Tarek Osman's Blog, page 6
June 25, 2015
The legacy of Hafez Assad and the future of Syria
In the mid-1940s, Hafez Assad became one of the earliest non-Sunni Muslim leaders of Syria’s general student union; in the 1950s, he became one of the country’s first air fighters; in his late thirties, he became defence minister; in 1970, by the age of 40 he ascended to the presidency. He acquired power through a coup that ended a decade long political struggle between various socialist and nationalist forces, the most powerful of which was the Baath (Resurrection) party. For most Syrians, this did not matter much; the country’s experience with liberal democracy (in the early 1940s) was short and marked with economic upheavals and chaos. Most Syrians longed for stability.
Assad delivered it. Often, the price was the devastation of entire villages as was the case when, in the early 1980s, he crushed Islamist groups that had challenged his regime. Despite that, Hafez Assad stroked a chord with broad segments of the Syrian society. His background positioned him as a man of achievements, able to get things done. His first decade in power witnessed a surge in national confidence and a sense of social cohesion. He was a charismatic leader and a savvy politician who knew how to connect with his people and how to manipulate mass media. And he was ruthless; existing or potential enemies were exiled or terminated.
The image of “the Strong man in Damascus”, as many in Arab and Western media came to call him, resonated with large groups of Syrians. For many in the region, Hafez Assad evoked few historical figures who, centuries ago, had dominated parts of the Levant: the loner, who had risen from a marginalised social group (in his case, the Islamic sect of the Alawites), without any claim to richness or prestige, and who, relying on steely nerves, Spartan work ethic, and fiery ambition had arrived at the helm of power. He lacked the natural appeal of Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser, but his stoicism, ruthlessness, and cunningness were, for many, a perfect match with a region whose culture was shaped by pragmatic mercantilism and problematic and often bloody interactions between a myriad of religious communities.
Assad benefited from the weakness of his opponents. The forces that remained from Syria’s 1940s democratic experiment suffered the classic ills that have always afflicted Arab liberals: condescension towards the lower middle classes and an infatuation with Europe that make them come across to their own societies as at best Westernised, at worst alien, “not of us”.
His opponents within the Baath party were either isolated in the ivory towers of academia or ideology, or in factions of the military that were less influential than the ones that had coalesced round him. Few months after he had ascended to the presidency, Hafez Assad ruled supreme in one of the Arab world’s most strategic countries, and for centuries, a centre of Arab culture.
Hafez Assad saw himself as an Arab nationalist playing a decisive role in a generational struggle to assert and secure Arab rights. Like many Arab leaders before and after him, he blurred the personal with the public. He saw his taking full control as saving Syria from chaos and from others’ treacherous schemes or utter incompetence. He saw his ruthlessness as a must to deter internal enemies and ensure stability.
He expected the people to understand that they must sacrifice many rights, because they should trust that he knows what is required to steer the ship in dangerous waters. And if that meant weakening the state’s institutions, then so be it. For him, his leadership embodied the governance system that Syria needed. Hafez Assad was no Louis who believed that “he was the state”; but he saw himself as the father, leader, visionary, and wise man whom the people should obey.
The majority did. The 1970s and 1980s was a period in which the Arab world was pulled between two feelings. The first was sadness. By the mid-1970s, the dreams that Arab nationalism (whether the Nasserite or Baathist versions) had given rise to, were crumbling. Many in the region clung to the notion that “we need a new generation of strong men who learnt the lessons of the 1950s and 1960s”, and who could resuscitate the shattered aspirations. This was particularly true in Syria, a country that was created (in the early twentieth century) on the idea that an overarching Arabness is needed to transcend the sectarianism that had always plagued the eastern Mediterranean.
The second feeling was apprehension. In the mid-1970s, Lebanon descended into civil war. Egypt seemed to be pulling away from the Arab world, looking for a new positioning as a solid ally of the West and especially of the US. Arab politics’ centre of gravity was slowly but steadily moving from the Levant and Egypt towards the Gulf. And the state’s ability to continue playing the role of the provider was becoming clearly unsustainable. Large segments of the Syrian middle classes were anxious.
The perception of the need for a strong man, a saviour, was powerful. Not surprisingly, the saviour proved to be a mere mortal, whose power structure gradually fell to corruption, concentration of power, incompetence, and a culture of intimidation that trampled over, not only people’s political and human rights, but also their dignity. But this was not the real disaster of Hafez Assad’s legacy.
Like many of the Arab world’s strongmen in the last half century, Hafez Assad gradually lost touch with the ideas that had inspired his project and upon which his appeal had grown. By the mid to late 1980s, and especially as he deeply involved Syria into the intricacies of the Lebanese civil war, Assad affected a transformation in the Syrian power structure. He began to allocate key positions, particularly in the intelligence and security apparatus, to members of his extended family, close friends, and carefully selected individuals from the sect to which he belonged. His regime continued to feature Sunni Muslims, Christians, and Druze. But real power was clearly kept in his increasingly close familial, Alawite circle.
