A talk by Brian Whitaker at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, 26 January 2010
ONE OF the things I have always tried to do as a journalist writing about the Middle East is to look at it from the inside rather than the outside. What I mean by that is that I try to focus as much as possible on issues that concern people actually living in the region rather than the issues that affect western governments.
It’s not always easy, because newspaper editors – and their readers too – tend to have rather fixed ideas about what constitutes news from the Middle East.
I didn’t fully appreciate how fixed their ideas are until I started writing full-time about the region for the Guardian. I would meet people at parties who asked what my job was, and they would immediately assume that I was either a war correspondent or some kind of terrorism expert.
Obviously journalists can’t ignore the big conflicts but readers can easily get the impression that the Middle East is a region of death and destruction and very little else.
It’s important to remember, though, that millions of Arabs go through their entire lives without ever seeing a shot fired in anger, let alone firing one themselves.
This brings me to the title of my book, What’s Really Wrong with the Middle East, where you see the word “really” highlighted in red.
The point I’m making here is that there’s a discrepancy – quite a large discrepancy in fact – between the problems of the Middle East as perceived from the west and its problems as perceived by Arabs themselves. The priorities are different.
Although the book is a critique of Arab society, and in some respects quite a stern one, I wanted it to reflect opinions from the inside rather than the outside. So I decided right from the start to use Arab sources as much as possible – which I have done, with only a few exceptions.
My research included about 20 formal interviews with Arabs in various countries, most of them lasting an hour or more, and my aim was to keep them as unstructured as possible – basically to sit back and let people talk.
So I looked on the internet and found 10 critical statements about the Middle East – about politics, oil, the media, corruption, and so on. I sent this list to the interviewees and asked them to choose the statements they wanted to talk about.
This was where the distinctively Arab priorities really started to show up. In fact, the issues that figure most prominently in western foreign policy seemed to be nowhere near the top of my interviewees’ agenda (or at least not in the way they are usually framed).
For example, democracy was hardly mentioned as such, though there was a lot of talk about the lack of transparency and accountability, the lack of good governance and the need to get rid of corruption.
There was also one statement on the list that people wanted to talk about more than any other. So much so that towards the end I was saying to people: “Please, let’s not talk about that one, I’ve heard enough already.”
The statement in question was the title from from one of al-Jazeera's Doha Debates and it said: "The family is a major obstacle to reform in the Arab world."
I’LL COME BACK to this issue of the family in a moment but there’s one more point I’d like to make about the book and its title.
Although it’s mainly a critique of Arab society it’s also, less directly, a critique of westerm policy. I wanted to make a case for change in the Arab countries that would not be based on neocon arguments.
Several people have asked if the title of my book alludes Bernard Lewis’s famous book, “What went wrong?” Lewis, of course, was Bush’s favourite historian and Bush often turned to him for advice. So my answer is yes, I did have Lewis in mind when thinking about the title, though the book itself doesn’t mention him or his work.
Before Bush’s arrival at the White House in 2001, American policy towards the Middle East – and British policy too, for that matter – had been primarily about maintaining stability.
Bush and the neocons changed that, largely in response to the September 11 attacks which opened the way to more a radically interventionist discourse – especially interventions of the military kind.
In a major speech in 2003, Bush said:
Sixty years of western nations excusing and accommodating the lack of freedom in the Middle East did nothing to make us safe – because in the long run, stability cannot be purchased at the expense of liberty. As long as the Middle East remains a place where freedom does not flourish, it will remain a place of stagnation, resentment, and violence ready for export.
There were many things wrong with Bush’s policies but I think he was right to say we should not be “excusing and accommodating” a lack of freedom in the Middle East. I think he was also right to say that purchasing stability at the expense of liberty is a bad idea in the long term.
Bush, of course, was viewing this almost entirely from the point of view of American security, but in my book I wanted to look at the effects of authoritarian systems on the Arab countries themselves and the people unlucky enough to be ruled by them.
