It has been said that ‘a sense of history is a sense of loss’. It is also a sense of change. Contemporary political islamists, in rejecting history, thus deny the organic life and flexile strength of Islam, which has constantly renewed itself in a changing world, adapting to complexity, maturing. The idea that Islam is ‘an evolving culture-bound dynamic of belief and behavior’ is not only an opinion of historians and anthropologists. If it had ever been a monolith, it would have crumbled soon after the first cracks appeared.
The Wahhabis recapitulated the beginning of Islam on an Arabian peninsular scale. Arab nationalism recapitulated ’asr al-tadwin, the Abbasid ‘age of setting down’ in which an Arab ethos was fixed in ink. Both the Wahhabis and the nationalists were standing up, in different ways, to the Shu’ubiyyahs – the non-Arab cultural alternatives – of the Ottomans and the European empires. More recently, political Islam has been attempting to recapitulate the lot, but on an even grander scale: in effect, contemporary political islamists are fighting against the Shu’ubiyyah of the whole messy, modern, multicultural, complex, confused, tangled, tied-up, hung-up, interconnected world. They are fighting for one version of a heavenly ideal versus a multifarious earthly reality. The fight appeals to some precisely because it promises simplicity instead of complexity, monism as against pluralism; but it is also a struggle for totalitarianism versus individualism. In that last respect, it can resemble other recent totalitarianisms. We had the Brownshirts and the Blackshirts; for the moment we have the Longblackshirts (though not too long – long enough to cover the knee, but not to pick up ritual impurities from the ground). But fashions change, and so do uniforms, and contemporary political Islamism will soon be yesterday’s trend.
There will always be other trends. Another one that has taken off in my adoptive country, and zoomed into reverse gear, is that of the neo-Zaydi Hashimi-supremacist Huthis. Their leader has actually been known to sleep in a cave, safe from Saudi missiles and from the progressing world.
NOT GOOD NEIGHBOURS
In parallel with the new Islamism, deeper patterns of Arab identity were re-emerging. With the demise of that other overarching -ism, pan-Arabism, many Arabs now seemed to return to old habits of fragmentation and mutual raiding, sometimes with outside help. The extreme case would be Lebanon where, from 1975 on, everyone – Sunni, Shi’i, Maronite, Druze, Palestinian – fell bloodily out. Israel would also weigh into the fight in 1978 and 1982, the second time especially murderously as its own clients from the Maronite Phalanges massacred Palestinians in the camps of Sabra and Shatila.
The raiding was not only mutual. In 1980 the ancient phenomenon of Arabs raiding Persians updated itself as an Iraqi raid into Iran. The difference was that the old Arab target of the eastern Sawad – the ‘Black Country’, so called from its dense dark groves of date palms – was now the Black Country of the Iranian oil industry. The new Iraqi dictator, Saddam Husayn, was also understandably worried about Iran’s Shi’i Islamic Revolution spreading to Iraqi Shi’is, who made up the majority of his subjects. In his adventure he was supported by an outside empire – the United States, who were happy for him to wreak proxy revenge on the revolutionary Iranians who had overthrown their client-shah. The initial mobility of the raid, however, was soon bogged down in a trench war. By its inconclusive end in 1988 there were no winners, but up to a million dead.
The Americans were not so happy about their Iraqi client’s next raid, on Kuwait in 1990. One might argue, and of course Saddam did, that Kuwait as a sovereign state was a creation of British imperial lobbying that only became an Arab League member in 1961, and that it was historically often a dependency of Iraq. But Iraq itself as a sovereign state – rather than an ill-defined geographical region, the lowlands where two great rivers oozed together into the Gulf (geographers pointed out that the common noun ’iraq is ‘the bottom of a waterskin’) – was also the creation of British cartographic doodling. The British may have been over-imaginative with their pencils; but during the previous seventy years oil had solidified boundaries and imposed its own new realities. Saddam was trying to reunite a notional, ‘natural’ Iraq; in doing so he only succeeded in disuniting Arabs as a whole. A majority of Arab governments opposed him and sided with the American-led coalition that threw him out of Kuwait in 1991; the rest were vehemently against the intervention. But in the pro-coalition states there were deep splits between governments and governed: the Iraqi hard-man was supported by a majority of Men in the Suq. It is hard to quantify such things, but Saddam’s Kuwait escapade was probably as divisive as any other event in Arab history since the fateful seventh-century war between the old and new regimes of Quraysh under Mu’awiyah and Ali. It also led eventually to what was by far the biggest physical superpower intervention in the region since the days of Byzantium and Sasanian Persia: in the anti-Saddam coalition force of nearly a million, US forces alone numbered 650,000.
