As for this topic, please refer to my previous postings (http://d.hatena.ne.jp/itunalily2/20131018)(http://d.hatena.ne.jp/itunalily2/20131019) respectively. (Lily)
（http://www.martinkramer.org/sandbox/reader/archives/arab-nationalism-mistaken-identity/）
Talking Democracy and Islam
Is it true, as Fouad Ajami wrote, that this signifies the “end of Arab nationalism”? Do its defenders, mostly in exile, inhabit “fortresses at the end of the road that are yet to receive the dispatches that all is lost and the battle is over”?47 Arab nationalism has suffered yet another blow, and has retreated almost to its point of origin, inspiring a few societies and clubs in Beirut, and some newspapers and journals published in Europe. With the exception of Libya under the mercurial Mu’ammar al-Qaddhafi, no Arab state makes any pretense of championing Arab nationalism. Yet Arab nationalists have not lost hope that from their last fortresses, they might return triumphant to recapture the center. Did that not happen in the case of Iran, where an old ayatollah, banished to one of the last bastions of Shi’ite Islam, launched a revolution and swept to power? The return of political Islam from purgatory holds out hope to Arab nationalists that they might do the same. Their desperate gamble on Saddam failed, but there are other avenues of return, provided Arab nationalism can adapt to the changing spirit of the times.
Arab nationalism has never been totally averse to such adaptation. The core of its message has never changed, and remains the existence of one Arab nation, destined to be drawn together in some form of unity, and poised antagonistically against an array of external enemies. But in the past, Arab nationalism borrowed supplementary themes and vocabulary from liberalism, fascism, socialism, radicalism, and messianism. As the division of the Arab world became ever more established and recognized, this borrowing achieved less, so that Arab nationalism became ever more utopian in its presumptions. But given the immense economic and social problems that face Arab societies, there are Arab nationalists who believe that any moment might become a revolutionary one. They intend to be there.
Since the “defeat” of 1991, they have bid to stay in the contest by presenting Arab nationalism as the natural ally of democracy and Islam. In theory, Arab nationalism never required a commitment to either, and in practice it showed a strong preference for revolutionary dictators and a strong aversion to Islamic movements. In their prime, Arab nationalists had no qualms about banning political parties and executing Islamic activists, all in the name of Arab unity. That they now have fixed upon democracy and Islam is less a matter of conviction than convenience. They understand that the prevailing order has two weaknesses. First, it is not democratic. Its aging rulers, in power now for a generation, are under pressure from a populace that gets younger every year, and that yearns for a measure of political participation. Second, it is not legitimate in the eyes of the growing numbers of frustrated people who have filled the ranks of Islamic movements. They genuinely yearn for a measure of authenticity, which they believe can only be achieved by the creation of an Islamic state under Islamic law. Somewhere in the Arab world it is possible that a regime might succumb to one of these weaknesses. Arab nationalists hope to join the resulting fracas and perhaps emerge triumphant by championing either democracy or Islam or both.
From a reading of the leading journals of pan-Arab opinion, it appears that the slogan of Islam has been more difficult to sing. There is plenty of common ground with Islamic discourse, most notably in the shared conviction that the Arab world still suffers from imperialist domination and that Israel’s presence must not be normalized. But Islam already has its champions, in the form of well-organized and disciplined mass movements, and these express almost no interest in an alliance with the discredited stragglers of Arab nationalism. The lengthy round-table debates among Arab nationalist intellectuals about their possible relationship with Islamic movements are not reciprocated by the Islamists, whose leaders have no need for guidance from others, especially those who once persecuted them.48 Still, some Arab nationalist intellectuals, from their perches in Europe and America, have offered their intellectual services to the defense of Islamic movements before Western opinion — something Islamic movements have been ill-prepared to undertake themselves. This has created the foundations of a relationship, although not all Arab nationalists are pleased or prepared to become apologists for varieties of Islam which, only a few years ago, they denounced with all their polemical force.
