The New Middle East: The World After the Arab Spring

Introduction

‘Even if you win, it is difficult to rule an angry people,’ he told me. The world was glued to the crisis in Syria, but as we sat sipping coffee in the Foreign Ministry in Damascus in June of 2012, Jihad Makdissi had an old Jackie Chan film playing on the TV. In the movie the bad guys were getting a beating for troubling one of the nice families in the neighbourhood. In the real world it was the nice families who were getting the beating at the interrogation centres set up by Makdissi’s colleagues. His country, the crossroads of the region, the ‘beating heart’ of the Arab world, was sliding into civil war. Makdissi was the very public face of the regime, answering its critics on TV screens across the world. But he and the other civilian members of the regime were not only scared of the opposition groups creeping closer to the capital. They feared the scrutiny of their own increasingly predatory security services.

The certainties of the old Middle East, the world Jihad Makdissi had always belonged to, were crumbling around him.

Just down the road the men in blue helmets were watching their mission spiral away from them. ‘This is a YouTube war,’ said the diplomat from the United Nations, leaning towards me, his voice low and throttled with anger. He pulled on his cigarette and sat back in his chair. We were in the bubble of their headquarters. This man was watching the news, constantly. It was dominated by images uploaded by tech-savvy teenagers armed with a video camera and a broadband line. His boss, the man leading the United Nations’ peacekeeping mission in Syria, Major General Robert Mood, told me at the time that these images had driven much of the reaction in the West to the crisis. But as the war entered its third year he remembered the moment he told the youngsters it wouldn’t be enough. ‘ We saw Libya, when do you think they are coming? they asked me. You could see the disappointment in their eyes when I said: Honestly I don’t think you can expect that in Syria. ’

The UN was there to be a neutral pair of eyes, but the nature of the war meant it was often impossible to determine the truth. The previous day I had gone out with their ‘ceasefire’ monitors and ended up standing on a roof alongside them watching the Syrian army lob mortar rounds into a residential district of the city of Homs. The Syrian government had welcomed the UN into the country but now wouldn’t let them into the area to see whom their army was bombarding. It was the last time the observers would try to enter, because five days later the worsening violence forced the UN to suspend all its patrols. The following month the number of killings in Syria began to soar.¹

‘This is a fight between Russia on one side with the Iranians, and the whole Western world. The Americans are now on the same side as al-Qaeda!’ said the exasperated diplomat. Neither of us knew it then, but the man first charged with finding a peaceful solution to the conflict had also reached the end of his tether. Kofi Annan, the joint United Nations and Arab League envoy, would soon be resigning from his ‘Mission Impossible’ with a scathing attack on the ‘finger-pointing and name-calling’ between the members of the Security Council.² By the time I returned to Damascus in February 2013 the UN had said almost seventy thousand people had died in the conflict.³ Jihad Makdissi had fled the country. As the year wore on the death toll kept climbing.

Nothing expressed the profound shock caused by the collapse of the old order in the Middle East more clearly than the confused and dithering reaction of the outside world to the war in Syria. It simply did not know what to do. The only Great Power, America, used to have a simple solution for problems in the region: ring the Israelis or ring the Egyptians or ring the Saudis. Or ring all three and let them get on with it. That easy set of instructions has been consumed by the political inferno that has raged through the region in the wake of the first Arab uprising in Tunisia. The telephone numbers may have stayed the same but the people at the other end, and their priorities, have not. Newly influential players have emerged. Writing the next rulebook has barely begun. Barbara Bodine, the former US ambassador to Yemen, told me: ‘I really don’t know anybody who liked dealing with dictators, but there is a perverse simplicity to it.’ The world after the Arab Spring is now much more complex.

The old Middle East stopped making sense years ago. The Soviet Union had been dead for decades. One by one, around the world, in Africa, South America and in Eastern Europe, brutal regimes had fallen, or been abandoned by their foreign sponsors. Elsewhere, for better or worse, the world had moved on – but not here. In the old Middle East the unholy alliance between ‘the Land of the Free’ and the world of dictatorship limped on because no one knew what else to do. It took schoolteachers, farmers and accountants to achieve what generations of diplomats and world leaders failed to do. The creation of a New Middle East. But revolution is only the journey; it does not bring you to a destination. It is a process, not a result. We can see now that this journey is leaving behind the old socialist ideologies of Ba’athism and Pan-Arabism, and those carried by the founders of Zionism. There is a stronger Sunni, and a weaker Shia, Islam. There is a growing religious divide in Israel. The regional powers are now more strongly divided along sectarian lines. Christians and other minorities wonder if they still have a safe place in the new societies being formed. Religion, not nationalism or Arabism, is now the dominant force.

God has returned to the Middle East.

