Shifting Sands

by Raja Shehadeh

  Like elsewhere in the world a vociferous debate in the Arab press over the possibly ‘dangerous’ impact of novel-reading on the impressionable young – particularly the female young – accompanied the exuberant production of novels (many of them adaptations from French or English works). It’s true that the young heroines in these novels read – and wrote – love letters, and so maybe the parents of young readers did have reasons to worry about fiction’s influence! Perhaps the more disturbing insight was that romance was political. It was all about the many levels of liberation that individuals would seek and fight for. Good governance, these novels suggest, required respectful family relations, traced especially between parents and daughters, and husbands and wives. Zaynab Fawwaz’s Good Consequences plotted a political succession struggle, casting it as contingent on a young woman’s personal struggle to be allowed to choose her (marital) future. Fari’a and Shakib fall in love over an intellectual and poetic conversation; his respect for Fari’a’s choices validates his legitimacy as a future ruler. His rival is portrayed as an unacceptable ruler because of his lack of respect for Fari’a – he has his thugs abduct her repeatedly. Published in 1899, the novel reworked 1850s–1860s south Lebanese history in a way that insisted on a different historical narrative, one that brought women’s and other marginalised subjects’ voices into decisions on who would rule the community. The concerns are not so dissimilar to those that animated young activists in 2011 and since.

  I raise this historical example because I think it is worth keeping in mind how persistent some issues are, and how youthful energies (found in humans of all ages!) continue to confront these issues. Today’s literary, artistic and political activists operate in different circumstances, but the nineteenth century (like Nout) is always with us, wherever in the world we live. With all the differences acknowledged, the conflicts, stresses and inequalities that marked the world then still mark it today. It is as well also to remember the horizontal similarities across different societies – to not exceptionalise, while always remaining deeply aware of the inequalities wrought and deepened by imperialism and settler colonialism. In the 1890s, young readers in Mansura, Egypt, were immersed in romance plots little different from those capturing young readers in Manchester in England, or Lyons in France, or Hyderabad in imperial-era India. Challenges to patriarchal governance systems in family and society are not as far apart as we tend to assume. (Reading women in Egypt were well aware of suffragists’ activism in Britain, and some supported them.) As today, ‘globalisation’ then had its liberatory and its repressive facets, and its uneven effects on class-differentiated and geographically dispersed populations.

  In Afifa Karam’s Fatima the Bedouin – a novel published in the twentieth century’s first decade in Arabic in New York City – the eponymous heroine, an emigrant originally from a semi-nomadic Sunni Muslim tribe in the Lebanon, is abandoned by her lover, an elite urbanite of a Christian sect who deceived her into believing they were married before fleeing Lebanon and his parents’ wrath. With her baby in her arms, wandering dazed along Broadway (yes, Broadway, where the novel begins), Fatima is accosted as a vagrant by an officer of the NYPD. She is rescued by Alice, a wealthy New York socialite and charity patron, who – we learn through their conversations – has known parallel sufferings, though within her privileged life. This fictional encounter sounds (and is) improbable, but it’s a reminder that imagined lives in the past also helped writers and readers make sense of a world of bewildering journeys, aspirations dashed by oppressive mental and material structures, and, in spite of it all, affirming solidarities – the ‘ethics of otherness’ that al-Nakib sees as central to her own writing. Practices and desires that fiction writers scripted then, in part by writing fictional histories of their own ‘earlier times’, are ones we still grapple with now. Young people in Gaza, Kuwait and Lebanon – as well as New York, Mumbai and so many other places – experience them, engrave them on walls and read and write them in novels.

  Burdened by histories that leave them few choices, histories their elders but not they themselves have helped to shape, fictional youth in Selma and Mai’s writing could, given other circumstances, be in the maidans of Cairo, Hong Kong, Bahrain, Istanbul, New York.