By the mid-1990s, the Assad regime had moved far away from its secular Arab nationalist origins and, in the eyes of many, became a militaristic, Alawite elite coalescing round an authoritarian leader. This transcended nepotism and concentration of power. It negated the primary feature of Syria’s modern history.
For over four centuries, since the Ottomans annexed the Levant in 1517, Syria was the bulwark of Sunni Islamism in the eastern Mediterranean. In the same way that the Maronites and the Druze dominated Mount Lebanon, the Shias scattered in the region’s southern valleys, the Sunnis had come to politically, socially, and culturally shape the relatively large urban and agrarian area surrounding Damascus.
In the first half of the twentieth century, cosmopolitanism shrouded sectarianism. A thriving trading culture and the existence of scores of merchant families from Christian, Druze, Armenian, Jewish, Persian, and Greek origins made Damascus and Aleppo cosmopolitan. But this pluralistic scene floated above a dominant Sunni Islamic bedrock.
Hafez Assad’s transformation of the Syrian power structure meant that for the first time, in centuries, Syria was being ruled by a non-Sunni elite, with a conspicuous sectarian look and feel. Three factors averted wide social activism against this new reality and lent the regime some staying power.
The first was the 1990s’ Arab-Israeli peace negotiations. Through the mediation of the US’s Clinton Administration, Hafez Assad negotiated a peace treaty with Israel. But unlike several Arab leaders, he was never willing to retract his red lines. Repeatedly, he walked away from negotiations, preferring to “leave the issue for the future generations to settle it.” It is impossible to know his real convictions and incentives. But that stance helped him perpetrate his positioning in Syria (and in various parts of the Arab world) as the last champion of Arab nationalism.
The second factor was Hafez Assad himself. Irrespective of his record, even his enemies acknowledge the man’s gravitas. Longevity helped. By the late 1990s, almost three quarters of all Syrians had never seen any president but him. And the rest could hardly remember the various presidents and prime ministers who barely exercised any power in 1960s’ Syria. The country’s political and economic ills were growing; but the presence of the strong man of Damascus glued Syria together.
The third factor was fear. Hafez Assad’s Syria was a police state par excellence. Any sign, or suspicion, of rebellion carried a heavy cost.
As he left the scene, and as his son and successor, Bashar Assad, ascended to power, the regime became deprived of any vestiges of legitimacy, and detached from any connections to the old Arab nationalist heritage. Some Syrian and international observers speculated that the London-trained doctor would depart from his father’s path; would introduce political reforms; and would steer Syria towards a trajectory that would, gradually and slowly, lead towards democracy.
This betrayed a misunderstanding of Bashar Assad’s inheritance. His authority hinged on the loyalty of the key circles of powers that had come to define Hafez Assad’s regime in the 1990s. These circles had grown into political, social, and economic power centres with vast interests in the country, and beyond. And some had assertive sectarian worldviews. Maintaining his authority meant that Bashar Assad had to sustain, protect, and continuously prove his loyalty to that power structure. Whether he liked it or not, Bashar Assad was beholden to his inheritance.
Economics helped him. The 2000s’ economic tide lifted the Syrian ship. Foreign direct investments, especially from the Gulf, created tens of thousands of jobs in Damascus and Aleppo, and triggered a conspicuous consumerist wave. The money cycle accelerated. And scores of families, especially in the country’s mercantile upper middle class, found lucrative financial opportunities, in an economic system that the Assad family was becoming increasingly its prime player. New circles of power became, indirectly, associates of the regime. Politically, however, by the late 2000s, the regime became nothing more than a cabal of economic principals dominating several webs of financial interests in a strategically important country.
The wave of the 2011 Arab uprisings reached Syria, as it did other Arab countries, through the demands of secular nationalist youths who wanted political reforms and (some) economic equality. But those seculars were quickly overwhelmed by the rise of tens of thousands of fervent warriors, willing to sacrifice their lives to get rid of Bashar Assad and his regime. Those were not fighting for democracy and political and human rights. Unlike the secular youths who had triggered the first phase of the uprising, those religious warriors saw the Assad regime as an Alawite elite that has ravaged a Sunni Islamic country.
Bashar Assad relished that change in the nature of the uprising. He wanted to convince the Syrian middle classes, and observers worldwide, that his opponents are violent jihadist groups who constitute a peril not only to his regime but to the entire region.
For some, this strategy has worked. In this view, Bashar Assad has managed to garner support from several international corners (most notably from Iran’s Shia Islamic Republic). Others see the strategy as a colossal mistake, for it meant that the struggle has become irrevocably religious, and in such a positioning, his regime will be seen as nothing but an Alawite one.
