The Coming Revolution

Struggle for Freedom in the Middle East

Walid Phares

• Publisher: Pocket Books
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781439180495
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political Ideologies
• Index: Politics & International Relations

After the 9/11 Commission concluded in 2004 that the U.S. was engaged in a war with terrorists and never realized it, they reasoned that "a failure of imagination" had prevented us from seeing terrorism coming. In effect, Americans were simply unable, or in fact disabled, to fathom that there were people who hated and opposed our democracy with such ferocity. But after billions of dollars and almost a decade fighting a war in the Middle East, will we miss the threat again? With penetrating insight and candor, Walid Phares, Fox News terrorism and Middle East expert and a specialist in global strategies, argues that a fierce race for control of the Middle East is on, and the world's future may depend on the outcome. Yet not a failure of imagination, but rather, of education has left Americans without essential information on the real roots of the rising Jihadi threat. Western democracies display a dangerous misunderstanding of precisely who opposes democracy and why. In fact, the West ignores the wide and disparate forces within the Muslim world—including a brotherhood against democracy that is fighting to bring the region under totalitarian control—and crucially underestimates the determined generation of youth feverishly waging a grassroots revolution toward democracy and human rights. As terror strikes widen from Manhattan to Mumbai and battlefields rage from Afghanistan to Iraq, many tough questions are left unanswered, or even explored: Where are the anti-Jihadists and the democrats in the Muslim world? Does the Middle East really reject democracy? Do the peoples of the region prefer the Taliban, the Muslim Brotherhood, or Hezbollah over liberals and seculars? And is there really no genuine hope that freedom and democracy can prevail over the Islamist caliphate? Phares explores how the free world can indeed win the conflict with the Jihadists, but he says, not by using the tactics, policies, and strategies it has employed so far. He urges policy makers to first identify the threat and define its ideology, or there will be no victory. T he Coming Revolution is a vital corrective step in the world's war against terrorism and essential reading that clearly and explosively illustrates the untold story of a struggle to determine if the Middle East can at last reach freedom in this century—or if this planet can prevent the otherwise inevitable outcome that could change our social and political landscape forever. The race is on.

1.
The Missed Century: How the Democratic Revolution Failed During the Twentieth Century

The Greater Middle East is the cradle of the oldest civilizations on Earth: Egyptian, Persian, Assyrian, Phoenician, and others. Many of its intellectuals boast about the region’s high cultures during ancient times as compared to Europe’s state of tribalism in the same period. Historians, poets, and ultranationalist politicians argue that these civilizations practiced sophisticated engineering, advanced sciences, built roads, gardens, and towers, and compiled legal codes while barbarians were roaming in the regions of the Danube and the Rhine. Phoenicians offered the world an alphabet, and their commercial ships established the first multinational corporations some twenty-five centuries ago. Moreover, Eastern Christian, Jewish, and Muslim interfaith assemblies have often asserted that the three Abrahamic religions came from that region.

The wealth of stories about the uniqueness of this old region of the world comes in great contrast with its contemporary hostility to the development of democratic societies. The contradiction between the region’s so-called rich history of sophistication and its current poor productivity in human rights advancement and fundamental freedoms is stark. It was the cold continent of the barbarians—Europe—and its emigrants to new worlds that produced charters for democracy and embodied them in modern texts, and not the cities of the Greater Middle East that had produced the letters of the alphabet, the Code of Hammurabi, laws of the seas, and the sciences of humanity.

Furthermore, Latin America’s nations, on different scales, have been able to move from Iberian colonialism to acceleration of modernization, to acceptable multiparty systems—with few exceptions—while the Arab world’s societies, said to be much older in settlement, failed to do the same. Argentina and Chile, Brazil and Colombia, Mexico and Jamaica were all colonies, and most have experienced military regimes, yet they all gradually accepted the idea of pluralism and the peaceful coexistence of elites, while Saudi Arabia, Syria, Iran, Libya, and Sudan, despite the huge regime differences between them, didn’t move beyond the one-party system or the no-party system.

Even more dramatic is the comparison with some African countries, such as Côte d’Ivoire, Senegal, and Ghana, that, despite having fewer resources than the Middle East, in some ways have moved toward plural politics. Even where discrimination is at its worst, in South Africa, the country moved away from apartheid toward the end of the twentieth century, while Sudan dove into practicing slavery and ethnic cleansing.

