Making the New Middle East: Politics, Culture, and Human Rights 0815636067, 9780815636069

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Making the New Middle East

Contemporary Issues in the Middle East Mehran Kamrava, Series Editor

Select Titles in Contemporary Issues in the Middle East Colonial Jerusalem: The Spatial Construction of Identity and Difference in a City of Myth, 1948–2012 Thomas Philip Abowd

Democracy and the Nature of American Influence in Iran, 1941–1979 David R. Collier

In the Wake of the Poetic: Palestinian Artists after Darwish Najat Rahman

Iraqi Migrants in Syria: The Crisis before the Storm Sophia Hoffmann

Islam, Arabs, and the Intelligent World of the Jinn Amira El-Zein

Making Do in Damascus: Navigating a Generation of Change in Family and Work Sally K. Gallagher

The Mizrahi Era of Rebellion: Israel’s Forgotten Civil Rights Struggle, 1948–1966 Bryan K. Roby

Shahaama: Five Egyptian Men Tell Their Stories Nayra Atiya

Making the New Middle East Politics, Culture, and Human Rights Edited by Valerie

J. Hoffman

Syracuse University Press

Copyright © 2019 by Syracuse University Press Syracuse, New York 13244-5290 All Rights Reserved First Edition 2019 19  20  21  22  23  24    6  5  4  3  2  1 ∞ The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992. For a listing of books published and distributed by Syracuse University Press, visit www .SyracuseUniversityPress.syr.edu. ISBN: 978-0-8156-3606-9 (hardcover) 978-0-8156-3612-0 (paperback) 978-0-8156-5457-5 (e-book) Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Number: 2018053056 Manufactured in the United States of America

Contents List of Illustrations and Tables  Acknowledgments 

 

Valerie J. Hoffman 

vii

ix

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Introduction

 

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1

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Part One. Religion, Politics, and Society in the Middle East 1. Religion and Politics in the Arab Spring and Its Aftermath Valerie J. Hoffman 

 

47

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2. The Islamic Republic and the Politics of the New Middle East Behrooz Ghamari-Tabrizi 

 

�

71

3. The Military, the Islamists, and the Battle over Egypt’s Constitution Feisal G. Mohamed 

 

90

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4. Old and New Battles for Turkish National Identity Joshua D. Hendrick 

 

109

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5. S ecurity Challenges in Tunisia, Libya, Morocco, and Algeria in the Wake of the Arab Uprisings Ramazan Erdağ 

 

134

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Part Two. Human Rights in the Middle East 6. I slam, Non-Muslim Minorities, and Human Rights in the Middle East Valerie J. Hoffman 

 

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153

vi  �  Contents   7. Regime Ruptures and Sectarian Eruptions in Post-Mubarak Egypt Mariz Tadros 

 

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194

  8. The Palestinians Justice Denied

Cheryl A. Rubenberg 

 

222

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Part Three. Gender Dynamics: What Has Changed?   9. Gender Norms in the Muslim Middle East Valerie J. Hoffman 

 

�

285

10. The Politics of Gender Equality in Turkey Gül Aldıkaçtı Marshall 

 

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318

11. Between a Rock and a Hard Place The “Arab Spring,” Women, and Lessons from Iran Haideh Moghissi  �  338

Part Four. Media and Cultural Expressions 12. S tate-Sponsored Media, Cultural Production, and Information Wars The Case of Iran Niki Akhavan  � 

357

13. The Power of Corruption and the Corruption of Power The Arabic Historical Novel in Morocco (and Elsewhere) Roger Allen  �  371

14. From Sayed Darwish to MC Sadat Sonic Cartographies of the Egyptian Uprising Ted Swedenburg  �  394 Contributors  Index 

 

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459

455

Illustrations and Tables

Illustrations 1. The closed area in the South Hebron Hills  �  236 2. The Separation Barrier in the Tulkarm-Qalqiliya area  �  243 3. The Separation Barrier between Abu Dis and East Jerusalem  �  4. Gaza Strip and restricted areas, 2013  �  258

