Cruelty and Silence

Arab Studies Quarterly (ASQ), Summer, 1993 by Hala Maksoud

"This book was never about scholarship in the first place," states Kanan Makiya in the concluding chapter of his book Cruelty and Silence. He adds: "History and scholarship can wait for better days, which I am certain will come." (pp. 326-327) This disclaimer cannot shield the book, however, from being judged by the criteria of precision and responsibility, the two main components of scholarship. Nor can it protect its author from the charge of distorting and mistrepresenting facts. To be an "intellectual," as Makiya portrays himself, requires a level of integrity, which is lacking in the book, and a level of knowledge of one's subject which in Makiya's case is flawed. To disregard scholarship in an historical analysis is to defeat the stated intent of the book, namely to redress the existing situation in Iraq and other Arab countries; a situation which is intolerable and which consequently should be addressed responsibly.

Commenting on the book A.M. Rosenthal predicted that Makiya "will now be the target for Arab and pro-Arab intellectuals. The book will drive them crazy." (The New York Times, 13 April 1993) Rosenthal is right about the anger at Makiya, but he is wrong about the reasons. No one is angry with Makiya's account of the cruelty of the Iraqi regime, nor is anybody angry about his departing from what he describes as a built-in Arab cultural bias which makes one refrain from "washing [one's] dirty laundry in public while gruesome cruelties and whole worlds of morbidity unfold around us." (p. 325) His is not the first account of the horrible situation in Iraq, nor will it be the last. It is one more addition to a substantial documentation by many credible experts. In fact, even though some of the testimonies he recounts in the first part of the book are very powerful, his withholding of the witnesses names takes away from the power of the narrative.

Furthermore, and contrary to both his and Rosenthal's assertions, no one is angry over his descriptions of cruelty in other parts of the Arab World. These are also well-documented by Amnesty International and various other human rights groups including Arab Human Rights organizations. Arab intellectuals have written extensively about such practices and many of these writers are in prison or living in exile because they became targets of some of the regimes they criticized. Cruelty and Silence, one can assert, would not have elicited the interest it did by Rosenthal and others had it limited itself to an expose of the all-pervasive cruelty. The book received the attention it did because of its unjustified and unwarranted attack on credible Arab intellectuals and those of Arab descent. This is the source of Arab anger; the wanton misrepresentation of positions of highly respected intellectuals such as Professor Edward Said and the famous Arab poet Adonis. In both cases, Makiya misreads and misrepresents their positions by taking statements out of context in order to justify his personal attacks on them and through them his indictment of Arab intellectuals in general.

With regard to Professor Said, one does not have to cite his well-known record of championing human rights and criticism of their violations both in the Arab countries as well as elsewhere in the world. His sensitivity to the subject is limitless as is attested by any serious reviewing of his works. Said's record is public and available to whomever wants to study it. To illustrate Makiya's misreadings, one need only consider an article written by Edward Said in the London-based Independent on 12 August 1990. Makiya refers to this article as Said's "first response to the Gulf crisis," and chastises Said for having "nothing to say about Saddam Hussein." He then goes on to state that "the focus of the article instead was on Western culpability," and continues by criticizing the article for being about "culture, not history," and adding that Said in this article was arguing that "the eruption of the Gulf Crisis ... revealed deep-rooted Western prejudices against Arab culture." (pp. 278-279) True, the article is about Arab culture. This is what it was intended to be. That it coincided with the Gulf crisis does not make it a response to the Gulf crisis. Contrary to Makiya's assertions, the focus of the article is that the West should be aware of the oppositional literature which exists in the Arab World. Said says (and, unlike Makiya, I quote verbatim): "The best of today's writers are oppositional figures who frequently use literary virtuosity as an oblique critique of life in various Arab states, where tyranny and atavism are common features of daily existence." (Emphasis added) Thus Said celebrates the Arab writers who oppose "tyranny and atavism," subjects if one believes Makiya, Said never mentioned much less criticized.

Makiya's attack on Adonis focuses on the latter's refusal, in an article entitled "The Prayer and the Sword: Or Savage Democracy" in Al-Quds al-Arabi, on 11 March 1991, to equate Saddam Hussein with Hitler. (p. 250) Adonis acknowledges the cruelty of Saddam, but he refuses to fall prey to easy and self-serving comparisons, even when such comparisons suit President Bush's agenda. Adonis understands the importance of nuances in political discourse and believes that the set of conditions that existed in Iraq which led to the all-pervasive cruelty of Saddam Hussein are totally different from the set of conditions that led to Hitler's rise in Germany. In fact, it is Adonis' acceptance of Makiya's main thesis in Cruelty and Silence, namely that Saddam's cruelty is universal and does not target any particular group of people--Kurds, Shiites or Sunnis--that make him refuse to equate the two. This does not make Adonis insensitive to tyranny. On the contrary, his analysis, based on scientific analysis and historical precision, makes him confront tyranny more forcefully.