The Strong Horse: Power, Politics, and the Clash of Arab Civilizations (6 page)

Husri, a Sunni, included minorities in his scheme, but there was never any real effort to detach Arabism from Islam, which would have been doomed from the outset in any event. “To define the Arab nation in terms of its history,” as the Iraqi-born historian Elie Kedourie wrote, is “to come upon the fact that Islam originated among the Arabs, was revealed in Arabic to an Arab prophet.”
⁵
The language of the Arabs, the defining feature that ostensibly made them one nation, is a shared tongue considered sacred by most Middle Easterners because it is the language of the Holy Quran. And hence Arab nationalism, as Kedourie writes, “affirms a fundamental unbreakable link between Islam and Arabism.”

If the minorities had hoped that Arab nationalism would emancipate them, or at least deflect attention from their status, they were not nearly so naive as to expose themselves to the inevitable repercussions of challenging Sunni prestige and actively agitating against
Islam. Instead, they sought to court favor with the Sunnis, the sect that constitutes roughly 70 percent of the Arabic-speaking world and has ruled it for most of the last fourteen hundred years. In effect, the minorities were little more than smaller tribes aligning themselves with the Sunni strong horse, and so their goal was not to ditch Islam but to elide all other sectarian and ethnic identities by raising everyone to the level of Sunni Arabs. In keeping with the status-anxiety-ridden logic of the convert, many of the minorities became more Sunni than the Sunnis themselves. Michel Aflaq, a Syrian-born Greek Orthodox Christian, commended all the Arabs to “attach themselves to Islam and to the most precious element of their Arabness, the Prophet Muhammad.”
⁶
A half century later, Said sounded the same note before an American audience in reaffirming the bargain minorities had made with the Sunni majority: “Islam is something all Arabs share in and is an integral part of our identity.”
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This overcompensation is perhaps yet another reason so many have been misled into believing that Arab nationalism is a secular philosophy—if non-Muslims express their devotion to Islam, then Arab nationalism can’t really have anything to do with religious faith.

The Sunnis themselves were slow to embrace Arab nationalism. They owed their primary allegiance to the larger Islamic
umma
and the Ottoman caliphate, not to a linguistically separate sub-nation. And inasmuch as they also identified with their sect, there was no reason to give up their place and privilege on behalf of an
umma
that made no distinction between them and nonbelievers, Christians, Jews, and, worst of all, the heretical Shia. But with the dissolution of the empire, many former Ottoman officers and administrators, like Lawrence’s comrades-in-arms, saw their main chance at hand.

The Sunnis refashioned themselves as Arab nationalists and in doing so strengthened their claims to govern not just their villages, cities, and districts of origin but also the entirety of the Arabic-speaking provinces—for after all, they were Arab, brother to those they meant to put under their dominion. Later they came to protest
against the borders randomly imposed by the European powers, but those borders had given them sovereignty over lands they had no right to rule, except that the subject populations also spoke dialects of the same language. The Arabs complained of the new map of the Middle East and the powers that enforced it, not because they believed that the Sunnis should not govern Shia and Kurds in Iraq, or that the Saud clan of the Nejd had no claim to the Hejaz, but because it limited the scope of their infinite ambitions, and so they fought each other for larger shares, in Iraq, the Arabian Peninsula, Syria, Transjordan, and Palestine. Arab nationalism in their view was yet another heroic chapter, albeit unfinished, in the Sunni Arab triumphalist version of Middle Eastern history.

The mass graves throughout the region stretching from the Gulf to the Mediterranean testify to the willingness of Arab nationalist leaders to enforce Arabism. Arab intellectuals praised and exculpated the rulers by forging a narrative of the region that ignored more than a millennium of Middle Eastern history. Arab nationalism suppressed confessional, ethnic, racial, and tribal differences and brought forth a mythical Middle East where Jews and Christians were always treated as brothers, where there are no Kurds or Shia, Druze or Alawis, but only Arabs. It did away with the distinct legacies and contributions of those various communities while, as one scholar put it, “conveniently passing over the less than seemly episodes—the self-inflicted wounds; the civil wars, massacres, and human atrocities; the ethnic, linguistic, and religious cleavages and dislocations.”
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The purpose of Arab nationalist historiography was to coerce a single homogeneous identity from many competing, often antagonistic strands. The genre afforded its authors two types of apologetics: either accounts enumerating the legendary exploits of the heroes who fought for the greatness of the Arab nation; or epic narratives of betrayal and foreign subterfuge that had separated the Arabs from their destiny, like Said’s
Orientalism.

