Arab civilisation has collapsed. It won’t recover in my lifetime.
By Hisham Melhem
With his decision to use
force against the violent extremists of the Islamic State, President Obama is
doing more than to knowingly enter a quagmire. He is doing more than play with
the fates of two half-broken countries—Iraq and Syria—whose societies were
gutted long before the Americans appeared on the horizon. Obama is stepping
once again—and with understandably great reluctance—into the chaos of an entire
civilization that has broken down.
Arab civilization, such
as we knew it, is all but gone. The Arab world today is more violent, unstable,
fragmented and driven by extremism—the extremism of the rulers and those in
opposition—than at any time since the collapse of the Ottoman Empire a century
ago. Every hope of modern Arab history has been betrayed. The promise of
political empowerment, the return of politics, the restoration of human dignity
heralded by the season of Arab uprisings in their early heydays—all has given
way to civil wars, ethnic, sectarian and regional divisions and the reassertion
of absolutism, both in its military and atavistic forms. With the dubious
exception of the antiquated monarchies and emirates of the Gulf—which for the
moment are holding out against the tide of chaos—and possibly Tunisia, there is
no recognizable legitimacy left in the Arab world.
Is it any surprise that,
like the vermin that take over a ruined city, the heirs to this self-destroyed
civilization should be the nihilistic thugs of the Islamic State? And that
there is no one else who can clean up the vast mess we Arabs have made of our
world but the Americans and Western countries?
No one paradigm or one
theory can explain what went wrong in the Arab world in the last century. There
is no obvious set of reasons for the colossal failures of all the ideologies
and political movements that swept the Arab region: Arab nationalism, in its
Baathist and Nasserite forms; various Islamist movements; Arab socialism; the rentier state and rapacious
monopolies, leaving in their wake a string of broken societies. No one theory
can explain the marginalization of Egypt, once the center of political and
cultural gravity in the Arab East, and its brief and tumultuous experimentation
with peaceful political change before it reverted back to military rule.
Nor is the notion of
“ancient sectarian hatreds” adequate to explain the frightening reality that
along a front stretching from Basra at the mouth of the Persian Gulf to Beirut
on the Mediterranean there exists an almost continuous bloodletting between
Sunni and Shia—the public manifestation of an epic geopolitical battle for
power and control pitting Iran, the Shia powerhouse, against Saudi Arabia, the
Sunni powerhouse, and their proxies.
There is no one single
overarching explanation for that tapestry of horrors in Syria and Iraq, where
in the last five years more than a quarter of a million people perished, where
famed cities like Aleppo, Homs and Mosul were visited by the modern terror of
Assad’s chemical weapons and the brutal violence of the Islamic State. How
could Syria tear itself apart and become—like Spain in the 1930s—the arena for
Arabs and Muslims to re-fight their old civil wars? The war waged by the Syrian
regime against civilians in opposition areas combined the use of Scud missiles,
anti-personnel barrel bombs as well as medieval tactics against towns and
neighborhoods such as siege and starvation. For the first time since the First
World War, Syrians were dying of malnutrition and hunger.
Iraq’s story in the last
few decades is a chronicle of a death foretold. The slow death began with
Saddam Hussein’s fateful decision to invade Iran in September 1980. Iraqis have
been living in purgatory ever since with each war giving birth to another. In
the midst of this suspended chaos, the U.S. invasion in 2003 was merely a
catalyst that allowed the violent chaos to resume in full force.
The polarizations in
Syria and Iraq—political, sectarian and ethnic—are so deep that it is difficult
to see how these once-important countries could be restored as unitary states.
In Libya, Muammar al-Qaddafi’s 42-year reign of terror rendered the country
politically desolate and fractured its already tenuous unity. The armed
factions that inherited the exhausted country have set it on the course of
breaking up—again, unsurprisingly—along tribal and regional fissures. Yemen has
all the ingredients of a failed state: political, sectarian, tribal, north-south
divisions, against the background of economic deterioration and a depleted
water table that could turn it into the first country in the world to run out
of drinking water.
Bahrain is maintaining a
brittle status quo by the force of arms of its larger neighbors, mainly Saudi
Arabia. Lebanon, dominated by Hezbollah, arguably the most powerful non-state
actor in the world—before the rise of the Islamic State—could be dragged fully
to the maelstrom of Syria’s multiple civil wars by the Assad regime, Iran and
its proxy Hezbollah as well as the Islamic State.