A numerically smaller but ultimately more fateful intervention was to come in the 2003 American-led invasion of Iraq, which aimed to remove the now intractable Saddam from power. In this it was successful. What came next was not part of the plan: there was no plan. US President George W. Bush, who with his neo-conservative advisers masterminded the blank blueprint, had wished to remove a ruler whom he branded, spuriously, a threat to the West. He also wanted to liberate Iraqis from a dictator who was a proven threat to many of his own people. Laudable though the second aim sounds, Bush might have done better by keeping in mind James Baldwin’s dictum: ‘Freedom is not something that anybody can be given; freedom is something people take and people are as free as they want to be.’ In the case of Iraq, it was not that Iraqis did not want to be ‘free’. But, for most of them, freedom meant something different from what it meant in the mind of Bush. For Iraqis, as for many other Arabs, ‘freedom’ was the right to be controlled by someone of your own kind – whether tribe, sect, denomination or dialect group – or, failing that, a guarantee of protection by someone of a different group. ‘Freedom’ does not yet have the same nuances in the Arabic world as it does elsewhere, the same resonances of individualism; and while it is easy for a superpower to implement ‘regime change’, it is much harder for it to bring about dictionary change.
It is still too soon to know what the long-term ramifications of the 2003 invasion will be. In the short term, however (unlike the divisive events of 1990–1, which began with that inter-Arab raid on Kuwait), superpower pressure had the time-honoured effect of forcing Arabs together: this time, governments and people united in condemnation. The invasion of Iraq also showed – in the US claims, dutifully chorused by its allies, about the military ‘threat’ posed by Saddam Husayn to the West – that Arabs and Arabic have no monopoly on rhetorical ‘truth’.
Elsewhere, conflicts bubbled or raged on through this increasingly fractious and depressing post-pan-Arab age with little or no outside help. Scanning the scene from west to east, Morocco and Algeria have been particularly bad neighbours because of Algeria’s backing for the Polisario Front, a movement which since 1975 has sought to throw off Moroccan control of the old Spanish colony of Western Sahara. In Algeria itself, meanwhile, islamists won the first round of national elections at the end of 1991, upon which the ruling party cancelled the second round, setting off a civil war that may have killed 100,000 or more. Next door, Libya’s thespian dictator Mu’ammar al-Qadhdhafi would survive in power long enough – over four decades – to stage a one-man show of the entire Age of Disappointment: he played the Nasserist, the post-Nasserist, the islamist, the tribal neo-nomad and, ultimately, the ageing and isolated autocrat. During that time, he managed to land himself in conflicts with most of his neighbours, as well as with others in Africa and further afield.
Those next, anomalous neighbours to the east, Egypt and Israel, had exchanged handshakes and olive branches; otherwise, the Israeli mini-empire-within continued to destabilize the region. As talk of ‘autonomy’ in the territories it had occupied in 1967 was revealed as mere temp
orizing, their Palestinian inhabitants rose up against their tormentor from 1987 to 1993, and again from 2000 to 2005; in so doing they gave a new Arabic word to the English dictionary – intifadah, meaning in Arabic ‘a shaking off’. The Israelis responded with excessive force, bullets against pebbles. But the pebbles themselves would turn into something more deadly. As the inmates of the giant concentration camp of Gaza grew more crowded and more angry, their newly elected islamist rulers, Hamas, began firing rockets across the border into Israel. The reaction from Gaza’s gaolers was again one of overkill. In the 2014 campaign, for example, Palestinian to Israeli dead numbered more than 2,100, mostly civilians, to 73, of whom 7 were civilians. The Palestinian number has been debated. But even in figures from Israeli sources, the disproportion is clear enough: over all, between 2000 and the middle of 2018, 9,456 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli security forces, compared with 1,237 Israelis killed by Palestinians – almost 8:1.
