Race Class 2005 Coury 1 19

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2005 46: 1Race ClassRalph M. Coury

The demonisation of pan-Arab nationalism

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The demonisation of pan-ArabThe demonisation of pan-ArabnationalismnationalismRALPH M. COURY

Abstract: Although the denigration and misrepresentation of pan-Arab

nationalism existed long before recent attempts to portray SaddamHussein’s regime as exceptionally heinous, threatening and a majorsource of terrorism, the demonisation of this profoundly important

and evolving political force has been given further impetus by theimperative to justify current US Middle Eastern policy. The fallaciesthat inform reductionist and hostile approaches to pan-Arabism,

including the assumption that it is inherently racist and totalitarian,are here dissected and contextualised, and the evolution of pan-Arabnationalist thought is illuminated in the process.

Keywords: Baathism, Islam, Middle Eastern studies, pan-Arabism

The Bush administration’s effort to justify its invasion of Iraq on thebasis that Saddam Hussein’s government was so heinous that its

Ralph M. Coury is Professor of History at Fairfield University in Connecticut. He is theauthor of The Making of an Egyptian Arab Nationalist: the early years of Azzam Pasha,1893–1936 (Reading, 1988) and is co-editor of the Journal of Middle Eastern and NorthAfrican Cultural and Intellectual Studies, published by Binghamton University.

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possession of weapons of mass destruction or its links to al-Qaida areirrelevant has been challenged by many commentators. There is never-theless a parallel effort of comparable shabbiness that is likely toremain largely unchallenged, at least in the mainstream of Americanand British intellectual culture in which it is now receiving a respectfuland often favourable hearing. I refer to the demonisation of pan-Arabnationalism found in such recent publications as Terror and Liberalismby Paul Berman and Occidentalism: the West in the eyes of its enemiesby Ian Buruma and Avishai Margalit.1

The argument in these and comparable writings in respect to pan-Arab nationalism consists of two themes – that this nationalism hasbeen inherently totalitarian and racist, and that it has been a dismalfailure. ‘Baathism’, write Buruma and Margalit, in words that arerepeated almost verbatim from work to work, ‘the ideology of theSyrian and former Iraqi governments, is a synthesis, forged in the1930s and 1940s, of fascism and romantic nostalgia for an ‘‘organic’’community of Arabs. It was developed, after the collapse of the Otto-man Empire, in the wake of World War I, by such thinkers as SatiHusri and Michel Aflaq, founder of the Baath Party in Syria.’ Accord-ing to these authors, al-Husri was a ‘keen student of German Romanticthinkers such as Fichte and Herder’ who had promoted the idea of ananti-Enlightenment volkisch nation, rooted in blood and soil, and hewas directly inspired by the pan-Germanism of fascist circles inVienna and Berlin in the 1920s and 1930s and by the idea of asabiyya,or ‘(Arab) blood Solidarity’, developed by Ibn Khaldun in the four-teenth century.2

We are led to believe that the ideas of the Baathists and other pan-Arab nationalists (in a review of Berman, Buruma links them withIslamists, Indian fascists, Russian Slavophiles and other ‘enemies ofliberalism’3) were bad in themselves and that their rule has been pre-dictably calamitous. Berman argues that the Arab/Islamic movementshad nightmarish results, ‘fully as horrible as the fascism and Stalinismof Europe’. Other commentators might speak more responsibly andjudiciously, but rarely with anything good to say. ‘Nasser’s achieve-ments and those of his followers [radical pan-Arab nationalists moregenerally] turned out to be sparse’, Sir Lawrence Freedman wrote inthe Financial Times on 26 January 2004. ‘Their revolutionary drivefoundered as the conservative regimes held their ground. The realityof Arabic unity remained far short of the rhetoric . . . Economic policieswere disastrous . . . Survival has been the result of ruthlessness andrepression, but also political agility.’ 4

The discussion that follows is limited to the more egregious omis-sions and commissions.

* * *

2 Race & Class 46(4)



The demonisation of pan-Arab nationalism as found in Berman,Buruma, Margalit et al. owes much to the hoary distinction made byHarold Acton and then Hans Kohn between a benign nationalism(sometimes designated as patriotism) that is civic, contractual andliberal, and whose policies are peaceful, moderate, measured and calcu-lated, and an organic nationalism that is based on ethnicity or race andthat is prone to violence and tyranny. In the late nineteenth century,Acton argued that the Teutonic nations (Britain, Germany and theUS) had the good nationalism and that the Latin nations had the bad,and in the mid-twentieth century, Kohn believed that the Americansand British had the good nationalism and that theGermans, the EasternEuropeans and the Africans and Asians had the bad.5

Elie Kedourie played a leading role in introducing this discourse intothe field of Middle Eastern studies. According to Kedourie, national-ism itself is an unnatural style of politics in which existence is envisagedas an organic whole rather than as disparate and disconnected parts.Kedourie condemns, in particular, the German variety of nationalism,which he contrasts to the ‘patriotism’ of the British and Americans.Patriotism is shorn of ‘a particular doctrine of the state or the indi-vidual’s relation to it’. It is love of one’s country and loyalty to its insti-tutions. In fact, the label ‘nationalism’ should only be attached toGerman nationalism and its transmutations in the rest of the world.In Asian and African regions, this nationalism remained entirelyalien. Initiated by a handful of western-educated young men, estrangedfrom their own society and their scrupulous European masters, thisnationalism spread by imposition and imitation, with destruction,brutal murder and persecution of minorities as the result.6

Proceeding on the basis of such an understanding, Kedourie arguesthat the Egyptian and Syrian pioneers of pan-Arab nationalism lacked‘a sense of concrete difficulties’ and possessed faith in sedition and vio-lence and a contempt of moderation. They believed in an authoritarianstate ‘that would transform the heterogeneous, fissiparous, skepticalpopulations of the Fertile Crescent [and Egypt] to the likeness oftheir dream, with all the differences suddenly annihilated and externalunity the emblem of a deeper, still more fundamental unity: one state,one nation, one creed’.7

Although Kedourie and other authors of his generation and persua-sion produced their most important works in the 1950s, 1960s and1970s, their interpretations are now undergoing a revival within MiddleEastern studies,8 a revival that finds a parallel in works that are broaderin scope (Terror and Liberalism and Occidentalism: the West in theeyes of its enemies denigrate pan-Arab nationalism as part, albeit avery important part, of a larger, undifferentiated, non-western ‘anti-liberalism’) and geared to broader audiences.

