by Ed Husain
For example, the mob might want to attack the American or Israeli embassy in Cairo or Tunis. A mullah or imam who has to keep his congregation happy will hesitate to maintain a position of rectitude and warn against attacking embassies or burning flags. To do so might make him seem to be complicit with America, and the money in the bucket might dry up. On the other hand these craven imams, fearing for their jobs, cannot compete with the strident, modern-sounding Islamists’ rhetoric against Muslim governments and their Western allies.
In the twentieth century, then, the Arabs were dishonoured and Islam itself was dishonoured, as the Prophet may or may not have said. The Arabs’ acute sense of karama (nobility, or dignity) was deeply wounded – and the wound festered. By 2004 a few candid voices among the Arabs were warning of this collapse of Arab pride and dignity:
It’s not pleasant being Arab these days. Feelings of persecution for some, self-hatred for others; a deep disquiet pervades the Arab world. Even those groups that for a long time have considered themselves invulnerable, the Saudi ruling class and Kuwaiti rich, have ceased to be immune to the enveloping sense of malaise since a certain September 11.
These are the opening words of Being Arab by Samir Kassir, one of Lebanon’s best-known journalists and historians. For his views, and his criticisms of the Syrian occupation of Lebanon, he was assassinated by a car bomb in Beirut in June 2005 (Syrian intelligence remain the prime suspects). His life and death underscored the point he was making about the suffocation of critical thinking and writing in the modern Arab world.
Dignity, pride, self-esteem, respect are not fanciful wishes but a vital part of Arab, Muslim – human – DNA. Karama, in the sense of the dignity and nobility of human beings, is a major theme in the Quran, and a popular verse among Muslims is ‘Laqad karramna bani Adam’: ‘We have indeed ennobled the children of Adam [the human race].’ An emotional sense of violation of karama is at the core of the contemporary Arab Muslim existential angst. And in the tiny Tunisian village of Sidi Bouzid, in December 2010, this desecration of dignity came to the fore.
Twenty-six-year-old Mohamed Bouazizi was a simple street vendor selling fruit and vegetables. His father had died when he was young, and from the age of ten he had been supporting his mother and sisters. His mother had remarried, but family poverty and the poor healthcare in Tunisia meant that his sick stepfather could not be treated and get a decent-paying job. Bouazizi tried to join the military, but he had no strong recommendations or wasta, connections – the magic ingredient for mobility in Arab societies. To improve his sister’s prospects, he sent her to university while he sold fruit and vegetables, walking two kilometres each day to the nearest bazaar to pick up produce. Despite being poor himself, he was known to give food away to people who were even poorer.
All his life, like so many other Tunisians, he had been harassed by the police and state bureaucracy. All they wanted was bribes, but they disguised their demands as fines for spurious violations of the law and not having a vendor’s licence. On 11 December 2010, a female police officer interrogated Bouazizi in public. She wanted him to pay money that he could not afford. She seized his scales and insisted he go to the police station and pay 250 dollars – more than two months’ worth of his earnings. Ignoring his protests, she then slapped him in the face. This was the ultimate insult to his Arab Muslim manhood, for a female to demean him in public – and for no other reason than his efforts to earn a living and support his mother and sisters.
He went to the police station, but nobody there agreed to see him – the officials were all ‘in meetings’. In Tunisia that’s another way of asking for a bribe. He was up against the entire bureaucracy of the state, and had nowhere to turn. Frustrated, worn out, defeated, humiliated, his cry for help was to buy some paint thinner and set himself on fire in protest. He died of his burns two weeks later.
Mohamed Bouazizi’s short life held meaning for millions of people across the Middle East. His story captured the injustice and indignity experienced by a generation, and the Arab Spring was born. Governments were swept from power as the Arab peoples demanded, literally, karama, dignity, and adala ijtima‘iyya, social justice. These were the slogans they wrote on the walls of major cities and shouted in the mass protests that toppled dictators in Tunisia, Yemen and Egypt.
