Wither the Arab order?

Will the chaos of the Arab Spring give way to a new order, or lead to protracted anarchy, asks Abdel-Moneim Said

In articles appearing on these pages last year I attempted to discern the contours of the future of the Arab order in light of the upheavals that have been dubbed the Arab Spring. I must confess that my attempts were sometimes wide of the mark, apart from the observation regarding the burst of activity and confidence on the part of the Arab League. Suddenly this institutionalised embodiment of the old (pre-Arab Spring) Arab order seemed ready and willing to supervise, in coordination with the international community, the processes of change, thereby acquiring legitimacy and some sources of strength regionally and, perhaps, internationally as well. This occurred in its clearest and most positive form in Libya and to a lesser extent and in a less effective way in Syria, where spring is still characterised by searing temperatures and rivers of blood.

The differences between the Libyan and Syrian cases reflect the inevitable changes that have occurred in the components of the Arab order, due to the rush of developments and complex interactions of the "transitional periods" in the countries of the Arab Spring that have cast their shadow over the situation in Syria, both delaying and raising the costs of its logical conclusion, and which have also affected the Arab Spring projects in Sudan and Mauritania that have yet to enter the arena of revolution. Nevertheless, on a broader level, the Arab order is being swept by a powerful tide of youth, complete with youth's inherent impetuousness, love for simplicity, disinclination to prudence, and distaste for complexity and ambiguities.

This youthful current is fed by other forces who dream of civil society, who rebel against the traditionalism that keeps their societies struggling in the backwaters of a modern world brimming with advanced technology and wealth, and who long to build societies capable of advancing into and staking a prominent place in that world. However, the region is also rife with some well-organised forces that have spent decades trying to breach the walls of the palaces of power and that have recently been handed an unprecedented, and indeed historic, opportunity to channel that current in another direction. Moreover, these forces have displayed no shortage in political cynicism when it came to using the original revolutionaries, when circumstances required, to accomplish certain ends of their own, after which the revolutionaries were perfunctorily dumped and left stunned and floundering on the river banks. For examples of this, one only has to turn to the daily press and read what happened to the "national front" that was formed between the Muslim Brotherhood and the revolutionary forces before the announcement of the final presidential election results.

The Muslim Brotherhood has become a primary feature of the new Arab order. It has reached power, or won a major share of power, in Morocco, Tunisia, Egypt and Yemen, and currently it is in the forefront of the opposition in countries in the grips of revolution, such as Syria, as well as in countries whose "traditional" leaderships had long imagined that they enjoyed sufficient religious immunity only to find the local Muslim Brotherhood chapters knocking at the doors of power brandishing the banner of religion and Sharia law or, if that fails, wielding democratic demands as their weapon, once again. Consistency was never an issue. The Muslim Brothers change their roles and postures according to the demands of the available opportunities. Where the legitimacy of religious claims can't strike, perhaps the legitimacy of the democratic ballot box can.

To some extent, the situation today is reminiscent of the 1950s when military coups became "revolutions" through government drives to intervene in and control education, healthcare, the market and the media, to which was added a dose of "Arab nationalism" whose chief source of energy and legitimacy was the Palestinian cause. This "ideology" also steered these revolutions to military defeat and to economic impotence, after which the regimes simply continued to decay until virtually nothing was left of the old revolutions but dilapidated and occasionally ludicrous structures and institutions (see the Gaddafi syndrome in Libya and the workers and peasants parliamentary quota in Egypt). Finally, with the outset of the second decade of the 21st century, the "system" began to topple, yielding to widespread anarchy that sometimes goes by the name of "transitional phase" and at other times is called civil war, which so far has reached its most extreme expression in Syria.

At the regional level, what the revolutionary regimes of the 1950s and 1960s produced was the "Arab Cold War," the dynamics of which Malcolm Kerr discussed at length in his excellent book with this title. This war was not just the regional mirror of the global Cold War that was raging at the time between the USSR-led socialist camp and the US-led capitalist camp. It was also a manifestation of a deep rift between Arab states, not so much over the idea of Arab nationalism per se, but over their radicalism or conservatism with respect to this idea. More importantly, it was a regional power struggle between the oil producing countries and riparian countries, and between those that sought to export revolution and those that refused to import it.

