On Obama and the Middle East

The Ever So Inspiring Vexing Obama

How many times did we hear it said around the world, in 2008, that Barak Hussein Obama is the new president of the new America?

It isn’t just the fresh African-American heritage and its mix of Christian and Muslim blood that had the crowds rhapsodizing in ecstasy. It’s that he harks from the old colonies and yet inhabits Rome so comfortably; the education, the worldliness, the sophistication, the very sharpness of him and—here comes the whopper—that he’s so self-satisfied and superior. Unnerving as that made Obama to many Americans, it actually added that extra halo over him among his foreign admirers.

Once sold on the résumé, it was very easy for his partisans to make the leap from profile to policy. For them, the compelling logic went, Obama’s style of leadership and conduct were bound to be as transformational as his person.

It was thought, who better than this American president to refashion the purpose and use of power in a world that seems to be walking briskly towards a radically different era. It isn’t just that emerging centers of influence—all non-western—have been giving the old club a run for its ideas and money. Technology’s innovations also have been chipping away at the deep-set walls between center and periphery. Civil societies have been bypassing their governments, forging transnational links and making robust common cause. Even capitalism itself, already sullied by the IMF and its neoliberal agenda in the league of developing nations, was taking a battering in much of the West by 2008. To boot, the US was finally showing the serious strains of its military and financial excess.

It helped, of course, that, in the endless battles between imperium and its foreign dominions, indigenous grit, facing overwhelming military might, stood its ground and occasionally won. In this movie, Vietnam ran like a preview of things to come.  

And so came Obama on the heels, we must never forget, of a frighteningly insular man called Bush, with a frighteningly adventurous troop. Thus the hope, the clamor and the Nobel Prize. The expectations of many Americans (and otherwise) were that the change would be dramatic, loud enough for us to hear the crusts of international politics shift.

Truth be told, plenty were the skeptics, none more than President Obama himself, enumerating the constancies that belied the fast-moving trends. His very own Oslo speech, upon receiving the Nobel peace prize, waxed eloquent about the seductiveness of lofty ideals once tempered by the irresistible logic of power politics.

Amongst us Middle Easterners there’s always been fury—as there should be—at an atrocious US track record that could stretch as far back as President Woodrow Wilson’s failure to offer more than lip service to the constructs of democracy and self-determination that graced his famous 14 points. President Dwight Eisenhower’s warning to England, France and Israel to withdraw from the Sinai in 1956 is a very lonely moment when American interests coincided with Arab ones.

And yet, however deep our outrage, it’s not every day that we get to hear a politically savvy thinker, like Hamid Dabashi, bemoaning an American president thus: “Oh, how deeply did he betray that hope! He coulda been a contender!" We are very much in the habit of taking offense at American violations of our national integrity or disregard for our political yearnings, or, worst of all, its collusions that tear at the very fabric of our lives. Rarely do we criticize an American president for disappointing our hope in him, since we were conditioned a long time ago not to entertain such silly sentiments.

It took an Obama to rekindle the poetry. So, going back to Dabashi: Obama “coulda been a contender” for what exactly? 

Although he doesn’t quite say it, I suspect Dabashi was hoping that this American presidency might usher in an age of imperial enlightenment of a sort, watershed achievements like a juridical withdrawal from Afghanistan, a palatable peace treaty in Palestine, a more balanced policy towards Iran… Overall, a concerted effort to shorten the distance between the US’s high minded Jeffersonian principles and its hard-edged interests.

Just to be clear, as mindful as I am of the absurdity of pairing imperialism with enlightenment, my tongue was nowhere near my cheek when I was writing the above paragraph. The proposition that a retrenching US must reimagine itself in the region—to show more suppleness and farsightedness in pursuing its interests--is one that has been made by policy makers and critics alike. Leaving the very fundamental but elusive matter of justice aside, the rationale is that, notwithstanding blunders like Iraq, it might seem like the US has not done too badly over the past century, standing as it does now alone, with all its previous rivals nearly vanquished or snapping at its coattails. But the cumulative effect of its connivance with and/or indulgence of the Middle East’s most reactionary and predatory countries (Israel included) has been ruinous to the prospects for stability that the US needs most today as it retreats and pivots towards more pressing spheres.

Judging by the hyperbole in Dabashi’s lamentations, Obama’s record so far—at least for his betrayed fans--is more than disappointing. The kill lists, the soaring number of drone-strikes and other such like loathsome prerogatives of empire shock, while “servility” to Israel infuriates. Needless to say, the US’s reliance on multiple yardsticks in navigating the current Arab uprisings—quick uptake in Tunisia and Egypt, firepower in Libya, silence on Bahrain, studied reluctance on Syria…—have invited the usual cries of foul play.

But the truth is that Obama’s tactics point to tentative departures from old policies and new frictions with longstanding allies that have translated into openings for those of us playing on the opposite side of this perennially dirty game of geopolitics. He predictably gave way on Yemen and Bahrain, but rebuffed Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah on Egypt’s Husni Mubarak, moved swiftly on Tunisia and is still derailing Qatari and Saudi efforts to arm Syrian insurgents, quite a few of whom are extremely unattractive Islamists.

