Conflict in the Middle East

P.J. Vatikiotis

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781317206316
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Regional Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

The Middle East is a continuing crisis area in world politics. This crisp and penetrating book, first published in 1971, analyses the historical development of the major issues in Arab politics, explains the conflicting interests now at stake in the Middle East and how the politics of the area were likely to develop. It examines, among other topics, the Palestine Liberation Movement, the prospects for Arab unity, and Great Power interference, and was written by one of the world's leading scholars writing on the Middle East.

Part One
Arab Aspects of Political Conflict in the Middle East

Chapter 1
Politics in the Islamic Tradition

Politics in the Middle East is an activity which is still largely confined to the state administrative level, and more specifically, to those who hold power in it. This includes 'Men of the Sword' (Soldiers) and 'Men of the Pen' (Bureaucrats).¹ Citizens of most Middle Eastern states do not as a matter of course engage in political activity in the same way as citizens of the advanced states in the West do within an elaborate or established institutional political arena. Thus, regimes and states are the organizations of power that operate in political conflict. With a few qualified exceptions (Israel, Lebanon, Morocco, Tunisia and Turkey), this is the context of politics in the area as a whole.

Politics moreover is still concerned mainly with the attainment and retention of power. It has yet to reflect a more normative concern, such as the use of power in the construction of a polity, despite the recent articulation of ideological attributes to power in several Middle Eastern states, ranging from its use for economic development and social welfare to the maintenance of an Islamic community. The exercise and use of power in most Middle Eastern states is still divorced from the ideological or value-laden political ideas which have so far been expressed.

The last powerful political dominion in Muslim experience was the Ottoman Empire. The authority of that great empire extended over most of the Muslim lands of the Middle East as defined here. The Sultan-Caliph provided Muslims, regardless of race or ethnic group, with the object and sense of their religiously-derived political loyalty, and with the basis of community. Both the central and provincial bureaucracies of that great empire conducted government in the name of the spiritual-temporal head of the Islamic Community. When this great imperial edifice collapsed, a lack of authority and sense of community was bound to be felt and Arab Muslims in particular were affected by this loss for a long time. This traumatic and consequential secular experience is crucial to any understanding of political phenomena in that part of the world. At the same time the experience complicated the problems of political and social change which arose from the challenge of the modern world, specifically of an expanding modern Europe. The response of Middle Easterners to this challenge and the matter of adaptation were also influenced by long-standing traditional Muslim attitudes and perceptions, some of which are outlined below.

This political dissolution aggravated the tension present in all Islamic communities which derives from the inability to reconcile an ideal Islamic view of the state and society with the actual historical evolution of that society. Thus when sultanates within the Islamic Empire appeared in the ninth century to displace the effective power of the Caliphate, their power practically neutralized the limitation imposed by the Sacred Law of Islam on the power of Muslim rulers. Instead, Islam soon accommodated itself to this new political reality of power and to authority based on force. This development has constituted a source of tension and conflict in Muslim societies ever since.

When the declining Ottoman Empire came to face the impact of the West in the late eighteenth and throughout the nineteenth centuries, the trauma increased. A technologically and commercially advanced Europe now presented a serious military challenge to Muslim dominion. Commercial superiority as such hardly disturbed the ruling and intellectual classes of the Ottoman Empire. Military superiority however was another matter, for it threatened the very existence of the dominions of the Commander of the Faithful – the Caliph.

The net social and intellectual effect upon Muslim societies of the European challenge and encroachment over 175 years has remained superficial – and a mixed blessing. It forced the new despots of the Middle East to adopt modern techniques and methods of administrative, military and economic organization in order to better protect their realms via strong centralized government. It hardly affected the real basis of their societies which remained fundamentally unaltered despite the adoption of Western methods in the use and exercise of power. To this extent the secular experience of Middle Easterners before and after the nineteenth century became a source of tension and conflict. It was characterized after the eighteenth century by state economic, administrative, military and educational reform imposed by forceful rulers without any creative or initiatory participation by the members of the society. This political experience moreover varied in its detailed evolution from one society in the Middle East to the other.

