Nation and Religion E-Book

Fred Halliday

• Herausgeber: Saqi Books
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 487

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014

Beschreibung

This collection of essays offers a general analysis of the Middle East and more focused country-by-country examples. Nationalism and Islamism are re-examined to demonstrate their ongoing relevance and relationship to the present-day Arab context and identity. This is followed by a closer look at Islamist movements in Turkey, Iran and Tunisia and how these forces may either come to erode the secular state (as in Turkey and Tunisia) or bolster the Islamic one (in the case of Iran). The author also examines the fate of the eight remaining monarchies of the Arab world and the conditions of their emergence, consolidation and continuation.

Leseprobe

Nation and Religion in the Middle East

Fred Halliday

Nation and Religion in the Middle East

Saqi Books

Contents

Introduction

I. Political Theory and Nationalist Ideology

1.   Liberal Theory and the Middle East

2.   The Middle East and the Nationalism Debate

3.   History and Modernity in the Formation of Nationalism: the Case of Yemen

4.   ‘Terrorisms’ in Historical Perspective

II. Modernity and the State

5.   The Fates of Monarchy in the Middle East

6.   A Contemporary Confrontation: The Conflict of Arabs and Persians

7.   Fundamentalism and the State: Iran and Tunisia

III. Reportages

8.   Tehran 1979: The Revolution Turns to Repression

9.   Saudi Arabia 1997: A Family Business in Trouble

10.   Turkey 1998: Secularism in Question

11.   The Millet of Manchester: Arab Merchants and the Cotton Trade

Conclusion: The Middle East at 2000: The Millennial Illusion

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Introduction

The texts included in this volume cover a range of topics and genres: some are analyses of the workings of ideology and power within the contemporary Middle East, some are engagements with particular debates that concern both the Middle East and the Western world, some address the ways in which identity has been defined and changed. I have tried in previous books to address these issues, both in regard to particular countries on which I have written, most notably Iran and Yemen, and in more general discussions of the contemporary Middle East.1 These essays pick up and, I hope, take further the discussion in these earlier volumes.

There are three themes in particular which I hope that these essays, in their diversity, can address. The first is that of the formation of culture – be it national, or religious. Against those within the Middle East and outside who analyse the region in terms of constant cultural or religious identities, I seek to show here how what is defined as the national or religious is itself subject to change: what is presented as ‘true’, ‘traditional’, ‘genuine’ is liable to differing interpretations that draw both on themes from outside the region and from variant interpretations of the past. In the analysis of religion, as much as in that of nationalism, I hold to a modernist position: the pretense of both nationalism and religion is that they represent a true reading of a given, the past or the doctrine; the reality is that different groups, in power or out of it, in the region or in exile, constantly redefine and reselect to serve contemporary purposes. What is today presented as the ‘true’ representation of a past tradition is in fact a contemporary, modern creation, designed to meet contemporary needs, not least the interests of those defining the tradition. Ideology is in this sense instrumental, for those in power – states, elites, classes, religious authorities, men – and for those challenging power.

My second theme is the impact on the Middle East of the external context – be this economic, military, political or cultural. Contemporary focus on globalization may run the risk of confining discussion of such international factors to the recent past: but the Middle East as a whole, and the variant states and peoples within it, have been influenced by the external, just as they have influenced the external world for millennia. The defining moment in the original definition of classical Greece, and hence of Europe, was the battle of Thermopylae in 480 BC, between Greek defenders and Persian invaders. Later one need only think of the impact on Europe of Christianity and Islam, both of which originated in the Middle East, or of the impact on Mediterranean countries of the Arab and Turkish Islamic empires. From the eighteenth century onwards European imperial expansion, above all that of Russia, Britain and France, was to dominate the history of the Middle East. The Middle East of today has been formed, above all, by the workings of modern capitalism.

This relation is not the expression of some timeless antagonism. In much of the twentieth century it took a specific form, conflict between colonial and anti-colonial forces. The form that states, economies, but also religious and nationalist ideologies, have taken in the modern Middle East reflects that interaction. The role that anti-imperialism took was itself two-sided – serving to emancipate peoples from foreign oppression, but also in its turn serving to legitimate new forms of indigenous oppression.

Today there is much discussion of the relation between cultures: but I do not see such a relation as necessarily antagonistic or, conversely, as conducive to benign monotheistic accommodation. While the interaction between cultures is changing, variant, a reflection of political and social needs, the fact of interaction cannot be avoided: cultural autarky is, and always was, an impossibility. In the contemporary Middle East no society is immune to the international context, as the contrasted but convergent fates of Wahhabi Saudi Arabia and revolutionary Iran demonstrate: the question is how these societies react to changes in the external world, and whether they can respond creatively to them.

The third and for me most important theme that this book addresses is that of the possibility of discussion, on analytic and moral issues, between peoples and cultures. No understanding of the contemporary world, and not least that between the Middle East and the West, can fail to recognize the profound inequalities, and persistent hierarchy of power, that define these relations. That is why it is essential to recognize the continuing impact on the Middle East of the period of imperialist domination. A recognition of that past is a precondition for an understanding of the present, let alone for a resolution of the issues that divide the Middle East from the West. Contemporary, capitalist globalization accentuates the inequality, but recognition of this should not lead us to explain all developments in the Middle East in terms of imperialism. The end result of that can all too easily be conspiracy theory. Nor should a recognition of imperial domination and cultural difference, or the hierarchy inherent in globalization, lead to the denial of discussion of issues that are common to the Middle East and the West. It is possible to address issues of analysis and ethical position that are shared.

