Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki addressing a press conference in Baghdad on May 11, 2011. AHMAD AL-RUBAYE/AFP/GettyImages

Just 140 out of a total of 325 Iraqi parliamentarians attended the special parliamentary session called for by Speaker Osama Al-Nujaifi at the behest of the Ahrar parliamentary bloc, affiliated to the Sadrist Movement. The State of Law coalition bloc, headed by under-fire Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri Al-Maliki, boycotted the emergency parliamentary session, as did a number of other allied parliamentary blocs.

Prior to the session, Maliki had called for Iraqi MPs to boycott the emergency session, making general accusations against unnamed Iraqi MPs of being directly involved in the latest violence.

Although the major topic of discussion at yesterday’s parliamentary session was the deteriorating security situation in the country, senior defense and interior ministry officials boycotted the emergency session. Local media reported that both Iraqi Defense Minister Saadoun Al-Dulaimi and Deputy Interior Minister Adnan Al-Assadi had boycotted the parliamentary session, along with all other security officials.

Following this latest controversy, along with previous parliamentary dissatisfaction with the security authorities, the first full Iraqi parliamentary session following the legislative break—scheduled for June 18—is expected to see these security officials removed from office following a parliamentary vote of no confidence.

Responding to Maliki’s accusations and calls for a boycott, Iraqi parliamentary Speaker Osama Al-Nujaifi accused the Iraqi prime minister of “recklessness and tyranny.”

Speaking during a press conference following the parliamentary session, Nujaifi characterized Maliki’s calls for MPs not to attend the emergency session as “disregard for the blood of the Iraqi people.”

“We had hoped that the prime minister would have been more courageous and attended parliament to discuss the security breaches and the reasons behind the failure of the security services,” he added.

In an unprecedented move by the parliamentary speaker, Nujaifi accused Maliki of “rebelling” against the constitution and being “indifferent” to the suffering of the Iraqi people.

He stressed, “Maliki has confirmed his rebellion against the constitution by calling on MPs not to attend the emergency parliamentary session and carry out their constitutional duty to discuss the security deterioration in the country,” adding, “this is taking place at a time when a large portion of the armed forces budget is being spent on counter-terrorism to no avail.”

He also confirmed: “The prime minister’s inflammatory statements yesterday and his accusations against parliament (of being involved in terrorism) gives us the right to raise an official complaint to the cabinet,” adding that “we will do this in the coming days.”

Moqtada Al-Sadr had previously warned against the presence of “extremist” voices, among both Iraq’s Sunni and Shi’ite communities, pushing the country towards violence.

He emphasized that Iraq is on the verge of witnessing “imminent sectarian violence.”

Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri Al-Maliki had ordered a shakeup of senior security officers on Tuesday evening, following a spate of bombings that have killed more than 380 people over the course of one month.

The office of the prime minister issued an official statement announcing, “After consultation with security officials, the commander-in-chief of the armed forces, Prime Minister Nuri Al-Maliki, today (Tuesday) issued orders…for changes in the operations commands and the leadership of the divisions.”

Maliki named Lieutenant Abdulamir Al-Shimari as head of Baghdad’s Operations Command following the sacking of Staff Lieutenant General Ahmed Hashem.

Over the past week more than 200 people have been killed in a wave of car bomb attacks across Iraq. The worst violence took place in Baghdad, where car bombs targeted Shi’ite districts during Monday morning rush hour. A spate of sectarian bombings also struck Iraq on Tuesday; the worst attack seeing a car bomb explode near a Sunni mosque in Baghdad, killing at least 10 people. At least 23 people were reported killed in the newest wave of attacks earlier today.

Written by Hamza Mustafa

Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi addresses a gathering during India-Egypt Economic Forum in New Delhi on March 20, 2013. MANAN VATSYAYANA/AFP/Getty Images

CAIRO, Asharq Al-Awsat—Responding to the Tamarod (Rebellion) petition seeking to oust Egyptian president Mohamed Mursi—which at last count had gathered more than two million signatures—the Islamists have launched a petition of their own in support of the embattled leader.

Mursi supporters have launched a Tajarud (Impartial) petition following calls by Al-Gama’a Al-Islamiyya leader Assem Abdul-Majid. This battle of the petitions comes in the week that an independent public opinion research center revealed that just 100 days into the job, his popularity had decreased to 30%.

The Tamarod campaign is seeking to “forment rebellion against the Muslim Brotherhood” and withdraw confidence from President Mursi, claiming that he has failed the revolution that brought him to power. This campaign is seeking to collect 15 million signatures in support of a vote of no confidence in Mursi; this would outnumber the 13.2 million votes he received to become president last year.

The Tamarod petition is gaining more and more signatures every day, and a number of prominent intellectuals and writers signed it on Monday.

George Isaac, a member of the Egyptian opposition National Salvation Front (NSF), told Asharq Al-Awsat that the Tamarod campaign represented the return of the Egyptian Movement for Change, which was the first group to oppose the Mubarak regime and which had been one of the major catalysts for the January 25 revolution.

Isaac, who served as the first general coordinator of the Kefaya movement, emphasized: “I believe that the Tamarod campaign is the beginning of the second wave of the Egyptian revolution, and this will lead to the achievement of the objectives of the revolution that we failed to achieve until now.”

“If President Mohamed Mursi wants to protect the country from division and disintegration, he must call for early presidential elections in response to the demands of the majority of the Egyptian people,” he added.

