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The Unmaking of the Arab Intellectual
 Edinburgh Studies in Modern Arabic Literature
Series Editor: Rasheed El-Enany

Writing Beirut: Mappings of the City in the Modern Arabic Novel

Samira Aghacy

Autobiographical Identities in Contemporary Arab Literature

Valerie Anishchenkova

The Iraqi Novel: Key Writers, Key Texts

Fabio Caiani and Catherine Cobham

Sufism in the Contemporary Arabic Novel

Ziad Elmarsafy

Gender, Nation, and the Arabic Novel: Egypt 1892–2008

Hoda Elsadda

The Unmaking of the Arab Intellectual: Prophecy, Exile and the Nation
Zeina G. Halabi

Post-War Anglophone Lebanese Fiction: Home Matters in the Diaspora

Syrine Hout

Nasser in the Egyptian Imaginary

Omar Khalifah

War and Occupation in Iraqi Fiction

Ikram Masmoudi

The Arab Nah∂ah: The Making of the Intellectual and Humanist Movement
Abdulrazzak Patel

Sonallah Ibrahim: Rebel with a Pen

Paul Starkey

www.edinburghuniversitypress.com/series/smal
 The Unmaking of the
Arab Intellectual
Prophecy, Exile and the Nation

Zeina G. Halabi
 To Khaled Saghieh

Edinburgh University Press is one of the leading university presses in the UK. We publish
academic books and journals in our selected subject areas across the humanities and social
sciences, combining cutting-­edge scholarship with high editorial and production values to
produce academic works of lasting importance. For more information visit our website:
edinburghuniversitypress.com

© Zeina G. Halabi, 2017

Edinburgh University Press Ltd

The Tun – Holyrood Road
12 (2f) Jackson’s Entry
Edinburgh EH8 8PJ

Typeset in 11/15 Adobe Garamond by

Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire,
and printed and bound in Great Britain by
CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon CR0 4YY

A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978 1 4744 2139 3 (hardback)

ISBN 978 1 4744 2140 9 (webready PDF)
ISBN 978 1 4744 2141 6 (epub)

The right of Zeina G. Halabi to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in
accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 and the Copyright and
Related Rights Regulations 2003 (SI No. 2498).
 Contents

List of Figures vi

Series Editor’s Foreword vii

Note on Translation and Transliteration x

Acknowledgements xi

Preface xv

Introduction: In the Beginning was the Word 1

1 Requiem for the Enlightenment 38

2 Elegy for the Intellectual 65

3 The Banality of Exile 96

4 Ruins of Secular Nationalism 131

5 The Political Remains 155

Bibliography 171

Index 184
 Figures

Figure I.1 Mahmoud Darwish standing on Mount Nebo in Jordan

overlooking the West Bank in Simone Bitton’s Mahmoud
Darwich: As the Land is the Language (1997) 4
Figure I.2 Mahmoud Darwish standing on Mount Nebo in Jordan
overlooking the West Bank in Simone Bitton’s Mahmoud
Darwich: As the Land is the Language (1997) 5
Figure 3.1 E. S.’s friends discussing evolutionary urology in
a Nazareth café in Elia Suleiman’s Chronicle of a
Disappearance (1996) 120
Figure 3.2 E. S. attempting to deliver a lecture in Elia Suleiman’s
Chronicle of a Disappearance (1996) 121
Figure 3.3 E. S. listening to Crow reporting to One about the
raid on his home in Elia Suleiman’s Chronicle of a
Disappearance (1996) 123
 Series Editor’s Foreword

T he Edinburgh Studies in Modern Arabic Literature is a new and unique

series which will, it is hoped, fill in a glaring gap in scholarship in the
field of modern Arabic literature. Its dedication to Arabic literature in the
modern period, that is, from the nineteenth century onwards, is what makes
it unique among series undertaken by academic publishers in the English-
speaking world. Individual books on modern Arabic literature in general or
aspects of it have been and continue to be published sporadically. Series on
Islamic studies and Arab/Islamic thought and civilisation are not in short
supply either in the academic world, but these are far removed from the study
of Arabic literature qua literature, that is, imaginative, creative literature as
we understand the term when, for instance, we speak of English literature or
French literature, etc. Even series labelled ‘Arabic/Middle Eastern Literature’
make no period distinction, extending their purview from the sixth century
to the present, and often including non-Arabic literatures of the region. This
series aims to redress the situation by focusing on the Arabic literature and
criticism of today, stretching its interest to the earliest beginnings of Arab
modernity in the nineteenth century.
The need for such a dedicated series, and generally for the redoubling of
scholarly endeavour in researching and introducing modern Arabic literature
to the Western reader has never been stronger. The significant growth in the
last decades of the translation of contemporary Arab authors from all genres,
especially fiction, into English; the higher profile of Arabic literature interna-
tionally since the award of the Nobel Prize for Literature to Naguib Mahfouz
in 1988; the growing number of Arab authors living in the Western dias-
pora and writing both in English and Arabic; the adoption of such authors
and others by mainstream, high-circulation publishers, as opposed to the
 viii | the unmak i ng of the a r a b in te l l e ctua l

a­ cademic publishers of the past; the establishment of prestigious prizes, such

as the International Prize for Arabic Fiction (the Arabic Booker), run by the
Man Booker Foundation, which brings huge publicity to the shortlist and
winner every year, as well as translation contracts into English and other
languages – all this and very recently the events of the Arab Spring have
heightened public, let alone academic, interest in all things Arab, and not
least Arabic literature. It is therefore part of the ambition of this series that it
will increasingly address a wider reading public beyond its natural territory
of students and researchers in Arabic and world literature. Nor indeed is
the academic readership of the series expected to be confined to specialists
in literature in the light of the growing trend for interdisciplinarity, which
increasingly sees scholars crossing field boundaries in their research tools and
coming up with findings that equally cross discipline borders in their appeal.

With both the Arab national and cultural projects unrecognisably different
today from what they were at the late decades of the nineteenth century and
early ones of the twentieth (the nahda or awakening period) and with all
the metamorphoses that these interdependent projects have undergone from
that time to the present day, a reassessment of the role of the Arab intel-
lectual – the writer, the novelist, the poet, the filmmaker is overdue. From
the very beginning of the nahda, the Arab intellectual has borne the burden
of the educator, the moderniser, the connector between East and West, the
importer and adaptor of foreign thought and values, the very prophet of a
brave new world.
This essentially romantic perception of the role of the intellectual, whether
as self-perceived by the intellectuals themselves, or as projected on them by
society, was bound to be subverted by the multi-faceted disasters that befell
the Arab world since at least the second half of the twentieth century, i.e.
more or less since the end of colonialism. The failure of democracy, the dic-
tatorships that replaced the rule of imperial powers in the post-independence
era, the defeats in wars with Israel, the economic failure, the civil wars, and
more recently the fiasco of the Arab Spring – all this was inevitably to cause
the perception of the intellectual as prophet to implode, to become redun-
dant, ironic, a false prophecy.
This is what Zeina G. Halabi is attempting to explore in this study.
 seri es edi tor’s f orewo r d | ix

Chapter by chapter she juxtaposes authors and texts (and indeed films and
directors) from the past with others from the present to demonstrate the
conceptual change in the mission of the writer as prophet, bringing the dis-
cussion right up to the Arab Spring with its further implications for the role
of the intellectual.

Professor Rasheed El-Enany, Series Editor,

Emeritus Professor, University of Exeter;
Professor of Modern Arabic & Comparative Literature,
Doha Institute for Graduate Studies
 Note on Translation and Transliteration

I have followed the style and transliteration guidelines of the Chicago Manual
of Style (15th edn) and the International Journal of Middle Eastern Studies.
For Arab authors’ names, I have chosen the most commonly used translitera-
tion in English. I have transliterated the glottal stop ‫ ء‬as ʾ and the consonant
‫ ع‬as ʿ. Whereas my translation of poetry and the Quran includes all accents
on word endings (e.g. rabbikā alladhī khalaqā), my transliteration of prose
text includes only internal vowels (e.g. rabbik alladhī khalaq). I have indi-
cated either in the body of the text or in the notes when the translation is my
own.
 Acknowledgements

