Politics of Social Change: In the Middle East and North Africa 9781400875344

Table of contents :
FOREWORD
The Substance of this Book
The Need for Policy-oriented Research Based on Inadequate Data
The Question of Method
Subjects Omitted
The Place of Israel
Middle Eastern Geography: A Matter of Convenient Definition
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
CONTENTS
PART 1. THE LEGACY OF THE PAST AND THE CLAIMS OF THE PRESENT
1. THE INHERITANCE OF THE ISLAMIC COMMUNITY
The Present Setting: From Revolution to Revolution
The Political Community as a Religious Vision
The Political Community as a Historical Reality
Islam's Supreme Political Achievement
The Polarities of Folk Islam: Isolation and Conquest, Acquiescence and Rebellion
Ulema and Sultans: Antagonistic Collaboration between Vision and Power
Unity through Factionalism
Saints, Intellectuals, and Soldiers Testing the Limits of the Islamic System
Islam as a Common Fate rather than a Common Faith
2. THE CHALLENGE OF THE MODERN AGE TO ISLAM
The Shattering of the Glass
The Problems of Reconstruction
The Age of Choice
PART II. THE CHANGING STRUCTURE OF SOCIETY
3. KINGS, LANDLORDS, AND THE TRADITIONAL , BOURGEOISIE: THE DECLINING ELITE
Prospects for Kings
Feudalism in the Middle East
The Frailty of the Traditional Urban Upper Class
4. THE NEW MIDDLE CLASS AS THE PRINCIPAL REVOLUTIONARY AND STABILIZING FORCE
The Birth of a New Class
Conflicts within the New Middle Class
The Relationship of the New Middle Class to Other Classes
Prospects for the New Middle Class
5. PEASANTS: THE SILENT MAJORITY AT THE „ THRESHOLD OF POLITICS
A Majority in Misery
Fatalism and Its Other Face—Rebellion
Toward a Solution of the Peasant's Problems
6. WORKERS: THE GROWING TIDE OF THE UNSKILLED AND UNEMPLOYED
PART III. THE RANGE OF POLITICAL CHOICES
7. AMENDING THE PAST: REFORMIST ISLAM
The Failure of the Reformers of Islam
The Successful Reform of the Law of the Moslems
The Triumph of Secular Leadership
8. RESURRECTING THE PAST: NEO-ISLAMIC TOTALITARIANISM
Native Totalitarianism: The Sources of Its Appeal
Tactics
Program
The Fate of a Totalitarian Party
The Varieties of Islamic Totalitarianism
The Potentialities of Islamic and Post-Islamic Totalitarianism
9. TOWARD A NEW AGE OF CERTAINTY: COMMUNIST . TOTALITARIANISM
Islam and Communism
The Attractions of Marxism
The Attraction of the U.S.S.R. as a Model of Rapid Progress
The Attraction of Chinese Communist Models
Factors Hampering the Role of Communist Parties in the Middle East: Small Membership
Shifting and Unrewarding Communist Strategies
The Burden of Soviet Discipline
Lack of Internal Cohesion in Communist Parties
A Mistaken Communist Image of Middle Eastern Society
The Competition of Nationalist Movements
The Price of Rivalry
Factors Favorable for Communist Activities
The Potentials of Communism
10. FROM UNORGANIZED INSECURITY TO ORGANIZED ., INSECURITY: NATIONALISM
The Meaning of Nationalism
Nationalism as a Necessity
The Nation as an Accident
The Popularity of Nationalism
The Limitations of Nationalism
11. TRANSFORMING THE PRESENT: THE QUEST FOR FREEDOM AND AUTHORITY
The Radical Requirements of Democracy
Freedom and Authority in Traditional Islam
The Search for Democracy in the Middle East
The Authoritarian Road to Democracy
The New Authoritarians and the Old
Toward Representative Government
12. TRANSFORMING THE PRESENT: SOCIALISM FOR THE FEW, FOR THE MANY, OR FOR THE AGGRANDIZEMENT OF THE STATE?
The Tasks of Socialism in the Middle East
The Faces of Socialism
PART IV. INSTRUMENTS OF POLITICAL MODERNIZATION
13. THE ARMY
The Army's Traditional Role
From Praetorian Guard to Advance Guard
The Army's Special Virtues as a Political Instrument
The Size and Composition of the Military Bureaucracies
Contrasts in the History of Middle Eastern Armies
The Circumstances of Army Intervention
Limitations of Army Rule
The Army as a Partisan in Conflicts Within the New Middle Class and with Other Classes
Making Army Regimes Unnecessary
Probable Problems and Trends During the Next Decade
14. POUTICAL PARTIES
Political Parties as the Chief Architects of The New Political Culture
The Harnessing of Charisma
The Novelties of Voluntary Political Association
The Uses and Abuses of Ideology
Accountability in One-Party Regimes
Morocco and Tunisia: Modernizing Parties in Action
Egypt: Learning from Failure
Turkey: From the One-Party to the Multi-Party System
15. TRADE UNIONS
Obstacles to Effective Organization
The Trade Union under Governmental Control
The Trade Union as the Government's Junior Partner
The Trade Union as an Independent Force
The Trade Union as Equal Partner of a Political Party
The Trade Union as a Sudden Avalanche
The Role of Trade Unions in the Political Modernization of the Middle East
16. THE CIVIL BUREAUCRACY
From Oriental to Modern Bureaucracy
Recruiting Bureaucrats: Too Many and Too Few
The Changing Status of Bureaucrats
The Role of the Bureaucracy in the Modernization of the Middle East
PART V. THE COST AND CONSEQUENCES OF MIDDLE EASTERN CHOICES DOMESTICALLY, REGIONALLY, AND INTERNATIONALLY
17. THE PRICE OF POLITICAL STABILITY
Problems of Decision-Making
The Economic Cost of Political Stability
To Set a Course
18. REGIONAL RIVALRY AND THE PROSPECTS FOR UNITY
Is There a Middle East?
Conflicts Within and Around National Frontiers
Nationalism vs. National Interests: The Struggle for Arab
Unity The Arab-Israeli Conflict
19. THE INTERNATIONAL ORIENTATION OF THE MIDDLE EAST
The Vulnerability of the Area
Defending the Middle East Militarily While Losing it Politically
The U.S.S.R. Enters Middle Eastern Politics
Roots of Neutralism
Opportunities and Limitations for Soviet Policy
The Relative Contributions of Neutralist and Pro-Western States to the Security of the Middle East
Limitations and Opportunities for Western Policy
INDEX

Citation preview

THE POLITICS OF SOCIAL CHANGE IN THE MIDDLE EAST AND NORTH AFRICA

The Politics of Social Change in the Middle East and North Africa

By Manfred Halpern Consultant to The RAND Corporation

PRINCETON, NEW JERSEY PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 1963 by The R A N D Corporation Published 1963 by Princeton University Press All Rights Reserved L.C. Card Number 63-12670 Printed in the United States of America First PRINCETON PAPERBACK Edition, 1965

For my Mother and Father

FOREWORD

The Substance of This Book THE AREA from Morocco to Pakistan is in the midst of a profound revolution. This book attempts to analyze the causes and character of that revolution; examine the forces, groups, ideas, and institutions now in motion; and estimate the direction which politics may take in the future in the Middle East and North Africa. I have not been content, therefore, merely to summarize recent insights into the nationalist revolution now in progress in this area, or into the ensuing "revolution of rising expectations." These two revolutions have been particularly dramatic in the Middle East and North Africa. The number of newly independent nations has almost tripled in this region during the past twenty years. The revolution of rising expectations is being accelerated by the pressure of a population that has tripled since the turn of the century but still cultivates only four percent of the region's total land area. The revolution being examined here is broader and runs deeper than nationalism and its discontents. The five parts into which this book is divided define the scope of the Middle Eastern and North African transformation. First, a way of life that endured nearly 1300 years is being destroyed by challenges for for which, as a system of faith and action, it was almost entirely unprepared. Second, a new social system with new social values is taking the place of the traditional society. Third, a new range [vii]

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of ideological choices has opened up for a new kind of elite. Fourth, new political instruments are at the elite's disposal. Finally, the fact that new men are using new means to attain new ends in their attempts to deal with the politics of social change entails revolutionary consequences at home and abroad. Only by understanding the totality of this revolution will we be able to see why the cost of change, or of avoiding change, runs so high in the Middle East and North Africa. By concentrating on the comparative analysis of changing internal politics, this study is also intended to contribute to the understanding of international relations. In order to appreciate the opportunities, driving forces, and limitations of the international system, it is not enough to attend to those dramatic moments when the interests of one nation clash with the interests of another or to appreciate the changing structure of the international system. The world is steadily and rightly concerned with the difficult and still tenuous efforts of the great powers to make large-scale war too costly. But because a truce between the great powers persists, international relations are today being profoundly transformed mainly through internal politics. The balance of power, and the orientation, health and stability of the international system, are vitally affected by the success or failure of local elites in dealing with the social, political, economic, intellectual, and psychological modernization of their countries. At the same time, no rulers can pursue these tasks in sovereign isolation. Increasingly, the choice which all of them face is whether to achieve such complex and difficult domestic goals through free international collaboration, or whether to suffer such social change to be directed through the subversive intervention of the stronger nations in the unstable and violent internal politics of the unsuccessful. In the latter case, domestic failure thus also helps to enlarge the areas of hostile confrontation among the great powers. Such an emphasis on the domestic forces that mold the attitudes and interests of nations is perhaps especially required in approaching an area of the world where people often remain obsessed by the memories of particularly unhappy conflicts with outside powers and with each other; an area where the West has [ viii ]

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been late and often unskillful in adjusting itself to the changing pattern of international relationships; an area where both Middle Easterners and Westerners have barely begun to deal with the political problems of social change. The Need for Policy-oriented Research Based on Inadequate Data It must be admitted at the outset, however, that anyone who presumes to analyze the changing forces at work in the Middle East and North Africa treads on uncommonly precarious ground. The systematic study of comparative politics and the art of estimating future trends are themselves quite new.1 Analyses that focus on the changing present in the Middle East and North Africa for the sake of estimating future forces and trends are also hampered by our lack of knowledge about this area's past. Although the traditions of medievalism in Islam have been yielding to the modern age only during the past century and their long shadows still affect the vision of today's Moslems, it remains difficult to assess that legacy in terms of its contemporary meaning. We know much more about the Islamic community's inherited theology than about the actuality of its past beliefs; much more about its inherited political Utopias than its past political practices. "We do not know the social history of Islam," writes the French historian Braudel, and he adds in despair, "Shall we ever know it?"2 We are scarcely better informed about the present. As H. A. R. Gibb has written: "The historian of the Arab world in the twentieth century . . . has at his disposal few—and in all cases incomplete—materials of a genuinely historical nature upon which 1 On the present state of comparative politics, see Harry Eckstein and David Apter, Comparative Politics: A Reader, New York, 1963. None of the most active and organized practitioners of the art of estimating, namely those in the American government, has yet published his reminiscences. 2 La maditerranfe et Ie monde maditerranien a Tepoque de Philippe II, Paris, 1949, p. 637, cited by Robert Brunschvig, in "Perspectives," Studia Islamica, 1953, p. 5. For a detailed inventory of our ignorance concerning the Ottoman Empire even during the last 200 years of its existence, see H. A. R. Gibb and Harold Bowen, Islamic Society and the West, Volume 1, Part I, London, 1950, pp. 1-18, passim.

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to base his study of twentieth century trends. His facts hang in mid-air. But in all truth the situation is worse still. Even in relation to the twentieth century, political and diplomatic history has all but monopolized the interest of students or observers of the Middle East, to the exclusion of fact-finding studies on the actual phenomena and mechanisms of human life. . . . There is not one [volume] which traces the internal social and economic institutions [of Egypt] on the basis of the available documents. . . . The full and true history of the British Occupation has still to be written. . . . There is surprisingly little on the development of the [Arab] cities and their populations, and nothing at all on the evolution of the modern professional classes: doctors, lawyers, journalists, school teachers, industrialists, and civil servants. . . . Too often, also, the studies made by Arab writers other than novelists of the economic, educational, religious, and other institutions are tracts, more or less purposefully and skillfully designed to support a policy or a point of view."3 Except that it takes too generous a view of political and diplomatic studies, this is a just complaint. There is scarcely a handful of books in any language that analyze the relationship between social, economic, and intellectual forces and contemporary political trends in the countries of the Arab world— east or west of the Suez Canal—or among the Turks, Iranians, Afghans, and Pakistanis along the northern tier.4 Even without these materials to draw on, an essay such as the present one must be attempted. The policy-maker and the concerned public need an analytical foundation for judgment before all the returns are in. If one waits until all is known and the die cast, knowledge may do no more than let the dead bury the dead. * H. A. R. Gibb, "Problems of Modern Middle Eastern History," in Report on Current Research, Spring 1956: Survey of Current Research on the Middle East, edited by Anne W. Noyes, The Middle East Institute, Washington, D.C., 1956. 4 Twenty years ago, no one had ever written a book on American policy in the Middle East and North Africa, nor could any American be found teaching the contemporary politics, economics, or sociology of that region of the world. From its belated beginnings, the political exploration of the Middle East and North Africa has not progressed as quickly or systematically as that of Eastern Europe or the Far East. For a further examination of this backwardness, see Manfred Halpern, "Middle Eastern Studies: A Review of the State of the Field with a Few Examples," World Politics, October 1962, pp. 108-122.

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To this extent, therefore, the study is policy-oriented. From incomplete knowledge of present forces and trends, it projects probable estimates of the future, since no policy-maker in the West or in the Middle East can escape making commitments upon this precarious ground. The book, however, is addressed equally to those whose main concern is the increase of knowledge. There may be considerable advantage in giving priority to the construction of a broad outline map that will give us an overview of major Middle Eastern patterns and dynamics. It will teach us where to find the gaps in our knowledge, what questions we need to ask first, and which detailed studies are likely to prove to be the most crucial. A map, however imperfect, forces us to make explicit and to expose to criticism our basic assumptions about the lay of the land, its resources, and the direction of its traffic. The Question of Method This study rarely pauses to make explicit the methodological framework of its analysis, or the concepts and hypotheses that underlie its conclusion. To show how political, social, economic, and intellectual systems may be linked with one another, and how change is related to stability is a task demanding separate treatment and a language of its own. Nevertheless, it should be pointed out that this study is not based merely on existing facts. It does not say simply, for example, that the Middle East has few political parties, that there is some talk, though less effort, to form a few more, and that it would therefore be premature to estimate just what political parties might be able to accomplish. The book goes further and asks what role parties must play if they are to be effective in creating a new political culture in the midst of rapid social transformation. What kind of structure must they build? What kind of functions must they be able to perform? What kind of problems are they likely to face? And then—returning to the existing political parties—how successful are particular countries likely to be in achieving political stability and modernization given the help (or lack of help) of an effective popular movement? The advantage of this type of [xi]

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analysis—exploring the structural and functional requirements no less than the actualities of a situation—is that it allows a more systematic treatment of the potentials of the situation, while it makes explicit the criteria of judgment involved. This study also relies upon a second and related method for drawing broad generalizations from incomplete data. It proceeds on the assumption that institutions, groups, behavior, or ideas performing functionally equivalent roles in a similar context are comparable. Since an army in the Middle East, for example, acts like a political party, much that we have learned about parties can be used to illuminate the role of an army under such conditions. More generally, we are here exploring some sixteen countries that have experienced similar problems in passing from an Islamic past into the modern age. In other respects, systematic contrasts can usefully be drawn between one and another of these countries. The concern for comparable roles and functions under similar conditions of social change forces us to reject the stereotyped meaning of such familiar labels as "moderate," "extremist," "leftist," or "rightist," drawn from the history of a different culture, and to ask anew what the major historical issues are about which a Middle Easterner may be a moderate or extremist. It may be idle, for example, to call "conservative" a Middle Eastern regime that does not encourage innovation and, hence rendered powerless to deal with a rapidly changing society, fails to conserve anything. In this part of the world, the meaning not only of "socialism" but of "society" is changing, while "political parties," "armies," and "parliaments" play unexpected roles. Even locally bred ideas and institutions no longer mean what they have always meant. Wherever Islam asserts itself as an active political force today, it is not in the form of a traditional religion but as a modern political ideology. The impact of Islam is therefore quite different from what it used to be. The two methods of analysis on which this book chiefly relies can help us to enhance the range, accuracy, and relevancy of interpretation. They cannot fully compensate for our ignorance of facts, and much of what is said here still rests on selected examples rather than full and complete evidence. Such ex[xii]

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amples, nonetheless, are intended in every case to be a convincing illustration that data in support of a particular hypothesis do exist. They are offered on the assumption that further research would reveal corroborative evidence in other parts of the region. Every hypothesis, however, remains a hypothesis without sufficient proof, so that others may find it possible either to alter or to disprove what has been offered here as further evidence comes to light. Subjects Omitted A number of topics vital to any thorough study of the politics of social change in the Middle East and North Africa has been omitted. I do not separately examine each Middle Eastern and North African country in detail to account for political developments within it, or to spell out all the variations between one and another. Many additional years' work by many hands would be required to assemble the necessary materials for the first time, and many times the space occupied here would be needed to examine even the most significant issues and events. I have also had to overlook a number of area-wide phenomena that help to mold the process of social change. The growing liberation of women—psychologically, intellectually, socially, economically, and legally—is bound to alter the whole style and substance of Middle Eastern relationships. The energy of other important segments of society remains circumscribed. The independently creative or critical intellectual as yet still rarely raises his head. The university is in most countries still hobbled by state control, overwhelmingly large classes, and extremely small salaries. The primary and secondary schools remain greatly inadequate in number and quality. The press, with honorable exceptions, is frustrated by censorship or corrupted by venality and sensationalism. The judiciary is increasingly free to deal rationally and fairly with criminal and civil cases, but usually powerless to enter with the same spirit into cases dealing with political liberty and social values. The great ease of communication within and beyond the region through books, radio, and rapid transportation is creating a new psychic mobility and re[xiii]

FOREWORD

latedness. These factors already deeply affect the changing political culture of the Middle East and also the chances for the development of a stable plurality of autonomous centers of power. But none of them could be taken up here. To analyze the intellectual, moral, and psychological climate of the Middle East, as it affects the relationship between leaders and followers, and between freedom and authority, is a task which, however useful to the present inquiry, demands a major investigation of its own. Such a study would also give more explicit and systematic treatment than this one to the cultural diversities within the Middle East and North Africa. The Saudi Arabian, whose heritage is the proud, parochial freedom of the desert, obviously has a different cast of mind from the Egyptian, who has for so long been dependent on the tyranically corrupt rulers of a generous Nile; the trading Lebanese have different values from the mountaineers of land-locked Afghanistan. Such distinctions have already been assimilated within the range of problems and alternative courses examined under the topic of political modernization—the chief concern of the present book— but so far as these differences also affect styles and preferences of action, they must be given more attention at another opportunity. The Place of Israel Israel is not one of the states considered in this volume. At first, its exclusion seemed logical. This is not intended to be a textbook covering each country of this region, but a comparative study of the political modernization of a certain, interrelated portion of the Islamic community. Even the Arab-Israeli conflict is given only enough space to explain how it exacerbates or helps to distort the politics of social change in the area. Since nearly 95 percent of the population in the region from Morocco to Pakistan is Moslem in its religion and way of life,5 it seemed unfruitful constantly to interrupt the flow of thought about the "The principal religious minorities among the 230,000,000 people who live in this region are: 10,000,000 Hindus, 7,000,000 Christians and 2,500,000 Jews. However, about 30,000,000 Moslems belong to various heretical sects, while in Iran the heretical Shia form of Islam is the state religion.

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consequences of social change in Islamic society with the phrase "except in Israel." Yet as the book progressed, it became apparent that Islam shared many problems with Israel. Like Islam, Israel presents a society whose modern, Westernized elite will have to learn how to assimilate an oriental majority. Both are intent upon creating secular states despite the presence of important religious political parties. One society faces the problem of converting Zionism, as the other must transform anti-colonialism, into a nationalism appropriate to a generation that has known neither exile nor foreign rule. Israel is challenged by the task of making Judaism relevant to a modern environment quite different from the one that has nourished it, either in Europe or in oriental countries, for the past two thousand years, and thus finding new sources for moral judgment. Moslems face the same challenge in Islam. Israel must renovate Hebrew, as other countries must Arabic, so that it can deal clearly with modern science, politics, and philosophy. Israel has the special opportunity of demonstrating whether large infusions of capital into an underdeveloped economy can succeed in raising both the political and economic standard of living. Its experiments with trade unions, cooperatives, and collectives are immediately relevant to the general social and economic problems of the area. Both Israel and the Arab countries, having declared their commitment to the ideas of the secular nation-state, will fall far short of that promise unless they come to treat the ethnic and religious minorities inside the state as equals. No book has yet been written on Israeli politics in a perspective akin to that of the present work. When that too-long-delayed task has been accomplished, it would be most rewarding to develop comparisons and contrasts between the transformation of Israel and that of its neighbors. Middle Eastern Geography: A Matter of Convenient Definition This study draws material primarily from the following countries: Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Sudan, Jordan, [XV]

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Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. I have ignored the sheikhdoms and principalities of the Arabian Peninsula and Persian Gulf since most of these small tribal societies have not yet experienced the problems or developed the institutions that lie at the center of my analysis. The oil-producing states of Kuwait, Bahrein, and Qatar are rapidly entering the modern age, but so little pertinent material concerning them was available that I had to exclude them from consideration. Throughout, I have used the term "Middle East" to refer to the entire area from Morocco to Pakistan. I do not mean to cause old "Near Eastern" or new "West Asian" hands any more dismay than necessary. This usage is merely a matter of present convenience. Although I have sometimes reminded the reader of the area covered by referring to the "Middle East and North Africa," I have used the less cumbersome term "Middle East" consistently to indicate the whole region under discussion. The phrase "Arab world" refers here to the area from Morocco to the Sudan and thence to Iraq. The "Arab East" is separated at the EgyptianLibyan frontier from the "Arab West," or the Maghrib of North Africa, which sometimes also receives separate mention.6 * Every book dealing with the Middle East must face the fact that the sound of Middle Eastern languages cannot readily be transliterated into the Roman alphabet. There is an excellent and accurate system of transliteration adopted by the Library of Congress, involving dots below letters, dashes above letters, and two kinds of apostrophes. This is a necessary device for assuring communication among scholars. But one has to know Arabic to recognize Koran in Qur'an and Saladin in Salah al-DTn. I have elected to use a simplified form of the Library of Congress system and to give the common spellings of wellknown names for the sake of the general reader.

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

in this book can be blamed on a lack of opportunities. After ten years in the Department of State, I had wished for a chance at last to describe in a single work the most significant forces and relationships of Middle Eastern and North African politics. I had hoped for a few years of comparative freedom from other work to re-examine the problems and my ideas about them, and also to test these views during a fourteen months' visit to two-thirds of the countries in this area. This book is the realization of hopes that once seemed almost extravagant. The generosity of two institutions has made this volume possible: The RAND Corporation and Princeton University. Apart from my field trip, the preparatory work for the book has been supported by Air Force Project RAND, a continuing program of research conducted by The RAND Corporation. The costs of book production, however, have been assumed by The RAND Corporation, out of its own funds. As a Consultant to The RAND Corporation, I have benefited from the assistance and criticism of several RAND staff members. Jeffrey C. Kitchen encouraged, and with Victor Hunt and Hans Speier helped to crystallize this project from the very beginning; Alexander L. George greatly facilitated its completion. These four, together with Bernard Brodie, Herbert Goldhamer, Paul Langer, and Herman B. Fredman, helped to sharpen the analysis by their criticism of an earlier draft. Paul Kecskemeti and Victor Hunt commented extensively on two successive drafts. If this book possesses any merits, it is to a considerable degree because I tried NOTHING

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to come to terms with the persistent questions, objections, and suggestions offered by my RAND colleagues. I am grateful to Princeton University's Program in Near Eastern Studies for supporting the field research which is in part reflected in this study. The Department of Politics willingly granted me leave to go overseas. The contributions and discussions of the Program's Faculty Seminar helped me to enrich several parts of the volume. In addition, several of my Princeton colleagues read large portions of the manuscript and sustained my morale while enlarging my understanding. I would thank, in particular, Gregory Massell, Roger Le Tourneau, and Harry Eckstein. The absence of footnote references to the work of Harry Eckstein and the paucity of references to that of Marion J. Levy, Jr., make it all the more important to record here that their theoretical essays and my conversations with them have been of great help in giving structure to the present analysis. Princeton graduate and undergraduate students in several seminars and classes have made no small contribution to the clarity, focus, and accuracy of the study. Five of them continued to debate its themes long after their association with the seminars ended. Their concerns—both those we settled and those we did not—are now part of this book. They are Eqbal Ahmed, Rifaat Abu el-Haj, Mohammed Guessous, Stuart Schaar, and Walter Weiker. My former colleagues in the Department of State, both those who accept the perspectives presented below and those who still firmly oppose them, have formed a major stimulus to the development of my ideas. To all of them I owe much for their understanding and friendship. I am grateful for much intellectual and personal helpfulness to individual members of the United States Air Force and of some other official agencies. Custom requires that they, like my State Department friends, remain anonymous. Many Middle Easterners and North Africans have generously contributed facts and insights, as well as friendship and hospitality. Though I might name a few of them, most live in circumstances that make individual mentions an uncertain kind[ xviii ]

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

ness. I would like them to know that I cherish the remembrance of each and every one. A number of colleagues in universities other than Princeton read most or all of the manuscript and provided me with most rewarding comments. I am indebted particularly to Jacob C. Hurewitz of Columbia, Malcolm Kerr of Oxford and UCLA, and George Lenczowski of Berkeley. An earlier and shorter draft was read with particular care and criticized most helpfully by Philip Thayer, Majid Khadduri, Paul M. A. Linebarger, and Thomas Cook of Johns Hopkins University, and Sir Hamilton Gibb of Harvard. Among intellectual influences that decisively affected this book even before a line of it was written are C. Grove Haines, now Director of the Bologna Center of Johns Hopkins University, and Helen Kitchen, now Editor of Africa Report, a former State Department colleague, and editor of two thirds of this book. The former shaped the substance of my graduate education; the latter collaborated in much of the education that followed. Nouri al-Khaledy helped to comb the excellent Princeton Library for Arabic materials, collaborated in some translations, and made astute comments. Nicholas H. MacNeil assisted in checking bibliographic references. Ian C. C. Graham and William W. Taylor of The RAND Corporation's Social Science Department, and David Harrop of the Princeton University Press, completed the editing of the manuscript in a helpful and perceptive way. My wife Betsy enriched six lives by her spirit, intellect, and strength—and in the Middle East and North Africa, by her sense of adventure—while this book ruled much of my existence. It was not only the book, therefore, that she helped make grow. If the book has virtues, none of these individuals and institutions can escape responsibility for them. For the faults that remain, of course, they bear no responsibility whatever. The opinions expressed below, taken as a whole, are mine alone.

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CONTENTS

VU

FOREWORD

The Substance of this Book The Need for Policy-oriented Research Based on Inadequate Data The Question of Method Subjects Omitted The Place of Israel Middle Eastern Geography: A Matter of Convenient Definition

vii ix xi xiii xiv XV

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

PART 1 THE LEGACY OF THE PAST AND THE CLAIMS OF THE PRESENT 1. THE INHERITANCE OF THE ISLAMIC COMMUNITY

The Present Setting: From Revolution to Revolution The Political Community as a Religious Vision The Political Community as a Historical Reality Islam's Supreme Political Achievement The Polarities of Folk Islam: Isolation and Conquest, Acquiescence and Rebellion Ulema and Sultans: Antagonistic Collaboration between Vision and Power Unity through Factionalism [xxi]

3

3 5 5 8 11 15 18

CONTENTS

Saints, Intellectuals, and Soldiers Testing the Limits of the Islamic System Islam as a Common Fate rather than a Common Faith 2. THE CHALLENGE OF THE MODERN AGE TO ISLAM

The Shattering of the Glass The Problems of Reconstruction The Age of Choice PART

19 22 25

25 30 35

η

THE CHANGING STRUCTURE OF SOCIETY 3. KINGS, LANDLORDS, AND THE TRADITIONAL BOURGEOISIE: THE DECLINING ELITE

Prospects for Kings "Feudalism" in the Middle East The Frailty of the Traditional Urban Upper Class 4. THE NEW MIDDLE CLASS AS THE PRINCIPAL REVOLUTIONARY AND STABILIZING FORCE

The Birth of a New Class Conflicts within the New Middle Class The Relationship of the New Middle Class to Other Classes Prospects for the New Middle Class 5. PEASANTS: THE SILENT MAJORITY AT THE THRESHOLD OF POLITICS

A Majority in Misery Fatalism and Its Other Face—Rebellion Toward a Solution of the Peasant's Problems 6. WORKERS: THE GROWING TIDE OF THE UNSKILLED AND UNEMPLOYED

, 41

41 43 45 51

51 60 67 73 „ '*

79 87 97 105

PART III THE RANGE

OF POLITICAL CHOICES

7. AMENDING THE PAST: REFORMIST ISLAM

The Failure of the Reformers of Islam The Successful Reform of the Law of the Moslems The Triumph of Secular Leadership [ xxii ]

119

119 125 129

CONTENTS 8. RESURRECTING THE PAST: NEO-ISLAMIC TOTALITARIANISM

Native Totalitarianism: The Sources of Its Appeal Tactics Program The Fate of a Totalitarian Party The Varieties of Islamic Totalitarianism The Potentialities of Islamic and Post-Islamic Totalitarianism 9. TOWARD A NEW AGE OF CERTAINTY: COMMUNIST TOTALITARIANISM

Islam and Communism The Attractions of Marxism The Attraction of the U.S.S.R. as a Model of Rapid Progress The Attraction of Chinese Communist Models Factors Hampering the Role of Communist Parties in the Middle East: Small Membership Shifting and Unrewarding Communist Strategies The Burden of Soviet Discipline Lack of Internal Cohesion in Communist Parties A Mistaken Communist Image of Middle Eastern Society The Competition of Nationalist Movements The Price of Rivalry Factors Favorable for Communist Activities The Potentials of Communism 10. FROM UNORGANIZED INSECURITY TO ORGANIZED INSECURITY: NATIONALISM

The Meaning of Nationalism Nationalism as a Necessity The Nation as an Accident The Popularity of Nationalism The Limitations of Nationalism 11. TRANSFORMING THE PRESENT: THE QUEST FOR FREEDOM AND AUTHORITY

The Radical Requirements of Democracy Freedom and Authority in Traditional Islam The Search for Democracy in the Middle East The Authoritarian Road to Democracy [ xxiii ]

134

134 140 143 148 150 153 . 156

156 159 162 165 168 170 175 177 178 184 185 186 192 ., 196

196 201 204 207 210 214

214 217 221 223

CONTENTS

The New Authoritarians and the Old Toward Representative Government 12. TRANSFORMING THE PRESENT: SOCIALISM FOR THE FEW, FOR THE MANY, OR FOR THE AGGRANDIZEMENT OF THE STATE?