Isaac noted that President Mursi was elected president on the back of a controversial constitutional declaration issued by the then-ruling Supreme Council of the Armed Forces, and after he took office he issued a number of controversial constitutional declarations himself which removed any legitimacy that he had gained by the ballot box.

As for the Tajarud petition launched by Egypt’s Al-Gama’a Al-Islamiyya, Assem Abdul-Majid emphasized that his pro-Mursi campaign will collect more signatures than the Tamarod petition.

For his part, former presidential contender Hazem Salah Abu Ismail expressed his rejection of petitions being used in this manner to express political positions.

He said, “The Tamarod petition gathering signatures will only serve to divide the country, and there is no legal basis for this campaign,” adding, “I could gather many more [signatures].”

The Egyptian Center for Public Opinion Research (Baseera) conducted a telephone poll on April 29 and 30, 2013 that showed that just 30% of respondents would vote for President Mursi in an election, compared with 37% percent one month earlier and 58% one hundred days after the president’s election.

The poll also revealed that the number of people who “agree” with Mursi decreased to 46%, from 47% one month earlier and 78% one hundred days after the president’s election.

Saudi Arabian special security forces march during a military parade at a base near Mount Arafat, southeast of the holy city of Mecca. AFP

STANFORD, Asharq Al-Awsat—Ten years ago yesterday, the Saudi capital, Riyadh, was rocked by three near-simultaneous suicide bombings at housing compounds for expatriates. Over 30 people died and 160 were injured in what was, and remains, the deadliest terrorist attack in the kingdom’s history. The bombing came as a shock to most Saudis and robbed the country of its relative innocence as far as internal violence was concerned. After decades of calm, Saudi Arabia suddenly became the scene of a dramatic and protracted terrorist campaign that would claim many victims and worry many an oil investor before Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) was finally crushed in 2006.

It is hard to overestimate the political impact of the Riyadh bombings. These caused a major shift in Saudi attitudes toward Islamist extremism and a complete overhaul of the Saudi internal security apparatus. The terrorism campaign—and the Saudi response to it—also did much to change Western perceptions of Saudi society, many of which, in retrospect, were biased and flawed. Finally, the campaign backfired against Al-Qaeda, leading to its demise as an organization in the kingdom. In short, the learning curve was steep for everyone involved. Specifically, the experience taught us ten important things about terrorism and Saudi Arabia.

First, we learned that terrorist campaigns need not have deep, structural causes. In the summer of 2003, many observers attributed the violence to a fundamental malaise in Saudi society, derived from some combination of economic sclerosis, lack of political participation, and religious indoctrination. However, as I showed in my book, Jihad in Saudi Arabia, the causes were mostly exogenous: the terrorists had radicalized and trained abroad, and the timing was dictated by events in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Like many terrorist campaigns, this one was the result of developments within an organization.

The second lesson is that wars affect international terrorism in unpredictable ways. Nobody I know had considered that the fall of Kabul might produce terrorism in Riyadh. In retrospect, we can see that it made strategic sense for Al-Qaeda to send its army of Saudi trainees back to the kingdom, given that the alternative was near-certain death or capture in Afghanistan. Conversely, the US invasion of Iraq in 2003 had the unexpected—but exact opposite—effect of undermining the Al-Qaeda campaign in Saudi Arabia, by creating a battlefront that for Saudi Islamists was theologically less controversial—and thus more worthy of material support—than the home front.

Third, war volunteers often become terrorists even though they started with less malign intentions. Most of the Saudis in Afghanistan in 2001 had not intended to join Al-Qaeda, but to train so they could fight in Chechnya or other war zones. They had left as foreign fighters, motivated by a desire to help Muslims at war abroad. Once in Afghanistan, Al-Qaeda indoctrinated them into Bin Laden’s global jihad project. Prior to 2003, many Saudis saw fighting abroad as a relatively harmless activity distinct from terrorism. However, the perpetrators of the Riyadh Compound Bombing were nearly all former foreign fighters; they were the proverbial chickens coming home to roost.

Fourth, not all jihadists endorse Bin Laden’s global terrorism strategy. In fact, most radical Islamists in Saudi Arabia were what I call “classical jihadists,” who approved of fighting in war zones such as Chechnya, but not in uncontested areas like Saudi Arabia. Prior to 2003, many Western observers mistook classical jihadism for global jihadism and overestimated Al-Qaeda’s support base in the kingdom. The relative support for each of the two positions became very clear when young Saudi militants flocked to Iraq after 2003, leaving AQAP desperate for recruits.

Fifth, radical Islamism is not an existential threat to the Saudi state. In 2003, some Western observers thought the Al Saud kingdom might not make it, and many expected the violence to escalate into a veritable insurgency. We now know that Al-Qaeda never stood a chance, because it had no popular support and because the group’s core was a closed network of Afghanistan veterans that was easy to rein in once identified.

The sixth lesson is that terrorists often make grave strategic miscalculations. Al-Qaeda’s decision to launch a campaign in Saudi Arabia was disastrous, because it destroyed the group’s entire infrastructure in the kingdom, including logistics networks that might have remained useful for much longer. Osama bin Laden, like Western observers, overestimated Saudi popular support for Al-Qaeda. Like many terrorists, he had lost touch with his original constituency, and he fell for the temptation to act when waiting would have been better. As Abdulrahman Al-Rashed famously predicted in this very newspaper ten years ago, “By targeting New York on September 11, the extremists have shot themselves in the foot. In the Riyadh bombings the same extremists shot themselves in the head.”