A byproduct of the
depredation of the national security state and resurgent Islamism has been the
slow death of the cosmopolitanism that distinguished great Middle Eastern
cities like Alexandria, Beirut, Cairo and Damascus. Alexandria was once a
center of learning and multicultural delights (by night, Mark Twain wrote in Innocents Abroad, “it
was a sort of reminiscence of Paris”). Today Alexandria is a hotbed of
political Islam, now that the once large Greek-Egyptian community has fled
along with the other non-Arab and non-Muslim communities. Beirut, once the most
liberal city in the Levant, is struggling to maintain a modicum of openness and
tolerance while being pushed by Hezbollah to become a Tehran on the Med. Over
the last few decades, Islamists across the region have encouraged—and
pressured—women to wear veils, men to show signs of religiosity, and subtly and
not-so-subtly intimidated non-conformist intellectuals and artists. Egypt today
is bereft of good universities and research centers, while publishing
unreadable newspapers peddling xenophobia and hyper-nationalism. Cairo no
longer produces the kind of daring and creative cinema that pioneers like the
critically acclaimed director Youssef Chahine made for more than 60 years.
Egyptian society today cannot tolerate a literary and intellectual figure like
Taha Hussein, who towered over Arab intellectual life from the 1920s until his
death in 1973, because of his skepticism about Islam. Egyptian society cannot
reconcile itself today to the great diva Asmahan (1917-1944) singing to her
lover that “my soul, my heart, and my body are in your hand.” In the Egypt of
today, a chanteuse like Asmahan would be hounded and banished from the country.
***
The jihadists of the
Islamic State, in other words, did not emerge from nowhere. They climbed
out of a rotting, empty hulk—what was left of a broken-down civilization. They
are a gruesome manifestation of a deeper malady afflicting Arab political
culture, which was stagnant, repressive and patriarchal after the decades of
authoritarian rule that led to the disastrous defeat in the 1967 war with
Israel. That defeat sounded the death knell of Arab nationalism and the
resurgence of political Islam, which projected itself as the alternative to the
more secular ideologies that had dominated the Arab republics since the Second
World War. If Arab decline was the problem, then “Islam is the solution,” the
Islamists said—and they believed it.
At their core, both
political currents—Arab nationalism and Islamism—are driven by atavistic
impulses and a regressive outlook on life that is grounded in a mostly
mythologized past. Many Islamists, including Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood (the
wellspring of such groups)—whether they say it explicitly or hint at it—are
still on a ceaseless quest to resurrect the old Ottoman Caliphate. Still more
radical types—the Salafists—yearn for a return to the puritanical days of Prophet
Muhammad and his companions. For most Islamists, democracy means only
majoritarian rule, and the rule of sharia law,
which codifies gender inequality and discrimination against non-Muslims.
And let’s face the grim
truth: There is no evidence whatever that Islam in its various political forms
is compatible with modern democracy. From Afghanistan under the Taliban to
Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, and from Iran to Sudan, there is no Islamist entity
that can be said to be democratic, just or a practitioner of good governance.
The short rule of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt under the presidency of
Mohamed Morsi was no exception. The Brotherhood tried to monopolize power,
hound and intimidate the opposition and was driving the country toward a
dangerous impasse before a violent military coup ended the brief
experimentation with Islamist rule.
Like the Islamists, the
Arab nationalists—particularly the Baathists—were also fixated on a
“renaissance” of past Arab greatness, which had once flourished in the famed
cities of Damascus, Baghdad, Cairo and Córdoba in Al-Andalus, now Spain. These
nationalists believed that Arab language and culture (and to a lesser extent
Islam) were enough to unite disparate entities with different levels of social,
political and cultural development. They were in denial that they lived in a
far more diverse world. Those minorities that resisted the primacy of Arab
identity were discriminated against, denied citizenship and basic rights, and
in the case of the Kurds in Iraq were subjected to massive repression and
killings of genocidal proportion. Under the guise of Arab nationalism the
modern Arab despot (Saddam, Qaddafi, the Assads) emerged. But these men lived
in splendid solitude, detached from their own people. The repression and intimidation
of the societies they ruled over were painfully summarized by the gifted Syrian
poet Muhammad al-Maghout: “I enter the bathroom with my identity papers in my
hand.”
