On the Arab Revolts and the Iranian Revolution

Power and Resistance Today

Arshin Adib-Moghaddam

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781472589040
• eBook ISBN: 9781472506146
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Middle Eastern Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

On the Arab Revolts and the Iranian Revolution: Power and Resistance Today is the first comparative analysis of two central political events that have altered our world forever: the Arab uprisings which started in Tunisia, and the Iranian revolution in 1979. Adib-Moghaddam demonstrates how contemporary forms of protest are changing our understanding about the way power and resistance function. In a theoretical tour de force which is substantiated with a range of primary material, he argues that acts of protest in Tehran to Cairo can be entirely linked to the same act in New York, London, Madrid and Athens. Breaking through the east/west, north/south divide, Adib-Moghaddam shows how the Arab revolts promise to shift the discourse away from the idea that Arabs and Muslims are peculiar, that "Middle Eastern Studies" cannot be linked to political theory, that the dynamics of rebellion "there" are fundamentally different from the politics of revolt "here". Adib-Moghaddam argues that the dialectics of power and resistance are truly universal and that they are unfolding within a globalised political context that is increasingly interconnected. In order to illuminate this argument theoretically, the study is organised around conceptual terms that feed into forms of power and resistance, such as revolution, radicalism, dissent, knowledge, neighbour and reform. These terms and concepts are discussed and deconstructed via an empirical discussion of pivotal events beyond the non-western world, demonstrating that for a long time, and without realising it, we have been living in the end times of unitary categories such as "west" and "east."

INTERREGNUM 1

Our Revolting Neighbours

Good rulership is equivalent to mildness.

Ibn Khaldun, Al-Muqaddimah

The other side of us

A few metres from my office at the School of Oriental and African Studies in the heart of London’s Bloomsbury area is the Senate House of the University of London, a remarkable neo-classical colossus of a building that functioned as the headquarters of Britain’s Ministry of Information, where George Orwell worked occasionally during the Second World War. The building’s influence on Orwell is apparent in his dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, which powerfully evokes a lobotomized society controlled by Big Brother, whose Thought Police dominate a brainwashed populace while torturing anyone guilty of ‘thoughtcrime’ into submission. Winston Smith, the tragic hero, is charged with the daily task of altering the historical record to conform with whatever the current position of the regime (Oceania) happens to be in relation to its counterparts (Eurasia and Eastasia); he works at the Ministry of Truth, which Orwell drew on his wartime experiences of Senate House to depict. The novel is most often viewed as a political satire of the totalitarianism of the era (especially Soviet, as the Fascist regimes had fallen by the time the book was written) and an indictment of ultra-controlled illiberal societies. Among the most memorable themes is its emphasis on the state’s use of mass media to establish complete power over language and thought. Orwell elaborates this theme via the concept of ‘Newspeak’, the language of the ruling Party, used to smooth over any complexity in favour of easy and clear dichotomies: ‘goodthink’ versus ‘thoughtcrime’.

Orwell writes elsewhere, in a famous essay, that ‘(political) language – and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists – is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind’.¹ In this non-fictional context, Orwell seems to be acknowledging that thoughtcrime is not limited to Soviet and Fascist regimes, that the distortion of reality is a feature of politics in general and that the media is complicit in the assault on independent thinking. The word Orwellian has itself become as instantly recognizable in modern media and political discourse as its description of a world of lies, propaganda and indoctrination. Its connotations seem to become even more sinister when it is used to identify, not direct and overt deceit, but the kind of thought control that operates in advanced capitalist societies: more ciphered, clandestine, opaque, flatly networked, horizontal, penetrative, global and politically transcendent than that in the intensely vertical and vulgar top-down form indicted in Nineteen Eighty-Four.

