On the Meanings of Crisis

Abstract

The pandemic has revealed the deep and structural inequalities marking various lifeworlds and social landscapes, accelerating trends and vulnerabilities long at play. It has further entrenched deep inequalities between the Global South and the North. At the same time, the pandemic has ushered in a profound realization of the interconnectedness and imbrication of various fields: the medical, the economic, the political, and the environmental. One crisis has led to another in a cascade of interlinked crises, eroding the legitimacy of political leaders and governing structures. It has led to a temporal, material, and social suspension, which was most acutely felt during state-imposed lockdowns, and has, at least temporarily, confined people to the immediate present. This suspension has impeded our ability to think in the uncertain, unpredictable, and opaque terms of a future.Like all crises, the pandemic triggers a radical rethinking not only of the present and the future, but also of the past. It compels us to think of crises in the past; how they were understood, lived, and experienced; and what their causes were as well as what their long-term legacies have been. More specifically, it prompts us to explore how social actors—individually and collectively—understood and explained a specific contemporary crisis. Was there a clearly identified consciousness of living through a crisis as it was unfolding? Did a series of catastrophic events subsequently and in hindsight come under the label of crisis? How did various understandings of crisis change as the conditions of the suspension of “normal” daily life shifted? How did social and individual practices and actions adapt or react to changing circumstances? Which social groups were understood to have been most affected by past pandemics, wars, famines, economic collapse, and other crises? Did this lead to a conceptualization of or a deeper reflection on what today we might call structures of vulnerability? By structures of vulnerability, I am referring to political, social, and economic conditions that have the power to negatively impact individuals and collectives in the long term and make them more prone to suffer and impede their recovery in times of crisis.The allocation of responsibility for crisis is a central concern in intellectual history and the history of ideas: how and when did thinkers understand crisis as a nexus between “natural” disasters, such as drought and disease, on one hand, and political decisions, action and inaction, on the other? Such actions could range from mismanagement, corruption, incompetence, and stalling to deliberate neglect or even specific targeting of groups and regions deemed less valuable or undesirable to the state, local officials, local elites, or colonial powers, European or Zionist.Another set of questions pertains to temporality. Was a specific crisis understood to be temporary? And to be an anomaly? Was it a rupture or a pause for those who lived through it? For specific writers and social actors, this must have been the case—a momentary pause that would hopefully end with a return to “business as usual.” While for others, the crisis came as an opportunity to mobilize for fundamental change. If, for many social actors, crisis represented a transition or a breaking point, we should also pay heed to thinkers who understood crisis as structurally endemic.One such author was Muhammad Fahmy Husayn, an Egyptian writer whose book, Principles of Political Economy (Mabadi’ al-iqtisad al-siyasi, 1908–1911) sought to explain the debilitating economic and financial crisis that struck Egypt in 1907. A number of interrelated financial crises in the world, in part triggered by a liquidity crunch, affected countries that had been particularly linked through the circulation of global capital. Egypt, whose economy had been even more dependent on the cotton crop since the British Occupation of the country in 1882 and thus deeply imbricated with global financial networks, was especially vulnerable. It was among the first countries to be affected by this global financial crisis, with devastating consequences for the population. Relying in part on British political economists as well as Friedrich Engels, Husayn argued that monetary, financial, and economic crises were all interconnected and were structural, endemic to capitalism, and cyclical, and that “the economic crisis repeats itself every ten years” (236). The analysis—and summary of other thinkers’ analyses—that Husayn provided on crisis was considered authoritative and was still relevant enough some fifteen years later to be reproduced in an important reference work. In fact, the entry for crisis (azma) in Muhammad Farid Wajdi’s encyclopedia relied almost exclusively on Husayn’s work, which was copied verbatim and covered fourteen pages.1Other instances of suspension and devastation barely receive mention. In the preface to the first volume of another encyclopedia, the “original” Da’irat al-Ma‘arif, author and compiler Butrus al-Bustani, a leading figure of the Arabic nahda, or Arab intellectual renaissance, of the late nineteenth century, made a cursory reference to the cholera that had struck greater Syria (Bilad al-Sham) in 1875. The outbreak delayed the production and publication of that first volume for six months. Bustani hastened to add that during this suspension, he (and presumably the entire team behind the Da’ira, who were based in Beirut) put this time to good use by collecting more books and preparing more entries (Da’irat 3). It is not clear whether Bustani was downplaying the crisis and terrible suffering that cholera had wreaked from a place of privilege. It is equally unclear if he saw the outbreak as a temporary blip or one instance of a recurring event. Perhaps Bustani took part in a sort of emotional denial or blackout, hiding fear and anxiety in plain sight, leaving it to the historians of the future to read such emotions between the lines and in the pages of the encyclopedia itself.Having so far relied on an understanding of crisis as an event through which historians order their periodization and understanding of the past—and through which they prioritize calls for the study of periods, focusing on those deemed periods of crises that triggered suspension—I want to simultaneously destabilize and complicate the notion of crisis as an organizing principle and a unit of historical analysis and, by the same token, address another question raised by the editors of this special issue, namely, “what does the Global South teach us about navigating crisis?”First, much of the suffering, death, and suspension during the modern history of the Middle East happened outside of specific periods of “crisis”: the conscription of peasants into Muhammad Ali’s army; the building of large infrastructural works for the sake of developing and modernizing Egypt; in other words, the state and its elites’ specific vision of a future world, colonialism, as well as the logic of global capitalism and the infrastructure it required, cost the lives of hundreds of thousands of people and thus deprived them of a future. According to one estimate, around one-third of the 350,000 peasants who were forcibly recruited to work on the Mahmudiyya Canal died due to disease, malnutrition, and terrible work conditions (Mikhail 243).2 For the Suez Canal, 8 percent of the labor force died (Fintz, Moulin, and Radi 16). Second, many crises have nearly completely disappeared from the historical record, given that the populations affected were not deemed worthy of study. Quasi-invisible crises, such as the famine in Central Anatolia (1873–75) that Özge Ertem recently analyzed, cost the lives of hundreds of thousands of people—the death toll of the famines was over one hundred thousand in the span of two years (Ertem 153). Clearly, there were many invisible crises that have escaped and demand our attention.3 Third, crises are rarely self-contained events that last for a couple of years. Their causes often have roots in a distant past preceding the crisis itself, but their impact and effects can last for generations. We know the effects of starvation can be passed on to future generations, and that starvation can negatively affect the health of descendants of famished individuals (Columbia University Irving Medical Center). Famine, as well as other traumatic events, including wars and pandemics, can leave genetic, physical, and mental traces on descendants. And the descendants of stateless refugees, in many cases, have inherited their ancestors’ status or nonstatus.This is not to suggest that the history of the modern Middle East is one of perpetual crisis. Rather, it is to question assumed binaries between health and unhealth, crisis and normalcy, even war and peace, and ultimately, hope and despair. The intellectual and social history of crises invites us to dig deeper into structures of vulnerabilities, violence, and inequity and write their longue durée histories. Memory, narration, and study of past crises can help us make sense of and comprehend our contemporary crisis. They also work to build a repertoire of collective actions, solidarity, and futures, past and present, that can help us suspend despair in moments of crisis. After all, crises and emergencies have historically offered opportunities to effect change, and have often led to collective expressions and demands for just solutions instead of individual conflicts over scarce resources. It is such historical moments of contestation and new imaginings that we should work to recover.The author would like to thank Sherene Seikaly for her invitation to contribute to this special volume and for her invaluable suggestions.