The Middle East Crisis Factory

Tyranny, Resilience and Resistance

Ahmed Gatnash, Iyad El-Baghdadi

• Publisher: Hurst Publishers
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781787383043
• eBook ISBN: 9781787386143
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Middle Eastern Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Why is the Middle East a crisis factory, and how can it be fixed? What does the future look like for its 500 million people? And what role should the West play? Iyad El-Baghdadi and Ahmed Gatnash tell the story of the modern Middle East as a series of broken promises. They chart the entrenchment of tyranny, terrorism and foreign intervention, showing how these systems of oppression simultaneously feed off and battle each other. Exploring demographic, economic and social trends, the authors paint a picture of the region's prospects that is alarming yet hopeful. Finally, they present ambitious and thoughtful ideas that reject both aggressive military intervention and cynical deals with dictators. This book, written by two children of the region, is about the failures of history, and the reasons for hope. The Middle East Crisis Factory offers a bold vision for those seeking peace and democracy in the Middle East.

PART I

HISTORY

1

BROKEN PROMISES

The number of democracies in the world increased on every inhabited continent through the twentieth century. The total went from twenty-four in 1948 to seventy-five in 1993, peaking at eighty-five in 2005.¹ The MENA region was uniquely excepted from this ‘wave of democratisation’, though, being the only part of the world in which no progress was made.² Today, only one Arab country is classified as a full democracy, Tunisia.³ At the same time, as of late 2020, our region has lived through four civil wars, four proxy wars, three refugee crises, and four major terror flashpoints—as well as nine major popular protest movements—since 2018.

In 2019, as a new wave of uprisings shook the region, a video clip of a Moroccan football chant went viral. In unison, thousands of young people in a stadium in Casablanca sung these painful verses:

In this country, we live in grief

All we seek is to be safe

Our talents, you waste

Our dreams, you break

Our country’s wealth, you steal

Our generation, you crush

Our passion, you kill

And now you provoke us?

You pass laws against violence

But by violence want to rule us?⁴

There is a reason why the clip was so popular: it could have been sung in any city in the MENA. Our region lives in the midst of a protracted legitimacy crisis that has surpassed the political and seeped into its social, cultural, and religious spheres. The origin of uprising is not mobilisation—that comes rather late in the process. Rather, the origin of uprising is a broken social contract. Dictators do not rule by force alone—they also rule by fraud, threats, and promises, until they run out of lies.

Social contracts are fundamental promises made by the leaders of the political order, upon which their legitimacy is based. Most histories of our region focus on political actors or conflict; this may inform you of all the wars and who won them, but it will leave you with rather little understanding of how the people of the region felt about these events. Here, we will put societies at the centre, narrating our modern history as a series of social contracts, through to their breakage.⁵ We believe that our history of resistance and resilience can only be understood through this prism.

Origins of a Political Order

Between the eighth and thirteenth centuries, the Middle East’s societies were among the world’s most advanced. Polymaths and innovators in mathematics, astronomy, physics, chemistry, engineering, arts, and philosophy produced lasting contributions to human knowledge, laying the groundwork for, among other things, Europe’s later renaissance. Diverse people from the region’s many ethnicities and faiths contributed to this Golden Age.

But all good things come to an end, golden ages included. The political order would be devastated by the Crusades in the twelfth century, the Mongol invasions in the thirteenth century, and the Black Plague in the fourteenth century—and it never fully recovered from these blows. The region slipped into a centuries-long period of decline, despite the rise of a new power—the Ottoman Empire—which consolidated control over much of the Middle East. The Ottomans were rightfully considered a world power, but in the ensuing centuries the Middle East was no longer the global centre of culture, enlightenment, and economic dynamism that it once had been.

The legitimacy of the political order continued to lean upon religion, and it was rarely successfully challenged. Contact between communities across the region continued, thanks to long-established trade routes and yearly religious pilgrimages—but contact with the West was limited, even as Europe underwent a Renaissance and an Enlightenment.

In the aftermath of the French Revolution and as part of the ensuing Revolutionary Wars, Napoleon’s army invaded Egypt in 1798 in an attempt to secure French trade interests and undermine Britain’s access to its Indian colony. The French occupation of Egypt would last for only three years, but it was a harbinger of what was to come. The Ottoman Empire was past its own Golden Age—and its reformist and constitutionalist movements which emerged in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were too late in the face of greater forces that had been set into motion.

