Everyday Arab Identity

Christopher Phillips

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781136219603
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sozialwissenschaften
• Subtopic: Landeskunde

Whether through government propaganda or popular transnational satellite television channels, Arab citizens encounter a discourse that reinforces a sense of belonging to their own state and a broader Arab world on a daily basis. Looking through the lens of nationalism theory, this book examines how and why Arab identity continues to be reproduced in today's Middle East, and how that Arab identity interacts with strengthening ties to religion and the state.

Drawing on case studies of two ideologically different Arab regimes, Syria and Jordan, Christopher Phillips explores both the implications this everyday Arab identity will have on western policy towards the Middle East and its real life impact on international relations.

Offering an original perspective on this topical issue, this book will be of interest to academics and practitioners working on the Arab world and political affairs, as well as students of International Relations, Political Science and the Middle East, notably Syria and Jordan, and policymakers in the region.

1 Defining Arabism

Contemporary Arab identity and the state

In Spring 2003, as American tanks were gathered in Kuwait preparing to invade Iraq, angry crowds gathered on the streets of Arab cities. In Syria, 200,000 people marched through Damascus, the capital city, in solidarity with Iraq, encouraged by the ruling regime that vehemently opposed America’s invasion. In Jordan the crowds were smaller, restricted by a ruling regime allied to the United States that tacitly approved of the invasion, but several thousand still made it onto the capital Amman’s streets to vent their frustration. The looming war was wholly unpopular throughout the Arab world. Facilitated by 24-hour reporting from the comparatively new Qatar-based Al-Jazeera satellite television channel, footage of anger on the Arab streets was broadcast around the world.¹ This protest was not limited to the specific circumstances of 2003 and the Iraq war, however. In 2006, when Israel attacked Lebanon, Arab cities were again awash with outraged citizens. The same was seen in 2008/9 when Israel bombarded Gaza. Nor was this sense of popular Arab solidarity restricted to times of conflict or to expressing anti-Western or anti-Israeli feeling. In early 2011 when popular unrest toppled the presidents of Tunisia and then Egypt, thousands of Arabs from Jordan, Morocco, Algeria and elsewhere flooded onto the streets waving Tunisian and Egyptian flags showing their approval. Of course, such public protests are nothing new. Arab capitals had seen similar spontaneous declarations of solidarity with Iraq during the 1991 Gulf War and with Lebanon when Beirut was invaded in 1982. However, the presence of a new and popular regional media led by Al-Jazeera in recent years has served to magnify and reproduce the sense of solidarity to a level not seen since the days of Egyptian president Gamal Abdul Nasser. Even in defiance of some of their leaders, ‘the Arab street’ appeared to be expressing Arabism once again.²

Yet why do Arabs feel this sense of identity? There is no single ‘United States of Arabia’ from which ‘the Arabs’ originate but rather 22 separate multi-ethnic states with different governments. Are the Arabs a nation? Are they a culture? Such questions are rarely asked by either media commentators or academics, who have come to accept the ‘Arab World’ as an established fact without asking how it has been established and how it is sustained. It is rarely asked, for example, why a Syrian who has never visited Iraq, never lived there and has no relatives in the country should care about the fate of the Iraqi people. Nor is it asked why a Jordanian who has no personal ties to Lebanon feels solidarity with the victims of Israel’s 2006 attacks. Indeed, it is rarely asked why or how any ‘Arab street’ can exist. Most states in the Arab world have been independent for over 60 years, and the prospect of any realistic Arab unity was extinguished by the events of 1967, if not before, yet still ‘Arabism’ seems to arouse passions. This book seeks to explain why, how and in what form Arabism continues to be reproduced in today’s Middle East.

This book studies two ideologically different Arab states, Syria and Jordan, to demonstrate how Arab identity is reproduced. It argues that Syrians and Jordanians have retained a sense of Arabism because Arab identity is embedded in the nationalist discourses of the regimes that have ruled for the past 40 years and has recently been further boosted by new pan-Arab satellite television stations. Benedict Anderson, a prominent theorist of nationalism, tells us that nations are ‘imagined communities’ in which members, ‘will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion.’³ Today’s Arabism is an imaged community in the Andersonian sense, but it is subordinate to state nationalism and should therefore be redefined as supra-nationalism. This supra-nationalism is now reproduced daily alongside state identities in a largely banal and everyday manner, which is then easily aroused into ‘hot’ Arabism at perceived times of threat, such as the 2003 Iraq War.⁴ I term this daily discourse ‘Everyday Arabism’.

