Radical Arab Nationalism and Political Islam

Lahouari Addi, Anthony Roberts

• Publisher: Georgetown University Press
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781626164505
• eBook ISBN: 9781626164512
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: International Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

In Radical Arab Nationalism and Political Islam, Lahouari Addi attempts to assess the history and political legacy of radical Arab nationalism to show that it contained the seeds of its own destruction. While the revolutionary regimes promised economic and social development and sought the unity of Arab nations, they did not account for social transformations, such as freedom of speech, that would eventually lead to their decline. But while radical Arab nationalism fell apart, authoritarian populism did not disappear. Today it is expressed by political Islam that aims to achieve the kind of social justice radical Arab nationalism once promised.

Addi creatively links the past and present while also raising questions about the future of Arab countries. Is political Islam the heir of radical Arab nationalism? If political Islam succeeds, will it face the same challenges faced by radical Arab nationalism? Will it be able to implement modernity? The future of Arab countries, Addi writes, depends on this crucial issue.

Published in collaboration with Center for Contemporary Arab Studies, Georgetown University.

PART I

Origins and Perspectives of Arab Nationalism

THE ARAB WORLD is a vast political entity that extends from Morocco to Iraq. For centuries it has had relationships of exchange and conflict with Europe. Prior to the seventeenth century, the military rapport de force between the two was more or less equal; the change in favor of Europe coincided with the gradual weakening of the Ottoman Empire. Napoleon Bonaparte’s expedition to Egypt in 1798 demonstrated the military, scientific, and economic superiority of Europe. It opened the way to a political domination of the Arab countries and to the acculturation of a section of their elites, who became convinced that the best way of defending themselves was to imitate the Europeans, politically and culturally. The ideological arguments and controversies that began in the early nineteenth century and have continued to rage right up to our own time concern the form and content of this imitation, with special reference to Islam. For some, modernization is based on the implicit pattern of secularization; for others, it is accomplished with Islam as a religion linked to politics and to law. The Arab world is still wrestling with this question of Islam’s place in society and the state at a time when many social practices have become secularized, as if consciousness was lagging behind the social and cultural transformations that have taken place in the last one hundred years. What is lacking is the idea that religion is embedded in culture, implying that it is not an essence but a social construct that changes with time. This idea is foreign to medieval interpretation of Islam that impedes the aspiration to modernization, although this aspiration is shared by everyone. Despite the strong feeling of unity (oumma), the spread of nationalism has divided the populations of the region into separate and sometimes concurrent political entities. The condemnation by the ulemas of the chou’oubia (kind of ethnocentrism) has not prevented Islam either from accompanying nationalism or from giving it legitimacy. The desire to organize themselves as nation-states, and not as umma on the model of the caliphate, has proven stronger than the common cultural and religious heritage championed by the ulemas. The universalistic and transregional Islam of the ulemas and brotherhoods have yielded to “nationalist Islams” to such a point that religious holy days are celebrated on different days in Morocco, Algeria, and Egypt, demonstrating that the people have assimilated the culture of nationalism as a dialectical consequence of European domination and their rejection of it. There has also been a fragmentation of the geographical space occupied by Islam that has had no effect on its religious heritage, which steadfastly continues to reject secularization despite the sociological and cultural transformations society has undergone.

The struggle against colonialism mobilized the resources of identity, of which religion was one, leading to the ideological incoherence that might eventually prevent the postcolonial state from bringing peace in the political sphere. Nationalism succeeded in the first phase of creating a central power, but it failed in the second phase, which consisted in giving the governed a true sense that they were free. The liberation of the group does not necessarily mean the freedom of the individual. The former is the easy part because it unites everyone against foreign oppressors; the latter is the struggle of the individual against the group, and of the present against the past. To impose the institutional framework of a nation-state without giving the governed the civil rights that protect them from the arbitrary actions of their rulers is to prepare the ground for an authoritarian regime. Nationalism does not automatically create a nation if we understand by “nation” a political community at peace with itself. If it fails to win over local ethnocentricities, if it fails to endow political power with a public character, if it fails to secularize the law and take religion out of politics, the state will be authoritarian and brutal, headed straight for civil war. The Arab uprisings of 2011, with the extreme case of Syria, show the scale of the rift between governments and governed as well as the weakness of the fabric holding society together and the way it has been shredded by community, ethnic, and linguistic differences. The legacy of postcolonial nationalism in terms of national cohesion is nothing short of pitiful, as the violence of these rebellions shows all too clearly. It has proved incapable of transforming the social bond from “mechanical solidarity” founded on sentiment to an “organic solidarity” based on the social division and sharing of labor.¹