Seventh, Saudi Al-Qaeda members were much like terrorists everywhere else. They were young males from urban backgrounds who had joined through social networks, often in search of camaraderie and adventure. There is little evidence of a “tribal factor” or “southern radicalism” in their profiles. To the extent that ideology motivated them, it was ideology in a very rudimentary sense, not some elaborate theological code. Most common was the belief that Muslims were being exterminated by non-Muslims. Only a handful of members had a very strong interest in the finer points of their ideology.

Eighth, technology can help terrorists, but it usually favors governments in the long run. In the early part of the campaign, militants exploited the Internet, mobile phones and digital cameras to their considerable tactical advantage. However, authorities soon caught up with the militants and developed a tracking and surveillance capability that severely restricted Al-Qaeda’s ability to communicate or move around.

Ninth, counter-terrorism works best when it is targeted and calibrated. The Saudi response to the Riyadh Compound bombings was relatively successful because it was restrained. History is full of governments that responded to terrorism by lashing out against an invisible enemy, thereby creating new grievances that only served to aggravate the problem. Unlike Algeria and Egypt in the 1990s, Saudi Arabia did not conduct mass arrests and appears to have abstained from systematic torture. It also developed a prisoner rehabilitation program that, despite some cases of recidivism, is better than most alternatives. However, not everything is rosy: like the United States, Saudi Arabia has a detainee problem in the form of individuals that the government, for various reasons, does not want to put on trial, but who are considered too dangerous to release.

Last but not least, it’s not over. A sustained terrorism campaign in Saudi Arabia is unlikely any time soon, but the threat from ad hoc attacks will persist for at least another decade. The Yemeni incarnation of AQAP is thriving and wants to take its war to Saudi Arabia. The Al-Qaeda movement has a long memory, and the legacy of the Riyadh attackers is preserved in Internet propaganda and by people who knew them personally. Someone will want to finish what Bin Laden started ten years ago. We owe it to the victims of the Riyadh Compound bombings to stop that from happening.

Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad makes a statement to the press on March 19, 2013 before a signing ceremony at EU headquarters in Brussels. GEORGES GOBET/AFP/Getty Images

Fayyad’s resignation followed weeks of controversy between the two Palestinian leaders over the resignation of Finance Minister Nabil Qassis, as well as disagreements over a forthcoming draft budget. Relations between Abbas and Fayyad have always been strained, however the latter tendering his resignation is seen as unlikely to solve the problems besetting the Palestinian government.

A source close to Fayyad, speaking to Asharq Al-Awsat on the condition of anonymity, revealed that the Palestinian prime minister had been contemplating resigning for a long period of time but had held off taking this decision out of respect for Abbas.

The source claimed that following the most recent dispute between the two Palestinian leaders over the resignation of Qassis—which Fayyad accepted and Abbas rejected—the prime minister took the decision to tender his resignation.

Sources informed Asharq Al-Awsat that Fayyad told his colleagues: “I am going.”

Fayyad had been scheduled to meet with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas late last night to officially handover his letter of resignation but the meeting was postponed at the last minute. Reports indicate that the West is pressuring Abbas not to accept Fayyad’s resignation and to put an end to the divisive in-fighting that characterizes the Palestinian political scene, particularly as Washington is seeking to revive the Israeli-Palestinian negotiations.

The Palestinian source said: “There is a lack of harmony between the different components of the political system, and it has gone even beyond this to sabotage Fayyad.”

Qassis tendered his resignation to Fayyad on March 2 over a disputed draft budget. Despite this, President Abbas announced that he did not accept the finance minister’s resignation, stressing that Fayyad did not have the constitutional power to accept this resignation and ordered Qassis back to work. This ultimately made Fayyad’s position as prime minister untenable.

The US-educated Fayyad is a popular figure on the international scene. The former World Bank official is credited by Western powers with helping to create government institutions that the Palestinians will require if they are to gain independence from Israeli occupation.

By Kifah Ziboun

Turkish official language aims to mirror the monumentality of the mausoleum of the founder of the Turkish Republic, Ataturk.

Ve Providing an illusion of unity: what Turkish use of the common-or-garden conjunction ‘and’ tells us about Turkey.

Ve [Veh] conj. and

Modern English loves adjectives. Look at the pudding section of the supermarket: a chocolate cake is never a chocolate cake; it is always a Belgian-chocolate cake. A custard tart is a free-range-egg custard tart. A yoghurt is a Madagascan-Vanilla-West-Country yoghurt. A shortbread – if Prince Charles made it – is an organic-Sicilian-lemon-all-butter shortbread. Marketing has triumphed, and marketeers love adjectives.

Adjectives, in their jargon, are ‘live’ words. They are words that stop the customer in his or her tracks and make them look, and when they look they are half-way to buying, aren’t they? That’s the theory at least. Marketeers know all about the importance of vividness. They have read George Orwell’s essay on “Politics and the English Language”, in which he lampoons the “staleness of imagery” and the “vagueness” he says are characteristic of modern writing. (I have a copy of his collected essays in front of me now: “hard-hitting and wide-ranging”, says the blurb on the back.)

Adjectival hypertrophy hasn’t quite reached Turkish yet. It will come, in the wake of the shopping malls and the credit cards, but for the moment most Turks are sufficiently new to money that buying a chocolate cake is pleasure enough, whether or not it has Belgian on the label. For the moment, it is still politics that shapes public language, and politics – at least of the old school – is not like marketing. It uses language as seers and prophets do: it aims not to attract people’s attention, but to force them to avert their eyes, as from a sacred secret. It works best with a language that is not like an attractive knick-knack, but like one of those vast forgotten monuments that litter post-Communist eastern Europe, cold and imposing.

