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Crying Shame

By Musatapha B Marrouchi

27 January, 2007
Countercurrents.org


You have tossed us away from our kin,
from our water and air, and you have ruined us.
You have emptied the sunset from the sunset.
You’ve robbed us of our first words
and looted the peach tree of our days.
You have stripped us from our days.

Mahmoud Darwish, Unfortunately, It Was Paradise, 41

The military victory in Iraq is at once a blow to freedom and a step into an unknown territory in which the extent of US power and the wisdom of its use become even more critical. In the closing years of the Second World War Isaac Bowman, one of the architects of modern US foreign policy, wrote “No line can be established anywhere in the world that confines the interests of the US because no line can prevent the remote from becoming the near danger.” Nearly seventy years later, the elision of the remote into the near is complete. Lines there still are, but the US has crossed another line in appointing itself the arbiter of the fate of Iraq, by implication, and of the Arab world as a whole, by choiae. After all, the war has made politics more global by emphasizing the centrality of US power, by offering the first test since the Vietnam war of what happens when an American endeavor is opposed by most of the rest of the world, by engaging the US and the Muslim world more intimately, although not amiably, and by showing how US and European politics can no longer even begin to be divorced from one another, even if in the case of “Old Europe,”doubt still persists as to whether France and Germany, who opposed the invasion of Iraq, are part of the New Europe.

The occupation of Iraq has taken one stage further the processes that began with September 11. The world, to put it another way, is even more wired together, for good or bad. That the formidable nature of the American military instrument has been spectacularly displayed, albeit against a terribly disadvantaged country the size of California, is not the most important aspect. What is more crucial is that the US has embarked on a project of change of regime in Iraq and in the region that will be, for quite sometime to come, at the center of world politics. We, Arabs of this world, in the mean time, must sit aside and watch. The supreme irony is that if the US is addicted to oil, we are hooked into dependency and consumerism, cultural vassalage and technological secondariness, without much active volition on our part. No surprise, insofar as the Arab world today is a shadow of itself not only politically but also economically, culturally, morally, and even spiritually. Its modern history is one of failure and hshum? (shame). Such shame is epitomized in the mise à sac of Baghdad (the old Abbassid capital with its thousand and one wonders from old manuscripts to minarets) reflects the torments and tribulations of Arab modernity. That the city was subjected to the rigors of modern technological warfare, its water conduits broken, its electrical supply which used to sustain four million people, destroyed, does not seem to disturb the rest of the Arab world, who continue to bow to President Bush and his lackeys. In point of fact, the wholesale destruction of Baghdad is a larger replay of Israel’s invasion and flattening of Beirut in 1982. Speaking of the latter inferno, Khalil Hawi put it trenchantly: its dawn ushered in a “strange morning. The sun had reversed its orbit, rising in the West and setting in the East.” He wept for himself and for that “Arab Umma (nation)” whose rebirth and regeneration he so much wanted to see. By the time the Arab national movement suffered its most spectacular defeat, which came to be known as Nakba, at the hands of Israel in June 1967, Hawi had become a seasoned exponent of the politics of disappointment. But the defeat of the pan-Arabism with which he had become so closely identified was like a descent into a bottomless pit. “Let me know if Arab unity is achieved”; he once exclaimed, “if I am dead, send someone to my grave side to tell me of it when it is realized.” Death, whether individual or collective, was never far from his thoughts. On June 6, 1982, the day Israel invaded Lebanon, Hawi took his own life. “Where are the Arabs?” he had asked those gathered at the American University of Beirut before he went home and shot himself. “Who shall remove the stain of shame from my forehead?” is a question that may not find an answer, even if another beleaguered poet, namely, Mahmoud Darwish attempts one: “He was weary of the state of decay, weary of looking over a bottomless abyss.” The 2003-electronic war that has destroyed Iraq is not only a lesson in retributive power but also one in exterminism of the worst kind that Hawi foresaw long ago.

The dismay that Hawi felt when Israel swept into Lebanon is conveyed in more acerbic terms by Nizar Qabbani and Adonis, who did not wait to offer their autopsies. For both, the impotence of the Arab world is simply a reflection of the political state it finds itself in today, a state of subservience to a corrupted West that is determined to keep it forever in check. They argue that there is a disturbing discontinuity between the discourse of politics and poetry on the one hand and the world Arabs confront every day on the other. Qabbani went so far as to borrow the concept jahiliyya, meaning pre-Islamic ignorance, to describe the reality on the ground. In that original time of darkness the poet was his tribe’s spokesman, chronicler, and scribe. The new jahiliyya is darker than the old one, however. It has no use for the poet because it wants people to live on their knees. The rulers (fake sultans, ambitious colonels, corrupted kings, and debauched generals) want only subordinates and sycophants, and this has had the effect of emasculating the language. They fear the word because it is “intrinsically an instrument of opposition.” The conflict between al-kalima, or word and a-ssulta, or authority, is inescapable.

Qabbani was born in Syria but made his home in Beirut, the then capital of Arab letters and the Arab enlightenment. But having to witness the destruction of the enchanted city of his youth by the Israeli army and the civil war that ensued prompted him to speak of the death of Arab civilization. The war in Beirut showed how all the grand ideas resulted in endemic violence and a return to primitive tribalism–his own wife and son were killed in 1981 in one of the daily episodes of violence. In his grief he wrote a moving lament:

How heavy is the shame,
do I bear it alone?
Am I the only one to cover my face with ashes?
The funerals that the morning announces
echo in the funerals at dusk.
There is nothing over the horizon,
save for the smoke of black embers.

