SHIFTING SANDS
The Unravelling of the Old Order in the Middle East
SHIFTING SANDS
Edited by Raja Shehadeh and Penny Johnson
First published in Great Britain in 2015 by
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In association with the Edinburgh International Book Festival
The Significance of a Screwdriver © Penny Johnson, 2015; The Post-Ottoman Syndrome © Avi Shlaim, 2015; The Divisive Line: The Birth and Long Life of the Sykes–Picot Agreement © James Barr, 2015; Why Did You Rename Your Son? Diaries of the Great War from the Ottoman Front © Salim Tamari, 2015; Opening Politics’ Black Box: Reflections on the Past, Present and Future of the Egyptian Revolution © Khaled Fahmy, 2015; Cracked Cauldrons: The Failure of States and the Rise of New Narratives in the Middle East © Tamim al-Barghouti, 2015; A Long View from Baghdad © Justin Marozzi, 2015; Iran: Coming in from the Cold? © Ramita Navai, 2015; Civic Courage: The Clue to Turkey’s Future? © Alev Scott, 2015; Living and Writing in Kuwait: What Fiction Can Do © Mai al-Nakib, 2015; Writing the Middle East, Writing Gaza © Selma Dabbagh, 2015; Fiction’s Histories: Writers and Readers in the Middle East © Marilyn Booth, 2015; What You Don’t Read About the Syrian Humanitarian Crisis © Dawn Chatty, 2015; Syria Seen and Represented © Robin Yassin-Kassab, 2015; Defying the Killers: The Emergence of Street Culture in Syria © Malu Halasa, 2015; Palestine and Hope © Raja Shehadeh, 2015
Selection copyright © Penny Johnson and Raja Shehadeh, 2015
The moral right of the authors has been asserted.
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
eISBN 978 1 78283 192 1
CONTENTS
Introduction
PENNY JOHNSON
The Significance of a Screwdriver
Lines in the Sand: The Great War and the Remaking of the Middle East
AVI SHLAIM
The Post-Ottoman Syndrome
JAMES BARR
The Divisive Line: The Birth and Long Life of the Sykes–Picot Agreement
SALIM TAMARI
Why Did You Rename Your Son? Diaries of the Great War from the Ottoman Front
In the Present Tense: The Unravelling of the Old Order
KHALED FAHMY
Opening Politics’ Black Box: Reflections on the Past, Present and Future of the Egyptian Revolution
TAMIM AL-BARGHOUTI
Cracked Cauldrons: The Failure of States and the Rise of New Narratives in the Middle East
JUSTIN MAROZZI
A Long View from Baghdad
RAMITA NAVAI
Iran: Coming in from the Cold?
ALEV SCOTT
Civic Courage: The Clue to Turkey’s Future?
Living and Writing in the Middle East: Fiction, Imagination and History
MAI AL-NAKIB
Living and Writing in Kuwait: What Fiction Can Do
SELMA DABBAGH
Writing the Middle East, Writing Gaza
MARILYN BOOTH
Fiction’s Histories: Writers and Readers in the Middle East
Syria in Crisis
DAWN CHATTY
What You Don’t Read About the Syrian Humanitarian Crisis
ROBIN YASSIN-KASSAB
Syria Seen and Represented
MALU HALASA
Defying the Killers: The Emergence of Street Culture in Syria
Afterword
RAJA SHEHADEH
Palestine and Hope
Notes
Contributors
Acknowledgements
THE SIGNIFICANCE OF A SCREWDRIVER
Penny Johnson
To Ra’ed Taysir al Hom, who defused bombs with a screwdriver until his luck ran out
RA’ED AL HOM, the head of northern Gaza’s only bomb disposal unit, died on 13 August 2014, the third day of a temporary ceasefire in Israel’s war on Gaza and the second day of the five panels on the Middle East at the Edinburgh International Book Festival which inspired this book. Ra’ed, a resident of Gaza’s Jabaliya refugee camp, was already a hero to Palestinians. With no protective clothing and little equipment, he had successfully defused 400 unexploded ‘objects’: ordnance dropped by the Israeli air force and army that hit homes, Gaza’s crowded streets and, in one case, a bicycle repair shop. Arriving in Edinburgh from our home in Palestine and still shaken by the events taking place there, Raja and I were hit particularly hard by his death, which came while he was trying to defuse a 500-kilogram explosive. Defusing bombs with screwdrivers – this image haunted us as panellists travelled through a century of crisis and wars, colonial powers, new borders and fragile states, great cities and unending conquest, authoritarian power and people’s civic resistance.
