, which is, by the way, they are two, almost two sides of the same coin.

[A]

Okay, so I take a very empathetic view of the first. In other words, there is a deep problem in Arabic society, in Islamic society focused on the Arab world. Again, Islam is a huge word. I don't talk about Islam, I don't. But the Islam around the Islamic part of Arab culture around me is what I usually talk about when I say the word Islam. So that is. But it comes from deep, serious, profound good places. Some of it the reformist impulses of the, of the 19th century, of Al Afghani, of Rita's teachers talked about building liberalism out in the Arab world. Now I then read your essay and it blew my hair back. And that's very difficult to do ever since in the army they showed me those buzzers and that's been my haircut for the last 25 years. And you argued, and forgive me for butchering it, but it's just again to set it up for you to explain it to us. You argued that it is neither. It is not deep dysfunction within Islam or not just that's not the beginning and end of the story. It is not Europeans coming in. It is something much more interesting which is Arab Muslim world reaching into Europe, pulling out of Europe the deepest profoundest ideas and then animating and reconstructing Europe, adopting it with a whole new kind of Arabic discourse and language and vocabulary into Arabic solution, building for the Arab modern crisis of modernity and building out a lot of really bad things at the same time that Europeans using these ideas were building out a lot of really bad things. It's almost entirely Europeanisms. And the deepest civilizational debates in the Arab world are actually debates between French Enlightenment Romanticism and German historicist romanticism. It all makes sense if you Read the essay. By the way, you cover a lot of academic ground very clearly in like 10 paragraphs and then people can really get into the story. So I really, really recommend this essay. The Bad, the Broken, the Destructive. These are Arab borrowings from Europe and that was fascinating. So tell us that story. Go as far back as you can. This is a podcast with for nerds who enjoy an hour long lecture on history. I know, I just lost half of them just this second. Stay with us, people. That is a badge of honor. Tell us this story.

[B]

Okay, wonderful. Well, first of all, just, I don't insist on being academic or using academic language, but I think now everybody knowing the problems of the universities and what they are, people who we thought they knew that they were doing, turned out a lot of them actually had no idea what they're doing. So this is why I expect everyone to at least get to know and struggle a little bit to learn some of this stuff, because you actually need it. The people who are supposedly in charge actually are not there. So we all have to be responsible for how we think. So the essay basically suggests, as you said, it's neither actually. What happened is a hyper modernization, a hyper modernization in a particular modern discourse. First of all, we assume that, that the timeless stability of something called Islam, that these Muslim societies know who they are and they've always known who they are and know what they are doing, is actually. It's just a fantasy. It's a Western fantasy usually projected as a self critique of the West. You know, we don't know who we are anymore and we're unlike those Muslims who are very firm in their society. It's really just a fantasy because no humans are like this. Muslim societies are just like any other society. When the 19th century happened, this long century of all of its innovations and changes, it is very naive to expect people in the Middle east to see these new innovations and be immune to it. Whether the seduction of the new ideologies, Romantic nationalism, Romanticism, Marxism, atheism, Darwinism, because they somehow have a local immunity system that prevents them, that's just not true. They find these things as fascinating as any other. And this is the case. If you really lift all of the ideological filters and you look at the Middle east, if you look at normal Arab society, you will see that they are on TikTok today. They are following all the trends. All of the COVID conspiracy theories that start here or any other conspiracy theories will immediately travel in the Middle east, be translated, be circulated with enthusiasm, just like anywhere, anywhere else. If you Go to an Arab wedding in Damascus or Cairo, you will discover that the groom wears a black suit and the bride wears this very big white dress. I mean, these things came from certain places and they celebrate their wedding by cutting something called a cake. And then they go home to this French Baroque 19th century style furniture, you know, that big gold thing, things that people sit on. If you actually lift all of these ideological filters and looked at how these people live, you'll discover that their entire life is shaped by the modern world like anybody else. However, maybe in a different composition than, or a different articulation of it than most other people. Now the story that I'm telling is that no, they adopted the modern world very enthusiastically, but we understand, we have a very limited understanding of what the modern world offers if you're a liberal who live in a democratic country. So let's say in, like Bernard Lewis was, your understanding of the term modernity is almost necessarily positive. And it means one specific thing. Modernity means freedom, democracy, liberalism, free market, human rights. So when you say that somebody's rejecting modernity, you imagine somebody who's back backward against secularism, against freedom, against women, so on and so forth. But here's the problem. That's only one meaning of modernity and it's a meaning that was triumphant for the longest time. But there were also alternative meanings for modernity. Notably, the strongest of them were actually articulated in 19th century Germany. And they are, it's a different meaning that is revolutionary, that is profoundly anti Semitic, deeply and almost irreversibly antisemitic, totalitarian in aspiration. And by the way, it's even more modern than liberalism. That is liberalism is actually a much older worldview than these 19th century new ideologies that saw themselves as post liberal. They are the new edge kind of thought and they produced these totalitarian fascinating systems that of course received its articulations in the world's most powerful two German ideologies. There are actually many, but there are two that became politically extremely potent and that's basically communism or Marxism and fascism. Those also are modern answers. They have their own epistemology and they see the world in a very certain way. And they have actually a philosophical tradition I would say is much richer, much more complex and much more seductive than anything came from the liberal worldview, which, whether from the French or from the Anglo American world now.

[A]

And why is that just one thing? Why is that? I mean, you wrote some of this, but fascism gives you the insane power of this idea that the collective is redemptive. Which satisfies so much in the modern age of identities that have been broken away from their localities and became mass societies. And communism gives you another kind of redemption arc. In other words, the very thing that religion is seductive about, religion is seductive about these. And then when you go over to, I don't know what, Anglophone liberalism, that's all missing. What redemption is available to you in Anglophone liberalism? You're trying to buy a house and raise some kids, right?