The Tasks of Socialism in the Middle East The Faces of Socialism

226 229 235

236 239

PART IV INSTRUMENTS OF POLITICAL MODERNIZATION 13. THE ARMY

The Army's Traditional Role From Praetorian Guard to Advance Guard The Army's Special Virtues as a Political Instrument The Size and Composition of the Military Bureaucracies Contrasts in the History of Middle Eastern Armies The Circumstances of Army Intervention Limitations of Army Rule The Army as a Partisan in Conflicts Within the New Middle Class and with Other Classes Making Army Regimes Unnecessary Probable Problems and Trends During the Next Decade 14. POUTICAL PARTIES

Political Parties as the Chief Architects of The New Political Culture The Harnessing of Charisma The Novelties of Voluntary Political Association The Uses and Abuses of Ideology Accountability in One-Party Regimes Morocco and Tunisia: Modernizing Parties in Action Egypt: Learning from Failure Turkey: From the One-Party to the Multi-Party System 15. TRADE UNIONS

Obstacles to Effective Organization The Trade Union under Governmental Control The Trade Union as the Government's Junior Partner [ xxiv ]

251

251 253 257 261 265 270 271 274 275 278 281

282 284 285 287 291 294 304 312 318

318 320 324

CONTENTS

The Trade Union as an Independent Force The Trade Union as Equal Partner of a Political Party The Trade Union as a Sudden Avalanche The Role of Trade Unions in the Political Modernization of the Middle East

326 329 334 335 340

16. THE CIVIL BUREAUCRACY

From Oriental to Modern Bureaucracy Recruiting Bureaucrats: Too Many and Too Few The Changing Status of Bureaucrats The Role of the Bureaucracy in the Modernization of the Middle East

340 343 345 346

PART ν THE COST AND CONSEQUENCES OF MIDDLE EASTERN CHOICES DOMESTICALLY, REGIONALLY, AND INTERNATIONALLY 17. THE PRICE OF POLITICAL STABILITY

Problems of Decision-Making The Economic Cost of Political Stability To Set a Course 18. REGIONAL RIVALRY AND THE PROSPECTS FOR UNITY

Is There a Middle East? Conflicts Within and Around National Frontiers Nationalism vs. National Interests: The Struggle for Arab Unity The Arab-Israeli Conflict 19. THE INTERNATIONAL ORIENTATION OF THE MIDDLE EAST

The Vulnerability of the Area Defending the Middle East Militarily While Losing it Politically The U.S.S.R. Enters Middle Eastern Politics Roots of Neutralism Opportunities and Limitations for Soviet Policy The Relative Contributions of Neutralist and Pro-Western States to the Security of the Middle East Limitations and Opportunities for Western Policy INDEX

351

351 356 361 365

365 367 370 378 388

388 393 399 403 406 409 414 421

[ xxv ]

THE POLITICS OF SOCIAL CHANGE IN THE MIDDLE EAST AND NORTH AFRICA

PART I THE LEGACY OF THE PAST AND THE CLAIMS OF THE PRESENT

per sq/km is shown in color

Population density above 40 people

CHAPTER 1 THE INHERITANCE OF THE ISLAMIC COMMUNITY

The Present Setting: From Revolution to Revolution the region from Morocco to Pakistan—the span of this study—there were only seven independent nations twenty years ago and the world was scarcely interested in them. The United States had diplomatic representatives in only five of the seven countries, the U.S.S.R. in only two. By 1963, eighteen countries in this region, with a total population of about 230,000,000, had become fully sovereign. Their problems filled front pages around the globe. This nationalist revolution, dramatic and pervasive as it is, is only the political symptom of a more profound and yet unfinished social transformation of Asian and African society. This larger transformation involves not merely a change in rulers but a change in what men believe, how men act, and how men relate to each other. To gain the political freedom to run one's own society is no mean achievement. Men who have lost their traditional faith and social structure have little chance of recovering or refashioning themselves or their society as long as foreigners control local political, economic, and intellectual institutions for alien ends. That is one powerful reason why the battle for national independence was everywhere given priority in Asia and Africa, even where the elimination of poverty or ignorance or exploitation was no less obvious a target. The nationalist revolution has put Africans and Asians themselves in charge of the fire that is now melting and transmuting WITHIN

[3]

LEGACY OF THE PAST

the form and substance of their faith and society. Can they put the resulting fragments together in a new form suitable to the modern world and the new expectations of the people? Asians and Africans are entering the modern age centuries later than the West, and hence are vulnerable to the superior power of others. These new nations are intent upon rapidly overcoming their poverty and powerlessness, yet most of them possess fewer resources and skills than those who took the road to modernization before them. More invidious frustrations and more intense conflicts than marked the modernization of the West are therefore likely to dramatize African and Asian politics as this majority of the world at last joins in making the transformation of man's existence a universal quest. It is in the context of this transformation that we explore the political tasks and choices facing the Islamic countries of the Middle East and North Africa. Any study of transformation must begin at the beginning of change. In the case of Islam, there is a special profit to be gained from contrasting the Islamic past and present. Traditional Islam, like modern Islam, was a society almost continually beset by rivalries, assassinations, rebellions, and wars. Yet it survived over large areas as a single political system and always as an interrelated pattern of faith and action for nearly 1300 years. What was the secret of its extraordinary endurance amid almost constant instability? Why is a system that has proved itself so resilient in the past faced by revolution today? An attempt to answer these questions in the first part of this inquiry may help to define with greater precision the character and scope of the forces of change which challenge the Moslems of the Middle East, and so clarify the range of policies that may therefore be relevant. Only by understanding the past will we see why the cost of change (or of avoiding change) runs so high in the Middle East. It is appropriate to begin with the birth of Islam, for its official calendar starts not with the birth of its Prophet Mohammed but with Islam's first political act—the founding of the Community of Believers in A.D. 622.

[4]

I N H E R I T A N C E OF THE I S L A M I C C O M M U N I T Y

The Political Community as a Religious Vision Divine and therefore perfect, perfect and therefore complete, complete and therefore final, final and therefore unalterable— such was the constitution the Prophet Mohammed received for the Moslem community from God in the middle of the seventh century of our era. It was a constitution that did not separate the realm of God from that of Caesar, or the realm of ethics from the realm of law. As detailed in the Koran and the Shari'a—the corpus of Islamic jurisprudence—God's realm was not circumscribed. His word covered with equal authority matters of worship, ritual, politics, economics, and personal relations. By conducting himself in conformity with this established pattern of righteousness, the Moslem could hope to establish a perfect society on earth. The term Islam designates, therefore, not only a religion but also a community and a way of life. For the first time in Arab history, this community transcended the tribe, for it is composed of all who are ready to surrender themselves to the same God.1 Its ruler's supreme purpose is to execute God's revealed law, being himself subject to it. Its learned men exert themselves to understand the law, and advise both ruler and ruled in its meaning. Such is the vision of Islam held by the "ulema"—literally, the "knowers," the scholar-legists of the Islamic code of conduct. Until the nineteenth century, all their books and teachings were based on this view. In the twentieth century, Moslems who think and write nostalgically about the past recall that world. In fact, it never existed. The Political Community as a Historical Reality The conduct of righteous politics proved to be no easier for Moslems than for other peoples. The Islamic attempt began as an inspired response to great needs. Arabia in the seventh century heard prophets mourning the multiplicity and corruptions of 114 MoSIeInS" are those who have surrendered themselves to God, "Islam" their state of surrender.

[5]

LEGACY OF THE PAST

faiths while men tired of the constant warring among tribes in the absence of a clearly transcendent authority. But the Prophet Mohammed alone was inspired to establish a Community of Believers that would permanently overcome moral and political instability in a society organized to serve God. He succeeded in laying the emotional, intellectual, and political foundations for a new social system that was to endure for over a millennium. But it was not quite the community he had in mind. The new community was born in compromise. Mohammed, who had been forced to leave his Meccan tribe in order to find honor as a prophet elsewhere, had initially organized his followers in a brotherhood divorced from all regional and tribal allegiances. The great majority who became Moslems in Mohammed's lifetime and thereafter, however, were not individual converts but families and tribes who made the decision to join the larger community of Islam on the basis of their own customary solidarity. Alongside the demand for the unity of all Believers, there were thus, from the first, these other organized and competing claims for loyalty. The new community of Islam never acquired institutions that could permanently resolve such conflicts of loyalty and the constant battle for power which this multiplicity of allegiances entailed. Of the four caliphs who succeeded Mohammed, only the first died a natural death. In retrospect, orthodox Moslems remember them as the four pious caliphs. For they were succeeded by the Umayyad branch of the Prophet's family, which reasserted its ancient political pre-eminence in Mecca to become the first dynasty in Islam. Within a hundred years after the Prophet's death, the Umayyad dynasty expanded Islam into an area reaching from France to India—larger than the Roman Empire at its zenith—but at the cost of turning the new Community of Believers into an Arab Empire. "For many centuries after the Muslim conquest, the vast majority of the Caliph's subjects were not Sunni [Islamic orthodox], and hated Sunnism as the emblem of an oppressive regime and of a foreign privileged ruling class of Arabs."2 2 Bernard Lewis, "The Islamic Guilds," Economic Review, November 1937, p. 22.

[6]

I N H E R I T A N C E OF THE I S L A M I C C O M M U N I T Y

The Umayyad dynasty was overthrown toward the beginning of the second Islamic century by the Abbasids, another branch of the Prophet's family, who led a movement to refashion the Arab Empire into a Moslem Empire. The dream of a Community of Believers united to carry out God's laws never ceased to inspire Moslems and to stimulate action to turn this vision into a reality. But all such efforts, including that of the Abbasids, produced new rivalries and discontents, splintering Islam in the very task of creating unity. Perhaps only a community that experienced so much disunity and lawlessness would hold on so dearly for so long to the ideal of a Community of Believers joined under divine law. Certainly the environment of the Middle East and North Africa itself was inhospitable to movements for unity. This region of the world has never resembled the neat cluster of well-articulated colored blocks that map makers draw. Most of the population lives in a scattering of large and small oases, far separated from each other by high, rugged mountains and broad deserts. However absolute was the Caliph in Baghdad or Constantinople, his powers of supervision and execution diminished almost geometrically with the distance from the capital. The thin coastal oasis of Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia was in its entire Islamic history of 1250 years united with the Arab Empire to the east for only about 100 years; only twice, for about 120 years altogether, was it united within a single North African empire. Egypt, mostly desert but containing one of the most reliable sources of water, was usually strong enough to assert its autonomous political existence within any Islamic Empire. Segmented geographical isolation and sharp competition for scarce resources helped to perpetuate that spirit of separatism and rivalry which, in most conflicts, elevated the kinship of common blood above the kinship of common faith. Traditional Islam did not succeed in developing sufficient spiritual and material resources to alter this environment. It could not establish institutions above the kinship group that could assure the continuance of any particular state, provide for the equal application of authority in all its parts, or ease the peaceful transfer of power. Traditional Islam gave an appearance of continuity and stabil[7]

L E G A C Y OF T H E PAST

ity that was deceiving. For 600 years, it is true, a single family supplied all the Sultans for the Ottoman Empire, the largest and most enduring Islamic state. In fact, however, power in the Ottoman Empire was usually shared among various autonomous groups and rulers. Between the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, for example, one finds Egypt pursuing its customary independent course, and Iraq supporting its own Mamluk dynasty (from 1749 to 1831). Moreover, Mamluk rule did not extend to Mosul, which was governed separately for over a century by the Jalili family. Meanwhile, the Azm family ruled in Damascus; other families held Jerusalem; and the Aleppo region was so torn with strife, civil wars, and depredations that between 1765 and 1785 hundreds of villages disappeared. It would be "monotonous and repetitious," writes one historian, "to describe each one of these petty lords ruling autonomously within the Ottoman Empire and to relate the incidents of his rise to power and his local tyrannies."3 Islam's Supreme Political Achievement Islam could scarcely have survived for so long as a political system and as a contributing civilization, however, if its longevity had depended only on the uncertainties of petty tyranny. Its survival is all the more remarkable in view of the many threats from outside. Over three hundred years ago, the Islamic world was already almost encircled by the superior strength and enterprise of Western sailors and soldiers and Russian Cossacks. "The noose was round the victim's neck," writes Arnold Toynbee, "and, what was more, he had by then already been foiled in divers attempts to break out of the toils. This failure was a signal one in view of his possession of the interior lines . . . and he was now inexorably condemned to die by strangulation whenever an alien executioner might choose to draw the fatal bow-string tight. . . . 3 Sydney N. Fisher, The Middle East, A History, New York, 1959, p. 254. This particular period of regional dissidence in the Ottoman Empire differs from other such periods only in the inability of the Sultans to oust the disloyal. Even in earlier days, the defeat of rebellious local leaders merely produced temporary acquiescence.

[8]

I N H E R I T A N C E OF THE I S L A M I C C O M M U N I T Y

"Why had both the West and Russia been so slow in taking the offensive against an hereditary enemy at their gates? And why, after they had at last tasted blood, had they not managed to devour more than the extremities of this Tityos' carcase? In a list of reasons for the Islamic World's rather surprising reprieve we may include the initial self-confidence with which the Muslims had been inspired by the memory of extraordinary previous achievements; the subsequent tactical victories that masked their strategical defeat in their attempts to break out of the toils of Western and Russian encirclement; the long-lasting effect of these impressive Muslim successes in inducing Westerners to take the Muslims at their own valuation; the leading Modern Western peoples' loss of interest in the Mediterranean for some three hundred years after their conquest of the ocean towards the close of the fifteenth century; and the mutual frustration of the rival competitors for the spoils of the Islamic World after the Western Powers and Russia had at last become aware that the once formidable titan now lay at their mercy."4 These are valid points, but it would be misleading to write an exposition of Islamic society merely as the tale of divorce between vision and power, and to accredit its long endurance to an accident of good fortune. This is not the whole truth any more than is the argument that Islam was one perfect moment in history foiled, according to one's lights, by secular lusts of the later Umayyad or Abbasid dynasties, the destruction wreaked by invading Turkic and Mongol tribes, the weakness and errors of later Ottomans, or the encroachments of the imperialist West. To understand the traditional Islamic system, we must see it in its entirety, not merely as a turbulent sequence of events or as a compendium of its most glorious or desperate moments. Each of the main participants in the Islamic system—sultan, scholar-legist, saint, soldier, tribesman, villager, intellectual, and devotee of religious brotherhoods—called himself "Moslem." In one sense, this was a valid identification. Each lived under conditions created by the presence of the others; all roles were entwined in a single pattern of action. Yet, in another sense, this 4

Arnold Toynbee, A Study of History, London, 1954, Vol. vui, pp. 219-222.

[9]

LEGACY OF THE PAST

identification was misleading. Far more than the medieval European or the traditional Japanese, every Moslem also retained his spiritual, political, and social autonomy. Despite its original ideal, Islam had many faces, for what was demanded of each Moslem in practice was not theological or political conformity. The decisive criterion of membership in the Community was acquiescence in the largely unwritten code which defined the rules of social collaboration and conflict.5 The Moslem Community hoped for, but rarely ever insisted on, other proofs that an individual was a Believer. Traditional Islam survived for more than a millennium in a harsh and uncertain environment because it was capable of converting constant tension and conflict into a force for constant political renewal and social survival. This extraordinary political and social system of action—mobile in all its parts yet static as a whole—is rare in human annals for its endurance. This resilient system has been one of traditional Islam's greatest, yet least appreciated, achievements. The Islamic system's ability to convert tensions into balances deserves closer examination, both for the sake of developing a political theory that reflects the actual practice of the traditional Islamic system and for the sake of understanding why such a system could not continue to function in the modern age.6

5 "There would seem to be no word in Arabic, or indeed in any Islamic language, meaning 'orthodox,'" writes Wilfred Cantwell Smith in Islam in Modern History, Princeton, 1957, p. 20. "The word usually translated 'orthodox,' sunni, actually means rather 'orthoprax,' if we may use the term. A good Muslim is not one whose belief conforms to a given pattern, whose commitment may be expressed in intellectual terms that are congruent with an accepted statement (as in the case generally of Protestant Christianity), but one whose commitment may be expressed in practical terms that conform to an accepted code." This statement aptly defines the "good Moslem." We have somewhat expanded this formulation to make room for all Moslems within the pale, whether good or bad. Heretic Moslems are those who fashioned a similar but separate system of action. 6 Chapter 2 explores the reasons for the disintegration of this traditional system. For a discussion of traditional Islamic political theory based on ideal Moslem prescription, see Erwin I. J. Rosenthal, Political Thought in Medieval Islam, Cambridge, 1958.

[10]

I N H E R I T A N C E OF T H E I S L A M I C C O M M U N I T Y

The Polarities of Folk Islam: Isolation and Conquest, Acquiescence and Rebellion Most Moslems have lived and died in the small, closed kinship group of the family and tribe. Whatever the original motive for conversion to Mam—whether piety, fear, profit, or politics—the folk community7 could find in the Islamic way of life a broader, more profound understanding of ultimate and secular imperatives, and a larger scope for political and social mobility than it had usually possessed before. Still, its relationship to the Islam of the caliphs or scholarlegists remained uneasy. Folk Islam could appreciate caliphs as enforcers of the larger code of revelation and conduct, and of peace among settled and nomadic tribes. There were advantages in the rule of a sacred stranger who could bring peace and justice, but a stranger by his very existence did not fit into the consensus of kin, and therefore was bound to inspire fear and suspicion no less than awe and respect. Even the kinship group's own leaders could not command or legislate in defiance of the existing tribal consensus.8 A secular-minded sultan who ruled by exploiting rivalries and represented neither kin nor the larger code was an obvious menace. The early splintering of the new Community of Believers renewed the threat of unprincipled external authority to the integrity of the kinship group. As a result, a considerable number of families, villages, and tribes sought parochial isolation in mountain strongholds or desert vastness. For most, however, there was little security. The very existence of a multitude of closed kinship groups in an environment of great scarcity, of unstable centralized power, and the absence of any intervening, stable, powerful property-owning class were permanent incitements to tribal imperialism. Islam provided a new cause or rationalization for conquest. The splintering of Islam allowed all manner of men to assert the resuscitation of Islam as their justifiT "Folk" Islam in this book refers to the traditional way of life and the beliefs of the common people, regardless of whether they lived in city, village, or desert. e Emile Tyan, Institutions du Droit Public Musulman, Vol. I, Le Califat, Paris, 1954, p. 87.

[H]

L E G A C Y OF T H E PAST

cation for building their own empires, without in fact heeding their moral ties with all Believers. One of the greatest Arab sociologists and historians, Ibn Khaldun (1332-1406), has analyzed the doom of continuous rise and decline of all such caliphates, sultanates, and kingships in a fashion applicable to the entire period of traditional Islam, including its last remnants in contemporary Saudi Arabia and Yemen.9 When a tribe found itself blessed with more asabiyah (loyalty, courage, and will based on strong group solidarity) than any neighboring tribe, it would move out to conquer. Con­ quest by force or the threat of force was the only way in which a state could be formed. A tribe was organized by lines and obliga­ tions of blood. In its patriarchal egalitarianism, it required no institutions of state. A state involved control over men with whom one had no automatic ties of kinship. Hence to form a state meant to form an empire, and thus create a new and uncertain pattern of dominance and submission. Each conquered tribe sought to the utmost to protect its integrity for the sake of survival and for future struggles for predominance. The conqueror himself, according to Ibn Khaldun, was secure in his rule because he had defeated others and had enlarged the respect of his tribe by virtue of his victory and the distribution of booty. The son who succeeded him could not claim the respect due to a victor; he usually demonstrated his prowess by building monuments and encouraging luxury, and secured his power by finding allies in many parts of his empire. Since his own tribe was no longer fit for war, yet being closest to him was most prone to produce rivals, the king began to rely increasingly on merce­ naries. As a result, the asabiyah that united him with his tribe weakened. The grandson, having to his credit neither conquest nor construction, became the tool of the mercenary army, the only local group with force at its command, or else fell prey to conquest by a tribe with a stronger asabiyah. Whether in three generations, a dozen generations, or a single 9 Ibn Khaldun, The Muqaddimah, An Introduction to History, New York, 1958, translated from the Arabic by Franz Rosenthal, esp. Vol. I, pp. 252-286, 305-307, 311-447; Vol. π, pp. 103-155. (Vol. I, pp. 353-355, summarizes his thesis.)

[12]

I N H E R I T A N C E OF THE I S L A M I C C O M M U N I T Y

one, this schema covers the history of all parts of the Islamic world. Wisdom, energy, imagination, and shrewdness have sometimes allowed a particular leader to delay the doom spelled out by Ibn Khaldun. There were clear-cut limits, however. The sources of wealth—including booty, tribute, taxes, trade, and harvests—were circumscribed and uncertain, and the ruler sought to marshal them for the uses of his dynasty. In the most illustrious phases of Islamic history, schools, hospitals, mosques, as well as writing and art, experienced the ruler's patronage, as did, in the darkest periods, the military commander, the torturer, and the executioner. Solicitude for the material welfare of his subjects as a whole, however, was required neither by the Shari'a nor by sultanic tradition. Defense against the political power of unbelievers, the administration of the Islamic code of justice, and enforcement of public morality were the only duties prescribed for the ruler by the Shari'a and even the fulfillment of these obligations often suffered due to weakness, intra-Moslem rivalries, and expediency. The bureaucracy was appointed to function only as an extension of the sultan's person. The soldiery were, while he remained strong enough to control them, the sultan's personal property or personal henchmen, without permanent links to state or society. For most of his subjects, the sultan's power was thus absolute but almost irrelevant. The caliph Ma'mun (813-833), though himself one of the most liberal and philosophical of rulers, is quoted as saying: "The best life has he who has an ample house, a beautiful wife, and sufficient means, who does not know us and whom we do not know."10 Yet this is not the full story of rise, conflict, decay, and renewal in Islam. Seldom was the struggle between kinship group and supra-tribal authority merely political. Even in its political disunity, Islam remained a transcending bond among kinship groups—though not in the way that had originally been intended 10 Cited by G. E. von Grunebaum, Islam, Essays in the Nature and Growth of a Cultural Tradition, The American Anthropological Association, Vol. 57, No. 2, Part 2, Memoir No. 81, April 1955, p. 26. "It should perhaps be noted," Grunebaum adds (p. 136), "that despite theoretical differences and actual hostilities between Sunnite and Shi'ite governments, their administrative practices would seem to have been more or less the same."

[13]

LEGACY OF T H E PAST

—by fostering an undivided political loyalty to Mohammed's caliphs. Instead, by placing all loyalties and relationships under the authority of one God, Islam reinforced a more ancient test of political legitimacy—the ruler's ability to protect the moral and physical integrity of the Middle East's most immediate and enduring community, the kinship group. Even before the coming of Islam, the kinship groups of the Middle East had long acted on the implicit assumption that faith and community constituted a single web. This web was composed exclusively of personal relationships—whether to neighbor, nature, or spirits. Any ruler, whether imposed lord or the kinship's own victorious chieftain, could justify his status only by his success in his personal relationships, whether with his own group or with ultimate powers, including God. He might be blamed for the drought no less than the taxes. After the coming of Islam, kinship groups continued to grant their full loyalty only in personal relationships, now reinforced by God's final standard for judging such relationships. More than ever before rebellion seemed to be a duty whenever the ruler, by either impiety or injustice, morally isolated himself from the community. In seeking to set the world in tune again with the moral laws of the universe, the kinship groups often linked themselves with a movement equally devoted to personal relationships—the religious brotherhoods. While many scholar-legists, as guardians and interpreters of orthodox Islam, became defenders of caliphal and sultanic authority, large numbers of Moslems bound themselves to each other in brotherhoods dedicated to personal unity with God and with ritual brothers. These brotherhoods took various forms.11 Some were craft and trade guilds dedicated to the autonomous regulation of the spiritual, economic, and, whenever possible, political welfare of their members. Some fraternal organizations, by their devotion to contemplation, 11 Bernard Lewis, "The Islamic Guilds," The Economic Review, November 1937, pp. 23-37; also Hans Joachim Kissling, "The Sociological and Educational Role of the Dervish Orders in the Ottoman Empire," in G. E. von Grunebaum, editor, Studies in Islamic Cultural History, The American Anthropologist, Vol. 56, No. 2, Part 2, April 1954, pp. 23-35; Franz Taeschner, "Futuwwa, eine gemeinschaftsbildende Idee im mittelalterlichen Orient und ihre verschiedenen Erscheinungsformen," Schweizerisches Archiv fiir Volkskunde, Vol. 52, 1956, pp. 122-158.

[14]

I N H E R I T A N C E OF THE I S L A M I C C O M M U N I T Y

ecstatic exercises, or mutual assistance, helped to make acquiescence to superior power bearable. Others were openly or covertly organized as fighters for "virtue." Between the ninth and the twelfth century, several brotherhoods took the form of Isma'ili heresies which by their religio-political rebellions kept the Islamic realm in constant turmoil, and succeeded in establishing several major rival centers of power. The largest and most enduring of them, the Fatimid caliphate in Egypt (971 to 1173), was at least the equal in power and prosperity of the orthodox caliphate of Baghdad.12 Like conquests inspired by tribal asabiyah, rebellions inspired by religio-political mysticism served not only to destroy existing authority in Islam, but also continually to renovate it. All successful rebellions produced states. All states, in turn, inspired new rebellions. The rebellious and state-forming activities of the religious brotherhoods continued to the nineteenth century, when the Mahdi Mohammed Ahmad created a state in the Sudan and the Sanusi a state in Cyrenaica. Ulema and Sultans: Antagonistic Collaboration between Vision and Power In the first two centuries of Islam, the ulema had been courageous and creative in trying to avoid a divorce between law, morality, and politics by expanding and revising the unalterable constitution God had revealed to the community.13 An empire needed governing, and on this subject the Koran was silent, inadequate, or too restrictive in many fields. By relying as guides first on the sayings and actions of the Prophet, then of his Companions, and finally on the invention of such sayings and actions14 and on the actual customary law of the conquered areas, the ulema greatly expanded the available corpus of law. So "Bernard Lewis, The Origins of Isma'ilism, Cambridge, 1940; also his article, "Some Observations on the Significance of Heresy in the History of Islam," Studia Islamica, Vol. I, pp. 43-63. 18 See Joseph Schacht, The Origins of Muhammadan Jurisprudence, Oxford, 1950. For this and the later period, see also Majid Khadduri and Herbert J. Liebesny, editors, Law in the Middle East, Vol. 1: Origins and Development of Islamic Law, Washington, Middle East Institute, 1955. "Including the invented saying of Mohammed, "Whatever is good, I said it," and his invented reassurance that "My community will not agree on error."

