by Ed Husain
Terrorist groups, their tactics, new names for breakaway groups, must not distract us from the fact that they are also becoming more successful as the effectiveness of state military forces weakens. Hezbollah, Hamas, al-Qaeda may have been losing to date, but their war of attrition is not over. Unless we, their opponents, including most Muslims around the world, shift the grounds on which they stand, then they can sustain a long war in a way in which liberal democrats cannot.
A Harvard study2 has shown that in asymmetric conflicts between 1800 and 1849, the weaker side in terms of soldiers and arms achieved its aim in 12 per cent of cases. In the wars between 1950 and 1998, the weaker side won in 55 per cent of cases. Moisés Naím, in The End of Power, concludes that ‘when nation-states go to war these days, big military power delivers less than it once did’. It looks particularly impotent in the face of amateur lone attackers – and in 2015, 450 of the 452 suicide bomb attacks across the world were by Islamist extremists.
The Arab masses cannot be bombed into submission by governments and their armies. Terrorist organisations will continue to be born claiming to want to restore dignity and honour to their imagined form of Islam. The more we delay, postpone, contain or block the cry for dignity and participation in government, the messier, bloodier and more protracted the conflicts of the Middle East will become. We need a long-term, comprehensive strategy to unpick the webs of warfare in the region.
But what will that new order be? Hoping for the best, the comfortable refuge of relativists, is not an option. We cannot leave matters to the Middle Easterners themselves, for fear of giving offence or facing accusations of renewed colonialism. What happens in the region has an impact upon the West. On the other hand, intensive European and American meddling, imposing Westphalia-style nation-states, empire, world wars, secular liberalism and dictatorships has not worked in a part of the world that holds true to its conservative heritage on faith, family, and a future world beyond this one. Treading a careful line between ignoring and fuelling the fire, we can all assist in organising regional order and contributing to global peace and security.
There are major challenges facing our world over the coming decades: the actuality of a changing climate, rapid population growth, resource scarcity, a resurgence of ideology, and shifts in power from West to East.3 In all of these, the Muslim world generally, and the Middle East specifically, is at the sharp end. Water shortages and record temperatures are occurring across the Arabian Gulf. Rising water levels in Bangladesh, literally inch by inch each year, threaten to obliterate that country. Muslim birth rates are higher than in every other faith and non-faith community. Islamist ideology is on the rise, and all the more so now because of government crackdowns in several countries. And the West-to-East shift in power is likely to concentrate on India and China, again bypassing the Middle East – unless the region changes, and changes fast.
Western governments have been pursuing policies that ignore concrete realities. Leftist activists and NGOs help spread the secularising and revolutionary ideas of Voltaire, Rousseau and Marx, but not the conservative, faith-accommodating philosophy and economics of Burke and Adam Smith. Yet the latter resonate among peoples who were traders and merchants for millennia, and maintained a conservative balance between monarchs, merchants, mullahs and the masses in their political systems.
Edmund Burke’s genius in Britain and relevance in today’s Middle East was that he was both religious and a conservative, but also understood and held in balance the forces of past, present and future. He balanced the monarchy, aristocracy and commons while reining in the iconoclastic temptations of the French Revolution. And yet he supported the American Revolution, the Irish cause and Catholic emancipation; he took the British East Indian Company to task for its injustices; and he believed in a constitutional monarchy for Great Britain with checks and balances. This compromise and consensus of conservatism is based on centuries of coexistence. To oppose this with abstract ideas of human rights while endorsing attacks upon and killing of police officers (as happened during the Arab Spring in Bahrain and Egypt) is to sow the seeds of destruction. Governments and revolutionaries wanting all or nothing have repeatedly resulted in Arab failures. Mubarak, Assad and Gaddafi battled street protesters; business elites lost out and capital took flight; and the rule of law suffered further setbacks in countries where the legal culture had been lost. To address this, the Burkean compromise was to include all in power – monarchy, aristocracy and commons, which would nowadays translate into head of state, opposition, and religious, military and business elites all working together.
‘A state without the means of some change is without the means of its conservation,’ Burke wrote. The changes that the Muslim world in general, and the Middle East in particular, will need in order to conserve what is best in those societies include religious faith, family values, a sense of the sacred in the public space, and maintaining a belief in life beyond this world. But where must the changes be made? Based on the themes identified in this book, there are three areas that can be worked on to help heal the increasing rifts and rancour in the Islamic world.
1. CREATE A MIDDLE EAST UNION (MEU) – URGENTLY
In 2015 alone, a million migrants entered Europe, most of them from the war-shattered lands of the Middle East. Since 2012, over three million Syrian refugees have fled to Turkey. The conflicts in several Arab countries have yet to peak. Refugee flows will continue to increase, not decrease. Tens of thousands of Muslims and others have already died at sea trying to enter Europe. What does it say about societies and governments when their people are, literally, dying to leave them for Europe?
