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NY Review of Books, July 10 2014
What Happened to the Arab Spring?
by Malise Ruthven
The Second Arab Awakening: And the Battle for Pluralism
by Marwan Muasher
Yale University Press, 210 pp., $30.00
The People Want: A Radical Exploration of the Arab Uprising
by Gilbert Achcar, translated from the French by G.M. Goshgarian
University of California Press, 310 pp., $65.00; $27.95 (paper)
Demonstrators with a portrait of General Abdel Fatah el-Sisi—now Egypt’s
president—at a rally in Tahrir Square, Cairo, January 2014
In 1938 George Antonius, an Egyptian Christian of Lebanese origin living
in Jerusalem, published The Arab Awakening: The Story of the Arab
National Movement. In his path-breaking book Antonius, who had been
educated at Cambridge, charted the Arab national idea from its ethnic
and linguistic beginnings in the early Islamic conquests, through the
intellectual renaissance in nineteenth-century Syria, and to the
grassroots—and eventually armed—political movement that overthrew
Ottoman rule in Arabia, Iraq, and Syria—in alliance with Britain—during
World War I.
In his indictment of British policy Antonius demonstrated that promises
made by Britain to the ruler of Mecca, Sharif Hussein, whose sons Faisal
and Abdullah led the Arab revolt against Ottoman Turkey, contradicted
commitments Britain had made to its allies France and Russia under the
secret 1916 Sykes-Picot Agreement and to the Zionist leaders who were
promised a Jewish homeland in Palestine under the terms of the November
1917 Balfour Declaration. Though Antonius, who died in 1942, did not
witness the triumph, and debacle, of Arabism in Egypt under Gamal Abdel
Nasser, The Arab Awakening powerfully set the stage for its trajectory.
Taking his cue from Antonius, Marwan Muasher, a Jordanian diplomat and
former foreign minister now working at the Carnegie Endowment, argues
that what some have called the “Arab Spring”—and others the “Arab
inferno”—should really be seen as a “second Arab Awakening.” The liberal
promise of the “first Awakening” was aborted at the end of the colonial
period, he writes, “when foreign despots were replaced by homegrown
ones, who went on to rule the region for more than fifty years.” The
fatal flaw of these post-independence governments was, at heart,
constitutional: none of the regimes,
whether monarchist or “republican,”…paid much attention to developing
pluralist systems of government, building systems of checks and balances
on executive power, or promoting the rich diversity of their
populations. Instead, the legitimacy gained during independence
struggles hardened into diverse forms of autocratic rule.
In short the inadequacy of the first Awakening made the second
Awakening—the wave of uprisings beginning in the winter of
2010–2011—inevitable. But that failure also conveys a warning:
Toppling despotic rulers alone is no guarantee of a healthy political
development. A constructive vision for future polities must be hammered
out and must be founded on an unshakable commitment to pluralism—leading
to systems of protections and inclusiveness that enable what may be the
Arab world’s greatest asset: its ethnic, cultural, religious and
intellectual diversity.
In most of the countries he visits in the course of preparing his book
Muasher finds that a pluralistic approach embodying a respect for
differences of values, religions, and ethnicities is conspicuously
absent. His book was already being printed when Mohamed Morsi, Egypt’s
only president to have come to power through a transparent electoral
process, was removed from office by the military. But he cannot have
been greatly surprised, having noted that many of the secular leaders to
whom he spoke were prepared to “accept the military’s undemocratic
practice of appropriating legislative and executive powers if that would
check the growing influence of the Islamists.” A post-coup note added to
the book reinforces his argument
that the Islamist and secular forces in the Arab world, both before and
after Arab uprisings, have shown no solid commitment to pluralistic and
democratic norms. Each side has denied the right of the other to operate
and has often ignored the popular will.