Yet the uprisings were not Islamic revolutions. The call did not come from the mosques. Even so, religion is going to play a much greater role in the politics of the New Middle East. Its level of influence will depend on the make-up of each society. The rise of political Islam will create a discussion about the role of religion in the post-Arab Spring era. It may lose sway in countries where Sunni Islam forms almost the entire religious spectrum. Even in places where political choices will be tied to individual faiths, being pious will not be enough. Voters want answers to problems like unemployment, an inadequate education system and poor health care. The young revolutionaries did not fight to overthrow dictators just to have their freedoms curbed by religious edicts. Political Islam will have to adapt to reflect a more personal approach to religion. Islamic, or Sharia, law is not wanted in these new democracies even if faith is their reference point.

In Europe there will be concerns about the mix of religion and politics. Many in America will fear the rise of political Islam, because the legacy of 9/11 has left much of the nation believing that Islam often leads to extremism. The bomb attacks by two newly radicalised young men, one of whom had been granted American citizenship, on the Boston Marathon in April 2013 can only have strengthened that conviction. It is likely that the next few years will further reinforce some of these stereotypes, because extremism feeds on chaos, and chaos is likely to be a strong force as the New Middle East emerges from the ashes of the old.

The Arab dictators ruled their countries by dividing their people. They did that by stirring suspicion and mistrust among communities and religions. Now the Arab Spring revolts have also breathed new life into the schism within Islam itself. Sunni and Shia Muslims are facing off against each other in some of the region’s most volatile areas. Iran had a burst of influence after the US toppled regimes in two of the nations that had been boxing it in, Iraq and Afghanistan. The Sunni powers have used the Arab Spring to put that firmly in reverse. But even they are divided. The revolts reignited old rivalries between competing ideologies among the Sunni Islamists too.

The board on which all these new power games are being played stretches across the Middle East. The rules came from scripture and each player interprets them according to their faith. America not only does not understand the rules of the game, it can’t work out what winning might look like. So it is roaming around the table looking at everyone else’s hand, offering advice on which card to play, but because it has no stake in the game nobody is really listening.

Syria was where the last act of the old Middle East would be played out. The finale would drip with blood. It would hark back to the region’s darkest days, to the decades when its societies were opaque, when ‘the Arab street’ couldn’t raise its voice without getting its fingernails pulled out. Back then the world heard only the narrow view of a handful of dictators who ruled with an iron fist over hundreds of millions. Saddam Hussein, Assad, Ben Ali, Muammar Gaddafi and Hosni Mubarak all lived lives of cartoonish excess. States were fashioned that mirrored their paranoia. Their people were surrounded by symbols of their masters’ omnipotence.

That narrative of the old Middle East lasted longer than the Cold War in Europe. It lasted as long as the Arab dictators did. The West propped up these men because, so the story went, the alternative was states falling first under the influence of the communist block and later into the arms of radical Islam. In Syria President Bashar al-Assad believed he could stem the tide of history by playing by the rules created by his father’s generation. He helped rekindle Cold War rivalries between Russia and America to stymie international intervention. His army tugged at the fragile mosaic of sects and religions that made up Syria’s complex society. It started a sectarian civil war that would bleed into the countries around it. I saw the regime’s warning to the world scrawled across the walls of the Damascus suburbs that dared to show dissent: ‘Assad or we’ll burn the country’.

The rise of the Arab people against their tormentors took even the protesters who manned the barricades by surprise. These revolutions took place in societies locked down by a security apparatus that had had decades to hone its skills. Generations of men from North Africa to the Levant had been trained in the craft of suppression. They had stalked their own people, snatched them from their beds, strapped them into seats and beaten them to pulp. These acts were not justified by religion or ideology. They were not necessary evils inflicted to further a cause or liberate a people. It was not done for God. It was done for a man and his regime. Now most of those men are gone. Locked up, exiled or buried in unmarked graves. They leave behind countries in transformation. The statues and posters of those dictators have been torn down and trampled underfoot. The people have been led blinking out of the dark days of oppression by their children, a generation of youngsters force-fed for their entire lives on the lie that nothing could or would ever change. Until it did.

‘The Arab world was considered a stagnant pond of retardation and tyranny, inhabited by what appeared to be a complacent populace toiling fatalistically under the yoke of their dictators,’ wrote the blogger Iyad el-Baghdadi, in the introduction to his satirical ‘Arab Tyrant’s Manual’.⁴ ‘It really felt like this state of stagnation was permanent,’ he told me. ‘A lot of us thought that something has got to give at some point, but we didn’t really think it was going to happen for another twenty years. We thought it was not going to be our generation but the next generation that would be doing it.’