Last but not least, the treatment of women in their own families and society offers stunning comparative images. While wealth is abundant and construction projects are endless in the Wahabi Kingdom, Saudi women can’t drive, or even walk unescorted. Women in Madagascar and Trinidad live poorer, but freer lives. Under the Islamic Republic, Iranian women are severely restricted; they are arrested on the streets by female police to check on their hijab.¹ However, in Sri Lanka, a woman is prime minister. Even within the Muslim world, the oddities of sexual repression are salient. In Pakistan, Benazir Bhutto was elected head of government while her countrywomen in Waziristan are living under laws from the Middle Ages. Not surprisingly, Bhutto was assassinated by the Taliban, the force imposing severe sexual discrimination in Waziristan and other valleys.

The question of why democracy didn’t emerge as a winning political culture south and east of the Mediterranean is relevant at a time when many in the West and worldwide are condemning entire societies for their inability to produce a democracy that protects basic freedoms. Some argue that the East by nature cannot bypass authoritarianism. Others assert that the lack of secular democracy is embedded in the canonical texts of the Islamic religion, and many postulate that this part of the world is simply condemned to live unhappily forever, no matter the explanation.

Beyond the debate about the “democratibility” of the Arab world and its neighborhood, scores of hard-core realists in the West claim that it is in the interest of the industrialized world that strongmen continue to rule the region. A surge of unstable democratic culture, they feel, would destabilize the capitalist societies, or, more accurately, would injure those in such societies who live off the oil trade with Arab Muslim petro-regimes. Ironically, as harsh as this equation seems to be, we may see that it really serves the interest of financial elites on both sides of the Mediterranean. Our analysis throughout this book will show the incredibly ferocious interests involved in the obstruction of freedom in the region.

Democracy’s Failure to Take Root in Middle Earth

For half a century, scholars and propagandists have charged that colonialism, corruption, and Western foreign policies are the real root causes for the failure of democratic freedoms in “Middle Earth.” I disagree.

The classical pressures that have precluded societies in other struggling regions from advancing toward freedom haven’t completely blocked the march of human rights toward theoretical and practical victories. Colonialism, postcolonialism, imperialism, Western foreign policies, and multinational corporations have had an impact on Latin America, Eastern Europe, Oceania, parts of Asia, and countries in black Africa, but in all these huge zones of the planet, democracy pierced the layers of obstruction and established home bases. Brazil and Uruguay decolonized from Portugal and Spain, endured their own military regimes, and eventually reached functional multiparty systems with acceptable electoral processes. The Philippines, Japan, and India lived under military occupations but swiftly moved on to sophisticated free governments. Setbacks to democracy have also quickly bred postcolonial experiments, as in Cuba, Venezuela, and Thailand, but sexual equality wasn’t reversed dramatically once it had begun to move forward. Women’s rights have survived, even when political rights have regressed. Even in communist China and Vietnam, women were still granted equal rights despite general suppression of liberties. In the Greater Middle East, noncommunist regimes have suppressed the very basic rights of women.

One must not overgeneralize, but statistics do show that when communist regimes collapse, liberal democracies are not formed immediately afterward, yet things do move forward eventually. After the Soviet collapse in Central and Eastern Europe, Russia, and many of the Central Asian and Caucasus republics, some form of multiparty system rose. In the Middle East, the crumbling of the Ottoman Empire in 1919, the end of European colonialism in the late 1940s, and the end of the Cold War and of Soviet power in 1991 didn’t open the path for democratization, nor did they lead to an expanding space for liberalization and the rise of human rights—quite the opposite.

These events unleashed more lethal oppressive forces to reverse and crush the chances for democracy. The twentieth century offered the region multiple opportunities, but almost all these windows were carefully closed by radical ideologies and oppressive elites. While similar totalitarian regimes rose to block democracy during the same century, almost all their “evil” manifestations vanished or slowly declined. Fascism, Nazism, Soviet communism, military juntas, and populist dictatorships rose and fell from the Atlantic to the Indian Ocean while Wahabism, Salafism, Khomeinism, Baathism, and other totalitarian ideologies persisted and wreaked havoc in civil societies.

The Caliphate’s Long History

Before becoming the centerpiece of the twentieth century’s conflicts and challenges, the region called the Greater Middle East, stretching from Morocco to Afghanistan, experienced a variety of dynastic rules, wars, breakups, and migrations, with all the human dramas that accompany such events. It isn’t that different from any other heavily populated area of the world throughout history. Similar conflicts ravaged Christian Europe, Asia, Africa, and later on, the Americas. Unlike most other regions, Middle Earth has lived under a universal empire for the longest period of time in the history of civilization—a full thirteen centuries.

One of the most fascinating imperial institutions in history, second in lifespan only to the Roman Catholic See (about twenty centuries), is the Islamic Caliphate. Known as Khilafah in Arabic, the Caliphate served as an inspiration and theological authority, but also as a center of tremendous power for millions of people from the western tip of Africa’s Sahel to the eastern edges of the Himalayas. More important for today’s geopolitics, the ideologically revisited concept of “Caliphate” continues to serve as a long-range goal for hundreds of thousands of militants, determined to reestablish it, and thus block any form of government or identity that contradicts its raison d’être.