  Of course places are not interchangeable, and fiction’s capacity to evoke the particular geographical and built layers of community experience can help to sustain survival through archiving, or recreating, memory: Palestine and Syria today are powerful examples. The fragrance of a bulldozed orchard, the cracks in those front steps that used to be ours, that conversation the night before your brother was dragged to prison, the ball game in the street … all the everyday lives that people everywhere work so hard to maintain and sometimes to overcome are the stuff of fiction. With the destruction of societies (some built with great suffering and dedication on the debris of earlier wars), the recording, evoking, constructing, of memories, of imagined and recalled oral histories, of that specific café on the corner and the precise taste of Grandma’s soup, become part of political responsibility – the bearing of witness that our writers are so conscious of doing.

  Selma built her ‘fictional Gaza’ – her sense of (this) place – from the memories of others, the archives of the internet, conversations and her own emplacements elsewhere – that café, but somewhere else. Selma’s Gaza raises the compelling if unanswerable question of who the outsider or the insider is. Mai’s Kuwait, which she feels has been ‘rewritten’ by new representations that she does not recognise from her childhood – a monochromatic narrative, as she sees it, of a more polychromatic, cosmopolitan place – leads us to wonder what is ‘outside’ or ‘inside’. Time itself might make us outsiders in or to places where we think we still dwell. At the same time, the capacity we have, in our technology-driven era, to peer inside so many windows may mean more apparent access, but with it comes more responsibility: to listen, and observe, and read, humbly and widely, always conscious of our own places, the spaces – mental, physical, linguistic, political – in which we think and speak as learners, translators, writers.

  The revolutionary imaginary that has emerged in so many parts of the world may be ephemeral in terms of concrete accomplishments, but it has brought youth to the forefront, a symbol of change to be sure, but also transformation’s motor. That so many new writers are engaging in today’s Arabic literary scene (including its blogosphere) is also a sign of this. Yet as we celebrate youthful energy, we must remember that so very many young people in the world do not have the means to be part of a motor of change, even when they have grown up in relatively comfortable circumstances. Even more when they have not: malnutrition, lack of educational opportunity or pressure to stay away from school, war as daily reality and various kinds and remnants of political violence and colonial rule, disease, sexual violence and domestic abuse – these are the unconscionable inequalities of the global system in a time when human inventiveness has more scope than ever to think of solutions. These, too, are the conditions necessary for liberatory thinking and art, along with the irrepressible affective energies of adolescents everywhere. Writing fiction, writing history, Arab authors keep readers mindful of persistent patterns but also alert us to their unravelling. And they remind us that it doesn’t have to be this way.

  SYRIA IN CRISIS

  WHAT YOU DON’T READ ABOUT THE SYRIAN HUMANITARIAN CRISIS

  Dawn Chatty

  IN 2012, a year into the Syrian crisis, policy pundits in the US and Europe began asking, ‘Is this the end of Sykes–Picot?’ In other words, is a hundred-year-old secret agreement between France and Britain that shaped the contemporary state order of the Middle East – as delineated by James Barr in this volume – coming to an end? That very question was addressed in 2014 by Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi after he declared himself the ‘Caliph’ – chief civil and religious ruler – of the entity known as ISIL (the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant). His goal, he said, was to erase the borders of the modern nation-states of Syria and Ira
q – and thus erase ‘Sykes–Picot’, which established these boundaries. But the artificiality of these borders established by the British and the French are only part of the story. The post-First World War carve-up of the region cut across multi-ethnic communities and regularly ignored natural and social frontiers. Recognising the continuities of social communities despite this carve-up can help us to make sense of the contemporary forced migration of millions of people from Syria, both within the country and across nation-state borders into Turkey, Lebanon and Jordan. With or without the Sykes–Picot borders, I will argue in this essay that many of Syria’s numerous multi-ethnic, religious and tribal communities are responding to the crisis with integrity, internal social cohesion and a unified defence, even if only at the local level. While I am not contesting the powerful effects of armed conflict between state and non-state actors, I will focus on Syria’s untold stories of community cohesion – and how the once marginalised, particularly the Kurds and mobile tribes, are taking on major and important roles.