My visits to Egypt several times soon after the fall of Mubarak revealed a very different country from the land I had known for fifteen years previously. No doubt there were security challenges with the breakdown of law and order, but the pride of the Egyptians was running high. There were songs, slogans, wall paintings, and people constantly saying: ‘Enta Masri, irfa’ rasak!’ – ‘You are Egyptian, hold your head high!’ The words are more poignant in the Arabic and evoke, by contrast, the meek way in which a generation had grown up with their heads trodden under the boots of the Egyptian military and police, who controlled every aspect of their lives with fear. There was a sense that justice had finally been served.
Now, however, with the exception of Tunisia’s transition to democracy, the dignity, social justice and freedom sought by the Arab uprisings has been taken away again. The Arabs’ great sense of loss and defeat has been handed down to yet another generation. The general mood of despair continues and will doubtless prick the conscience of the world again, in worse form – if only in numbers – than Bouazizi’s self-immolation.
What did the Arab Spring generation want? I lived and worked in their midst in Syria as a teacher and researcher for two years during the American-led occupation of Iraq. After the Arab Spring, I visited Egypt, Tunisia, Bahrain, Jordan, Morocco and Saudi Arabia multiple times as a senior fellow of a leading American think tank. I met many of the youth leaders and political and religious figureheads. In addition to their unrelenting cries for dignity, social justice and political freedom, three observations stayed with me.
First, there had been a widespread expectation that the West would come to the assistance of democracy activists. Since 11 September 2001, American political leaders had been openly calling for democracy in the Middle East. Billions of dollars had been spent on democracy promotion from Washington, DC. Surely, now that the moment had come, aid and investment from Europe and the US would follow? At the same time, governments in the region were convinced that the uprisings were Western-backed plots. But in the end the imagined help from the West never came. Massacres of protesters followed, not least by security forces in Rabaa Square in Egypt in 2013, but the blame was placed on the West. Silence in the capitals of the West reinforced perceptions of Western acquiescence in Arab degradation. Arab and Muslim lives seemed not to matter.
Second, there had been a pitched battle of ideas inside Arab societies – political ideas about democracy and freedom – that had been simultaneously repressed and exploited by governments in the region. The precise meanings of words such as ‘liberal’, ‘democrat’, ‘conservative’, ‘right’, ‘left’ or ‘secularist’ – let alone ‘Islamist’ – had not yet been agreed upon or even broadly defined. Dictatorships do not provide space for dignified and meaningful discussion. Meanwhile repression had led to underground Islamist movements being organised, such as the Muslim Brotherhood and the Salafists. Consequently, when the tyrants fell, the old guard proclaimed the threat of Islamist radicalism, and the West duly fell in line behind new, anti-democratic forces in government. The battle of ideas had been lost again.
Third, the activists and protesters I met across the region all spoke about their personal losses and grievances. They identified with Bouazizi’s plight, but the rich middle-class kids educated at the American University in Cairo were also acutely aware that one of their own, Khaled Said, from a middle-class family in Alexandria, had died from police torture in 2010. He was not the stereotypical Islamist suspect hungering for power. The Facebook page ‘We Are All Khaled Said’, set up by Google executive Wael Ghonim, helped mobilise millions across Egypt. The same platform was also host to the pain that many others had felt: the Facebook pag
es of young Arabs are filled to this day with photos of faces in tears, thorns beside roses, and broken love hearts pierced by arrows.
Things were not working for young Muslims. They could not be in a loving relationship, because it was forbidden – and impractical, as most young Muslims, even in their twenties, still lived with their parents. If they wanted to get married, they were either too young or could not afford to do so, because buying a house and car, and providing for children, in countries with high unemployment and – even when work was available – low wages was not feasible. Everything in life seemed stacked against them.
Through my conversations I gained a strong sense of this personal loss, and young people’s personal motivation to regain their dignity and improve their circumstances. These feelings are also expressed in the Arab world’s music, literature and art, which all amplify the mood of despair. Seven of the all-time top ten Arabic songs are about sadness, loss and pain; only three are happy and upbeat. Earlier, too, the Arab world’s most popular modern poet, the Damascene writer Nizar Qabbani, was transformed by the trauma of Arab military defeats: from writing erotic love poetry he switched to angry explorations of frustrated Arab aspirations.
