The Modern Middle East - A Political History Since World War I (Third Edition)

by Mehran Kamrava

  Some important conclusions can be drawn here. It should be obvious that Islam is not inherently prone to extremism or violence. In fact, as we have seen, there is a rich array of interpretations and differences between and within the conservative, intellectual, and fundamentalist varieties of Islam. Over the past few decades, there has been a steady politicization of Islam as secular ideologies either have been repressed by state elites (as in the case of socialist ideologies) or have lost popular credibility among the masses on their own (as in the case of Pan-Arabism and secular na--tionalism). Islam was first politicized and then steadily radicalized. Hence Islamic fundamentalism was born. Of the varieties of political Islam, Islamic fundamentalism has attracted by far the most attention because of its violence and its transnational character. The primary fuel for this Islamic fundamentalism has been poverty, both economic poverty and a poverty of political discourse imposed by the state. As long as poverty and political repression remain basic facts of life in the Middle East, there is little reason to believe that Islamic fundamentalism will subside. The ascent of the Muslim Brotherhood to power in Egypt, in the form of the presidency of Mohamed Morsi, is bound to have consequences for political Islam in the Middle East. Precisely what these consequences will be only time can tell.

  As the preceding analysis demonstrates, the prevailing patterns of political rule by various types of states in the Middle East prior to the 2011 uprisings impeded the emergence of meaningful and viable forms of political opposition in the region. Except for the democracies in Israel and Turkey, and even there in imperfect forms, the underlying authoritarianism of Middle Eastern political systems rendered organized, institutional opposition to state leaders literally impossible. As oppositional political parties declined in relevance, unorganized forms of political protest became more popular and commonplace. Secular intellectuals spearheaded the oppositional tendencies of the earlier, postindependence decades, the 1950s to the 1970s. Steadily, however, Islam emerged as a far more viable medium for political opposition and, especially beginning in the mid-1970s, informed the discourse of the state’s opponents. This opposition was likely to come from the conservative ulama, activist intellectuals, or, most commonly, relatively moderate Islamist parties or fundamentalist organizations. In any case, the institutional, ideological, and emotional chasms between the state and society remained unbridged and in many instances widened.

  Prior to the uprisings of 2011, nondemocratic political systems continued to dominate the political landscape of the Middle East. These states were likely to be either inclusionary, exclusionary, or sultanistic. The region’s three democracies, Lebanon, Turkey, and Israel, would be more aptly classified as quasi-democratic, although in recent years Israel moved more and more in a liberal democratic direction. These are, of course, ideal type classifications, and significant differences marked the states within each of the categories. From a comparative perspective, for example, both the Turkish and Israeli political systems are here labeled quasi-democratic because of the excessive influence of the military in politics and the state’s treatment of ethnic minorities living within its borders—the Kurds in Turkey and the Arabs in Israel. Nevertheless, the degree to which the Turkish military was involved in civilian politics was far more extensive and the Turkish state’s treatment of the Kurds much harsher than was the case in Israel with respect to the IDF or the Arabs. Similarly, vast differences separated the two civic myth monarchies of Jordan and Morocco.

  These categories are not fixed, and states can and at times do slip back and forth between categories. Of the various categories, inclusionary states are perhaps the most prone to becoming exclusionary as, with age, they begin to rely more and more frequently on sheer intimidation and exclusion of the masses from the political process instead of their inclusion. Iran’s case has been somewhat different, since the Islamic republican state has lost its elite and ideological cohesion in recent years and has ushered in a system that oscillates between allowing extensive participation and resorting to indiscriminate repression.

  Similar difficulties arise when one tries to categorize the types of political opposition in the Middle East. That some groups or organizations are allowed to openly operate one year but are banned the next year makes their classification especially difficult. Also, individual thinkers and political parties are not always distinguishable, since they may cooperate with one another. At times, it is also difficult to differentiate between “secular” and “religious” intellectuals. These difficulties notwithstanding, political opposition in the Middle East has historically come from organized political parties, Islamist thinkers, conservative clerics, Islamist political parties, or extremist groups espousing Islamic fundamentalism.

  Given this state of affairs, it is important to ask what the consequences are for the overall nature of the state-society relationship, and, more importantly, for the prospects of democracy in the Middle East. The next chapter considers these questions.

  8Repression and Rebellion

  As the first decade of the twenty-first century was drawing to a close, the Middle East found itself in a deepening political morass. The 1980s had seen the rebirth of democracy in Latin America and eastern Europe, but not in the Middle East. In the 1990s much of East Asia embraced democratic rule, but once again the Middle East was left behind. The historian Roger Owen called the Middle East, where aged kings and presidents were simply assumed to have permanent tenure in office, “a veritable kingdom of the old.”1 Throughout the region, the gap between state and society—between the aspirations and hopes of the people in contrast to the realities of political life—continued to widen. In the name of fighting terrorism, what emerged increasingly as national security states all too frequently “diverted resources away from social priorities, and justified domestic repression in the name of national unity against an external enemy.”2 Meanwhile, as Latin America and East Asia continued to grow and develop at a feverish pace, Middle Eastern economies struggled to stay afloat. The scholar Fouad Ajami’s reflection on Egypt summed up the collective mood of despair across the Middle East: “Egyptians are not blind to what has befallen their country. They can see the booming lands in Asia, countries that were once poorer than Egypt, digging out of the poverty of the past. No way out has materialized for Egypt. The dreams of liberal reform, the hopes for revolution from above, the socialist bid of Nasser all withered away. The country drifts.”3

