The Arab world
Tethered by history
The failures of the Arab spring were a long time in the making
Jul 5th 2014 | CAIRO
REPRESSED for decades, the anger burst like a summer storm. Rioting youths flooded city streets. The shaken regime granted hasty concessions: freer speech; an end to one-party rule; real elections. But when Islamists surged towards victory in the first free elections the army stepped in, provoking a bloody struggle that lasted until the people, exhausted, acquiesced to a government similar in outlook, repression and even personnel to that which they had revolted against in the first place.
It sounds like the recent history of several Arab countries: Bahrain, Egypt, Libya, Syria, Tunisia and Yemen, the states of the 2011 Arab spring, have seen some or all of the story unfold. But this is also, and originally, Algeria, a quarter of a century earlier—the first major political crisis in the age of modern Islamism.
A flurry of freedom in the late 1980s gave way to a vicious civil war in the 1990s that left as many as 200,000 dead and Algeria’s Islamists more or less defeated, but not eradicated. Today the country’s citizens remain powerless spectators to a continued stand-off between what they call le pouvoir—the entrenched oligarchy that controls the state, the oil money and the army—and the now-marginalised Islamist radicals, who serve more as a justification for ongoing repression than as any sort of inspiration to ordinary people.
All too many of the Arab world’s 350m people are stuck in similar binds, caught between rotten governments and even more rotten and often violent oppositions. Its would-be reformers have retreated to the condition described laconically by the late Syrian playwright Saadallah Wannous as “condemned to hope”. Trapped either in stagnant repression or cycles of strife, they are unable to make progress. This stasis has heightened long-standing concerns that Arab countries are in some fundamental way unsuited to the modern world, concerns which have spawned a gaggle of grand theories. But it is a particular pattern of 20th-century modernisation, rather than its absence, that lies behind the region’s political failure.
Spring’s lease is ended
The Arab spring has led to something depressingly like a region-wide rerun of the Algerian experience. Voices calling for the kind of sweeping, liberal reforms that might have pulled Arab countries into line with the rest of the world almost always proved too weak. Only Tunisia truly cast off its old ways and embraced a new, more open order. Elsewhere the result has been either a reprise of theancien régime, as in the Egypt of President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, or civil war. These wars have empowered radical Sunni jihadists like those of the Islamic State of Iraq and Greater Syria (ISIS), a vicious and ambitious al-Qaeda stepchild which now controls territory in both countries and which has declared its blood-spattered leader to be caliph of all Muslims.
The region’s monarchies, many of them so saturated with oil that their rulers can postpone change by buying off dissent, mostly sat out the Arab spring. Other non-spring-ers, like Algeria, had already gone through their own cycles of fruitless revolt. Lebanon’s “Cedar Revolution” of 2005 brought a quarter of that country’s people onto the street, toppled a government and forced President Bashar Assad of neighbouring Syria to withdraw the “peacekeepers” that had made Lebanon a Syrian satrapy. A decade later, Syrian-backed parties dominate politics again, as does the same squabbling cast of sectarian politicians. Most Lebanese would still love to see their backs; but they grudgingly turn to them for protection and patronage.
The Palestinian intifadas (uprisings) of 1987-93 and 2000-05, while different in their setting, have proved similarly futile. They changed the nature of the Israeli occupation, yet the territories remain ultimately under Israeli control. And the people are still under the thumbs of single-party regimes: the Islamists of Hamas in Gaza and the secular-leaning Fatah party in the West Bank exercise monopolies of power with the backing of unaccountable security services. Few Palestinians rate the chances of a recently formed unity government; Israel is determined to smash Hamas anyway.
Beyond these places that have got no better lies the spectre of those that have got far worse. The epic, ongoing and increasingly interlinked tragedies of Syria and Iraq, taken together, make Algeria’s look merciful. Leaving out the damage directly caused by America’s invasion of Iraq in 2003, the combined toll from a decade of bloodletting in Iraq and the civil war that erupted in Syria in 2011 so far exceeds 300,000 dead; perhaps 13m people have become refugees. With hundreds of archaeological sites pillaged and cities like Aleppo gutted, no conflict since the second world war has caused such widespread damage to the world’s cultural heritage.
The war, or wars, took a grim twist towards the absurd on June 29th when ISIS proclaimed its territory a caliphate. Its elevation of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, a former theology student and terrorist warlord from the Iraqi city of Samarra, to the title of Commander of the Faithful ostensibly resurrects a position as leader of all Muslims that was only truly effective in the first decades of Islam, 1,400 years ago.
