Arabs

by Tim Mackintosh-Smith

  And then, all of a sudden, unity was back on the agenda, and about to prove more divisive than ever before.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  THE AGE OF

  DISAPPOINTMENT

  AUTOCRATS, ISLAMOCRATS,

  ANACHARCHS

  GUERNICA-ON-THE-ORONTES

  About twenty years ago I visited the Syrian city of Hamah, a sleepy place on the Orontes interspersed with tangled orchards and with the groans and gull-cries of giant wooden wheels that raise water from the deep-sunk river. I particularly wanted to find a venerable riverside mansion, Bayt al-Kaylani, that I had seen in an old photograph. The house had its own enormous waterwheel attached and was wonderfully strange, half palazzo, half paddle-steamer. But it had vanished: its site and the surrounding area were a public park planted with giant plastic toadstools.

  My quest for the strange was more successful in the Great Mosque. The first thing that caught my eye in the prayer hall was a fine ancient inscription – of, unaccountably, the first words of the Odyssey . . .

  ΑΝΔΡΑΜΟΙΕΝΝΕΠΕ . . .

  Tell me of the man . . .

  After that it was not Homer, and not about Odysseus but someone called Elias; more than that my rusty Greek would not tell me. It was a double dislocation: Greek in a mosque, and Homer that was not Homer. Looking around, everything else was wrong, too. I knew the Great Mosque of Hamah was an Umayyad foundation, 1,300 years old, and yet it had none of the patina of an ancient building; much of it might have been built yesterday. There were jarring details, including an aluminium door that said ‘PUSH’ on the handle. This led into the tomb-chamber of a local thirteenth-century potentate, a member of Saladin’s family. The chamber too seemed to have been recently and hastily rebuilt. The prince’s original cenotaph had gone, and was replaced by a jerry-built thing little better than a packing case.

  ‘I wasn’t expecting to find that so much had been . . . restored,’ I said to the mosque-goers who were showing me around.

  They said nothing.

  Most of the Great Mosque, all of Bayt al-Kaylani and much else in Hamah had been destroyed fifteen years before my visit, in February 1982, by aerial bombardment followed up by tanks and artillery: as an example of modern mechanized slaughter, Hamah was an Arab Guernica. The many dead were members of the Muslim Brotherhood, adherents of a newly militant Islam who had seized the city four days earlier; those killed included, of course, their families, neighbours and anyone else who happened to be in the way. The man responsible for the destruction was Hafiz al-Asad, one of a new – but in some ways very old – breed of autocrats. He himself had seized Syria in 1970, and had never bowed to the increasing demands of Islamic hardliners. In Hamah, the intersection of hard lines cost between 8,000 and 25,000 lives – at least five Guernicas’-worth and at most more than the London Blitz; no one is sure. History is often founded on such variables, even when it happened in living memory. Not that many outside Syria remember Hamah: the Syrian victims had no Picasso to memorialize them, no Churchill to give heart to the survivors. Within the country, silence was their monument, and the newly empty spaces and hastily built antiquities in Hamah itself.

  It is all very well to run a tight ship (or to keep a tidy shop: Hafiz al-Asad’s omnipresent portrait made him look to my eyes less like a tyrannous captain of state than a friendly neighbourhood grocer). But clearly something is wrong if you feel you have to kill 8,000 or more of your fellow countrymen in one go. Apart from the Black Death and the Mongols, these are the sort of figures for sudden extermination that we have not had since al-Hajjaj ibn Yusuf, who was massacring opponents in Iraq at the time when the Great Mosque of Hamah was first built. It may be conducive to short-term unity, in that you have terrified your opponents into silence; but it is only likely to make things worse in the long run. And, with the death-toll in the current Syrian war waged by Hafiz al-Asad’s son now standing at perhaps half a million, it has.