In the ‘autonomous’ West Bank, meanwhile, Israeli policy would make nineteenth-century European colonialism and twentieth-century apartheid seem liberal by comparison. For example, an Israeli property law causes any land which is not actually lived on by its owner to revert to the ‘original’ possessors – that is, the Israeli state. Since the State of Israel dates back only to 1948, the use of ‘original’ seems strange; it is, of course, an allusion to the Jewish presence in Palestine in ancient times, and to the modern Zionist-colonial interpretation of ancient references to a sacred ‘Promised Land’. The equivalent thinking applied to England would result in absentee landowners forfeiting their property to a foreign-based sect of revivalist Druids, on the grounds that the land was sacred to them before Julius Caesar’s invasion. As a tunnel vision of history, a denial of time, the State of Israel’s viewpoint is even more astonishing than anything the so-called Islamic State has come up with.
TRIBES TRIUMPHANT
During these inscreasingly disturbed decades, an island of relative calm was the ‘Island’ of the Arabs, the Arabian Peninsula. There too, however, border wars flared on and off through the 1970s between the two parts of a divided Yemen, while a major insurgency in Oman’s south-western Dhofar province threatened the new unity of the sultanate. These conflicts were not minor, yet they were peripheral. But the occupation in November 1979 of the Meccan Haram – the great pilgrimage complex centring on the Ka’bah – by militant islamists, and a bloody siege to eject them, brought the dangerous energy of a newly re-politicized Islam to its navel.
Islam and politics were converging again; at the same time, even the most secular-seeming politics could not rid itself of religious associations. The heady scientific socialism that developed in the 1970s in the People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen (PDRY), the southern part of the divided land, now has an air of unreality: the nationalization of bicycles was mooted; acrobatics and ballet were taught; women joined the army. But there were threads of connection to the past. Traditional Muslim clerics were persecuted, but several of the main proponents of scientific socialism were from Hashimi families belonging to the old religio-political elite, while the
Chief Politburo exegete was Abd al-Fattah Isma’il, an expert on Socialist doctrine who was known, wrily, as al-Faqih (literally, the scholar of holy writ). Under his guidance, the early caliphs of Islam were classified according to their rightist or leftist tendencies.
But if Yemen was a land divided, so was the Party in the PDRY. Pulled every which way by its own leftist, rightist, traditionalist and reformist wings, ‘splittism’ became rife and internal conflict ever more aggressive, leading to a crescendo of violence in 1986 in which thousands were killed.
As with much ‘religious’ sectarian conflict, struggles between the various doctrinal sects of Socialism were a metaphor for old tribal differences that were bubbling up afresh. Pan-Arab unity had failed, and now – whatever the lines on the map proclaimed – many of the lesser unities, the territorial nation-states, were also beginning to fall apart, almost as soon as they had been cobbled together. It had often been relatively easy for colonial powers to sketch in borders, even to disarm tribal warriors; but it had been much harder to implant the institutions that nation-states need to survive. Writing of Aden, British government minister Richard Crossman admitted to his diary in 1967 that ‘Chaos will rule after we’ve gone, and there’ll be one major commitment out – thank God’. The ‘chaos’ was not confined to Aden. It ruled much of the Arabic world, in the form of a lot of people vying for power and influence and, unconstrained by strong institutions, doing so with the millennially tried and tested vehicles of kinship and tribe, raid and feud; in other words, creating new wheels of fire. Poets, still often the only speakers of truth nearly 1,500 years on from Imru’ al-Qays and al-Shanfara, told it like it was. In 1980 Nizar Qabbani summed up the scene:
From the Gulf to the Atlantic, tribes
Running rampant, devoid of thought and culture . . .
Qabbani’s tirade thundered on, a long and bitter attack on Arab pretensions to unity and civilization – recited not to some coterie of intellectuals, but to the Arab League at its thirty-fifth birthday party. Only a poet could have got away with it.