Essentials and oil
It is a grand gesture, although one more likely to speed the group’s demise than to bring closer its dream of a globe-spanning Muslim nation. Most rival jihadist groups, let alone most ordinary Muslims, scoff at Mr Baghdadi’s presumption, dismissing as grotesque his qualifications to become caliph, a word that denotes the “successor” to the Prophet Muhammad. Yet the challenge presented by ISIS (which now wishes to be known as the State of the Islamic Caliphate) underlines the sorrowful condition into which Arab politics has sunk.
Why is the Arab world a weary and wearying mess? It is not a new question—Arab intellectuals of the 19th century pondered the puzzle of their ancient civilisation’s weakness in the face of an imperialist West—but the past decades have made it more salient than ever, both within the region and outside. The production of tomes such as “The Arab Predicament” and “What Went Wrong?” has become something of an industry.
Answers can typically be divided up by academic discipline. Political scientists point to the prevalence in the Arab world of “rentier” states, where government control of resources such as oil has obviated any need for rulers to gain the consent of the ruled. Sociologists have blamed an Arab “democratic deficit” on patriarchal cultures that encourage deference to elders from one’s own clan or tribe and distrust of outsiders. To demographers an obvious cause for social distress has been the breakneck growth of Arab populations, particularly in cities where millions of displaced peasants struggle to cope with urban life.
For many years it was fashionable for historians to point the finger at Western imperialism. Colonial powers, it was said, created a dangerous rift in Arab societies between a privileged, outward-looking, Westernised elite and a disgruntled “native” class. The borders fixed by European mapmakers created unwieldy polities that had to struggle through painful and often violent processes of nation-building. The implantation of a Jewish state in Palestine drove a physical wedge between Arab countries and provided an excuse for the military dominance of surrounding Arab societies. “No voice may rise above the sound of the battle,” was the rousing cry of Arab regimes in the 1960s as they locked up dissidents and stirred talk of conspiracies.
Most academics have been wary of fingering Islam as a fundamental impediment to modernisation, yet some, and not only Western ones, suspect it plays a role. Timur Kuran, a Turkish-American economist, argues that Islam’s rigidly egalitarian inheritance rules have hindered the accumulation and mobilisation of capital in a way that hampered industrialisation. The unresolved issue of proper relations between Islam and the state represents a chronic conundrum. For most of the time since the first caliphate governments have outwardly endorsed the notion that temporal laws must be subservient to religious rulings while doing as they wish and ensuring that jurists toe the line. In the 19th century the governments of Turkey, Egypt and Tunisia all moved to trim the influence of sharia judges, not under European pressure but because their unpredictable rulings were an obstacle to commerce as well as to government power.
The modern spread of Islamism as an explicitly political expression of Islamic thought has created another set of problems. Groups such as the Muslim Brotherhood, a wellspring of Islamism since its founding in 1928, claim that the founding texts of Islam provide a template for every aspect of life, including government. The trouble is that these texts are open to widely varying interpretations. As the proliferation of Islamist political parties proves, it is hard to balance the notion of a fixed, immutable source with the changing whims of democratic politics. Instead, one dominant party is liable to try to silence rivals, a process which often involves outbidding them in a contest for greater “authenticity”.
The weakness of strong men
Despite this reactionary dynamic, Islamism is itself a creature of modernity. In the past two generations the proportion of Arabs who can read has soared from less than a quarter to more than three-quarters; as in Reformation Europe, their reading of first choice has been religious. The subsequent breaking of a priestly class’s monopoly over interpreting the faith means the village-shop version of Islam, stocked with traditional local fare, has been replaced by an Islamic supermarket packed with exciting new brands. Among the best advertised, particularly on the internet, are the ones whose heroic nihilism most appeals to alienated youths; ISIS is all over Twitter.
There is some merit in most of these explanations. Yet none is unique to Arab countries. Three-quarters of the world has suffered colonial rule; patriarchy of various sorts besets just as much of it. There are Muslim states, rentier governments and booming populations in other places. And although these factors have, singly and in combination, held back some non-Arab countries, they have all been overcome by others.
To be fair, some Arab states can claim successes, too. For all the thinness of their democratic veneer, the monarchies of Jordan and Morocco remain pleasant and vibrant places to live. Lebanon is a political mess, but it always has been a mess, and for the most part its people cheerfully get on with their lives and each other. For their own male citizens, as well as for the more fortunate of their millions of foreign workers, wealthy Gulf monarchies such as Oman, Kuwait, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates and even Saudi Arabia offer great economic opportunity, though with zero political choice.
This all suggests that it is not enough to cite the Arab world’s essential cultural, religious or economic attributes as an explanation for its problems: you need also to look at the history of the region’s various approaches to modernising itself.
