Arabs

by Tim Mackintosh-Smith

  The equation of this latest reunification

  (PDRY – USSR) + YAR = RoY

  sums up a lot of Arab history. The combined pressure exerted by two superpowers in opposition was off, and Arab identity softened. With pan-Arabism removed from the sum as well, the resulting state became visibly, nominally, less Arab: the ‘Arab’ of the old Yemen Arab Republic was dropped. Were Arabs set to ‘disappear’ once more, lost in new nation-states? It seemed not: Egypt is still the Arab Republic of Egypt; Syria is still the Syrian Arab Republic; the Emirates are still the United Arab Emirates (although perhaps, like the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, they should really be the United Arabian Emirates; the word is ambiguous in Arabic). School exercise books in Yemen still have a map of al-Watan al-’Arabi, ‘the Arab Homeland’, on one pair of endpapers. Equally, on the other pair of endpapers they have a world map that still shows Yugoslavia and the USSR. Perhaps it is just that no one has bothered to do away with the old names.

  Soon after Yemen’s unification, there was a short and oxymoronic ‘War of Unity’ in 1994, in which some of the old PDRY bosses led an attempt to secede. The union was preserved, but at a cost: the war set the seal on the dominance of the old YAR and its leader, Ali Abd Allah Salih. Then, as another element was added to the equation – time – the freedoms contracted. Salih at first exercised a tolerably benign dictatorship. But in the world of change and decay, of generation and corruption, dictators, however benign to begin with, have fairly short half-lives; as they age they tend to become progressively more unstable and less benign. A soldier from a tribal background, Salih had earlier been nicknamed tays al-dubbat, ‘the billy-goat in the officers’ mess’: thick-skulled, head down, butting his way to the front. His caprine, capricious side found it less constricting to run things via personal, informal links with tribal leaders. ‘The state,’ he had said in 1986, ‘is part of the tribes, and our Yemeni people is a collection of tribes.’ This was, strictly, a contradiction in terms – or at least in ancient Arabian and Qur’anic terms, in which sha’bs and qabilahs, peoples and tribes, are two distinct creatures, sheep and goats. Or was it another attempt finally to reconcile the two?

  It wasn’t. Increasingly, after 1990, society was intentionally re-tribalized. This happened even in the former South, which had been nominally de-tribalized. There, the British and then the Socialists had tried to disarm the tribes, turning them into citizens without arms (and, in their own view, without ‘honour’); but the tribesmen had never deigned to take up ploughshares, and after 1990 they re-armed themselves with a vengeance. Apologists saw no anachronism; on the contrary, wrote one, with an eloquently unfortunate choice of phrase, those who warn of the dangers of old-fashioned tribalism in the modern state ‘might as well look for camel-trains at metro stations!’ – and get knocked over by the other sort of train while looking . . . Tribes, too, like trains, are mechanized these days, and even more dangerous than they used to be.

  Democracy withered – though not Salih’s popularity, for as the press became less free again, the word became more gathered. Eventually even the ‘Republic’ was lost from the equation in all but name: the country became a jumlakiyyah, a demonarchy, with Salih grooming his son Ahmad to succeed. Posters of the two, in uniforms and mirrored aviator shades, began to proliferate and to swell in size; a later version included a third generation, Ahmad’s small son, out of nappies and into fatigues. And the demonarchy took on an ever more ‘tribal’ aspect, with the president as paterfamilias: ‘But he is my father!’ a friend of mine protested when I criticized the leader. At times, the relationship was more complicated: ‘Ali [Abd Allah Salih], you are my brother, my son, my father!’ one poster exclaimed. Society under such a leader is founded not on a constitution or laws or even shared faith but, like tribal society, on the multiply impossible fantasy of a blood-relationship. As for the 1,000 years of ancient South Arabian civil history in this same land – of sha’bs, peoples united not by claims of blood but by divine covenants – and the 1,400 years of Islamic history that followed and built on it across continents – it might all never have happened.