The first part of this book reviews the historical framework of the rise of Arab nationalism in Egypt and the Middle East in its different moderate and radical variants.² After this, I shed light on the ideological limitations that have prevented Arab nationalism from building a rule of law. Finally, I show that the concept of nation is related to other concepts, such as citizenship, civil rights, sovereignty, and political liberty. A nation is not just a territory with a geographical frontier protected by soldiers; it is above all the space of a civil society that has separated religion from politics, secularized the law, and affirmed its autonomy in regard to the state, whose leaders are accountable to their electors within a peaceful system of electoral alternation.

Notes

1. For these two concepts of solidarity, see Emile Durkheim, The Division of Labor in Society (New York: Free Press, 1997).

2. On Arab nationalism, see Tibi Bassam, Arab Nationalism: A Critical Inquiry, edited and translated by Marion Farouk Sluglett and Peter Sluglett (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1981); Khalidi Rashid, ed., The Origins of Arab Nationalism (New York: Colombia University Press, 1991); and A. I. Dawisha, Arab Nationalism in the 20th Century: From Triumph to Despair (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016).

1

The Emergence and Development of Arab Nationalism

SINCE THE NINETEENTH CENTURY, any community that failed to organize itself into a nation-state risked occupation by foreign powers. The Westphalian order that had emerged in Europe two centuries earlier had spread all over the planet, imposing the concept of the nation-state; no population could escape it. Western Europe, with its overwhelming military and economic strength, was able to propagate its own form of political organization, the nation-state. The other regions of the planet had no alternative but to copy this model if they valued their existence as communities held together by bonds of culture, language, and history. It must be clearly understood that the non-European nationalisms that emerged following the colonial conquests, apart from a few messianic and millennialist movements, did not seek to revive the old political structures that had been swept aside by colonialism; instead, they expressed the desire to create a sovereign state endowed with a central power exercising, as much as possible, a monopoly on justice, violence, and education. This aspiration for political autonomy found expression either through adhesion to the liberal ideas of Europe or through attachment to a religious tradition. These two reactions to the European threat are illustrated by the experience of Egypt under Muhammed Ali (1769–1849) and of the Arabian Peninsula, where Wahhabism—after a few wrong turns— finally succeeded in establishing a centralized authority.

As in every other part of the world, the Arab peoples were caught up by a wave of nationalism in their fight against colonial domination. The emergence of nationalism in the Middle East and North Africa must be analyzed in the light of these facts, bearing in mind that local elites expressed either local patriotism (North Africa), hegemonic Pan-Arabism (Syria-Lebanon), or religion-based ethnocentrism (the Arabian Peninsula). The ideological differences between these experiments were the consequences of history and were unrelated to any supposedly immutable special characteristics. If the Egyptians opted for territorial nationalism, in contrast to the Syrians and Lebanese, who favored the doctrine of Pan-Arabism, it was because their respective relationships with the Ottoman Empire were not the same. The difference between the Egyptian experience and that of the Fertile Crescent derives from history and from the strategic perception of the adversary against which nationalist sentiment was pitted. In Egypt in the second half of the nineteenth century, the elites positioned themselves politically against the colonial ambitions of Great Britain by seeking help from the Ottoman Empire. By contrast, the Ottoman administration was perceived as the enemy, particularly by the nomad tribes of the Arabian Peninsula, where the influence of the city elites had barely penetrated a mostly Bedouin society. In the Middle East, the influence of European political ideas found a more favorable terrain in the major urban centers of Egypt, Syria, and Lebanon than in the peninsula. The nineteenth century was a period during which the Arabs, or at least the Arab elites, became aware of how far behind Europe they had fallen, and of Europe’s consequent ambition to dominate them. To face the threat of a dominant and modern Europe, various forms of nationalism were present in the region: Wahhabism, born in the Arabian Peninsula in the mid-eighteenth century; the movement of Rifa’a al-Tahtawi, which appeared in the wake of Muhammed Ali’s reforms; and finally, the Pan-Arabism of Syrian-Lebanese Christian and Muslim intellectuals.