  Nearly 50 per cent of Syria’s population has now been displaced. The UN agency for refugees (UNHCR) released figures in January 2015 confirming that more than 9 million of Syria’s 22 million people have been dispossessed and displaced. Of these, 3.7 million have crossed state borders seeking refuge and asylum. We know that more than 1.1 million have crossed into Lebanon, a small country with a population of only 4.4 million. Another 1.6 million have crossed into Turkey, which has a population of over 76 million. And at least 620,000 have sought refuge in Jordan among its population of less than 6.4 million. Why have some sought refuge across national borders and others remained in Syria even when fighting has destroyed their homes and neighbourhoods? Why have some chosen Turkey, others Lebanon and still others Jordan for asylum? Why have some who fled returned? And finally why have so few of Syria’s Christian minorities fled (current figures show that they are leaving at the same rate as Muslim Sunni and ethnic-minority groups)? In other words, why has there been no mass exit of Christians or other minority groups of the sort that occurred in Iraq post-2003 (for example, Assyrian Christians and Mandeans), just the steady exits of people in family groups seeking safety and security from sites of armed conflict?

  Understanding these movements means taking a bird’s-eye view of the ethnic composition of both late Ottoman Syria and the modern state carved out of the general Ottoman region known as Bilad al-Sham (the Levant). Bilad al-Sham in the late nineteenth century was a region of surprising ethnic and religious complexity. In large measure as an outcome of the nineteenth-century Ottoman reforms (Tanzimat), the separate ethno-religious communities of the Levant such as the Greek Orthodox, the Nestorian Christians, the Assyrians, the Catholics, the Apostolic Armenians and the Jews engaged in officially sanctioned self-government through the millet system.1 Further adding to this mix of peoples were the nearly 4 million forced migrants, largely Muslim, from the borders of the Ottoman–Russian–Austro-Hungarian empires who were dispossessed and made to leave their lands looking for sanctuary first in the Balkan provinces of the Ottoman Empire, starting from the 1860s, and later in eastern Anatolia and the Levant itself. These included Tartars, Abkhazis, Circassians, Chechnyans and Dagestani. In eastern Anatolia this influx of Muslim forced migrants resulted in tensions and localised massacres that saw Armenians and other Christian minority groups seeking asylum in Syria.

  Under the mandates granted by the League of Nations – conforming to a great extent to the divisions under the Sykes–Picot Agreement – Greater Syria was divided between Britain and France. The British controlled Palestine and almost immediately subdivided it into Transjordan and Palestine. The French received – but also had to fight off deep local resistance – much of the rest of Syria, creating ever more territorial divisions: Greater Lebanon and an Alawite state along the northern Mediterranean coast, a Druze state just north of Transjordan, a Bedouin ‘state’ in the semi-arid desert (badia) of Syria and two statelets composed of Aleppo and Damascus and their hinterlands. These divisions were deeply unpopular and opposed by those nationals who felt they belonged to Bilad al-Sham. After years of revolt the French had to formally reunite the Syrian people under their mandate into one nation-state in 1936.

  This same period, however, saw the acceptance of significant groups of Christian minorities from Iraq when Britain gave up its mandate over the country. The Assyrian Christians, who had served in the British Mandate Iraqi gendarmerie, felt abandoned upon the withdrawal of Great Britain in 1932 and many fled to Syria, as well as further shores. The Armenians, the survivors of the massacres and death marches of 1915 from eastern Anatolia down the Euphrates River, were also welcomed and given Syrian citizenship. Kurds fleeing the failed uprising in Turkey to restore the Islamic Caliphate (the Sheikh Said Revolt) were accepted too and given citizenship, as were the earlier wave of Palestinians entering Syria at the beginning of the Palestinian rebellion against British rule of 1936–9. These diverse groups of refugees made the modern Syrian nation-state an eclectic mix of peoples, religions and ethnicities.

