Dreams and Shadows: The Future of the Middle East

A
ll men dream: but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake in the day to find that it was vanity. But the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dream with open eyes, to make it possible.

—T. E. L
AWRENCE,
S
EVEN
P
ILLARS OF
W
ISDOM

I
am certain that this night of darkness will not last. The moon of freedom will emerge from behind the clouds of religious tyranny.

—I
RANIAN DISSIDENT
A
KBAR
G
ANJI, IN A LETTER FROM PRISON ON THE FORTY-THIRD DAY OF A HUNGER STRIKE
, J
ULY
23, 2005

Prologue
THE MIDDLE EAST
The Prospects

One
THE PALESTINIANS
The Conundrum

Two
EGYPT
The Turning Points

Three
EGYPT
The Players

Four
LEBANON
The Dreamers

Five
LEBANON
The Shadows

Six
SYRIA
The Outlaws

Seven
IRAN
The Revolutionaries

Eight
IRAN
The Reactionaries

Nine
MOROCCO
The Compromises

Ten
IRAQ AND THE UNITED STATES
The Furies

Acknowledgments

Notes

Bibliography

Index

The Prospects

O
n a warm spring day in April 1983, I stood across from what had been the United States Embassy in Beirut and watched as rescuers picked through tons of mangled steel and concrete littered with glass shards. Tenderly, emergency crews put salvaged bits of bodies in small blue plastic bags. Forensic experts later matched up the pieces so they could be buried together. More than sixty Americans were killed in that lunchtime bombing.

Some of the dead had been my friends.

The attack was the first by a Muslim suicide bomber against an American target—anywhere in the world. Over the next eighteen months, Islamic extremists blew up a second American embassy and the U.S. Marine peacekeeping compound in Lebanon. The Marine bombing is still the largest loss of American military life in a single incident since World War II, larger than any attack in Vietnam or Iraq. I heard those bombs thunder through Beirut too and again watched weeks of rescue efforts. The three terrorism spectaculars marked a turning point for the Middle East.

Since then, Islamic extremism has progressively grown into the most energetic force in the Middle East—and the gravest threat to Western interests. Out of my own sense of anguish, I tracked the trend as it unfolded in country after country and wrote one of the first books, in 1985, about this new form of sacred rage that has since redefined the world’s political divide. Fear of its explosive potential will define American foreign policy for years, potentially decades, to come. Al Qaeda and a growing array of offshoots continue to push their tentacles deeper throughout the region—and beyond.

Yet a generation later, Islamic extremism is no longer the most important, interesting, or dynamic force in the Middle East. The hard-core terrorists in al Qaeda or Islamic Jihad have repeatedly proven that they can destroy. But they have yet to provide tangible solutions or viable new models for problems plaguing the region.

In the early twenty-first century, a budding culture of change is instead imaginatively challenging the status quo—and even the extremists. New public voices, daring publications, and increasingly noisy protests across two dozen countries are giving shape to a vigorous, if disjointed, trend. It includes defiant judges in Cairo, rebel clerics in Tehran, satellite television station owners in Dubai, imaginative feminists in Rabat and the first female candidates in Kuwait, young techies in Jeddah, daring journalists in Beirut and Casablanca, and brave writers and businessmen in Damascus.

For all, peaceful empowerment has become the preferred means of making political decisions and producing change.

The tiny minority willing to go out and kill has had such impact in part because there have been so few other political ideas and activists in the region offering alternatives. Now, increasingly, there are. A trend struggling for decades to take root has finally begun—and, I stress,
only
begun—to have impact.

Impatience and frustration fueled by education, technology and the miracles of instant media, demographics, globalization, and change elsewhere in the world have altered the equation.

The mujahedeen, or holy warriors, have long dominated the headlines. Today, however, the so-called pyjamahedeen, or pajama warriors, are increasingly capturing the public imagination too. They campaign for change not with bombs on battlefields, but from laptops at home.
²
Web sites and blogs have become the twenty-first-century chroniclers of police crackdowns, human-rights abuses, and election irregularities. In countries where I once sought out clandestine cells, I now also look for computer nerds. So, tellingly, are government security forces. Some of the pyjamahedeen have already gone to prison.

“Governments have a new kind of opponent,” said Egyptian blogger Wael Abbas. His blog has posted cell-phone videos of police brutality, including one of a detainee writhing in pain as he was sodomized by police with a broomstick. Started in 2004, Abbas’ blog was getting up to 30,000 hits a day—and up to 45,000 during a crisis—by 2007.

“We are not bound by government rules, like the political parties. We can use the language of freedom,” he told me. “We offer an alternative voice, especially for the young.”

The issue in the Middle East is no longer whether to engage in political transformation. The issue today is how to get there.

“In the Arab world, the status quo is not sustainable,” reflected Marwan Muasher, a former Jordanian foreign minister who became a World Bank vice president. “What worked forty years ago—when the state could decide things and expect people to follow—does not work now. Unless the state is responsive and aware, it is in for major trouble.”

Pressure is now mounting on virtually every Middle East regime. Even the conservative Gulf sheikhdoms have had to respond, albeit in the smallest feasible steps. Saudi Arabia held its first (male only) elections for local councils in 2005, while Kuwait’s parliament ended a long boycott and finally granted women the rights to vote and run for office in 2006.

“Regimes are increasingly unable to deliver what they promised or protect their people, and they certainly provide no direction for the future,” explained Nader Said, a Palestinian pollster and political sociologist. “Mix that with a constituency that is more demanding, and more aware, and more in search of rights.

“Most in the Arab world now think they deserve better.”

