The Strong Horse: Power, Politics, and the Clash of Arab Civilizations (21 page)

“The evidence of history confirms and demonstrates that the status of women is inseparably tied to the status of a nation,” wrote Qasim Amin, a late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Egyptian liberal.
⁵
Amin’s first, tentative feminist arguments were set down in his 1899 book,
The Liberation of Women.
He argued that women’s emancipation was a patriotic duty that would serve all Egypt, men and women alike. Amin was reluctant to offend his audience, so he appealed to traditional Muslim sources and focused on the veil. He acknowledged that the veil was “one of the permanent cornerstones of morality.” But, he argued, in its modern context the way the veil was now used was not true to the original message of Islam. Despite his caution, Amin still came under attack. So two years later, he made his criticisms even sharper.

In 1901, Amin published
The New Woman
, a pamphlet that makes few concessions to Islam and draws instead on Western political philosophy and social theory. Man, Amin wrote, treated woman like a slave and thought she “was not capable of moral or intellectual development,” a prejudice that he tied directly to the veil. “This is the secret behind the imposition of the veil upon women and for its continued existence. The first step for women’s liberation is to tear off the veil and totally wipe out its influence.”
⁶
It was a bold argument. Unfortunately, it’s also one that a century later Arab liberals are still having to make.

It’s worth noting that within two years Amin took the two different positions available to Muslim reformers, even down to the present day. In his first effort, Amin showed himself aware of the problems of the Muslim societies, even as he was loath to criticize the
customs of the
umma
lest he alienate his local audience and provide ammunition to the foreigners watching and judging. In his next time out, he seemed eager to dismantle Muslim tradition entirely.

We have seen these same two sides represented most recently by two European Muslim activists: Tariq Ramadan, the European Salafist and grandson of Hassan al-Banna; and Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the former Dutch parliamentarian and outspoken critic of many Islamic practices, from the treatment of women to
takfir.
Western commentators have tended to portray their clashing viewpoints as a debate between an authentic spokesman of the Muslim Arab masses and an elitist intellectual who has no street credentials because she sounds too much like a Westerner.
⁷
However, Banna’s grandson is no more genuinely Muslim than the intellectual progeny of Qasim Amin. And it is not a lack of legitimacy that makes liberalism a minority position in Muslim and Arab societies today. It is Arab violence.

 I
t is a piece of received wisdom that the Arab world is still awaiting its Voltaire, but the search for the Arab Voltaire overstates the role European polemicists played in creating a modern, secular culture in the West. The real pioneers of secularism were not the polemicists. They were the scientists like Galileo, who had no real ax to grind with Christianity or even the Church, but whose observations led to data that finally didn’t square with religious dogma. And they were rationalists like Descartes, who looked to defeat obscurantism not with satire or polemic but with reason and enlightenment. This was the kind of figure Taha Hussein sought to be, and since literature was Hussein’s field of research, he tried to bring an empirical approach to texts of all kinds—including the Quran.

In 1926, Hussein published a short book,
Fi ash-sh’ir al-jahily
(On Pre-Islamic Poetry), about the poetry that predates the advent of Islam. This body of work represents the pagan Arabian ethos that Muhammad’s revelation was supposed to have transformed into a
devout monotheism. Nonetheless, these poems are vital documents that establish the basis for certain traditions, stories, and even words that are central to orthodox interpretations of the Quran. But in his book, Hussein made a startling argument: the poems were actually written after the Quran and had been invented by religious scholars. He also cast doubt on parts of the Quran itself and made fun of the idea of jinn. Perhaps most damningly, he discussed the passage in the Quran that takes up the biblical narrative of Abraham, ordered by God to sacrifice his son. In the Quran the son is not Isaac but Ishmael, a variation that Hussein called a “fabrication.”

Perhaps it seems improbable that a book discussing poems that were fourteen hundred years old could make much of an impact. But in his preface to the book, Hussein made his ambitions clear:

In other words, Hussein’s investigation was designed to touch off an earthquake by confronting revelation with reason. It did, and Hussein barely survived it. He was called an apostate, death threats were published, and he was tried for attacking the religion of the state. Though the charge was eventually dismissed, Hussein revoked the book and reissued it the next year without the passage about Abraham and Ishmael. The damage, though, had already been done,
and the intellectual who poked at the foundations of Islam had been successfully terrorized.

Hussein retired to France for a year with his family, where he wrote
The Days
in a little more than a week. All of the liberal intellectuals, meanwhile, most of whom had defended Hussein during his ordeal, found themselves under attack not just by the official religious authorities like Al-Azhar but also by the Salafis. The backlash put Arab liberals on the defensive. And in all the years that followed, they were never really able to get off it. Instead, it was men like Hassan al-Banna, Sayyid Qutb, and Omar Abdel Rahman who would set the Arabs’ intellectual, cultural, and political agenda. And they would do so not through force of argument but through force of arms.

 S
o why didn’t liberalism carry the day in the Arabic-speaking Middle East? When the old man stood, the meeting of the Mahfouz circle was done; Raouf put out his cigarette, then pulled an idea out of his ashtray. “Maybe the question is not what went wrong with Islam and the Arabs,” he said, “but what went right with the West.”