This current form of thought control can be seen operating in relation to many politicized topics, but it is particularly apparent in depictions of ‘Arabs’ and ‘Muslims’, especially after the terror attacks on the United States in September 2001. As I have argued in A Metahistory of the Clash of Civilisations, the outburst and jingoistic vitriol against individuals and issues considered to be remotely ‘Islamic’ was the surface effect of a cultural constellation that runs deep in the subliminal consciousness of western Europe and North America. In order to accentuate that this ‘Islamophobic’ assemblage is dense and historically anchored I called it a clash regime, a system that reproduces Islam as unique, deviant, violent and ultimately different to ‘us’.² This is not to say that there is an all-encompassing anti-Islamic culture in Europe and the United States of course, but to accentuate that Islamophobia continues to be exploited politically by powerful strata of western society, exactly because there exists a cultural constellation that is amenable to such manipulation. It is this regime of truth, nurtured by influential doyens of our contemporary culture, which compels ‘us’ to believe in some inevitable, cosmic battle with ‘them’. It is such norms, institutions and ideologies that fortify boundaries that are turned into trenches of war during times of crisis. And it is in this way that murder in the name of civilization continues to be accepted and legitimated as an international modus operandi.³

It is one of the central purposes of this book to cut through some of the representations of the Arab and Islamic world as ultimately different. To that end, I am taking as a point of departure the recent events in the Arab world, which spread like wildfire through the Mediterranean encompassing capitals in North Africa and southern Europe. I start by arguing that the uprisings are indicative of a post-modern form of globalized politics that reclaims the universality of norms such as social justice, independence, freedom and democracy. For a decisive period for the future of world politics, the ‘power of the powerless’ has been on display. Not since the uprisings that brought down the Iron Curtain and facilitated the demise of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, has there been such an interconnected outpouring of public dissent with decisive political consequences. At the time of writing, three of the longest standing dictatorships in the region, those of Zine El Abidine Ben-Ali in Tunisia, Hosni Mubarak in Egypt and Muammar Gaddafi in Libya, have been swept away by the sheer determination of the people; in the case of Libya accompanied by a period of armed conflict between the state and the opposition who were partially aided by NATO. These leaders, whose legitimacy was not democratic, but geared towards the authority of the military establishment and the ideal of the charismatic and strong leader, have followed the fate of the Shah in Iran and Saddam Hussein in Iraq. Despite the residues of the authoritarian regimes that continue to be part of the political culture in West Asia and North Africa (WANA), it is safe to argue that demands for democracy, independence and social justice have become the common currency of the societies in the region. Irresistible as it would be to assume that the stereotype of Arabs and Muslims as unique, deviant and ultimately different has been overcome, the revolts have shown nonetheless that they are not simply reducible to targets in the ‘war on terror,’ that Orientalist depictions of them as the irreconcilable other are outdated and of questionable analytical value.

In that sense, the Arab revolts have given impetus to a trend that started in the middle of the Cold War with intellectual movements such as the dependencia school in Latin America, the New Left in Europe, post-colonial studies, feminism, critical theory and other forms of counter-cultural movements that were galvanized by the ‘68 generation’. Undoubtedly, this period opened up new opportunities to think politics in a critical mode and challenged the Euro-Americo-centric legacies in the western social sciences and the humanities. This is the topic of a recent analysis in the emergent field of global history, which establishes that in ‘contrast to the beginning of the twentieth century, today critiques of Western bias have become a more common repertoire in many academic communities throughout the world’. At the same time, it is acknowledged that ‘global hierarchies’ continue to exist, that those challenges to the canon do not ‘mean that Eurocentric structures and mentalities have disappeared from the global academic landscapes’.⁴

While it is true that today subjugated knowledge is more readily recognizable, that the other has a presence in the curriculum, to argue that Eurocentric knowledge has been subdued is too optimistic. If anything, the immediate presence of the other has provoked a hostile reaction, which transmuted into a counter-movement that has established its own power base within academia and beyond. After all, the theory of a ‘clash of civilisations’ reinvented by the late Samuel P. Huntington, who was also one of the main advocates against the ‘hispanization’ of the United States, continues to occupy a central, if also contested place in the curriculum of many political-science and international-relations departments in North America and, to a lesser extent, in Europe. This is detrimental to a better understanding, especially of world politics exactly because ‘international theory does not so much explain international politics in an objective, positivist and universalist manner’, as Hobson argues in a recent study, ‘but seeks, rather, to parochially celebrate and defend or promote the West as the proactive subject of, and as the highest or ideal normative referent in, world politics’.⁵