[B]

That's a huge part of the answer, right. Basically, liberalism doesn't offer you any answer to any existential question because. Or at least it didn't used to be like that. I think one of the crisis of recent crisis of liberalism is that it actually got affected by this originally Germanic way of thinking and now wants to be a religion and anthropology and the theology and ultimately that led to it. Because that's not originally what it could provide. It could provide very limited things that has to do with the management of everyday practical life and your needs. As you said, fascism comment, they offer much more. They offer primarily a religious vision and this causes them to be superior in many aspects. People forget that fascism and communism were aesthetically superior in every possible way to the world of liberalism. That is, if you look at the seductiveness of early century communists and fascist aesthetics, whether in their posters, in their works of art, in their writing, I mean, they produced much better writers, for instance. And most like committed liberals, they don't produce good writers. All the good writers who came from liberal societies were not liberal. They didn't identify with T.S. eliot, for instance. They were not liberal themselves. Because if you're a liberal, you can't write well. Because if you're truly a liberal, your writing has to be safe because it's about safety. You can't injure anybody or anything. If you're not injuring anybody or anything, you write very nice, kind of cold, dead and deadening.

[A]

Where would you put Mark Twain or Christopher Hitchens on something like that? Unsafe, but liberal.

[B]

Unsafe but. Well, Hitchens was militant. I mean, he was not very liberal.

[A]

So maybe not liberal.

[B]

He had an enemy like, you know, Islam and so on. And that kind of animates when you have something you write against, when you have something that you want to injure. That's when you write interesting things. But this is just an observation why these ideological systems are seductive. But this is on the intellectual side. On the practical side, they were also very seductive for many reasons. A lot of the German thought is animated by deep hatred from the 19th century. I have Nothing against the German people. Studying Germany deeply made me like them and their culture deeply as well. But just historically speaking, German philosophy was animated by a deep hatred for the French and the English for various historical reasons. Obviously this resonated with the colonial world for multiple reasons, because they primarily were dominated by the English and the French. The liberal positivist thought is primarily reformist. Well, in order to reform, you have to have something to reform. You have to have stable institutions. A lot of the countries or societies, the post colonial or the colonial societies didn't even have these institutions. They had to start from zero. German revolutionary thought offers you an opportunity of a sudden violent rupture, a break with a bad past and the beginning of a glorious future. The idea of the revolution, walk us.

[A]

Through that, Walk us through that as if people have not been in those classes.

[B]

So you talked about the. Basically the aspiration, the beginning of the aspiration of Arab reform, which was 19th century, extended till the beginning of the 20th century. That basically the influence primarily was French intellectually. And these societies, they were translating French thought, they were translating French concept. And they definitely talked about reform in that way. That is, we're gonna reform society to the existing society to make it better. By World War I, the basis for this thought was gone. Because World War I was a rupture in Europe itself. A lot of almost all the world empires, old empires, got destroyed, including the Ottoman Empire. And then all of a sudden you have societies that never existed before. You have all of these new countries that are becoming independent under colonial rule. So basically, this is a fundamentally different socioeconomic reality and an intellectual reality than the one that liberal reformist thought supposes. This is something that's brand new. You're talking about a complete break. Now added to this that the interwar year was really the time or the moment when you got the first post colonial generation that basically looks like me. What do I mean? Looks like me. So in the Middle east, you basically got the first generation of Arabs who would be much closer culturally, in taste, educationally, temperamentally, to the English officer rather than their own grandparent. And this has happened not just in the Middle east, this has happened in China, for example. So the interwar year was a generation that really did post colonial modernity all over the globe. In China, that's the generation of Mao in Vietnam, that's the generation of Ho Chi Minh in the Middle east, that was a generation that really founded Arab nationalism, that founded Islamism, that founded all the ideologies that will continue with us today. And that generation was extremely modern. I mean, by that time there were no madrasas. They didn't go to madrasas and mosques. No, they actually went to schools ran by the government, modeled after European educational systems. They were constantly translating European literature. One last factor I'll put in that, in the interwar year themselves, that was also the explosion of the popularity of both communism and fascism in Europe. As we all know, World War II happened basically out of that explosion. Leninism, or the Russian Revolution, caused this huge explosion of popularity. It transformed Marxism immensely from merely kind of an exercise for a lot of intellectuals. Lenin basically transformed it into a real world power, into a possibility. You can actually have a revolution. This caused a major popularity of Marxism in Europe. What came to be known as Critical Theory or the Frankfurt School was actually established as a response basically in Germany to that success of Marxism. Now everybody's exploring Marxism in new ways as well. Of course, that with itself. The other pole is fascism itself. Arabs were deeply engaged in Europe. They were affected with these ideas. And then they started to try to articulate themselves in this new fascist or totalitarian political aspiration that really can't be called secular. I mean, whether fascism or communism, we have to remember that they don't really make any room for any separation of any areas of life. There's no inner, there's no outer, there's no private, there's no public. It's really a total conception of man, a total conception of society, so on and so forth. And out of that fruit, for instance, out of that, the fruit of this inspiration was the beginning of the Muslim Brotherhood, or what became the Muslim Brotherhood. So during the interwar years, and I'll stop here, what I want to say is that this modern epistemological base that was established throughout a century prior of French reformist thought was actually eroded and replaced with these German philosophical totalitarian concepts.