Coury: Demonisation of Arab nationalism 3



The principal weakness of this ‘Kedourian’ tradition, apart from thegross misrepresentations of the actual history of pan-Arab nationalismto which it is prone, lies in the fact that the basic distinction between an‘organic’, racial/ethnic nationalism and a ‘civic’, contractual national-ism is untenable. In the first place, civil society is virtually indefinable.It is very difficult to establish a clear theoretical distinction betweensociety and the economy or between society and the political state. Incapitalist societies, for example, many coercive functions that oncebelonged to the state have been relocated to the private sphere – inprivate property, class exploitation and the market.9 Secondly, andas Bernard Yack has argued, the political community of so-called‘civic’ nations is not the result of a rational and freely-chosen allegianceof citizens to a set of principles. The United States or other ‘civic’nations took shape because they had particular cultures linked totheir particular histories and serving as the basis of their discreteidentities. Moreover, even if these nations were based on shared politi-cal principles, they might exclude those suspected of rejecting theseprinciples.10 The myth of the peaceful and humane nature of ‘civic’nationalism is perhaps most vulnerable when one thinks of the atroci-ties committed against the ‘civic’ nations’ working classes or theirpeople of colour, or the foreign ‘other’. The Baath Party did notbring us the destruction of Native American and Vietnamese societies.As Edward S. Herman has argued in an astute review of Terror andLiberalism, the distinction that Berman and others seek to makebetween an inherently peaceful American liberal political culture andan inherently violent Arab/Islamic totalitarian political culture has‘a number of problems’, including the fact that ‘US liberalism is attachedto an advanced, globalized, militarized, capitalist political economywhose material interests might be a more important force shaping itsexternal [and often internal] policies than liberal principles’.11

* * *

If efforts to differentiate between ‘organic’ and ‘civic’ nationalism aredoomed to failure, either in respect to conceptualisations of the consti-tutive elements of national identity or alleged tendencies to violence orpeace, this does not mean that there have not been differences betweenthe nationalism of liberals and others. The intellectuals and activists ofthe first phase of pan-Arab nationalism, which extended from the latenineteenth century until after the second world war, were in fact largelyliberal. This nationalism was not established by Sati al-Husri (heremained loyal to the Ottoman Empire during the Arab revolt of thefirst world war), but by Islamic reformers and Arab Christian andMuslim secularists of the late Ottoman period who embraced scienceand representative government as the core of the ‘modernity’ that theychampioned.12 ‘If only two things were present, science and constitu-




tional government’, the Syrian Muslim Rafiq al-Azm wrote in 1924,progress and power would be within reach of Arab society.13

The ‘intellectual father’ of this liberal national tradition as it reachedits maturity in the period between the two world wars was the SyrianChristian Constantine Zurayq (1909–2000) who, as president of theUniversity of Damascus and then professor of history at the AmericanUniversity of Beirut (he received his PhD from Princeton at the age oftwenty-one), served as mentor to an entire generation of Arab nation-alist youth. Zurayq argued that religion could not be set apart fromArab culture, but that the state must be absolutely separated fromreligious institutions. Social reform had to be based on the promotionof individual initiative, scientific knowledge and culture, and political,social and intellectual liberties.14 Zurayq had no ‘romantic nostalgia’for an Arab organic community: ‘I am concerned’, he writes in hisclassic work al-Wai al-Qawmi (National Consciousness) of 1939,‘that [an] historical mentality has . . . occupied a higher place in ourthinking than it deserves. It is incumbent upon us to direct our atten-tion – and more than we have previously done – to the impendingfuture so that a vision of life could be formed expressing our hopesand needs.’15

Liberal pan-Arab nationalism, as represented by Zurayq, wasseriously weakened with the rise of the single party Arab nationaliststates of the 1950s and 1960s, but it hardly disappeared, and it hasundergone a revival since the 1970s in the form of a ‘neo-Arabism’that posits a necessary connection between democracy and Arabunity. The Syrian philosopher Ahmad al-Barqawi, who participatedin recent discussions on the reform of the Baath Party sponsored bythe Syrian government, effectively captured the spirit of this strain ofArabism during an interview (22 April 2004) with the Egyptian AlAhram Weekly in which he differentiated between universal humanrights and democracy, on the one hand, and western political and eco-nomic domination, on the other:

Pan-Arabism becomes more effective in a democratic context.I believe there is no contradiction between the notion of Arabnationalism and democracy. We don’t want the . . . Arab world tobe reduced to [playing the role of ] a guard protecting oil fields forthe West. We want the nationalist parties to preserve the idea thatthere is an Arab homeland with common concerns andaspirations.16

Al-Barqawi’s views are shared by a large number of contemporaryintellectuals and activists, including social democrats and socialists.In al-Mihna al-Arabiyya: al-dawla did al-umma (The Arab Ordeal:state against nation, 1996), the well-known Syrian political analystBurhan al-Ghalyun argues that the establishment of democracy




cannot have truly important results if it does not transcend localentities and serve to create a link between a common cultural identityand polity.17 And in Masalat al-Huwiyya: al-Uruba wa al-Islam waal-Gharb (The Question of Identity: Arabism, Islam and the West,1997), the Moroccan Muhammad Abid al-Jabiri, author of one ofthe most influential modern commentaries on the history of Arabphilosophy and religious thought, maintains that democracy will facil-itate Arab unity in that most Arab citizens, given their growing culturaland economic ties, would choose to create a larger and more viablestate.18

* * *

The influential Syrian theorist Sati al-Husri (1880–1968) did not pro-vide a clear blueprint of the united Arab polity for which he hoped,but he was certainly not a racist, volkisch nationalist. In his detailedanalysis of Ibn Khaldun’s philosophy of history, al-Husri points outthat asabiyya is not limited to communal feeling based solely uponblood relationships. Asabiyya can include le lien social and esprit decorps based on friendship and social solidarity.19 And in his Awamilal-Qawmiyya (Bases of Nationalism), he writes: ‘All scientific studiesbased on the facts of history, the discoveries of anthropology andethnography, leave no doubt that there is not found on the face ofthe earth any nation descended from one origin and possessing pureblood.’ 20

