Suppose dictators control the state, and always have. The way to wealth is through power, and whoever controls the army has the power. People who agitate for political power wind up in prison or worse, and you're never quite sure who is going to be running the show next year.
Your history recalls days when your land was the center of power and culture, but it has been ruled for hundreds of years by local appointees of a distant emperor, which collapsed in front of even more powerful foreigners. Now suppose that there's no indigenous scientific scholarship, that the religious scholars teach that the world was perfect 1400 years ago, and that your land is now a backwater in the world.
In that sort of setting, how can you have any influence? Not in politics, if you value your health. Nor in commerce; not without political influence. Not in religious scholarship, unless you want to out-do them in piety or rigor. Not in science, or in technology; all that's left is the arts.
And the arts are influential. What you are immersed in shapes the way you think. If you can influence a circle of literary friends, you can perhaps influence the literature of a country. If you can shape the stories and songs of a generation, you can shape the way they think.
And this is why Ajami's book deals largely with poets and novelists, even when he is writing about Sadat or Arafat. Ajami uses leisurely story-telling, drawing the background so detailed that his subject almost seems like a shadow moving on the canvas by comparison. Not that Ajami neglects his subject, but he sees the character as part of a bigger world, and shows you the world as well.
In "The Suicide of Khalil Hawi" Ajami introduces Lebanon and Khalil Hawi, a son of the Lebanese mountains trying to make his way in cosmopolitan Beirut. He found acclaim and hard-won success, but the Lebanon he knew with its dreams of modernity and pan-Arabism was savaged by the Palestinians and the rising Shi'ites. Neither in safe "exile" in the West nor in his return was there any comfort or hope, and he shot himself--and the sound was overlooked because gunfire was so commonplace.
The poet and critic whose pen name was Adonis wrote "I come from a Shia home. And every Shia home inherits tragedy while it awaits a coming deliverance." The Shi'ite history is a history of martyrs, punctuated only with the occasional doomed dynasty--until Khomeini. The old pan-Arab dream had shattered after the 1967 war, and the new focus of power shifted to the oil-moneyed Gulf states and the revolutionary theocracy of Iran. And in the chapter "In the Shape of the Ancestors" Ajami describes the forces that fought across the MidEast:
When it rode high in the aftermath of 1967, the Palestinian movement insisted that it had the answers not only to the problems of the Palestinians but also to broader Arab ailments. It was the Palestinian belief that "guerrilla warfare" or "wars of national liberation" or "revolution" would deliver Arab society from its superstitions and weaknesses, that the Palestinian movement would create a new, emancipated society. The pamphleteers went to work, and so did the gunmen, proclaiming an era of daring and defiance. But it was all delirium.. . .
For all its drama, the battle in Beirut and southern Lebanon was really an extension of the battle raging farther east between the Iranian revolution and the Iraqi regime. It was there that the Arab political order would make its stand. The "Persian state" had to be kept at bay and the Iranian revolution quarantined if the familiar order of things in the Arab world was to have a chance. Just was it was no accident that Khomeini named his military campaigns for Karbala, the great Shia shrine to the martyrdom of Hussein, the grandson of the Prophet Muhammad, it was also no accident that Saddam Hussein of Iraq labeled his campaign Qadisiyyat Saddam. (Qadisiyya was the seventh-century battle in which the Arabs conquered Persia and converted the Persian realm to Islam.) The Iraqi campaign was to be phrased in the simple and crude language of race: Arab versus Persian. Since the 1920s and 1930s, Arab nationalism had fallen under the spell of Germanic theories of nationalism--the unity of the "folk," the bonds of race, the entire baggage of German populism. This strain of nationalism found particularly fertile soil in Iraq. It was natural for Saddam Hussein to fall back on the call of the race and the nation. The tribe was threatened, so the tribe struck back.
. . .
In Khomeini's rendition, Hussein Ibn Ali, a grandson of the Prophet and a son of the Prophet's cousin, Imam Ali, rode to a sure death at Karbala. In this manner the hero-martyr of Shia history was turned into a prototype for the suicide driver. . . . For centuries, Karbala had been the material for lament, sorrow, and political withdrawal. In Khomeini's sermons, the pendulum swung to the other extreme. Karbala became a warrant for unrelenting zeal.
...