Exploiting Ottoman decline, France would invade the Maghreb (Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia) in the nineteenth century. The British invaded Egypt in 1882, having already expanded their influence over the Arabian side of the Gulf, all the way to the Iraqi port of Basra. Italy, for its part, invaded and occupied Libya in 1911. After the Ottoman Empire was defeated in World War One, the French and British divided the Levant region between them. France took Syria and Lebanon, whilst the British took Iraq, Jordan and Palestine. New borders were drawn in the infamous Sykes–Picot agreement, which divided a long-integrated region into new nation-states, importing European systems of governance.

Out of all countries in the modern MENA, only Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Iran were not completely colonised—although Iran came very close, with both Russian and British influence and intervention lasting well into the twentieth century.

European colonisation was a kind of foreign rule that was markedly different from previous empires that had risen and fallen in the Middle East over millennia. It had a deep impact on the region’s political order, indeed on its very psyche. Perhaps most insidious was that it brought new narratives of a ‘civilising mission’ that called into question whether the natives were even fit to exercise any agency over their political affairs. In that same period, the people of both France and the United Kingdom enjoyed democratic rights at home—a contradiction that could only be explained by resorting to racist tropes of the type explored in the previous chapter.

In fact, colonialism is defined by its inherent racism. More fundamental than its enactment of occupation, subjugation, exploitation, and violence is the idea that no matter what the natives do, they will never be equal to the colonisers. The colonisers justify their subjugation and right to determine our fate not merely because they are more powerful than us, but because they are better than us. We may try to assimilate, to literally become similar to the colonisers; while that might make us a little bit more human-like in their eyes, we will never be equals. To acknowledge our full humanity would make them unable to defend their denial of our agency—and how could they, when their prosperity and their status in the world depends upon it? This is the essence of European colonialism, and this is why it was an evil unmatched by that of the other numerous empires that had come and gone.

Colonisation also imported new economic and political systems, including modern capitalism and the nation-state; these brought with them a level of administrative control that did not exist before. The people of the MENA, coming from a region with a proud history, had to contend with a new reality in which they were dominated by foreign nations largely richer, more educated, and freer than they were.

The late colonial period—roughly corresponding to the first half of the twentieth century—kicked off a decades-long soul-searching across the region. Are the colonialists correct when they say we are mere savages, unfit for self-rule? If so, does mimicking the colonialists in the way they speak, dress, and eat make us more ‘civilised’? Or is the answer in copying the way they think, trade, administer—even repress? Should we engage with the colonialists to learn more about their new theories and technologies? And if we do, how can we make sure it’s an equal exchange, given the enormous disparity in power? Perhaps the colonialists present an opportunity—their superior weapons and their hunger for natural resources could enable interesting alliances; perhaps for the right price, they will assist us against our enemies?

Or maybe the colonialists are wrong, so wrong that we should do the opposite of everything they do, reverting instead to our traditional systems of knowledge. Should we isolate ourselves from the colonialists as much as possible, even if it means pushing away all the material success and scientific knowledge that they boast? These questions were asked by generation after generation, leading to a new ecosystem of ideologies and political movements representing every side of each question.

Virtually every society across the region saw an anti-colonial struggle for independence and self-determination, but it was in the mid-twentieth century that the European colonial powers, exhausted by World War Two, would withdraw from much of the region, giving rise to a new political order in freshly independent states.

Perhaps now, the people of the region thought, was the time for native agency.

We will not return to chains

We have become free and liberated the homeland!

from the Libyan national anthem, 1951⁶

1950s–1970s: ‘We Liberate You—And You Shut Up’

In the decades following World War Two, European nations withdrew from their colonies, unable to afford to maintain them and exhausted from constantly having to suppress native liberation movements. In 1946, Syria and Lebanon became independent from France, and Jordan from Britain. Egypt had gained its independence from Britain in 1936, although Britain maintained control over the Suez Canal until 1956. Libya gained its independence in 1951, after a period of UN stewardship. Five years later, in 1956, Tunisia and Morocco became independent from France; Sudan gained its independence from Britain in the same year. In 1961, the British protectorate over Kuwait ended, making it an independent state. In 1962, Algeria gained independence from France, after a brutal war of over seven years that according to some estimates cost over a million lives.⁷ Yemen became independent in 1967, and the Gulf states in 1970 and 1971.

Even in Saudi Arabia, which was never colonised, Western powers were instrumental to the rise of the modern state. In 1915, the British signed the treaty of Darin with Emir Ibn Saud—the ruler of Najd (central Arabia), who had fought the Ottomans—making his lands a British protectorate and giving him military support. The treaty of Jeddah in 1927 gave diplomatic recognition to what was to become the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia five years later. In return, Britain expected Ibn Saud to stop the religious extremists that he commanded from attacking neighbouring states within their sphere of influence.