[A]

And just to satisfy the left wing view, in case any angry academics are listening to us, you do write there this beautifully succinct couple of sentences. The devastation of World War I had discredited Enlightenment ideals for Europeans and Arabs alike. In other words, there's also reason that Enlightenment ideals sank. And what was that reason? For one, it was the devastation of World War I. For the latter, moreover, meaning for Arabs, the fracturing of the Ottoman system, as well as the punitive logic of colonialism, the British colonialist project and the holding on to Iraq and the Levant, and, you know, building out a nationalist project with the Ottoman, with the Saudis. But actually it's all puppets of the British Empire, all of that stuff that control, that oppression that that imperialist project entailed in the Middle east and intensifying social disintegration all made the promise of gradual progress appear naive if not obscene. So the Western imperialist entry and oppression in the region helped to replace the French Enlightenment or Anglophone kinds of ideas that maybe some of them were susceptible to. Toward these anti enlightenment Germanic ideas. Arabs had gone from ruled by the Ottomans to rule by the Christians. One of the really fascinating things for me was to think of the Arab intellectuals, anti Western rage. When it comes up, and it comes up in many places, especially in Islamism as Western, right Sayyid Qutb as a German romanticist, that's new to me now is that a total innovation? It suddenly fits because Hassanal Bana was tremendously the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, was tremendously influenced by German ideas. Can you walk us a little bit through the anti Westernism of for example Islamism in the Muslim Brotherhood model, which is everything we're familiar with today. Can you walk us through how much the that is dependent on, borrows from European anti Westernism?

[B]

There are many people who alluded to this, but I don't think a lot of people actually tried to look into it in details and try to reconstruct it historically throughout the text and cultural history of how did this happen. But definitely if you actually look at texts and that's a bigger project that hopefully will see the light in the future so people can actually follow those who are interested to kind of get to the nitty gritty details. If you follow even just the history of language, I mean let's take an Arabic word and gonna trace its meaning from the late 18th century, year by year, publication, publication to see what it ended up meaning. In the middle of 20th century you will see that gradual shifts in the meaning of words to become a lot violent, conspiratorial, many times very anti Western. I can give you an example. The word conspiracy didn't exist in Arabic before the 19th century. So we all know that Arab public or political, public propaganda is shaped entirely almost by conspiracies and conspiracy theories. They didn't even have a word for conspiracy before. Before in the 19th century. Passages in the Quran that says, you know, God has his wrath against or maybe may God deliver us from the fate of those he has his wrath upon gets almost exclusively interpreted as the Jews. That's what meant by this. Then you go to the 19th century and 18th century, you discover that this was not really the interpretation of the text this was one out of 40 options. So you had 40 possible interpretations. So what happened really in the last century that a single one was selected, the one against the Jews to serve an ideological need, obviously, and then canonized as the meaning of this part of the text. So you see these gradual shifts that's happening everywhere. Anti Westernism is one of the most important Western exports to the whole world. One of the most unique things, and I don't know how much of it can be said to be that unique, but one of the most unique things about the modern west is that it mastered also its own self hatred discourse. It's really hard to say that about many other cultures or cultural histories. The west since the 18th century. And it really started with somebody like Rousseau started to develop or Western thinkers started to develop this very strong hatred for the post Christian west itself, for modern society, for capitalism that was made into a metaphysical entity that is crushing all of us and we need to all to fight. From this came all the fantasies about the noble savage. For instance, that somewhere there's some brown savage sitting on a branch of a tree and he's much more nobler than any of us. And this idea is continued for today. Think about the vision of society and the world that exists in the Avatar movies, right? You know, this Western technologically superior society that is deeply corrupt and decadent and violent and really inhumane. And you have this primitive blue. These primitive blue people who are very noble. They don't even need democracy because they are free. They are ruled by this benevolent matriarch. They are in so much peace with nature that they quite literally hook up with the animals. You know, they organically connect with the animals. I mean, you don't get more naturalism than this that you basically the heart.

[A]

Of romanticism in many ways. That's where it always goes. Right?

[B]

And this is. And this is recent. Exactly. Wakanda is the same thing. And this is. I'm talking about things that are happening now. I'm not even talking about.

[A]

But so much of. But so much of this turns the. It's. I mean, that's what's deeply orientalist about it. So much of it turns the Arab into the noble, into the authentic. So much right now of the far right discourse in the west about Hamas admires the organic naturalness of the brutality as opposed to the somehow artificial stilted brutality of the Jews, which is a bad brutality. That's a good brutality. It's this whole discourse on how do Arabs build out that idea.

[B]

That's the thing you can't be the.

[A]

Noble savage in your own hatred, right? Or I guess if you can hate the west, you can be the noble savage.

[B]

Yes, you can be. I mean, we imagine first of all when the Europeans started to develop these ideas and as you get post colonial intellectuals, that is, if as you come you have natives who can understand these ideas, I think it'd be very naive to imagine that they wouldn't like these ideas. I mean, it ultimately makes them saviors, it makes them heroes. And that's by the way, postcolonial theory entirely is based on this. It's now the postcolonial who's going to liberate the entire world, including the west itself, from its own oppression, from its own capitalism and so on and so forth. You'll find this in intellectual Palestinian discourse that basically the Palestinian fighter is not just liberate the Palestine is not going to liberate the Palestinians, they are also going to liberate the Jews. I don't know if he ever came across kind of this articulation, but basically because of Zionism, Remember, Zionism is a tragedy. It's a Faustian bargain with imperialism. So by destroying Zionism, this Palestinian masculine hero is not just going to liberate himself, but is going to liberate Yu Havib from also the need to be an Israeli, the need to be this malevolent, human hating, evil person. So as I said, these ideas were also very attractive. And then add on top of this that they were quite literally woven into these extremely powerful German ideologies, whether Marxism or Marxism took some time to have it, but then you have it with it to fascism. That's really a lot of the blood and soil. Third World nationalism is a kind of a hybrid mix of those. So think about it as one of the liberatory briberies of the modern world. I mean, that's kind of one of the things about the modern world or modern society that it bribes people with false promises of making them idols or gods and saviors of the world. You know, the women are going to be the savior of men, from the historical evil of patriarchy. At one point the Jews were promised that they're going to be after World War II, they are going to be the saviors from Christian or Western tyranny. This idea was adopted by a lot of kind of the radical Jewish intellectuals. And then Edward Said basically came and articulated it for the Palestinians, kind of pulling the rug from underneath Jewish radicals. No, now the Palestinian is going to have the promise. So it's kind of this liberatory promise that was offered and then it was adopted by a lot of these post colonial intellectuals. So the short answer to the original question, yes, anti Westernism itself is a deep and profound and extremely sophisticated Western intellectual universe of its own that has been popular around the world.

