The Shaping of the Modern Middle East (18 page)

But even today, in the modern, national state of Israel, the Jew may be an agnostic or even an atheist and still pass muster. But let him adopt another religion, and he ceases to be a Jew in any sense that is acceptable to the state, the law, and the overwhelming majority of the people. It may be that, given time, Israel will develop into an ordinary secular nation-it has not done so yet. Perhaps the nearest analogy-although the differences are great and obvious-is Pakistan, where the attempt is also being made, after struggle, upheaval, and partition, to form a new, modern nation based on a religious community.

We have traced the rise and fall of liberal patriotism, the rise and spread of ethnic nationalism. It remains to glance briefly at the most recent phase: the return, at first tentative and uncertain and then increasingly vigorous, to a new patriotism based on new nationstates that are at last beginning to take root in the consciousness and loyalties of their peoples.

The process began with and has gone furthest among the Turks. In 1922, in the moment of victory over the Greeks, they still faced great uncertainties. They were, to borrow a phrase, a people who had lost an empire and not yet found a new role in the world. In the struggle for national liberation, many themes occur-Islam and pan-Islam, Turkism and pan-Turkism, and hostility to the imperialist West. The theme of Turkey-of the fatherland of a nation called the Turks-was for long a comparatively minor one. Yet the form of the struggle, which was to eject foreign invaders from the redefined national territory, inevitably gave it the character of a patriotic war and prepared the way for a new patriotism based on an entity hitherto unknown to Turks-the state and land of Turkey. Resisting the temptations offered by the upheaval in Russia, Mustafa Kemal (later surnamed Ataturk) renounced all pan-Islamic and pan-Turkish aims and ambitions and persuaded his people to do the same. Turkish and Muslim brothers in other lands must fight their own battles; the Turks had urgent and difficult tasks to perform in their own country. Alone among the peoples of the Middle East, the Turks could claim no readily identifiable ancestors in the area in antiquity. Ataturk gave them the Trojans and the Hittites and, through the intensive cultivation of history and archaeology, tried to foster the sense of identity of the Turks with the country they inhabited. By our own day, Turkey has made a probably irreversible choice for a democratic patriotism of the Western European type.

In Israel and Iran also, the recovery of the ancient past has proceeded rapidly and contributed significantly to the growth of patriotism, albeit of a somewhat mythopoeic nationalist tinge. In Israel, archaeology has become a national passion, expressing the deeprooted desire to establish continuity with the ancient past and to forget the many centuries of the Exile. In Iran, after the triumph of the Islamic revolution in 1979, there was a sharp reaction against the shah's brand of patriotism, and zealots with axes even went to the ruins of Persepolis to deface the faces of the surviving images. Yet it soon became apparent that the new regime had not entirely abandoned patriotic themes or the national interest. The Ayatollah Khomeini had proclaimed that there are no frontiers in Islam, but when the sultan of Oman requested the return of three islands in the Persian Gulf that had been seized by the shah, his request was refused. More remarkably, the constitution of the new Islamic republic lays down that the president must be of Iranian birth and origin-more than is required for the presidency of the United States, where birth is sufficient. During the long war with Iraq, it became clear that although the rhetoric was almost entirely religious, the sentiment of patriotism, of the defense of "the pure soil of Iran," was also a powerful force.

For the Arab lands, the cult of antiquity raised special problems. At first, the revival of interest in the pharaohs in Egypt was paralleled in the Fertile Crescent; the Assyrians and Babylonians in Iraq, the Phoenicians in Lebanon, the Aramaeans in Syria-all were claimed with pride by the present-day inhabitants of these countries. But soon these movements were drowned by the rising tide of Arabism. The Syrian constitution of 1950 proclaimed that Syria is "part of the Arab nation." The same formula was later adopted in Egypt, Iraq, and Kuwait. For the pan-Arabists, not only the pharaonism, as they called it, of the Egyptians, but also similar movements in other countries were parochial, separatist, and harmful to the cause of Arab unity. These movements were contemptuously designated as Shu`ubiyya, a reconditioned medieval term meaning, roughly, national factionalism. Sometimes they were actively opposed, as in Syria under the United Arab Republic, when the Adonis cinema in Damascus was renamed the Balqis and any reference to Aramaean civilization was regarded as evidence of support for the dissident, anti-pan-Arab, Syrian Popular party. At other times they were, so to speak, taken over, as in the attempt to prove that Hammurabi and the rest were Arabs, by granting posthumous, honorary Arab nationality to all the ancient Semitic peoples except two: Israel and Ethiopia. Nationalist historiography is generally worthless to the historian, except the historian of nationalism, for whom it can be very instructive indeed.

