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| Wadi' al-Bustani (1888–1954). Frontispiece to Al-Mahabharata: al-Malhama al-Hinduwiyya (Beirut, 1952). |
Thanks to the support of the Institute for Contemporary History at the Universidade Nova de Lisboa, my Modern Intellectual History article “Empire and Arab Indology” will be published soon in Portuguese translation as part of the “Trânsitos” series. The article deals principally with the past, with the life and work of Wadi’ al-Bustani (1888 -1954), the Lebanese-Palestinian poet, lawyer, and translator. I’ve reproduced the preface below in its original English as it deals (historically) with the present situation.
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Wadi’ al-Bustani faced the present head on. His poetry was almost exclusively political in orientation. If his form was conservative and his diction archaic, his politics were radical, attuned fundamentally to the challenges of the day: British imperialism and Zionist settler-colonialism.
While his poems—published in Palestinian dailies and recited in the Palestinian streets—were by necessity occasional and timely, his philology was decidedly not. He sought, through decades of research, travel, and translation, to uncover deep truths about language through his own practice of Indology. But even timeless pursuits are punctuated by time. As my article recounts, Bustani prefaced his Arabic Mahabharata with reference to the new reality surrounding his home, namely, the establishment of the State of Israel, the severing of Haifa from the Levant (and Bustani from his children in Lebanon), and the ethnic cleansing of Palestine.
And as I write about Bustani writing about Israel’s beginnings, the world is perhaps witnessing Israel’s end. Like the settler-colonies that preceded it, Israel is desperate. Gripped by denial, Israeli leaders are seeking, with multi-ton bombs, to put an end to the recalcitrant problem of the native. But in this genocidal activity, Israel does not work alone. As ever, Israel’s murder and maiming of Palestinians is a project assiduously supported by the North Atlantic (and, at least in the theaters of the United Nations, some hardly sovereign islands in America’s Pacific empire). On this score, we may recall some words from Amílcar Cabral’s forward to Basil Davidson’s 1969 report on the PAIGC’s revolution:
No illusions, though. Everyone knows that Portugal does not make any aircraft, not even as toys for children. Our situation—this Portugues aggression against our people—also involves the allies of Portugal, including Great Britain and the United States. And there too our struggle brings another gain: it teaches us to know the friends and enemies of our people, of Africa.¹
Here, Cabral echoes C.L.R. James in 1960, reporting on Ghana’s revolution from Accra. “You see,” James said, “I don’t bother with the enemies of Africa. They are enemies, they are over there, that is no problem; we just have to fight them to the end, that is all.”²Palestine’s enemies are fairly easy to identify—they commonly dwell in parliaments and boardrooms, in imperial universities and colonial bureaucracies, in Merkava battle tanks and F-15 fighter jets, at the New York Times and CNN.
What our present predicament has revealed more clearly than ever is the number and location of Palestine’s friends. Cabral was an old friend, his revolution was entangled with ours and with others. “We are with the refugees,” Cabral announced at Dar es Salam in 1965, “the martyrised refugees of Palestine, who have been tricked and driven from their own homeland by the maneuvers of imperialism. We are on the side of the Palestinian refugees and we support wholeheartedly all that the sons of Palestine are doing to liberate their country.”³When hundreds assembled alongside Cabral in Khartoum for the International Conference in Support of the Peoples of Portuguese Colonies and Southern Africa in January 1969, the PLO was there. And when many of the same delegates traveled up the Nile to Cairo a few days later for the Second International Conference in Support of the Arab Peoples, the PAIGC was among them.
Meetings and statements, mediated by translation and nourished by solidarity, were the infrastructure of internationalism. This international sustained the PAIGC through the transfer of arms and knowledge, in demonstrations and publications, even with flesh and blood. “Some Frenchmen have formed a committee to send us blood” Gil Fernendez, the PAIGC’s representative in Cairo told Ufahamu in 1970, “Every two weeks a plane comes from Paris which stops in Conakry from where we can get the blood. So this is the blood of Frenchmen while the French government helps Portugal. Funny war.”⁴The present war on Palestine has stretched the vast distance between official support for genocide and popular support for the Palestinians to its breaking point.
Between ideas and actions, are methods and tactics. “Empire and Arab Indology,” considers the content and conditions of Wadi’ al-Bustani’s political and philological approach. I ask, through his example: must the study of another people be one of mastery and domination? Edward Said—great critic of imperial power and imperial knowledge—once counterposed Ernest Renan, “the philologist as judge” and Louis Massignon, “the philologist as guest.” Renan, Said wrote, surveyed “lesser religions like Islam with disdain,” Massignon on the other hand was “the rarest-veined unraveler of Islamic civilization the West has produced.”⁵ Time was the fulcrum of Renan’s philological judgment. Massignon’s philology, in contrast, was spatial in orientation. Topography, rather than typography, was the engine of Massignon’s inquiry. Bustani, in his study of India, was a kind of guest, or friend. For him, India was at once a territory brimming with difference and a geography inextricable from his own home. Finally, anti-colonialism, in a way even the most sympathetic European orientalist could not fathom, drove Bustani’s intellectual labors forward.
My article on Bustani is a kind of pre-history of an era of public and prolific solidarity. The conditions of Bustani’s imperial career, between British India and British Palestine, was the ground upon which a powerful anti-colonialism was made in the twentieth century. It is an anti-colonialism that many millions still carry upon their shoulders today.
Esmat Elhalaby
Toronto
December 15, 2023
¹. Amílcar Cabral, “Forward,” in Basil Davidson, The Liberation of Guinea: Aspects of an African Revolution (London: Penguin, 1969), 14.
². C.L.R. James, Nkrumah and the Ghana Revolution (Westport: Lawrence Hill and Company, 1977), 167.
³. Amílcar Cabral, “The Nationalist Movements of the Portuguese Colonies,” Revolution in Guinea, ed. and trans., Richard Handyside (New York and London: Monthly Review Press, 1969), 62.
⁴. “A Talk with a Guinean Revolutionary,” Ufahamu 1:1 (Spring 1970), 16.
⁵. Edward Said, “Islam, the Philological Vocation, and French Culture: Renan and Massignon,” in Malcolm H. Kerr, ed., Islamic Studies: a Tradition and its Problems (Malibu: Undena Publications, 1980), 71.
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