Shifting Sands: The Unravelling of the Old Order in the Middle East
Page 11
In 2012, Erdoğan initiated a historic peace process with the Kurds, negotiating with the imprisoned leader of the PKK, Abdullah Öcalan, via representatives of the HDP’s predecessor, the Peace and Democracy Party (BDP). These peace talks have now stalled, but for a while looked promising. In March 2013 a cease-fire was announced which, while technically unilateral on the PKK’s side, was observed by both sides until May 2014, when the PKK allegedly attacked new military outposts being set up in south-eastern towns. A further blow was struck to the peace process in September 2014, during the siege of Kobane. Almost every Turk I spoke to at the time was extremely alarmed by the protests among the Kurdish communities, which erupted in response to the failure of the Turkish government to help the besieged Kurds. These protests killed thirty-one people, including three policemen, and shocked Turkish patriots with images of burning statues of Turkey’s founding father, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk.
During the Kobane siege the underlying spectre of Kurdish–Turkish distrust was dramatically reawoken. Western observers forgot that to most Turks the idea of supporting Kurdish fighters linked to the PKK (either with direct military support or by allowing arms flow) was unthinkable, despite the desperate situation of those trapped in Kobane, and the unifying horror of ISIL. The PKK attacks of the 1990s were fairly fresh in people’s minds and general paranoia about the fighting in Syria was growing. Turks who think of the Kurds in those terms were never going to suddenly turn round and say, ‘The Kurds are our friends now’, and those Turks are also suspicious of peace-brokering parties such as the HDP. The AKP, in fact, took advantage of these suspicions when they courted nationalist voters in the run-up to elections in June 2015 by repeatedly warning the electorate of the HDP’s terrorist links, raising concerns about any genuine, long-term commitment to the Kurdish peace process. Yet despite these tensions – and they are serious – it is not unthinkable that some kind of friendship of convenience might be forged between Turks and Iraqi Kurds in fifteen years’ time, complemented by greater trust between Turks and Kurds living within Turkey.
What is the future of the political opposition in Turkey, especially in the wake of these elections results? Gezi Park is only one strand of popular protests; after June 2013 there were nationwide protests in response to the corruption scandal of December 2013, the Twitter ban of March 2014 and the horrific mine blast in Soma in May 2014. The protests after Soma in particular show the anger from workers and their families in response to perceived government negligence and corruption, a very different crowd to the largely left-wing and middle-class Gezi protesters who came to represent the face of ‘protest’ in Turkey in 2013. There was similar anger after blasts in the Ermenek mines in October 2014, but the protests were quashed as mercilessly as the Gezi protests were. However, the fact that they happened at all shows the seeds of dissatisfaction are spread over a larger swathe of the Turkish demographic than many people previously assumed – and this was proved by the June 2015 election results, when Turkey voted ‘no’ to the further consolidation of AKP power.
Turkey’s political opposition cannot continue as it currently is, with outdated Kemalist and nationalist parties who generally fail to challenge the AKP. Its best hope involves giving a chance to the HDP, which aims to provide something for everyone – for example Alevis, Kurds, women and members of the LGBT community can vote for decentralisation and promoting the rights of minorities and women, instead of being condemned to settling for the long-established and sclerotic ‘left’ party, the Kemalist Republic People’s Party (CHP), whose left credentials are dubious and not particularly representative of minorities. The people who came out and protested in Gezi in 2013, who were for the most part liberal, believe in principles that seem to have evaporated from the mainstream Turkish political agenda, principles that perhaps new, more democratic parties could enact.
In his contribution to this volume, Tamim al-Barghouti discusses the emergence of unity in the Tahrir Square protests – the fact that Egyptian women and men behaved differently towards each other in the sudden democratic euphoria that came out of those moments. I experienced the same thing during Gezi. My strongest hope for the future of Turkey is based on the democratic maturity, the pacifism and the sense of humour of the Gezi generation – and by ‘generation’ I mean all those young enough to make a difference in the decades to come, while remaining mindful of the stalwart pensioners who protested with as much passion as their grandchildren. The Gezi sense of humour – and its subversive potential – is still very much alive, as witnessed by the response to the political dramas of the past two years, and it is to be hoped that it will continue. To what extent this subversive humour will be punished, quashed or fed – or all three – may determine Turkey’s direction.