Apart from the Bush administration’s simplistic analysis and its fondness of military solutions, I think there were two fundamental flaws in its scheme for promoting reform in the Middle East
The first mistake was to focus on authoritarian regimes and regime change, with the idea that everything would be fine once they were removed. As we have seen in Iraq, that’s not necessarily what happens.
The second mistake was that Bush tried to promote freedom in a very selective way. It was no coincidence that the Middle Eastern countries deemed to be most in need of liberating were those considered most hostile towards the United States. This was very damaging because in the eyes of people living in the region it called into question the sincerity of the whole “freedom” promotion agenda.
Another kind of selectivity could be seen in the way Bush used the words freedom and democracy interchangeably, as if they were the same thing (which they are not). For Bush, promoting freedom and/or democracy basically meant promoting free elections and very little else – and then only if the outcome was likely to suit the United States.
What I set out to do in my book was to look at the question of freedom in its broadest sense – personal liberties as well as political liberties. I wanted to show that it’s not just a problem of authoritarian regimes but of authoritarian societies too.
Early on in my research I was struck by a comment from an Egyptian friend when he said: “Egypt has a million Mubaraks” – in other words, the Mubarak way of doing things in not just confined to politics, it is found at all levels of society, in homes, schools, workplaces and so on.
This has far-reaching implications, because if means that if you want political change you need social change too.
TO UNDERSTAND Arab society, and indeed its politics, we have to understand Arab concepts of the family. The family is the basic molecule of society and, in many ways, a microcosm of the Arab state. It is the primary mechanism for social control – or, put another way, the point where liberty begins to be constrained.
A lot has been written about Arab families and the wider kinship structures so I won’t go into details here but, to summarise it briefly, Halim Barakat decribes the traditional Arab family as one where the father sits at the top of a pyramid of authority and requires “respect and unquestioning compliance with his instructions”.
The Arab Human Development Report of 2004 painted a similar picture, of families with a father “who often tends to be authoritarian, bestowing and withholding favours; a mother, usually tender-hearted, submissive, and resigned, who has no say in important matters except behind the scenes; and children who are the objects of the father’s instructions and the mother’s tenderness.”
Though the father may often be an invisible presence, spending most of his time outside the home, he remains the figure of authority even in families where it is the mother who “actually exercises power over the children … entrusted with raising and disciplining them” and sometimes using the father “to scare or threaten them”.
Although this is a broad-brush picture and the character of Arab families is certainly changing in some parts of the region, authoritarian and patriarchal attitudes seen in the traditional family are replicated throughout society, right up to the top.
“Rulers and political leaders,” Barakat says, “are cast in the image of the father, while citizens are cast in the image of children. God, the father, and the ruler thus have many characteristics in common. They are the shepherds, and the people are the sheep: citizens of Arab countries are often referred to as ra’iyyah (the flock).”
This image of a distant, often unseen but omnipresent father figure who is protective and makes all the important decisions on your behalf – but who can also become angry if you displease him – applies to the family, the state and, of course religion.
Interestingly, in families without a father, God can be invoked as a surrogate father. A divorced working mother who I interviewed in Cairo recalled how her toddler son’s nanny would constantly say things like: "If you don't eat this, God will hate you" or "If you don't wear those socks, God will hate you."
Although the traditional Arab family can be very oppressive – a tyranny in miniature – there are benefits as well as disadvantages – which is why I describe it in the book as a gilded cage. Salam Pax, the Iraqi blogger, told me:
It’s good to have the family structure we have. I know very well that if anything goes wrong I can always fall back on something. I’ve got that safety net under me all the time. That’s the plus. But again, because I’m depending on the family so much, I need to constantly make sure that they approve of all my decisions.
It doesn’t matter where you are, the structure is there … decisions are made at the top and have to be followed by everyone else, and every time you need to do something it has to be referred up before you can get approval.
This happens on a bigger scale, the tribal scale. Most governments in the Arab world function like that, too. There is this person who is the head of the family, the head of the tribe, the head of the state, who has final call on every single decision, and you will do what he says, otherwise there is always this fear of being cast outside the family.
