Arab Awakening and Islamic Revival the Politics of Ideas in the Middle East

ARAB AWAKENING AND ISLAMIC REVIVAL The Politics of Ideas in the Middle East Martin Kramer Transaction Publishers New Brunswick (U.S.A.) and London (U.K.) Second paperback printing 2009 Copyright © 1996 by Transaction Publishers, New Brunswick, New Jersey 08903. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. All inquiries should be addressed to Transaction Publishers, Rutgers—The State University of New Jersey, 35 Berrue Circle, Piscataway, New Jersey 08854-8042. www.transactionpub.com This book is printed on acid-free paper that meets the American National Standard for Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials. Library of Congress Catalog Number: 96-18312 ISBN: 978-1-56000-272-7 (cloth); 978-1-4128-0767-8 (paper) Printed in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Kramer, Martin S. Arab awakening and Islamic revival : the politics of ideas in the Middle East / Martin Kramer. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index. ISBN 1-5600-272-7 (alk. paper) 1. Nationalism—Arab countries—History. 2. Islam—20th century. 3. Middle East—History—20th century. I. Title. DS63.6.K73 1996 320.5'4'09174924—dc20 96-183123 CIP To Bernard Lewis master, mentor, mensch Contents Acknowledgments vii Introduction 1 Part I: Arabism and Friends 1. Arab Nationalism: Mistaken Identity 19 2. Arab Pen, English Purse: John Sabunji and Wilfrid Scawen Blunt 53 3. Arabistik and Arabism: The Passions of Martin Hartmann 63 4. The Sharifian Propaganda of Eugène Jung 87 5. The Arab Nation of Shakib Arslan 103 6. Ambition, Arabism, and George Antonius 111 7. Prisoner of Love: Jean Genet and Palestine 125 8. America’s Arabists 133 Part II: Islamism and the West 9. “Islam is the Power of the Future” 141 10. Khomeini’s Messengers in Mecca 161 11. Syria’s Alawis and Shi‘ism 189 12. Hizbullah: The Calculus of Jihad 209 13. Sacrifice and “Self-Martyrdom” in Shi‘ite Lebanon 231 14. France Held Hostage 245 15. Islam and the West (including Manhattan) 255 16. Islam vs. Democracy 265 Conclusion 279 Index 287 Acknowledgments vii Acknowledgments This volume brings together sixteen separate but closely related studies, bound together by an introduction and conclusion. Chapter 9 is a new study; all other studies have been previously published, and are reprinted here by permission. Chapter 1 appeared in 1993 in Dædalus, a journal published by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, in the issue entitled “Reconstructing Nations and States.” Chapter 2 appeared in The Islamic World From Classical to Modern Times: Essays in Honor of Ber- nard Lewis, edited by C. E. Bosworth and others, and published by Darwin Press in 1989. Chapter 3 is a revised version of an article published by Middle Eastern Studies, a Frank Cass journal, in 1989. Chapter 4 appeared in The Hashemites in the Modern Arab World: A Festschrift in Honour of the late Uriel Dann, edited by Asher Susser and Aryeh Shmuelevitz and published by Frank Cass in 1995. Middle Eastern Studies published chapter 5 in 1987, and chapter 6 formed a part of The Great Powers and the Middle East, 1919–1939, edited by Uriel Dann and published by Hol- mes and Meier in 1988. Commentary published chapters 7 and 8 in 1994. Chapter 10 is an updated version of an article that appeared in Religious Radicalism and Politics in the Middle East edited by Emmanuel Sivan and Menahem Friedman and published by the State University of New York Press in 1990. Chapter 11 originally appeared in Shi‘ism, Resistance, and Revolution, a collection edited by myself and published by Westview Press in 1987. Chapter 12 originally appeared in Fundamentalisms and the State: Remaking Polities, Economies, and Militance, edited by Martin Marty and R. Scott Appleby and published by the University of Chicago Press in 1993. Chapter 13, published here in a slightly abbreviated form, appeared in Violence and the Sacred in the Modern World, edited by Mark Juergensmeyer and published by Frank Cass in 1992. Terrorism and Po- litical Violence, a Frank Cass journal, published chapter 14 in 1990, and Commentary published chapters 15 and 16 in 1993. I am grateful to the publishers of the above for their kind permission to reprint. I wrote nearly all of these studies at Tel Aviv University’s Moshe Dayan Center for Middle Eastern and African Studies, which I now direct. I am vii viii Arab Awakening and Islamic Revival indebted to the two past directors, Itamar Rabinovich and Asher Susser, for opening wide space for thinking, research, and writing. I owe another debt to Martin Indyk and Robert Satloff, the previous and present directors of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, who encouraged my broader inquiries into the nature of Islamism. I gratefully