[A]

So today's Arab societies, to quote you, are not the product of a mass reconversion to Islam. As I have told the story. As Islam has told the story, Islamic discourse itself has told the story. But the mass conversion from Islam to very European ways of thinking and feeling. And you write where Lewis focused on cultural resistance to. To modernity. That's how he framed it. That's how I've grown up understanding it. Not just from Bernard Lewis. I studied at Hebrew University, I read a lot of Americans and English writers. Modern Arab intellectuals grew enchanted by the most dangerous metaphysical structures of post modernity.

[B]

Right?

[A]

The left Islamist alliance that we're seeing in protests in various cities around the world over the Gaza war. And everybody's very surprised. What the heck is queers for Palestine? Any queer person can be for Palestine. Any queer person can support Hamas. But as a movement to define itself as the queer agenda, supporting Hamas is awfully weird. And yet it's not. They're born in the Same fundamental over 75, 80, 100 years, same fundamental kind of postmodern resistance to modern liberalism rooted in very similar things that they've borrowed from each other. There is no civilizational gap here. There is just some pieces of Westernism. Islam is brought into Western discourse in this way of thinking.

[B]

Islam is entirely modern Islam, contemporary Islam. That's the thing. When we say Islam today, we're talking about something new that is entirely shaped by Western discourse. And by the way, this is not another victimhood narrative. Oh my God. Even their self destruction is because of the West. No, no, not at all. Muslim societies did this very willingly. Muslim elites, they are the ones who did this willingly. There is complete agency in this story. But, yes, the but it's profound, but.

[A]

It'S a profound change. You had one comment on Rida that I also saved. It's a long essay. I promise everyone I'm not reading any more of it, except for this one little paragraph. Herein lies the paradox of Rida. Anyone who has read me has been told to go read Rida many times. Rida, his circle and his spiritual heirs, including the Muslim Brotherhood. Obviously on the one hand, they wanted to create an Islamic revival. On the other hand, they completely transformed the meaning of Islam, shifting its center of gravity from law and revelation to man. History and the world, man history and the world understood as European philosophical ideas. Yeah, yeah. It's a profound re. Envisioning of everything.

[B]

Yeah, it's a complete transformation. That's why I'm saying the Islam that existed, it's a modern philosophical, really a modern philosophical hybrid that is articulated through outwardly Islamic symbols. Jihad is, you see jihad, and that's something from the world of Islam and Islamic history. You see Quran, you see Sharia. But the ideological content of these symbols is actually a modern philosophical, abstract, post enlightenment idea. And that's what happened. Ultimately, you get a whole cohesive, total understanding of something called Islam that is very, very close to what fascism is. I mean, this is something that people knew, but people assumed that somehow Muhammad in the seventh century invented fascism before fascism or invented Leninism before Leninism. I mean, this similarity that people see between modern Islamic thought and modern Islamic movements and fascism and communism are actually real. You are 100% right. But this is because of the major transformation that happened to the meaning of Islam in which basically it's not a return of tradition, but the continuation of the worst revolutionary thought that is deeply anti Semitic and deeply Western, that came out of Germany under religious guise. And this, once you understand this, you go back and read somebody like Sayyid Kut, you discover you're not reading something about the Quran. Then you see that basically this is a symbolic reading of basically the world aesthetics. It's a very German romantic aesthetic view of the world and of politics married to a Leninist structure of a vanguard revolution that basically transforms the meaning of the world, transforms the meaning of the Quran, transforms the meaning of Islam. Islam itself becomes this idealist force. It's something that marches in history, a symbolic text that demands worldly actualization. And these are profoundly different worldviews than the traditional worldview that, by the way, that is very close to the rabbinical worldview. I mean, people are very secular, find it very pedantic and petty and legalistic and like the minute details about life and doesn't care about the grand things of politics and history and destiny. But that's exactly what these traditional orthodoxies were, man. Destiny, history, those are new abstraction, and probably the key one of them is history. That is because history itself, the idea of history, that there's something called history and that history has meaning and it's discoverable through historians or philosophers who organize material in order to give us a view of history that then actualizes itself in a concrete political outcome. Today. This is a modern philosophical invention. And sadly, that completely replaced any theological worldview that once underpinned Islamic knowledge.