He has yielded to Israel, as any American president would, on Palestine, but he has stubbornly and effectively resisted it on Iran. One could argue that Israel’s unusually audacious efforts to manipulate great power interests on an issue much bigger than its size—even if it is such a “special” friend--were bound to fail. But the art of Obama’s diplomacy, which publically mined Israeli dissent as much as it capitalized on the US’s sheer heft is not lost on Netanyahu and his camp—it certainly shouldn’t be lost on the rest of us. And double standards do pervade the cocktail of sanctions against Iran, but I’d be interested to hear a serious counterargument on the better path of war from other than those whom history has already proven insane.

Clearly, Obama is not thinking of the good people of the Middle East when he insists on flexibility in this very uncertain climate. And he might well be embracing alliances with forces, such as the Muslim Brotherhood, which might be as averse to a freer, more democratic politics as the old regimes. But precisely because of the fluidity of the times and the US’s dimming star, Obama has had to listen harder and watch carefully the swing of the pendulum. We should all remember that one of his more intriguing qualities is how well he manages to unsettle his supposed friends.

And since Dabashi himself describes the man as a mere opportunist, the hint for our opinion leaders to quit the outrage, take the opportunity, catch up with the grassroots and help make irreversible and resounding our newfound vibrancy.

In one of the more lucid takes on the “bewilderingly diverse and ferocious energies” recently unleashed in the Arab region, Pankaj Mishra, one of the more robust public intellectuals seguing between East and West, posits that the revolts are but the latest manifestations of a century-long struggle by the people of Asia to wrestle themselves free of Western domination. The US, no less than the colonial powers of old, has long resisted, at a huge cost in resources and lives, this trajectory. Even now

Republicans calling for President Obama to ‘grow’ a ‘big stick’ seem to think they live in the world of Teddy Roosevelt. Liberal internationalists arguing for even deeper American engagement with the Middle East inhabit a similar time warp; and both have an exaggerated idea of America’s financial clout after the biggest economic crisis since the 1930s.

 If the main question before us is whether the final push towards a “post-Western era…will be as protracted and violent as Europe’s mid-20th century retreat from a newly assertive Asia and Africa,” it is certainly arguable that an opportunist at the White House is all we need to manage the transition with the least damage possible. When we breathed a sigh of relief at the reelection of Obama, did we not phew with that in mind?

When Will Bach Come to Mecca?

In very private company, a venerable Arab commentator is in the habit of repeating every so often an old maxim of his: "I will know that we [the Arab world] have made it when I rhapsodize to Bach in Mecca.”

At first impact, the man’s pining hits almost every sensitive chord in the politics of our identity. His is a strike out in a bowling alley, hitting Islam and Arabhood with all the pride and honor and pieties and colonial insults and indigenous humiliations and Western arrogance and nativist chauvinisms that are packed into them.

Were he to sigh this way in public, death would be his wish. And herein lies the heart of the problem: much more than the actual yearning itself, audacious though it may be, it is this mindless intolerance towards any perceived provocation that speaks most poignantly about one of our more confounding regional realities.  

In truth, this Arab Muslim’s vision is anything but an affront: a people who are confident enough of who and what we are that we think nothing of welcoming the best of the West—and what could be more sublime than Bach’s cantatas?—to the most sacred place in Islam.

Why not, for that matter, Umm Kulthum, the better to press home the source of the pain and the urgency of, first, an intra-cultural dialogue? Because this attitude that deems diversity--the very essence of humanity—anywhere between a grave offense and blasphemy considers homespun colors even more menacing than the imported variety. In fact, for those who hold dear their grievances and phobias, the West and its modernities are the easiest targets to caricature and slander. But what do you do with the enemy within?

Insist, especially in these times, on sealing yourself clean of the world around you, from the best of its challenges to the worst of its cheap shots, and yours is a life of insupportable hypocrisy and contradictions, not to mention every imaginable infraction.

Ours, of course, is not a unique mistrust of (or even rage against) the Other. Wherever there is life, there is injury, bigotry, hate, along with a lurking mob eagerly waiting to feed off of them. All cultures suffer demagogues. But ours have been climates in which supposedly fringe groups have had a remarkably successful track record in barging into the center, enfeebling serious discourse and dictating agendas. As crowds, egged on by high-ups acting as lowlifes, grow apoplectic about the merest slight to Islam, most of us have a tendency to recoil, as if retreating into our eternal dystopia, ceding precious ground for others to monopolize.

How unbelievable is it that the hilariously dumb Innocence of Muslims and its maker Nakoula Bassely Nakoula—what the hell kind of name is that anyway?--a moronic, meth-cooking, two-bit crook could manage this kind of havoc in our midst? Even if we were sure that the idiot is a sinister conspiracy dressed as a clown, could we not offer a reaction—if any were required at all—that is more befitting of the man and his movie, perhaps a snigger and a yawn?

They say that this mayhem started out as Islamist fury and very quickly morphed into a free for all. But the multiplicity of reasons does not obscure the fundamental fact that this Islamism of ours can’t seem to rise above, let alone outsmart, even the stupidest of taunts. Worse still, that’s the last thing it wants. But since Islamists have long been insisting that theirs is the only answer to an all out Western assault on our identity, surely they can muster a more convincing one than just frothing at the mouth.

True, among the countless provocateurs that get mobs riled up, religion is king. There’s nothing quite like a mob drunk on sanctimony as it storms the streets avenging its victimhood or flaunting its self-righteousness. In that, we are no different from other offenders. But frankly, this pious fury that is always agitating on the surface of our collective existence is but that massive boil that keeps erupting in a body politic that appears utterly lacking in resilience. More than that, a body politic that visibly relishes its sickness, thinking it the proper antidote to all contaminants, homegrown no less than foreign.

