Unfamiliar questions in the Arab air

OF ALL the films to extol the fight for freedom from imperialism, one of the most cheering to Arab hearts is the rousing 1981 epic, “Lion of the Desert”. A richly bearded Anthony Quinn plays the role of Omar Mukhtar, the simple Koran teacher who became a guerrilla hero, and for 20 years, from 1911-31, harassed the Italian forces bent on subduing Libya. In one memorable scene his Bedouin warriors, armed only with old rifles, hobble their own feet to ensure martyrdom as Mussolini's tanks roll inexorably towards them.

Such imagery, mixed with big doses of schoolbook nationalism and more recent real-life pictures of stone-throwing children facing Israeli guns, has bolstered a common Arab perception of “resistance” as an act that is just and noble. The romanticism is understandable, and not much different from how, say, the French view their own underground in the second world war. Yet the morphing in recent years of resistance into terrorism, and the confusion in Iraq, where a humiliating foreign occupation also brought liberation from Baathist tyranny, has increasingly called this iconography into question.

The undermining of entrenched myths is a slow and halting process. But it is subject to sudden, shattering jolts, such as the November 9th suicide bombing of three hotels in the Jordanian capital, Amman. In the minds of the killers, American-allied Jordan had become a rear base for the “crusader” invaders of Iraq, and so its hotels, the sort of places where crusaders and their minions congregate, were legitimate targets for the resistance.

Yet it is perhaps more than incidentally ironic that among the 60 people they killed was Mustapha Akkad, the Syrian-born director who created “Lion of the Desert”. His film, glorifying the bravery of Muslim resistance fighters, happened to be one of the few productions explicitly endorsed on jihadist websites, albeit in a version that replaced the musical soundtrack with religious chants, and cut out all scenes showing women.

The global al-Qaeda franchise, whose Iraqi branch claimed responsibility for the Amman atrocity, has scored many own-goals over the years. The carnage in such Muslim cities as Istanbul, Casablanca, Sharm el-Sheikh and Riyadh has alienated the very Muslim masses the jihadists claim to be serving. By bringing home the human cost of such violence, they have even stripped away the shameful complacency with which the Sunni Muslim majority in other Arab countries has tended to regard attacks by Iraq's Sunni insurgent “heroes” against “collaborationist” Shia mosque congregations, funeral processions and police stations.

In Amman, al-Qaeda's victims included not only Mr Akkad and his daughter Rima, a mother of two, but also dozens of guests at a Palestinian wedding. The slaughter of so many innocents, nearly all of them Sunni Muslims, in the heart of a peaceful Arab capital, inspired a region-wide wave of revulsion. Far from being perceived now as a sort of Muslim Braveheart, the man who planned the attack, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, may be the most reviled person in Jordan, the country of his birth. His own tribe, which had previously taken some pride in its association with the Iraqi resistance, has publicly disowned him. Tens of thousands of Jordanians have taken to the streets of Amman to denounce terrorism. Opinion polls, which had previously shown Jordanians to be at best ambivalent about jihadist violence, now show overwhelming distaste for it (see tables).

Similar changes in attitude have overtaken other Arab societies. Some 150,000 Moroccans marched in Casablanca earlier this month to protest against al-Qaeda's threat to kill two junior Moroccan diplomats kidnapped on the road to Baghdad. The execution by Mr Zarqawi's men of two Algerian diplomats and the Egyptian chargé d'affaires in Iraq earlier this year aroused similar indignation in their home countries. Two years of bloody jihadist attacks in Saudi Arabia have rudely shaken the once-considerable sympathy for radical Islamism in the conservative kingdom. A top Saudi security source reckons that 80% of the country's success in staunching violence is due to such shifts in public feeling, and only 20% to police work.

The direct impact of tragedy has not been the only impetus for change. Arab governments used to treat local terrorism as something that dented their prestige and should be covered up. Now they eagerly exploit the images of suffering to justify their policies. The way such events are reported in the press no longer hints at a reflexive blaming of external forces. The Arab commentariat, much of which had promoted sympathy with the Iraqi insurgency, and focused on perceived western hostility to Islam as the cause of global jihadism, has grown vocal in condemning violence. Jihad al-Khazen, the editor of al-Hayat, a highbrow Saudi daily, is a frequent and mordant critic of western policy. Yet his response to the Amman tragedy was an unequivocal call for global co-operation to combat what he blasted as the enemies of life, of joy, and of the light of day.