Recent scholarship has simply given the lie to commonplace clichesabout al-Husri’s Germanism. Youssef M. Choueiri shows that al-Husridistanced himself from Fichte’s ideas, apart from linguistics, that healways cited Herder (who was at once cosmopolitan and parochial)with qualification, and that his early view of language gave way toseeing it as a practical instrument forged to create effective modes ofcommunication in a state that treated all equally.21

What can be said of al-Husri extends to many other major pan-Arabnationalists: their thought differs significantly from the distortions thatare now being presented to us. In 1941, for example, in his widely influ-ential Dustur al-Arab al-Qawmi (The National Constitution of theArabs), the eminent Lebanese Sunni cleric Sheikh Abdallah al-Alayaliexcoriated personality cults and dictatorships and argued that racism,and particularly the idea of the superiority of an Aryan race, stemmedfrom an emotional reaction to the decline of religion or from the desirefor power and domination.22 Modern nationalism (he used the term‘imagined community’ – khayal al-jamaa – roughly forty years beforethe great contemporary historian of nationalism Benedict Anderson)could only be based on the concept of social and territorial loyalty.Or there is Michel Aflaq himself, the co-founder of the Baath: ‘The




national socialism of Germany and of Italy is’, he writes, ‘based on theidea of racial superiority and on the differences between people, that is,on the superiority of one kind over another, and their right to dominatethe world.’ These philosophies, he continues, ‘also establish differencesbetween nationals of the same nation, which leads to the dictatorship ofan individual or of a class. True socialism cannot succeed in such asystem . . . Nationalism as currently understood in our homeland orin the West is, for the most part, a negative and illusory concept perme-ated with reactionary and exploitationist beliefs. It is our duty to stripaway this mask of negativism and deception. Nor need we be afraid ofthis, because a core will always remain after we have purified thenationalist idea. This core may be something very simple and insub-stantial but it is nevertheless essential. Nationalism, in truth, is notvanity, is not fanaticism vis-a-vis other nations, is foreign to all materialinterests of a certain class, and is, in fact, humanism itself manifestedand realized in one living reality: the nation.’ 23

To be sure, as a revolutionary who believed that the dominantexploitative elite would not surrender its power voluntarily, Aflaqseems to have thought that revolution could not be achieved peacefullyand he often adopted militant language, but there is no necessary,direct relationship between this militancy and the brutalities and/ormilitarisation of the Baath in its Syrian and Iraqi branches duringthe 1960s and 1970s, which cannot be analysed apart from the politicalexigencies of those decades. As Hanna Batatu points out, Aflaq’s viewthat ‘nationalism like every love . . . is as distant from hatred as pos-sible’ captures the general tendency of his thought. ‘The Arab’, Aflaqwrites, ‘is bound not only to his nation but also to mankind, which isbut one mass with common interests and common values.’ 24

When speaking of Aflaq and of the party that he established, wemust not lose sight of the fact that he passed through a number ofphases and that his party has been embodied in a number of incarna-tions. Baathism has ‘not been one force acting in a single direction . . .but a mantle for a variety of elements . . .’.25 The Syrian party of today,in which careerists and professional party operators play a large role, isnot the party of the late 1940s and 1950s. In the first decade of theparty’s existence, Baathist physicians (without prompting from theirleaders) travelled on foot to provide free medical treatment to peasantsin remote and neglected villages, and Baathist activists sent the promis-ing sons of peasant families to secondary schools in the cities at theirpersonal expense or tutored them without charge.26

This spirit of self-sacrifice was linked to a democratic politicalculture. ‘In the fifties, before it [the Baath] became a party of powerin Iraq and Syria, and for a brief period afterwards’, Tariq Ali hasrecently reminded us:




there were open debates and arguments inside the party that wereusually resolved by ballots . . . The historical founders of the party,Michel Aflaq and Salah Bitar, were men of moderate temperament;both were teachers by profession and had studied together at theSorbonne a decade after the First World War. They often conveyedthe impression of two cultured European socialists trapped in themurky maze of the Arab political bazaar, and to their great distaste,forced to haggle.27

If there have been a number of Baaths and many different kinds ofBaathists, there have been many different kinds of pan-Arab nation-alists. Vitalist, mystical and romantic notions of political identity andnationalism have played a role among pan-Arab nationalists, butthese have co-existed with positivist understandings (emphasisingshared culture and interests and subordinating, or altogether eschew-ing, any reference to shared biology), and elements from both strains,the vitalist-mystical-romantic and the positivist, as has been the casewith the nationalism of the so-called ‘civic’ nations (think of ‘manifestdestiny’ or of America as ‘mankind’s last best hope’), have sometimesintermingled. The well-known Egyptian pan-Arab nationalist Abdal-Rahman Azzam, who became the first Secretary-General of theArab League in 1945, argued for the Arabness of the Egyptianpeople on the basis of blood and spiritual ties and their participationin a humane ‘eternal mission’, but also on the basis of the economicand geopolitical needs of all Arabs, including strong economic blocsin the age of the cartel and trust.28

* * *

Arab nationalist governments have experienced failures and setbacksand even tragedies, but they also have many positive achievementsto their credit. The condition of the Syrian peasantry under Hafizal-Asad’s government can be taken as one example. ‘The diffusion ofeducation and trained agriculturalists in the countryside’, HannaBatatu wrote in 1999, ‘the spread of rural health centers and mobilemedical units, the marked rise in life expectancy, the faster and moredependable system of transport and communications, the increase inthe pace of peasant mobility, the electrification of more than 95% ofSyria’s villages, and the exemption of the agricultural classes fromthe income tax and, since 1992, from the profits tax and recentlyfrom the imposts on exported agricultural products – all thesefactors . . . contributed directly or indirectly to the enhancement ofthe life chances and the standard of living of a great number ofpeasants.’ 29

