The Strong Horse: Power, Politics, and the Clash of Arab Civilizations

When people see a strong horse and a weak horse, by nature, they will like the strong horse.

—
OSAMA BIN LADEN

Acknowledgments

 

I would like to thank the various magazine and newspaper editors who over the last several years have helped make it possible for me to write about the Middle East. At
Slate
, Jacob Weisberg, June Thomas, and Meghan O’Rourke; William Kristol, Richard Starr, Jonathan Last, Michael Goldfarb, and Philip Terzian at the
Weekly Standard;
Thomas Goetz at
Wired;
Alex Star at the
Boston Globe
and then the
New York Times Magazine;
Kyle Crichton, Ethan Bronner, Amy Virshup, Laura Marmor, Mary Billard, Stuart Emmrich, and Maura Egan at the
New York Times;
Franklin Foer and Zvika Krieger at the
New Republic;
Michael Young at the
Daily Star;
Michael Karam, Faerlie Wilson, and Hanin Ghaddar at
NOW Lebanon;
Tariq Alhomayed at
Asharq al-Awsat;
Nathan Lump and Amy Farley at
Travel and Leisure;
Hugh Garvey at
Bon Appétit;
Eric Banks at
Bookforum;
Michael Tomasky at the
American Prospect;
Jim Nelson at
GQ;
Adam Shatz at the
Nation;
Sara Ivry at
Nextbook;
Jonathan Foreman at
Standpoint;
and Jose Guardia at PJM.

Among my friends and colleagues, I am deeply grateful to:

In New York, David Samuels and Virginia Heffernan; Casey Greenfield; Katherine Zoepf; Michael Caruso; Richard Chen; Tom Vanderbilt; Salle Colagi; Abdul Tabini; and Heather Caldwell.

In Washington, Harold Rhode; David and Meyrav Wurmser; my colleagues at the Hudson Institute, especially Ken Weinstein, Allan Tessler, Enders Wimbush, Nina Rosenwald, Grace Terzian, Rachel DeCarlo Currie, Katie Fisher, Phil Ross, Ioannis Saratsis, and Katherine Smyth; Nadia Schadlow; Samantha Ravich; Steven Peter Rosen; Sam Spector; Oubai Shabhandhar; Peter Theroux; David Schenker; Michael Doran; Rob Karem; Marsha Thaler-Smith; Carmen Lane; Eddie Becker and Joanie; Michael Veltri; Danny Kopp; Joseph Gebeilly; Hussein Abd al-Hussein; Amal Mudalalli; Firas Maksad; Hassan Mneimneh; Ammar Abdulhamid; Matthew Irwin; Noah Pollak; Joshua Pollack; Andrew Apostolou; and Zaynab al-Suwaij.

In Egypt, Raymond Stock; Hala Mustafa; Lobna al-Tabei; the faculty and staff at the AUC Arabic Language Institute; Awad and Marous; Josh Stacher; and Patrick Haenni.

In Lebanon, Mrs. Dina Fawaz, my mother away from home; Rita Aad; the faculty at Saint Joseph University, especially Rana Bakdache; the U.S. embassy and its exemplary staff during the Cedar Revolution, including Ambassador Jeffrey Feltman, Greg Marchese, Matt Pilcher, and Juliet Wurr; Andrew Tabler; Lin Nouehid; Norbert Schiller; Nick Blanford; the Quantum group, especially Eli Khoury, Elena Anouti, Lara Hajj, Makram Rabah, Jean-Pierre Katrib, Hussam Harb, Lina Mustafa, and Lina Silistily; Malek Mroue; Lokman Slim; Inga Schei; Hazem Saghieh; Nadim Koteich; Ahmad al-Husseini; Homer Lanier; Bill Harris; Michael Totten; Peter Speetjens; Jana al-Horr; Andrea Stanton; Charles Chuman; and Hassan Mohanna.

Elsewhere in the Arab states, Rana Sweiss; Ali abu Shakra; Malia Asfour; Jihad Fakhreddine; Sheikha Lubna al-Qasimi; Abdul Rahman al-Rashed; and Abd al-Rahman al-Alwani.