acknowledge Irving Louis Horowitz of Transaction Publishers, whose suggestions helped to give this book its final form. My gratitude goes also to my parents, Anita and Alvin Kramer, in whose wooded retreat I prepared this book for publication. Fi- nally, I embrace in thanks my wife Sandra and our children, who stoically bore my long absences as I pursued leads wherever they led. Introduction Introduction For the Middle East, the old appellation of the Ottoman Empire—the “sick man”—still seems apt. The social and political order in the Middle East seems as afflicted today as it appeared to observers a century ago, and many of the symptoms have not changed. Paul Kennedy, author of Preparing for the Twenty-First Century, has provided the kind of trenchant summation perhaps only a complete outsider can dare to offer: Far from preparing for the twenty-first century, much of the Arab and Muslim world appears to have difficulty in coming to terms with the nineteenth century, with its composite legacy of secularization, democracy, laissez-faire economics, transnational industrial and commercial linkages, social change, and intellectual questioning. If one needed an example of the importance of cultural attitudes in explaining a society’s response to change, contemporary Islam provides it.1 Some historians and political scientists of the Middle East would recoil at this hint of cultural determinism, and most Arabs and Muslims would blame colonialism instead. But the Arab and Muslim world’s “difficulty in coming to terms” is undeniable. This book is a critical assessment of two attempts to overcome that difficulty: Arab nationalism (or Arabism) and Islamic fundamentalism (or Islamism). Believers in each have tried to remake the modern Middle East into a seat of power and prosperity. So far they have failed, in many instances producing even more serious complications. While Arab nationalism seems finally to have been abandoned, Islamic fundamentalism remains the most widespread alternative to the resolute pragmatism of the “new Middle East.” Whether it will prevail is one of the great preoccupa- tions of our own fin-de-siècle. But this is not a future study. It is a book about modern history and contemporary politics, looking back over a troubled Arab century and a difficult Islamic decade. Like Europe, the Middle East has been buffeted by ideologies. Admittedly, their effects have not been as devastating in the Middle East; Europe paid for its nationalism with two terrible world wars, and then paid again for its communism with over forty years of threat and Arab Awakening and Islamic Revival division. Ideology in Europe has had a greater capacity for destruction than ideology in the Middle East. Yet if the failings of the Arab “awakening” and the Islamic “revival” seem smaller in comparison, this is largely thanks to restraints imposed by the West. It is usually argued that the oil extracted by foreigners, the military interventions made by foreigners, and the aid granted by foreigners have combined to make the Middle East dependent. But they may have also restrained a pursuit of utopias that could have pushed the Middle East over the edge long ago, into famines, gulags, and civil wars. As it is, parts of the region have been gutted or “cleansed” in the name of the Arab nation or Islam, from Kurdistan to Kuwait, from Lebanon to Sudan. This is necessarily a book about illusion and disillusion, but even more, it is a series of studies in contradictions that finally became unsustainable. Arabism and Islamism purported to be authentic and original creations of Arabs and Muslims, but both owed much to foreign influences, romantic and radical. Both pretended to be liberating and unifying ideals, but their practice often produced oppression and division. Most of these contradictions have ended in a shattering of dreams, and sometimes of bodies. Each chapter picks up some discarded scrap of paper or shard of glass, and asks how the hope it represented came to nought. The structure of this book is straightforward. An integrative chapter opens each of the book’s two parts—one devoted to Arabism and the other to Islamism. Each integrative chapter is followed by seven more chapters on the particular origins or actual effects of Arabism or Islamism, in various times and places. This is not a seamless book of running narrative; its chapters are puzzle pieces, interlocking but separate. They can be assembled in more than one order, although the order suggested here seems the most logical to their author. The first part, on Arabism, revolves largely around personalities; the second, on Islamism, is structured around movements and events. The emphasis could easily have been reversed, but the sum would have been the same.

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