The example of the development of the Syrian peasantry under theBaath can be matched by many others, such as that of the development




of higher education for women in universities and other institutes inEgypt under Nasser and the successors who built upon his legacy.‘Women’s enrolment rose rapidly and at a much faster pace thanmen’s’, writes Leila Ahmad:

The ratio of males to females, which had stood at 13.2 to 1 in 1953–1954, was 8.1 to 1 in 1976. In 1953–1954 there were 6,121 womenattending universities and institutes of higher education, and by1962 this figure had risen to 19,762. By 1980 some 154,000 womenheld university degrees, and women degree-holders constituted aquarter of the university graduates in the nation. Women’s accessto education resulted in a radical change in the number of employedwomen and their pattern of employment. Women had formed 4 per-cent of the wage labour force in 1962, and the majority of those618,000 women had been illiterate rural workers engaged in agricul-tural work. By 1982 over 15 percent of Egyptian women, or onemillion people, were in formal employment outside the home, withthe majority concentrated in urban areas . . . The greatest proportionof them were found in professional, technical, and scientific fields,women holding 26 percent of such employment in the country.Teaching and health related work were the foremost growth occu-pations, and clerical work and the civil service also significantlyexpanded as fields of employment for women. But women penetratevirtually all professions, notably aeronautics, engineering, politics,agriculture, medicine, law, journalism, film, business, radio and tele-vision (radio and television being the ones in which women haveachieved notable prominence).30

It is true that neither the Baathist government in Syria, nor theNasserist government in Egypt, nor, for that matter, other Arabnationalist governments, were able to achieve significant lasting politi-cal and economic unity at the institutional inter-state level, but thisdoes not mean that they did not have important successes in the promo-tion of pan-Arabism. Staggering transformations have occurred inArab life over the past 200 years, including the decline of traditionalinstitutions such as guilds and clans, the creation of homogeneouslegal systems, the development of new aesthetic forms and norms, thecrafting of a modern form of Arabic, the evolution of new forms ofsubjectivity and the formation of a fairly cohesive, secular, pan-Arabintellectual and political culture.31 The Arab system has been comparedto a vast sound chamber in which information and ideas resonateacross state frontiers.32 The policies and institutions of the Arabnationalist states, particularly in the realm of culture and education,have contributed mightily to the development of such a chamber.

* * *




The ideas that I have subjected to criticism are now widely echoed in anarray of non-scholarly contexts relating to American policy. Formerdirector of the CIA James W. Woolsey, an important ally of the neo-conservatives who have played such a leading role in launching thewar against Iraq, regularly refers to Syria’s ‘fascism’.33 PresidentBush has lumped Syria’s leaders with Saddam Hussein, arguing thatthey have promised a restoration of ancient glories but have left ‘alegacy of torture, oppression, misery and ruin’,34 and New York Timescolumnist and public television commentator David Brooks tells usthat, if we wish to understand Saddam Hussein, we have to realisethat the founder of the Baath was – again, and always – ‘a fascist’.

Berman, Buruma, Margalit et al. do not necessarily share the samehawkish penchants, or at least not to the same degree. Berman has beenquite explicit in arguing that the war against Iraq was justifiable as awar against ‘fascism’,35 but Buruma appears to be rather skittishabout democratisation through military conquest. Nevertheless, andapart from whatever conscious intentions they may harbour, theirtreatment of pan-Arab nationalism is highly ideological and lendsfuel to the fire of the neo-conservatives and their liberal neo-imperialistallies. The effort to demonise serves several functions: it provides avulgar intellectual version of the Bush administration’s argumentthat ‘they hate us for who we are rather than for anything we havedone’, it conveys the impression that Arab hostility towards Zionismis grounded in racism and not in resistance to settler colonialism,and it lends support to the administration’s ‘Greater Middle EastInitiative’ which, under the guise of promoting democracy (taken tobe synonymous with neo-liberal structural adjustment programmes),seeks to devise new forms of economic and political control. Arabunity is inherently dangerous. A fragmented Arab world, reduced toprimordial but manageable identities (tribal, regional, religious andethnic), will be incorporated into a redesigned ‘multicultural’ sub-imperial system dominated by the United States and its principalnon-Arab satrapies Israel and Turkey.

Oded Yinon, an Israeli journalist and former official of the IsraeliForeign Ministry, provided an overview of the possibilities in areport produced for the World Zionist Organization in 1982. After pre-senting a summary of how Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, Libya and SaudiArabia could be broken up into separate religious, ethnic and regionalenclaves, he turned to Iraq as the piece de resistance:

Iraq, rich in oil on the one hand and internally torn on the other, isguaranteed as a candidate for Israel’s targets. Its dissolution is evenmore important for us than that of Syria. Iraq is stronger than Syria.In the short run it is Iraqi power which constitutes the greatest threatto Israel . . . In Iraq, a division into provinces along ethnic/religious




lines as in Syria during Ottoman times is possible. So three (or more)states will exist around the major cities: Basra, Baghdad and Mosul,and Shiite areas in the South will separate the Sunni and KurdishNorth.36

Although the scope and totalising nature of Yinon’s deconstructiveproposals might have seemed fantastic at the time, they neverthelessreflected a wider pattern of American/Israeli principles and practice:a fierce determination to prevent the emergence of a hegemonic Arabstate or group of states that would challenge the stranglehold of theUS over oil resources and Israel’s military superiority and monopolyof nuclear weapons, a preference for small, weak Arab political units,and the willingness to stimulate, and/or to support, various degrees ofseparatism (Kurdish in Iraq, Iran and Syria, Berber in North Africa,Christian in Lebanon, the southern Sudan and Palestine) in pursuitof such ends.37

The recent events in Iraq, however spectacular, must be understoodas embodiments of long-lived aspirations which were reinforced in the1990s with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the growth of Europeand China as threats to American world dominance. In 1996, a taskforce of American neo-conservatives drafted a paper, ‘A clean break:a new strategy for securing the realm [Israel]’ for the then Israeliprime minister Benjamin Netanyahu. ‘A clean break’, which declaredthat ‘whoever inherits Iraq dominates the entire Levant strategically’,advocated preventive action to remove Saddam Hussein from power,a ‘roll back’ of Syria (through strikes at selected targets in that countryand proxy attacks on Lebanon), the renunciation of Oslo, and thesearch for alternatives to Arafat. The task force that wrote the paperconsisted of Richard Perle, now a key Pentagon adviser and memberof the Defense Policy Board, David Wurmser, who worked for theJerusalem-based Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studieswhich commissioned the paper and who is currently a high-rankingmember of Cheney’s National Security Department, Douglas Feith,who is currently Under-Secretary of Defense for Policy, and MeyravWurmser, David’s wife, who currently heads the Middle East StudiesDepartment at the conservative Hudson Institute and who is a founderand member of the Middle East Media Research Institute, whichspecialises in translating negative views of the West from the Arabicpress.38