In fact, Bashar Assad had no choice but to dig deeper in the hole that his father had begun. He could not have acquiesced to the protestors’ demands; his inner circle would have marginalised, or removed him totally from the scene. And he could not have resuscitated the old Arab nationalist legacy. The power structure he presides over, the lack of legitimacy, the sense of fear that was cultivated for decades and that had created many silent enemies, and above all, the sectarianism that his father had installed as a defining feature of the regime, all obliged Bashar to either quit, or continue on the same path he was put on when he was summoned from London to succeed his father.
Bashar Assad proved willing to sacrifice large parts of his country, and tens of thousands of his people, to perpetuate his regime. But this is not the prime reason why he will ultimately fail.
The Syrian middle classes, in or outside the country, fear and detest the violent jihadists wreaking havoc in their country. But whether they see it or not, this threat is transitory. As was the case in several parts of the Arab world in the last half century, violent Islamism in Syria will be defeated, or at least contained.
However, the regime’s irrevocable confirmation that it represents a specific sectarian (Alawite or Shia) identity that is different from the one (Sunni Islamism) that the vast majority of Syrians associate with, is neither transitory nor containable. This cleavage of representation, of identity, has now been laid extremely clear and has been cemented by the loss of hundreds of thousands of lives.
Geopolitical dynamics have transformed Syria into yet another theatre of the region-wide Sunni-Shia confrontation. Iran’s backing of the Assad regime and the financial and logistical support that different Sunni Islamic countries give to the myriad of Sunni rebel groups fighting him, have prolonged the war.
Syria is being devastated. Thousands lose their lives every month. And, so far over three millions have been displaced. The Arab world is losing the heritage of one of its most beautiful and culturally richest countries. All of this distracts observers from the quandary that the Syrian regime had put itself into. Syria’s evolution into yet another theatre of the Sunni-Shia confrontation has gained Bashar Assad more months, or perhaps few years, on top of the ruins surrounding Damascus. But he will not be able to extract his regime from its quandary.
There is a single unescapable outcome of the representation and identity problem that Hafez Assad has created and that Bashar Assad has dug himself deeper into: the regime will fall. Only then will Syria emerge from the sad story of Hafez Assad’s legacy.
You can also read this article at this address:
http://english.ahram.org.eg/NewsContentP/4/133632/Opinion/The-legacy-of-Hafez-Assad-and-the-future-of-Syria-.aspx
May 31, 2015
Letter from Tbilisi
The signature dish in my first dinner in Tbilisi was succulent chicken soaked in a creamy walnut sauce. Probably not the healthiest dish in the world, but as the charming waitress informed me, twice in heavily accented English, “we use only the best ingredients”, and so I had the dish a happy, and by its end, full man. The dish was delicious; its flavours accentuated by the fresh salad, the grilled aubergine, and the wild mushroom stuffed with Georgian cheese. To my mind, the walnut chicken was reminiscent of “Sharkaseya”: the Egyptianised version of a similar Turkish recipe, that one hardly finds these days in any Cairene restaurant, but remains the product of many an Egyptian lady of a certain age and social background.
Heavy delicious meals punctuated my long weekend in Tbilisi. So did history. My companions, Russian and Dutch international relations professionals focused on the Caucasus, explained to me how Georgia has always been a crossroad between the Russian, Turkish, and Persian empires. Crossroads are rich places, though often full of grief. You see the richness in the architecture of Tbilisi’s old centre. Various traditions mix and blur; a sense of harmoniously coexisting East and West pervades the city. Georgian music showcases this meeting of cultures. Even after generous drinking, one still appreciates the oriental dancing beats mingling with sharp, graceful Western tones.
Tbilisi is not beautiful in the absolute, or even relatively when compared to many other European cities. But it’s a city, one feels, that was built, and rebuilt, with an appreciation for the aesthetics. Small touches, from statues to water fountains to street art, remind you that the place has a thriving art culture, and more importantly, that Georgians have an eye, and a place in their life, for beauty.
“Is Tbilisi a European city?” My Dutch companion asked me, the Egyptian man. I guess it depends on how you define “European’ness”. It certainly lacks Paris’s elegance, Amsterdam’s refinement, Vienna’s hauteur, Rome’s accumulation of the features of Western civilisation; it also doesn’t have the beauty and scars that many Eastern European cities display. But, in a way, Tbilisi reminded me of real Naples, away and beyond its cornice; Tbilisi also has touches of inner Athens; and for my eyes at least, it carries reminiscences of Alexandria. In a way, Tbilisi is European, when the notion was inspiring to many Mediterranean cities (and societies) that looked to Europe for cultural orientation and artistic inspiration.
