AFTER SADDAM, WHAT NEXT?
Edward Mortimer forecasts
a resurgence of Islamic fundamentalism when the war is over
THE WAR may be just, necessary, and on balance worth fighting. But to anyone who knows and likes Arabs, as I do, it is also deeply depressing. I was about to write 'the Arabs', but that would be to fall into the trap. It would be highly pretentious to claim that I know 'the Arabs', and it would be false to say that I like 'the Arabs'. All I mean is that in the course of my work I have got to know and like a large number of individual Arab people. I have also met some who are quite unpleasant, and many with whom I have nothing much in com- mon.
It is, precisely, the tendency to think in terms of a solid bloc, 'the Arabs', that lies at the root of many of our current prob- lems. By which I do not mean that it is all the fault of vulgar orientalism among Westerners. The main propagators of this way of thinking have in fact been Arabs themselves, though it is true that they develope the idea of an 'Arab nation' in imitation of European, particularly Ger- man, nationalism.
At home and in the street Arabs speak regional dialects which differ more widely from each other than do Slavonic lan- guages such as Czech and Russian. But that observation is not as significant as is sometimes thought. What matters when it comes to building a nation is the language people learn at school, read in the news- papers, hear on the radio. Virtually all modern nationalisms depend on the im- position of an official 'correct' version of the national language: even in this country we had 'the Queen's English'. Arabs had a great advantage in this respect, in that the Koran provided a universally known and accepted starting-point. A much greater obstacle to the fulfil- ment of Arab nationalist dreams is the geographical extent and diversity of the lands in which Arabs live, 'from the Atlantic to the Gulf. To impose political unity on such a far-flung region would require a state even more powerful and ruthless than Bismarck's Prussia. That, perhaps, is what Saddam Hussein aspired to build. That is certainly how many Arab see him. They believe, too, that that is the real reason why the West could not toler- ate this power, and has now mobilised its own even greater power to crush him.
The tragedy of Arab nationalism is that its intellectual success has been as great as its political failure. When it started, under the Ottoman empire, the Arab nation was assumed to consist only of the Arabs of Asia. It was really not until after Nasser and his Free Officers came to power in 1952 that Egyptians began to think of themselves as part of it. As for the Maghreb, or Arab West, its membership was for a long time almost purely rhetoric- al. In 1974, sent by the Times to cover the Arab summit in Morocco, I found myself sharing digs with the correspondent of the leading Algerian magazine Revolution Africaine. When I suggested that he might help me by translating during briefing and press conferences given in Arabic he re- plied, disarmingly. Tranchement, je suis aussi paume que vows.' Yet over the decades Algerians have been convinced that they are indeed part of the 'Arab nation', and last week hundreds of thousands of them were demonstrating in favour of Saddam Hussein.
But the growth of Arab nationalism has not been even or steady. It has had many setbacks, and other claims on Arab loyal- ties have sometimes been stronger. During the first world war many Arab officers were loyal to the Ottoman empire, and even those who did join the British- inspired Arab Revolt did so after much hesitation and heart-searching. Egypt be- fore Nasser was much more interested in its own nationalism than in that of the Arabs. In Arabia loyalty to the tribe or the `As we sit here, day after day, under this pitiless barrage . . local dynasty has probably always been more important than Arabism to all but a handful of intellectuals. (Support for the 'Arab cause', meaning essentially the Palestinians, was felt to be a slightly tiresome duty rather than a passion and now, thanks to PLO support for Saddam, it is being dispensed with altogether.) In the Jordanian army King Hussein has been careful to inculcate loyalty to himself and his kingdom rather than to a wider Arab nation. Once in the late 1970s, after I had lectured at the Staff College, Camberley, on 'the Arab-Israeli dispute', a Jordanian office came up to me and said, 'Surely all that Arab nationalism is over and done with now?'
