Part Fourteen
(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.)
What Did the Arab Nationalists Do? (2)
I concluded the previous instalment by noting the necessity of pausing to
identify the structural flaws in the conduct of Arab nationalists during the
twentieth century.
The first—and most jarring—conclusion that confronts us is that the leaders of
the Arab nationalist project in Iraq, Greater Syria, and Egypt all shared a
fundamental failure to understand the nature of their own societies. The
nationalist leaders in Iraq and Greater Syria failed to grasp the depth of
sectarian affiliation in both countries—an affiliation far stronger than speeches
and proclamations of national belonging. When loyalty was put to the test,
sectarian identity proved more powerful than national identity. Had these
leaders understood this reality, they would have devoted a significant portion of
their efforts to genuine civic education aimed at cultivating national
belonging—one that would, in time, diminish the weight of sectarian affiliation.
The assumption that nationalist sentiment was deeply rooted, upon which
nationalist leaderships relied, was an illusion—one recognized by their enemies
and exploited in the invasion of Iraq in 2003 and the beginning of Syria’s
destruction in 2011.
In Egypt, Gamal Abdel Nasser—who did not begin his political life as an ardent
Arab nationalist but rather came to recognize its significance later—was not
unlike most Egyptians, who generally assume their Arab identity as a given that
requires no reaffirmation. As a result, nationalist sentiment in Egypt has never
been an active or mobilizing force. When Nasser came to realize that Egypt’s
Arab identity was the only true safeguard for Egypt itself and for the Arabs as a
whole, he erred in assuming that the Egyptian people had reached the same
understanding and would naturally follow him. Consequently, he failed to
establish a political party that could theorize, institutionalize, and shape the
Egyptian character upon this foundation. The Arab Socialist Union was not a
party but a mass rallying platform for public occasions. The outcome was
predictable: no sooner had Nasser departed than Egypt reverted to what it had
been before him—Arab in identity, but passive in action on behalf of that
identity. The reality today is that there are more Arabs outside Egypt who
remain followers of Gamal Abdel Nasser—at least in conviction, if not in
number—than there are within Egypt itself.
The Arab nationalist project in all three states shared another profound illusion,
which they labelled “the masses.” For Nasser, the masses were the vast crowds
that sincerely rallied in his support; for the Baʿath in Iraq and Syria, they were
represented by the massive inflation of party membership. All believed this
phenomenon to be a guarantee of success and permanence.
I do not wish to be misunderstood here. I do not deny the importance of the
masses or their legitimate demands and expectations. But I do not believe that
the masses lead; they are led. A ruling party cannot be a mass party—it must be
a party of an elite.
The Soviet Communist Party tested this model and demonstrated its failure.
When advancement in work and access to life opportunities become contingent
upon affiliation with the ruling party rather than dedication, competence,
principles, and loyalty to the nation, everyone joins the party. At that point, new
norms govern relationships both within and outside the party: corruption
spreads, and individuals devoid of belief in anything beyond themselves ascend
to leadership. When tested, they are the first to fall—as happened in Moscow.
The Arab nationalist project thus replicated the Soviet experiment of
transforming the leading party into a mass party—and failed, just as the Soviets
had failed.
The consequences of this failure extended beyond the mere abandonment of the
party by the masses or their defection to its enemies. The results were far more
dangerous and far more difficult to remedy. The illusory concept of the “mass
movement” led Arab nationalist leaders to abandon any serious demographic or
developmental planning, assuming instead that the masses would spontaneously
organize themselves into a civilizational development project. The result was
precisely the opposite.
This absence of urban planning was compounded by another equally dangerous
factor: the excessive egotism of the nationalist leader, which drew him into
revelling in the noise of the masses and basking in their glorification.
But cities do not generate masses.
So where did these masses come from? They came from the countryside.
Thus, the lack of urban planning and the leader’s desire for popular adulation
transformed Cairo, Damascus, and Baghdad into cities surrounded by seas of
rural migrants who had moved in search of a better life—one the state was
unable to provide in their villages. When the countryside envelops the city,
urban values erode. This is not a judgment that rural values are inferior to urban
ones; it is simply a statement of fact.
How can a city advance when governed by values fundamentally different from
its own structure and social logic? To avoid abstraction, I will present a concrete
example of the contradiction between rural and urban values that the nationalist
project failed to resolve.
In the final years of the Iraqi monarchy during the 1950s, Iraq began
transitioning from tribal systems of social regulation to a framework based on
civil and criminal law, drafted by highly competent specialists. The republican
period following the 1958 revolution witnessed significant progress in this
direction—so much so that ʿAbd al-Karim Qasim went beyond what was
acceptable at the time by amending personal status law to equalize inheritance
between men and women. It would have been expected that the leaders of the
Arab nationalist project in Iraq would continue the process of dismantling tribal
structures in favour of strengthening an urban legal system.
But this did not occur. Under mounting pressures, nationalist leaders sought
expedient solutions and found them in reverting to tribal mechanisms of dispute
resolution—specifically the practice of fasl. They felt no discomfort in doing so,
as their own rural origins were a reality, and their separation from rural life was
relatively recent. Accepting tribal mechanisms therefore posed little
psychological difficulty. In reality, however, this was a grave error. A nationalist
state cannot be built upon the foundations of a rural tribal system that does not
recognize civil law. This concession allowed rural norms to infiltrate the city,
with the immediate consequence that urban citizens were entirely excluded from
the equation. They ceased to play any role in managing their cities or the state
they had once founded.
Another outcome of the doctrine of the “leading party” was the nationalist
leaders’ belief that the army, too, should be a mass institution. They therefore
adopted compulsory conscription as the foundation of the armed forces, despite
widespread resentment and discontent among the population toward this
obligation of citizenship. Had these leaders understood that a professional army
could be built by raising salaries to a level where enlistment would be not only a
patriotic choice but also a viable livelihood, they might have chosen differently.
And dissatisfaction was not the only negative outcome of compulsory
conscription. Far worse, nationalist leaders in Iraq and Syria handed Zionism a
weapon it could scarcely have dreamed of when it launched its project for a
“New Middle East.” Zionism found itself facing an entire army of men trained
in every type of weaponry—saving it the burden of training and equipping
them. All it required was for a group of self-proclaimed Islamists to seize
weapons from a military site, allowing idle men to deploy their military
expertise against the very state that had trained them—this time not against the
enemy, but against the state itself.
These are but some of the flaws in the Arab nationalist leadership’s
understanding of society. But where, then, lie the most consequential errors
committed by those leaders in their political conduct?
That is what I shall attempt to examine next.
To be continued…