The Fire This Time – Part 4
By Professor Nazeer Ahmed
Concord, US
The Arab Spring was the collective voice of the Arab people. It emanated from the pent-up frustrations of the masses, and was led by the secular elite. Its origins were basically non-religious and were rooted in the anger against the corruption in their societies. It was a genuine mass uprising.
The moderate and secular groups suffered from a fatal flaw. They did not have an ideologue who could articulate their positions in a cogent, coherent language in conservative Islamic societies. Allama Iqbal (d 1938) successfully did this in the subcontinent. Ali Shariati (1977) attempted the same for Iran. However, even in these two cases, the results have been short lived. Iqbal’s Pakistan was hijacked by extremist jama’ats while the Iranian Revolution was taken over by the clerics. In the Arab world there have been notable intellectuals from Mohammed Abduh (d 1905) onwards who have tried to articulate a consistent modernist theme for the Arabs. But the results have been mixed. Sometimes the efforts have degenerated into Arab nationalism; at other times they have veered off to the religious right.
This is a general observation: the Islamic world has yet to produce a thinker who can successfully integrate the traditional and the modern and articulate this synthesis in a cogent manner that is understood and accepted by the thinking elite as well as the conservative Muslim masses. This is a monumental task as the secular and the religious establishments jealously guard their turf and are always ready to pounce upon anyone who they perceive to be not one of them. Considering the fragmentation of the Islamic world and the enormous tensions within its body politic, it is not likely to be a person like Mujaddid Alf Thani who will articulate and implement a grand vision but a process extending over many generations to which many thinkers will contribute.
A second flaw of the secular front in the Arab Spring was that it had no social and political infrastructure to back it up once the existing corrupt infrastructure was eliminated. A successful revolution needs many elements: a goal, an ideology, a spokesperson, an organizer, a mass movement and a sound social and political infrastructure. The secular front achieved its first goal of shaking up the existing political structure but it could not follow through to fill the resulting political vacuum. There were others who were ready to move in and take advantage of the vacuum. An imperfect analogy is like that of a lion who hunts and kills its prey but is unable to eat the meat because it has no teeth. In total frustration, it walks away and surrenders its prey to the foxes who are waiting not far away.
No sooner had the Arab Spring started, first in Tunisia and then in Egypt that the forces of reaction went into high gear. The counter revolution was both internal and external. Internally, the forces of the Islamic right, long quiescent under political pressure from entrenched dictators raised their head. Here again, one finds a wide spectrum of rightist forces, ranging all the way from extremist salafists to the moderate Ikhwan ul Muslimeen who have been vetted over the last fifty years in the crucible of international politics and have learned to moderate their posture. The salafists are comparative newcomers on the international scene. They cause havoc wherever they go. They target their own people as well as foreigners. Their actions result in massive social dislocations and political turmoil.
The external resistance to modernist and secular change came from the Western powers. Contrary to popular perceptions that the policies of the West foster democracy and fair play, the actions of these powers work exactly in the opposite direction. They support dictators and strongmen who suppress democracy and foster corruption. A more correct assessment of the policies of the West is that they are geared towards their own self interests and the preservation of a world order in which capital has a free reign to exploit the resources of the world. Philosophically, there is nothing right or wrong with this position. The position may indeed be legitimate. It is the hypocrisy with which these self-interests are wrapped in a jargon of democracy that irks people.
The Arab Spring was no exception to this rule. First, the propaganda machine in the West went into action projecting the objective of the uprising not as a demand for economic justice but as a desire for electoral democracy. Genuine democracy, which means government by the people, of the people, for the people is one of the most profound political ideas to grace the civilization of man. But alas! Political democracy has been hijacked by Big Money wherever it is practiced. The rituals of democracy, the elections and the voting are there, but lurking behind the ballot boxes is Big Money which controls the process itself and makes a sham of the genuine will of the people. The Arab Spring was about economic justice and a level playing field, not about the trappings of a manipulated ballot box.
The results speak for themselves. In Libya, the overthrow of one dictator, Mo'ammar Qaddafi, has resulted in the dictatorship of anarchy. There is no law and order. Armed gangs roam the streets. The economy is in ruins. People endure even without the most basic amenities. No one knows what happened to the billions that Libya had deposited in foreign banks. In Tunisia, there is political instability. In Egypt, the secular forces that had organized the demonstrations in Tahrir Square were shunted aside by the Muslim Brotherhood which has a vast, well organized network of social and political institutions. Mubarak was dethroned but the right wing forces have moved in. The salafis, massively funded from abroad, stirred up disturbances against the minority Copts, and have cornered a respectable share of the right wing votes. Democracy is suppressed in Bahrain by force. The civil war in Syria ranges on. It is not hard to see the intervention of Western powers in each country. In Libya, the intervention was overt. In Syria it is covert. In Bahrain it is indirect. In Egypt it is subtle. And so on.
On the broader global scene, the interventions of Western powers led by the United States have reinforced the perception that the West is waging a war on Muslims, with some even going so far as to say that it is a war on Islam. Those who subscribe to these perceptions cite the American invasion of Iraq, the war in Afghanistan, the drone attacks in Pakistan and the NATO bombing campaign in Libya to support their position. They suspect that America is out to undo the Middle East and remake it to suit its long-term strategic interests. Specifically, they maintain that seven countries are targeted for destabilization and remaking: Iraq, the Sudan, Libya, Syria, Lebanon, Iran and Afghanistan. Add Pakistan to this list as an encore. Iraq has been destroyed and a virtual new state has been set up in the Kurdish North which threatens the territorial integrity of Turkey, Syria and Iran alike. Sudan has been bifurcated with continuing pressures for further fragmentation. Libya is in shambles and there is talk of dividing it into two. Afghanistan is in ruins. Pakistan is bleeding from drone attacks, its economy in shambles, one of its provinces in ruins and its body politic at the mercy of extremist groups. Now, it is the turn of Syria where an insurgency goaded and armed by the West is pitted against an entrenched dictatorship supported by Russia. The raging wars and the political turmoil have segmented the Middle East into two camps: one including Turkey, Saudi Arabia and the Gulf Shaikdoms who support the West and the other group that includes Iran, Iraq, Syria and Lebanon who oppose the West. So far it is the United States that has prevailed, although the long-term benefits of its interventions, which were achieved at great cost, are questionable. The so-called unity of the Muslim countries has been shown to be what it is, namely, a sham. The Organization of Islamic Countries cannot even hold a quorum and spends its time expelling one member or the other. In short, the situation is a mess. The Arab Spring which started as an expression of the genuine hope of the masses for economic justice has instead been manipulated to destroy left leaning dictatorships and replace them with right leaning dictatorships. The mid-term score for the Arab Spring is: The Empire 1, Democracy 0. The future remains unstable and highly unpredictable, offering opportunities for creative solutions as well as possibilities for destructive disintegration. (To be continued)
--------------------------------------------------------------------
Back to Pakistanlink Homepage