In the hinterland of the vast Arabian Peninsula, which was of zero strategic or economic interest to the European powers (apart from a few seaports in the area), the Al Saud family, after a string of defeats, had at last succeeded in eliminating its local opponents. Built as it was on the myth of defending the purity of Islam, the Al Saud project relied on Wahhabi religious rigor, whereby it succeeded in creating an absolute monarchy. Having grasped that the international rapport de force did not favor them, the Al Sauds renounced the dream of a new caliphate after conquering as many provinces as they possibly could. Instead, they created a political entity that was run as the private property of the Al Saud—after whom the country was named—while at the same time espousing the concept of Muslim universalism. The obvious contradiction between an appropriation of the state and the universalist symbolism of Islam was surmounted, several decades later, by the discovery of oil, the exploitation of which brought in sufficient funds to build up networks of clients rooted in urban and rural areas by distributing wealth in a way that would include the Saudi people in a circuit of consumption while excluding them from the running of the state.

The case of Egypt effectively sums up the opportunities missed by the Arab world in its quest for modernization. Having endured the course of liberal reform, very robust for the time, which was meted out by Muhammed Ali, Egypt had the nascent attributes of a nation-state. These were snuffed out by the British, whose interest lay in preserving their own strategic and economic interests as well as their influence, all of which were threatened in the region by their intimate rivals, the French. The hopes of Rifa’a al-Tahtawi seduced the Egyptian urban elite and nourished a liberal nationalism that sought to copy the Westminster model, wherein the king reigned but did not govern. This project aroused the hostility of the British themselves, who preferred an absolute monarchy in Egypt because they could control it; it was also doomed by the predominance of landowners in the Egyptian bourgeoisie. Fearing for their own interests, the landowners would not countenance any social change that might favor the rise of workers’ or farmers’ unions. As a result, liberal nationalism was obliged to turn its back on the majority of the population, of which it was afraid. Following the geopolitical upheavals caused by the First World War, Egypt formally became a sovereign state. The aristocratic elite, with liberal leanings in politics and conservative ones in social matters, supported the monarchic regime. In the 1920s and 1930s, the political game was so narrow that the same figures were constantly at office. The sterility of all this created a breeding ground for radical Arab nationalism, in particular after the creation of Israel in 1948. Four years later a coup d’état was implemented by “free officers” in July 1952, opening a new era in the Arab world.

Radical Arab nationalism was the expression of anger at European domination, which despised the native populations it controlled. It won a popular dimension by the solidarity with the Palestinian cause. The military expressed the people’s frustration and brushed aside the governing elites, which they accused of being allied with foreign interests. They promised to catch up with the admired but hated West, perceived as an economic and military entity seeking to take control of the Arab countries. The organization of the army on the model of European armies nurtured the dream to catch up with Europe in a few decades. This dream underestimates the fact that the basis of European power was not military but intellectual and political.

Wahhabism as a Proto-Nationalism

In the academic literature devoted to nationalism, the Saudi Arabian experience is excluded, even though for all intents and purposes it represented the earliest attempt to construct a nation in the Arab world. From 1744 onward, the Al Saud family created a central power in the Arabian Peninsula that defied, at the time, the Ottoman caliphate, of which the peninsula was formally a part. Moreover, it sought to create an inherited monarchy like those that existed in medieval Europe, whose historians claim that they were at the origins of the European nation-states. In their opposition to the Ottomans accused of perverting Islam, the Al Sauds exploited ethnocentrist sentiment to rally the tribes of the peninsula, where a multitude of local powers were competing with each other, taking advantage of the strategic vastness of the desert. They formed alliances that enabled them to quell their adversaries in a tribal world where alliances were volatile and changed according to events and the evolution of the local balance of power. The advantage of the Saudi clan over their competitors was Wahhabism, which was useful to them in showing that they were the harbingers of a universalistic vision of Islam, defending the interests of all Muslims. The Al Sauds were able to exploit the opportunity gifted to them by the stern Wahhabi doctrine to overcome local tribal considerations and launch themselves into a political adventure whose declared goal was to impose the true Islam on all Muslims. They used their military strength to annex the maximum possible territory. The families of Al Saud and Sheik Muhammad ‘Abd al-Wahhab strengthened their alliance by marriage from the start, in 1744, uniting to found a state whose religious bedrock was Wahhabism. In this alliance, politics was the senior partner, as later events were to show. The military strength of the one partner and the religious ideology of the other combined to create a coalition and a kingdom that bore the name of a family. The Al Sauds imposed themselves after an almost two-hundred-year competitive process, during which they were badly defeated twice in battle, once by the Ottomans (in 1818) and once by the Ibn Rashid tribe of the Shammar Mountains in 1870. A third process of reconquest began in 1902, ending with the official proclamation of the founding of the kingdom, which was immediately recognized by the foreign powers.

