Arabs

by Tim Mackintosh-Smith

  2020/1441

  The herding – with words, in the form of rhetoric and propaganda – has recently become even more effective. With advances in information technology, a ruler’s folk, his flock, graze contentedly in a land of literal make-believe: they believe what he makes them believe. But how is this possible, in a world permeated with alternative sources of information? Even the most repressive Arab regimes have not banned satellite TV and the internet. Surely these technologies should, like those before them, usher in a new stage of Arab history. In particular, by revealing the freedoms enjoyed by the world’s liberal democracies, they ought to inspire long-oppressed Arabdom to want the same. That, anyway, was the expectation of the Arab Spring.

  In the first place, alternative truths have come up against a firewall of inertia. Within the firewall, another metaphor applies: many, perhaps most Arabs are subject to what might be called a Mass Stockholm Syndrome. It is a ‘coping mechanism’: if you are in the thrall of all-powerful men, rather than admitting that you yourself are weak and powerless and thus losing your self-respect, your ‘honour’, you begin instead to declare that your masters are good. Over time it becomes a rhetorical truth, however much the empirical evidence contradicts it. Much of Arab public life is lived in this way, in a willing suspension of reality. The suspension is also usually conscious: ‘We know he’s bad, but we still love him!’ The notion of ‘unfitness for public office’ does not exist: however high people’s moral standards are in private life, public life is expected to be amoral. The bemerded shoes are shed at the door; inside, all is purity. It is one of the great bipolarities of Arab existence.

  Of course, most of humanity for most of history has had to put up with authority, however bad; it has been a simple matter of survival. However, the fact that Arabs still tend to do so is not only due to their repressive rulers or to their own coping mechanisms. It is also due to the form Islam often takes among them, in which religious belief and politics are so deliberately entangled. Just as there is, and always has been, ‘political Islam’, there is also ‘“islamic” politics’ – from islam not in any spiritual, moral or doctrinal sense, but in its most basic meaning, of ‘submission’. There is an illustration outside my window. Banners of loyalty to the Huthi leader bear the words,

  Labbayka Ya Qa’id Al-Thawrah!

  At Your Service, O Leader Of The Revolution!

  That first word, labbayka, is far from being an everyday Arabic term; it is rare even in high Arabic. It is usually used only in two settings: by a Thousand and One Nights genie appearing from a magic lamp or ring to serve his summoner; and by a pilgrim approaching Mecca, addressing Allah. Both the genie and the pilgrim are in a state of submission and servitude.

  Enthusiastic foreigners assume that Arabs want or ought to want ‘freedom’ from their tyrants. Quite a few do, but they are the ones who already talk the foreigners’ talk. The vast inert mute apathetic majority collude and collaborate with the tyrannosaurs. They are accomplices: as Samuel Johnson put it, ‘Cunning has effect from the credulity of others.’ And the credulity works both ways: ‘The Emperor’s New Clothes’ might have been written for an Arab audience today.

  Arab free-thinkers – poets, in other words – have long observed the effects of the Mass Stockholm Syndrome. In the sixth century, Imru’ al-Qays reviled his father’s killers as the servile dupes of their leaders, ‘slaves of the stick’. A later poet said, bitterly:

  If Time enthrones some lowly bum

  and ruler’s robes his shoulders drape,

  Then to Time’s power you must succumb,

  and bend and nod and bow and scrape.

  . . .

  If lions are gone, and apes are come –

  then dance to the time of the ape!

  In the thirteenth century of Ibn Khallikan, who quotes the verse, the last line was proverbial. The proverb is long overdue for a revival.

