By 1975, the precarious arrangements on which the Lebanese state had come to rely could no longer withstand the multiple stresses that confronted them. The political system had turned out to be largely unworkable, with the parliament too weak and the president too powerful. The country’s demography had changed significantly since the 1932 census, with high Muslim birthrates and an influx of Palestinians after 1970. Pressures also arose from Lebanon’s frontline status in relation to Israel, since Palestinian guerrillas attacked northern Israel and Israel retaliated against Lebanese targets. Many of the country’s Shiʿites, especially in the south and in the Biqa valley, experienced abject poverty and discrimination and felt alienated from the politically and economically dominant Christians. Elite infighting and the increasing balkanization of state institutions only exacerbated the state’s inability to effectively contain its own disintegration. Civil war erupted, and, as it dragged on, members of each of the various confessions sought deeper and deeper shelters in their primordial identities. “Lebanese” identity was thus subsumed by Maronite versus Sunni versus Shiʿite versus Druze identity.
Not until October 1989, by which time most of the warring factions had fought each other into near exhaustion, was a serious attempt made to end the civil war, in Taʾif, Saudi Arabia. Under Saudi, Syrian, and American sponsorship, thirty-one Christian and thirty-one Muslim deputies from the 1972 parliament—the last one to have been convened before civil war broke out—met and agreed to reform the system. Two of the provisions of the Taʾif Accord stand out: (1) the powers of the presidency, still informally in Maronite hands, were reduced, while the powers of the prime minister, under Sunni control, were increased; and (2) the number of MPs for a new parliament was set at 108, to be divided equally between Christians and Muslims.103 Syria, which had maintained troops in Lebanon since 1976, promised to withdraw them in the near future when circumstances allowed. A new president was also elected. The Lebanese civil war itself continued into 1990. By that time almost all Lebanese factions had given up fighting except the followers of the Maronite general Michel Aoun, who insisted on the withdrawal of Syrian forces before surrendering. He was not as concerned about Israel’s continued military presence in southern Lebanon, where, following the 1982–85 invasion of the country, Israeli forces had declared a “security zone” in which they had stationed troops. At the invitation of the Lebanese government, Syrian forces crushed Aoun’s well-equipped militia in October 1990, and the long and bloody civil war finally came to an end.
To the surprise of most observers, the Taʾif Accord, which did not differ a great deal from the other unsuccessful agreements that preceded it, has managed to hold up so far, despite the state’s frequent political paralysis and continuing hostilities with Israel. Amid jubilant scenes of celebration by the Lebanese, Syrian forces withdrew from the country in April 2005. Earlier, in 2000, Israeli troops had pulled out of most of the “security zone” areas in the south. In many ways, the Shiʿite Hezbollah still defies the central authority of the state and represents something of a state-within-a-state in Lebanon. Up until its collapse and surrender in 2000, the South Lebanese Army, made up of Christian fighters and supported by Israel, also operated with little regard for the central authority of the state. In July and August 2006, Israel launched a massive military assault on Lebanon following a Hezbollah attack on an Israeli patrol, leading to the death of more than a thousand Lebanese civilians and the widespread destruction of property and infrastructure.104 Hezbollah, with alleged Iranian support, proved itself to be a worthy opponent to Israel, but only at great human and infrastructural cost. The Lebanese polity eventually recovered from this shock, but only after the state once again moved to the brink of implosion as a result of internal bickering and paralysis by the country’s multiple factions in 2007–8. Only after persistent mediation efforts by the Saudi and especially the Qatari governments in the summer of 2008 did Lebanon’s fractious political parties agree to once again work together in a coalition cabinet.
In essence, the Lebanese polity is being reconstituted, yet again, and state authority is once again becoming the paramount political force in the country. In many ways, the reconstituted system is a somewhat reformed and apparently more workable version of consociational democracy. The reasons the reconstituted polity is once again democratic are explored in chapter 8. For now, it must be noted that the democratic system has yet to shed its highly elitist character, which is a product of the larger phenomenon of the zuʿama system. The final shape of the Lebanese democracy has yet to emerge. For the time being, the larger sociocultural and political circumstances in which it was born lend it the features of a quasi democracy as opposed to a viable democracy.
POLITICAL OPPOSITION
Given the types of institutional arrangements that Middle Eastern states are likely to assume, it is worth asking what forms of political opposition they allow or provoke. As events in the political history of the modern Middle East have demonstrated, most recently in 2011–12, even the most repressive and dictatorial states of the region have encountered severe political crises at one point or another. Some regimes that once seemed politically invincible have succumbed to popular revolutionary movements—as in Iran, Tunisia, and Egypt—while others have faced violent opposition from actors within society, as in Algeria (in the 1990s) and Syria (beginning in 2011). To deflate the potential for popular uprisings, some states, such as the Jordanian, Kuwaiti, and especially Moroccan monarchies, have allowed limited forms of “loyal opposition” while retaining tight restrictions on the scope of political activity. Whatever their form might be, Middle Eastern states encounter various types of political opposition, and the nature of this opposition directly influences the state’s agendas and capabilities, as well as its broader relationship with society.
