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- Najat Fawzy AlSaied: The Islamist Tsunami and Arab Society
- Harold Rhode: Will Syria Remain a Unified State?
The Islamist Tsunami and Arab Society
by Najat Fawzy AlSaied
July 10, 2012 at 5:00 am
July 10, 2012 at 5:00 am
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Whenever
the Muslim Brotherhood are asked if Sharia law will be imposed, the response is
that their intention is to build "a democratic and civil state" that
guarantees freedom of religion and the right to peaceful protest. But anyone
who traces the actions of the Muslim Brotherhood -- in Egypt, Tunisia or
anywhere else in the Arab world, will see that their intention is to further
Islamize their societies, not to create civil alternatives.
When the news came that Mohamed Mursi of the
Muslim Brotherhood (MB) had been declared Egypt's President, the immediate
concern was about what kind of society the Muslim Brotherhood and other
Islamists would want to create, and how this election would affect society in
Egypt and the rest of the Arab world. Would they want to establish a robust
civil society or a pious Islamic one, and would it be tolerant and respectful
towards women and religious minority rights?
Whenever the Muslim Brotherhood are asked if
Sharia law will be imposed, the response is that their intention is to build a
"democratic and civil state" that guarantees freedom of religion and
the right to peaceful protest, as has been stated by Mursi himself on several
occasions. But anyone who traces the actions of the Muslim Brotherhood and
other Islamists over the past decades -- in Egypt, Tunisia or anywhere else in
the Arab world -- will see that their intention is to further Islamize their
societies, not to create civil alternatives. Before they gained power, their
approach was from the bottom up, but now that they have the reins of power;
they might instead approach their task from the top down.
If the MB's intention is to build a democratic
and civil state, what explains Tunisian MB mentor Rachid Ghannouchi's obsessive
criticism of Habib Bourguiba, the father of modern Tunisia? If Ghannouchi were
scathing toward the corrupt regime of the overthrown Zine El Abedine Ben Ali,
that would be understandable; but why against Bourguiba, who was the liberator
of women and cultivator of modernism in Tunisia? Ghannouchi always rejects
parallels drawn with Khomeini, insisting that he is more like Recep Tayyip
Erdogan in Turkey and that the Tunisian MB party, known as Ennahda or Rebirth,
is closer to the Justice and Development Party (AKP) in Turkey.
But, unlike the AKP, Ennahda has neither an
obvious economic program nor a political program -- omissions which suggest
that Ennahda will instead pursue a social agenda of rapidly Islamizing Tunisian
society, as revealed in Ghannouchi's writing about the history of women in the
Arab world: "Before the emergence of the Islamist movement, woman found
herself in an unstable and decaying society whose liberation was purely superficial:
nudity, eroticism, leaving the house and the intermingling of the sexes."
Ghannouchi has also highlighted the importance
of "tradition" in art: "Art is linked to the values and
traditions of society, and no one should take away freedom of expression
through art, as long as it reflects those traditions." According to these
comments Ennahda's true goal is not, as the title of his party would suggest, a
Rebirth or a program of development, but rather the fuller Islamization of
society, making it more "traditional;" that is, backward-looking. In
mid-June, during Tunisia's annual spring art fair, Tunisian Islamists threw
rocks and petrol bombs at modernist works they deemed offensive to religious
sensibilities. One person was killed, hundreds of people were injured and
arrested, and riots lasted for two days This is the extremism that Ghannouchi's
"tradition" defends.
The Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, established in
1928 with the aim of Islamizing Egyptian society from the bottom up, saw, under
Mubarak's corrupt regime, a social decay set in that strongly increased the
Islamists' appeal. The Brotherhood, with its battle cry of "Islam is the
Solution," greatly benefitted from this erosion; it was not surprising
that they were able to and gain the support of the majority and win elections.
In the short run, the Mubarak Government also
benefited – in addition to marginalizing liberals and pro-democracy forces, it
could also present the rise of Islamists as an implicit threat to the West as
"It is either us or the Islamists" – but eventually, primarily with
Mubarak's insistence that his son, Gamal, succeed him, that strategy failed.
Although Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood claims a
likeness to the Turkish AKP, when Erdogan suggested, perhaps ambiguously, that
Egypt guarantee a secular state in its new constitution, the MB became angry
with him. The MB will campaign against any secular party that seeks to revise
Article 2 of Egypt's constitution, which states that "the principle source
of legislation is Islamic Jurisprudence [Sharia law]." The MB also claims
that anyone who challenges Article 2 is somehow facilitating an American and
Israeli plot against Egypt.
The main difference between the constitution in
Turkey and the one in Egypt is that in Turkey, the constitution was protected
historically by the military which defended the secular state against
Islamization – until recently it has been undermined by pseudo-judicial
persecution – while the Egyptian military has no guiding political or religious
principles. The Egyptian military will accept whatever deal allows them to
maintain their rule. It matters little to them whether women's faces are
covered or not; whether Christians will enjoy full citizenship or not, or
whether liberals are free to express themselves or not – without the
restrictions that all Islamists long to impose.