  Salih, preferring swords to ploughshares, indulged in an orgy of arming himself, and put his nearest and dearest in charge of the arsenal. He, naturally, was commander-in-chief; his son Ahmad was in charge of the elite Republican Guard; his brother ran the air force; and so on. Arms, and loyal lieutenants to bear them, are the marks of honour of the tribesman, and Salih was becoming a super-tribesman. The civil state was entirely hollowed out. Even school uniforms were changed to military green. Across the turn of the millennium, similar processes were under way across the Arabic world. With the distracting rise of al-Qa’idah, foreign observers of the region spoke much of an international clash of civilizations; they overlooked the internal clash of cultures – peoples versus tribes, agriculture versus armiculture – in which tribes and arms were winning hands down.

  Yemen is a poor country, but shocking amounts of its money were spent on weaponry. To the north, the Saudis were doing exactly the same (but, being immeasurably richer, on an immeasurably bigger scale). When in 2015 they destroyed just one of Salih’s Scud missile silos, housed in a mountain 7 kilometres away, a seismic shock-wave made my house sway three times. They then destroyed another, nearer mountain arsenal, and we were showered with rockets – smaller ones minus, thank heaven, their warheads. It was apocalyptic, like the great earthquake at the end of time when ‘the earth disgorges its burdens’.

  It may be assumed that most if not all arms deals produced rich kickbacks. Corruption ruled, literally. It was not just that the system was corrupt: rather, corruption was the system. Seen from another angle, however, it is all a version of the old raiding economy updated for the age of the nation-state, in which the chief raids the state he rules, and retains his quarter or fifth of the booty. Seen from yet another, slightly different angle, the state income does not belong to the people; it belongs to the dominant tribe or loyalty-group, and effectively to its patriarch, who happens to have the misleading title of ‘president’. All this became apparent when, early in 2015, the UN publicly alleged that, over his third of a century ruling the YAR and the RoY, the billy-goat had acquired something between $30 billion and $62 billion from oil and gas contracts and from corruption in general. He laughed this off: as if he had that sort of money in the bank! Of course, he hadn’t. A lot of it had been ploughed back (at last, a ploughshare) into the economy to buy support; a lot went to buy yet more weapons. (Naturally, the neighbouring oil monarchies do exactly the same, but they don’t pretend to be ‘republics’ so they can do it blatantly. They can also generally afford to do it without beggaring most of their subjects.) In Yemen, few seemed to be aware of the allegations of theft. Of those who were, few believed them in principle – they came from untrustworthy foreigners. Even fewer seemed particularly bothered; an Arab ruler enriching himself is not news. The poor, who are most noticeably deprived of their share, have no voice with which to complain.

  Looked at with bleak detachment, a plundering-redistributing demonarchy is doing something similar to a tax-collecting state. The main difference is that, in the first case, there are no checks and balances; only cheque-books and bank-balances, held ultimately by one man. But, if nothing else, the system has the imprimatur of long usage. As the scribe of the Almoravid leader Yusuf ibn Tashfin advised his master before he set out to annex Spain in the late eleventh century,

  Man jāda sād, / wa-man sāda qād, / wa-man qāda malak al-bilād.

  An open hand gives you the upper hand; / an upper hand leads the band; / lead the band, and you’ll rule the land.

  TO RUIN OR TO RULE

  Similar narratives played out across the Arab world in other countries where a mask of republicanism was in place. In the big lands of the northern Fertile Crescent, Iraq and Syria, and in its western extension, Egypt, other presidential sons were groomed to succeed their fathers. They were emboldened by the US presidential election victory in 2000 of Georg
e W. Bush, son of President George Bush: if Americans did it, why shouldn’t Arabs? It was a fair point. Whatever he meant to do for liberal democracy by invading Iraq, George Bush II had already undone it by simply being who he was, the son of his father, Būsh ibn Būsh (‘Nonsense son of Nonsense’ in some Arabic dialects, from a Turkish word that also gives English ‘bosh’).