As the rain beat on the book festival tent, sometimes softly and sometimes with bullet-like intensity, reminding many of us of moments at home, fifteen writers – historians, novelists, social and cultural critics, travel and memoir writers – addressed large and enthusiastic audiences. Their presentations, like the essays in this book, were thoughtful, deeply informed and replete with observations that illuminate the present, past and future of the region. But they were not cold and dispassionate: the Middle East for some is home and family, for others a lost homeland or a beloved landscape of memory, but for all a place of friends and colleagues and the subject of a writer’s insistent quest to understand. Thus noted historian Khaled Fahmy from Cairo began by reading the just-released Human Rights Watch Report on the Egyptian army’s mass killing of protesters at Raba’a square in Cairo, on the anniversary of that event, and went on to probe a peasants’ revolt in the nineteenth century to try to understand the deeper dynamics of Egypt and the Arab world today. Alev Scott held up a T-shirt she wore in the Gezi Park protests in Turkey in the summer of 2013, while offering a sober and sobering assessment of its aftermath. Tamim al-Barghouti provided a broad and innovative framework for understanding the dynamics of contemporary popular revolt against authoritarian Arab states – and also read part of his powerful poem that resonates with the Gaza War.
There are many ways the Middle East is defined and named: several United Nations organisations suggest the geographically correct but historically and politically weak ‘Western Asia’, while the World Bank and other international institutions prefer to talk of ‘MENA’, the Middle East and North Africa. Arabists – and indeed many Arabs – speak of the ‘Arab world’, dropping off Turkey, Iran and the non-Arab populations residing in Arab countries. Then there are those who simply speak of ‘the region’, perhaps the vaguest term but one that signals a place and people that are interconnected. While one would perhaps prefer the rich culinary connections as a guide to the region, today one defines ‘the region’ by serial crises and insecurity. A region on fire in far too many ways.
A pen is less useful than a screwdriver; a writer’s task is certainly less pragmatic and exponentially less dangerous than bomb defusing, and Ra’ed al Hom’s life and death are no metaphor. Yet the urgency of understanding the wave of events that terrible summer and onwa
rds – indeed, the aftermath of the Arab Spring – from the war in Gaza to the advance of the Islamic State to the floods of Syrian and other refugees – brought writers together in Edinburgh armed only with a pen and a voice to probe the unravelling of the old order in the Middle East and its consequences.
That mission took us back a hundred years to the outbreak of the First World War.
One might think that urgent contemporary crises overwhelm historical events when it comes to reflecting on and writing about the Middle East. But, as our contributors show so eloquently, the events of a century ago are not simply background to today’s conflagrations, but producers of the same. Consider an event that for many seemed to come out of the blue that summer: on 10 June, the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL, or Daesh in Arabic, or simply IS, the Islamic State) took over Mosul as the Iraqi army literally evaporated, a military defeat called by veteran journalist Patrick Cockburn ‘one of great military debacles in history’.1 Unlike the measured on-the-ground analyses of Cock-burn and some fellow journalists, politicians and pundits outside the region rushed in with little information but many generalisations about the Islamic State and its trajectory. What can a long view tell us?