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L E G A C Y OF T H E PAST

powerful had been the impact of the original revelation, however, that the four schools of Islamic jurisprudence which emerged during the first 200 years differed relatively little in spirit or detail. Yet this pious creativity and invention became dangerous as the Islamic Empire splintered and the caliph became the captive of his mercenary troops. To the secular interests of rival sultans and armies, the ulema coud not counterpose the institutional power of any priestly hierarchy or established church. To save the spirit of the law, the ulema safeguarded its letter. By the tenth century, the ulema closed the "gate to individual interpretation" of the Shari'a. A living community, however, could scarcely abide by such a decision. The rulers continued, as they had almost from the first, to develop administrative law (encompassing the entire realm of politics and government) as well as criminal, civil, and commercial law apart from Shari'a law. The people, in turn, frequently sought to avoid the law courts of sultans and ulema by resorting to private vengeance or the arbitration of tribal chiefs and saintly men. If nothing else would help, they attempted to secure justice through nepotism, bribery, personal influence, and casuistry, or to restore it through rebellion. In such a sundering of the values and activities of the various components of Islamic society lay the seeds of destruction. We have already explored the creative defenses of folk Islam against such moral and political division. In their search for certainty in this highly uncertain environment, sultans and ulema discovered that, however much at odds their final aims, they also needed each other. The sultans recognized that the rule of naked force is the least secure of all authority. They required an ideological justification for their power consonant with the pre-Islamic and Islamic folk insistence upon the unity of politics and religion, even though they refused to accept the sharing of sovereignty implicit in this folk tradition. The ulema also could not countenance the unorthodox religio-political concepts championed by folk Islam. The ulema became the ideologists of the state, for they could not deny legitimacy to the actualities of Islamic history lest they imply that the Community of Believers had fallen away from the sacred law, [16]

I N H E R I T A N C E OF THE I S L A M I C C O M M U N I T Y

and hence that the Community's judicial and religious activities were void.15 "The concessions made by us are not spontaneous," said Abu Hamid al-Ghazzali, the greatest of medieval Moslem theologians, "but necessity makes lawful what is forbidden. . . . We should like to ask: which is to be preferred, anarchy and the stoppage of social life for lack of a properly constituted author­ ity, or acknowledgment of the existing power, whatever it be? Of these two alternatives the jurist cannot but choose the latter." 18 In this way, the doctrine of the necessary unity of faith and politics, which justified rebellion to folk Islam, also became the justifica­ tion employed by the ulema for demanding obedience to kings. Though it would appear an unrewarding division of labor for the ulema to uphold one kind of norm while the powerful con­ formed to a different kind of practice, the role of the ulema was by no means without profit to the latter. For the role and doc­ trines of the ulema reflected and served well certain fundamental social interests. The minority of ulema who counted politically— the muftis appointed by the sultan to issue formal interpretations of the Shari'a, the kadis who not only pronounced legal judgment but usually also supervised urban or provincial administration, and the ulema who acted as advisers to the sultans—almost in­ variably came from the most prominent families of the town or 17 empire. Almost all education was in their hands; almost all offi­ cials were educated by them. In the Ottoman Empire, their occu­ pations became increasingly, though not exclusively, hereditary, like most other crafts. They also became tax-exempt. Thus "we can picture the bureaucrat" in the Middle East, no less than in 16 H. A. R. Gibb and Harold Bowen, Islamic Society and the West, Vol. I, Part i, p. 26. Part I and π, London, 1950 and 1955, have provided indispensable materials for the present analysis. 16 In Iqtisad Fi al-I'tiqad, cited by I. Goldziher, Vorlesungen iiber den Islam, Vol. n, Heidelberg, 1929, p. 93. 17 See Claude Cahen, "Zur Geschichte der stadtischen Gesellschaft im islamischen Orient des Mittelalters," Saeculum, Vol. 9, 1958, No. 1, p. 67. An audit of "Listes chronologiques des grands cadis de l'Egypte sous les Mamlouks, etablies, annotees et documentees," by Kamal S. Salibi in Revue des Etudes lslamiques, Vol. 25, 1957, shows that a majority (or 76) of the cadis between 1267 and 1517 were related to each other or to officials of similar rank in other important towns. Since power created wealth in traditional Islamic society more often than wealth created power-—and since power was unstable—this relationship between ulema and prominent families does not imply that the same families remained dominant. Rather, this type of relationship pre­ dominated even though the fortunes of specific families waned.

[17]

LEGACY OF THE PAST

China, "as a scholar-gentleman, with his roots in society, sensitive to the varied complexities of individual social and family situations, and adapting the law and his own behavior to fit them, accommodating himself to state power,. . . but checking it simply by being what he was."18 The ulema's role in the service of the sultan was not without benefit to the rest of the community, for their ideology had a double-edged character. By supporting all existing authority— that of the successful usurper no less than the dynastic heir—the ulema were able to safeguard not only their own position, but also prevent both ruler and community from quite forgetting the ideal code of conduct. By constantly reiterating that code, they maintained an implicit criticism of actual authority. By occupying many of the subsidiary positions of power, these ulema were able to modify the exercise of sultanic authority. They could filter or entangle royal commands through a web entwining the social, economic, and legal interests represented or mediated by the ulema.19 Unity through Factionalism Another autonomous set of tensions and balances existed in Islam to bind the entire society through conflict no less than through collaboration. Although kinship was Islam's most solid and enduring tie, relatives and kindred families and tribes often fought each other until menaced by a common enemy.20 Almost all villages, tribes, and families in the Middle East were, and often still are, divided into rival factions. These factions, cutting across class and status lines, acted as rival networks for marshal18 Confucianism in Action, edited by David S. Nivison and Arthur F. Wright, Stanford, 1959, p. 17. The introduction and essays in this book, first called to my attention by Professor Paul M. A. Linebarger, and Max Gluckman's Custom and Conflict in Africa, Oxford, 1955, suggested rewarding perspectives for this analysis of Islamic society. 10 A number of the more pious ulema refused to serve the government in any capacity. Their role in the Islamic system is discussed in a later section of this same chapter. 20 Tribal blood ties were not immutable. Defeated, decimated, or dependent tribes were sometimes given the option of becoming clients of other tribes, and ultimately merging with them. Individuals were sometimes also given this privilege.

[18]

INHERITANCE OF THE ISLAMIC COMMUNITY

ling influence and protection, and for undermining the influence of others. They were, in a sense, the secular equivalent of the religious brotherhoods, providing for collaboration among individuals unrelated by blood. The resulting alliances were often fickle and hence there was much political instability, but the very system that produced conflict also produced means for new collaborative combinations. Even when tribes were pacified or their chiefs granted bribes, individuals readily continued to conspire for power. In a society divided by lines of blood, factionalism provided an important solvent, freeing men for collaboration regardless of kinship ties. Saints, Intellectuals, and Soldiers Testing the Limits of the Islamic System There were three groups whose members were by their very nature not firmly tied to the network of balanced tensions that in actuality constituted Islam. Since it assumed that God's final truth had been fully revealed, the Islamic community found it difficult to make room for intellectuals bent on a search for truth. The recruitment of standing mercenary or slave armies to protect sultans against their Islamic rivals or Islamic subjects created elements of preponderant force difficult to match elsewhere in Islamic society. (Originally, the entire Islamic community had been expected to supply armed men for wars that were holy because they were exclusively directed against non-Moslems.) Although the continual generation of saintly men must surely have been desired by the prophet of Islam's original vision, his successors often found saints difficult to bear. By their less fettered existence all three—intellectuals, saints, and soldiers—often clearly revealed and challenged the limits of the Islamic system. During most of Islam's history, the saints and soldiers who raised Islam's spirit and power seemed also to be the principal threats to the survival of the system. The saints, by their extreme, sometimes even heretical piety, endangered the system of balanced tensions that in fact held the Moslem community together; the soldiers threatened it by their exceedingly secular and unilateral concern for power. The pious and the men of [19]

L E G A C Y OF T H E PAST

arms helped, as we shall see, to bring about the decay of the traditional Islamic system. It was the intellectuals, however, who ultimately succeeded in destroying it. Throughout Islamic history, some of the most pious Moslems refused to accept public office. They did not see how justice could triumph when those who knew the Shari'a attempted to reconcile it with their loyalty to sultan, family, and faction. Sometimes such saintly ulema or mystics were imprisoned or killed for their conscientious objection. When they publicly asserted the supremacy of absolute truth or the absolute good, they threatened the compromise by which the Islamic community lived. The military found it easier than any other group in Islam to make its views prevail. It often had the strength to master its master; it made and unmade sultans. Because the army was usually recruited among slaves or mercenaries, and hence alien to the population among whom it was stationed, the soldiery commonly did not hesitate to extort a high price for its presence. It ravaged and wasted the community's resources in almost perennial warfare among Islamic military commanders. By possessing a preponderant power that could only imperfectly and infrequently be checked by other elements of the Islamic system, the military made it more difficult for the balanced tensions of Islam to remain in creative and renovating motion. By its overbearing weight, the army gradually made the Islamic system more static. In this way, and by its pre-emptive sapping of the region's material resources, it helped to bring about the decay of Islam. That decay was slowed, however, by the fact that even this most powerful and detached force was vulnerable to the operations of the Islamic pattern of action. The army might have assured its supremacy had it been able to convert itself into a stable, exclusive military caste. But it could not muster the strength, either through brute force or institutional transformation, entirely to put an end to social and political mobility in Islam. The army's own ranks frequently splintered, reflecting personal, factional, tribal, and regional conflicts.21 Army regimes at times succumbed to the attacks of rival armies organized by other au21 In Algiers, between 1671 and 1818, for example, 14 of the 30 rulers rose tp power as a result of a military mutiny and the assassination of their

[20]

I N H E R I T A N C E OF THE ISLAMIC COMMUNITY

tonomous groups in the realm—the tribes and the religious brotherhoods. In addition, the army could be infiltrated. The Ottoman army had at first been composed of kidnapped or recruited Christian children converted into Moslems and bound to service as the Sultan's personal property. By the seventeenth century, this Janissary army became essentially a guild that, like other crafts, had its particular rituals and saints and gained its membership through inheritance or co-option. But an army that had entirely adapted its outlook and organization, whether in a spirit of exploitation or integration, to the style of the Islamic system was unprepared for an enemy whose strength was derived from an entirely different style of life. Most Middle Eastern armies were easily defeated by modern Western imperialists. A few Moslem rulers, among them the rulers of the Ottoman Empire, sought refuge in copying their enemies' modern weaponry and methods of training. They discovered too late that these novel methods depended for their effectiveness upon the development of new men and relationships, and that they had therefore embarked on a course that would undermine the very system they sought to save. The intellectuals held the most precarious position in traditional Islam. The educated man who accepted life as it was had ample opportunity to serve the system as bureaucrat or one of the ulema. But the independent intellectual, searching for truth rather than believing it to have been already revealed with finality, was rare. The essential spirit of Islamic civilization, reinforced by rote learning and political tyranny, discouraged their growth. Philosophers who expressed their novel ideas and interpretations in deliberately esoteric style survived, but, like Avicenna (Ibn Sina) and Averroes (Ibn Rushd), at the price of being almost unread by his own community. Philosophers who spoke plainly often suffered physical harm; some, like Suhrawardi (d. 1191) were executed. Certainly, the ulema and sultans were right in believing that granting freedom to individual reason would jeopardize all other predecessor. See Charles-Andre' Julien, Historie de I'Afrique du Nord, Vol. n, Paris, 1952, p. 292.

[21]

LEGACY OF THE PAST

established Islamic relationships. It was, indeed, the emergence of a significant number of individuals claiming freedom for themselves in thought, technology, politics, and society that ushered in the modern age in the Middle East and the destruction of the traditional Islamic system of action. Islam as a Common Fate rather than a Common Faith Traditional Islam bound orthodox and heretic, scholastic and mystic, ruler and people in a single connected system of roles, values, orientations, and action. The combinations possible within that system were varied and unstable, but the system itself left play for all these uncertainties within rigidly defined patterns. It was a system in constant motion, like a prayer wheel, yet always anchored in the same place. Islam could provide all participants with a universal language of terms and symbols, just as the language of nationalism and social welfare has become the common tongue of Asian and European, capitalist and communist, today. This common language reflected, however, not so much a common faith as a common fate. It was the language of all who accepted, exploited, enjoyed, justified, or rebelled against the limits within with life had to be lived. Whatever one's attitude, none could escape the terms of the encounter.22 To describe Islam in this fashion, however, is to pay a price. In order to clarify the interaction of groups, interests, and beliefs, and show how opposing poles were bound in tension to each other, we have been indifferent to the historical direction and variegated complexion which Islamic society has taken in different periods, to its religious depth, and to the rich flowering of civilization which it produced. The neglect of that cultural unfolding is an injustice that cannot be remedied here, for our concern with the Islamic past is only with the problems it poses for a changing present—the focus of this book. Even so, the historical direction of the Islamic community that led to the present must be briefly indicated. 22 A fuller and systematically conceptualized analysis of the traditional Islamic system of action is being prepared by the author under the auspices of Princeton University's Center of International Studies.

[22]

I N H E R I T A N C E OF T H E I S L A M I C C O M M U N I T Y

Long before the renaissance of Western Europe, Islam showed great flashes of creativity, critical reason, and vigor. Between the ninth and thirteenth century, one may at timesfindMoslem rulers encouraging the translation and discussion of Greek philosophy. A number of philosophers and historians wrote of themselves as individual human beings and analyzed the actual process of their society. Literature and science showed remarkable accomplishments. Merchants, for a time, plied a cosmopolitan trade unhindered by Islamic rules against banking. Isma'ili heretics were accused of teaching that laws were merely enacted in order to hold down the masses and to maintain the worldly interests of those who rule.23 Farm workers turned religion into an ideological weapon against landlords. In what is probably one of the first examples of the use of the sit-down strike (given the Moslem posture of prayer), a landowner complained in the late ninth century that the fifty prayers a day ordered by a heretical Karmatian preacher interfered with the work of his laborers.24 Revolutions of laborers, artisans, and peasants continued into the eleventh century. Yet by the end of the thirteenth century, Islam had remained resilient enough to defeat the Christian Crusaders, and attractive enough to convert the Turkish invaders into Moslems. Unlike Western Europe, however, there was to be no renaissance or reformation. Islam continued to give birth to new empires, including by the sixteenth century the Ottoman Empire, the largest and most enduring among them, but the tug of war among the same forces continued, and the cast of characters did not change. The moral inspiration of Islam was never transformed into institutional power sufficient to sustain political authority permanently, yet also to limit its sway. The interplay of opposing interests among autonomous groupings in Islam never entered a lawful and public arena in which conflicts might find more lasting reconciliation. Instead, the Islamic system's characteristic mechanism for constant renewal began to warp not long after the establishment of a M

Ibn Hazm, quoted by Lewis, The Origins of Isma'ilism, p. 93. Tabari, quoted by Lewis, ibid., p. 92. The Karmatians preached the sharing of all property, but may have cared little about praying. Their sect won followers in large parts of Iraq, Syria, and Arabia between the ninth and eleventh centuries.

[23]

L E G A C Y OF THE PAST

the Ottoman Empire, and sooner or later in other Moslem states. In an area of scarce resources, the predominance of the military had been achieved at the expense of merchant and peasant. That imbalance was reinforced and became petrified as Islamic military and commercial expansion was foiled by Europe's growing power and greater trade with America and India, and the army could only strengthen itself by exploiting its own rulers and people. The continued reiteration of the orthodox vision in the face of a corrupted reality finally discouraged creativity. It became impossible to use an orthodox vocabulary to speak clearly and honestly on current issues without hypocrisy or creating illusions. The persisting superiority of secular authority; the ever more characteristic ties of blood between ulema, who constituted the community's principal intellectual and moral leadership, and the politically and economically prominent families; and the lack of resources for altering a style of life based on perennial scarcity encouraged a spirit of acquiescence. Moslems became convinced that a man's heart mattered more than his behavior, eternity more than history. Even folk Islam turned its discontent inward and sought a better world through mysticism or dissipated its frustrations through politically innocent exercises akin to those of the holy-rollers of American Protestantism. Its occasional rebellions confined themselves to protests against sultans who violated vested interests or established customs. The various Islamic brotherhoods seldom raised any longer the larger issues of social justice and morality. As a result, the new emphasis on acquiescence strengthened Islam's endurance even while the checks and balances and the vitality of the Islamic system were deteriorating. Islamic society thus lingered basically unchanged until the nineteenth century, and was therefore especially unprepared to meet the challenges of the modern age. Foreign powers were able to gain control of the Islamic world before it could regain its own vigor and sense of direction.

[24]

CHAPTER 2 THE CHALLENGE OF THE MODERN AGE TO ISLAM

*8 8* The Shattering of the Glass in the Middle East seem to repeat the past. The newspapers are filled with sudden deaths of Middle Eastern regimes and alliances, with tales of rivalries and rebellions. Yet the issues and the context in which they are fought are entirely new. The modern age has brought about a dying more important than the death of kings; it has also introduced a greater chance to be creative and a greater need to make choices than has confronted any previous generation of Moslems. The stakes are greater, too, because there are more Moslems alive today than at any time in Islam's preceding history. Today's Middle Eastern revolution is not merely a revolution of rulers or rising expectations. The cumulative growth of ideas, production, and power generated outside the Islamic system has penetrated that system and is tearing apart its repetitive pattern of balanced tensions. A system connecting man, God, and society is falling apart, and the new forces are still too far out of balance, sometimes even out of touch, with the old and with each other to constitute a stable and resilient new pattern. Many vital elements of Islam are likely to persist for centuries to come, but they will need to be related to each other in new ways. The traditional system of which they once formed a part cannot be recovered, for important segments are already missing, and the rest have therefore lost their essential links, and thus their relevance and effectiveness. The head of the Islamic community, the caliph, no longer EVENTS

[25]

L E G A C Y OF T H E PAST

exists. Protests from other Moslem communities did not deter the Turks in 1924 from abolishing his office. Conferences among Moslems in Cairo and Mecca in 1926 and in Jerusalem in 1931 did not succeed in reviving him. The Caliphate has ceased to be even an issue in Moslem politics. The Islamic empire is also dead. The demise of its last incarnation, the Ottoman Empire, is mourned neither by Turks nor Arabs. No Islamic bloc of nations has since emerged, either in the U.N. or outside, nor are there any significant forces now working in that direction. The Islamic World Congress, a non-governmental body founded in Karachi in 1949, has suffered from lack of effectiveness since its very beginning as a result of the patent efforts, first of Pakistan and later of Egypt, to control its operations and policies for national ends, and for a time, from its exploitation by neo-Islamic totalitarian groups for prestige and funds. A similar Congress organized by Saudi Arabia in May 1962, which instituted an Islamic League, was intended primarily to counter Egyptian and socialist influences in the Islamic world. Pan-Islam, a mere specter when Sultan Abd al-Hamid unsuccessfully invoked it during the last quarter of the nineteenth century for the political purpose of stemming secularism and disunity in his Empire, no longer comprises a living community.1 The ulema are no longer the guardians of the core of the community's law, or the only educated interpreters of its tradition, or the advisers of the ruler. The tenor of their political discussions, however, has not changed much with time, except in those countries where the pressure of reformist governments has been strong enough to induce the ulema to echo or sustain the new secular ideas with their own traditional vocabulary. Left to their own initiative, the ulema could deprive AIi Abd al-Raziq of the certificate placing him among the ulema because he wrote a book in 1925 suggesting that the state can and should be separated from the religious institutions of Islam.2 At the Islamic Colloquium in Lahore in mid-winter of 1957, Syrian and other 1 The attempt to resurrect Islam as a partisan political ideology is analyzed in 2Chapter 8. al-Islam wa-Usul al-Hukm (Islam and the Fundamentals of Authority), Cairo, 1925.

[26]

C H A L L E N G E OF THE MODERN AGE TO ISLAM

delegates demanded the withdrawal of a paper by Professor Muhammad Daud Rahbar, who argued that certain texts in the Koran clearly referred to the here and now of the Prophet's time, that these texts are no longer relevant, and by their presence demonstrate the acceptability of further evolution of thought.3 Consequently every Moslem state that has established a new constitution, or a civil, criminal, or administrative code during the past thirty years, has had it drafted by Western-trained or Western-inspired lawyers rather than by ulema. In fact, when Pakistan—the one state formed in modern times intentionally along Islamic, rather than ethnic or historical, divisions—questioned its ulema on major issues of state and society, the inquiry became a turning point in the country's ideological orientation. The testimony of its leading ulema was so divided, confused, and ambiguous that the influence of the ulema materially declined thereafter.4 In Tunisia, the unwillingness of the French to abandon the medieval theological curriculum of Zeitouna University in Tunis produced a prolonged student strike in 1950. The protests of the ulema against the changes finally instituted by the independent Tunisian Government in 1958 found no response among Tunisian intellectuals or politicians. Similarly, the efforts of the Moroccan Government to convert its ancient medieval university at Fez into a new secular institution have elicited only approval. The institutions of popular Islam, the guilds and religious brotherhoods—organizations of worship, mutual help, and political discontent—have dissolved or decayed. The economic basis of the guilds has been undermined, for their goods could not compete with the cheaper and more efficient products of modern industry. Even the saintliness of the leaders of religious brotherhood—traditionally assumed to be inheritable—seems to have lost its efficacy. 8 Reported by G. E. von Grunebaum, "Ruckblick auf drei islamische Tagungen," Der Islam, Vol. 34, 1959, p. 142. Rahbar's paper is reprinted as "The Challenge of Modern Ideas and Social Values to Muslim Society," in Muslim World, October 1958, pp. 274-285. *See Report of the Court of Inquiry constituted under Punjab Act II of 1954 to enquire into the Punjab Disturbances of 1953, Government Printing, Lahore, 1954, commonly known as the "Munir Report."

[27]

LEGACY OF T H E PAST

In the past, many of the empires and rebellions of the Islamic realm owed their origin to the alliance of a religious brotherhood, or at least its founding saint, with a major tribe. The Almohad, Almoravid, Fatimid, and Wahhabi states, among others, were formed in this way. Such a combination can still cause unrest, but it can no longer hope to seize the reins of government. No tribe can now match the technology and armaments of a central government. Coup, not conquest, is today's avenue to power. Hence charismatic leadership, to be effective, must now resort to the machinery of urban parties and factions. The only unit which has possessed sufficient social, economic, and moral strength to survive all the past vicissitudes of Islamic history—the patriarchal family and its emanations, the self-sustaining village and tribe—is ceasing to be the secure nucleus of Islamic life. With improved health measures, such a family becomes too large for the land it has traditionally occupied. With the coming of industrialization, individuals tend to go wherever jobs can be found. Kinship groups are no longer adequate in size or organization to serve as an effective unit for collective bargaining with the rest of the world.5 They cannot overcome their present ignorance and poverty unless they participate in a larger world of new skills and markets. In many Middle Eastern countries, the disintegration of the traditional family unit has gone so far that the patriarchal family, with its carefully protected veiled women, is already beginning to yield among urban workers to the sustaining authority of the wage-earning mother. In Iraq, about 10,000 of the armed civilian militia, the Popular Resistance Forces, established by the regime of General Abd al-Karim Kassim, were reported to be women.6 While traditional links are shattered beyond repair, new connections are not readily at hand. The social distance among individuals in the Middle East is growing wider under the pressures of the modern age. The educated and the uneducated were in the past separated by the amount of knowledge they possessed about 'This point has, of course, already been admirably demonstrated, and in detail, for other areas undergoing similar transformation. See Marion J. Levy's The Family Revolution in Modern China, Cambridge, 1949, especially pp. 273-365. 6 New York Times, April 9, 1959.

[28]

CHALLENGE OF THE MODERN AGE TO ISLAM

the same things. Now those who have had a modern education know something belonging to a different realm of being. Sheer physical mobility leads to the discovery that life outside the family offers choices not dreamt of by one's father. The radio, movies, newspapers, and books allow a young man for the first time to choose his own intellectual ancestors and spiritual brothers. Modern scientific thought makes possible, indeed requires, a re-examination of all traditional relationships and structures. Whether technician, intellectual, or politician, a member of the new educated generation finds the traditions, skills, and values of his fathers deficient or irrelevant. Knowledge has thus become an issue and instrument of battle. As a result, moral and intellectual contact is broken between generations. Faced with this gap, the new generation has generally chosen to make a revolutionary leap. The Ataturks and Nassers—men in their thirties when they gained control of their country—act as if age, once the one sure title to respect in this part of the world, no longer mattered. Indeed, they act almost as if they had no ancestors. There is also a greater gap than ever before between the rich and the poor. In the past, the rich usually feared to be ostentatious lest the sultan suddenly seize their wealth. They wore, if better materials, still the same cut of clothes as the poor. They died of the same diseases. Now they no longer live alike, dress alike; they need no longer die of the same diseases. Today, when it has become possible for the first time in the history of the world to alleviate and perhaps even overcome poverty, the difference between rich and poor ceases to be a condition and becomes an issue. There has always been an important gap between city and countryside in the Middle East. Islam was originated and elaborated in the cities, and the Koran itself, reflecting the traditional distrust between the settled and nomadic population, upbraids the bedouins for not being good Moslems.7 Since the Middle East is still largely a peasant society dedicated to repeating itself in tune 7 "The Arabs of the desert," begins Verse 97 of Sura IX, "are keener in misbelief and hypocrisy. . . ." (Koran, translated by E. H. Palmer, London, 1949.)

[29]

L E G A C Y OF T H E PAST

with the seasons, the very rhythm of its life has now become an issue. The mechanization and routinization required by modern machine and modern bureaucracy for the sake of efficiency and change demand an entirely different rhythm of life. There is a sharpening contrast between those largely urban elements now committed to production-mindedness and the discipline of the eight- or ten-hour day, and that largely rural majority which remains attuned to the rhythm of season. The politics of progress thus becomes a battle between two different cultures and two different ages. The modern age that first became visible in Western Europe between the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries and reached the Middle East by the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is thus shattering the traditional community of Islam. The new nationstates in the Middle East are so far no more stable than their predecessors, since the new ideologies often divide kin and neighbor from each other. Escape from the period of revolutionary turmoil is also hindered by the lack of resources: in almost all of these countries population is growing more rapidly than production, aspirations more rapidly than accomplishment, opinions more rapidly than consensus. And there is also the great pain of starting now, so far behind other nations. A European, Hermann Hesse, has written about the modern West that "now there are times when a whole generation is caught . . . between two ages, two modes of life, with the consequence that it loses all power to understand itself and has no standards, no security, no simple acquiescence."8 To be thus caught is all the more unstabilizing in the Middle East, which has had, not Western Europe's five centuries, but, on the average, five decades in which to adjust itself to the modern age. The people of the Middle East cannot escape having to find answers appropriate to telescoped time. The Problems of Reconstruction As early as about A.D. 1105, the great Moslem theologian alGhazzali could write that "There is no hope in returning to a tra8

JDe;- Steppenwolf, New York, 1929, p. 28.

[30]

C H A L L E N G E OF THE MODERN AGE TO ISLAM

ditional faith after it has once been abandoned, since the essential condition in the holder of a traditional faith is that he should not know that he is a traditionalist. Whenever he knows that, the glass of his traditional faith is broken. That is a breaking that cannot be mended, and a separating that cannot be united by any sewing or putting together, except it be melted in the fire and given another new form."9 It was possible for al-Ghazzali to put his faith together again by joining reason and mysticism with fear and hope in God. His was an inward journey at a time of intellectual doubt, spiritual corruption, and political turmoil; but it was a time that failed to give birth to a new age. Such a return is much harder today. The existential foundations of Moslem life have been decisively altered. Those Moslems who ignore the material changes about them, or the vital spiritual and intellectual achievements of societies which do not accept God's final revelation to mankind, are likely to find few companions for their pilgrimage. Yet how is a modern Moslem to begin the reconstruction of his world? A popular, radical Pakistani poet of the twentieth century has written in a poem entitled, "There Is No Messiah for Shattered Glass": Be it a pearl, a looking glass, or a drinking cup, Once broken, it is broken forever. What is shattered is better given up as lost, For tears can mend it never. . . . Fruitlessly you gather and cling to these pieces, And continue to pin your hopes in them: Remember, no messiah can patch them together. . . . Perhaps in these very fragments, lies The pearl of your grandeur That grandeur which the mighty and elegant envied Even in your days of humility. . . . These goblets, mirrors, gems and pearls As Wholes a price they fetch. 8 In Al-Munqidh min al-dalal {Preservation from Error), cited by Duncan B. Macdonald, The Religious Attitude and Life in Islam, Chicago, 1909, p. 180.

[31]

L E G A C Y OF T H E PAST

Once broken into pieces, They bring but toil and tears And prick and bleed you to death. In this ever-building world, wherein These cups and glasses are molded, Everything can be replaced; all pockets can be filled.10 Twice before the coming of the modern age, Islam successfully assimilated the concepts of other cultures without essentially changing its own character. Why not again? In its first two centuries of existence (from about 622-820), Islam brilliantly adapted laws, customs, and institutions from the peoples among whom it was born as well as from those it conquered. It was relatively easy to accept ideas from societies with similar forms of social organization and give them an Islamic cast. During the ninth century, Islam assimilated from Hellenism scientific facts, and also ontological concepts and methods of logic for the foundation of an Islamic scholasticism, but rejected Greece's critical ideas regarding nature and justice, and the dignity of the free individual. Islam was then free to choose or not to choose. It was at the height of its power, and did not need to deal with Greece as an intellectually and economically more productive and politically more powerful society. Islam picked only those aspects of Greek thought which would buttress its own traditional position. The majority of rulers and ulema were right to consider the remainder of Greek philosophy subversive. If Islam's God were no longer to be thought allpowerful but instead lawful and just, could the all-powerful caliphs, some of whom had begun to think of themselves as deputies of God rather than successors of Mohammed, be less lawful and just? If law and justice were to be thought accessible to human reason, could not both the Koran and the caliph's commands be reviewed in the light of reasonable men's judgment of what is just and lawful? As a result of this conflict of minds in the 10 Faiz Ahmad Faiz, "Shishon Ka Masiha Ko'i Naheen" (There Is No Messiah for Shattered Glass), in Dast-i-Saba, Lahore, 1953, translated especially for this book by Eqbal Ahmed.