Out of that morass there eventually emerged a kind of system, in the sense of a set of arrangements and patterns of interaction that can be identified institutionally or at least as modes of behaviour determined by convention or exigency, or perhaps an order, in which there is a clear power structure with a set rules for how states should work together and press for their demands. That system or order produced the alliances that confronted Israel in the October 1973 War, that addressed the challenge of "globalisation" and its first democratic waves through the affirmation of "Arab moderation," and that confronted the peril of terrorism globally, regionally and nationally.

Like it or not, that system or order has collapsed. At first, when the revolution erupted in Tunisia I, like many others in Cairo, held that Egypt is not Tunisia. But when the torch of revolution was raised in Tahrir Square, all other iconic squares around the Arab world became an object of speculation and the question arose as to whether the rules of the game between Arab states would work towards the creation of a new "order" or "system" that would manage the spectre of total anarchy in some rather large swathes of the Arab region.

The region has experienced quite a few outbreaks of chaos even before the Arab Spring. Iraq is a prime example. So too is Sudan, where anarchy continues to strike deep into Darfur and Kordofan and where secession proved the means of handling it with respect to South Sudan. However, the revolutions of the Arab Spring have produced new instances, in spite of the electoral processes and in spite of the differences between Libya, Yemen and Egypt, which has had an established state for more than 5,000 years. Now, with the Syrian crisis, the situation becomes more ominous yet, for the anarchy there has dimensions that extend across the borders with Turkey and touch upon the long-standing and intractable Kurdish question, and with Palestine and the Arabs' central and eternal cause, and with Lebanon and Lebanon's plexus of unresolved problems and tensions that date back to the height of the old Arab order, and with Iraq where social and political divisions extend all the way to Tehran.

This time it is not a question of another Arab Cold War, even if there has emerged a number of signs pointing in that direction. Rather, the issue in essence is whether there will be an order at all, whether as a structured balance of powers or as systematised mechanisms for collective management of problems, or a massive state of anarchy that engulfs the whole of the region's societies, borders, and ethnic groups, and that is fuelled by age-old rancour and hatreds. The situation may look like something from Europe of the 19th century, but it has no counterpart anywhere else in the world of the early 21st century.

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Romney's narrow worldview

Despite some failures of the Obama administration, Mitt Romney's full-blown return to Bush administration policies threatens disaster for America, writes James Zogby

Republican presidential aspirant Mitt Romney is visiting the UK, Poland and Israel this week in an effort to broaden his foreign policy exposure. Pledging not to be critical of the president while overseas, in the days before his departure Romney laid out his differences with President Obama in an address to the Veterans of Foreign Wars (VFW), and an interview with the Israeli daily newspaper Israel Hayom, which is owned by controversial casino owner and funder of Islamophobic propaganda, Sheldon Adelson.

If Romney's VFW remarks were intended as a preview of the policies he would pursue, they were a disappointment. His speech was long on rhetorical flourish, but short on detail. His criticism of President Obama was harsh and unrelenting. Romney charged that this administration had "diminished American leadership", weakened the military, fomented a "national security crisis", and "betrayed the trust that allies place in the United States".

Delivering lines that sounded like they had been prepared in the thick of the Cold War by speechwriters for president Ronald Reagan, Romney affirmed his belief that "our country is the greatest force for good the world has ever known"; that America must have "the strongest military in the world"; and declared his "one overwhelming conviction and passion" that "this must be an American Century" in which "we lead the free world and the free world leads the entire world".

If this all sounds Reaganesque or a replay of George W Bush, it is precisely because many of Romney's foreign policy advisers come out of the "Project for a New American Century", the group created by the acolytes of the Reagan era who then populated the Bush Jr administration. George W Bush's rhetoric often conflated the good/evil worldview of neoconservatism with the Manichaeism of right-wing Christian fundamentalism. In Romney's case, there is a disturbing mix of neoconservative hawkishness and militaristic American supremacy with Mormonism's narrative of divinely ordained American exceptionalism. Just as Bush's interpretation of Christianity was not shared by most Christians, Romney's America-on-steroids is a minority view among Mormons.

