Tom Friedman, "The Arab Quarter Century"
David Shasha
The Arab Quarter Century
By: Thomas L. Friedman
There is little question that the contemporary Arab world is a mess.
That said, it is always interesting to see what Tom Friedman has to say about it.
His recent appearance on the Charlie Rose PBS program gave us yet more of his grand pronouncements on the Middle East.
http://www.charlierose.com/view/interview/12860
What Friedman lacks is any real understanding of the culture and history of the region. His analysis is consistently predicated on surface realities – and even there he is not altogether coherent on what he is seeing.
Without understanding the net impact of European Imperialism on the region and the way in which the Ottoman Empire was dismantled it is really hard to penetrate the contemporary reality.
“Realists” like Friedman will always claim that there is a statute of limitations on the use of the old Imperialist arguments. And indeed we must be extremely careful not to permit the old dysfunctions to exonerate the bad actors of the present.
But we must also not allow our present view to ignore the typological aspects of the ongoing situation. We have religious radicals, violent nationalists, and Western-type reformers all thrown into the mix. What we do not see are the heirs of the Nahda; the Arab cultural renaissance that accompanied the early moments of Arab renewal that came with the defeat of the Ottomans.
The Nahda actually began in the waning years of the crumbling Ottoman Empire and was first formulated in the principles of the Ottoman Constitution that is at the center of Michelle Campos’ excellent book Otttoman Brothers:
https://groups.google.com/group/Davidshasha/browse_thread/thread/ed22bf8cc741ab7e/9c61e3829972044f
This stage of Middle Eastern history which covered the late 19th century to the end of World War I showed great promise for Liberal values and democracy. It was the age that the Egyptian novelist Naguib Mahfouz enshrined in his classic Cairo Trilogy. It was a time of great promise and optimism.
What happened to this Nahda was a lethal combination of the European arrogance of the Versailles treaty, the emergence of Wahhabi Saudi Arabia as a major player in the region’s Oil politics, and the founding of Israel in 1948.
All these developments worked together to undermine Liberalism and to assert reactionary values among nationalists, religious extremists, and Western lackeys looking to line their pockets with Petrodollars.
So while Friedman grasps the end result of this dysfunctional process, he does not seem to be able to articulate its root causes.
Oil, Israel, and Islam now permeate the discussion and the reality of the region. The values of the Nahda and knowledge of its history are nowhere to be found. But I always thought that it was the purpose of journalism and political analysis to uncover the sources of our current situation rather than suppress knowledge of those sources.
From this standpoint “experts” like Tom Friedman have done an immense disservice to their readers by presenting only one part of what is a much longer and more complicated story. In the end, what we see in our American media reinforces the narratives presented by the status quo elements in the Middle East and refuses to explore those forgotten cultural histories that can be seen in the story of the Nahda and its attempt to restore the classical Arab heritage in a modern setting.
These forgotten histories are a central part of what I have called “The Levantine Option”; a cultural model that is central to the heritage of the Sephardic Jews whose literature expressed the highest values of Arab civilization processed through the filter of the classical Jewish tradition.
Reading Tom Friedman does not aid us in penetrating the hard surface of our current malaise. Instead it keeps us ignorant of the larger historical forces that have played such an important role in creating that current malaise.
DS
I guess it’s official now: The term “Arab Spring” has to be retired. There is nothing springlike going on. The broader, but still vaguely hopeful, “Arab Awakening” also no longer seems valid, given all that has been awakened. And so the strategist Anthony Cordesman is probably right when he argues: It’s best we now speak of the “Arab Decade” or the “Arab Quarter Century” — a long period of intrastate and intraregional instability, in which a struggle for both the future of Islam and the future of the individual Arab nations blend together into a “clash within a civilization.” The ending: TBD.
When the Arab Spring first emerged, the easy analogy was the fall of the Berlin Wall. It appears that the right analogy is a different central European event — the Thirty Years’ War in the 17th century — an awful of mix of religious and political conflict, which eventually produced a new state order.
Some will say: “I told you so. You never should have hoped for this Arab Spring.” Nonsense. The corrupt autocracies that gave us the previous 50 years of “stability” were just slow-motion disasters. Read the U.N.’s 2002 Arab Human Development Report about what deficits of freedom, women’s empowerment and knowledge did to Arab peoples over the last 50 years. Egypt, Tunisia, Libya, Yemen and Syria are not falling apart today because their leaders were toppled. Their leaders were toppled because for too many years they failed too many of their people. Half the women in Egypt still can’t read. That’s what the stability of the last 50 years bought.
Also, “we” did not unleash the Arab Spring, and “we” could not have stopped it. These uprisings began with fearless, authentic quests for dignity by Arab youths, seeking the tools and freedom to realize their full potential in a world where they could see how everyone else was living. But no sooner did they blow the lids off their societies, seeking governments grounded in real citizenship, than they found themselves competing with other aspirations set loose — aspirations to be more Islamist, more sectarian or to restore the status quo ante.
Still, two things surprise me. The first is how incompetent the Muslim Brotherhood has been. In Egypt, the Brotherhood has presided over an economic death spiral and a judiciary caught up in idiocies like investigating the comedian Bassem Youssef, Egypt’s Jon Stewart, for allegedly insulting President Mohamed Morsi. Every time the Brotherhood had a choice of acting in an inclusive way or seizing more power, it seized more power, depriving it now of the broad base needed to make necessary but painful economic reforms.
The second surprise? How weak the democratic opposition has been. The tragedy of the Arab center-left is a complicated story, notes Marc Lynch, a Middle East expert at George Washington University and the author of “The Arab Uprising: The Unfinished Revolutions of the New Middle East.” Many of the more secular, more pro-Western Egyptian political elites who could lead new center-left parties, he said, had been “co-opted by the old regime” for its own semiofficial parties and therefore “were widely discredited in the eyes of the public.” That left youngsters who had never organized a party, or a grab bag of expatriates, former regime officials, Nasserites and liberal Islamists, whose only shared idea was that the old regime must go.
Since taking power in Egypt, “the Brotherhood has presided over economic failure and political collapse,” said Lynch. “They have lost the center, they are feuding with the Salafists, and they are now down to their core 25 percent of support. There is no way they should win a fair election, which is why the opposition should be running in — not boycotting — the next parliamentary elections.” The old line that you have to wait on elections until a moderate civil society can be built is a proven failure. “You can’t teach someone to be a great basketball player by showing them videos,” he said. “They have to play — and the opposition will not become effective until they compete and lose and win again.”
The old sources of stability that held this region together are gone. No iron-fisted outside powers want to occupy these countries anymore, because all you win today is a bill. No iron-fisted dictators can control these countries anymore, because their people have lost their fear. The first elected governments — led by the Muslim Brotherhood — have the wrong ideas. More Islam is not the answer. More of the Arab Human Development Report is the answer. But the democratic opposition youths don’t yet have leaders to galvanize their people around that vision.
Given all this, America’s least bad option is to use its economic clout to insist on democratic constitutional rules, regular elections and political openness, and to do all it can to encourage moderate opposition leaders to run for office. We should support anyone who wants to implement the Arab Human Development Report and oppose anyone who doesn’t. That is the only way these societies can give birth to their only hope: a new generation of decent leaders who can ensure that this “Arab Quarter Century” ends better than it began.
From The New York Times, April 10, 2013