In Israel, Naomi Shultz; the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, especially Dan Diker and Dore Gold; Martin Kramer; Barry Rubin; Ami Isseroff; Richard Landes; David Hazony; Asgeir Ueland; Ezra Gabbay; Steven Alper; Maya Nathan; Avi Goldberger; and Stardust graduates.

Special thanks to my agent and great friend, Chris Calhoun, and all the Sterling Lord office; the staff at Doubleday/Knopf, especially the editor in chief, Bill Thomas, Stephanie Bowen, and, above all, my editor, Kris Puopolo, without whom this book could not have been written.

Tony Badran, Elie Fawaz, Jonathan Spyer, and Muhammad abd al-Raouf are great teachers all, and even better friends.

Greatest thanks go to Jim Surowiecki, a friend who sees the best in me and brought out the best in this book.

INTRODUCTION
The Clash of Arab Civilizations

 

  I
t was hard not to take 9/11 personally. I was raised in New York City, so when those planes flew into the World Trade Center, it felt like a direct attack on my family and friends and myself, on the neighborhoods where I’d gone to school, played, and worked, and on the Brooklyn block where I was living that beautiful summer day when the sky darkened with the ashes of other New Yorkers. It occurred to me more than once during the time I spent living and traveling in the Middle East after 9/11 that had I lived most of my life in some other American city or village, had New York not been my hometown, I might not have moved to the region some few months after to try to figure out what had happened. This book is an account of my time in the Middle East since then, and my understanding of it. My conclusion, without racing too far ahead, is that we all took 9/11 too personally.

The spectacular nature of the event was cause enough to see it as a declaration of war on America, so it is hardly surprising that Americans across the political spectrum came to think of it in the context of a “clash of civilizations.” Even those on the left who disdained the phrase nonetheless employed a version of the conceit when explaining that the death and destruction were by-products of the legitimate
grievances that Arabs had with the United States, which was finally just a way of delivering a verdict for the other side in the same civilizational war.

I see it a little differently. I believe that 9/11 was evidence of a clash all right, but the clash that led to 9/11 was less the conflict between the West and Islam than the conflict between the Arabs themselves. In that sense, strange as it sounds, the attacks on New York and Washington were not really about us.

To be sure, a significant part of the Middle East, including Osama bin Laden, is at war expressly with the United States. And there are genuine points of conflict between the lands of Islam and the West, including a religious rivalry that dates back to the appearance of the Quran and myriad regional confrontations to which the United States’ strategic interests make us party. But these conflicts are just part of a system of wars that involves the entire Middle East. We are now incontrovertibly a part of these wars, but their causes and sources are to be found in the region itself, and not at the lower end of Manhattan, or even in the halls of the Pentagon. September 11 is the day we woke up to find ourselves in the middle of a clash of Arab civilizations, a war that used American cities as yet another venue for Arabs to fight each other.

 I
f that assertion sounds implausible, it’s because Americans are accustomed to thinking of themselves, in one way or another, as the source of the tumult in the Middle East. And that feeling was magnified after 9/11, when the continued eruptions of violence in the region made it hard for observers, from ordinary Americans to international affairs specialists, not to assume that the Bush administration was mostly, if not wholly, responsible for what was happening. But the problems of the region will not fade now that Barack Obama is in the White House, because they did not start when George W. Bush arrived there. Consider just a few of the clashes that preceded
Bush’s tenure: the intrastate Arab crises like Saddam Hussein’s 1990 invasion of Kuwait and Syria’s occupation of Lebanon (1990–2005); the civil wars that wracked North Yemen (1962–1970) and Lebanon (1975–1990); wars between the state and non-state actors, like the Islamist insurgencies that ravaged Algeria (1991–2002), Egypt (1981–1997), and Syria (1979–1982), and the Palestine Liberation Organization’s revolt against the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan (1968–1971); the genocidal bouts of ethnic and sectarian cleansing, like Saddam’s campaigns against the Kurds and Shia, Hafez al-Assad’s mass slaughter of Sunnis in Hama in 1982, and the Sudanese government’s campaigns against Christians and animists in the south (1981–2004) and now against non-Arab Muslims in Darfur. In all of these, the United States played, at most, a secondary role, and was often little more than a bystander.

