Liberation and Resistance

In his weekly article in the Lebanese daily Al-Akhbar, the Palestinian thinker and former member of the Knesset Azmi Bechara wrote about the need to establish a distinction between resistance movements and liberation movements. The issues in question in such an attempt are clearly, among others, the culture of colonialism and its current representation, the strategies of resistance, the processes of identity building in the context of a re-assertion of a dominant self that can represent itself independently from the dominant power, and the means through which one can achieve a self-representation which implies the role of media in its broad sense.

As Bechara remarks, the Arab region is bursting with movements of resistance against the growing patch of American colonialism. However, these scattered factions and randomly organized groups do not all qualify for the term liberation movements. In fact, one can go as far as saying that the large majority of these groups are far from having a liberation thought. The cliché in physics is that every action engenders a reaction. This reaction is initially an automatic one, a thoughtless physical reaction. Resistance in this case is the normal, natural reaction that defines the act of resisting the action exercised against the initial stagnation. It has no other goal than to resist; it exists by virtue of the action against which it is acting. A resistance can have different justifications, moral grounds, strategies, organizations, techniques, and so on, but as long as it is only a resistance it has no further project that the one of resistance and in this sense is dependent on the force it is resisting.

For a resistance to be called a liberation movement it has to have a further aim, one that goes beyond resistance. A liberation movement is one that has a project that starts once the resistance is accomplished, once it is no longer a resistance. In other words, it is a movement whose existence is not dependent on the force that is being fought; rather its main activity starts once this force is defeated, once resistance is accomplished. One can also express the difference in the following sentence: while resistance organizations take resistance as their aim, liberation movements see resistance as a means; and while a resistance movement is not necessarily one of liberation, a liberation movement is necessarily one of resistance.

Ever since the Arab world was subjected to direct colonialism there appeared a number of liberation movements, some were on a regional or Arab level, others stressed on local, provincial levels. Each of these projects was articulating and representing an identity of resistance for which liberation meant that it can finally represent and express itself as an independent identity. Needless to say all these projects of liberation have failed dramatically and very often, tragically. This failure includes both the Pan-Arab movement (Nasserism and Baath) as well as those country specific liberation movements. Not so recently, political historians and analysts of the Middle East have started noticing the rise of Islam as the new engine of liberation and resistance movements, while in earlier times ideals of cultural and ethnic nationalisms or leftists ideals of socialism and communism were predominant. In other words, some say that Islam has taken the place of former Arabist, leftist, or national movements of resistance as the bounding imagined identity and ideal of the resisting group. Islam has assumed the role of the dominated culture that seeks liberation and self representation. This of course does not imply that Islam constitutes an identity as such or that Islam defines a pre-existing group or a clearly articulated ideology of resistance. It simply means that different narratives of resistance are using different interpretations of Islam as the common factor that constitutes the group; however, all these narratives are using Islam as their main principle.

The paradox of Islam as resistance movement can be looked at in the shadow of the dominant power’s interests. The paradox appears when we consider that Islam as a resistant force constitutes a positive factor for the American colonialism while Islam as a liberation movement constitutes a threat. This sentence cannot be relevant if we do not look at the war against terrorism as the new pretext of colonialism. In other words, if there was no terrorism – or resistance – there would be no colonialism. The causality is here inverted, it is no longer the presence of the colonizer that engenders resistance, it is the very threat of this resistance that justifies the creation of its cause namely colonialism. This is certainly a historical fallacy, however it remains discursively relevant. In other words it is not to say that colonialism started as a reaction to terrorism – or resistance – since it had been continuously present for the last century, but that the discourse of the new American colonialism denies its previous presence in the region and inverts the cause and effect (by choosing a different starting point for the causal events in the region, and a different historical narrative). Thus the very name terrorism justifies the colonial narrative of history.

Terrorism is a thoughtless act, where the perpetrator lacks any sense of cause; it is an absurd and gratuitous act of evil (a return to the Ethical judgment, the dichotomy of Good and Evil). By using the term terrorism instead of resistance one can no longer ask why is this terrorist committing this crime (causal questioning), since by definition his only purpose is destruction; this is where the discourse of terrorism inverts the cause and effect of historical events and gives them a new meaning where colonialism becomes an act of self defense against a blind evil, making the very act of resistance (terrorism) a favorable act for the narrative of the colonizer. Any strategy of resistance must aim at getting out of this deadlock.

As long as resistance is in this context favorable for the dominant power, and liberation is not, the challenge of resistance movements in the “Islamic” world today is to establish liberation projects that can form a basis for a real independence. In other words it is to articulate an identity that opposes the gaze of the dominant power; an identity that does not constitute itself as the mirror image of the dominant other. Thus any liberation movement based on Islam has to interpret Islam in the best interest of the group in the present historical context and not as a mere reaction to its other.