  Whether Arabs will ever break free of the baton and out of the rhythm, this hypnotizing dance to the music of time, is a question that has been asked regularly for nearly 200 years, ever since the start of the nineteenth-century Awakening. The break may not be inevitable; or it may need centuries of Springs. ‘Give me five hundred years,’ the new Syrian leader Husni al-Za’im famously said in 1949, ‘and I will make Syria as prosperous and enlightened as Switzerland.’ He may be right. Perhaps one cannot hurry history. Perhaps different sorts of progress run by different clocks, and while in the present (AD 2020/AH 1441) most Arabs are in AD 2020 as far as their smartphones go, almost all might be in about AD 1441 in terms of comparative sociopolitical development: before, that is, Gutenberg, Reformations, Enlightenments, French and Russian Revolutions, World Wars, Springs (at least, successful ones). The comparison is not meant to be invidious. It is simply that different sorts of history flow at different rates in different environments – as they do within the Arabic world itself. (In Dubai I have been the guest of princes in the world’s tallest skyscraper; on the Yemeni island of Socotra, I have feasted with cavemen on raw goats’ kidneys, and the welcome there was princely too.) There can also be eddies, where the flow goes into reverse; that is what may have happened in the Arabic world over the last few decades. Looked at as a proportion of human history as a whole, that 600-odd-year gap is almost nothing; even as a proportion of political and intellectual history – if we place its beginning at the time people began to talk, between 100,000 and 50,000 years ago – it is a difference of around 1 per cent or less. At the same time, these last 600 years have been a kind of historical accelerando. For Europe, they were a political adolescence. The Arab Spring was part of the delayed and now re-postponed onset of that adolescence, the beginning of the loss of faith in ‘paternalistic’ rule (‘He is my father!’); but only for some. For the rest, the former state continues, an increasingly disturbing innocence, like that of Peter Pan.

  Of course, change doesn’t have to take half a millennium. Many countries in Eastern Europe and South America have recently swapped dictatorships for tolerably workable democracies in the space of a few years; Spain did so almost overnight on the death of Franco. But it is in the interests of the tyrannosaurs that change does take a long time: it gives them a stay of extinction. They may sleep peacefully for the time being; or with just one eye open, for they have each other to fear more than their own peoples.

  THE BONFIRE OF THE VERITIES

  There is another answer to that question of how repressive regimes deal with multiple sources of information, another reason why the tyrannosaurs may sleep peacefully, and that is that they themselves have adapted extraordinarily well to the changing information environment. This adaptation is the most recent development in a history of Arabic information technology – and of political control – that began with the unified high Arabic language, and took off with Arabic script. The Arab Spring may have been a ‘Facebook revolution’, but it would soon be the victim of its own facilitating technology. In 2011, the relatively few Arabs who used social media were often the same sort of people who would espouse the freedoms that the Spring was meant to promote. Many more Arabs use social media today; but the dinosaurs are now on Facebook too, and on everything else, and are avid mufasbikun, ‘Facebookers’, and mugharridun, ‘chirpers’, that is, ‘Twitterers’. They are the ones who have always known best how to gather the word; now they have the perfect tools with which to do it, and to insert that word instantly into as many minds as are connected to smartphones. ‘Words,’ said Nizar Qabbani,

  are shots of morphine,

  Dope for rulers drugging masses

  Ever since the seventh century.

  Now the words are mass-mainlined even more directly to the brain. Such misinformation streams might be called ‘lie-fi’. They speed their users ever deeper into the territory of Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities and Martin Nowak’s Supercooperators; of Wittgenstein’s ‘bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language’. The end product is a programmed proletariat, not the Great Unwashe
d but the Great Brainwashed.

  Older methods of word-gathering, or dissension-silencing, still exist. The ruling house of Qatar, for example, who founded that state-of-the-art media outfit, Al Jazeera, can also resort to ‘cutting the tongue’ of a poet who piques them. When mildly critical verses by the Qatari poet Muhammad al-Ajami came to their attention, he was put on trial and given a fifteen-year gaol sentence. He was pardoned after serving three years, but his story shows how the ancient sorcery of poetry still scares the holders of more prosaic power. Eastwards along the Gulf in Dubai, meanwhile, there is an example of the poetry of power: around one of the famous artificial archipelagos in the shape of palm trees is an outer ring of man-made islets spelling out a verse by the ruler. As it says (or will do when it is finished),

  It takes a man of vision to write on water . . .

  A thousand years after Sultan Qabus of Jurjan was suspended in a crystal coffin in his calligraphic tower-tomb, conspicuous constructions with grand inscriptions can still project the might of princes and the sinuous, sinewy magic of Arabic characters. Latin script writ large would simply never work: it would always smack of the HOLLYWOOD sign.