The Crusaders and Mongols attacked the Muslim heartlands, yet within decades the Muslims regrouped and revitalised. But the Western onslaught led by Napoleon in 1798 destroyed the dignity of Muslims in a process sustained for two centuries. Across the Muslim world, blame is placed firmly on the West. There exists a powerful, gripping narrative of the West plotting and planning to weaken, divide and conquer the Muslims. This account is not viewed as history, from a bygone era that the modern West would like to see relegated to the annals of imperial misadventures: for the Arabs, in particular, it is a lived and everyday reality. It is the story told to Arab children in school textbooks and discussed by the general public and political circles throughout most of the Muslim world. The toxic anti-Western atmosphere that gives rise to ‘Death to America’ slogans in Iran, flag-burning in Pakistan, and a widespread view in Egypt that the 9/11 atrocities were committed by the CIA, is the result of a historic narrative of humiliation and indignity that is still being lived out today.
Plato best diagnosed this psycho-political condition, which has haunted sections of humanity throughout history. He identified three parts of the human soul. First, there was reasoning, the capacity to calculate, make a risk–benefit analysis, utilise logic. This element controls a person, and seeks logical means to achieve aims. Second, there was appetite, the instinct to satisfy hunger and satiate thirst. Third, there was thymos (pron. thumos), a word that is hard to capture fully in English but refers to spiritedness, togetherness, a sense of collective dignity. Thymos is not always in step with reason or appetite. Thymos deals with emotions of pride, shame, humiliation, indignation of the human soul – and the human need for justice. This was of real and fundamental importance to the ancient Greeks, as it is to today’s Arabs, but seems to elude the modern Western mind.
Thymos is about a people’s collective self-esteem. Honour and glory are underestimated in Western foreign policy analysis, but Russian actions in Syria or Ukraine are driven precisely by these factors that Western-trained minds find hard to grasp. Political realists stress interests and the survival instinct – Darwinist thinking is at the core of their understanding of international relations and conflict. But they fail to appreciate the emotive power of honour and glory, absent or present, in the conduct of other civilisations. Britain’s Lord Palmerston was reflecting this cold, calculated view in the nineteenth century when he quipped, in what has since become a maxim of foreign diplomacy: ‘Nations have no permanent friends or allies. They only have permanent interests.’
Western policymakers expect others to behave like the West, where it is claimed that reason is king. They anticipate rational actions from rational political actors, but thymos is often a more powerful driver, and punishing a state will not necessarily change its behaviour. Iraq, Syria, Cuba, Russia and Iran all seek to advance their thymos and respond according to thymotic calculations that are not always rational. What else explains, for example, Palestinian militants firing rockets into Israel from Gaza? And this despite Israel not only killing terrorists in retaliation, but also destroying their family homes. Israel’s security wall is there to keep Palestinian radicals away from Israel’s cities – without it suicide bombers could wreak murderous havoc in Tel Aviv. The Israeli wall is a consequence of Palestinians acting not from self-interest and reason but driven by thymos, or karama, to violate every law, defy every form of punishment, and continue to attack Israel to bolster feelings of Palestinian pride in resistance.
This pursuit of self-worth, the preparedness to die for dignity, also motivated the self-declared caliph of ISIS-held territory, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, in May 2015. Knowing full well the emotional and psychological wounds of the Arab and Muslim worlds, al-Baghdadi addressed Muslims with these words: ‘We call upon you so that you leave the life of humiliation, disgrace, degradation, subordination, loss, emptiness, and poverty to a life of honour, respect, leadership, richness, and another matter that you love – victory from Allah and an imminent conquest.’1
Al-Baghdadi is echoing a call for thymos, but justified in the worst language of threats, violence, religion and invasion.
