It was not surprising. Egypt had become the centre of Arabic culture after the fall of Baghdad 700 years earlier. Following the long sleep of Ottoman times, the land had been central to the nineteenth-century Arab Awakening. Now Nasser had placed Egypt at the political centre of the Arabic world, and if his speeches provided its slogans, then the songs of the great diva Umm Kulthum were its cultural theme tunes. Her magnificent voice billowed out on the airwaves, often as a warm-up act to Nasser, whose speeches would be broadcast after her radio concerts. It almost seemed as if she was addressing him, the idol, personally, on behalf of each one of the millions of individuals drunk on love of him:
I’ll not forget you, you who swept me from my feet
with words so soft that came from lips so sweet.
I’ll not forget you, you whose hand stretched out to save
me, drowning, deep from in the swelling wave.
. . .
Has love known such as us, so drunk on ecstasy?
We built about us walls of fantasy!
For the first time since the seventh century, Arabs everywhere rode a wave of unity. The ride was ecstatic; but it was also, in the most literal sense, fantastic.
At home, meanwhile, with the high Arabic magic of Umm Kulthum and the pan-Arab mission of Nasser, Egyptians questioned their arabness at their peril. But there would always be rebels. One was the young Leila Ahmed who in a later memoir, in a chapter entitled ‘On Becoming an Arab’, recalled an irate teacher correcting her high Arabic reading at school in the 1950s:
‘You’re an Arab!’ she finally screamed at me. ‘An Arab! And you don’t know your own language!’
‘I’m not an Arab!’ I said, suddenly furious myself. ‘I am Egyptian! And anyway we don’t speak like this!’ And I banged my book shut.
A VERY TEMPORARY MARRIAGE
The Balfour Declaration; mandates and military bases; client-kings, fat-cat courts and cabinets; the British in Palestine; the French in Algeria, where a bloody war for independence had begun in 1954; Britain, France and Israel in cahoots at Suez in 1956 . . . It was all a crescendo of broken promises, a catalogue of duplicity and dashed hopes, and it left Arabs both suspicious of outsiders’ intentions towards their world and unconvinced – as they still are, a lifetime later – that the Westerners’ solution of supposedly harmonious multiplicity could work for them. Thus the continuing pursuit of the mirage of unity, whether led by a living hero like Nasser or, as more recently, by the long-dead Prophet of Islam. The mirage had always eluded them; but at least it was their own dream, not someone else’s hallucination.
Nasser, however, was not alone among the living in claiming to champion pan-Arabism. A decade before his rise to power, the Ba’th movement had formed in Syria and Iraq. Its beginnings sound like the start of a joke: ‘There were these three Syrians, a Christian, a Sunni and an Alawi . . . ’ But the three – Michel Aflaq, Salah al-Din al-Bitar and Zaki al-Arsuzi – were serious. Ba’th is ‘resurrection’, and in its founders’ minds, the movement promised a sort of apocalyptic Arab Awakening, a secular End Time in which Arabs would rise as one and enter a state of blissful unity. The mark of the elect was that most ancient one of all: for the Ba’th, as for Nasserists and proto-nationalists, an Arab was defined above all by language. Defined, and led: ‘Our language,’ said a Ba’thist academic in 1956, ‘is like the flag behind which soldiers march.’ As well as a flag, however, the rather cerebral Ba’thists needed a populist flag-bearer. Nasser, covered with the borrowed laurels of Suez and basking in stardom, was perfect.
On 12 January 1958, a group of high-ranking army officers, including Ba’thists, flew from Damascus to Cairo to put the idea of bringing Syria and Egypt closer together politically. Nasser sent them home with stars in their eyes and an agreement for a full union with Egypt in their pocket – with, of course, Nasser in control. The politicians back in Damascus were presented with a fait accompli. Syria, independent for little more than a dozen years, was independent no longer: it was part of the United Arab Republic (UAR). And if the politicians didn’t like it, they could lump it, in gaol.
Extraordinarily, the reactionary, absolute and highly eccentric king-imam of Yemen, Ahmad, immediately took his country into a federation with the UAR; the new and kinky ménage à trois was called the United Arab States (UAS). Perhaps on reflection, however, Yemen’s joining was not altogether strange. Like his father, Imam Yahya, Ahmad had always harped on the theme of throwing the British out of Aden and its Protectorates and forming a reunited Greater Yemen – with, of course, himself as king. To this end, arms and advisers now flowed into the country from Egypt. So too did rhetoric, and Yemen’s radio, which had also modestly upped its wattage, crowed in the tones of Cairo, ‘The Arab giant will drive imperialism into the pit. The claws of death have clutched at the imperialists.’
With not just one but two unions – the UAR and the UAS – orbiting around Nasser, the two remaining Hashimite monarchies, Jordan and Iraq, formed their own union. For a historical split second, the Arab world seemed to be heading not for unity but for yet another duality; perhaps for its own Cold War. Time, though, did not tell. In July 1958, belatedly inspired by the 1952 Egyptian revolution but with that extra dash of gore that always seems to have been to local taste, a coup by army officers in Baghdad killed the young king and most of the royal family. While the blood was still fresh, Ba’thist officers considered taking Iraq into the UAR; the coup leader, Brigadier Abd al-Karim Qasim, however, feared that Egypt and Syria would gang up on him and quashed the idea. In this world of alpha males, some were more alpha than others, and they all knew that one, Nasser, was alpha-double-plus.