244

Tables 1. Population, GDP, and average individual income  �  3 2. Religion in the Middle East  �  9 3. Ethnic groups in the Middle East  �  15 4. Democracy index and regime types in the Middle East  �  5. Iran’s five republics  �  74 6. Main actors and events during each of Iran’s five republics  7. What does each faction in Iran envision?  �  87 8. 2012 protests about Coptic-related issues  �  211

vii

34

 

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85

Acknowledgments

This book has its origins in a conference titled “The New Middle East: Social and Political Change in the Twenty-First Century,” sponsored by the Center for South Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign on October 18–20, 2012. Taking place in the middle of the Arab Spring uprisings, the conference brought together twenty-seven scholars for an exciting conversation across disciplines, ending with a joint discussion on the future of democracy in the Middle East. Among the many conferences that took place on the Arab Spring at this time, this one stood out for its broad perspective beyond the events that grab headlines and for the way it brought together experts from such diverse disciplines as political science, anthropology, sociology, media studies, and comparative literature. The organizers decided that the conference afforded an opportunity to create a uniquely broad narrative on the contemporary Middle East that ought to find expression in a published text. Although many books were rapidly produced on the Arab Spring in 2011 and 2012, there was a dearth of up-to-date books on the broader cultural and social issues of the contemporary Middle East. It was decided to translate the momentum provided by the conference into a book that would be interesting and insightful for the informed public and usable as a textbook in undergraduate and graduate classes on the Middle East. Many of the conference speakers had already committed their papers to other publications, so other contributors were brought into the project in order to cover the major issues at stake in the struggle for justice in the Middle East. None of the authors were compensated ix

x  �  Acknowledgments for their contributions; I owe each of them a debt of thanks. Work on this book was delayed because of a plethora of other commitments, and the authors responded by updating their contributions to reflect changes on the ground. For this, too, I thank them. During the period of final revisions, one of the authors, Cheryl Ann Rubenberg, passed away. I am grateful that, even in her final illness, she remained deeply committed to this project. While writing a memorial notice for the Review of Middle East Studies, I learned of the extent of her dedication to the cause of Palestinian human rights and her personal involvement in helping several Palestinians study in North America; she modeled the combined pursuit of meticulous scholarship and humanitarian advocacy. The conference in 2012 was funded by a Hewlett International Conference Grant from International Programs and Studies at the University of Illinois, with additional funding from the US Department of Education’s Undergraduate International Studies and Foreign Language Program. The UISFL grant also provided me with summer salary in 2013 to enable me to devote time to this book. The following units at the University of Illinois cosponsored the conference: the Center for Advanced Study; the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences; the School of Literatures, Cultures, and Linguistics; the European Union Center; the Departments of Anthropology, History, Media and Cinema Studies, Political Science, Religion, and Sociology; the Programs in Comparative and World Literature, Jewish Culture and Society, and Women and Gender in Global Perspectives; and the Global Crossroads Living and Learning Community. I thank all of them for their participation in this exciting gathering of scholars. Asaf Volanski of B’Tselem was extraordinarily helpful in preparing the maps for figures 1 and 2; I am very grateful to him and to Roy Yellin of B’Tselem for granting permission to use them. I would also like to thank Dr. Brendan McKay for providing me with the photograph used for figure 3 and the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs for providing me with the map used in figure 4.

Acknowledgments  �  xi I would also like to express my appreciation to Alison M. Shay, former acquisitions editor at Syracuse University Press, for all her patience, persistence, and assistance in helping bring this project to fruition, and Fred Wellner for designing the book cover. Finally, I thank my husband, Kirk Hauser, for his constant support of my work.

