Articles

Israel’s victory in the June War and its renewed occupation of the Gaza Strip lifted the nightmare of the Egyptian regime from the Muslim Brotherhood, following a confrontation triggered by the attempted assassination of Egyptian leader Gamal Abdel Nasser in Manshiyya, Alexandria, in 1954. At the time, the Egyptian authorities accused the “Brotherhood” of plotting the attack and launched a sweeping campaign of arrests targeting its leading figures, including Sayyid Qutb, the foremost theorist of political Islam’s approach to power. A decade later, after Abdul Salam Arif became president of Iraq, his mediation secured Sayyid Qutb’s release. The episode did not, however, lead to reconciliation. Qutb was arrested again, accused of establishing a clandestine organization aimed at overthrowing the Egyptian regime by force, and sentenced to death. He refused to appeal for clemency in exchange for a commutation of his sentence and was hanged on August 29, 1966.

The region appears to have entered a prolonged “pause,” a lull that could last until the two elections scheduled for the fall, first in Israel and then in the United States. Mobile pockets of tension persist, however, but remain under control. The week now getting underway is following much the same course as the previous one, both politically and militarily. There have been no sharp shifts in position, either on the American or Israeli side, even as U.S. President Donald Trump’s remarks on Iran on Sunday continue to fuel speculation about a possible shift in Washington’s strategy. Only Tehran, engaged in a process of internal restructuring, has broken the lull by responding directly to the occupant of the White House. In an interview with the U.S. news site Axios on Sunday, Donald Trump compared the standoff with the Islamic Republic to “a game of chess,” after ruling out the use of force to compel it to reopen the Strait of Hormuz.

Language, as a vehicle of national culture, can become an instrument of liberation, as it did for Johann Fichte and Karol Wojtyla, and even a fundamental reason for being, as Charles Malek argued. It shapes national consciousness, fosters cohesion in the face of military or cultural hegemony, and makes it possible to build the future while remaining rooted in the heritage of the past. While Johann Gottfried von Herder highlighted the role of language in shaping cultural identity, Johann Gottlieb Fichte took this idea further by directly linking language to the concept of the nation. What he called Volkstum (national culture) (1) emerged as an instrument of resistance to French supremacy. It was on this same principle that Karol Wojtyla, the future Pope John Paul II, promoted the use of the Polish language in the theater as a means of preserving the soul of his people under Soviet rule.

It may be no more than a small mountain project, but the laying of the cornerstone on Saturday, August 8, for a center serving children with special needs in Bcharre, a town of 24,000, is nonetheless a “major undertaking” for those who have embarked on it with limited means but a profound awareness of its necessity. The center is the flagship project of the Bishop Philippe Chebaya Foundation, named after a priest who served for 40 years as principal of Bcharre’s public school before being ordained a bishop late in life. A priest running a public school: the case is unique in Lebanon. The anomaly is due partly to Bcharre’s distance from Beirut, but above all to the fact that Father Philippe always refused to be paid for his work as principal. During the darkest years of the war and the Syrian occupation, he had turned the school into his monastery, sleeping and eating there.

The Trump Administration displayed a troubling and unusual passivity last week in the face of aggression (and arrogance) from the radical wing of the Iranian regime and its proxies — both in the Strait of Hormuz and on the front opened by the pro-Iranian Yemeni Houthi militia against Saudi Arabia. It was against this backdrop that a mutual defense pact was sealed this week between Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and Turkey, widely seen as a kind of Sunni NATO against Iran. The past week in the Middle East will likely be defined by a single image: Saudi Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, and Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif signing a mutual defense pact on Friday in Mecca — a location of profound symbolic significance.

Since the Ain al-Rummaneh bus incident in 1975, which served as the symbolic spark of the war, the Lebanese people have been caught in an unbroken cycle of organized fear, rather than occasional fear. This falls within what some thinkers call the “economy of fear” or the “politics of fear,” in which fear becomes something that is manufactured and managed, rather than merely a spontaneous emotion. Fear performs three dangerous functions here: First, it paralyzes collective action. When a society lives under the permanent threat of war, civil strife, collapse, or an external or internal enemy, its primary concern becomes individual survival rather than collective action. The possibility of organized resistance to any form of domination or occupation consequently begins to disintegrate.