The New Middle East (3 page)

The American people have failed to grasp the scale of the change going on in their most important ally in the Middle East. And that is also true of the American government. When Barack Obama gave his ‘historic’ speech at Cairo University in 2009 he was presenting himself as an honest broker to all sides in the region. Instead he alienated almost everyone. The Israelis couldn’t believe their ears and the Arab people couldn’t believe their luck, but later ended up feeling utterly betrayed by what they saw as empty words. In 2013 he tried again with another address to the Middle East, this time from Jerusalem. He launched a charm offensive, pouring his love on the Israeli nation, which made them mistrust him less though not like him more.
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‘There were too many “buts”,’ said Elior, a young Israeli student in the audience. His trip left the Palestinians feeling they had been given the cold shoulder.

Barack Obama’s symbolic ‘first telephone call’ as president on his first full day in the White House was claimed by the Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas, who was ‘president’ in name only. The call to him and other Middle Eastern leaders was meant to show just how engaged the new American president would be in the region.
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As he picked up the handset Barack Obama had no idea that during his first term he would see decades of US foreign policy collapse in front of him.

Back then it was so much easier. America could divide the Arab world into two camps. There were those it could largely trust: Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and the rest of the Gulf states. And those it could not: Iran, Syria, Hezbollah, Hamas and Libya. It’s not that simple now. Despite US reservations it must engage with Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood after its democratically elected President was ousted in the July 2013 popular coup so the Brotherhood’s wider membership does not turn inward and increasingly violent in response. After the coup how much effort is made to show Islamists that democracy still has a place for them will be crucial. It will decide how both moderate Islamists and Western governments deal with the rise in influence of the Salafists.

Salafists are ultra-conservative puritanical Sunni Muslims who model themselves on a form of Islam dating to the first followers of the Prophet Muhammad. Salafism is very close to the Wahhabism that is the dominant form of Islam in Saudi Arabia. That is why wealthy Saudis are so willing to support Salafists in places like Syria. But Salafist groups are quite disparate. They are not disciplined single units like the Muslim Brotherhood. In Egypt, where the Salafists have deep roots, they are largely peaceful, previously apolitical, advocates for greater implementation of Islamic Law. Because they did not get involved in politics they were largely left alone under Mubarak. But in North Africa, where they were brutally suppressed by the old regimes, they have been responsible for some of the worst violence since the revolts took place.

The rise in influence of the proponents of political Islam, or Islamism as it is also called, has reshaped the Arab world after the revolutions and it will redefine Western diplomacy. Political Islam is essentially the opposite of what the West would call the division of Church and State. Broadly speaking, at the core of Islamism lies the belief that the basic original principles of the Muslim faith still have a fundamental role to play in the effective governing of modern societies and should go beyond just the issues of personal law.

The rise in influence of the adherents of political Islam has already began to flow into the conflict that has fractured the entire region and confounded the peacemakers for decades: the struggle between the Palestinians and Israel. ‘This victory will change the political map in the Middle East,’ said Ghazi Hamad, a senior member of the militant group Hamas. He was speaking as tens of thousands of Muslim Brotherhood supporters were still on the streets of Cairo celebrating the election of their candidate to the presidency. ‘Israel should understand that they’ve lost their friends and allies in the Middle East. The political game will be changed now. Israel will not find an umbrella, it will not find silence for its crimes against the Palestinian people.’
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The following day Israel’s best-selling newspaper,
Yedioth Ahronoth
, drew its inspiration from the language used in the First Testament to describe the biblical plagues. ‘Darkness in Egypt’ was the translation from Hebrew of its headline.

The Arab Spring brought Hamas very publicly back into the Sunni Muslim Arab fold. Along with Syria, Iran and Lebanon’s Hezbollah it had been an integral part of the so-called ‘Axis of Resistance’ against Israel. Before the uprisings of 2011 its base was in Damascus, under the guardianship of the heterodox Shia Alawite sect of President Bashar al-Assad. Its funding had come largely from Shia Iran. It had coordinated its attacks on Israel with the Shia group Hezbollah. And yet Hamas was an offshoot of the Sunni Muslim Brotherhood. The ‘Axis of Resistance’ had always been a marriage of inconvenience essentially imposed on it by the old Egyptian leadership who feared the Islamist Brotherhood at home and so rejected its siblings abroad. Now the Islamists were in power in Egypt, and their natural inclination would be to support Hamas over the more secular Palestinian groups supported by the West. Hamas was back where it belonged. This was important for the group because the Arab Spring would heighten the schism within Sunni and Shia, the two biggest branches of Islam.

Jews, Christians and Muslims all worship the same God. What they disagree about is which prophet carried the final version of His message to mankind. In simple terms the First Testament, also called the Hebrew Bible, is the key text on moral life for the Jewish people. They do not accept Jesus as a prophet so they do not recognise the Second Testament, which is the Christian Bible. Muslims consider their Holy Book, the Koran, to be the final version of God’s message to mankind. They recognise Adam, Noah, Abraham, Moses, Solomon and Jesus as all being prophets, but they consider Muhammad, who was born just under 1,500 years ago in Mecca, in what is now Saudi Arabia, to be the final prophet and therefore the most important one.

Muhammad had two sons and four daughters. His sons died young. The youngest of his four daughters, Fatimah, married Ali. Ali was the son of Muhammad’s uncle, who had cared for Muhammad when he was left an orphan.