If the trashy Innocence of Muslims is the price Liberty pays for its insistence on the vital tenet of freedom of speech, so it goes that the mad frenzy of the last week is the price Islamism is happy to pay for its insistence on the fundamental absence of that same freedom of speech.

This illiberalism does not a citizenship make. When sticking to their guns, as it were, it behooves Islamists (of all strains) to think hard about the lessons of the Arab uprisings. More importantly, it behooves the rest of us to do the same. For a while now, we, in the Middle East, have been witness to conversations on the compatibilities between democracy and Islam. It’s time to jack up the volume.

And should--for some bizarre reason--the West, and specifically the United States, be feeling the need to revisit its policy in the region, the first places to land in and the first friends to talk to are those who have long given sustenance and comfort to the most troubled among Islam’s devout children. 

Did It Have To Be This Way For the Assads and Hezbollah?

When the situation began to palpably deteriorate for the Assads of Syria, one question kept circulating with more frenzy than all others: Did it have to be this way for the family?

It seemed like Bashar had an assortment of options at his disposal that could have helped him avoid the unenviable fate that is now staring him in the face. He could have delivered swift justice for the children of Dara’, for starters. He could have reined in his shabiha, depended less on military solutions, opted for more dramatic reform politics… He had the state, the security apparatus, the army, the commercial classes, the Christians and Alawites, Aleppo and Damascus, and, for a while there, even Obama.

Bashar, the story went, could have played it differently and come out the victor. In fact, as Bassem Haddad penned it in MERIP, Bashar could have played it differently way before the uprising.

But then, that’s not how the Assads came to rule Syria. Its not that they were lulled into a false sense of infallibility after 42 years of reign, although the cards certainly appeared well stacked on their side of the deck. It’s that, for them, to lose even a bit of grip on power meant to lose grip over all of it. The nature of this family’s sway is not just the nature of Hafez Assad and his kin, it is the stuff of centuries’ long Alawite wretchedness under Sunni rule. However successful this community has been in joining mainstream life, however eager the Assads have been to subsume their identity in a larger Arab nationalist one, the dichotomies that had long crisscrossed Syrian society were not erased so much as they were papered over by a thick veneer of Ba’athism, cooptation of the Sunni sect and pseudo-secular policies. That’s why Assad, very soon after the uprising, decided to turn the fight into a sectarian conflict: he knew Syrian earth was fertile ground for his strategy.

A few months ago, I heard it said by sources close to the palace that when Bashar early on pondered the possibilities of give and take with some opposition figures, his maternal uncle Mohammad Makhlouf, the grand patriarch after Hafez, made it clear that the President had it all mixed up in his head: it was the family that presided over the country, and the family forbade any such discussions.

And when the regime finally gave way on the presence of foreign observers on Syrian soil and on reforms, cosmetic though they were, it was largely due to Russian insistence. As usual, no amount of internal pressures impels the Assads to deal; only foreign ones push their buttons that way. 

One day, perhaps in the not too distant future, we shall learn much about what really went on in the Assad household. But, hard as it is to believe in the midst of this turmoil, friends of the family tell of exit negotiations running round the clock for weeks now. Whichever way it goes for the Assads—a retreat to their Alawite enclave and/or an engineered exit through a pre-arranged handover to old-time allies like Mnaf Tlass, or even an overplayed hand that ends in tragedy for them, much like the tragedies visited upon many Syrians since the revolt…-- their era is all but rubble.

Not surprisingly, the doomsday scenarios for both Syria and the Levant abound. Veteran journalist Helena Cobban can see a breakup of postcolonial systems through missteps and miscalculations if not outright intent. Others predict, at the least, chaos for Syria for years to come.

When considering the future, it might be useful to note that, so far, not a single regional or international power has shown a stomach for a complete retooling of the postcolonial setup. In the current tumult, there are no signs of grand designs, just makeshift strategies and tactics made on the run. We forget that the effective cover given to Bashar over the past year and a half did not come only courtesy of Russia. Had the West resolved to dislodge him outright or wreak havoc on the country and the area beyond, it would have long ago abandoned the United Nations as the primary conduit of policy. Instead, a gradual tightening of the noose was deemed safer in the long run, while an enfeebled Syria had already begun to twist regional adversaries Hezbollah and Iran in knots.

To cite the Lebanese precedent by way of a preview of Syria’s own civil strife is to misunderstand it. Lebanon lit up for 17 years not because it was so precious, but because it was not. The neighbors and a medley of other encroachers were happy to fight their little wars over it for so long because they could afford to without much consequence to them, and because, well, the Lebanese themselves did not quite mind it so much.

You might, right about now, want to shoot Iraq my way. But you’d be too quick to the trigger. The mosaic of unnerved sects aside, there is not much in that country’s recent experience that is comparable to Syria’s. The US invaded Iraq--perhaps the most inept imperial venture of modern times—resulting in a catastrophic loss to the region’s Sunni dominions. While Iran wanted to ensure US failure, Arab Sunni monarchies wanted to undercut Shiite ascendance in this vital environ. Syria itself wanted in, if only to keep the disturbingly combative Bush administration at bay. The makings of a civil war were all there. And yet, as battered and dysfunctional as Iraq is today, it is still holding on to its collective self for dear life, ten years after the American invasion.

