The Barbarians Within Our Gates. By Hisham Melham. Politico, September 18, 2014.
Enough lies, the Arab body politic created the ISIS cancer. By Hisham Melhem. Al Arabiya, August 16, 2014.
The sectarian inferno. By Hisham Melhem. Al Arabiya, February 8, 2014.
The persistence of the old order in the Middle East. By Hisham Melhem. Al Arabiya, November 16, 2013.
Arab Muslims Yearn for Lost Greatness. By David Ignatius and Hisham Melhem. NJBR, July 14, 2013.
Light comes from the West, nostalgia from the Middle East. By Salman Masalha. Haaretz, August 28, 2013.
Melhem [Barbarians]:
Arab civilization has collapsed. It won’t
recover in my lifetime.
With
his decision to use force against the violent extremists of the Islamic State,
President Obama is doing more than to knowingly enter a quagmire. He is doing
more than play with the fates of two half-broken countries—Iraq and Syria—whose
societies were gutted long before the Americans appeared on the horizon. Obama
is stepping once again—and with understandably great reluctance—into the chaos
of an entire civilization that has broken down.
Arab
civilization, such as we knew it, is all but gone. The Arab world today is more
violent, unstable, fragmented and driven by extremism—the extremism of the
rulers and those in opposition—than at any time since the collapse of the
Ottoman Empire a century ago. Every hope of modern Arab history has been
betrayed. The promise of political empowerment, the return of politics, the
restoration of human dignity heralded by the season of Arab uprisings in their
early heydays—all has given way to civil wars, ethnic, sectarian and regional
divisions and the reassertion of absolutism, both in its military and atavistic
forms. With the dubious exception of the antiquated monarchies and emirates of
the Gulf—which for the moment are holding out against the tide of chaos—and
possibly Tunisia, there is no recognizable legitimacy left in the Arab world.
Is it
any surprise that, like the vermin that take over a ruined city, the heirs to
this self-destroyed civilization should be the nihilistic thugs of the Islamic
State? And that there is no one else who can clean up the vast mess we Arabs
have made of our world but the Americans and Western countries?
No one
paradigm or one theory can explain what went wrong in the Arab world in the
last century. There is no obvious set of reasons for the colossal failures of
all the ideologies and political movements that swept the Arab region: Arab
nationalism, in its Baathist and Nasserite forms; various Islamist movements;
Arab socialism; the rentier state and
rapacious monopolies, leaving in their wake a string of broken societies. No
one theory can explain the marginalization of Egypt, once the center of
political and cultural gravity in the Arab East, and its brief and tumultuous
experimentation with peaceful political change before it reverted back to
military rule.
Nor is
the notion of “ancient sectarian hatreds” adequate to explain the frightening
reality that along a front stretching from Basra at the mouth of the Persian
Gulf to Beirut on the Mediterranean there exists an almost continuous
bloodletting between Sunni and Shia—the public manifestation of an epic
geopolitical battle for power and control pitting Iran, the Shia powerhouse,
against Saudi Arabia, the Sunni powerhouse, and their proxies.
There
is no one single overarching explanation for that tapestry of horrors in Syria
and Iraq, where in the last five years more than a quarter of a million people
perished, where famed cities like Aleppo, Homs and Mosul were visited by the
modern terror of Assad’s chemical weapons and the brutal violence of the
Islamic State. How could Syria tear itself apart and become—like Spain in the
1930s—the arena for Arabs and Muslims to re-fight their old civil wars? The war
waged by the Syrian regime against civilians in opposition areas combined the
use of Scud missiles, anti-personnel barrel bombs as well as medieval tactics
against towns and neighborhoods such as siege and starvation. For the first
time since the First World War, Syrians were dying of malnutrition and hunger.
Iraq’s
story in the last few decades is a chronicle of a death foretold. The slow
death began with Saddam Hussein’s fateful decision to invade Iran in September
1980. Iraqis have been living in purgatory ever since with each war giving
birth to another. In the midst of this suspended chaos, the U.S. invasion in
2003 was merely a catalyst that allowed the violent chaos to resume in full
force.
The
polarizations in Syria and Iraq—political, sectarian and ethnic—are so deep
that it is difficult to see how these once-important countries could be
restored as unitary states. In Libya, Muammar al-Qaddafi’s 42-year reign of
terror rendered the country politically desolate and fractured its already
tenuous unity. The armed factions that inherited the exhausted country have set
it on the course of breaking up—again, unsurprisingly—along tribal and regional
fissures. Yemen has all the ingredients of a failed state: political,
sectarian, tribal, north-south divisions, against the background of economic
deterioration and a depleted water table that could turn it into the first
country in the world to run out of drinking water.