Islamists' supporters in the Arab revolution
should learn from history and particularly from that of the Iranian Revolution,
in which the liberals similarly formed an alliance with the Islamists, only to
be slaughtered by them afterward. Once the Iranian clerics came to power; they
focused on Islamizing society, not on building democracy and striving for
social justice – both of which had been promised during the revolution.
Within months of the founding of the Islamic
Republic, female government workers were forced to wear head coverings, women
were barred from becoming judges, gender segregation laws were promulgated, and
the age of marriage for girls was lowered to 13.
We would do well to recall that even though the
Islamic Republic was not welcomed widely in the region because of its Shia
revolutionary principles, the Iranian Revolution did have an impact on peoples'
social, as well as the political, lives. In Saudi Arabia, for example, two
extremist Islamist developments – one internal and other external, both of
which took place in 1979 -- changed the direction of Saudi society: the attack
and takeover by Juhaiman Al-Otaibi and his Islamist followers on the Al-Masjid
al-Haram [Grand Mosque] in Mecca, and the Islamic Revolution in Iran. Both the
Al-Otaibi assault and the Khomeini Revolution and were widely condemned in
Saudi Arabia but, because both criticized and embarrassed Saudi Arabia – the
country that includes the two holy mosques, in Mecca and Medina – as not
representing Islam virtuously, the Islamist outlook was adopted as Saudi
government policy and the foundational Wahhabism of the kingdom aggressively
reinforced.
As a result, all plays, fashion shows,
international events, and cinemas were banned in Saudi Arabia. The so-called
Commission for Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice, known as the
"religious police," or "the Commission" (hai'a in Arabic)
increasingly harassed people on the street, and "control" became the
watchword of the 1980s, particularly for women. Female broadcasters were
prevented from reading the news; all female singers and other women vanished
completely from the television screen; women without their ID cards could not
walk around, even with their husbands, and sometimes even ID cards were not
enough for the "religious police."
Saudi Arabia continued this method of
reinforcing Islamization, not only inside its own borders but also among most
of the Sunni communities in the region -- primarily to establish a balance in
outward piety with its rival, the Shia Islamic Republic of Iran. Since it
founding in 1979, the main mission of Iran has been to export its Islamic
ideology and galvanize the Shia Muslims across the Muslim world against their
own governments and against the international community.
Until the shock of September 11, 2001, when 15
of the 19 hijackers were from Saudi Arabia, the world was not even aware of the
effects of this Islamization. Greater pressure was subsequently exerted on
Saudi Arabia to open up its society and loosen its hard-line Wahhabi influence
on society.
Although the Islamists are now in power, their
biggest test is yet to come: Can they offer solutions to the people's largely
economic woes that brought them out onto the streets in the first place? And
will the Islamists in the Arab world be compelled to meet their people's needs
through the workings and compromises of day-to-day government rather than the
imposition of an ideology in the name of religion?
However, if you perceive that act the terrorism
on 9/11 was the result of an unwelcome revolution and an unsuccessful extremist
attack in Mecca, imagine what the impact of the Islamists' successes in the
Arab revolutions will be, not only on Saudi Arabia, but across the world?
Najat AlSaied is a Saudi PhD researcher in
media and development at University of Westminster in London. She can be
reached at: najwasaied@hotmail.com
Will Syria Remain a Unified State?
by Harold Rhode
July 10, 2012 at 4:45 am
July 10, 2012 at 4:45 am
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What stands
behind much of the violence in Syria is the rise of Arab Sunni fundamentalism
in its various forms – whether Salafi, Wahhabi, or Muslim Brotherhood? All of
these threaten the very existence of the Alawites, the Kurds, and other
non-Sunni ethnic and religious groups.
While the news is filled daily with terrible
atrocities which the Syrian regime is carrying out, these reports mask another
development: the breakup of Syria into at least two, if not more, statelets. Is
Assad trying to create an Alawite homeland in the traditional Alawite area
along the Syrian coast between Lebanon and Turkey? Will Syria end up being a
federated state, more along the lines of Iraq? And where are Syria's Kurds
headed?
Reports from various sources inside Syria and
from the defectors and refugees whom al-Jazeera has interviewed in northern
Jordan reveal that the war in Syria has descended into a sectarian war,
primarily between the ruling Alawite minority and the Arab Sunni majority.
One of the places that the Assad regime has
been most violent is against the Sunnis living in the Alawite traditional
homeland and in Homs, a largely Sunni city just to the east of the Alawite
heartland. Assad's forces have been destroying Sunni villages in that area, and
wreaking havoc on Homs. As the Sunni refugees in Jordan – mostly from the Homs
area – who were cited on al-Jazeera on July 4 noted, "The regime has
turned this into a sectarian battle between itself and the Sunnis. It is
killing the Sunnis in Homs and forcing other Sunnis to flee that area.
Clearly, the Syrian regime of Bashar Assad
understands that the trend in the Middle East is towards Islamic Sunni
fundamentalism, supported by the Muslim Brotherhood, the Wahhabis, the Qataris,
and Turkey's Sunni fundamentalist leadership.
