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Historical Cycles of the Twentieth Century and the Issue of Violence

In this chapter I will suggest that the issue of violence in the Middle East has been determined by specific features of different historical cycles the region went through. Each cycle started as a consequence of violent ruptures that exerted a destructive and restructuring impact well beyond one single coun­try.

Each was also dominated by a specific ideological and political ‘micro­climate' and bore the fingerprints of a given generation. The first cycle, which began with the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire in 1918 and the partition of its Arab provinces, lasted until the foundation of the state of Israel. The second cycle covered the thirty-year period from 1948 to 1979. The third cycle, which I have analysed elsewhere,[173] started in 1979 with the Camp David Agreements and recognition of Israel by Egypt, the Iranian revolution, the Islamist uprising in Mecca and the occupation of Afghanistan by the Red Army. The most recent cycle opened with the Arab revolutionary contests of 2011 and their disruptive effects in some countries since then.

During the first cycle, violence took the form of anti-mandate/anti- colonial or anti-settlements riots in Iraq, Syria, Egypt and Palestine. Except in Egypt, where political movements and trade unions had a notable pre­sence, the other uprisings were launched by tribal categories or large coali­tions, including the Shia clergy, some pro-Kurdish or pro-Druze forces, or

urban elites. In Palestine, many urban dynasties, hamulas (‘enlarged families') and the religious establishment became sources of the revolts of the 1930s.

One should however bear in mind that, although they were difficult to deal with, the majority of the old social classes and tribal sheikhdoms ultimately accepted cooperation with the rules of the Mandatory system.[174] In contrast, the Arab intelligentsia maintained a high level of mobilisation even after the revolts.

Before the First World War, this intelligentsia did not necessarily adhere to a nationalist ideology, but it was radicalised after the execution of some Arab dignitaries by Cemal Pasha, the Ottoman proconsul for Syria, in 1916. After the war and the formation of the new states, nationalism became the dominant political current within this generationally renewed category. With some few exceptions, the intelligentsia did not switch to violence; but it was highly influenced by European radical right-wing ideas and forms of mobilisation. Movements such as the Umayyad Brigades in Syria, al- Futuwwah (‘The Youth') in Iraq and the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt took the shape of paramilitary organisations. In Iraq, the only country that estab­lished a ‘national army' in the wake of its independence, the ideas of this intelligentsia also influenced the military. In particular Bakr Sidqi, who in 1936 organised the first coup d'etat in the history of the Arab countries - the 1941 coup of al-Gaylani - also bore the hallmark of right-wing ideas.

The second historical cycle, which lasted from 1948 to 1979, was marked by a revolutionary crisis in many parts of what would come to be known as the Third World. But in the Middle East, the creation of Israel was seen as a new amputation of Arab lands and unleashed a long process of radicalisation. In a context in which the Arab world was divided along Cold War lines, the defeat of the Arab armies could but give birth to violent internal reactions which adopted left-wing mottoes and themes, but were also influenced by Social Darwinism.

The trauma following the Arab defeat by Israel put an end to the very ideal of democracy in the Arab Middle East. It is true that elections took place in Iraq and Syria in the 1950s, but as Nasser put it bluntly, the ‘bourgeois' democracy was henceforth perceived as a Trojan horse aiming at the division of the Middle East and as a rule of ‘feudal' strata over society.[175] While authoritarianism was accepted as the only way of uniting the state and the nation and resolving the social and national questions through the concentra­tion of power, violence became synonymous with ‘national resistance'. As the killing of the Jordanian King Abdallah, the Syrian president Husni al-Zaim and the Egyptian prime minister al-Nuqrashi Pasha attested, violence was before everything else internal, targeting mainly the ‘betrayers'; but the revolutionary crisis in Egypt and in Syria and the intifada in pre-1958 Iraq demonstrated that it could also be applied to wider popular contests.

The post-1948 crisis led to a series of military coups and to the establishment of new and in some cases extremely brutal ‘revolutionary' regimes in Egypt (1952), Syria (1948,1963,1966, 1970) and Iraq (1958, 1963, 1966, 1968), and later on in Libya (1969) which, together with independent Algeria (1961), formed the so-called Arab progres­sive bloc. Under these new powers, political language itself was brutalised. For instance, Iraqi TV after 1968 left no doubt about the future coercive praxis of the new regime: ‘the great and immortal squares of Iraq shall be filled up with corpses of traitors and spies! Just wait!'[176]

There is no doubt that Middle Eastern violent conflicts were, at least partly, linked to the Cold War alignments of some countries such as Egypt, Iraq and Syria with the Soviet Union, and of the others, namely Saudi Arabia, Iran and Turkey, with the Western bloc. The contests which took place then could partly be explained by the diffusion of left-wing ideas which exerted an almost hegemonic impact across the ‘Tri-Continental region'. This was not only the name of an organisation which was founded in Havana in 1967, but as importantly a world-wide regime of subjectivity, a political grammar which spread itself throughout Latin America, Africa and Asia. One can in fact easily compare the aesthetics and vocabulary of the Middle Eastern violence of the I95os-i96os with those of other parts of the world during the same period, replete with a fetishism of armed struggle and revolutionary organisation on behalf of an imagined ‘united people'.

Sociologically speaking, one could consider the military and civilian intel­ligentsia as the main actors of contest and violence in the Middle East of these decades. These strata, which included many students, young lawyers, engi­neers, officers and what one could call the literati, constituted the ‘inter­mediary elite' of these societies; they had an operational knowledge of the world and were also able to extrapolate from science to social issues.

But they were not the sole actors of contestation on the Arab scene: the plebian strata also emerged as political actors between the I950s and I970s to replace the intelligentsia almost entirely in the following decades as the core of contesta­tion. Their ascent went hand-in-hand with the reinforcement of some for­merly marginal parties such as the Communist Party and the Ba'ath, and a generational renewal in many parts of the Middle East. Nasser, son of a modest postman, was only 34 when he took power in 1952, and Arafat, another symbolic figure, only 30 when he became a world-renowned figure of Palestinian struggle. The revolutionary fidai (‘the one who sacrifices him/ herself), who had much to share with guerrilleros across the world, imagined him/herself as in charge of a ‘historical mission'. That mission was not only to mark a decisive break with the past Ottoman and mandate/colonial legacy and the corruption of the present, but also to offer a new horizon to Arab societies, regenerated by resistance and by an act of ‘re-foundation'.

Although socially marginal, the Islamist movement also went through a process of radicalisation during these decades. The Muslim Brotherhood, whose leader Hassan al-Banna had been killed in 1949, participated in the insurrectional violence of the turn of the 1950s. Towards the end of this decade, Sayyid Qotb, the organisation's most prominent intellectual (exe­cuted in 1966 at the age of 60), abandoned the legacy of the seventh- to tenth­century legists as well as al-Banna's policy of ‘re-Islamisation through reform' and justified the use of violence within the dar al-islam.

1979:

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Source: Edwards Louise, Penn Nigel, Winter Jay (eds.). The Cambridge World History of Violence. Volume 4: 1800 to the Present. Cambridge University Press,2020. — 676 p.. 2020

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