  In the 1950s and the 1960s, states across the Middle East struck a ruling bargain with labor and the middle classes in which political parties were banned and civil society organizations and trade unions came under government control, in return for promises of state-provided employment, social and welfare services, free education and health care, and subsidies for food, housing, energy, and transportation.4 As the decades wore on, however, the state could deliver little in terms of its promises, and it found itself more and more reliant on repression to stay in power. At the same time, Arab politics became steadily more personalized, with the structures of political and economic power increasingly dependent on the personal traits and personality of the leader and his relationships with his immediate family members and associates. At its highest levels, the system became reduced to intricate webs of political and business relationships between the president, his family members, and oligarchical business elites.5 To enhance their political longevity and ensure their tenure in office, presidents often surrounded themselves with men they felt they could trust, as well as an interlocking network of intelligence services and, in most cases, a single government party. “Put simply, in such cases the people were subordinated to the state, the state to the party, and the party itself to the single ruler who was himself either responsible for its creation or who had become its master.”6 Beginning in the 1970s, meanwhile, the state started a messy, disorderly retreat from several socioeconomic functions, leaving public spaces vacated and ready to be filled by either religious extremists (as in Egypt and Algeria) or separatists (as in
Sudan, Somalia, and Iraq).7 Repression was pervasive, but so was the imperative to rebel.

  Across the Middle East beginning in the 1960s and the 1970s, secondary school opportunities expanded significantly, whereas employment opportunities for high school graduates lagged behind. There is a direct link between higher levels of education and the likelihood of taking part in opposition activities and calling for political change, especially in adverse economic circumstances.8 In particular, all countries that experienced the Arab Spring saw the entry of armies of young into the labor force, rising levels of education, and poor job prospects.9 This was particularly the case with job seekers with relatively higher levels of skill and, therefore, higher aspirations. In the span of twenty years, between 1990 and 2010, the youth population aged between fifteen and twenty-nine grew by 50 percent in Libya and Tunisia, 65 percent in Egypt, and 125 percent in Yemen. Youth unemployment, meanwhile, remained on average twice the global average, by 2009 standing at 23 percent.10 At the same time, despite pervasive repression, Middle Easterners were becoming increasingly more connected globally and, consequently, restlessly aware of the opportunities denied them by the state. According to the 2011 Annual Arab Public Opinion Survey, in the six Arab countries surveyed, fully 15 percent of the respondents had had access to the Internet between the previous three to five years, 18 percent between the previous one to three years, and fully 27 percent for less than one year.11 In 2011, no less than 20 percent of those surveyed used the Internet as their primary source of international news, compared to 8 percent in 2009, and Al-Jazeera television remained the dominant provider of international news among comparable broadcasters, though its viewership did decline from 58 percent in 2009 to 43 percent in 2011.12

  In the final months of 2010 and in early 2011, all the ingredients for a mass uprising came together to usher in a revolutionary wave that began in a small, remote town in Tunisia and went on to engulf the whole of the country, then Egypt, and from there Libya, Bahrain, and Syria. The ingredients for the social movements that collectively came to be known as the Arab Spring had all been present for some time. What finally sparked the revolution was the breaking of the fear barrier, in the form of a dramatic act of self-immolation by a distraught fruit seller in the Tunisian city of Sidi Buzid. As with most other revolutions, Mohammed Bouazizi most probably never imagined that his desperate, final act of defiance would set into motion national movements that eventually brought down modern-day pharaohs like Ben Ali, Mubarak, and Qaddafi. But Bouazizi’s life and death eerily symbolized the predicaments in which most Tunisians and other Middle Easterners found themselves. Reportedly a university graduate, he had been repeatedly frustrated in his efforts at finding a job commensurate with his qualifications and aspirations. His encounter over inadequate licensing with a policewoman, a representative of the repressive state, sent him over the edge. The people who heard about his plight and his fate, his aspirations and dashed hopes, could all relate to him. His story was relayed again and again, through social media and satellite television and, eventually, the printed media that could no longer ignore what was becoming a revolutionary wave. Bouazizi’s act of desperation spoke to the predicament of ordinary Tunisians everywhere. The people came out to demonstrate, first in his native Sidi Buzid, then in Tunis and in other large cities, then in Cairo and Alexandria, and in Benghazi and Tripoli. By mid-2011 the revolutionary contagion was well under way, having reached the shores of the Persian Gulf and having begun to shake the very foundations of the Bahraini monarchy.