While he does not provide details of the events that followed the coup,
when some nine hundred protesters were killed in a confrontation with
the army and police—in which armed Brotherhood activists may well have
fired first—he sees the Islamist and secular forces as equally
intransigent. He blames the Islamists for pushing through a partisan
constitution without adequate protections for religious and other
minorities, when the very purpose of a constitution must be “to achieve
consensus among the various forces in society.” He criticizes the
secular side for continuing
to act as if the elections in Egypt meant nothing, refusing to cooperate
with the Islamists, until they finally sided with the armed forces in
deposing a democratically elected president. Thus they practiced the
same power-monopolizing behavior of which they accuse the Islamists.
Muasher’s critique of the secular forces, including the judiciary, gains
further credibility from recent events. In December 2013 Egypt’s
military-backed government designated the Brotherhood a terrorist
organization. This was followed in March by the death sentence imposed
by Judge Saeed Youssef on 529 protesters in the southern city of Minya
for the killing of a single policeman. In April, Judge Youssef sentenced
an additional 683 Muslim Brotherhood supporters to death, including
Mohamed Badie, its “supreme guide” or spiritual leader. He upheld
thirty-seven of the 529 death sentences passed in March, commuting the
rest to life in prison.
While none of these sentences are final, and all can be appealed, the
repression is much more severe than under the Mubarak regime, when
Brotherhood deputies were permitted to stand as independents in the
national parliament. According to a recent report from Amnesty
International, dozens of civilians have been arrested and held for
months at a military camp outside Cairo, where they’ve been tortured
with electric shocks and other illegal treatment, in order to make them
confess to crimes or implicate others.1
The Egyptian Brotherhood, or part of it, may now be expected to abandon
the democratic path to power and take up a jihadist position toward the
regime and its foreign protectors. Yet as Muasher points out, Islamism
is far from monolithic: apart from the Muslim Brotherhood itself, there
are significant differences between movements that are “violent and
exclusionary” such as al-Qaeda; those such as Hamas in Gaza and
Hezbollah in Lebanon that are committed to liberating territories they
regard as being under foreign occupation; and some “salafists” who live
by a strict puritanical code while advocating “total obedience to the
ruler.”
These types can shift according to the obstacles they meet. In Syria,
the regime began shooting and torturing peaceful protesters. When
activists started arming themselves in response, they were denounced as
takfiris—a label attached to militants who anathematize their opponents
as infidels. In time the official rhetoric became self-fulfilling. The
Syrian opposition is now dominated by takfiris, some from outside Syria,
some cynically helped by the regime in order to undermine the
opposition’s appeal and its legitimacy with outside supporters,
including Western governments. In Egypt, as in Syria, authoritarian,
military-backed regimes have found the threat of political Islam a
highly “convenient excuse for keeping their political systems closed.”
In Muasher’s view the threat of Islamist rule has been exaggerated by
secular groups in the Arab world and beyond who harbor the suspicion
that whatever gesture Islamists make toward pluralism and democracy is
just a tactic for grabbing power. According to this theory Islamists
will tolerate just “one man, one vote, one time.” The warning issued by
former US Assistant Secretary of State Edward Djerjian in 1992 reflects
a widespread concern among minorities as well as the advocates of
secular government.
Muasher thinks this fear to be greatly overstated and he produces a
number of arguments and survey figures with a view to allaying it. He
cites at length a 2011 declaration by al-Azhar, Egypt’s foremost
institution of Islamic learning and widely regarded the leading academy
in the Sunni world, stating that democracy “represents the modern
formula to achieve the Islamic precepts of shura (consultation),” and
that “Islamic precepts include pluralism, rotation of power,…freedom of
thought…with a full respect of human, women and children’s
rights,…multi-pluralism…and…citizenship as the basis of responsibility
in the society.” Muasher claims support for this view from his talks
with a number of senior Islamic figures, including the Grand Imam of
al-Azhar, Egypt’s highest religious authority, Imad El Din Abdel
Ghaffour, the leader of the Salafist al-Nour party, and Khairat
al-Shatir, the FJP’s chief strategist, who told him that for the next
five to ten years “Egypt must be ruled by a broad coalition” of forces.