[A]

I'll tell you why this essay got me excited, because I really felt like I'd landed on some, a little piece of treasure. The vocabulary Shaib and ummah, which are words for nation in various ways, if you understand it as the German folk, a lot of pieces fall into place. Jihad, Jihad understood as the German Kampf, as the fascist idea of Kampf. Suddenly it all falls into place. And it just, it got me thinking of this frustration that I have listening to Muslim apologetics in the West. I have a profound respect for Islam, maybe rooted in my very growing up essentially on medieval Jewish philosophy. I have a tremendous respect for Islam. But people keep saying in the last 50 years or so that Islam is a religion of peace. That's like one of the sort of catechisms you have to accept if you're going to be a modern decent person. And Islam is obviously not a religion of peace. It's not a religion that sets peace as its highest goal. It's not a religion that defines itself by peace. It's not a religion that seeks peace. And I've always wondered, what do Muslims mean? If they're saying something, you know, to be wrong, then they're saying something else using this vocabulary. So what, what are they saying? What are they saying when they're saying Islam is a religion of peace? And it occurred to me that that old Islam is the religion of order, not of peace. Islam is profoundly a religion of social order. And then you can come to it with critiques about the social hierarchy that it establishes gender and Muslims and non Muslims, all of that. But it's religion of absolute order and order brings a kind of peace. Now all of these new Islams, exactly, all the new Islams, where you take the vocabularies and you layer them as the veneer to sell, essentially European ideological structures are revolutionary, are the opposite of order, and therefore have produced the opposite of peace. And so the collapse of Islam is the inhaling into Islam of everything that collapsed Europe up until World War II.

[B]

You summarized it perfectly historically, Islam. And there have been, of course, many Islams. I mean, it's a long historical phenomenon, big part of the world, various empires, but that's the key. It's always been empires. And that means that Islam throughout its history was truly shaped by this order driven mentality. Some orders, societies that were order, societies that were extremely diverse, religiously diverse, ethnically diverse, linguistically diverse, as you said. Of course it was not liberal. Of course there was a social hierarchy There are a lot of oppression and injustice that we can and we should critique. In Islamic history, slavery was permitted. Jews and non Muslims were second, third and and class citizens with episodic episodes of persecution. So all of this is true. But ultimately it was driven exactly as you said, by making and establishing a stable social order. And that's exactly not the Islam of the second half of the 20th century. The second half Islam of the 20th century is radical, subversive, destabilizing, whether in the Middle east as you see it in Europe. I mean, for a lot of people who say Islam and they almost, they get goosebumps because of just how destabilizing, just the very presence of Islam is understood to be. And what I'm saying that this is actually true. So Bernie Lewis, half of his answer is right, yes, our observation is right, our eyes are not lying. This is how it is. But this is not some eternal inherent nature of Islam. It happened exactly as you said, through the complete inhalation and internalization of European ideologies that we know in the nihilism. So the kind of the rock bottom of ISIS and all of this nihilistic violence, it completely makes sense and eroding whatever meaning a lot of the Islamic texts had and replacing it with this revolutionary meaning. And this happened, by the way, this happened in a lot of other places. But my suggestion is also this was remarkably more successful in the Middle east than many others. For example, there's something called liberal theology. So liberal theology? No, liberation theology.

[A]

Liberation.

[B]

Liberation theology does the same for Catholicism specifically. It came from Latin America. It's an atheistic theology. I think it's one of the most hideous things in the world because it exactly does that. But to Christianity. But liberal theology did not take over Catholicism. Imagine that liberal theology takes over the Catholic Church. The Catholic Church, to the extent that the Catholic Church has an amnesia of what Catholicism ever meant or even Christianity ever meant, away from revolution against capitalism and the west and so on and so forth. This happened also to some, even Judaism, to various degrees, and it still exists. For example, you have battles amongst different Jewish secular groups trying to redefine the meaning of Jewish symbols, either as progressive activism. Well, Judaism really means social justice and social activism and so on. But imagine that this process happened in the Middle east with only one meaning. So you had only one faction who really was determining the meaning of this modern Islam, which was revolutionary and then completely succeeding in doing so. And that's basically what you get. Or the modern Middle east as we get it today. Now, another reason I'm trying to tell this story. This story is not just about the Middle East. And I tried to do that in the end of the essay that I tried to make the story into a mirror for the Western reader. Because these ideologies, the World War II was not the end of that way of thinking or these post Christian philosophies, they continued in various degrees. And what's happening today in American University that basically developments out of this very same philosophical ground as you said, that this, you know, then you see why the radical left and Islamism, they find so much in common, and they took over Western high culture, the humanities, for instance, are completely gone. They are totally defined today by theories that are basically downstream from a lot of these very same ideas on which the Muslim Brotherhood was built, on which Arab nationalism was built, on which Palestinian nationalism also was built.

[A]