That’s where ve comes in. Because the best way to achieve that granitic, monumental sort of language is by repeating words with a similar meaning, lists of near-synonyms with ve in between. Birlik ve beraberlik, for instance, that old Ankara favourite: “unity and togetherness.” Or the phrase that conservative nationalists turn to in order to signal their dislike of any innovation: örfler ve âdetler, “customs and usages” – as in, “x or y is against our national customs and usages.” Official texts are full of these couplets. The first sentence of the Prologue to the Constitution has three of them: Türk Vatanı ve Milleti, “the Turkish motherland and nation”, ölümsüz önder ve eşsiz kahraman Atatürk, “the immortal leader and peerless hero Ataturk”, O’nun inkılâp ve ilkeleri, “his [Ataturk's] reforms and principles.”

Usually, the words repeated are nouns – good, solid, masculine words – but not necessarily. Another couplet that rises high on the official list of all-time greats is maddî ve manevî, “material and moral”, altered sometimes to millî ve manevî, “national and moral”, as in “national and moral values.” Writing about the official rhetoric of the late Ottoman state, the historian Selim Deringil observes that it often appears “to voice the feelings of a ruling elite that is trying to convince itself of its own legitimate right to existence. The very name of the Ottoman state, memalik-i mahrusa-i şahane, (the well-protected domains of His Imperial Majesty’) was a testimony to this state of mind, and a monumental irony, because they were anything but well protected.” Threats to Turkey’s existence have receded today, but the siege mentality is still there. Perhaps that is why ve is such a very popular word: it is a conjunction after all. It joins together. It provides an illusion of togetherness.

An Iranian worker puts the final touches to a mural of Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, adjoining a cinema

Militarizing the Cultural Arena

In a speech in 2003 Ayatollah Ali Khamenei stated that

“More than Iran’s enemies need artillery, guns and so forth, they need to spread cultural values that lead to moral corruption. They have said this many times. I recently read in the news that a senior official in an important American political center, said: ‘Instead of bombs, send them miniskirts.’ He is right. If they arouse sexual desires in any given country, if they spread unrestrained mixing of men and women, and if they lead youth to behavior to which they are naturally inclined by instincts, there will no longer be any need for artillery and guns against that nation.”

It is striking here how the government uses military literature, vocabulary and metaphor to speak about culture. Since Khamenei is the commander in chief of the Armed Forces he also regards himself as the commander in chief of Islamic culture. He is the one who defines it and he is the authority who implements it.

What Khamenei considers a cultural invasion should be seen as the broadest war in the history of mankind. In his eyes the enemy’s armies are innumerable and include all members of Western society who adhere to modern liberal values and cultural institutions—from art to tourism. Not only this, but the West has globalized its ideals in order to poison all foreign cultures—not only Muslim hearts and minds but also non-Muslim cultures like Japan. According to Khamenei the Muslim world is under particularly heavy attack. Western cultural colonizers are trying to destroy the cultural “authenticity” of Muslims and deprive it of its “originality” and there are colonized minds within Muslim community who are knowingly or unknowingly the West’s agents—who corrupt cultural territory and contaminate it with western cultural microbes. These agents—such as intellectuals, scholars, artists and writers—reproduce the same values that the colonizers want to spread all over the world. Therefore aesthetics are as dangerous as conventional politics: We may not easily be able to perceive its danger but we should be certain that it was not created by the West in vain.

As Islamist ideology believes Islamic government should manage all cultural affairs of the country, the rulers of Iran therefore believe that Western culture is under the tight control of the political powers—imperialists and Zionists. For them the capitalist world is not designed to function within a decentralized network but as a well-guided structure that exploits every citizen and dominates undeveloped nations.

In other words, everything is political and every member of the society ought to prove whether she/he is with ‘us’ or with ‘them’. The process of proving that one is with the ruling ideology is not easy. Totalitarian ideology is temperamental and moods can change swiftly, because in the end it is not principles which define the ideology but the whims of the ruler. Absolute loyalty to the ruling ideology can also be risky. The cult of personality of the leader trumps the ideology in such a way that he becomes the main criterion for measuring the fidelity to the ideology.

“The objective of a totalitarian system is to destroy all forms of communal life that are not imposed by the state and closely controlled by it, so that individuals are isolated from one another and become mere instruments in the hands of the state” wrote Leszek Kolakowski in describing why Joseph Stalin killed many more people who were sincerely loyal to the communist ideology than people who were opposed to it.

“Those who took the faith seriously wanted to interpret it for themselves and to consider whether this or that political step was in accordance with Stalin’s version of Marxism-Leninism. But this made them potential critics and rebels against the government, even if they swore fealty to Stalin; for they might always invoke yesterday’s Stalin against today’s and quote the leader’s words against himself” Kolakowski continues.

In Iranian contexts this picture seems very familiar: Mir Hossein Moussavi and Mehdi Karrobi—the leaders of green opposition who have been under house arrest for more than 450 days at this point— never rebelled against Islamic ideology but instead criticized Khamenei. Both were former officials and sincere believers in the Islamic Republic but came to the conclusion that Khamenei had deviated from the initial path of the revolution. This is also true about intellectuals who were considered to be committed to Islamist ideology three decades ago, but now are seen by the government as Western agents who seek to penetrate Muslim society and corrupt it from within. The film maker Mohsen Makhmalbaf, the late poet Qaisar Aminpoor and the intellectual Abdul Karim Soroush are among the best examples whose starting-point was within Islamic ideology but the government’s record disappointed them and made them its critics. In fact the true believers who abstain from becoming morally and economically tied to the regime are susceptible to become revisionists and reformists.

