Robert Worth: The Arab Intellectuals Who Didn’t Roar

Robert Worth is a staff writer for The New York Times Magazine who has reported from Egypt, Yemen and Libya.

IN mid-June, the Syrian poet known as Adonis, one of the Arab world’s most renowned literary figures, addressed an open letter to the Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad. The stage was set for one of those moments, familiar from revolutions past, in which an intellectual hero confronts an oppressive ruler and eloquently voices the grievances of a nation.

Instead, Adonis — who lives in exile in France — bitterly disappointed many Syrians. His letter offered some criticisms, but also denigrated the protest movement that had roiled the country since March, and failed even to acknowledge the brutal crackdown that had left hundreds of Syrians dead. In retrospect, the incident has come to illustrate the remarkable gulf between the Arab world’s established intellectuals — many of them, like Adonis, former radicals — and the largely anonymous young people who have led the protests of the Arab Spring....

To some extent, the intellectual silence of the current uprising is a deliberate response to the hollow revolutionary rhetoric of previous generations. The Arab nationalist movement began in the 1930s and ’40s with idealistic young men who hoped to lead the region out of its colonial past, backwardness and tribalism. The Syrian political philosopher Michel Aflaq and other young writers and activists found inspiration in 19th-century German theories of nationalism, and envisioned their Baath Party as an instrument for modernization and economic justice.

But the party and its misty ideas were soon hijacked and distilled into slogans by military officers in Syria and Iraq, whose “revolutionary” leadership was really just the old tribalism and autocracy in a different guise. In Egypt too, Arab socialism soon became little more than a pretext for dictatorship and reckless policies at home and abroad. Arab nationalism reached its zenith — or its nadir — in Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, who saw himself as a godlike intellectual, publishing his own fiction and imposing his delusional Third Universal Theory on Libya’s hapless people. Everything in Colonel Qaddafi’s Libya was styled “revolutionary.” When the rebels overthrew his government this year, they found it difficult to separate the names of their own revolutionary councils from the ones they were overthrowing....