As envisioned by these and other architects of the American inva-sion and occupation, the neo-imperial Iraq of the future, and theArab world of which it is a part, would be de-centred. Arab societies,to use the words of Wurmser in a paper that he wrote after ‘A cleanbreak’, would be ‘reorganized’ according to ‘tribal/clan and familialalliances’;39 the Palestinian-Israeli conflict would be solved on Sharon’s




terms and through the permanent Bantustanisation of the occupiedterritories; the balance of power within the state system would beshifted to the north – to Israel, Turkey and an Iraq detached from itsneighbours and under permanent and direct American economic,political and military control (the US is currently building fourteen‘enduring bases’);40 Iraq’s economy would be almost completely priva-tised, it would become the world’s widest open market, a model oflaissez-faire economics, what the Economist called ‘a capitalistdream’;41 ethnic and religious minorities within Iraq and the Arabworld would be accorded rights as ethnic and religious entities, andin such a way as to inhibit or preclude Arab majorities from exercisingtheir right to self-determination as part of a larger Arab nation;42 and,if some form of broader framework were necessary to counter thethreat of radical Islamism or a truly integrative secular nationalism,the answer might be provided by ‘liberal Islam’, marinated in petrol-soaked or petrol-drenched capital, and accepting of permanent com-munal cleavages and a system of tiny and/or dependent Arab states.43

Hence, the Americans’ appointment of Ghazi al-Yawar, a sheikh of theShammar tribe (he was working as an obscure telecoms manager inSaudi Arabia when the US established contact with him a little beforethe invasion), to be President of Iraq, their efforts to bond with the‘quietist’ and ‘non-political’ Shiite cleric Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani,44 and their skilful machinations at the inter-state level overthe past year: getting the Tunisians to sabotage the attempt to holdthe Arab summit on time; weakening Kuwait’s traditional ties withthe Arab states and tempting it to opt out of the Arab system entirelyby offering it the status of a non-NATO ‘strategic ally’; using smallstates such as Qatar and Bahrain as partial ubstitutes for SaudiArabia; diminishing Egypt’s role and pressuring it from the souththrough efforts to divide the Sudan and renew the controversy overNile water; and increasing pressure on Damascus through the SyrianAccountability Act.45

The new Iraqi flag, designed by the Americans but now defunct(things have not always gone that well), provided the symbolism.Two blue stripes in the new flag symbolised the Tigris and Euphratesand the yellow between the two stripes symbolised the Kurds. A cres-cent, representative of Islam, was rendered in light blue, below thetwo stripes of the same colour. As Azmi Bishara notes, there are certaincolours associated with the Fertile Crescent and blue is not one of them.There is in fact only one state in the region that combines religion andethnicity and its flag is strikingly similar to the one that the Americansdesigned. This, however, is hardly the only offence. The flag is sup-posed to represent Iraq, but, as Bishara also points out, Iraq is morethan the Tigris, the Euphrates and the Kurds. The flag ‘transcendsreality, negates facts’, Bishara writes. The ‘Iraqis, Sunnis and Shias,




are largely Arab. They come from Arab clans, live in Arab cities. But itis the non-Arabism of Iraq that the flag chooses to highlight. Non-Arabism has a flag at last.’ 46

* * *

I will conclude with remarks about the scholarship of the demoniserswhose works I have treated. Given the availability of the Englishsources that I have drawn upon for this article, it is hard to believethat the ignorance of these authors is not self-willed. That Bermanshould rely so heavily on the Middle East historian Bernard Lewis isin itself depressing in its predictability. The most prominent Americanpublic and state intellectual on matters Arab and Islamic, Lewis hasplayed a significant role in all of the major crises (the 1973 war andoil embargo, the Iranian revolution of 1979, the Gulf War of 1991and now September 11) that have been seized upon to project theArabs and Islam as a threat to ‘western values’ and the world’s peaceand security, and one that must be countered largely through force.‘The outside experts on the Middle East who have the most credibilitywith the administration’, Nicholas Lehmann wrote in the New Yorker(1 April 2002), ‘seem to be Bernard Lewis of Princeton and Fuad Ajamiof the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, bothof whom see the Middle East as a region in need of radical remediation.Lewis was invited to the White House in December to brief the seniorforeign policy staff. One point he made is, ‘‘Look, in that part of theworld, nothing matters more than resolute will and force,’’ the seniorofficial I had lunch with told me – in other words, the United Statesneedn’t proceed gingerly for fear of inflaming the ‘‘Arab street’’ solong as it is prepared to be strong.’ 47

Although poll after poll reveals that the overwhelming majority ofArabs and Muslims admire American ‘democracy’, values and culture,but reject American policies,48 Lewis attributes the hostility of Arabsand Muslims to their traditional hatred of non-Muslims and/or tojealousy and failures for which they are solely responsible. ‘You can’tbe rich, strong, successful and loved, particularly by those who arenot rich, not strong and not successful’, he told a C-SPAN TV channelaudience just after the September 11 attacks. ‘So the hatred is some-thing almost axiomatic. The question we should be asking is why dothey neither fear nor respect us.’ Instilling respect and fear throughforce was therefore necessary for American security.49

It is clear that Cheney and his associates took Lewis’s lessons toheart, or at least that they seized upon them to lend their alreadyheld opinions an impressive ‘academic’ cachet. Speaking on NBC’sMeet the Press just before the attack upon Iraq, Cheney declared, ‘Ifirmly believe, along with men like Bernard Lewis, who is one of thegreat students of that part of the world, that strong, firm US response




to terror would go a long way, frankly, toward calming things in thatpart of the world’. As Peter Waldman wrote in the Wall Street Journalin February 2004, the ‘Lewis doctrine’ had, in effect, become USpolicy.50