A major obstacle to innovative political thinking remained unsurmounted. The rigid distinction Inherited from Muslim political 'ideology' survived: the acceptance of the existing order was consecrated in orthodoxy, whereas its criticism or rejection was not only a flight to subversion, but constituted religious apostasy and heresy. This 'either-or' dichotomy in Islamic political thinking has endowed our contemporary Middle Easterners with an awkward legacy that affects much of their lives and activities: from problems of cognition, that is, the thought processes by which they acquire knowledge of ideas, to the confrontation of personal and social problems. It has equally thwarted, if not arrested, original, individual and public thought, and rendered difficult if not impossible the practical reconciliation and absorption of diverse elements of society within a political order.

In their desire to defend their state against foreign (non-Muslim) attack, the Muslims found very little in the armoury of the Islamic theory of resistance beyond the concept of Holy War (Jihad). Consequently a concept of loyalty to the state as distinguished from loyalty to the religious community of Islam was difficult to develop. The Islamic obligation incumbent upon the believer to observe the Sacred Law and to obey those in authority over him amounted to a passive idea of politics. This particular notion of politics was further upheld by the experience of state modernization under forceful rulers in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Although several intermediate social orders existed in Muslim history from the tenth to the eighteenth centuries uncontrolled and not adversely affected by central power, at no time could these be considered similar in function to the politically active and autonomous intermediate organizations in the West which emerged to mediate between the individual citizen and the state and to press the demands and advance the interests of their members upon the state. Nonetheless, their religious, mystic (Sufi) orders, occupational and other guild organizations for long were possessed of a sense of corporate identity, interest and existence.

One could perhaps generalize by saying that the Muslims settled for a conception of the state as a static form of political organization – and life. And although, when the challenge came from the outside, the successor rulers and states of the Ottoman Empire adopted new techniques for the attainment and retention of power, they hardly succeeded in devising or developing a creative, dynamic idea of the state or the political. How static this idea was, whether it precluded change, and what attempts if any there have been to change the political order of things are matters that fall outside the scope of this essay. Yet a partial clarification of these may emerge from the discussion of political conflict in the region.

Perhaps the greatest weakness, or gap, in the Arab Middle Eastern experience of the last 150 years has been the failure to recognize the importance of institutionalizing the many changes which had occurred or were occurring. Much of the social, religious, ethnic and other fragmentation so glaringly visible in the Fertile Crescent for instance might have been overcome and even supplanted by transforming disparate communities, with divisive and clashing loyalties, into political communities. To some extent, the Muslim reluctance to accept positive legislation produced certain anomalies in the body politic.

One was that when so-called modernizing rulers (viz. Muhammad All in Egypt, Sultan Mahmud II in Turkey) found it absolutely necessary to introduce modern schemes of legislation in order to regulate administrative, economic, judicial and educational activities and procedures, they did so by fiat of central power, superimposing them over more traditional means of conduct based upon religious and customary law and convention. Thus a dichotomy in the Muslim body politic in Middle Eastern societies developed to plague the relationship between the individual and the state, the subject and the ruler.

An anomaly resulting from this dichotomy was that legislation, instead of constituting a creative act for the political integration of a community, remained mechanical and opportunistic. It failed to transform Arab societies from a conglomeration of tribes, peasant societies and urban groups into a community with a sense of commonality, or agreement on common fundamentals. The conglomeration became an agglomeration; and so it remains largely to this day.

One could even suggest that the early political-administrative policy of the first Arab conquerors which was that of tolerating the settled communities, comprising different religious and ethnic groups they had subjugated, though humane in the long run, became a serious obstacle to integration. It was further bolstered by the Ottoman millet system under which the Sultan's non-Muslim subjects had been organized in milletler and ruled by their religious leader. Humane toleration was the outward manifestation of an illusory contention on the part of the Arab Muslim ruling class that they were the carriers of a perfect, or ideal, order. The actual evolution and historical development of this order hardly approached the ideal, and rarely became an active intellectual and social concern of Muslims.

Another source of conflict has been the militarization of the state and government early in the political history of Islam (the middle of the ninth century A.D.). Despite the similarity of this development to the situation in Byzantium and feudal Europe, in Islam it has remained a permanent feature until today.