The dictators, always
unpopular, opened the door to the Islamists’ rise when they proved just as
incompetent as the monarchs they had replaced. That, again, came in 1967 after
the crushing defeat of Nasserite Egypt and Baathist Syria at the hands of
Israel. From that moment on Arab politics began to be animated by various
Islamist parties and movements. The dictators, in their desperation to hold
onto their waning power, only became more brutal in the 1980s and ‘90s. But the
Islamists kept coming back in new and various shapes and stripes, only to be
crushed again ever more ferociously.
The year 1979 was a
watershed moment for political Islam. An Islamic revolution exploded in Iran,
provoked in part by decades of Western support for the corrupt shah. The Soviet
Union invaded Afghanistan and a group of bloody zealots occupied the Grand Mosque
in Mecca for two weeks. After these cataclysmic events political Islam became
more atavistic in its Sunni manifestations and more belligerent in its Shia
manifestations. Saudi Arabia, in order to reassert its fundamentalist “wahhabi”
ethos, became stricter in its application of Islamic law, and increased its
financial aid to ultraconservative Islamists and their schools throughout the
world. The Islamization of the war in Afghanistan against Soviet occupation—a
project organized and financed by the United States, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and
Pakistan—triggered a tectonic change in the political map of South Asia and the
Middle East. The Afghan war was the baptism of fire for terrorist outfits like
the Egyptian Islamic Group and al Qaeda, the progenitors of the Islamic State.
This decades-long
struggle for legitimacy between the dictators and the Islamists meant that when
the Arab Spring uprisings began in early 2011, there were no other political
alternatives. You had only the Scylla of the national security state and the
Charybdis of political Islam. The secularists and liberals, while playing the
leading role in the early phase of the Egyptian uprisings, were marginalized
later by the Islamists who, because of their political experience as an old
movement, won parliamentary and presidential elections. In a region shorn of
real political life it was difficult for the admittedly divided and not very
experienced liberals and secularists to form viable political parties.
So no one should be
surprised that the Islamists and the remnants of the national security state
have dominated Egypt since the fall of Hosni Mubarak. In the end, the uprising
removed the tip of the political pyramid—Mubarak and some of his cronies—but
the rest of the repressive structure, what the Egyptians refer to as the “deep
state” (the army, security apparatus, the judiciary, state media and vested
economic interests), remained intact. After the failed experiment of Muslim
Brotherhood rule, a bloody coup in 2013 completed the circle and brought Egypt
back under the control of a retired general.
In today’s Iraq, too,
the failure of a would-be authoritarian—recently departed Prime Minister Nuri
al-Maliki—has contributed to the rise of the Islamists. The Islamic State is
exploiting the alienated Arab Sunni minority, which feels marginalized and
disenfranchised in an Iraq dominated by the Shia for the first time in its
history and significantly influenced by Iran.
Almost every Muslim era,
including the enlightened ones, has been challenged by groups that espouse a
virulent brand of austere, puritanical and absolutist Islam. They have
different names, but are driven by the same fanatical, atavistic impulses. The
great city of Córdoba, one of the most advanced cities in Medieval Europe, was
sacked and plundered by such a group (Al Mourabitoun) in 1013, destroying its
magnificent palaces and its famed library. In the 1920s the Ikhwan Movement in
Arabia (no relation to the Egyptian movement) was so fanatical that the founder
of Saudi Arabia, King Abdul-Aziz Al Saud, who collaborated with them initially,
had to crush them later on. In contemporary times, these groups include the
Taliban, al Qaeda and the Islamic State.
Yes, it is misleading to
lump—as some do—all Islamist groups together, even though all are conservative
in varying degrees. As terrorist organizations, al Qaeda and Islamic State are
different from the Muslim Brotherhood, a conservative movement that renounced
violence years ago, although it did dabble with violence in the past.
Nonetheless, most of
these groups do belong to the same family tree—and all of them stem from the
Arabs’ civilizational ills. The Islamic State, like al Qaeda, is the tumorous
creation of an ailing Arab body politic. Its roots run deep in the badlands of
a tormented Arab world that seems to be slouching aimlessly through the
darkness. It took the Arabs decades and generations to reach this nadir. It
will take us a long time to recover—it certainly won’t happen in my lifetime.
My generation of Arabs was told by both the Arab nationalists and the Islamists
that we should man the proverbial ramparts to defend the “Arab World” against
the numerous barbarians (imperialists, Zionists, Soviets) massing at the gates.
Little did we know that the barbarians were already inside the gates, that they
spoke our language and were already very well entrenched in the city.
Related
Reading:
No comments:
Post a Comment