In the event, both the UAR and UAS were doomed. Theoretical Arabs might have been led by the flag of a standard language; real-life Arabs marched to the cross-rhythms and disharmonies of different dialects, both linguistic and political. Theirs was never a simple Sousa melody (‘Keeping Step With The Union’?) but the fantastic complexities of Charles Ives. The cross-purposes soon revealed themselves in Syria, where Nasser’s functionaries had brushed the Ba’thists aside, nationalized the holdings of astonished landowners, and tormented the populace with red tape (Egypt, having invented papyrus, has always been inordinately fond of paperwork). On 28 September 1961, less than four years after they invited them in, Syrian army officers rose up and gave the Egyptians the boot. Yemen’s Imam Ahmad, who had had second thoughts about the UAS from the start, cut his own ties with the UAR (as Egypt continued to call itself, alone and wistful, until 1971). A pre-modern monarch if ever there was one in modern times, he did so by attacking Nasser’s socialism with the ancient edged weapon of verse:
To grab all property and ‘nationalize’,
and, in the name of ‘justice’, equalize
The inequality of rich and poor –
both acts are crimes against God’s holy law.
The Egyptians counter-attacked, most memorably in a feature film that portrayed the imam as a concubine-fondling tyrant who kept a lion chained next to his throne.
Nasser’s dream of union was over. But worse, much worse, was to come. The two main Ba’th parties, of Syria and Iraq, would follow a forked path and end up fighting each other: the Ba’th dissolved in bathos, and battles. ‘Nothing was resurrected with us,’ said Sami al-Jundi, an early member of the ‘Resurrection’ Party, ‘but the age of the Mamluks.’ In Iraq, under the Ba’thist Saddam Husayn, it would be more like the age of the Umayyad bogeyman al-Hajjaj ibn Yusuf. As for the current state of the Syrian Ba’th, it is the final punch-line, the tail-end of the shaggy dog story that began with those three founders and their good intentions; its slogan, ‘Unity, Freedom and Socialism’, would be more accurate if changed to ‘Disunity, Tyranny and Fascism’. The irony, again, is that calls for union, both Nasserist and Ba’thist, could lead to such division. It was as if Arab nationalist leaders were magnets attracting popular support – until the leaders tried to come together, and found that like poles repel.
Fire’s kindled with two firesticks,
war with words . . .
The war in Yemen soon blazed up into Egypt’s Vietnam, napalm and all. If Nasser had a way with words, he didn’t have a way with wars.
A SPARROW AMONG RAINDROPS
So much for Arab unity in the time of Nasser. In contrast, the other element of Nasser’s theme, the anti-imperial one, was proving more successful in this age of worldwide decolonization. The French granted independence to Tunisia and Morocco in 1956, in both cases following popular resistance that had surged following the 1952 Egyptian revolution. Algeria, however, their first Arab possession, they held on to at huge cost in blood. Both sides committed terrorist atrocities against civilians, but probably the worst were those inflicted by French settlers on their Arab neighbours. The colonial authorities freely used torture and internment without trial as weapons, and at the height of the conflict had half a million troops on the ground.
A result of the horrors was that, perhaps for the first time, Arabs everywhere – in both Maghrib and Mashriq – began to feel a genuine solidarity, a mass sympathy with their fellows in Algeria. It was a unity of spirit that leapt borders and ignored the personality clashes of their leaders. Again, radio broadcasting was vital in forming this awareness. But, unlike Suez, the long and bitter Algerian war needed no Nasserite spin: its heroes and heroines were inspiration enough. The most celebrated was Jamilah Bu Hayrad, a woman in her early twenties who delivered bombs and other messages for the resistance, and whose capture and torture in 1957 made her a secular martyr across the Arab world:
Jamilah among their bullets,
A sparrow among raindrops.
A shock of volts shakes her wine-dark body,
Burns on her left breast
On her nipple . . .
On . . . on . . . the shame of it . . .
. . .
Revolutionary from the Atlas
Remembered by lilac and narcissus
Remembered by citron flowers.
How small is France’s Jeanne d’Arc
Beside my country’s Jeanne d’Arc!
France had tried to make Algeria her own; by turning Jamilah Bu Hayrad into Joan of Arc, the Arab poetic imagination had colonized the colonizers’ own national epic. The Maid of Algiers was condemned to the guillotine, but her sentence was commuted to life imprisonment. After the French left Algeria in 1962, worn down by the war and by public opinion at home, Jamilah – in her own remake not of Joan of Arc but of the frog prince – married her French defence lawyer. Now, that is independence.