Moreover, the Middle East has become palpably more unpredictable since the Arab revolts. In this explosive environment, Syria is a coveted prize; in bits it’s a powder keg. Those competing for it, therefore, would like to keep it intact, not break it into warring pieces precisely because its dismantlement may well mean the collapse of the Fertile Crescent as the West conceived it after World War I.

True, we could be witnessing the inevitable withering of that imposed arrangement, the final chapter in a crisis of legitimacy (or is it illegitimacy?) that has characterized nearly a century of artificial political geographies. One by one, they might fall: Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, Jordan, shards hitting Turkey, Eastern Saudi Arabia, the Palestinian Territories, Israel, Bahrain, Kuwait… Certainly, the sheer velocity of collisions inside Syria might prove too overwhelming for a society forced to battle so many of its own sectarian demons. However, because conflicting interests are, by a collapsing Syria, similarly threatened, the bet is that the combined effort will be towards saving it.

The Assads, some insist, would like the end of them to be the end of Syria itself. Perhaps, but they don’t necessarily have the critical mass to make of this nightmare a reality. Iran might lend a hand, but why would it, with such high stakes, at a minimum, in precarious Iraq?

There is, of course, Israel. But, again, Israel, pre-Arab revolts, may have judged that it would thrive best in the midst of a strife-riven Levant, but one of its own making, where it acts as puppeteer, not a dangerously uncontrollable one of which it might yet become a casualty. Besides, why light up the area when a weakened Syria, much like a weakened Iraq, will very likely spend years trying to sort itself out. And, dare we suggest that a domesticated Sunni-dominated polity might offer up borders just as quiet as the Assads have kept them since 1973.

Which brings us to Hezbollah. It is undeniable that without the breathing space, the logistical routes and the underground support long extended by Assad’s Syria, Hezbollah would be left perilously exposed in any future faceoff with Israel. Equally, however, a turbulent Syria that is home to all manner of Salafi radicalism and free for all conspiracies would sap the energies of a Shiite force coerced into navigating in a sea of hostile Sunnis. While, ironically, it would no longer have to defend its armed status in either scenario, its critical positioning as a resistance movement would be dealt a crippling blow under both.

In truth, Hezbollah’s discomforts did not start with those of the Assads.  In a way, the organization has been too successful for its own good. For the Shiites of Lebanon, it has provided first and foremost protection and relevance. But more critically, for Iran and Syria, this powerhouse’s unique talent for multitasking has been a boon on too many fronts to count. And it goes without saying that, in that thick portfolio of achievements, 2000 and 2006 stand out. To kick an occupying Israeli army out of Arab land and years later deny it its standard devastating military victory was the stuff of fiction before the arrival of this party of God. These feats were more than enough to stretch the movement’s appeal beyond sect and country. More than that, they helped it hold on to its many potentially combustible identities.

But Hezbollah’s juggling act, ever since Israel’s withdrawal from South Lebanon in 2000, and Syria’s retreat from Lebanon itself in 2005, has grown progressively trickier. Its burgeoning reach, which took it to the pinnacle of Lebanon’s sectarian politics and from there to the center of a notoriously prickly Arab playing field, made the challenge all the more herculean and consequential for the party’s standing.

Back in early 2010, right after Hezbollah issued a new manifesto, which was designed to reconcile its evolving commitments, I wrote:

From occupation to liberation, from the wretched earth of downtrodden Shiism to the heights of sectarian power, from the womb of Khomeini’s revolutionary Iran to the warm bosom of warring Lebanon; from resistance, pure and simple, to the infinitely trickier threesome of resistance, deterrence and governance: this has been the journey of Hezbollah over the past two decades. It’s a movement that’s been there, done that, and the manifesto is meant to reflect the wisdom it has acquired along the way.

…It would like to believe that there is no friction between the demands of armed resistance and the imperatives of political governance. And so long as the threat of Israel and the frailty of Lebanon continue to offer the pretext and Syria and Iran continue to give cover, this marriage, peaceful or not, will last.

And, lately, it has not been that peaceful for Hezbollah. Corruption scandals, rampant drug dealing and protection rackets in Beirut’s Southern Suburbs, intelligence breakdowns in its previously impenetrable ranks and high pitched confessional bickering have taken their toll on the party.  

To boot, Syria’s Assad, remarkably, is falling, further pressing this feisty member of the Syrian-Iranian rejectionist axis to contend with its quarrelsome identities.

Criticism of the organization picked up very soon after Syria itself went up in arms. It was attacked, even by some longtime admirers, for its unwavering support for the Assads, as if it had any choice, or more bluntly still, as if it had any other preference. Hypocrisy was the charge. After all, they asked, what made the revolt against Mubarak or the khalifas of Bahrain so easy to condone and against Assad so easy to condemn? 

On its face, the question seems unbearably rhetorical and too stupid to ask.  But that’s largely a reflection of the mess the revolts have caused for the old Arab politics. So long as the Arab people, wherever they resided, stayed quiet, the many faces of liberation could lurk just as quietly under deep garb. In pursuit of human dignity and justice, the struggle for Palestine would suffice. And if the people revolted solely against unfriendly despots, all the better—and all the more proof of the singularity of the Palestinian cause. But once Syrians erupted in the name of deliverance, realpolitik was sure to trump principle--as it always has and always will, when core interests are at risk.