In Islam, the faith itself was from the start the basis of political action. Conquest helped to imprint this strongly upon Muslim thought and society. Early governors of newly conquered provinces and lands were generals in the main. The Prophet first, and the caliphs after him, had been warriors of the faith, Commanders of the Faithful. The martial overtones of Islam were stronger than any other monotheistic religion. In part this was due to the fact that Islam as a religious movement did not arise in a state with whose temporal authority it had to come to terms. Rather Islam acquired a state by war, and an empire by conquest. It then proceeded to divide the world sharply between the World of Peace (where Islam prevailed) and the World of War (the world of the infidels, or non-Muslims). The two 'worlds' were theoretically in a state of permanent war with one another. As it turned out, the unrealistic aim to establish a universal Muslim state and dominion created the dichotomy between an ideal to be attained and a reality to be suffered.

The earliest crises of legitimacy, or political authority, in Islam had been confronted (and partially dealt with) by civil war. When similar crises arose in the Abbasid Caliphate (750-1258), militarization of caliphal rule permitted the usurpation of authority by force throughout the empire. Since that time the ideal of authority, unattained and unattainable, floated above the reality of power. Moreover, this dichotomy in Islamic political life, partly resulting from the militarization of the state, led to conspiracy, and the arrest of institutional development.

Worst of all, it threw the matter of political succession into utter disarray, and exposed it to abuse. The more traditional, albeit unclear, Islamic notions and processes of succession that could claim legitimacy in religious law and sacred tradition were superseded, displaced by ones based on force. Those difficulties were also partly due to the lack of any systematic political theory among Muslims beyond that provided by jurisprudence emanating from the revealed Sacred Law. The latter dealt comfortably and rigidly with the rationalization and idealization of orthodox and pristine Islamic doctrine but in general refused, for a long time, to respond to the actual political evolution of Islamic society.

Religion and its tradition generated a sentiment of brotherhood among all Muslims and a feeling of belonging to the same community. Yet this sentiment had no practical expression in institutions (other than the Pilgrimage, Prayer or Holy War) which also provided for political cohesiveness. As a primary loyalty to Islam it superseded perhaps other more existential allegiances. In the absence of other social-political organization and institutions, the faith had this function of providing a sense of commonality among Muslims up to a certain point. But as it was superimposed on distinct and diverse traditions that ante-dated it, the former coexisted and co-developed with religion. The latter either absorbed or accepted them, or both. Similarly the faith was also superimposed on agrarian, pastoral and urban communities alike. It did not however transform them fundamentally in the social and political sense.

One must therefore look even more closely at the background of politics in the Middle East, the environment in which it occurs –its ecology, if you wish. One must then seek the characteristics of politics, i.e. the factors affecting political behaviour, and the emergent political map of the region. It is this that I try to do briefly in Chapter 2, for it helps one to distinguish between political experiences and phenomena in the Middle East as compared with and contrasted to our experiences. It helps one to raise theoretical questions common to most political inquiry, viz., the basis of legitimacy and nature of authority, the patterns of rule, or the organization, exercise, use and distribution of power. Notions of social class and social movements by themselves cannot explain politics. For that one needs to look into political organization. This in turn helps one to distinguish between aspects of political change; to place in proper perspective insurrections, coups, and rebellions. Even more significant, it helps one to understand the difficulties of national integration, common loyalty to a nation-state, and the Middle Easterner's very conception of the state.

In all of this, controversy is inevitable. Politics, fortunately or unfortunately, is neither black nor white. It is neither apocalyptic nor cataclysmic. It is tenaciously and drably grey. It entails the most impressive dialectic of existence, that of order and disorder; and the tragedy of the human condition against its environment, and the interaction between the two. All order thus is precarious and delicate because man is also conditioned by his biological drives and psychological needs, so that the course of human relations is always fraught with unforeseen mutations, and unpredictable. Politics therefore is hardly the expression of a linear progression leading either to Hell or Paradise. Rather the two extremities of the political spectrum, especially in this age, are survival and extinction. Politics therefore remains an adaptive experience in time, basically for survival, and hopefully a civilized life.