For a time, Arabism was the dominant ideology, even in the land of the pharaohs, where the ancient and illustrious name of Egypt itself was for a while officially abandoned. But even at the height of Nasser's pan-Arabism, the reality of Egypt survived the name. One of the most fascinating problems confronting the student of United Arab foreign policy is the relative importance of Egyptian and United Arab interests. The same policies can be and have been described as the exploitation of Arabism for Egyptian imperialist purposes, or as the subordination of Egyptian national interests to pan-Arab dreams.

In Iraq, alone among the eastern Arab states, the position is complicated by the presence of an important non-Arab minority, the Kurds. At one time it seemed that Kurds and Arabs might live together in an Iraqi nation, in the same kind of association as the Celts and Anglo-Saxons in Britain. That hope, and the tolerant at mosphere that encouraged it, dwindled with the rise of ethnic nationalism, which affected both parties.

The Arab successor states of the Ottoman Empire are now threequarters of a century old and have become familiar and accepted. A complex body of interests has grown up around each of them; all have a strong desire for separate survival. This is especially so where the modern states coincide with ancient distinctions and rivalriesfor example, between the valleys of the Nile and of the twin rivers of Mesopotamia. It is noteworthy that despite the desire for a larger unity, no independent Arab state has disappeared. The rulers of these countries frequently appear to be guided in their policies by the interests of their states and countries rather than those of the panArab cause. But such allegiances and policies, however deeply felt and effectively maintained, were rarely openly avowed. They remained tacit, even surreptitious, while Arab unity long remained the sole publicly acceptable objective of statesmen and ideologues alike.

It is no longer. For some time, circumstances seemed to favor the pan-Arab cause. One of these was language. In the past, the unity of language of the Arab countries had to a large extent been theoretical rather than real. Although they shared a written language, few could write, and the spoken languages of the various Arab countries differed greatly from one another, rather as if medieval France, Italy, Spain, and Portugal had kept their various languages for conversation only and had continued to read and write Latin. In recent years, the growth of education and the consequent rise in the level of literacy have greatly increased the effect of the common written language as a medium of unity. Its effect has been further accentuated by the rapid growth of the mass media-television, radio, films, and the printed word, including books, magazines, and newspapers. Publications emanating from the two main cultural centers, Cairo and Beirut, circulated all over the Arab world, and Egyptian films brought a knowledge of Egyptian Arabic to virtually all Arab countries. The pan-Arab cause was further helped by the powerful legal and public sponsorship accorded to it by Arab governments and by the adoption of pan-Arabism as the official program of at least one major party, the Ba'th, and its encouragement by others. The public and formal acceptance of pan-Arabism has indeed gone so far that it is included in the constitutions of many Arab countries.

This inclusion of pan-Arabism in the constitutions, alongside the guarantees of personal liberty, freedom of expression, and other democratic rights, was perhaps a sign of its decline, for in the current political tradition of the region, the enactment of political principles was a substitute for their enforcement, not a means of ensuring it. In fact, with one exception, all attempts to create larger units by merging existing Arab states have so far failed. The most ambitious of these was the union of Syria and Egypt in the United Arab Republic. This was brought about in 1958 amid great rejoicing in the pan-Arab camp. It proved a difficult association and ended in 1961 with the separation of the two and the resumption of a separate existence by Syria. Other attempts to create greater units, by joining Jordan and Iraq, Egypt and Libya, Egypt and Sudan, were without result. The one exception was the union, or rather reunion, of North and South Yemen in 1990: the restoration of an old historic and political entity that had been artificially sundered by the British colonization of Aden.