In many countries in the region, the modern nation-state was not just new but alien to lived realities. The ideal nation-state consisted of a fairly homogeneous nation that spoke one language and lived within well-defined historical borders. How does this apply to a region in which many indigenous groups speaking numerous languages have coexisted for millennia—one which was largely borderless, allowing people to trade and move freely? Even though the model was ill-fitted for the MENA, given that the most powerful countries in the world were nation-states, a question arose: If we adopted their model, would we achieve the same level of power, prestige, and dignity?

Across the region, a new class of leaders emerged who derived their legitimacy from the struggle for self-determination. Tunisia was ruled by Habib Bourguiba, who had led the struggle for independence and spent over twenty years in French prisons. In Algeria, Ahmed Ben Bella—one of the leaders of the anti-colonial National Liberation Front (FLN)—took power, before being overthrown by his own defence minister after two years.

This was happening in a global context in which rivalry between Western countries and the Soviet Bloc was evolving into a Cold War. Given that the region’s most prolific colonialists, the United Kingdom and France, were both part of the Western Bloc, many political movements in the MENA sought to align themselves in opposition to their previous colonialists.

In many newly established states, post-independence governments perceived to be weak or beholden to the previous colonialists were overthrown in military coups. In Syria, the military overthrew the civilian government in 1949; military coups also toppled monarchies and civilian governments in Egypt (1952), Iraq (1958), and Libya (1969).

These were anti-Western coups, but there were coups in the opposite direction too; most famously the 1953 CIA-assisted coup against Iran’s democratically elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh. The coup enabled Iran’s monarch, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, to centralise his rule; Iran would remain closely allied with the Western Bloc—and highly authoritarian—until the 1979 revolution overthrew the monarchy, bringing to power an intensely anti-Western and equally authoritarian theocratic regime.

In general, the region’s post-independence rulers built highly centralised, autocratic states that, ironically enough, borrowed a lot of their repression strategies from the previous colonialists. Colonel Adib al-Shishakli, architect of the 1949 coup in Syria, presents a notable case study, and would be a harbinger of what was to come. He abolished political parties, setting up a one-party state led by his staunchly nationalist ‘Arab Liberation Movement’. He established a cult of personality, which he amplified by expanding the state-supervised media, making his face ubiquitous in public life. This control of the media allowed him to valorise and expand the armed forces, police, and security services, and invent and exaggerate threats against the state. Being a veteran of the French mandate-era gendarmerie, he was already experienced in using security forces to control the population.⁸

Shishakli was deeply inimical towards religious institutions, banning religious clothing, curtailing religious education, and ensuring that all religious establishments became organs of state. At the same time, he was intensely suspicious of ethnic and religious minorities, and in the legacy of colonial ‘divide and rule’ tactics, he pursued a strategy to marginalise them. He shut down their institutions, limited their use of minority languages, and forbade the usage of ‘foreign’ names. Ironically, he was himself of Syrian Kurdish descent.

Shishakli even staged national elections in 1953, in which he (of course) won 99.7 per cent of the vote. Ultimately, Shishakli was only in power until 1954, but the methods he pioneered were picked up by Gamal Abdel Nasser in Egypt, Saddam Hussein in Iraq, and Muammar Gaddafi in Libya, as well as by his future successor Hafez al-Assad.

By now, the division of the Arab world into nation-states had given rise to a backlash. After generations under colonialism, many people across the region faced a crisis of identity that led them to prioritise identitarian narratives over political freedom; this brought on the heyday of Arab Nationalism. One anecdote exemplifies this. Algeria’s Ben Bella was invited to give a speech in Egypt at the behest of Nasser, then considered to be the foremost leader of Arab Nationalism. Ben Bella started to speak, but then burst into tears at his inability to communicate in standard formal Arabic, having lived his entire life speaking French instead. ‘Nous sommes Arabes, nous sommes Arabes, nous sommes Arabes!’ he passionately declared in a speech following independence.

Arab Nationalists sought to erase the borders entirely and unite into a single state;⁹ the years between 1958 and 1972 saw multiple attempts at Arab unification, such as those between Egypt and Syria (1958–61) and Iraq and Jordan (1958). There were also talks about the unification of Egypt and Iraq; Egypt and North Yemen; Egypt, Syria, and Iraq; and Egypt, Syria, and Libya—none of which ever came about. Each of these states were led by leaders with their own cults of personality, who clashed with each other constantly.

Among the greatest sins of the Arab Nationalism movement was that it suppressed the region’s native ethnic minorities, forcing a single prevailing identity. The Middle East’s ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword
• Introduction: An Unlearning
• Part I: History
• Part II: Horizons
• Notes
• Acknowledgements
• Index