  AFTER ORPHEUS

  Looking back to the mid-1960s, just a few years before al-Asad père grabbed power, the Palestinian writer Samir Kassir wrote that the Arabic world was ‘largely optimistic: the Arabs seemed as if they were on the move’. Arabs were still in the active, transitive mood that had returned with their Awakening. Unless you were an old-fashioned tyrant, a male supremacist or a dispossessed Palestinian, the middle decades of the twentieth century had seemed in many ways an age of hope. ‘During the interwar years,’ Eugene Rogan has pointed out, ‘Egypt achieved the highest degree of multiparty democracy in the modern history of the Arab world.’ Women in Syria, Kassir noted, got the vote before women in France. In the mid-1950s, Iraq seemed to have a hugely promising future, perhaps as ‘a kind of Oriental Canada’. Kuwait looked set for liberal democracy. Nasser, flawed as he was, had radiated hope. Admittedly the Catastrophe – the 1967 war with Israel – had severely damaged the optimism, but in the 1970s the revolution in oil prices and the pilgrimage of petroleum had mobilized Arabs anew and given them fresh hope. Even my adoptive land, seemingly locked in mountains and the past, could have a book written about it in the early 1980s entitled Yemen Enters the Modern World. Arabs everywhere talked of al-taqaddum, ‘progress’.

  And then, in the 1980s, as the Islamic calendar edged into its fifteenth century, the forward motion stalled. It wasn’t just that there was a fork in the path, a hesitation; for many, there was a complete about-turn. It was as if Arabs had begun to sense that the path of progress was leading them into alien territory – into the ‘Modern World’, but also out of their own Arab world. That, at least, has been the warning to them put out by a remarkable reactionary double-act of new-wave autocrats and islamocrats. Both have been empowered by the swelling wealth of the region, by the machinations of superpowers, and most recently by that other ancient leaven of Arab history, developments in information technology. Both have been able to use old rhetorics in ever more creative and persuasive ways.

  New-wave though they might be, they are also inheritors of a very old legacy of power that had been in danger of slipping from their hands. In 1970, in the Afterword to the tenth edition of his History of the Arabs that he had been updating for a third of a century, Philip Hitti wrote that

  Reconstructing Arab society on a democratic political basis and reconciling Islam and the modern world remain the greatest tasks confronting the contemporary generation.

  They had been the greatest tasks for several editions of the History; in fact, the business of reform had already exercised half a dozen generations of thinking Arabs, since the beginnings of the Awakening in the first half of the nineteenth century. In 1980, it was a process that still needed more time and forward motion. Over the four decades or so since then, however, autocrats and islamocrats have blocked social reconstruction and Islamic reconciliation at every step. It is what one would expect: the last thing they want is to lose power. What is more surprising is that most Arabs have gone along with them, silently, obediently backwards.

  Meanwhile the vision of unity, that shimmering phantom to which Arabs had reached out in the time of Nasser – their knight, their Orpheus, their charmer – receded too, lost perhaps for ever.

  PEOPLE OF THE CAVE

  Along with that fleeing phantom, many Arabs after Nasser seemed to have lost the thread of their own arabness: to have lost that definition he had given them as a people, the Arabs. But in the labyrinth of the modern world – to evoke another subterranean myth – there was another thread for them to follow: ‘Hold fast,’ the Qur’an says,

  all of you together, to the habl of Allah, and do not be divided among yourselves.

  As we have seen, habl is ‘a cord, a rope’; but it is also ‘a binding covenant, a treaty’, and evidently it is the same term used in the most ancient inscriptions for treaties, made under the auspices of a patron deity, that bound the pre-Islamic unitary states of South Arabia. Could Islam now provide the thread of unity once more? The idea was alluring; the reality was more complex. The bond that held the Islamic
state of Medina together had unravelled within a generation of Muhammad’s death; since then it had frayed still further. With multiple sectarian claimants now insisting that they held the one and only true end of the thread, it was impossible to know which one to follow into an increasingly Daedalian future. The alternative, of course, was to do what Almohads and Wahhabis – both ‘Muwahhidun’, Unitarians – had tried to do, and head the other way, back to the brief but glorious unity of Muhammad’s Medina. This retrogressive trend was to become so widespread in Islam over the closing decades of the twentieth century that terms like ‘Wahhabi’ and ‘Salafi’ (that is, following the example of the salaf, the pious fathers of the faith) seem too constricting, too particular for it. One solution might be that, just as secular politics is conveniently if simplistically seen in terms of left and right, the politics of religion should be thought of as orientated forward or in reverse.

