The fault lies not in ourselves
David Pryce-Jones
A BRUTAL FRIENDSHIP by Said K. Aburish Gollancz, £20, pp. 412 The Arab world today, as Said Aburish rightly describes it, is a menacing cauldron of despotism, corruption and injustice. It takes courage for someone of Arab origins to say so. Polemicising against those he holds responsible, he is often on target, but sometimes goes beyond the historical facts. Either way, he will make few friends. Are there Westerners, it should be asked, who write Arabic as pithy as his English?
No trace of democracy or unity is to be detected anywhere in the Arab past, but Arab nationalists have always argued that if Arabs were freely allowed their say they would prove to be democratic and united. Aburish still takes this for granted. To him, self-declared nationalists such as Gamal Abdul Nasser, some of the Syrian presidents, even Abdul Karim Qassem liquidating the Iraqi monarchy, offered real hope of democracy and unity. So why did they fail, and unleash so much violence? Why is Arab democracy and unity a mirage? Aburish gives the standard nationalist answer: it is all the fault of someone else. Something called `the British' or 'the West' deliberately kept, and continues to keep, the Arabs backward and divided, the better to exploit and control them.
This required tacit conspiracy on the part of Arab leaders. Aburish has a hit- list including the Al-Saud and Hashemite families, Nun al-Said in Iraq, Haj Amin the Mufti of Jerusalem, Camille Chamoun in Lebanon, all of them accused of selling out democracy and their own people for the sake of personal advancement. Even Nasser, in this view, began as the CIA's man.
Both 'the British' and 'the West' are abstract reductions which seemingly give purpose and thrust to events actually at the mercy of hazard. Politicians and their agents at all levels take initiatives for all sorts of reasons, high or low. Entering the Middle East, the British and French discovered a tribal and absolute system, with strict but Darwinian procedures for obtaining power and eliminating rivals. The Al-Sauds and Hashemites were indeed willing clients of the West as a result of anti-Zionist intrigue by a local official. Miscalculating the advantage in it, Haj Amin later went over to Hitler. Even Nuri al-Said, supposedly Britain's most loyal collaborator, was to put out feelers to Hitler. Not suddenly a generation of quis- lings, such men were operating according to the rules of absolutism.
More confused than considered, to be sure, British and French policy was to introduce into the Middle East the rule of law, representation and a free press. Later, the Americans also hammered away at democracy. In practice, all found Arab absolutism too strong to be broken by imported structures and values. Nasser and other nationalist leaders were the ones to close down Western-promoted democratic institutions.
The nationalist argument should really be stood on its head. The British were brilliantly, suicidally, lured by Arab leaders into a type of politics in which they were utterly out of their depth. Proof of that was Pan-Arabism, the definitive policy which Arab nationalists claimed to want, and which our famous and far-sighted Arabist experts accordingly wished on the unfortu- nate masses. Contenders for absolute supremacy over all Arabs at once had every incentive to violence and intrigue. Revival of traditional rivalry between Cairo, Damascus and Baghdad completely destroyed the British position. Playing the great powers off against one another, Nasser and his many imitators further doomed the Middle East to become an active front in the Cold War, killing off any last prospect of democracy.
Some of the examples suggested of Arab leaders who have attempted to meet their people's needs are not convincing — in old days King Ghazi of Iraq, more usually judged to have been a feckless playboy, and latterly Saddam Hussein and Gaddafi. One way or another, 'the West' thwarted all such. Tacit conspiracy is alleged to be alive and well, with the result that Arabs sell oil cheap, buy arms dear, and Israel survives. King Fand of Saudi Arabia, King Hussein of Jordan, President Mubarak of Egypt, even Yasser Arafat, variously see to it that Arab demands are subordinate to 'Western' interests. (But published documents reveal that, just as the Mufti had turned to Nazism, so Arafat placed himself under Soviet patronage in the Cold War, the obvious career move at the time, but irreconcilable with being a thorough `Western' stooge.) Injustice is driving Arabs everywhere to despair. If this means an Islamist funda- mentalist explosion, as Aburish thinks like- ly, then that too will be held more our fault than theirs.
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