This takes us back to the triptych at the start of this essay, and the scenarios presented. Peaceful protest, violent suppression and organic, incremental democratisation are all elements in the future of Turkey, and it is impossible to predict which will be dominant in fifteen years’ time. The economy, neighbouring wars and domestic party politics are unfathomable factors, but again I return to the constant quality I call the ‘Gezi spirit’, or civic courage, that is tried and tested repeatedly but never quite goes away. Whatever the government may throw at the Turkish people, this spirit remains the country’s best long-term hope.
LIVING AND WRITING IN THE MIDDLE EAST
Fiction, Imagination and History
LIVING AND WRITING IN KUWAIT: WHAT FICTION CAN DO
Mai al-Nakib
WHAT IS LIFE LIKE for writers living and working in the Middle East? A straightforward question and yet one that is not at all easy to answer. Television and internet images make it seem as though the dominant feature of the region is that it is forever in a state of crisis. Needless to say, many of us have a legitimate bone to pick with media representations of the Middle East. However, if I’m honest, living in Kuwait as I do, it often does feel as though the world around me is on fire, on the brink of catastrophe or already there. The ongoing crises during the summer of 2014 in Gaza, Syria and Iraq are only the latest in the serial tragedies that have gripped our region.
The Gulf states might appear to be relatively calm by comparison – an air-conditioned bubble in the midst of hell. This is a mirage. First of all, there can be no real peace of mind for anyone with an ounce of humanity in them as long as the brutal suffering in the region continues. Even if you do not happen to have bombs falling on your particular head today, you can’t help but put yourself in the place of those – not so far away, not so different from yourself – who are not as lucky. And while it might be easier for Qatar, the Emirates and Saudi Arabia to allow themselves to believe it could never happen to them, it should be impossible for Kuwait to do so, given its own encounter with war and occupation in 1990–91.
Second, while perhaps not overtly in crisis, the Gulf states nonetheless thrum beneath the surface with a disparate range of problems that could erupt in the not too distant future. Reliance on a single resource is, perhaps, the most obvious concern, but other issues include demographic imbalances, fundamentalisms, sectarianisms, political disenfranchisement, environmental ruin, obesity and diabetes, masked unemployment, labour exploitation, a failing system of education and hyper-consumerism. The current state of affairs is unsustainable both materially and ethically. Gulf citizens may bury their heads in the sand but, soon enough, these issues will surface, and it doesn’t take an expert to recognise that the cumulative outcome will be grave.
So, amid seemingly endless regional disasters and local difficulties, how does a writer write? With the stresses and sorrows of war, the anxiety over bleak future projections and the guilt of knowing that people nearby are experiencing intolerable suffering, how does a writer from my part of the world manage it? I can attempt a response to this question by addressing another one: what can fiction do? As a professor of English and comparative literature, this question is always on my mind as I teach students and reflect
on the relevance of my research. As a writer of fiction, it is a question that informs everything I write. In brief, as far as I’m concerned, the special function of fiction is to invent worlds, to imagine alternatives to the present, to conjure up what Edward W. Said, in a different context, describes as ‘eccentric angles’, in order to remind us of our shared interests, if not our shared humanity.1 Fiction can produce these effects in a myriad of inventive ways, some of which may include revisiting forgotten elements of the past; producing the conditions necessary for readers to inhabit different modes of life; and drawing attention away from a dominant order that often seems to choke off any sense of possibility. One way to convey this function of literature is through my specific experience as a Kuwaiti writer.