While paying lip service to pan-Arab ideals, the various governments of Arab countries pursued their own separate interests, and these precluded the subordination of their own states and governments to larger centralized units located elsewhere. As pan-Arabism declined, the individual states became more solid and more real. To begin with, most of them were artificial enough, carved out of former provinces of the Ottoman or Western empires, with frontiers that were lines drawn on maps by European statesmen. Some of the entities are old and authentic. None can doubt the millennial reality of Egypt as a nation and a civilization. The centuries-old monarchies of Morocco and, until recently, of Yemen have through the centuries formed and developed their own strong regional traditions. In a different way, the mountaineers of Lebanon and the desert sheikhs of Arabia had preserved, even under Ottoman rule, strong local traditions of distinctive culture, combined with a measure of de facto political independence. In most of the countries that now form the Arab world, however, there has for centuries been no tradition of separate existence or even of regional autonomy. Their very names reveal their artificiality.

In time, all these states, however artificial in their origins, became realities. Around each of them there grew up a ganglion of interests, careers, and loyalties, and, most important of all, a ruling and administering elite that made the state an effective unit, unwilling to surrender or share power or control and increasingly conscious of a separate identity and purpose. This was already clear in the disunity of the Arab states that sent their armies into Palestine in 1948, even at the moment of crisis. It became much clearer in the years that followed, more especially after the political and social transformations that took place in some of these countries and intensified the conflicts of interest and purpose between them. The response of the Arab states to the wars of 1967, 1973, and 1982 illustrated the rapidly declining interest of the Arab states in panArab concerns and specifically in the fate of the Palestinians. Between 1980 and 1988, Iraq, an Arab state, was at war with Iran, a non-Arab state. In this war, which the Iraqis presented as a struggle for Arabism, they were able to obtain financial and logistical help from some Arab states and military help from none, whereas the Iranians could count on friendly neutrality and positive support in other Arab lands. Even more dramatic were the events of the Gulf War of 1990 to 1991, when an Arab state invaded, conquered, and annexed another Arab state and thus initiated what was-despite the intervention of outside powers-essentially an inter-Arab war.

The state of the Arab world in the last decade of the twentieth century suggests an obvious parallel with Spanish America after the end of Spanish rule. There, too, the ending of empire left a series of independent states akin in language, culture, religion, and way of life. They might have come together, as did the English-speaking colonies of North America, to form one or two major states. But they did not do so, and the opportunity, once lost, did not come again. The Arab states seem to be moving in the same direction as South America-a community of language, culture, religion, and, to some extent, institutions and way of life, with a common Arabism that may be equivalent to the Hispanidad of the Spanish-speaking world-but no more. This would not preclude the formation of regional groupings, of a pattern increasingly common in the world today, based on practical rather than on ideological considerations. It may well be that at some future time, with the growth of cultural links, communications, and the trend toward the formation of larger entities, the Arab countries may come together in larger political formations. But for the time being, the trend is in the opposite direction.

The decline of pan-Arabism was probably accelerated by the discovery of oil in some, though by no means all, Arab countries, and the consequent uneven distribution of the newly acquired wealth. In a family in which some members are immensely rich while others remain abysmally poor, the ties of kinship are likely to break if too much strain is put on them. Another reason for the decline of pan-Arabism has been the Arabs' increasing disillusionment with successive attempts to achieve it. All too often, it seemed that the real objective of the pan-Arab leaders was not so much unity as hegemony. Some chose a German model, each seeing himself as Bismarck and his country as Prussia, with a dominant role to play in the united Arab state. Others chose a revolutionary model and tried to displace their fellow Arab rulers by subversion.

In most of the Middle East, identity is experienced and recognized, loyalty is claimed and given, at three levels. The most visible, and usually the most effective, is the level of the nation-state: the central government exercising sovereign authority over the national territory and operated by a political elite enjoying a legal monopoly of coercive authority and armed force. Below the level of the state, there may be a variety of other loyalties determined by other identities. As the state disintegrates, the loyalties that it once commanded revert to older and deeper identities, more restricted and correspondingly more intense. These in turn may break up into still smaller units: from national to ethnic to tribal, from patriotic to regional to local, from religious to sectarian to factional. When, for whatever reason, the state fails or falters, these older, narrower loyalties reappear and reassert their more primal claims, often in conflict with one another. This is what happened when the government of Lebanon disintegrated into civil war, and what almost happened after the cease-fire in Iraq in February 1991. Yet despite these wellknown dangers, there have always been many who yearned for something greater and nobler than the often squalid politics or shabby tyrannies of the states under which they live-some vaster, more authentic human community that would have both historic resonance and significant worldly power. The idea of Arab revival and unity, which seemed for a while to offer such a prospect, is for the moment at least dimmed. But the hope of Islamic unity remains.