In contrast, the slogan of democracy is easier to appropriate. There are no mass democracy movements, and while virtually every Arab regime now claims to be committed to democracy, their late conversion often seems less credible than that of the Arab nationalists themselves. And so the pan-Arab journals brim with articles, conference proceedings, and study-group reports on the methods and means of promoting democracy in the Arab world. The assumption underlying this sudden enthusiasm for political pluralism and free elections is that if the people were only allowed to express themselves, they would endorse the Arab nationalist program: greater Arab unity, repudiation of the United States, and withdrawal from the Arab-Israeli peace process.49 This belief flies in the face of the existing attitudinal surveys, which show a continuing shift of self-identification away from the Arab nation, and toward either the state or Islam. The results of those relatively free elections held to date show a similar polarization between the party of the state and the party of Islam. No Arab nationalist parties have been a factor in these elections. And while there is a constituency for some elements of the Arab nationalist program, it clearly belongs to Islamic parties, whose platforms incorporate similar repudiations of American hegemony and Israel, but are couched in the language of Islam.
In these circumstances, the commitment of Arab nationalists to democracy remains as superficial as that of the Islamists and the regimes. It is deployed as a slogan for mass mobilization against the existing order, and then as a shield against the revenge of a triumphant Islam. But even as the Arab nationalists speak of democracy, their eyes remain fixed on the horizon, awaiting the next Nasser, the next Saddam — the man who will save the Arabs from themselves and unite them. Even now, when the slogan of democracy is on everyone’s lips, half of the Arab nationalist intellectuals in a recent survey believe that Arab unity can only be achieved by force, not by democracy.50
But Arab nationalism, having lost almost everything, now has little to lose, and its endorsement of democracy and Islam has been made in just that spirit. That Arab nationalism should now cast itself as the defender of freedom and the faith is ironic. The irony is not lost on the Arabs themselves, who have a strong sense of history and long memories. They discarded Arab nationalism because it failed to keep its promise of power, even as it exacted an exorbitant price in freedom and faith. It was not the only utopian ideology to do so at the time. And perhaps the more useful comparison, when the perspective is longer, may be between Arab nationalism and Soviet communism: two great myths of solidarity, impossible in their scale, deeply flawed in their implementation, which alternately stirred and whipped millions of people in a desperate pursuit of power through the middle of the twentieth century, before collapsing in exhaustion — and stranding their last admirers in the faculty lounges of the West.
© Martin Kramer
Notes
1 Ibrahim al-Yaziji, “Tanabbahu wa istafiqu” (“Awake and Arise”).
2 George Antonius, The Arab Awakening: The Story of the Arab National Movement (London: H. Hamilton, 1938).
3 Mahmoud Darwish, “Bitaqa hawiyya” (“Identity Card”).
4 Nizar Qabbani, “La buda an asta’dhina al-watan” (“I Must Ask the Homeland’s Permission”).
5 Rupert Emerson, From Empire to Nation: The Rise to Self-Assertion of Asian and African Peoples (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1960), 126.
6 See, for example, Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983); and Elie Kedourie, Nationalism, 4th ed. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993).
7 First assessed by George Antonius, The Arab Awakening. For subsequent accounts, see Zeine N. Zeine, Arab-Turkish Relations and the Emergence of Arab nationalism (Beirut: Khayat’s, 1958); Sylvia Haim, Arab nationalism: An Anthology (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1962), pp. 3-72 (introduction); Albert Hourani, Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age 1798-1939 (London: Oxford University Press, 1962; reprint, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983); C. Ernest Dawn, From Ottomanism to Arabism: Essays on the Origins of Arab Nationalism (Urbana, Ill.: University of Illinois Press, 1973); Philip S. Khoury, Urban Notables and Arab nationalism: The Politics of Damascus 1860-1920 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983); A. A. Duri, The Historical Formation of the Arab Nation, trans. Lawrence I. Conrad (London: Croom Helm, 1987); Bassam Tibi, Arab nationalism: A Critical Inquiry, 2d ed., trans. Marion Farouk Sluglett and Peter Sluglett; (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1990); and Rashid Khalidi et al., eds., The Origins of Arab Nationalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991).
8 For the most systematic critique of the “awakening,” see Hisham Sharabi, Arab Intellectuals and the West (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1970). For its difficulties in creating a modern vocabulary of politics, see Ami Ayalon, Language and Change in the Arab Middle East: The Evolution of Modern Arabic Political Discourse (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987).