Liberal internationalism, which is the dominant paradigm in politics and international relations, argues that interests and reason are the prime motivators of state conduct. Universities and governments alike often make the mistake, however, of confusing their theoretical descriptions of rational actors and an interests-based world with the real world in which self-interest and survival are only two of several powerful motivating factors. To recognise the power of thymos, as Francis Fukuyama tried to do, could go a long way toward helping heal the raw wounds of Muslim disgrace and degradation.2 We do that by treating Arabs as full, dignified humans; we help reinstate Arab thymos by supporting the democratic and reformist strains within governments and civil societies. We should take a longer-term view of the world’s most volatile region. Revolutions may not always bring immediate benefits to oppressed peoples, but evolution toward prosperity and freedom is lacking, too. The West helped create the modern Middle Eastern nations, laws, borders, and armed forces. Where is our Marshall Plan for the Arab world? We have helped our ally Israel. What have we done for the Arabs?
Let us turn now to consider the one country that, together with its Western allies, is perceived to have dealt the heaviest blows to the thymos of Arabs and Muslims: Israel.
13
The Jews
In a Pew opinion poll conducted in 2011, 95 per cent of Egyptians and Lebanese expressed a ‘very unfavourable’ view of Jews; in Palestine the ‘very unfavourable’ response was 89 per cent; in Pakistan and Turkey 64 per cent. Among non-Arab Muslim nations the level of anti-Semitism was somewhat lower – 47 per cent of Indonesians felt ‘very unfavourable’ toward Jews – but not impressively low. It seems that the loathing of Jews among Arabs and Muslims, despite protestations that ‘we are not anti-Semitic’, is, lamentably, on the rise again. Yet it is not intrinsic to Islam, and has not always prevailed.
In the fifteenth century, from the city of Fez, the Marinid dynasty controlled what is today Morocco, Algeria and parts of Tunisia. A Sunni Islamic civilisation, the Marinids sponsored religious and cultural education programmes that are still vividly alive in Morocco today. There were Jews in Fez who served in successive Marinid administrations as high-ranking ministers. This matters, for in Europe at that time Jews were subjected to expulsions, pogroms and persecution. In 1290, Jews were expelled from England for nearly four hundred years. Between 1350 and 1450, provinces in France, Germany and Italy also banished this persecuted people.
When the last Muslim ruler of Spain, King Boabdil,1 negotiated his surrender of Granada in 1491 to the Catholic monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella, he sought reassurances that Muslims would have the greatest possible freedoms. He obtained guarantees t
hat there would be no forced conversions to Christianity, families would be protected, property rights respected, and places of worship maintained. Boabdil requested these rights not only for Muslims, but he specifically mentioned Granada’s Jewish communities and stated that they ‘should benefit like us from these terms’. At his weakest point in life, Spain’s last Muslim ruler put Jews on a par with Muslims and set out to protect their rights.
By the spring of 1492, all Jews, not only those from Granada, were expelled from Spain, killed, or forced to convert by Ferdinand and Isabella. At their apex of power, these famed Christian rulers oppressed Jewish communities. The Ottomans welcomed in Istanbul perhaps as many as 30,000 Jews from Spain. Sultan Bayezid II commented, ‘You call Ferdinand a wise ruler ... (yet) he impoverishes his country to enrich mine!’2
‘Throughout the Middle Ages,’ wrote the philosopher Bertrand Russell, ‘the Muslims were more civilised and more humane than the Christians. Christians persecuted Jews, especially at times of religious excitement; the crusades were associated with appalling pogroms. In Muslim countries, on the contrary, Jews at most times were not in any way ill-treated.’3 Russell was no friend of Islam and Muslims – his testimony was an honest assessment of the historical record.
Alas, Muslim tolerance was not to last much longer either. In 1465, the Marinids fell from power. A group of clerics, commoners and agitators declared war on the Marinid sultan Abdul Haqq and killed him while parading him humiliatingly on a donkey through the Jewish quarter of Fez. The sultan was not without supporters – many of Fez’s leading merchants, professors and Muslim clerics who commanded strong support courageously gave Abdul Haqq their backing. But they could not prevail against a violent mob seeking to topple him, accusing him of corruption and ‘support for the Jews’.
