Arabs (2 page)

By the time U.S. president George W. Bush was preparing to invade Iraq in 2003 to liberate its people from the tyranny of Saddam Hussein’s rule, the Arabs had heard it all before: the wolf of occupation dressed in the lamb’s fleece of liberation.

It is bad enough to invade a people without insulting their intelligence. Iraqi journalist Muntadhar al-Zaidi reflected widespread anger when he threw his shoes at President Bush in a valedictory press conference in Baghdad in December 2008. “This is a farewell kiss, you dog!” al-Zaidi shouted as he threw his first shoe. “This is from the widows, the orphans and those who were killed in Iraq,” he added, throwing his second shoe. Though he was subsequently arrested and tried by the Iraqi authorities for his act, al-Zaidi became an overnight hero across the Arab world for telling the most powerful man in the world that the Iraqis knew the difference between liberation and occupation.

Al-Zaidi’s outburst, and Arab sympathy for his actions, revealed a profound sense of anger and frustration—that the Iraqis had neither been able to rid themselves of a tyrant like Saddam on their own nor were able to prevent foreigners from invading Iraq to do so for their own reasons. This was the kind of impotence Samir Kassir had in mind when writing about the Arab malaise: “The Arab people are haunted by a sense of powerlessness . . . powerlessness to suppress the feeling that you are no more than a lowly pawn on the global chessboard even as the game is being played in your backyard.”
⁶
Unable to achieve their aims in the modern world, the Arabs see themselves as pawns in the game of nations, forced to play by other peoples’ rules.

This is not an entirely new phenomenon. The Arabs have negotiated the modern age largely by the rules set by the dominant powers of the day. In this sense, modern Arab history begins with the Ottoman conquest of the Arab world in the sixteenth century, when the Arabs first came to be ruled by an external power. The European
imperial powers and the superpowers of the Cold War era each perpetuated the subordination of the Arab world to outside rules. After five centuries of playing by other peoples’ rules, the Arabs aspire to mastery over their own destiny—such as they had enjoyed in the first five centuries of Islam. Most Arabs today would say they have never been farther from realizing that ambition.

 

Viewing Arab history through the prism of the dominant rules of the age yields four distinct periods in modern times: the Ottoman era, the European colonial era, the era of the Cold War, and the present age of U.S. domination and globalization. The trajectory of Arab history across these different periods has been marked by peaks and troughs of greater and lesser sovereignty and independence of action. For to say that the Arab world has been subject to foreign rules does not mean the Arabs have been passive subjects in a unilinear history of decline. Arab history in the modern age has been enormously dynamic, and the Arab peoples are responsible for their successes and failures alike. They have worked with the rules when it suited them, subverted the rules when they got in the way, and suffered the consequences when they crossed the dominant powers of the day.

Indeed, the Arabs were always most empowered when there was more than one dominant power to the age. In the colonial era, the Arabs took every opportunity to play the British off the French, as they tried to play the Soviets off the Americans during the Cold War. But with each historic watershed, leading to the fall of the dominant power(s) and the rise of a new world order, the Arabs were driven back to the drawing board until they had mastered the new rules of the age. The moments of transition always heralded a new opening or opportunity, though experience has shown that the impulse of foreign powers to dominate the region becomes more pronounced with each new age.

 

Modern Arab history begins with the Ottoman conquests of 1516–1517, during which a modern gunpowder army with muskets defeated a medieval army wielding swords. The conquests established Ottoman power across the Arab lands until the end of the First World War. They also represented the beginning of Arab history as played by other people’s rules. Until this point, the Arabs had been ruled from their own great cities—Damascus, Baghdad, and Cairo. Under the Ottomans, the Arabs were ruled from distant Istanbul, a city spanning the two continents of Europe and Asia astride the Straits of the Bosporus.

The Ottomans ruled the Arabs for four of the past five centuries. Over this expanse of time the empire changed, and the rules changed accordingly. In the first century after the conquest, the Ottoman rules were none too demanding: the Arabs had to recognize the authority of the sultan and respect the laws of both God (sharia, or Islamic law) and the sultan. Non-Muslim minorities were allowed to organize their own
affairs, under their own communal leadership and religious laws, in return for paying a poll tax to the state. All in all, most Arabs seemed to view their place in the dominant world empire of the age with equanimity as Muslims in a great Muslim empire.

In the eighteenth century, the rules changed significantly. The Ottoman Empire had reached its zenith during the seventeenth century, but in 1699 suffered its first loss of territory—Croatia, Hungary, Transylvania, and Podolia, in the Ukraine—to its European rivals. The cash-strapped empire began to auction both state office and provincial agricultural properties as tax farms to generate revenues. This allowed powerful men in remote provinces to amass vast territories through which they accumulated sufficient wealth and power to challenge the authority of the Ottoman government. Such local lords emerged in the Balkans, in Eastern Anatolia, and across the Arab provinces. In the second half of the eighteenth century a string of such local leaders posed a grave challenge to Ottoman rule in Egypt, Palestine, Lebanon, Damascus, Iraq, and Arabia.

By the nineteenth century the Ottomans had initiated a period of major reforms intended to quell the challenges from within the empire and to hold at bay the threats of their European neighbors. This age of reforms gave rise to a new set of rules, reflecting novel ideas of citizenship imported from Europe. The Ottoman reforms tried to establish full equality of rights and responsibilities for all Ottoman subjects—Turks and Arabs alike—in such areas as administration, military service, and taxes. They promoted a new identity, Ottomanism, which sought to transcend the different ethnic and religious divides in Ottoman society. The reforms failed to protect the Ottomans from European encroachment but did allow the empire to reinforce its hold over the Arab provinces, which took on greater importance as nationalism eroded the Ottoman position in the Balkans.