If Tbilisi’s European identity is debatable, its Christian one isn’t. To be specific, it is a clear, and proud, Orthodox Christian city. Simple crosses adorn the city’s skyline, and women’s necks. Austere centuries-old churches sit at the corners of the old city, as if guarding and blessing the passers-by. The sad eyes that Orthodox Christian artists consistently give to Christ stare at you from almost all shops and most small restaurants. And of course, like almost all ancient communities, Georgians see their country as “God’s own place”, the small part of earth that He reserved for Himself.
The wine was certainly heavenly. And when bottles get emptied at a fast pace, and the small carefully prepared dishes keep coming, and beautiful women beguilingly sing and dance, one’s mind alternates between A Thousand and One Nights and Paris’ late night wine bars.
May 14, 2015
Gulf Countries Shape a New Political Order
The meeting is a show of the United States’ commitment to the Arab countries, especially in light of recent U.S.-Iran nuclear negotiations—but also a sign of the growing strength of these countries in the world order. Today, the Gulf is the only stable region in the Arab world. Gulf states do not suffer internal armed conflicts; acute polarizations between major political actors, like secularists and Islamists; and apart from Saudi Arabia’s ongoing military operation in Yemen, Gulf countries do not confront rebel groups operating in the Arabian Peninsula.
Gulf soft power has never been stronger. Hydrocarbon revenues in the last decade exceeded four trillion dollars, allowing Gulf states considerable financial leverage. They underwrite the basic economic needs of several Arab countries, and are the key providers of investment capital across the region. Gulf-owned satellite channels have the largest audiences and the strongest brands among Arabic-speaking communities worldwide. Abu Dhabi, Dubai, and Qatar have become the key centers for funding, collecting, and promoting modern Arab art. Meanwhile, success has become associated with the Gulf: development of cities into world-class business and entertainment hubs, the colossal growth of Gulf merchant-family-conglomerates; and, for tens of millions of young Arabs, the escape from their difficult lives in North Africa and the Eastern Mediterranean to the region’s new land of plenty and promise.
The Gulf’s ascendancy has not been merely a result of financial windfalls. Since the early 2000s, a new generation of leaders has taken charge of decision making in all key Gulf emirates. Educated in and well exposed to the West, supported by armies of advisors and specialists, and with a sense of the influence that immense wealth bestows, this new generation of leaders has led transformative urban and economic projects in their countries. Several of them promoted a culture of innovation and risk-taking, which led to admirable dynamism and significant changes within their states. In Saudi Arabia, the late King Abdullah affected a generational change within the ruling family that brought relatively young, and highly assertive, princes to the fore. Though King Salman, who ascended to the throne in January 2015, reshuffled the cabinet, he has maintained the rise of the younger generation.
The Gulf’s ascendancy is underscored by the relative decline of traditional Arab centers of commerce, culture, and entertainment. Many of Egypt’s education, art, and media institutions, for decades the largest and most influential in the region, have descended into shocking levels of incompetence and intellectual decay. Since emerging from the ruins of its civil war (1975-1990), Lebanon has remained hostage to debilitating sectarianism, and the political and financial influence of Gulf states and Iran. Corrupt regimes have politically, economically, and culturally ravaged Syria and Tunisia. Meanwhile, Morocco has been increasingly looking towards Europe for inspiration and economic opportunities, and to Africa for markets and influence, while reducing its connections to the Arab world.
Global economic trends have also served in the Gulf’s favor. The swelling of Russian, Chinese, and other Asian middle classes gave rise to significant investment capital and spending power, benefiting the Gulf’s booming real estate sector, off-shore investment zones, and consumer centers. Sanctions on Iran incentivised many Iranian merchants and businesses to channel funds to their Gulf neighbours. The opening up of several African markets gave the Gulf’s well-capitalized airlines opportunities to connect European and Asian capitals with these countries, enlarging their market shares in the strategically important aviation industry and boosting their countries’ logistical hubs. Meanwhile, the instability from the Arab uprisings have prompted scores of wealthy Arabs to substantially increase their investments in the Gulf’s comparatively stable economies, particularly in real estate and capital markets.
Regional Responsibilities
The Gulf’s ascension in the region, however, comes with responsibilities. The socio-political polarization in countries following the Arab uprisings have dismantled the political order that had governed the Arab world since the end of the Second World War. Already, several Arab countries have fallen into chaos and anarchy. Gulf states, and especially Saudi Arabia, have responded by mobilizing their military, political, economic, and media resources to, in some cases, salvage the old order, and in others, to shape the emerging one. There is often little consensus among all Gulf countries: Saudi Arabia and Abu Dhabi have repeatedly clashed with Qatar’s strategies, and Oman has consistently carved for itself an independent route. Still, the Gulf has become an important orchestrator of the pace and direction of change in the most troubled parts of the Arab world.
