“History without Documents”: The Vexed Archives of Decolonization in the Middle East

Omnia El Shakry is Associate Professor of History at the University of California, Davis, specializing in the cultural and intellectual history of the modern Middle East. She is the author of The Great Social Laboratory: Subjects of Knowledge in Colonial and Postcolonial Egypt (Stanford University Press, 2007) and editor of the multi-volume Gender and Sexuality in Islam (Routledge, forthcoming). Her current book project, The Arabic Freud, traces the development of psychoanalysis and discourses of subjectivity in postwar Egypt as part of the transregional history of ideas of the self. An essay from this project appeared as “The Arabic Freud: The Unconscious and the Modern Subject,” Modern Intellectual History 11, no. 1 (April 2014): 89–118. In Sonallah Ibrahim's 1981 novelThe Committee, an unnamed protagonist is tasked with writing a report on the greatest “Arab luminary.” After obtaining access to the archives of a national daily newspaper through a personal recommendation, the narrator receives a much-sought-after file and recounts: “I opened the folder, my fingers trembling from excitement. It revealed a white sheet of paper with a date from the early '50s at the top and nothing else. I turned it over and saw a similar sheet of paper. Quickly, I examined the sheets of paper in the file and saw that they all lacked everything but a date.”1 Jotting down the dates listed, the protagonist then cross-references them with other, more publicly available information in an attempt to reconstruct a narrative of events—piecing together what an Egyptian historian once referred to as a “history without documents.”2 Ibrahim's literary parable demonstrates two senses of the phrase “history without documents.” One references what Achille Mbembe calls the chronophagy of the state, the way it devours the past through either the material destruction of archives or the presentation of a history purified of antagonisms and embodied in empty commemorative accounts.3 The second sense refers to the history that we might seek to reconstruct because of, and despite, the absence of access to such documents. The archive thus functions as an “instituting imaginary” that seeks to reassemble and inter the traces of the deceased—always incomplete, always unknowable, and always, at least partially, the projection of our own desires.4 How, then, might we conceptualize the archives of decolonization in light of the problematic of “history without documents”? We might start by focusing on the two senses of the term, first by exploring the material inaccessibility of particular postcolonial state archives, and second, and more importantly, by questioning the compositional logics of archival imaginaries, the “conditions that allow something to be archived and archivable.”5 As Ann Stoler remarks, the archive “may serve as a strong metaphor for any corpus of selective forgettings and collections.”6 In what ways, then, have historians remembered, forgotten, or appropriated the various intellectual traditions that belonged to the era of decolonization in the Middle East?7 What compositional logics enable certain individual thinkers to be archived as part of the history of decolonization and others not? The uses and abuses of both paper and what we might term non-documentary archives have led to “subjugated knowledges,” “excluded socialities,” and aporias, the implications of which we have yet to fully explore.8 As Jean Allman has noted, much of the literature on archives has focused on the colonial archive, even while scholars of the postcolonial world have grappled with the substantial limitations of state archives in formerly colonized regions and their methodological implications.9 Historians have become increasingly accustomed to openly discussing the very material difficulties of accessing archives, which are so intensified in postcolonial contexts—the tortuous security clearances, for example, or the impossibility of archival access in times of war or revolutionary upheaval.10 For historians of the Middle East, such questions have reached a heightened pitch as scholars face the prospect of ever-diminishing access to archives and national libraries in the region in the wake of recent political convulsions. Nothing has highlighted these difficulties more than the highly acrimonious debates surrounding the legality of the acquisition of Iraqi state documents pertaining to Saddam Hussein's regime, which were seized by the U.S. in Baghdad after the 2003 invasion of Iraq and are held by a Media Processing Center and storage facility in Qatar and by the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. Archivists have debated the political, ethical, and legal repercussions of the seizure of Iraqi documents during the war, as well as the contrasting notions of cultural property embedded in different viewpoints regarding their repatriation.11 Yet, despite their vexed and tainted nature, the Iraqi Baʿth Party records, which contain millions of pages of documents, have already yielded invaluable studies of Baʿthist Iraq, exploring the architecture of the party apparatus, as well as the normalization of war in Iraq under the last twenty three-years of Baʿthist rule.12 Disputes similarly exist over the Nasir era in Egypt, during which the regime attempted to coopt historians, who were cast as participants freed from a monarchical and colonial past in a national struggle toward postcolonial revolutionary sovereignty. The archives of the period—many of which are reported to be in the personal possession of Nasir's close associates, and some of which are widely dispersed across various personal, governmental, and archival locations—have been contentious sites of dispute.13 As historians have demonstrated, the question of archival compilation, management, and availability has been a perennial feature in the Egyptian press, particularly since the reorganization of the Egyptian state archives in 1954.14 It was the dire nature of this situation that prompted Egyptian historian Ibrahim ʿAbduh's cynical use of the phrase “history without documents” to refer to the attempt to write the history of the Nasir period.15 Such disputes about the nature of state archival collections and scholarly access have come into sharp relief in the wake of Egypt's 2011 revolutionary uprising, as historians have argued the need for easier access to the Egyptian National Archives, admittance to which requires a time-consuming and labyrinthine security clearance, and as they have critiqued the powerful local and international heritage industry interests invested in the Library of Alexandria project.16 While, to borrow Joanna Sassoon's phrasing, “chasing phantoms in the archives” may provide “an opportunity to write histories of the absence of evidence in the archival records,” the