Arabs

by Tim Mackintosh-Smith

  The use of new technologies to communicate protest is also a constant. If it was Facebook pages that mobilized protesters in Cairo in 2011, it was the political pages of the new Cairo newspapers that had activated their ancestors in the Urabi uprising. (And there is that great prototype – the use of the new writing to spread the original Islamic revolution of the seventh century.) But the technologies of 2011 were remarkable for a reach that was both geographical and social. One of the major motive factors in the Arab Spring was ‘the meeting of minds’ – and of hairstyles: in Cairo’s Tahrir Square, an islamist protester could admit to his new leftist comrade-in-protest, ‘the secular and shaggy-haired Adam’,

  ‘I would never have imagined I would be talking to someone with hair as long as yours.’ To which Adam responded, ‘Nor did I ever imagine befriending someone with a beard as long as yours.’

  Lefties and fundies were coming together. So too were words and freedom. The new information technologies were uncontrollable, uncensorable, and so were the crowds. ‘We are all here together,’ the Egyptian writer Ahdaf Soueif noted in Tahrir Square, ‘all doing what we’ve not been able to do for decades: each and every one is speaking, acting, expressing themselves’. A lot of that self-expression articulated alternative truths to those of the traditional rulers. In contrast, ‘This [Egyptian] regime lies as naturally as it breathes’. All regimes did. Everywhere, regime media put out the tired old lie that the protesters were ‘foreign agents’. At times, misinformation was more precise. When more than fifty protesters were shot dead by rooftop snipers in the Yemeni capital San’a on 18 March 2011, a day the protest movement had dubbed ‘the Friday of Dignity’, Salih’s regime put it about that the marksmen were local householders annoyed at the disturbance to their lives.

  As in all the best revolutions from Islam on, slogans were vital. The feisty Cairenes, with centuries of protest behind them, were adepts in the art of the political haiku. A typical chanted demand was for

  ’Aysh!

  Hurriyyah!

  Karamah insaniyyah!

  Daily bread!

  Liberty!

  And our human dignity!

  Again, the call for dignity. Perhaps, though, it lacks the strange piquancy of the pro-Ottoman chant in the time of Napoleon’s occupation of Cairo:

  God save the Sultan!

  God ruin Fart al-Rumman!

  Fart al-Rumman, ‘Surfeit of Pomegranates’ (or maybe ‘of Breasts’, for which they are the poetic metaphor), being a nonsensical distortion of ‘Bartalamin’, the name of a prominent local Christian in the French service. As for the ‘rascals’ of the fourteenth century, their brazen slogan – chanted beneath the walls of the Cairo Citadel by thousands – had been a demand to the sultan, chronically lame in one foot, to release their patron: ‘Luckless Limper, let him go!’ The man was set free; when he was later re-arrested, protests by the massed orphans of Cairo secured his release.

  To return to 2011, the slogan raised in every country touched by the Arab Spring was the simple but rhythmic:

  Al-sha’b

  Yurid

  Isqat al-nizam.

  The people

  Demand

  The fall of the regime.

  At first sight it is the same sort of demand that has felled dictators in Latin America and toppled thrones in Europe. But to a historian of their region if not to themselves, al-sha’b, ‘the people’, is a word with other resonances, faint but clear: from those ancient South Arabian inscriptions in which the sha’b is the settled, plural, non-tribal society; from the Shu’ubiyyah, the pluralist ‘peoples’ movements’ of the eighth century on, in which the diverse peoples of the Arab empire sought equality with their imperial ruling elite. It is thus a slogan freighted with past meaning. But it is also fraught with present danger. That last word, nizam, is a calque on the French régime, and in Arabic it is ‘bipolar’: in its imported sense it means ‘(bad) regime, rule’; but in its traditional sense it means ‘(good) order, law-and-order’. Come the counter-revolution, it would not be hard for traditional, reactionary rulers to spread the word that the youth of the Spring had actually been calling for anarchy . . . The protesters may not have been ‘foreign agents’; but was the language they were using in itself foreign, a sort of semantic fifth column? Then again, if protesters import meaning, dictators distort it: their ‘good’ nizam is often a facade fronting anarchy; disorder is the order of their day.