Though it may not be immediately apparent, these observations about the family are very important when we look at the wider problems of the Middle East. Many of the principles shaping family life can be seen at work in other areas too. Barakat’s analogy of shepherds and sheep is one of them. The subsuming of individual liberty, supposedly for the collective good, is another.
The book covers a lot of different issues and I won’t try to mention all of them here, but I want highlight four particular crunch points. I call them crunch points because they are areas where Arab society often tries to have it both ways but in my view will sooner or later be forced to make a decisive choice one way or the other. I’ll summarise them under the headings of knowledge, equal rights, secularism and citizenship.
Knowledge
It’s becoming very clear that economic and social development in the future will depend increasingly on knowledge and the ability to make use of it through problem-solving, innovation, and so on.
Arab governments do seem to recognise this but their educational systems are ill-eqipped to provide it. One study by the World Bank, for example, found that school students were taught to memorise and retain answers to “fairly fixed questions” with “little or no meaningful context”, and that the system mainly rewarded those who were skilled at being passive knowledge recipients.
Put simply, the system actively discourages the sort of skills that will be needed in a knowledge-based society.
“At school,” one Egyptian told me, “you memorise everything, even literary critique. When you are given a piece of poetry, you study the points of strength and the points of weakness. You don’t move your brain, you don’t use anything – you just memorise what the government textbook tells you.”
This applies to universities as well as schools. Another interviewee described his experience studying economics in Egypt. He said:
There was an emphasis on making profuse notes when you attended lectures. You tried to get the professor’s [exact] wording because you would be expected to regurgitate that in the exam and the closer you came to how the professor put it, the higher the grade you were likely to get.
Professors expect you to act like a disciple – what they say is gospel. I would often question the professor’s thinking in lectures and exam papers, and that hurt my grades.
Curricula, teaching and evaluation methods, in the words of the Arab Human development Report, “do not permit free dialogue and active, exploratory learning and consequently do not open the doors to freedom of thought and criticism. On the contrary, they weaken the capacity to hold opposing viewpoints and to think outside the box. Their societal role focuses on the reproduction of control in Arab societies.”
This extends to other areas, too. In terms of research, the Arab world lags behind other developing countries such as South Korea and Brazil. In business, the lack of innovation is illustrated by the small number of patents registered each year – which again lags behind other developing countries.
Think-tanks are another indicator of the level of innovative thought. The total number of think-tanks across the 22 Arab countries is less than the total in one European country – France, which has 162. Egypt has the largest number of think-tanks in the Arab world (21) but when population is taken into account, it’s only one-quarter of the level found in South Africa.
The recent Arab Knowledge Report (funded jointly by the UN and a member of the Maktoum family in the Emirates) adopted a “must try harder” approach to the problem. It suggested, for example, that education systems could be improved by better management and better allocation of resources.
Up to a point this is true but it doesn’t address the underlying problem, which is a fear of independent thought. The pressure “not to go there” comes partly from the regimes, partly from religious elements and partly from society as a whole. This brings us back to the shepherd/sheep relationship and a belief that people cannot be trusted to make their own judgements and must therefore be protected from dangerous ideas.
There’s a striking example of this in Egypt. Almost half a century ago, a decree by President Nasser established the Central Agency for Public Mobilisation and Statistics (known as Capmas for short) as the country’s “official source for the collection of data and statistical information, and its preparation, processing and dissemination”.
Capmas is in charge of “providing all the state bodies, organisations, universities, research centres … with the information that can help them to make informed decisions”. In effect, this gives the Egyptian state a monopoly on statistics.
Anyone wishing to compile data independently, through surveys or interviews, must first obtain a permit from Capmas’s “General Department for Security”.
Where controversial issues are involved, the security department often delays permission indefinitely or refuses it outright, without giving reasons. Capmas may also delete certain questions from a survey or demand that they be re-worded.
Whether or not a permit is granted “depends on contacts and the sensitivity of topics”, according to an associate professor at the American University in Cairo, but “certain topics can’t be researched”.