The American corporate print and broadcast media has been no lessenthusiastic about Lewis than the government it usually serves. Lewisbecame a celebrity on American television and radio talk shows in thepost-September 11 period, and his best-selling What Went Wrong?The clash between Islam and modernity in the Middle East was ubiqui-tous in American bookshops. In an interview with Al-Ahram Weeklyin July 2002, Karen Armstrong, author of the best-selling The Historyof God: from Abraham to the Prophet Muhammad and a biography ofthe Prophet Muhammad, complained that the New Yorker hadcommissioned her to write an article on Islam, but that the piece waskilled and the magazine published one by Lewis instead. ‘They thoughtI am an apologist for Muslims’, she explained, ‘because my article wasabout the Prophet as a peace-maker, and this did not suit their agendaas much as Lewis’s did. Both Lewis and Kramer [Martin Kramer,head of the pro-Israeli Near and Middle East Studies Institute inWashington] are staunch Zionists who write from a position of extremebias. But people need to know that Islam is a universal religion, andthat there is nothing aggressively Oriental or anti-Western about it.Lewis’s line, on the other hand, is that Islam is an inherently violentreligion.’ 51

Lewis’s treatment of pan-Arab nationalism tends to be as hostile andreductionist as his treatment of Islam and contemporary Islamism. Onelooks in vain for an analysis of internal dynamics or a sense of thediversity, pluralism and achievements to which I refer. There is, natu-rally, a reference to Sami al-Jundi’s contention that he and other pan-Arabists of the late 1930s and early 1940s were ‘racists’ (duly reproducedby Berman) and that he had to borrow a copy of a French abridgementof Rosenberg’s TheMyth of the Twentieth Century fromMichel Aflaq’spersonal library after he was unable to find a copy in Damascus’s book-shops, but there is no mention of the resounding denunciations ofNazism and racism by Sheikh al-Alayali or Aflaq himself or by manyother pan-Arab nationalists of far greater importance than al-Jundi.52

‘The two dominant movements in the 20th century’, Lewis writesin one of the several condemnations in What Went Wrong?, ‘weresocialism and nationalism. Both have been discredited, the first by itsfailure, the second by its success and consequent exposure as ineffec-tive. The overwhelming majority of Muslims now live in independentstates, which have brought no new solutions to their problems. Thebastard offspring of both ideologies, national socialism, still survivesin a few states.’ 53




As in the case of the New Yorker editors, Berman draws upon Lewisto confirm what he wants to believe. He and a score of others are hostileto the idea of Arab unity, and they are determined to think the worst. Ifthe dog is to be put down, it must first be declared mad.

References

1 Paul Berman, Terror and Liberalism (New York, 2003); and Ian Buruma andAvishai Margalit, Occidentalism: the West in the eyes of its enemies (New York,2004). For examples of respectful and favourable responses, see Philip Bobbitt’sreview of Buruma and Margalit in the New York Times Book Review (4 April2004) and George Scialabba’s review of Berman in the Nation (28 April 2003).Bobbitt speaks of Occidentalism as a ‘fine book’, even if its central argument needs‘further development’. Given the ignorance displayed in both of these works,Scialabba’s comment that ‘even a non-historian will find a lot to quibble with’ isalso remarkably generous.

2 Buruma and Margalit, op. cit., pp. 145–6.3 Ian Buruma, ‘Revolution from above’, New York Review of Books (Vol. 50, no. 7,

May 2003).4 Lawrence Freedman, ‘A legacy of failure in the Arab world’, Financial Times

(26 January 2004).5 For a discussion of Acton and Kohn, see Youssef M. Choueiri, Arab Nationalism:

a history (Oxford, 2000), pp. 1–14.6 This summary of Kedourie is based on Choueiri, ibid., pp. 6–8.7 Elie Kedourie, ‘Pan-Arabism and British policy’, in his Chatham House Version and

other Middle Eastern Essays (London, 1970), p. 218.8 See, for example, Efraim and Inari Karsh, Empires of the Sand: the struggle for

mastery in the Middle East, 1789–1923 (Cambridge, MA, 1999); and MartinKramer, Arab Awakening and Islamic Revival (New Brunswick, NJ, 1996).

9 See Ellen Meiksens Wood, Democracy against Capitalism: reviewing historicalmaterialism (Cambridge, 1995).

10 See Barnard Yack, ‘The myth of the civic nation’, Critical Review (Vol. 10, no. 2,1996), p. 208.

11 Edward S. Herman, ‘The cruise missile left, part three’, Z Magazine (July/August2003), p. 59.

12 See Hisham Sharabi, Arab Intellectuals and the West: the formative years, 1875–1914(Baltimore, MD, 1970), pp. 87–128.

13 Ibid., p. 96.14 See Tarek Y. Ismael, The Arab Left (Syracuse, NY, 1976), pp. 3–6.15 Cited in Choueiri, op. cit., p. 130.16 Cited in Omayma Abdel-Latif, ‘Is Baathism dead?’, Al Ahram Weekly (22 April

2004).17 Choueiri, op. cit., p. 215.18 Ibid., p. 217.19 See William L. Cleveland, The Making of an Arab Nationalist: Ottomanism and

Arabism in the life and thought of Sati al-Husri (Princeton, NJ, 1971), pp. 103–4.20 Ibid., pp. 105–6.21 Choueiri, op. cit., p. 116.22 Cited in ibid., p. 135.23 Michel Aflaq, For the Sake of the Baath (Beirut, 1959), translated from the Arabic,

as excerpted and edited by Kemal Karpat in Political and Social Thought in the Con-temporary Middle East (New York), cited in Marvin E. Gettleman and StuartSchaar, The Middle East and Islamic World Reader (New York, 2003), pp. 133–5.