Such arguments, of course, cut no ice with the military. Al-Shatir is
now in jail along with the ousted President Morsi, who is accused of
treason. Muasher deploys these interviews, and other materials including
survey data, to illustrate his general thesis that the problems of Arab
states derive more from the structure of power than from ideology. In
Muasher’s view the religious question is much less divisive than
practical issues of governance and particularly of economic management.
To support his argument Muasher cites a Gallup survey taken in three
countries—Egypt, Tunisia, and Morocco—in the spring of 2012 after mass
protests had ended decades of one-party rule. Some 94 percent of the
respondents in Egypt, 95 percent in Tunisia, and 75 percent in Morocco
agreed that all citizens should be allowed to express their opinions on
political, social, and economic issues.
However, the figures in favor of freedom of religion were somewhat
lower, with 70 percent of Egyptians, 84 percent of Tunisians, and 49
percent of Moroccans agreeing that citizens should be free to observe
and practice any religion of their choice (the lower figure for Morocco
is partly accounted for by a high percentage of “don’t knows”). Muasher
concludes that
while they support these freedoms, most Arabs also want some role for
sharia as a basis for legislation. To many Muslims, the term sharia
means not necessarily a specific code but rather general principles. The
percentage of those who prefer no role for Islamic references is in the
single digits in the three countries.
But it is clear that many more Egyptians (47 percent) favor sharia as
the “only source” of law than Tunisians (17 percent).
In Egypt the survey found that 46 percent thought sharia should be a
source of law, but not the only one. The difference between those who
think sharia should be the source as distinct from a source can hardly
have been sufficient to take the country to the brink of civil war, as
appeared to be happening before the military overthrew Morsi’s
government in July 2013.
Nevertheless the differences between Egypt and Tunisia are instructive.
Under Morsi, constitutional delegates from the Brotherhood, the al-Nour
party, and other Islamist movements insisted on drafting a document that
amplified the religious language of the existing 1971 constitution and
omitted mechanisms for protecting politically vulnerable constituencies
such as Christians, women, and journalists. In mid-November 2012, before
the finished draft was published, representatives from the Coptic
Church, whose followers number around 7 percent of Egypt’s population,
withdrew from the assembly in protest. More than forty churches were
attacked and a number of Christians were killed. With the military
takeover, however, Copts are now said to feel safer—though their
situation remains precarious.
In contrast to the disputed efforts toward producing a new Egyptian
constitution (with two elected constitutional assemblies dissolved by
judges, followed by a commission of experts chosen by the military), the
Tunisian process has been impressive in its effort to be inclusive. The
Constituent Assembly elected to draft the new constitution reflected a
broad consensus. Unlike Egypt, where the army remains the foundation of
the old guard and has a huge stake in the economy, the small Tunisian
army is neutral and removed from politics. Tunisia’s electoral law makes
it difficult for any one party to gain an absolute majority. The
Islamist Ennahda party, the biggest winner in the 2011 elections with 89
out of 217 parliamentary seats, formed a coalition with two secular
parties before stepping down for a nonpolitical, technocratic government
that will serve until elections are held under the new constitution
later this year.
Although the party’s leader, Rached Ghannouchi, is strongly committed to
consensus politics and has been one of the leading intellectuals making
the Islamist case for equal rights and citizenship, Ennahda was slow to
identify and punish the Salafist groups or individuals who violently
attacked activists and intellectuals. The new constitution, which took
all of two years to complete, wrestles with the problem of harmonizing
Islam and the state. It recognizes Islam as the official state religion
but, crucially, makes no reference to sharia as a source of law. Article
6 guaranteeing freedom of belief also bans the religious anathemas that
are now part of the currency of Arab politics:
The State is the guardian of religion. It guarantees liberty of
conscience and of belief, the free exercise of religious worship and the
neutrality of the mosques and of the places of worship from all partisan
instrumentalization.