The ingredients that sparked the uprisings existed throughout the region. Nearly every country has a massive ‘youth bulge’, with half its population under the age of twenty-five.⁵ That made the competition even tougher for the meagre opportunities available to young people. The aspirations of the youth across the Middle East and North Africa were the same. Everywhere I went I would hear identical demands from the young protesters on the streets. They wanted their rulers to allow them some dignity. They wanted to work. They wanted some hope for a life at least as good as their parents’. The ‘youth bulge’ didn’t need to be a problem; it could have been an opportunity if the old Middle East had not been so dysfunctional. In East Asia I saw for myself that because the economies worked and made things people wanted, they were able to absorb and benefit from the suddenly larger workforce. In the Middle East the state knew how to turn out graduates, but not how to create an economy to usefully employ them. Even worse, the graduates it did produce didn’t have the right skills to fit the few opportunities there were in the market.⁶ The state had solved this problem with the parents of the revolutionaries by buying them off with ‘jobs for life’ in the government.

Professor Ragui Assaad studies labour markets in developing countries at the Humphrey School of Public Affairs. He told me the old regimes eventually no longer had the resources to do the same thing for the next generation:

The only thing young people found themselves able to do was work in the informal economy, and that creates a lot of anger and frustration, so in a sense it’s the unravelling of that social contract, with much of that unravelling being imposed on the youth. The adults kept their government jobs, they kept their benefits, they kept their subsidised housing, but all the adjustment was imposed on the young people.

During the revolutions the West realised for the first time that Arabs were people just like us. They weren’t all brooding jihadis who needed to be kept in check by a reign of terror.

‘We have been here for seven thousand years, but people in Europe, you think that I have the camel in front of my house and I’m living beside the pyramid.’ I met Youssef, a 42-year-old engineer, at the height of the Egyptian revolution in Cairo’s Tahrir Square. Before the uprising, Youssef kept his thoughts and feelings to himself. Now, in slightly broken English, and just yards from where pitched battles were still taking place, he was relishing the chance to talk freely for the first time in his life without having to look over his shoulder for a secret policeman. ‘We live like Third World people but we are First World people. We want to be able to show that we have all the capabilities to be First World people. Even the poor people here are civilised.’ If Youssef can now speak openly for the first time, then this is also our first chance to listen, to find out what people like him want from the post-Arab Spring era. We can ask what kind of societies they are going to build and learn how their decisions will change our lives.

The only people of the old Middle East that the Western world thought it understood were the Israelis. The West knew much of their lore because their histories were intertwined. The Israelis were still seen as the homogeneous group of Europeans, surrounded by a sea of troubles, that built the Jewish homeland. But as the West enjoyed the celebrations of democracy emerging from the revolutions in the Arab world, it discovered that Israel did not. Why does the country that likes to boast it is the ‘only democracy in the Middle East’ think the Arab Spring was a catastrophe? Why has the bit of the region we thought was the most like us stopped thinking like us? The Arab world may have been going through a very noisy transition, but a quiet revolution is taking place in Israel too. It has rarely been more politically isolated than it is today. Its neighbourhood has radically changed but it has belligerently refused to adapt to that reality. ‘Israel doesn’t know what its best interests are,’ said President Obama privately after he won his second term.⁷

The Arab uprisings have presented Israel with its greatest political challenge for a generation, just as its society seems at its most fragile. The rise of political Islam in the Middle East has ended for Israel the era of the cosy deal stitched up in smoky rooms with generals from Arab dictatorships. Mike Herzog has spent the last decade at the centre of Israeli decision-making on all key strategic, defence and political issues. To a greater extent than in other democracies in the world the Israeli military plays a central role in the country’s society and politics and its views have a huge impact on policy. Herzog is a former brigadier general and the son of an Israeli president. I asked him whether an Arab dictatorship was better for Israel than an Islamic democracy.

It’s a very good question, and people in Israel don’t usually think about it in that way. Over the long run an Islamic democracy is better than a dictatorship, over the short run not necessarily, because when it comes to Israeli interests I think [issues like] the security situation, the peace agreement, don’t promise good news. The problem is that Israel is highly unpopular on the Arab street, there’s a lot of hatred, resentment and so on. These people were educated that way for generations. So there’s a lot of hatred when the street speaks now. It’s clearly an anti-Israel voice and we don’t know how to communicate with these people.

In fact the street that worries many Israelis is much closer to home. It has posters telling women not to enter their area without covering their arms, legs and heads. It has banners describing Israel as a ‘Nazi state’ and blaming Zionism for the Holocaust. On these streets, just a few kilometres from where Mike and I were sitting, are people who want an end to the state of Israel. And these people are not Arabs, they are Jews.

