The Shaping of the Modern Middle East (14 page)

In the meantime, events in the outside world once again, as so often before in this century, gave a new impetus and a new direction to the quest for freedom in the Middle East. The breakup of the Soviet bloc and then even of the Soviet Union, the retreat and perhaps the collapse of Soviet power, and, behind these, the manifest failure of the Communist system and its utter inability to make good on its promises, all had an immediate and obvious impact on the balance of power, both regional and international. More important, they also provoked some fundamental rethinking of aspirations and possibilities-similar, though on a much greater scale, to the new impulses generated by the Japanese victory over Russia in 1905, the Allied victory in 1918, the rise of fascism and Nazism in the interwar period, and the perceived Soviet victory in 1945. This time, the ending of the Cold War and the victory of the West were connected with such basic Western ideas as an open society, a market economy, and the maintenance of human rights, now at last defined in individual and not merely in national terms. In recent decades, in the Middle East as in Eastern Europe, the words "democracy" and "democratic" were sadly misused and came to connote-in the eyes of those who lived under the regimes that arrogated these termsthe economics of poverty enforced by the politics of tyranny. In the early 1990s, they acquired once again-in the eyes of those who looked at them from the outside-a connotation of freedom and plenty. It remains to be seen how far these newly defined democratic aspirations will accord with the economic, social, and political realities of the region and with the deep-rooted national and religious traditions of its peoples. One of the great dangers to freedom is the widespread belief-in the region and elsewhere-that general elections with universal suffrage are the foundation of democracy. They are not; they are the copestone, to be added when everything else is in place.

The fight for national freedom has been fought and won, though the triumph of nationalism over imperialism has become a new kind of Middle Eastern myth in need of seasonal and ritual reenactment. The fight for political freedom has been fought and lost, though this defeat need not be final. The fight for economic freedom-meaning freedom from want-has been engaged, and after severe setbacks and many self-inflicted wounds, there are signs, still very tentative, of a move in new directions and a readiness to tackle the still formidable problems that remain. The fight for social freedom is still inconclusive, with some battles won and some battles lost, and the issue very much in doubt. In all these struggles, this much is clear, that whatever their nature and outcome may finally prove to be, economic and social radicalism has been a powerful force in Middle Eastern affairs and has given a new drive and direction to both nationalism and religion.

4

Patriotism and
Nationalism

It is a universal habit of human societies to divide people into insiders and outsiders and to find opprobrious names for the latter. The two most articulate peoples of antiquity called the rest gentiles and barbarians; medieval Islam and Christendom called each other infidels; in many modem societies, the term "foreigner" combines the worst features of both barbarity and unbelief. An amended Latin tag-"I regard no alien as a human being"-might serve as the motto of a good deal of twentieth-century statesmanship and administrative practice.

In Europe and in other countries of European civilization, it has been the custom for some time past to classify people, for political purposes, by nationality. There has been some variation in the use of this term. In English (both British and American) and in French the word "nationality," or nationality, indicates the country or state of which one is a citizen or subject. In German, Staatsangehorig- keit-state belonging-is used in this sense, while the term Nationalitat, though etymologically akin to "nationality," is semantically different, with an ethnic rather than a legal-political sense. Soviet usage adopted and formalized this distinction. The Soviet visa form and other documents had separate rubrics for Grazh- danstvo (citizenship) and Nationalnost, which corresponds in meaning to the German Nationalitat and not to the English or French "nationality." Apart from these formal differences of usage, different nations and parties have, from time to time, variously stressed the importance of citizenship, descent, language, religion, and other factors in determining national identity. But allowing for all these variations, it remains broadly true that in Europe and the Americas, identity and loyalty are defined in terms of nationality-that is, to varying extents, by the polity of which one is a citizen, the country one inhabits, and, in most countries in the Eastern Hemisphere, the stock from which one is deemed to descend and the language one speaks.

This has not been so in the Islamic world. Descent, language, and habitation were all of secondary importance, and it is only during the last century that under European influence, the concept of the political nation has begun to make headway. For Muslims, the basic division-the touchstone by which men are separated from one another, by which one distinguishes between brother and strangeris that of faith, of membership in a religious community. In our day, "faith" is perhaps the wrong word. We all know-from our daily newspapers, if not from our own experience-that dislike of other religions long survives any effective belief in our own. What is meant is, rather, religion as a social and communal force, a measure of identity and a focus of group loyalty.

Within the universal Muslim community, the Muslim accepted as brothers, at least theoretically, other Muslims of whatever language, origin, or place of habitation. He rejected as aliens his own compatriots who might be of the same stock and speak the same language, but professed another religion. He also rejected his own non-Muslim ancestors, with whom he felt little or no sense of identity or continuity. The peoples of the Islamic Middle East did not neglect antiquity because they were barbarous or ignorant, incapable of understanding the importance of such things. On the contrary, they were peoples of high culture, with an unusually strong sense of history and of their place in it. But for them, real history began with the advent of Islam. Their spiritual ancestors were the early Muslims in Arabia and the heartlands; the heathen Egyptians, Babylonians, and others were remote and alien peoples with whom, despite the accidental and unimportant links of blood and soil, they had no real connection. It was only in the nineteenth century, when European archaeology revealed something of the value of this forgotten past, that they began to take an interest in it-an interest that grew and developed as it became associated with the newly imported Western ideas of the fatherland and nation, of the mystical and continuing identity of a people and the country they inhabit.