Beyond the rhetoric, there was little else that was noteworthy in Romney's foreign policy preview. As others have observed, many of his criticisms of the Obama administration were either wrong on facts, splitting hairs, or just plain bad policy.

For example, when Romney accuses President Obama of proposing "arbitrary, across-the-board... massive defense cuts", he ignores the fact that these cuts are not Obama's but the result of a congressionally mandated agreement, owing to Congress's failure to behave responsibly and raise the debt ceiling. And Romney's charge that this administration would "weaken... the VA system" is off base. The president has, in fact, increased spending on veterans.

In other areas it is difficult to see where the policies advocated by candidate Romney differ significantly from those of the White House. For example, despite his rejection of Obama's Afghan policy or current policy towards Syria, Romney ends up supporting very much the same approach to both. And the accusation that this administration has betrayed European allies like Poland and the Czech Republic may score some points at home with disaffected ethnic communities hailing from Eastern Europe, but the reality is that both countries appear quite satisfied with the commitments they have received from President Obama. Other than criticising the way the US has handled relations with Egypt, a country undergoing dramatic transformations, and Russia, a country that is increasingly asserting itself, Romney offers no prescriptions for a meaningful change in policy.

Romney reserves his sharpest criticism for the way President Obama has handled Israel's difficult prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu. This may sit well with some pro-Likud American Jews and right-wing Christians, but it ignores recent history and the imperative for American policymakers to find a solution to the profoundly unsettling Arab-Israeli conflict -- an issue Romney conveniently fails to mention. And while sounding more threatening towards, and less willing to negotiate with, Iran than the Obama administration, it is not clear how Romney would deal with that country's nuclear programme other than by going to war.

What is deeply disturbing in all of this is the fact that Romney continues to demonstrate how out of touch he is with the changing world the Obama administration has inherited. Romney describes the world of today as a "dangerous, destructive, chaotic" place. But it was the reckless and neglectful policies of the Bush administration, not the Obama administration, which created this state of affairs. Two failed wars, a failure to use diplomacy when it might have made a difference, a penchant for unilateralism, and a reliance on practices that violated the rule of law and tarnished America's image, all combined to produce widespread anti-American sentiment, an expansion and emboldening of extremist movements, and a weakening of American allies.

The Obama administration started out determined to change course. There have been some successes in rebuilding frayed relations with NATO allies and some Asian and Latin American nations. But when faced with strong domestic pressure in other areas, notably in the Middle East, the administration's resolve weakened. On too many occasions it failed to build public consensus around alternative approaches to peace making, to fighting extremism, and to supporting democratic reform. Instead, they resigned themselves to a variation of existing policy -- taking the path of least resistance. But even with the justifiable criticisms that can be offered of the Obama administration's conduct, it must be said that Romney's full-throated endorsement of the failed policies of the Bush era is far more worrisome. This is what we heard from the Republican Party's candidate this week before he left. We will, no doubt, hear more upon his return.

The writer is president of the Arab American Institute.

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A difficult fast

Ramadan can be a trying month for Muslims, but it is especially so in Gaza, amid the Israeli siege, the threat of the occupation army, and constant power cuts, writes Saleh Al-Naami Palestinian worshippers pray outside the Dome of the Rock at the Al-Aqsa Mosque compound in Jerusalem during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan

Rehab was in disbelief when she found the meat she put in the freezer had spoiled Saturday afternoon because of a long power outage in Berket Al-Wez where she lives in the centre of the Gaza Strip. Rehab quickly called her husband Salah and asked him to buy more on his way home so she could cook for Iftar (the breaking the fast in Ramadan). Rehab and Salah agreed that they should avoid using the freezer because of frequent power cuts.

The power outages are affecting all aspects of life during the holy month. As a result of fuel shortages at the sole power station in the Gaza Strip, the electricity authority is using rotational eight-hour power cuts around the Gaza Strip followed by eight hours of power, and so on. This makes fasting a difficult endeavour because residents cannot rely on the usual methods to alleviate the heat, especially during an exceptionally severe heat wave there.

Locals cannot use the fans most of them have, or the air conditioners that wealthy families own; many families have taken to going to the beach for Iftar, mostly to escape the heat compounded by overcrowding.