Making the New Middle East

Introduction va l erie j. hoffm a n

No one can doubt that the Middle East is a region of pivotal importance in the world today. The source of much of the world’s oil reserves and the site of many conflicts, it is a focus of heightened interest among policy makers and others concerned with global security. Less attention has been paid to the rampant abuse of human rights in the region; both residents and analysts assumed the durability of entrenched authoritarian regimes and the hopelessness of active struggle for justice. In recent years, however, there were signs that the populace was becoming less resigned to the status quo, beginning with the April 6 Youth Movement founded in Egypt in 2008 and followed by the spontaneous protests of Iran’s “Green Movement” following the 2009 presidential elections. Neither of these movements had any notable success, and the latter was brutally suppressed. But protests launched in Tunisia in December 2010 brought down the government in January 2011 and inspired a series of “Arab Spring” uprisings in 2011–12, catalyzed by demands for democracy, dignity, and human rights in states ruled for a half century by military strongmen and other types of authoritarian regimes. These events captured the world’s imagination and inspired popular protests in Europe and the United States. The whole world watched as new regimes were formed in Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen, and Libya; international alliances shifted; and creative spirits produced bold new visions of society in art, music, and literature. It was in this context that many people began to speak of a “new Middle East.” This term had been used earlier with different references: Shimon Peres used it to refer to politics after the Oslo Accords 1

2  �  Valerie J. Hoffman (1993), former US secretary of state Condoleezza Rice used it in 2006 to express a hope that the bloodshed occurring in Iraq and Lebanon represented “creative chaos” and the “birth pangs of a New Middle East” (Harnden 2006; Kamal 2015), and the president of the Council on Foreign Affairs, writing that same year, used the term to refer to the demise of the United States’ power and prestige in the region after the invasion of Iraq in 2003 (Haass 2006). However, the term gained new traction during the Arab Spring as analysts expressed unprecedented optimism concerning the possibility of democracy in the Arab world and pondered the implications of unfolding events. The currency of the term is reflected in the large number of recently published books with “the new Middle East” in their titles. Six years later, the Middle East remains unstable and authoritarianism’s hold has barely been loosened—indeed, it has been strengthened in Egypt and Turkey, while Syria, Libya, and Yemen remain in the grip of civil war. This book examines the struggles for justice in today’s Middle East from the perspective of multiple disciplines by analyzing the dynamics and outcomes of the upheavals, the status of human rights and gender relations, the prospects for democracy, and popular aspirations for dignity and justice as expressed through literature, media, and the arts. For the purposes of this book, the Middle East includes all of the countries on North Africa’s Mediterranean coast (Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, and Egypt), Sudan, and the countries east of the Mediterranean, from Turkey in the north to the southern tip of the Arabian Peninsula, and east to Afghanistan. True justice, entailing the rule of law, equality before the law, and guarantees of personal security and freedoms, is a challenging goal in any region or context, but it has been vexingly absent in the Middle East. An understanding of why this is so requires a review of some of the region’s most important attributes. Demographic and Economic Characteristics The relative aridity of the Middle East makes water management and control of water resources significant economic and political

Table 1 Population, GDP, and average individual income Country

Population

GDP

Afghanistan Algeria Bahrain Egypt Iran Iraq Israel Jordan Kuwait Lebanon Libya Morocco Oman Palestine—Gaza Strip Palestine—West Bank Qatar Saudi Arabia Sudan Syria Tunisia Turkey United Arab Emirates

32,564,342 39,542,166 1,346,613 88,487,396 81,824,270 37,056,169 8,049,314 8,117,564 2,788,534 6,184,701 6,411,776 33,322,699 4,092,000 1,816,379 2,731,052 2,194,817 27,752,316 36,108,853 17,064,854 11,037,225 79,414,269 5,779,760 (CIA est.) 9,445,624 (UN est.) 26,737,317