  By a very glazed or indulgent eye, the pseudo-republics may be seen as a ‘dynamic political order . . . an alternative notion of democracy’ created by the ‘stalemate . . . [between] liberalism, republicanism and Islamism’. But, shorn as they are of a free press, an impartial judiciary, and any popular understanding of what dimuqratiyah really means, they are the wispiest phantoms of alternative notions of democracy. It would be more accurate to look on dimuqratiyah as an alternative name for what has been going on in the Arabic world since time out of mind. It is ‘gathering the word’ in a new guise, but in the same old sense: in Arabic, ‘voices’ and ‘votes’ are the same word, aswat, and the massive election majorities claimed for leaders, with percentage shares in the 90s, are the evidence for the continued search for unanimity. For example, in the 2014 election that gave the first imprimatur to Egypt’s current president, al-Sisi, a year after he seized power, the coup leader gained 97 per cent of the vote; those who had voted freely and fairly for his overthrown predecessor, al-Mursi, remained necessarily silent, for they had no one to vote for. Dimuqratiyah is thus closer to monarchy in instalments – like that of Napoleon (elected emperor with a 99 per cent majority) and of the Roman emperors (Augustus, for example, was unanimously voted monarchical privileges for periods of five or ten years). It is a whole semantic world away from demo-kratia, ‘people-power’, in its most ancient sense, and from democracy in its usual modern sense. The notional ‘peoples’ have the power to ‘elect’ their leaders; they do not yet have the power – or perhaps the vision – not to elect them.

  It would be more honest to ditch the alien word dimuqratiyah and revert to the old Arabic term, mubaya’ah, usually translated as ‘giving allegiance’. The word is from a root that means ‘to sell or buy, to do a deal’, and the particular derivative suggests that the deal is reciprocal, a social contract: you sell your political freedom, and in return you are paid with justice and with as safe and prosperous an existence as circumstances allow. In practice, however, mubaya’ah comes to mean ‘selling out’. As the lexicon puts it,

  Baya’ al-amir: He promised, or swore, allegiance to the prince; making a covenant with him to submit to him the judgement of his own case and . . . not to dispute with him in respect of anything thereof, but to obey him in whatever command he might impose upon him, pleasing and displeasing.

  Inevitably, as power corrupts over time, the displeasing preponderates. The prince gets more princely and more puissant and does not keep to his side of the bargain; he takes freedom, but does not dispense justice. He ignores his people, but he also begins to ignore his advisers, and to engage in rash acts to remove his opponents. He reverts to his autocratic, usually military self, and rules by command and cunning, not by consensus and planning. His sycophants multiply and praise his ‘wisdom’ – and as Bacon said, ‘Nothing doth more hurt in a state than that cunning men pass for wise’. With rule ever more autocratic and arbitrary, such institutions as there might have been wither too; not least the law. The leader becomes a sort of lid on lawlessness and can say – as did Ali Abd Allah Salih – with increasing truth but zero honesty, ‘Without me, the country will become a second Somalia’.

  That statement sounds like a warning, but it is actually a threat. Such leaders are perfectly aware of the dangers they more or less contain. They need the fears – of sectarian extremism, of tribal raiders, the collapse of society, the coming deluge – to maintain their own control. They are not chairmen running an ordered system, but ringmasters of mayhem or, to coin a word, anarcharchs. Their philosophy might be that of Milton’s fallen Satan,

  better to reign in hell than serve in heaven;

  their policy is that of Dryden’s Achitophel, ‘born a shapeless lump, like anarchy’,

  In friendship false, implacable in hate:

  Resolved to ruin or to rule the state.

  A HISTORY OF ASHES

  By the new AD millennium, the Arab age of hope seemed a distant memory. Extreme militant islamists were becoming ever more audacious, striking in 2001 at the secular navel of the world, the World Trade Center in New York and its twin stretch-Ka’bahs of capital. At home, oil monarchs and anarcharchs tightened their grip, and began increasingly to resemble both each other and Sindbad’s Old Man of the Sea, the persuasive parasite who wheedles his way on to an unsuspecting wanderer’s back, then wraps his legs around the victim’s throat and uses him as a riding-beast and a cherry-picker to pluck the choicest fruit. And there were those new generations being groomed to inherit, Young Men of the Sea. The American experiment of 2003 in Iraq – ‘regime change’ – removed one Old Man from his subjects’ backs; but it also lifted the lid on the underlying anarchy. Across the Arabic world, the sages of the suqs shook their heads and said, as ever, ‘Iraq needs a Saddam, a Hajjaj ibn Yusuf. It needs the stick.’ The grip, the lid, the stick have all been there so long that they seem normal, and necessary. They seem to be what holds things together.