The regime knows that in the long run, it
cannot stand up to these forces -- possibly the reason Assad and his cohorts
are doing everything they can to destroy the Sunni fundamentalists and perhaps
hoping then to retreat to the Alawites' ancient homeland.
Another sign that the Syrian Sunnis are
abandoning Assad is the defection of Manaf Tlas,
a senior Sunni Syrian military official – a childhood friend of Bashar Assad,
and whose father Mustafa was a close ally of Bashar's father Hafiz, the
previous dictator who ruled Syria with an iron hand.
Since 1966, Syria has been ruled by the Alawite
minority, who make up about 12% of Syria's population and live mainly in the
coastal area between Lebanon and Turkey. As the Alawites historically would do
the distasteful work which the Sunnis refused to do, the Syrian Sunni Arab
establishment traditionally looked down upon them, referring them as as "abid,"
or, roughly "slave."
Also, as Alawites believe that Ali – the Muslim
prophet Muhammad's cousin and son-in-law – is God, Sunnis do not see them as
monotheists, and often therefore do not even accept them as Muslims.
During the 1940s and 1950s, the Sunnis, who did
their best to avoid military service, gave their Alawite servants
recommendations to enter the military. As they rose to higher and higher ranks,
the Alawites eventually, in 1966, took over Syria in a military coup.
Members of Alawite community have all along
felt conflicted: should they see themselves as Arabs and try to attain, through
Arab nationalism, the equality they lacked among the Sunnis? Those who accepted
this view became the most ardent Arab nationalists in Syria; their hope was
that speaking Arabic as the Sunnis did would serve to gain them the equality
that was eluding them under Syrian traditional system, in which being Sunni was
a key element to advancement.
Others within the Alawite community, who
disagreed with this approach, argued that they would never be accepted by the
Sunni majority as equals; and instead strove to attain an independent homeland
in their traditional homeland: the Syrian coastal area between today's Lebanon
and Turkey.
In the early 1940s after the French had ruled
Syria from post-World War I until 1946, Suleyman Assad, the grandfather of
Syria's present leader, Bashar Assad, and about five other Alawite leaders
wrote to the French government asking the French to let the Alawites have their
own state in their homeland along the coast. These Alawite leaders claimed that
the Sunnis had never treated the non-Sunnis fairly, and that therefore, in a
united Syrian state, the Alawites would continue to suffer serious
discrimination. They cited as evidence the way the Sunnis were at that time
treating the Jews in British-Mandated Palestine.
Given the present trend towards Sunni Islamist
rule throughout the region, the non-Sunnis clearly feel threatened. Christians
have been leaving the Middle East in droves. Shiites in Bahrain, although they
form the majority, are ruled by an oppressive Sunni minority who use brutal
force and who, earlier this year, called in their Sunni Saudi allies to subdue
the Shiites, who were calling for equal rights. Syria's Druze, Ismailis,
Christians and other minorities seem to be terrified about what might happen to
them if the Sunni Muslim Brotherhood takes over there.
If one views Assad in this context, there is a
real possibility that Syria will not stay united, and that the days of Arab
nationalism are over. Islamist Sunni fundamentalism is the enemy of the non-Sunnis,
who, to survive, will likely have to look for other political alternatives
beyond the present borders, and possibly ally themselves with fellow non-Sunni
Arabs in the region.
Similarly, the Kurds in northern Syria, who are
directly connected to the Kurdish territories inside Iraq, although also Sunni,
see the Muslim Brotherhood and the Wahhabis by and large as Arab imperialists
trying to force them to abandon their Kurdish identity and become Arabs --
probably the reason most Kurds loathe the Muslim Brotherhood. For the
Brotherhood, being Sunni is not enough. For the Brotherhood, only Arabs can be
true Muslims. Non-Arabs must abandon their non-Arab and non-Sunni languages and
cultures, and adopt an Arab identity -- exactly how most of the Middle East
became Arabs during the first century of Islam.
If the present violence in Syria does not come
to an end, Syria could easily disintegrate; the northern part of the country
would become a Kurdish entity – either within a loosely federated, geographically
altered Syria, or possibly even as an independent state. If either of these
were to happen, Iraqi Kurds, who have been politically counseling the Syrian
Kurds, could form an alliance with Syria's Kurds who inhabit an area which
reaches west almost to Aleppo, a city not far from the Mediterranean Sea. If
the Kurds then made some political arrangement/alliance with a future Alawite
state, they could gain access to the sea . This would be a major step towards
the establishment of an independent Kurdish state.
In short, what stands behind most of the
violence in Syria is the rise of Arab Sunni fundamentalism in its various forms
– whether Salafi, Wahhabi, or Muslim Brotherhood. All of those threaten the
very existence of the Alawites, the Kurds, and other members of the non-Sunni
ethnic and religious groups.
It is therefore much easier to understand why
the ruling Alawites feel they are fighting a life and death battle with the
Sunnis, and why they believe they must spare no effort to survive. It also
explains why most of Syria's other minorities – such as the Druze, Ismailis,
and Christians – still largely support the Assad regime.
Related Topics: Syria
| Harold
Rhode
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