I read Elizabeth Suzanne Kassab’s essay with great interest, as well as Mohammed Hashas’s thoughtful response. Kassab rightly calls for the emergence of a new contemporary Arab thought—one less culturalist and more attuned to people’s demands for freedom, dignity, accountability of rulers, and social justice. Hashas, for his part, raises concerns about the final paragraph of her text, where she writes:
“The very meaning of thinking and critique could no longer be taken for granted… Categories of thought, such as universality, were profoundly shaken and needed to be re-addressed. The whole claim of ‘European’ or ‘Western’ civilization to universal categories and values collapsed irremediably in the genocide in Gaza… After the abyss of Gaza, universality and humanism had to be thought anew.”
He does not seem ready to abandon the possibility of building what he calls “overlapping civilization,” grounded in a conception of justice that “allows one to befriend an enemy, understand a friend, and defend a victim”—a justice that, he insists, demands “radical change from all stakeholders.” His proposal is therefore less a call for rupture with the West and more an invitation to engage with it critically and ethically.
In this regard, I find myself closer to Hashas than to Kassab. What follows is an attempt to elaborate this position and reflect on how we might still work toward a form of “soft universalism” in these dark times marked by genocide and by the erosion of the hopes once carried by the Arab Spring.
In responding to the questions raised by both pieces—what counts in constructing universal categories, and how we ought to understand the gap between liberal values and their application, particularly beyond the confines of the nation-state—we need, in my view, to think in complex terms. Every intellectual tradition carries its own (ideological) blind spot. Not only do the social sciences and humanities influence culture, but culture also influences knowledge production. Such observations help explain how universal categories are influenced by the bias of an author’s positionality. Yet humanistic values and universal categories are salient for comparing social and political phenomena and for mobilizing humanistic solidarity.
Constructing universal categories is never straightforward, particularly in relation to (il)legitime violence. At the University of Pennsylvania, law professor Claire Finkelstein has issued a “Call for Restricting Free Speech on Palestine.” She views the debate only in terms of potential “violence” and “(in)safety” within American universities; the violence in the form of genocide and war crimes in Gaza remains invisible in her argument. Only debate and discussion can enhance our understanding of (soft) universalism, but the tension is not only between the Western world and the rest. For instance, some Arabs who are sensitive to the Palestinian cause simultaneously cheer the mass killings carried out by the Syrian regime against its own people. We recognize the Israeli war on Gaza as a crime against humanity yet often fail to apply the same moral vocabulary to the brutality of the Syrian dictatorship.
Returning to the Western stance on the genocidal war on Gaza, the problem does not lie in the universal values embedded in human rights and international conventions, nor in denying these values or exposing their fallacious nature. Rather, the issue is that these principles have been hollowed out by interpretations shaped by vested interests and power relations. In this sense, the critique articulated by Kassab and Hashas of the double standard or universalism should not push Arabs to framing the moment as a religious or civilizational clash with the West. Even if Western support for Israel is partly motivated by Islamophobia, this phenomenon is political, not religious; many of its most ardent proponents are after all atheists.
Are liberal values applicable outside the nation-state, or beyond European borders? Historically—particularly in the context of colonialism—the answer has been an unequivocal no. Currently, the stark contrast between universal principles and their real-world application is evident in the selective enforcement and interpretation of international and human rights laws. Jürgen Habermas’s position is illustrative. He has long grounded his work in liberal political and ethical theories, offering a solid philosophical defense for both democratic communication and the ethics of difference. Yet, he falters when confronted with the question of the Palestinians’ right to national liberation. He co-signed “Principles of Solidarity: A Statement,” issued by the Research Center “Normative Orders” at Goethe University Frankfurt—a text that is entirely one-sided and expresses no regret for Israel’s actions in Gaza. His insensitivity to Israel’s actions in the Palestinian territories did not surprise me, I first understood it during a dinner with him in Jerusalem at the time of the Second Intifada. I was taken aback by his position at that time, which is why his current denial of Palestinian national rights is not merely a political misstep. Regardless of one’s interest in Habermas as a person and his political views, we must engage with his broader system of thought and his dialogical communicative theory.