These responsibilities raise strategic threats. For the first time since their emergence as modern political entities, the Gulf states are confronting major upheavals and relying primarily on their own resources without the full backing of a world power. In the 1950s, the Gulf states entered the world arena with support and guidance from Britain. From the 1960s to the mid-1990s, the United States’ strategic backing helped the Gulf states stem, initially, the revolutionary wave of Arab nationalism, and later, that of Iran’s Islamism. Today, the United States is increasingly becoming energy self-sufficient and willing to engage with Iran on various strategic dossiers. The strategic change in the western powers’ needs and priorities have compelled Gulf states to assume security responsibilities on their own. The Gulf’s military interventions, in Bahrain in 2011 and in Yemen in 2015, are examples of this strategic coming of age.
The Gulf is surrounded by fires from all directions: a sectarian Iraq; no central authority in Syria; jihadist groups in the Eastern Mediterranean; and Yemen’s descent into a full-blown war. As the Gulf intervenes in these fraught conflicts, it is losing the detachment that has allowed it, for decades, to deflect the Arab world’s problems. Not only will this involvement strain resources, it is placing acute and unprecedented pressures on decision-making centers in the Gulf.
These interventions are also pitting the Gulf, particularly Saudi Arabia, more starkly against Iran. Irrespective of a United States-Iran nuclear deal, Iran and the Gulf states have asymmetrically different interests in the region. Iran is widening its sphere of interest to areas it sees as historically linked to Persia or Shiism: central and southern Iraq, the Shiite and Alawite parts of Syria and Lebanon, and almost all of Bahrain and northern Yemen. This expansion flies in the face of Arab identity, Sunni Islamism, the ascendancy of the Gulf, and the leading role that Saudi Arabia has played in the Arab and Islamic worlds. Iran comes to this confrontation armed with experienced military and its powerful regional proxies, as well as with its demographic weight, cultural influence, and the confidence driven from being heir to one of the world’s most sophisticated civilizations. This confrontation will prove exacting for Iran’s opponents in the Gulf.
For the last few years, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates have been assembling a wide regional alliance, primarily to bolster their position against Iran, and secondly to confront forces, such as political Islam, that they deem perilous to their interests. This alliance is frail. After briefly toying with the idea of admitting the two non-Gulf Arab monarchies (Jordan and Morocco) to the Gulf Cooperation Council, all Gulf states determined that this will result in movements of labor that wide sections of their societies would find disruptive. Instead, they implemented various financial support programs to the two countries. But generous as these may be, fiscal support and direct investments do not forge strategic links.
The Gulf has also tried to build an alliance by drawing from large Sunni Islamic countries that boast sizable military capabilities, such as Egypt, Pakistan and Turkey. Egypt and Pakistan are among the largest recipients of Gulf financial aid, which is the decisive variable in their economic stability in the short term. But this dependency won’t alter the strategic fact that neither Egypt nor Pakistan has high enough stakes in the Gulf’s confrontation with Iran to merit large and sustainable involvement in this conflict. As for Turkey, the Sunni link is hardly strong enough to balance Turkey’s ambitions for cannibalizing Saudi’s hegemonic role in the region. Moreover, Turkey has more important historic, trade, and cultural links to Iran, than to any Arab country.
These geo-strategic responsibilities come at a time when Gulf states are facing serious internal challenges. Gulf economies remain acutely dependent on hydrocarbon revenues, which generate over three quarters of their total incomes. This has consistently stifled entrepreneurialism and eroded incentives for hard work. There is serious inequality in all Gulf countries, among social classes and regions, which will be exacerbated by the irreversible decline in the long term trajectory of oil prices—a function of slowing marginal growth in demand, improving technologies in fracking and alternative energies, and dismal coordination within the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries. Gulf governments will find it difficult to sustain many of their social welfare systems. Despite the Gulf’s colossal currency reserves, financial pressures are already mounting. Saudi will have a budget deficit of over $30 billion in 2015, equal to nearly 5 percent of its GDP.
Demographic Burden
That over two-thirds of all Gulf populations are under thirty years old, is touted as a blessing, but it could also be a burden. For over a decade now, most Gulf states have introduced programs to decrease the alarming rates of youth unemployment in their societies. Saudi Arabia has launched admirable initiatives to build scientific research centers. But a significant percentage of the jobs generated for Gulf nationals, especially in the civil services, are disguised unemployment. Moreover, a dramatic skills gap between those who study in the West and the majority of those who graduate from the countries’ educational system, renders large segments of young Gulf nationals uncompetitive in today’s global job market.