This possibility of discussion across national and cultural boundaries is true of, for example, the role in politics of nationalism and religion. This is an issue that arises in many parts of the world, including that country from which I originate, namely Ireland. I do not believe that being reared in the context of Irish nationalisms, for there are more than one, necessarily allows one to understand the rest of the world. I am wary of how many in the Middle East, both Arab and Zionist, have drawn lessons to suit their purpose from the Irish case. I do, however, think the Irish story instills both a recognition of the enduring force of nationalism, of its cultural and political importance, and an element of scepticism about the claims of nationalists, not least those who so confidently mix nationalism with religion.

I am, for these reasons, strongly against the trend, pervasive in much contemporary Western and Islamic political thinking, that seeks to deny the possibility of a common, universalist intellectual endeavour. Whether it be in regard to issues of democracy and human rights, or in regard to the claims of nationalists and fundamentalists, or in arguments about secularism, I believe there is a possibility of a shared political space: that shared space is a product of a common humanity, and common membership of a single world economic and political system produced by modernity. Indeed it is only on the basis of such an aspiration to shared, indeed universal, values that the recognition and overcoming of the international system of hierarchy, so central to globalization as it was to imperialism, can be addressed. The disputes that do divide peoples and nations are not primarily about values or civilizations. They are about interests, territory, power, and about the impact of competition for power within particular states on the international system. The earlier, contestatory universalisms of liberalism and socialism recognized this commonality of value in a world of material inequality.

No-one familiar with academic and political discussion of the contemporary Middle East can think that it will be easy to win the argument on these issues. There is too much of an accumulation of myth and half-truth, and too many people with a vested interest in propagating such myths, for them easily to be overcome. Yet it is important for the debate to be held, for those whose simplifications affect discussion in the Middle East and outside to be challenged. Here I would cite three people who, in my view, have made an exceptional contribution to this endeavour: Maxime Rodinson, the French orientalist, whose substantive work and critique of myths on the Middle East has set a model for us all; Sadeq al-Azm, the Syrian writer, who has over many years written with courage and clarity, against the tide of nationalist and religious obscurantism; and Muhammad Khatami, current president of Iran, whose writings have argued for a dialogue, not a clash, between civilizations and whose own philosophical work is an outstanding attempt to explore the implications of liberty, seen by him as a universal aspiration, with religious and cultural identity. In a world of simplification, dogmatism – secular and religious – and demagogy it is voices such as these which mark the possibility of a distinctive, reasoned and universalist approach.

In conclusion I would like to acknowledge the generous help of the Trust, which funded research used in this collection, in particular chapter 1. I would also like to take this opportunity to thank those who have contributed to the production of this book: Jennifer Chapar, at LSE; Emma Sinclair-Webb, an editor at once sympathetic and exigent; and the many friends from the region whose hours of conversation have informed these pages.

Acknowledgements

Chapter 1 was written as part of a research project funded by the Leverhulme Trust, whose support is gratefully acknowledged. Other chapters in this book are versions of texts published or preserved in earlier form. Chapter 2 was first published in Middle East Lectures, no. 3, The Moshe Dayan Center for Middle Eastern and African Studies, Tel Aviv University, 1999. Chapter 3 first appeared in James Jankowsi and Israel Gershoni (eds.), Rethinking Nationalism in the Arab Middle East (New York, Columbia University Press, 1997). Chapter 4 was published in Arab Studies Quarterly, Association of Arab-American University Graduates and the Institute of Arab Studies, vol. 9, no. 2, Spring 1987. Chapter 5 appeared in Joseph Kostiner (ed.), Middle East Monarchies: The Challenge of Modernity, (Boulder, Lynne Rienner, 2000). Chapter 6 was published in Cahiers d’études sur la Méditerrannée orientale et le monde turco-iranien, no. 22, 1996. Chapter 7 appeared in Akbar Ahmad and Hastings Donnan (eds.), Islam, Globalization and Postmodernity (London, Routledge, 1994). Chapter 8 was published in two parts in the New Statesman, 17 and 24 August 1979. The postscript appeared in the New Statesman, 27 January 1984. Chapter 9 was first published in London Review of Books, vol. 19, no. 14, 17 July 1997. Chapter 10 was published in Soundings, October 1999. Chapter 11 first appeared in British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, vol. 19, no. 2, 1992. The conclusion was published in Middle East Reports, no. 213, Winter 1999. I am grateful for permission to republish these articles here.

PART I

Political Theory and Nationalist Ideology

CHAPTER 1

Liberal Theory and the Middle East

The Rise of ‘Hegemonic Abstentionism’

Why should I worry about Saddam Hussein? He’s no worse than the Los Angeles Police Department. (Gore Vidal, interview with BBC TV, 1990)

In the West above all, the past two decades or so have seen a remarkable split, or divergence, between two forms of public discourse supposedly concerned with the same question. On the one hand within international law and on the agenda of non-governmental organizations and some states, concern with universal human rights codes has grown: there are now over ninety such codes enshrined in the body of UN resolutions.1 On the other hand, a significant trend within political theory has come to question the possibility, or desirability, of any universal conception of rights. Against this background, the following discussion has two aims. It is intended to explore the implications of this theoretical trend for those involved in discussing the Middle East. It also seeks to examine the presuppositions underpinning this theoretical trend itself, by reference to a specific part of the real world. It is about something that I find troubling and do not claim to have resolved in either its theoretical or Middle Eastern dimensions.

I have used the term ‘hegemonic abstentionism’ to refer to those political theorists who, from a variety of philosophical starting points, seek to limit the application of universal concepts of human rights. Numerous terms for such an approach exist – communitarian, relativist, tradition-based, anti-foundationalist, post-modernist, realist. There are philosophical differences between them, but their practical conclusion, their implication in the real world, is broadly similar. Following this approach, the concepts of a desirable society, and specifically of rights, as they are espoused in Western political discourse, are limited in large measure or entirely to the West. Consequently the attempt to develop and implement universal codes is fundamentally mistaken. Such an approach is distinct from relativism of the kind articulated in or on behalf of (or supposedly on behalf of) non-Western societies: in the name of Asian or Islamic values, or as part of a critique of ethnocentrism or imperialism. The latter I would term relativism from below, since it seeks to resist the imposition of something from outside.