Re-Islamizing Islam

For Islamists, the golden age is not the period immediately before Western colonialism or the emergence of modernity in Europe. They idealize the time of Prophet Mohammed and his four succeeding Caliphs (in the case of Sunnis) and (in the case of Shi’ites) his fourth succeeding Caliph. They look at the history of Islam as a history of misunderstanding Islam. Islam deviated from its divine path a short while after its very inception. They reject not only the objective and concrete history of Islam but also its subjective history; Islamic theology and exegeses. They want to provide a ‘new’ interpretation of Islam which is supposed not to perfectly correspond to the period of prophet. Since interpreting is not possible without referring to a tradition, they take a very eclectic approach to Islamic traditions, books, authors, and customs. They arbitrarily choose what they need for their political agenda and leave what does not serve their ends—occasionally forcing people to forget it ever existed. Consequently they use force not only to fight with Western cultural influence but also to impose their own image of the past in the minds of Muslims—manipulating Muslims’ historical memory and identity. This is why they try to re-Islamize Muslim society; a process that never ends.

Islamists fight not only with the present and the future but also with the past. They fight time itself and want to replace it with mythological eternity.  Islamists’ historical pessimism does not have any cure. It just makes them exert more violence until their capacity of using force gets exhausted; something that is happening now in Iran after the brutal implementation of Islamic ideology for more than three decades. Interestingly their approach to modernity is also eclectic. They do not deny all of it. They choose technology and science and reject certain cultures and worldviews. The marriage of modern technology and ideological interpretation of Islam can generate the darkest forces in our time.

Cultural Ground Zero

The Islamic Republic has tried to transform Islamic tradition into a shield against modern culture. But the clerical establishment—the main factory for producing tradition and guarding it—was not equipped to do the job. Indeed, clerics themselves have not been effective guardians of tradition. The clerical mind has been closed for several centuries. Clerical discourse is a repetition of what has been said by Muslim scholars many centuries ago.  After the revolution the clerical establishment’s bureaucracy was not compatible with the requirements and expectations of the newly formed Islamic government, it was modernized structurally and bureaucratically but failed to modernize the foundations of its thought and to remedy the sclerosis of tradition. The government allocated billions of dollars to the clerical establishment and other religious institutions, so that they could take the place of modern cultural institutions.

Significantly, the intelligence ministry and the Islamic Revolution Guard Corps (IRGC) maintain de facto control over cultural production but the result is not satisfying for the regime. Islamist ideology, as in other totalitarian ideologies, ignores the spontaneous nature of culture. None of the religious cultures of the past could have been created as a result of social and cultural engineering by the ruling power. Culture evolves naturally, unconsciously and freely. Consequently, as the government has sought to intervene in culture in order to steer it in a specific direction, it has destroyed it. By censoring cultural production, bankrupting private publishers and cultural entrepreneurs, arresting writers and artists, laying off scholars from universities, eliminating humanity majors from academia and changing textbooks to religious books, the government has so far failed to produce its own brand of acceptable culture.

Islamist ideology defines itself as more ‘against’ modernity than ‘for’ building an authentic and functional society. Islamist ideology is now more than a century old, but still there is no clear vision of what a Utopian Islamist society would look like. Since its nature is more based on negation its power lies more in destruction. What is ironic in Islamist ideology is that it gives a pivotal role to culture and soft power, but in countering Western soft power it relies on aggressive hard power. Without a potential recourse to violence local society tends to become influenced by modern global culture rather than isolate itself from it.

Also Islamist ideology wants to replace culture with Shari’a or Islamic law. Therefore in its view, religious jurists become custodians of culture and they have the responsibility of imposing a juridical model on the society. An ideology that looks at individuals only from a juridical perspective would find all of them sinful.

Culture Saves the Nation

Islamists in Iran were lucky to take power in 1979 but not lucky enough in ruling a society already deeply modernized. Had Iran not been modernized for several decades before the Islamic Revolution, imposing an “Islamic model of society” would have been much easier. Women, young people and the urban middle class in Iran subsequently saved the country from going in a similar direction to Afghanistan under the rule of the Taliban. Despite all the daily systematic pressure on people in Iran, more than 40 percent of people watch prohibited satellite television and more than 20 million use the internet. Underground culture in Iran is not underground anymore; it is visible and widespread. The new generation stands against the government’s imposed cultural model. Even the religious strata of the society distinguish between state Islam and civil Islam and frequently prefer the latter. Clerics who do not have affiliation with the government feel closer to people than those who are in power.  Both the Islamic state and state Islam are losing their credit, even in the house of IRGC and the clergy.

The Islamic Republic did not take into consideration that the Islamization of a society has its limits. It has overstretched its political authority. Women and youth want to look to the future but the government wants to imprison them in a mythological past. Under the Islamic Republic the number of schools for foreign languages in Iran has enormously increased, because families are keen to provide their children with secular education. Despite censorship people are more eager to read Western books or watch Western movies or listen to Western music. If the Pahlavi monarchy was trying to modernize the society from above, the Islamic republic has unwittingly but successfully modernized the society from within. If modernity was a luxury for the upper and upper-middle class in the north of Tehran under the Shah, now every remote village can access the internet and satellite television and dream of a better life and a noble cultural interaction with global culture.