In the early 20th century the Nahda movement in Egypt and the Levant, inspired by what it saw elsewhere, espoused such liberal ideas as public education, women’s rights, empirical science and an open society. A contrary trend thought the right response would come instead through a return to Arab roots and an ostensibly purer form of Islam: this gave rise to Salafism, which seeks to emulate the ways of the earliest Muslims and in which jihadism is rooted. But in the end the response was influenced less by ideas and more by physical force. In most Arab countries it was soldiers, or hereditary rulers backed by strong armies, who took over from departing European powers after the second world war, and who set the terms for the modern Arab state.
State control over broadcasting, schools and the flow of capital allowed the new rulers to promote a paternalistic form of modernisation not unlike that of Franco’s Spain or Mussolini’s Italy. As in fascist Europe, the underlying bargain was that in exchange for obedience, governments would defend the realm, preserve cultural authenticity and bring progress in the form of heavy industry and mechanised agriculture. Differences of sect or ethnicity were officially ignored; the state co-opted selected classes of loyalists, whether business cronies or privileged castes of intellectuals, jurists or engineers, to its cause.
The mostly rural and illiterate population meant these new rulers felt little pressure to change the colonial systems of government they inherited, such as police forces that prioritised the stifling of dissent over fighting crime. Over time the circle of loyalists became more venal and narrowly circumscribed, the need actually to please the people less keenly felt; education fared particularly poorly. It was against this increasingly repressive background that Islamism grew into its modern political form. The grim experience of Egyptian prisons in the 1950s inspired Sayed Qutb, a Brotherhood propagandist much quoted by later jihadists, to declare holy war against “infidel” Arab regimes.
Geopolitics did not help. The bitter legacy of colonialism, combined with a hatred of Israel, tilted many Arab states into the anti-Western camp in the cold war, where they found a ready supply of military hardware and advice on state planning. Conservative Arab monarchies tilted the other way, and their Western allies were not about to jeopardise this allegiance by urging democratisation.
The crises that eventually beset this model of development came at different times in different places, but with similar underlying causes. For Algeria, a collapse in oil prices in the 1980s exposed the folly of pursuing rigid socialism at a time when population growth had produced a vast pool of young men without jobs. In the Arab spring the triggers included growing disparities in wealth and a breakdown in public services as states diverted more resources elsewhere, notably to the security services. This is one reason why wealthy monarchies that still go some way to placating the poor were largely insulated—although Saudi Arabia, where youth unemployment is high, is seeing increasing levels of class anger.
Putting out fire with gasoline
The late Samer Soliman, a political scientist, called this the paradox of the weak state and the strong regime. During the 2000s he noted a decline in the Egyptian state’s ability to mediate disputes—increasingly settled out of court—as well as a further collapse in state education. Islamist groups often stepped in to provide social services, while police preoccupied with protecting the state allowed petty quarrels to balloon into ugly sectarian clashes. In Syria economic liberalisation after years of socialist austerity enriched an ostentatious few. Add to that the government’s lack of any response to the devastating drought of 2006-10, which filled burgeoning slums with 1.5m mostly Sunni peasants, and the scene was set for the 2011 uprising.
Such tensions between social classes, far more than those between sects, have sparked many recent Arab revolts; but sectarianism is then used to fan the flames. Islamists exploit class resentment to expand their base; governments stoke sectarian strife to justify their security apparatus.
The most egregious of these arsonists is Syria’s Mr Assad. When his regime, led largely by fellow members of the minority Alawite sect, responded to initially peaceful protests with extreme brutality it was on the pretext that its foes were Sunni fanatics bent on destroying the country’s complex social mosaic. It went on to release hundreds of jihadists from prison and to instigate attacks on Christians and other minorities to make its case convincing—and thus brought the reality about. Iraq’s prime minister, Nuri al-Maliki, used the threat of Sunni terrorism—in the case of Iraq an ugly reality—to expand his own powers over the army and police and to ensure the loyalty of his Shia base. In so doing he stoked first a Sunni insurrection and then a full-scale revolt.
The authorities in Egypt have played the same game, albeit in a slightly less ruthless form. As it has clawed back power in the aftermath of the 2011 revolution, the “deep state” centred on the army and the security services found it expeditious first to make the Muslim Brotherhood its ally in controlling the streets, then to demonise it. The bloody crushing of pro-Brotherhood protests in the wake of last year’s military coup predictably provoked terrorist responses. These in turn have justified a wider crackdown that has effectively if not yet completely silenced even the secular critics whose hopes for liberalising reforms inspired Egypt’s brief spring.
Egypt’s government may succeed in snuffing out dissent, just as the regimes in Iraq, Syria and elsewhere may eventually achieve Algeria-like solutions. But as Amr al-Zant, an Egyptian scientist and columnist, has noted, it takes openness for societies to progress. Closed politics may be tempered by an openness to ideas and an open economy, as in China. Open politics can make up for poverty and a paucity of human resources, too. But to have closed politics and closed minds together is a recipe for disaster; for proof, consider the current fate of the Arab states.