The current I want to examine in this paper is rather a claim, from within the West, that there are limits to what can be prescribed for other societies, and that it may even be in everyone’s best interests to so abstain. This is what I term ‘hegemonic abstentionism’. It is hegemonic in that it comes from a standpoint within the dominant liberal-democratic states and reflects a choice about how to use existing forms of power. A theory that advocates doing less or doing nothing when more could be done, it raises many interesting questions.

The idea that values are specific to particular regions or communities is far from new. As historians of political thought point out, it runs through Western political thinking, from Plato to Spinoza, Rousseau, Hegel, Marx, and is implicit in much anthropological and sociological thinking.2 It would nonetheless be accurate to say that over the past two decades or so we have witnessed a coherent and widespread reassertion of this approach. This can be seen in the writings of, among others, philosophers such as Alasdair MacIntyre, Stuart Hampshire, and Charles Taylor, and in the work of political theorists such as Michael Walzer, Amitai Etzioni and John Rawls in the USA, in Britain David Miller, Raymond Plant and John Gray. While most of these writers would regard themselves as in some sense within a liberal category, there is, of course, nothing especially or necessarily liberal about this view. The concept of community has authoritarian as well as democratic potential. The idea that rights or political ideals were only applicable to the Western elite states was very much a stock-in-trade of nineteenth-century colonial thinking, mixed as it was with ideas of social Darwinism. Huntington’s espousal of this position, replete be it with misused quotes from Walzer, is of an equally illiberal, conservative kind.

Here let us summarize the views of some other thinkers in this vein. Thus MacIntyre, in a series of writings, has questioned the possibility of a rational and hence universalist approach to rights. He has insisted on locating all discussions of morality within the context of tradition and tradition-related communities.3 MacIntyre would appear to take pleasure, in the vein of Jeremy Bentham and Margaret Thatcher, in mocking the very idea of rights. Hampshire is equally sceptical of universalist or rationalist approaches. He believes instead in the possibility of some minimum, ‘a non-divisive and generally acceptable conception of justice, however thin a conception this may be, amounting at its minimum only to fair procedures of negotiation’.4

Walzer also denies the possibility of a universalist, rational approach to moral issues and rights, but allows of some dialogue between different groups: he distinguishes between a ‘thick’ and a ‘thin’ morality, the former being principles inherent within communities, the latter being only those values that we can observe as recurring, reiterated, between communities. As universal values are few, and weak, he advocates a moral minimalism in the international arena. For Walzer we have an entitlement to criticize other societies but within limits: were he to be invited to China to lecture on democracy, he writes, he would explain his own views about democracy but would defer to what he terms ‘local prerogative’. It is up to the Chinese to define what they mean by rights and democracy.5 Samuel Huntington echoes these themes from the very different perspective of defending Western civilization. He argues that belief in the universality of Western culture is ‘false, immoral and dangerous’. This leads him to enunciate what he terms ‘the abstention rule’, one of three maxims for regulating conflict between civilizational blocs in the next century.6 Huntington has little to say about rights or justice, but the implication of what he is saying would seem to be clear enough. Later in this essay I want to take as an example of this approach the lecture given by John Rawls in Oxford in 1993 on what he terms ‘the law of peoples’ and relate it to the Middle East. First, however, it is necessary to spell out what some implications of this turn in political theory might be for the debate on rights in the Middle Eastern context.

Implications for the Middle East

I would argue that this development in political theory marks a new stage in the Western discussion of human rights in the Middle East, and a new challenge to those concerned with the issue. Very broadly one might identify three earlier stages in the discussion of rights in this region. The first, what one might term the ‘Bulgarian Atrocities’ approach, is associated with the colonial era and particularly with the clash over the treatment of Christians in the Ottoman Empire. Explicitly selective and non-universalist, the concern of this approach was with the fate of Christians and citizens of Christian states, in the Muslim world. The second stage associated with the rise of nationalism and inter-ethnic conflict, saw the discussion of rights and condemnations of violations of rights used instrumentally in rival claims of different sides in conflicts. Thus while one’s own side were innocent, provoked, occasionally made mistakes or committed regrettable excesses, the other side were murderers, to the point that their whole claim was illegitimate. We can see such a partisan use of human rights, combining denial with denunciation, in the Palestinian-Israeli context, in Cyprus, and in Ireland. More recently it has been reproduced in post-communist ethnic conflicts, such as Bosnia and Nagorno-Qarabagh: indeed one of the most depressing features of debate on the post-communist world has been the recurrence of just the same half-baked and partial arguments about rights that one finds in the Middle East. This trend invokes universal codes and international opinion but is not universalist at all, based as it is on selection and competitive comparison.7

The third debate has been around the issue of relativism – what I have termed above ‘relativism from below’. This takes the form of a critique of Western domination and ethnocentric concepts. As I have written elsewhere, for all its supposedly anti-imperialist and authentic character, this approach is questionable.8 Be it in the Far or Middle East, a relativist argument is often made not by those whose rights are denied but by those who, in the regional context, are denying them, or by their Western friends who derive financial and strategic benefit from so doing.9

All three of these discourses are still with us: they are not mutually incompatible, nor are they specific to the Middle East. The emergence of the current of ‘hegemonic abstentionism’ could then be said to mark another phase in the discussion of human rights. It does so in at least four ways. First, if generally accepted, it would provide a rationale for Western states, as well as for Western media, universities, non-governmental groups and the like, to drop or downplay the issue of human rights and more broadly the issues of democracy and justice in the Middle Eastern context. Secondly, it would (and indeed visibly does) provide a rationale for those in the Middle East who, for their own reasons, wish to limit external criticism of their human rights practices. This goes for those in power, but also for those who, in the name of regional authenticity, be they nationalists or religious fundamentalists, deny the application of universal codes. Thus if the rulers of Saudi Arabia, Iran or Iraq want an argument to fend off criticism of their policies on individual human rights, of if Turkey, Sudan or Israel want to fend off criticism of their denial of collective rights, they will find succour in the arguments of the hegemonic abstentionists. Equally, those opposition groups whose own practices and programmes are themselves in conflict with universal human rights principles will be reassured by these arguments. Little wonder that Islamists like Huntington: he is telling them what they want to hear.