In his essay, James Barr takes us back to 1915, as two men, Mark Sykes, a 36-year-old English Tory politician, and François Georges-Picot, a French diplomat, sit down over a map and draw a line in the sand, ‘from the “e” of Acre [Palestine] to the last “k” in Kirkuk [Iraq]’, dividing much of the region – particularly the Arab lands of the dying Ottoman Empire – into French and British spheres of influence, later regularised as Mandates. The ensuing 1916 secret agreement, as Barr argues convincingly (and with telling anecdotes), signalled an immense change in the political geography of the Middle East. Thus today, while ‘erasing’ the border between Syria and Iraq through military conquest, the Islamic State declared the end of the Sykes–Picot Agreement and a new caliphate in June 2014. Surely, as William Faulkner told us, ‘The past is never dead. It’s not even past.’ We would argue, however, that the militants of ISIL are poor historians, seemingly intent on erasing not just the last hundred years, but thirteen centuries of Islamic and Middle Eastern civilisation. As Justin Marozzi reminds us in his own long view from Baghdad, ‘For the first time in 2,000 years the ancient city of Mosul has no Christians.’ Both in ISIL’s erasure of the past and its utilisation of an Islamic essence that defies history, we can recall the Khmer Rouge, in an apt comparison by political analyst Mouin Rabbani,2 who also argues convincingly that ISIL is a thoroughly modernist project. Its savvy and cruel use of media also attests that it is a creature of our troubled twenty-first century.
Avi Shlaim points to the Sykes–Picot Agreement as one of the three contradictory promises made by the British and examines the other two, the Hussein–McMahon correspondence, pledging British support for an independent Arab nation if the Arabs entered the war on the Allied side and the Balfour Declaration, promising a homeland in Palestine for the Jewish people. The Balfour Declaration is a staple in the recitation of the bitter history of the conflict between Palestine and Israel, but Shlaim widens the lens and makes a provocative new argument in his essay, calling it ‘one of the most colossal blunders in British imperial history’.
Salim Tamari brings us face to face with the terrible consequences of the First World War in the eastern Mediterranean on the ground, where about a sixth of the population of Greater Syria died from war, famine and disease. Through the memoirs of civilians and the diaries of three Ottoman soldiers, he traces the ruptures in identity, and in particular new assertions of local and national identity. Tamari notes that reversions to local identity can be discovered ‘in the war and devastation that are happening today’.
Indeed, what Avi Shlaim calls the ‘post-Ottoman syndrome’ has also had long-lasting consequences, which he identifies as ‘turmoil, instability and a deficit of rights for the peoples of the region’, all much in evidence today. The lack of legitimacy Shlaim describes in some post-war states (his example, tellingly, is Iraq) surfaces as a deep cause for popular rebellion in Khaled Fahmy’s analysis of Egypt. Fahmy, one of the many thousands of Egyptians at Tahrir Square in January 2011, asks the probing question ‘Why were we demonstrating?’ He reflects on the lack of constitutional and political rights, but then goes on to ask, ‘Were we protesting against the very nature of the modern Egyptian state?’
Here, Fahmy’s searching question reminds us of a key aspect of the writer’s job, namely (to liberally paraphrase Chekhov) to ask the right questions rather than to provide pat answers. And understanding the failures of what Tamim al-Barghouti calls the ‘cracked cauldrons’ of the ‘colonially created Arab states’ takes us beyond Egypt as well. Al-Barghouti’s searing critique begins with the failure to perform the functions ‘for which humans invented states in the first place’: to protect and defend their citizens from civil war and invasion. Ramita Navai on Iran and Alev Scott on Turkey remind us that crises in state–society relations in the Middle East are not confined to Arab states, but take on other dimensions in these two seemingly more stable, and increasingly more crucial, political and social environments.