Raouf was right. To ask what’s wrong with the Arabs is to take the West as the historical norm and imagine that its progress is a trajectory that all societies must inevitably follow, leading toward freedom, democracy, and respect for the inherent dignity of the individual human being. But since we have been handed all of these things for free, it is easy to overlook the sacrifices many generations made in blood along the way. Likewise, to forget how we got here is to trivialize the efforts of others elsewhere who strived for the same ideals but met with little or no success, like the Arab liberals. As with all stories of heroes, the life and career of Taha Hussein, a blind boy from a poor Egyptian village who became the leading Arab intellectual of the twentieth century, both highlight and obscure the practical difficulties that waylay more ordinary men.

According to many scholars of the period, liberalism failed because it was not a traditional source of political legitimacy and, as the Muslim Brotherhood’s popularity proved, Islam was. To be sure, Islam is a cogent ideological force that binds Arab
assabiya
, but ideas like legitimacy and authenticity taken from the sourcebooks of Western political science and journalism miss the point.

Arab liberals, the intellectual heirs of Taha Hussein, are not less authentically Arab than the Salafists. Liberals and Salafists can both date their origins back to the same historical moment. They have a common ancestor in Muhammad ‘Abduh, and both movements arose in response to the challenge of the West. What makes Salafism more potent, and liberalism a minority position in Muslim and Arab societies today, is not an absence of authenticity among liberals. If liberals cannot win, it’s at least in part because Arab politics is an affair between armed elites, the regimes and their insurgent rivals, who will kill and die for their causes.

Liberals in the Middle East have been loath to use violence to make their ideas reality. This was intellectually consistent, and, in its way, admirable. But the consequence has been that Arab liberals have been condemned to a fragile existence, dependent on the whim of whatever strong horse was in power. After 9/11, the question that many started asking was whether American intervention in the region might change this dynamic. In other words, was it possible to revive Arab liberalism—which had been crushed in Egypt in the 1920s—as a real cultural and political force in the region, if the Americans were willing to play the strong horse on behalf of those who shared their values? The battleground where this question was asked most seriously was Lebanon.

  I
f Lebanon was a country where genuine democracy seemed to have a chance of flourishing, it was perhaps because it was a country that had already been at war with itself for fifteen years, from 1975 to 1990, and had come out of the fire with the knowledge (or hope) that there were other ways to settle your problems than with violence. Lebanon not only contained the kernel of a democratic polity, but its history presaged much of what occurred in the region after 9/11. But the fact that the United States had been burned there before, taken together with the war in Iraq, was enough to keep Washington from getting close enough to Lebanon again that force would be required.

In 1958, Eisenhower sent the Marines to protect the government of the Christian president, Camille Chamoun, from domestic and foreign rivals. At the time, the U.S. ambassador to Lebanon, Robert McClintock, boasted that the Marines stayed three months without “a single shot having been fired in anger.”
¹
Twenty-five years later, American soldiers would not be so lucky. They had been dispatched as peacekeepers to keep the warring parties apart, an impossible role that made them vulnerable to every side in the Lebanon wars. In October 1983, this neutrality cost 241 Marines their lives.

It was in the wake of that Hezbollah attack and the subsequent withdrawal of troops from Beirut that Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger laid out the precepts that should define the use of American force, guidelines later abridged as the Powell Doctrine. It is understandable that a Washington still reeling from Vietnam was chastened by its experience in Lebanon, but to articulate principles that policy makers should observe while deciding whether to use force, and to proclaim that troops should only be committed as a last resort, were to advertise a weak hand.

More important for Lebanon, by declining to engage the Party of God in earnest and choosing instead to withdraw after the Marine barracks bombing, the Americans had given the strong horse a free rein. Consequently, during the 1990s, under the patronage of Syria and Iran, Hezbollah grew in stature and power. While most of the Lebanese had had enough of violence, Hezbollah and its allies became more willing to use it, for they were at war not only with the West (most obviously Israel) but also with all those in Lebanon who subscribed to the values that the West prized and embodied.

Perhaps it seems strange to think of this tiny country on the Mediterranean of fewer than four million as a bellwether for the rest of the region, but more than Iraq or any other Arab society, Lebanon exemplifies most clearly, and starkly, the disparity between two different Middle Eastern worldviews: one is a culture of tolerance, freedom, and coexistence that has hopes of opening onto democratic horizons; and the other is a culture of those who, in the words of Hezbollah’s secretary-general, Hassan Nasrallah, love death more than life.

 F
awaz’s father had been abducted by Hezbollah during the wars and ransomed for half of the family’s savings. The rest of it was stripped, after his father’s death, by his father’s side of the family, leaving Fawaz with no choice but to find his way alone and
without a name. In Lebanon you are first of all a name. Your father’s name, your family’s, the name of your community, town, region, and sect, but Fawaz made his own name. During the 1990s, as a six-foot-six power forward, he was the mainstay of the Christian-dominated Sagesse basketball team at a time when the Christians were paying a high price for their role in the wars. Fawaz and Sagesse were among the few bright spots for the community when the Syrian occupation went after Christian opposition figures and tried to smother under the blanket of Arab nationalism the identity of a sect that predates the Islamic conquests. (Christ, after all, preached the gospel in Lebanon.) During Sagesse games against the top Sunni team, the Muslims waved the green Saudi banner emblazoned with the
sha-badab—
“There is no God but God and Muhammad is the Messenger of God”—while the Christians showed the white and gold flag of the Vatican. Fawaz wore a beard signaling that he was rebellious, an intellectual, and celebrated victories strutting around with a cigar. “When we won the Arab championships,” he says, “I danced in front of the Algerians’ bench and Lebanon went crazy. Grandmothers thanked me for restoring our hope, for reminding them what Lebanon stands for.”