A Couple of Words About Innocence In the Arab World

Rather bizarrely for a man of letters known for his utter lack of innocence (and I say that with much admiration), Elias Khouri declared the other day in Al Quds al Arabi Newspaper that “the time of innocence has ended.”

I am not sure whom he had in mind when he opened his piece thus, because I don’t recall that innocence had ever come visiting on this side of the Mediterranean. In Lebanon, his and my hometown, especially, the term is so alien we always opt for “tourist” by way of a put down.

And still, it clobbers you every single time, death on the face of a child. Nothing touches a hard heart quite like innocence snuffed out. But then, what currency has more political purchase for hard hearts at war than the visage of toddlers stopped dead in their tracks? People tend to think it’s the race for the moral high ground that imbues such images with such import, when in fact it’s equally the race away from it: in their name, revenge is excusable, slaughter even, permissible. After all, the reasoning goes, it was because of them that innocence in us is lost.

I don’t know if the recent display of Syrian youth in their white shrouds, so serene and so dead, gassed into oblivion signals a new twist in Syria’s epic collapse. But I do know that whichever way the politics turn it will do so over a mass of shards.

Should this have been the purpose of the West, as our conspiracy theorists claim, then it must be the most bitter irony for them that Assad, on cue and as promised, brought the whole Syrian house down. Even if he were, in the end, to win this battle royale, they need but for a minute imagine a shattered Syria over the next 20 years and they will know that the deed, if indeed it was ever that, is done. Conspiracy or not, Syria, that old country, is already gone.

Sure, with a victory in hand, Hezbollah and Iran will have retained their foothold in this Godforsaken queen of the Levant. And, for the West, what exactly would be wrong with that? At a minimum, Iran and Assad will own the fight against Sunni Jihadists, with the US et al content to watch and tinker (sometimes even help) from the sidelines. By way of an explanation for Western reticence, there is none more compelling than that.

If Syria is the plague, what of the danger to the neighbors, one might ask. Indeed what of them? The obvious truth is that the region is floundering about in rivers of morass. Even the most likely scenarios stand on shifting assumptions. We have an Arabic saying for when we are unable to pin down the future: “For every event, a conversation.”

But there is one fact we can hold on to as we look ahead. When the dust settles—as it always does—only Syria and the dreams of those who truly loved it will have died. The whole lot of them—the Assads, Hezbollah, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Israel, Turkey, the US...—feel free here to add all your favorites--can crow over the remains, happy that whatever Syria is, it is not the other camp’s.

In Shorthand, Main Takeaways from Egypt’s June 30

For Egypt and all those who have a stake in its future, the real significance of June 30 is located in the rubble of Mohammed Mursi’s first presidential year. And lying dead or seriously injured among Egypt’s human victims are so many of conventional wisdom’s own children.

To identify those and bury them is not to lay claim to a disturbingly unruly future, but to have a much humbler respect for its promise.  

We can go on endlessly about the immediate details that attach to the volatility that is currently tearing at Egypt: the constitutional crisis, the haplessness of the Muslim Brotherhood, burgeoning economic problems, the stubborn resilience of the so-called deep state, the factionalism that plagues the opposition… But there are trends that run like wild currents underneath this ceaseless tug of war. They will not tell you what is immediately next for Egypt, but use them as guideposts and they will help you better interpret the long days ahead.

1.   It is finally time to concede that Islamism is not an easy shortcut into the political and social fabric of Egypt. Formidable though it is, Islamism neither commands this country’s society nor its politics.

And hence the assumption (even hope) by the powers that be that the Muslim Brotherhood will stabilize and reign in polities in transition is proving dangerously shortsighted and ill-considered.

For more insight about the trials and travails of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, check out Winter in Cairo by Marc Lynch.

2.   The main challenge to Islamism is post-Islamism. Secularism does not belong anywhere—yet!—in the raging debate between Egyptians. The chief opponents mobilizing against political Islam are true, bona fide believers who have embraced Islam’s role in the public arena and are now keen on establishing their rights under it. The push, in other words, is for a more generous interpretation of Islam’s exhortations and a more rigorous recognition of its serious limitations as a “solution” to life’s mundane problems. This trend is not new and it is not sudden, but has been decades in the making.  

For more insight on post-Islamism, check out Asef Bayat’s two must-read books: Making Islam Democratic and Politics as Life

3.   Grassroots activism matters. The notion that mighty international and local forces dictate events and the rest of us just live them is plain wrong. People working bottom up can bend wills and win a seat at the table.

Moreover, the official opposition is but one gauge of Egypt’s tense mood. And much like all other traditional political actors they’re not leading but scurrying behind the people’s manic trajectory.