Nowhere are the failures of state responsibility to society more acute than in Syria, and nowhere perhaps is the writer’s responsibility to ask the right questions more pressing or to avoid pat answers more appropriate. Indeed, finding words to describe the dangers ordinary Syrians face – with 200,000 dead, at least 2 million refugees and half the population displaced as of February 2015 – is itself a daunting task. And it is both ordinary Syrians struggling to survive and extraordinary Syrians continuing to create and advocate for their people who are addressed by our three contributors writing about Syria. Robin Yassin-Kassab visited northern Syria to hold workshops with refugee children in 2011 and 2012 and observes, ‘Neither visit took me to a country or a people recognisable from the Western media.’ Yassin-Kassab’s passionate polemic on the failures of his own UK government and people to aid the Syrian opposition has a quiet counterpoint in his encounters with ‘human beings in transformation’, debating and discussing everything with deep commitment and bracing humour. That many of these activists (and armed militants as well) of the non-sectarian opposition are currently trapped ‘between two states’ – the Baathist and the Islamic – between the brutality of the Syrian regime and the encroaching horrors of ISIL, provides a telling and tragic image of Syria today. Malu Halasa provides a much-needed breath of optimism in her engaging and important discussion of ‘perhaps the only positive development in over four years of brutal conflict’, a cultural revolution with activists across the country (and now abroad) producing posters, cartoons, videos, comic strips, rap and other forms of street art that mobilise, boost morale, give direction to protest and advocate globally via social media for rights, life and democracy for the Syrian people. Dawn Chatty discusses ‘what you don’t read’ about the Syrian crisis and argues that in multi-ethnic Syria communities continue to cohere and find resilience in older, local identities. In particular, she notes the emergence of Bedouin tribes and Kurds as possible major players and argues, ‘The lines drawn on the map of the Levant by Sir Mark Sykes may no longer hold, but the pre-existing social and cultural groups of the Levant with their multitude of ethno-religious belongings will remain.’ This long view situates Syria in local, regional and Western histories, rather than in a ‘black hole’ that defies understanding.
The tendency to view Western and Middle Eastern histories as separate, or at least to include Western nations in the history of the Middle East only as colonial powers, has often led to seeing the entire Middle East as a black hole – whether not ready for democracy, doomed to eternal authoritarianism, defined by Islam or, in its most neoconservative version, as an exporter of only hatred and terror. While paying close attention to regional, national and local histories, our contributors can also be usefully read as providing ways of understanding global dynamics that affect us all. The crises in the
Middle East are a lens to understand present and coming crises in a global order that increasingly produces inequalities and concentrations of economic and political power. The separation of power and people which marks our age may produce crises in the nation-state, a turn to religious and exclusive identities, or political and social rebellion at great odds – all features of the current conflagrations in the Middle East.
The earthquake of the Arab Spring in Tunisia and Egypt in 2011 delivered the first crack to Middle East exceptionalism, where the Arab world was no longer the province of long-living dictators, oil monarchies and armies but of people demanding dignity and change. In what the ubiquitous Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek called the ‘year of dreaming dangerously’, Tahrir Square and Tunis were linked with Occupy Wall Street, protests in Greece and the Indignados in Spain. Žižek, always the Hegelian, also observed that the emancipatory dreams of these protesters were shadowed by the destructive dreams propelling Breivik [the Norwegian who murdered seventy-seven people, mostly teenagers, on the island of Utøya in the summer of 2011] and racist and anti-immigrant populists across Europe,3 an early warning that the wider world, not just the Middle East, is on dangerous ground. Tamim al-Barghouti describes a regional terrain that has global resonance: where ‘narratives are replacing structures’ and ‘ideas, for better or for worse, are replacing leaders’, noting that these new forms of political mobilisation characterise the liberatory moment of Tahrir Square – but also, in societies with ethnic or sectarian divisions, can be exploited.
‘How did the Arab Spring morph into an Arab nightmare?’ asked Khaled Fahmy. He gives no sound-bite answer, but instead probes five ‘deep problems’ that need to be both understood and addressed in an extended process of change. These range from the scourge of petro-dollars to deeper existential questions on the role of religion in politics and what I would interpret from his remarks as the search for a usable past to inform a better future. And he offers in his own prediction for the future an intangible resource: hope.
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