I was a child in Kuwait in the 1970s and came of age there in the 1980s. For me, those decades mark Kuwait’s golden years. Of course, this is a view tainted by nostalgia; it is politically and historically inaccurate. In fact, those decades were marked by the Iraq–Iran War; the Souk al-Manakh stock market crash; the rise of Islamic fundamentalism; the clampdown against segments of the Kuwaiti population, the Shia community in particular; and the policy of Kuwaitisation, which threatened members of the non-Kuwaiti population, including Palestinians. Still, as a teenager growing up in the 1980s in Kuwait, I experienced some of the residual cosmopolitanism that had characterised the country’s previous history. It is this currently ignored characteristic of Kuwait that I attempt to revisit in some of the stories that appear in my book The Hidden Light of Objects.
Kuwait was a thriving commercial port town from the 1700s. Accustomed to travel and movement, its population – whether seafarers or Bedouin, rulers or merchants – developed canny negotiating capacities and expressed a decidedly outward-looking slant on the world. Historically, it is fair to say that Kuwait and its population have tended to be globally interactive, managing to maintain autonomy over the centuries, walking a precarious tightrope across the Ottoman Empire, central Arabia, Britain and Iraq. I would argue that Kuwait’s past successes were a result precisely of its outward-looking, engaged, generally tolerant sensibility. This particular point of view also defined the early years of Kuwait’s establishment as a modern nation-state. From the 1930s onwards, up until the 1970s, Kuwait welcomed people in, tended not to see them as outsiders but, rather, as participants in the development of a shared country. We know this because in the 1950s and 1960s Kuwaiti citizenship was offered to individuals of various nationalities in a way that would never occur today.
I must insert a caveat here in order to prevent myself from slipping too far into the dangerous trap of nostalgia. Kuwaiti political scientist Abdul-Reda Assiri has argued that over time Kuwaitis developed what he calls a ‘siege mentality’, which emerged as a result of real threats to the state’s survival.2 For example, immediately upon declaring its political independence in 1961, Kuwait was threatened by Iraq with annexation. This threat was countered by British military protection, as well as – paradoxically – the support of 2,000 Saudi troops. I say ‘paradoxically’ because historically there had not been much love lost between the two nations or their leaders. From the Wahabi attacks against Kuwait from the late eighteenth to the early twentieth centuries, to the Uqair Protocol of 1922, which saw Kuwait lose two-thirds of its land to Saudi Arabia by way of the British, to crippling trade sanctions imposed by Saudi Arabia against Kuwait from 1928 to 1937, the relationship between Kuwait and Saudi Arabia has been fraught, to say the least. The vexed nature of this relationship has been overshadowed by the more recent hostilities from Iraq. Needless to say, the 1990 invasion did nothing to ease this Kuwaiti disposition. Still, Assiri suggests that, despite its defensive inclination, what kept Kuwait reasonably stable and secure over hundreds of years was the ‘external outlook’ of its population, shaped by the country’s ‘interaction with faraway lands and people’.3
In the 1970s, this more open sensibility still dominated my parents’ generation. My parents and their contemporaries were taught mainly by Palestinian teachers at primary, secondary and university levels. Many of that generation continued their education abroad and most, if not all, then returned back to Kuwait in their prime, eager to build their country according to the exciting range of images and experiences collected along the way. Furthermore, it was a sensibility passed on to their children, those of us who grew up in the 1980s. As was evident in the streets of Salmiya or Hawalli or among the student bodies at international or even government schools, the texture of our community was decidedly varied and complex and, for the most part, it was harmonious.
After 1991, however, Kuwait’s historical cosmopolitanism began to recede and its ‘siege mentality’ to intensify. In some ways, a more inward-looking attitude is understandable. Interactive policies and tolerance appeared to have brought nothing but catastrophe to the country and its citizens, so it was believed that something drastic and different needed to be done. Cosmopolitanism, it seemed, had been part of the nation-state’s downfall, so something else needed to be slotted in its place. Expulsion, restriction and purity were chosen over inclusion, openness and plurality. In the last two decades, however, that alternative has proved to be even more catastrophic than the original crisis that initiated the shift away from cosmopolitanism. Since 1991 at the very latest (arguably even a decade before that), the relative stability enjoyed by Kuwait since the 1700s has come undone on many fronts – political, social, economic, cultural. This is not the place to enumerate all the various crises Kuwait has been through in the last two and a half decades, but a few examples would include the routine dissolutions of parliament since 2006; the disenfranchisement of the bidoun (those without citizenship); the escalation of tensions between the government and various opposition groups; an intensification of sectarian divisions; a worrying increase in violence; ongoing human rights concerns regarding expatriate labour as a result of the kefala (sponsorship) system and lack of protection; the marked decline in educational standards; an increase in health issues and the inability of the health-care system to keep up with demand; the traffic fiasco; and, above all, the predicament of dependency on a single natural resource. Something to consider is whether the absence of the cosmopolitanism that buoyed Kuwait through previous crises, excised post-1991, leaves the country ill-equipped to address the seemingly insurmountable crises suffered today.