  The reverse-leaning militants of Hamah, who dreamed of turning Syria into an Islamic state, sometimes look like the Arab vanguard of a new political Islam; but that is partly because they stand in such sharp contrast to the secular setting of Ba’thist Syria and the recent nationalist past of the region. Islam has been political ever since Muhammad moved to Yathrib and it became Medina, his madinah, his polis. Subsequent Arab leaders have always used Islam for political ends – from Abu Bakr al-Siddiq, defeating the ‘apostate’ (in other words, opposition) tribes of Arabia in the 630s, to Abd al-Aziz Ibn Sa’ud occupying most of the peninsula in the earlier twentieth century with his raiding Wahhabi tribesmen. Or were they using politics for Islamic ends? It is hard for mortals to distinguish.

  There is, however, something new and different about political Islam in its current global form. It is a creature of contemporary globalization, and a by-product of secular pan-Arabism’s failure. That is why it seemed new to an observer like Ali Allawi, who can say, ‘I don’t recall ever coming across the word jihad in any contemporary context’, when growing up in 1950s Iraq. Yet, even at that time, the movement was germinating. It took an American novelist in a far corner of the Arabic world to notice it with clarity. Paul Bowles, writing of a cell in the independence movement in Morocco in 1954, knew that the majority were orientated to Nasser’s Egypt; but one, Benani, had other ideas:

  They dreamed of Cairo with its autonomous government, its army, its newspapers and its cinema, while he [Benani], facing in the same direction, dreamed just a little beyond Cairo . . . to Mecca. They thought in terms of grievances, censorship, petitions and reforms; he . . . in terms of destiny and divine justice . . . They saw factories and power plants rising from the fields; he saw skies of flame, the wings of avenging angels, and total destruction.

  In the lurid light of September 2001 and the attacks on New York, that is a chillingly prophetic vision. Soon after, astute political observers were also beginning to predict the growth of a new political Islam. In 1955, for example, Edward Atiyah wrote, ‘if Western democracy and reformist military dictatorship failed, the alternative would be the forces of revivalist, theocratic Islam’. Before then, political Islam had seemed the precise opposite of contemporary and global – anachronistic and parochial. Islam’s most recent major political and military success, those conquests of the Saudi–Wahhabi alliance, was confined to a still-tribal, pre-petroleum Arabia where society had changed relatively little since the early seventh century. The new political Islam, however, would be far from parochial: its Promised Land is the whole world. It is a logical development. Muhammad had achieved tawhid, unification both political and theological, in the Arabs’ ‘Island’. His immediate successors had extended it over the Arabian subcontinent. The subsequent conquests had tried to impose it on a wider Old World. Now, in a more or less globalized world, the ideal is even bigger. So too is the sense of failure and anger when the ideal collides with the reality of a planet that, even if interconnected, is immensely and irreversibly (we presume) various.

  Three major factors, more recent than the Saudi conquests, and all of them originating outside the Arab arena, energized political Islam. The first was those crushing but instructive victories of political and military Judaism, in 1948 and 1967. The next was the Islamic Revolution of January 1979 in Iran. Here was an Islam that was not uniting and empowering impoverished tribesmen, but taking over a wealthy state whose regime was backed by one of the two latest ‘lions’, the United States. The fight against old-fashioned colonialism had already been won, in the decades immediately following the Second World War; the fight against the new cultural and economic imperialism of the Cold War could triumph too – with the blessing of Allah (or at least, in His name, of Ayatollah Khomeini), rather than of Nasser or Che Guevara. The third factor came into operation when, at the end of that same year, 1979, the second, Soviet, lion pounced on Afghanistan. From 1983, this time with the blessing of the United States as well as of Allah, Arab fighters went to join the Afghan resistance. Afghan and ‘Afghan-Arab’ mujahideen were the toast of the West; ‘jihadists’, the cognate with the darker connotations, had yet to be coined.

