Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Introduction: Weak State – Weak Society
- 1 Mother Egypt: The Gift of the Nile
- 2 Ibn al-balad: The True Son of Egypt
- 3 Misri Effendi: The Squeezed Middle Class
- 4 The ‘As if’ State
- 5 Tools of Mass Persuasion
- 6 Language of Division or Unity?
- 7 The Intellectuals’ Identity Crisis
- 8 When Egyptians Revolt
- Conclusion
- Bibliography
- Index
7 - The Intellectuals’ Identity Crisis
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 September 2016
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Introduction: Weak State – Weak Society
- 1 Mother Egypt: The Gift of the Nile
- 2 Ibn al-balad: The True Son of Egypt
- 3 Misri Effendi: The Squeezed Middle Class
- 4 The ‘As if’ State
- 5 Tools of Mass Persuasion
- 6 Language of Division or Unity?
- 7 The Intellectuals’ Identity Crisis
- 8 When Egyptians Revolt
- Conclusion
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
The French Revolution also gave rise to a new figure of professional revolutionist, who spent his life not in revolutionary agitation, for which there existed but few opportunities, but in study and thought, in theory and debate.
(Hanna Arendt 1965: 262)Introduction
The intellectual, argues Edward Said (1994: 11), has a public role to play as ‘an individual endowed with a faculty for representing, embodying, articulating a message, a view, an attitude, philosophy or opinion to, as well as for, a public.’ This act of representation and articulation of a message is based on personal reflection; consequently, Said does not distinguish between private and public realms for the intellectuals’ role:
there is therefore this quite complicated mix between the private and the public worlds, my own history, values, writings and positions as they derive from my experiences, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, how these enter into the social world where people debate and make decisions about war and freedom and justice. There is no such thing as a private intellectual, since the moment you set down words and then publish them you have entered the public world. (Said 1994: 12)
Intellectuals are the ironists, according to Rorty (1989), or those who are selfcreating, seeking autonomy from previous pasts and theories and who have ‘played all the authority figures … against each other’ (p. 137).
Brinton ([1938] 1965: 40) states, in his classical work about revolutions, that intellectuals in societies that had witnessed revolutions transferred their allegiance from the government, calling for radical reforms. Intellectuals provide ideas which beget debates which in turn beget reforms:
We find that ideas are always a part of the pre-revolutionary situation … No ideas, no revolution. This does not mean that ideas cause revolutions, or that the best way to prevent revolutions is to censor ideas. It merely means that ideas form part of the mutually dependent variables we are studying. (ibid. p. 49)
As Said (1994: 28) states, ‘there has been no major revolution in modern history without intellectuals; conversely there has been no major counterrevolutionary movement without intellectuals.’
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Egyptian DreamEgyptian National Identity and Uprisings, pp. 121 - 140Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2015