Like many others I have been watching events in the Middle East, hoping of the best, and remembering that it could still all turn very nasty, and hoping that the White House has that possibility at the front of its collective mind. So far so obvious, and I for one little to add to such responses as these.
But, it does occur to me that, what with all the agonising about, e.g., what the Syrians will do next, and what with all the pro-warriors crowing about how they must not crow, and the anti-warriors trying to talk their way out of giving President Bush any credit for what is happening, there is one significant consequence of these events which may have escaped immediate and widespread attention.
9/11 was bad, but almost worse was the amount of celebrating about it that seemed to be going on, and presumably was going on, in the Muslim world, and among Muslims generally.
These latest demonstrations have, surely, changed the idea that will from now on be held in the West of popular opinion in the Middle East. For the first time since 9/11, these people no longer look like “these people”, that is to say, utterly foreign and barbaric, all either exulting in the deaths of the innocent, or else silently acquiescing to such exultation, out of fear or out of semi-barbarism.
It is not that millions of people of the Middle East have spent the last month marching about with signs saying: “Sorry – We Were Wrong About 9/11 – It Was Horrible And We Should Not Have Celebrated It”. It is merely that a whole lot of different people are now getting their faces into our camera lenses and onto our front pages and magazine covers, with messages that we in the West can thoroughly relate to, like: “Let Us Govern Ourselves Intelligently”. My particular favourite in this connection was the one that went: “Let Muslims and Christians Unite Against The Syrian Occupier”. That sounds very Western to me.
Clearly, “these people” are not all barbarians, and from now on, any Westerners who persist in believing that they are will be in a small minority.
It may well be that this new message is almost as misleading and un-nuanced as the previous one. But it is very different. And in many ways, the big point here is as much the desire to communicate this new and dramatically more West-friendly message as the matter of whether the message itself is completely accurate.
The long term consequences of this different message now emerging from the Middle East are surely huge.
And talking of Muslims and Christians uniting against those damned Syrians, let us also notice that we are surely witnessing a come-back of a kind, and a rather interesting kind, for Arab nationalism. The problem with Arab nationalism in the past was not so much the nationalism itself, as all the fascistic rubbish that went with it. Now, that same nationalism may soon be seen as having made one vital and positive contribution to the emerging Middle Eastern scene.
Democracy only works well if there is widespread, and preferably almost unanimous, agreement about the boundaries of the democratic entity being argued about. When great chunks of voters would rather be living in a different country, voting about exactly how to govern the one they are currently stuck with has far less appeal. All they will vote for is to get out. Well, the Middle East, thanks to the casualness of a long dead generation of imperialists, was said to be cursed with just such pseudo-nations. Yet for all their recentness and arbitrariness, the boundaries of these states do now seem to mean something to most (definitely not all I do agree) of the people now living in between them. They do seem content to let the boundaries stay as they are, and vote about how each national entity shall be governed, rather than quarrel endlessly about moving the boundaries. Quoth Glenn Reynolds, in the piece linked to above:
Protesters have largely eschewed political or religious divisions, uniting behind the notion of Lebanon as a nation . …
On a more pessimistic note, I think I detected – in a hard copy of The Times which I bought on Monday, to read on the bus – the next mainstream media Iraq meta-story, to replace those damned voters with their inky fingers, to which all regular stories will be subordinated for the next few weeks, months or years, until the next one comes along.
Times links are dodgy and not liked here, so big quote:
SIX weeks ago, full of hope and apprehension, Abdullah Hussein stepped out into the street, braving the threat of bombs, bullets and mortars, to cast his vote in Iraq’s first free election. Now he is wondering what it was all for.
“We risked our lives and we put our families in danger to vote because we believed in a government that could bring us a better future,” said the 26-year-old car mechanic, wringing his hands in despair. “But all we’ve ended up with is a bunch of people fighting over who will get what, just like kids fighting for sweets. Maybe we shouldn’t have voted for these people. Maybe we shouldn’t have voted at all.”
One month after the results of the election were announced, an agreement on a government is yet to be reached and the people who took their lives in their hands to vote are growing disillusioned with their new leaders even before they have had the chance to take power.
Yep, democracy is messy and slow. All that taking-into-account-everyone’s-opinions-and-interests crap. Expect a lot more disappointments of democracy reportage of this kind.
The problem with Arab nationalism is that it wasnt nationalism but Pan-arabism.
Another problem you dont refer is that there are many non-arabs in what we commonly call Arab world.
Many of them are protesting on streets.
There are also many of what we West call Arabs that have resentement towards Saudis and wahabism and call them Arabs depreciatively , for example in a recent news in Yahoo a journalist was writing that in the square of a Baghdad neighboroud there was a banner “We support the governement hunting of all Arabs”
I dont have extensive knowledge, but that reminds me the words of Elie Kedourie a Baghdadee.
http://www.geocities.com/martinkramerorg/Kedourie.htm
I cannot agree with you more that for democracies to work there has to be common agreement over where the boundaries should be and that there should be as few people as possible who would rather be living in another country.
Of course, making that a reality is not so easy. One of Ulster’s tragedies is that the Boundary Commission that (in the 1920s) was supposed to sort all this out didn’t. This left large Irish populations in South Armagh and the West Bank of the Foyle.
And then there is the question of population islands. If Ulster were to be partitioned on ethnic lines that would leave an Irish island in West and North Belfast and a British island in Enniskillen. Personally, I have no theoretical problem with such arrangements but they would be a bit odd. There might be practical problems.