As far as Yoel Weber is concerned Mike Herzog is not a Jew. We met in his small apartment, which is on the outskirts of the old city of Jerusalem. Yoel told me that the country’s ultra-Orthodox Jews believe that 70–80 per cent of Israeli Jews have no right to call themselves Jews at all. ‘They were lost to Judaism,’ he said. ‘We believe if any Jew behaves non-religiously, even if he was born a Jew then he has nothing to do with Judaism. He’s cut off his pipeline to Judaism.’ What’s more, Yoel said most of his community have no time for people like Mike who fought in the 1973 war to protect the state of Israel against its Arab neighbours. ‘The Haredi or ultra-Orthodox community don’t believe in the state of Israel. They don’t believe the state has done any good for Judaism or the Jews. [They think] that the state of Israel is not a blessing, rather it is a curse for the Jewish people.’

Ultra-Orthodox Jews were a tiny proportion of the Israeli state when it was created. Today they still make up only 10 per cent of the population, but the fractured nature of Israeli politics has often given them disproportionate influence.⁸ That is only going to grow, because one third of all the Jewish children in kindergarten today come from their community.⁹ The ongoing battle for Israel’s future is between the secular and the religious. Its outcome will have just as much influence on the Middle East of tomorrow as the consequences of the revolts that are still searing through the Arab world today. The old narrative forgot to tell us that Israel has changed too. Israelis no longer all think the same, talk the same or worship the same. Their society is split along ultra-Orthodox, religious Zionist (also known in Israel as religious nationalists) and secular lines.

Eight-year-old girls dressed in long skirts and coats have been spat at by Haredi men who called them ‘whores’ as they walked to school. Hard-line settlers are demanding Israel’s democracy be replaced by Jewish religious law. Secular Jews are fighting attempts to segregate their buses along gender lines and want protection from the spectre of ‘Jewish terrorism’.¹⁰ Jewish religious extremists who reject the existence of the state of Israel have sprayed pro-Hitler graffiti on the walls of Yad Vashem, the nation’s monument to the victims of the Holocaust. At the other end of this society are the Arab communities living within the recognised boundaries of Israel. The demographics show that the country will soon be dominated by the two extremes of its social spectrum.¹¹ The state of Israel’s response to this, according to one of its leading newspapers, Ha’aretz, is to ‘thrust Israel down the slope of apartheid’.¹²

The American people have failed to grasp the scale of the change going on in their most important ally in the Middle East. And that is also true of the American government. When Barack Obama gave his ‘historic’ speech at Cairo University in 2009 he was presenting himself as an honest broker to all sides in the region. Instead he alienated almost everyone. The Israelis couldn’t believe their ears and the Arab people couldn’t believe their luck, but later ended up feeling utterly betrayed by what they saw as empty words. In 2013 he tried again with another address to the Middle East, this time from Jerusalem. He launched a charm offensive, pouring his love on the Israeli nation, which made them mistrust him less though not like him more.¹³ ‘There were too many buts,’ said Elior, a young Israeli student in the audience. His trip left the Palestinians feeling they had been given the cold shoulder.

Barack Obama’s symbolic ‘first telephone call’ as president on his first full day in the White House was claimed by the Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas, who was ‘president’ in name only. The call to him and other Middle Eastern leaders was meant to show just how engaged the new American president would be in the region.¹⁴ As he picked up the handset Barack Obama had no idea that during his first term he would see decades of US foreign policy collapse in front of him.

Back then it was so much easier. America could divide the Arab world into two camps. There were those it could largely trust: Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and the rest of the Gulf states. And those it could not: Iran, Syria, Hezbollah, Hamas and Libya. It’s not that simple now. Despite US reservations it must engage with Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood after its democratically elected President was ousted in the July 2013 popular coup so the Brotherhood’s wider membership does not turn inward and increasingly violent in response. After the coup how much effort is made to show Islamists that democracy still has a place for them will be crucial. It will decide how both moderate Islamists and Western governments deal with the rise in influence of the Salafists.

Salafists are ultra-conservative puritanical Sunni Muslims who model themselves on a form of Islam dating to the first followers of the Prophet Muhammad. Salafism is very close to the Wahhabism that is the dominant form of Islam in Saudi Arabia. That is why wealthy Saudis are so willing to support Salafists in places like Syria. But Salafist groups are quite disparate. They are not disciplined single units like the Muslim Brotherhood. In Egypt, where the Salafists have deep roots, they are largely peaceful, previously apolitical, advocates for greater implementation of Islamic Law. Because they did not get involved in politics they were largely left alone under Mubarak. But in North Africa, where they were brutally suppressed by the old regimes, they have been responsible for some of the worst violence since the revolts took place.

The rise in influence of the proponents of political Islam, or Islamism as it is also called, has reshaped the Arab world after the revolutions and it will redefine Western diplomacy. Political Islam is essentially the opposite of what the West would call the division of Church and State. Broadly speaking, at the core of Islamism lies the belief that the basic original principles of the Muslim faith still have a fundamental role to play in the effective governing of modern societies and should go beyond just the issues of personal law.