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Islamic world, Arab translations of Greek philosophy became available to help bring about the renaissance of Europe. Among the orthodox of Islam, however, the advocates of human reason lost, and even those who applied it subsequently to the interpretation of dogma were fewer by far and their fate more problematical than those who applied their reason to the codification and clarification of revealed law. Orthodoxy chose not free reason but a rigidity capable of being bent only by the particular balance of tensions at any concrete moment. The modern age, however, issues a challenge, or invitation, of quite a different order. As long as a Moslem holds that the comprehensive order revealed by God in the seventh century and subsequently hallowed by tradition is final and cannot be amended, he will be unable to study the world independently and scientifically in order to fashion his own world himself. The Christian, breaking out of the middle ages into an era of scientific thought, could at least retain the medieval notion that God —or now nature—operates by laws, and that the nature of God —or now the nature of nature—could to a large extent be ascertained by reason. The Moslem, by contrast, emerges from an age in which tyranny, anarchy, hunger, and death seemed often beyond remedy, an environment helping to reinforce his religious dogma that God was all-powerful, and that the moments of life were not a succession of cause and effect but separate Godcreated miracles. Only by setting his judgment against the received interpretation of life, whether through ulema, ancestors, or accustomed nature, can a Moslem now alter his history and environment. Only by using his individual judgment against that tradition can he escape the deepest of all Islamic inhibitions or prohibitions—that against innovation. The reformation of Islam, however, involves far more decisive steps than reformation did in the West. It is not a matter merely of altering the relationship between Church and State, for there is no church in Islam. No one is ordained; there is no hierarchy; each mosque is locally endowed. (The ulema are scholar-legists, not priests.) Indeed, reformation cannot be confined to the realm of religion: in God's revelation to Mohammed all human thoughts, actions, and institutions are related to the sacred, and [33]

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have meaning only relation to it. Thus, reformation in Islam means changing a way of life. But once that integrated pattern of relationships is altered, each part of it loses its original significance and potency, perhaps even its meaning, unless it can be transmuted and integrated into a new form of life. Reformation in Mam inescapably touches not only God's relation to man, but also man's relation to truth, ruler, wife, and neighbor. Such a reformation and renaissance are well under way in the Middle East. Many observers have missed this fact because their attention is drawn instead to the exceedingly few Moslems who have been at work during the past century deliberately reforming Islam to preserve its integrity as a system of faith and action. It may well be that these few seek to accomplish the impossible. Can any closed system like Islam be made to mesh with an open and dynamically changing society, yet succeed in remaining a closed system? But if the modern Moslem must contend with an inherited system that was fixed and closed, he also received from the past an uncommonlyflexiblestyle for dealing with a world in motion. He has long known how to combine his awe for the powerful, the learned, and the successful with his more enduring respect for the consensus of the community. He can adapt resilently to the permanent tension between justice and power, and ratify the inescapable with shrewd forebearance. Such customary flexibility has allowed the still tradition-bound masses to accept today's secular reformist governments, and has made it easier for the reformers to respond to the modern world with creative assimilation." The reformation of Islam, in contrast to that of Christianity, is not likely to be heralded and defined through theological disputations. Rather, the change in the Islamic way of life will become visible through the reformation and renaissance of Moslems. This great venture is already in progress, and the Islam that will emerge will be definable as Islam has always been 11 These conclusions are developed in greater detail in Chapter 7, on Reform Islam. Moslems who react to the greater uncertainties and insecurities of modern change by emphasizing the rigidities and certainties of the past are discussed in Chapter 8.

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defined in practice—as the pattern of interaction which relates Moslems to each other and which, if they are fortunate, a majority among them also consider to be good. Such a changed Islam, however, is bound to create a different network of relationships than traditional Islam. Precisely for that reason, some Middle Eastern leaders deem it prudent to call their new ways by old names, while others emphasize the thoroughness of their reforms by renouncing old symbols entirely and speaking only of socialism, nationalism, and other modern ideas. The road to modernization for all societies involves a march without a final prophet, a final book, or even assurance of final success. This universal fate, however, is differently shaped in each part of the world by unique beginnings. Just as British and French democracy or Russian and Chinese communism differ because of their historical origins, so will the traditional Islamic way of life, in its transformation, help to mold the nature of modern ideologies in the Middle East—hence our concern for the character and depth of the Islamic revolution. The Age of Choice Social transformation, it is worth repeating, is by now a worldwide phenomenon and therefore demands analysis that is not parochial, either Western or Islamic. This is a point that needs especially to be made in a study of the Middle East, where the problem of making new choices used to be debated as the issue of "Westernization." Historically, that is indeed how change began. The transformation of the Middle East did not originate, as in Europe, with the rise of new social classes or the growth of new forms of production. These came later, as the first fruits of change. The metamorphosis of the Middle East began with the efforts of sultans, whether in Constantinople, Cairo, or Rabat, to maintain themselves, their ideas, and their empires intact by copying Western instruments of defense. Westernization, once started, snowballed as Western powers took advantage of the fact that these Moslem rulers lacked money, skill, and strength to preserve themselves. By direct Western action, that is, by way of imperialism, Westernization made its mark even to the extent of [35]

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supplying Middle Eastern states with governing institutions such as constitutions and parliaments. By now, however, the issue is no longer Westernization but "modernization." It has become a native movement. The term Westernization has itself become parochial and misleading. However much he may prefer to continue to draw upon Western Europe and the United States for knowledge, ideas, and assistance, the contemporary Middle Easterner recognizes (perhaps in contrast to some of his fathers) that being modern does not mean becoming English or French or American. The modern age, with its science, technology, and values, is transforming both East and West impartially, and the roads to modernization that can now be chosen as models include India, Yugoslavia, Japan, Ghana, or China no less than the United States, Germany, or the U.S.S.R. Westernization could not help but become a locally rooted movement. Before the modern age began, it was possible to arm, and become more prosperous and more powerful than any neighbor, without changing one's mind about anything one's ancestors held dear. Today, the price of knowledge, status, and power for Middle Eastern countries is conversion to an entirely new outlook. It is not feasible to buy the weapons and learn the techniques of modern warfare, and yet preserve ancient traditions. The Ottomans had this illusion. The new Turks knew that they had to abandon it.12 Social change in the Middle East has taken place unevenly and remains incomplete. Here the modern age has deprived more men of customary satisfactions, and denied more men the fulfillment of their newly raised expectations, than it has so far expanded opportunities for a richer life. It has served to undermine 12 "Before the impetuous torrent of civilization resistance is futile: it is quite without mercy towards the heedless and refractory. In the face of the might and superiority of civilization, which pierces mountains, flies in the sky, sees everything from the atoms invisible to the eye to the stars, and which enlightens and investigates, nations striving to advance with a medieval mentality and primitive superstitions are condemned to perish or at least to be enslaved and humiliated. But the people of the Turkish Republic have decided to live to eternity as a civilized and progressive community, and have torn to pieces the chains of slavery with a heroism unequalled in history." Ataturk in a speech at Inebolu, 1925. (Translation by Joseph Bell.)

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old institutions more decisively than it has yet initiated the effective development of new ones. Almost everywhere, social change has outrun institutional reforms. To exercise effective leadership in the Middle East means above all to overcome these imbalances. It means fashioning a social structure that can accommodate newly emerging social classes and new relationships among individuals. It means forming political institutions resilient enough to overcome the present crisis of uncontrolled change, and capable of transforming further changes into evolutionary, stabilizing development. Concern with the roots of social relationship and political institutions has thus become the test for the relevance and survival of leadership. Whether to create such new roots, who is to deal with them, what price to pay for the work, and who is to pay for it—these have now become the principal issues upon which men divide their political loyalties in the Middle East. Although certain religious conservatives and secular extremists continue to blame the West for the fact that they must face these issues, the fight is no longer primarily between the modern West and the medieval Middle East, or between the local "Westernizers" and the traditional masses. The conflict now takes place among and within Middle Easterners themselves, and until they have dealt with the roots of their problem, change in their region will continue to be frequent, sudden, discontinuous, and violent.

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PART II THE CHANGING STRUCTURE OF SOCIETY

THE CHANGING STRUCTURE OF SOCIETY

THE social structure which characterized the Islamic community for over a millennium is being decisively altered. This is a powerful part of the reason why caliphs can no longer rule this society, ulema can no longer guide it, and the military serves new masters. This is also why all politically active Moslems are looking for new ideologies and institutions that might hold their nation together for the task of building a new society. The four chapters which follow explore the emergence of new social classes and the changing environment for traditional classes. Together they define the "nation" which is now coming into being in most of the Middle East, the "public" with its changing aspirations, and the shifting balance of power among the groups that now supply the decision-making elite.

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CHAPTER 3 KINGS, LANDLORDS, AND THE TRADITIONAL BOURGEOISIE: THE DECLINING ELITE

Prospects for Kings IN 1951, there were ten kings upon the throne in the (then) seventeen sovereign countries between Morocco and Pakistan, almost all of them in theory and practice the final authority in the state. Today there are only six kings left, and almost all of them have suffered in the interval at least one severe crisis challenging their right to rule. A decade hence, there will probably still be kings. Those that survive, however, will not do so merely by virtue of being royal. When faith and society are in upheaval, and symbols cease to have a common meaning for all men, it is difficult for a king to hold himself above politics. Kings will henceforth succeed or fail, like other politicians, by their performance in resolving conflicting domestic pressures. As late as 1925, Reza Khan, the Iranian cavalry officer, still thought it necessary to make himself King of Kings in order to gain status and power enough to reform and stabilize his country. The army officers who have assumed power three decades later have as much power as most kings, but they no longer see advantage in being known in any guise but that pertaining to their task. Kings can choose how to play the politics of social change. They may resist all changes and reforms except those which specially benefit their own dynasty. They may passively provide a facade of fictitious harmony behind which battles for political control of the state may continue. Or they may become figureheads for forces already dominant in the capital but in need of the king's charismatic mantle to spread their hold in the country[41]

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side. AU such employment of royal power, by its very nature, involves a more tenuous status than that civil service category known in Washington as "temporary indefinite." On the other hand, there are two alternatives for perpetuating royal authority in the midst of revolutionary change. The king himself can strive to become the principal force for modernization. Or, he can use his strength to establish a constitutional framework in which others are responsible for political decision. In that event, the king may reserve his power as a symbol of unity above particular parties by acting as moderator, but never engage himself as final authority except in crises that party politicians cannot remedy. Modern Middle Eastern kings seem especially prone, however, to fall repeatedly between these two stools, finally never to rise again. They tend to take all powers into their own hands for the announced purpose of modernization, yet then utilize it ineffectively. Or else they spend much of their power in balancing political elements against each other without allowing any of them to carry out a long-range program or create an institutional framework that might safely contain such rivalry. In neither case does the king escape popular blame for everything that is done or left undone—whether it be the low pay of teachers or the wrong orientation in foreign affairs. The recent conversion of the Iranian, Jordanian, and to a lesser extent, Saudi Arabian monarchs to modernization seems marked by an inadequate capacity for building public institutions and political organizations, and a continuing distrust of most of the salaried middle class which must supply the essential cadre for such an effort. There is, however, more at stake in the failure of a king than of a prime minister. One prime minister can readily be replaced by another; only a revolution can replace a king. The present Middle Eastern kings, in their striving for tenure, can draw no reassurance from memories of the past. All present kingdoms were founded on the same traditional and unstable pattern. By conquest, or by grant from a more powerful king, each kingdom was erected as an empire over towns and tribes. In each of these territories the power and survival of rulers has always fluctuated with the rebellions of towns and tribes and of their own [42]

THE DECLINING ELITE

mercenary armies. Even when a dynasty endured, its power varied greatly from generation to generation. That Middle Eastern kings should have come to be regarded by some Western powers as pillars of conservative strength is thus remarkable, especially when the twentieth century finds the Islamic royal institutions no more solidly anchored than in the past, yet at the same time faced with radically new tasks. This image of the stability of Middle Eastern kings is, in fact, a very recent Western illusion. During the nineteenth century, Western nations conquered or circumscribed the power of Middle Eastern kings and sultans as it fit Western purposes. The alliance between kings and Western nations dates from the era when both became conscious of their dependence upon each other for the maintenance of their respective positions. Such collaboration could not serve to build strong, enduring, conservative bulwarks both because of the character of traditional kingship in the Middle East, and because of the nature of the feudal and traditional bourgeois elements with which such royalty might most closely ally itself. "Feudalism" in the Middle East Contrary to the popular view, the so-called feudal rulers of today's Middle East are neither feudal nor ancient—hence both the depths of their roots and their stabilizing influence are questionable. Feudalism in the Middle East has not been traditionally a reciprocal relationship, binding lord and serf in mutual, if unequal, service. In the Ottoman Empire, for example, fiefs were granted by the sultan to enable military commanders to secure money and men, or, especially by the time of the eighteenth century, for the purpose of tax-farming. This made it difficult for the majority of feudal lords to become linked to the peasantry or identify themselves with the traditional values of the countryside. In addition, sultans usually took care, especially until the eighteenth century, to make fiefs only temporary, frequently redividing them, dispersing holdings, and allocating them in areas where the fief-holder was a stranger.1 As a result, demesne 1 A . N. Poliak, Feudalism in Egypt, Syria, Palestine, and the Lebanon, 1250-1900, London, the Royal Asiatic Society, 1939, pp. 18, 23-25, 61 and 78.

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farms were seldom established, and neither peasantry nor nomadic tribes were effectively brought into those larger political and cultural relationships which were cemented by both European and Japanese feudalism. It may be said about the entire Middle East, as it has been said of Iran, that "whereas the power and privileges of the landowning class have been relatively constant over a long period, its composition has undergone many changes. . . . Never, however, has a stable landed aristocracy, transmitting its estates in their entirety from generation to generation, emerged."2 The European assumption of control over much of the Middle East in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries abruptly brought to an end the constant circulation of the "feudal" elite. Once the Europeans established order in the states they took over, the "feudal lords" who had fiefs at that moment could almost for the first time hope to keep them. Hence the "feudal lords" who found it prudent to collaborate with European powers were not aristocrats, Junkers, or squires rooted in established nobility or inheritance on their traditional territories. They were the most recent crop of Ottoman beneficiaries; or Egyptians or Iranians who had bought newly founded villages or state lands since the nineteenth century; Iraqi tribal sheikhs who, toward the end of that century or even later, received their tribesmen and tribal lands in fief;3 Pakistani landowners converted into tax-farmers (zamindars) by British initiative; or Tunisian and Moroccan caids and pashas allowed to acquire large holdings as rewards for recent service to France. Though these lords came to be the 2 8

Ann K. S. Lambton, Landlord and Peasant in Persia, London, 1953, p. 259. In Iraq, most of the "feudal lords" acquired absolute ownership of their land only in the 1930's and 1940's. "Because in Ottoman times the cultivators [on tribal lands] had no legal title to the land which they occupied, the landlords were able, during the period of the mandate, to use their political power to secure legal title to land which was by custom and tradition the property of the tribe. In much the same way, the English landlords in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries enclosed land as their property which was traditionally common property and ousted small holders whose title was based only on custom. As in nineteenth century England, the process is being hastened by mechanization, which gives the big landowners an advantage as against the small cultivator and by inflation, which gives them the impetus to invest." (Doreen Warriner, Land and Poverty in the Middle East, London, Royal Institute of International Affairs, 1948, p. 107.)

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major pillars upon which Britain and France rested the "indirect rule" of their protectorates and mandates in the Middle East, few of them were in a position, as were once the truly feudal lords of Europe, to commit with assurance the loyalties of the people dwelling in their domain.* What linked the peasants or bedouins to them was force, ignorance, poverty, and, in some cases, blood—not reciprocal obligations or respect of noble lineage. In an age of choice, this kind of "feudalism" is much more fragile and is bound to break sooner than the European variety. Western expectations with regard to Middle Eastern "feudalism" were, perhaps, understandable in the nineteenth century when the phenomenon was imperfectly understood, when land was still the most productive form of Middle Eastern wealth, and when the cementing of such alliances seemed the easiest and most prudent course. As long as British or French military forces could intervene directly, the erroneous premises were not too noticeable. By the middle of the twentieth century, the fragility of "feudalism" and the inability of Western powers to compensate for it by military and political intervention had grown painfully evident. The Frailty of the Traditional Urban Upper Class It was in the small traditional bourgeoisie5 of the Middle East that much Western hope for the future stability of the area used to rest. This was a hope based on very little substance, however. Except to some degree in Lebanon, the bourgeoisie of the Middle *The Western illusion began early and lingered long. In 1829 the Governor General of Bengal, Lord William Bentinck, remarked, "If security was wanting against extensive popular tumult or revolution, I should say that the Permanent Settlement, though a failure in many respects, has this great advantage at least of having created a vast body of rich landed proprietors deeply interested in the continuance of British dominion and having complete control over the mass of the people." (Jawaharlal Nehru, The Discovery of India, New York, 1954, p. 304.) The consequences of collaboration in the realm of foreign affairs between the West and the traditional elite of kings, landlords, and bourgeoisie is discussed in Chapter 18. 6 The term "bourgeois" is used here in preference to "middle class" to allow for the fact that their income, and often during the past hundred years, their power and prestige, allowed members of this group to live upper class lives. For additional distinctions between these two terms, see Chapter 4.

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East constituted for centuries a much smaller portion of the population than its counterpart in Europe. Trade has always been uncertain, confiscation frequent, taxation heavy, inheritance fragmentive. Power led to wealth far more often than wealth led to power. Since power was unstable, there was almost continuous mobility. The bourgeoisie lacked the resources and skills to multiply wealth by increasing production. As middlemen, they operated, at least between the sixteenth and the twentieth centuries, in a commercial backwater of the globe. They could not, therefore, as during the comparable period in European history, become the backbone of independent cities or the cashmasters of kings. In fact, their activities did not touch the majority of the people, who produced little for sale and bartered only for bare necessities. Although orthodox Islam spoki highly of merchants—the Prophet's wife had been in the can, van business, and cloth and cotton merchants were numbered among the first caliphs of the seventh century—trade and manufacturing were increasingly left to non-Moslems. After the ninth century, the military usually took precedence in power and status over all other groups, and its sway, rivalries and exactions were often destructive of production and trade.6 In this situation, the non-Moslems had the advantage of being able to retain links with each other and maintain trade even while Moslem dynasties and tribes fought with each other. Jews and Christians (Arab, Copt, Greek, and Armenian)7 have thus played in the Middle East a role similar to that of the Chinese in the commerce of Southeast Asia. Because an appreciable proportion of the bourgeoisie was non-Moslem in a largely Moslem society, it could not hope to perform the leading or mediating role of a middle class in relation to politics and society. Instead it functioned as a middle or lower caste in a particular economic task. This caste, being unfettered by Islamic traditions and in almost continuous contact with non-Moslem areas, adjusted more quickly, intellectually, economically, and politically, to the com* S. D. Goitein, "The Rise of the Near Eastern Bourgeoisie in Early Islamic Times," Journal of World History, Vol. in, No. 3, 1957, pp. 583-604. 7 Hindus played a similar role in what was to become Pakistan.

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ing of European power into the Middle East.8 Its members became the favored middlemen—at the cost of making their social and political status even more problematical in a future Middle East independent of European rule. European overlordship, however, also made it more difficult for either Christians or Moslems to create a new, industrially productive bourgeoisie. The bourgeoisie was deprived of the political power to protect its own growth in the face of competition from the greater capital resources and efficiency of European production, and the cheapness and superiority of European goods. The general increase in trade and public order that followed the establishment of European predominance in the Middle East led, under these terms of competition, to only a small increase in the size and economic power of the bourgeoisie.9 Its political role, however, grew considerably. Together with men from the newly created modern professions (in the early twentieth century usually sons of landowners and the bourgeoisie), it was the first class to experience, as a whole group, the discontent and frustration that arises from the disparity between well-founded aspirations and actual opportunities. It became, almost everywhere, the financial and social core of moderate nationalist movements typified by the Egyptian Wafd party. The political and social influence of this small bourgeoisie was not seriously challenged until World War II, when shrewd trading in scarce items and inflation suddenly swelled its number with nouveaux riches whose sense of social and political responsibility remained largely unformed. Under the growing pressure for change from below, the bourgeoisie usually allied itself with the landlords, who were politically the dominant group in almost all Middle Eastern countries until the 1950's.10 This step was in line with its traditional 8 A. J. Meyer, "Entrepreneurship and Economic Development in the Middle East," a paper delivered to an Annual Meeting of the American Sociological Society, Washington, D.C., August 27, 1957. 9 In 1951, for example, it was estimated that after 39 years of French rule, Moroccans owned less than 5 percent of companies in Morocco capitalized at more than 100 million francs. 10 "In Syria, for instance, out of 109 members of the 1946 Parliament whose occupation was known, 96 were landowners, 7 merchants, 4 lawyers, one a landlord and a merchant, and one a contractor." (Warriner, Land and Poverty, p. 134.)

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proclivity to seek greater social status and economic security by reinvesting its earnings in land rather than long-range productive facilities. In the field of political organization, the potential of the bourgeoisie suffered after World War II from its simultaneous loss of contact with the rest of the politically active population and from its own internal splintering. Thus the bourgeois leadership of the Wafd, which had been one of the Middle East's few genuine political parties with a mass base, began to withdraw from the task of guiding through the social revolution the following it had gathered for the nationalist revolution. Some bourgeois, as a substitute for domestic support, began to look to Britain or France—until the mid-1950's their best and sometimes their only market and source of credits—as their political protectors. Others, especially the nouveaux riches, became more desperate in their search for domestic reassurance and turned to anti-modern groups like the Moslem Brotherhood, who promised to turn popular frustrations primarily against foreign rulers and foreign capitalists. There were a few "senior government officials and successful business and professional men," who seemed to show "even in crises, a degree of sanity which the politicians have lost." Of this group, the Economist wrote in 1951: "A high proportion of them have—either at home or abroad—had a European or an American education. Almost all are sufficiently in touch with Western thought not to take the more extreme nationalist pretensions at their face value. They are interested enough in their country's affairs to make a move, here and there, to perform some simple physical act such as founding a social center or establishing a clean drinking-water supply; they are only too ready to criticize the corruption and time-serving of those in office. But they are not prepared to take a broader moral stand; they will not face the buffets of public life; they are not the stuff of which martyrs are made. Their social conscience is not sufficiently developed to make them want to risk anything for their opinions."11 "Their failure was greater than they or the Economist could imagine on December 22, 1951, when it wrote these lines and added, "For all its apparent instability, the social system in Egypt does not yet contain enough disruptive

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The education of the bourgeoisie, though superior to that of any other segment of Middle Eastern society, did not always enhance their insight or power. Just as education widened the horizon of many landlords only sufficiently to increase the social and physical distance between them and their peasants—turning them more resolutely into absentee landlords—so it often made the bourgeoisie more enterprising or more far-seeing, but therefore only inclined to enjoy themselves more before the deluge.12 Among its professional men were a number of highly skilled, Western-trained constitutional liberals; the constitutions, codes, and books they wrote demonstrate great mastery of the law, but they also show too often a fatal neglect of the social, economic, and political conditions that can sustain lawful authority. The bourgeoisie does not appear to be capable in most Middle Eastern countries of strengthening itself politically and economically as a class through its own initiative and resources. It has given rise to a number of remarkably capable leaders, but as a group it seems to lack the habits of courage and enterprise, and, in its present environment, lacks also the requisite safety for private individual investments of work and wealth. It is eager for acquisition, but still devotes itself to commerce far more than industry, and its gains go primarily into ventures that produce quick and high profits, and if these seem uncertain, then into land, buildings, jewelry, or into Swiss or American banks. The larger part of what it sells are raw materials, and hence more subject to price fluctuations than industrial goods. The organizational, managerial, and financial resources it can command remain circumscribed by the fact that almost all private enterprise is still family enterprise.13 In most countries of the Middle elements to threaten their privileged position. . . ." Four weeks later, on January 26, at least 67 persons were killed and wounded and millions of dollars worth of property destroyed in the "Black Saturday" riot in Cairo which also brought about the fall of the Wafd government. Six months later, civilian rule had yielded altogether to Nasser's army coup. 12 For a vivid portrayal of this bourgeoisie by an Egyptian novelist, see Albert Cossery, 7"Ae Lazy Ones, Norfolk, Connecticut, 1952. 18 The economic shortcomings even of the Lebanese bourgeoisie, one of the most enterprising in the Middle East, are carefully documented by Arthur E. Mills in Private Enterprise in Lebanon, The American University of Beirut, 1959, and by Yusif A. Sayigh, Entrepreneurs of Lebanon, The Role of the

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East, therefore, the government has already become the largest employer and investor. In Syria and Lebanon, where private enterprise has been responsible for a high rate of growth since World War II, and in Pakistan, where development has so far been slow, the shift toward a preponderance of public investment is clearly evident.14 Today, a new salaried middle class is emerging and is seizing control of Middle Eastern governments. Unlike the traditional bourgeoisie, it is eager to modernize society and the body politic no less than the economy. By stabilizing laws, instilling production-mindedness, creating new skills, raising purchasing power, increasing savings and capital investments, improving transportation and communication, the new salaried middle class could succeed in expanding opportunities for an independent bourgeoisie, whether it be drawn from members of the traditional upper class, or from the most successful members of the salaried new middle class. By independent we mean a bourgeoisie free of government as its principal contractor or controller, as well as self-reliant enough not to force the government to become its principal agent. The renewed commercialization of the Middle Eastern economy did not sufficiently strengthen the traditional bourgeoisie. The task of industrializing the Middle East therefore falls largely on the salaried new middle class whose character and role is analyzed in the next chapter. Business Leader in a Developing Economy, Cambridge, 1962. The political acumen of this bourgeoisie in avoiding a repetition of the civil war of 1958 remains to be tested. " S e e A. J. Meyer, Middle Eastern Capitalism, Cambridge, 1959, pp. 32-46; Charles Issawi, "The Entrepreneur Class," in Social Forces in the Middle East, edited by Sydney Nettleton Fisher, Ithaca, 1955, pp. 116-136.

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CHAPTER 4 THE NEW MIDDLE CLASS AS THE PRINCIPAL REVOLUTIONARY AND STABILIZING FORCE

The Birth of a New Class THE traditional Middle Eastern elite of kings, landowners, and bourgeoisie is declining in power or has already yielded its place. Workers and peasants are only beginning to enter the realm of politics. As for a middle class, the consensus of observers is that it barely exists. "Nationalism" and "social change" are nothing more than abstractions. Who shapes politics and makes the fundamental decisions in the Middle East and North Africa? Two different answers are usually given. Individual personalities and small cliques, reply many Western policymakers. A "new indigenous intelligentsia . . . rootless [and] possessing no real economic base in an independent native middle class,"1 is the explanation increasingly being accepted by social scientists. Here we shall argue that both these views overlook the emergence of a new social class in the Middle East as the principal revolutionary —and potentially stabilizing—force. In our unproductive search for middle classes in underdeveloped areas, the fault has been in our expectations. We have taken too parochial a view of the structure of the middle class. A study of both Western and non-Western historical experience suggests that the British and American middle classes, which have commonly been considered prototypes, were actually special cases. Moreover, with the growing scope and scale of 1 Morris Watnick, "The Appeal of Communism to the Peoples of Underdeveloped Areas," in The Progress of Underdeveloped Areas, edited by Bert F. Hoselitz, Chicago, 1952, pp. 158-159.

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modern enterprises and institutions, the majority of the middle class even in the United States and Great Britain is no longer composed of men whose independence is rooted in their possession of productive private property. Bureaucratic organization has become the characteristic structure of business (or charity or trade unions) no less than of government, and the majority of the middle class is now salaried. They may be managers, administrators, teachers, engineers, journalists, scientists, lawyers, or army officers. A similar salaried middle class constitutes the most active political, social, and economic sector from Morocco to Pakistan. Leadership in all areas of Middle Eastern life is increasingly being seized by a class of men inspired by non-traditional knowledge, and it is being clustered around a core of salaried civilian and military politicians, organizers, administrators, and experts.2 In its style of life, however, this new middle class differs from its counterpart in the industrialized states. The Middle East moved into the modern administrative age before it reached the machine age. Its salaried middle class attained power before it attained assurance of status, order, security, or prosperity. In the Middle East, the salaried new middle class therefore uses its power not to defend order and property but to create them—a revolutionary task that is being undertaken so far without any final commitment to any particular system of institutions. This new salaried class is impelled by a driving interest in ideas, action, and careers. It is not merely interested in ideas: its members are not exclusively intellectuals, and, being new to the realm of modern ideas and eager for action and careers, they may not be intellectuals at all. Neither are they interested only in action that enhances their power: they also share a common commitment to the fashioning of opportunities and institutions that 2 For example, when Tunisia became independent in 1956 under the leadership of the Neo-Destour Party, a party controlled almost entirely by the new middle class, the election for a Constituent Assembly rewarded this class in the following way: To fill 98 seats, the country voted for 18 teachers and professors, 15 lawyers, 11 civil servants, 5 doctors, 4 pharmacists, 2 journalists, 2 commercial employees, 1 engineer, 1 appraiser, 5 workers, 17 farmers, and 17 businessmen and contractors. By contrast, every Middle Eastern parliament prior to 1950, except that of Turkey, contained a majority of landowners and a minority of professional men and industrialists.