To illustrate and explain this phenomenon, this study poses three interrelated questions. Firstly, it asks what Arabism means today; secondly, why do states maintain Arab identity and how does it interact with state nationalism; and thirdly, what are the mechanisms and processes by which Arabism and state nationalism are reproduced? This first chapter explores the broad historical, theoretical and methodological origins of these themes and questions, before discussing the principle theory upon which this investigation rests, Michael Billig’s Banal Nationalism.

Firstly, to consider what Arabism means today, the many debates among historians and theorists surrounding it need consideration. The current state of ‘Arabism’ in the Middle East, and even finding a definition for it, prompts huge disagreement. When, why and if Arabism rose and fell has divided scholars, as has the issue of a possible ‘New Arabism’ after the emergence of pan-Arab satellite television in the 1990s. After engaging with these debates, today’s Arabism is located and defined as a supra-nationalism existing alongside state nationalism.

To explain why states maintain Arab identity and how it interacts with state nationalism, the chapter then discusses the debated position of state identity in the contemporary Arab world. While some authors argue that Arab states are stronger today than they’ve ever been (Lewis 1999), others see them as weak entities that cannot move beyond a coercive form of government for fear of fragmentation (Ayubi 1995). A key issue addressed by this investigation is the normalisation of state identity. It will ask whether sustained nation-building alongside the simple longevity of ‘Syria’ and ‘Jordan’ has brought about the acceptance of state nationalism alongside, rather than instead of, Arab and religious ties. The reasons for case studying Syria and Jordan in particular are outlined, explaining that the ideological gulf between the two regimes that have ruled for the past 40 years, despite their historical and geographical closeness makes a comparison useful for similar claims on the wider Arab world. Engaging with nationalism and state-building theory helps to explain why these regimes continue to promote supra-national Arabism within their national identity discourses.

To understand the processes and mechanisms by which Arabism and state nationalism are reproduced, the chapter finally outlines the theoretical and methodological basis for this thesis. It discusses the new notion of the ‘everyday’ within the study of nationalism and explains why an adaptation and expansion of Michael Billig’s Banal Nationalism proves the most suitable theory and methodology with which to explain the reproduction of Arab and state identity in Syria and Jordan today. This facilitates an outline of the methodology of the thesis and the reasons why certain examples, questions and case studies were chosen over others.

Arabism today: contested identity

What does Arabism mean today? Academics and commentators have used ‘Arabism’, ‘Arab nationalism’ and ‘pan-Arabism’ to describe everything from a loose cultural attachment to a movement for political unity.⁵ Debate surrounds the narrative of Arabism: whether a collective Arab identity stretches back to the birth of Islam or earlier, or whether it was a modern creation.⁶ Arabism’s fate is similarly contested, with some seeing its demise in the formation of the Arab League (Owen 1992), the failure of the United Arab Republic of 1958–61 (Dawisha 2003) or the defeat of 1967 (Ajami 1978/9). More recently a group of scholars have claimed that a ‘New Arabism’ has emerged in the form of an Arab public sphere brought about by popular transnational satellite television stations such as Al-Jazeera (Telhami 1999, Lynch 2006, Rinnawi 2006, Valbjorn 2009), a fact disputed by others (Dawisha 2003, Ajami 1992). Central to these disagreements are competing definitions of Arabism. Those who see a ‘New Arabism’ emerging, see Arabism as a malleable political and cultural bond that has evolved over time. Others see it as purely a political nationalism, whose time has passed.

One of the most recent scholars of Arabism, Morten Valbjorn, defines Arabism broadly as, ‘the idea that some kind of special bonds exist between Arabic-speaking peoples sharing not only a common language but also history, culture and tradition.’ This broad definition is a useful way to link all expressions of Arab identity in the modern era together that at times have been cultural, political, conservative, revolutionary, unitary and statist.⁷ Yet a ‘special bond’ is not the same as feeling a sense of nationhood and Valbjorn too frequently uses ‘Arabism’ and ‘Arab nationalism’ interchangeably.⁸ For example, while co-operation between the different Arab states in the 1970s might be seen as working towards a common Arab goal and therefore Arabist according to his definition, they were not attempting to politically unify their communities and should not be considered Arab nationalist. A key dimension of this book will be to distinguish Arabism from Arab nationalism. ‘Arabism’ used to be considered synonymous with ‘Arab nationalism’–a phase in Arabism’s evolution that I refer to here as ‘Old Arabism’–yet now it is something looser. ‘Arabism’ should now be used as an umbrella term that incorporates a sense of political and cultural identity, while ‘Arab nationalism’ is a specific political and cultural ideology. In order to show how today’s Arabism has reacted to the failure of unitary Arab nationalism (Old Arabism) to evolve into a supra-nationalism (New Arabism), it is first necessary to give an overview of how that failure came about and the contested debates among scholars.