W hen I first came across Tarek Butayhi’s painting Waiting for Youssef
(2013), which now adorns the cover of this book, I was struck by
the man sitting on the low chair. His gaze and posture exude a troubled aura.
Staring straight at us, the character appears resilient yet disenchanted; disen-
chanted yet resilient. His presence evokes urgency, an injunction to reflect
on the crisis that he endures in silence. His face was all-too familiar: he is the
Syrian painter Youssef Abdelke. It is curious how Abdelke, whose oeuvre I do
not engage in this book, features so prominently on its cover. But the ambiva-
lence that this painting captures, at the intersection of generational deference
and dissent, speaks to this book on numerous levels.
To my mind, Abdelke’s generation of Syrian, Palestinian and Lebanese
intellectuals were all the protagonists of the story I saw unfolding in 1990s
Beirut. It was a time of disenchantment, as intellectuals reckoned with a set
of political posts-: the post-war Lebanese era of redefining militancy following
the devastation of the civil war and the post-Oslo moment of thinking of the
slippery notion of peace in Palestine and the remaining prospects for national
liberation. It was also the post-Gulf War juncture in which Arab intellectu-
als observed in shock the disintegration of a unified Arab position on Iraq.
Intellectuals were introspective and retrospective as they wrestled with the
very questions that would ultimately animate this book: What remains of the
legacy of the intellectual, when the theorised and anticipated future did not,
in fact, materialise? From that moment began a long chain of questions that
I was fortunate enough to explore in conversation with a host of thought-
provoking interlocutors.
This journey was enriched by the support and generosity of my friends
and family in Beirut. I thank Azza el-Zein, Michelle Obeid, Nisrine Mansour
 xii | the unma k i ng of the ar a b in te l l e ctua l

and Alya Karame for pointing to the end of the tunnel each time I was in
doubt; Samer Frangie for his overwhelmingly generous and rigorous feedback
on drafts and proposals; and Fadi A. Bardawil for his feedback, particularly
as I wrote the introduction. Khaled Saghieh’s own trajectory has inspired my
work in ways that I cannot describe here; I am indebted to his wisdom and
patience. I thank my family, Laila, Rania, Lana and Omar Halabi, for their
constant flow of love and support.
My mentors and colleagues at the University of Texas at Austin continued
to support my project even after I graduated. This book would not have been
possible without Mahmoud al-Batal and Kristen Brustad and the Arabic pro-
gramme they founded more than a decade ago. I hope to convey a semblance of
their passion in these pages. Tarek el-Ariss has been there since the first moment
I was intrigued by Arab intellectuals and their experience of loss in literature.
His advice, brilliance and own work on Arab literary modernity accompanied
me as I wrote this book. Yoav Di-Capua, the inimitable storyteller, grounded
my work in intellectual history and showed me how this book is a story waiting
to be told. His humour and rigour are what I hope to channel here. Since her
first smile across the classroom, Angela Giordani has read my work, pitched in
her vast knowledge of modern Arab thought, and has not ceased to embrace
me with love. I thank Benjamin Koerber, the humorous sajjāʿ, for helping
me render in English the rhymed prose that I analyse in Chapter 1, and Blake
Atwood for reading drafts upon proposals, making suggestions with eloquence
and care, always reminding me to keep track of the comparative thread.
At the University of North Carolina, I would like to thank the College of
Arts and Sciences for granting me a course release and the Research and Study
Assignment that allowed me to complete the book, as well as the UNC Junior
Faculty Development Award that funded the initial research. The University
Research Council’s Publication Grant was essential to the production of the
book. I am grateful to Nadia Yaqub for her feedback on my work and for cre-
ating the most favourable working environment for a junior faculty. I thank
Robin Visser for reminding me of all the ways in which my project is part of
a global narrative on the shifting sand on which intellectuals stand and for
her conviction that this book will see the light of day. I thank my colleagues
Dominique Fisher, Mark Driscoll, Sahar Amer and Gang Yue for their gener-
ous advice as I began preparing the manuscript for publication.
 a ck nowledg ements | xiii

At Duke, miriam cooke understood the stakes of this project from the
outset. Her support, comments and advice were invaluable. I thank Bruce
Lawrence, Erdağ Göknar, Helen Solterer, Ellen McLarney and Didem
Havlioglu for reading the manuscript and pointing to all the ways in which
the argument could shine.
My affiliation with the Freie Universität Berlin, the Center for Arab
and Middle Eastern Studies at the American University of Beirut, and the
Orient Institute in Beirut allowed me to reach out to a wide community
of scholars and have access to some of the most distinguished libraries and
archives. In 2012–13, the postdoctoral fellowship ‘Europe in the Middle
East – the Middle East in Europe’ at the Forum Transregional Studien in
Berlin gave me the opportunity to complete the book and engage an excep-
tional community of Arab scholars who may not have been able to col-
laborate otherwise. I have deep gratitude to Georges Khalil, who knows not
only how to gather a unique group of artists, humanists and social scientists
and make an intellectually stimulating programme happen, but also how
to continue conversations, even after the programme ends. I thank Hanan
Toukan for her generous feedback on proposals and drafts and Friederike
Pannewick for inviting me to present on the various stages of my work and
for editing with Georges Khalil a section of Chapter 3 that appeared as
‘The Day the Wandering Dreamer Became a Fida’i: Jabra Ibrahim Jabra and
the Fashioning of Political Commitment’, in Georges Khalil and Friederike
Pannewick (eds), Commitment and Beyond: Reflections on/of the Political in
Arabic Literature since the 1940s (Wiesbaden: Reichert, 2015), pp. 156–70,
reprinted with the permission of Reichert Verlag.
I thank Elias Khoury, first, for making available al-Mulhaq, the cultural
magazine that gave me a sense of political direction in 1990s Beirut; and second,
for reading my interpretation of his legacy, two decades later, and remaining an
extraordinary interlocutor. My deep gratitude goes to Michael Allan, Samira
Aghacy and Ken Seigneurie for their invaluable and thought-provoking com-
ments on the manuscript. I thank Muhsin al-Musawi for his support of this
project and for editing an earlier version of Chapter 2 that appeared in ‘The
Unbearable Heaviness of Being: The Suicide of the Intellectual in Rabiʿ Jābir’s
Rālf Rizqallāh through the Looking Glass’, Journal of Arabic Literature 44, no. 1
(2013), pp. 53–82. Reprinted by permission of Koninklijke Brill.
 xiv | the unmak i ng of the a r a b in te l l e ctua l

I would like to extend my gratitude to the editor of the series, Rasheed

el-Enany, for his enthusiasm and support for this project and Nicola Ramsey
and the editorial team for the remarkable work they have done. I am grateful
to Simone Bitton and Elia Suleiman for providing me with the stills from
their films and the permission to use them. Tarek Butayhi’s kind permission
to use his painting has bestowed the book with the mystique of the man sit-
ting on the low chair.
 Preface

At that moment, the future became your approaching past!

Mahmoud Darwish, In the Presence of Absence

I n ‘We, the Intellectuals’ (2013), the Palestinian artist Oraib Toukan reflects
on the intricate relationship between intellectuals and the politics of cul-
tural institutions in a post-2011 Arab world. She recounts an incident in
1997 when Mahmoud Darwish (1941–2008) read ‘In Ritsos’s Home’ to a
packed auditorium at the Royal Cultural Centre in Amman, Jordan.1 Upon
speaking the verses ‘O Palestine / name of the earth / and name of the heav-
ens / you shall prevail’, he was interrupted by a few zealous listeners, who
chanted thrice – perhaps not so spontaneously – ‘Long Live His Majesty King
Hussein the Great!’ Predicated on power and authoritarianism, the injunc-
tion to Jordanian nationalism reveals an orchestrated sabotage of Darwish’s
verse, one that sets the power of the king against the poet’s prophecy of
Palestinian emancipation. Toukan recalls:

Darwish simply cleared his throat with a firm ‘ahem’ and moved on to his
next verse. ‘In Pablo Neruda’s home, on the Pacific coast, I remembered
Yannis Ritsos’, he read. ‘I said: What is poetry? He said: It’s that mysteri-
ous event, it’s that inexplicable longing that makes a thing into a specter,
and makes a specter into a thing’. Flash-forward to now and a ‘Long Live
the King’ interruption today would certainly cause a writer to pack up,
leave, reject, refuse, and decline invitations from the institution thereafter.
There are simply more cultural institutions to choose from – more think-
ers, more artists, more spaces, more patrons, more of everything, really …
Moral authority has been democratized. Anyone can speak truth to power;
besides, power knows the truth.2
 xvi | the unmak i ng of the a r a b in te l l e ctua l

Toukan’s account of Darwish’s poetry reading enfolds three temporali-

ties, of which the past is the first. Before he began reciting ‘In Ritsos’s Home’,
Darwish briefly described the circumstances behind the poem. He had been
in Chile on a visit to Pablo Neruda’s (1904–73) ‘lavish’ home, when he
remembered the Greek dissident poet Yannis Ritsos’s (1909–90) ‘modest’
dwelling in Athens.3 Struck by the contrast between the living conditions of
the two poets, particularly the former’s proximity to power and the latter’s
alienation from it, Darwish poetically reconstitutes the trials of his friend
Ritsos, enfeebled by fascism and military rule and exiled at home. Darwish
relates past conversations with Ritsos about prisons, poetry and Palestine;
more precisely, about the future of prisons, poetry and Palestine. Back then,
the two poets, alienated and disenfranchised, anticipated a future in which
prisons have disappeared, oppression has ended and Palestine has prevailed.
The poet’s prophecy draws on the power of the word to achieve collective
salvation. He not only speaks truth to power but also speaks of emancipation
in the name of the displaced and the disenfranchised.
The second temporal layer is the future. The event that Toukan narrates
takes place in 1997, or in the wake of Darwish’s past conversation with
Ritsos. Toukan’s temporality – or the future of justice and emancipation
that both Darwish and Ritsos had impatiently anticipated – evokes cognitive
dissonance, for it mismatches the reality of Darwish as he stands interrupted
by the invocation of authoritarian forces. While Darwish reminisced about
his exchange with Ritsos, it was clear that Palestine – at least the Palestine
in Ritsos’s and Darwish’s past hopes – did not, in fact, prevail. By the time
Darwish stood reading his poem in the post-Oslo Accords era of the 1990s,
emancipation and justice had been reconsidered. The Palestinian political
and economic elite had returned to the West Bank and Gaza and fostered
a discourse of realpolitik, which ultimately pacified and bureaucratised the
Palestinian liberation struggle. In other words, Darwish’s poetry reading indi-
cated that the future that he and Ritsos had predicted never materialised. In
their hoped-for future, power co-opts dissidence twice over: feigning political
tolerance by inviting the Palestinian national poet while assigning chanters to
sing the praises of the monarch once the poet pronounces Palestine free (‘O
Palestine/ … / You shall prevail’). Here, the sabotaging of Darwish’s verse at
the Royal Cultural Centre reveals his prophecy’s predicament.
 pref ace | xvii