American liberal Jews who know almost nothing at all about Judaism but know the 15 words of Judaism, you need to be a good democrat and use Jewish and give it Jewish labels, have done a kind of version of that. There's 15 Zionisms, and some of them are absolutely taking in, I mean, openly Marxist and socialist and communist and various kinds of romanticist and nationalist. And they absolutely have done that and tried to apply Jewish ideas and a sense of Jewish, Jewish deep sort of past and history to those kinds of modern European ideas. And there's on a much smaller scale, a Sephardi intellectual project of that sort that happens over the course of the 20th century. Long story short, everybody. Everybody's mental framework was scrambled in the 20th century, and Arabs were not immune, and Muslims were not immune and Jews were not immune. And getting to that sense, it just feels like such more serious, realistic, and deeply humanizing place to stand than standing. You know, apart from the Arab world looking at Syria falling apart, looking at ISIS looking at the Yemen war and saying, ew, yuck. Why are Arabs so violent? Which, you know, there's. I'll finish with this tiny little rant. And then I want to talk about your substack article very briefly at the beginning of. And I think I mentioned this on this podcast at the beginning of Guns, Germs and Steel, Jared diamond talks about walking on the beach in, I believe it was Papua New guinea and talking with a local politician named Yali, I think was his name. And the local politician says, how come white people have so much cargo? And cargo was a word in Papua New guinea for just literally, just stuff, commodities. I mean, just literally what modern economies produce. And it was a fascinating question. And one of the first realizations that Jared diamond had was why don't we ask the question? Why don't we ask this fundamental question of why Western European society built this modern world and created so much advance and prosperity. And maybe we don't ask the question because we're afraid that the answer is racist, that nature is racist, that Europeans are superior intellectually or superior in some other ways. And he says the things you can't ask questions about are the deep secret anxieties that we all have to dance around. And so he's going to ask the question and don't worry, you should read the book. I want to Pulitzer Prize. Its answer is not racist. He thinks there are good reasons why it happened in Europe and not in the Aztecs or whatever and they're environmental and all these other things. But that was such a fascinating moment for me. People who will not ask the question, why the Arab world, so much of it, not all of it obviously, but so much of it looks the way it looks, are racist. That is a racist proposition that we don't look at them and apply to them the same standards we would apply to ourselves. They're people, they are three dimensional human beings, as I said. And so I feel like I, after reading your essay and I haven't fully digested it and I'm going to be thinking about it and if I have complaints, I'll email you about them. But I feel like I'm standing on firmer ground in that regard. And so it really is one of these eye opening moments. And I urge everybody to go to Mosaic magazine and read that essay and then of course yell about it angrily on Twitter where it will get more traffic and people will read Hussein's ideas. You wrote a piece on Substack. You have an excellent substack, which everyone can subscribe to. Why not? And you argue that Zionism has become, this is usually said as a bad thing, homeless. It used to be a darling of leftist ideology and intellectual thought, and then it was a darling of the right and now it's not really a darling of anybody or the people it's still a darling for are fading away as an older generation and it's homeless. And that's not such a bad thing for Zionism. Can you walk us through that argument? And we're going to finish off here because you can do to Jews what you did to Arabs. What do you mean by Zionism is homeless? And why is that a good thing?

[B]

It is a good thing. I actually tried to help and I wrote another essay also much Longer about the issue, I tried to help my Jewish reader to say good riddance. So the process that happened to Arab and Muslim societies obviously happened also at a much earlier level to Jews, because they were at the heart of Europe. I'm talking about European Jewry specifically. They were really at the heart of all of these Enlightenment developments as they were happening. And also they had a lot of stakes in them because the question of emancipation, the question of Jewish freedom from oppression and political marginalization, so on, was also hinged on a lot of these, you know, abstract discourse of philosophies. And this completely transformed Jewish self understanding the way it transformed Arab and Muslim self understanding. Maybe not exactly in the same way. Actually, I would say Jews ended up being much more diverse in the way they approach these issues. He didn't have that diversity, had only the one revolutionary answer that then became institutionalized into this new post colonial state that shaped all of these societies. But Jews know, you had people who wanted to assimilate into the liberal establishment. You have people who were disillusioned with it, and they wanted some sort of modern Orthodox living in the margin of the city. And then you had the Zionist propositions. They themselves had a lot of diversity in them. But regardless of all of these attempts, which a lot of them continue with us on different forms, whether liberal Reform Judaism in the United States, Zionism and its various iterations, all of them ultimately rest on a philosophical justification that naturally appeals to one of these modern philosophies, which all of them are universal and abstract. So you either are appealing for legitimacy, for your legitimacy of your existence as a Jew and as an Israeli, you always appeal to one of those universal criteria that were established by the Enlightenment. So either you appear to nationalism and national rights and so on and so forth as an abstract principle. You appeal to justice and democracy and so on and so forth. Now, in the moment that we're living in, this is kind of we're living at the consummation of postmodern century. That kind of roughly started with Nietzsche, in which all of the major ideologies now are collapsing. So Marxism collapsed, fascism collapsed, and then liberalism kind of lasted for a long time. And now liberalism, everybody's seeing intellectually, philosophically, liberalism is over. No one can make an argument to justify anything using liberal principle anymore. I mean, people do that, but I'm talking about serious thinkers. No one thinks that liberalism really can justify anything anymore.

[A]

Give us a couple more sentences about that to people who just feel liberal. What does that mean?

[B]

Well, you can be liberal, doesn't mean that you can't be liberal. But the idea that liberalism is a universal idea that comes at the end of history, right? You have Francis Fukuyama, for example, of the early 90s, kind of the end, the logical and rational end of all humanity. Political striving consummates itself in liberalism. That liberalism is rational and rests on some self evident principles. All of this of course is gone because in the, you know, after, after two centuries, basically all of the post enlightenment development, which is basically radical atheism coupled with constant skepticism ultimately means that there is no actually grant. There is nothing self evident, there's nothing you can prove. The idea of the human itself is a Western invention. So liberalism has no rational ground. That doesn't mean that you can't choose it. And that's basically what some postmodern, for example, one of the main postmodern liberal thinkers, Rorty already said that in the 80s he celebrated postmodernism. He celebrated the destruction of reason and the destruction of philosophy as liberating. Because now we don't have to pretend anymore that there are binding things. We just like liberalism because we want it. So it's just will, right? I will to live this way. I will to be liberal. And that's what somebody like John Gray, from a different angle also started saying in the 80s and the 90s. You see all of this already been happening in the academy for a long time. It's kind of, there is a relay between then. It's kind of, you feel it in the actual street. Everybody's living it too. John Gray, who's a British liberal philosopher, already said basically that liberalism now is just a cultural heritage. You know, we don't have the. There's nothing universal about liberalism, there's nothing rational. But we can live it as our own cultural heritage. This is who we are as Western societies. We're just liberal. So basically all of these major philosophies that used to justify things, Marxism used to justify things in the name of social justice or the name of the revolution. Fascism used to justify things in the name of the Volk and the nation and historical authenticity, so on and so forth, liberalism used to justify things in the name of humanity, intellectually speaking, all of these things collapsed in the postmodern age. So when the Zionists appeal, or when you appeal, Zionism can no longer appeal to one of those many post enlightenment philosophies for legitimacy because none of them give legitimacy even to their own societies. I hope this idea is clear.