The political adventure began in the middle of the eighteenth century with a preacher, Muhammad ‘Abd al-Wahhab, who dedicated himself to purge Islam of the iniquitous innovations introduced by the Ottomans and the Sufis. His message insisted on the oneness of God and on a prohibition of all intercession between God and the faithful. There was nothing original about this puritan movement in Islam; thousands of other preachers had called for the same brand of orthodoxy that was already a feature of classical Muslim theology at the time of Ahmad ibn Hanbal. What clinched the success of Muhammad ‘Abd al-Wahhab was the military force of the Al Saud, who carried many tribes with them in the mission to regenerate Islam and fight those who would pervert it, especially the Ottomans. From then on, Wahhabism became a puritanical doctrine with the objective of fighting “miscreants and hypocrites.” Its followers preferred to be known as “Al Mouahidoun”: those who profess the oneness of God and who call for the unity of Muslims in this cause.¹

The strength of Wahhabism lies in its ethnocentric appeal to re-Arabize Islam, after its appropriation by Turks, Persians, Asians, and the Berbers who have supposedly disfigured it. Wahhabism found an echo among the Bedouin tribes who felt a duty to bring Arabness back since the Prophet was himself a native of their peninsula. The Al Saud family used Wahhabism in their political project to found a central power that would affirm the autonomy of the peninsula against the Ottomans. From the end of the eighteenth century, the ambition of the Saudis was to supplant the sultan in Istanbul who, anticipating the danger, called upon Muhammed Ali, viceroy of Egypt, to go out and defeat them. The troops of Muhammed Ali went to the peninsula in 1818, sacked the Saudi capital, and carried off hundreds of prisoners in Istanbul where many of their leaders had been beheaded on the orders of the Sultan. After the departure of the Egyptian troops, whose presence was incapable of maintaining Ottoman rule over the vast desert land, the power of Al Saud was reconstructed over a few years before collapsing again in a family quarrel over the succession. Defeated, the Saud family fled to Kuwait, where they settled. In 1902 a young Saudi, Abdulaziz, born in 1880, came back to the peninsula to fight for a new Saudi kingdom. He took up the project of uniting the tribes of the peninsula under the banner of Wahhabism. Coming from Kuwait, he attacked and took Riyadh in 1902. He proclaimed himself Emir of Nejd, his family’s native land, and set about rebuilding the network of tribal alliances on which his ancestors had depended. He waged merciless war against his adversaries, notably the Al Rashids of Shammar. On the eve of the First World War, Abdulaziz, son of Abderrahmane Saud, showed that he had the statecraft to protect his own position as Emir of Nejd by taking advantage of the conflict between the British and the Ottoman Empire.

The alliance between Ibn Saud’s warrior spirit and a puritan religious doctrine ensured the success of the Al Saud political enterprise, which, at the third attempt, had now achieved its objective of setting up a strong central authority that was feared within its borders and respected beyond them. This was largely thanks to those believers who willingly agreed to defend the true word of God, ready to sacrifice for the cause. Abdulaziz attracted a host of men from the nomad tribes and organized them into sedentary military units settled in local village garrisons. In this way he managed to weaken the tribal links of these fighters who pledged allegiance to Wahhabism. The Ikhwan—the name by which these military units were known— constituted a considerable strike force in a desert region that was hard for any regular army to control. The universality of Wahhabism, transcending tribal frontiers and championing Muslim unity, rolled back the warlike local ethnocentrism that had hitherto prevented the constit...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Boxes
• Preface
• Introduction
• Part I. Origins and Perspectives of Arab Nationalism
• Part II. The Ideological and Political Dynamics of Islamism
• Conclusion
• Index
• About the Author