Of course, Arab governments and societies are happy to "improve" education if that will bring economic benefits further down the line. But they don't really want improvements that will produce thoughtful, informed citizens with original or unorthodox ideas. A knowledge-based society is essentially non-authoritarian and open. It favours transparency, encourages a spirit of enquiry and confronts unwelcome realities.
That’s why I call it a crunch point – because there’s no way they can develop genuine knowledge-based societies without also embracing social and political change.
Equal rights
My second crunch point is equal rights.I think it’s fair to say that most Arabs accept equality as a principle, in a very general, theoretical sort of way, and most Arab states pay some sort of lip-service to notions of equality. For instance, the constitution of Jordan says:
Jordanians shall be equal before the law. There shall be no discrimination between them as regards to their rights and duties on grounds of race, language or religion.
And the constitution of Yemen:
The state shall guarantee equal opportunities for all citizens in the fields of political, economic, social and cultural activities and shall enact the necessary laws for the realisation thereof.
The problem is that equality, as a principle, also has to compete with other social principles – often more powerful ones – pushing in the opposite direction: the obligation to help your own kind; the high value placed on conformity and the low value placed on diversity; the desire to assert identity; and the need to keep up appearances of national unity (whatever the underlying reality) in the face of perceived threats from outside.
Discrimination is closely linked to ideas about family, kinship and ancestry – especially in the moder traditional parts of the Arab world.
Nesrine Malik talked to me about her experience growing up in Sudan. She said:
My father’s family is very obsessed that we’re the Maliks. We have land, our ancestor was the founder of this tribe … You’re indoctrinated with the superiority of the tribe. My father’s tribe, they say things like: “We’re taller and our skin is softer.”
My dad’s family would say: “This guy doesn’t look like he’s free” – meaning: “Were his family slaves?” If there is even a hint, then it’s a problem. It can be appearance – if you have a slightly bigger nose, slightly kinkier hair, if you are less Ethiopian, less Eritrean-looking, more southern Sudanese, you’ve got a problem, even if you have no slave background at all …
These issues would come particularly to the fore whenever a marriage was contemplated. In Nesrine’s view, it was all about maintaining a consistent family tree. She said:
Birth and lineage, at least from what I’ve seen in Sudan – it’s a massive thing. Because you know that you are from a pure stock, it gives you a sense of superiority and snobbery. It’s so accepted, so normal.
People would limit their choice of partner and their choice of who you mixed your blood with. Basically it’s a fear, a terror of this blood line being polluted, and I think it’s entirely in people’s heads. It’s a tribal legacy.
But the Malik family’s confidence in their social status was suddenly shaken when they moved to Saudi Arabia where ideas of “pure” breeding are taken to even greater extremes. Nesrine continued:
My little sister, she’s got a really fat nose. The first week we were there, we were sitting in a car and a little Saudi girl walked by with her mother. The Saudi girl pointed to her and said to her mother: “Abda! Shufi abda!” (“Look! A slave-girl!”). My little sister was just … she was in tears, coming from this really proud Sudanese family. She was teased in school, and they used to call her “khubza mahruqa” – which means burnt bread – because she was dark.
It was a similar story a few years later when Nesrine continued her studies at university in Egypt and shared a female dormitory with a mixture of Sunni Muslims and Coptic Christians. She said:
The Sunni girls wouldn’t eat with the Coptic girls and they wouldn’t take their clothes off – they wouldn’t change – in front of the Coptic girls, because they had this kind of fear that they were impure, the devil was in them, or something like that, and there was very, very clear friction between the two.
The Copts themselves were very parochial – it was reciprocated. It wasn’t just discrimination by Muslims. It was also Copts thinking Muslims are retarded and barbaric – massive stresses that I don’t think people talk about a lot. I saw lots of hatred and almost tribal tension between the two – girls spitting in each other’s faces, tearing their hair, calling each other dirty – and this wasn’t a school, it was the American University in Cairo. We were in our late teens and early twenties.