Popular culture, too, has begun to reflect such shifts in attitude. Recently, during the peak television season of Ramadan, satellite channels watched by millions across the region broadcast several serials dramatising the human toll of jihadist violence. One of these contrasted the lives of ordinary Arab families, living in a housing compound in Riyadh, with a cartoonish view of the terrorists who eventually attack them. Another serial focused, with eerie foresight, on a group of jihadist assassins in Amman. Their plot to murder a television producer who is critical of their methods goes awry, killing three children instead. Unusually for an Arabic-language serial, even the villains are presented as conflicted souls, alienated from society and misled by dreams of glory and heavenly reward.

Religious leaders have chipped in. Moderate Muslim clerics have grown increasingly concerned at the abuse of religion to justify killing. In Saudi Arabia, numerous preachers once famed for their fighting words now advise tolerance and restraint. Even so rigid a defender of suicide attacks against Israel (on the grounds that all of Israeli society is militarised) as Yusuf Qaradawi, the star preacher of the popular al-Jazeera satellite channel, denounces bombings elsewhere and calls on the perpetrators to repent.

In Jordan, Mr Zarqawi's former cell-mate and mentor, Sheikh Abu Muhammad al-Maqdisi, long a firebrand proponent of widening holy war, has publicly given warning that excesses in Iraq have “defiled the image” of jihad. Another mentor, al-Qaeda's overall second-in-command, Ayman al-Zawahiri, is believed to have written a letter of advice to Mr Zarqawi that suggests he should desist from such provocatively grisly acts as sawing off captives' heads when a simple bullet would do.

Noteworthy in all these subtle shifts is the fact that they are, by and large, internally generated. Few of them have come about as a result of prodding or policy initiatives from the West. On the contrary, the intrusion of foreign armies into Iraq, the consequent ugly spectacle of civilian casualties and torture, and the continuing agony of Palestine, have clearly slowed down the Arab public's response to the dangers posed by jihadism.

Now, or so it seems, it is the cooling of the Palestinian intifada, a slight lowering of the volume of imagery featuring ugly Americans in Iraq, and a general weariness with jihadist hysteria that have allowed attention to refocus on the costs, rather than the hoped-for rewards, of “resistance”. At the same time, the rising tide of American domestic opposition to the war has begun to reassure deeply sceptical Arabs that the superpower may not, after all, be keen to linger on Arab soil for ever.

Is a shift in attitudes on the fabled Arab street important? The answer is, very much so. It surely affects, for example, the scale of private funding directed to the Iraqi insurgents. The volume of those very secret sums is impossible to determine, though the enthusiasm among, say, rich and conservative Sunni Saudis for thwarting both an infidel superpower and the perceived influence of Shia Iran in Iraq must be pretty strong. Even a trickle of cash translates quite directly into damage. And if it can be assumed that for each of the 700-2,000 foreign fighters in Iraq (the current estimate of the Brookings Institution), there are many others who prefer to play jihad with their cheque books, there has been much more than a trickle.

A more tangible measure of change is the behaviour of Arab states. Undemocratic though they may be, shaky Arab governments in many cases owe their baseline legitimacy to their own historical record of perceived resistance to foreign hegemony. The deeply unpopular invasion of Iraq placed them in a quandary. Any gesture towards aiding the success of this “American project” risked a fierce popular backlash. That equation has now altered, and the results are already evident.

The two Arab heavyweights, Egypt and Saudi Arabia, have lately begun to lend their diplomatic clout to resolving Iraq's troubles. The sudden urgency to do something, after years of fence-sitting, is prompted by several fears. One of these, seemingly justified by the Amman bombing, is that Iraq has turned from being a sponge for jihadist violence into a fountainhead that threatens the region.