It is an index of Arab nationalism’s hold over the American imagination,
thanks in no small part to Said, that after 9/11 even those who didn’t claim that U.S. policies led to the attacks nonetheless took the Arab nationalist worldview for granted—9/11 was about Us versus Them. “Why do they hate us?” we asked. Is it because of what we do or who we are? But in believing that 300 million Arabs had really lined up as one against America, we had been taken in by a mirage.

  I
n the second half of the twentieth century, with the five-hundred-year-old Ottoman Empire dissolved and its British and French successors on their way out of the region, the Arabic-speaking Middle East seemed to be rushing headlong toward modernity. Ostensibly secular governments checked the rise of the Islamic revivalism best represented by Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, and in the considered opinion of many nationalism rather than religion was the wave of the Arab future. So, what happened, and why was that advance checked?

There are a number of explanations, some of them drawn from the ideological biases of the region itself—such as the notion that the conflict with Israel siphoned off energies that would otherwise be used to build Arab societies and/or that the legacy of European colonialism prevented the Middle East from progressing. Other explanations were torn from the pages of Western sociology and political science textbooks—one side argued that Arab state institutions were too weak, while another contended that the Arab state was too strong and gave no room to civil society. In fact, the issue was much more elemental. What looked like secularization was merely a veneer
laid over a society that had been proudly Muslim for over a millennium. Moreover, the ostensible engine of Arab modernization—Arab nationalism—was little more than an elevated tribal covenant. Arab nationalism was how Arab regimes made the various clans, sects, and tribes collectively called the Arabs cohere, and no one could galvanize the masses like the Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser.

 M
ustafa told me that he had been Nasser’s director of censorship twice. A short, balding bachelor in his mid-sixties with a large mouth that filled easily with laughter, Mustafa hardly radiated the kind of awful power that position would seem to require. He lived a short walking distance from me in the center of the city, overlooking the two major squares in downtown Cairo, Midan al-Tahrir and Midan Talaat Harb, where the noise, he complained, had gotten worse over the years, the crowds larger, and the streets dirtier. He had lived there with his sister long enough to remember when it was one of Cairo’s most fashionable neighborhoods, with broad boulevards, large public squares, and mansions and apartment buildings designed by European architects, and just down the block was Groppi, a Greek café that virtually became a cinematic cliché so many directors had staged film romances there, with lovers discreetly reaching for each other’s hand across a cup of Turkish coffee and a mille-feuille. Since then, the sun and desert winds had browned the buildings the same dun hue as the Pyramids, Groppi had turned into a dusty relic, and Mustafa had become a critic.

He ran a foreign film club, wrote articles on Egyptian and European movies, and published a book on the stars of the golden age of Cairo cinema, from the 1930s through the early 1960s. I met him through Sayed Badreya, a Hollywood-based Egyptian-born actor and filmmaker whose Web site featured his work with James Cameron on
True Lies
, the Arnold Schwarzenegger vehicle about saving the world, and his marriage, from a terrorist group named Crimson Jihad. It
seems Sayed was so proud of his American-immigrant success story that it didn’t occur to him that having worked on a film Arabs loathe for its depiction of them as violent, and hapless, fanatics would hurt his reputation in Cairo, the Hollywood of the Arabs. And so when Sayed tried to raise money for
Saving Egyptian Film Classics
, a documentary warning that the film stock of many of the country’s cinematic classics was deteriorating, Mustafa was one of the few who came to the filmmaker’s aid. The rest of the Egyptian film community was not eager to support what sounded to them like a catalog of their incompetence, for to note even the tiniest blemish in Egyptian society is typically perceived as an all-out assault against Egypt, the Arabs, the
umma
, and Islam.