But the effects are detrimental not just to scholarship. The clash narrative has become far more than a mere theoretical or scholarly construct, for it has entered the ideology and practice of political groups, including rightwing parties that have secured seats in the parliaments of many European Union countries; for example, the influential Dutch politician Geert Wilders has brought the clash thesis to life by making vulgar attacks on Islam the foundation of his career. Even at the centre of power, the idea of an inevitable clash between ‘the west and the rest’ can function as a political device to rally support for military intervention against the latter; for example, Britain’s former prime minister Tony Blair deployed the notion in evidence to the Chilcot Inquiry into the war in Iraq to, in effect, call for military action against Iran. ‘At some point the west has to get out of what I think is a wretched policy or posture of apology, believing that we are causing what the Iranians are doing, or what these extremists are doing’, he said.⁶ Blair elided the adversaries of the west in characteristically sweeping fashion: ‘They disagree fundamentally with our way of life, and will carry on unless met with determination and, if necessary, force.’⁷

The power of the idea of an inevitable clash of civilizations between the west and the rest is thus evident; it is too optimistic to argue that most consumers of the clash regime cease to be socialized into accepting the dominant narratives permeating their societies. Thought-control in advanced liberal-capitalist societies is practised in a much more subtle and clandestine way than even George Orwell imagined. A single example of what has been written and said about Islam at the same time as the Arab uprisings were unfolding illustrates the point. Thilo Sarrazin, a board member of Germany’s Bundesbank and a former senator of finance serving in the Berlin government, published a book titled Deutschland schafft sich ab (Germany Does Away with Itself), which argues that high birth-rates among Turkish and Arab communities in the country mean that Germany will soon be ruled by ‘Muslims,’ and that ‘Turkish genes’ are responsible for lowering the level of intelligence in the country.

The great success of Sarrazin’s book, helped by huge press exposure, prompted the leading political magazine Der Spiegel to ask why Sarrazin has become a national hero. Sarrazin’s phobia corresponds to what is happening elsewhere in Europe, such as the electoral success of Geert Wilders in the Netherlands, the minaret ban in Switzerland, neo-Nazi terror cells responsible for the murder of immigrants in Germany, the massacre committed by Anders Breivik in Norway in the name of a ‘global anti-Islamic crusade’, and the emergence of ultra-nationalist parties in several European Union member-states such as Hungary, Sweden and in the United Kingdom in the form of the anti-Muslim English Defence League. Thilo Sarrazin’s words contain residues of a persistent racist myth that was central to the cod-science of the Nazis (among others): that intelligence is ethnically codified. The obscure American pastor called Terry Jones who raised a furore when he threatened to burn a Qur’an in protest at the proposed establishment of an Islamic community centre in Manhattan (two blocks away from ground zero, the site of the 9/11 attacks) reflects another expression of social attitudes towards the other: that Islam functions as a formula to aggregate Muslims even more tightly under the label of terrorism. The social and geographical distance between these two men suggests that, while there is no all-encompassing anti-Muslim consensus, such attitudes are capable of reaching widely across the political cultures of the contemporary world.⁸

It was, for example, another prominent English novelist, Martin Amis, who in 2006 gave expression to the cultural persistence of the clash regime to say that Muslims should ‘suffer until they get their house in order’, in a sequence of measures: ‘deportation – further down the road. Curtailing of freedoms. Strip-searching people who look like they are from the Middle East, Pakistan, until it hurts the whole community and they start getting tough with their children.’⁹ Amis’s friend, the late Christopher Hitchens – who had written widely on George Orwell – in 2007 linked what he called ‘the fascistic subculture’ in Britain to ‘shady exiles from the middle east and Asia who are exploiting London’s traditional hospitality’ and to the ‘projection of an immigrant group that has its origins in a particularly backward and reactionary part of Pakistan’.¹⁰ All the individuals mentioned have (or in the case of Terry Jones, been given) privileged access to the media, and their tendentious and in some cases inflammatory views are readily disseminated across the world-wide-web. As one astute observer noted: ‘The recent spike in anti-Muslim sentiment in the United States and Europe is not the result of a naturally evolving climate of scepticism.’ Islamophobia is not coincidental. Rather it is a ‘product that has been carefully and methodically nurtured over the past decade and is only now in the second decade of the twenty-first century reaching its desired peak’.¹¹ The US film industry is complicit too. At the time of writing a US hit series called ‘Homeland’ presents Arab characters that are either rich and licentious or ragged and violent. The plot revolves around sleeper cells in the United States, who have been ‘turned’ by al-Qaeda into the invisible enemy within. In the cacophony that invariably ensues when ‘culture’ is produced in this way, the voices of reason and empathy tend to be quelled.¹²