[A]

Yeah, you wrote the liberal order once needed Israel to affirm its values because Israel was a democracy in a region that was Soviet backed and non democratic. And then Zionism is now finding an ally on the political right as leftist internationalism turned hostile. Israel's struggle against terrorism, its national identity, its unapologetic defense of sovereignty appeal to conservative movements. But that era too may be fading. The right that once defended Israel as a natural nationalist project is now no longer a coherent force. Today's right is fragmented, oscillating between different and often contradictory instincts. Isolationism, populism, traditionalism, a reactionary impulse against the old conservative establishment that once embraced Israel. So Zionism is losing the intellectual frameworks it had used to explain itself and justify itself, because the west that it was justifying itself to no longer has these intellectual frameworks as the overriding, abiding sort of ways of understanding Western existence.

[B]

You summarized my essay better than I, than I, than I ever could. If you want to come back.

[A]

I'm a summarizer. It's my profession. And so where does, where does Zionism now find itself?

[B]

That's in the wilderness. That's basically. I use a lot of biblical imagery to understand the world and I think they're very helpful, more than anything, actually. And I invite everybody to do the same. They're out of Egypt. They are. Exactly. They are in the wilderness. It's just all of the gods failed. All of the idols collapsed. The twilight of the idol, to quote one of my least favorite people.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

The idols are gone. You can cry as much as possible. And they see a lot of Jews doing this and natural right, kicking and screaming, no, no, no, no, no, don't kick me out of the temple. I belong here. You don't understand. The temple itself is collapsing. It's not just that you are being kicked out, but the idols themselves are now fragmenting. And the idols themselves were fragments of fragments. I mean, if you think about the enlightenment as a tower, then it collapsed into these fragments that became different ideological idols. Now even those different ideological idols are fragmenting now more to all of these contradictory, incohesive, postmodern world that we live in. You can kick and scream as much as you want, but there is nothing to hold you whole anymore. And that leaves, and this is why I said good riddance. That leaves then Jews in this historical opportunity to then rediscover themselves. And this is something also, by the way, that I hope that will happen to Muslims and Arabs. I mean, if what I say is true, if modern Muslims are really these amnesic post Christians who really think they are, you know, they are continuing historically somewhere. They actually destroyed it very, very long time ago. My hope is now is the time to wake up from this nightmare and actually try to rediscover and re articulate who is it that they are without relying on all of these fantasies of the last two centuries. This is what I want to. I hope to see it too. I see to see now Jews also doing the same thing. Now we're not gonna define ourselves according to the needs of the Western power centers to gain legitimacy. We're gonna actually try to see who we think we are from our own selves. That's kind of. And this is not an appeal to authenticity. Ultimately whatever you articulate is gonna be your own reinvention, your own reading. But there's a difference than it being your own and being actually a script that was written by others that we just had to fit into in order for life to go on.

[A]

What I liked about it exactly was that it's not an appeal to authenticity because authenticity runs dangerously close to romanticism. And so you're afraid of it. And it is. I read it as an appeal to humility and everything that Judaism has always been to me. And in that sense, I think I had a fairly traditional sense of what Judaism is growing up has always been humility, Maimonides, path of negation. We cannot know truth, we cannot know God, but we can identify lies. And then we throw them overboard and then we're slowly proceeding toward truth, a place we can never get to. A path of negation that is at its hard, maybe even scientific method, I don't know. But it's a kind of sense of I can know something that approaches closer to the truth than what I knew before. That is the limit of knowledge. And then of course, the Jewish argument, that is enough. And so you have, and maybe I'll end with this, you have a line that says Zionism has been forced back onto its fundamental premise because it doesn't have all these other. Because the west doesn't believe in the things Zionism used to explain itself with that the Jewish people, as a historical community extending back centuries, sought to re establish sovereignty in the land from which they had been exiled. The central claim does not align and no matter how much Jewish magicians tried, will not align with the modern world's emphasis on fluid identities and suspicion toward fixity. Nor does it easily fit the postcolonial narrative that condemns power asymmetries wherever they appear. By choosing self determination within a specific territory, Zionism represents a stubborn exception to the prevailing sensibilities that favor boundary blurring and universal identities. And so with these usual pillars of ideological support withdrawn, Zionism has an opportunity, some would say a necessity, to articulate its own foundations without leaning on other ideologies. It's not merely an offshoot of 19th century European nationalism, nor is it solely the result of late 20th century geopolitics, but originates in the enduring beliefs of the Jewish people about the cosmos and their place in it. Your vision of Islam and the reason I wanted to bring these two together, your vision of where Islam went wrong, which is you say you stand next to Bernard Lewis in the sense that Muslims built their world, not Westerners, but what the Muslims did in order to build their current world was to lean on everybody else to define themselves by others. The Europeans came in not just with better tech. The Europeans came in with an entire intellectual epistemological world that the Arabs found themselves totally at sea in trying to match. And so they imbibed and they define themselves by someone else's mental world for too long. And that is everything that is broken in them. And the Jews, in a different way, in a different reasoning, define themselves for their. Just because they're small, because they have to explain themselves to the world because they're so small, did that as well. And you're telling the Jews, just be yourself. And you maybe solve a lot of these ideological dependencies that create a lot of the discourses that come after that. Not maybe they'll still come after us because anti Semitism is what it is, but you don't need them. And maybe that's a precursor for you then telling the Arabs. And you talk about this in the essay, find your own voice. You're not going to shed a century of thought, a century of culture, a century of assumptions about the world, but you can't just be 1920s Germans because that's not a healthy place to be. And so there's a kind of. Is this your intellectual project writ large is to find where these things happen? And how, I hate to say it, there's a little bit of a leftist element here of finding a non Western path away from the Westernized overwhelming of all these other peoples?