Majed Abu Semha, 44, who also lives in Berket Al-Wez, told Al-Ahram Weekly that he takes his family by car to Al-Zwaida beach near his house after his wife prepares food for Iftar. They set up their meal on the sand and eat together. Abu Semha continued that when it's time for ishaa (night) prayers, he and his eldest son head to a nearby mosque to pray and stay for the taraweeh prayers while his wife stays with other women to socialise. The family returns home after power is restored to the area where they live.

Although most families in the Gaza Strip now rely on power generators to operate fans and lights, the high cost of fuel used in generators has prevented many families from using them. At the same time, the number of deaths and injuries caused by exploding generators or poisoning from generator exhaust fumes has caused many families to cut their use of generators.

As a result of blackouts and rising temperatures, some mosques -- especially in rural areas -- now hold taraweeh prayers in the open where it is cooler for worshippers. In Al-Qararah village in the centre of the Gaza Strip, the mosque has zoned off an outdoor space next to the mosque for prayers. Meanwhile, mosque imams abridge taraweeh prayers by reading fewer Quran verses and do no give sermons during these late night prayers if there is a power outage. The Ministry of Religious Endowments issued strict orders to mosque imams to keep prayers short to make it easier on the congregation, although taraweeh prayers are a mainstay ritual of Ramadan after fasting.

Palestinians living in the border zone with Israel have mostly given up on taraweeh prayers because they fear if they leave their homes late at night, they will be shot by occupation soldiers on the border or would become targets for reconnaissance jets that are constantly hovering in the skies. Yehia Barak, who lives in Wadi Al-Salqa in the centre of Gaza, which is considered a border zone, told the Weekly that he is heartbroken that he and his sons cannot pray at the local mosque, which is only 200 metres away from his home. Barak fears that they would be targeted by occupation soldiers who consider anyone moving at night in this area as a resistance fighter plotting a mission against Israel.

Nonetheless, in other areas on the border some are willing to risk their lives to perform the late night prayers. Adel Suleiman, who lives on the edge of Beit Hanoun in the northeast Gaza Strip and only a few hundred metres away from the border, insists on performing taraweeh prayers despite the high security risks. Suleiman uses the fact that his home is located in an orange grove to take cover amid the trees while travelling the long distance to the mosque located outside the border zone.

As well as difficult security conditions that restrict the ability of Palestinians to perform their religious rituals during Ramadan, economic factors also weigh them down during the month of fasting. This is not limited to poor families and the unemployed. Government employees are also suffering because the governments of Gaza and Ramallah are unable to pay full salaries or salaries on time because of a crippling financial crisis in both governments. Complicating matters further, the expenses of Gazans are climbing, not only because of Ramadan but also because Palestinian families will also need to buy new clothes for Eid Al-Fitr (the holiday after Ramadan) and the new school year that begins September.

Many Palestinian families have decided to cut spending on food during Ramadan in order to meet other expenses. Ghassan Abu Semha, who lives in Al-Maghazi Refugee Camp in the centre of Gaza, decided that he would cut food expenses during Ramadan by buying frozen meat and not the more expensive fresh meat. "I have one son going to college and five others going back to school," Abu Semha explained to the Weekly. "This means I have a lot of expenses for university and clothes, and so we have to cut spending."

Charities have become very active in collecting donations inside and outside the Gaza Strip to provide financial and material assistance to poor families. Researchers at Al-Saleh Charitable Society are working quickly to update their lists of poor families by adding new ones who meet the charity's definition of poverty. Anyone visiting the charity's headquarters in the central zone in the Gaza Strip will quickly notice the large number of women, men and elderly flocking to its doors either to receive assistance or ask the administration to add their families to the poverty list. There are also individual charity efforts by the wealthy that prepare Iftar meals to distribute among the poor.

Ramadan days in Gaza are long and hard in light of a six-year siege, but Gazans are ever determined to minimise the negative effects of harsh conditions on their religious obligations during this holy month.

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Culture: God's Books: Interview with the Vampire

Mohab Nasr, Ya rabb, a'tina kutuban linaqra' (Please, God, give us books to read), Cairo: Al Ain, 2012

"Any pretence of having specific reasons to stop writing poetry at one point or to return to it at another will be a fabrication," says Mohab Nasr (b. 1962). "All I can say for sure is that I was surrounded by friends who used up my energy in conversations, which gave me a sense of reassurance of a certain kind, the extent of whose hazardousness it took a long time to realise."