consequences of such obstructed access have been manifold.17 Within Middle East historiography, it has led to the resourceful use of oral histories and interviews, family holdings and private collections, published memoirs and letters, press reports, and foreign archives.18 In many instances, then, the historian's ability to forge relationships with individuals with genealogical connections and generational bonds to historical personages has replaced the oft-fetishized “allure of the archives” and the tactile nature of brittle documents.19 It has even led to the creation of counterfactual or fictitious archives, as in the work of Walid Raad, a contemporary visual artist born in Lebanon, and the Atlas Group, an artistic project created by him that challenges the “boundary between historical and fictional narration,” while it grapples with the reconstruction of the Lebanese Civil War in the near-complete absence of documents.20 And yet, one could argue that the obstruction of post-independence official state archives has tended to make the workings of the colonial state far more visible than the operations of the national states that succeeded colonial rule.21 In other words, the archive has functioned as a dense locus of postcolonial power, and its impermeability has often masked the precise nature of the political and social debates that went into the consolidation of regimes in the aftermath of decolonization. If the material inaccessibility of state archives in places such as Baghdad, Beirut, Cairo, and Damascus has rendered the decolonizing state less discernible, so too has an imaginary that has archived the era in terms of received narratives that occluded key elements of the history of decolonization from our view. Among these has been what Samah Selim terms the nahda/naksa (awakening/catastrophe) narrative, which conceptualized Arab cultural history in terms of a fin-de-siècle cultural renaissance partly inspired by contact with Europeans, and a tragic post-1967 decline brought on by the Arab defeat in the June 1967 war with Israel.22 The murky and nonlinear process of decolonization, so often overshadowed by the troubled history of the present as well as increased U.S. military intervention in the region, began to appear to many as simply reversible. Decolonization in the Middle East, one might be led to think, was a tragic enterprise that, in Abdallah Laroui's words, failed to bring “finally to a close the long winter of the Arabs” and instantiated a “melancholic historicism.”23 A second, and perhaps related, narrative has been the assumption of an “incommensurable divide” between Islamism and secular nationalism in the era of decolonization.24 Yet what if we thought of decolonization as an ongoing process and series of struggles rather than a finite event, as regional as well as national, intellectual and cultural as well as political, and religious as well as secular? We might then shift our attention away from dominant and declensionist narratives of decolonization as a state-driven and secular political process, to include members of the intelligentsia, social scientists, and religious thinkers who were bypassed in or excised from traditional archives. How, then, might we reimagine the archives of decolonization? Thomas Osborne notes that the heuristic value of the concept of the archive lay precisely in its elasticity, oscillating between literalist and idealist notions. Beyond their figuration as literal places—centers of storage and libraries—archives, he argues, can be viewed as centers of interpretation that require epistemological and ethical credibility. In other words, archives are sites “for particular kinds of knowledge, particular styles of reasoning.”25 If, as Foucault argues, the archive constitutes the limits and forms of the sayable, as well as its memory and appropriation, then what currents of thought and intellectual traditions belong to the archives of decolonization? How have individual thinkers been archived or appropriated within historiographical debates and public thought in ways that reinforce a melancholy historicism that pits Islamic thought against liberal or revolutionary secular ideals? In “The Body and the Archive,” the late Allan Sekula spoke of “a shadow archive that … contains subordinate, territorialized archives: archives whose semantic interdependence is normally obscured by the ‘coherence’ and ‘mutual exclusivity’ of the social groups registered within each.”26 Sekula's musings on the semantic interdependence of our archival categories are productive for rethinking the categories of decolonization. To date, scholarship on the Middle East has not sufficiently placed secular and religious thought within “a single analytic field”; nor has the heuristic value of these ideologically charged categories, perhaps themselves the product of the colonial encounter, been sufficiently questioned.27 Take, for instance, Egypt's Sayyid Qutb (1906–1966), who has generally been viewed through the prism of Islamism, that is, as the progenitor of radical Islamic thought concerned with reshaping both polity and society.28 Scholars have thus referred to him as “the most significant thinker of Islamic resurgence in the modern Arab world,” and “by far the greatest ideologue and thinker of the Muslim Brothers' movement,” whose global influence rivaled or surpassed that of Ayatollah Khomeini—a “martyr” whose “text-icon” has swayed multiple radical Islamist groups in regions as far-flung as Chechnya and Pakistan.29 Qutb's prolific and erudite body of writing, which includes poetry, autobiography, journal articles, full-length books, and multi-volume Qurʾanic commentaries, has led scholars to focus, virtually in isolation, on his writings, debating the provenance of his ideas and their orthodox, heterodox, or “fundamentalist” tendencies in an effort to corroborate or refute his influence over radical jihadist groups. To be fair, some scholars have acknowledged the anticolonial tenor of Qutb's corpus, his critique of “intellectual and spiritual colonialism,” and have even noted resonances between his thought and that of revolutionary anticolonial thinkers such as Frantz Fanon.30 In some instances, they have argued that Qutb is best understood as a theorist or theologian of freedom, in contrast to Western media representations of him as “the philosopher of Islamic terror.”31 While such accounts have immeasurably enriched our of Qutb's work and his thought as the product of local social and political as well as they have not him within a sufficiently and local In they have the of Islamic and secular social groups. Qutb's not a but rather the as of his secular In he too to the archives of decolonization, archives that be conceptualized as a between secular nationalism and our historical evidence the of these social groups. 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