Regimes have been forced to adopt the language of democracy, whatever their real intentions or conniving to prevent it. The definition publicly embraced in the Middle East is the same as it is everywhere else, reflected in the Alexandria Statement produced at a meeting of 165 civil society leaders and government officials from eighteen Muslim countries at Egypt’s rebuilt Alexandria Library in 2004.

Few governments have begun yet to honor those words. What makes this era different are the activists now trying to hold them to account. They are no longer limited to the intellectual elite. And the numbers engaged—especially compared to the small cells of suicide bombers—are striking. Roughly one quarter of Lebanon’s entire population took to the streets, peacefully, in 2005 to demand the government’s resignation and an end to Syria’s twenty-nine-year military occupation. Despite dangers from an escalating insurgency, Iraqis poured out in three elections that made the purple ink-stained finger famous. Participation increased with each vote.

More than 100,000 people turned out in the Jordanian capital to protest after suicide bombers simultaneously struck three Amman hotels in 2005. “Burn in hell,” they shouted, in rhythmic unison, after the al Qaeda leader in Iraq claimed credit.

And none of these were rent-a-crowds, the usual means of producing mass turnouts in the region.

“These initial signs were intoxicating. They produced wonderment,” mused Ghassan Salameh, Lebanon’s former minister of culture.

“A region long dead politically suddenly had a pulse.”

Violence is increasingly unacceptable to the majority, according to public opinion polls and petitions. In 2004, more than 2,000 Muslim intellectuals signed a petition calling on the United Nations to sponsor a new international treaty that would outlaw the use of religion to incite violence. It proposed that the Security Council create a new international tribunal to try “the theologians of terror” and the “sheikhs of death” who provide religious cover for terrorism. The petition also urged members of the world body to prevent broadcasts of “the mad musings of the theologians of terror.”
⁴

Even as people turn to political Islam, they are turning against Islamic extremism. Clerics and theologians have begun to challenge bin Laden and al Qaeda with their own
fatwas
in what has been dubbed the “counter-jihad.”
⁵
Even in Iraq, some Sunni tribal leaders turned on al Qaeda cells after they went too far in kidnapping and killing the local populations.

Militant movements are under pressure too. A few of the groups that began as secretive cells have also begun to emerge from the underground to run for office. Motives are often suspect, but it is also striking that they are appealing to voters on platforms that deal with everyday issues such as better garbage collection, improved health care, and less corruption.

The new momentum has spurred talk of a
nahda,
Arabic for “awakening” or “renaissance.”
⁶

“Is it something real? Is this finally an Arab spring?” asked my old friend Saad Eddin Ibrahim, the leading human rights activist in Cairo, who was jailed three times and left crippled by prison abuse. “Our desert region is famous for its mirages. But these are real visions of change.

“The despots in the Arab world are on their last gasp,” he reflected.

“Just like any last-ditch battles, they will do a lot of stupid things and leave a lot of destruction. But these will be the last battles. People have already broken the fear barrier. They are as ready for change and democracy as Eastern Europe was in the 1980s and as Latin America was in the 1970s. History is moving. The moment is ours.”

That’s the good news.

The so-called “Arab spring” of 2005, which offered greater promise than at any time since most countries gained independence, did not endure. It did not set off the toppling dominoes of regional change, as the fall of the Berlin Wall did in Eastern Europe. For much of the Middle East, the challenge of change is today tougher than anywhere else in the world.

The Middle East, concluded a United Nations survey in 2005, faces an “acute deficit of freedom and good governance.” Most Arabs live in a “black hole…in which nothing moves and from which nothing escapes.”
⁷
The region has the largest proportion of ruling monarchies (eight) and family political dynasties (four) in the world.
*

The dangers of change are also already visible.

Democracy is about differences—and they are bound to flourish once disparate sides of society are really free for the first time to speak and make their own specific demands. Unity in opposition to tyranny almost never translates into unity once in power. In a region rife with vulnerable minorities and shifting demographics, opening up politics endangers deepening the problems it is meant to solve.

As Iraq has illustrated too vividly, democracy unleashes existential dilemmas.

Opening new space also does not guarantee what or who will fill it. Because the political debate in the Middle East is grounded in its own experience, the face of change will be too. More often than not, Islam will be the dominant idiom of opposition and change. Indeed, the region may not be transformed without tapping into its religious traditions—because of their appeal and legitimacy, but also by default.

Shortly before he was killed in 2005 by a bomb placed underneath his car in Beirut, Lebanese historian Samir Kassir opined in a little book entitled
Being Arab,

The period of change will often witness an uneven contest pitting inexperienced democratic activists with limited resources against both well-heeled autocrats who have no intention of ceding control and Islamists who believe they have a mission from God and a flock of the faithful to tap into. It will be an unfair battle from the start.

Nothing will happen quickly, either. Even regimes that acknowledge the need to open up politically talk about gradual steps, in phases, over years or decades or generations.

“Change is a future notion,” reflected Marwan Muasher, the former Jordanian foreign minister. “The trick is putting it in the present.”

In 1995, Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa al Thani of Qatar—the little emirate jutting off Saudi Arabia into the Persian Gulf—became the first of a younger generation of Gulf princes to assume power. He did it by overthrowing his father, the region’s most autocratic leader in what was then the Middle East’s most closed society. To the consternation of neighboring sheikhdoms, Sheikh Hamad then invited Israel to open a commercial office in Doha, the United States to headquarter Central Command in Qatar, and American and European universities, including Cornell and Georgetown, to open up Qatari branches. He also launched al Jazeera, the first all-news Arab satellite channel. All were bold, controversial moves. Yet Qatar’s emir is still pacing the spread of political participation.