Counterintuitive though it may seem, influential American intellectuals like the gender-studies philosopher Judith Butler and linguist-turned-propagandist Noam Chomsky see regressive Islamist groups like Hamas and Hizballah as “part of the global left”—a position shared by such political figures as Britain’s Jeremy Corbyn. Hussein Aboubakr argues that Butler and Chomsky, perhaps in ways they themselves don’t understand, are not far from the truth. For the past hundred years, Middle Eastern intellectuals have absorbed European ideological trends, from fascism to French existentialism to anticolonialism to postmodern leftism. None of them have been a salutary influence:
The ideological developments and transmutations [of the 20th-century Middle East] can be seen in the lives of many figures of the period such as Fayez Sayegh, who was the first Arab intellectual to apply Sartre’s critique of racism and neocolonialism to Israel. He argued that what applies in Congo and Vietnam also applied to Israel, and he was also the principal author of the 1975 UN Zionism-is-racism resolution. Sayegh, born in Syria to a Presbyterian minister in 1920, started his active life in the 1940s by joining the Syrian Social Nationalist Party (SSNP), a Syrian imitation of Nazism under the leadership of the “Führer” Antun Saadeh. During the time Sayegh wrote and spoke for the SSNP about “the danger of Zionism on civilization and the soul,” as well as the dangers of the “Jewish psyche.”
After the turn to the left, Sayegh became an Arab existentialist authority on Sartre and Fanon. In 1965, during his tenure at Stanford, he wrote the booklet Colonialism in Palestine which was published by the PLO and then translated to a dozen of languages and distributed globally by the Afro-Asian People’s Solidarity Organization (AAPSO). His booklet was the birth document of the global cause for Palestine as it hit all the major notes played by the international left—racial supremacy, segregation, exclusion, civil rights, emancipation, anti-capitalism, self-defense, human rights, and resistance—invoked Algeria, African Americans, Congo, and Vietnam, and used existentialist ideas of otherness. It was Sayegh who inserted Palestine into the anti-Western canon of the international left. The later anti-Zionist works by major figures of the French left such as Maxime Rodinson would only continue Sayegh’s work.
The new textbooks, movies, magazines, songs, and literature produced in such an intellectual environment were all tasked with shaping the Arab masses and its new generations ideologically. This was the moment of birth of Arab modernity. Together, the committed new intellectuals and cultural figures produced an entirely committed revolutionary anti-Western and anti-Semitic reading of Islam.
Read more on Tablet: https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/history/articles/liberation-arabs-global-left