  Semantics apart, the mere act of speech was liberating. And the voices raised were not just those of angry young men. An older woman at the Tahrir Square protest in Cairo saw Ahdaf Soueif taking notes, and said to her,

  Write, write that my son is in there with the shabab [the young men]. That we’re fed up with what’s been done to our country. Write that this regime divides Muslim from Christian and rich from poor. That it’s become a country for the corrupt. That it’s brought hunger to our door.

  ’Everybody,’ Soueif realized, ‘everybody here has become an orator. We have found our voice.’

  This was the word ungathered. The monopoly on speech of the dictator – in that most basic meaning, ‘he who speaks constantly’ – was broken. Individuals were expressing themselves in the open again, like those earliest audible Arab voices in graffiti carved on desert stones; like the su’luks, those early poets-errant and freelancers of the truth; like al-Hallaj, protomartyr of free speech. Everybody was an orator, and everywhere in the populous demonarchies people were calling – not in the obedient unison that dictators love, but in their own ragged polyphony – for a civil state in which all would be equal under the law, a civilian state not ruled by army men barking orders. Their word for ‘civil/civilian’ was madani, from madinah, ‘city’. They might equally have used another word with more ancient resonances, hadari: for the Arab Spring was a new variation of a very old theme – the debate between hadar and badw, between those who wanted to build society and those who wanted to raid it; between peoples and tribes.

  Hope sprang everywhere. As late as May 2013 one Panglossian optimist, an Egyptian poet, was seen on television predicting a united Arab world ‘by 2017’. (‘How I admired him!’ said the viewer, Raja Shehadeh, Candide to Pangloss.) But much of the hope was guarded, and the majority – the actual Man in the Suq – remained, as ever, silent and static, looking on but not taking part, often not even taking in what the protests were really about.

  In the end, what the Arab Spring proved to be about was superficial change. Adonis, who knew as a poet that Arabs were

  stalled between seasons,

  diagnosed in prose the nature of the Arab impasse as long ago as 1980, the start of the present long winter:

  The current Arab regimes, however many they may be, are in fact one regime . . . a regime founded essentially on repression. This regime must be utterly rejected and fought at every level. But fighting the regime and defeating it does not in itself necessarily guarantee the advent of democratic rule. That is because social and economic infrastructure is itself repressive . . . and needs to be deconstructed from the foundations . . . The political level of revolution is the shallowest level . . . Attaining power should come as the crowning act of a vast process of dismantlement. Without this process, gaining power changes nothing.

  As the original revolutionaries of Islam knew, ‘Allah will change nothing for a people unless they change what is in themselves’.

  Today, those individual voices that were raised have been silenced again. Another spring has had no summer; like so many revolutions, Muhammad’s included, it was begun by those who were hungry for justice, but was hijacked by those who were hungry for power. In several cases, notably that of Egypt, it was a double hijacking: first by the self-styled proponents of the ancienne révolution, the islamists – for the straggly beards soon ousted the shaggy heads – and then by the anciens régimes themselves, the insatiable tyrannosaurs.

  It might be said that Arab history is a series of stolen revolutions.

  THE TYRANNOSAU
RS FIGHT BACK

  In Egypt, a year after the Muslim Brotherhood gained power in national elections, the old rulers, the army men, staged a coup. All opposition, islamist or independent, was silenced; many were imprisoned, and hundreds were condemned to death. In Syria, Bashshar al-Asad, the second-generation demonarch, began mercilessly to exterminate opponents, and ignited a civil war that has killed around half a million. In Bahrain, a rising by the Shi’i population, the majority, had already been swiftly crushed with the help of Saudi tanks. Fainter rustlings of Spring in other overt monarchies had been stamped out or hushed up. Tunis, where the Spring began, has been its only success story, perhaps; we shall return to it later.

