(This is a translation from the original Arabic, offered so that my grandchildren, and others of their generation, may understand something of their history— a history they were denied when they were uprooted without choice.)
The Crisis of Belonging in the Arab Mind
When Baghdad fell to Hulagu in 1258, the region entered centuries of ignorance and illiteracy. Had it not been for the Qur’an, the Arabic language itself might have been lost, and we might today be incapable even of reading our own heritage. A similar fate befell the Arabs of the Maghreb when they were finally expelled from Spain in 1492. The peoples of the region fragmented into small, often warring entities whose legitimacy was sometimes derived from sectarian or tribal affiliation. Although political change occurred at the moment of conquest, culture and thought lag behind political upheaval; thus intellectual life in Baghdad did not cease the day Hulagu entered it. Decline came gradually.
The Ottoman state put an end to these petty entities by establishing a powerful empire that imposed its control over the region in one form or another. The Ottomans devoted themselves to conquest and expansion, seeking to build a glory that was not originally theirs, relying on the legacy of the Abbasid Arab state while claiming inheritance of Islam. Yet there was a fundamental difference between the Abbasid state and the Ottoman state. The Abbasids had no need to prove their connection to the Qur’an, because the very medium through which they expressed thought was the language of the Qur’an itself. The Ottomans, by contrast, failed to establish such a connection, for their insistence on using Turkish severed their genuine relationship with the Qur’an.
I will not delve here into the reasons for the Ottoman failure to produce a civilization that could complement what the peoples of the Abbasid state had created. But it must be stated clearly that the exclusion of Arabic from education resulted in the Arab nation emerging, after centuries of Ottoman rule, with one common denominator: ignorance and illiteracy. With the exception of certain religious centres and limited areas in Greater Syria and Egypt, illiteracy was widespread by the nineteenth century, on the eve of the Ottoman collapse.
Thus, the Arab individual entered the twentieth century marked first by ignorance and illiteracy. But the second—and more dangerous—mark was the Arab’s inability to define the meaning of belonging, and to whom that belonging should be directed. The inability to belong is complex in nature, the
result of multiple factors, and extraordinarily dangerous, for it has played—and continues to play—the central role in shaping Arab behavior and in bringing us to our present condition.
Residual Bedouin instincts within urban populations may play a role in this crisis of belonging, but this is not the decisive factor. Rather, the decisive factor lies in what Islam produced in terms of statehood and political order—an outcome that forced the Arab into difficult choices and, at times, deep confusion. Throughout his ancient history, the Arab of this region never experienced the concept of the nation-state as produced by political struggle in Europe and later imposed globally through domination, colonization, and settlement. The Arab who lived in the Semitic states preceding Islam knew only expansive states that covered the region and beyond. When not living under such states, he existed under foreign Roman or Persian occupation, regardless of whether he felt any sense of belonging to them.
With the advent of Islam, a radical transformation occurred. Islam gave the Arab the opportunity to belong to an Islamic state with an Arab identity. No longer was he forced to choose between belonging to Islam and belonging to Arabism; his Arab identity and Islam became one and the same. Thus, the Arab belonged, contributed, and created within an Arab identity that Islam had opened wide before him.
This unity, however, was disrupted when the Arab fell under the rule of a Turkish state that claimed legitimacy through Islam. The Arab now faced a choice: to belong to the Turkish Islamic state or to remain without belonging. Here the crisis began. To belong to the Turkish state meant the loss of Arab identity, which had been an inseparable component of his Islam. Those who aligned themselves with the Turkish state became Turks and severed their connection to Arabism; when the Turkish state later shed Islam, they lost their religious bond as well. Those who remained attached to Arab identity, meanwhile, found themselves marginalized, outside history and outside the political moment.
When the Turkish state collapsed, the Arab emerged illiterate, ignorant, and unsure of where he belonged. The catastrophe of Turkish rule over the Arabs lay not only in the suppression of their language and heritage, but in leaving them the worst victims of its final war. While the Turks secured an independent Turkish state from the ruins of the Ottoman Empire, the Arab found himself passing directly from Turkish domination into European colonial rule.
As the Arab began to acquire education, he encountered before him a model of statehood produced by Europe as a solution to its own devastating wars—a
model called the “nation-state.” Yet the historical developments following the First World War demonstrated that the Arab was unconvinced by the European nation-state imposed by the colonizer, who divided the region at will according to its logic. He amputated large portions of political Iraq, fragmented Greater Syria into four parts, fabricated artificial entities along the Gulf coast, and empowered Bedouin forces in Mecca and Medina.
Thus, a genuine crisis was born. The Arab did not wish to belong to the nation state constructed by the occupier, nor did he have access to the Arab Islamic state within which his ancestors had lived and flourished. As a result, the political parties that emerged within the new nation-states were all founded upon divergent concepts of belonging.
The educated Arab, aspiring to a new and freer life, divided primarily into three axes of allegiance, each representing what he believed to be the path to salvation.
The Arab who believed that Islam was the solution aligned himself with religious movements and worked to undermine the nation-state established by the colonizer in order to establish the hoped-for Islamic state. Yet this aspiration for a religious state inevitably became sectarian in outcome. Although the majority of Muslims belong to Sunni Islam, the significant Shiʿi presence in the Fertile Crescent caused the Islamic project in our region to split into two competing Islamic projects: Sunni and Shiʿi. Any observer of events can readily perceive the role played by the political conflict between Sunni and Shiʿi movements in the struggles of Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Yemen, and the Arabian Peninsula. This reality did not escape the enemy, who skilfully exploited it— either by inflaming the conflict or by infiltrating and manipulating these movements to serve his interests.
The Arab who believed that the desired state must be internationalist, within a unified global socialist system, aligned himself with the global communist movement. Yet this Arab, despite his sincerity, soon discovered that he lacked true freedom of action. His international movement was, in most cases, governed by political decisions in whose formulation he played no role, leaving him at times unable to express his own national loyalties or humanitarian convictions.
Others among our people believed that the future of the nation could only be realized through a unified Arab nationalist state. They joined one of the principal nationalist movements, most notably the Baʿath Party, the Arab Nationalist Movement, or the Nasserist movement. Yet despite their professed belief in a single project, these groups ended up fighting one another—
sometimes descending into childish disputes over the ordering of words in political slogans. Nor did the enemy fail to exploit this political immaturity, infiltrating these nationalist movements and setting some against others.
What all three forms of belonging shared was their rejection of the nation-state imposed by the colonizer, even though each rejected it for different reasons.
So, what became of these affiliations, and where have they led us?
That is what I shall attempt to explore next…
To be continued