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will provide careers open to all who have skills. This involves them in actions quite novel to their society, and hence also distinguishes them from previous politicians. They are not concerned merely with safe careers. They know that, without new ideas and new actions dealing with the backwardness and conflicts of their society, careers will not open or remain secure. The men of this new class are therefore committed ideologically to nationalism and social reform. Obviously, there is also a part of the new middle class that has neither deep convictions nor understanding. In contrast to the dominant strata of its class, this segment excludes itself from the process of making political choices, and hence does not alter the present analysis. It is also true that some members of the new middle class are interested only in ideas (hence inspire and clarify, or merely stand by), only in action (hence rise spectacularly and fall), or only in safe careers (hence merely serve). Among the last, clerks especially compose the largest yet relatively most passive segment of the new middle class. Our analysis focuses on men interested in ideas, action, and careers because such a description fits the most influential core of this group. There are also opportunists among them but, by now, of two different kinds which are often confused by those who are taken advantage of. There is the politician who, largely for the sake of satisfying the aspirations of his new middle class constituency and so also staying in power, takes advantage of whatever opportunities may offer, east or west, at home or abroad. There is also the free-floating opportunist—Stendhal's novels describe him very well for a period in French history when values and institutions were similarly in doubt—who represents no one but himself, but represents himself exceedingly well, being loyal only to the art of survival. Some sell their skills as political brokers; some come close to selling their country. In the twentieth century it has become essential, however, to be able to distinguish between those, however perverse they may appear, who are out to gain greater elbow-room for the new middle class they represent and those, however smooth, who also make deals because they can fashion no connections unless they continually sell themselves. In the Middle East, this salaried new middle class assumes a [53]

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far more important role than the local property-owning middle class. Although the latter is about as numerous as that portion of the new middle class which is actually employed,3 it has far less power than the salaried group. Neither in capital, organization, nor skills do the merchants and middlemen control anything comparable to that power which can be mustered by the machinery of the state and hence utilized by the new salaried class. In this part of the world, no other institutions can mobilize as much power and capital as those of the state. By controlling the state in such a strategic historical period, this new salaried class has the capabilities to lead the quest for the status, power, and prosperity of middle-class existence by ushering in the machine age.4 8 In this analysis, the term "new middle class" excludes the property owning middle class. However, it includes both those who are now drawing salaries and a far larger group—a "would-be new middle class" which resembles this class in every respect except that it is unemployed. The "would-be" salariat is discussed in greater detail in the next section of this chapter. From a different perspective, Professor Morroe Berger defines the middle class as including (1) "merchants and small manufacturers, self-employed, whose income and influence are not great enough to place them among the really powerful men in political or economic life" and (2) "independent professionals such as doctors and lawyers,- employed managers, technicians, and administrative workers such as clerks and bureau chiefs; and the civil service." He concluded that, in 1947, these amounted altogether to about half a million persons in Egypt, 51 percent of them merchants; that is, mostly small retailers. ("The Middle Class in the Arab World," in The Middle East in Transition, edited by Walter Laqueur, New York, 1958, p. 63.) Thus defined, the salaried middle class and the property-owning middle class together amount to about six percent of the gainfully employed population or about three percent of the total population in Egypt. If one also includes the agricultural middle class, as does Professor Hassan el-Saaty ("The Middle Class in Egypt," L'Egypte Contemporaine, April 1957, pp. 47-53), the total figure for Egypt in 1947 increases to 16 percent. The middle class is probably as large, or else smaller, in other Middle Eastern countries. By contrast, a new middle class composed of the salariat—whether employed or unemployed—must be estimated to number (no one has yet counted them) a far higher percentage. Aspiration is politically as relevant a criterion for such a census as education and position. * The present work is not the first to notice the emergence of this new class in underdeveloped areas. Professor T. Cuyler Young, drawing in part on his experiences as Political Attache at the American Embassy in Tehran during 1951-1952, was the first to publish an analysis of the role of the new middle class in the Middle East in "The Social Support of Current Iranian Policy," Middle East Journal, Spring 1952, pp. 125-143. Professor John J. Johnson was the first to suggest that in Latin America "the urban middle groups are vitally, if not decisively, important in an area where one still commonly hears and reads that there is no middle class to speak of [and] where, in the view of traditional scholarship, individuals hold the center of the stage." {Political Change in Latin America: The Emergence of the Middle Sectors, Stanford, 1958, pp. vii-ix.)

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In the West, a variety of organizational structures and devices —both governmental and private—have gradually made individual entrepreneurship a rare commodity. Stock companies, subsidies, insurance, tariffs, as well as large governmental, business, and union bureaucracies have served, among other things, to reduce individual risk and enlarge institutional predictability. The pressures that make for organization and organization men are much more desperate in the Middle East. In most of the countries of this region, there are few important jobs in the modern sector of the economy available outside the large organizations and institutions that constitute, or are guided by, government. Those who cannot get into them or cannot hold on to them usually count for little, and often cannot make a living. For most there is little hope for safety or prosperity in separate personal endeavors. Indeed, more organization is urgently needed for aggregating separate interests, bargaining among them, and executing a common will. Among these two and the present essay, there are common intellectual links. In his preface, Johnson states that he "first became fully aware of the importance of the urban middle sectors in Latin American politics during the fifteen months in 1952-53 that [he] was with the State Department as Acting Chief of the South American Branch of the Division of Research for American Republics." At that time, a number of us in the Division of Research for Near East, South Asia, and Africa had contributed to an analysis in January 1952 of the causes of Political Instability in the Middle East which was to become a prototype for a series of such studies of other underdeveloped regions. An evaluation of the role of the "urban middle sector" was one of the principal themes of that study. If at least one of the collaborators of that 1952 study has changed his mind, and substituted "middle class" for "middle sector," it is because the latter term is finally too broad: Johnson includes within it the "poorly paid white-collar employee in government" as well as the "wealthy proprietors of commercial and industrial enterprises." Class is a term with peculiar advantages. The anthropological term "acculturated" includes those who have forsaken pottery for aluminum no less than those who have left Islam for communism. The parochially historical term "Westernized" defines only one portion of those who now make modern political choices. The sociological terms "traditional," "transitional," and "modern" designate way-stations in social communication and psychic mobility insufficiently related to conflicts over political ideology and power. The political term "elite" is often used to designate any dominating power group without concern for the social classes from which it may be drawn. Once the term "class" is freed from its ideological strait jackets and defined dynamically in terms of the evolving interests, opportunities, and behavior of a class in the midst of the transformation of a society, and not merely of its economy, "class" may well continue to serve us as the most useful category for relating changes in social structure to changes in political power.

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The intelligentsia, that is, those with knowledge or awareness to see that a social and political revolution is in progress, form the largest and politically most active component of the new middle class. But they are not the only component of this class. Some members of this new class are already middle class in their pattern of consumption but still searching for ideas (hence new in a society once sure of its truths). Others are interested only in ideas about means and not, like the intelligentsia, also about ends, and the concern for truth of the intellectuals does not interest them. The intelligentsia, however, is the predominant force of this class, in part because its knowledge inescapably exposes the weakness or irrelevance of tradition. Just as in Russia in the nineteenth century, however, the intelligentsia is more rebellious than self-confident. Its thought is "by its very nature unspecific, unformulated, unfixed . . . sensitive to every intellectual wind from Europe, alert to the changing history of both Russia and the West. For all their dogmatism at every stage, some of the most energetic minds of the intelligentsia passed from one ideological stage often to its extreme opposite in their insistent search for a total system which should somehow resolve all the largest questions of national destiny."5 They are new men. They are often the very first in the history of their family to be literate. They often discover their best friends at school or in a political movement, not among kin or established brotherhood or faction. They are the first to trust strangers on grounds of competence or shared ideology.6 They are ready to trade new dogmas for old. They are also the first publicly to confess their uncertainties. Until Gamal abd al-Nasser no Egyptian politician had begun a statement of his philosophy with the confession: ". . . I feel that I stand before a boundless world, a bottomless sea—and a trepidation restrains me from plunging into it since, from my point of vantage, I see no other shore to head for."7 "Herbert E. Bowman, "Intelligentsia in Nineteenth Century Russia," The Slavic and East European Journal, Spring 1957, p. 15. •Some of the men appointed to the cabinet by the Iraqi army conspirators of 1958 had until their appointment neither heard of the revolution nor met their new chiefs. T Gamal abd al-Nasser, Egypt's Liberation: The Philosophy of the Revolution, Washington, 1955, p. 17.

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In Russia the intelligentsia was often known as the raznochintsy, the "men of varied ranks," on the justifiable recognition that they sprang from all classes, but also on the unwarranted conclusion that they therefore belonged to none. To make this assumption about the Middle East is to suppose that the classes from which they come, in contrast to the one in which they are now gathering, are solid and neatly distinguishable in their relationship to each other and their role in society. That is not the case, and one of the principal reasons in the Middle East as it was in Russia for the departure from their previous classes of men eager for ideas, actions, and careers is that these classes can no longer maintain their customary relationships to each other, or play their traditional role in what is becoming a modern society. It is their new role that defines their class membership, not the accident of their birth in a particular traditional social class. "The French expression 'sorti du peuple,' like the English 'sprung from the working class' does in fact indicate both origin and breach with them."8 In the Middle East (as in other rapidly changing, underdeveloped societies) the new intelligentsia acts in behalf of the older ruling classes only until it is strong enough to win control of the government. When this occurs, however, the intelligentsia no longer remains socially unattached but acts in the interests of the new middle class of which it is an integral part. It cannot preserve the privileges of the older ruling classes if it hopes to propel any Middle Eastern country into the modern age. Similarly, it cannot offer the immediate rewards sought by workers and peasants, because its plans for the modernization of the country call for mobilization of the underlying population for new roles and productive sacrifices. In the Middle East, as in Russia, the new middle class springs largely, though not exclusively, from groups that had not hitherto been important, and hence had more reason and less deadweight to take advantage of new knowledge and skills. Le Tourneau's description of North Africa could readily be applied 8 Maurice Duverger, Political Parties: Their Organization and Activity in the Modern State, London, 1954, p. 159.

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to the rest of the Middle East. One can still find among the middle class, he points out, "a good number of members of the old leading families, the ruling aristocracy, the trading bourgeoisie, or even, but in lesser proportion, intellectuals of a traditional kind." Since the turn of the century, however, "things have changed, and young men from the hinterland now form the essential backbone of the middle class." The political parties reflect this change: "The Democratic Union of the Algerian Manifesto has as leader a pharmacist from Setif, M. Ferhat Abbas [until recently Premier of Algeria's Provisional Government]; his principal lieutenants are doctors, lawyers, and teachers among whom almost no one is a descendant of a 'grande famille' of earlier days. The same holds true for the Tunisian Neo-Destour, whose leader, M. Habib Bourguiba, is a lawyer born to a humble family of the Sahel, and for the Moroccan Istiqlal, whose governing committee is, in large part, composed of former students of the Moslem College of Fez."9 In Egypt, Nasser illustrates the type perfectly: the son of a postmaster, he graduated in 1938 from the first class of the Egyptian Military Academy that had admitted students from other than the upper classes. He was among thefirstto take advantage of a new avenue to knowledge and status. Such men are not merely strays or a stratum of spokesmen for other classes but the creators of a new class system more appropriate to the new tasks and relationships of the emerging modern age in the Middle East. The new middle class itself does not define or crystallize its character from the very outset, but only as its various strata come to intervene in the process of modernization and assume additional roles in it. It originates in the intellectual and social transformation of Middle Eastern society, not as a homo8 Roger LeTourneau, "Le Developpement d'une Classe Moyenne en Afrique du Nord," in Development of a Middle Class in Tropical and Sub-Tropical Countries, Record of the XXlX Session Held in London from 13-16 September 1955, Brussels, International Institute of Differing Civilizations, 1956, pp. 106-110. The group that split off from the Moroccan Istiqlal party under Mehdi Ben Barka's leadership in 1959, the National Union of Popular Forces, is even more clearly the product of a class shaped by modern secular education and the values of the new middle class.

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geneous socio-economic class but as a secularized action group oriented toward governmental power. After capturing political power, it also attains hold of its own economic base. By controlling government in the Middle East, it also comes to own or control the countries' largest and most significant means of production. It becomes a salaried middle class with the power to decide its own salaries and responsibilities. The attainment of salaried status by this stratum of the middle class in turn also legitimizes the drive for the same status by the remaining would-be salaried middle class and usually gives that demand priority among political problems. Unlike the traditional elite of landowners and trading bourgeoisie or the tradition-bound artisans or peasants, it is thus the first class in the Middle East that is wholly the product of the transition to the modern age. Unlike the emergent new generation of peasants and urban workers, it is already powerful and self-conscious enough to undertake the task of remolding society. The new middle class has been able to act as a separate and independent force because: (1) prior to its seizure of power, it is freer than any other class from traditional bonds and preconceptions, and better equipped to manipulate armies and voluntary organizations as revolutionary political instruments; (2) once it controls the machinery of a modernizing state, it possesses a power base superior to that which any other class in the Middle East can muster on the basis of prestige, property, or physical force; (3) it is numerically one of the largest groups within the modern sector of society; (4) it is, so far, more obviously cohesive, more self-conscious, and better trained than any other class; (5) its political, economic, and social actions, in so far as they come to grips with social change, are decisive in determining the role other classes will play in the future; and (6) it has shown itself capable of marshalling mass support. Wherever the salaried new middle class has become dominant in the Middle East, it has become the chief locus of political and economic power and of social prestige. There are few classes anywhere in the world of which this much can be said.10 10 Hence we cannot accept the Marxist idea that the intelligentsia, since it does not start from an economic base of its own, is unable to act in its own interest but must ally itself with one class or another. In areas like the Middle

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Thus there can rise to power a Nasser as "Saladin in a Grey Flannel Suit,"11 greeted as hero or devil, but conceivable in these dimensions largely because he symbolizes and represents a whole class—a class which is the principal actor of the age. Those who disagree with his policies or methods may continue to think of him as devil, but they at least must recognize that this kind of devil cannot be exorcised. As the representative of a particular policy, Nasser can be foiled. As the representative of a class, and his class is the product of the Middle East's movement into the modern age, his kind cannot be made to disappear by military intervention. To acknowledge the growing presence of such a class is also to deny the long-held Western myth that the passing of the remaining older ruling elites in such countries as Iran or Jordan would leave an internal social and political vacuum. Conflicts within the New Middle Class To seek to create a modern prosperous economy, a modern society, and a modern nation is a noble objective. However, the task itself involves painful decisions about who shall receive rewards, or shall no longer receive them, and who shall change position, and when and how. There are obviously different ways of eliciting sacrifices, sharing sacrifices, and establishing goals for which such sacrifices are to be made. There are, correspondingly, different ways of minimizing the antagonism East, Soviet analysts have talked about a "national bourgeoisie," composed of local industrialists, merchants, and bankers, a "lower middle class" which employs little or no outside labor, an "intelligentsia" of students and clerks, even a "military intelligentsia." (See Walter Z. Laqueur, "The 'National Bourgeoisie,' A Soviet Dilemma in the Middle East," International Affairs, July 1959, pp. 324-331.) They have failed to perceive, however, the central role of the class which contains such men as Ataturk, Nasser, Kassim, and Bourguiba and which not only leads the nationalist revolution, but is the harbinger and architect of a decisive change in the social structure of the Middle East. There are fundamental reasons for this failure of recognition. Perceptively, the Marxist philosopher Georg Lukacs has noted: "In such periods of transition, society is not dominated by any system of production. . . . In these circumstances it is, of course, impossible to speak of the operation of any economic laws which would govern the entire society. . . . There is a condition of acute struggle for power or of a latent balance of power . . . : the old law is no longer valid and the new law is not yet generally valid." He adds, "As far as I know, the theory of historical materialism has not yet confronted this problem

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of conflicting interests and values as the new middle class translates its objectives into the mission of the entire nation. It is also possible for nationalists representing the new middle class to hold different conceptions of the national interest in relation to foreign nations. What, then, determines these choices on the part of the new middle class? The factors that readily come to mind—the burden of the past, available skills and resources and the awareness and opportunities to utilize them, differences in individual character and temperament, the force of ideas and the exigencies of particular local power constellations—are all relevant and important.12 An elite in power, whatever the social class from which it springs, faces problems and temptations in the very business of maintaining itself in power which will often distinguish it from those who have the same hopes and interests but not the same responsibilities. Membership in a particular social class is by no means the sole determinant of policy decisions. Differences in political choices among members of the new middle class, however, also reflect differences among the strata of that class and the variant character of its class consciousness. Such differences are real enough, but they usually become politically important only after the new middle class has achieved power. Earlier, all its members normally concentrate on the battle for power, mobility, and status in order to open up the from an economic perspective." (Geschichte und Klassenbewusstsein, Berlin, 1923, pp. 243 and 249.) As far as the present author is aware, this vacuum remains. 11 C . L. Sulzberger's phrase in The New York Times, March 26, 1958. 12 Not that we know by any means enough about how these factors operate. It would be most instructive to make a number of case studies, to examine, for example, the dynamics involved in the change by different age-groups in the control over large parts of the same political movement (e.g., from al-Fassi to ben Barka in Morocco's Istiqlal party); the change of outlook within the same family (e.g., the change from Abbas, father, recipient of the French Legion of Honor to Abbas, son, recent Premier of the Provisional Algerian Government in Exile); and the change within a single spirit (e.g., Edward Atiyah, An Arab Tells His Story: A Study in Loyalties, London, 1946) and contrast these with the fate of a party which remains under the control of a single age-group for several decades (e.g., the Wafd in Egypt), of a family which maintains its role as a mediator above political factions for several generations (e.g., the Shehabs of Lebanon), and of a man who never changed his mind (e.g., Nuri of Iraq).

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controlling positions in society and administration. Soon after the triumph of the new middle class, however, it becomes apparent that there is simply not room for all of them—that some will be "in" and most will be "out." It also becomes clear that, although they are agreed on the need for the transformation of their society, they are not of the same mind as to what to do with their historical opportunity.13 Such differences, however, are never merely political, or merely social, or merely economic. AU three realms are entwined as, for example, in one of the most profound of all tensions within the new middle class—between those who are salaried and those who would be like them but are not. Only a minority of the Middle East's new middle class actually holds jobs and draws salaries. The rest either can find no jobs consonant with their skills and values, or else work for status quo regimes which deny this group status and power. It would be quite misleading to exclude the "would-be" new middle class from this middle class. Both components of the middle class possess modern rather than traditional knowledge, and both are eager for a forced march into the modern age. Both are striving for the status, power, order, and prosperity that ought to go with middleclass existence. They resemble each other in every respect except success. This would-be middle class will therefore enlist itself in any movement that promises the kind of education that creates modern skills, the kind of job that opens a career, and the kind of action that gives a mere career individual rewards and social importance. The inclusion of this group among the new middle class may be unexpected to those who restrict themselves to the classical economic definition of classes. In areas like the Middle East, however, where a modern economy is still to be created, and where control over the state and the forces of social change is more potent than ownership of property, property relations alone cannot serve to define class relations. In the midst of a profound transformation of society, it would also be quite wrong to define 13 At such a point, the intelligentsia may well split again and speak for different competing factions within the new middle class—another reason why it is not possible to use "intelligentsia" and "new middle class" interchangeably.

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a social class statically, in terms of occupation, or employment at a particular moment in time. Each class must be defined in terms of its political, social, and economic role in the process of social change. In the present instance, that means taking account of all who either already perform the role of a member of the salaried middle class or who are bent by revolutionary action, if necessary, to gain a chance to perform this role and no other. How searing the difference can be between the new salaried class and the would-be middle class, whose basic orientation must be defined by middle class deprivations instead of middle class achievements, is illustrated by the situation in Iran. The Iranian example also demonstrates on how many levels that difference can recur, and how quickly the pressure of frustration can mount in the Middle East. In the 1920's and 1930's there were jobs in Iran for all who were educated, and there was only one cause of frustration. Status was still largely the fruit of traditional rank rather than individual accomplishment. "Those who had been educated abroad [and] had good family background and professed unquestionable loyalty to the political system . . . were given top administrative posts. . . . The graduates of the University of Tehran and other colleges (plus some high school graduates during the 1930's) were assigned less important government positions and formed the majority of the lower echelon of the civil service. They tended to come from families where the fathers had been merchants, guildsmen, and clergymen."14 Within a decade, the causes of discontent had multiplied enormously. Those members of the new middle class who had ideas and careers found their opportunities for status and action circumscribed. By the early 1940's, the "surplus of government employees was glaringly evident at all levels, [hence] the prestige of civil service jobs also dropped. . . . The duties proved to be routine and the job gave . . . no responsibility or sense of social participation." Inflation, the result both of "Reza Arasteh, "Education for Bureaucracy and Civil Service in Iran," an unpublished manuscript presented to the Faculty Seminar of the Program in Near Eastern Studies, Princeton University, May 1959, pp. 38-40. Arasteh has now enlarged upon this subject in Education and Social Awakening in Iran, 1850-1960, Leiden, 1962.

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planned and unplanned scarcities in the economy, took its toll. "The civil servant was no longer able to maintain his accustomed standard of living, and since then it has become necessary for him to take on a second job, equally uninspiring." He had also become socially isolated, "that is, he feels alienated from his family and he also senses the abyss that lies between him and the under-privileged, illiterate masses." He had also become more conscious of "the divergency of [his] interests with the upper-class elite whose mode of life is even more Western than [his] own."15 But that is not all. Just at a time when the status of those members of the new middle class having careers is becoming increasingly insecure, they are also being exposed to the growing challenge of a would-be middle class demanding careers, status, and power. Approximately 18,000 students graduated from Iranian colleges between 1851 and 1958. A smaller number studied abroad. Yet in 1958 alone, 9,321 students were enrolled at the University of Tehran and more than 10,000 additional Iranians were studying in universities abroad.16 There are few jobs open for them in the government, and even fewer in private business. Yet a still larger number are waiting—waiting to get into schools in which there are no vacancies in order to wait for a job that does not exist. "Because the University of Tehran and the universities in the provinces can accept only a third of those who apply, competition is very keen, and family influence often plays a part in acceptance." But the number of those who actually apply is only a partial measure of frustration. "Looking at it one way, the present 20,000 (approximately) Iranian college students constitute only 10 percent of secondary school enrollment, and two percent of the graduates of elementary schools." However, if we compare the number of college students with the potential college age group in the total population (some 1,760,000), or merely in the major urban areas (some 440,000), then the 1S

Arasteh, "Education for Bureaucracy and Civil Service in Iran," pp. 39-43. " B y contrast, only 16,229 students were enrolled at various levels of the Koranic schools, once the only educational institutions. (Ernst A. Messerschmidt, Iran, Cologne, 1953, p. 48.) Thefiguresfor the religious schools apply to 1952/53.

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number of students who actually reach college is far below one percent.17 "There is sufficient evidence to indicate that this large college age group . . . constitutes for a non-technical society like Iran an unrestful group and a potential source of change."18 In Egypt there has occurred the same closing of opportunities during the past decade. In 1947, about a third of all Egyptians with primary education or above held government jobs. The entire educational system was designed largely to prepare students for the civil service and, until recently, salary and promotions depended on the type of school certificate, rather than on the nature of the work or the skill of performance. In 1953, about 41 percent "or 46 percent, depending on how closely one calculated," of total expenditures went for government salaries and wages.19 Meanwhile, although a third of all Egyptian children of school age had no opportunity even for primary education, there were almost twice as many university students in proportion to the population as in industrialized Great Britain, and all would be clamoring for appropriate jobs. In Iraq between 1950 and 1955, about 10,000 Iraqis graduated from the Colleges of Law, Commerce, Arts, and Sciences, but only 1,250 of them found jobs in government and business.20 Partially overlapping the distinction between the working and jobless sections of the new middle class is the difference between the younger and older members of this class. "Youth" is not a passing phase in this region where half of all the people are under 20 years old, and where population grows so quickly and opportunities so slowly. In this situation men in their forties may still have almost all the naivete of youth—being untouched by careers, status, and power—yet have none of youth's innocence, for they know what they have missed. The plight of youth is obvious when the elite is recruited only from traditional classes. This plight is not resolved when the new 17

In the United States, 22 percent of this age group goes to college. Arasteh, "Education for Bureaucracy and Civil Service in Iran," pp. 17-28, passim. 19 Morroe Berger, "Civil Service and Society," an unpublished paper prepared for a Panel on Comparative Public Administration, Fiftieth Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, Chicago, September 1954. 20 Al-Hawadith (a Baghdad daily), September 17, 1955. 18

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middle class comes into its own. Initially, it grows worse. Those who have arrived often come to the top in their thirties (Ataturk, Nasser) or their forties (Kassim, Ayub). What they do can have more far-reaching results in the lives of their people than the actions of any preceding government. Yet almost all of them become authoritarians who do not intend to relinquish the reins of power until they die. Nor do members of the leading echelon of administrators and directors in government, business, journalism, schools, etc. mean to depart before the particular head of state to whom they owe their position. The older group of nationalists often learned patience and perseverance in the long struggle for power when a foreign state could always be made to bear the blame for the postponement of success. The younger men now find no target for their frustration except their own ruling elite. When youth wins out early and retires late, all the young men who mature for action thereafter are unlikely to be able to acquire a stake in the status quo and hence in moderation. When the age group that made the revolution lingers, yet does not increase the range of employment for those with talent, energy, and ideas, then the young are likely to remain radical (i.e., insist on going to the roots of the problem) or else extremist (i.e., using violence to substitute a dogmatic answer of their own). The characteristic extremism or radicalism of contemporary Middle Eastern student groups must therefore be taken more seriously than it might be in countries where one might smile comfortably at Clemenceau's jest that men who are not socialists at twenty have no heart, and men who remain socialists at forty have no head. The sharp and often bitter competition among members of the new middle class, however, does not inhibit the acquisition of a common historical awareness that each of them suffers from the same burden of the past and the same frustrations of the present. In the very fact of their separate individuality lies the essence of their common fate.21 Coming into being by influx from all social 21 Some may concentrate on preserving their status, some on enlarging it, others on attaining it. Such competition, however, does not touch their class membership. Separate individuals, to amend only slightly a formulation by Karl Marx (TAe German Ideology, New York, 1938, p. 49), form a class only in so far as they play a common role in relation to social change, and

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classes—uniting the Western-educated son of a landlord with the army-trained son of a postmaster—the new middle class is the first in Middle Eastern history for whom family connections can no longer help automatically to establish class membership. Also, being itself composed of new men, it is the first which cannot hope to rest on inherited status or existing opportunities. It is the first class for whom communication depends on successful persuasion of other individuals; it cannot base itself on the implicit consensus of the past. The new middle class is distinguishable from all other classes in the Middle East by being the first to be composed of separate individuals. It is therefore also the first class for which the choice between democracy, authoritarianism, and totalitarianism is a real and open choice. The Relationship of the New Middle Class to Other Classes The fact that the goals of the new middle class demand the mobilization of the entire society in no way implies that the role it assigns to others in its national design will correspond to the interests felt by other classes. Even the communists, whose ideology declares their dictatorship to be in the interests of the proletariat, cannot escape this clash of class interests. "It took some time until the lesson had . . . been learned; communism must cease to be 'proletarian.' . . . 'Revolution' no longer signifies 'liberation of the toilers' but 'all power to the planners.' "22 No have to carry on a common battle against another class or seek collaboration with it. Otherwise, they may be on hostile terms with each other as competitors. 22 G . L. Arnold, "Collectivism Reconsidered," British Journal of Sociology, March 1955, p. 12. The issue of antagonism between the planners and the workers had actually been raised decades before the Russian Revolution. As early as 1899, a Polish revolutionist named Waclaw Machajski had raised this point in The Evolution of Social Democracy, and in 1904, in The Intellectual Worker, he restated his thesis that the theory of socialism had not been worked out in the interests of the proletariat but of a new force, "the growing army of intellectual workers and the new middle class." Their revolution would produce a state capitalism in which the technicians, organizers, administrators, educators, and journalists would constitute the "great joint stock company known as the State, and become, collectively, a new privileged stratum over the manual workers." (Daniel Bell, "One Road from Marx: On the Vision of Socialism, and the Fate of Workers' Control, in Socialist Thought," World Politics, July 1959, pp. 491-512.)

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other rulers, at least in underdeveloped areas, can escape this conflict. K most Middle Eastern peasants and workers want more worldly goods, they want them for the sake of living well here and now; for the sake of gaining the prestige of offering larger dowries, of having more leisure. The contrast between postponing rewards and reaping them now is great enough, especially in a part of the world where scarcity and uncertainty have always loomed so threateningly, to create valid and deeply felt distinctions between political parties; indeed, between styles of life. Hence there is no reason to assume that the contradiction—even between those who demand immediate satisfactions for workers and peasants and those who claim to represent their "true" interests in the long run—can be "non-antagonistic."23 Such contradictions need not, however, become overtly antagonistic. This is not because nationalist ideologists deny that such conflicts are genuine, but because the sense of class interests is still blurred. The new middle class has only recently been emerging as a class and tribal and family loyalties remain predominant among many of the peasants and workers. Although the disciplined organization of a majority of urban workers into trade unions in Morocco and Tunisia within a decade or less demonstrates how quickly the Middle East is changing, the mobilization of peasantry and workers by the new middle class has scarcely begun in most countries of this region. Charismatic and nationalist identification between leaders and followers frequently creates much overlapping enthusiasm even when there are few overlapping interests. And peasants and workers are often content to yield much for concrete rewards, regardless of the political system that grants them—especially greater justice from the courts, more honesty from the administrators, more wells, more schools, more food. The Middle East is only beginning to enter the age of choice, and hence of experiencing the price of making friends and enemies among one's own people. Middle Eastern political and social stability, therefore, has scarely yet been tested. The new middle class is not the first class that has sought to 23 Cf. editorial in Peiping People's Daily on "non-antagonistic contradictions," reprinted in Pravda, April 15, 1957.

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take the leading role in modernizing the Middle East. There were individual rulers in the nineteenth century who recognized that the survival of their power, the prestige of their dynasty, and the security of their domain depended on the modernization at least of their army, bureaucracy, and trade. Mohammed AIi (in power 1805-1848) in Cairo, and Sultan Mahmud II (in power 1808-1839) in Constantinople were among the earliest such rulers. Later, when Middle Eastern empires were succeeded by independent states, the bourgeoisie and large landowners assumed this task, but once again limited their performance largely to what was required to enhance their own status and power. Hence trade and bureaucracy remained the principal foci of modernization. To reflect the participation of a somewhat broader group in politics, party cliques and quasi-parliamentary structures were developed. Since European influence in the Middle East was usually strong enough during this period to curb the army's growth, it was modernized only sufficiently to make it an adequate repressive force. There was little or no response to pressures for modernization from below, and no general commit­ ment to deal with social change. This older bourgeoisie was in its structure, interests, and relationships, and hence in its political role, quite different from the emergent new middle class. The former maintained itself in 24 urban enclaves within a "feudal" society. It never attained the strength to unite city and countryside into a single economic unit, or the courage to reshape that larger society which was, nonetheless, beginning to crumble around it. Many of the small businessmen—the principal pillars of the propertied middle class—have tended here as elsewhere "to develop a generalized hostility toward a complex of symbols and processes bound up with industrial capitalism, the steady growth and concentration of government, labor organizations, and business enterprises, and the correlative trend toward greater 25 rationalization of production and distribution." Their interests **This distinction between the role of the bourgeoisie and the middle class is also employed by G. D. H. Cole, "The Conception of the Middle Classes," The British Journal of Sociology, December 1950, pp. 275-290. α Martin Trow, "Small Businessmen, Political Tolerance, and McCarthy," American Journal of Sociology, November 1958, p. 274.

