It is easy to be an Arab pessimist today. The Arab Spring, once heralded by many as the beginning of something beautiful and promising, is now a dark nightmare; legions of reactionary interpreters of Islam take hold in North Africa, Syria today is set to become like Yugoslavia in the 1990s, voices of racial and sectarian intolerance abound from Gulf to ocean (as pan-Arabists once liked to collectively refer to Arab lands) and, last but not the least, the demographically triumphant Palestinians remain under effective apartheid rule.
There are many dead and those who survive are either resigned or engaged in deep hatred of anything they are not.
Hamid Dabashi called the Arab Spring the end of post-colonialism; I hope he still thinks so. What we are undergoing as states, ideologies and people continues to be historic. Alas all our deaths, tears and dejection will be reflected upon by our grandchildren and duly accepted and pseudo-forgotten by their grandchildren. For all its ugliness, chaos and loss, this moment is only temporarily eminent.
I’ve been reading back-to-back primers on how we got here; educated and incensed middle class twenty-somethings on Facebook, neoliberal IMF-dictated policies, America, the Muslim Brotherhood, 9/11 and regime oppression. It is probably all of the above.
Bewilderment abounds on how Islamists, primarily Muslim Brotherhood branches and offshoots, have consolidated power in so many places — in power and in opposition. Is it their pious Islamic appeal, their social welfare networks or disciplined membership system? All that is relevant, but there is a more fundamental reason behind their success — they represent the continuation of the familiar.
The crisis of the Arabs is not the Muslim Brotherhood as much as it is the circumstances that have shaped the movement and presented it for quite some time as the only ‘untainted’ political force. Secretive extra-state organisations that employ religion for political hegemony have existed throughout history.
The real issue here is the Arabs’ absence of individuality. What we have now is the latest iteration of a process that has been taking place for more than 200 years: Oppressive Ottoman rule replaced by repressive colonialism replaced by left-wing revolutionary military brass turned authoritarian civil servants turned neo-liberal US client states — and collectivist throughout.
In other words, Arabs and political Islamists understand only one language: that of the jama’ah i.e. the group. Call it sect, tribe or party … it is an affiliate-based pyramid system. A worried people asked to vote overnight will run to the hills of the least common denominator: The hill of group.
One-stop-shop
The political Islamists portrayed themselves as a one-stop-shop — they had bankers, lawyers, consultants and fatwas. The liberals, leftists, nationalists had none of that. The Arabs may theoretically understand political, economic and social freedom but not intellectual freedom and certainly not electoral responsibility.
The Islamists had to win; it was both natural and necessary. It was natural because the revolution only happened in streets, not minds. Those elected to lead were chosen because their rhetoric was too familiar if edited enough to replace Arabic and National with Islamic. It was necessary because they had to rule and fail and be relegated from exceptional ideology to just another political party, perhaps even mediocre.
It is unclear how and when the Arab Spring will achieve any of its slogans but it seems destined to achieve two other things.
First, there are simultaneous calls to interpret and apply Islam, both more strictly and more broadly. While it’s tempting to liken the current state of Islam to the — pre-reformation — Catholic Church, a Martin Luther does not seem to be among us. And while a contextual interpretation of religious text may not be beckoning, the brewing tensions of a grand Sunni-Shiite war certainly are.
One that is likely to be long, bloody and messy. While sectarian scuffles have taken place in Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia and Iran the epicentre of the battlefield is almost certain to be in Iraq and Syria — quite fittingly the two major parts of Mesopotamia.
Centuries of regression in Islam are coming to roost on the back of the Arab Spring. One cannot imagine that all the racial, tribal, sectarian and religious absolutism would wither away at the arrival of cosmetic regime changes. This fear-based faith in intolerance of the other merely for being ‘the other’ is a product of decades of educational indoctrination and centuries of frustration at the passing of glorious days.
Second, the current borders of Sykes-Picot are no longer defensible. All cities and regions will outlast the Arab Spring as they’ve outlasted many other transformations, physical and metaphysical, but not all states will. The few states that can justify their borders through geographic legitimacy or economic governance will remain; some might even expand upon the failure of others. These new formations, most of which are likely to be secessions, will not last either.
One should take note of the short-lived success of ethnic states in Eastern Europe after the First World War. Alas, like the sectarian wars, these breakdowns of colonial nation states are natural and necessary.
It is unlikely that any Arab state that has experienced regime change will arrive at any form of political stability, economic development or social cohesion before the debate on the role of religion and legitimacy of borders is agreed upon.
Shuttle diplomacy and economic aid may buy the region time, but only time. The void that needs to be filled is the intellectual and existential abyss that all these wars and breakdowns will leave behind. Who are we? What does Arab mean? What does Muslim mean? How will we arrive at post-modernity, eventually? Budding and aspiring Arab philosophers take note.
Everything else is noise. Gloom may seem appropriate but this is necessary. The roots of German Nazism and Italian Fascism lie in their centuries long divided principalities and negligible success at colonialism and capitalism — they had to catch up. The Arab people will also heed similar extreme and counter-enlightenment calls for some time.
Yes, the speed of time has changed and Egypt does not need 180 years to go through five republics, two empires and two restorations to arrive at stability like France did, but even a fraction of that is a decade or two. This will go on for the rest of our lifetime, generation Y.
Mishaal Al Gergawi is an Emirati current affairs commentator. You can follow him on Twitter at www.twitter.com/algergawi