Another is that Iraq's Sunni minority, by backing the insurgents, has isolated itself and paved the way for Iran, whose government is now in the hands of revolutionary Shia radicals, to expand its influence. Since the Iraqi elections scheduled for December 15th will create, for the first time, not an interim government but one with a four-year term, it has dawned on many fellow Sunni Arabs that Iraq's Sunnis must stake a role in their country's future or face further marginalisation.

Egyptian and Saudi efforts bore first fruits at a conference held in Cairo this week in a bid to reconcile Iraqi factions. The decisions reached were neither binding nor dramatic, and the whole event was pitched as preliminary to a broader meeting to be held in three months' time. Even so, the gathering of some 100 politicians of different stripes marked a big step in the crucial process of coaxing Sunnis back into the political game. The hosting of the event by the Arab League, an organisation that had previously kept aloof from Iraq's troubles, encouraged groups such as the Muslim Scholars' Association, which contests the legitimacy of Iraq's Shia-dominated government and has so far boycotted the political process, to join in. Although neither senior Baathists nor active leaders of the insurgency were present, several of the Sunni delegates are known to be close to these factions.

Iraq's president, Jalal Talabani, who is a pro-American Kurd, set the tone by saying that he would personally be happy to meet with active fighters in the resistance. Further gestures to appease the Sunnis came in the final communiqué, which asserted the right of “all peoples” to resist occupation, and called for a timetable for the withdrawal of foreign troops. Significantly, these clauses had been watered down, after heated debate with Sunni leaders who initially insisted on a direct endorsement of resistance action “against occupation forces”. The resolution also expressly declared that terrorism cannot be considered a form of resistance, and appeased Shia feelings further by rejecting the Sunni jihadists' contention that Shi'ism is a heretical sect.

Obviously, the vague wording over the key issue of “resistance” is open to interpretation. Shia parties, such as the Islamist-oriented United Iraqi Alliance, led by Iraq's prime minister, Ibrahim al-Jaafari, have long insisted that they are engaged in “political resistance”; the fastest way to end the occupation, they argue, is to achieve the security that will enable the troops to leave.

For their part, pro-resistance Sunni parties contend that they, too, have been subject to terrorism. They point to incidents such as the recent exposure, by American forces, of a secret jail, run by the Shia-controlled police, where hundreds of Sunni captives were mistreated. Attacks on foreign soldiers remain legitimate in their eyes. As for political resistance, a senior member of the Muslim Scholars' Association, Abd al-Salam al-Kubaisi, acidly remarked that its strongest proponents seem to be the American public, “since they are calling daily for the troops to leave.”

Hardline insurgent leaders remain even more adamant. Baathist websites denounce Iraq's government as “spies and agents”. A statement from Mr Zarqawi denounced the Cairo conference as an American ploy “to make Sunni Muslims accept the dirty political game”. The only dialogue permissible, he said, was “by the sword and seas of blood”.

Yet despite such verbal sparring and the vicious bloodletting on the ground, a degree of convergence can be detected. A huge majority of Iraqis want the occupation to end—some 82% according to a poll conducted by the British Ministry of Defence in August. The argument is over how to go about it. Most Iraqis also shun jihadist zeal, including many members of the broader Sunni resistance who feel that the radicals tarnish their cause. Despite deep mistrust of political institutions that have failed to provide security and a decent infrastructure, and despite the heightening of sectarian loyalty generated by two years of fear and chaos, the weary Iraqi public does not appear to have lost faith in the possibility of a political solution.

The two largest forces in the fragmented Sunni spectrum, the Iraqi Islamist Party and the Iraqi National Front, a more secular grouping that includes former Baathist officers, are actively rallying Sunnis to turn out to vote. Other Sunni politicians report a growing willingness among the non-jihadist groups, which make up the bulk of the insurgency, to consider a deal to wind down the fighting.

Their main stated demands so far have been an immediate pullback of foreign troops from Iraqi cities and a timetable for full withdrawal. With even the Pentagon now hinting at plans to draw down troop levels significantly next year, and with Congress pushing for a phased withdrawal, such demands no longer look beyond possibility. Iraq's own, much-maligned security forces, meanwhile, are slowly getting fitter. Troop strength in the reconstituted army recently passed 100,000, nearing the targeted level of 135,000. The quiet re-enlistment of Baathist officers, who had been sacked wholesale early in the occupation, has also worked to restore a measure of Sunni confidence—though there are few Iraqi units where the insurgency is fiercest.