Thus the seemingly eternal vicious circle, perhaps even more pronounced outside Cairo, the underground literary centre of operations--in Alexandria, where, after a stint in said centre in the mid-1990s that cost him his government schoolteaching post, Nasr was living again:

To write, you have to have a reader; but, being a serious poet in late 20th-century Egypt, your reader can only be a fellow writer; you might as well just talk with them at the cafe--and, beyond an inevitably skewed sense of personal fulfillment, what on earth in the end could be the point of that?

Prompted by his short-lived marriage to the feminist-Marxist activist, aspiring theorist and Student Movement icon Arwa Saleh (1951-1997), Nasr's experience of Cairo had been more depressing than instructive. But, like the bite that makes a man immortal, freezes him in the age at which it happened and binds him to a routine of bloodsucking, spending the day in a tomb and surfacing only in the nighttime, the experience marked him; some 14 years later, when unprecedented protests broke out while he lived and worked as a cultural journalist in Kuwait, it would prove obliquely regenerative.

Cairo gave Nasr a direct taste of the wannabe aesthetician's pretensions and the wannabe autocrat's mean-spiritedness so rife among Generation of the Seventies activists and writers; it made him aware of the potentially fatal fragility of the Arab Intellectual--a creature as mythical and parasitic as a vampire, and perhaps ultimately as irrelevant to consensual reality, since its emergence in Muhammad Ali Pasha's times.

It was in 1997 that Nasr's first book of poems, Ann yassriq ta'irun 'aynayk (or "For a bird to steal your eyes"), was published in a small edition in Alexandria: the year during which his divorcee, Saleh, finally killed herself.

They had not been in contact for months and he felt no guilt about the incident; he felt he had done all he could to be supportive, and anyway what drove her to suicide as he saw it, the inevitably failed attempt at literally embodying moral-political principles, had nothing to do with him. But the horror of what happened left him unsure not only about moral and political but also emotional and aesthetic issues.

Following the event, he started working on a long and involved text he still refers to as The Fragments, in which--without the arguably necessary theoretical equipment, as he readily admits--he tried to work out the meaning of life in the context of his experience. But, realising the result was too abstract to lead anywhere, he gave up.

The process was to be echoed far more recently--and perhaps also more meaningfully--in the wake of 25 January, 2011, when Nasr began responding to a Facebook comment by an old Muslim Brotherhood-sympathetic coworker who asked, "What if the Brotherhood comes to power?" It was as if the question unplugged a cache of latent energy:

"Instead of writing a few lines to him I found myself reviewing with him the entire history of the concept of the state and the decisive point separating two histories before and after the emergence of modernity and capital. I dealt with the rise of the notion of identity as more of a slogan than a truth; with the way the scaffolding of society had been taken apart; and with the resulting absence of society. It ended up as an incredibly long Facebook 'note', and I repeated the experiment with several other topics after that."

Nasr had himself been a Muslim Brother once, however briefly, as an Arabic student at Alexandria University's Faculty of Arts (he graduated in 1984); and it was not as if, by the time his Fragments took on such concrete form--for which he thanks the revolution--he had made no discoveries.

"When the writer creates an image to be attached to, they stand directly behind that image and lionise it as a 'conviction'--a mask: when you remove it the writer goes away with it, vapourises. The real writer places their image at a distance, knowing that any image is a moment out of something fluid, a portion of existence in flux; and when they place it between the covers of a book, they are also placing it between two brackets of doubt?ê?"

