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It is hard for us to understand the intoxicating appeal of pan-Arab Islamic <br>nationalism; the dream of an Arabia without borders, united under a restored <br>Caliphate, answerable only to Koranic law, the Sharia...The answer lies in <br>the despotic tyranny under which most Arabs now live. President Bush said, <br>"They hate us for our freedoms", but that is not true: freedom is a rare <br>commodity that Arabs would dearly like a lot more of. They hate us, rather, <br>for the condition of humiliating subjection in which they find themselves, <br>and for which, rightly or wrongly, they hold us responsible. They hate us for <br>Sir Mark Sykes, for Georges Picot, for Gertrude Bell, for Arthur James <br>Balfour (whose 1917 "declaration" was the basis of the movement to create a <br>Jewish state in Palestine); for America's steadfast support of what they <br>perceive as corrupt and cruel regimes (like that of the Saud family in its <br>glittering hi-tech fortress of modern Riyadh) and for its bland indifference <br>to the injustice suffered by the Palestinians. <br><br><br>The Guardian (UK)- Wednesday December 11, 2002<br><br><br>Here we go again <br><br>The family dictatorships that dominate the Middle East are the legacy of <br>fantasy borders drawn by colonial administrators. Now with the Bush <br>administration pressing to topple Saddam, says Jonathan Raban, we may be <br>about to repeat our mistakes - and do just what Bin Laden wants <br><br><br>Somewhere in the letters-home of Gertrude Bell, the doughty English <br>archaeologist and colonial administrator, there is a description of a <br>pleasant afternoon spent riding in the Mesopotamian desert in 1918 or 1919. <br>Bell trails a walking stick in the sand. Behind her, Arab boys erect cairns <br>to mark the future boundary between what will eventually become the states of <br>Iraq and Saudi Arabia. <br><br>Bell was one of the many British and French nation-builders who carved up <br>Arabia in the years following the Sykes-Picot agreement of 1916. The lines <br>they drew in the sand rarely corresponded to any pre-existent historical, <br>tribal, cultural or geographical reality. The nations they invented were <br>arbitrary agglomerations, their borders thrown up around dozens of warring <br>local sheikdoms. These fictional states were given kings (the British loved <br>to create monarchies in their own image) and elegant written constitutions, <br>as if the right sort of ceremonial language and regular 21-gun salutes could <br>somehow transform the chaos of post-Ottoman Arabia into a neat patchwork of <br>Denmarks, Hollands and Swedens with date palms and minarets. <br><br>A nation so fancifully constructed does not easily lend itself to governance. <br>You need a warlord, with a loyal standing army and a far-flung force of <br>secret policemen, to prevent the country from falling into the turmoil that <br>is the natural state to which it is perpetually tending. The systems of <br>government that have evolved in Syria, Iraq and Saudi Arabia are paranoid <br>family dictatorships with ancestral roots in a single city or village. Thus <br>the Assad family of Qurdaha, an Alawite village up in the hills behind <br>Latakia, Syria's Mediterranean port. Thus the Saud family of Riyadh, an <br>oasis-town in the Nejd desert, now the capital of Saudi Arabia. Thus the <br>Husseins of Tikrit, a town 90 miles north of Baghdad, and the birthplace of <br>Saladin. (Saddam's full name is Saddam Hussein al-Tikriti.) <br><br>If the European inventors of these countries believed that generously drawn <br>borders would encourage a commensurate enlargening of national as opposed to <br>local consciousness, the effects have been quite the reverse. To be an army <br>general, a security chief or a government minister in Arabia, it is necessary <br>to come from Qurdaha, Riyadh or Tikrit, and better still to bear the name of <br>Assad, Saud or Hussein. So the village, and the family, supply a tyrannical <br>ruling class which treats the rest of the country as an unruly empire, to be <br>held in place, as empires are, by regular shows of military and terroristic <br>power. In the case of Syria and Iraq, the reigning families belong to <br>religious minorities: the Assads are members of the eccentric Alawi sect, <br>though most Syrians are Sunni Muslims; the Husseins are Sunnis, and Tikrit is <br>a Sunni enclave in Shiite Iraq. <br><br>The least unstable states in the Arab world are emirates that have survived <br>intact from long before Picot and Sykes arrived on the scene. They too are <br>family businesses. The al-Sabahs of Kuwait, the al-Khaleifas of Bahrain, the <br>al-Thanis of Qatar, the al-Nahyans of Abu Dhabi, and the al-Maktoums of Dubai <br>have been in power for around 200 years. But these functioning political <br>entities are tiny. Qatar, for instance, is roughly the size of Devon and <br>Cornwall combined, with a third of their population; its neighbour Saudi <br>Arabia, by contrast, is nearly five times the size of France. <br><br>The Sauds, Assads and Husseins practice a form of rule that works well enough <br>in a tiny country such as Qatar, but is a disaster when applied on a larger <br>scale. It fills prisons and graveyards and breeds among its subjugated <br>peoples the kind of impotent despair and fury that makes them natural <br>candidates for conversion to Islamist totalitarianism. <br><br>Consider the case of Hama in Syria, a city famous for its huge, groaning <br>water wheels (they are said by the local poets to make a sound like that of <br>women in orgasm). It is a centre of Sunni conservative puritanism, always <br>hostile to the secular Ba'athist regime of Hafiz al-Assad. In 1982, a group <br>of Sunni