Episode 30: How the Middle East broke, a conversation with Hussein Aboubakr Mansour

Ask Haviv Anything

Haviv Rettig Gur

History

4.9 • 640 Ratings

🗓️ 21 July 2025

⏱️ 79 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Hussein Aboubakr Mansour was born and raised in Egypt before fleeing to the United States and dedicating his life to understanding how the Arab world came to be defined by state failure, religious extremism and all the rest of the region's many crises.

His conclusions, laid out in a recent essay in the magazine Mosaic, are an extraordinarily innovative new path. It isn't a crisis of internal Islamic failure, as conservative thinkers argue, nor a crisis forged and sustained purely by Western imperialism, colonialism, capitalism and the other nefarious isms of the left-wing lexicon.

It is something stranger and more interesting: An imbibing into Islamic form and language of European romantic ideas about nation, history and revolution that went so deep as to almost replace (Hussein speaks of a kind of forgetting) the traditional Islamic sense of what Islamic and Arab culture once were.

In this longer-than-usual episode, we take a deep dive into Hussein's thesis, and then we try to apply it to the Jews.

This episode was co-sponsored by Tovit and Mike on behalf of their son Rafi and his unit, Battalion 202 of the Paratroopers and all of our brave IDF soldiers protecting our country and fighting our enemies.

“This episode was also co-sponsored by the family of Larry from Encino, California in in honor of his birthday. They asked to dedicate the episode to the IDF’s reservist pilots, who 10 -- even 20 -- years out of active service, with families and full-time jobs, continue to serve with incredible selflessness. Their achievements during the Iran war were nothing short of heroic.

Please join me on Patreon to support this project: ⁠www.patreon.com/AskHavivAnything⁠.

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Musical intro by Adam Ben Amitai.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello, everybody. Welcome to a special new episode of Ask Aviv Anything. I think I've
0:09.4	called every single one of these episodes special, but this one I've really been waiting
0:12.6	for for a while. I'm going to be talking today to Hussein Abu Bakr Mansour, one of the most
0:17.2	interesting writers on the Middle East, on Islam, on the West, on Israel, on Jews that I know.
0:24.6	He comes at it seemingly from an outsider's perspective in every single one of the arenas in which he swims.
0:30.0	I'm going to be asking him about that.
0:31.8	And we're going to be tackling this conversation as an extension of things that anyone who's listened to this podcast or any of my
0:38.1	talks online has already heard a lot about, which is the theological lineage, the ideological lineage,
0:43.3	the ideological lineage of groups like Hamas, like al-Qaeda. What is the source of the great
0:48.8	crises that afflict the Arab world, the instability is the extremism? How we should understand
0:53.7	it all. The podcast
0:55.1	will be divided into two parts. The first part, we're going to talk about Arab ideological development,
1:00.6	how we got to where we are today, what it all means. The second part, we are going to talk about
1:06.2	Zionism and Jews, where the analysis is once again fascinating, interesting, and new, in a sense,
1:12.4	certainly new to me. And so I'm very excited about this conversation. Let's get to it.
1:18.5	Hussain is a researcher at Iskap, the Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy,
1:23.8	a fellow at the Jerusalem Center for Foreign Affairs, and the author of the extraordinary
1:28.2	Abrahamic Metacritique substack. Very highfalutant words in there, a little bit of an academic
1:33.7	viewpoint. I forgive him for it because what he says is actually original and deeply serious,
1:38.5	which is not true of a great many people who have adopted, you know, academic vocabulary.
1:43.7	So he has the Haviv stamp of approval, if that helps.
1:48.0	I don't know Hussein if that's going to help.
	...

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