Remaking the Middle East

The Middle East is going through a period of concentrated turmoil unlike anything since the end of World War II. Uprisings, coups and wars have seen governments overthrown, hundreds of thousands killed and millions displaced. Parts of the region have become ungoverned or ungovernable. Extremists have carried out acts of terror inside and outside the Middle East.

Anthony Bubalo argues that the current turmoil is the result of the irrevocable decay of the nizam – the system by which most states in the region are ruled. But amid the ferment there are also ‘green shoots’ of change, which could remake the Middle East in ways that are more inclusive, more democratic, less corrupt and less violent.

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CONTENTS

Introduction: Claude Rains — 1

PART I: Decay — 9
al-Nizam — 11
Social defaults — 15
Bad karama — 26
The hammer and the anvil — 34
The weary hegemon — 46
Divide and misrule — 57

PART II: Green shoots — 67
Za’atari — 69
Uncivil society — 74
Slow journalism — 87
The new entrepreneurs — 96
The republic of women — 107
Impious politics — 117
Crash through or crash — 129

Epilogue: Cynics and enthusiasts — 139

Endnotes — 151
Acknowledgements — 165

Photo: Flickr user Robert Haandrikman

Introduction - Claude Rains

It is a famous rendering of the modern Middle East’s apocryphal birth-story: ‘Mr Sykes is an English civil servant. Monsieur Picot is a French civil servant. Mr Sykes and Monsieur Picot met and they agreed that after the war France and England should share the Turkish Empire,’ intones Claude Rains gravely as Dryden, an amalgam of various British Arab Bureau schemers, in David Lean’s ‘Lawrence of Arabia’.

Sykes and Picot never appear in the film. They are a whispered intrigue, floating above the action. In the Middle East today, ‘Sykes-Picot’ is still considered the original conspiracy – the perfidious act by which the West drew the region’s ‘artificial’ borders. Soon after declaring its caliphate in Iraq and Syria in 2014, the terrorist group Islamic State released a video entitles The End of Sykes-Picot.

Mr Sykes and Monsieur Picot did meet in secret in 1915, and they did agree on how Britain and France might portion the remains of the Ottoman Empire after World War I. Whether their agreement created the borders of the modern Middle East bears more argument. Some believe the San Remo conference in 1920 was more consequential; others point to the role played by various Arab nationalist leaders in defining the region’s boundaries.

As one academic has observed, however, the fact that today’s map of the Middle East bears little resemblance to the one drawn by Sykes and Picot suggests that their role in shaping the modern region is a myth.² Centuries of history preceded the Sykes–Picot agreement, during which time the people of the region established societies, cultures, languages and religions. In the decades that followed the agreement, it was largely the leaders and people of the Middle East who created its contemporary states.

This is not to suggest that the West was an innocent bystander in the region’s modern history. Far from it. The colonial powers created institutions and norms of governance that were inherited by many states at independence. During the Cold War, the United States and the Soviet Union propped up allies and undermined, and occasionally overthrew, adversaries. In more recent decades the West has undertaken military interventions that have done great and often indiscriminate harm. The West has also spent billions on aid and development, mounted costly humanitarian interventions and helped educate some of the best minds in the Middle East.

However, a preoccupation with what the West has done or should do in the Middle East often obscures what the inhabitants of the region are doing to transform their own lives. The aim of this Paper is to show how the people of the Middle East are trying to remake their societies in their own ways and on their own terms. It argues that the region’s citizens are doing more to change their lives in positive ways than is usually reported by a mainstream media fixated on calamities, crises and conflicts.

It is certainly true that the Middle East is going through a period of concentrated turmoil unlike anything since the end of World War II. Since 2001 the United States and its allies have evicted al-Qaeda from Afghanistan and invaded Iraq. There have been wars and civil conflicts in Lebanon, Gaza and Syria. Popular revolts have toppled regimes in Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen and Libya. Regimes around the region have promised deep reform and delivered even deeper repression.