Yet, the same ideas that inspired the Ottoman reforms gave rise to new ideas of nation and community, which made some in the Arab world dissatisfied with their position in the Ottoman Empire. They began to chafe against Ottoman rules that increasingly were blamed for the relative backwardness of the Arabs at the start of the twentieth century. Contrasting past greatness with present subordination within an Ottoman Empire that was retreating before stronger European neighbors, many in the Arab world called for reforms within their own society and aspired to Arab independence from the Ottoman world.

The fall of the Ottoman Empire in 1918 seemed to many in the Arab world the threshold of a new age of independence and national greatness. They hoped to resurrect a greater Arab kingdom from the ashes of the Ottoman Empire, and they took heart from U.S. president Woodrow Wilson’s call for national self-determination as set out in his famous Fourteen Points. They were to be bitterly disappointed, as they found that the new world order would be based on European rather than Wilsonian rules.

The British and French used the Paris Peace Conference of 1919 to apply the modern state system to the Arab world, with all Arab lands bar central and southern Arabia falling under some form of colonial rule. In Syria and Lebanon, newly emerging from Ottoman rule, the French gave their colonies a republican form of government. The British, in contrast, endowed their Arab possessions in Iraq and Transjordan with the trappings of the Westminster model of constitutional monarchy. Palestine was the exception, where the promise to create a Jewish national home against the opposition of the indigenous population undermined all efforts to form a national government.

Each new Arab state was given a national capital, which served as the seat of government. Rulers were pressed to draft constitutions and to create parliaments that were elected by the people. Borders, in many cases quite artificial, were negotiated between neighboring states, often with some acrimony. Many Arab nationalists opposed these measures, which they believed divided and weakened an Arab people that could only regain its rightful status as a respected world power through broader Arab unity. Yet in keeping with the European rules, meaningful political action was confined to the borders of the new Arab states.

One of the enduring legacies of the colonial period is the tension between nation-state nationalism (e.g., Egyptian or Iraqi nationalism) and pan-Arab nationalist ideologies. National movements emerged in the first half of the twentieth century within individual colonial states in opposition to foreign rule. No meaningful Arab-wide nationalist movement was possible so long as the Arab world was divided between Britain and France. And by the time the Arab states began to secure their independence from colonial rule in the 1940s and 1950s, the divisions between Arab states had become permanent. The problem was that most Arab citizens believed smaller nationalisms based around colonial creations were fundamentally illegitimate. For those who aspired to Arab greatness in the twentieth century, only the broader Arab nationalist movement offered the prospect of achieving the critical mass and unity of purpose necessary to restore the Arabs to their rightful place among the powers of the day. The colonial experience left the Arabs as a community of nations rather than a national community, and the Arabs remain disappointed by the results.

 

European influence in world affairs was shattered by the Second World War. The postwar years were a period of decolonization as the states of Asia and Africa secured independence from their former colonial rulers, often by force of arms. The United States and the Soviet Union emerged as the dominant powers in the second half of the twentieth century, and the rivalry between them defined the rules of the new age, which came to be called the Cold War.

It was then that Moscow and Washington entered into an intense competition for global dominance. As the United States and the USSR attempted to integrate the Arab world into their respective spheres of influence, the Middle East became one of several arenas of superpower rivalry. Even in that age of national independence, the Arab world found its room to maneuver constrained by outside rules—the rules of the Cold War—for nearly half a century (from 1945 to 1990).

The rules of the Cold War were straightforward: a country could be an ally of the United States, or of the Soviet Union, but could not have good relations with both. The Arab people generally had no interest in American anticommunism or Soviet dialectical materialism. Their governments tried to pursue an intermediate path through the Non-Aligned Movement—to no avail. Eventually, every state in the Arab world was forced to take sides.

Those states that entered into the Soviet sphere of influence called themselves “progressives” but were described in the West as “radical” Arab states. This group included every Arab country that had undergone a revolution: Algeria, Libya, Egypt, Syria, Iraq, and South Yemen. Those Arab states that sided with the West—the liberal republics like Tunisia and Lebanon, and conservative monarchies like Morocco, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and the Gulf States—were dubbed “reactionaries” by the progressive Arab states but were considered “moderates” in the West. These labels came to be used by Western journalists and policymakers alike. What followed were patron-client relations, in which Arab states secured arms for their military and development aid for their economies from their superpower patrons.

Arab states proved able participants in the Cold War, deploying a range of weapons in a bid to level the playing field with the superpowers. In the 1950s and 1960s the Arabs placed their faith in the politics of Arab nationalism. However, repeated defeats to Israel and the death of Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser undermined the movement’s credibility. In the 1970s some Arab states used their oil resources to gain leverage in international affairs. In the 1980s many in the Arab world turned to the politics of Islam to provide strength and unity against external powers. None of these strategies liberated the Arab world from the rules of the Cold War.

So long as there were two superpowers, there were checks and balances in the system. Neither the Soviets nor the Americans could afford to take unilateral action in the region for fear of provoking a hostile reaction from the other superpower. Analysts in Washington and Moscow lived in fear of a third world war and worked day and night to prevent the Middle East from sparking such a conflagration. Arab leaders also learned how to play the superpowers off each other, using the threat of defection to secure more arms or development aid from their patron state. Even so, by the end of the Cold War the Arabs were well aware that they were no closer to achieving the degree of independence, development, and respect they had aspired to at
the start of the era. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Arab world was to enter a new age—on even less favorable terms.

 

The Cold War came to an end shortly after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. For the Arab world, the new unipolar age began with the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in 1990. When the Soviet Union voted in favor of a UN Security Council resolution authorizing a U.S.-led war against the Kremlin’s old ally Iraq, the writing was on the wall. The certainties of the Cold War era had given way to an age of unconstrained American power, and many in the region feared the worst.