Toukan speaks from the future of Darwish’s past exchange with Ritsos.
We are in 2013, years after Darwish was hosted at the Royal Cultural Center.
Toukan’s contemporary world abounds with bloody uprisings, military
coups, and intellectuals not uncomfortable around centres of power. As they
are connected in cultural institutions that contribute to the construction and
dissemination of truth, intellectuals materialise in their capacity of ‘agents
of regimes of truth’, of mediators of ideology and their enactment.4 It is a
contemporary juncture in which ‘moral authority has been democratized’,
as Toukan observes, where legitimacy is no longer the prerogative of the
prophet-poet as the sole representative of the national cause.5 Visual artists,
activists, filmmakers, curators, graffiti artists and other cultural actors assume
that role and speak for a cause, unbound by national, linguistic or generic
boundaries. More significantly, Toukan’s contemporary moment, which is
also the future of Ritsos’s and Darwish’s prophecy, has proven that speaking
truth to power is no longer prized as an act of courage, simply because ‘power
knows the truth’, having heard it all before.6 If scandals of leaked diplomatic
documents, torture, abuse and state-orchestrated war crimes have shown us
anything, it is that even when power has been exposed, scandalised and
shamed, it is still unyielding.
The incident of Darwish’s poetry reading is nestled between a past of
prophecies, a present in which they have not materialised, and a future that
has not come. As Toukan recalls Darwish recalling, in turn, his prophecy of
national and poetic emancipation, she brings multiple realities to the fore. She
invokes Darwish’s past embodiment of political commitment in poetry and
juxtaposes it with a post-Oslo conjuncture that domesticated and neutralised
radical politics, which has engendered a temporality of stalled uprisings and
aborted revolutions. Toukan thus confronts Darwish’s past – significantly, his
prophetic past – with her present as she witnesses the receding of ideologies
of emancipation, particularly as they manifest in cultural politics. Toukan’s
sensibility stems from the cognitive dissonance of observing the power of
the intellectual’s prophecy and tracing its demise. It begins by discerning, as
David Scott words it, ‘the temporal disjunctures involved in living on in the
wake of past political time, amid the ruins, specifically, of postsocialist and
postcolonial futures past’.7
Toukan movingly captures in this short passage a contemporary
 xviii | the unmak i ng of the a r a b inte l l e ctua l

­ isenchantment with the afterlife of the Arab intellectual’s prophecy. In

d
Toukan’s contemporary juncture – the future of the intellectual’s prophetic
past – the intellectual-prophet can barely say anything new about prisons,
poetry and Palestine, for it all has already been said. More significantly,
hers is a present temporality that reveals how the intellectual’s prophecy has
become futile, replaceable and redundant for ‘there are simply more cultural
institutions to choose from – more thinkers, more artists, more spaces, more
patrons, more of everything, really’.8 As she demystifies the intellectual’s
authority to speak truth to power in the name of a stateless people, Toukan
gestures to Foucault’s refiguring of the intellectual’s contemporary role. ‘The
intellectual discovered,’ Foucault writes, ‘that the masses no longer need him
to gain knowledge: they know perfectly well, without illusion; they know
far better than he and they are certainly capable of expressing themselves’.9
No longer the lone voice speaking truth to power, the prophetic intellectual
that Toukan portrays carries tragically the burden of his aborted prophecy,
stranded in a dystopic present, unable to move to the future. Intertwined
and enmeshed, the prophetic past, the dystopic present and the stalled future
are temporalities that operate as a reminder of the intellectual’s interrupted
journey toward emancipation.
Darwish’s own words on the power of poetry are pertinent in this context.
He identifies poetry as ‘that inexplicable longing that makes a thing into a
specter, and makes a specter into a thing’.10 Akin to his poetry, Darwish is the
inexplicable spectral prophecy that hovers over Toukan’s contemporary text,
just as Ritsos hovered over Darwish’s poem in 1997. In Toukan’s description
of the scene, the intellectual is elevated to the realm of the abstract, and then
turned into a thing, an objectified figure that inhabits poetry, prose, Palestine
and everything in between. And yet, he appears at the poetry reading as a
remainder of his past self, emblematising the aspirations, contradictions and
predicament of the Arab intellectual-prophet. In this context of consecutive
disenchantments and the cycle of objectification and demystification, what
remains, then, of the Arab intellectual’s prophecy that Darwish channelled so
well? Oraib Toukan’s layered depiction of Darwish, first as Ritsos’s prophetic
interlocutor and later as an interrupted speaker, evokes a discursive dissent
that I map in post-1990s literature depicting intellectuals.
 pref a ce | xix

Notes
1. Entitled ‘Ka-Haditha Ghamida’, the poem appeared in Mahmoud Darwish, La
Taʿtadhir ʿAmma Faʿalt. My translation from the original Arabic.
2. Toukan, ‘ “We, the Intellectuals” ’.
3. Darwish, ‘Fi Bayt Ristus’.
4. Foucault, ‘The Political Function of the Intellectual’, p. 207.
5. Toukan, ‘ “We, the Intellectuals” ’.
6. Ibid.
7. Original emphasis. Scott, Omens of Adversity, p. 2.
8. Toukan, ‘ “We, the Intellectuals” ’.
9. Foucault and Deleuze, ‘Intellectuals and Power’, p. 207.
10. Darwish, ‘In Pablo Neruda’s Home’, p. 308.
 Introduction:
In the Beginning was the Word

So ascend with your people, higher and farther than what the myths have
prepared for you and me. Write, yourself, the history of your heart, from
the moment Adam was struck with love, until the resurrection of your
people.
Mahmoud Darwish, In the Presence of Absence

I n The Unmaking of the Arab Intellectual, I identify the 1990s as a critical his-
torical juncture following which writers began displacing the figure of the
intellectual-prophet that had governed Arabic literature in the modern era. If
the end of the Cold War engendered collective scepticism over the viability of
Marxism, the end of the Gulf War and the dismemberment of the Palestinian
resistance indicated the demise of a unified pan-Arab position toward Iraq
and the question of Palestine. Writers experienced these profound transfor-
mations, in the context of the collapse of the secular nation-state – exempli-
fied by the violent sectarianism of the Lebanese civil war (1975–90) – as
the last instalment in a series of consecutive political defeats that had begun
in the early 1960s and culminated in the 1967 war. More significantly, the
dislocation of the nationalist, socialist and pan-Arab ideological paradigms,
which had framed literary and intellectual discourse in the twentieth century,
transformed the ways in which writers conceived of the intellectual as both
the carrier and embodiment of a prophecy of teleological change and pro-
gress. As those paradigms that provided ideological underpinning for eman-
cipation receded, the time came to rethink what constitutes the political in
the contemporary era.
The dissent I identify in contemporary literature begins by constructing
an effigy of the prophetic intellectual that Mahmoud Darwish personified so
 2 | the unmak i ng of the a r a b in te l l e ctua l