The State commits itself to the dissemination of the values of
moderation and tolerance and to the protection of the sacred and the
prohibition of any offense thereto. It commits itself, equally, to the
prohibition of, and the fight against, appeals to Takfir [charges of
apostasy] and incitement to violence and hatred.
There is no guarantee, of course, that the constitution will resolve the
abrasive struggle (including attacks on unveiled women and the
assassination of two lawmakers) between Islamist and secular-minded
Tunisians that followed the departure of the dictator Zine el-Abidine
Ben Ali in January 2011. As Amna Guellali of Human Rights Watch points
out, the article forces together two irreconcilable visions for the
future in a complicated formula that is disturbingly vague:
The clauses allow for the most repressive of interpretations in the name
of offense against the sacred. Citing the constitution, lawyers, judges
and politicians could interpret Article 6 however they see fit. This
ambivalence could hold grave consequences for the country.2
Compared with Egypt, however, where the military has reinstalled itself
with considerable public support after experimenting with democracy for
less than a year, the outlook for pluralism in Tunisia seems more promising.
The Tunisian model has yet to be replicated elsewhere. Muasher’s former
employer, the king of Jordan, receives praise for good intentions but no
more, as Jordan “conspicuously failed to muster the political will” to
lead its governing class away “from a rentier system, which offered
privileges in exchange for blind loyalty, and toward a merit-based
system that would have threatened those privileges.”
Like many other observers, Muasher sees the “rentier system” as central
to the Arab world’s problems. A state that is dependent on oil revenues
or earnings from other extraction industries, such as gas or phosphates,
rather than taxation, avoids the basic social contract between a
government and its citizens. As Muasher puts it:
The region’s large oil reserves, and the Arab countries’ influence over
the price of oil since the 1970s, have proved as much a curse as a
blessing…. In oil-rich countries, the government made use of its oil
income to act as a general provider for its people. Rather than
encourage a culture of self-reliance or private sector–led growth, oil
state governments fostered a culture of dependency. Citizens came to
depend on their rulers to deliver jobs, services, and favors without
supplying in return the productivity necessary to develop the economy.
Even worse, as governments did not need to raise taxes from their
citizens for income, their authoritarianism was more difficult to
challenge. The political culture they developed was one of “no taxation,
no representation.”
This is evidently true, but the reality to which it alludes is much
harsher than explained by Muasher. Not only does the rentier system
underpin authoritarianism by allowing tribes or coteries to monopolize a
country’s wealth. It also fosters the region’s enormous inequalities. To
take just one example: the Arabian Peninsula contains two sovereign
countries, Qatar and Yemen. With a GDP per capita of $93,825 in 2012,
Qatar ranks with Monaco, Liechtenstein, Bermuda, and Luxembourg as one
of the states with the world’s highest per capita national income.
Yemen, with a per capita GDP of $1,498 in 2012, is near the bottom of
the table of MENA (Middle East and North Africa) countries listed in
World Bank statistics. The proportion of people living in extreme
poverty, based on the World Bank poverty line of $1.25 per day, may be
less in MENA than in other developing regions, including Latin America,
South Asia, and sub-Saharan Africa. But as Gilbert Achcar reminds us in
The People Want—a more detailed and searching account of the “Arab
Spring” than Muasher’s—“poverty is even harder for the poor to accept
when it affects a minority, which must daily be confronted with the
sight of overconsumption and ostentatious luxury.”
So long as opportunities are seen as inclusive, a capitalist culture in
which financial success is considered a reward for diligence or
risk-taking may accommodate disparities of wealth around common ideas of
citizenship. The Middle East, however, is a region of conflicting
religions and ethnicities, where the state has mostly been captured by
tribal systems or privileged coteries. Power, and the rewards of wealth
that go with it, tend to be appropriated by minorities or clans who hold
it by means of military and police coercion.
Arab citizens of the oil-rich countries may benefit from the
cradle-to-grave welfare system provided by their government.