[B]

Actually not, I mean that's what it seems, but it really. I mean, I'm very Western myself. Look at how I'm speaking and how I'm. How I'm thinking. I mean, not the old, the west is bad, but basically it's over. We're all Western. I mean, I think that the embrace of who we are at the moment. I mean that's going to be our starting point. You're not going to negate. Fighting against reality is a losing game. That is even for Arabs to start moving on, they have to recognize that they are 1920s Germans, right? That this is actually who we are. If you're going to go rediscover your tradition and your history, you're going to go rediscover it from that point. There is no other. Right. And that's the only that self awareness, by the way, can actually help you because then you can look for something different or go try to look beyond or past that point. But we're all Western. There's nothing, first of all, there is nothing to be ashamed of. It's just history happens the way it happens. I don't have any grand narratives about history or theories about or. And I don't want history to be in a certain way. It just things happen the way they happen. This is where we are today, whether Jews or Arabs. And we just have to accept that. And now we are at a juncture that gives us an immense opportunity that is even with the chaos. What I write is actually immensely hopeful at the end because I'm saying that all of this collapse is good because it's finally cracking out of these epistemological and philosophical prisons that we've been imprisoned in. And now we can go past them and do other things and actually be who we are without pretending that we're the liberators of humanity or the liberators of mankind in order to fit in the script of certain people. So it's my project, but it's not left. It's as a matter of fact I am redeeming or trying to redeem very humbly things that the historical left philosophically back two centuries ago, usurped from the Judeo Christian tradition. And this is by the way, why I call my substack the Abrahamic Metacritique. And Abrahamic here is a hearkening to a midrash, a very famous midrash that also made its way in the Quran. So it exists actually in the text of the Quran as well.

[A]

That's a Talmudic. A midrash is a Talmudic homily. It's a part of Talmudic text that is not or Talmudic era text that is not law. Yes, right.

[B]

And it's a story about Abraham and his father was an idol maker. So he used to carve idols and people would come by them. And that story, funny enough that the sequence is that's immediately after the tower. So you know, the tower collapsed. Let's assume the tower collapsed and then the boulders became idols. Really. I mean it's plausible that Abraham's father took some of those sitting boulders from the fallen tower and made idols out of them. And people would buy them and worship them. And Abraham one day takes an axe and he goes and hacks the idols to show people that these idols are fake. And then he makes up these funny stories about how they destroyed each other and people don't believe him. And their own answer is a proof that these idols are nothing. And that's basically why I named my substack the Abrahamic Metacritic is that we've all worshipped these idols of all of these lofty ideas that are now falling. And it's time to see that good riddance. These idols are falling. We don't need to worship revolution anymore. We don't need to worship social justice, all of these. That doesn't mean that behind the idols there are no concepts that are important socially. But there is a difference between something practical socially and an idol that we sacrifice our life, we sacrifice who we are, we sacrifice other people, we literally sacrifice our children at their feet. Whether that's Palestine or freedom or honor and so on and so forth.

[A]

So yeah, the Abraham Accords in that sense is almost entirely anti ideological, unideological and driven by forces is the Muslim world in the Arab Muslim world that this was explained to me once by someone from the Gulf and I said, I don't understand why you people don't hate me. I mean that's been the sort of archetype. And they said it's not that we want to reconcile and end the Arab Jewish enmity in the Middle east, it's that the obsession with Jews correlates perfectly to the self destruction of Arab society. So we want to get over you, we want to forget about you. We want to know you only as people shopping in Dubai's malls. That's what we want from you. And people will fight over politics and interests. That sounds like the promised land.

[B]

No, people will fight over. There always be conflict between humans. That's just the norm of human history. Iran and the Arabs, even if the Islamic Republic falls tomorrow, will always have conflicts because you always compete over resources. We live next to each other, neighbors have issues, especially if they are states. Same thing with Arabs and Jews. But we want to get passed over is for these conflicts to be these world determining worldviews, right? The conflict itself is my philosophy of existence. That's the tragedy of the Arab Israeli conflict historically. It's not that the conflict is not real. Of course the conflict is real. Of course there is land at issue. There are people, homes. But what made it what it is is that the conflict itself became a worldview, a self contained, self sustaining, a worldview with its own moral systems, with its old saints, with its own church. And that's of course, again, that comes from the philosophical history that we discussed and that's actually what we have an opportunity to go over. So we're going to have our conflict, but the conflict is not going to determine who you are. It's not going to determine who I am. And by the way, when this happens, then you'll find practicality comes in and this is why the Abraham Accords, you're right, this is why the Abraham Accords matters, because it exactly tries to achieve that.

[A]

Hussain Abubakr Mansoor, thank you so much for joining me. People can find you, first of all, the wonderful essay at Mosaic magazine, which is currently its lead essay on the website, and your wonderful substack which they Abrahamic Metacritique. They can also find it just by searching your name which will be in the show notes and wherever you are consuming this episode. Thank you so much for joining me.

[B]

Thank you.