  Arabs were – are – in an age of disappointment, ‘a history of ashes,’ as the poet and political commentator Adonis called it. Because belief in a before-life is as comforting as belief in an afterlife, they looked back to supposed golden ages. Some, as we have seen, found perfection in early seventh-century Medina, splendid to aspire to but impossible to return to. Others found it in al-Hajjaj ibn Yusuf’s bloody late seventh-century Iraqi police state, all too easy to recreate with modern surveillance and weaponry. That other golden age, the early Abbasid period of cultural and intellectual synthesis celebrated by Arabs of the nineteenth- and twentieth-century Awakening, seemed to have receded with the end of the pan-Arab dream. Its afterglow – the glory that was – only mocked the tarnished present. Even nostalgia wasn’t what it used to be.

  The escape-route of education was blocked by obstacles too. Across the Arabic world, more young people were getting higher qualifications; society, however, had not yet grown to accommodate their new skills and aspirations. In a system composed of impenetrable layers of patronage, for most new graduates the ceilings were not of glass, but of granite. In December 2010, for example, I hitched a ride on a motorcycle taxi – and found myself discussing, in fluent English, the metaphysics of Eliot’s Waste Land with the driver. He was the top graduate of his year, but had found no other job than this. I wished him better luck. He shrugged. ‘Here in Yemen I feel I’m in prison.’

  That young man and the millions like him would soon be as important to the Arab history of our times as the demonarchs and dictators. For it was just then that people like my metaphysical biker began to look the other way, out of prison, out of the past, to a golden age in the future. Why, after all, should one be at the mercy of the toss of a coin in which heads are autocrats and tails islamocrats, with only the free fall of anarchy to decide between the two? One submits, of course, because the autocrats and islamocrats hold all the weapons, a fearsome arsenal of gunfire and hellfire. But, as the earliest Arab poets and orators knew, and as the Qur’an proved most eloquently of all, words can be weapons too.

  THE SPRING THAT HAD NO SUMMER

  More than forty years ago, the Moroccan writer Abdallah Laroui was already calling this age of disappointment ‘the long winter of the Arabs’. It felt long then, but it had only just begun. The events of the new millennium – the al-Qa’idah attacks on the United States, the Americans’ ‘war on terror’, their destabilization of Iraq – would plunge the winter into its dark solstice. Seasons, however, eventually turn, and at the end of 2010 it looked at last as though the time had come.

  As if in some rite of spring, a sacrifice was needed. The story has often been told of Muhammad Bu Azizi, the young Tun
isian street-vendor persecuted by the police, who set himself on fire in protest and died in January 2011. Anger at his death spread across the country, then through much of the Arabic world. It was a mass uprising against the tyranny, corruption and arbitrary rule of authoritarian regimes, and it spread spontaneously. But the spontaneity was given form and direction by those two perennial tools of revolution – language and technology. Old-style slogans combined with brand-new social media to drive what soon became known, prematurely as it turned out, as the Arab Spring. (‘Since to look at things in bloom / Fifty springs are little room . . . ’)

  Of course, the potential for protest had always been there, lying dormant but shooting up from time to time and place to place; spring had been a seasonal, regional occurrence. What was different about this one was its geographical reach, from Morocco to Oman, and its sudden simultaneity. Both were due to new technologies, and especially satellite television and the internet. Despite the new speed and scope of the revolution, however, there were constants in play. One of them was the central position, between Maghrib and Mashriq, of Egypt. It had always been a fertile land for protest. Going backwards in time, there had been violent bread riots in Egypt in 1977. In 1968, following the defeat in the war with Israel, ‘a generation that had been systematically lied to’, as Fouad Ajami called them, demonstrated against what they saw as the hypocrisy of Nasser’s regime. Further back, during the uprising of Ahmad Urabi in 1881–2, anti-regime soldiers defending the people against the ruler occupied Abdin Square, the central urban space of its day. Further back again, groups belonging to an underclass called (by the chroniclers) zu’’ar, ‘hooligans’, staged periodic uprisings against the Ottoman and Mamluk authorities; in early Mamluk times, their predecessors the harafish, or ‘rascals’, had demonstrated openly and vociferously against the periodic excesses of the long-reigning sultan, al-Nasir. The difference in 2011, of course, was the speed with which the spores of discontent born in Tunisia and bred in the Egyptian hotbed would spread abroad: television viewers and internet users across the Arabic world could follow those seminal protests as they developed. Most, as ever, would remain unmoved, inert. A few, however, would be inspired; enough for the movement to spread.