If the newly elected Egyptian and Tunisian Islamist governments declare that they do not want to imitate an Iranian model, it means that the Islamic Republic of Iran is an example for no one in Muslim world. Iran needs to rely on its money and military strength to mobilize Muslims to its cause. While the Islamic Republic’s soft power fails, the Iranian people’s urge to integrate into world culture and economy is unprecedented. This leaves the door of hope for political change in Iran wide open.

Armed fighters in Aleppo confront government forces. Foreign military intervention in the Syrian crisis seems unlikely

This article does not in any sense recommend military intervention in Syria. But it is essential that hypothetical options are considered systematically as much to inform decisions not to intervene as to offer this possibility. If, as is likely, the Assad regime continues its slaughter of civilians, there will be growing political pressure on governments across the world to ‘do something about it’.  Since the early 1990s the international community has increasingly accepted that the responsibility to protect is a general principle governing multinational actions that should be adopted for the future of the planet as much as to stop specific atrocities against people. But the use of military force is always a catalyst for chaos and unpredictable outcomes could mean far greater suffering. Nothing new here.

There are four broad categories of military ‘purpose’ and action that could apply to Syria. The first and mildest in terms of risk and consequences would be intervention by a United Nations (UN) peacekeeping force for policing, monitoring and removal of arms. For this operation to be a possibility the Security Council would need to reach a consensus. So China and Russia would have to be on board. Other countries opposed to intervention such as Iran would at least need to agree to ‘constructive abstention’ in the debate. A UN force would be very vulnerable to irregular warfare sponsored by an external state. A truce on the ground would be a requirement so the Assad government would need to give assent as would the oppositions in all their forms. And agreement as to at least an outline plan for the future governance of Syria would be necessary. If the truce broke down or proved to be ineffective, this force would withdraw. The average number of troops in present UN Department of Peacekeeping Operations led operations is about 5,000 per intervention. The exact numbers that would be required would depend on the precise mission and the robustness of the truce.

A second category would be UN sanctioned peace enforcement. It is unlikely that this option would be realistic unless the rebels had made some substantial advances. If they had, for instance, seized some large towns and cities and gained realistic military control over substantial areas of territory; forcing a stalemate. Security Council consensus and a UN mandate would be essential because external powers such as Russia might otherwise intervene independently with the prospect of an international war on Syrian territory. There would be the problem of the management of Iran (and perhaps Israel) to prevent uncoordinated interventions or the provision of support to parties on the ground. One must understand that peace enforcement would only be feasible if there was general acquiescence among the parties on the ground. Also a peace enforcement operation is one in which the intervening forces may have to use large scale combat if this acquiescence collapses. Both in Syria and internationally there must be a clear understanding that this force is capable of dominating escalation if fighting at a level beyond small scraps breaks out. The numbers required for effective peace enforcement could be of the order of 120,000 if the UN and NATO interventions in Bosnia are taken as a model—bearing in mind that Syria’s population is some five times larger.

Combat support to rebel forces—the proxy war—would be a third category of intervention. The Libya model in which air power in particular was used, ostensibly to protect civilians but in reality in weakening Qadhafi’s forces and coercing his regime, has been widely discussed in relation to Syria. But it might not only be air power in the form of fighter jets and sea, land and air launched missile systems. Special forces and elite airborne and amphibious infantry might be used for reconnaissance but also against the regime itself, as well as other discrete capabilities that the rebels lack—such as airborne surveillance and unmanned combat aircraft. Of course neither Libya, nor indeed the coercive air operations in Kosovo, are reasonable scenarios for Syria which is much more densely populated and the Syrian Arab Army is already embedded in the urban areas.  If air strikes were to be militarily effective, there would be very high levels of civilian casualties and the reason for the intervention would be compromised. That is not to say that military support could not be given to the rebels effectively. A condition would once again be, however, that they had made substantial progress and controlled territory and urban areas. The scale of external force contributions to a proxy war would depend very much on the situation at the time of the intervention.  NATO flew some 27,000 air sorties in Libya. Syria would be very much more complex environment, and this could constrain rather than increase the number of sorties.

The final category is a full scale invasion of Syria to bring about regime change along the lines of the 2003 US-led war in Iraq. It is almost impossible to see the diplomatic and political circumstances under which such an operation would be possible. The numbers of civilian casualties might be huge and from a moral viewpoint early surrender by the Assad regime could not be assumed in minimizing this risk. An initial aerial ‘shock and awe’ campaign against, say, Damascus, to bring about a change of heart in the government would be as stupid now as it was in 2003 bearing in mind that it is the Syrian communities (in all their complexity) who would be terrified—and they would subsequently be problematic for occupation forces.  The military forces would need to be very competent and interoperable if they were to ‘win’ the combat phase. What experienced nation would be the framework nation for an operation of this size? (That nation would have to provide a large proportion of the troops; because that is the only way it could possibly work). Not the US, for all the obvious external diplomatic and internal political reasons reinforced by Administration rhetoric. Nor France and the United Kingdom together as the core of a European force; for the same reasons even if they could muster the capabilities. France has historic associations with Syria but these could be as much a dis-incentive to lead an intervention. Israel would be completely inappropriate. Neither Turkey nor Saudi Arabia have the experience of leading major interventions. And then there is the matter of access:  From which adjoining countries would it be diplomatically feasible and appropriate? The sea option requires great competence – the combination of good quality and appropriate military equipment, versatility, realistic training and, most importantly experience in military intervention in complex emergencies.