Turning the question around, we can see how in several respects the Middle East could act as a test case for such theories of moral minimalism or abstention. Most obviously we can ask two practical questions. First, what would be the implications for the region if such theories were applied as policy? This is a simple, if rather dramatic, thing to do. Secondly, one can enquire whether in relation to the Middle East the minimalist principle being advocated – be it Hampshire’s rules of procedure, or Walzer’s thin morality – would in fact be applicable. The theorists themselves claim to be formulating ideas that have some, mediate, relation to the real world. Rawls, for example, regards himself as engaged in what he terms ‘non-ideal theory’, that is, speculation that is supposed to have a relation to real-world situations and to guide real-world choices. He invokes principles of ‘political realism’ and plausibility.10 We are entitled, therefore, to assess how ‘real’ the ‘non-ideal’ is.

Another way in which the Middle East could be used to probe these theories of hegemonic abstentionism would entail inquiry into the underlying assumptions about the nature of politics and communities embedded in such theories. Without derogation to the separate and necessarily theoretical world of political thinkers, we are entitled to examine some of the assumptions that underlie their thinking. Here I would mention five: the idea of communities or nations as historically discrete entities; the idea of tradition as something given and unequivocal; the idea of communities as self-regulating and their rulers as representative; the notion that tradition is immune to criticism; and the common characterization of what the preconditions for liberalism are.11

‘The law of peoples’

One formulation of hegemonic abstentionism is to be found in John Rawls’ A Theory of Justice, published in 1971, a rich and complex attempt to derive from first principles a liberal theory of justice. In this account justice, rather than freedom or equality, is shown to provide the basis for a liberal political order. In particular the thesis rests upon the notion that values can be universalized through a set of procedural mechanisms. Rawls was concerned, quite properly, with the ordering of a particular liberal community, but appeared to leave open the possibility of applying his theory internationally. It was this hint which others, including Brian Barry and Charles Beitz, took up when they argued that the procedures for attaining justice within particular societies could be applied internationally, to encompass economic redistribution, rules of war, the protection of treaties, and human rights.12 They argued, in other words, that Rawls’ theory could be developed to encompass both the issue of international relations in the strict sense, that of relations between states and communities, and universality, the application in each society of principles evolved on a liberal basis. In applying Rawls’ theory writers such as Barry and Beitz were not, therefore, hegemonic abstentionists but were, rather, liberal universalists.

Twenty years after the publication of A Theory of Justice Rawls himself entered the fray to draw different and more limited conclusions. It is these conclusions which put him in my hegemonic abstentionist camp. This contribution to the debate took the form of a lecture, given in Oxford in 1993, entitled ‘The law of peoples’. This term was meant to imply not international law as we now have it but those laws which all peoples have in common, that is, a set of principles shared across frontiers and cultures. These pertain, inter alia, to the issue of how liberal societies, constituted internally on Rawlsian principles, should relate to illiberal ones. Rawls’ argument, in summary, is that the law of peoples does not entail that all societies should be liberal, but only that they respect certain minimal principles. Non-liberal but in a minimal sense law-abiding states are termed by Rawls ‘well-ordered hierarchical’ societies. He writes:

. . . a liberal society must respect other societies organized by comprehensive doctrines, provided their political and social institutions meet certain conditions that lead the society to adhere to a reasonable law of peoples.13

When he comes to specifying what such a society would look like he lays down three requirements. First, ‘it must be peaceful and gain its legitimate aims through diplomacy and trade, and other ways of peace.’ It cannot be expansionist and must fully respect the civic order and integrity of other societies. Secondly, the legal system must be ‘sincerely and not unreasonably believed to be guided by a common-good conception of justice’. It must take into account people’s essential interests and impose moral duties and obligations on all members of society. This second condition also involves what Rawls terms ‘a reasonable consultation hierarchy’. Thirdly, such a regime should respect basic human rights. Religion may be a source of authority, but the religious and philosophical doctrines of such a society should not be ‘unreasonable’: they should allow some freedom of thought, no other religions should be persecuted, and there should be a right of emigration. For Rawls this set of conditions would form an adequate basis for the application to the international arena of the principle of justice as fairness evoked in A Theory of Justice.

Rawls appears to regard the category of the hierarchical well-ordered society as a realistic one, that is to say he sees it as more than a mere exercise in the rearrangement of principles. He clearly hopes that the category and the three requirements that underpin it will provide a means both of recognizing the limits of liberalism in an international context and of answering some of the concerns of other societies. Thus a notion of universalism is shown not to be the underlying criterion for a principle of justice and at the same time Rawls demonstrates that liberalism respects non-liberal societies. As such, Rawls’ theory allows, even invites, the test not only of philosophic clarity but also of plausibility and realism.

In making this argument, Rawls accepts that there may be societies that do not meet these criteria and he goes on to identify two types of states. There are those which are aggressive and which he terms ‘outlaws’, and there are those that exhibit what he terms ‘unfavourable conditions’. In his words, they lack the political and cultural traditions, the human capital and resources necessary for a well-ordered society. Towards such states he adopts a markedly more interventionist stand. The outlaws, he argues, should face sanctions and be refused admission as members in good standing into the ‘mutually beneficial practices’ of well-ordered states. As for those societies that do not have the conditions for being well-ordered, he argues that it is the obligation of wealthier societies to assist in trying to rectify matters, including through the promotion of human rights. Rawls lays particular emphasis on the role of political culture and on the religious and philosophical traditions that underlie a state’s institutions. Among the evils of such societies he mentions oppressive government and corrupt elites, and the subjection of women.