In the final analysis, in all fairness to it, Hezbollah has never been about democracy, or pluralism, or whatever other flavor-of-the-day ideal… The plain fact is that this liberation movement was born single-issue and single-sect, and now both are under serious threat.

Sure, Hezbollah and the Assads could have played everything differently, but only if they were different themselves.

In the end, then, it had to be this way for them.

Farewell, Ghassan Tueni

You know the shopworn expression? A house is its master’s character! Well, there is no place quite like that sprawling abode up in mountainous Beit Meri, a 30-minute ride from Beirut, which lifts such banality into something close to wisdom.

The main hallway cascades down into a vision of the sea and the fireplace warmth of the main living rooms. Mid-stairs, the library hangs to the left, austere, majestic, inhabited. On walls, Byzantine icons intrude on modern art. The bedroom to the side of the library is ascetic-bare, and so is the dinning room but for a subtle elegance and ceilings high enough to render lone voices clangorous. The eeriness of the inner sanctums, where guests rarely were invited to tread, is softened only by the breeziness of the meandering garden. Up and down, twists and turns, lightness and whispers, a passion for the here and now, a longing for the gods.

That was Ghassan Tueni!  

He had a rapacious appetite for that cigarette, for nightlong banters, for early morning sweeps of the pen, for power, for self…

The public persona was colorful, dramatic. The private man was the same, his panache legendary, his personal tragedies Shakespearean. There was an unrequited love between him and life; he loved her unconditionally, recklessly; she was whimsical, sadistic, keener on those stabs of anguish than with her driblets of mercy.

Ghassan segued between politics and journalism, waltzing life away between two mean lovers. The performance was often flawless, but the trip ups were awkward and embarrassing. The dossier is not thick with evidence, but the episode that seared him the most was his stint as adviser to former president Amin Gummayyel, a man who, many agree, was very becoming of Lebanon but not of Ghassan Tueni.

His sword and shield was Annahar, for a long time one of the Arab world’s feisty broadsheets thanks to Ghassan and his remarkable ability to make his instinctive liberalism and his sponsors’ unrelenting conservatism cohabit. But the toll hung heavy, and well before the end, this delicate balance was no more.

About Lebanon he was unwavering, stubbornly magnanimous about its failings and absurdly rhapsodic about its specialness. His famous words, “The war of others on Lebanese land,” say it all. For him, Lebanon was almost always victim to every insult but its own utter lack of respect for itself. 

Ghassan fascinated, puzzled and infuriated his friends just as much as he did his foes. He was made for accolades—yes, he was. But every good quality in him flirted shamelessly with its nemesis.

He was brainy but careless. A resounding success and a disappointment. As capricious as he was gracious. Highbrow and hard knuckled. A wit with an inexplicable tolerance for bores. A giant with a weakness for dwarfs.  An enlightened man who was too ready to entertain the interests of those who preferred life at its dimmest.

It is vintage Ghassan that he should fade just as we Arabs are agitating to come out of our own slumber. But then he had grown quiet years ago. Long before a series of strokes banished him to a punishing silence, his pain had become immeasurable, his days sedate, his pulse faint.

In due time, much will be written about Ghassan and his era, a time when the Arab world turned every moment of possibility into a stupefying dead end, a time when Lebanon itself made of a presumably interesting experiment in consociational democracy a forbidding showcase of sectarian bloodletting. No doubt, much will be written about Ghassan’s legacy in this unforgiving trajectory.

But if the narrative means to illuminate and instruct, it would have to tell the story of modern Arab journalism in making this region’s downhill slide all the more inexorable. History is home to many a progressive journalist who either could not or would not resist the pull of power, for survival, for fear, for proximity to that proverbial ear. History is home as well to many who did resist and died a miserable death. Here, in the Arab world, these journalists’ dilemma was every good man and woman’s, who often were forced to countenance an existence stripped of meaning or principle.

By the turn of the 21^st century, you were hard pressed to name a publication that was not outright owned by patrons—public or private— who were no longer content with mere influence. In Lebanon, once an arena of relatively intrepid speech, the practice, not coincidently, is still at its most unseemly.

We are now—dare we hope!--upon a different age. Extraordinarily, a new vigor promises to enliven politics, whilst the fourth estate of old continues to nibble on the extreme margins of dissent. But if the early signs are to be believed, Arab print journalism may yet enjoy its own revival.

You’re mistaken if you’re sensing judgment on this page. Mine are just fleeting ruminations about a pocket of Arab history that left most of us in lament about the terrible choices we weaved for ourselves.

Those who loved Ghassan—gems, warts and all, like me--will have no trouble tracing the man’s grace in a life teeming with brave stands, fortitude, wiliness, love, humor, sadness, lapses and contradictions.

Rest in peace, amou Ghassan. An eternity without pain—at long last!

Feeling Good and Bad about Umm al Dunya?

Thoughts on Egypt

It’s a sign of our extraordinary times that you could—and without appearing remotely stupid--feel at once good and bad about Egypt.

The frantic twists and turns of revolt jerk you between dread and anticipation. Adding to the frenzy are the many meanings that accompany every event and the many implications that haunt each one of them. There are those who suspect that Egypt is not in genuine flux and that this is all part of an elaborate show by the old guard to reclaim the initiative. The more plausible explanation is that it is, and what in fact we are experiencing is the tension borne out of a country on the edge which hasn’t quite made up its mind to jump.