9 Gertrude Bell, The Desert and the Sown (London: W. Heinemann, 1907), 140.
10 Turkish nationalism, inspired by Balkan nationalisms, in turn inspired much of the outlook of early Arab nationalism. On its genesis, see David Kushner, The Rise of Turkish Nationalism, 1876-1908 (London: Frank Cass, 1977).
11 See Neville J. Mandel, The Arabs and Zionism before World War I (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1976).
12 Elie Kedourie, “Pan-Arabism and British Policy,” in Elie Kedourie, The Chatham House Version and other Middle-Eastern Studies (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1970; reprint, Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1984), 213.
13 On Arab politics in the immediate postwar period, see Zeine N. Zeine, The Struggle for Arab Independence: Western Diplomacy and the Rise and Fall of Faisal’s Kingdom in Syria, 2d ed. (Delmar, New York: Caravan Books, 1977).
14 For the genesis of the names that filled the postwar map, see Bernard Lewis, “The Map of the Middle East: A Guide for the Perplexed,” The American Scholar 58, no. 1 (winter 1988-89): 19-38.
15 The deep debate in Lebanon over the very definition of its history is considered by Ahmad Beydoun, Identité confessionnelle et temps social chez les historiens libanais contemporains (Beirut: Université libanaise, 1984); and Kamal Salibi, A House of Many Mansions: The History of Lebanon Reconsidered (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1988).
16 While the story of the Arab Revolt has been told many times, most famously by T. E. Lawrence and George Antonius, there are fewer accounts of the rival campaigns for separate independence in different parts of the Fertile Crescent. For a widening of the perspective, see Eliezer Tauber, The Arab Movements in World War I (London: Frank Cass, 1993).
17 Quoted by William L. Cleveland, The Making of an Arab Nationalist: Ottomanism and Arabism in the Life and Thought of Sati’ al-Husri (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971), 127.
18 Ibid., 163-65.
19 On this evolution, see C. Ernest Dawn, “The Formation of a Pan-Arab Ideology in the Inter-War Years,” International Journal of Middle Eastern Studies 20 (1988): 67-91.
20 On the Egyptian debate over identity, see Israel Gershoni and James P. Jankowski, Egypt, Islam, and the Arabs: The Search for Egyptian Nationhood (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986).
21 These plans have been considered in great detail by Yehoshua Porath, In Search of Arab Unity 1930-1945 (London: Frank Cass, 1986).
22 J.C. Hurewitz, The Middle East and North Africa in World Politics: A Documentary Record, 2d ed., vol. 2, British-French Supremacy, 1914-1945 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), 736. For the development of inter-Arab relations in this period, see Bruce Maddy-Weitzman, The Crystallization of the Arab State System, 1945-1954 (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1993).
23 For a contemporary discussion of the transition to ideological politics, see Leonard Binder, The Ideological Revolution in the Middle East (New York: John Wiley, 1964).
24 Translation in Haim, Arab nationalism: An Anthology, 233-41.
25 Sami al-Jundi, a member of the Ba’th from its earliest years who wrote a devastating account of the party, as quoted by Elie Kedourie, Arabic Political Memoirs and Other Studies (London: Frank Cass, 1974), 201.
26 For the early history of the Ba’th, see Kamel S. Abu Jaber, The Arab Ba’th Socialist Party: History, Ideology, and Organization (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1966); John F. Devlin, The Ba’th Party: A History from Its Origins to 1966 (Stanford: Hoover Institution Press, 1976); and Kanan Makiya [Samir al-Khalil], Republic of Fear: The Politics of Modern Iraq (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1989), 149-257.
27 For this period, see Malcolm H. Kerr, The Arab Cold War: Gamal ‘Abd al-Nasir and His Rivals, 1958-1970, 3d ed.(London: Oxford University Press, 1971); and P. J. Vatikiotis, Conflict in the Middle East (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1971).
28 David Holden, Farewell to Arabia (New York: Walker, 1966), 101.
29 Abdul Aziz Said, “Clashing Horizons: Arabs and Revolution,” in People and Politics in the Middle East, ed. Michael Curtis (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction, 1971), 279.
30 Fouad Ajami, “The End of Pan-Arabism,” in Pan-Arabism and Arab nationalism: The Continuing Debate, ed. Tawfic E. Farah (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1987), 98.