Applications to the Middle East

Earlier on, I mentioned two questions which one might ask of any theory of rights when applied to a particular region. The first would ask how the states of the region look when viewed in light of this theory. To provide a straightforward answer, let us take the three obvious sources of documentation on this issue: the reports of Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and the US State Department. If we apply Rawls’ two main categories of the well-ordered liberal state and the well-ordered hierarchical state to the Middle East, not one state in the region qualifies for inclusion in either category. To make it clear, no state in the contemporary Middle East can, on Rawls’ criteria, be categorized either as a liberal state or as a well-ordered hierarchical state, of a kind that would permit them to be, in his terms, in ‘good standing’ in the international community.

There are, of course, gradations. There will be protests from readers. Some states do respect part of the criteria for being well-ordered: certain Arab states allow certain political freedoms, Israel permits a judiciary to function with considerable independence. But there are two major problems, one with regard to human rights of a group or collective kind, one with regard to individual rights. Those countries with a strong showing on such issues as democracy, and which could be argued to meet Rawls’ second and third criteria, have a poor showing on his first criterion, and in particular on respect for the collective rights of others. Thus Turkey not only denies reasonable group rights to the Kurds, but continues, through a regime that everyone knows to be a subaltern entity, to occupy part of Cyprus; Israel has a strong showing on democracy, the rule of law, and freedom of expression for Israeli citizens, but long continued in defiance of international law and opinion to deny proper independence and statehood and a fair measure of territorial integrity to the Palestinians, and refused to allow refugees to return to Palestinian territory. When it comes to individual human rights, no state in the region respects the Rawlsian minimum let alone the liberal maximum: whether it be in the denial of freedom of expression, or in controlling emigration (a remarkably common practice) or in the distortions of the judiciary in all Arab states and in Iran, or in the use of torture, practised by Turkey, Israel and Arab states, these violations are clear and documented. In the Arab world and Iran we have widespread violations of gender rights, including those which pertain to equality between men and women. We also see in an increasing number of Muslim countries, the infliction of what international humanitarian law considers as cruel and inhuman forms of punishment.

Equally, the concept of the well-ordered but hierarchical does not apply to the kind of society being envisaged by the opposition forces currently on the scene in the region. All of the Islamist groups, from the more peaceful Turkish Virtue Party and more moderate Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, to the most extreme military groups, espouse illiberal programmes in relation to women, non-Muslims, homosexuals, and where freedom of expression and assembly are concerned. In Israel we see the rise of a religious right whose programme includes serious infringements of individual rights on issues such as the Sabbath or Jewish identity, and whose spokesmen often espouse racist views towards Arabs. The secular groups fare no better: the political records of the PKK, or in the Iranian context the PMOI\NCR, are authoritarian, demagogic, profoundly illiberal. Since 1991 we have seen what the two main Kurdish forces, the KDP and the PUK, have done with their national and democratic mandate in northern Iraq. We should not be surprised by, nor should we indulge, the illiberal, 1950s-style corrupt, nationalist dictatorship being created in the Palestinian Authority area which nearly matched in three years the record for Palestinian deaths in custody which the Israelis reached in over twenty. Stripping aside all the apologetic claptrap and official, and unofficial, denial in which commentators frequently engage, and the nationalist misuse of critiques involving of ethnocentrism, imperialism and the like, we have a region that is, on these criteria at least, seriously in default. Following the Rawlsian framework, we are left with states that are to be classified either as outlaws or as lacking the preconditions for being well-ordered societies. Rawls does not spell out what this might entail, beyond hints of what look like very familiar, muscular assertions of hegemonic universalism. The limits of the ‘non-ideal’ approach would, therefore, seem to arise here as well.

The other question which the application of the Rawlsian framework to the Middle East raises is that of plausibility, in the sense of whether it makes sense, even with the necessary distance of political theory, to talk in terms of these two categories of well-ordered society. Rawls does not give examples, contemporary or historical, of what he means by a hierarchical well-ordered society, but he would seem to have the Middle East at least partly in mind since he talks of states in which ‘religion may be on some questions the ultimate authority within society and control government policy on certain important matters.’14 At the same time, as we have already seen, he stipulates that such a society should meet certain conditions: it should not seek to extend its authority politically to other societies, these religious and philosophical doctrines should admit of liberty of conscience and freedom of thought, no other religions should be persecuted, and there should be a right of emigration. But in the Middle Eastern context what does this mean? What we see is a situation in which the very way in which religion is formulated, by those in power, precludes respect for these minimal criteria. No Muslim state allows complete freedom of thought for those who seek to change their religious belief. None permit full equality of men and women. Many limit the rights of other religions: Iran suppresses the Baha’i, and inhibits its Sunnis; Saudi Arabia denies all beliefs other than those derived from the Wahhabi interpretation of Hanbali tradition. Elsewhere – in Egypt, the Emirates, and now in the Palestinian Authority – the rights of Christians are constrained by pressure from society and/or state.

We need also to look at how Rawls characterizes such a society. We may note that the distinction he implies between religious and political authority contains the questionable assumption, present in Rawls’ formulation, that religion is a given, separate from political power. The point is, however, that the denial of human rights in these societies may be legitimated in terms of religion, but we have to ask whether this is but another idiom for authoritarian political and social practices described as religion. To accept religion as being the legitimation, just because those in power say so, is to beg many questions. There is, moreover, the central problem of what Rawls quite rightly calls ‘representation’: where religion is the legitimation for a hierarchical illiberal society, the rulers or state officials cannot with any validity be termed ‘representative’. They do not recognize a form of consultation, as stipulated by Rawls, nor do they recognize a duty to reflect the wishes of their people. Once again, the well-ordered hierarchical society turns out to be an empty and arguably misleading category.