For more insight on the pulse of the Egyptian people, check out Mona al Ghobashy’s Egyptian Politics Upended, Mariz Tadros’ Egypt’s Unfinished Transition or Unfinished Revolution and my own post, Don’t Peep at Egypt Through the Keyhole.

4.   We already know that the ballot box is not a byword for democracy, and it certainly is not a guarantor of legitimacy. More significantly and of infinite more relevance to a case study like Egypt’s, elections under murky, helplessly complicated, skewed electoral rules in climates that resist the fundamental benchmarks of transparency and efficiency give the winners little more than the pretense of victory.

For more insight on the oft neglected issue of the electoral process, check out How to Win an Election and Lose a Presidency by the Atlantic Council’s Nadine Wahab.

Enough said. 

On Lebanon and Akram Zaatari's Letter to a Refusing Pilot

All countries living on the edge overflow with paradox. Because of war or famine or internecine conflict or fratricide or the hell of it all, humanity gets to showcase its demons only to egg on the angels. Like that, destruction wrestles with creation, lunacy with sobriety, gunfire with poetry.

            

Like that, Lebanon seems to have been living day in, day out. Twenty years after the supposed end of the civil war, our sectarianism remains as treacherous as it is vulgar. Not from nothing the video parties in Tripoli to watch Qatari or Saudi sponsored Sunni fighters munching on   Alawite hearts. Not lost on us either the sight of Hezbollah mothers ululating sons “martyred” while beating Sunni Syrian heads to the ground. All, of course, courtesy of the regional struggle for power in Syria in which Lebanese, dependable proxies that we are, play the foot soldiers.

And yet, as is the wont of Lebanon, this month alone saw Beirut host the Hay Festival, Ashkal Alwan’s Home Works Forum, the Samir Kassir Beirut Festival and the Inaugural Conference of the Asfari Institute for Civil Society and Citizenship. To cap it all, a group of art patrons has just launched the Lebanese Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, with a singular work by the ever so conceptual (and remarkable) Akram Zaatari.

No need to juxtapose the colliding images for message and meaning. It’s a stale technique and, anyway, this is not about the push and pull that wracks our so-called Lebanese identity. These ostensible paradoxes, two decades into this post-war situation, actually beggar a fundamental question: Are our creative energies little more than forced vigor in an otherwise severely impaired nation, or do they, in fact, betray a part of Lebanon no less real than its maladies?

In other words, are we part lie, or are we actually an extreme type of Gemini?

Let me go even further: Close to 100 years on, is Lebanon more than a name, more than a space between four borders? Battered, yes, but whole. If it is, then ours is indeed a land of anomalies and absurdities.

If it is not, then we are the inhabitants of countless hamlets simply sharing the same geography and partaking, for convenience, of the same atrociously inefficient and corrupt state bureaucracy. Which would mean that the only lie here is Lebanon, and the only paradox is our reflexive refusal to treat it as such in full view of this stark reality.

Convoluted? Not really.

For years I have maintained that cosmopolitan, freewheeling Beirut floats like a bubble above tragic landscapes; that the blithe pretense is all ours and the dire truth is, say, Akkar’s. The contrast was always meant to betray much more than the usual class divides and periphery-center alienations that plague many a country. It meant to question the very right of this tiny patch of Beirut to claim a presence as valid as Lebanon’s other selves.

I was wrong. My mistake all along was in assuming, when it came to this argument, that Lebanon may be mad, but it is one and distinct, the actual sum of its many bizarre pieces. And so I thought that if there is an overarching Lebanese paradox, it is simply in the way the genuine accommodates the contrived, or in the way fiction mingles with fact.

It’s above my pay grade to critique Akram Zaatari’s Letter to a Refusing Pilot, but my gratitude to him all the same for nudging me to revisit a matter I had long ago tucked away in the attic of my mind. A conceptual piece, the film shows with almost unbearable grace that all politics is very personal in anguished locales.

It is ironic that Zaatari composed this Letter for Lebanon’s Pavilion, because it flouts all boundaries as it looks back and inward. The high school, which his father ran and which an Israeli pilot refused to bomb in 1982, only to be brought down by another, is the bond that ties the narrative even as it deconstructs it.

His beginnings.

Imagination as flight and sanctuary.

Sidon, his city.

War, loss, survival, youth as a continuum.

The skies that could be so unforgiving and the sea that could be so merciful.

People disobeying orders on contested terrains.

These are the Letter’s frames.

It’s not surprising that Zaatari’s quest holds fast onto Albert Camus’, “I should like to be able to love my country and still love justice.”

Do we not love Lebanon when we love the justice of letting her go?