Most of the problems of a full scale intervention— leadership, competence, access—apply also to a peace enforcement operation. And two fundamental issues in both cases is scale of forces, particularly on the ground and long term commitment by the supplying nations. If a UN peacekeeping force or a proxy war fails, it is back to the drawing board. But an intervention requiring military control on the ground requires force levels that could prevail in combat and enduring commitment. The Syrian armed forces are substantial and are reasonably well equipped. An opposed military intervention cannot rely on maneuver theory—the ability to surprise and coerce—if it is to be conducted at risk levels that will be acceptable to participating nations and the international community and will minimize casualties. Winning is of course not about numbers alone but the old metrics of the Cold War matter. To keep risk low a ground invasion force would need to be three to five times the size of the forces the Syrian Arab Army could muster to defend Syria. Coalition forces committed some 540,000 ground troops to the liberation of Kuwait in 1991. The ground intervention in Iraq in 2003 was about half this number. In the case of Syria at least 300,000 would be realistic. Every bit as important are the numbers of intervention troops that would be available to occupy and subsequently stabilize the country after any combat phase. These numbers apply to peace enforcement forces as well. Once again, whatever the competence of the intervening forces and the quality of their counter-insurgency doctrine, the decision on the ratio of troops to population should bear in mind the levels of the International Security Assistance Force in Kosovo in 1999, not Iraq in 2003, nor Afghanistan before the 2010 US surge.  A low risk figure based on the Kosovo ratio would be half a million troops.

Syria has been the subject of several scholarly texts

1. Malik Mufti, Sovereign Creations: Pan-Arabism and Political Order in Syria and Iraq (Cornell University Press, 1996)

Mufti provides one of the best overviews of Syria prior to the rise of Hafiz al-Assad. It importantly shows Syria’s central role in the contest for political influence and identity in the region in the 1950s and 1960s, and why Syria was at the centre of the Arab Cold War. His analysis is essential for understanding why the Assads created such a regime in Syria, and how fragile Syria’s sovereignty was before the 1970s. The competition by Iraq, Egypt, and Turkey to gain influence in Syria in the 1950s and 1960s potentially foreshadows what is to come if the Assad regime were to fall or if Syria goes into civil war.

2. Patrick Seale, Asad of Syria: the Struggle for the Middle East (University of California Press, 1990)

This is the seminal work on the life and presidency of Hafiz al-Assad. Written by Patrick Seale who was one of the few western journalists to spend time with the late President, Seale charts the emergence of the modern nation state in Syria in the 1970s and the central role Syria played in the region’s affairs in the 1970s and 1980s.

3. David Lesch, The New Lion of Damascus: Bashar al-Asad and Modern Syria (Yale University Press, 2005)

Leading American scholar on Syria, Lesch spent hours with Bashar al-Assad in the year after the American invasion of Iraq in 2003. Similar to Seale who profiled the late President, Lesch profiles his successor by providing both a personal portrait of the President and an insight into his thinking and outlook. This work demystifies to some degree the inner-workings of the Assad regime.

4. Andrew Tabler, In the Lion’s Den: An Eyewitness Account of Washington’s Battle with Syria (Lawrence Hill Books, 2011)

The founding editor of the Assad regime’s only sanctioned English publication, Syria Today, who later fell out with the regime writes a trenchant account of Bashar al-Assad’s rule after 9/11 and Syria’s interactions with its neighbors and the United States. Tabler, similar to Seale and Lesch, had unique access to the regime in Damascus. This work is also a strong account of US-Syrian relations after 9/11.

5. Roger Owen, The Rise and Fall of Arab Presidents for Life (Harvard University Press, 2012)

One of the longest observers of the Middle East, Harvard professor, Roger Owen provides a systemic analysis of the creation of the modern republican presidential state system in the Middle East. He shows importantly how these Presidents sustained their rule and used their power in this authoritarian system. He crucially shows the internal contradictions within these regimes, which created the conditions for the Arab Awakenings of 2011. It’s essential to read because the underlying conditions that sustained the Assads’ rule of Syria will for the foreseeable future be part of the fabric of this state with or without the Assads.

Hamas: From Resistance to Government
By Paola Caridi
Seven Stories Press, New York
In this new book, Italian journalist and historian Paola Caridi sets herself an ambitious goal. She seeks to get under the skin of the most notorious of the offshoots of the Muslim Brotherhood: Palestine’s Islamic Resistance Movement, or Hamas, in an effort to explain why it came to be choice of the majority of Palestinians in the elections of 2006, as well as the impasse that led to the split between Gaza Strip under Hamas and the West Bank under Fatah.

In doing so, she methodically traces all the major milestones in the life of the movement, including an interesting genealogy of the movement: its birth, the different currents of Islamist activists in it, and how the First Intifada and internecine Palestinian politics catalyzed its creation in 1987. Caridi describes the creation of a refugee society in the Gaza Strip, Hamas’ traditional stronghold, the incubating role played by the Palestinian universities (and some others elsewhere in the Arab world) after 1967, and the conflict amongst the students who would become future leaders.

Later, Hamas begins to take shape in the social service network run by the Muslim Brotherhood amongst the Palestinian refugees. Eventually, a younger generation of activists forced their elders to accept the creation of a militant resistance movement, Hamas, amidst the violence of the first intifada and the corresponding tumult in Palestinian politics.

The central focus, however, is the evolution of the movement as it moves steadily into mainstream Palestinian politics and begins to contest elections.  Caridi gives an exhaustive account of the political debates and maneuverings behind the scenes, as the different currents of thought and activism within the movement work out their differences, strategize, and react to events shaping the Israel-Palestinian conflict.  She also offers the reader a valuable insight into the movement’s decision-making structures and the interplay between its different constituencies.