Is the concept of a well-ordered hierarchical society therefore invalid? Not necessarily. It may be that, for example, nineteenth-century European states which were not colonialist, and were peaceful and law-abiding, but which did not allow universal suffrage and other rights, were candidates. Some third-world states, like Singapore, that do not torture or kill and do not threaten others, might be candidates. In the Middle East one can think of some states, arguably Oman, Tunisia or Jordan, which do not threaten others and which display some evidence of being well-ordered. But one has to say that, in the contemporary Middle East at least, the concept of a well-ordered hierarchical society, where religion is presented as defining the system, not only does not apply but is inapplicable. Insofar as it is intended to allow of a resolution or application of the issue of how liberal societies relate to non-liberal ones the concept does not appear to help. It leaves the option of illiberal intervention, yet this would not seem to be a course of action most, or any, of these writers would favour.

Tradition, community, religion: historical and moral problems

This brings me to the question of whether Rawls’ theory is in fact an adequate basis for thinking through the problem of how to relate to non-liberal societies. Here I would draw attention to a number of issues which, while not extensively explicated in his text, do nevertheless underpin it and which to a considerable extent surface in the work of other thinkers of this school.

(i) historical distinctiveness

First there is the problem of discreteness, of cultures or religions or communities being assumed to be separate entities into which the world is divided. This has philosophical import because beneath the talk of tradition and religion we discover a historical premiss shared by Rawls, MacIntyre and Walzer. This premiss is that of historical separateness which continues in some sense to characterize the contemporary community or individual. But this model of distinct traditions and of discrete communities which only subsequently proceed to interact and in some way overlap is simply false (just as it is for the history implicit in the international relations theory of ‘international society’ which envisages such a society as a set of states who gradually build contact with each other). The communities/nations we have today in fact grew out of the breakup of earlier, much larger entities, entailing the severing of transnational links. They are also constituted by the appropriation of international ideas, currents, populations and technologies for national ends. The state, nation, community of today presents as particular and indigenous what is in fact drawn from a variety of sources. Whether in liberal or illiberal contexts, the language they present as specifically theirs is in most cases the appropriation of an international concept now presented in national, pseudo-specific form. One example is universal suffrage. Another is national independence and territorial integrity. States give national form and allege national histories for their political institutions when these are neither traditional nor indigenous institutions. The same goes for much else in what appears in Walzer’s formulation as the ‘thick’, that is, all that is apparently specific to a particular, separate group.

One can counterpose to the minimal or, in Walzer’s term, reiterative universalism a ‘diffused’ universalism. In other words, shared values are there not because of chance coincidence but because of a history of political and cultural transnationalism and universalization, spuriously denied by current state and ethnic divisions. This is true for politics, as it is for language, cuisine, custom, but it is most of all so for religion. Once you invoke religion as a legitimation or description of difference, then you have forfeited the right to talk in terms of divisions in the contemporary world, sovereign states or ‘national’ cultures. This is evident throughout history, but very much so today in the Middle East: no state has a religious life limited by the frontiers of that state. For Muslim countries this interaction is widespread, and takes the form of both influence and aspiration. But it is equally evident for the apparent exception: the debates within Israel on Judaism, and on the identity of Jews, are linked theologically and politically to the two thirds of the world’s Jews who do not live in Israel, just as the supposedly national Christianities, in Greece or Armenia, are interlocked with diaspora debates. There is a core, a much larger, thicker core than appearance suggests.

(ii) essentialism

Closely related to this historical premiss is that of the essentialism of tradition or religion. Throughout the communitarian, or hegemonic abstentionist literature, there is an assumption that our moral philosophical problem is that of relating to a given ‘other’. Rawls implies this with his model of the hierarchical well-ordered society where religion plays a constitutive role. A comparable premiss underlies Huntington’s idea of ‘civilizations’ as unitary givens. One could make a similar argument with regard to the nation. And of course this is exactly what many people, including people in the Middle East, do: by essentialising culture or religion you claim that your interpretation is the true one. In the Islamic context the invocation of ‘Islamic government’ or ‘Shari‘a’ is similar. The moral philosophers say they have to accept this and then worry about how as liberals they can relate to it.

However, no national culture or language or religion is unequivocal in this way. All allow of different interpretations and implementations. There is no one true ‘Islam’ or Shari‘a or anything else. This is what the whole debate within Islam and Judaism, and in the West within Christianity and liberalism, is about. The obverse of this is that the most difficult and divisive disputes are not between communities at all but within them. All the debates of modern times on political form, nationhood, gender relations and so on can be fought out with recourse to the language of specific communities. Yet the appeal to community allows for no means of adjudicating these, except either by the assertion of authority (and the denial of other interpretations) or by introducing other, international, supposedly ‘thin’ but actually transnational and, therefore, transcendent values.

(iii) authority and interpretation

The premiss of communities being determined internally, and of the issue being of relations between liberal and illiberal societies, also begs a set of questions about who defines the values of the community and indeed the criteria for deciding on the accuracy of claims to authoritative definition.15 When Walzer goes to China, we are not sure on what basis he assesses what ‘local prerogative’ really is. Yet being a committed liberal in practice, he chose those more consonant with his views. It is here, above all, that the apparently liberal tolerance of illiberalism may edge imperceptibly into an abandonment of common sense, let alone elementary sociological critical spirit. For the presupposition of Rawls is that when confronted with an illiberal other, a community based on different principles but potentially well-ordered, we should accept this as a given. But when a society is illiberal we cannot know whether those who claim to speak for it actually do so. As already noted, Rawls uses the term ‘represent’. But faced with a claim by a group of people – males in power – caution is in order. The self-appointed abound in these cases, not least on gender issues. Moreover, even when one can plausibly argue that a particular practice – for example female genital mutilation – has the support of the majority of the society at any one time, one has to pose the sociological question of how such ‘assent’ gets reproduced, manufactured, through social and ideological pressure.