Prior to the 2011 uprisings, political opposition in the Middle East was generally divided along two principal axes: officially recognized versus clandestine (or formal versus informal), and secular versus religious. Except for the more conservative kingdoms of the Arabian peninsula—notably Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Oman—states in the Middle East allowed for the existence of one or more political parties and their participation in a parliament. From about the 1950s to the mid-1970s, most countries had one all-encompassing political party. The primary function of the sole official party was to foster controlled popular political participation and to channel the ensuing mass energy into support for various state agendas. Examples of these state parties—in each country acting as the “Ministry of Mobilization”—included the National Liberation Front in Algeria, the Arab Socialist Union and its future incarnations in Egypt, the Neo-Destour in Tunisia, the Baʿth in both Syria and Iraq, and, though hardly successful, the Rastakhiz in Iran.105
Beginning in the mid-1970s, and especially since the late 1980s, most states have allowed limited, highly controlled activities by a few officially approved political parties. In fact, beginning especially in the late 1980s, in countries such as Jordan, Morocco, Tunisia, Egypt, and Kuwait, nonstate parties were allowed to recruit members, hold meetings, and even field candidates in parliamentary elections. Some of these parties have had relatively long traditions of activism, although the state often banned them and then lifted the ban depending on changing political conditions: the Wafd, the Muslim Brotherhood, and the National Progressive Unionist Party in Egypt; the Istiqlal in Morocco; and the Muslim Brotherhood in Jordan. Other parties emerged in the late 1980s and early 1990s specifically as a result of the more open political atmosphere of the time. Some had been established earlier but were not transformed from paper parties into actual organizations until the late 1980s. Examples included the Islamic Salvation Front (FIS) in Algeria, the Democratic Unionist Party (Al-Waʾad) and the Islamic Action Front (IAF) in Jordan, the Al-Nahda and the Social Democratic Movement Parties in Tunisia, the National Entente in Morocco, and the Islah (Reform) Party in Yemen.
Official recognition by the state, or even parliamentary represe
ntation, did not necessarily lead to the increased popularity of these parties among the urban middle classes. Many, in fact, turned into little more than obscure, semiofficial, elite clubs. For example, the Islamic Action Front, established in 1992, initially caused much excitement among the Jordanian electorate and was able to get sixteen of its candidates elected to the Jordanian parliament in the 1993 elections. In municipal elections two years later, however, by which time some of the luster of the new party had worn off, the IAF did relatively poorly and lost much ground to procourt candidates from the tribal, southern parts of the country. By 1997, the party, whose fortunes had significantly declined by now, thought it best to boycott parliamentary elections. Tunisia’s officially recognized “opposition” parties were in even worse shape, to the extent that in the run-up to the 1994 elections the Tunisian state decided to subsidize them to ensure their viability, at least as long as they remained politically docile. When they failed to do so, the government arrested and imprisoned their leaders. Prior to the 2011 uprising, they were marginalized to the point of near oblivion. As one observer noted in 2001, “None of the Tunisian parties present any credible alternative to the [state party]. At best, they are gadflies, consciences, safety valves; at worst, they are salon clubs, ego trips, window dressing. Most ironic, the government need do nothing repressive to keep them in that ambiguous status.”106
There were several reasons for the chronic obscurity and lack of meaningful popular support for the majority of officially recognized political parties in the Middle East. First, to secure recognition from the state and to operate openly, most parties toned down their ideologies considerably and greatly modified their political agendas. Legal status necessitated tacit cooperation with the state and the explicit recognition of the legitimacy of the existing political system. Worse, it was seen as recognizing the legitimacy of the current ruling establishment—an establishment that to the popular eye often looked highly authoritarian and corrupt. Although most of these parties went to extraordinary lengths to distance themselves from the ruling elite and reject the political hegemony of those they saw as politically incompetent, they were often seen as “guilty by association” by most ordinary citizens, for whom participating in the system even as an “opposition party” was tantamount to complicity with autocrats.
There was also the perception, accurate or not, that these political parties were elitist in their social composition and their ideological disposition. High-level parliamentary politics did little to alleviate the economic difficulties saddling the middle classes or the pervasive poverty plaguing the cities and their slums. This perception was reinforced by two characteristics found in most Middle Eastern parties. Very few political parties in the region developed—or were given the opportunity to develop—viable means of organizational networking with an intended constituency. At best, “party organization” often meant little more than an office in the capital city, sometimes in the provincial capitals as well, and a periodic “congress” attended by party loyalists and sympathizers. At worst, the party resembled a social club in which like-minded elites gathered and discussed politics. Some viable political parties succeeded in such essential functions as interest articulation and electoral mobilization. The former Refah Party in Turkey, discussed above, had some initial success because it developed an elaborate organizational structure for the mobilization of potential voters extending all the way down to city districts and neighborhoods. Similarly, the initial successes of the Islamic Action Front in Jordan were largely a product of its extensive ties with the country’s Engineers’ Association, thereby presenting the party with an existing organizational apparatus.
