The Shaping of the Modern Middle East (13 page)

While democracy faltered and died in the Arab lands, the quest for freedom entered on new paths. Individual freedom was not a major issue during the period of Anglo-French and other, later, foreign domination. Although limited in various ways, it was on the whole more extensive and better protected than at any time before or since. What was far more important was the demand for corporate or collective freedom, more technically known as independence. The British and French empires, by the logic of their own systems rather than in response to popular demand, conceded a large measure of freedom, but withheld independence. It was natural, therefore, that the national political struggle should have concentrated on the latter and neglected the former. The ending of imperial rule was the focus and purpose of all political effort, never more so than in the period just after it was ended. With the coming of independence, it was found that freedom-in the old, classical liberal sense-had been lost. There were few to resist or lament its passing.

The ending of foreign rule, when it came, did not solve but merely revealed the fundamental economic, social, and political problems of the Arab lands. Imperialism, though repeatedly vanquished, remained the chief enemy, but with it another was associated-feudalism, sometimes also called capitalism. Both terms designated the existing economic order. A period of experiment and upheaval followed, a period of policies described by their friends as pragmatic, by their enemies as opportunist. And then, in the summer of 1961, the government of the United Arab Republic revealed the name of the new ideology that was to be their guiding light. It was called Arab socialism, and its purpose was to secure economic liberty, the only kind that mattered. "Today," said President Nasser, announcing a series of nationalizations,

we are experiencing real economic liberty. No one exercises arbitrary power over the economy of the country or over its inhabitants. Every citizen feels that he is free in his country on the economic level and that he is not subjected to the dictatorship of capital.... True liberty is true democracy. It is economic liberty and social equality.

A few days earlier, the president had given his definition of democracy:

Fundamentally, democracy means the establishment of social justice and equity for the oppressed class as against the oppressive class. Fundamentally, democracy means that government should not be the monopoly of feudalism and exploiting capital, but should be for the welfare of the whole nation.... Democracy is not created simply by issuing a constitution or setting up a parliament. Democracy is not defined by the constitution or the parliament, but is created by eliminating feudalism and monopoly and the domination of capital. There is no freedom and no democracy without equality, and no equality with feudalism and exploitation and domination by capital.'

Like "freedom," like "democracy," "socialism" is a word of many meanings. The Soviet Union, we were told, was dedicated to the building of socialism; so too are the British and Scandinavian Labour parties. One of the most famous of parties bearing the name socialist was the National Socialist German Workers' party, usually known by its German abbreviated name as the Nazis. In the demonology of the American radical right-it has been said-socialism means anything to the left of Louis XIV. According to the rector of Al-Azhar, in a statement published on 22 December 1961, the most perfect, complete, useful, and profound socialism is that prescribed by Islam and resting on the foundations of the faith. To which of these, if any, is Arab socialism related?

Socialism began in the Middle East with small coteries, as a more recondite version of the prevailing fashion of copying Europe. A few serious writers gave it their support, such as the Syrian Christian Shibli Shumayyil (1860-1917) and the Egyptian Christian Salama Musa (ca. 1887-1959). Both followed Western models of socialism: Shumayyil, the French school of Jaures; Musa, the English Fabians. Also French in inspiration was the short-lived and ineffectual Ottoman Socialist party, founded in 1910, with a branch in Paris and a newspaper called Besheriyet (Humanity). The Russian Revolution brought a brief spurt of left-wing socialist activities in several countries, but this too petered out in sectarian squabbling, leaving only a very small, very hard core of professional revolutionaries. In mandatary Palestine, a strong social-democratic labor movement, of European type, developed among the Jewish population. Elsewhere in the Middle East in the 1920s and 1930s, socialism had virtually no following-nothing, for example, that could be compared with the social and political radicalism of the nationalist movements in India and Southeast Asia.

