Competing Identities in the Arab World.

• Author: Hovsepian, Nubar
• Position: Continuity and Transformation: The Modern Middle East

The "Middle East" as a region can mean several things and can refer to a multiple set of country clusters. At the crossroads of three continents, the Middle East as a concept often incorporates three geographic clusters: North Africa, the Fertile Crescent and Southwest Asia (which includes the Persian-Arab Gulf). The British initially called the region the "Near East," because it was a midway point between themselves and the Far East. The Middle East today is for the most part a political term, describing a region whose composition reflects changing Western strategic interests and involvement in the region. In the 20th century, this interest has focused on the struggle over historic Palestine and on the West's need for access to oil, as demonstrated in the Gulf crisis of 1990 to 1991. Most recently, the Middle East has been viewed by a growing number of writers as a menace to the West, which, in a post-cold War era, could lead to a new form of conflict - a "clash of civilizations."(1)

To discuss the Middle East only in terms of its strategic importance to Western powers is quite inadequate. It leads to gross oversimplification and obfuscation of the multiple political and cultural variables that define the region. Totalizing visions that see the Middle East through "Islam," "oil" or "strategic interests" can never capture all the meanings and significations of the region. History is made by human beings; in the struggle over the reinterpretation of historical and social meaning, "each generation asks new questions of the past, and finds new areas of sympathy as it relives different aspects of the experiences of its predecessors."(2) The human geography of the Middle East - its cultures and identities - has undergone dramatic transformations. As we approach the 21st century, the Middle East is, to use Christopher Hill's apt title, a "world turned upside down."

In his exploration of the sources of radical ideas in the 17th century, Hill focuses on the "obscure men and women," rather than on those "who appear as the history makers in the textbooks" (such as Charles I or Pym).(3) These people, the "obscure," live in what Foucault calls "hetoropias," which, as "heterogeneous spaces of sites and relations ... are constituted in every society but take quite varied forms and change over time..."(4) Therefore, each space in which people actually live is highly variegated, heterogeneous, eclectic, fragmentary, incomplete, contradictory and crowded, with competing elements of unity and diversity. Writing on Los Angeles, Edward Soja notes that "totalizing visions, attractive though they may be, can never capture all the meanings and significations of the urban when the landscape is critically read and envisioned as a fulsome geographical text."(5) Simply put, each geography is filled with many human voices or players acting and interacting within a multilayered environment, one filled with similarities, variations, diversity and pluralism.

To reduce the study of the Middle East to essentialized and totalizing concepts such as "Islam," "Islamic politics" or the "Arab or Muslim mind," or to look at the region only in term of its "strategic" relevance throughout history, is to ignore the actual diversity (ecological, geological, regional, local, ethnic, religious, cultural, political, familial, tribal, occupational, or based on class or on notions of the state or of the world outside) that exists. For example, how useful would it be to study the Middle East solely through the prism of Islam? In this connection Edward Said poses several important questions:

Is there such a thing as Islamic behavior? What connects Islam at the level of everyday life to Islam of doctrine in the various Islamic societies? How really useful is "Islam" as a concept for understanding Morocco and Saudi Arabia and Syria and Indonesia? If we come to realize that as many scholars have noted, Islamic doctrine can be seen to justify capitalism as well as socialism, militancy as well as fatalism, ecumenism as well as exclusivism, we begin to sense the tremendous lag between academic descriptions of Islam (that are inevitably caricatured in the media) and the particular realities within the Islamic world.(6)

We should ask about Islam the same set of questions we should ask about religion in every society: When does religion become politicized? When it is politicized, what are its objectives? As for Islam, do small, radical factions represent Islam as a whole? Can we talk about Islam as an unvariegated phenomenon? The reality is that Muslims and Islam have existed within different historical periods and different ideological movements. That is the important thing one should note: Islam is only a part of the culture of the region. It does not explain what happens; rather, it is appropriated in different ways by different social classes, social sectors and historical times.