The rise and fall of 'Old Arabism'

Though some scholars trace an Arab nation back to a pre-Islamic era, most agree that the seeds of mass Arab nationalism, Old Arabism, did not emerge until at least the nineteenth century. Until this time ‘Arab’ referred to the Bedouin desert nomads and evoked no pride among the largely urban elite who would go on to promote the ideology.⁹ Scholars have long argued that that most nationalism is framed in opposition to an ‘other’ and Old Arabism was no different. Some scholars argue it was Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt in 1798 that awakened Arab identity, while the majority claim it was the Ottoman Turks who most helped shape the early Arab nation. The first writer to use the term ‘Arabism’, C. Ernest Dawn, used it in contradistinction to ‘Ottomanism’: a late nineteenth-century attempt by Constantinople to ‘Turkify’ the Arab provinces it had ruled since the sixteenth century. Administrators from Arab notable families, which had ruled on behalf of the Sublime Porte for generations, were suddenly replaced by nationalist Turks as Istanbul sought to halt its decline against the West by modernising and promoting a sense of Turkish Ottoman nationalism.¹⁰ It was these members of this displaced elite that played leading roles in the two main expressions of Arabism in the late nineteenth and early twentiethth centuries: the Arabic nahda cultural renaissance and the Arabist political societies formed in Damascus, Beirut and Cairo soon afterwards.¹¹ Yet few of these Arab urban elites turned on the Ottomans when the First World War broke out in 1914. Instead it was Sharif Hussein in far-off Hijaz who struck a deal with Britain to launch an Arab revolt against Constantinople in 1916, holding pragmatic rather than Arab nationalist motives.¹² Even then, the majority of Arabs did not flock to Hussein’s banner and, despite subsequent mythmakers’ claims to the contrary; it was largely the British that pushed the Ottomans from the Arab lands by 1918, allowing them to carve up the region into mandates for themselves and France, at the expense of their militarily weak Hijazi Arab allies.

The Great Arab Revolt of 1916–18 and the mandate era that followed were key to the development of Arab nationalism, yet historians disagree exactly when the sense of Arab identity that emerged in the nineteenth century became nationalism. Georges Antonius, the first major historian of Arab nationalism, claimed that the Arab Revolt marked the final stage of Arab nationalism’s development.¹³ Yet later historians argued it was the mandates themselves that stirred mass nationalism, not reaching political maturity until the 1930s.¹⁴ It was during this era that Old Arabism was sharpened by theorists and ideologues such as Sati al-Husri (1882–1968), from a loose desire for autonomy within Ottoman Bilad as-Sham (Greater Syria) to a codified nationalism across all Arab-speaking lands.¹⁵ Stephen R. Humphreys and Fruma Zachs argue convincingly that the pre-war Arab elites in Damascus and Cairo lacked the cohesion of vision of al-Husri, and should instead by regarded as ‘proto-nationalists’, preparing the way for the mass movements that emerged in the 1920s and 1930s.¹⁶

The Arab nationalism of the mandate era took a dramatic twist once independence from the imperial powers had largely been achieved. The nakhba (disaster) of 1948–49 which saw the creation of Israel and the newly-independent Arab states heavily defeated, prompted a shift in both the governments and intelligentsia’s attitude to Arabism. Coups and revolutions saw the old regimes removed in Egypt, Syria and, later on Iraq and Libya, to be replaced by Arab nationalists who largely advocated physical Arab unity. Intellectuals such as Michel Aflaq and Saleh al-Bitar, founders of the Ba’ath party, and George Habash, founder of the Arab Nationalist Movement, introduced a new radicalism to intellectual Arabism.¹⁷ Gamal Abdul Nasser, the president of Egypt from 1954–70, emerged as the popular champion of Arab nationalism. Though his enthusiasm for it has subsequently been questioned, Nasser oversaw the first genuine realization of unitary Arab nationalism – the unity of Syria and Egypt in the United Arab Republic (UAR) in 1958.¹⁸ While this raised hopes on the Arab street that the Arab world might unite as one under Nasser, Iraq’s refusal to join the union halted momentum, and Syrian army officers soon staged a coup to unravel the UAR barely three years later.¹⁹

However, it should be noted that Old Arabism was not monolithic in either the interwar or the post-war Nasserist era. Not only did the thoughts of the key actors and ide...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction Everyday Arabism
• Defining Arabism Contemporary Arab identity and the state
• Building Arabism Identity-building in Syria and Jordan
• National Arabism Flagging identity on state television
• Transnational Arabism Arab satellite television's new discourse
• Receiving Arabism Everyday opinions from Syria and Jordan
• Conclusion Arabism's future
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index