Some would call this the inevitable tug of war between revolution and counterrevolution. That’s another easy one, neatly pitting two forces against one another and giving each its slogans and stark colors. The endless barrage of rumors, the intrigue that hovers like a mist over Tahrir, the many cards the SCAF is still holding close to its heart, the barely concealed eagerness of the Muslim Brotherhood to deal, the erratic temperament of the rebels, the it-could-be-this and then again it-could-be-that quality of the general political discourse… all these, they say, are the unmistakable symptoms of a stuttering revolt and a tenacious “deep state” reinforcing its dikes.

“Whatever!” as an Egyptian friend of mine has recently fallen into the habit of repeating like a mantra.

There is, of course, a very heated conversation going on in Egypt, but it is not between protagonists standing on opposite sides of the divide, but between the yearnings and dreams and fears and hopes that keep jumping camps, blurring the lines between enemies and friends and wreaking havoc even within the soul itself. Messy situations are the stuff of revolutionary tumult, one is tempted to surmise, but there is more to it than that. This is a furious people, no doubt, fed up with much of the past but very tentatively feeling their way forward.

This is indeed the changing face of Egypt, and its children haven’t quite decided how much of the new they want to take on and how much of the old they need to hold onto. There is nothing assuredly upbeat about this picture, but the visage is beautiful all the same. Egypt is in pain, traumatized, angry, and unusually defiant but still not free from its old masters’ embrace. That’s the idea, conspiracy talk might persuade you, and who wants to argue with ghosts and shadows? Anyone watching Egypt closely will see the keen turn of the pen of a people reimagining a future once deemed foreordained.  

I was in Cairo last week, right after the first round of the presidential elections. The results tickle and unnerve. Most pundits, not surprisingly, are churning out the easiest takes: the fast one that might have been pulled on the Egyptian voter, leading to a run off between Mubarak—yes, Mubarak!--and the Muslim Brotherhood, the same two old geezers that have dominated state and society for the last 40 years. Politics as usual, the evidence screams, is alive and well on the Nile. Even if you were generous enough to consider the MB’s strides as genuinely “subversive,” the stubborn continuities in the political scene seem to mock the pace and depth of the revolution. At first look, the choice today appears as ugly as it was before January 2011: “Despotism in the name of the state versus despotism in the name of religion,” as leftist candidate Hamdin Sabbahi aptly described it.

And yet, as muddied as the results were, intriguingly they do still tell tales about that changing face of Egypt. In its simplest version, the unfolding setting is of a perky if harried nation that has moved on and a pummeled status quo (the MB included) trying very hard to reconstitute the many shattered pieces of itself.

The politics, by turns volatile and predictable, fascinates. Discussions with friends and colleagues are like miniature impressions of a much larger patchwork. One boycotted the entire process; another struggled between candidates till the very last second, while her “capitalist” parents went with socialist Khaled Ali; a third voted for Sabbahi but will void the ballot in the final round; a fourth voted the same but will go for Ahmad Shafiq this time around… All are bona fide members of the Square, two are longstanding activists...--voters freely strolling up and down the electoral map.

Remarkably, while the elections’ many perceived flaws have further undercut the struggling legitimacy of the political system, they have nowhere touched the deeper trends revealed by these same elections. And, paradoxically, all that went wrong and right about the vote bodes equally bad for the two players that stand behind Shafiq and Mohammad Mursi, the first round’s two winners.  

While the SCAF has to brace itself now for possibly yet another resurrection of Tahrir Square, made more likely by the latest court verdicts that essentially acquitted the security apparatus, the Muslim Brotherhood has to contend with results that brought in Mursi first and last. Around 25% of a low 46% voter turnout and 10% of total eligible votes is a lousy return on an 80-year old investment. This after a grueling campaign as well that dragged God himself down into the muck of the political arena.

This unimpressive performance may not have immediate connotations for the MB’s ability to keep racking up political positions like so many trophies, but it does say plenty about the kind of influence it will be able to wield through those pulpits.

It might be sometime before we can fully discern the vote’s significance for the crucial question of Islam and identity that has harangued us Arabs for the better part of the 20^th century. But at this palpably low level of enthusiasm for the Brothers and their plans--a revelation that is but one of many pointing to the challenges unleashed by the emerging political climate—we can more forcefully caution against the rush of ill-considered warnings about Islamism overtaking Arab life.

The primacy of Islam is settled, the argument has it, even among vociferous secularists. There are no ifs anymore in this contested realm, just the hows. One school of thought, different branches. One heaven, different floors. One hydra, different heads. One solution, different applications. The same plate, different recipes…

But, in fact, for years now, there have been clear signs that Arab identity—no less than the Iranian one--is infinitely more capacious than Islamism would like it to be. As Professor Assef Bayat argues, post-Islamist currents within many Islamist movements or regimes are in their essence a response to societies’ insistence on pushing the boundaries. In describing post-Islamism as both a condition and a project, Bayat proposes that its aspiration is “to turn the underlying principles of Islamism on its head by emphasizing rights instead of duties, plurality in place of a singular authoritative voice, historicity rather than fixed scriptures, and the future instead of the past.“ In other words, it promises the end of the Islamist experiment itself.

