The Strong Horse: Power, Politics, and the Clash of Arab Civilizations (4 page)

Hence, it might be helpful to understand the Prophet of Islam as a type of pagan warrior-hero. We are accustomed to thinking of Muhammad as a holy man, and he is, but this hardly does justice to his career. He not only ruled a nation, the Islamic
umma;
he was also a wily commander, like Odysseus, who outwitted his often numerically superior opponents time and again. So, while his biography is usually seen in light of the tradition of the monotheistic prophets, he is also part of the literary tradition that includes epic heroes like Achilles, Beowulf, Cúchulainn, and Thor. As Muhammad turned the pagans of Mecca and then Medina into monotheists and created a nation, maybe it’s most apt to think of him as a cross between Moses and Aeneas, pious Aeneas, who created Rome out of the remnants of what had been the people of Troy.

Of course, I do not mean that Muhammad is a fictional character. That his life serves as a model down to the present day is a consequence of his actual existence, a heroic legacy that partakes of the nearly universal tradition of the warrior-hero, the great father of all those who follow and look back to him constantly for reference and inspiration and the renovation of the nation’s founding values. The contemporary West has no comparable figure—lawmaker, ruler, and
warrior—at its origins. But Muhammad is not only the founder of Islam; he is also the culmination of the pagan Arabian tradition. The virtues of the tribal leader, his strength, wisdom, and cunning, are what gives him the power to enjoin good and forbid evil, to protect his own, to reward his allies, and to punish his enemies; this is why others are naturally attracted to him, and this is what makes him the strong horse.

In the case of Muhammad, he is further increased by his religious significance, his prophecy and direct relationship with the eternal creator of all things. Islam universalizes his role as tribal leader so that Muhammad transcends a narrowly Arabian context. The same is so for the pagan values of the Arabian Peninsula before Islam, the
jahiliya
, for the revelation binds those values and sacralizes them, giving them, too, a universal expression, one that transcends time and is coterminous with the God of all things. It turns Arab tribal values into eternal ones. For instance, there is the tribe, and there are all those outside of the tribe; after the revelation of the Quran and the founding of the
umma
, there is
dar al-Islam
and
dar al-harb.
There are no values more important to the tribesman than his ability and willingness to make war to protect his people and advance their interests. Jihad may be understood as holy war, but it is perhaps more accurate to say that it is the
ghazu
enjoined by an everlasting and all-encompassing God.

 E
very time we passed the house afterward, Awad pointed it out and smiled. I nodded back blankly.
Bin Laden.
Of course Awad wasn’t with bin Laden any more than he said bin Laden’s brother was, but so what? Those lines were easy to draw:
We are not with Osama. Osama is crazy. Osama is not a real Muslim—and besides, Osama didn’t do it.
These were lines drawn in a desert.

It was the same when Awad brought Egyptian equestrian magazines to the barn and showed me photographs of Osama’s sibling
leading around one of his prize horses before an appreciative Arab audience. These small, fine-boned, neurotic animals weren’t really bred to be ridden, but to be led around like large poodles and judged for their gait and conformation, their tail, their head. This is not what the tall, beautiful, and eloquent Osama meant by people naturally preferring the strong horse to the weak one, for strength is not simply in beauty or blood or the accumulation of easy applause. Strength, whether it issues from the body, intellect, or will, is the raw material that wedded to character becomes power imposing itself on the world. What more is there to say about one horse beating another in the desert when no one is watching? The stronger wins, and the other knows it has lost.

  T
ribalism—the sense that society is, at heart, defined by the clash between groups (whether they be families or ethnicities or sects)—is a powerful force in Arab culture. At the same time, over the past century much of Arab politics has been defined by the quest to overcome tribalism, or, to be more accurate, by the quest to turn the myriad “tribes” that make up the Middle East into one super-tribe: the Arab nation. The origins of Arab nationalism date back to the second decade of the twentieth century. Until World War I, few Arabic-speaking Middle Easterners thought of themselves as Arabs, or subscribed to the logic of a political doctrine claiming that the Arabs constituted a separate nation just because they spoke the same language, or dialects of it. But as the Ottoman Empire began to totter during World War I, that started to change. Intellectuals and members of the bourgeoisie in search of a new political identity saw the Arabic language as a thread that connected hundreds of millions of Middle Easterners to each other and that could serve as the foundation for a pan-Arab project.