A new phase began with the triumph of Soviet arms and the electoral victory of the British Labour party in 1945. The Soviets, it seemed, had won the war, and even in Britain the people had preferred socialism to Churchill. Socialism might therefore be a good thing. In addition, it seemed to provide an answer for the mounting economic problems of the area. A series of socialist parties appeared in various countries, the most important of which was Akram Haur- ani's Arab Socialist party, founded in Syria in 1950. In 1953 it was amalgamated with Michel `Aflaq's Arab Renaissance party, to form the Arab Socialist Renaissance party, usually known as the Bath. The nucleus of the party was a group formed in 1941 in Vichyoccupied Syria to mobilize sympathy and support for the short-lived pro-Axis regime of Rashid `Ali in Iraq. The ideological writings of its founders clearly reflect the ideas of that time and place. Later, the party underwent some changes and, with a program combining economic socialism and a kind of mystical nationalism, soon won a considerable following in the Arab East. Apart from the Communists, it was the only party with a systematic ideology, an extensive network of branches, and a following among both the intellectuals and the working classes. In 1956 the Bath leaders joined the government in Syria, and were instrumental in taking that country into the United Arab Republic. For a while, the Bath played a predominant role in Syria after the union and claimed even to be providing ideological leadership for the UAR itself. By the end of 1959, however, they were losing ground. In Iraq, Jordan, and Lebanon they were opposed and, on occasion, suppressed. Even in the UAR, their leaders were dismissed from the high federal offices that they had held, and the party itself was suppressed twenty-two months after the union. The Bath did not return to prominence until the spring of 1963, when the revolutions in Iraq and Syria brought it to power in both countries and inaugurated a new sequence of both collaboration and conflict with President Nasser. In the meantime, the only place where socialist ideology could be seriously discussed was liberal, capitalist Beirut.

Socialism was in the air in the 1950s, just as fascism had been in the 1930s and 1940s, and liberalism a century earlier. Like its predecessor, socialism won a certain following among intellectuals, but it was not they who brought it to power. The socialist revolution, like the liberal constitutions, was imposed from above-not in response to a popular demand, not by the victory of a socialist or working-class movement, but by the decision of a military regime that had already been in power for nine years. Some practical steps, of a nondoctrinal nature, had been taken earlier in Egypt. British, French, and some Jewish enterprises had been nationalized following the Sinai and Suez expeditions; Belgian assets were added during the Congo crisis. The resulting flight of foreign and minority capital narrowed the field of candidates for what one might call conservative nationalizations. The government, apparently despairing of private enterprise, decided to adopt a more active role in economic life. Statements of the time refer to social justice rather than to socialism and appear to envisage a kind of limited state capitalism with a welfare program. By 1960, socialism was becoming more explicit in both word and deed, particularly with the nationalization of the great Misr group of enterprises. The nationalization of the newspaper press in the same year was not purely, or even primarily, an economic measure.

The next stage in Egypt came with the series of decrees in July 1961, establishing state ownership or control over almost all largescale economic enterprises, taking over, with compensation, all landholdings above a hundred feddans (about a hundred acres), imposing drastic income taxes in the higher brackets, and forbidding any individual to own more than £E10,000 worth of shares in a list of named companies. At the same time, a series of speeches and articles explained the nature and purpose of these measures and of the Arab socialism that they exemplified. The need of the country, said Muhammad Hasanayn Haykal in an authoritative ideological article, was for a comprehensive plan harnessing the entire energy of the nation, which would ensure the necessary increase in production while providing for the immediate consumer needs of the long-deprived masses. In this way, both economic growth and social welfare would be achieved without either the domestic and colonial exploitation of Western capitalism or the ruthless sacrifice of the present to future generations, as practiced by Stalin and Mao Tsetung." A French politician once said that war is too serious a matter to be left to the generals. The Egyptian officers had already decided that politics was too important to be left to politicians; they now also reached the conclusion that business was too important a matter to be left to businessmen.