When Muhammad died there was no heir. A disagreement began from that moment about who should succeed him as the civil and religious leader of the Muslim faithful, the Caliph. The majority of his followers recognised the first four caliphs as the Prophet’s successors, the fourth of whom was Ali. They are called Sunni Muslims. A minority thought God had chosen that role for Ali and his descendants alone. They became the Shia.The killing of the Prophet’s grandson Hussein and his supporters by the Sunni Caliph Yazid in the year 680 at Karbala in what is now Iraq was a defining moment in the split. Hussein was killed for refusing to recognise the authority of the caliph. His death created a strong theme of martyrdom within the Shia faith.
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This rift between the majority Sunni and the minority Shia, like the one in Europe between Catholic and Protestant Christians, has been the cause of much bloodshed and persecution over the centuries. It is the cause of some of the blood being shed in Syria today. It is at the heart of the struggle between the Sunni leadership in the Gulf and Shia Iran.

The countries engulfed by the Arab Spring are on the road from dictatorship to democracy. Together they will shape the New Middle East.

But why did some uprisings lead to the overthrow of regimes while others did not? Why did some revolutions take weeks while others took many months? Why in some of the most undemocratic countries in the Arab region did widespread protests not take place at all? Where revolutions did happen, why did some countries then vote for Islamist parties while other equally pious nations rejected them? Why was there international agreement to send NATO planes into the skies over Libya to pre-empt a
possible
massacre, whereas little was done in Syria when the bullet-riddled corpses of small children stared out at us from the front pages of our newspapers over morning coffee? Where and why did Western realism trump Western idealism?

To answer these questions properly it helps to have seen the transformation of the region from the beginning, when American troops drove into Baghdad a decade ago to impose a democratic ‘Freedom Agenda’ on the Arab world. My work as the BBC’s Middle East bureau chief also took me to the front lines in Libya and the protesters’ barricades in Egypt. In the pages that follow you’ll find debates with ultra-Orthodox Jews about the merits of Madonna and theological rows with West Bank settlers over their self-declared right to kill Arab children. You’ll meet Colonel Gaddafi at the beginning of the Libyan revolution, and stand before his bloodied and beaten body at the end. You’ll witness the civil war that soaked Syrian villages in blood and divided the country, the region and the world.

We in the West need to understand this region, because the Vegas rules don’t apply here. What happens in the Middle East does
not
stay in the Middle East.

We have no choice but to try to make sense of the changing dynamics in the Middle East because, as President Obama has acknowledged, ‘whether we like it or not . . . when conflicts break out, one way or another we get pulled into them. And that ends up costing us significantly in terms of both blood and treasure.’
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The new governments emerging from the revolutions will no longer act as client states doing Washington’s bidding, so ‘leading from behind’ will not be enough.
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‘We are in the middle of this struggle, it is going to take a generation, it is going to be very arduous and difficult,’ said the former British prime minister Tony Blair in February 2013 as he looked back at events in the Middle East since he sent troops into Iraq to bring about the region’s first regime change. ‘But I think we are making a mistake, a profound error, if we think we can stay out of that struggle, because we are going to be affected by it whether we like it or not.’
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The decade since the first Middle Eastern dictator was toppled has seen fundamental change in the Arab world. It has forced people to re-examine their identities and decide what role their faith will play in their lives and their politics. It has made the West look at its conscience as it rebuilds its foreign policies for the region.

The Arab Spring has been tidying up a lot of other people’s history. The toppling of the dictators provided the missing nail in the coffin of the Cold War era. The revolts also began to undermine the legacy of the Great War that came before that. After the First World War the Europeans conjured up plans for a whole raft of new countries, including Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Jordan, Palestine and Israel. In many of these places the Europeans’ actions left the minority communities in charge, thus building sectarian strife into them at birth. They in turn were only a little older than the ‘Middle East’ itself. That was a concept that had not existed before an American admiral, Alfred Thayer Mahan, referred in a 1902 edition of London’s
National Review
to ‘The Middle East, if I may adopt the term which I have not seen . . .’
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It was soon also adopted by the European powers, which shifted the boundaries of this construct as they constantly redefined their interests in this new region.

Those interests have now been dramatically changed again, and some of those countries in the Middle East run the risk of falling apart.

If the West stays engaged, then over the longer term there is much to be optimistic about. When opposition movements, violent or otherwise, have come to government, whether it is in South Africa or Northern Ireland, they have become more moderate. When you are running a country, reality kicks down the door, parks itself in the centre of the room and demands answers that ideology alone cannot provide. Governments, which reflect the views of their people, are also better at tackling extreme versions of themselves. It was the culture shock of imported Western modernity and Soviet-style dictatorship that gave birth to much of the region’s religious extremism. Diplomacy with the old Middle East was based on a lie. Earlier negotiations and peace treaties were not agreed with countries, they were signed off with the ruling family business. In the New Middle East the world’s leaders will be talking with people who probably won’t look, talk or think like them. But what both sides will share is the knowledge that each is speaking on behalf of their people. The men and women of the Middle East finally have a voice. When you think someone is listening to you, you are much less likely to feel you need to punch them on the nose.

The results of the elections which have taken place since the revolts have already revealed a political sophistication that belies the decades when people were denied the vote. Where Islamists were given a chance to govern it was largely because they suffered the most under the old regimes. But pity will only get them so far. If they don’t deliver they will be kicked out. That reality is likely to change the Islamists more than they will change the democratic process. The overthrow in Egypt of the region’s first elected Islamist president should not be seen as the beginning of the end for political Islam. As we shall see the Brotherhood has survived worse. But ejecting even an unpopular, incompetent government with military force has damaged Egypt’s fledgling democracy. It was though a reminder to any new government or army that fails to listen to the public. The people of the Arab world have lost their fear. There is no going back to dictatorship, even if the future course still looks unclear.