Islamist extremists have inspired and carried out acts of terrorism inside and outside of the Middle East. In Iraq and Syria, a new caliphate was declared, but also defeated. Borders have disappeared, mostly temporarily, and large pockets of territory have become ungoverned. The region’s great powers have squawked and squabbled for ascendancy, fighting proxy wars and sharpening sectarian enmity. In the past 15 years, millions of the region’s citizens have been killed, imprisoned, tortured or displaced.

As Part I of this Paper will argue, this turmoil has largely been the result of the irrevocable decay of the old system by which much of the region was ruled for most of the twentieth century. The rate of decay has varied from country to country, as have its consequences. In some cases, such as Libya, the state has collapsed entirely; in others, such as Egypt and Syria, the system has proved more resilient. Yet even in these cases, decay has continued, underlined by the urgent repairs to the system that many ruling regimes are undertaking.

What might replace this decaying system is unclear. There is a tendency to see the region’s future as inevitably bleak. When the Arab uprisings – also dubbed the Arab Spring – first swept the region in 2010–11, some impatiently declared the blooming of democracy. A few years later, when many of these revolts faltered, and as countries slid back to authoritarianism, observers just as impatiently declared the region’s ‘experiment’ with democracy was over.

This is a harsh judgement, especially given how long it took Western democracy to develop. But it also betrays a preoccupation with recent events that ignores the fitful way in which change normally occurs. The contemporary Middle East took decades to rise from the rubble of the Ottoman and colonial empires. It would be remarkable if a new region now rose in a fraction of that time.

History is a long narrative – something many observers have lost sight of in analysing current events in the Middle East. In the past, for example, great periods of transition in the region incubated new leaders and new movements whose impact was only felt years, even decades, later. I was reminded of this by Ayhan Aktar, a blunt, ebullient Turkish sociologist who made himself unpopular in Turkey by publishing the biography of an Armenian artillery officer and decorated war hero of the battle for Gallipoli in World War I.

Over dinner in Istanbul in early 2017 we talked about the emergence of modern Turkey from the crumbling Ottoman Empire. Aktar observed that history is often the story of unintended consequences and unexpected career paths. He noted, for example, that in the late nineteenth century Sultan Abdul Hamid II, desperate to inject new vigour into the Ottoman state, ‘opened up education to smart middle-class kids like Enver Pasha and Mustafa Kemal because the existing elite was corrupt and spoiled and it was this class that took over’.³

But it was these empowered kids from the Ottoman middle classes who eventually delivered the Empire its death blows. In 1908, Enver Pasha led the Young Turk revolt that turned Turkey into a constitutional monarchy and stoked Turkish nationalism. Mustafa Kemal, known more famously as Ataturk, completed the transformation, founding the modern Turkish republic in 1923.

Likewise, those who led the Arab uprisings were often veterans of earlier – and usually unsuccessful – campaigns of civic protest. In Tunisia, for example, the young people who campaigned against internet censorship in the mid-to-late 2000s went on to play key roles in the Tunisian uprising. In Egypt, leaders of the April 6 Youth Movement, which played a prominent role in the 2011 revolt, had either participated in the Kefaya movement in the mid-2000s, which sought to prevent President Hosni Mubarak handing power to his son, or in labour protests in the late 2000s.

Rather than rushing to quick judgements, therefore, it seems more prudent to look for the early buds of the region’s future. This is the focus of Part II of this Paper. It will, however, concentrate on the good things that are emerging – the ‘green shoots’. So much commentary is focused on what is going wrong in the Middle East that it seems worth spending some time focused on what may well end up going right.

This does not mean that I think the region’s future is inevitably rosy. What I point to are nascent growths that may or may not mature into more sturdy features of the region. There are many forces in the region intent on ensuring these new growths are uprooted. There is also much malign vegetation that competes with the green shoots for room to grow.

Here it is worth referring once more to Claude Rains’ portrayal of Dryden. In an early scene in Lawrence of Arabia, Dryden is trying to convince a British General that Lawrence should be allowed to join the Bedouin forces fighting the Turks. The General is, however, dismissive of the Arab revolt, describing it as ‘a sideshow of a sideshow’. Before he can finish his harangue, Dryden interjects gently but forcefully: ‘Big things have small beginnings . . .’.