In the early days of the Arab nationalist movement, much of the
impetus for it came from the Middle East’s minority (non-Sunni Muslim) communities. For members of these minority groups, the notion of an Arabic identity was an appealing alternative to the oppression they felt under Islamic law and the rule of the Ottoman Empire. Islamic law, after all, relegated non-Muslims to the status of protected subject
(dhimmi)
, making them effectively second-class citizens. This rule dated back to the seventh century, under Omar ibn al-Khattab, the second caliph after Muhammad, when the armies of the
umma
raced out of the Arabian Peninsula and swept through the region to create what we now know as the Arab Middle East. By the time Omar was finished, his conquests—or “openings”
(futuhat)
, as the
umma
called those military victories that brought new lands and peoples into Islam—included all of Arabia, Egypt, North Africa, Syria, Mesopotamia, and a part of Persia. It was one of the most spectacular campaigns in military history, from the Persian Gulf to the westernmost reaches of the Mediterranean Sea, a martial progress that, like all imperial projects, left a river of blood in its wake and ruins where cultures once stood.

We are used to thinking that the imperial adventures of the West are largely responsible for shaping the contemporary Middle East. But the slogans that fueled France’s and Great Britain’s imperial classes in their march through the Middle East—“the white man’s burden,”
“mission civilisatrice,”
and, more recently, “democratization”—were not more missionary than Islam, for the
umma
was an imperial power of the first order. To begin to understand the nature of the conflicts raging throughout the Arabic-speaking Middle East, we must go back to more than a millennium before Napoleon’s 1798 invasion of Egypt, to the period when the Middle East was invaded by the Arabs.

After Omar’s generals had laid siege to Jerusalem for a year, he entered the city in A.D. 637, a key date in Middle Eastern history, and not just because it consolidated the Muslim claim to a city already sacred to the Jews and the Christians. Muslim historians would come
to call the various laws and regulations by which non-Muslim subjects were allowed to conduct their affairs the Pact of Omar, a reminder that it was under Omar, al-Farouq, he who distinguishes truth from falsehood, that the Muslims came to rule so many non-Muslims. Thereafter, the weight of the
dhimmis’
burden would depend on the disposition of the particular caliph at the time, and the local authorities, but their legal status was never equal to that of Muslim subjects. Nor, logically, could it be.

Islam is not merely a personal religion but also the basis of a political community. If non-Muslims were entitled to the same rights as the faithful, then belief in God’s final and perfect message as revealed in the Quran through his prophet Muhammad would be irrelevant, and the basis of the community would cease to exist. Hence, full legal status is reserved for believers. Middle Eastern minorities seized on Arab nationalism more than a millennium later as an opportunity effectively to renegotiate the Pact of Omar and get a better deal from the Sunnis. That was the promise of Arab nationalism, even as the reality was something else.

 I
had been in Cairo for about a week when I was invited to my first dinner party with Egyptian aristocrats. Most of them were baby boomers who were members of the Cairo elite, but the older among them really were remnants of the days of royalty, and their formative catastrophe was not the 1967 Israeli defeat, or even Great Britain’s long occupation of Egypt (1882–1954), but the 1952 Free Officers’ coup, which had brought Gamal Abdel Nasser to power. Nasser’s ascendancy and the establishment of a quasi-socialist Arab republic had cost them land, money, and prestige. If it is customary to believe that Arab resentment is engendered by Western provocation, this was a class of Arabs whose humiliation consisted in having had to look on as an Arab demagogue sacrificed their country—the Egypt they helped build and modernize, bilk
and misgovern—to the inchoate will of the resentful, illiterate masses.