Presidential contender Abd al Muni’m Abu al Fotouh, dubbed a post-Islamist by many of his admirers, often declares that Islam has won as part of his message that it is time to close the file on Islam’s place in public life. In long evolving landscapes now finally accommodating and possibly nurturing a much more vibrant kind of participatory politics, we will have the chance to find out what Islam has won exactly. But the Egyptian election results tell us that, far from being over, the real debate over the matter of identity has just begun.

Marwan Bishara's The Invisible Arab.

There is a stunning passage in Marwan Bishara’s The Invisible Arab that sings like a canary:

As for the internal, it is about doing something that is changing; to change the society, and we have to keep up with the change, as a state and as institutions. You have to upgrade yourself with the upgrading of society. There must be something to have this balance. This is the most important headline…internally, there must be a different kind of changes: political, economic, and administrative. These are the changes that we need. But at the same time you have to upgrade the society and this does not mean to upgrade it technically by upgrading qualifications. It means to open up the minds. Actually, societies during the last three decades, especially since the eighties have become more closed due to an increase in close-mindedness that led to extremism. This current will lead to repercussions of less creativity, less development, and less openness. You cannot reform your society or institution without opening your mind. So the core issue is how to open the mind, the whole society, and this means everybody in society including everyone. I am not talking about the state or average or common people.  I am talking about everybody; because when you close your mind as an official you cannot upgrade and vice versa.

This is the remarkable Bashar Assad distilling for us the essence of the past 50 years of Arab politics: an oafish, strangely featherbrained kind of despotism that reduced the very serious business of leadership to utter nonsense--a thing as devastating as the whip it came with.

Not that we Arabs were not in on the cruel joke from the outset. It’s not by coincidence that Syria’s most famous fictional character is the prankster Ghawwar al-Tosheh, whose singular mark was in acting out the gibberish that Arab life had become under systems hell bent on turning the day into a conundrum.

Reading Bashar above is reminiscent of listening to Ghawwar’s sidekick, Husni Barzan, in the 1971 smash hit series Sah al Nawm (Good Morning!) penning his never finished article thus: if you want to know what is in Italy, you have to know what is in Brazil.”

As Bishara would have it, this is the overarching narrative of the Arab revolts: marauding dictatorships “whose practice is antithetical to any sense of human progress…”  Over decades, a sneaking suspicion about “Arab exceptionalism”—that somehow we were impervious to history’s forward march—grew into conventional wisdom, and not only among observers looking on with bemusement, but also by many an Arab looking out in lament. Arab authoritarianism, it was thought, had built up a sturdy house with no exits because Arabs had it in them to succumb, surrendering body and soul, mind and voice.

Those who have consistently rejected the very idea of this exceptionalism are now basking in the sun. And The Invisible Arab’s contention that the source of the region’s quandaries is “political par excellence” draws breath from these rejectionists’ counter argument. The past 50 years were not foreordained, Bishara is saying, but the handiwork of post-colonial viscerally illiberal regimes whose lethal ambition has been to bend state and society to personal whim and wont. That foreign patrons found much to capitalize on and benefit from such regimes made the Arabs’ predicament all the more difficult to overcome. On its face, the point may seem unoriginal, and yet the extent to which Arab exceptionalism still underpins expert opinion on the area justifies the importance Bishara attributes to it. 

In fact, The Invisible Arab is at its most resonant when reconstructing the building blocs of Arab misery that pinned down much of the 20^th century: colonialism’s noxious legacy that found continuity in post-colonial Western interests and policies; “taryeef al sulta” (the pastoralization of authority) as rural, army men overturned a feeble old order and countryside rode roughshod over metropolis; the relentless assault on the embryonic civil state, on citizenship itself; the gross mismanagement of economies that left entire new generations searching helplessly for an education that made sense and a job that allowed for a decent living; the rise of Islamism in landscapes cleansed of all other trends…

These are all elements of a history over which even warring ideologies would nod more or less in consent. Bishara thus describes more than he dissects, and he does that rather well. Equally, that rulers had grown “impatient, insolent and exhausted,” and that the people had simply had enough of humiliation and crumbs, Bishara compellingly echoes in the book, wrapping up with the prelude to revolt.

But, ultimately, Bishara’s pen aims for the sum-up more than the lingering analysis, and hence travels only the surface of a very rich and varied terrain. Nuance is inevitably lost along the way, acutely felt in the Jordanian case, where, ironically, an intra-elite squabble gets the better of a monarchy spared the more dangerous street-level action of the Arab uprisings. More significantly, Bishara’s take on his “miracle generation,” the Arab youth who managed to break the cycle of defeat and resignation, would have benefited from deeper probing. Spotlighting the social media’s impact on them, he states, more than speculates, that ”the Arab youth increasingly comprised a modern, transitional tribe that bypassed borders, religion, and social strata…. [they] transcended traditional hierarchy in favor of open and pluralistic characteristics.” There is little doubt that the youth have been critical drivers of the revolts, indeed somersaulting over the many barriers that walled in their parents, which is precisely why unshackling them from the stuff that inundates identity and thought, not to mention life, cries out for more than the sweeping assertion.