  There was another initial ‘success story’, in Yemen. It soon turned into a failure of fabulous proportions, the causes of which are rooted in several very ancient pasts; I have watched the failure happening and, like everyone else in the country, suffered from it. At first, Ali Abd Allah Salih, the now long-toothed billy-goat and long-term demonarch, stepped down in a deal in which he was replaced by his vice-president. Unlike the ex-dictator of Tunisia, however, he did not head into platinum-plated exile. He stayed at home under a guarantee of immunity from prosecution, and – always cunning, never wise – plotted revenge: he wanted, as the Arabic phrase has it, ‘to wash his liver’. His co-conspirators were a militant neo-imamist movement influenced by Iranian Shi’ism, who call themselves ‘the Helpers of Allah’. They are more commonly known as the Huthis after the surname of several of their main leaders, all related and belonging, like most of the group’s upper echelons, to the Hashimi clan of Quraysh, and in particular to the line that descends from Muhammad via his daughter and her husband, his cousin Ali ibn Abi Talib. Over the previous decade, Salih had squandered Yemeni lives and resources by fighting no fewer than six wars against these very same Huthis; after losing power, he performed a sudden about-turn – goats, even old ones, are agile – and joined forces with them to unseat the post-Spring consensus government by force of arms. He would have agreed with Lord Beaverbrook’s maxim: ‘What I want is power. Kiss ’em one day and kick ’em the next.’ Now Yemen is divided once more. It is at war, both with itself and – in the case of the Huthis – with all its peninsular neighbours (except Oman, which has remained neutral) and with an even wider Arab coalition. The result of all this is that the economy is ruined, poverty and disease are rampant, the innocent die in droves, alternative truths are not permitted and to engage in debate is to promote fitnah, ‘heresy’, diversity and unity are dead. (‘Screw unity!’ exclaimed an old friend of mine, now a Huthi sympathizer. It may not be the official line; it came from the heart.)

  In all these events, there are three repercussions from a long Arab past. When army units still loyal to the deposed Salih allowed the Huthis’ tribal warriors – some, knee-high to a Kalashnikov, as young as ten or eleven years old – to take over the capital and much of the country, some older townspeople had a sense of déjà vu: in 1948, the ruling imam invited in tribesmen to sack the capital in punishment for the assassination there of his father. But the playing of the tribal trump is much older still. As long ago as the decline of pre-Islamic Saba, failed rulers had wielded marauding tribesmen in their vendettas against those who had ousted them. In the event, Salih was to be the victim of his own plot, as many of the tribesmen had no inherent loyalty to him; loyalty is a commodity that goes to the highest bidder, and in this case the Huthis outbid him. And here is a second repercussion from a distant past: in the person of the Huthis, the Hashimi branch of the Meccan tribe of Quraysh is still proving its resilience 1,400 years after its first revolution. Salih had set himself up as the super-tribesman; but the Qurashis, including their Umayyad and Abbasid lines, have proved themselves time and again to be the super-tribe. The third ancient theme is reprised in the vehemence of the Arab coalition’s reaction to the Huthis, for Yemen’s peninsular neighbours view the Iranian-inspired movement as agents of a millennial struggle by Persia to dominate the Arabian subcontinent. Nor is this third theme much varied: nearly 1,400 years after their ancestors began to adopt Islam, the cruder sort of Gulf propaganda still calls the Huthis’ Iranian backers ‘Majus’ – ‘Magians’, or Zoroastrians, as if they still adhered to the state religion of the ancient Persian shahs . . . One does not have to be a novelist to see history, as did Lawrence Durrell, as ‘that vast complex of analogies’.