  As for Arabic rhetoric in general, its power is undiminished, and its role even more important than ever, given the plethora of truths competing in the ether. No less than in the time of Tarifah, the legendary pre-Islamic seeress, telling the truth is like telling a joke: it’s the way you tell it that matters. An old verse about the art of spin sums it all up:

  Call it ‘sweet nectar of the honey-bee’,

  or call it ‘stinging insects’ vomit’:

  It’s art that tells your hearers what to see,

  takes darkness and spins daylight from it.

  Admittedly, the art does not have to be very high. I have heard recently on San’a radio:

  Presenter [in a tone of quizzical donnish detachment]: Contrary to what most people believe, the USA is not a Christian state. It is in fact a Jewish state.

  A pandemic of proclamations, in metre-high letters and fine calligraphy, covers walls in public places. A recent one, during a massive cholera outbreak in Yemen in 2017, read:

  CHOLERA IS THE GIFT OF AMERICA.

  Such ‘facts’ gain their own surreal currency by repetition, especially when no one is allowed to question them publicly. Gathering the word of the media is thus the key, then pumping out the vomit and the nectar as loudly and as often as possible – and if you have seized the radio and TV stations, and if you can afford a satellite channel or two and the technology to reach millions of smartphones, you can pump it out very loudly indeed. The consequences are terrifying. For example, the conflict in my adoptive land is a civil war in which the neighbours have become involved. It emerges, however, from interviews with captured anti-Coalition fighters, that many have been convinced that they are battling not fellow Arabs and Muslims but ‘Americans and Israelis’. No wonder Arab unity has been so hard to achieve.

  In the 1950s, Claude Lévi-Strauss could write about people’s vulnerability to ‘lies propagated in printed documents. No doubt, there can be no turning back now’. There certainly has been no turning back. The controllers of truth have forged on with the transistor radio and the television, the internet and the smartphone, proliferating their own verities and messaging them ever more directly and instantly into people’s minds. Whether viewed from 2020 or from 1441, Nineteen Eighty-Four seems a long time ago.

  A FLIGHT TO NOWHERE

  One can resist, silently, and live in a sort of internal, unspeaking exile; or one can speak out, utter alternative truths, and suffer the consequences. Most people take an easier route: they both say and think nothing. It is better than losing one’s mind, or one’s life. Ignorance, feigned or real, may not be bliss, but at least it is survival.

  There is, however, another escape route, the old physical one of hijrah. Just before the desprung Arab Spring, one of those who took the path, the Paris-based writer Khalil al-Nu’aymi, could recall the provincial ennui of his Syrian childhood and contrast it with his present mobility and creativity:

  Here I am, going far . . . and back on the furthest horizon I see the scenes of my earliest childhood . . . I see al-Tawilah with its red hill sitting proudly on the plain. Directly beneath it flows the Khabur River, its red water full of mud and weeds and the last stalks of the cotton that we had gathered in a few days before. The cotton would travel to Aleppo and its giant caravanserais, and on beyond, elsewhere – while we stayed where we were, prostrate, like unclaimed corpses.

  And now here I am, getting my revenge on all that uncreative inertia with this far travel of mine . . .

  Go! Go far! The past will rejoice in you, for it is that which has transported you to this place.

  He is riding the same wave that carried his countrymen like Jubran Khalil Jubran to Europe and the Americas a century earlier.

  Now, only a few years on, travel for many Syrians and others is not a flight of creativity, but a flight from doom. Their past is broken and lost; far from rejoicing, it weeps blood. Contemplating his own downfall, Mu’ammar al-Qadhdhafi threatened to swamp Europe with migrants. The threat turned out to be a prophecy, but on a scale even the Libyan anarcharch had not foreseen. From Syria alone more than five million have fled – nearly a third of the population. It almost seems as if Arab history is spiralling into a grim parody of its own beginnings: the ancient sporadic waves of exodus from the northern Fertile Crescent are now a relentless human flood; this time round, the sufferings of Isma’il, the Qur’anic child-migrant and legendary Arab progenitor, are relived by millions. Europe and America are closing their doors, for the new diaspora has sown fears, further cultivated by populist, anti-liberal politicians in France, in the Netherlands, in a Britain which is in its own flight from Europe, in the United States of the Trump era. Indirectly, then, the reaction to the Arab Spring by Arab demagogues and their obedient demoi has globalized itself: the dinosaurs have by no means had their day, and perhaps not just in the Arabic world. Nothing is safe: not Western liberal democracy; not the life of a single Syrian or Yemeni child.