Then there is the question of defensibility – sure everybody is in the state they want to be in but the borders are in such odd places that one (or both) of those states can’t be defended.
Brian, you ought to read Roger Scruton’s “The West and the Rest”. He argues that a lack of ancient and well defined nation states in the ME, and the non-separation of powers between Islam and the State, is at the core of the problem. Definitely worth reading, regardless of what you might think of Scruton’s fogeyish tendencies. I can lend you a copy.
It’s a valuable observation, but to me it mostly highlights a social divide more than a moral one. The anti-Syrian marchers look much wealthier than the pro-Syrian marchers. The anti-syrian marchers look far less Arabian to me, too.
I agree that this kind of image change is very important in influencing people in the west, but I regard it personally with considerable skepticism. Who took the photos in each case? Maybe the pro-Syrians were being photgraphed by journalists or anti-Syrians, while the anti-Syrians were being photgraphed by friends and fellow marchers. That kind of thing makes a huge difference.
I’m reminded of a travellers account of Afghanistan, in the period prior to the Taleban’s rise to power, but after Soviet withdrawl. He talks of how everyone he meets is smiling and friendly, always grinning at the funny westerner and his funny ways. Then, when he gets his camera out, they immediately take on stern faces, and strike heroic poses with their guns.
Camera’s are powerful tools in changing perception and opinion, but they lie as much as anything else.
The Afghan travel book is ‘An unexpected light’ by Jason Elliot. I recommend it.
While representants of many, many Middle Eastern ehtnic and religious groups live in Lebanon, I’m not sure the Lebanese are so representative of the people of the region. They are a pluralistic, almost western-minded bunch and, in my limited experience, have little in common with the average Saudi, Qatari or even Egyptian. The current events are mostly setting this cultural difference in stark relief. I wish we could extrapolate from their demonstrations, but, to me at least, these are more like demonstrations in Hong Kong in the wider context of the Chinese regime than a Ukraine-style orange revolution in the making.
At least in the short term.
If Times links rot and are not thought well of, I suggest a more traditional citation for such quotes; the date of publication (if available), and the credited author/reporter. (Does the Times do “staff” articles without attribution? I don’t know.)
Maybe it’s just a holdover from my time in University, but I’ve got this thing for specific attribution…
Lebanon is about as typical of the Arab Middle East as Hampstead Garden Suburb is of Greater London.
Lebanon is about as typical of the Arab Middle East as Hampstead Garden Suburb is of Greater London.
To quote Bill Maher;
“All I know is the most popular name for a kid in Pakistan after 9/11 was Osama. So anyone who wants to tell you that this is only a few extremists is just whistling past the graveyard. That’s just not true”.
Food for thought.
As Rod Liddle said last week on his Channel 4 documentary, the West is becoming more liberal and tolerant, and Islam is becoming more conservative and oppressive.
You could easily argue that these two very different East/West civilizations appear to be parting, not merging. We think they are repressive, theocratic, misogynistic and downright medieval. And they in turn think we are decadent, weak and immoral.
A liberal Western country with a large, assertive and demographically powerful Isamic population will create nothing more than a schizophrenic society. Multicultural social cohesion…. I think not. Keep your eyes on what will happen in Holland in the next 15 years. Those laid back dope-smoking clog wearers are in for a rough time with their ever growing home-grown Koranic populations.
The tensions and civil unrest/violence that will probablly happen in Holland will prove a valuable lesson for us all, and may result in the death of this leftwing pipedream called multiculturalism.
I personally don’t think we are all going to hold hands and sing a rendition of “We are the World” any time soon.
Nice work, Samsung.
If multiculturalism is such a great idea, why do governments have to keep telling us it is, and increasingly forbid us to deny it is?
Birds of a feather flock together, and they don’t like being lumped together with birds of a different feather.
If the subspecies of homo sapiens, commonly but wrongly called races, follow the evolutionary patterns of other mammals, they are more likely to grow apart than together, eventually becoming incapable of interbreeding. It’s also worrying that in nature rival subspecies on the same turf typically fight each other to the death for resources until one is in sole possession.
Perhaps Man can rise above the drives of biology using his reason, but history does not yet afford much support for this optimism. At any rate, decanting large numbers of people with a very different heritage and outlook into western countries over a short period is playing with fire. Recent happenings have severely shaken the faith of the Dutch– previously one of the most open European countries– in the speedy assimilation of immigrants. The rest of Europe should take heed.
Sirs,
Before celebrating too much, we must keep in mind that this war is a war of ideas, not a war of political systems. Yes, the right to vote gives the possibility of choosing, and the mullahs annd sheikhs abhor freedom; but remember that Hitler was also democratically voted by the Germans: the problem was the ideas they already had in mind.
Islam and Judeo-Christianity have been clashing since the rise of Islam. That is a matter of logics if we recall the fact that Western ideals affirm the unity of Mankind, while Islam teaches the only respectable human group is the Umma, the community of Muslims.
And this is not solely a problem concerning the West: acording to the Islamic canonical texts, Jihad is an eternal and compulsory war waged against all non-Muslims. Ask some informed Hindu, Chinese, or non-Muslim Indonesian (e. g., East Timorese) or African (e. g., Darfurese).
“Islam and Judeo-Christianity have been clashing since the rise of Islam. That is a matter of logics if we recall the fact that Western ideals affirm the unity of Mankind.”
Christianity is universalist, and conversion easy. Not so Judaism.