Discrimination works both ways, of course. While some people are discriminated against, others get preferential treatment for equally discriminatory reasons. This introduces a complicating dimension in Arab societies. Wasta and other forms of favouritism, together with the feeling that everyone has a duty to help those with whom they have some affinity – whether the ties are based on kinship, a shared faith or simply having been born in the same district – encourages positive discrimination, as if it were a virtue. The fact that others more entitled or better qualified to receive a benefit may be excluded in the process tends to be overlooked.
Apart from its intrinsic unfairness, discrimination and the lack of equal rights places Arab countries at a disadvantage in comparison with other parts of the world. To compete effectively, you need equality of opportunity, social mobility and appointments based on merit rather than social connections.
Recognition of equal rights is one of the keys to change in Arab societies – perhaps the main one because it affects so many aspects of daily life. Accepting the equality principle undermines patriarchy, clannism and autocracy. It helps to combat corruption by eliminating the use of money and influence to deny people their rightful opportunities. It gives people an equal right to express themselves. It allows them to practise religion, if they so wish, according to their own conscience rather than the demands of others. It requires tolerance and acceptance of diversity.
More than calls for democracy and free elections, focusing on equal rights provides a basis for addressing the region’s problems across a broad front.
Despite the lip-service to equality, Arab governments do very little in practice to promote it. But human rights activist who I spoke to in the region were very reluctant to pin all the blame on governments. One of them told me:
Even within society the sense of equality or non-discrimination is absent. It’s not just the state that is the culprit here. Most examples of discrimination are between people, but no one is really going to take a strong stand to push for that equality.
For Hossam Bahgat, an Egyptian activist, it is the sheer pervasiveness of discrimination that makes it difficult to address. He said:
If you want to mobilise moral outrage against discrimination, you [need to] wake this sense of outrage in the minds of the majority, and that’s built on the premise that as people enjoying our [own] rights we should all stand with the oppressed. This majority doesn’t exist because injustice and inequality is so widespread in Egypt. It affects everyone almost, apart from the lucky few.
You can talk to many Egyptian Muslims and they would argue out of strong conviction that Copts are enjoying more rights than Muslims in Egypt. Really, this is a very widespread notion – that Copts in Egypt are a spoilt minority, they control the economy and they are the luckiest minority in the world, and look at how the west is treating Muslims – Copts here should feel really grateful.
Another part of the problem is that it’s all a power game, so a middle class, middle-aged civil servant in the ministry of transport who is working in inhuman conditions and gets very poor treatment from his superiors would immediately take this out on his wife or his children or his Coptic neighbour. This sense of injustice gets exercised in different ways. In a sea of victims it’s really hard to find one victim and to make a big case about their victimhood.
Secularism
Religion is another obvious cruch point. It’s also a big subject and I can’t go into much detail here but I’ll summarise one of the key arguments from my book.
It’s about secularism – by which I don’t mean a society without religion but a society where state and religion are kept separate.
One of the basic requirements for freedom in politics is that sovereignty belongs to the people. Power may be delegated to representatives but the people should remain the ultimate arbiters.
Islamists, no matter how they try to dress up their ideology, do not accept this key point. Islamism, by definition, seeks to apply “Islamic” principles to the state – hence the slogans of the Muslim Brotherhood, “Islam is the solution” and “The Qur’an is our constitution.”
Some Islamists directly reject the idea of popular sovereignty with another slogan: “La hukma illa li-Llah” (“Sovereignty belongs to God alone”) and this leads to claims that secular Muslims who question God’s sovereignty in worldly politics are guilty of apostasy.
Certainly there are differences of opinion among Islamists as to the preferred relationship between religion and the state, and some are more flexible on this point than others. Some aspire to a full-blooded theocracy while others envisage a degree of popular decision-making – at least up to the point where it conflicts with the “principles of Islam” (which of course begs the question of how the principles of Islam are to be determined, and by whom).
Regardless of these differences of opinion, the underlying problem is still the same: an anti-libertarian assumption that linking the state with religion is both legitimate and necessary. Not only that, but religion claims the right, at least in some circumstances, to over-ride the will of the people.