Here Adonis depicts the Arab writer as being under a “dual siege,” caught between Western modernity and the hold of Islamic tradition. “Our contemporary modernity is a mirage,” he writes. As long as the Arabs fail to grasp that there is more to the West than they have found in it–its spirit of curiosity, its love of knowledge, its defiance of dogma–their “Western” modernity is doomed to remain a “hired” form of it. Real modernity can only be attained when the “contrived” world of the foreigner and the “contrived” world of the ancestor are transcended.

Adonis, like Qabani, endured Beirut’s carnage and breakdown, and like him was driven into exile. Reality had surpassed their worst fears. Is it any wonder that many of those in the Arab world today who traffic in words feel that they have so little to say? Moving back and forth in time, one must keep returning to the false premises and the baleful consequences of corruption, nationalism, injustice, and ignorance. The political crisis of the early 2000s made it difficult even for its most passionate advocates to persist. Arab society, Mohammed Arkoun observes, had run through most of its myths and what now remains in the wake of the proud statements Arabs have made about themselves and their history is a new world of waste, confusion, and cruelty.

The oil-based economic boom of the 1970s had done nothing to sustain the myth that a collective condition prevailed from one end of the Arab world to another. On the contrary, the windfall created a fault line between those that were able to share in this new wealth, and the “modernity” that came with it, and the large sectors of the population who were only on the fringe. The petro-era catapulted the Arabs into an unfamiliar world of corruption and deceit. Take the case of Saudi Arabia where executions and floggings are routine in the wealthy desert kingdom: a version, Aziz al-Azmeh suggests in one of the best essays yet written on Saudi Arabia, of the “bread and circuses” principle favored by the Romans. Until recently, the victims of these popular spectacles have either been Saudi nationals or expatriate workers from poor countries like Sri Lanka, Pakistan Bangladesh, or the Philippines. We still remember the two expatriate British nurses who were falsely accused of murdering a colleague at a hospital complex. They were each given a sentence of 500 lashes, a punishment that has no place in modern society.

Saudi Arabia, while holding executions and floggings in public to demonstrate to its own subjects that its legal system fully conforms to Islamic law, prefers to conceal the practical consequences of that system from the outside world, to which its suave and highly educated bedouin princes like to present the image of a uniquely harmonious blend of modernity and tradition. The government seeks to present itself as stable, civilized, and modern, not only because such is the custom of governments everywhere, but because it depends on Western support. The Saudi regime, as shown with devastating clarity in 1991, relies heavily on US and Europe military power. Like the other oil-rich sheikhdoms, it spends billions of petrodollars on highly sophisticated equipment which it lacks the manpower, training or expertise to use itself. The tag of “medieval barbarism” cuts to the quick.

The moral outrage at the Arab incapacity to face the bitter reality on the ground is best captured by Said Aburish, who writes: “Reporters know King Fahd to be lazy, corrupt, ignorant, and a drunk, but little is written about these things and he is still the West’s man.” Prince Sultan, the Saudi Defense Minister, is one of the Kingdom’s biggest “skimmers,” making billions out of arms contracts; the late King Hussein of Jordan was a playboy who protected his hashish-smuggling uncle, Sharif Nasser, and misappropriated CIA funds for his personal use. Camille Chamoun, the former Lebanese President and the man largely responsible for launching the civil war in 1975, “dazzled Westerners with his wit and charm” but was really “nothing but a skirt-chasing, narrow-minded tribal chief who saw nothing wrong in lying, stealing and murder.” The Aburish verdict is correct insofar as the region’s history was shaped by dubious characters
after the defeat of the Ottoman Empire. Think of Gertrude Bell, Oriental Secretary in Mesopotamia, who had a crucial hand in the creation of modern Iraq. Bell was “an example of the empty socialite managing to misjudge everything in her way and creating havoc in her aftermath”; St. John Philby, the friend and supporter of Ibn Saud and father of Kim, was an “upstart contrarian . . . bent on creating noise.” What rankles in the thesis developed by Aburish is the absence of a broader historical and geopolitical analysis in which the actions of these individuals might be evaluated. True, British and French imperial interests were decisive in shaping the modern Middle East; and given the industrial West’s appetite for cheap oil, it is hardly surprising that Western interests still play an important part in sustaining current regimes, despite endemic corruption, a generally poor record on human rights and the absence of real democracy. The export of armaments remains far in excess of the external defense requirements of the autocratic regimes of Arabia and the Gulf states, initiated quite cynically as a way of recycling petro-dollars, raises important moral and humanitarian issues. Britain and the US armed Saddam Hussein to the hilt, with devastating consequences for Iran, Kuwait, and later for the Kurds and Shi’a of southern Iraq, and finally for Iraq itself. Selling high tech arms to a thug is a bonanza for the arms industry, on which thousands of jobs depended. There is a significant irony in the fact that what has become one of Blairism and Bushism’s most successful export industries was assiduously featherbedded in the years of free-market Thatcherism and Reganism, injected with government money and provided with lavish credit guarantees underpinned by the taxpayer.

The war in Iraq will be more catastrophic and will only distort the Arab world further. And there will be enough residual problems to start up another confrontation with Iran and Syria in a matter of months. We should be looking for political mechanisms with the rest of world that get a viable solution and send everybody safely home. It is good to be reminded of that phrase by Aimé Césaire which C.L.R. James, that great champion of liberation, like to quote: “No race possesses the monopoly of beauty, of intelligence, of force, and there is room for all at the rendez-vous of victory.” This may be utopian idealism and I may be a dreamer, but I would like to think “I am not the only one,” to echo another fighter for social justice, namely, John Lennon.



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