Citizenship, however, is not just ethnically circumscribed but largely
restricted to the tribal networks out of which the state was formed. Of
Qatar’s population of 2.1 million, 85 percent are listed as “foreign
residents.” Many of these are construction workers from South Asia who
work under poor conditions and suffer high casualty rates. According to
Andrew Ross of New York University, almost a thousand of these migrant
workers have died while building the infrastructure for the 2022 World
Cup—the subject of a financial scandal, following claims that the choice
of Qatar was secured by bribes.
The situation is no better in Abu Dhabi and Dubai where, as in Qatar,
migrant workers are subject to the kafala system of sponsorship, where
typically the “sponsoring employer takes their passports, houses the
workers in substandard labor camps, pays much less than they were
promised and enforces a punishing regimen under the desert sun.”3 The
scandal of labor abuse in the Gulf has now reached the US after The New
York Times’s exposé of conditions faced by workers constructing the NYU
campus in Abu Dhabi. Since they can be expelled on a boss’s or a
bureaucrat’s whim, their condition is even more precarious than that of
the indentured laborers who worked on the plantations or railways of the
British Empire.
Citizenship in the Gulf region is an artificial construct. The states to
which citizens belong are mostly entities created by treaties the
British signed with tribal leaders in the nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries. According to the rhetoric of Arab nationalism, local
citizenship is subsumed within the broader idea of an Arab nation, while
Islamists may claim emotional allegiance to the umma—the world Islamic
community. Yet faced with the bureaucratic power of the modern state,
such Arab and Muslim solidarities can be meaningless. After Saddam
Hussein’s attempt to annex Kuwait in 1990 was repelled by Operation
Desert Storm, some 400,000 Palestinian workers were expelled from
Kuwait, and around a million Yemenis from Saudi Arabia. These actions
were taken because of opposition to the US-led coalition voiced by the
PLO and by the Yemeni government.
The Gulf monarchies then realized that the inclusive message of Arab
nationalism as proclaimed by Saddam Hussein endangered their rule
because of the sympathies it evoked among Arab migrant workers. Their
solution was to shift from reliance on Arab labor to importing workers
from South and Southeast Asia, who were much less threatening
politically. Between 1985 and 2004 the proportion of Arabs among migrant
workers fell from 79 to 33 percent in the Saudi kingdom, from 69 to 30
percent in Kuwait, and in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries
overall (comprising Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kuwait, Bahrain, Oman, and the
United Arab Emirates) from 56 to 32 percent. The majority of these
mostly unskilled workers, who numbered more than 12 million in 2004, are
from the Indian subcontinent, followed by the Philippines, Indonesia,
and, more recently, Vietnam.
In the oil-producing regions of the Gulf, oil is treated as private
family property, rather than a communal resource. Despite rhetorical
gestures toward Islamic or Arab solidarity, wealthy Arabs avoid sharing
it with the wider Arab societies, or indeed with their fellow Muslims.
According to Achcar it is Western rather than Arab countries that are
the principal beneficiaries of Arab wealth. Of the $530 billion spent by
the GCC countries between 2002 and 2006, $300 billion was invested in
the US and $100 billion in Europe, compared with $60 billion in MENA.
Between 2002 and 2009 amounts put into foreign assets tripled to more
than $1 trillion. Slightly more than half of this sum is invested in
sovereign wealth funds based in the West. After China and Japan, the
group of mainly Arab oil exporters is the largest holder of US treasury
bonds.
The uprisings of the second Arab Awakening have multiple causes. To
economic factors—such as sudden rises in food prices caused in part by
desertification and drought—must be added the impact of satellite
television and the high levels of youth unemployment, enhanced by the
ever-growing access of youth to social media. Since it first appeared in
1996 the Qatari-owned Al Jazeera twenty-four-hour news channel has
defied taboos on the public criticism of governments—with the obvious
exception of Qatar itself. Social media have further contributed to the
uprisings, by publicizing information about police brutality or
industrial protests, including strikes by Tunisian phosphate miners and
Egyptian textile workers.