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It’s not surprising that the Bishara’s of this world—seasoned commentators and pundits—should want to weigh in on the surprise of the century, although the sheer velocity of developments and unpredictability of the moment argue for patience and—frankly—studied silence. But this is the age of rapid response: never let a thought, however tiny, go by unmentioned, God forbid. In times of confusion in the midst of tumult, why not a perspective to drill rays of light in the unbearable fog?

The temptation is clear and understandable, but the fear that is no less obvious is that soon enough too much will have been said and too little of it will have survived the turn of events.

For Bishara, al-Jazeera English’s senior political analyst, the urge starts the book itself: “This is an essay about the fall and rise of the Arabs. It is an attempt to understand how their revolutions evolved. What went right, why it is paramount, and how it could still go terribly wrong.” There is no specific ideological prism through which Bishara sets out the plot, just the unmistakably upbeat conviction that the rage we are witness to portends the eclipse of a harrowing era and is proof of the Arabs’ will to take up the fight.

And Bishara has a bone in this fight. His style is close to the heart, oftentimes a mix of romance and oratory. The I is not shy of declaring itself on a page punctuated by authorial predilections and unencumbered by too many footnotes or details of fact. Polls and statistics are thrown in without the usual references, at times giving the text less the feel of an essay than the impromptu remarks of a man in the midst of a heated conversation.

None of this need be a drawback, but Bishara’s is a daunting challenge, when this is 2012, and the so-called revolutions are still nursing in their crib. Which perhaps explains why the book is rather steady on the prologue to those and is uneven on what comes next and how specifically it might express itself. Bishara, alas, is at his most rushed, opting for the checklist approach, when the reader would have liked him to be more deliberate in offering a more measured outlook. And while there is everything admirable in striking a hopeful note in a space too crowded with doomsday scenarios, Bishara’s surefooted optimism often is oddly out of sync with the pitfalls of which he is at least rhetorically mindful. We therefore find him “convinced that the future belongs to the democratic majority of youth and women,” even as he races through the counterrevolutionary forces poised to make it all still “go terribly wrong.” Some of these he gets right, but his treatment of them is casual enough to give his entire take on post-revolution a blithe appearance that renders the book’s foray into the future significantly less artful than its walk through the past.

To the very real threat that reactionary Gulf monarchies pose to “revolution,” Marwan offers this curious warning as if the fight is already won: “If certain Arab monarchies persist in their attempt to resist or sabotage reform and change, the new Arab democracies will need to rally together as a league of Arab democracies.” If Bishara is that certain of victory, it would help if the rest of us were brought up to speed on how these new democracies actually beat the odds.

About Israel, Saudi Arabia and Iran’s intrigues against heaving locales, Bishara is similarly confident because, “these regional powers’ conflicting agendas will prevent them from jointly conspiring against them.” How such colliding interests might cancel out the havoc that each of these powers could still unleash, Bishara leaves unanswered. 

On the would-be Turkish Model, the current darling of every Western policy maker and his mother, Bishara is at once coyly enthusiastic and jarringly cursory. He states that “Turkey has inspired cooperation and coordination while Tehran has orchestrated confrontation and conflict, especially with the West,” a bizarrely naive statement for an analyst who knows that the role these two countries play is largely a function of their place on the geopolitical map, their relationship with the West, especially the United States, and the history that has long defined both. Moreover, since Bishara is clearly aware of the West’s exploits in the Middle East, why does he think cooperation with it a more commendable approach than confrontation? And what kind of cooperation does he have in mind exactly?

And so it goes for a whole range of obstacles and propositions already making life hard for Arab revolutionaries who, of course, do not speak with one voice. It could well be that Bishara, eager to stay in the moment, wanted to just touch on these--for the record, so to speak. All the same, the effect is that of an author who lines up many of the usual suspects but can’t quite decide what to do with them.

However, the most inexplicable omissions in The Invisible Arab are those that could have given it a unique flavor and strength. In the most puzzling pass over of all, Bishara chooses to remain mum about al-Jazeera as one of Qatar’s most celebrated, not to mention increasingly controversial, foreign policy instruments. His delicate position is understandable, and the impact on the book is all the more resounding because of it. Bishara does offer negative (and well deserved) commentary on Saudi Arabia’s reactionary push back against the Arab revolts, which renders his silence on the palpably more audacious role of Qatar, another unabashedly conservative Gulf monarchy, particularly unpersuasive.

Still more, although he devotes some attention—and praise--to the “Jazeera effect,” the station’s unprecedented push in bringing revolution to Arab homes, he does not take the opportunity to address some of the more salient criticisms of its uneven coverage of the uprisings, nor does he probe the coverage as an extension of Qatar’s foreign policy. Libya stands out in this unfolding story. While Bishara shares that “there was disinformation regarding Gaddafi’s early bombing of Tripoli, use of mass rape as a weapon…,” conveniently, he fails to point out that it is al-Jazeera itself that observers hold most culpable in spreading such disinformation. (For more on the coverage, read Hugh Roberts’ “Who Said Gaddafi Had To Go,” London Review of Books, Nov 17, 2011). His very brief acknowledgment that the Qatari station “has seen serious internal disagreement within its editorial leadership and made some poor calls and judgment,” not surprisingly, manages to pique the reader’s curiosity while failing to fig leaf Bishara’s decision to skip the subject.

In the end, however, Bishara did not write The Invisible Arab for those who have already invested serious time and thought on Arab history and politics, but for those who are playing catch up—an unenviable position in these confusing times which Bishara succeeds in making less disorienting.