Robert J. C. Young has argued that the Convivencia in Cordoba – the period of religious coexistence among Muslims, Jews and Christians in southern Spain that began under Caliph Abd-ar-Rahman III, who ruled from 912 to 961 – stands as an exemplary model of multicultural tolerance and of ‘communal living in a pluralistic society’.4 He suggests that such forms of multiculturalism continue to exist in some Gulf states even today. I would argue that historical Kuwait town and Kuwait as a young nation-state retained aspects of this key feature. Convivencia was sustained, Young points out, not by the erasure of difference or homogenisation in the name of nationalism or religious purity. On the contrary, as he explains, ‘The state becomes stronger through the tolerance of heterogeneity, weaker by repressing it.’5 Sadly, the validity of this paradox seems regionally and globally unintelligible, or perhaps just unacceptable.
Kuwait University students in the 1960s. Kuwait, by Oscar Mitri (Kuwait: Government Press, 1969), p. 17.
This was certainly the case in 2004, when I started teaching at Kuwait University. It became abundantly clear to me that any residue of the cosmopolitan Kuwait I grew up in was not only gone, but that its memory was being systematically obliterated. This was happening at an alarming rate on many fronts: in education, in the urban landscape, in the shifting demographic, in politics, culture, clothing, language and so on. It seemed almost as if we, citizens of Kuwait, were slipping into a state of amnesia. For example, while discussing a collection of photographs of Kuwait by the well-known Egyptian photographer Oscar Mitri with my undergraduate students during that first year, I was startled to discover just how unfamiliar Mitri�
��s Kuwait seemed to them. The book, printed by the government in 1969 and titled, simply, Kuwait, featured, among many other images, a religious ceremony at the Roman Catholic church, women waterskiing along the shore and a class of female university students, not one of them wearing the hijab. My students, the majority of whom were wearing the hijab, were baffled, as was I, though not for the same reasons.
This shift in outlook felt incredibly stifling to me, and one reason I turned to fiction was as a way to open a window, a vignette on to something else. My short stories attempt to revisit this forgotten or stifled cosmopolitanism in Kuwait and the wider region in an effort to imagine alternatives to the present, a different kind of home. Although my academic writing engages similar concerns, fiction possesses a flexibility and potential reach that make it particularly appealing. In any case, at the time it felt like no matter how many articles I wrote, none could match the visceral effect of fiction, my first love.
In some ways, it is impossible to escape the traces that make us who and what we are. We are born in a particular place, into a specific family with its own distinct history. We grow up inhabiting a certain language, among a defined community of people. All these elements, among others, shape us and our perspectives on the world. For a writer, these traces pierce through the writing in one way or another. It is impossible to think of Márquez without Colombia, Rushdie without India or Mahfouz without Egypt. Nonetheless, fiction is the unique site where it is possible to escape or transform these very traces. It is true that these traces make us who we are, the kinds of writers we become. But the writing we do allows us to flee the confines of these determining factors, to imagine other worlds. For me, writing fiction became a way to recreate or reimagine a place I was convinced had once existed but that was now nowhere to be found. I needed to construct a space – a safe haven – where I could not only remember my version of the adventurous and mongrelised past, but also imagine a future other than the one that was being prepared for us by the rather rigid and extreme orthodoxies dominating the region post-9/11.