Far from addressing the economic issues, however, the revolutions are
making them worse. In Egypt, tourism, a vital source of foreign
currency, has collapsed. In Tunisia, phosphate production, afflicted by
strikes and blockades since 2008, has slumped to a third of its
prerevolution volume, with a loss of $2 billion in revenue, while youth
unemployment stands at 30 percent, even higher than Egypt’s 25 percent.
Certainly the explosions of the second Arab Awakening were facilitated
by the fact that there were nearly 30 million Facebook users in Arab
countries (with the numbers rising exponentially), 75 percent of them
between the ages of fifteen and twenty-nine. A much more difficult
question is how these revolutions may work out in the long run.
Unlike the “classic” revolutions of France and Russia, where popular
protests were channeled through preexisting institutions such as the
Estates General, political clubs, or the soviets, with organized forces
determining the outcome, the “Facebook revolution” appears to have
little grounding outside the social media’s spontaneous networks. This
accounts for the initial political successes of the relatively
well-organized Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and Ennahda in Tunisia
following the uprisings, as well as for the crackdown by the
better-organized security forces in Egypt, with whom Morsi had tried,
but failed, to align his government.
In Egypt the relative weakness of internal civilian structures—apart
from the Brotherhood—resulting from six decades of military rule
combined with a collapsing economy to leave the country as open to
foreign manipulation now as in 1882, when it was deeply in debt and
taken over by the British. Today it is the Saudis who are calling the
shots, having endorsed the crackdown masterminded by General Abdel Fatah
el-Sisi and bailing out the Egyptian treasury. Sisi, a former military
attaché in Riyadh, is now Egypt’s president, after being elected by a
claimed majority of 96 percent. The alleged turnout of 45 percent was
achieved only by keeping polls open for an extra day.
With accusations of official ballot-stuffing and police “persuasion,”
Sisi’s mandate is less convincing than Morsi’s, who achieved a 51.7
percent victory on a 52 percent turnout. Though formerly the
Brotherhood’s leading protectors, Saudi Arabia’s tribal gerontocracy is
terrified that the glimmer of democratic legitimacy represented by Morsi
could weaken its hold on power. Local rivalries in the Gulf are also at
play. The gas-rich Qataris, rivals to the Saudis, have been the
Brotherhood’s main sponsors, as well as funders of the Tunisian Ennahda
party.
Muasher concludes with a powerful plea for improvements in education
that alone, in his view, can guarantee the pluralistic changes he
advocates: “Appreciating differences is a taught behavior. It must be
fostered by the community, particularly at school.”
It is difficult to see this happening while Salafism, underpinned by
petrodollars, holds sway in the region. In the Islamic world the
prospects for embracing diversity are especially difficult, since the
Salafist emphasis on tawhid (unity) is so emphatic in its stress on a
God who tolerates no partners. Hinduism, which incorporates diversity
into its vision, may prove less antithetical to democratic pluralism.
Achcar’s conclusion is scarcely more hopeful than Muasher’s, stating
that “it is impossible to consolidate democracy without a major
redistribution of property and income.” This seems improbable so long as
oil and modern weapons systems are available to buttress the tribal
oligarchies that still dominate the region’s wealthiest states.
More plausible openings for pluralism are likely to issue from within
religious conflict itself, as appears to be happening in the larger
regional rivalry between Saudi Arabia and Shiite Iran, as well as
between ultra-conservative Saudi Wahhabis and their neighbors in Qatar
(also Wahhabis, though of a different hue) who have used Al Jazeera to
make a niche for themselves in the Arab political world. Enlightenment
in the Middle East will come of age, as it did in the West, only when
the dogmatism of one system of faith finds itself challenged by others.
1. “Egypt: Dozens of Disappeared Civilians Face Ongoing Torture at
Military Prison,” May 22, 2014. ↩
2. Amna Guellali, “The Problem with Tunisia’s New Constitution,” Human
Rights Watch, February 3, 2014. ↩
3. Andrew Ross, “High Culture and Hard Labor,” The New York Times, March
28, 2014. ↩
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