"Archaeology," said Bernard Berenson, "like all studies pursued with a scientific method, is based on comparison. It is constantly comparing unknown with known, uncertain with certain, unclassified with classified."" It is no doubt in pursuit of the archaeological method, which has served so well in the study of earlier periods of Middle Eastern history, that many attempts have been made to explain and categorize recent Middle Eastern developments by com paring them with earlier, already categorized events, which took place at other times or in other places.

Arab socialism, the dominant ideology of the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, has been subjected to several such explanations by comparison. Some have sought precedents in the Egyptian past, for there is also an indigenous tradition of state economic action, exemplified in the commercial monopolies of the Mamluk sultans in the fifteenth century and the land nationalization of Muhammad `Ali Pasha at the beginning of the nineteenth. Others have looked for Western parallels and, pronouncing a kind of guilt by association, have at different times described the military regime as Nazi and as Communist. To call a movement Nazi, in both the West and the Soviet Union, in most of Asia and Africa, was usually considered an insult. It was not so in the eastern Arab lands, where many leaders made no secret of their wartime sympathy and even association with the Axis. When Qasim called Nasser a Hitlerite, the name was a danger sign of Communist penetration in Baghdad. This was not part of the Arab vocabulary of abuse, and its appearance as such was evidence of alien influence. In Egypt there were many reports, especially in the 1950s and 1960s (in Syria, not until much later), of the employment of Nazi German experts, particularly in police and propaganda work. The pervasive efficiency of the one and the strident mendacity of the other may well have owed something to the example or instruction of Nazi specialists. President Nasser himself on one occasion cited and recommended the so-called Protocols of the Elders of Zion.12

Nevertheless, one should not attach too much importance to this. Others, on both sides of the Iron Curtain, did not scruple to make use of Nazi experts in different fields when it suited them to do so. Evil communications corrupt good manners. These Nazi associations would seem to indicate a degree of moral obtuseness in the Egyptian regime of a kind that is fairly widespread in the modern world, but not necessarily any greater resemblance to the Nazi dictatorship than is implied in that.

Charges of communism also rest on rather slender foundations. The Communists, like the Nazis, could count on a sympathetic welcome, for they appeared in the same guise-as enemies of the West. For several decades after the end of the Second World War, Communism, unlike Nazism, was a fact, not a memory, and this meant both opportunity and danger. There was a period when Communist influence in the Arab world appeared to be great and growing. But in time, both the activities of the Soviet government in the Arab world and a closer acquaintance among Arabs with Soviet realities at home combined to reduce the attraction of this political and economic creed.

For a while, there was considerable debate in the Arabic world between the proponents of "Arab socialism," seen as both more authentic and more humane, and "scientific socialism," another name for Marxist Communism, defended by its supporters as superior to the corrupt and ineffectual local imitation and as offering the only true path to an ideal society. By the early 1990s, both brands had been thoroughly discredited. "Scientific socialism" had failed most dismally and dramatically in its countries of origin, while Arab socialism was believed by more and more observers to have prevented rather than produced the promised economic development and to have led the polities of the Arab world away from both traditional Arab tolerance and Western political democracy toward a string of totalitarian dictatorships patterned after the most odious of Central and Eastern European models.

It is no doubt tempting to try to explain Middle Eastern phenomena in terms of European or North or South American experience; it may also, within limits, be very useful. But on the whole, such comparisons-perhaps analogies would be a better word-obscure more than they explain. No doubt, Middle Eastern societies and politics are subject to the same human vicissitudes and therefore to the same rules of interpretation as those of the West. But since the Middle East has for some time now been under the influence of the West and has adopted Western outward forms in the organization and expression of its political and social life, it is fatally easy for the Western observer to take these alien outward forms as the element of comparison and to disregard or misrepresent the deeper realities that they so imperfectly express. The Islamic society of the Middle East, with its own complex web of experience and tradition, cannot adequately be labeled and classified with a few names and terms borrowed from the Western past.