Nor is this a new phenomenon. It’s true, of course, that outside actors—including the United States and the Soviet Union and, before them, the European colonial powers—have helped shape the history of the Middle East. But ultimately their actions and policies have been less important than we imagine. If we think differently—if we think that we are to blame for what is wrong with the Middle East-it’s because of two things: our own narcissism and the tendency of Arab nationalists to blame outside forces for the problems of their region. For decades now, the United States has been a convenient foil for those who believe that only the machinations of an evil outsider could keep the Arabs from becoming a formidable political, economic, and military bloc, just as we have become a convenient foil for Islamists seeking to explain why the Muslim world has fallen so far behind the West. But in both cases, focusing on the United States is a way of overlooking what’s really happening. In this book, I shift that focus back to where it belongs: on the conflicts and divisions within the Middle East itself.

There are some, of course, who deny that these conflicts among Arabs and Muslims matter. For most of the past century, in fact, the
mainstream American interpretation of the Middle East has seen it as a monolithic body, made up of people of similar backgrounds and similar opinions. (This misconception is frequently vented through the tidy journalistic cliché known as “the Arab street,” which presumes that, say, a Lebanese Christian and an Iraqi Shia necessarily hold the same point of view as an Egyptian Sunni.) More important, this is how Arab nationalists also see the world. Arab nationalism is a political and cultural doctrine holding that the Arabs, by virtue of a shared language, constitute a separate and single people. It is a tribal pact raised to the supranational level: in projecting unity, it seeks to obscure local enmities and keep Arabs from making war against each other. Arab nationalists have hoped to coalesce the energies of disparate factions and concentrate their hostilities onto a common, distant enemy.

It is somewhat paradoxical that even while Arab nationalism, and then Islamism, has taken the United States to be its main foil for over half a century, all during that time the mainstream American interpretation of the Arabic-speaking Middle East has been Arab nationalist, from the American missionaries who first ventured into the Holy Land to the oil companies and the State Department, from the academy to editorial boardrooms and foreign bureaus. The United States has paid a steep price for misconstruing the region like this, but at one time our face-value acceptance of Arab nationalism had at least the advantage of being in line with American interests.

Arab nationalism is a Sunni Arab viewpoint. The doctrine’s foundations are in a language considered holy by most Middle Easterners, and a history that holds the Prophet of Islam to be the greatest of all Arab heroes, and thus it is a sop to the status quo power of the Arabic-speaking Middle East that has ruled the region for more than a millennium, the Sunnis. Since the mid-1930s, the United States’ most vital interest in the Middle East has been energy, and as the world’s largest known reserves of oil are in Saudi Arabia, Washington has been guided by its need to accommodate a Sunni regime whose influence is proportionate to its wealth. America’s Sunnicentrism
has also been shaped by cultural and historical factors, but it is mostly the political and economic rationale that has given us our view of the region, a fact that allows us to derive a general principle: the Great Powers’ view of the Middle East is shaped by their own interests.

Even before the discovery of oil, for instance, the British looked at the region much the same way as we have, as a Sunni fiefdom. With the British Empire comprising enormous numbers of Sunnis from Egypt and Palestine to Iraq and the Persian Gulf all the way to the crown’s prize holding in India, London tinkered little after World War I with the skeletal remains of the Ottoman Empire’s administrative structure. The Ottomans’ Sunni Arab deputies were left in charge to protect and advance British interests, even in Iraq, where the Sunnis were, and are, clearly a minority. The French, however, saw the Middle East differently, partly because they were in competition with the British, and also because their Middle Eastern holdings included significant minority populations in conflict with the Sunnis, like the Maronites in Lebanon, the Alawis in Syria, and the Berbers in Algeria, communities that the French used to serve their own interests.

In the wake of 9/11, Washington found that the Middle East looked more like the way the French had conceived of it than how the British had ruled it. The U.S.-led invasion of Iraq changed the balance of power by pushing aside a Sunni strongman and empowering a national majority, the Shia, which, since they are also a regional minority, altered the nature of U.S. strategy. As descriptions of the Middle East go hand in hand with national interests, we need a way to understand the region in line with the reality now exposed, and this book proposes one. The Arabic-speaking Middle East is not a sea of some 300 million Arabs who all have common interests but a region with a 70 percent Sunni population and dozens of minorities. The size of the Sunni majority, and its concomitant power and prestige, have allowed it to rule by violence, repression, and coercion for close to fourteen hundred years. The Sunnis have been a bloc of force
that has never known accommodation or compromise, but has rather compelled everyone else to submit to its worldview.