24 Cited in Hanna Batatu, The Old Social Classes and the Revolutionary Movements ofIraq (Princeton, NJ, 1978), p. 724.

25 Hanna Batatu, Syria’s Peasantry: the descendants of its lesser rural notables, andtheir politics (Princeton, NJ, 1999), p. 133. The Baathist execution of members ofthe Communist Party during the 1963 anti-Qassim coup in Iraq cannot be laid atAflaq’s door. Comrade Hamdi (Hamdi Abd al-Maji, a member of the pan-Araband Baath Command), Aflaq told the Extraordinary Session of the Syrian Baathin 1964, ‘is aware that I constantly warned against a policy of bloodshed and torturewhomsoever might be its victims, for our differences with the Communists cannotpossibly justify such means. The revolution had in its first months a legitimateright to defend itself against those who opposed it by force of arms but afterwardswhen no month or weeks passed without our hearing or reading of the execution oftens of men, I told Comrade Hamdi that this course brought great harm.’ SeeBatatu, The Old Social Classes, op. cit., pp. 990–1.

26 Batatu, Syria’s Peasantry, op. cit., p. 133.27 Tariq Ali, Bush in Babylon: the recolonisation of Iraq (London, 2003), p. 104.

I should also here mention that Aflaq and Bitar always favoured some form ofcollective leadership for the party and attacked Nasser for encouraging a personalitycult. See Norma Salem-Babikian, ‘Michel Aflaq: a biographic outline’, Arab StudiesQuarterly (Vol. 2, no. 2, spring 1980).

28 See Ralph M. Coury, The Making of an Egyptian Arab Nationalist: the early years ofAzzam Pasha, 1893–1936 (Reading, 1998).

29 Batatu, Syria’s Peasantry, op. cit., p. 328.30 Leila Ahmad, Women and Gender in Islam: historical roots of a modern debate (New

Haven, CT, 1992), pp. 210–11.31 See Aziz al-Azmeh, ‘Nationalism and the Arabs’, Arab Studies Quarterly (Vol. 17,

nos 1–2, 1995), passim.32 See Paul Noble, ‘The Arab system: pressures, constraints, and opportunities’, in

Bahgat Korany et al., The Foreign Policies of Arab States (Boulder, CO, 1991).33 Cited in Arnaud de Borchgrave, ‘Commentary: World War IV’, (25 September

2002), at <http://www.upi.com/view>.34 New York Times (7 November 2003).35 Paul Berman, ‘Will the opposition lead?’, New York Times (15 April 2004). Edward

S. Herman provides a succinct explanation of Berman’s appeal: ‘Berman’s Terrorand Liberalism has done extremely well in the ‘‘free’’ press, with numerous, mostflattering, reviews and Berman invited to give his views in the New York Timesand on national TV. He is the kind of ‘‘leftist’’ that the imperial establishmentwants to encourage, who attacks the real Left for its failure to commit to the crusadeagainst terror and totalitarianism – as defined by the imperial establishment – andignores or gives support to the approved terror, which is called counter-terror,retaliation, and response. His work . . . lapses on close inspection on any topicthat he addresses, but that is irrelevant where the ideology, premises, and messageare congenial and lend support to on-going policy.’ A prime example is offeredby Berman’s extensive treatment of the Islamist Sayyid Qutb (d. 1966), whomBerman sees as an inspiration to bin Laden. As Hamid Algar, who has translatedseveral of Qutb’s works, noted: ‘Nowhere in Qutb’s writings can one find a parallelto Al-Qaeda’s advocacy of mass slaughter. Conversely, Osama bin Laden’s state-ments show not a trace of Qutb’s distinctive philosophy. Berman’s article exempli-fies the tendency to conflate into a malevolent blur all Muslims regarded astroublesome.’ Algar’s remarks are from a letter that he wrote in response to anarticle based on Terror and Liberalism which Berman published in the New YorkTimes Magazine (23 March 2003). See Herman, op. cit., p. 60.

36 See ‘A strategy for Israel in the 1980s’, translated and edited by Israel Shahak in TheZionist Plan for the Middle East (Belmont, MA, 1982), pp. 8–11. Yinon’s piece




originally appeared in Hebrew in Kivunim (Directions) (No. 14, February 1982). Thejournal was published by the Department of Publicity of the World Zionist Organi-zation in Jerusalem.

37 For the history of American/Israeli efforts to crush and/or subvert Middle Easternor other Third World states and movements of which they disapproved, eitherthrough a strategy of divide and rule or otherwise, see Binjamin Beit-Hallahmi,The Israeli Connection: who Israel arms and why (New York, 1987). Such effortsremain unabated on the part of the American and Israeli governments and theAmerican Zionist lobby and its allies on the Christian right. A law passed by theUS Congress allowing the American government to place penalties on foreigngovernments that do not guarantee religious freedom is illustrative. For its implica-tions, see Bashir Musa Nafi, ‘Nizam jaded li al-alaqat al-duwaliyya aw imbiriyaliyyabi wajh mubtakar?’ (A new order for international relations or imperialism with anew face?), al-Quds al-Arabi (26 May 1999); and Bruno Fouchereau, ‘Au nom dela liberte religieuse: les sects cheval de Troie des Etats-Unis en Europe’, LeMonde Diplomatique (Vol. 48, no. 566, 2001), pp. 1 and 26. For an example ofhow a bogus concern for religious freedom and equality manifests itself throughthe activities of the Zionist lobby in the American Congress, see Simona Shapiro,‘Pro-Israel groups focus on Christians under PA rule’, Forward (25 July 2003).For an example of more direct, hands-on deconstruction, consider the currentrole of Israeli agents in the Kurdish areas of Iraq, Syria and Iran. See SeymourHersh, Chain of Command: the road from 9/11 to Abu Ghraib (New York, 2004),pp. 351–60. Israeli commandos and agents are, of course, also working closelywith the Americans in non-Kurdish Iraq. According to Hersh, the Israelis are par-ticularly valued for their expertise in ‘targeted killings’, the ‘core lesson’ that theyprovide in their ‘tutorial’ in counter-insurgency.

38 For information on ‘A clean break’ and its authors, see Mark Perelman, ‘Cheneytaps Syria hawk [Wurmser] as advisor on Mideast’, Forward (25 July 2003).

39 Cited in Jim Loeb, ‘Democracy and the neocons: a marriage of convenience’, DailyStar, Beirut (21 July 2004). For the US’s support for tribal sheikhs and tribal struc-tures in the post-invasion period, see Patrice Claude, ‘Washington puts trust inIraq’s tribal system’, Guardian Weekly (17 September 2004).