In addition to the lack of organizational means for meaningful contacts with voters, many political parties in the Middle East prior to the 2011 uprisings suffered from leadership squabbles and a lack of internal cohesion. Given the restrictive political environment in which they operated, and an absence of a tradition of organizational evolution and maturity, many political parties suffered from personalism and lack of institutional depth. This made them vulnerable to splintering and frequent disagreements among the leadership. In the mid-1990s, the rapid descent into oblivion of the Jordanian al-Waʾad was largely due to bickering among its leaders. In the late 1980s in Morocco, the Mouvement Populaire (MP) ousted its founder, Mahjoub Aherdane, who then formed the Mouvement National Populaire (MNP). In 1996, a number of MNP members broke away and formed another party, called the Mouvement Democratique et Social (MDS). This pattern of switching offices and acronyms, without meaningfully altering ideological disposition or mobilizational efforts, could be seen in several other countries in the Middle East and North Africa as well. Naturally, this eroded the potential for voter mobilization and interest articulation.
There were two important consequences of the general disappearance of officially recognized, nonstate political parties in the Middle East. First, given that traditional political institutions such as parliaments and political parties turned out to be highly circumscribed in their scope of activities and their efficacy, alternative, nonstate institutions in which urban professionals were involved instead became quite significant. Institutions such as chambers of commerce, trade unions, professional associations, think tanks, and even nongovernmental journals and magazines assumed many of the functions usually performed by political parties. Through articulating their views and exerting indirect, subtle pressure on the state, such organizations were able to influence the nature and tenor of ongoing debates, put forward ideas on economic and social policies, and influence the state’s larger agendas in relation to society.107 Labor unions, for example, became influential players in domestic politics in Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Egypt, Turkey, and Bahrain. Professional and/or business associations became especially important in Jordan and Tunisia. Nongovernmental journals and newspapers emerged as powerful voices of dissent in Iran’s Third Republic, frequently banned and then relicensed under a different name.
A second important consequence of the decline in the significance of officially recognized political parties was the radicalization of political opposition in the Middle East and the growth in the number and activism of clandestine organizations. Over the past two decades or so, this trend corresponded with the steady emergence of political Islam as a powerful medium for political expression. The increasing radicalization of political opposition and the concurrent Islamization of political discourse led to the growth of “radical Islam,” or what is commonly called “Islamic fundamentalism.” This broad label is somewhat misleading and overly simplistic, for it obscures vast differences among the trends that have appeared under the larger rubric of political Islam. It is important that before analyzing each of these trends one get a better understanding of the underlying reasons for the spread of Islam as a powerful forum for political expression.
Growth in the popularity of political Islam over the past few decades is part of a broader historical trend in which other competing, secular ideologies have experienced an inverse decline in fortune after having first seen their own growth and popularity. As we have already seen, up until the 1960s and early 1970s, one of the most compelling ideologies among both state actors and the popular classes was secular nationalism, which contained few or no religious ingredients. Baʿthism, Bourguibaism, Nasserism, Arab Socialism, Qaddafi’s Third Way—all of these were essentially secular ideologies in which the dominant ingredients were the state and its articulation of the national interest. If religion had any role to play, it was ancillary in relation to the expression of the national identity. Buttressed by the charismatic leadership of real or would-be liberators, these ideologies enjoyed a genuine popularity among the urban classes.
By the early 1970s, however, there was widespread realization throughout the Middle East that the state’s articulation of secular nationalism was not all it was cracked up to be. Most significantly, as the fateful events of June 1967 demonstrated, the states were woefully incapable of defending the
national interest, let alone liberating the Palestinians. Far beyond the borders of the defeated states, the Arab public was shocked and in disbelief at the secular states’ near-complete impotence. And, psychologically comforting as it might have been, the states’ search for scapegoats and blaming of incompetent military commanders only partially reversed their loss of ideological legitimacy.
Compounding matters was an increase in state repression, which had actually been a part of the state’s modus operandi from the very beginning, and the steadily more blatant corruption of its officials at all levels of power. To hold on to the reins of power, virtually all the states of the Middle East and North Africa resorted to higher levels of repression as a substitute for declining ideological popularity. Repression was complemented by expansive networks of clientelism and patronage, thus widening the chasm between the haves and the have-nots. By the early to mid-1970s, few, if any, of the promises of the revolutionary, “progressive” era of the preceding decade had been fulfilled. The events of 1967 exposed regimes such as the ones in Egypt, Syria, Iraq, and Jordan as inherently weak and corrupt, headed by incompetent officers or officer-kings with little understanding of their own limitations or what it meant to run a modern state. Rhetoric made secular nationalism popular; reality made it crash and burn.
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