well, an effigy that carefully elevates him as the embodiment of emancipation

ideologies and subsequently points to the limits of his discourse. Almost iden-
tical to that which it aims to parody, the effigy is then voided of its signifiers.
But burning, in this sense, is not an act of rupture, erasure and silencing, but
rather an act of exorcism, of unmaking. It probes the loss of the prophecy and
declares the end of an era. It is a séance in which intellectual ghosts are sum-
moned and later asked to leave. I show how, as contemporary Arab writers
reflect on the ideological transformations of the intellectual, they are critical
yet reverent. They evoke the power of his iconography, yet point to its limits;
they channel its romantic undertones, yet delight in cynicism. In sum, they
remind us of the future of his prophecy and reconstruct its demise. The liter-
ary deconstruction of the Arab intellectual’s prophecy has implications on
what the intellectuals say, on how they say it and in whose name.
Crossing generational, linguistic and generic thresholds, the works of
the Lebanese novelists Rabee Jaber (Rabīʿ Jābir; b. 1972), Rashid al-Daif
(Rashīd al-¤aʿīf; b. 1945) and Rawi Hage (b. 1964); the Saudi novelist Seba
al-Herz (Íibā al-Óirz; b. 1983); and the Palestinian cineaste Elia Suleiman
(b. 1960) exemplify this aesthetic and political turn. Although identifying
with different historical generations and espousing distinct aesthetic sensibili-
ties, these authors participated in a dialectical appropriation of the archetype
of the Arab prophetic intellectual by engaging the legacy of forebears like
Jurji Zaidan (1861–1914), Jabra Ibrahim Jabra (1919–94), Edward Said
(1935–2003) and Mahmoud Darwish and simultaneously pointing to their
faltering power. As they embrace a self-reflexive, nonsecular and affective
mode of criticism, these writers reject the objectification and the ideological
codification of the intellectual and ultimately question the viability of the
modernist principles associated with the archetype’s construction. In fiction-
alising and subsequently burning an effigy of the modern, secular, nationalist
and exilic intellectual, they elicit a counter-discourse of criticism that ques-
tions intellectuals as knowledge producers and disseminators. This book will
reveal how notions pertaining to the intellectual-prophet as a modernising
subject, political commitment as a literary ethos, exile as a catalyst for change,
and nationalism and secularism as ideologies of emancipation have lost their
critical vigour and become symptomatic of a defunct political discourse and,
in turn, the locus of dissent. Espousing a distinct conception of what con-
 i ntroducti on | 3

stitutes the political, contemporary authors relocated their critique from an

explicit logocentric, teleological, secular-nationalist discourse to one that is
anachronistic, transnational, nonsecular and latently affective that predicates
the political on the personal. It is significant inasmuch as it invites us to con-
ceptualise that which we call ‘the contemporary’.
In The Unmaking of the Arab Intellectual, I thus make the hitherto opaque
conjuncture of the 1990s legible by highlighting the political critique inher-
ent in a presumed post-political aesthetic moment. Specifically, I counter
the available critical corpus that reads late-twentieth-century Arabic litera-
ture as an apolitical and fragmented discourse insofar as it transgresses the
ethos of political commitment, iltizām, and the archetype of the modernist
intellectual that channels it. I show how, as contemporary writers lost their
precursors’ faith in the secular modern nation-state, rational political action
and the Arab subject that emerged out of these structures, they articulated a
new vision of a political collectivity and subjectivity – one on which I draw to
theorise the uncharted field of contemporary Arabic literature.
I see this book as an examination of the remainder of the postcolonial
moment and a return to the legacy of the Arab intellectual-prophet as the
embodiment of emancipation ethos. I do not aim to generate a historiogra-
phy or a literary inventory of the different and consecutive representations
of the intellectual since the 1990s. Neither do I aim to restate the now-tired
condemnation of the apolitical nature of contemporary Arabic literature, and
much less to declare the political over and expired. Rather, I suggest that the
contemporary invites us to engage in a practice of criticism that is inherently
retrospective and evaluative, putting into question the very foundation of
what constitutes the modern Arab intellectual legacy. I suggest a methodol-
ogy that ultimately generates a politics of reading that locates the political in
contemporary Arabic literature.

The Making of the Intellectual-prophet

Simone Bitton (b. 1955) opens her documentary Mahmoud Darwich: As the
Land is the Language (1997) with a long drive down a desert road. A man is
captured in high angle as he contemplates the overwhelmingly barren land-
scape. The narrator wonders:
 6 | the unmak i ng of the a r a b in te l l e ctua l

poet-prophet, who shall carry it to the Promised Land of the future. Bitton,
however, sabotages the narrative of Zionism, for the land in question is not
Israel, but Palestine; the chosen people are not the Jews, but the Palestinians;
the messenger of truth is not a prophet, but a poet; indeed, the prophet is not
Moses, but Mahmoud Darwish. As the poet-prophet of today’s wandering
people, Darwish comments on the significance of standing on the prophetic
site:

The dialogue I have with myself here is a dialogue with the absent part of
me. I see Absence so closely that I can touch it. I can embrace it or reject
it, as if I were there. As if my spectre [shabaªī] here addresses my essence
[jawharī] there.3

Standing on Mount Nebo overlooking Ramallah, Jerusalem and Jericho,

which are in his field of vision yet outside his reach, the poet-prophet describes
the poetics of fracture that exile engenders. Exile, as Muhsin J. al-Musawi
describes it, ‘turns the speaker into a damaged creature and transforms home-
land into a site of silence and death.’4 As the proverbial exilic space brings him
close to that which is near yet unreachable, Mount Nebo invites Darwish on
a self-reflexive commentary on the state of existing in absence, on his uproot-
edness from home. Exilic absence, for Darwish, splits the self into binaries
along here/there and embrace/rejection. Most importantly, absence leads to
the dichotomous representation of the exilic spectre in contrast to a rooted
essence (shabaª v. jawhar).
This scene is perhaps one of the most revealing portraits of Mahmoud
Darwish. Invoking the prophetic iconography that colours Darwish’s poetry,
it evokes notions of displacement, absence, and the privilege of representa-
tion, about who speaks for the wandering people and in what ways. As it
dialectically reconstructs exile, this opening scene portrays the mythical yet
tragic journey of the poet-prophet, the question of temporality, and the dif-
ferent conceptions of time that frame the experience of exile. Palestine is thus
revealed across three successive temporalities: it is historical inasmuch as it is
embedded in biblical tradition and historical memory; it is a present signi-
fier of displacement and loss; it is ultimately projected into the future by the
spectrality of the exilic poet-prophet. The scene is thus about the intertwine-
ment of the lyrical and the political, the personal and the collective, and the
 i ntroducti on | 7

spectral and the messianic, all of which set the parameters of the prophetic
intellectual.
But here is where the enmeshment of the poet-prophet, Palestine and
the manifold sense of temporalities take on a metanarrative dimension. We
watch Bitton representing Darwish as he represents the Palestinians in 1997
from the vantage point of a contemporary moment of coups, revolutions and
civil wars that have taken their toll on the intellectual that Darwish evoked
so well. As such, in the wake of all the horrors they have witnessed, viewers
face the incongruity of two fields of meaning: the mythical-utopism of the
exilic intellectual-prophet that Bitton channels on the one hand, and the
materiality of the intellectual’s positioning in relation to power, which Oraib
Toukan reveals in her depiction of Darwish, on the other. The visual and
allegorical incongruity of these distinct representations of the intellectual-
prophet ushers in the questions that animate this book: how has the motif of
the intellectual – coded theologically and teleologically – been reconfigured
in contemporary literature? What can it tell us about the afterlife of the
intellectual? I ask, specifically, what does the contemporary representation
of the Arab intellectual reveal about the ways in which writers understand
both their past and present temporality? Answering these questions begins
by laying out the aesthetic and epistemic contours of the Arab intellectual,
specifically those revealed by Bitton’s scene.
The question of what exactly constitutes the intellectual has long ani-
mated the field of political sociology. Points of contention between the dif-
ferent typologies of the intellectual revolve around the material conditions
that mould intellectuals and their consciousness. The first of these questions
is whether intellectuals form a distinct social class; and the second is whether
intellectuals can, in fact, transcend their class of origins. Between Julian Benda
and Antonio Gramsci lies an entire critical corpus that puts forward distinct
typologies that are particularly pertinent to the contemporary era. They take
into account post-Marxist readings of notions of class and class formation;
post-capitalist visions of global actors; and a post-statist reading of history.5
Other approaches examine the ways in which intellectuals battle with onto-
logical questions about what it means to exist in a postcolonial Arab world6
and how to create a field of meaning for others by processes of translation,7
adaptation and speaking back to loci of power. Such approaches build on
 8 | the unmak i ng of the a r a b in te l l e ctua l