Bahrain
is maintaining a brittle status quo by the force of arms of its larger
neighbors, mainly Saudi Arabia. Lebanon, dominated by Hezbollah, arguably the
most powerful non-state actor in the world—before the rise of the Islamic
State—could be dragged fully to the maelstrom of Syria’s multiple civil wars by
the Assad regime, Iran and its proxy Hezbollah as well as the Islamic State.
A
byproduct of the depredation of the national security state and resurgent
Islamism has been the slow death of the cosmopolitanism that distinguished
great Middle Eastern cities like Alexandria, Beirut, Cairo and Damascus.
Alexandria was once a center of learning and multicultural delights (by night,
Mark Twain wrote in Innocents Abroad,
“it was a sort of reminiscence of Paris”). Today Alexandria is a hotbed of
political Islam, now that the once large Greek-Egyptian community has fled
along with the other non-Arab and non-Muslim communities. Beirut, once the most
liberal city in the Levant, is struggling to maintain a modicum of openness and
tolerance while being pushed by Hezbollah to become a Tehran on the Med. Over
the last few decades, Islamists across the region have encouraged—and
pressured—women to wear veils, men to show signs of religiosity, and subtly and
not-so-subtly intimidated non-conformist intellectuals and artists. Egypt today
is bereft of good universities and research centers, while publishing
unreadable newspapers peddling xenophobia and hyper-nationalism. Cairo no
longer produces the kind of daring and creative cinema that pioneers like the
critically acclaimed director Youssef Chahine made for more than 60 years.
Egyptian society today cannot tolerate a literary and intellectual figure like
Taha Hussein, who towered over Arab intellectual life from the 1920s until his
death in 1973, because of his skepticism about Islam. Egyptian society cannot
reconcile itself today to the great diva Asmahan (1917-1944) singing to her
lover that “my soul, my heart, and my body are in your hand.” In the Egypt of
today, a chanteuse like Asmahan would be hounded and banished from the country.
***
The
jihadists of the Islamic State, in other words, did not emerge from nowhere.
They climbed out of a rotting, empty hulk—what was left of a broken-down
civilization. They are a gruesome manifestation of a deeper malady afflicting
Arab political culture, which was stagnant, repressive and patriarchal after
the decades of authoritarian rule that led to the disastrous defeat in the 1967
war with Israel. That defeat sounded the death knell of Arab nationalism and
the resurgence of political Islam, which projected itself as the alternative to
the more secular ideologies that had dominated the Arab republics since the
Second World War. If Arab decline was the problem, then “Islam is the
solution,” the Islamists said—and they believed it.
At
their core, both political currents—Arab nationalism and Islamism—are driven by
atavistic impulses and a regressive outlook on life that is grounded in a
mostly mythologized past. Many Islamists, including Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood
(the wellspring of such groups)—whether they say it explicitly or hint at
it—are still on a ceaseless quest to resurrect the old Ottoman Caliphate. Still
more radical types—the Salafists—yearn for a return to the puritanical days of
Prophet Muhammad and his companions. For most Islamists, democracy means only
majoritarian rule, and the rule of sharia
law, which codifies gender inequality and discrimination against non-Muslims.
And
let’s face the grim truth: There is no evidence whatever that Islam in its
various political forms is compatible with modern democracy. From Afghanistan
under the Taliban to Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, and from Iran to Sudan, there
is no Islamist entity that can be said to be democratic, just or a practitioner
of good governance. The short rule of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt under the
presidency of Mohamed Morsi was no exception. The Brotherhood tried to
monopolize power, hound and intimidate the opposition and was driving the
country toward a dangerous impasse before a violent military coup ended the
brief experimentation with Islamist rule.
Like
the Islamists, the Arab nationalists—particularly the Baathists—were also
fixated on a “renaissance” of past Arab greatness, which had once flourished in
the famed cities of Damascus, Baghdad, Cairo and Córdoba in Al-Andalus, now
Spain. These nationalists believed that Arab language and culture (and to a
lesser extent Islam) were enough to unite disparate entities with different
levels of social, political and cultural development. They were in denial that
they lived in a far more diverse world. Those minorities that resisted the
primacy of Arab identity were discriminated against, denied citizenship and
basic rights, and in the case of the Kurds in Iraq were subjected to massive
repression and killings of genocidal proportion. Under the guise of Arab nationalism
the modern Arab despot (Saddam, Qaddafi, the Assads) emerged. But these men
lived in splendid solitude, detached from their own people. The repression and
intimidation of the societies they ruled over were painfully summarized by the
gifted Syrian poet Muhammad al-Maghout: “I enter the bathroom with my identity
papers in my hand.”
