Amin Maalouf's Dereglement du Monde

Lebanese novelist and writer Amin Maalouf is preoccupied by sectarianism, which he readily left in Lebanon decades ago, and its increasingly hold across the world.

Maalouf’s most recent book “Dereglement du Monde: French for Disorders of the World,” is a candid cry against confessionalism and the resulting loss of collective intelligence in the West and the East.

In his latest book, Maalouf offers a poignant account of the miseries of our world today, urging all to re-evaluate their stances.

Maalouf denounces the political system in Lebanon, and says he has long considered it “subversive.” The writer says his dread of confessionalism was mainly due to his Lebanese origins.

“Lebanon, where I was born, is the typical example of a country divided by confessionalism, that’s why I never sympathize with this subversive regime,” he writes.

Maalouf, adds that while confessionalism might have constituted a remedy for the disease in the past; in the long run it proved to be more harmful than the disease itself.  He compares confessionalism to a drug that the entire country has become addicted to, and which “weakens its body and intelligence day after day.” The 1993 Prix Goncourt laureate for “The Rock of Tanios”, deplores Lebanon’s confessionalism and blames the ancestors for having taken part in it. “Confessionalism was in the end a swamp that our fathers must have never sank in,” he writes. Using elegant language, Maalouf argues that disorder spreads and consequently confessionalism has widened its grip to almost everything. He adds that identity replaced ideology long time ago in the Middle East. “We have moved from a world where rifts were mainly ideological and where debate was incessant, to a world were rifts touch upon identity and where there is little, if no place for debate,” he writes. According to Maalouf, this global trend has had devastating effects in the Middle East. In “Dereglement du Monde”, Maalouf blames the Arab world for lacking “moral consciousness,” and accuses the West of making use of this absence to dominate the world.  “The Western civilization is, first and foremost, the creator of universal values; but it has been incapable to properly transmitting those. Humanity is paying the price for this gap,” he writes, in one of the book’s most powerful passages, which reveals a bitter disappointment in all that he had believed in. Maalouf’s book reveals another facet of the Lebanese author. His mind is a made up of contradictions that yield positive and humanist reasoning. He is a Christian who defends Muslims, he is an Oriental lover of Europe, and last but not least he is a Lebanese who despises confessionalism.