Being Arab. Samir Kassir
of those who watch from afar, applauding in front of their TV sets.
But whether Lebanese or Palestinian, resistance serves only to highlight overall Arab powerlessness. The second intifada, which started in September 2000, bears this out day after day. The hold of the concept of ‘total intifada’ is such that any analysis lays one open to accusations of treason. The idealization of resistance per se, based on a misunderstanding of the situation in Lebanon, prohibits any debate on the means that should be employed and so gives precedence to the most spectacular. Even if, like the suicide attacks, they are the most counter-productive. The Islamization of the Palestinian struggle, despite yielding sporadic gains that flatter the Arab public’s wounded pride, hardly arrests feelings of Arab powerlessness or counters the overall impression of general malaise. It has had quite the opposite effect in fact: the blurring of Palestine and Iraq has been of no help to either, and merely swamped the self-image of the Arabs of the Middle East – and the image the world has of them – in a tide of blood.
It has to be said that this powerlessness is not a cause of despair for all Arabs. There is an active, and apparently growing, faction that regards it as a secret cause for exultation, and as legitimizing acts of apocalyptic or at best Samsonian violence. The adherents of radical Islam are not really worried at all, in fact. Even the denunciation of the Western ‘crusade’ has for them the merit of confirming the superiority of the victims; all the latter then have to do is claim their victimhood and thus ascend to paradise.
This religious reflex is itself a sign of the Arab malaise. Of course, considering political Islam as one factor of the Arab impasse may be seen as fanatically secularist. If they have changed, there’s no need to insist on judging the Islamists by their past conduct, and by the fact that they played the Americans’ game, and in Palestine the Israelis’, for far too long. Everyone is entitled to change and one should no doubt concede the possibility that the Islamists’ transformation is permanent and their stand against foreign domination sincere. But this is still not enough to make one accept Islamism as the only possible way. For whether if is or is no longer a foreign agent, Islamism still reinforces the Other. In justifying, or enacting, the clash of civilizations, it gives supporters of the crusade their rationale and enables the West to use all the means afforded it by its technological capabilities to maintain its supremacy over the Arabs, and thereby to perpetuate Arab powerlessness.
A DEEP SENSE OF MALAISE PERMEATES EVERY CORNER OF THE ARAB WORLD
SOME PEOPLE IN Europe, and even in the Arab world, might consider the picture I have painted of the Arab malaise as itself a sign of the crisis, in so far as its presupposition of a global Arab entity smacks of pan-Arabism. One school of thought, inspired by American neoconservatives, maintains that the persistence of Arabism is one of the causes of the Arab world’s backwardness. This is most improbable. The picture would be no more cheering if one were to consider each Arab country separately. Admittedly, a tracking shot of this atypical continent would reveal some contented Arabs, and others who are aspiring to be so, but it would also show at every turn societies in crisis and deadlocked states, all ill-equipped to take their futures into their own hands.
Painful though it may be, it is worth conducting such a review of the Arab world, and Egypt, which has long played a pivotal role in it, is an obvious starting point. In the overpopulated Nile valley, with its vast economic disparities, the Egyptian state displays a chronic inability to manage its country’s human resources, let alone play a role beyond its borders. A hypertrophied bureaucracy blocks the workings of an economy that combines the worst of both worlds: the disadvantages of state capitalism, once rashly called socialism, with the failings of ultra-free-market economics. Emblematic of this sclerosis is the highest office of state, which has been held by the same man for twenty-three years, a record of longevity unsurpassed since Muhammad Ali in the nineteenth century.2 At least he initiated the country’s modernization and set in train decisive reforms, the effects of which were felt for over a century. His successor shows no such ambition, nor, oddly enough, does he even portray himself as a hero, unlike his predecessors – perhaps because he knows that the real power lies with the military, from which he came, which is itself another sign of the impasse. Such ‘modesty’, however, hasn’t prevented either the personalization of the regime or the extensive practice of nepotism: accusations of wheeling and dealing have been levelled at the president’s elder son for years, while certain political and economic circles openly lobby for his younger son to inherit office. But Egypt’s impasse is not merely a matter of governance. The whole society, including the elite, seems so in thrall to an ideology of stagnation that the few voices of protest are easily co-opted by the regime to become stooges of a pseudo-democracy. Meanwhile Islamism looms large: fuelled by a popular religious revival and indulged by the government, it has been spreading for years, veiling women and closing minds in ever increasing numbers.
To the south of Egypt, the Sudan, having barely emerged from a twenty-year civil war, now threatens to descend into a new one. Scene of an extraordinary squandering of natural riches, this colossus of the African continent and the Arab world is one of the least advanced countries on the planet. This in itself should sum up the stasis in which it is mired. Despite the end of the civil war, its integrity as a state remains in jeopardy, since the agreement that concluded hostilities explicitly allows for the possibility of the animist, Christian-dominated South breaking away after a transitional phase. Not to mention the immeasurable damage it has done to Arabs’ reputation in black Africa. Not content with having oppressed the South, the Arabized, Muslim North now gives allegedly out-of-control militias carte blanche to persecute the people of Darfur.
To the west of Egypt, Libya has been frozen in Gadaffism for thirty-five years. The global populism of the ‘guide of the revolution’ has alienated it from the international community and caused it to fall out with most of the Arab states. Oscillating between the Levant, the Maghreb and Africa, Gaddafi’s Libya has ended up abdicating any claims to be a regional power in return for a certificate of good behaviour dramatically conferred on it by a West at war. Its isolation is far from over, however, since the soi-disant ‘regime of the masses’ has produced a political vacuum in a closed society under constant police surveillance.
Further west, each of the three principal countries of the Maghreb after their own fashion offers equally dispiriting images of the Arab impasse. Morocco has embarked on its democratic transition too late and only to a limited extent. Reined in by the palace, the multiparty system hasn’t even been able to reduce the hoarding of wealth that is embodied by the Makhzen system,3 which has meant the party of government, the former opposition, losing its credibility. After a brief improvement in the press, freedom of information has once again got short shrift. Unalleviated by political progress, problems of underdevelopment fuse with the rhetoric of militant Islam to produce networks of jihadists, which then spread to other countries. In Tunisia, Islamism is kept in check for the moment by the police, who use their power to take the entire society prisoner and silence any democratic expression or criticism of the mafia-type corruption that is feeding on the country’s economic growth. This authoritarianism has in turn fostered a culture of tacit dissent among the working class – and elsewhere – that distorts the genuine social achievements of Bourguibism.4 But Algeria is undoubtedly the most dramatic embodiment of the Arab predicament, and perhaps the most resonant, more so even than Egypt, because it was once such a symbol of promise.
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