  For those of us left in the Arabic world, and especially in those eventful regions, the Fertile Crescents both northern and southern, the Age of Disappointment now verges on an Age of Despair. The oldest places seem the most hotly contested, ancient centres of civilization on the margins of tribal territory: in Yemen San’a and Ta’izz, in Iraq Mosul, in Syria al-Raqqah and Aleppo. In that last city, for example, fought over by everyone from the Akkadians on, many of the giant caravanserais to which al-Nu’aymi’s childhood cotton travelled are now battered beyond recognition. Its citadel, al-Shahba’, ‘the Iron-Grey’, where the poet al-Mutanabbi was loaded with gold by his tenth-century Hamdanid patrons, and which later withstood a siege by Hulagu’s Mongols,

  Lo! on her grim and massy rock

  That laughs to scorn the foeman’s shock,

  has been left gap-grinned by twenty-first-century artillery. And the sort of destruction inflicted on the Hamah mosque by the father, Hafiz al-Asad, the Grocer, has been visited on its Aleppan counterpart in the time of the son, Bashshar the Eye-doctor (though by which of the several sides is disputed).

  On my antiquarian Syrian jaunt twenty years ago, the deep melancholy that had shadowed me from Hamah was dispelled by that second mosque, a place rife with light and time. Before the Umayyads built on it, the site had been the garden of the Byzantine cathedral; before that, the Hellenistic agora. I had come looking for fourteenth-century features seen by the traveller Ibn Battutah, in what he called ‘one of the most splendid buildings of its kind’. In particular I wanted to see its ‘pavement of vast extent, and its pulpit of exquisite workmanship, inlaid with ivory and ebony’. Two-thirds of a millennium on, the pavement, overlooked by a soaring, script-bound Saljuq minaret, was as my predecessor saw it. It was laid in rectangles of light and dark stone, like giant polished prayer carpets, on which elderly Aleppan gentlemen took the sun in chairs or read. The mi
nbar, or pulpit, a gift from the Mamluk ruler al-Nasir, was brand-new in Ibn Battutah’s time – and there it stood, still, a wooden stairway to a preaching platform, a flight to nowhere but high-flown words:

  Its surface was an interlocking mass of marquetry polygons in fruitwoods, set off by deep-cut ivory trefoils and miniature screen-work of criss-crossing ebony balusters with tiny ivory knobs at the nodes. A few bits of inlay had gone missing; otherwise, it was as crisp and fresh as when Ibn Battutah had seen it. The workmanship was indeed exquisite. With its interplay of polychromatic parts, it was a Bach fugue for the eyes.

  And there I was, looking at it through Ibn Battutah’s eyes: our sight-line, our time-line was unbroken. For a moment, I was in a geometry that might have extended for ever.

  Now, two further decades on and seven years into a civil war, the Aleppo mosque, too, is in ruins. The calligraphic minaret was felled in 2013; the stone-carpeted courtyard and the prayer hall have been wrecked. As for the pulpit, it has gone. It may have been ‘dismantled and transferred to an unknown location’, but no one is sure.

  Perhaps when the wars are over and the eye-doctor, the billy-goat, the ‘Islamic State’, the ‘Helpers of Allah’ and all the rest of them are one with the Umayyads and Gindibu the Arab, perhaps then the survivors of Aleppo will steal back, and begin to reassemble their lives and their city. Perhaps their pulpit, too, with its interplay of ivory and ebony. I hope so. It is the word made geometry, a harmonious dialogue of dark and light.

  AFTERWORD

  IN THE STATION OF

  HISTORY

  Had I written this book ten years ago, it would have turned out differently. Recent events have made it darker than it might have been.