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therefore differ from those of a salaried new middle class accustomed to life in an organization, and their range of interests and their links with the new class are too limited in the Middle East to give them a leading role in shaping the direction of a society in upheaval. In part, of course, even the salaried middle class is aware of itself only as an interest group with pragmatic, specific, and relatively short-run demands. It may concentrate on conspicuous consumption—acquiring Cadillacs, building steel mills regardless of their relative economic utility, or improving armies that are already strong enough to maintain internal security and protect the frontiers against all but the large industrialized powers. To allocate savings and scarce foreign exchange to the satisfaction of the immediate desires of the new middle class in this manner is no different from allowing them to be used by peasants for larger dowries—the conflict is then between interest groups, not between different orientations toward social change. The interest of one group is satisfied at the direct expense of another's. It is quite apparent, however, that the pace and pain of social change had become too great by the second half of this century for the new middle class to avoid acquiring a larger historical consciousness of its role.26 The new middle class has become the first bearer of civic spirit on a national scale in the Middle East because it cannot translate its ideas into action or achieve careers or status unless it creates a nation of individuals linked by consciousness and material fact—a nation that economically, socially, and politically can survive social change. For almost every individual in the Middle East is now in motion, even those who are still standing still. Things are not the same for those who toil or die in traditional fashion if their neighbors now have modern implements to plant modern cash crops and can keep themselves healthy with modern medicines. When people come to be called traditionalists by their neighbors, the old spell has been broken. The new middle class not only possesses the kind of empathy 26 In Lebanon, however, there appears to be a peculiar obstacle to such a change: various religious and ethnic groups have become political interest groups, each entitled to a proportionate share of jobs in parliament, bureaucracy, and education.

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that allows its members to see themselves "in the other fellow's situation."27 Even in traditional Islam, it was not infrequent for an artisan to become the leader of a religio-political rebellion, or for a soldier or tribal chief to become Sultan. Some could envisage playing such roles; others could not. What characterizes the new middle class in the Middle East is that it is the first that has the capacity to envisage new types of roles to be played in a new kind of world. In the midst of a profound social transformation which it helps to shape and sharpen, this new middle class will, of course, not remain a stable or static element. In part it will give birth to new strata from within itself; in part it will be midwife to other classes kindred to it—namely those which are usually termed upper and lower middle classes. Indeed, these are already beginning to appear in their modern version. Given the predominant role of the new middle class in the government, and hence in the social and economic development of the country, the modern upper middle class is very likely to develop to a considerable extent from among the ranks of the former. Even the members of modern professions, almost exclusively sons of landlords and the traditional bourgeoisie earlier in this century, are being increasingly drawn from the same broader ranks as the salaried middle class. If such social and economic development grows apace, the modern upper middle class of politicians, professional men, and administrators may well come to dominate society and give it a moderate orientation. This upper middle class which starts, as it were, from scratch, may be joined by private entrepreneurs taking advantage of the new political stability and the economic foundations built by the government. It seems, however, rather rare for members of traditional bourgeois families to take advantage of their capital and connections to acquire new skills relevant to an industrial economy.28 To have become rich in traditional fashion often shrouds incentives to the learning of modern skills. As for self27 The key concept defining transitional and modern man in Daniel Lerner's The Passing of Traditional Society: Modernizing the Middle East, Glencoe, 1958, pp. 49-54, 69-75. 28 See Bert F. Hoselitz, "Entrepreneurship and Economic Growth," American Journal of Economics and Sociology, October 1952.

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made modern capitalists in the Middle East, much will depend on the ideology of the salaried middle class. In Egypt, even the most efficient large private enterprises have been nationalized for the sake of centralizing control over investments and distribution of benefits. In Syria, capitalists threatened by the same policies during 1961 allied themselves with opposition movements drawn from the would-be middle class and succeeded in installing a tenuous new regime pledged to a mixed economy. Members of the traditional elite who are not landlords or traders have sometimes gained access more readily to the modern upper middle class. Sons of the traditional bourgeoisie in a number of Middle Eastern countries have transformed themselves into one of the most influential elements of the modern upper middle class by virtue of their training as officers in the army. Trained in modern technology and administration, and assigned a national mission, this group had the opportunity and incentive for a successful transition. Similar to them in origin and second to them only in power are many of the Western-trained members of the upper levels of the bureaucracy. And there are, it must be added, a number of kings who seem anxious to make the same transition —among them those of Afghanistan, Iran, Jordan, and Morocco. But be they general, bureaucrat, or king, they are likely to fail politically unless they can relate themselves to the aspirations of the rest of the new middle class. For they themselves number in no country of this region more than a few hundred. Even if some of them have independent incomes, nevertheless all are dependent upon civil and military bureaucracies without whose loyalty or cohesion they can no longer function at all. The modern lower middle class is, in the Middle East, composed of two distinct groups. There are those whose "western education is limited, and more probably has been cut off at an early stage. Self-education seems to be a recurrent feature among them."29 But there are also those in the lower middle class who, instead of being able to capitalize on a modicum of modern 28 Leonard Binder's description of the Pakistani lower middle class is probably applicable to the rest of this region [drawn from an unpublished manuscript delivered at the Dobbs Ferry Conference of the Social Science Research Council, 1957].

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knowledge, suffer from a peculiarly modern disability. They are well trained, but in classic subjects (e.g., Shari'a law) or in the wrong language (e.g., Urdu, when English is essential to government and business). In any but the modern age, they would have been able to rise to a status equivalent at least to that of the modern middle class. Now they can only hope to eke out a lower middle class existence. In short, both components of the modern lower middle class in the Middle East consist of men who are frustrated in their social mobility. They are not like the traditional lower middle class, composed predominantly of small artisans and shopkeepers and minor clerks, most of whom implicitly accept their station in life.30 They are not, like the middle and upper strata of the new middle class, capable of translating their ambition into reality. Hence, organizing their discontent is likely to offer a major potential for political action. Prospects for the New Middle Class Thus the character and terms of the struggle for power in the Middle East become clearer. The changes now under way in the social and political system appear to have three successive, though often overlapping, phases: first, the battle between the new middle class and the traditional ruling class; second, the drive by the successful new middle class to supply cadre for all five groups that compose the elite in modern society (political leaders, government administrators, economic directors, leaders of masses, and military chiefs) ;31 and third, the struggles among 80 In Turkey, where the modern age began earlier than in most of the Middle East, the mid-nineteenth century saw the appearance of the Young Ottomans, many of them minor bureaucrats, whose level of expectations had risen since they had become the Empire's new experts in communication and administration. Yet they lacked the lubricants of money and family status to advance themselves. At that point in history they allied themselves almost entirely with the ulema who were beginning to lose prestige with the growth of secularization. (See §erif Mardin, The Genesis of Young Ottoman Thought, A Study in the Modernization of Turkish Political Ideas, Princeton, 1962.) In twentieth century Egypt, such men often allied themselves with the Moslem Brotherhood (see Chapter 8). 81 These five categories are drawn from Raymond Aron, "Social Structure and the Ruling Class," The British Journal of Sociology, March and June 1950, p. 9. Aron points out that "The fundamental difference between a society of the Soviet type and one of the Western type is that the former has a unified

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strata within the new middle class for predominance, increasingly involving other new classes, especially uprooted peasants and workers. In terms of these phases, it is apparent that the most important political struggle in the Middle East is no longer between the new middle class and the traditional ruling class. The new middle class has already come to power in almost all but the least developed and regionally least influential countries.32 At this extraordinary moment when the traditional ruling class has been defeated and the peasants and workers have not yet organized themselves to make their own demands, politics has become a game played almost entirely within the new middle class. Thus, it is a political era resembling none that preceded it and probably none that will follow it, and one that is likely to prove particularly volatile and productive. It will be volatile, in part, because politics within the new middle class will involve competition for a very limited number of powerful positions by persons who, even in behalf of issues, must often substitute the force of personality (itself still evolving) for the strength of established political parties. Compromises will be hard to arrange. Because the majority of the people are unrepresented, one of the most persuasive arguments for compromise among executive policy-makers in other countries—the anticipated reaction of a free legislature—will continue to be irrelevant. Disagreements among policy-makers in authoritarian regimes will usually mean ouster for one or the other. Although repression of one faction of the new middle class by elite and the latter a divided elite" (p. 10). From that perspective, the Middle Eastern situation fits somewhere in between, since the elite is drawn from a single, small, and embattled class which strives for the unification of the elite but seldom succeeds for long in preventing clashes. The pressure for a unified elite in the Midde East, moreover, is based on historical exigencies (the availability of a large number of members of the new middle class for a small number of careers in the new institutions of society) and political expediency (the need for loyal supporters in an environment in which the majority does not yet share the outlook of the new middle class). Conformity to an ideological dogma which justifies the unification of the elite (for example under the guise of the "dictatorship of the proletariat") characterizes only the communists in the Middle East. 82 The displacement of the landowners and traditional bourgeoisie as the political elite does not necessarily imply their demise as a social class. Where

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another faction is common, membership in the same class seems to make a difference. Rival movements are outlawed, but individual members—men with whom, after all, one went to school, worked in common clandestineness, and with whose ideas one may once have toyed oneself—are often allowed to write editorials or remain in the bureaucracy. And the more important opposition leaders are, with startling frequency, appointed to Embassies abroad, being jailed only if they insist on returning. The centuries of repression which the new middle class fought to end more clearly and courageously than anyone else are, at present, in disrepute. For the first time since the Middle Ages, and in contrast to recent status quo oligarchies such as the late Nuri al-Sa'id Pasha's in Iraq, the elite and the main opposition, both drawn from the new middle class, speak a mutually comprehensible language derived from a common experience. Thus a genuine political dialogue is at last in progress in the Middle East. The vital question now—vital because the outcome affects all aspects of society—is which segment of the new middle class shall predominate, what ideological orientation it will prefer, and what factors help or hinder the progress of competing factions. The thrust toward revolutionary action on the part of the new middle class is overwhelming. It is itself the product of an unfinished and uncontrolled revolutionary transformation of society. It intends therefore to organize social change rather than become its victim. Even those who do not possess this broader vision, but who nevertheless would like to live in the same style as the average man in the more conservative industrialized nations, will have to upset the status quo much further before they can hope to enjoy the benefits of a stable new status quo. Unlike the great majority of the Western salaried middle class, this new class cannot afford to perpetuate the traditional norms and laws of society, even though it is already being threatened by the confusion of standards and the growth of extremism in its own ranks. The such a demise of what was always a small group is in fact in progress, as in Tunisia, and where a strong egalitarian strain makes it difficult for any member of the new middle class to raise himself socially or economically high above his fellows, it may, strictly speaking, be wrong to speak of a middle class. Even here, however, "middle" still serves to define its aspirations and style of consumption, whatever its final destiny.

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largest component of the new middle class in most countries, and the most rapidly growing, will be the young with few links to tradition or to the previous generation, with inadequate knowledge and skills, and with little chance of status or of any useful job. Both the burden of the past and the threat of the future impel the salaried middle class to become the principal revolutionary force, creating new standards and institutions relevant to a modernizing society. There is no inescapable doom that revolutionary change must come through violence, however. One of the most remarkable, and remarkably neglected, phenomena of modern history is the near absence of violence that has marked rapid, structural changes in all those countries where, since 1950, the new middle class has come to power. In Egypt, for example, a landed ruling class was economically dispossessed, socially displaced, and politically overthrown. A new social class took its place, the greater part of the economy was nationalized or at least placed under effective state control, the legal basis of authority and the structure and functions of political institutions were fundamentally altered, and a religion-bound culture was secularized, all at die cost of less than twenty lives.33 This is a remarkable performance in contrast to the French Revolution of the eighteenth century, or the Chinese and Russian Revolutions of our time. The absence of violence alone, however, is not sufficient evidence of stability, or a clear sign that the fundamental revolution of Middle Eastern society has come to an end. The new middle class will be able to signal its conversion from a revolutionary into a stabilizing force only when it has succeeded in limiting the realm of politics to the domain of public authority, thus allowing the social, economic, and private business of men once again to become autonomous realms. That cannot happen until there is 33 TwO soldiers were killed during the brief fighting that accompanied Nasser's coup in 1952, eleven strikers were shot during riots or subsequently courtmartialed and hanged in 1952, and six members of the Moslem Brotherhood, as they might under the laws of any country, were sentenced to death in 1954 for having conspired to assassinate Nasser. Where the toll of violence was greater, the causes so far lay largely either in the resistance of the entrenched rulers to the emergence of the new middle class (as in Algeria), or in a deep division within the new middle class (as in Iraq).

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sufficient capacity and consensus for dealing with social change, and until political leaders need no longer convert all aspects of existence into issues of power. In most countries of this region it is improbable, certainly within the next decade, that the new middle class will have succeeded in establishing firm economic, political, and psychological foundations for the growth of individuals and groups that can be autonomous in action yet share in a broad consensus of values. Instead, most of the governments will still be struggling to establish their own authority, and assure physical survival for their citizens. The status and prosperity that ought to accompany middle class existence is likely still to elude most of its members, and even the term "middle class" will retain ironic overtones. They will still be caught in the middle of time, between an age not yet quite dead and one not yet quite born. They will still be suspended between a traditional folk that is being uprooted but not yet sure what leadership to follow over the longer run, and a political elite, drawn at last from their own class but unable as yet to satisfy their aspirations. The new middle class will not be able to escape soon from the harsh struggle for the sheer biological and psychological necessities of life. Hence it will not soon escape from an age of revolution into an age in which both freedom and authority are assured. The salaried new middle class possesses one advantage over all previous ruling groups. The tasks it must perform in order to create status, power, and prosperity for itself no less than the nation require the establishment of modern, integrating institutions which can mobilize the spirit and resources of the entire nation. At the same time these institutions, by their very nature, are also peculiarly adapted to control by the new middle class. While it is almost inevitable in the present historical situation that the new middle class will acquire power, there is nothing inevitable about its orientation or its permanent success. Under the inspiration of particular personalities, ideologies, or environmental changes, this new ruling group may fractionalize more often than act in unison. Overwhelmed by pressure of sheer population, inadequate organizational skill, or lack of courage, it may not be able to cement a working relationship with the [77]

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majority of the population—the peasants and workers. Yet unlike any of its predecessors, the new middle class has goals which depend for their success on popular support and participation, whether achieved by consent, authority, or terror. Thus, the new middle class is faced with most extraordinary opportunities. If it fails to consolidate its authority by achieving sufficient internal cohesion and general social progress, and its factions are instead engaged in ruthless competition for the support of the rural and urban masses, the approaching future is bound to be one of fearful unrest.

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CHAPTER 5 PEASANTS: THE SILENT MAJORITY AT THE THRESHOLD OF POLITICS

A Majority in Misery THE conflict of ideas in the Middle East is waged consciously only among a small, largely urban segment of the population. The conflict of loyalties and beliefs is felt with rapidly growing impact among rural masses who are becoming sensitive to the possibility and actuality of change. Agriculture occupies at least three-quarters of the population, and often more, in the region from Morocco to Pakistan. It does not follow, however, that most people in the Middle East are within reach of food. Only about four percent of the area from Morocco to Pakistan is at present under cultivation. Most peasants do not have enough land. They work exceedingly hard during about six months of the agricultural season. Thereafter, given present traditions and technology, the peasant is unemployed.1 An ever-growing number of peasants are becoming landless as population rises and the erosion and salinity of the soil spread. Egypt, between 1897 and 1947, increased its cultivated area by 14 percent and its crop area by 37 percent. During the same time, however, its population doubled.2 If, during the next decade, this most populous of all Arab states succeeds in completing the High Aswan Dam, it will add another third to the 1 I n Egypt, perennial irrigation and the silt brought continually by the Nile from the highlands of Ethiopa allows an average of five harvests in two years. Hence work is nearly continuous. 2 Doreen Warriner, Land Reform and Development in the Middle East: A Study of Egypt, Syria and Iraq, London, 1957, p. 17. In 1961, Egypt's population was almost three times what it had been 64 years earlier, or about 27,000,000.

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arable land of Egypt; in the same period, its population will probably also grow by 25 percent. Pakistan, the most populous of all Islamic states, has, since independence, lost more land due to faulty drainage and consequent increased salinity of the soil than it has added by clearance or irrigation. Those who had little land are coming to possess less. Between 1905 and 1940, the number of small proprietors in Egypt increased by 133 percent; the area devoted to parcels of less than five acres increased by 50 percent. And the greater part of this increase took place in the number of farms of less than one acre, which do not provide minimum subsistence. By 1950, 70 percent of all Egyptian farm owners possessed less than half an acre.3 The number of those owning no land at all has risen to about half the rural labor force. Most of those who are working on the land work not because the land requires their labor but because they require the work. It was estimated in 1939 that, with half the degree of mechanization as on American farms, 10 percent of Egypt's farmers could do all the work that needed to be done.4 In the past twenty years, mechanization on American farms has experienced a phenomenal growth, while in Egypt it is the population that has grown at a phenomenal rate. To increase output per man now would make even more laborers superfluous. To continue to let the superfluous workers share in the low income of the peasants further reduces the standard of living of all. A peasantry in this condition cannot afford to stimulate the growth of alternative industrial employments for themselves by purchasing the products of industry. In fact, the evidence suggests that during the 1930's and 1940's their total food consumption fell as their number grew.5 "Doreen Warriner, Land and Poverty in the Middle East, p. 36; National Bank of Egypt, Economic Bulletin, Vol. 5, No. 3, 1952. * Wendell Cleland, "A Population Plan for Egypt," L'Egypte Contemporaine, May 1939, p. 5. 8 Warriner, Land and Poverty, p. 39. The fall in consumption was related to a fall in real income. "This has been measured by an economist at Alexandria University: . . . the net annual income of the Egyptian peasant has declined from about 13.5 pounds Egyptian in 1913 to around 7.5 pounds in 1951, at 1913 prices. This represents roughly a decline of 40% in the real income of the Egyptian peasant." (Richard Nolte, "Report on the United Arab Republic,"

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In most of the Middle East, tilling the soil does not necessarily promise a harvest. Only in Egypt is there a steady supply of water. A few areas in several other countries are also favored by reliable rivers or rains. In most regions, however, the rains may not come, the desert winds may blow too long, or the locust may get out of control. "In the Syrian Jezira, for instance, wheat gives a tenfold return in a good year, sevenfold in a normal year, while in a bad year it will only give back the equivalent of the seed."6 In the Middle East the ownership of land gives status; working the land does not. Reaping a harvest does not necessarily imply eating it. Everywhere in the Middle East, until 1952, by far the greater part of each country, especially the most fertile areas, was in the hands of large landowners.7 It has not been uncommon for a landowner to possess 200,000 acres or more, including perhaps several scores of villages. Since then, the situation has radically changed only in Egypt, but by the end of the decade, the redistribution of large estates was also beginning in Tunisia, Syria, Iraq, Pakistan, and Iran. Sharecropping remains even now the most common form of farming. The division of crops differs from area to area and the tenant's share varies from one-third to one-twenty-first part of the harvest, frequently falling between one-third to one-fifth. Insistence by the landlord on "free" labor (i.e., personal servitude) sometimes adds to the burden. There is rarely afixedrent, so that there is no incentive for the tenant to work hard to create a surplus he can retain.8 The tenant's security, and hence his incenMiddle East Report, Report of the 13th Annual Conference on Middle Eastern Affairs, ed. by William Sands, Middle East Institute, Washington, D.C., 1959, p. 26.) 8 Warriner, Land Reform, p. 57. In Iran partial or total crop failure occurs, on the average, probably in one year out of five; in many areas of North Africa, in one out of four. 7 Lebanon and Turkey were the only exceptions at that time: there the majority of peasants owned their land. In Iran, by contrast, it was estimated that of about 41,000 villages, 40,000 were owned outright by landlords. (Messerschmidt, Iran, p. 48.) 8 "The general tendency is for the landowners not to encourage the peasants to make gardens. The reason for this is that the landowners know that the possession of gardens is likely to make the peasants more prosperous, and fear lest easier circumstances may make them independent. There is a minority of

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tive to improve himself, is further diminished by the fact that hardly anywhere does he possess either a written lease or accepted rights of tenure. Seldom, however, does this leave the tenant legally free to go elsewhere. Indebtedness to the landlord is his usual fate, the result either of bad harvests or the high price of services and commodities monopolized by the landlord. For most landlords the sharecropping system has the peculiar advantage of storing capital in the most reputable and least fragile form at a high return without the burden of management or operational expenses.9 Absentee landownership is more common than not. Sometimes the landlord leases his villages to another who may himself be an absentee. The opportunities for profit are ample enough: in few countries of the Middle East is there a tax on farm income. Where it exists it is not high and not always collected efficiently.10 For the tenant, the only advantage in the system is that it allows him to retain some lease on life, although his yield is seldom sufficient, after the deduction of the landowner's share and other dues, to provide for his minimal needs. Most peasants, unless they can supplement their incomes by the produce of a garden, flocks, or cottage industry, are barely able to subsist.11 In the rice-growing areas of the Caspian provinces of Iran, the situation is even worse than in the grain-growing areas of the plateau. The produce of 2,000 square meters, if the land is free of pests and well cared for, normally amounts to 450 kilograms. The landlord usually takes 150 kilos (in some villages, 225). A further landowners who adopt a more liberal policy and take the view that if the peasant has some permanent stake in the land, he is more likely to be contented and, therefore, to work better. . . . In so far as housing is concerned the landlords probably prefer the peasants to own their houses because they (the landlords) are not then liable for the expense of repairs." (Ann K. S. Lambton, Landlord and Peasant in Persia, pp. 302-303.) 8 "Ownership in no way affects the method of cultivation; in a landowner's village, the peasants continue their [separate] strip cultivation, even sometimes on the mushaa system [reallocating the strips every few years among the villagers] without in any way changing their methods or working under direction; landownership is a credit operation, nothing more." (Warriner, Land and Poverty, p. 23.) " U n t i l the present decade in Pakistan, zamindari (landlords) held land on condition that they paid annually to the government a sum in taxes that had been fixed in perpetuity as long ago as 1793. 11 Lambton, Landlord and Peasant in Persia, p. 368.

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150 kilos goes for the cost of cultivation. A family, therefore, must live on the residue of 150 kilos of rice a year.12 The number of peasant proprietors becoming tenant farmers has been increasing in the Middle East during this century. In most countries the majority of the titles to land remain unregistered, so that the more powerful landlords have been able to force many free peasants to become tenants. Indebtedness and usury, however, militate even more strongly against an independent peasantry. The reasons are the same throughout the area. In Morocco, for example, the average peasant proprietor cannot support a family of four on the proceeds of even a good year; some member of his family must find employment elsewhere. Most farmers, however, do not even realize three-quarters of the income needed for bare subsistence.13 As a result, the peasant proprietor often runs short before the harvest, and must borrow and buy just when prices are highest. Being in debt, he must sell when everyone else sells his harvest, that is, when prices are lowest. Hence there is a continuous process whereby, after bad harvests, proprietors lose their lands to merchants and speculators. The new landlord may allow the former proprietor to continue as a tenant or he may lease the land to another. Beyond even the pale of the sharecropper stands the landless farm worker, who is seldom sure in the morning whether he will earn enough during the day to procure the evening meal for himself and his family. His employment is never more than seasonal; in sickness or drought, he is the first to suffer. When fully employed, he can never hope to make enough to better his position. How fragile his hold on life may be is suggested by official Pakistani estimates that 1,710,000 people, most of them landless workers, died in the famine of 1942-1943.14 The number of "Ibid, pp. 376-8. " P a u l Buttin, in 1953, set this minimum at 416 francs or $1.20 a day. ("Needs and Salaries of the Moroccan Worker on European Farms," in Agriculture Moderne Au Maroc, May 1953.) In that year, the average agricultural wage was about 135 francs or about 40 cents a day. 14 A. F. A. Husain, Human and Social Impact of Technological Change in Pakistan, Vol. I, Dacca, 1956, pp. 47-48. In the same period, 100,000 died of malaria in the Egyptian provinces of Qena and Aswan where the greater part of the land was in the hands of large companies and where, as Egyptian Premier Nahas Pasha later acknowledged, underpaid and half-starved workers had no resistance to the accidental introduction of a new mosquito from West Africa. (Warriner, Land and Poverty, pp. 39-40.)

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rural workers possessing no land at all is certainly growing. In 1940, they constituted nearly half of all Egyptians actively occupied on the land. The landless now constitute about one-fourth of all peasants in Tunisia, half of those in Morocco, and twothirds of those in Algeria. In 1949, an Iranian survey of 1,300 villages in the Tehran and Demavend areas showed that 60 percent of the rural families had no land at all, and the situation may well be worse in areas further from the capital.15 Among those Middle Eastern areas with a predominantly non-nomadic rural population, the province of East Pakistan may be the least affected by this problem. Only 14 percent of its rural laborers are landless.16 Though the peasants' life has scarcely yet become a desirable one, the peasants' ranks are being swelled in many areas by former nomads who have hitherto always despised a settled existence. For the first time in the Middle East's history, urban society is about to achieve a final victory over the nomad. His freedom to ignore the laws, taxes, boundaries, and purposes of central governments, to raid and to wander, is now being curtailed or abolished. Especially in Iraq and Syria, he is being made to settle down, while the remaining pastoral tribes often lose their best steppe lands to the· encroachment of cereal production.17 Among traditional social groups, the nomadic tribes have repeatedly proved themselves a threat to the integrity of the new national states by fighting for autonomy or entering into alliances with foreign powers. Few measures have been taken to make it profitable for the nomad to change his whole heritage of values and acquire new skills.18 He enters the peasant world near the bottom, and without the latter's ancient habit of adjustment. Ironically, the tra15 Gideon Hadary, "The Agrarian Reform Problem in Iran," Middle East Journal, Spring 1951, p. 185. 16 Husain, Human and Social Impact, Vol. I, p. 47. 17 In Egypt, the settled population has historically almost always been able to dominate the nomad, thanks to its control of the Nile. In Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Morocco, Libya, and Iran, nomadic tribes can still play an important, independent political role. 18 Afif I. Tannous, "The Tribal Community in a Nationalist State," Middle East Journal, January 1947, pp. 5-17; Adnan Mahhouk, "Recent Agricultural Development and Bedouin Settlement in Syria," Middle East Journal, Spring 1956, pp. 167-176.

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ditional nomad is beginning to join the rural poor just as the migration from country to city is swelling the ranks of the urban "nomad," uprooted, displaced, and superfluous, with no fixed place in society. "The peasant lives, for the most part, in conditions of grinding poverty; the landowner, although he enjoys a comparative affluence, is in constant fear of being despoiled of his wealth by intrigue, or of being cheated of it by a discontented peasantry; and the government official, often inadequately paid, finds it difficult to support himself and his family unless he has some source of income other than his pay. Distrust, insecurity, and intrigue prevail on all sides."19 These words were written of the peasant's life in Iran, but they also describe the life of the overwhelming majority of Middle Easterners. A large number do not survive long to suffer this existence. "It is not exaggerating to state that the average agricultural worker (fellah) is a living pathological specimen, as he is probably a victim of ankylostomiasis [hookworm, leading to abdominal pain, intermittant fever, progressive anemia, and emaciation], ascariasis [an intestinal parasite causing diarrhea], malaria, bilharzia [blood flukes producing urinal discharge of blood and dysentery], trachoma [an infectious disease of the eye], bejel [a nonvenereal form of syphilis], and possibly of tuberculosis also."20 In all of Iraq, infant mortality is about 300-350 per 1,000, a figure probably applicable to most of the Middle East.21 Flies, 19

Lambton, Landlord and Peasant in Persia, pp. 394-395. A. Michael Critchley, "The Health of the Industrial Worker in Iraq," British Journal of Industrial Medicine, Vol. 12, 1955. A Rockefeller Foundation study made at the request of the Egyptian Ministry of Health found that, in five typical villages within 30 miles of Cairo, all villagers had amoebic dysentery, 92 percent bilharzia, 64 percent intestinal worms, 5 percent pellagra, and 6.5 percent syphilis. Two percent annually had typhoid, 6 percent were typhoid carriers, 2 percent had active tuberculosis, 6 percent acute eye infection, and 89 percent trachoma. 6.4 percent were blind in one eye, and 1 percent totally blind. (,New York Times, May 5, 1952.) 21 Doris G. Adams, "Current Population Trends in Iraq," Middle East Journal, Spring 1956. The Rockefeller report cited in the preceding footnote states that life expectancy at birth in Egypt is 15 to 20 years, but this average rests on the fact that about half the children die before the age of 5; those who survive beyond 5 may expect to live to about 50. In terms of a scale in which a community with proper sanitary conditions could score 106.5 points, villages in India and China examined by Rockefeller Foundation teams scored about 53.25 points, while the Egyptian villages examined scored only 23.8. 20

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fleas, lice, and worms are constant purveyors of disease and discomfort. For most Middle Eastern peasants the coming of the modern era has brought benefits of doubtful value and in some ways has increased their hardships. In the past, the peasant suffered from the raids of nomadic tribes, the devastations of troops defending or attacking the local ruler, the exploitation of landlord and official, and the levies of tax-farmers. For the great majority of peasants, the benefits of the modern age can be summed up by saying that it has become harder to die. While clean water remains an unattained luxury for most of the peasants, there are some water-borne diseases that, at least in certain countries, are no longer allowed to breed or kill as easily as before. Fewer people, for example, are dying of malaria. Above all, fewer are dying of tribal wars and famines. As a result, more Middle Eastern peasants are probably kept alive to suffer misery than ever before in history. It was in the modern age that perennial irrigation was introduced into Egypt; water-borne diseases like malaria and bilharzia actually became more frequent than before.22 Cotton became king, demanding (and until 1952 applying political pressure to preserve) a large mass of cheap seasonal workers.23 In the modern age, too, the patriarchal egalitarianism and nomadic freedom of the pastoral tribes broke down because insecure governments, especially in Syria and Iraq, hoped to create stable political allies by making sheikhs the sole landlords of their tribes. In this way they created lords without defined responsibility to kinsmen or government. Government officials for the first time became numerous in the rural areas, but they were 22 In Upper Egypt, where there is no perennial irrigation, the incidence of bilharzia is 5 percent, in Delta Egypt, 45 to 75 percent. (Warriner, Land and Poverty, pp. 41-42, citing the investigation of Dr. Mohammed Abd el-Khalik.) 23 Until the land reforms of 1952, labor in the large estates of the Delta was organized in gangs under overseers. "The gang system is open to obvious abuses, employment of children and exploitation by the gang leader being the worst." It was "not uncommon to see gangs of small girls, from five years upwards, picking cotton, followed by the gang leader with a whip." The authorities did not supervise labor conditions in any way and the agricultural worker, the majority of Egyptian fellahin, enjoyed no protective legislation of any kind. (Ibid., pp. 36-38.)