previous calls by Michel Foucault and Pierre Bourdieu to examine the intel-
lectuals’ self-fashioning and the ways in which they are interpellated by struc-
tures of power, including those of the cultural field itself.8 Foregrounding the
self-fashioning of the intellectual, Edward Said deplores the lack of attention
to ‘the image, the signature, the actual intervention, and performance, all of
which taken together constitute the very lifeblood of every real intellectual.’9
In dialogue with these aforementioned approaches, I examine the liter-
ary afterlives of the Arab intellectual by engaging modes of self-fashioning,
(self-) representation, and performativity at specific historical junctures. The
questions that I ask here and in the following chapters are concerned with the
ways in which contemporary Arab writers, emblematic of different literary
and historical generations, have conceived and represented the archetype of
the intellectual since the 1990s. It is important to begin by showing precisely
the dominant tropes that had framed the literary depiction of intellectuals
and that contemporary writers have subsequently undone, deconstructed and
transcended. I begin by exploring a series of interrelated questions: what is
at the core of the intellectuals’ prophecy? How do they articulate it? And
in whose name? Here, I turn again to Darwish as the quintessential poet-
prophet who reflected on and simultaneously embodied these questions.
Mahmoud Darwish’s prolific poetic project was one of national emanci-
pation, indeed, but also one that carried a humanist and universal outlook on
the questions of alienation, displacement and exile. He spoke of his challenge
to transcend the local and specific and engage a poetics of the absolute. It
was his way to ‘inscribe the national on the universal,’ as he writes, ‘so that
Palestine does not limit itself to Palestine, but that it may found its aesthetic
legitimacy in a vaster human space.’10 His was a project of universalising the
particular by making legible the Palestinian question as a human narrative
of displacement, and particularising the universal by tracing the yield of a
universal humanist discourse of emancipation on the Palestinian tragedy. As
such, Darwish carried in his project the ethos that the Arab Enlightenment
legacy bequeathed to his generation.
The nineteenth-century Arab Enlightenment era, known as the nah∂a,
invited Arab intellectuals to reflect on methodological and conceptual
approaches by which they could reconcile acquired Western epistemologies
with those drawn from Arab and Islamic heritage. The age of the nah∂a pre-
Another random document with
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but the claims of that revelation, for proclaiming which he was now a
prisoner. So admirably did he conduct his whole plea, both for
himself and the cause of Christ, that in spite of the sneer of Festus,
Agrippa paid him the very highest compliment in his power, and
pronounced him to be utterly guiltless of the charges. No part of this
plea and its attendant discussions, needs to be recapitulated; but a
single characteristic of Paul, which is most strikingly evinced,
deserves especial notice. This is his profound regard for all the
established forms of polite address. He is not satisfied with a mere
respectful behavior towards his judges, but even distinguishes
himself by a minute observance of all the customary phrases of
politeness; nor does he suffer his courtly manner to be disturbed,
even by the abrupt remark of Festus, accusing him of frenzy. In his
reply, he styles his accuser “Most noble;” and yet every reader of
Jewish history knows, and Paul knew, that this Festus, to whom he
gave this honorable title, was one of the very wicked men of those
wicked times. The instance shows then, that those who, from
religious scruples, refuse to give the titles of established respect to
those who are elevated in station, and reject all forms of genteel
address, on the same ground, have certainly constructed their
system of practical religion on a model wholly different from that by
which the apostle’s demeanor was guided; and the whole impression
made on a common reader, by Luke’s clear statement of Paul’s
behavior before the most dignified and splendid audience that he
ever addressed, must be, that he was complete in all the forms and
observances of polite intercourse; and he must be considered, both
according to the high standard of his refined and dignified hearers,
and also by the universal standard of the refined of all ages,――not
only a finished, eloquent orator, but a person of polished manners,
delicate tact, ready compliment, and graceful, courtly address:――in
short, a perfect gentleman.

voyage to rome.

As Paul, however, had previously appealed to Caesar, his case

was already removed from any inferior jurisdiction, and his hearing
before Agrippa was intended only to gratify the king himself, and to
cause the particulars of his complicated case to be more fully drawn
out before his royal hearer, who was so accomplished in Hebrew
law, that his opinion was very naturally desired by Festus; for, as the
governor himself confessed, the technicalities and abstruse points
involved in the charge, were altogether beyond the comprehension
of a Roman judge, with a mere heathen education. The object,
therefore, of obtaining a full statement of particulars, to be presented
to his most august majesty, the emperor, being completely
accomplished by this hearing of Paul before Agrippa,――there was
now nothing to delay the reference of the case to Nero; and Paul
was therefore consigned, along with other prisoners of state, to the
care of a Roman officer, Julius, a centurion of the Augustan cohort.
Taking passage at Caesarea, in an Adramyttian vessel, Julius sailed
with his important charge from the shores of Palestine, late in the
year 60. Following the usual cautious course of all ancient
navigators,――along the shores, and from island to island, venturing
across the open sea only with the fairest winds,――the vessel which
bore the apostle on his first voyage to Italy, coasted along by Syria
and Asia Minor. Of those Christian associates who accompanied
Paul, none are known except Timothy, Luke, his graphically accurate
historian, and Aristarchus of Thessalonica, the apostle’s long-known
companion in travel. These, of course, were a source of great
enjoyment to Paul on this tedious voyage, surrounded, as he was,
otherwise, by strangers and heathen, by most of whom he must
have been regarded in the light of a mere criminal, held in bonds for
trial. He was, however, very fortunate in the character of the
centurion to whose keeping he was entrusted, as is shown in more
than one incident related by Luke. After one day’s sail, the vessel
touching at Sidon, Julius here politely gave Paul permission to visit
his Christian friends in that place,――thus conferring a great favor,
both on the apostle and on the church of Sidon. Leaving this place,
their course was next along the coast of Syria, and then eastwards,
along the southern shore of Asia Minor, keeping in the Cilician strait
between that province and the great island of Cyprus, on account of
the violence of the southwesters. Coasting along by Pamphylia and
Lycia, they next touched at Myra, a city in the latter province, where
they were obliged to take passage in another vessel, bound from
Alexandria to Italy. In this vessel, they also kept close to the coast,
their course being still retarded by head winds, until they reached
Cnidus, the farthest southeastern point of Asia Minor, and thence
stretched across the Carpathian sea, to Crete, approaching it first at
Cape Salmone, the most eastern point at the island, and then
passing on to a place called “the Fair Haven,” near Lasea, probably
one of the hundred cities of Crete, but mentioned in no other ancient
writer. At this place, Paul, whose experience in former voyages was
already considerable, having been twice ship-wrecked, had sagacity
enough to see that any further navigation that season would be
dangerous; for it was now the beginning of October, and the most
dreadful tempests might be reasonably expected on the wintry sea,
before they could reach the Italian coast. He warned the centurion
accordingly, of the peril to which all their lives were exposed; but the
owner and commander of the vessel, anxious to find a better place
for wintering than this, persuaded Julius to risk the passage to the
south side of the island, when they might find, in the port of Phoenix,
a more convenient winter harbor. So, after the south wind had nearly
died away, they attempted to take advantage of this apparent lull,
and work their way, close to the shore along the south side of Crete;
but presently they were caught by a tremendous Levanter, which
carried them with great velocity away to the west, to the island of
Clauda, which lies south of the west end of Crete. Here the danger
of the ship’s breaking in pieces was so great, that having with much
ado overhauled their boat, they undergirded the ship with cables, to
keep it together,――a measure not unknown in modern navigation.
Finding that they were in much danger of grounding among the
quicksands on the coast of the island, they were glad to stand out to
sea; and taking in all sail, scudded under bare poles for fourteen
days, during a great part of which time, they saw neither sun, moon
nor stars, the whole sky being constantly overcast with clouds, so
that they knew nothing of their position. The wind of course carried
them directly west, over what was then called the sea of
Adria,――not what is now called the Adriatic gulf, but that part of the
Mediterranean, which lies between Greece, Italy and Africa. In their
desperation, the passengers threw over their own baggage, to
lighten the ship; and they began to lose all hope of being saved from
shipwreck. Paul, however, encouraged them by the narration of a
dream, in which God had revealed to him that every one of them
should escape; and they still kept their hopes alive to the fourteenth
night, when the sailors, thinking that the long western course must
have brought them near Sicily, or the main-land of Italy, which lay not
far out of this direction, began to heave the lead, that they might
avoid the shore; and at the first sounding, found but twenty fathoms,
and at the next fifteen. Of course, the peril of grounding was
imminent, and they therefore cast anchor, and waited for day.
Knowing that they were now near some shore, the sailors
determined to provide for their own safety, and accordingly
undertook to let down the boat, to make their escape, and leave the
passengers to provide for themselves. But Paul represented to the
centurion the certainty of their destruction, if the ship should be left
without any seamen to manage it; and the soldiers of the prisoners’
guard, determined not to be thus deserted, though they should all
sink together, cut off the ropes by which the boat was held, and let it
fell off. All being thus inevitably committed to one doom, Paul
exhorted them to take food, and thus strengthen themselves for the
effort to reach the shore. They did so accordingly, and then, as a last
resort, flung out the wheat with which the ship was loaded, and at
day-break, when land appeared, seeing a small creek, they made an
effort to run the ship into it, weighing anchor and hoisting the
mainsail; but knowing nothing of the ground, soon struck, and the
overstrained ship was immediately broken by the waves, the bows
being fast in the sandbank, while the stern was heaved by every
surge. The soldiers, thinking first of their weighty charge, for whose
escape they were to answer with their lives, advised to kill them all,
lest they should swim ashore. But the more humane centurion
forbade it, and gave directions that every man should provide for his
own safety. They did so; and those that could not swim, clinging to
the fragments of the wreck, the whole two hundred and seventy-six
who were in the vessel, got safe to land.
 “‘When sailing was now dangerous, because the fast was already past.’ verse 9. There
is no question but that this is the great fast of expiation, Leviticus xvi. 29, the description of
which we have in Isaiah lviii. under the name of a sabbath, verse 13. The precise time of
this sabbatic fast is on the tenth day of the seventh month, Tizri, which falls on the same
time very nearly with our September, the first day of Tizri on the seventh of that, and so the
10th of Tizri on the 16th of September, that is, thirteen days before our Michaelmas. This
being premised, the apostle’s reasoning becomes clear; for it is precisely the same as
though he should have said, because it was past the twentieth (the day Scaliger sets for the
solemnization of the fast,) of September; it being observed by all sailors, that for some
weeks before and after Michaelmas, there are on the sea sudden and frequent storms,
(probably the equinoctial,) which have in modern times received the name of Michaelmas
flaws, and must of course make sailing dangerous. Hesiod himself tells us, that at the going
down of Pleiades, which was at the end of autumn, navigation was hazardous.” (Williams.)