In the case of Habermas or any other problematic thought, we need clear justification for how to disentangle what is Eurocentric, colonial, or sexist from what remains valuable to engage with or adopt. Here, I would draw on Michael Gill’s two-part justification and expand it to three.
First, there is the “conceptual isolation” of certain ideas from a problematic scholar: separating their valuable contributions from their racist or flawed views. Second, is the “division of intellectual labor”: some scholars will focus on the positive contributions of a problematic thinker to our knowledge, while others will critique their racist or flawed views. Thus, one might analyze nineteenth-century America through Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, while others may provide a more inclusive and nuanced perspective using Harriet Martineau’s Society in America as a critique of Tocqueville. Third, we must take into account the “historical development of scientific and moral views,” recognizing that humanity’s conception of otherness has evolved over time and that what we regard as ethical today may be deemed racist or flawed in the future.
I will, therefore, continue to engage with Habermas’s dialogical communicative theory even if I disagree with his political position on Palestine. Having said that, I can observe some patterns. With the partial exception of Herbert Marcuse, all the thinkers associated with the Frankfurt School were utterly and radically inattentive to the movements emerging from what we now call the Global South. In that sense, Habermas is simply being a good Frankfurt School theorist.
The same reasoning applies when dealing with Heidegger, Foucault, Levinas, Locke, Kant, Hume, Marx, and others. This approach should also extend to historical and contemporary politicians, celebrities, and public figures, allowing us to recognize their positive contributions while critically assessing their political positions, especially with awareness to their colonial legacies. A telling example is the National Museum of Fine Arts in Amsterdam, where portraits of historical Dutch figures are now accompanied by labels detailing their role in the slave trade. I find this strategy far preferable to the removal of David Hume’s name from the “David Hume Tower” at the University of Edinburgh. That building was briefly slated to be renamed after Julius Nyerere, the anti-colonial Tanzanian leader who graduated from Edinburgh in 1952—until critics pointed out that Nyerere’s own rule was marked by despotism and homophobia. Similarly, one Arab sociologist recently suggested that Émile Durkheim should no longer be taught, due to his complete silence on French colonialism in Algeria, and proposed replacing him with W. E. B. Du Bois. But can we truly imagine undergraduate sociology students not engaging with the founder of sociology? And what are we to make of the fact that Du Bois himself disregarded the plight of the Palestinian people while praising the establishment of the State of Israel? This endless cycle of exclusion, driven by dichotomous thinking—angel or demon, guilty or innocent—will never be resolved. Only the three-part justification suggested above offers a path through this self-defeating approach.
In brief, Euro-American knowledge production should be treated as Dipesh Chakrabarty argued, as necessary but not sufficient. This is the core meaning of “provincializing Europe.” In this spirit, we can scrutinize scholars’ positions after Gaza just as scholars were scrutinized after the Second World War. However, I fear a “populist” tendency that seeks to discard modernity and the universality of human rights in response to such inquiries and contradictions. I would remind any Western scholar advocating against domestic violence against women in the Middle East today that they should also have spoken out against Israel’s mass killing of civilian women in Gaza (if they have not already done so).
Similarly, because European politics and its organic intellectuals have lost their authority, referentiality, and even credibility, I would now engage more with African and Latin American human rights scholars and activists, who better understand and address human suffering than their European counterparts—particularly those from Germany, the UK, and France, who often fund human rights organizations in the Global South. In this way, we can recognize the importance of certain topics that are particularly significant to Europeans (e.g., domestic violence), while other issues (e.g., mass human rights violations against colonized subjects) receive less attention. In this context, examining African or Latin American human rights agendas becomes especially relevant. Only by disentangling the universality of human rights—embodied, for instance, by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights—from Euro-American mainstream politics, both past and present, can that universality be preserved. This is how we can begin to work on what Hashas called “overlapping civilization”.
Sari Hanafi is a Professor of Sociology at the American University of Beirut.
Cover photo: A man visits the exhibition “Slavery” at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam on May 12, 2021. (Photo by Kenzo Tribouillard / AFP)
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