  In all three cases, pressures exerted by foreign empires – the US, the USSR, and that third, implanted empire-in-miniature, Israel – were shaping the region and moulding Arab identity. Or rather, they were remoulding it as Muslim identity, and not just for the relatively few young Arab men who made it to Afghanistan. In 1981, Middle East magazine ran a survey in which Arab respondents spoke of the ideal of Arab unity. They felt it had been shown up as a myth; yet they also still felt strongly Arab – even if they could not explain why, except in terms of ‘vague, though intense feelings’. The findings revealed, however, that Arab identity was under threat: ‘Being an Arab today on a personal or even a national level means being in crisis in perhaps a more acute form than had ever been the case in the last 50 years.’ The survey was small; its conclusions were themselves vague and impressionistic. But they did seem to confirm that the Arab thread was dangling, if not already lost.

  By the new AD millennium, the crisis of Arab identity was rapidly coming to a head. In a 2005 poll conducted in six Arab countries, almost half of the participants identified themselves as Muslims first, only a third as Arabs first, and an even smaller minority as nationals of a particular country; it seemed that being Arab was going out of fashion. Subsequent surveys revealed as many as 79 per cent of respondents giving their first identity as Muslim (in Egypt) and as few as 10 per cent or less giving their first identity as Arab (in Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Morocco, Iraq and Algeria). Nasser may not have been The Last Arab; but since his death and burial, arabness too had been buried under a revived – and in some aspects a new – Islamic identity.

  It probably helped the obsequies that one of the Cold War lions had itself expired in 1991, partly as a result of exhaustion from its Afghan adventure. It was then that the world’s geo-political GPS seemed to go awry, and the path of ‘progress’ and ‘modernity’ to look ever more misleading. Left and right lost their definition: Communist Party bosses in ex-Soviet states held on to power but swerved off to the ‘right’; China was technically communist but, looping the loop, was going rampantly capitalist. At the same time, the forward–reverse axis came into play: the American religious ‘right’ swung round towards their puritan past and turned their backs on the ‘permissive’ post-war decades; Russian traditionalists emerged from the woods and called for the canonization of the Romanovs. Caught in the middle of this global gyre, which direction would Arabs take? And would they go as a body? It certainly seemed that a newly invigorated, retrogressive Islam might succeed in forging Arab solidarity where secular pan-Arabism had failed. In its new ideological guise, signalled by a suffix – Islamism, like Arabism – that solidarity is what it has been trying to achieve ever since, as part of its mission of worldwide unity.

  However, the attempt to replay the Arabian seventh century on a global twenty-first-century scale has faced many challenges. First time round, Islam and Arabs had a ‘fit’: Islam was, after all,
born of Arabia and of ancient Arabian beliefs and customs. But Islam itself went global long ago, far beyond its Arabian origins. And – quite apart from the obvious fact that not all Arabs are Muslims – Arabs themselves, diverse enough to begin with, have become even more so over the diaspora of continents, centuries and manners. In an early chapter I mentioned two eighth-century brothers who ended up as governors in Sind and North Africa. Today there are further dimensions of distance: I might mention two brothers I know, of whom one is a fine-dining golfer and the other an al-Qa’idah sympathizer. One size does not fit all.

  Latter-day political islamists therefore find that, while you can flip the hourglass and re-enact the battles and the martyrdoms, even with Allah on your side it is hard to make time run backwards to the imagined uniformity of the Medinan utopia. Islamism’s more extreme proponents – the ‘Islamic State’ for example – have thus come to resemble the People of the Cave, a story the Qur’an shares with Christianity. The Seven Sleepers of Ephesus, as they are known in the Christian version, were persecuted for their monotheistic beliefs under the third-century Roman emperor Decius. Taking shelter in a cave, God put them into a state of hibernation – for 309 years in the Qur’anic version, although to the sleepers it seemed no more than a day – and only caused them to wake under the safely monotheistic emperor Theodosius II. The point of the comparison is this: the nineteenth-century Arab Awakening was a secular movement in its most basic sense, in that it recognized the passing of saecula, ‘ages’, during the long sleep, and the need to adapt to change; in contrast, recently awakened islamists find themselves out of synch with an altered world (in their own view, of course, the world is out of synch with them). Their solution is to ignore change; to deny the basic laws of al-kawn wa-’l-fasad, generation and corruption, that govern the universe; to deny history and time.