There are urgent steps we need to take in partnership with, not by dominating, the Middle East. First, we need to respond to the calls from the region and assist in the creation of a Middle East Union. Not long ago, Europe was a continent that looked the way the Middle East looks today. It was full of dictators and stalked by political extremists. Its intolerance of minorities led to the horrors of the Holocaust. Perpetual contests over its national borders triggered two world wars. This depressing picture is now being repeated across the Middle East, from Morocco to Syria to Yemen. The rise of religious sectarianism in Iraq and Syria, as well as the repression of Islamists in Egypt, produces the magnetic narratives of radicalism that find adherents among young Muslims in the West.
Europe’s past and present can inform the future of the Middle East. Ironically, despite current fractures over its future direction, the European Union’s history and stability offer a model for putting the Middle East back together in a way that reinstates thymos, a sense of pride in their place in the world, the political desire for recognition and respect as dignified ancient peoples. Just as a warring continent found peace through unity, by creating what became the EU, so Arabs, Turks, Iranians, Kurds and other groups in the region could find relative peace in ever closer union. Most of its problems – terrorism, poverty, unemployment, sectarianism, refugee crises, water shortages – require regional answers. None of the countries concerned can solve its problems on its own. The rule should be simple: we need to face in common that which we cannot do alone.
Egypt’s President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, in full recognition of regional challenges, has at several junctures called for the creation of a joint Arab military force. A Middle East Union could hold the key to a common security response to the shared threat of regional jihadism. Egypt describes this as ‘one of the most important tools of integration of the Arab world to defend the causes of Arab nations’, alongside the economic integration of Arab countries.
Such regional amalgamation and assimilation would have other benefits, and meet other needs too. For example, Egypt has low-cost labour but high youth unemployment. Neighbouring Libya has excess capital, huge infrastructure projects and an insatiable demand for workers. Turkey has the expertise to build airports, bridges and roads. These dots need connecting.
For more than a millennium, the Middle East was broadly united
under different monarchical dynasties. Free movement of people, goods, tribes, ideas and armies was the norm. There was a common religion for most and, compared with other regions of the world, there were fewer languages and more commonalities of culture and history. When Europe’s medieval pogroms were unleashed, it was the Muslim Mamluks and Ottomans who welcomed Jews. Minorities were protected when the majority had confidence in themselves.
Most people in the Middle East today no longer feel the dignity of their ancestors. Thymos is desperately missing. This is something an MEU could recreate. Through a sharing of resources and policies, the necessary corrections could be made in the education systems of the Middle East to promote critical thinking and develop open minds that honour women as equal human beings in the workplace and in families.
Conflict in Europe was eroded by Europeans growing more interdependent on each other for trade, security and prosperity, and joining their governments and peoples closer together. During Britain’s referendum to exit (‘Brexit’) the EU, the strongest warning not to leave came from the then Conservative prime minister, David Cameron: ‘The European Union has helped reconcile countries which were at each other’s throats for decades.’ He talked about ‘maintaining common purpose in Europe to avoid future conflict between European countries’. It is the absence of any such architecture of unity in the modern Middle East that creates fertile grounds for fanatics.
In a special report on the Arab world entitled ‘The War Within’, the Economist put forward a similar argument:
Arab states could do with more supranational integration to open markets and spur growth. As a political body, the Arab League is a failure. But many Arabs admire the European Union, even as it loses its appeal to a growing number of Europeans, not least because of Arab refugees. European history provides some solace to Arabs: before the continent united, it waged wars even bloodier than those Arabs are enduring.4
Israel, meanwhile, should be an ally and trading partner of this regional union, and eventually a member. Palestinians must be allowed to travel and trade across the Middle East rather than languish for further generations in refugee camps as recruitment fodder for Hamas and the jihadis. Israel’s technological, educational and innovative advantages over its Arab neighbours should be motivational: why does Israel have more patents and Nobel Prize winners than the entire Arab world combined? Israel is a magnet for global investors – peace with Israel would ensure that capital is spread across the region. Per capita venture capital investments in Israel in 2009 were 2.5 times higher than in the United States, more than 30 times greater than in Europe, 80 times higher than in China, and 350 times larger than in India. In absolute terms, Israel, a small nation of only 7 million people, attracted almost 2 billion dollars in venture capital, as much as flowed to the UK’s 61 million people. For how much longer must there be conflict rather than cooperation?
Regional thinkers and leaders have made calls for unity for almost a century. This is not, therefore, a Western project. Intellectuals of the past sowed the seeds of regionalist thought long ago.5 In polls, most people in the Middle East have been found to see themselves primarily as Arab or Muslim before, say, Jordanian or Saudi. Pan-Islamic identity still has more resonance than nationality.
