Reflecting on the intellectual and cultural ferment that seized the Arab world in the wake of the shocking defeat of 1967, Hisham Melhem seeks to understand why Arab societies failed to capitalize on this moment and laments “the Arabs’ long descent into the heart of darkness.”
[Immediately after the war], most Arabs sought refuge in denial, refusing to admit that their military rout was emblematic of deeper rotten cultural maladies and social defects and instead calling the disastrous defeat a temporary “setback.” . . . [But] Arab intellectuals and artists . . . transformed Beirut after 1967 into the most lively and cultured city in the Arab world [and] displayed tremendous courage in exposing the entrenched taboos and sacred religious dogmas of Islam and the political myths of the Arab nationalist movement in its Nasserite and Baathist manifestations. . . .
The great intellectual debate in the years after the June 1967 war raged mainly between the progressive current and an assortment of Islamists from many Arab states, who saw the defeat, correctly, as the historic rout of Arab nationalism. There was a faint attempt by some Arab nationalist writers to resuscitate Arabism, but to no avail.
I have always believed that it was only after the 1967 defeat that the Arab Islamists, who were mocked and dismissed by the left in previous decades, began to regroup and reassert themselves intellectually and politically as the only “authentic” alternative to Arab nationalism. None of us who were politically active in those years would have believed that the exclusivist and reactionary Islamists, mainly the Sunni Muslim Brotherhood movement and its various branches, and later the Shiite Hizballah, would dominate Arab life and politics in subsequent decades.
That historic moment of cultural and political ferment and renewal in Beirut began to dissipate in 1973. . . . By that time, . . . the Palestinian national movement, represented by the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), had failed to live up to its claim that it represented the genuine “secular” alternative to the humiliated Arab nationalists. The PLO’s blunders in Jordan and Lebanon—in which it intervened in the domestic affairs of both countries and intimidated local communities—deprived the leadership of the pretense that the movement was different from the rest of the Arab regimes.
Read more on Foreign Policy: http://foreignpolicy.com/2017/06/05/the-arab-world-has-never-recovered-from-the-loss-of-1967/