40 The pre-invasion popularity of Ahmad Chalabi (leader of the Iraqi National Con-gress and member of the Iraqi Interim Governing Council) within American andIsraeli/Zionist elite circles stemmed, in part, from his willingness to speak openlyand enthusiastically about splitting Iraq off from the Arab world and makingpeace with Israel. See Amr Shalakany, ‘Welcome to the future’, Al-Ahram Weekly(21–7 August 2003); and Ori Nir, ‘Iraqi dissidents pledge peace with Israel: Perleboosts exiles as leaders of a post-Saddam regime’, Forward (11 October 2002).

41 See Naomi Klein, ‘Baghdad year zero: pillaging Iraq in pursuit of a neocon utopia’,Harpers (Vol. 309, no. 1832, September 2004), pp. 43–53.

42 Kanan Makiya, the head of the constitutional committee of the Iraqi National Con-gress and another pre-invasion darling of the American/Israeli/Zionist champions ofwar, told a gathering of the American Enterprise Institute in October 2002 that post-Saddam Iraq would be ‘non-ethnic’ and ‘federal’, which, it is clear, meant that itwould be non-Arab. See Ori Nir, op. cit. The de-Arabisation of Iraq is, to besure, part of a larger process. When Egypt, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Turkeyand Iran met in Istanbul in January 2003 to discuss the Iraqi crisis, the US madeit clear that it did not want the Secretary-General of the Arab League to attend.‘Americans . . . are . . . opposed to the Arab League since they want Arabs tostop thinking in the ‘‘Arab’’ mindset and to start thinking in the ‘‘region’’ mindset’,an Arab diplomat commented. See Dina Ezzat, ‘From Arabism to regionalism’,Al-Ahram Weekly (23–9 January 2003).




43 Intense intellectual efforts are being made in the Islamic world to disassociate Islamfrom utopian and revolutionary claims, to construe a cultural Islam in which freemarkets, media interlinks, civil rights defined in bourgeois terms, and the rule oflaw and ‘civil society’ are institutionalised. See Bernard Schulze, A Modern Historyof the Islamic World (New York, 2000), pp. 281–92. American willingness to makepeace with ‘Islamic liberalism’ was tellingly reflected in the appointment of NoahFeldman, a politically unknown professor of law at NYU, to advise the Iraqis onthe writing of their new Constitution. Feldman is the author of After Jihad: Americaand the struggle for Islamic democracy, which argues that religion and democracy donot have to be separated in Islamic societies. Democracy does, however, have to bein accord with what the US wants, as indicated by Feldman’s recommending (inNovember 2003) that Iraqi elections be postponed because ‘the wrong peoplecould get elected’. See Michael Alexander, ‘Separation of mosque and state? Notnecessarily says one scholar’, Forward (20 June 2003) and the New York Times(29 November 2003). Samir Farid summarised American hopes in July 2004:‘Under the Greater Middle East scheme, the US seems keen on creating moderateIslamic governments styled after the Turkish model.’ See Samir Farid, ‘RedefiningArabism’, Al-Ahram Weekly (8–14 July 2004).

44 For al-Yawar and the collaborationist regime of which he is a part, see SusanWatkins, ‘Vichy on the Tigris’, New Left Review (No. 28, July/August 2004),pp. 5–17.

45 See Hassan Nafaa, ‘Taking stock’, Al-Ahram Weekly (8–14 April 2004); and RoulaKhalaf, ‘Arab minnows evade slipstream of their mightier neighbours: US linkshave given smaller states confidence to assert themselves’, Financial Times (5 April2004).

46 Azmi Bishara, ‘Flagging symbols’, Al-Ahram Weekly (4 May 2004).47 Nicholas Lehmann, ‘The next world order: the Bush administration may have a

brand new dream of power’, New Yorker (1 April 2002), p. 11.48 See, for example, International Herald Tribune (8 October 2002).49 Cited by Peter Waldman, ‘Containing jihad: a historian’s take on Islam steers US in

terrorism fight’, Wall Street Journal (4 February 2004).50 Ibid.51 Omayma Abdel-Latif, ‘The feel of religion’, an interview with Karen Armstrong,

Al-Ahram Weekly (4–10 July 2002). Lewis became politically involved with Israelin the 1970s when Golda Meir invited him to discuss an article that he had writtenfor the American Jewish Committee’s Commentary in which he argued that Palesti-nian Arabs didn’t have a historical claim to a state because Palestine hadn’t existedas a country prior to British rule in 1918. Lewis went on to spend months at a timeat the Dayan Center of Tel Aviv University in the 1980s and became the confidantof a succession of Israeli prime ministers, including Ariel Sharon. Amnon Cohen ofHebrew University, who worked for the West Bank military government, organisesan annual conference at the university in honour of his birthday. The AmericanUnder-Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz participated by video conference in2002. ‘Bernard has taught how to understand the complex and important historyof the Middle East’, said Wolfowitz, ‘to use it to guide us where we will go next tobuild a better world for generations to come.’ See Waldman, op. cit. Lewis’s Zionistcredentials may have had special resonance for the New Yorker as it is currentlyconstituted. In citing David Remnick, the magazine’s editor, as one of the fiftyJews who had exercised the most influence on American Jewish life in 2002, Forwardwrote, ‘For a magazine published in the capital of American Jewish life, The NewYorker traditionally felt more like a lobster salad than a pastrami sandwich. Butunder David Remnick, its fifth editor since 1925, the magazine has taken on a dis-tinctly Jewish voice for the first time. Its editorials urge Middle East peace butunabashedly insist on Israel’s need for security and the right to defend itself. In the




feature well, former Forward staffer Jeffrey Goldberg’s reports have been shaping thenational conversation on combating terrorism.’ See ‘The Forward fifty’, Forward(5 November 2002).

52 See Berman, op. cit., p. 55; and Bernard Lewis, Semites and Anti-Semites: an inquiryinto conflict and prejudice (New York, 1986), pp. 147–8.

53 Bernard Lewis, What Went Wrong? The clash between Islam and modernity in theMiddle East (New York, 2003), p. 158.


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