Demographics pose another threat. In most Gulf states, expatriates constitute around two-thirds of the populations. In the United Arab Emirates, the ratio exceeds seventy-five percent. The presence of such huge foreign majorities, a significant percentage of them is already second generation “guest workers”, affects social traditions, harmony, and identity. Beyond foreign laborers, Gulf states have absorbed hundreds of thousands of westerners and mobile middle classes with vastly different ways of living and value systems. Arab countries house large enclaves that are reminiscent of Singapore and Hong Kong, and that share almost nothing with the Gulf’s heritage.
Diversity is an asset. It makes societies more creative, tolerant, and adaptable to change. Whereas a few decades ago, Gulf societies were known for their cohesiveness around conservative tribal values, and relatively high homogeneity, today, these societies are contending with segments with vastly different social and economic preferences and aspirations. This is a testament to the impressive developmental leap that Gulf societies have made in the last few decades. But political systems have barely changed to reflect such societal shifts. Countries continue to lack genuine political representation, checks and balances, and any real separation between wealth and authority.
Gulf political leaders are cognizant of these challenges. Two strands of thinking are emerging. The first calls for gradual, but substantial, political and economic reforms: strengthening state institutions (primarily the judiciary), the sovereign government ministries, and the public sector; allowing the Gulf’s nascent civil society to grow, detached from the state’s controls; taking progressive steps to reduce Gulf societies’ economic dependency on state largesse; and overhauling the region’s educational system. These steps are envisioned to slowly but steadily dilute power concentration in Gulf politics, result in sustainable political dynamics divorced from familial tensions and intrigues, and increase economic competitiveness.
Some have already taken encouraging steps. For over a decade now, Dubai has been liberalizing utilities pricing. Recent changes in the leadership in Abu Dhabi’s colossal sovereign wealth funds and in Saudi’s ministry of foreign affairs indicate that these highly influential organizations are transforming from vehicles for the ruling families to solid state institutions. But such thinking and reforms also requires Gulf states to limit their ambitions and redeploy dwindling resources at home to tackle unfolding problems. Key decision makers, who have been formed in years of plenty and comfort, will have to re-negotiate their relationship with the rest of society.
All of this leads to another strand of thinking. The new generation of rulers will try to assert the Gulf’s leadership across the region; prolong its period of dominance; widen and deepen the confrontation with Iran; and assume more external responsibilities. The prevailing rhetoric will be that the region is undergoing a period of immense transformation that requires preserving the order that has existed in the Gulf in the last half century. A correct premise leads to the wrong conclusion, and as a result, internal challenges will be marginalized. The most creative and daring forces in the Gulf societies today, the ones trying to affect gradual but serious reforms from within, will be side-lined. Problems will not come to the surface. The Gulf’s current financial power, and especially its hold over the most influential media platforms in the region, will conceal the cracks. But the internal pressures will not disappear. The disquiet will remain quiet, but tensions will simmer until they reach a boiling point.
The greatest threat here is that no one can predict the triggers that will ignite these tensions. The 1979 siege of the Grand Mosque in Mecca (Islam’s holiest shrine and the seat of Saudi religious authority) by a group of religious fundamentals triggered the beginnings of a rebellion. It was quickly crushed. The mass demonstrations in spring 2011 in Bahrain were contained by a swift Saudi and Emirati military intervention. These were small scale surprises that security responses were sufficient to quell. If the next trigger comes from an economic or social shock, it could give rise to a large scale disruption that may not be contained by a rapid security reaction. The Gulf’s political system could face an explosion. Serious internal reform, not external projections of power and assertions of influence, is the sole mitigation.
You can also read this article at this address:
http://www.aucegypt.edu/gapp/cairoreview/Pages/articleDetails.aspx?aid=818
May 11, 2015
Tarek Osman Talks to Al-Jazeera International on North African Migration to Europe
The lives of thousands of migrants are at risk as unprecedented numbers try to make the sea crossing from North Africa to Europe.
Thousands are choosing to make the dangerous journey across the Mediterranean, fleeing from conflict, persecution and poverty at home. But they are often paying a high price.
It is a business as well as a human tragedy. It is estimated that the human trafficking industry as a whole produces almost $26bn a year, and smuggling is part of that.
So what is the cost of migrant smuggling? And who benefits? What is the European Union doing to address the migrant crisis?
Tarek Osman, from the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, joins Counting the Cost to discuss the business of migrant smuggling.
April 23, 2015
A Struggle for the Soul of Islam
It materialized in the periods that followed the fall of the Ottoman-Mameluke state in Egypt and the eastern Mediterranean in the early nineteenth century, after the crumbling of the Arab liberal age in the 1940s, and in the 1970s when secular Arab nationalism proved decisively unable to deliver on the grand ambitions it had given rise to. The current forms of violent Islamism, which rage across the eastern Mediterranean, North Africa, and increasingly in the Arabian Peninsula, attempt to fill the vacuum created by the fall of the Arab state order that had appeared after World War II and was rattled by the Arab uprisings. It also reflects deep anxieties and dilemmas within the Arab and Islamic worlds.