The victory had been swift, American and allied casualties surprisingly light. There was a desire to let well enough alone. The British wanted the military campaign to continue. They wanted to "close the loop" on the fleeing Iraqis. But they were overruled by Washington and told that it was not in the American military tradition to shoot a fleeing enemy in the back. Men use and misuse history and analogy. The specter of the "Lebanonization of Iraq" stayed America's hand. The Bush Administration did not trust its knowledge of Iraq and its distant ways and sects. America was haunted by the memory of Lebanon--the warring sects, the deadly fault lines--and convinced that the Shia of Iraq were destined to fall under Iran's sway. The Shia were the majority of Iraq's population, a people of that country, the Shia faith having spread in the nineteenth century (the tale has been told in an exemplary work of scholarship The Shi'is of Iraq, by Brandeis University historian Yitzhak Nakash) because the nomadic tribes of Iraq had taken to it when they settled near the Shia shrine towns of Najaf and Karbala in search of water for their agricultural work. There had been no "racial" divide, no clear-cut distinctions between the Sunnis and Shias of Iraq. All this was unknown to those who had waged the war against Iraq. America had seen the terrible harvest of aggrieved Shi'ism in Tehran and Beirut. No one wanted a replay of the past. Hard as the Shia leaders of Iraq would insist that they had no "sister republic" of Iranian theocracy in mind, they could get no hearing for their case.
"In the Land of Egypt" describes Sadat and the intellectuals of Egypt. "Sadat died isolated from the intellectual class; they had not been able to alter his policies, but they had done what was within their grasp: They had stripped him of his legitimacy." Because in his pragmatic search for relief for his impoverished and damaged country Sadat "betrayed" the varied goals of the pan-Arabists, the Palestinian-worshippers, and the fundamentalists, they in their turn undermined him. In the end the Islamists proved the deadliest. Egypt has for a thousand years been the intellectual heartland of Islam, and as the intellectuals and scholars of Egypt became more radicalized, so also have been the intellectuals elsewhere. Ajami doesn't dwell on the influence of the Gulf states' money, preferring to tell what native Egyptian poets and novelists said. And, of course, not all the writers hated Sadat and what he stood for--some hoped for peace and an end to the nonsensical delusions. Ajami has great faith in Egypt:
The country is too wise, too knowing, too tolerant to succomb to a reign of theocratic zeal. Competing truths, whole civilizations, have been assimliated and brokered here; it is hard to see Cairo, possessed of the culture that comes to great, knowing cities, turning its back on all that. The danger here is not sudden, cataclysmic upheaval but a steady descent into deeper levels of pauperization, a lapse of the country's best into apathy and despair, Egypt falling yet again through the trap door of its history of disappointment.
"The Orphaned Peace" shows the reaction of the artists to the Oslo accords and Arafat's betrayal of the cause. "This peace of Oslo could not win over the Arab intellectual elite. It was not their peace but the rulers' peace, they insisted, made at a time of Arab disunity and weakness, in the aftermath of a season of discord in the Arab world." The head of the syndicate of Egyptian artists and performers "prided himself on his hostility to Israel and on the resistance he put up to 'normalization' of cultural traffic with Israel." In a curious division of labor, the governments agreed to nod towards peace and the intellectuals (who publish newspapers, etc) agreed to reject normalization.
A culture's repect and approval can be strange. There is no justice in the way they are given or withheld. In an Arab political history littered with thwarted dreams, little honor would be extended to pragmatists who knew the limits of what could and could not be done. The political culture of nationalism reserved its approval for those who led ruinous campaigns in pursuit of impossible quests.That sounds a lot like European history too.
The old Arab world with its truths could not be reconstituted. The exiles could not find the way back to their old homes and their lost cities. The one truth that could not be bartered or betrayed, the one sure way back to the old fidelities, was this enmity with Israel that harked back to the past. This was the one domain that the rulers could not hand over to their American patrons and protectors, their inner space and sanctum, which would remain inviolable and intact.
One theme shines through the book--the Arab "Who am I?" Were they socialist modernizers, Arab Arabic speakers united together (which somehow always wound up meaning Sunnis), revolutionaries, theocrats, members of nations to which they felt no necessary connection, or what? Whatever path they seemed to pick, the rulers ruled the same way and the people were no better off. Juntas ruling in the name of the great Arab nation looked the same as juntas ruling in the name of socialism. With no role in the governing of the countries, the cultural elite picked the role of opposition. If the government is pragmatic (as governments generally have to be), then scream against the peace and all who benefit from it. Israel is the focus of not just Islamic detestation of uppity Jews, but of borrowed European anti-semitism and of a hatred of all successful aliens. They need Israel as something to be against in order to define themselves.
Go read this book. His style takes a little getting used to at first. Get used to it.
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