  Some modern historians have credited the new Syrian nation-state of 1943 as largely defined by its people’s openness to accept refugees and exiles from both the post-First World War era and the inter-war mandate-period social upheavals of the Palestinians and Kurds, for example. Thus Syria, defined by its refuge-granting policy, become the epitome of multi-cultural ethnic tolerance, with Christians, Muslims, Jews and Druze living side by side among Albanians, Palestinians, Armenians, Circassians, Kosovars and Cretans, to name but a few. The fact that twice the number of Syrians displaced by fighting today have not crossed international borders in their search for safety and security but remained in the country (6 million of about 9 million) suggests that return, once the armed conflict ends, is more likely than not. What the Sykes–Picot Agreement most undermined was the cultural and social integrity of the desert-dwelling mobile tribes of Greater Syria and the Kurdish people of eastern Anatolia. The distinction between Bilad al-Sham (Greater Syria) and the distinctive cultures of Mesopotamia (contemporary Iraq), as embodied in Basra and Baghdad and their rural hinterland, was never compromised, partially because they were mandated to two separate European powers and continued to have strong roots in pre-First World War affiliations and cultures. The border between French-mandated Syria and British-mandated Iraq followed a cultural and social frontier which had existed for centuries. In a very long view, it mirrored the differentiation between the Umayyad Caliphate, based in Damascus in the seventh and eighth centuries, and the Abbasid Caliphate, based in Baghdad from the eighth to the thirteenth centuries.

  The most significant damage to the social fabric of Greater Syria was caused by the attempt to impose lines in the sand as modern borders. These, first, bisected the traditional migration routes and grazing lands of the mobile tribes of northern Arabia, cutting them off from their places of origin in the Nejd (central Saudi Arabia today) and separating them from the Syrian badia they had moved into in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. With an arm of Jordan and Iraq (the line in the sand protecting the Haifa oil pipeline drawn by Sir Mark Sykes) transecting their traditional lands, it was only a matter of time before their movements would become circumscribed and their ability to act and their powerful attachment to the Saudi Kingdom be sorely tested. For the Kurds, these lines on a map turned them into dispossessed and displaced people, even without moving. The Kurdish nation was denied a state at the Treaty of Lausanne (so, too, the Armenians), and instead helplessly saw itself divided up and made part of four new modern nation-states: Turkey, Iran, Iraq and Syria. Never before had a nation in modern history been so blatantly dissected, and this in the era of self-determination of peoples. In the post-First World War settlement, the nations of central Europe were permitted nation-statehood – for example, Czechoslovakia (1918), Austria (1919) and Hungary (1920) – but not the Kurds nor the Armenians. And of course Palestine was to be granted a British-mandated statehood, but only as long as a Jewish
national home could be incubated in its core.

  At least at the close of the First World War, the US president, Woodrow Wilson, expected more. In January 1919 he set out his famous ‘Fourteen Points’. In a nutshell they were that there should be no more secret agreements, the League of Nations (the precursor to the United Nations) was to be established, and ‘self-determination’ was to be the basic principle regarding questions of sovereignty in international law. To make his points a reality, he set up the Inter-Allied Commission on Mandates in Turkey (concerning the disposition of non-Turkish areas of the Ottoman Empire). He appointed Henry Churchill King and Charles Crane to survey local opinion regarding their future. The Commission was ignored by the French and the British, who refused to send members to take part in the exercise. The Commission began its work in June 1919 and by 31 August 1919 had interviewed over 3,000 Syrians from all walks of life, including Ismaelis, Alawites, Druze, Muslims, Christians and Bedouin tribal leaders. The overwhelming conclusion was that Syrians did not wish to be divided into a northern and southern Syria. They wanted a decentralised, secular government, as was already in place under King Faisal, the son of Sharif Hussein of Mecca. They were ready to accept a League of Nations Mandate as long as it was awarded to America, or in second place to Great Britain. But under no circumstances would they accept a French mandate. By the time the report was prepared, the 1919 Paris Peace Conference had largely determined the area’s future. The findings of the King–Crane Commission were in absolute contradiction to the three secret agreements (the Hussein–McMahon Accords of 1916, granting the Arabs a nation of their own; the Sykes–Picot Agreement of 1916, dividing the same region among Britain, France and Russia; and the Balfour Declaration of 1917, permitting the creation of a Jewish homeland in Palestine for the Jewish people) examined by Avi Shlaim in this volume. The report was issued at the end of the summer of 1919, but it was suppressed and withheld from public dissemination for three years and then only released once the basic elements of the Sykes–Picot Agreement and the Balfour Declaration had been incorporated in the Covenant of the League of Nations.