It is crucial for readers to understand where the concept came from, how it has affected this gigantic region of the world for centuries, and how it has been used since the early part of the twentieth century as a rallying point for regimes, organizations, and elites determined to delay and obstruct the expansion of democratic institutions and culture. If one doesn’t grasp the notion of Caliphate, as advanced by the modern-day jihadists, one cannot understand the nature of the wall obstructing the rise of multiparty societies in the region, or realize how hard and dangerous is the path to fundamental freedoms in dozens of countries in that region. A quick historical review of this institution-empire is necessary for an understanding of the current climate in the region.

After the passing of the Muslim Prophet, Mohammad bin Abdullah, in 632 C.E., his followers had to decide on the future of the religion and the state he founded. Born in 570 C.E., in Mecca, Rassulal Allah (Messenger of Allah, per Muslim theology) dedicated his adult life to propagating a new religion he introduced as Islam (al-Islaam). Mohammad presented the Arabian society, particularly in Mecca, which was the economic capital of the Peninsula, as a universal system for faith and society (al Islaam deen was dawla). The way it was structured, the expansion of the deen (religion) had to be managed, organized, and sanctioned by the dawla (state). In 622 C.E., Mohammad and his “Muslim” followers left Mecca after being confronted by its pagan elite and took refuge in Medina to the north. In Medina, the Muslims were able to organize themselves as a force headed by a commander in chief and proceeded to engage in battles with the Meccan tribes until the city submitted. It has since been ruled as the original “Islamic state.” But after the Rassul died, the now-organized force had to move forward without its founder, and the decision of the senior commanders and new elite ruling the “Islamic land” was to create a succession order from their Prophet. They selected a successor to Mohammad to resume the leadership of the Umma (understand this term as the universal community of Muslims or “Islamic nation”) and set up a council to maintain the succession and the mission moving forward.

In Arabic, the word for successor is khalifa, or caliph. The institution of the caliph is al Khilafah or the Caliphate. It has two dimensions: The first is the legal and theological structure of the Umma’s top spiritual office, which is comparable to the “papacy,” “monarchy,” or “presidency”; the second is the entire land and resources covered by the authority of the caliph, as in “empire.” The geopolitical sense of the Caliphate is “empire.”

Immediately after the selection of a successor to the Prophet, Abu Bakr, the father of Mohammad’s most beloved wife, Aisha, resumed the geopolitical dimension of the mission. The “armies” of Arab Muslim tribes quickly conquered the other tribes of the Peninsula. Some were conquered militarily while others joined the marching victors without putting up a fight. The easier battles were fought against the pagan tribes, while Jewish and Christian clans offered more resistance.²

It is important to note that by 636 C.E. all inhabitants of the Arabian ancestral homeland had converted or been forced to join Islam. Arab historians are unanimous in describing that it was the rise of the Caliphate that united all Arabian tribes—by force or by adhesion—and gave them a historical common identity. Baathist ideologue Michel Aflaq wrote in the twentieth century that “Islam is to Arabism what bone is to flesh.”³

Thirteen centuries later, the concept of the Caliphate (or the existence of a universal state for the Umma) is hard to eradicate. It is the cement that created the Arab, and later the Islamic Umma, and was the legitimizing force behind many achievements, including territorial expansion and the rise of dominant political and financial elites who ruled large segments of three continents.

It is crucial to understand that challenging the idea of a Caliphate in modern times is not only a matter of theological reformation but a matter of threatening the legitimacy of a prominent power. It would be the equivalent of challenging ancient Rome, the universal political papacy, or the very essence of traditional empire. It would require a revolution in political thinking. The Caliphate as a political and military institution was the generator of and legitimizing authority for events that shaped the Middle East for centuries.

The Arab caliphs launched several offensive campaigns from the Peninsula after winning the crucial battles of Yarmuk in 636 C.E. in Syria against the Byzantines, and Qadissiya in 637 C.E. in Iraq against the Persians. From that point on, no empire, nation, kingdom, or population was able to stop an invasion undertaken by the Caliphate. In less than a century, a large part of the civilized world fell to the imperial new state: Syria, Palestine (including Jerusalem, which fell to Caliph Umar), Egypt, North Africa, Spain, Persia, Nubia-Sudan, and more. The invasions, called Fatah, thrust as far as France, Sicily, and Sardinia to the west, and Armenia, Tashkent, and the Indus River to the east. A formidable empire was established in less than one century, stretching from the Atlantic to the Indian Ocean. It was centered on the Caliphate, even though the institution itself was in decline only a few decades after its inception.⁴