The Arab revolts of the last five years gave rise to an intense transition. It entails a fight between the pillars of the old system which have lost moral authority but retain many levers of power, and young forces which reject the old system but have limited resources and cannot agree, yet, on what frame of reference they want for their societies. The transition includes attempts by immensely rich merchant (and often ruling) families to secure their future at a time of dramatic economic changes, most notably as Middle Eastern oil is increasingly losing its strategic (and monetary) value. The transition marks the coming to the fore of the largest cohort in Arab history of Arab teens and twenty-and-thirty-somethings.
And crucially, the transition revolves round conflicts between different interpretations of Arab liberalism and nationalism; between Arabness and other ethnicities in the region; and between Arabness and Islamism (seeing specific old interpretations of Islamic theology and experiences as the primary, and often the sole, frame of reference for political legitimacy, legislation, social organization, economic undertaking, and identity). That such a complicated transition takes place at a compressed timeframe makes it highly disorienting for the societies undergoing it. The transition has also been unfolding under the gaze of hundreds of millions of Arabs and Muslims, watching it live on satellite channels and the Internet. They see for themselves the cruelty, terror, horror, and banality that accompany such a mega transformation.
This transition is further inflamed by an acute moral problem across the Arab and Islamic worlds. In less than five years, more than a quarter of a million Arabs were killed and close to four million have been displaced. And yet, the Arab and Islamic political and humanitarian responses have been dismal. This created not only a glaring disconnect between the millions of refugees now in the Eastern Mediterranean and North Africa and the rest of Arab societies, but also an emotional gulf within the Arab and Islamic worlds. On one side, there is havoc and desolation, and on the other, indifference and feigning normalcy. For many, this dichotomy is shocking and sickening.
The fall of the order that had dominated the region for decades, the bankruptcy of the old governing systems, disorientation, and repugnancy at the ubiquitous lethargy, all fuel anger. It manifests itself through a rush to the sole value system that, in the eyes of millions, has retained its integrity: religion. Both Middle Eastern Islamism and Christianism have been imbued with immense momentum over the past few years. And in both, the leading groups assumed the roles of either the savior (promising harmony and redemption at a time of chaos and falling certainties) or the martyr (evoking hatred and provoking vengeance, both strong intellectual and emotional anchors). It helped that the fights between Arab secularism and Islamism and between old and new powers have given the largest Islamist groups across the Arab World successive opportunities to assume the role of the victim. Here, Islam has become not only a refuge in a world in which all ideologies and systems have been crumbling; it also became a powerful cause to be defended.
The fall of competing ideologies offered the Islamists a historic opportunity. Arab liberalism, Arab nationalism, and Persian and Turkish top-down impositions of secularism (throughout most of the twentieth century), all have cannibalized the notion of the ummah (the Islamic community as an overarching social identity and political entity). This has always riled the Islamists; and for decades, the ambition of resuscitating the ummah has animated different Islamist groups. The fall of these political systems not only offered an opportunity for mainstream Islamist groups to attempt a peaceful Islamization of different countries; it enthused, and emboldened, other Islamists to try to resurrect the ummah by force.
Unlike mainstream Islamist groups, violent Islamists did not present various ideas to reconcile Islamism with modernity; and they did not try to assume the role of ordinary political actors. They have, simply, rejected all of what has taken hold in the Arab and Islamic worlds in the last two centuries as sinful and deviation from true Islam. In this view, their form of Islamism need not adapt to the experiences of their societies’ modern history, need not incorporate new concepts, and need not demonstrate any kind of tolerance to others, or to others’ beliefs, understandings, or ways of life. This absoluteness (purity, even) made it, for some, a stronger emotional haven and social refuge, than the qualified and guarded Islamism of the large Islamist groups.
Violent Islamism also strongly connected with a yearning for a return of Islamic ascendancy and dominion. For at least two centuries now, the Islamic World has failed to catch up with its historical “other,” Christendom. And though the notion of Christendom has been majorly diluted by the waves of modernity and intellectual and scientific advancement, Islamism was never extinguished in the Middle East. And so at a time of anxiety, fear, and vacuum, the call for defending Islam and asserting Islamism by force blended with an acute awareness of how weak and lethargic the Islamic World has been, as opposed to the West’s strength and eminence.
For tens of thousands of young Muslims, this assertive Islamism was also a form of opposition and objection to the West’s repeated interventions in the Islamic World. As the West came to directly control large parts of the Arab and Islamic worlds, from Afghanistan to Iraq (including Baghdad, one of the most illustrious capitals in the history of the Islamic civilization), Western attitudes to Muslim societies came to be seen as, at best condescending, at worst contemptuous.