One can approach the study of politics and government in the Middle East either as a Machiavellian or as a political philosopher of the classical European variety. The former emphasizes two things: leadership and the survival of the state. The latter emphasizes the community, the nation, the human and social ends and purposes of power, and citizenship. It deals with politics to a great extent from the viewpoint of its value premises and its ideology. It is concerned with the cohesiveness and well-being of its citizens in a political community. It is therefore concerned with both ends and means. Islam has emphasized both leadership and the community, albeit in a more religious than secular political sense. One may therefore combine these two approaches in an inquiry into politics and political conflict in the Middle East.

The uncertainty of the Muslim about what should be the organizing principle of his political and social life remains a source of conflict. He has yet to choose clearly between one which derives from his inherited Islamic ethos and several imported varieties. Thus the short-lived experiment of 'liberalism' in the Middle East in the inter-war period was sustained by indigenous autocracies and therefore plagued by authoritarian social and political behaviour: Ataturk in Turkey, the Muhammad All dynasty, Zaghlul and Nahhas in Egypt, the Hashemites in Iraq, and others elsewhere. Its collapse in most of the Arab Middle Eastern countries within a decade after the end of the Second World War was not too surprising.

The fragmentation of the Fertile Crescent as well as the peripheries of the Arabian Peninsula (South Arabia and the Gulf) into states produced the Machiavellian condition of the state with its built-in tenacity for survival, its raison d'être. Integration versus fragmentation has since become the eternal song of inter-Arab and intra-state Arab politics at the centre of the Middle East. The eastern peripheries (e.g. Turkey and Iran) may suffer today the same basic disability, but without the same degree of sectarian, communal and ethnic divisions.

All of this requires more than a Machiavellian approach to, or understanding of, politics. It needs a creative idea of human commitment. This Middle Easterners (except Israel) have been unable or unwilling to provide. Many so-called ideological movements or parties, viz. the Baath, the Syrian National Social party (ex-PPS), Nasserism, the Arab Socialist Union in Egypt and Iraq, the Front of National Liberation (FLN) in Algeria, etc., have tried but foundered on the rocks of non-cohesive societies and nations, and upon a level of tenaciously traditional local political behaviour. To this extent many have recently been identified as the radicals of the Middle East through calling for a different order in terms of goals. They are, at least on the surface, willing to use power for ends that differ from those held by conservatives. Yet they are still unable to exercise and organize power in a different or original way.

Whereas the form of power organization in the contemporary Middle Eastern states varies from republican to monarchic, and authority from popular to dynastic, with one exception (Israel) and two qualified exceptions (Lebanon and Turkey), its basis of legitimacy, its essence does not. This remains autocratic, and its perception by Middle Easterners exclusive and pre-emptive. Established power, that is, cannot be opposed legitimately; opposition is tantamount to rebellion. Power changes are therefore possible only via rebellion or revolution; violent politics predominates over civil politics. Yet if one looks at recent instances of rebellion, coup d'état or insurrection in the Yemen, South Arabia, Syria and Iraq this kind of upheaval so far has only aimed at changing a particular, often personal, arrangement of power. It has yet to set as its objective the ending of a particular order and the creation of a new one in its place. It is partly because of this common experience of most Middle Eastern states in the last twenty years that some have been led to argue that, in terms of the vocabulary of Western political thought, these changes are in no way revolutions.

One of the basic difficulties derives from the environment of Middle Eastern politics. For example, the traditional rural-urban division in most Middle Eastern states has hindered not simply the emergence of a national identity and...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Original Title
• Original Copyright
• Dedication
• Acknowledgments
• Contents
• Map: The areas of conflict
• Introduction
• Part One: ARAB ASPECTS OF POLITICAL CONFLICT IN THE MIDDLE EAST
• Part Two: REGIONAL ASPECTS OF POLITICAL CONFLICT
• Part Three: JUNE 1967 AND ITS AFTERMATH
• Part Four: THE MIDDLE EAST, PERMANENT AREA OF CONFLICT?
• Postscript: The Decline of the Guerrillas
• Bibliography
• Index