The rise in influence of the adherents of political Islam has already began to flow into the conflict that has fractured the entire region and confounded the peacemakers for decades: the struggle between the Palestinians and Israel. ‘This victory will change the political map in the Middle East,’ said Ghazi Hamad, a senior member of the militant group Hamas. He was speaking as tens of thousands of Muslim Brotherhood supporters were still on the streets of Cairo celebrating the election of their candidate to the presidency. ‘Israel should understand that they’ve lost their friends and allies in the Middle East. The political game will be changed now. Israel will not find an umbrella, it will not find silence for its crimes against the Palestinian people.’¹⁵ The following day Israel’s best-selling newspaper, Yedioth Ahronoth, drew its inspiration from the language used in the First Testament to describe the biblical plagues. ‘Darkness in Egypt’ was the translation from Hebrew of its headline.

The Arab Spring brought Hamas very publicly back into the Sunni Muslim Arab fold. Along with Syria, Iran and Lebanon’s Hezbollah it had been an integral part of the so-called ‘Axis of Resistance’ against Israel. Before the uprisings of 2011 its base was in Damascus, under the guardianship of the heterodox Shia Alawite sect of President Bashar al-Assad. Its funding had come largely from Shia Iran. It had coordinated its attacks on Israel with the Shia group Hezbollah. And yet Hamas was an offshoot of the Sunni Muslim Brotherhood. The ‘Axis of Resistance’ had always been a marriage of inconvenience essentially imposed on it by the old Egyptian leadership who feared the Islamist Brotherhood at home and so rejected its siblings abroad. Now the Islamists were in power in Egypt, and their natural inclination would be to support Hamas over the more secular Palestinian groups supported by the West. Hamas was back where it belonged. This was important for the group because the Arab Spring would heighten the schism within Sunni and Shia, the two biggest branches of Islam.

Jews, Christians and Muslims all worship the same God. What they disagree about is which prophet carried the final version of His message to mankind. In simple terms the First Testament, also called the Hebrew Bible, is the key text on moral life for the Jewish people. They do not accept Jesus as a prophet so they do not recognise the Second Testament, which is the Christian Bible. Muslims consider their Holy Book, the Koran, to be the final version of God’s message to mankind. They recognise Adam, Noah, Abraham, Moses, Solomon and Jesus as all being prophets, but they consider Muhammad, who was born just under 1,500 years ago in Mecca, in what is now Saudi Arabia, to be the final prophet and therefore the most important one.

Muhammad had two sons and four daughters. His sons died young. The youngest of his four daughters, Fatimah, married Ali. Ali was the son of Muhammad’s uncle, who had cared for Muhammad when he was left an orphan.

When Muhammad died there was no heir. A disagreement began from that moment about who should succeed him as the civil and religious leader of the Muslim faithful, the Caliph. The majority of his followers recognised the first four caliphs as the Prophet’s successors, the fourth of whom was Ali. They are called Sunni Muslims. A minority thought God had chosen that role for Ali and his descendants alone. They became the Shia.The killing of the Prophet’s grandson Hussein and his supporters by the Sunni Caliph Yazid in the year 680 at Karbala in what is now Iraq was a defining moment in the split. Hussein was killed for refusing to recognise the authority of the caliph. His death created a strong theme of martyrdom within the Shia faith.¹⁶

This rift between the majority Sunni and the minority Shia, like the one in Europe between Catholic and Protestant Christians, has been the cause of much bloodshed and persecution over the centuries. It is the cause of some of the blood being shed in Syria today. It is at the heart of the struggle between the Sunni leadership in the Gulf and Shia Iran.

The countries engulfed by the Arab Spring are on the road from dictatorship to democracy. Together they will shape the New Middle East.

But why did some uprisings lead to the overthrow of regimes while others did not? Why did some revolutions take weeks while others took many months? Why in some of the most undemocratic countries in the Arab region did widespread protests not take place at all? Where revolutions did happen, why did some countries then vote for Islamist parties while other equally pious nations rejected them? Why was there international agreement to send NATO planes into the skies over Libya to pre-empt a possible massacre, whereas little was done in Syria when the bullet-riddled corpses of small children stared out at us from the front pages of our newspapers over morning coffee? Where and why did Western realism trump Western idealism?

To answer these questions properly it helps to have seen the transformation of the region from the beginning, when American troops drove into Baghdad a decade ago to impose a democratic ‘Freedom Agenda’ on the Arab world. My work as the BBC’s Middle East bureau chief also took me to the front lines in Libya and the protesters’ barricades in Egypt. In the pages that follow you’ll find debates with ultra-Orthodox Jews about the merits of Madonna and theological rows with West Bank settlers over their self-declared right to kill Arab children. You’ll meet Colonel Gaddafi at the beginning of the Libyan revolution, and stand before his bloodied and beaten body at the end. You’ll witness the civil war that soaked Syrian villages in blood and divided the country, the region and the world.

