The end of the age of prophecy?

By Hani Shukrallah
It's been several years since I first cast Edward Said in my mind in the role of a modern-day John the Baptist -- "a voice crying in the wilderness." Palestine, after all, seems to call forth biblical imagery as its due, even from the most resolutely secularist. This perception of Said seemed consistent with another inner perception of the age we are living in, at least in this part of the world, as an age of prophecy. We are not meant to see salvation, I would console myself, but to "prepare the way," "evangelise" in the hope that, some day in the future, the seeds of a better world will find less barren soil on which to fall. New Testament imagery notwithstanding, this was a strictly secular perspective; my concern is with this world, rather than the next. And since the mid-'70s, it has become a progressively uglier and more dehumanised world where (as one writer put it aptly) the future is no longer a site for hope, but the mere chronological progression of the present.
Nowhere did the dismal lack of alternatives that seemed to be the one defining feature of the world at the end of the 20th century appear as stark and hopeless as in the Middle East and, within the Middle East, in Palestine. Bill Clinton or Saddam Hussein, Thomas L Friedman or Osama bin Laden, Oslo's Bantustans or Hamas's human bombs, submission or suicide: these seemed to be the basic choices on offer, their common denominator being the negation of both our reason and our humanity. A post-modern world had elevated stupidity and ignorance to the status of "discourse," so we could unselfconsciously expend whatever mental and emotional energy we had debating the peccadilloes of British royals and American presidents or the finer points of religious rulings on the most asinine of life's daily pursuits, or indeed, all of the above -- interactively transmitted to our living rooms through satellite dishes, CDs and the Internet.
Hence, "a voice crying in the wilderness." No one, to my knowledge, has critiqued the Oslo process and exposed it for the Apartheid sham that it is as thoroughly, as scathingly or as persistently as Edward Said. This has won him considerable praise and a new Arab readership among the many opponents of the humiliating and crass oppression that the process put in place. One cannot help but wonder, however, how many among Said's Palestinian and Arab "constituency" actually share his larger vision of a consistently humanist, genuinely democratic and truly emancipatory solution for the Israeli/Palestinian struggle.
The object of scorn, ridicule and hate campaigns by the Zionists (who have recently been lobbying for his dismissal from his chair at Columbia University), he is dismissed by the PA (which at one time tried to ban his books in the self-rule territories) and other Arab "realists" as a sort of armchair revolutionary with a personal grudge. How dare he, while sitting in his plush apartment in Manhattan (leased by the university, as I have found out), criticise the actions of people "on the ground," the realists railed from their own plush apartments in Gaza, Cairo and Beirut. Even among the opponents of Oslo, Said remained largely "out of place."
Said, the late Eqbal Ahmad, Noam Chomsky: all seemed to be "voices crying in the wilderness." Their message (as diverse in detail, approach and style as it may be), to my mind, heralds the possibility that an uncompromising rejection of oppression can still be constructed in terms of such humanist values as rationalism, compassion and a spirit of internationalism. A possibility that seems increasingly remote, but no less valuable for being so.
Still, as Bob Dylan would say, the times they are a' changin. Neo-liberal triumphalism did not survive a single decade. Democracy -- which in the early 1990s was almost fully appropriated by the US and its allies, cynically and selectively manipulated to subvert their enemies -- had before the decade's end become the battle cry of an international movement against capitalist globalisation. Fukuyama and Huntington were already collecting dust before the century turned and, if Friedman continued to spout his learned inanities from the pages of The New York Times, it is doubtful that anybody outside Manhattan took him seriously -- except, of course, in our blighted part of the world (but then, Egyptian and Arab intellectuals are still battling heroically with Huntington's creaking ghost).
It is also here, where the double bind of debasing submission and futile, suicidal vengeance seemed almost impossible to break, that the Intifada has surprised us all, cutting us loose from our immediate past and hurling us toward an obscure future. Could it be that the age of prophecy in our region is finally giving way to one of action?
There is no certitude, of course. I may find post-modern cynicism -- wherein humanist rationalism and irrational bigotry alike are only "in the eyes of the beholder" -- abhorrent, but I do not have any comforting modernist faith in the inevitability of human progress, self-fulfilment, or emancipation.
Ultimately, it all depends on people, and their choices.
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