The
dictators, always unpopular, opened the door to the Islamists’ rise when they
proved just as incompetent as the monarchs they had replaced. That, again, came
in 1967 after the crushing defeat of Nasserite Egypt and Baathist Syria at the
hands of Israel. From that moment on Arab politics began to be animated by
various Islamist parties and movements. The dictators, in their desperation to
hold onto their waning power, only became more brutal in the 1980s and ‘90s.
But the Islamists kept coming back in new and various shapes and stripes, only
to be crushed again ever more ferociously.
The
year 1979 was a watershed moment for political Islam. An Islamic revolution
exploded in Iran, provoked in part by decades of Western support for the
corrupt shah. The Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan and a group of bloody
zealots occupied the Grand Mosque in Mecca for two weeks. After these
cataclysmic events political Islam became more atavistic in its Sunni
manifestations and more belligerent in its Shia manifestations. Saudi Arabia,
in order to reassert its fundamentalist “wahhabi” ethos, became stricter in its
application of Islamic law, and increased its financial aid to
ultraconservative Islamists and their schools throughout the world. The
Islamization of the war in Afghanistan against Soviet occupation—a project
organized and financed by the United States, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and
Pakistan—triggered a tectonic change in the political map of South Asia and the
Middle East. The Afghan war was the baptism of fire for terrorist outfits like
the Egyptian Islamic Group and al Qaeda, the progenitors of the Islamic State.
This
decades-long struggle for legitimacy between the dictators and the Islamists
meant that when the Arab Spring uprisings began in early 2011, there were no
other political alternatives. You had only the Scylla of the national security state
and the Charybdis of political Islam. The secularists and liberals, while
playing the leading role in the early phase of the Egyptian uprisings, were
marginalized later by the Islamists who, because of their political experience
as an old movement, won parliamentary and presidential elections. In a region
shorn of real political life it was difficult for the admittedly divided and
not very experienced liberals and secularists to form viable political parties.
So no
one should be surprised that the Islamists and the remnants of the national
security state have dominated Egypt since the fall of Hosni Mubarak. In the
end, the uprising removed the tip of the political pyramid—Mubarak and some of
his cronies—but the rest of the repressive structure, what the Egyptians refer
to as the “deep state” (the army, security apparatus, the judiciary, state
media and vested economic interests), remained intact. After the failed
experiment of Muslim Brotherhood rule, a bloody coup in 2013 completed the
circle and brought Egypt back under the control of a retired general.
In
today’s Iraq, too, the failure of a would-be authoritarian—recently departed
Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki—has contributed to the rise of the Islamists. The
Islamic State is exploiting the alienated Arab Sunni minority, which feels
marginalized and disenfranchised in an Iraq dominated by the Shia for the first
time in its history and significantly influenced by Iran.
Almost
every Muslim era, including the enlightened ones, has been challenged by groups
that espouse a virulent brand of austere, puritanical and absolutist Islam.
They have different names, but are driven by the same fanatical, atavistic
impulses. The great city of Córdoba, one of the most advanced cities in
Medieval Europe, was sacked and plundered by such a group (Al Mourabitoun) in
1013, destroying its magnificent palaces and its famed library. In the 1920s
the Ikhwan Movement in Arabia (no relation to the Egyptian movement) was so
fanatical that the founder of Saudi Arabia, King Abdul-Aziz Al Saud, who
collaborated with them initially, had to crush them later on. In contemporary
times, these groups include the Taliban, al Qaeda and the Islamic State.
Yes, it
is misleading to lump—as some do—all Islamist groups together, even though all
are conservative in varying degrees. As terrorist organizations, al Qaeda and
Islamic State are different from the Muslim Brotherhood, a conservative
movement that renounced violence years ago, although it did dabble with
violence in the past.
Nonetheless,
most of these groups do belong to the same family tree—and all of them stem
from the Arabs’ civilizational ills. The Islamic State, like al Qaeda, is the
tumorous creation of an ailing Arab body politic. Its roots run deep in the
badlands of a tormented Arab world that seems to be slouching aimlessly through
the darkness. It took the Arabs decades and generations to reach this nadir. It
will take us a long time to recover—it certainly won’t happen in my lifetime.
My generation of Arabs was told by both the Arab nationalists and the Islamists
that we should man the proverbial ramparts to defend the “Arab World” against
the numerous barbarians (imperialists, Zionists, Soviets) massing at the gates.
Little did we know that the barbarians were already inside the gates, that they
spoke our language and were already very well entrenched in the city.