Since the 1940s the Palestine issue has been the central focus of Arab nationalism. Yet the Palestinans themselves have dif- fered in their views on the subject. Until the 1960s most of them were happy to regard themselves as Arabs, assuming that the Arab world would sooner or later unite and deliver them from the Zionist yoke. But the rise of Yasser Arafat and his Fatah movement marked a revolt against that line of thought: a belief that Palestinians could not and should not wait for the Arab states to do something, but should take their destiny into their own hands. The belief caught on especially after Israel's defeat of the Arab states in 1967, and again 20 years later when Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank, disgusted by an Arab summit in Amman which had concentrated exclusively on the Iran-Iraq war and hardly even mentioned Palestine, embarked on the intifada, realising that if they them- selves did not challenge the Israeli occupa- tion no one else would. The political counterpart was the PLO's decision to recognise Israel and seek a peaceful solu- tion through dialogue with America. Sadly by last year the wheel had turned again: the intifada had reached stalemate, the `peace process' was getting nowhere, and Palestinians were again ready to believe in a pan-Arab saviour.
Palestinian bravery always wins verbal tributes from Arab nationalists in other countries, but dedicated pan-Arabists such as the rival wings of the Ba'ath party in Iraq and Syria are deeply suspicious of Palestinian particularism and employ all kinds of methods to bring the Palestinian movement back under their own control. The bitter feud between Arafat and Syria's President Hafiz al-Assad is well known. Arafat endlessly twisted and manoeuvred to avoid being in the pocket of any one Arab leader — until last year, when, for reasons still not clearly explained, he allied himself unconditionally with Saddam. His chief lieutenant, Abu Iyyad, was known to be unhappy with this alignment. Few doubt that that is why he was assassinated last week by a member of the Iraqi-backed Abu Nidal splinter group. (He would probably have been the Saudi candidate to replace Arafat once the war was over.) By far the strongest rival to Arab nationalism is Islam. Not that the two can ever be fully disentangled. It was Islam that carried the Arabic language to lands far outside the Arabian peninsula. Without reference to it, few Arab nationalists, Muslim or non-Muslim, could explain how they come to be Arabs at all. Islam is to all intents and purposes the essence of Arab history and Arab civilisation. Anyone who calls himself an Arab nationalist is bound to take pride in Islam and its achievements.
Yet the great majority of Muslims are not Arabs, and quite a few Arabs are not Muslims. Many leading Arab nationalists, including Michel Aflaq, the founder of the Ba'ath party, have been Christians — Aflaq's alleged conversion to Islam was announced only after his death in Baghdad in 1989 — and the central tenet of Arab nationalist theory is that the Arab nation is composed of all those whose mother- tongue is Arabic, irrespective of religious affiliation. From an Islamic traditionalist or revivalist point of view, that theory is itself a heresy imported from the West, artificially dividing the community of be- lievers.
These two forces, nationalism and Islam, have at times pulled in the same direction, especially when predominantly Muslim Arab peoples were struggling against Christian colonial rule. Saddam has now managed to provoke a struggle which is seen by many as another such phase. But if at the end of the war this struggle, or at least the form in which he waged it, is seen to have been futile and to have brought down only destruction on his country, the validity of nationalism may well be ques- tioned again, as it was after Nasser's defeat in 1967. Other formulas will be canvassed.
It would be nice to think one of them might be political and economic liberalism, which after all is the root of the West's devastating military strength. It seems likely, however, that in their present frame of mind more Arabs will be attracted, as they were after 1967 and especially after the Iranian revolution, by the view that what is needed is a more authentic applica- tion of Islam. It will be remembered that Saddam belonged to a party founded by a Christian; that he executed prominent Islamic scholars; that under his rule alcohol was freely sold; above all that he waged war for eight years against Iran's Islamic revolution and eventually prevailed only with massive help both from non-Muslim `imperialist' powers and from corrupt Ara- bian sheikhs (including the Emir of Kuwait), whose interests that war was seen to serve.
The pendulum will swing back away from nationalism and in favour of militant, xenophobic Islam.
Edward Mortimer is on the staff of the Financial Times.
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