These narratives also sketch the contours of a new strategic enemy, which exists as a projection from the mind of its makers rather than as reality. An insidiously divisive discourse promotes the idea that ‘Muslimness’ is equivalent to an all-encompassing and reductive signifier. The toddler is the Muslim. The neighbour is the Muslim. The prostitute is the Muslim. The gay-rights activist is the Muslim. The prisoner is the Muslim. The worker is the Muslim. The feminist is the Muslim. The disabled person is the Muslim. The lover is the Muslim. Muslim – and nothing more. The waste of opportunities for understanding and dialogue here is obvious. But even on their own terms, if writers such as Martin Amis and Christopher Hitchens are seeking to distinguish forms of ‘Islamic radicalism’ from a notional ‘good Islam’ then to talk of Muslims and Islam as if they are integrated entities is self-defeating. Even more as their discourse pronounces the unity and singularity of Islam, and renders coherent what is diversified, differentiated and molecular. The resemblance here is to the views of the leaders of al-Qaeda, who fervently believe that Islam is an all-encompassing totality which determines everything, all the way down to a person’s individual character traits. In their shared flattening of complex realities, these imagined adversaries collude in a dangerous myth of truly Orwellian proportions.

This makes it all the more important to question the underlying bipolar assumption on which the clash regime is based. For in reality, there are no such boundaries or ‘bloody borders’ separating a western entity from an Islamic bloc. To think in such dichotomous terms is a residue of a Cold War mentality that seems ever less fitting to the complexities of the post-modern disorder of the early twenty-first century. After all, the contemporary world more and more challenges the supposedly mutually exclusive categories of the clash thesis. For example, the everyday experience of major cities in the western hemisphere pervaded by hybridity and a cosmopolitan spirit, where many other cultural formations (including a sort of Islamo-European-American amalgam) are present.¹³ On an anecdotal note, one could refer to personal experience in my current hometown of Cambridge, where a mosque operates almost immediately adjacent to a traditional public house (pub) where one can cherish a good pint of traditional Ale. At no stage has there been any disturbance or agitation. The two manifestations of lifestyles in Britain shadow dance with each other in mutual respect on an everyday basis, despite occasional tensions which have remained the exception rather than the norm. In light of this intertwinement of lifestyles, policy attempts to ‘fix’ the division between entities – which have been a feature of British government reactions to the attacks of July 2005 in London, and of subsequent anti-extremist initiatives such as the ‘Prevent’ strategy – are misconceived and anachronistic. They assume the existence of a west that is ideologically unified, provincial and devoid of cosmopolitan spirit and intercultural heritage. In today’s globalized world order this assumption no longer has purchase, for the west and its correlates (east, south, north) are inside each other, part of an emerging post-modern constellation.

The consequences of this development are profound. First, the fact that the west has no clear boundary anymore (inner or outer) creates security interdependencies. The global terror campaign of al-Qaeda has made abundantly clear that no foreign war can be waged without some serious blowback. Second, the globalized world order fuels a particular kind of transnational solidarity exemplified by the opposition across the world to the invasion of Iraq in 2003 or the global support for a Palestinian state. This in turn is connected to the evolution since the 1990s of a sort of global public sphere in which local forms of political activism are woven into a borderless structure of resistance. The world-wide-web makes it easier to connect, organize and fuel diverse political struggles, and gives them a multi-polar and decentralized character; an influence that can be seen from the uprisings in Bahrain, Egypt, Tunisia and Syria through campaigns in Britain against steep increases i...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series
• Introduction
• 1 Our Revolting Neighbours
• 2 Between Power and Resistance in Praxis
• 3 Between Power and Resistance in Theory
• 4 How the (Sub)altern Resists: A Dialogue with Foucault and Said
• 5 What Is Radicalism? Lessons from Contemporary Iranian History
• 6 Discourse and Power: The Paradoxical Case of the Iranian–American Conjunction
• 7 Neighbourhood Policies: Muqawamah or the Meaning of Power and Resistance Today
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index