Such calls for closer regional collaboration have been echoed by former president of Turkey Abdullah Gul, the Saudi king, the president of the United Arab Emirates, Jordan’s monarch – and also by more threatening voices among Hamas, Egypt’s Salafists and the Muslim Brotherhood. On a visit to Egypt in April 2016, King Salman of Saudi Arabia, addressing the Egyptian parliament, called for regional issues to be addressed through regional unity. This did not make headlines in the West, but it reflected the instincts of the peoples and politicians of the Arab world’s two most powerful nations. The commitment of both sides to building a new bridge across the Red Sea to connect their countries is a symbol of this urge for greater Arab unity.6
ISIS already operates beyond nation-states, and its transnational outlook and ideology are spreading fast worldwide. Is the West going to wait until the Islamists and radicals are powerful enough to create a Middle East in their own image, one hostile to the rest of us? Or will it help its Middle Eastern partners in government to harness this momentum for greater unity? This is the moment to create multilateral institutions that could embed pluralism across the region as firmly as Mustafa Kemal Atatürk’s constitution did in Turkey almost a century ago. An MEU would not be the caliphate of the literalists or the secular democracy of liberals, but a pluralistic political and economic union true to the reality of the region, where the sharia is honoured through the Maqasid of preserving life, freedom, intellect, family and property. Yearning for the sharia will not vanish. ‘Human beings will no more cease to be religious than they will stop being sexual, playful or violent,’ warns John Gray.7 But the Maqasid approach to the sharia, being at once rooted in history and scholarship dating back nine hundred years and at the same time readily applicable to the modern world, is the most constructive way forward for Muslim activists.
In short, conservatism, capitalism and coexistence should be the forces behind creating a new Middle East order that provides dignity, security and stability for the region and the wider world.
2. IMPLEMENT A MUSLIM MARSHALL PLAN
As well as closer regional political and security cooperation, economic integration is essential to create prosperity and meet the rising generation’s aspirations. After the demolition of Europe’s infrastructure and depletion of its capital reserves at the end of the Second World War, the United States deployed $130 billion in today’s money to rebuild Europe. The Marshall Fund aimed to minimise state barriers, eradicate red tape that prevented business growth, and facilitate business productivity and economic growth. In recent times the West has fought multiple wars in the Middle East, at enormous expense – the Iraq War cost the United States 2 trillion dollars – but no such economic reconstruction plan for the region has been conceived. A Marshall Plan for the Middle East, which could help to fund and facilitate a Middle East Union, is urgently overdue. The nearest we have come to this so far is the Deauville Partnership floated by the G8 in 2011 after the Arab uprisings, but none of the promises made were kept. France’s President Nicolas Sarkozy is said to have made up the figure for the amount of aid to be pledged just thirty seconds before it was announced.8
During the past three decades, the Middle East region’s per capita income has grown by a mere 0.9 per cent per year (the lowest of all regions in the world except sub-Saharan Africa). In a region of 450 million people, only 3.2 million jobs have been created per year in the past ten years – fewer than half the number needed. In 2008–10, 76 per cent of the region’s exports were primary commodities, largely oil and gas – not products created by the people. Manufactured goods accounted for only 11 per cent of exports. Only 20 per cent of small and medium-sized businesses have a loan or line of credit, much lower than anywhere else in the world.
In August 2015, Jordan’s Queen Rania warned that 100 million new jobs were needed in the Middle East by 2020. What regional and strategic steps are in place to meet this desperate need? None. Two in three Egyptians live on less than 2 dollars a day. The situation is only set to get worse unless an international economic plan for the region, linked to creating a Middle East Union, is crafted and implemented with speed.
In May 2012 the World Bank had released a report9 highlighting the vital need for Arab economic integration, ‘for without strong economic underpinnings, and without growth and quality employment for the millions of young Arab men and women who seek jobs and a decent life, the Arab democratic transition indeed faces a grim future’.10 It said the region was the least integrated in the world, despite having the strongest ingredients for integration, including the sharing of a common religion, heritage, language, culture and history.
A regional union, with economic integration, would promote greater movement of people, capital and enterprises. It would t
urn Arabs and Muslims inwards to help raise the status of their people from impoverishment to one of dignity, political rights, and a role in the global economy. Almost 70 per cent of Middle Eastern trade at present is with the EU. Free trade agreements with the EU and US would help incentivise entrepreneurship. Just as China and the US negotiate agreements with the EU and not its member states, so too the West would deal with the Middle East Union as a bloc. And just as Germany and Britain have footed the bill for subsidising poorer EU members, Arab states with higher GDPs should share their resources with Egypt, Jordan, Syria and other poorer nations. Failure to do so creates conflicts that then consume the peoples of the entire region and beyond.
China, India, Europe and America are all organised today as political and economic unions and federations of various kinds. Globalisation, free trade and the pooling of sovereignty and resources minimise internal wars and loss of life. In Europe, Germany is no longer at war with France. In a united America, the Civil War ended two centuries ago and has not been reignited. But Saudi Arabia and Iran are continuing to fight old sectarian wars by new proxies – and the consequences, seen in Syria, Lebanon, Iraq and Yemen, are growing annually.
If Arabs, Turks, Kurds and Iranians do not expedite the creation of a Middle East Union, then responsibility for the breakdown will be theirs. The West cannot be held accountable for the failings of a divided people. Currently, blame for Middle Eastern catastrophes is placed firmly on the West. A move away from addressing one nation at a time to taking a regional approach to regional problems would shift the blame, and show that the West understands the impulses and instincts of the region. Success would be a win–win outcome. Failure would not be the fault of the West.
3. EXPEL VIOLENT EXTREMISTS FROM WITHIN ISLAM