So my basic point is that you cannot have real freedom and popular sovereignty without separating religion from the state. For a variety of reasons, though, secularist ideas have very little support in the Middle East at present and some degree of linkage between religion and the state is accepted in virtually every Arab country, even those with relatively secular regimes such as Syria.
The dispute between governments and Islamists is usually about how much linkage there should be and what form it should take – not whether there should be any at all.
Though it may seem counter-intuitive, I think the best way to open up a debate about secularism is to legalise religious political parties – because that would force them to grapple with the contradictions inherent in many of their ideas.
Citizenship
The fourth crunch point is citizenship. By “citizenship” I mean a sense of engagement – a feeling that you can participate in the country’s affairs, or having a sense of civic duty at a more local level. You don’t really find that in Arab countries – at least, not to the same extent as you find it in western countries.
This lack of citizenship is not much discussed, but I think it’s very important and it helps to explain why Arab regimes survive for so long with so little apparent opposition.
The Moroccan writer Abdellah Taia described it to me as a sense of disengagement or detachment. He said:
In Morocco we have this idea that we have to be proud of our country, of our religion, of our family, of our king, and if foreigners ask we tell them it’s good. But at the same time it seems as if we are not Moroccan society – that society is something abstract. We are in it but we don’t see that society is us, and that we can influence it or change it.
Karim Makdisi, a political scientist in Lebanon, put it slightly differently when he told me that Arab regimes “have a direct interest to ensure that they do not develop a class of citizens – citizens as opposed to clients or subjects”.
There was an interesting example of that in Egypt recently when a group of Christians were shot dead outside a church. Various dignitaries went to the town to offer condolences, with official approval. But when a group of activists and bloggers tried to do the same, they were arrested the moment they arrived.
The reasons for their arrests were not fully explained but I think the most likely explanation is that the authorities simply didn’t want people taking independent initiatives of that kind.
The message that it doesn’t pay to make waves is impressed on Arabs from an early age. It starts in the family, where father knows best and if you don’t respect his decisions there will be trouble.
It continues in schools and universities, where the one thing Arab educational systems are supremely good at is teaching students how to survive in an authoritarian system: keep your head down and don’t ask awkward questions.
We see it too in adult life with complex rules to regulate the activities of civil society organisations and political parties, rules about who can stand for election, rules for keeping newspapers in the hands of “responsible” owners.
People become so accustomed to this that they start to regard it as the norm.
Arab journalists have often talked to me about the need to reform the press laws. And when I say “No, don’t try to reform them or tinker with them, just abolish them,” they look surprised.
Similarly, many ordinary Arabs regard freedom of association as a privilege to be granted by the authorities rather than a natural entitlement. According to Hoshyar Malo, of the Iraq-based Kurdish Human Rights Watch:
In many countries, especially in the Middle East, neither the governments nor the people believe that the rights of association and assembly are among the fundamental rights … Even where the government allows individuals to establish associations, this is seen more like a gift or a bonus from the government to the people than a recognition of the human rights protected by international conventions.
The pretext, of course, is that all this regulation is to protect people from harmful influences – another case of shepherding. That argument might be more plausible if the authorities made a comparable effort to protect the public from things that can actually kill them. But as we can see from the numerous railway disasters and collapsing buildings in Egypt and last year’s tragic floods in Jeddah, they don’t – and we’re left to conclude that it’s not so much about protecting the public as protecting the regimes themselves.
NOW, this may all sound rather gloomy. An Egyptian journalist asked me recently: if the problem lies with authoritiarian societies as much as with authoritarian regimes, doesn’t that make it harder for change to happen?
Well, it does mean the problem is a lot more complex than Bush and the neocons imagined, and that there are no quick fixes.
At the same time, though, I don't think it's a reason for pessimism. Arab society is definitely changing, if only slowly at the moment.
But the more it changes the more it is likely to change. And I think the forces driving that change - globalisation, satellite TV, the internet, foreign travel and so on - are virtually unstoppable in the long term, even if there are setbacks along the way.