Meanwhile at the far end of the Arab world, Aden, Britain’s first Arab possession (if we except Tangier, Catherine of Braganza’s dowry to Charles II in 1662, abandoned in 1684), taken like Algiers in the 1830s, was also proving to be its last. The British withdrew in 1967, bombed out by the local resistance, but also budgeted out by Prime Minister Harold Wilson’s defence cuts at home. Abandoning a royal flush of client-rulers, they slipped away, as the military commander Brigadier Lunt put it, ‘like thieves in the night’.
Across the peninsula, the British redeemed themselves, to some extent, in their last spheres of Arabian influence. The now withered hand of empire had already helped to machinate in 1966 the succession of Shaykh Zayid as ruler of Abu Dhabi; now, in 1970, it eased that of Sultan Qabus in Oman. The millennial history of imperial kingmaking had life in it yet. The stability of the resulting states – the United Arab Emirates, formed of Abu Dhabi and its six smaller neighbours, and the Sultanate of Oman – was by no means guaranteed: over time, Oman had never been any more united than next-door Yemen; of Zayid’s fifteen predecessors at Abu Dhabi, eight had been murdered and five deposed. But small populations and oil-filled coffers have helped.
There was, however, one other late manifestation of colonialism that would prove more baleful. That the sins of Balfour and Sykes–Picot had been amply expiated, in many international eyes, by the sacrifice of Jews in the Holocaust, was not obvious to Arabs. They saw the simple fact of outsiders coming and settling on land where their own people had lived time out of mind. At the same time, the Zionist intrusion still had the potential to form the core of a new Arab solidarity. Arabs had lost the 1948 war with the Zionists because of that ‘something false and rotten’ in themselves; but perhaps the State of Israel would prove to be something unexpectedly beneficial, like the grit in the oyster.
THE CATASTROPHE
In June 1967, while Nasser still had a third of his forces in Yemen, he suddenly found himself up against a foe much nearer home. He had built up his aggressive capability with Soviet-supplied tanks and warplanes, the camelry and cavalry of the Cold War. Recently, he had signed military agreements with Syria and Jordan. All wanted vengeance for the defeat of 1948, and it seemed that Arabs were poised on the edge of another moment of unity, perhaps of greatness. The Israelis, however, had also been building up their military muscles, and especially their air power. On 5 June they struck first, wiping out the Egyptian air force on the ground, and in a few short days seizing not only Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula as far as the Suez Canal, but also the Jawlan or Golan Heights of southern Syria and, most fatefully, the remaining Arab parts of Palestine – the Gaza Strip and Jordanian-run East Jerusalem and the West Bank. Even more disastrously than in the long slow debacle of the Yemen war, Nasser had been the victim of his own dreams, his own rhetoric. He had learned that rhetoric is to truth as dreams are to realities.
The calamity generated much elegy, and – that rare thing – much honesty. There was no way a loss of this magnitude could be alchemized into anything other than defeat. Poetry became confession. In particular, it was recognized that while words might start wars, they were no match in the actual fighting for modern weaponry well used. In 1798 the Egyptians had opposed Napoleon with words and their rhetorical adjuncts, sticks. Similarly, in 1967,
If we lost the war, no wonder,
For we go to war
With all the speechifying talent that an Oriental has,
With the Lays of Antar that never killed a fly . . .
If verses about ancient warriors like Antar couldn’t kill flies, what could they do against Israeli Mirage jets? As Nizar Qabbani went on to explain in this most bitter ode, ‘Marginalia in the Notebook of the Naksah’ – the ‘Catastrophe’, the Disaster Mark II – the speechifying had drowned out genuine speech, the expression of people’s real thoughts, hopes and fears:
O my master . . . O my master the sultan
You have lost the war twice
Because half our people have no tongue . . .
As so often, the gathering of the word had meant the silencing of the crowd.
Writing over twelve years before the 1967 war, Edward Atiyah had noted how Arabs were well aware that the power of the unwelcome presence in their midst might be
great enough, perhaps, to enable the Israelis (if the Arab states wer
e unable to defend themselves adequately) to snatch another piece of Arab territory – in Jordan or the Gaza region – with impunity.
Such sober prophecies had been forgotten in the euphoria of the moment, of armament, and of Nasser’s grandiloquent stage presence. Now the worst had happened; or worse than the worst, for the Israelis had snatched both those two territories and a lot more besides. It was a defeat that put Arab time and motion back on pause. The only movement was that of the new flood of refugees, some of them double refugees, driven from their old homes in 1948 and now in 1967 from their temporary homes. As for the prime mover himself, the Knight of Dreams, he now became, according to his vice-president and successor Anwar al-Sadat, ‘a living corpse’. For his later biographer, Said Aburish, Nasser was The Last Arab. Hyperbolic though the title is, the hundred million and more Arabs who were left had indeed lost something huge: Nasser had made them feel like a people, ‘the Arabs’; now the definite article was in doubt again, perhaps even the capital A. It was all a new Arab awakening, and a harsh one. Umm Kulthum’s songs now seemed to be about this cruel morning after:
But time dispelled the wine; day dawned, and we awoke –
Arabs Page 60