We in the West need to understand this region, because the Vegas rules don’t apply here. What happens in the Middle East does not stay in the Middle East.

We have no choice but to try to make sense of the changing dynamics in the Middle East because, as President Obama has acknowledged, ‘whether we like it or not . . . when conflicts break out, one way or another we get pulled into them. And that ends up costing us significantly in terms of both blood and treasure.’¹⁷ The new governments emerging from the revolutions will no longer act as client states doing Washington’s bidding, so ‘leading from behind’ will not be enough.¹⁸ ‘We are in the middle of this struggle, it is going to take a generation, it is going to be very arduous and difficult,’ said the former British prime minister Tony Blair in February 2013 as he looked back at events in the Middle East since he sent troops into Iraq to bring about the region’s first regime change. ‘But I think we are making a mistake, a profound error, if we think we can stay out of that struggle, because we are going to be affected by it whether we like it or not.’¹⁹

The decade since the first Middle Eastern dictator was toppled has seen fundamental change in the Arab world. It has forced people to re-examine their identities and decide what role their faith will play in their lives and their politics. It has made the West look at its conscience as it rebuilds its foreign policies for the region.

The Arab Spring has been tidying up a lot of other people’s history. The toppling of the dictators provided the missing nail in the coffin of the Cold War era. The revolts also began to undermine the legacy of the Great War that came before that. After the First World War the Europeans conjured up plans for a whole raft of new countries, including Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Jordan, Palestine and Israel. In many of these places the Europeans’ actions left the minority communities in charge, thus building sectarian strife into them at birth. They in turn were only a little older than the ‘Middle East’ itself. That was a concept that had not existed before an American admiral, Alfred Thayer Mahan, referred in a 1902 edition of London’s National Review to ‘The Middle East, if I may adopt the term which I have not seen . . .’²⁰ It was soon also adopted by the European powers, which shifted the boundaries of this construct as they constantly redefined their interests in this new region.

Those interests have now been dramatically changed again, and some of those countries in the Middle East run the risk of falling apart.

If the West stays engaged, then over the longer term there is much to be optimistic about. When opposition movements, violent or otherwise, have come to government, whether it is in South Africa or Northern Ireland, they have become more moderate. When you are running a country, reality kicks down the door, parks itself in the centre of the room and demands answers that ideology alone cannot provide. Governments, which reflect the views of their people, are also better at tackling extreme versions of themselves. It was the culture shock of imported Western modernity and Soviet-style dictatorship that gave birth to much of the region’s religious extremism. Diplomacy with the old Middle East was based on a lie. Earlier negotiations and peace treaties were not agreed with countries, they were signed off with the ruling family business. In the New Middle East the world’s leaders will be talking with people who probably won’t look, talk or think like them. But what both sides will share is the knowledge that each is speaking on behalf of their people. The men and women of the Middle East finally have a voice. When you think someone is listening to you, you are much less likely to feel you need to punch them on the nose.

The results of the elections which have taken place since the revolts have already revealed a political sophistication that belies the decades when people were denied the vote. Where Islamists were given a chance to govern it was largely because they suffered the most under the old regimes. But pity will only get them so far. If they don’t deliver they will be kicked out. That reality is likely to change the Islamists more than they will change the democratic process. The overthrow in Egypt of the region’s first elected Islamist president should not be seen as the beginning of the end for political Islam. As we shall see the Brotherhood has survived worse. But ejecting even an unpopular, incompetent government with military force has damaged Egypt’s fledgling democracy. It was though a reminder to any new government or army that fails to listen to the public. The people of the Arab world have lost their fear. There is no going back to dictatorship, even if the future course still looks unclear.

The confusion about what will now follow is reflected by disagreement even over what this dramatic change should be called. It has been argued that the phrase ‘Arab Spring’ is yet another inappropriate Western import into the region, drawn as it was from events in Prague during 1968 at the height of the Cold War. Some people, like US Secretary of State John Kerry, refuse to use it, preferring the term ‘Arab Awakening’. ‘Spring’ does suggests something quick and pleasant. That may have broadly been the case in Tunisia and Egypt; it certainly wasn’t in Libya and Syria. It was also clear by the summer of 2011 that these events would take many seasons to play out. However ‘Arab Awakening’ has been used before, to describe the surge of Arab nationalism in the 1950s, so reviving it now is also confusing. The Israeli government and its supporters first called these events ‘the Islamic Spring’ and then later ‘the Islamic winter’. In the years that followed the start of these events some were calling it the ‘Sunni Spring’. It is a testament to how much these revolts have changed the region that they mean so much to so many people in so many different ways. If I have tended to use ‘Arab Spring’ in this book, it is because it is the phrase most commonly used on the international stage. Every country, including Syria, is in the post-Arab Spring era, because they are having to deal with the consequences of the initial revolts.