“Undergirding the ship.’ verse 17. We learn from various passages in the Greek and
Roman writers, that the ancients had recourse to this expedient, in order to save the ship
from imminent danger; and this method has been used in modern times. The process of
undergirding a ship is thus performed:――a stout cable is slipped under the vessel at the
prow, which can be conducted to any part of the ship’s keel, and then fasten the two ends
on the deck, to keep the planks from starting. An instance of this kind is mentioned in ‘Lord
Anson’s Voyage round the World.’ Speaking of a Spanish man-of-war in a storm, the writer
says, ‘They were obliged to throw overboard all their upper-deck guns, and take six turns of
the cable round the ship, to prevent her opening.’ (p. 24, 4to. edition.) Bp. Pearce and Dr.
Clarke, on Acts xxvii. 17. Two instances of undergirding the ship are noticed in the
‘Chevalier de Johnstone’s Memoirs of the Rebellion in 1745‒6, London, 1822, 8vo. pp. 421,
454.” (Williams’s notes on Pearson, p. 85.)
 They now found that they had struck on the island of Melita, (now
Malta,) which lies just south of Sicily, in the direct track in which the
eastern gale must have blown them. The uncivilized inhabitants of
this desolate spot received the shipwrecked voyagers with the
kindest attention, and very considerately kindled a fire, to warm and
dry them, after their long soaking in cold water. The dripping apostle
took hold with the rest to make the fire blaze up, and gathered a
bundle of dry sticks, for the purpose; but with them he unconsciously
gathered a viper, which was sheltering itself among them from the
cold, and roused by the heat of the fire, now crept out upon his hand.
He, of course, as any other man would, gave a jerk, and shook it off,
as soon as he saw it,――a very natural occurrence; but the
superstitious barbarians thought this a perfect miracle, as they had
before foolishly considered it a token of divine wrath; and having
looked on him as an object of horror, and a wicked criminal, they
now, with equal sense, adored him as a God.

Another incident of more truly miraculous character, occurred to

Paul soon after, in the part of the island on which they were wrecked,
which had the effect of gaining him a much more solid fame. The
father of Publius, the Roman officer who governed the island, as the
deputy of the praetor of Sicily, was at that time very sick of the
dysentery; and Paul, going to see him, laid his hands on him and
prayed,――thus effecting a complete recovery. This being known,
other diseased persons were presented as the subjects of Paul’s
miraculous powers, and the same cures following his words, he with
his associates soon became the objects of a far more rational
reverence than had been excited by the deliverance from the viper.
The reverence too, was extended beyond mere empty honor. The
shipwrecked apostolic company having lost all their baggage and
provisions, were abundantly provided with everything that they
needed, by the grateful contributions of the islanders;――and when,
after a stay of three months, Paul and his companions departed,
they were loaded with things necessary for the voyage.
 PUTEOLI. Acts xxviii. 13, 14.

Sailing, on the return of spring, in another Alexandrine vessel, of

the same very common name borne by that in which they were
shipwrecked, they came next to Syracuse, on the east side of the
island of Sicily, and after a stay of three days, turned through the
Sicilian strait to Rhegium, on the main-land directly opposite the
island. There Paul first saw the soil of Italy, but did not leave the
vessel for his land journey, till they came, with a fresh south wind, to
Puteoli, a port in the bay of Naples. Here they found Christians, who
invited them to rest among them for a week; after which they
journeyed along the coast, on the noble road of Pozzuoli and Baiae,
for about a hundred miles, to Appius’s Forum, a village about
eighteen miles from Rome. At this place, they were met by a number
of brethren from the church of Rome; and having journeyed along
the Appian way, to the Three Taverns,――a little stopping place a
few miles from the city,――they were received by still another
deputation of Roman Christians, come out to greet the great apostle,
whose name had long been known among them, and whose
counsels and revelations they had already enjoyed by his writings.
This noble testimony of the esteem in which they held him, was a
most joyful assurance to Paul, that, even on this foreign shore, a
stranger and a prisoner, he had many near and dear friends; and his
noble spirit, before probably depressed and melancholy, in the dark
prospect of his approach to the awful seat of that remorseless
imperial power that was to decide his doom, now rose to feelings of
exultation and gratitude. Entering the vast imperial city, the prisoners
were remanded by the centurion to the custody of Burrhus, the noble
and influential praefect of the praetorian guard, who was, ex-officio,
the keeper of all prisoners of state, brought from the provinces to
Rome. Burrhus however, was as kind and accommodating to Paul as
Julius had been, and allowed him to live by himself in a private
house, with only a soldier as an attendant guard.

After three days, Paul invited to his lodgings the chief men of the
Jewish faith, in Rome, and made known to them the circumstances
under which he had been sent thither, and his present relations to
the heads of their religion in Jerusalem. In reply, they merely stated
that they had received no formal communications respecting him,
from Jerusalem, nor had those of their brethren who had arrived
from Judea spoken ill of him. They expressed also a great desire to
hear from him the peculiar doctrine, for entertaining which he had
been thus denounced, of which they professed to know nothing, but
that there was a universal prejudice against it. A day was accordingly
appointed for a full conference on these very important
subjects,――and at the set time, Paul, with no small willingness,
discoursed at great length on his views of the accomplishment of all
the ancient prophecies respecting the Messiah, in the life and death
of Jesus of Nazareth. His hearers were very much divided in opinion
about these points, after his discourse was over,――some believing
and some disbelieving. Leaving them to meditate on what he had
said, Paul dismissed them with a warning quotation from Isaiah,
against their prejudices, and sternly reminded them, that though they
did reject the truth, the waiting Gentiles were prepared to embrace it,
and should receive the word of God immediately. They then left him,
and made his words a subject of much discussion among
themselves; but the results are unrecorded. Paul having hired a
house in Rome, made that city the scene of his active labors for two
whole years, receiving all that called to inquire into religious truth,
and proclaiming the doctrines of Christianity with the most
unhesitating boldness and freedom; and no man in Rome could
molest him in making known his belief to as many as chose to hear
him; for it was not till many years after, that the Christians were
denounced and persecuted by Nero.

his epistles written from rome.

With these facts the noble narrative of Luke ceases entirely, and
henceforth no means are left of ascertaining the events of Paul’s life,
except in those incidental allusions which his subsequent writings
make to his circumstances. Those epistles which are certainly known
and universally agreed to have been written from Rome during this
imprisonment, are those to the Philippians, the Ephesians, the
Colossians, and to Philemon. There are passages in all these which
imply that he was then near the close of his imprisonment, for he
speaks with great confidence of being able to visit them shortly, and
very particularly requests preparation to be made for his
accommodation on his arrival.

There is good reason to think that the epistles to the Ephesians, to

the Colossians, and to Philemon, were written about the same time
and were sent together. This appears from the fact, that Tychicus is
spoken of in both the two former, as sent by the apostle, to make
known to them all his circumstances more fully, and is also implied
as the bearer of both, while Onesimus, the bearer of the latter, is
also mentioned in the epistle to the Colossians as accompanying
Tychicus.

the epistle to the ephesians.

The most important question which has been raised concerning

this epistle, regards the point, whether it was truly directed and sent
by Paul, to the church in Ephesus, as the common reading distinctly
specifies. Many eminent modern critics have maintained that it was
originally sent to the church in Laodicea, and that the word Ephesus,
in the direction and in the first verse, is a change made in later times,
by those who felt interested to claim for this city the honor of an
apostolic epistle. Others incline to the opinion, that it was directed to
no particular church, but was sent as a circular to several churches
in Asia Minor, among which were those of Ephesus and Laodicea,
and that several copies were sent at the same time, each copy being
differently directed. They suppose that when the epistles of Paul
were first collected, that copy which was sent to Ephesus was the
one adopted for this, and that the original manuscript being soon
lost, all written trace of its original general direction disappeared
also.

The prominent reason for this remarkable supposition,

unsupported as it is by the authority of any ancient manuscript, is
that Paul writes apparently with no local reference whatever to the
circumstances of the Ephesians, among whom he had lived for three
years, although his other epistles to places which he had visited are
so full of personal and local matters; and that he speaks on the
contrary as though he knew little of them except by hearsay. A
reference to the particular details of the reasoning by which this
opinion is supported, would altogether transcend the proper limits of
this work; since even a summary of them fills a great many pages of
those critical and exegetical works, to which these discussions
properly belong; and all which can be stated here is the general
result, that a great weight of authority favors the view that this was
probably a circular epistle; but the whole argument in favor of either
notion, rests on so slight a foundation, that it is not worth while to
disturb the common impression for it.