$61.69 billion $552.6 billion $61.56 billion $945.4 billion $1.284 trillion $505.4 billion $268.3 billion $79.77 billion $283.9 billion $80.51 billion $103.3 billion $254.4 billion $163.6 billion $1.3 billion $5.4 billion $323.2 billion $1.616 trillion $159.5 billion $107.6 billiona $125.1 billion $1.515 trillion $605 billion

Yemen

$106 billion

Average income

2,000 14,300 51,400 11,100 16,500 14,100 33,400 11,900 71,000 17,900 16,600 7,700 44,100 876 1,924 144,400 52,800 4,500 5,100 11,400 19,600 65,000 3,900

Comparison countries China Germany India Indonesia Kenya Malaysia Mexico Russia United States

1,367,485,388 80,854,408 1,251,695,584 255,993,674 45,925,301 30,513,848 121,736,809 142,423,773 321,368,864

$17.63 trillion $3.613 trillion $7.277 trillion $2.554 trillion $134.7 billion $746.8 billion $2.143 trillion $3.568 trillion $17.46 trillion

12,900 44,700 5,800 10,200 3,100 24,500 17,900 24,800 54,800

Source: Statistics from CIA World Handbook. Population estimates are generally for 2015; GDP estimates are generally for 2014. a Estimate for 2011.

4  �  Valerie J. Hoffman issues, but such concerns are often forced into the background by the dominance of oil in the region’s economy and by intense, often violent struggles over power and ideology. Home to some of the wealthiest countries in the world as well as some of the poorest, the Middle East is marked by extreme contrasts of wealth and poverty. Over the past century, the Middle East underwent extremely rapid social and political change, including independence struggles, the founding of nation-states, the birth of new political ideologies, the adoption of modern technologies, and the institution of mass education. Improvements in public health led to a dramatic decrease in child mortality, a corresponding rise in population, and, because of the region’s high birthrate, a demographic shift toward societies that are disproportionately young (Moghadam 2013, 291–95). The inability of rural areas to sustain their growing population led many thousands to migrate to the cities; despite the images of deserts and nomads that often spring to Western minds at the mention of the Middle East, about 73 percent of the region’s population lived in cities in 2010—up from 24 percent in 1950 (Moghadam 2013, 288). Despite the perdurance of some aspects of Middle Eastern culture, the impact of urbanization and globalization on lifeways and values can scarcely be overestimated. Religion Although its significance has often been overstated, religion has a strong influence on social and political life in the Middle East. Many of the chapters in this book address, in one form or other, the role of religion, particularly Islam, in politics and the struggle for justice in the Middle East. The overwhelming majority of the inhabitants of the Middle East, almost 95 percent, are Muslim, of whom approximately 74 percent are Sunnis. The Muslims of North Africa, Palestine, and Jordan are almost entirely Sunni, but much of the rest of the Middle East has significant Shi‘ite minorities, and most of the Muslims in the Sultanate of Oman belong to

Introduction  �  5 the tiny Ibadi sect (Hoffman 2015). The significance of these sectarian splits, which originated in disputes over political leadership in the early Muslim community, was largely subordinated to an impulse toward Islamic unity during the struggle against European colonialism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and to Pan-Arabism during the heyday of Arab socialism in the 1950s and 1960s. This subordination of sectarianism does not mean that sect-based discrimination was absent during these years: Iraq was dominated by Sunni Arabs, who constituted only 17 percent of the population; Syria was dominated by Alawites, who constituted only 18 percent of the population of that country; Bahrain was ruled by Sunnis, although the Shi‘a are demographically dominant; Saudi Arabia discriminated against its Shi‘i minority; and Libya discriminated against its Ibadi minority. Nonetheless, sectarian differences did not arouse the virulent hatreds we see today in many places. Even the emergence of Islamism as a prominent political ideology in the 1970s did not immediately arouse sectarian sentiments; the Shi‘ite-dominated Islamic revolution of Iran was initially regarded with enthusiasm by many Sunnis, who saw it as proving the viability of an Islamic political ideology and took pride in the humiliation of the Americans and the US-backed government of the shah. The Saudis, however, were alarmed by the Iranian revolution, and the rise of Saudi influence in the Muslim world, especially since its involvement in the Afghan war in the 1980s, led to the reemergence of violent anti-Shi‘ite sentiment among radical Sunni Islamists. The dominance of the long-suppressed Shi‘a in the Iraqi government after the removal of Saddam Hussein from power sparked rampant sectarian violence in that country. In recent decades there has been a spike in bombings of Shi‘ite shrines in the Middle East and Pakistan. In the wake of the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 and the Arab Spring uprisings of 2011–12, sectarianism has contributed to the region’s volatility. Chapter 1 examines the role of religion in the politics of the Arab Spring and its aftermath.