Whatever people choose to call the uprisings, the challenge for the rest of the world is to embrace the changes in the Middle East, engage with its new leaders and form a partnership with these emerging forces to make sure democracy in the region survives its infancy. The road to democracy for the Arab world has been harder and longer than for almost any other region on the planet. It took so long that a casual assumption was made in parts of the West that it simply couldn’t work there. That conclusion propped up dictators for decades. The key test for the revolutionaries of the New Middle East, now that they have fought and won their new states, is this: Can they accept democracy’s fundamental characteristic? It expresses the will of the majority of the people. So many of them may not like what they are going to get.

Jerusalem/al-Quds, 4 July 2013

1

The Collapse of the Old Middle East

‘Take a sheep and give me your vote,’ said the placard in Arabic. It was held above the heads of two young Tunisian women standing in a crowd of a thousand people outside the results centre for the Constituent Assembly elections in the capital Tunis. They were waiting for the announcement of the final tally but they already knew who had won. Unusually for a protest in the Arab world, more than half the demonstrators were women. They suddenly felt they had the most to lose from the outcome of the first democratic process born of the Arab Spring.

After the revolts the rich educated urban youth, many of whom had propagated the uprising through their Facebook pages and with rocks and stones on the streets of Tunis, had woken up to the reality of their country. They were not the real Tunisia. Like many wealthy people living in the developing world, the poor were to them the men and women who served, cleaned and did jobs they did not want to do. And they did it quietly. The people eking out an existence just above the poverty line weren’t necessarily thought of badly. They simply weren’t thought of at all, except as an intellectual concept to be debated in coffee shops or over dinner.

The poor did not have a voice during the years of President Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali’s dictatorship in Tunisia. Now they not only had a voice, they had a vote. And in October 2011 they used it to make the moderate Islamist party Ennahda the largest in the Constituent Assembly. This crowd of the liberal elite simply couldn’t believe anyone would pick Ennahda unless their vote had been bought. They assumed the poor were gullible enough to swap their votes for livestock.

Standing among the placards was Manal Labidi, who taught accountancy at a college in Tunis. She was in her twenties, very fashionably dressed, with a pair of designer sunglasses pushed up onto her head. And she was angry. ‘They stole the revolution,’ she told me. The most remarkable thing about Manal Labidi’s protest was not what she said, it was the fact that after she said it she wasn’t dragged by her hair down to the local police station. Before the revolution her entire generation had been constantly warned by their parents to keep quiet, keep their heads down and avoid eye contact with the police.

In Tunisia you had only to compare the size of the force assigned to protect the country with that assigned to protect the regime to see what kept President Ben Ali awake at night. The internal security services were at least five times larger than the army.¹ Like all the Arab dictators, Ben Ali was much more afraid of his own people than he was of foreign invaders. And what scared him most about them was that one day they might get the vote. In a fair fight at the ballot box the Arab leaders all knew they’d be kicked out on to the streets. Fortunately for them, democracy in the Middle East did not suit their friends in the West either.The end of the Cold War in Europe in 1989 saw a wave of democracy wash around the globe, but it hit a wall in the Middle East. The academics of the day even had a phrase for it: it was called ‘Arab Exceptionalism’, and people studied it as if it was a supernatural phenomenon. It was not. It was man-made. Many in government in the West believed that letting the people of the Middle East make their own minds up only produced what became known as the ‘Algerian problem’, which ‘crystallised as the nightmare vision for American policymakers of what democracy might bring to the Arab world: legitimately elected Islamist governments that are anti-American, and ultimately anti-democratic, in orientation’.² Dr Osman Hassan, from Warwick University, who has studied the attempts to bring democracy to the region, described the ideas of ‘Arab Exceptionalism’ to me in much clearer terms: ‘It’s inherently racist, there are no two ways about it. It becomes a really benign way of saying: We don’t need to do anything because Arabs can’t have democracy because they don’t want it because there is something fundamentally wrong with them. ’

For much of the last sixty years the West didn’t understand the region because the story we heard from the Middle East was simple. The news focused largely on the violence. The victims and perpetrators ebbed and flowed but the plot did not. At worst the Arabs were treated as an amorphous mass of people who were constantly trying to kill each other or the Israelis. At first glance even the revolutions fitted an easy narrative. There was a dictator against the people. Simplicity once again hid the subtleties. But there is nothing simple about the New Middle East.

We need to understand why the Arab people’s fight for democracy was so long and lonely. There were broad forces that made the old Middle East collapse, but there were also distinct differences between each revolution because of the distinct differences between each nation.