The epistle certainly does not seem to dwell on any local

difficulties, but enlarges eloquently upon general topics, showing the
holy watchfulness of the apostle over the faith of his readers. He
appears, nevertheless, to emphasize with remarkable force, the
doctrines that Christ alone was the source and means of salvation,
“the chief corner-stone,” and that in him all are united, both Jews and
Gentiles, in one holy temple. There is something in many such
passages, with which the epistle abounds, that seems peculiarly well
fitted to the circumstances of mixed communities, made up of Jews
and Gentiles, and as if the apostle wished to prevent the former from
creating any distinctions in the church, in their own favor. Many
passages in this epistle also, are very pointedly opposed to those
heresies, which about that period were beginning to rise up in those
regions, and were afterwards famous under the name of the
Gnosis,――the first distinct sect that is known to have perverted the
purity of Christian truth. Paul here aims with remarkable energy, to
prove that salvation was to be attributed to Christ alone, and not to
the intervention of any other superior beings, by whatever names
they are called, whether principalities, or powers, or might or
dominion, both in this world and the world to come,――in heavenly
places as well as earthly. The apostle also is very full in the moral
and practical part,――urging with great particularity the observance
of those virtues which are the essentials of the Christian character,
and specifying to each particular age, sex, rank and condition, its
own peculiar duties.

the epistle to the colossians.

In the first verse of the second chapter, the apostle expresses a

peculiar anxiety for the spiritual safety of those Christians who have
not seen his face in the flesh, among whom he appears to number
the Colossians and Laodiceans. It seems quite evident that he had
never been at Colosse; for though he traversed Phrygia, on two
several occasions before this time, he is not said to have visited
either Colosse or Laodicea;――but his route is so described, as to
make it almost impossible for him to have taken either city directly in
his way. This circumstance may account for the fact of his
distinguishing in this manner a single city like Colosse, of no great
size or importance; because as it appears from the general tenor of
the epistle, certain peculiar errors had arisen among them, which
were probably more dangerously rife, from the circumstance of their
never having been blessed by the personal presence and labors of
an apostle. The errors which he particularly attacks, seem to be
those of the Judaizers, who were constantly insisting on the
necessity of Mosaical observances, such as circumcision, sabbaths,
abstinence from unclean meats, and other things of the same sort.
He cautions them particularly against certain false doctrines, also
referred to under the names of philosophy, vain deceit, the traditions
of men, &c. which are commonly thought to refer to the errors of the
Essenes, a Jewish sect characterised by Josephus in terms
somewhat similar, and who are supposed to have introduced their
ascetic and mystical doctrines into the Christian church, and to have
formed one of the sources of the great system of Gnosticism, as
afterwards perfected. The moral part of this epistle bears a very
striking similarity, even in words, to the conclusion of that to the
Ephesians,――a resemblance probably attributable in part, to the
circumstance, that they were written about the same time. The
circumstance that he has mentioned to the Colossians an epistle to
be sent for by them from Laodicea, has given rise to a forged
production, purporting to be this very epistle from Paul to the
Laodiceans; but it is manifestly a mere brief rhapsody, collected from
Paul’s other epistles, and has never for a moment imposed upon the
critical. It has been supposed that the true epistle meant by Paul, is
another, now lost, written by Paul to Laodicea; and the supposition is
not unreasonable.

the epistle to philemon.

This was merely a private letter from Paul to a person otherwise

not known, but appearing, from the terms in which he is herein
mentioned, to have been at some time or other associated with Paul
in the gospel work; since he styles him “fellow-laborer.” He appears
to have been a man of some property and generosity, because he
had a house spacious enough to hold a worshiping assembly, who
were freely accommodated by him; and he is likewise mentioned as
hospitably entertaining traveling Christians. The possession of some
wealth is also implied in the circumstance which is the occasion of
this epistle. Like almost all Christians of that age who were able to
do so, he owned at least one slave, by name Onesimus, who had
run away from him to Rome, and there falling under the notice of
Paul, was made the subject of his personal attentions, and was at
last converted by him to the Christian faith. Paul now sends him back
to his old master, with this letter, in which he narrates the
circumstances connected with the flight and conversion of
Onesimus, and then with great earnestness, yet with mildness,
entreats Philemon to receive him now, not as a slave, but as a
brother,――to forgive him his offenses, and restore him to favor.
Paul himself offers to become personally responsible for all
pecuniary loss experienced by Philemon in consequence of the
absence of his servant in Rome, where he had been ministering to
Paul; and the apostle gives ♦ his own note of hand for any
reasonable amount which Philemon may choose to claim.
Throughout the whole, he speaks in great confidence of the ready
compliance of Philemon with these requests, and evidently considers
him a most intimate friend, loving and beloved. He also speaks with
great confidence of his own speedy release from his bonds, and
begs Philemon to prepare him a lodging; for he trusts that through
his prayers, he shall shortly be given to him.

♦ duplicate word “his” removed

the epistle to the philippians.

That this was written after the others that were sent from Rome by
Paul during this imprisonment, is proved by several circumstances.
Luke was certainly with him when he wrote to the Colossians and to
Philemon; but no mention whatever is made of him in the epistle to
the Philippians, who would, nevertheless, feel as much interest in
him as in Timothy or any companion of Paul; because he had
resided in Philippi many years, and must have had many
acquaintances there, who would expect some account of him, and
some salutation from him. Paul, moreover, says, that he trusts to
send Timothy shortly to them, because he has no man with him who
is like minded, or who will care for their state;――a remark which, if
Luke had been with him, he could not have made with any justice to
that faithful and diligent associate, who was himself a personal
acquaintance of the Philippians. There were some circumstances
connected with the situation of Paul, as referred to in this epistle,
which seem to imply a different date from those epistles just
mentioned. His condition seems improved in many respects,
although before not uncomfortable, and his expectations of release
still more confident, though before so strong. He speaks also of a
new and remarkable field in which his preaching had been
successful, and that is, the palace of the imperial Caesar himself,
among whose household attendants were many now numbered
among the saints who sent salutations to Philippi. The terms in which
he mentions his approaching release, are still more remarkable than
those in the former epistles. He says――“Having this confidence, I
know that I shall abide and continue with you all,” &c. “that your
rejoicing may be more abundant, by my coming to you again.” “I trust
in the Lord that I shall myself also come shortly.”

The immediate occasion of this epistle was the return of

Epaphroditus, the apostle or messenger of the Philippian church, by
whom Paul now wrote this, as a grateful acknowledgment of their
generosity in contributing to his support that money, of which
Epaphroditus was the bearer. In the epistle, he also took occasion,
after giving them an account of his life in Rome, to warn them
against the errors of the Judaizers, whose doctrines were the
occasion of so much difficulty in the Christian churches.

the epistle to the hebrews.

The release which Paul so confidently anticipated, probably

happened shortly after the writing of the last epistle, and at this time,
just before leaving Italy for another field of labor, it is commonly
believed that he wrote his epistle to the Hebrews. Of the particular
place, the time, the immediate object, and the persons who were the
receivers of this epistle, nothing is with any certainty known; and the
whole range of statements in standard works of exegetical and
critical theology, on this writing, is the most appalling mass of vague
speculations, unfounded conclusions and contradictory assertions,
that presents itself to the historian of the apostolic works in any
direction; and in respect to all these points, referring the critical to
any or all of the thousand and one views, given in the learned and
elaborate introductions and commentaries, which alone can with any
justice so much as open the subject, the author excuses himself
entirely from any discussion of this endless question, in the words
used on one of these points, by one of the most learned, acute,
ingenious and cautious critics of modern times. “Any thing further on
this subject I am unable to determine, and candidly confess my
ignorance as to the place where the epistle to the Hebrews was
written. Nor do I envy any man who pretends to know more on this
subject, unless he has discovered sources of intelligence, which
have hitherto remained unknown. It is better to leave a question in a
state of uncertainty, than, without foundation, to adopt an opinion
which may lead to material errors.”

voyage to the east.

On leaving Italy after this release, he seems to have directed his

course eastward; but nothing whatever is known of his motions,
except that from the epistle of Titus it is learned that he journeyed to
Miletus, to Ephesus, to Troas, to Macedonia, to Crete and to
Epirus,――and last of all, probably, to Rome. His first movements on
his release were, doubtless, in conformity with his previous designs,
as expressed in his epistles. He probably went first to Asia, visiting
Ephesus, Miletus, Colosse, &c. On this voyage he might have left
Titus in Crete, (as specified in his letter to that minister,) and on
embarking for Macedonia, left Timothy at Ephesus, (as mentioned in
the first epistle to him.) After visiting Philippi and other places in
Macedonia, where he wrote to Timothy, he seems to have crossed
over the country to the shore of the Ionian sea, to Nicopolis, whence
he wrote to Titus, to come from Crete, and join him there. These two
epistles, being of a merely personal character, containing
instructions for the exercise of the apostolic functions of ordination,
&c. in the absence of Paul, can not need any particular historical
notice, being so simple in their object that they sufficiently explain
themselves. Respecting that to Timothy, however, it may be specified
that some of its peculiar expressions seem to be aimed at the rising
heresy of the Jewish and Oriental mystics, who were then infecting
the eastern churches with the first beginnings of that heresy which,
under the name of the Gnosis, or science, (falsely so called,) soon
after corrupted with its dogmas, a vast number in Asia Minor, Greece
and Syria. The style and tenor of both of the epistles are so different
from all Paul’s other writings, as to make it very evident that they
were written at a different time, and under very different
circumstances from the rest.

return to rome.