At the same time, subtle realignments are changing the shape of Shia politics. The party of Muqtada al-Sadr, the young cleric whose fiery attacks on the occupation proved hugely popular with the urban poor, has joined the governing United Iraqi Alliance, a broad group dominated by two pro-Iranian Islamist parties. Meanwhile, prominent secularists have abandoned the alliance, leaving it a straightforward representative of activist Shia Islamism. Since many Iraqi Shias feel uncomfortable mixing religion and politics, and associate the alliance with the perceived weakness of the government, this might strengthen the nationalist centre.

The fact remains that Iraq is a nasty and dangerous place, where even a widening commitment to political solutions may not prevent disintegration into civil war. Recent revelations about police death-squads targeting Sunnis, and the bombing of Shia mosques, have intensified sectarian animosities. The vexed questions of federalism and how to share oil revenues remain to be settled. The secret objectives of Iran—whether it just wants to burn American fingers or to install a look-alike theocratic state—are unknown. The jihadists who have made Iraq their playground may have lost their wider appeal, but they are not going to disappear.

Yet there appears to be a growing consensus, within Iraq and outside, that the time has come to settle down and get on with life. A columnist in a Saudi daily, al-Sharq al-Awsat, Mashari Zaydi, suggests that Arabs have been torn by a struggle between two world-views, one hard, absolutist and aspirational, the other realist, compromising and practical. While the realist approach, he says, may not win all you want, the absolutist one risks losing everything you have.

Jihad : The Trail of Political Islam (Paperback)
by Gilles Kepel, Anthony F. Roberts (Translator)
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0674010906/ref=pd_sl_aw_alx-jeb-9-1_book_4523211_3/104-4914374-6174369?n=283155

Amazon.com
Gilles Kepel's Jihad is an intense, detailed examination of the militant Islamist movement over the last quarter-century. Kepel divides his book into two parts--"Expansion" and "Decline"--and posits that the September 11, 2001, attacks, rather than demonstrating "strength and irrepressible might," highlighted the "isolation" and "fragmentation" of a "faltering" and probably doomed extremist ideology. Kepel follows Islamism from its theoretical underpinnings in the late 1960s and its rapid expansion into Africa, the Middle East, the Balkans, and Central, South, and Southeast Asia, through the Taliban's ascendancy in Afghanistan and beyond. He explains Islamism's attractions, and outlines its severe shortcomings. With consummate skill, he illuminates the bewilderingly intricate effects global events (oil prices, the fall of Communism) have had on internal politics of individual countries, and vice versa. Kepel, wisely, refuses to prognosticate. Instead, his achievement is in providing--for the determined reader--a deeply authoritative context for the seemingly inexplicable events of the recent past. --H. O'Billovich--This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From Publishers Weekly
In this history of fundamentalist Islam, Kepel stands conventional wisdom on its head, asserting that the spate of Islamist violence during the last few years is a result not of the movement's success, but of its failure. A professor at Paris's Institute for Political Studies, Kepel clearly traces the rise of the contemporary Islamist movement from its origins in the mid-20th century through its later appearance in countries such as Malaysia, Algeria and Turkey, as well as in Western Europe. Its apogee, he argues cogently, was the 1979 revolution in Iran that brought about the defeat of the Shah and the rise of a fundamentalist Islamic regime. But while ideologies that fused Islam with political power gained adherents throughout the world in the ensuing 20 years, says Kepel, in no other country were Islamists able to seize and hold power for more than a few years, a factor that he attributes to the ideology's inability to attract both the middle class and the poor. "Muslims no longer view Islamism as the source of utopia, and this more pragmatic vision augurs well for the future," he writes. Despite some outpourings of support, he believes, Osama bin Laden and his followers squandered much of the movement's political capital with its attacks on American institutions, most notably the World Trade Center. Kepel's approach is not without weaknesses in many places around the globe, fundamentalist political Islam has transformed society and politics, even if Islamists have not been able to attain political rule. But amid the plethora of books on Islam released since September 11, this work stands out, both for its erudition and its provocative thesis.

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.