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usually underpaid and hence inclined to bend before the superior influence of the landlords in both the capital and the village.24 The shift from subsistence to commercial agriculture in the modern age has served so far only to increase the gap between rich peasants and poor. Directly or indirectly, the peasant continues to pay most of the taxes. But improvements in agricultural equipment and production, health, education, housing, and food have, in general, reached only those landowners who already possessed sufficient capital and political influence to take advantage of opportunities for modernization. Nevertheless, although comparatively few have benefited from the improvements introduced by modern science, the masses have become aware that poverty and exploitation are not inescapable. With appetites whetted by the hope of a better life, their present suffering seems all the harder to bear. Fatalism and Its Other Face—Rebellion The Middle Eastern peasant is poor and exploited, but hardly anyone in the area expects him to rebel. The assumption of the peasant's passivity, however, is based on a surprising ignorance about his life, even among his fellow-countrymen. "Next to the family the most important social unit in all Moslem countries outside Arabia is the village, [yet] no Moslem writer, in either medieval or modern times has condescended to describe the organization of village life in his country."25 Most landlords who speak readily about the attitudes of peasants are absentees living in cities. Their estate managers, con24 Landlords wielded such political influence that, in Iraq for example, they paid no income tax on rents drawn from land until 1956, and at least until 1948 paid no property tax on the land itself. 25 Gibb and Bowen, Islamic Society and the West, Vol. 1, Part 1, p. 5. Hamed Ammar was the first Middle Eastern scholar to break the silence in his perceptive study of personality and culture, Growing Up in An Egyptian Village, London, 1954. Without the pioneering studies of Warriner and Lambton, so often cited in the foregoing pages, this chapter could not have been written. Among volumes not cited, the reader will find particularly valuable Henry Habib-Ayrout, The Fellaheen, a sympathetic and detailed description translated by Hilary Wayment, Cairo, 1946; Jacques Weulersse, Paysans de Syrie et du Proche-Orient, Paris, 1946; Jacques Berque, Histoire Social d'un Village Egyptien du XXeme Steele, Paris, 1957; and John Gulick, Social Structure and Culture Change in a Lebanese Village, New York, 1955.

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trolling the peasants' essentials of life, have little difficulty producing the proper peasant vote. The urban intelligentsia and some peasant migrants have for centuries found in the cities escape from the infinitely greater ignorance, poverty, and toil without reward or dignity that prevail in the countryside. The gulf between city and village culture is now even more profound than before. The intelligentsia has remained reluctant until quite recently to return to the hinterland of the majority and discover their needs. Even the peasants themselves, who during the twentieth century have been leaving by the millions for rapidly growing urban slums, seem reluctant to return to the land until the present "idiocy of rural life" has been remedied.28 However, since almost no one speaks for the peasant, it has been possible for Middle Eastern governments dominated by landowners, and also for a number of foreign observers, to take comfort in the thought that the peasant has long ago learned to accept misery, and that his passivity and conservatism will not let him revolt. If the Middle Eastern peasant is conservative, it cannot be for any of the reasons that are said to make people of his class conservative in other regions. The vast majority in the Middle East are neither owners of their land nor masters of their own labor; neither in knowledgeable partnership with nature nor respected by other classes in their society. They no longer live in communities that are relatively stable and largely self-contained and selfgoverned.27 There are peasants on middle-sized farms, especially in Lebanon and a few other regions, who do enjoy all or most of 28 There is a wasteland east of the dyke which protects Baghdad from floods where about 40,000 recent immigrants from rural areas live. "The area was also used by the municipality as well as private individuals as a dumping ground for human and animal excreta, and rubbish. In addition the few surface water drains in the east of the city are pumped over the bund into this area, just after receiving the washings from the city abattoirs. The polluted and foul-smelling liquid, which formed a sizeable stream, wound its way through the conglomeration of mud buildings. . . ." (A. Michael Critchley, "Observations on a SocioMedical Survey in Iraq," Journal of the Iraqi Medical Professions, June 1956, pp. 71-72, cited by Doris G. Adams Phillips, "Rural to Urban Migration in Iraq," Economic Development and Cultural Change, July 1959, pp. 405-421.) "Despite this morbid picture," Mrs. Phillips concludes that "migrants from rural areas to the city are better off than they were before," and that it is this "differential between rural and urban levels of living that explains most of the migration." 27 Cf. Maurice Zinkin, Development for Free Asia, London, 1956, pp. 1-2.

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these advantages. Most peasants, however, experience a great distance between themselves and their landlords, their government, and even the larger culture in which they dwell. Orthodox Islam is an urban religion with an urban way of life, and hardly any Moslem, in literature or song, by word or deed, admires the peasant's style of life; not even the peasant does so.28 There are matters in which the peasant feels a deep interest, but it would be false to simplify his attitude toward such matters by calling it conservative. The Moslem peasant is conscious, above all, af a recurrent dance of life governed by supernatural forces too powerful, arbitrary, and incomprehensible to need "conserving" or defending. The peasant attempts to enter into a personal relationship with these forces through propitiation, intermediation, or careful avoidance. The rituals and beliefs through which he seeks to come to terms with the sacred are ancient and have been variously sanctified by different religions of the past. It was Islam's contribution to persuade this worshipper of natural forces, objects, and charismatic personalities that all sacredness flows from a single God. In his concern for survival in the face of forces more powerful than himself, the peasant has not been without a sense of realism. He tests religious prescriptions by their success. But since Islam, like other religions, can explain seeming accidents, failures, and injustices, the peasant recognizes that his worship will not always be rewarded. After centuries of subservience, he may well have come to distrust his own capabilities. But while he acknowledges forces greater than himself, both sacred and secular, he does not cease being "hardheaded, materialistic, questioning, doubting, scoffing at his own superstitions and usages, fond of tests of the supernatural—and all this in a curiously light-minded, almost childish fashion."29 "For centuries before Ottoman Turk and Mamluk entered Egypt, the peasant had pitted his craft against the exploiters and had failed; and failing, the genius of the race, inferior to no other in capacity and depth of feeling, had turned 28 It is the nomad—noble, free, and roaming—whose way of life is traditionally admired above all others by urban and nomad alike. 29 D. B. Macdonald in Religious Attitude and Life in Islam, p. 4, quoted by H. A. R. Gibb, "The Structure of Religious Thought in Islam," The Muslim World, January 1948, p. 22.

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in upon itself in bitterness and sought revenge, as it were, in limiting production to the minimum of its requirements, in a tenacious opposition to all changes, and an almost deliberate harshening of all its conditions of life. The fertility of the soil served only to raise up oppressors on every side, and since, in the fellah's experience, it seemed that only by oppression would anything be gained, he also, by a natural reaction, became an oppressor of his own kind. .. . Physical undernourishment and malnutrition, one of the main underlying factors which had brought the Moslem civilization to a standstill, limited the capacity of the cultivator, hardy as he was, to a certain standard of exertion."30 That which is called the "passivity" of the peasant, in the face of both misery and opportunity, incorporates a multitude of different attitudes for none of which "passivity" is the most suitable term. Fatalism, in its highest religious form, is conducive to hard, careful work done without personal involvement in its failure or success. It demands resignation to those forces which one is powerless to change, but calls for courage in fighting holy wars and for causes in which victory is possible. The term "fatalism," however, has often been used to describe what is in fact the peasant's shrewdness when he bends with a wind he cannot resist. It has been used to describe what is actually passive resistance, as when the peasant deliberately accepts a lesser punishment for neglecting or misunderstanding orders he does not wish to fulfill but cannot openly oppose without courting a larger punishment. Is has been used to denote what is in fact the peasant's ignorance of alternative ways of doing things, and of how to acquire or apply new techniques. It has been used as a glib explanation of his disinterest in the political battles of small urban cliques whose victory or defeat changes nothing in his life. The term "passivity" has been employed to designate what is in fact a deep skepticism—a hard-headed appreciation by the 80 Gibb and Bowen, Islamic Society and the West, Vol. I, Part 1, p. 264. They add: "It is historically false to regard the fellahin of the Delta and a large part of Middle Egypt as lineally descended from the ancient Egyptians and inured to tyranny. The population of these districts was completely recreated by a continuous process of Arab settlement from the middle of the seventh century and from that time almost down to the Ottoman conquest there was no lack of agrarian revolt."

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peasant that after centuries of exploitation it remains to be proven that the government's or landlord's sudden interest in his greater productivity will not mean, as it always has in the past, a diminution of the peasant's proportion of the total harvest, or that the cleaner water or better seed will turn out to be as beneficial as the more familiar kind which he and his ancestors have prayed over for centuries. He has no surplus that he can afford to devote to experimentation. He has no way to protect himself except by suspicion and prudence. There is also the lethargic "passivity" that results from disease, malnutrition, and physical debilitation. In absolute numbers, more people are ill-fed and sick today than ever before, and these people lack the strength to rebel. Many escape into the realm of drugs.81 "Passivity" as an ideal—the pietistic inwardness of sufism32 —is only one face of folk Islam. Its other face is rebellion. The two are really complementary. Passivity is the waiting for deliverance in periods when rebellion, murder, or flight are not possible.33 The "passivity" of the Middle Eastern peasant was no bar to frequent rebellions in the past. Now there are more peasants than ever before who have become aware that new methods, more effective than the wisdom of tradition, can be used to cure poverty, ignorance, and disease. The fact is, however, that there has been no major peasant rebellion in the Middle East in the twentieth century. Central governments are, in general, more capable than before of speedily repressing rural rebellion. At the same time, however, new groups among the urban intelligentsia have come to consider it politically, economically, or morally necessary to reshape the peasant's life. Has this revolutionary century set bars to revolution that no other century could discover? The peasant remains passive in the twentieth century for a 81

Statistics in this field are bound to be uncertain, but Egyptian narcotics experts estimate that about 1,000,000 are "fairly regular" users of hashish in Egypt, while many more mix it occasionally into their smoke, tea, or candy. (New York Times, September 20, 1959.) 32 See the discussion of Islamic mysticism in Chapter 1. 33 The desertion of whole villages under the pressure of exploitation or insecurity has been rather frequent throughout history. In the past two decades alone the migration of peasants to the city has probably amounted to about five million.

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reason peculiar to our era. More than any other social class, the peasantry remains a prisoner of the past. Fatalism is clearly irrelevant in an age that can master nature sufficiently to produce both leisure and prosperity for farmers in other lands. But the traditional kind of rebellion, ritualistic rather than political, conservative rather than revolutionary, concerned with re-establishing the morality of the universe rather than altering the structure of society, this kind has become equally irrelevant. A British anthropologist, speaking about African traditional society, draws a significant distinction between the old-fashioned rebellion and the modern revolution: "As positions of leadership carry high ideals, and as most men are, well, only men, there develops frequently a conflict between the ideals of leadership and the weakness of the leader. This is the frailty in authority. . . . But in certain types of society, when subordinates turn against a leader thus, they may only turn against him personally, without necessarily revolting against the authority of the office he occupies. . . . This is rebellion, not revolution. A revolution aims to alter the nature of political offices and of the social structure in which they function, and not merely to change the incumbents in persistent offices. . . . These rebellions, so far from destroying the established social order, work so that they even support this order. They resolve the conflicts which the frailty of authority creates. . . . Rebellious tendencies against authority are restrained by the structure of the political system itself. They are controlled by custom which gives men allegiances to various leaders, so that when they attack one leader, they do it by supporting another leader of the same kind, in the name of the ideals of leadership. . . . The kingship is ritualized: national disaster shows the king to be ritually unworthy: the ritual sacredness of kingship prevents anyone but another prince taking the throne."34 In the Middle East, with the encroachment of modern ideas, the ancient ritual of rebellion has begun to lose its potency. Yet peasants have only recently begun to learn how to obtain redress through political processes, by changing the nature of the political offices and of the social structure in which leaders function. 84

Max Gluckman, Custom and Conflict in Africa, pp. 27-28, 45.

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When Middle Eastern peasants have participated in violent political action in the present century, their purpose, however revolutionary it may have seemed to modern urban observers, was usually still rebellion in the traditional sense. Characteristically, a foreign ruler seemed the source of all evil and needed to be expelled, so that another and local ruler might take his place. Only through the re-enactment of this ritualistic drama did the peasant hope to re-establish social justice. The peasant may well move from the age of rebellion to the age of revolution before he is fully literate, or fully free in mind and body. In other words, he is likely to become a revolutionary before he can achieve any substantial degree of freedom. Even while he remains at home, he may hear and see enough to discover that an entirely new style of life has become possible. He may make this potentially subversive discovery before he achieves the ability to cure his misery and before others are altogether prepared to do it for him. When the Middle Eastern peasant realizes for the first time that the structure of life can be concretely improved, and that he is being denied the opportunity to improve his own lot, then the seeds of revolution will have been planted. There may well be an intervening phase before the peasant enters the political market place ready to make individual choices. Those tribal chiefs and family heads who are more concerned than the rest to preserve their existing status as well as the safety of their dependents, or who are perhaps more sophisticated, may pledge their kinsmen's support to new ideologies. For example, in the days of the French Protectorate, Moroccan tribes would attack French outposts to take revenge for the arrest of fellow-tribesmen whose motivations had been nationalist, secular, and reformist. Another transitional style of peasant involvement in politics has also been observed. Rif tribes have followed traditional modes of protest—refusal to pay taxes, avoidance of local market towns, and withdrawal of the men to bleak and inaccessible hills—in pursuit of essentially modern goals, such as work for unemployed laborers, new schools, and the improvement of local markets.35 85 William H. Lewis, "Rural Administration in Morocco," Middle East Journal, Winter 1960, p. 52.

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There is a sharp limit, however, to the capacity of a traditional kinship group to react as a closed community to modern opportunities and frustrations. Once the individual peasant emerges to seek help through national political channels, he will not remain uninterested in the clash of rival urban factions. The spiritual tradition of the Middle East does not exclude material ambition. Islam has always been concerned with establishing a perfect society on earth while its paradise promises above all the fulfillment of the believer's highest material aspirations—a society in which poverty is abolished and man, being at ease, can fulfill all his needs. Moreover, if the Middle Eastern peasant becomes desperate, orthodox Islam instills no sense of sin or fear of hell to keep him from seeking desperate remedies. Since orthodoxy itself acknowledged the limitations of human nature, the comfortable assumption is widespread that few Moslems will be doomed on Judgment Day. The Koran itself has only a limited restraining effect: it is written in an Arabic that differs markedly from the Arabic the peasant knows and speaks. Lacking organization, hierarchy, or ordained rank, and not always free of ignorance and corruption, Islamic religious leaders cannot rely on the appeal of religion alone to keep peasants from following a new social gospel in times of acute crisis. In the tradition of the Middle East, as in that of Russia, apocalyptic change brought about by a messianic figure through a divinely sanctioned rebellion has not only played a powerful role in popular belief, but has again and again been translated into action.38 In the modern age, the barriers to secular politics begin to crumble as the peasant becomes ever more aware of how his interest is or could be affected by action on the national stage. Moreover, both traditional and modern incentives to action can be combined and utilized by neo-Islamic and communist movements that promise equality and salvation. The nation-state has not yet integrated the peasant to the point where he is likely to feel much concern if fellow Moslems undermine its secular foundations or local communists its independence. A peasantry alive to the possibility of economic progress 86 Emanuel Sarkisyanz, Russland und der Messianismus des Orients: Sendungsbewusstsein und Politischer Chiliasmus des Ostens, Tubingen, 1955.

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through political and social reform will face the same range of choices as the new middle class.37 Understanding the new ideologies will be no prerequisite for political participation. It will be enough to know who offers, or seems to offer, land, bread, and an end to exploitation; or, if the offer is not made good, who promises an immediate breakthrough to the millennium. In the Middle East, however, the peasantry is only beginning to awaken, and as yet only in a few countries. Villages still remain largely isolated from the rest of the world. In most areas there are no roads, no surplus to exchange for manufactures, no cash for buying, and no trustworthy kinsmen outside the village. In most countries, the new urban middle class has not yet broken through the great cultural barrier that has traditionally separated city from countryside. Nevertheless, within the past decade, the political involvement of the peasantry has shown extraordinary advances. The growing tide of rural migration to the cities is accompanied by a seasonal flow of migrants returning to the countryside. In this way trusted kin bring news of urban issues and conflicts—news which has already had dramatic consequences in unrest and even rebellion in such remote areas as the High Atlas of Morocco, the Kabylie of Algeria, the Kurdish mountain areas of Syria and Iraq, and the eastern provinces of Turkey. Political organization has reached the peasant in a number of countries during the past decade. The only attempt in the entire Middle East to found a conservative peasant movement failed. In 1956, Caid Lahcen Lyoussi, the chief of the large Berber Ait Youssi tribe and an intimate of Morocco's King Mohammed V, tried to organize such a group. He argued that all other parties "forget that the largest part of the inhabitants of our country are of the rural countryside; that the element that has produced the glory of our country is of the rural countryside . . . and it is contrary to the interests of the people to confer all political, social, and economic responsibility [on] certain men who ignore all the tribes and the countryside." Lyoussi's appeal, however, appeared to have overtones of Berber tribal parochialism and was soon dis87

That is, the range of alternatives discussed in Part ITJ of this study.

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couraged by the King.38 In Morocco, however, both the Istiqlal and its left-wing off-shoot, the National Union of Popular Forces, as well as the Moroccan Union of Labor, have made major gains in recruiting rural membership. In addition, Hajj Ahmed Ben Mansour Nejjai, a former Minister of Agriculture, organized the Moroccan Union of Agriculture to represent especially farmers with medium-size holdings. In Algeria, peasants provided most of the recruits and auxiliary support for the nationalist guerrilla forces, and they have probably moved further from a rebellious to a revolutionary spirit than any other peasants in the entire region. In Tunisia, property-owning farmers have been organized since May 1949 in the General Union of Tunisian Farmers. This organization of about 60,000 members is affiliated with the dominant trade union movement, the General Union of Tunisian Labor, and through this channel comes under the guidance of President Bourguiba's Neo-Destour Party. In the Sudan, the Gezira Tenant Union had enrolled about 15,000 members. In Lebanon, many of the Druses, a religious sect of peasant mountaineers, supported the Socialist Party of Kemal Jumblatt, though in large part because feudal loyalties have always called for the support of the Jumblatt family. In Syria, the peasants in the Homs area constitute one of the chief sources of support for the Arab Socialist Resurrectionist Party, in part because its leader, Akram Hourani, is a member of one of the traditionally prominent local families. The Kurdish leader of the Syrian Communist Party, though himself emancipated from traditional beliefs, can count on the support that Kurds would give to any prominent and influential son. In Iraq, the sharp competition between communists and non-communists during the tenure of the Kassim regime suddenly gave rise to a number of peasant organizations. In Egypt, a "combined services unit" is being established for every 15,000 rural inhabitants. This is at once a school, health clinic, and social center. Resident staffs are instructed to drop the 88

Ashford, Political Change in Morocco, Princeton, 1961, pp. 198-201.

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usual official attitude of aloof dignity and to stimulate peasant participation. Two hundred such units were created by June 1956, and another 650 were intended to be in existence by 1963.39 Peasant organizations are a development of only the past decade. Within the past decade, land reforms in Egypt, Algeria, Syria, Iraq, Tunisia, Morocco, Iran, and Pakistan have begun to give the peasant an immediate interest in urban decisions about who gets what, and how soon. It has put city and countryside in touch for the first time in history on issues that vitally interest the peasant. Toward a Solution of the Peasants Problems While peasant involvement in national politics is only beginning, it is already evident that the initiative and prime motivation for rural reform are urban. It is clear that even as rural demands for change increase, only urban initiatives can decisively alter the peasant's life.40 There have been very few demonstrations of political violence in rural areas in the Middle East.41 The peasant's chief responses to increasing poverty and hardship remain faith, migration, or death—not initiation of political organization. The impetus for change comes from the city, where even the more conservative have learned, if nothing more, that land reform gives the prestige of modernity and is a prophylactic against agitation. In the cities the nationalist social reformers are impelled to recognize that true nationhood cannot be achieved while three-quarters of the population remain outside the body "Frederick H. Harbison and Ibrahim Abdelkader Ibrahim, Human Resources for Egyptian Enterprise, New York, 1958, p. 103. For a contrast with earlier policies, see Gabriel Baer, "Egyptian Attitudes Towards Land Reform, 1922-1955" in Laqueur, Middle East in Transition, pp. 80-99. 40 In Eastern Europe, where peasants owning middle-sized farms and a tradition of political participation are far more pervasive than in the Middle East, peasant parties played a major role in domestic politics between the two World Wars. Their ultimate failure, however, rose in large measure from the fact that most of them turned their backs on the problems of urbanization and industrialization rather than come to terms with them. (See David Mitrani, Marx Against the Peasant: A Study in Social Dogmatism, Durham, N.C., 1951.) 41 Baer, "Egyptian Attitudes," p. 97, and Warriner, Land Reform, p. 55, record the small total in recent times in the Arab East.

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politic, and that neither human progress nor international respect can be attained while the great majority remain poor, inefficient, and exploited. In the expropriation of land, urban leaders see a major source of capital for new investments by the state. The leaders of the new urban middle class are confronted by the political fact that their rule remains insecure as long as the landowners retain the economic basis of their traditional political predominance. Hence they have a direct interest in the kind of thorough land reform that not only redistributes the land, but also increases output, makes production more efficient, and offers security of tenure and income. Such a reform would decisively alter the peasant's way of life, but he cannot undertake it by himself. Better seeds, fertilizers, pest controls, and machines can come only from the city. Adequate water and credit can be supplied only by central planning. Urban stimulation, training, and supervision will probably remain inescapable for a long time to come, even in activities where rural labor is the major cost, and where seasonally idle farm labor is available to build roads, schools, and other rural improvements. Urban leadership is especially necessary in setting up and operating cooperatives. Although the peasant has already experienced progress in some countries and may do so on a far greater scale in the future, poverty remains predominant in most of the area. Egypt is the most dramatic example, not only because it contains within its borders half of all Arabs living between the Libyan desert and the Persian Gulf, but also because it faces a fearful problem that may some day bring other more fortunate areas down to the level of Egypt's poverty. Egypt's agricultural economy is one of the most productive in the world. The land yields nearly as much wheat per acre as in Great Britain. Egypt's yields of corn and cotton are the highest in the world. Its rural areas, unlike those of Iraq and Syria, are not "a neglected hinterland which supplies food to the cities and gets nothing in return,"42 for the Nile and the cash nexus unite city and village in a single web. But if Egypt's land produces twice as much per acre as the countries of Western Europe, its labor earns only one-seventh as much 42

Warriner, Land Reform, p. 56.

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(though the European average includes Spain, Italy, and Greece).43 The causes have been overpopulation, an exploitive land tenure and employment system, and lack of alternative productive opportunities. The example of Egypt demonstrates that high agricultural productivity alone cannot cure poverty. These other problems must also be solved. The examples of Iraq and Syria also reveal the insufficiency of a purely economic approach to the problem of rural poverty. Iraq, in sharp contrast to Egypt, is far from having reached its maximum potential in the exploitation of its arable land. Threequarters of the area now under cultivation was not used until 1918, one-third of it not until 1945. No Ministry of Agriculture seemed necessary until 1952. As late as 1959, some five million potentially usable acres were still uncultivated. Improved farming methods would greatly enlarge harvests on the existing six million cropped acres.44 Despite these economic opportunities and the large funds available from oil revenues to utilize them, the Iraqi peasant, on the whole, has been no better off than the Egyptian peasant. The Iraqi government, until 1959, took no steps to alter the traditional links that bound peasant to landlord and land.45 The regimes that preceded General Kassim's did not wish to pay the political and social price of altering the status quo. Syria, unlike Iraq, has taken tremendous strides in bringing new areas under cultivation. Between 1943 and 1953, grain production doubled, while cotton grew to eight times the pre-war average. Population during that ten-year period grew only 33 percent. AU this was accomplished without foreign capital or advisers, and with little government assistance, even in the field of roads and other utilities. A few merchants, most of them Christians who had made large profits in wartime commerce and had foreseen gains in mechanizing agriculture, used their initiative and reaped a great harvest.46 Their enterprise, however, may well speed soil erosion. Moreover, it took place in a lightly popu48

Ibid., p. 20. «Ibid., p. 115. On July 17, 1959, General Kassim redistributed the first 10,000 acres among 1,200 peasants (Washington Post, July 18, 1959). "Warriner, Land Reform, pp. 71-89. Also, International Bank for Reconstruction and Development, Economic Development of Syria, Baltimore, 1955. 45

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lated region of Syria, and it changed neither the traditional exploitive agricultural relationships elsewhere in that country, nor its growing political polarization and instability. An exclusive concentration on raising productivity while retaining traditional social and political relationships cannot prevent the growth of agrarian discontent. Reliance on modernization of production alone may do nothing more than widen the gap between rich and poor. Before Nasser's revolution of 1952, Egypt possessed "highly capitalized estates, with their big machinery and heavy expenditure on fertilizers and seed, their qualified managers and accountants [but also with] their wretched tied villages," with landowners who kept private armies to defend their houses and persons, and with armed men who stood guard over the crops.47 In Iraq, at least until the Kassim revolution of 1958, tribal chiefs and merchants invested in modern pumps which increased total output tremendously but invariably turned the original occupant of the land, who lacked the capital to maintain the installation, into a sharecropper. The Egyptian land reforms of 1952 expropriated less than 2,000 landowners, compensated all but the former royal family, and temporarily jailed only one landlord. The reforms had by the end of 1955 given land to about 69,000 families, or about 415,000 persons.48 In July 1961, a new decree further reduced the amount of land anyone could own from about 200 acres to about 100. Nevertheless, there will still not be any land for the majority of the 1,500,000 Egyptians who had no land in 1961, or the nearly 2,000,000 who had too little of it to escape malnutrition. They must now wait for the completion of new dams and wells a decade or two from now. By that time, however, the generation of new bodies will probably again come close to catching up with the generation of new land, and the purchasing power of the mass of the population may be no greater than before. 47 Warriner, 48

Land Reform, p. 13. It had also helped these families with tools, skills, and organization, reduced rents for tenant-farmers, given them greater security of tenure and, though circumscribed in practice, raised the wages of agricultural workers and granted them the right to organize unions. (For a detailed discussion, see Warriner, Land Reform, pp. 32-54.)

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A still quiescent countryside is no evidence that there is as yet no agricultural problem: if governments wait until the psychology of the peasants is sufficiently transformed to permit revolutionary action, then there may no longer be sufficient economic resources left for coping with the unrest of an all too rapidly increasing rural population. There is a time limit for effective reform. For a while the tempting dream of escape to a new life was being realized in the Liberation Province of Egypt. There a brand-new type of Egyptian, psychologically and medically tested, and possessed of only one wife and no dependents but his children, could undergo three months of probation and six months of training for modern living. He wore a new standardized dress, worked to a schedule on a cooperative mechanized farm, reared his children collectively, and ate 3,600 calories a day. Although this program proved too expensive for Egypt, it served briefly to demonstrate to a discouraged country that a better life was possible.49 Middle Eastern leaders are beginning to learn much from existing systems of collective farming, ranging from the cooperatives of Israel to the communes of China. Can their plans for collective farming be reconciled with the peasants' dream of private ownership of the land? Agrarian collectivism is really nothing new in the Middle East. In most of that area, bedouin tribal lands were, at least until the nineteenth century, held in common. Not tribesmen but central governments initiated changes in the late nineteenth century which either forced individual division of property (as in Algeria) or made tribal sheikhs the owners of all tribal land (as in Iraq). In some areas of Syria and Jordan, a certain proportion of village land is reserved for private ownership, and parcels of land comprising this proportion are redistributed every few years. Sharecroppers, who constitute the majority of Middle Eastern peasants, are usually told by their landlords what to grow, and they depend on him for seeds, tools, and the purchase of their crops. That is why Warriner concludes that "in Europe it is difficult to overcome the peasants' deeply ingrained traditional individualism; 48 Ibid., pp. 51-52. Since 1955, much of the experiment has been dropped as being too expensive.