31 The most thought-provoking account of the post-1967 crisis of Arab nationalism remains Fouad Ajami’s The Arab Predicament: Arab Political Thought and Practice Since 1967, updated ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). Other works representative of the reassessments made by Arab intellectuals include Abdallah Laroui, The Crisis of the Arab Intellectual: Traditionalism or Historicism?, trans. Diarmid Cammell (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1976); Samir Amin, The Arab Nation (London: Zed Press,1978); Hisham Sharabi, Neopatriarchy: A Theory of Distorted Change in Arab Society (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988); and Paul Salem, Bitter Legacy: Ideology and Politics in the Arab World (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1994). For a variety of assessments by non-Arabs, see Michael Hudson, Arab Politics: The Search for Legitimacy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977); Jacques Berque, Arab Rebirth: Pain & Ecstasy, trans. Quintin Hoare (London: Al Saqi Books, 1983); David Pryce-Jones, The Closed Circle: An Interpretation of the Arabs (New York: Harper and Row, 1989); and Olivier Carré, Le nationalisme arabe (Paris: Fayard, 1993).
32 Salibi, A House of Many Mansions, 218, 231.
33 Kamal Abu-Deeb, “Cultural Creation in a Fragmented Society,” in The Next Arab Decade: Alternative Futures, ed. Hisham Sharabi (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1988), 165.
34 The strengthening of the Arab state served as the theme of a multiyear project on “Nation, State and Integration in the Arab World,” which generated four volumes of detailed studies. The most significant of these studies are collected in Giacomo Luciani, ed., The Arab State (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1990).
35 Michel Aflaq, Fi sabil al-ba’th (Beirut: Dar al-Tali’a, 1963), 55.
36 Quoted by Emmanuel Sivan, Radical Islam: Medieval Theology and Modern Politics (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985), 30-32.
37 On the evolution of this approach, see Moshe Shemesh, The Palestinian Entity 1959-1974: Arab Politics and the PLO (London: Frank Cass, 1988).
38 Jean Genet, Prisoner of Love, trans. Barbara Bray (London: Picador, 1989), 239.
39 Quoted by Olivier Carré, Le nationalisme arabe, 175.
40 Quoted by Amatzia Baram, Culture, History and Ideology in the Formation of Ba’thist Iraq, 1968-89 (London: Macmillan, 1991), 121. The book includes a detailed discussion of the issue of identity in Iraqi politics, and the genesis of the Mesopotamian myth.
41 See Samir al-Khalil [Kanan Makiya], The Monument: Art, Vulgarity and Responsibility in Iraq (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1991).
42 Hichem Djaït, Europe and Islam, trans. Peter Heinegg (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1985), 140-41.
43 Quoted by Kanan Makiya, Cruelty and Silence: War, Tyranny, Uprising, and the Arab World (New York: Norton, 1993), 242. The second half of this work is devoted to the rush of Arab nationalist intellectuals to endorse Saddam Hussein before and during the Gulf crisis.
44 David Pollock, “The Arab Street”? Public Opinion in the Arab World, Policy Papers, no. 32 (Washington: The Washington Institute for Near East Policy, 1992), 29-41.
45 An example of this trend is the article by the Egyptian intellectual Lutfi al-Khuli, “Arab? Na’am wa-lakin sharq awsatiyin aydan!,” Al-Hayat (London), 20 May 1992.
46 Roderic Davison, “Where is the Middle East?,” in The Modern Middle East, ed. Richard Nolte (New York: Atherton, 1963), 16-17.
47 Fouad Ajami, “The End of Arab nationalism,” The New Republic, 12 August 1991.
48 For an example of such a debate, see the proceedings of a roundtable of Arab nationalist intellectuals on the possibility of a nationalist-Islamist rapprochement, in Al-Mustaqbal al-arabi (Beirut) 161 (July 1992): 96-119.
49 For a typical statement of this view, see As’ad AbuKhalil, “A New Arab Ideology?: The Rejuvenation of Arab nationalism,” Middle East Journal, 46 (winter 1992): 22-36.
50 The survey was conducted by researchers at Yarmuk University, and included almost one thousand respondents from several Arab countries. See Al-Mustaqbal al-arabi (Beirut) 164 (October 1992): 27-33.
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