  In this chapter I examine the background and the underlying causes of the Arab uprisings of 2011–12. I begin by examining the institutional underpinnings of authoritarian systems that prevailed across the Middle East up until the eruption of the Arab Spring. Throughout the region, I argue, authoritarian systems demonstrated considerable resilience and staying power by retaining a fair amount of adaptability and ability to respond to crises as they emerged. Few authoritarian systems can rule through sheer coercion, and Middle Eastern states sought to complement their authoritarian practices by the imposition on—rather than negotiation with—their society of a “ruling bargain.” The chapter traces the emergence and decline of these ruling bargains. In the process of maintaining themselves in power, states invariably undermined and frustrated various efforts at democratization, even when such efforts were controlled and were only meant to prolong the incumbents’ hold on power. With states intractable in their authoritarianism, and societies restless and frustrated, the eruption of revolutions was only a matter of time.

  THE POLITICS OF REPRESSION

  Faced with increasingly restive, educated, and unemployed or underemployed populations, most Middle Eastern states resorted to steadily higher levels of repression from the 1970s on. Across the Middle East, in fact, authoritarian regimes used the fight against Islamists to justify repressive policies.13 Saudi Arabia, as only one example, witnessed a significant consolidation of authoritarianism in the 1970s and the 1980s, and, faced with increased Jihadist terrorism, the Saudi state became downright repressive in the 1990s and the 2000s.14 But, when needed, repression was often mixed in with strategic, often temporary, liberalization aimed at coopting less militant opposition groups and presenting a public facade of democracy. Not surprisingly, therefore, Middle East authoritarianism was both persistent and dynamic, with authoritarian regimes using limited openings to usher in what Stephen King called “new authoritarianism.”15 This was an “adaptive, flexible style of rule,” often combining elements of democracy, such as elections and parliamentary debates, with a robust variety of repressive institutions such as the secret police and the army.16

  Whether the state was monarchical or nominally republican, often its apex was composed of a small, interlocking elite of senior army officers, bureaucrats, and wealthy business oligarchs with a vested interest in protecting “both the regime and themselves by limiting and controlling the impact of Western-inspired political and economic reform.”17 This was particularly the case with the Middle East’s republican regimes, in which the presidency seldom resembled an office beholden to the will of the electorate. Often, in fact, the powers of the president were codified in a constitution whose primary function was to ensure that the president’s prerogatives remained uncontested.18 In 1971, for example, Anwar Sadat convened a diverse group of Egyptians—made up of feminists, Islamic legal scholars, socialists, liberals, nationalists, and Christians—to draft a constitution. The resulting constitution promised a little to everyone, and a lot to the president.19 Decades later, between 2005 and 2007, the Egyptian parliament passed a series of constitutional amendments that were sold to the public as meaningful reforms to the political process but that in reality sharply curtailed the right to opposition activity and made election candidacy by nonestablishment actors extremely difficult.20

  Often the big man, “the boss,” began to make big mistakes.21 The biggest mistake, of course, was for the president to start believing in his own centrality to the country’s political stability and future destiny. Dismissive and deeply suspicious of their peoples, the presidents all too often began believing their own rhetoric. As one observer has noted in relation to Tunisia, “Ben Ali’s was a particularly insulting dictatorship,” one in which the state-run media and all its other agencies participated in producing a cult of personality. The president’s portraits were everywhere, the media lauding his every initiative, “with Ben Ali the ever avuncular and enlightened ruler.”22 Saddam Hussein is said to have remarked in the late 1980s, “The law is anything I write on a scrap of paper.”23 In Syria, Assad made sure that all combat units were commanded by an Alawi and that none of their equipment was moved without his permission.24

  The predominant features of these “presidential monarchies,” particularly in Algeria, Tunisia, Egypt, and Syria, included a repressive and highly robust security apparatus that stifled dissent and spread fear across society; a cult of personality that placed the leader, and at times his family, above al
l else, representing the leader as indispensable to the nation’s progress and well-being; and a token republicanism symbolized by pro forma elections with foregone conclusions.25 A pyramid-like structure therefore emerged in which the president’s office, at the apex, relied on a network of intelligence agencies, the police, senior members of the armed forces, and crony capitalists, followed by the main agencies of civilian administration—such as ministries and provincial governorships—and centers of ideological legitimation and control, the most important of which were universities, a tame judiciary, and an equally tame religious establishment.26 In Syria, the military, the ruling elite, and the secret police became so intertwined that it became “impossible to separate the Assad regime from the security establishment.”27

  Members of the president’s family were frequently deeply involved in various state-related business ventures. Sons and other relatives of the president became “part of a single team dedicated to the promotion of mutual family interests.”28 In Egypt, the wealth of President Mubarak and his family was estimated at anywhere between $40 and $70 billion, and thirty-nine of his son’s associates are alleged to have made on average $1 billion each.29 In Tunisia, Ben Ali’s extensive network of close relatives who benefited from commercial deals simply became known as “the Family.”30 In Syria, the president’s cousin Rami Makhlouf was said to control as much as 60 percent of the country’s economy.31