The flaws of this work are the flipside of its strengths: Caridi’s narrow focus on the internal affairs and evolution of Hamas mean that the wider context is sometimes obscured. In particular, the West Bank is given comparatively short shrift, thanks to Gaza’s role as Hamas’ spiritual and political home.

If the book has an overarching theme—aside from tracing the trajectory of Hamas’ movement from violence towards politics, and indeed government—it is to illuminate the ‘true’ nature of the organization as a complex and nuanced example of the phenomenon of Islamic political movements. In particular, Caridi shines a spotlight on several developments that undercut the stereotypical view of Hamas as an organization composed of fanatical religious extremists dedicated exclusively to destroying Israel.

In particular, she describes the decision to use suicide bombings after the Cave of the Patriarchs massacre of 1994 and subsequent decisions to suspend them when they were judged to be counterproductive, as part of truces with Israel and Fatah. She also details Hamas’ willingness to extend an implicit recognition of the Jewish state and the acceptance of a ‘two state’ solution.  Ultimately, Caridi reaches a simple conclusion, but one made much more convincing by her methodical and comprehensive study of the organization and its recent history: Hamas is “a movement that has used terrorism, but that cannot be thought of simply as a terrorist organization.”

The picture that emerges is of an organization that is simultaneously ruthless and careful, pragmatic and calculating, despite its roots in the Islamic revival in the Arab world that began in the late 1960s and its original intention to restore Palestinian statehood by reforming the moral and spiritual character of its people. Both its decision to adopt the tactics of terrorism (unlike virtually all other movements descended from the Muslim Brotherhood, as a Hamas leader tells Caridi at one point), as well as its decision to become a player in Palestinian politics, are therefore the products of careful calculation and deliberation amongst its members and leaders.

Ultimately, the conclusions Caridi draws about the future of Hamas are pessimistic ones. Like its rivals in Fatah, she argues, Hamas has failed to come up with a formula for sharing power, with both parties abetted in this by Western governments. The movement also faces a choice between moving further towards mainstream, peaceful, politics and continuing armed struggle; she argues that given the international isolation faced by Gaza after the Palestinians elected Hamas in 2006, the latter is more likely.

Admittedly, Caridi does not offer a way forwards that may help resolve the tensions that have grown up between the different Palestinian factions, but this is not her goal. Overall, this is a valuable work that sheds light on an important player in Palestinian politics, and provides a sober and judicious account of a movement that is all too often misunderstood.

Anti-Omar Suleiman posters in Cairo, Egypt

It has been an entertaining couple of weeks in Egyptian politics. First there was the will-he-won’t-he drama surrounding Abu Ismail, the ultra-conservative Salafi who was facing disqualification from next month’s presidential elections over claims his mother was American.

Then the Muslim Brotherhood surprised everyone by completing a jaw-dropping political U-turn, breaking last year’s cast iron pledge and putting forward their own presidential candidate.

As if things couldn’t get any more intriguing – and as if last year’s uprising had never even happened – Omar Suleiman, former President Hosni Mubarak’s spy chief, dropped a bombshell and announced his own candidacy for the race.

But all of it appears to have come to nothing when Egypt’s electoral commission upheld a ban on 10 presidential candidates, including all of the aforementioned contenders.

In terms of top notch political theatre, it was pure London Palladium – but there is also a farcical whiff of Punch and Judy too.
This is perhaps best summed up by the battle being waged over Egypt’s new constitution.

Right now, nobody knows for sure what powers the country’s first post-revolutionary president will wield.

This is because the assembly tasked with drafting a fresh constitution – and thus defining the remit of Egypt’s highest office – recently imploded amid squabbling between MPs.

It is still unclear whether a new constitution will be drafted before elections due to start on May 23. Field Marshall Hussein Tantawi, Egypt’s de facto president, has said he wants one before the poll.

But other political groups say that is impossible, pointing to the lengthy periods which were required to draft previous Egyptian constitutions.

Then there is the debate about the nature of the document itself. Most of the main political parties involved agree that in contrast to Egypt’s previous 1971 constitution, whatever comes next should be decidedly less presidential.

Since the time of Sadat, Egypt’s leader has enjoyed substantial powers. Treaties and agreements could be signed off without the approval of MPs, criminals pardoned and parliaments dissolved at will.

According to Shaheer George, a leading figure in the liberal Freedom Egypt Party, much of that needs to change. “We cannot have a president who interferes with legislation,” he said. “He should have the right to dissolve the parliament only after consultation between the parliament and president. But he should not be able to dissolve it without a referendum.”

Another bone of contention has been the influence of political Islam. The previous constitutional assembly, half of which was composed of members of parliament, broke up over concerns from liberals that Islamist MPs had too much sway.

Speaking to Egypt Unwrapped recently, Dr Amr Darrag, a leading member of the Muslim Brotherhood’s political wing, argued that it was his party’s right to dominate the assembly, given how many seats the group won during the recent parliamentary election.

He also swept aside concerns that political Islam would feature too strongly in the next constitution, noting that under Article Two of the 1971 document – which states that Islam is the primary source of all legislation – the religion was already represented.

Under the terms of the new constitutional assembly, no MPs will be involved in the drafting process – effectively emasculating the Muslim Brotherhood, whose members control nearly half of parliament.

This has provided some comfort to the secularists who fear Brotherhood’s influence. But given how rapidly political fortunes have changed over the past two weeks, nobody can be sure what surprises this election campaign will continue to throw up.