At least that’s how they saw it, the aristocrats. They served hors d’oeuvres on china bearing the once-royal colors of green and white, and spoke French, English, and Arabic fluently and all in the same sentence. As a belly dancer made her way around the large, bright apartment, the hostess and the rest of the women clapped along and pretended not to notice their husbands’ eyes following her around the room. A recently remixed techno version of a famous Umm Kulthum song prompted some of the guests to debate the merits of tinkering with perfection. “You don’t change the classics,” one man explained. “You don’t change Umm Kulthum.” A younger man standing behind him shook his head for my benefit. “This is normal in Egypt,” he confided to me. “People don’t want anything to change, and nothing is better than the past.”

The hostess walked me around to meet her guests—doctors, lawyers, designers, government officials, journalists, and, at the end of a long line of introductions, Omar Sharif. I looked up to see the gap between his two front teeth as he smiled warmly and shook my hand. I stood there speechless. “Why have you come to Egypt?” he asked. Because of you, I was tempted to reply, until he said it for me. “It’s your Orientalist fantasy that’s brought you here, isn’t it?” He grabbed my jacket sleeve. “Tell me if I’m wrong,” said Sharif, walking us over to the bar. “I’m not wrong very often, and I like to know when I am. But you are an Orientalist, no?” He threaded the word “Orientalist” with so much wit that I couldn’t tell if he was poking more fun at me or at the catchphrase itself.

I said I was hoping to become one. “You are studying real Arabic?” he asked. Modern Standard Arabic, or
fusha
, is virtually the same as classical Arabic, with a vocabulary expanded in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to account for scientific and political ideas imported from the West. The syntax is denser and the grammar stricter than the colloquial dialects of Arabic that are spoken in
everyday exchanges throughout the region, and the pronunciation, since it is the language of the Quran, is more careful, and hence it is
fusha—
clear, fluent, and eloquent, like Omar Sharif. “It is a very difficult language,” he said. “And I am sure all the Arabs here tonight have forgotten it.”

Several of his friends had joined us by then, and Sharif tested his thesis, leading a small tutorial in conjugating Arabic verb forms. They sounded like half-drunken imams, rolling out sonorous verb endings until they finally broke down in laughter.

The odd thing was that the whole evening was a kind of Orientalist fantasy. In fact, sometimes it seemed as if no one cherished Arab culture and even its clichés more than the Arabs themselves. And it would have been hard for the evening to be more picturesque. Umm Kulthum was blasting on the stereo, and a belly dancer was coursing past us every few minutes just to bat her thick eyelashes at him,
Omar Sharif.
For a generation of Westerners, Sharif represented the ideal Arab. And the same was true for Arabs themselves, for whom the name Omar alone (Sharif was born Michel Shalhoub) recalled some of the giants of Arab history—Omar ibn al-Khattab, of course, but also Omar ibn Abi Rabi‘ah (d. 712), a Meccan poet who is said to have watched female pilgrims unveil at the holy shrine as he stood astonished by the beauty of their bare faces. The poet was similarly enamored of his own appearance, and this uncomplicated narcissism makes him appear, in his work, to be a sort of Meccan movie star
avant la lettre.
Omar was one of the early masters of the
ghazal
, or love poem, a genre he stamped with a vanity so gallant that he permitted his conquests to sing his praises. In one poem, he offers his version of a conversation between three sisters as they watch him ride in from out of the blue:

Sharif, it was clear, was also familiar with having people fall hard for him. He was the center of this large gathering of friends and their families, indisputably the star, but playfully ironic about his magnitude. His easy demeanor suggested he might have really believed the only difference between his successes and failures and those of his friends is that his were just more public. Sharif had used this vulnerability and intimacy to great effect throughout his career, especially in his first Hollywood film,
Lawrence of Arabia
, in which his character alternately shelters the weak and victimizes them.