Mustafa led me into the kitchen and poured us tumblers full of whiskey, the alcohol of choice for Egyptian intellectuals of a certain age and income bracket—not the fashionable single malts, but scotch blends, Johnnie Walker, Dewar’s, Seagram’s, real liquor with Western labels, holdovers from a different time, when modern Egypt was trying to integrate Western habits and brands into its own tastes and traditions. Mustafa was concerned that I wasn’t going to get a very accurate picture of contemporary Egypt by watching Egyptian movies from that bygone age.

“The period idealized in those films is long past. It was a different moment in Egyptian history, different ideas about Egypt and its place in the world. Sayed is trying to preserve them lest the manner and style of life become as incomprehensible to future generations as the hieroglyphs were before the Rosetta stone.”

Those golden-age films serve as an essential reference for middle-class Egyptians, less for those like Mustafa old enough to recall a Cairo that they remember as cosmopolitan as Paris or London, than for the younger generation who otherwise have little evidence besides their parents’ and grandparents’ reveries to prove that once upon a time the aesthetic ideal in Cairo was women in stylish skirts, French manicures, and impossible hairdos, not the veil, a black robe, and
black gloves. Of course that glittering city of the past, an urban dreamscape of nightclubs, black-tie galas, and swimming pool parties, was unavailable to all but the wealthiest Cairenes, and yet the films themselves are self-conscious enough to recognize the class and cultural divides as well as the growing conflict between traditional Egypt and encroaching modernity.

Ghazal al-banat
(1949), or “The Flirtation of Girls,” is the movie George Cukor or Preston Sturges might have made had he been born on the Nile. It opens with a musical number featuring several young women on horseback singing, led by the famous Egyptian singer Layla Mourad playing an easily distracted young woman whose wealthy father has hired an Arabic tutor to improve his French-speaking daughter’s classical
fusha.
The tutor, played by Naguib al-Rihani, is an elderly bachelor at first astonished by the girl’s impertinence and then overcome with love for her youth and carefree ways. In the climactic scene, he follows her around an entire night desperate for her to end his loneliness as she leads him through a grand tour of golden-age Cairo, including a brawl at a nightclub and a random encounter with one of the giants of Egyptian cinema, the actor and director Youssef Wahby, playing himself.

It is well into the evening when the tutor and the girl stumble upon Wahby’s home as he is putting the finishing touches on his newest screenplay while in another part of the mansion Egypt’s greatest modern composer, Muhammad Abdel Wahab, also playing himself, just happens to be working on a melancholic love song for the movie. The director, the tutor, and the girl look on as Abdel Wahab rehearses his orchestra, during which the song seems to remind the tutor that the nature of desire is such that he will never win the girl. Leaving the director’s home, the tutor and the girl hitch a ride with a dashing young airplane pilot whom she has fallen for, and he for her. The camera pans to the sad, silent, and suddenly very wise eyes of the tutor. It was the actor’s last film; Rihani was dying while it was being shot, and
Ghazal al-banat
was shown after his death
at the age of sixty, a real-life sad ending that only deepens the movie’s rendering of love, loneliness, and longing.

At the time, the film must have seemed to be about the ongoing transformation of Egyptian society, mixing up as it did an aging teacher of Arabic, a flirtatious modern girl, and an airplane pilot in a madcap tumble from the country’s past into its uncertain future. But in retrospect it seems to mark the end of an era. Three years after its release, a military regime came to power that would look to the West primarily for weapons, not culture, and the national temperament was less disposed toward the adventure of the new and fell into a self-crippling paranoia. For instance, Layla Mourad, born Jewish and later converted to Islam, was accused of collaborating with Israel, and while the charges were eventually dropped, the point was made. No one was above suspicion, and “traitor,” “imperialist,” and “Zionist agent” were the watchwords of the Arab nationalist consensus, as “infidel,” “crusader,” and “Zionist agent” would fulfill the same function for the Islamist movement decades later.