  The reunification of Yemen, less than twenty-four years before these calamitous events, had been an event to be celebrated in the long Arab winter. But if the country has now torn itself apart again, then it is only following a fashion. Nearly everywhere in the Arabic world, disunity rules. There is an unspoken disunity in Egypt, where the opposition is judicially gagged or with its neck in the noose. Elsewhere there is open disunity: in Libya, split like Yemen into areas controlled by legitimate government, militia, and armed gangs who do not even merit the latter term; in Lebanon, with its Hizb Allah state-within-a-state; in Palestine, where the Israeli dagger divides a Hamas-run Gaza from a Fatah-run West Bank, often themselves at daggers drawn; in Syria, which makes Pandora’s Box seem a mere can of worms, and where not only the current superpower, the United States, but three ex-superpowers – Turkey, Persia and Russia – are all stirring like mad; in the hornets’ nest of Iraq, poked into venomous life by that first superpower. Sudan has split, though more understandably, into Arab and non-Arab parts. Things could be worse in Algeria; but probably only because they were so bad in the 1990s, with the civil war dead reaching six figures, that Algerians lost the will to kill each other. Only the absolute monarchies seem to work at all, a system most of the rest of the world has abandoned. So perhaps the soothsayers of the suqs are right: Arabs are different – they need to be ruled by al-Hajjaj, by Saddam, with the stick, and talk of freedom and truth and Spring is so much Western eyewash. And if the stick is hereditary, a sceptre – well, it saves a lot of bloodshed when it passes on.

  But there is, so far, an exception: Tunisia, the only country where the Arab Spring has had a reasonably successful outcome. The country is not without problems, including sporadic acts of islamist terrorism; but as yet there seems to be an underlying stability. Why there and not elsewhere? Partly, perhaps, because it had the first Spring revolution, and the old dictator cut his losses and ran before he could be edified by the example of his fellow-tyrannosaurs fighting back. Partly because of enlightened leadership: Munsif al-Marzuqi had been admired as an Arab confrère of Sakharov and Solzhenitsyn more than twenty years before he became Tunisia’s first post-Spring president. Probably also, to be honest, because of the preponderance in Tunisia of hadarah over badawah, settled civilization over tribal nomadism, since ancient times. The Phoenicians made the Tunisian coastland a settled hub of trade in the first millennium BC. It was the wealthy Roman province of ‘Africa’, exporting grain and olive oil to Italy. With the Arab takeover and the founding of the garrison and trading city of al-Qayrawan, it became the administrative centre of the Maghrib. It survived the eleventh-century migrations and depradations of Banu Hilal and other Arab tribes better than elsewhere. French colonialism treated it more lightly than the rest of the region – the mission civilisatrice had already been accomplished, in ancient times – and the divorce from France was far less violent than in neighbouring Algeria. On independence, it had a progressive leader in Habib Bourguiba, who spent a quarter of the national budget on education, encouraged the emancipation of women and even tried, unsuccessfully, to bring in laws to stop the working population fasting in Ramadan. It lacks the sprawling and underdeveloped tribal hinterlands that form the mass of most Arab countries. And, finally, unlike most Arab countries today it is, and always has been, geographically and culturally outward-looking: it wears its heart on its coast.

  So maybe the exception, Tunisia, is a riposte to those suq soothsayers and casbah Cassandras. For a start, their premiss – that ‘the Arabs’ are different from everyone else – is wrong. Arabs are too diverse, too different from
each other, too deeply mingled too long ago with the peoples of a vast and various empire, to be lumped together or even to be a ‘the’. What has been different is their historical environment, and particularly that formative setting of the Arabian subcontinent. It gave rise to the yin and yang of hadar and badw, conjoined twins constantly arguing but necessarily coexisting, in which settled civilization has never achieved the decisive victory it has won across most of the world. The present wars are hardest fought at the perennial points of greatest contact and conflict between the two types of society: here in Yemen, in our smaller, southern Fertile Crescent, and in the greater crescent in the north, the lands of Syria and Iraq. The conflict has been less bitter where settled civilization and openness have predominated over time.

  Of course, the bigger, fuller picture is never as stark as ‘nomad’ versus ‘settled’, tribes versus peoples. It never has been. But the dichotomy does seem to lie at the heart of history, and to influence a present in which a derived form of badawah is dominant. Its derivation is not obvious, for latter-day ‘badw’ do not generally ride camels or live in hair tents. If, for example, Hafiz al-Asad resembled a grocer, his son Bashshar looks like the eye-doctor he trained in London to become. And yet they and their fellow autocrats are no less raiders and herders than the raw desert dynasts of Ibn Khaldun’s classic theory. Their power is taken and held by raiding; their people – their ra’iyyah, ‘subjects’, or in its first meaning, ‘private flock’ – are controlled by herding, a herding of minds.