6  �  Valerie J. Hoffman Christians are the largest non-Muslim religious group in the Middle East, numbering approximately 16 million, although there are no reliable statistics. Egypt has the largest number of Christians, with estimates ranging from 4.6 to 17 million, or 5 to 20 percent of the population; most sources estimate the percentage of Christians at 10 percent, or 9 million (Tadros 2013, 30–35). Most Egyptian Christians belong to the Coptic Orthodox Church of Alexandria, which has its own pope, currently Tawadros II. Although Copts did not enjoy the same rights as Muslims under the government of Gamal Abdel Nasser (Hasan 2003), the rise of Islamism in the 1970s led to violent attacks against the Copts, who were perceived as an obstacle to the achievement of an Islamic state (Kepel 1984, 195–201). The regimes of Anwar Sadat (1970–81) and Hosni Mubarak (1981–2011) made strategic concessions to the Islamists in an effort to co-opt their message, while at the same time suppressing independent Islamist groups. The Copts felt forced to accept an authoritarian government that often failed to protect them, for fear of the inevitably worse Islamist alternative. Similar dynamics have kept Syria’s 1.7 million Christians loyal to the regime of Bashar al-Assad. But the lethal bombing of a Coptic church in Alexandria on December 31, 2010, provided, for many Copts, evidence of the government’s failure to protect them; many threw in their lot with the January 25 revolutionaries. The fall of Mubarak in 2011, however, led, as feared, to a rise in violent attacks against Copts, as Mariz Tadros discusses in chapter 7 of this book. The removal of a military strongman from power in 2003 likewise made Iraq’s Christians vulnerable to attacks on churches on such a scale that very few Christians remain in that country. The eastern part of Anatolia was home to as many as 2 million Armenian Christians before the Ottoman Empire ordered the deportation and killing of between 0.9 and 1.2 million Armenians in 1915–16. Only 50,000–70,000 Armenians remain in Turkey today, mostly in Istanbul and its environs. Ironically, the founding of the secular Republic of Turkey after World War I was

Introduction  �  7 accompanied by a massive transfer of Christians from Turkey to Greece and of Muslims from Greece to Turkey (Shields 2013), making the Republic of Turkey nearly entire Muslim. In chapter 4 of this book, Joshua D. Hendrick reviews Turkey’s struggles to define its identity vis-à-vis Islam. The only Middle Eastern country where Christians have a substantial share of power is Lebanon, a state carved out of greater Syria in 1920 by the French in order to create a Middle Eastern state with a Christian majority. Lebanon is dominated by a “confessional system” in which religious affiliation plays an important role in structuring social life: one normally marries within one’s own religious group, attends a school belonging to one’s religious group, and finds a job through connections among one’s kin and religious group, and one’s ultimate loyalty belongs to one’s kin and religious group. Lebanon’s power-sharing system is also based on this confessional system, conforming to the relative size of religious groups at the time of the 1932 census. According to this unwritten “National Covenant,” government offices are distributed on a ratio of six to five in favor of the Christians. The president is a Maronite Christian, the prime minister a Sunni, and the Speaker of the Chamber of Deputies is Shi‘ite. Non-Christians in Lebanon came to resent this arrangement as, over time, the share of Christians in the population shrank to approximately 39 percent. The relative strength of the confessional system and the weakness of the state led to civil war from 1975 to 1989, when the Charter of National Reconciliation, also known as the Ta’if Agreement, transferred much of the president’s authority to the cabinet and increased Muslim representation. Nonetheless, Lebanon remained a weak state, occupied by Syrian forces from 1976 to 2005 and bombed and invaded numerous times by Israel. The fragility of the government is exemplified by the fact that the office of president remained vacant from May 25, 2014, until October 31, 2016. Although there were small but significant Jewish communities in many Arab countries, such as Morocco, Egypt, Algeria, Yemen,