The only real evidence of this movement of Paul is found in the

tenor of certain passages in the second epistle to Timothy, which
seem to show that it was written during the author’s imprisonment in
Rome, but which cannot be connected with his former confinement
there. In the former epistles written from Rome, Timothy was with
Paul;――but this of course implies that he was absent. In them,
Demas is declared to be with Paul;――in this he is mentioned as
having forsaken him, and gone to Thessalonica. In the first epistle to
Timothy, Mark was also with Paul, and joined in saluting the
Colossians; in this, Timothy is instructed to bring him to Paul,
because he is profitable to him in the ministry. In the fourth chapter,
Paul says that “Erastus abode at Corinth;”――an expression which
implies that Erastus abode in Corinth when Paul left it. But Paul took
no journey from Corinth before his first imprisonment; for when he
left that place for the last time before his journey to
Jerusalem,――when he was seized and sent to Rome,――he was
accompanied by Timothy; and there could therefore be no need of
informing him of that fact. In the same passage of this epistle he also
says, that he had left Trophimus sick at Miletus; but when Paul
passed through Miletus, on that journey to Jerusalem, Trophimus
certainly was not left behind at Miletus, but accompanied him to
Jerusalem; for he was seen there with him by the Asian Jews. These
two passages therefore, refer to a journey taken subsequent to
Paul’s first imprisonment,――and the epistle which refers to them,
and purports in other passages to have been written during an
imprisonment in Rome, shows that he returned thither after his first
imprisonment.

The most striking passage in this epistle also refers with great
distinctness to his expectation of being very speedily removed from
apostolic labors to an eternal apostolic reward. “I am now ready to
be offered, and the time of my departure is at hand. I have fought the
good fight; I have finished my course; I have kept the faith:
henceforth, there is laid up for me a crown of life, which the Lord, the
righteous judge, shall give me at that day.” All these expressions are
utterly at variance with those hopes of release and of the speedy
renewal of his labors in an eastern field; and show very plainly that
all the tasks to which he once looked forward were now completed,
and that he could hope for no deliverance, but that which should call
him from chains and toils to an eternal crown.

his death.

The circumstance of his being again in Rome a prisoner, after

having been once set free by the mandate of the emperor himself,
after a full hearing, must at once require a reference to a state of
things, in which Paul’s religious profession and evangelizing labors,
before esteemed so blameless that no man in Rome forbade him to
preach the gospel there,――had now, by a mighty revolution in
opinions, become a crime, since for these, he was now held in
bondage, without the possibility of escape from the threatened
death. Such a change actually did occur in the latter part of the reign
of Nero, when, as already related in the history of Peter’s first epistle,
the whole power of the imperial government was turned against the
Christians, as a sect, and they were convicted on that accusation
alone, as deserving of death. The date of this revolution in the
condition of the Christians, is fixed by Roman history in the sixty-
fourth year of Christ; and the time when Paul was cast into chains
the second time, must therefore be referred to this year. His actual
death evidently did not take place at once, but was deferred long
enough to allow of his writing to Timothy, and for him to make some
arrangements therein, for a short continuance of his labors. The date
which is commonly fixed as the time of his execution, is in the year of
Christ 65; but in truth, nothing whatever is known about it, nor can
even a probability be confidently affirmed on the subject. Being a
Roman citizen, he could not die by a mode so infamous as that of
the cross, but was beheaded, as a more honorable exit; and with this
view, the testimony of most of the early Fathers, who particularize his
death, distinctly accords.

Of the various fictions which the monkish story-tellers have invented to gratify the
curiosity which Christian readers feel about other particulars of the apostle’s character, the
following is an amusing specimen. “Paul, if we may believe Nicephorus, was of a low and
small stature, somewhat stooping; his complexion fair; his countenance grave; his head
small; his eyes sparkling; his nose high and bending; and his hair thick and dark, but mixed
with gray. His constitution was weak, and often subject to distempers; but his mind was
strong, and endued with a solid judgment, quick invention, and prompt memory, which were
all improved by art, and the advantages of a liberal education. Besides the epistles which
are owned to be genuine, several other writings are falsely ascribed to him: as an epistle to
the Laodiceans, a third to the Thessalonians, a third to the Corinthians, a second to the
Ephesians, his letter to Seneca, his Acts, his Revelation, his voyage to Thecla, and his
Sermons.” (Cave’s Lives of the Apostles.)

But the honors and saintship of Paul are recorded, not in the
vague and misty traces of bloody martyr-death, but in the far more
glorious achievements of a heroic life. In these, are contained the
essence of his greatness; to these, all the Gentile world owes its
salvation; and on these, the modern historian, following the model of
the sacred writers, dwells with far more minuteness and particularity,
than on a dull mass of uncertain tradition.
 JOSEPH BARNABAS.
Of this apostle, so few circumstances are known, that are not
inseparably connected with the life of Paul, in which they have been
already recorded, that only a very brief space can be occupied with
the events of his distinct life. The first passage in which he is
mentioned, is that in the fourth chapter of Acts, where he is specified
as having distinguished himself among those who sold their lands,
for the sake of appropriating the avails to the support of the Christian
community. Introduced to the notice of the reader under these most
honorable circumstances, he is there described as of the tribe of
Levi, and yet a resident in the island of Cyprus, where he seems to
have held the land which he sacrificed to the purposes of religious
charity. This island was for a long time, before and after that period,
inhabited by great numbers of wealthy Jews, and there was hardly
any part of the world, where they were so powerful and so favored,
as in Cyprus; so that even the sacred order of the Levites might well
find inducements to leave that consecrated soil to which they were
more especially attached by the peculiar ordinances of the Mosaic
institutions, and seek on this beautiful and fertile island, a new home,
and a new seat for the faith of their fathers. The occasion on which
Joseph (for that was his original name) left Cyprus to visit Jerusalem,
is not known; nor can it even be determined whether he was ever
himself a personal hearer of Jesus. He may very possibly have been
one of the foreign Jews present at the Pentecost, and may there
have been first converted to the Christian faith. On his distinguishing
himself among his new brethren, both by good words and generous
deeds, he was honored by the apostles with the name of Barnabas,
which is interpreted in Greek by words that may mean either “son of
consolation,” or “son of exhortation.” The former sense, of course,
would aptly refer to his generosity in comforting the poor apostolic
community, by his pecuniary contributions, as just before mentioned;
and this has induced many to prefer that meaning; but the majority of
critical translators and commentators have been led, on a careful
investigation both of the original Hebrew word and of the Greek
translation of it, to prefer the meaning of “son of exhortation” or
“instruction,” a meaning which certainly well accords with the
subsequent distinction attained by him in his apostolic labors. Both
senses may, however, have been referred to, with an intentional
equivoque.

“Acts, chapter iv. verse 37. ὑπάρχοντος αὐτῳ ἀγροῦ He could not have sold that which was
his paternal inheritance as a Levite; but this might perhaps be some legacy, or purchase of
land in Judea, to which he might have a title till the next jubilee, or perhaps some land in
Cyprus. (Doddridge.) That it was lawful for the Levites to buy land, we learn from the
example of Jeremiah himself, who was of the tribe of Levi. See Jeremiah xxxii. 17. It is
observed by Bp. Pearce, that those commentators who contend that this land must have
belonged to his wife, because, according to the law mentioned in Numbers xviii. 20, 23 and
24, a Levite could have no inheritance in Israel, seem to have mistaken the sense of that
law, ‘which,’ says he, ‘means only that the Levites, as a tribe, were not to have a share in
the division of Canaan among the other tribes. This did not hinder any Levite from
possessing lands in Judea, either by purchase or by gift, as well as in right of his wife.
Josephus was a Levite, and a priest too; and yet in his Life, chapter 76, he speaks of lands
which he had lying about Jerusalem, and in exchange of which, Vespasian gave him others,
for his greater benefit and advantage. After all, I see no reason why we may not suppose
that this land, which Barnabas had and sold, was not land in Judea; and if so, the words of
the law, “no inheritance in Israel,” did not, however understood, affect their case. His land
might have been in his own country, Cyprus, an island of no great distance from Judea; and
he might have sold it at Jerusalem to some purchaser there; perhaps to one of his own
countrymen.’” (Bloomfield’s Annotations, Vol. IV. pp. 147, 148.)

In all the other passages of the New Testament in which he is

mentioned, he is associated with Paul, and every recorded act of his
life has been already given in the life of his great associate. His first
acquaintance with him on his return to Jerusalem after his
conversion,――his mission to Antioch and labors there in
conjunction with Paul, when he had brought him from
Tarsus,――their visit to Jerusalem,――their return to
Antioch,――their first great mission through Asia Minor――their visit
to Jerusalem at the council, and their joint report,――their second
return to Antioch,――their proposed association in a new
mission,――their quarrel and separation,――have all been fully