(iv) the right to dissent

The espousal of the authority of tradition, community and culture raises moral as well as historical questions. Most directly we face the issue of whether the individual located within such a community loses the right to reject, criticize or escape the codes of the community. There is no need to labour this point: the challenge of dissenters, apostates, the gender ‘deviant’, the human rights activist and the rest is not to the veracity of ‘the tradition’ – he or she may accept, as culturally or historically accurate, the claim that something is part of the country’s tradition. No doubt genital mutilation, public execution, family violence and the rest can be proven, on statistical grounds most of us would accept, to be part of a tradition. This does not preclude, or should not on liberal grounds, preclude the right of an individual, or a minority of dissidents, possibly even inspired by universal codes or transnational discourses, from challenging it. The ultimate paradox of this story is that liberalism, which is if nothing else associated with individualism, ends up by denying the individual’s right to reject what is presented as tradition. Rawls recognizes a right to emigrate, but this implicitly denies the right to stay and dissent.

(v) the preconditions for liberalism

There is a final area where the historical and political premisses of Rawls’ argument are open to question. This pertains to the preconditions for liberalism itself. The argument he presents, albeit in summary form, is again based on the model of discrete societies. We have, on the one hand, ‘a closed and self-contained democratic society’, on the other societies that ‘lack’ the conditions, the know-how, the resources to make being well-ordered possible. The point about this model is that it is not only unreal, but profoundly misleading. No democratic society is closed or self-contained, or ever has been. The same goes for the non-liberal societies of today. Trade, empire, invasion, cultural interaction have characterized them throughout history. The liberal societies of today got there in part by five centuries of domination of the rest of the world. The non-liberal societies are not just non-liberal because they ‘lack’ something, any more than they are poorer because they have not been incorporated into the global economic system. In political as in economic terms one can avoid a globalist, dependency-type reductionism, but still note that the dictatorships, the nationalist and religious demagogues, and corrupt administrations of the contemporary non-liberal world were created as part of the modern state system and owe much to it.

No discussion of the relation between liberal and non-liberal societies can avoid this issue of a shared modern history. This history has constituted both the liberal and the non-liberal: it entails a common moral space. The universal espousal of the principle of national self-determination, a good old Western European concept, is one example. There is also a problem of consistency here: one cannot invoke the critique of Western domination at the atemporal moral level against universal moral codes, only to deny it as the historical level, that of explaining how these regimes came to be there in the first place, and to stay in power. Rawls to some extent recognizes a transnational moral commitment when he argues for raising, or assisting, societies with unfavourable conditions to reach the level of being well-ordered. But he is unable to spell out the philosophical implications of this, namely that liberal states are, historically as well as morally, interrelated with non-liberal societies. The latter’s very social and economic conditions, or whatever other conditions are deemed relevant to their illiberal state, are a product of a historical process of interaction. Causation and responsibility are shared.

Conclusions

One cannot but be struck by the similarities, of implication and then denial, in the work of Rawls and of the other communitarians and hegemonic abstentionists. It is almost as if some professional rootedness as political theorists within states inhibits them from developing an internationally relevant moral theory. What appears as a legitimate procedural caution about the implications of their work becomes a form of international abstention, based not just on philosophical care, which may be justifiable, but on a refusal, expressed as a rather lofty distance from the realities and real moral choices in these societies, to recognize what other kinds of society are like. The mere fact that internal intolerance and external aggressiveness persist renders their solutions untenable.

This would suggest that this trend in political theory, initially plausible as it may appear, does not offer a way of resolving the broader debate on human rights and their application to areas such as the Middle East. One can, one should, recognize the force of the critiques of rationalist universalism and of the association of this universalism with the imperial past and the hegemonic present. But if plausibility, or realism, is one legitimate test of a political theory, and if the constitutive role of certain historical and moral premisses in theory are laid bare, then there are major difficulties with the alternative approach. The challenge faced by all concerned with human rights in the Middle East is not to produce theories of community or tradition, but to address the very real problems, ethical and practical, in applying the universal codes that exist and which most regional states have signed up to uphold. So far, it would seem, the best we have is enlightenment universalism, grown wiser and more cautious with time, but potentially the more effective for that. And, by any criteria, Saddam Hussein is worse than the L.A.P.D.

CHAPTER 2

The Middle East and the Nationalism Debate

It is foolhardy in the extreme to discuss the subject of nationalism and the Middle East. Nationalism itself is a subject of lively, often acrimonious discussion amongst social scientists. In the world at large it is associated with some of the most bitter and unresolved conflicts of modern times. Recent history has given us some reminders of these problems: we have seen an unexpected and bitter case of inter-nationalist war in the Balkans, just as we see around us political movements, generically termed ‘fundamentalist’, that combine a return to holy texts with a militant assertion of nationalist themes. The modern history of the Middle East has been and will continue to be bound up with a range of nationalisms – Iranian, Arab, Turkish, Israeli, Kurdish. Not simply a clash between a group of unitary, consistently defined forces, this history exhibits within each nationalism subdivisions according to religion, district, left-right orientation and much else. At the same time, and as elsewhere in the world, hitherto silenced or marginal currents are seeking to redefine the nation, or assert their own distinctive place within it – on the basis of social class, gender, region, cultural current. The main constitutive goal of nationalism is, of course, independence, but nationalism does not stop with the attainment of that goal: there are always arguments about how the formal status accords with reality, whether juridical independence does not conceal a continued ‘neo-colonial’ status. Equally, the official or predominant definition of national identity continues to change, and is contested by others within the national community.