8  �  Valerie J. Hoffman Tunisia, Syria, and Iraq, in the first half of the twentieth century, political tensions caused by the establishment of Israel as a Jewish state in Arab Palestine in 1948 led most Jews in Arab countries to migrate to Israel or to the West. Jews constitute approximately 75 percent of Israel’s population, nearly 6 million people. Today, Morocco is the only Arab country with a Jewish population that rises above 1,000, but at 2,500 to 6,500 it is but a shadow of its former size, which was estimated at 250,000 to 350,000 in 1948. Even in Iran, a non-Arab country, it is estimated that one-third of the Jewish population migrated to Israel between 1948 and 1952 (Sanasarian 2000, 47); today, estimates of the Jewish population of Iran range from 9,000 to 25,000. The horrors of the Holocaust prompted the United Nations to endorse the founding of the state of Israel as a homeland for Jews in Palestine in 1947. The war that established the state of Israel forced some 720,000 Palestinians off their land and into exile, setting the stage for decades of war and conflict in the region. Israel’s capture of the West Bank and Gaza Strip in the 1967 war also produced new and persistent human rights violations, as described by Cheryl A. Rubenberg in chapter 8. Other religious minorities in the Middle East include the Alevis of Turkey and the Druze of Lebanon, Israel, and Jordan, offshoots of Shi‘ism that diverge significantly enough from mainstream Islam that often they are not considered Muslims, although Alevis are included among the Shi‘a in table 2; the Yazidis, a Kurdish group numbering approximately 500,000 in Iraq and 50,000 in Syria, followers of an ancient, syncretic monotheistic religion with beliefs that include both Zoroastrian and Islamic elements; the Baha’is of Iran, whose persecution is discussed in chapter 6; and Hindus, who live in the Gulf countries as migrant laborers, where they lack the rights of citizens and have been granted the freedom to practice their faith only in Oman and the United Arab Emirates. All of these groups have suffered from various degrees of discrimination, and sometimes even persecution, as discussed in chapter 6 of this book.

Table 2 Religion in the Middle East Regional Estimatesa Total Middle East population: 560,424,386 Religion

Population

Percentage

Muslims Sunnis Shi‘a Twelvers Zaydis Alevis Alawites Isma‘ilis Ibadis Christians Jews Hindus Druze

530,921,966 394,912,796 132,639,335 113,782,740 9,273,838 6,340,435 3,071,674 170,648 3,369,835 16,494,787 6,536,781 1,531,266 997,078

94.74% of total 74.38% of Muslims 24.98% of Muslims 85.69% of Shi‘a 6.99% of Shi‘a 4.78% of Shi‘a 2.32% of Shi‘a 0.13% of Shi‘a 0.63% of Muslims 2.94% of total 1.17% of total 0.27% of total 0.18% of total

Country Estimates Country

Population

Percentage estimates

Afghanistan

32,564,342

Sunni Muslim 80%; Shi‘a Muslim 19%; other 1%

Algeria

39,542,166

Nearly 100% Sunni Muslim

Bahrain

1,346,613

Muslim 70.3% (60% Shi‘a, 40% Sunni); Christian 14.5%; Hindu 9.8%; Buddhist 2.5%; 35 Jews; folk religion