militiamen ambushed an army patrol in the heart of the old city, and <br>sparked an Islamic uprising against the provincial government. Assad sent in <br>the Syrian army under Alawite commanders. Most of Hama was flattened. Between <br>10,000 and 25,000 Hamaites, most of them civilians, were slaughtered. <br><br>It is an important axiom of the Bush administration that Saddam has used <br>weapons of mass destruction "against his own people"; but the concept of "own <br>people" in Arabia needs footnoting, as the Hama massacre illustrates. When <br>Assad sent his army into Hama he was not moving against his "own people" so <br>much as attacking his traditional enemies, whose base lay within his <br>territorial jurisdiction. So it was with Saddam and the Kurds, and Saddam and <br>the Shiites. From the perspective of Tikrit, the Kurdish city of Halabja and <br>the floating villages of the Shiite Marsh Arabs did not contain Saddam's own <br>people: they were, rather, insolent colonial outposts that needed to be <br>taught a savage lesson. <br><br>In the Middle East, the concept of nationality is understandably weak: It <br>would be hard to feel patriotic allegiance to the capricious lines in the <br>sand traced by Bell and her kind. To say "I am a Syrian" or "I am an Iraqi" <br>means a lot less than to say "I am a Damascene" or "I am a Baghdadi". For the <br>ancient cities of Arabia - Cairo, Jerusalem, Damascus, Aleppo, Baghdad, <br>Mecca, Medina and Sana'a - used to have the character of Renaissance <br>city-states, as grand or grander than Venice and Florence. Even now, when you <br>go to, say, Aleppo or Sana'a, you can feel their political self-containment <br>as a once great centre of civilisation and commerce. A powerful sense of the <br>civic, as it relates to people's home towns, is matched by something very <br>close to indifference to the national, and no amount of enforced flag-waving <br>and protestations of fealty to the dictator in make-believe elections is <br>going to change or conceal that fact of Arab life. <br><br>Yet one vastly potent nationalism haunts the Arab world; the idea of the <br>Ummah, the nation or community of believers. It is to the Ummah that Osama <br>bin Laden addresses his calls for armed resistance to the west and its <br>"puppet" dictators in the region. Notice that he never speaks of "Saudi A<br>rabia", his own home country; he always refers to it as "the land of the two <br>holy mosques," for to Bin Laden and his followers the Saud family are <br>usurpers, kept in place by the patronage and military might of the US. In <br>Osama's version of things, the country we know as Saudi Arabia exists only as <br>a piece of arrogant colonial mapmaking. Notice that in his most recent <br>audiotape he spoke of "our sons in Iraq"; meaning not Saddam and his Tikriti <br>henchmen, whose secular Baathist regime has long been on his hit-list, but <br>the faithful millions who live inside the artificial borders imposed on <br>Mesopotamia by the western powers when they summoned Iraq into being. <br><br>It is hard for us to understand the intoxicating appeal of pan-Arab Islamic <br>nationalism; the dream of an Arabia without borders, united under a restored <br>Caliphate, answerable only to Koranic law, the Sharia. To western eyes, <br>Sharia law, with its public stonings, beheadings, amputations, its male <br>triumphalism, appears tyrannical in the extreme. How could anyone see in it <br>the promise of liberation? <br><br>The answer lies in the despotic tyranny under which most Arabs now live. <br>President Bush said, "They hate us for our freedoms", but that is not true: <br>freedom is a rare commodity that Arabs would dearly like a lot more of. They <br>hate us, rather, for the condition of humiliating subjection in which they <br>find themselves, and for which, rightly or wrongly, they hold us responsible. <br>They hate us for Sir Mark Sykes, for Georges Picot, for Gertrude Bell, for <br>Arthur James Balfour (whose 1917 "declaration" was the basis of the movement <br>to create a Jewish state in Palestine); for America's steadfast support of <br>what they perceive as corrupt and cruel regimes (like that of the Saud family <br>in its glittering hi-tech fortress of modern Riyadh) and for its bland <br>indifference to the injustice suffered by the Palestinians. <br><br>All this may be unreasonable of them, but that is why they hate us, and that <br>is why, in the poorest parts of Arabia, the favourite name to give a boy at <br>present is Osama; the latest folk hero of an impossible, idealised "Islamic <br>nation" that will transcend the petty frontiers of the hopelessly divided and <br>despotic Middle East. This is not meant to sound soft on Bin Laden: he is a <br>monster, but a monster born of desperate dreams that are widely shared across <br>an immense and unhappy tract of land. <br><br>Now we are going nation-building in Arabia once again. No one in the present <br>US administration seems to have any useful memory of our earlier adventures <br>in this department, and no one appears able to clearly distinguish between <br>the two crucially different bad-hats with sallow complexions, Osama bin Laden <br>and Saddam Hussein. No one seems to have noticed that toppling Saddam, though <br>it ranks a good deal lower on the agenda than toppling the Sauds, is a <br>necessary part of Osama's larger game plan. We are on the brink of an <br>intervention that will rank in Arabian history beside the Sykes-Picot <br>agreement and the Balfour declaration, and we are bringing to that <br>intervention a terrifying mixture of ignorance and amnesia. <br><br>ยท Jonathan Raban's books include Arabia (1979). His new novel, Waxwings, <br>comes out next year.<br>
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