The best defence for tackling this subject can only be that one puts one’s view as reasonably and carefully as one can, and that if offence is caused it is caused equally to both or all parties involved. This essay takes up that challenge of relating discussion of the Middle East to broader discussions of nationalism: it is an opportunity, in the light of contemporary debates on nationalism, and in the light of the still on-going history of nationalism in the Middle East to explore how far the general debate on nationalism can be applied to the region. More particularly, it explores how far what has been termed the ‘modernist’ approach to nationalism can be applied to the ideologies and movements associated with nationalism in these countries. It is, therefore, an attempt both to throw light on Middle Eastern nationalism from a comparative perspective and to take the examples of Middle Eastern nationalisms as challenges to this broader theoretical debate.

The nationalism debate: cosmopolitanism and internationalism

When we talk of nationalism we talk of two things, interrelated but distinct, each of which has prompted dispute in academic and political contexts. The first is nationalism as an ideology, a set of ideas about how the world is run and, equally, about how it should be run. Nationalism has no great founding thinker, but from the history of the democratic and popular movements of Europe in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries a certain set of basic tenets associated with nationalism arose. This ideology asserts that the world is divided up into peoples, that they have distinct characteristics and history, usually a distinct language, that they have entitlement to a particular piece of land, and that those who are born into the nation have an obligation to respect it.1 In the famous definition of Ernest Gellner nationalism is ‘a political principle which holds that the political and the national unit should be congruent’, in other words that nations exist and that they ought to have, are entitled to be represented in, independent states with their own territory and customs.2

At the same time, nationalism is used to refer to a set of movements – political movements arising at particular times with specific leaderships. In addition to claiming self-determination and usually independence for their peoples such movements also set out to define what the nation is, what its characteristics are, its history, the proper way of speaking its language, who is and, very importantly, who is not part of the nation. A nationalist movement is one that, broadly speaking, espouses the doctrine and which sets out, as any proponent of a normative theory should, to make it happen. This is what Arab nationalism has done since the early part of the twentieth century, what Iranian nationalism has advocated since the 1890s; it has been the programme of Jewish nationalism, or Zionism, since the movement’s founding congress at Basle in 1897. Nationalism in this sense is necessary and modular: every state in the world now has to espouse it and whatever its origins or particular content, every nationalist ideology has to meet the modular requirements of this ideology, just as every state has to have a flag, a capital, a national airline, a football team, folklore, a national cuisine, and so on. Like marriages, nationalisms may start for the most unexpected and bizarre of reasons; accident and even illusion may play a role, but once contracted nationalisms conform to certain basic tenets. The bigamist or the polygamist still recognizes what marriage is.

The title of this essay is ‘the nationalism debate’ but it would be more accurate to talk not of one debate but of several, revolving around the two meanings of the word nationalism. The first debate, which preoccupied thinkers and politicians in the nineteenth and much of the twentieth centuries, was whether nationalism was a transitory or permanent phenomenon, a relic of an atavistic pre-modern age, or an accompaniment of modernization, indeed a necessary accompaniment of modernity itself. One sceptical response reflected the outlook of the pre-modern or cosmopolitan world, a world in which cultural and other differences indeed existed but did not take a nationalist form. We can discover such a response in those who favoured some continuation of the Ottoman empire, or who, in the European context, believed that forms of cosmopolitanism could resist or prevail over the rise of nationalism.

We may think we know better now, especially in light of the tragedies of the twentieth century. However, for much of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries most liberals, socialists and Marxists expected that nationalism, a doctrine that divides peoples up and at the same time asserts a unitary view of the community termed nation, would sooner or later disappear. This was the approach associated with ideas of internationalism, some Marxist or ‘proletarian’, some liberal and cosmopolitan. Just as in the Middle East cosmopolitanism drew on poets like Rumi, and even on verses in the Koran. Some of the greatest European internationalists, among them many Jews, were people who drew on elements in religious tradition: one need only think of Marx himself, of Spinoza, Freud, or later Marxists, notably Leon Trotsky and Rosa Luxemburg.3

In the Middle Eastern concern both forms of resistance to nationalism were evident. In the nineteenth century and beyond there were those within the Ottoman empire who sought to preserve a pre-nationalist diversity. In a different vein the work of my late colleague Elie Kedourie, who saw nationalism as a set of aberrant ideas mistakenly spread by intellectuals, reflected a similar perspective.4 Yet for all the calculations and manipulations involved, the rise of specific linguistic nationalisms within the Ottoman empire and its successor states swept such cosmopolitanism aside and produced a Middle East in which nationalist movements with their aspirations to nation-hood prevailed. From the other perspective, that of a post-nationalist internationalism, there were many who sought to build links across ethnic frontiers, not least in the Arab-Israeli context or, under different circumstances, in the French communist movement and within the nationalisms of North Africa. Yet here too it was nationalist movements, nationalist sentiment, and nationalist animosities, that prevailed.

In the Arab-Israeli context this was not an all or nothing matter, as the work of Joel Beinin has shown, but there was little chance in such circumstances of an effective cross-national movement developing, let alone prevailing.5 Some left-wing groups, notably Israeli and Palestinian communities, did seek to maintain such an internationalist approach, but the mainstream of Zionism, including that of Mapai, most certainty did not. Zionism embraced chauvinism and denial. From the 1950s the Arab left almost universally espoused militant nationalism, seeking to outbid its more right-wing rivals in hostility not just to the policies of the Israeli state but to the very existence of Israel and to the right of its people to their own state. In the 1960s and 1970s no groups were more opposed to mutual recognition than the ‘Marxist-Leninist’ factions of the Palestinian movement. When in 1977 an Arab leader, Anwar al-Sadat, did courageously make the break, the Arab left universally joined the chorus denouncing capitulation. The espousal by the Arab left of such nationalism is not specific to the Arab-Israeli conflict: such attitudes have been repeated in other cases, in the support by much of the Arab left for Iraqi aggression against Iran, or by most Moroccan communists and socialists for Hassan II’s assault on Western Sahara.