Sometimes the perimeter of a wheel of fire did coincide with the lines on the map. This was true in some of the Gulf statelets, small and rich enough to maintain their integrity. It was also true at the far end of the Arabic world in Morocco, where a critical mass of shared history – a 300-year Hashimi dynasty, and the recent shared struggle against the French – had brought rulers and ruled together. But, just as often, state boundaries were wildly at variance with the demographies of loyalty. This was the case, for example, in Iraq and Syria, where numerical majorities – of Kurds and Shi’is in the one, of Sunnis in the other – were only kept in check by the arms and the terror of the ruling cliques. Whether states were successful or not, however, what was clear was that ‘tribes’, sometimes overt, sometimes disguised as sects that were religious, political, or both together, were still part of the narrative. The old debate between hadar and badw, peoples and tribes, was continuing with new vigour.
Most often, the hadar–badw debate has continued as a dispute between weak institutions and strong men, the latter ruling through a web of bloodlines, business deals and military loyalty. From 1980 or so, the strong men were winning the debate, and getting ever stronger. This was true even in Egypt, a land that had previously attained high levels of statehood, and had enjoyed more stable institutions than anywhere else in the Arabic world. Under President Husni Mubarak, the fact that the ruler was a military man with control of an expanding arsenal and economy, and – particularly – that he would rule for thirty years, had predictable consequences: institutions withered, and the warp and weft of patronage and corruption grew ever tighter.
Other than in an absolute hereditary monarchy, probably the most important act of the leader of a well-run state is to leave his or her job quietly, and to leave the country in good order. In poorly-run states, it is more likely that leaders will have to be thrown out or otherwise disposed of, if they do not conveniently die in office; this was the case with post-colonial Arab states for several decades. But over time, with security apparatuses growing more technologically advanced and effective, this healthy turnover-by-coup decreased. By the turn of the AD millennium, nearly all of the Arabic world found itself controlled by either absolute monarchies or long-lived dictatorships, and in all of them what mattered to the ruled was not so much one’s relationship as a citizen with an impersonal state as one’s connection to the network of a personal leader. Whether these connections were overtly tribal or not differed from country to country; but even where they were not, ties of blood and other forms of loyalty – wala’ – were mattering more and more again, just as they had mattered for ancient tribes with their supposed blood-links and affiliated mawlas, those joined by wala’. States were becoming little more than wala’-webs, centring on hungry and insatiable spiders.
DEMONARCHIE
S
Of the Arab states that are not overt hereditary monarchies, all but one include the term jumhuriyyah, ‘republic’, in their official names. Nominally, then, rule is by the jumhur, ‘the mass of people’. (The exception has been Libya, which until the fall of Mu’ammar al-Qadhdhafi was a jamahiriyyah, from the plural, ‘masses’ – maybe a case of horror vacui in a big country with a small population. Now it seems to be simply ‘the State of Libya’.) A wry but more honest term, however, has been coined recently, and applies to many of these faux republics: jumlakiyyah, an amalgamation of jumhuriyyah and malikiyyah, ‘monarchy’ – perhaps in English ‘rexpublic’, or even, to retain the alleged democratic element, ‘demonarchy’. An example is my adoptive country. If I now focus on it for two or three pages, it is because I am an eye-witness of its recent history, and in any case it lies, like the troubled lands of the northern Fertile Crescent, on a major fault line between peoples and tribes. It is a case study in the surprising survival of those tribes.
Until 1990 Yemen was divided in two: the post-British, Soviet-backed People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen (PDRY, South Yemen), and the richer, more populous and vaguely non-aligned Yemen Arab Republic (YAR, North Yemen). The British had left South Yemen in ‘chaos’; but with the fall of the USSR a short generation later and the loss of its new backer, the country found itself even less viable than it had been, and united with the YAR in May 1990 to form the Republic of Yemen (RoY). The unification, or reunification, seemed right and proper: unlike the modern state of Iraq, say, al-Yaman, ‘the South’ of the Arabs’ Island, feels like a natural whole, geographically, culturally, historically. It was home to the ancient South Arabian settled states and has been politically united on and off – admittedly much more off than on – at various times over the past couple of thousand years and more.
Arabs Page 63