***

As is nearly always the case with poetry, it is next to impossible to say anything about the present book, apart from: "If you know Arabic, read it!" Mohab Nasr defines the poem very tentatively as a text that says something it never actually makes explicit, linking it to the cliche of knowing that someone is lonely when you notice how compulsively they chatter. After a hiatus that lasted over a decade, poems came back to Nasr like a reunion with a long lost friend, once he was out of Egypt. There was a sense of vertigo, he says: he was less confident than simply, shyly joyful; and he would send his texts to a select number of fellow writers to make sure they really were poems. The revolution, which would set off a parallel process of nonfiction writing, made his emotions raw and intense. Finally history was opening its door, he says, even if only monsters and dwarfs came through. It is interesting to note that, unlike much Generation of the Nineties poems to which it is linked, the present book makes absolutely no concessions to sensationalism: besides the fact that--prose as they remain--they are written to be read out loud, Nasr's poems achieve the Nineties objectives of concentrating on immediate (physical) reality, drawing on day-to-day life and avoiding rhetoric precisely by avoiding direct and formulaic approaches to the New Poem. The language and images are extremely familiar, easy and recognisable; but they are just as extremely hard won.

***

"The life of an image in a book is the death of that image in reality. It is being free of the image's limitations, of the illusion that an image however satisfying actually represents life."

Thus the seemingly eternal life cycle of genuine or meaningful (literary) discourse, as opposed to the discourse of the Poet (the Arab Intellectual) who, precisely by placing himself above and beyond, manages effortlessly to be nonexistent as well--the echo of an echo of a lie:

To write, you have to have been a reader; you read what books life throws at you, but you also read the books of life itself--the people, the places, the things, the relations--as honestly, as sceptically, as unpretentiously as you can; then, when you tell someone else about what you have read, you contribute to an exchange that will somehow at some time actually shape a collective consciousness, a social state of being, life.

By 1999 Mohab Nasr will have met his present wife, the young short-story writer and fellow Arabic teacher Jehan Abdel-Azeez, with whom he settled down in Kuwait in 2007, three years after they were married. By then there had been a year of employment in Libya, and a difficult year of unemployment.

Kuwait seemed to open up a new space through both the slave-driven routine of having to produce a newspaper page every day and distance from Egyptian intellectual life, where the problem has less to do with a scene that puts pressure on or unsettles you than it does with one in which "the battle is lost from the beginning, even with yourself, because it is completely spurious"; he had felt he could only respond to that scene by letting it choke on its own lies.

"In the same way as writing in itself creates delusions, so too do opinions laid down easily during informal gatherings among writers," he says in response to my questions, typing into his laptop in a seaside cafe back in Alexandria, a city he now visits only for holidays:

"They create delusions of belonging to a common, mutually comprehensible language?ê? There is an extremely subtle difference between the writer creating images of consciousness as an interactive and critical medium and the writer creating those images with the intention of being attached to them as a person, of using them as a shield against society," a tool for upward mobility, a sense of individual distinction, a lucrative link with the--political--powers that be, "not a way of relating to human beings at large."

Prompted by this belief in a common ground, a multiparty dialogue, a welfare that eschews elitism without being populist, with Nasser Farghali, Hemeida Abdalla and the late Abdel-Azim Nagui, Nasr founded a literary group, Al Arbi'a'iyoun (or the Wednesdayers)--three issues of their eponymous journal were published in the early 1990s--and was later among the founders of the much longer-lived and by now well-known non-fiction journal, Amkenah, edited by Alaa Khalid.

In both cases his tendency towards excessive abstraction seems to have got in the way of a greater or longer-lived contribution on his part, but it was the increasingly dog-eat-dog conditions of life that drove people away from each other and dissipated the collective momentum (Amkenah charges ahead thanks to Khalid's individual dedication).

Nasr's nonfiction, an open-ended form of critique that can be seen as both amateur sociology-philosophy and political commentary-journalism, reveals a moralist eager to transcend morality, an aesthete well aware of the absurdity of art for art's sake and an aspiring scholar with neither the patience nor the dispassion for scholarship; it reveals, in short, exactly the kind of man of letters whose scarcity has robbed the scene of vitality for decades, reducing the Role of the Intellectual to yet another empty slogan.

"I always suffered from this idea of abstraction as a writer, and even though I still believe in abstraction I feel it is necessary for live examples of the abstract concepts to be always present. This is what the revolution has done, or let's call it the dissolution that facilitated such unprecedented human boiling over: the essential questions--even if they are extreme or naive or fallacious--have risen to the surface, come out (if temporarily), broken free of the hegemony of a cultural sphere that is dead and in shameful conspiracy with itself."

Reviewed by Youssef Rakha

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