The Ottoman Empire was the last and the most enduring of the great Islamic universal empires that had ruled over the Middle East since the day when the first of the caliphs succeeded the last of the prophets. Within it, the basic loyalty of Muslims was to Islam, to the Islamic empire that was its political embodiment, and to the dynasty, legitimized by time and acceptance, that ruled over it. The discontented and the rebellious might seek a change of ministers, of sovereign-even, in a few cases, of dynasty-but they never sought to change the basis of statehood or corporate identity.

In this respect, the situation in the Middle East until the nineteenth-perhaps even the twentieth-century was not unlike that which existed in medieval Europe. The greatest poet of medieval Christendom, Dante, in his dreams of reviving a universal Christian Roman empire, was not disturbed by the fact that the Roman emperors of his day happened to be German and not Italian. Italy and the Italians existed and were of profound importance, but their true political expression was as a part of the universal Christian monarchy. The idea of Italy as a political entity, needing to express its territorial and national identity in statehood, lay far in the future. In the same way, until the impact of European political ideas, the Arab subjects of the Ottoman Empire, though well aware of their separate linguistic and cultural identity and of the historic memories attached to them, had no conception of a separate Arab state and no serious desire to part from the Turks. Certainly, they did not question the fact that the sultans happened to be Turkish. On the contrary, they would have found it odd had they been anything else. So alien was the idea of the territorial nation-state that Arabic has no word for Arabia, and Turkish, until modern times, lacked a word for Turkey. The Turks now use a word of European origin; the Arabs make do with an expression meaning the peninsula of the Arabs.

The old order continued to function more or less effectively until the introduction of new ideas from Europe began to undermine the firm basis of acceptance on which it had rested. The impact of Western action and example was changing the structure of society and the state; the influence of Western thought and practice encouraged the emergence of new political conceptions, affecting both the pattern of authority in the state and the basis of association of its subjects. During the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the old Islamic and dynastic loyalties that prevailed among the Turks, Arabs, and Persians were modified, transformed, and, at times, replaced by the disruptive European ideas of patriotism and nationalism, with their new, abstract theories of country and nation to obscure the older realities of state and faith.

Today the three major peoples of the Middle East, the Turks, Arabs, and Persians, have become intellectually isolated from one another. Each was for long absorbed in its own dialogue with the West, and had little knowledge of the other two, or interest in them, beyond the surface movement of political events. Arabic is still taught as a classical and scriptural language in Iranian secondary schools-and conveys about as much contact with Arab movements as the vestigial teaching of Greek in English public schools does with modern Greece. Classical Arabic has also been reintroduced in Turkish religious seminaries and, at a rather elementary level, forms a part of religious instruction among Muslims generally. Apart from this, foreign Middle Eastern languages are studied in the Middle East only by small groups of students in specialist and learned institutions. The general public knows nothing of the other two languages and, until the Iranian revolution of 1979, was almost totally ignorant of the intellectual and cultural movements expressed in them. After the revolution of 1979, the new leadership in Iran made a determined effort to bring the Islamic revolution to other Muslim, and especially Arab, countries. They were able to achieve some local successes, notably among the Shia population of war-torn south Lebanon. They also no doubt contributed to the establishment of an Islamic fundamentalist regime in the Sudan and to attempts to install similar regimes elsewhere. But after the elation in the first flush of revolution, their influence diminished considerably and in particular had remarkably little effect among the educated middle class or, more generally, among intellectuals. Cairo, Tehran, and Istanbul had become culturally very remote from one another. They may still look outward for guidance and inspiration, but they do not look to one another.

It was not always so. In the nineteenth century, Arabic was still read and understood by most educated Muslims; Turkish was still an imperial language, the medium of communication of the last great independent Muslim empire, to which Muslims everywhere looked as their guide and final hope. Today, a knowledge of Turkish is a rarity in the Arab lands. In Ottoman times it was a language of government and education in the cities of Syria and Iraq and survived even in Egypt, until yesterday, as a language of the court and aristocracy. Persian was the hallmark of an educated gentleman in the Ottoman lands; Ottoman Turkish was read and understood by important elements among the Turkic-speaking populations in Transcaucasia, Iran, and Central Asia. Apart from ease of communication, the three peoples were still near to one another in spirit and outlook and had not yet grown apart into a series of separate, insulated nation-states. New ideas and new moods could still be communicated swiftly all over the Middle East, and it is only in the larger framework of the area as a whole that the separate development of the Turks, Arabs, and Persians can be adequately understood.

Turkey was the most advanced and most powerful country in the region, the most sophisticated and experienced nation, with the longest and closest acquaintance with Europe. It was natural that the new ideas should first have appeared among the Turks and have been transmitted by them to their subjects and neighbors.

"Patriotism" and "nationalism" are the words that express the normal kind of political loyalty and identity in the modern world. Both are words of unstable and therefore explosive content and so need to be handled with care. In English usage, the two convey very different suggestions and associations. Patriotism, most of us would agree, is right and good-the love and loyalty that all of us owe to our country. Nationalism, on the other hand, is something rather alien and therefore rather suspect. The expression "English nationalism," for example, does not come very naturally to the tongue. One thinks of nationalism as being Celtic or continental, African or Oriental, but not English and not American.