The successions of one caliph to another were often bloody, and many were assassinated. A civil war exploded between the partisans of the fourth successor, Ali, who was a cousin and the son-in-law of Mohammad, and the supporters of a challenger, Damascus governor Moawiya. The “partisans” of Ali became the Shia, and those who opposed them became the Sunnis. This first civil war within the Caliphate generated a deeper division, soon after becoming sectarian between the two factions. The Sunnis held the leadership of the empire. The Arab Khilafa was first based in Damascus, then moved to Baghdad in 750 C.E. as a result of the first coup d’état in the empire. A new Arab dynasty, the Abbasids, butchered the Umayyad dynasty, expanded the Caliphate even farther inland into Asia and Africa, and ruled almost until the destruction of their capital by the Mongols in 1250 C.E.

This Arab-dominated Caliphate produced political, economic, and social elites comparable to those of the feudal system of Europe, which was attached to the papacy for ultimate legitimacy. The ruling establishment settled in Damascus, Cairo, Baghdad, and Tripoli. The rest of the conquered territories owed their new status to the higher authority of the Caliphate. They became the national elites of these governorates, which became countries later, thanks to appointments made by the Prince of the Believers (a title of the Caliph). Sultans, walis, emirs, and subdynasties were an extension—or sort of viceroys—of the supreme leader of the empire.

Even though many powerful princes and military commanders rose against individual caliphs, and killed them, the umbilical connection to the concept of the Caliphate was indestructible. From it came the legitimacy of jihad and the ability to call on “brothers” to come to the rescue when infidels threatened one or another Muslim principality (called Jihad al Fard and Jihad al Ayn). The authorization for Fatah, to resume conquests into the kuffar (infidel) lands, also emanated from the Caliphate. In short, the Khilafa did far more than provide the theologically necessary successor to the Prophet; it was a moral and political authority that allowed the expansion of the empire and its provinces (soon to become countries), and most important, it provided an authority to the elites installed by its power in cities and wilayat (governorates). And since the nature of the Caliphate was based on a command by Allah, or so believed its founders after the passing of the Messenger, reforming it, dismantling it, or going against its initial mission was impossible. The concept was made of iron, and politically it was the foundation upon which the ruling elites of the empire established themselves. Take away its fundamental legitimacy, and the entire system would collapse.

In fact, the Caliphate resembled the European Christian, the Asian, and to some extent the Mesoamerican empires. The “divine” was the center of power, making any challenge to authorities almost impossible, short of a radical revolution. Just as no Christian was able to challenge the authority of the pope on strategic affairs, no Muslim was able to challenge the caliph on war and peace, or on conquest and expansion. In risings against the caliphs throughout the years, the aim was to replace the individual ruler, not the Caliphate as an institution working in the name of Allah. For thirteen centuries, the region controlled by that Caliphate was molded intellectually and ideologically by clerics and rulers to be faithful to the successor of the Prophet as a guardian of the Islamic lands and rulers, the Hukkam of the Umma.

In other regions of the world ruled by theological empires, absolute monarchies, and colonial enterprises, challengers rose from among their own people. From revolution to revolution, the religious geopolitical spaces crumbled and were replaced with nation-states. Deteriorating religious empires didn’t bring about democracy and human rights immediately, but created an opportunity for constant challenge. Until...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Flap
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Acknowledgments
• Contents
• Preface: A Revolution against the Caliphate?
• Introduction: How the West Missed the Story and May Miss It Again
• 1. The Missed Century: How the Democratic Revolution Failed During the Twentieth Century
• 2. The 1990s: A Dark Tunnel for Dissidents
• 3. Lights from the Window: Post-9/11 Western Interventions
• 4. Democracy Sabotaged
• 5. Freedom and Its Obstructors
• 6. The Taliban’s Nightmare: Women against Their Oppressors
• 7. Mesopotamia Rises
• 8. The Cedars Revolution: The Battle over Free Lebanon
• 9. Syria’s Reformers: Opposition against the Baath
• 10. The Green Revolution: Iran’s Youth, Women, and Minorities
• 11. Hell in Sudan: Genocide against Africans and the End of the Last Apartheid
• 12. The Greater Maghreb: The Most Violent Jihadists and Their Nemesis
• 13. The Copts and Liberals: Egypt’s Rising Democrats
• 14. Arabia’s Liberals: How the Peninsula Produces Jihadism and Its Antidote
• 15. Islamists versus Muslim Democrats: The War for the Soul of the Muslim World
• Afterword
• Notes
• Index
• Back Flap
• Back Cover