‘The Arabs’ have never been thought of or portrayed as a collection of individuals. The world focused only on the things that made them the same. We need to focus on the things that make them different. We must dispel even those myths about the Middle East that were created with good intentions. By examining what made each uprising distinct, and how the societies differed in their religious and political make-up, we can see why each country has since taken a different path after the Big Bang of the revolt. That will help us work out where each country is going. It will also help us understand why the firestorm of revolution was sparked in what had always been the least exciting corner of the region.

Democracy has finally arrived in the Middle East, but it has quite literally had a torturous journey. Many of the leaders of these new democracies were subjected to sadistic brutality by the old regimes simply because of their religious beliefs. Successive Western governments turned a blind eye to this abuse for the same reason. Now that these Islamists are being lectured by Western politicians about freedom and human rights, they wonder why the same people were silent when they were in jail. Understanding this legacy will help us understand those tensions. If the Western governments are suspicious of the Islamist politicians, then the Islamist politicians have plenty of personal reasons to mistrust Western governments.

The uprisings were described around the world as the ‘Facebook’ revolutions.³ The West looked for labels it could understand to describe a region it did not. Across the Middle East and North Africa the nature of the demonstrations confused the state security apparatus. It was not designed to deal with this. The organisation through social media created a disorganised pattern of protest. Young revolutionaries would later recall coming across other protest marches entirely by accident, assuming at first that the crowd on the horizon was riot police ready to confront them.⁴ The confusing nature of the rebellion was so effective at undermining the security forces that it led to the belief among the regimes that there must be some hidden hand or dark force at work.⁵ But then these were old men who probably needed help from their grandchildren to operate the DVD player.

The essence of dictatorship is control of the public arena. It is done through stories shown on the state television, the editorials in the newspapers, the omnipresent image of the ‘Father of the Nation’ on posters or statues. Social media took that power away. The Grandads were too blind to see that their political class didn’t control the message any more. By the time they tried to turn the Internet off it was too late. As the revolutions moved from country to country the role of the World Wide Web in getting an alternative message out became more and more important.

Yet many of those who emerged as the voices of the regional protest movements say that social media was merely an instrument of the uprisings, it should not have been used to define them. They argue that the West projected its own wishful thinking onto the revolutions, hoping that a third force of young liberals was emerging as an alternative to the old dictators and the resurgent Islamists. Their desire was that this group, which was unsurprisingly a reflection of the West’s own image, would then determine the fate of the New Middle East. But the West got it wrong, the Egyptian–American writer and activist Mona Eltahawy told me:

When you look at Facebook and Twitter, how many people do they reach? When we had the [constitutional] referendum in Egypt [in March 2011], if you followed the Egyptian Twitterverse the majority of the people were going to say ‘no’ and then seventy-five per cent of Egyptians said ‘yes’. That shows you where Twitter is and where the rest of Egypt is. Social media was a tool in the way cassette tapes were a tool for Ayatollah Khomeini in the run-up to the Iranian Revolution, in the way the fax machine was a tool in the run-up to Tiananmen Square, the printing press in the run-up to Martin Luther, pamphlets for the Soviets. It’s just a tool and it helped to connect people that couldn’t find each other in an atmosphere where civil society was being decimated by the regime.

The dictators first began to lose control of the public sphere with the rise of the Arabic satellite news channels, the most important of which was Al Jazeera. It was where the Arab people found a common narrative, because Al Jazeera in its heyday, in the first decade of the new century, was reporting on causes that united the Arab people. There was the second much more violent uprising by the Palestinians against the Israeli occupation in 2000, and then came the partial and then total Western occupation of Muslim lands in Afghanistan and Iraq. Al Jazeera was also a catalyst for the Tunisian revolution. It picked up early and stayed with the protests as they gathered pace, and because of its constant coverage it increased the momentum. By the time of Egypt’s revolution the channel was perceived by many in the Arab world as not just reporting but cheering on the uprisings, but as those who saw it that way were on the same side it upset no one.

Which is why Al Jazeera came in for so much criticism when it seemed to do its utmost to ignore the uprising in the Gulf state of Bahrain.⁶ That was the moment it and Al Arabiya really began to be perceived by parts of their audiences as softer arms of their host states Qatar and Saudi Arabia. During the Libyan conflict, even though it was staunchly on the side of the opposition, revolutionaries became distrustful of the channel’s motives. The rising tide of revolution took the viewing figures of every Arab news network with it, but the Arab-language Al Jazeera news channel saw its credibility damaged as staff members resigned, accusing the channel of allowing interference by the Qatari government.⁷

Unlike earlier revolutionary movements in the world’s history, social media in the twenty-first century provided the capability to organise without central control. The revolution in Tunisia, like the ones that followed, was leaderless, so the usual government tactics didn’t work. There was no one to buy off, lock up or scare away. It was the great strength of the Arab Spring when it began, but for the secular middle class