The danger here transcends the thousands of deaths and enormous chaos that violent Islamism results in. The combination of the yearning for Islamic ascendancy and agitation at the West redefines the Islamic World’s long interaction with the West as one based on adversity and confrontation. This betrays a limited understanding of Islamic history. It reduces the Islamic World’s experience with modernity in the last two centuries to a struggle with colonialism, various geostrategic confrontations, and, as Samuel P. Huntington put it, “a clash of civilizations,” though in this case, it is reduced by the violent Islamists to its most basic and crudest form: killing in the name of a faith. This exacerbates the division within the Islamic World; it widens the polarization between the Islamists and the secularists to become one between those who see Islamic history through the growth and evolution of its civilization (which has benefited from and added to Western civilization), and those who ignore its rich path through long centuries and varied cultural interactions and restrict it to its earliest societies in the Arabian Peninsula and the Eastern Mediterranean in the seventh and eighth centuries. Here, Huntington’s “unceasing struggle between civilizations” becomes an unceasing struggle within the Islamic World.
Violent Islamism subjugates the myriad civilizational understandings of Islam to strict embracement of its earliest societies, and literalist interpretations of its theological sources. This repudiates all the intellectual innovations that Islamic thinkers developed to ensure that Islam remains a social framework, suitable for different ages and applicable in diverse societies. It renounces the work of the medieval Islamic philosophers who graduated Islamic thinking from its early desert origins and ushered it into the cosmopolitanism and intellectual richness of Persia, the Fertile Crescent, Egypt, and later southern Europe and the Indian subcontinent. It also rejects the work of modern thinkers, such as Jamal Al-Deen Al-Afghani and Mohamed Abdou, who founded ways of marrying traditional understandings of Islamic theology with ways of living in modern societies. Without this contribution, it is highly likely that Arab liberalism and nationalism would have become not only anti-Islamist, but also anti-Islam, similar to Kamal Atatürk’s secularism in Turkey. And so by disclaiming the Islamic civilization’s rich heritage and trying to impose early interpretations of Islam on today’s societies, violent Islamism is foolishly dragging the faith itself into a confrontation with modernity.
Abandoning the Islamic civilization’s opulent heritage also condemns the Islamic World to relive its past. It forces it to undergo the torturous experiences it had endured in the tenth century, and many times since then, of how to evolve an intrinsically flexible theological structure into a social and political frame of reference applicable in societies with vastly different historical experiences and cultural characteristics. Throughout these many experiences, the Islamic World endured various episodes of mass violence.
Some of that violence, though abhorrent, made sense. For example, in their successful endeavour to unite large parts of the Arabian Peninsula under the extremely conservative and highly literalist Wahhabi Islamic doctrine, Abdelaziz Al-Saud’s religious warriors had used chilling violence. Here, violence had a clear and viable objective: creating the Islamic Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. The social and political system that has anchored that Kingdom resonated with the historical experience and cultural characteristics of the communities that lived in that part of the Islamic World in the early decades of the twentieth century. There were similar examples in Islamic history when violence, repugnant as it always is, was an effective approach to realize a viable and sustainable objective. That was particularly true when the purpose for which that violence was perpetrated had inspired large swaths of people. Today, the violence adopted and promoted by various jihadist groups in North Africa and the Eastern Mediterranean, is senseless. Not only is their political objective (creating a seventh-century style state at the heart of the Arab World) unachievable; it is delusional. Resuscitating the earliest form of Islamic state, stripped from all the religious, historical, cultural, and moral features that made the original one a seed for a rich civilization, is not an objective that will inspire or resonate with any large group of Arabs or Muslims today.
The thinking of today’s violent Islamism also denies the Islamic World the major advancements in human and civil rights that large sections within most Islamic societies have come to see as basic freedoms. And it restrains these societies from seeking innovative ways for retaining their Islamic frame of reference (under whatever definitions) and, at the same time, accepting new milestones of human knowledge. Rigid thinking and circumscribed frameworks will render the majority of believing Muslims utterly detached from understandings that biology and physics are making increasingly irrefutable. This will not only entrench the Islamic World’s lethargy, but will gradually dilute the connection between millions of young Muslims (and coming generations) and Islam itself.
Over time, this will become a threat to the religion. The simplicity of violent thinking, the depravity it descends souls into, and the harshness and crudeness it engenders within societies, will impoverish and corrupt contributions to Islamic theology. The more this murderous thinking ingrains itself within the Islamic World, the less sophisticated the Islamic World will be in dealing with scripture and with its diverse set of sources. The result will be less ingenious ways of interpreting the sacred, precisely at the time when it will be under extreme scrutiny by new generations with vastly different social perspectives and scientific certainties. Today’s violent Islamism is arguably one of the most significant perils that the Islamic World, and Islam itself, has ever confronted.
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