The struggles for and over identity occur within this multilayered space, and are at the same time human constructions that involve continuous interpretation and reinterpretation. Edward Said observes that:

... these processes are not mental exercises but urgent social contests involving such concrete political issues as immigration laws, the legislation of personal conduct, the constitution of orthodoxy, the legitimization of violence and/or insurrection, the character and content of education, and the direction of foreign policy....(7)

Said rejects Samuel Huntington's reduction of civilizations and cultures to "essences" or "distinct breeds." Instead he points out that modern cultural theory universally accepts that "cultures are hybrid and heterogeneous and, as I point out in Culture and Imperialism (1993), that cultures and civilizations are so interrelated and interdependent as to beggar any unitary or simply delineated description of their individuality."(8) The political, cultural and religious debates in the Arab Middle East are, to borrow Edward Soja's formulation, an exercise in interpretation which seeks a "balance between space, time and social being, or what may now more explicitly be termed the creation of human geographies, the making of history, and the constitution of society."(9) This approach, according to Soja, provides "an illuminating motif through which to view the interplay between history, geography and modernity."(10) In the making of their history, Arabs and Muslims are not prisoners of immutable realities. Instead, the record of their modern history shows that they have searched for different, and often competing and conflicting, approaches to confront the challenges of modernity. The struggles associated with these processes, and the ideas and ideologies that have arisen, have been influenced by both endogenous and exogenous dynamics.(11)

The identity debates are neither neat nor antiseptic. They involve clashing visions, violent encounters between individuals or groups and the state and violence among individuals in society as well. The editors of this volume asked this author to contemplate the reasons for the absence of unity in the Middle East. By unity they mean "some common regional agenda, some camaraderie, some degree of community." The question is quite pertinent, especially in view of the great divisions that have beset the Arab world in the recent past. Arabs have invaded other Arab territories (as when Iraq invaded Kuwait); Arabs fought on opposing sides in "Desert Storm"; Arabs killed each other in internicine conflicts in Lebanon, Iraq, Yemen and Algeria, to name only a few. Despite these serious clashes, the dominant and modern Arab political order has displayed a keen sense of unity in preserving and perpetuating its power. In early January 1995, the council of Arab interior ministers met in Tunis. No rancor was displayed between the Kuwaiti and Iraqi ministers; instead harmony prevailed among all. The level of cooperation and coordination among all Arab intelligence agencies is astounding: Together they decided to form an inter-Arab agency for "information security." The stated function of this "repressive consensus" is to "impose news blackouts, prevent free expression, tighten censorship, prepare blacklists, and block alternative views."(12) The agenda for this security gathering was limited to one issue - the protection of Arab regimes from the threat of Islamic fundamentalism. Internal enemies change. Today it is Islamic forces; in the 1960s and 1970s it was oppositional movements, whether Arab nationalist or communist. The success of the "security consensus," despite the escalation of violence in countries like Algeria, has been remarkable, and to a large degree it has prevented the Arab political order from being infected by the winds of political change which the world has witnessed since the fall of the iron curtain. On this level, then, unity of purpose and action is alive and well in the Arab Middle East. Despite their conflicts and rivalries, the leaders of the Arab states are united over the need to stem the growth of opposition movements, which today are mostly Islamic. These movements have grown out of specific domestic circumstances, which inter alia include economic failures, the marginalization of youth, corruption, human-rights abuses and the persistence of authoritarian rule. An additional source of their strength resides in their conviction that Islam as an ideology can cement their unity across existing national boundaries. The Arab leaders of Arab states fear the potential impact of cooperation among the various Islamic movements. Thus the purpose of the "security concensus" is to ensure the preservation of regional and domestic political stability.(13)

Arab rulers fear the rising tide of violence that besets the Middle East today. But is it Islam that produces violence? First, it should be made clear that Islam is not the social agent that causes or yields political or violent action. Instead it is people...