This does not mean that the Sunnis’ reliance on violence to maintain their rule is the “root cause” of the problems in the Middle East. Rather, it is just the central motif in a pattern that existed before Islam and is imprinted on all of the region’s social and political relations—whether the state is facing down insurgents, or nationalists are fighting Islamists, or one tribe is squared off against another, or two minorities are at war with each other. The order of the region is the natural order of things that the fourteenth-century Arab historian Ibn Khaldun describes in his masterpiece
Al-Muqaddima:
history is a matter of one tribe, nation, or civilization dominating the others by force until it, too, is overthrown by force. And it is this, what I call the strong horse principle—not Western imperialism, nor Zionism, nor Washington policy makers—that has determined the fundamental character of the Arabic-speaking Middle East, where bin Ladenism is not drawn from the extremist fringe but represents the political and social norm.

The war that Arabs are waging against the United States, some in deed as well as in word, is merely a massive projection of the same pattern of force, with a tribe bound as one to defend against and defeat the outsider. The Arabs hate us not because of what we do or who we are but because of what and who we are
not:
Arabs. But because of the size and heterogeneity of this putative Arab nation, that compact is not sustainable on so large a scale, civilization versus civilization. The wars waged between Arabs according to the strong horse principle make the Arabic-speaking peoples of the Middle East a much graver threat to themselves than they are to anyone else.

 T
he Strong Horse: Power, Politics, and the Clash of Arab Civilizations
is broken into three parts. The first part details the complex of issues—from tribalism to Arab nationalism, and from Islam to Islamism—spanning Arab history from before the advent of Islam
through the nineteenth-century Muslim reform movement that have shaped the contemporary Middle East. And it is these issues taken as a whole that led to 9/11. The second part describes how the Bush White House responded to the attacks according to what it perceived to be the problems of the Middle East, and how the region in turn reacted to the Americans. At the core of the Bush administration’s post-9/11 strategy was democratization, and thus the final third of the book looks at the challenge of making democracy work in a region that has little experience with it.

The first chapter deals with the tribal character of Arab societies, including jihad and its most famous contemporary practitioner, Osama bin Laden. The next two chapters take up Arab nationalism by sketching its history, introducing some of its most prominent ideologues, and describing the political, social, and cultural purposes to which it’s been put. While those chapters deal explicitly with Arabism, this is a subject that runs throughout the book since I understand it to be the region’s defining issue. In fact, I take Islam, at least in its initial thrust, to be little more than a variety—indeed the first manifestation—of Arab nationalism. Over time, as it extended throughout the Fertile Crescent, Persia, and North Africa, Islam clearly became something else and something more than just a pan-Arab ideology, but before anyone imagined the revelation embedded in the Arabic Quran could spread to faraway Spain or the Asian subcontinent, the “universality” of this religious and political doctrine applied to the various Arabian tribes to be unified under the rule of an Arabian leader, the Prophet of Islam. And for the conquered non-Arabs who converted to the new faith, as one scholar of the period explained, “membership of Islam was equated with possession of an Arab ethnic identity”
¹
The early
umma
—or Muslim community—was an Arab super-tribe held together not by blood and kinship but by a religious idea that motivated and rationalized the Arab conquests by distinguishing between the tribe and all comers—Muslims versus infidels,
dar al-Islam
versus
dar al-harb
, or the abode of Islam versus that which is not under Islam, the abode of war.

Dar al-Islam’s
first modern encounter with
dar al-harb
was Napoleon’s 1798 invasion of Egypt. The fourth and fifth chapters describe the intellectual and cultural ferment that came in the aftermath of this collision between the West and the Arab world, looking specifically at the rise of the Muslim reform movement. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Muslim intellectuals and activists took the West as their yardstick to measure how far the
umma
had fallen, and contended that the failure was due to the condition of Islam itself. They argued that the Islamic faith had been corrupted by centuries of fake customs and practices, leaving
dar al-Islam
so brittle that the infidels had overrun it effortlessly. The Salafist movement, as this reform current is called, is the precursor of what we know today as political Islam or, more frequently, Islamism.