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but in the Arab world there is no such tradition; on the contrary, tradition is all communal."50 The peasant's eagerness for more land—which is plain enough —is not a manifestation of capitalist individualism. It is, primarily, a striving to escape the threat of starvation and, secondarily, a striving for status. Land hunger, in so far as its motivations are traditional, is a drive not for greater elbow-room for initiative and enterprise, but rather for private holdings that are large enough to make their owners independent and free of the need to work. The peasant's striving for individual ownership of land, therefore, need not be conducive to modernization. It is doubtful that the peasant's poverty and dependence can be ended until the state has deprived the largest landowners of their property, if only to curb their political power to oppose measures that would benefit the mass of peasants. The peasants will not be able to fulfill their private dreams until they accept a great deal of direction on what to plant and how to plant, and a great deal of sharing in the utilization of credits, machinery, purchasing and marketing—that is, a good deal of public intervention in their private business. A peasant who acquires new land and is free to farm it in traditional fashion may well remain unable to produce more or earn a steadier income than in the past. He may lose it again to the usurer in his own lifetime. Moreover, Islamic law, with its obligatory division of inheritances, will soon make each land parcel too small for subsistence (or if the usufruct rather than possession is subdivided, too inefficient). How can the Middle Eastern peasant make both his country and himself progress economically while achieving a new freedom for shaping his own life? In the Sudanese Gezira Scheme, covering a million acres, a partnership of government and about 25,000 tenants combines, in extraordinary fashion, government control over administration and research, free enterprise through special rewards for harder work, and cooperation in buying, selling, and sharing profits.51 Under the Egyptian reform law of 1952, the former tenants became owners, paying installM 51

Warriner, Land and Poverty, p. 20. Arthur Gaitskell, Gezira, London, 1958.

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ments on the purchase price for thirty years. However, they sell their cotton and buy seeds, fertilizers, and services cooperatively. The old estates continue to be managed as units by state administrators. In the Liberation Province, only the peasant's house, not the land, is his own. There are obvious limits both to freedom and to coercion. To allow the peasant population unfettered enjoyment of private property would be to prevent economic progress. On the other hand, to try to control every aspect of the life of this most traditionally minded class through the bureaucratic apparatus likely to be available in the Middle East in the next decade or two could result only in mismanagement and even terrorism. Few tasks of leadership in the Middle East will require as much sensitivity, skill, and exertion as that making the peasants knowledgeable and participating partners in the modernization of society. Planning is fruitless without rural collaboration. If all the land presently being cultivated in the Middle East were redistributed equally among its entire present rural population, each family would own only about half an acre. Only in six of the states of the Middle East, possessing about one-fifth of the area's population—Iraq, Sudan, Syria, Iran, Turkey, and Yemen—is there enough land and water to make a real chance for peasant advance possible through various changes in rights and property, efficiency, and security. In most of the other countries, a majority of the peasants would still be exceedingly poor if their present standard of living were doubled, and not in all countries is there hope of that.52 So high is the ratio of population to land that land reform can do no more than bring benefits to a few and hope to the rest. The hope that more progress is on the way, however, may be too tender a plant to endure through the decades that will still pass before sea water can cheaply be used to irrigate the vast areas that now contain only sand, or until advances in food production and birth control alter the present imbalance between people and land. Indeed the visible evidence of progress in some villages is likely to arouse discontent in neighboring villages that must still wait. Uneven progress among 62

Warriner, Land Reform, p. 4.

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neighboring lands could easily cause not only domestic unrest but also intra-regional jealousies and quarrels. In countries which make no progress or lose ground, the entrance of the peasant into politics is likely to demonstrate just how moderate were those leaders who are now thought of as "extremist." Fortunately it is no more necessary than it is safe to wait until the masses of ignorant, diseased, and tradition-bound peasants are ready to take the initiative. While the collaboration of the peasantry is essential, the leadership and organization of constructive peasant action can come, at this stage of history, only from the new urban middle class. It is thus possible to begin the task of helping the many by supporting the initiative of the few who, having risen above the general level, care about a nation in which most peasants still suffer.63

* The price of economic progress is discussed in Chapter 17.

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CHAPTER 6 WORKERS: THE GROWING TIDE OF THE UNSKILLED AND UNEMPLOYED

IF THE PEASANTS are beginning to be unable and unwilling to stand still in body or spirit, the workers have even greater cause to be restless. Most of the present generation of Middle Eastern workers are landless peasants working in the countryside or peasants transplanted to the cities. Most of those born in the city have fathers who migrated from the countryside. In the cities, they are in touch with change where it is first perceived and experienced, and they are, of course, readily available for recruitment by the new salaried middle class—the first class eager to accept and manage social change. It is politically significant that these former peasants or descendants of peasants are, for the most part, those who have lost their land or no longer have enough of it, and consequently are about to lose or have already lost their traditional social and economic status.1 Those who arrive without status cannot easily establish a secure position in life. Although factory workers usually earn twice or three times as much as landless agricultural workers, wages are low. In Egypt, for example, 18 percent of the workers in industry during 1958 earned less than 100 piastres ($2.80) a week, and only 19 percent earned more than 400 1 It is not possible, statistically, to prove for the entire Middle East this assertion concerning the social origins of workers. Wherever surveys have been made, however, they show that the landless or those short of land make up the majority. Thus, for East Pakistan, see A. F. A. Husain, Human and Social Impact of Technological Change in Pakistan, Vol. I, pp. 123-125; also Saad ed Din Fawzi, The Labour Movement in the Sudan, 1944-1955, Oxford, 1957, pp. 10-12; Bureau of Labor Statistics, United States Department of Labor, Summary of the Labor Situation in Egypt, July 1955, p. 2; Robert Montagne, editor, Naissance du proletariat morocain, Paris, 1950, pp. 9-130.

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piastres ($11.20) a week.2 And other aspects of living may worsen, for city life is expensive. If the new worker leaves his family at home, he is likely to be deprived of normal human comforts.8 As meat and vegetables become more expensive his diet is likely to suffer; his consumption of tea and tobacco will probably increase.4 Factory work, unlike agricultural work, demands a steady pace and discipline; health conditions may well be inferior;5 and the worker probably stints himself to send money to his family. If the worker brings his family with him, he often finds that industrial society pays scant respect to patriarchal values, that women and children, for example, being readier to accept lower wages, will in some occupations be given preference in employment. That the result is often a moral dissolution of which the outward symptoms are indolence, petty theft, gambling, and the smoking of hashish (alcohol has only recently become more popular in this Islamic area) is to be expected. It is a story made familiar enough by earlier European experience. The distinguishing feature in most of the Middle East is that the destroying of old patterns does not seem to buy rapid industrialization as it did in nineteenth century Europe. This is not a wholly valid picture. Some companies, including several of the foreign-owned oil companies, have set the pace in wages and working conditions. Some countries have succeeded in actually applying their usually progressive social welfare legislation to some of their larger or state-owned enterprises. But 2 Frederick H. Harbison and Ibrahim Abdelkader Ibrahim, Human Resources for Egyptian Enterprise, New York, 1958, p. 88. 'Thus East Pakistan's largest cities, Dacca and Chittagong, have 1,652 and 1,827 males respectively for every 1,000 females. (Husain, Human and Social Impact, Vol. I, p. 58.) 'Ibid., pp. 155-165. ' I n one of the largest factories of East Pakistan, for example, half the workers' houses "are of bamboo and thatch huddled close to each other. Narrow winding lanes containing heaps of garbage and sewage provide the approach to the houses. The rooms . . . are congested and stuffy and lack adequate lighting and ventilation. Gunnybags are used as screens to secure some privacy in the family quarters which further restrict the entrance of light and air. There is no separate kitchen; a small space of about 3 feet wide adjoining a hut is used as a kitchen which is exposed to rain. There is no drainage system of any sort. . . ." (Husain, Human and Social Impact, Vol. I, pp. 150-151.) The smaller factories, often economically marginal, usually provide worse conditions.

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these are exceptional instances. Most workers live under far different conditions. We must distinguish among workers: (1) Those who comprise the largest single group of workers in most Middle Eastern countries are the landless rural workers. They belong in this chapter no less than in the last. They are usually wage earners on large estates that produce cash crops. They have no special skills, there are too many of them,6 and technological progress can only serve to decrease their chances for earning a livelihood. (2) Among urban workers there is a large group destined for technological extinction—the majority of employees of artisans.7 In earlier centuries, some of these men could reasonably hope to advance to respected middle class position, depending, of course, on their skills and the importance of their crafts. Today, they suffer from competition with better, cheaper, mass-produced goods, and from the decadence of their own craft. Even many of their employers can eke out only a day-to-day existence. (3) There are employed workers, frequently the graduates of trade schools or men with army training, who possess modern skills. They are usually well-paid: an Egyptian mechanic makes about three times as much as a day laborer. The policies of some of the larger Middle Eastern companies—company housing, recreation, clinics, canteens, jobs for the sons of key workers— are intended to attract and hold this group of employees. Barring general economic crises, they have steady employment, for no Middle Eastern country has a sufficient number of them. Whether they will remain politically content, however, is uncertain.8 They are often barred from positions above that of fore6 7

Except in certain regions of Iran, Iraq, and the Sudan. Thomas B. Stauffer considered artisans to be a majority of the employed industrial workers in Egypt, even ten years ago one of the most industrialized countries of this area. ("The Industrial Worker" in Social Forces in the Middle East, pp. 86-88.) Hisfigures,however, included both employers and employees as artisans and since only the latter interest us here (the former are to be found among the middle class in Chapter 4), no estimate of numbers seems possible. 8 Husain's survey in East Pakistan (,Human and Social Impact, Vol. I, pp. 218-19) confirms this view: "A great majority of the workers would probably like to give their sons education up to a sufficiently high level so that they might qualify for white-collar jobs. There is no doubt that most workers would

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man. Most trade schools in the Middle East—only belatedly given impetus by recent official concern with economic development—still have only mediocre facilities, and on-the-job training remains a novelty among locally owned firms. At the higher levels, jobs are reserved for college graduates even when they are not, as in many Middle Eastern oil companies, still reserved for foreigners. Despite the spectacular progress that many of these workers have made during the past few years, the overriding question is how their status compares with their aspirations. (4) A much larger group of urban workers are the unskilled or semi-skilled. Included under these terms are not only the rag-pickers and sweepers, but also those who work at machines but are not really machinists, being skilled only at moving the lever of a particular machine. All of these workers are readily replaceable by others; they have no certain status, only aspirations. Wherever labor unions are still weak and where neither government nor employers are restrained by humane considerations, the supervision by company police and foremen (sometimes assuming the right of physical punishment), and the threat of dismissal for the mere expression of discontent often make life harsh for the worker. In the smaller enterprises, regulations regarding pay, hours, and safety conditions are often circumvented. Wages are usually set by custom or by personal arrangements, not by norms of output, productivity, or on a basis of equal pay for equal jobs. The surplus of workers makes labor available regardless of such arbitrary employment practices.10 These workers live at the margin: even while working, most of them remain undernourished, ill-housed, illiterate, and diseased. For most of them, losing a job may well mean permanent loss of steady employment. like to give up factory work if they had sufficient education to enable them to secure office work of some kind. It is only because their standards of education and their resources do not make it possible for them to take up some white-collar job or some business they seem to stick to factory work." 9 Frederick H. Harbison and Ibrahim Abdelkader Ibrahim, "Some Labor Problems of Industrialization in Egypt." Agrarian Societies in Transition, The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, May 1956, p. 116. 10 Harbison and Ibrahim, Human Resources for Egyptian Enterprise, pp. 94 and 136.

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The new recruits to the working force often discover that thenentrance into the industrial age also marks the beginning of their superfiuousness. In Egypt, and elsewhere in the Middle East, the smaller enterprises rely heavily on the employment of children between the ages of ten and fifteen. Since children must labor to help support their families, they seldom retain the fruits of their work. Many of them quit their jobs and leave their families whenever they can. They and older recruits are frequently hired as low-paid apprentices, only to be fired when their apprenticeship ends and higher wages are due.11 Labor is cheap, and few firms are therefore inclined to adopt policies for holding workers and improving their productivity. (5) By far the largest group of urban workers are the unemployed and unskilled.12 For the majority of Middle Eastern countries, estimates made for Morocco probably apply: one-fifth of all urban workers are chronically out of work, and many who do have jobs are probably underemployed.13 As would-be workers, they are even more desperate than the would-be salaried middle class for, unlike the latter, they have neither skills nor jobs. Such are the workers of the Middle East. Considering their lot, one can hardly expect them to act as a unified political force. Their most direct and immediate competition is with each other. Because there are too many of them for the jobs available, they 11

Ibid., pp. 75-77. This system of classifying workers, essential for illuminating their possible political roles, prevents us, however, from utilizing statistics even when these are available. Thus a manpower survey made in November 1957 by the Government of Egypt—a country with a higher proportion of workers than most in the Middle East—indicates that in a population of 23,603,000, there are 6,710,000 employed workers, of whom 3,648,650 are agricultural workers, 725,000 are employed in industry and construction, and 715,000 in commercial establishments. (See al-Gumhuriya, a semi-official Cairo daily newspaper, February 28, 1958.) However, these figures probably understate the number of agricultural workers (since only 644,000 of the total working force are listed as women, and far more women and children than that are certainly employed in farming alone). They do not allow us to assess which proportion of the less than 6 percent of the population employed in industry, construction, and commerce are skilled workers. If, in contrast to our estimate of the unskilled and unemployed as the largest single component of the urban proletariat, the Egyptian survey lists only 360,000 worker as unemployed, such a number appears to represent only an administrative accident. In common 12

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have little with which to bargain. In one of the largest Egyptian textile mills prior to 1952, job applicants waiting at the gate were screened by a personnel officer who passed by "applicants who showed particular alertness or who might appear to be potential troublemakers. . . . Those applicants who had been previously employed in factories were summarily rejected because the company had an unwritten but firm policy of engaging young workers with no previous industrial experience. . . . The objective, obviously, was to recruit and retain docile and submissive labor rather than efficient workmen."14 The possibility of these workers becoming a unified political force is also inhibited by the survival of traditional hiring practices that reinforce ties of kinship rather than of class solidarity. "In Beirut, to hire an office boy one does not put an ad in the paper but informs the head clerk of the opportunity. When all his relatives have had the refusal of the job, the second clerk's relatives have their turn, and so on until status and blood ties, or even village ties, have been exhausted. . . . A willing worker with good social security behind him has been recruited, and he will have guidance and discipline even apart from the job, because his sponsor's prestige is at stake. . . . [In the case of the ArabianAmerican Oil Company, this system of depending on different tribes for recruitment for different tasks] gave rise to something very like the caste system in India. . . .1B" Workers themselves in turn often perpetuate traditional attitudes in a changing society by migrating to that quarter of the city that contains members of their village or tribe. There they expect kinship solidarity to produce a job or at least sustenance while they are unemployed. Work in the city thus only partially with similar surveys, that category includes for the most part only that small minority of workers who once held jobs, have a definite skill, and registered themselves at an official labor agency as unemployed. 18 "The Atlantic Report: Morocco," The Atlantic Monthly, August 1959, p. 18. It is estimated that 50 percent of the rural population is underemployed. "Harbison and Ibrahim, "Some Labor Problems of Industrialization in Egypt," p. 117. 15 Thomas B. Stauffer, "The Industrial Worker," pp. 88-90. Husain (Human and Social Impact, Vol. I, p. 129) found that about 43 percent of East Pakistani workers had relatives working in the same factory.

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creates a new style of life; in part, ancient loyalties are reinforced under the pressure of new obligations.16 Important traditional attitudes and loyalties among workers are likely to persist for decades to come. There will be few opportunities for change. Frustration will mount. Even in countries that possess the resources and the will for making rapid economic progress, the increase in the number of jobs will not even come near absorbing the entire labor force, and continued unemployment will act to depress wages. To be sure, "not all who are poor are frustrated. Some of the poor stagnating in the slums of the cities are smug in their decay. They shudder at the thought of life outside their familiar cesspool. Even the respectable poor, when their poverty is of long standing, remain inert. . . . It is usually those whose poverty is relatively recent, the 'new poor' [who] open their eyes to the transitoriness of the 'eternal order,' . . . the disinherited and dispossessed who respond to every rising mass movement."17 For those workers who have newly discovered their poverty, extremist movements, in one form or another, are likely to seem an admirable panacea. Religio-political organizations like the Moslem Brotherhood and ultra-nationalist bodies like the Socialist National Workers Party of Iran readily cater to the aspirations of the disaffected. There are still other alternatives: communist movements that clamor for land and bread, or urban mobs seeking revenge against the powerful and rich. The dying elites of the Middle East cannot be resuscitated. The social classes emerging or being transformed are being driven by the sheer force of numbers, especially of the would-be workers, would-be peasants, and would-be middle class, toward the more radical or else more extreme political alternatives. Though this seems to be the bent of the area's changing social structure, there "Janet Abu-Lughod's "Migrant Adjustment to City Life: The Egyptian Villager in Cairo," is a brief but thoroughly and vividly detailed investigation illustrating this point. (This paper was presented to a conference on The New Metropolis in the Arab World, sponsored by the Congress for Industrial Freedom and the Egyptian Society of Engineers, Cairo, December 17-22, 1960.) See also the forthcoming studies by Gene and Karen Petersen (American University of Beirut). 17 Eric Hoffer, The True Believer, New York, 1958, p. 31.

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is nothing inevitable about its final shape. The range of alternatives and instruments available for dealing with the modernization of the Middle East, and their consequences, is the substance of the ensuing discussion.

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PART III THE RANGE OF POLITICAL CHOICES

THE R A N G E OF P O L I T I C A L C H O I C E S

MIDDLE EASTERN MAN is freeing himself, or is being torn from, his traditional system of relationships to confront profound risks and great freedom. At a moment of history when the social and moral constraints of the past are dying and the bonds among individuals are more uncertain than ever before, he is being compelled to ask himself all over again: Who am I? Whom and what can I trust? As a result, for the first time in Middle Eastern history, all strata of society are becoming involved in politics. No one can any longer take for granted his status in life, or the share of material rewards he will get. Everyone is now concerned about where he goes from here, and in whose company. The spectrum of political alternatives we present here lacks the familiar progression from "left" to "right." It derives from an unusual history and exhibits an unusual world. In the Middle East, a military dictatorship may turn out to be the first step toward democracy. A regime that does not encourage innovation may not be conservative: by its very caution it may fail to conserve anything. In the midst of rapid and uncontrolled social change, even a regime that would ordinarily be called radical in the West may be moving too slowly. The very rate at which ideologies develop and change in the Middle East is extraordinary. Before 1951, no regime in this area was at once neutralist, socialist, and authoritarian. By now, these views characterize the majority of governments, and in Algeria, opposition and government alike already accept these sentiments as a framework within which they will fight out their differences. We have not included tradition in this spectrum of choices. To be traditional (a style of life now being challenged even in the Arabian Peninsula) is to remain unrelated to modern political choices.1 The traditionalist tends to re1 There are fewer untouched traditionalists left than one might suppose. "The Iraq which came to the forefront of world attention on July 14 [1958] and the Iraq in which I spent almost two years are two totally different things," writes Malcolm N. Quint. In the village of Umm alNahr, "one might well believe that time had gotten turned around and that he had somehow returned to some remote period before the birth of Christ. . . . The rice cultivators of Umm al-Nahr and of 'Amarah province in general are perhaps the most 'backward' of Iraq's peasants."

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gard his social, political, and economic environment as part of the natural order of things. If this "natural order" permits him to speak of the pre-Islamic era as the Age of Ignorance, it does little toward helping him cope with the modern world that threatens his undoing. Those who try by force and terror to resurrect Islam succeed only, as we shall see, in transforming a traditional way of life into an extremist modern ideology. Those who break with traditional Islam altogether must henceforth be their own prophets in reconstructing relationships between the sacred and the secular. If it is too late for traditionalism, it is too early for conservatism. Not enough of the past is left sufficiently viable to be conserved. Much already has come into being (from the area's artificial frontiers to its extensive social security laws) that a conservative would not necessarily want to conserve. Much is of such uncertain value that conservatives cannot yet play their customary role of confining politics to the realization of advantages within the limits of the prevailing consensus. No part of the political spectrum in the Middle East today holds conspiracy, subversion, coups, and revolution in ill repute. The premature conservative in the Middle East therefore tends to engage in ritualistic behavior—elaborately copying, while he can, the manner of the nouveaux riches of the West. Or else, defending the present as a mere speculator in vested interests, he tends to make the suppression of his competitors the principal task of government. (Not a few of the leading conservative politicians achieved their sudden yet insecure status and wealth by shrewd political rather than economic investments.) Being on the defensive, Middle Eastern conservatives also usually tend to ally themselves with the remaining traditionalist forces. They seem unaware that unYet even in this remote area, Quint finds it possible, in the best scientific spirit, to define "backward" without imposing his own standards: "I use the word here as one of the clan leaders of Umm al-Nahr uses it (mufakhkhir) to mean isolated from Western innovations and institutions." How backward are peasants who already know themselves to be backwards? ("The Idea of Progress in an Iraqi Village," Middle East Journal, Autumn 1958, pp. 369-70.)

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controlled (no less than deliberate) social change will soon doom traditionalism entirely, or that the right kind of controlled change could give them their only real chance to achieve stability with resilience. The largest group of political leaders in the Middle East are moderates. It may not be easy for the West to recognize them as such. The attitude of moderates in the Middle East is similar to that of moderates the world over. What is different are the issues and problems they can be moderate about. The imbalances created by a far-reaching social revolution demand a gradualism relevant to telescoped time. Even the more conservative moderates, devoting themselves to keeping the inherited past alive by adapting it to the changing present, make use of immoderate methods. Thus General Abboud (Sudan) and General Ayub (Pakistan), during 1958, used extralegal or non-legal methods to re-establish a more stable social and political equilibrium in their countries. There have been moderates in the Middle East who in many respects resembled the secular liberals of Western Europe, but their numbers have dwindled greatly. They did not understand that theirs was a different problem. They did not recognize that they would first have to reduce their problems to moderate proportions and create within their society a strong vested interest in liberty before moderation could become more than a distant goal. Those who would prefer to call the present moderates of the Middle East extremists and radicals will have no terms left when they encounter extremists and radicals. In this analysis, extremists are defined as people who are impelled to turn all problems of life into issues of dogma and power and whose political alternatives therefore include (though expediency may suspend their use) conversion or death. Communists, ultra-nationalists, and neo-Islamic totalitarians are thus extremists. Radicals are all those whose concern is, not a priori with Islam or any established ideology, but with how man might strike permanent roots amid the Middle East's permanently continuing transformation. Unlike moderates,

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radicals would not merely adjust to social change in order to reduce frustration; they believe that it is better and easier to transform all aspects of society deliberately and quickly than to be burdened continually with partial change. They are persuaded that remnants of the past tend "to reinstate the rest, and so continually act as a drag on the establishment of new habits. . . . While it is dreadfully difficult to graft one foreign habit on a set of old habits, it is much easier and highly exhilarating to learn a whole new set of habits, each reinforcing the other as one moves... with as little reminder of the past as possible to slow down the new learning, or make that learning incomplete and maladaptive."2 Radicals, including those who would establish the conditions in which democracy could prosper, are, however, still scarce in the Middle East. Nasser and Bourguiba are among the moderates who are recent converts to domestic radicalism; Ataturk was one of the first. A new kind of society is emerging among Moslems, and with it the need to make new choices. Most scholars in the West believe that this is a question involving the Reformation of Islam. In fact, the great change proceeding apace in the Middle East is not the deliberate reformation of Islam as a religious system but the transformation of Moslems as individuals and as members of a new society. All choices that Moslems may make will be deeply influenced by the fact that the Middle East has been an Islamic community for thirteen centuries, but the range of choices is no different now from that facing Asians, Africans, Latin Americans, or perhaps even Americans. Those who concentrate on the reform of Islam today are offering only one particular alternative for the reform of Moslems. Choices will not come easily. The searching, detached, yet concerned intellectual is still a new and rare individual in the Moslem Middle East.3 The great majority of the polit2 Margaret Mead, New Lives for Old, Cultural Transformation— Manus, 1928-1953, New York, 1956, pp. 447 and 451. s This point is cogently argued by Wilfred Cantwell Smith in "The Intellectuals in the Modern Development of the Islamic World," in Social Forces in the Middle East, pp. 190-204.

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ically active desire the fruits of modernization, but few understand the methods or appreciate the costs of producing such a harvest. In some Middle Eastern countries, this contrast between reach and grasp also characterizes the ruling elite. Yet in each country, one can already point to individuals and small groups—and in this part of the world, the minority invariably rules—who are intent upon becoming organizers rather than victims of social change, and who are therefore deeply concerned about political means and ends. Most of them lack the self-assurance that marked the founding fathers of the United States. The new leaders of the Middle East cannot build upon inherited philosophy, customs, or institutions; nor is there, as yet, any consensus on how to alter the legacy of Islamic tradition. Commitment to various ideologies thus usually takes the place of inherited, inner-directed certainty, both as the frame of analysis and as the inspiration of action. In the seven chapters that follow, the role and content of ideologies in the Middle East have been stated with greater precision than they have yet been articulated by Middle Easterners. This has been accomplished by analyzing and interpreting the actions of Middle Eastern leaders; by bringing to the surface the latent implications of their public statements; and by reviewing critically the ideologies that have emerged in response to forces and needs already in being. The ideologies which concern us here are those most likely to attract the important decision-making groups during the next decade. These groups are drawn from the various strata of the new middle class.

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CHAPTER 7 AMENDING THE PAST: REFORMIST ISLAM · # & •

The Failure of the Reformers of Islam1 ISLAMIC HISTORY, from

the perspective of the ulema, is the history of a community in process of realizing a divinely ordained pattern of society.2 To pursue righteousness, however, means resolving the conflicts of existence or, at least, learning how to live with them with dignity, patience, and compassion. As we have seen, this was not infeasible during those centuries when Moslems had few new problems to solve, or else allowed practice to sanctify submission not only to God, but also to tyranny and community consensus. The practices thus ordained, however, belong to the pre-scientific, pre-industrial, pre-nationalist age. The principles belong to the tenth century, when the ulema set limits to the debate of basic questions. Although H. A. R. Gibb argues that "the future of Islam rests where it has rested in the past—on the insight of the orthodox leaders and their capacity to resolve the new tensions as they arise by a positive doctrine,"3 he acknowledges that "in the attitude and outlook of the ulema and their followers there is a disturbing weakness. They are losing touch with the thought of the age. Their arguments, however just, fail to carry conviction because they are expressed in thought-forms 1 TlIe discussion of this topic, although our conclusions may differ, draws especially upon Wilfred Cantwell Smith, Islam in Modern History; and Modern Islam in India, London, 1946; H. A. R. Gibb, Modern Trends in Islam, Chicago, 1947; Gustave von Grunebaum, Islam, Essays in the Nature and Growth of a Cultural Tradition. 2 See Smith, Islam in Modern History, pp. 16-18 and 28n. ' A n d Smith agrees, at least for the Arab world, in his Islam in Modern History, p. 152.

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which arouse no response in the minds of educated men. Even the very language which they generally use has an antiquarian flavor that strikes curiously upon the ear and eye and strengthens the feeling that they have no message for today. Above all, their public pronouncements display a rigid formalism and reliance upon authority which, as the modernists see truly, are but feeble weapons. . . .4" The reformist ulema are trying to respond to the challenge of Western civilization at a time when orthodox Islam has already lost its fervor, influence, and clarity. "In accord with God's command . . . Muslim society once erected a great civilization; but now this is seen as being attacked, without and within, and perhaps superseded, by a new power based not on God's ordinance . . . a new society more successful, and perhaps in some aspects even more attractive. Islamic backwardness implies that something has gone wrong not only with the Muslim's own development but with the governance of the universe. . . . The challenge is no longer simply that the [Islamic] dream is unrealized. The new challenge . . . is in the fear of the recognition that the dream may be invalid, [that] even if implemented, [it] would . . . be too weak in the world of today.6" The attempt of the ulema to reform Islam has met with difficulties. Like their predecessors in the first centuries of Islam, they acknowledge the usefulness of reason, provided, however, that it is employed in the service of dogma.6 Jamal ad-Din al-Afghani and Mohammed Abduh, among the greatest thinkers of reformist Islam, were prepared near the turn of the century to accept the scientific theories of the nineteenth century. They departed far enough from orthodox Islam to welcome the idea that laws control the universe of nature. They objected only to science's mechanistic concepts of causation and in their own works reassured Moslems that God was the author of these scientific laws. 4

Gibb, Modern Trends in Islam, pp. 122-123. "Smith, Islam in Modern History, pp. 111-112. 6 Only the reformist ulema go that far. Others continue to say, "Islam is not our property for us to offer it to others, with alterations suitable to the requirements of the market." (Maulana Maudoodi, as quoted by J. W. Sweetman, "View Points in Pakistan. I," The Muslim World, April 1957, p. 115.)

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They felt that they were simply acknowledging that the world had become more comprehensible, while preserving their own religion since it now appeared that the whole universe was Islamic in character: everything, even the stars, must submit to the laws of God. Rereading the Koran, they discovered a verse that has since been quoted more often by Moslem reformers, both secular and religious, than perhaps any other, commanding initiative and self-help: "Verily, God changes not what a people has until they change it for themselves."7 But this verse continues in quite a different vein, and the reformers do not quote its remainder: "And when God wishes evil to a people there is no averting it, nor have they a protector beside Him." Careful reinterpretation of the Koran also seemed to suggest to the reformers of Islam that the most modern discoveries had long been foreshadowed in it. The verse, "He has created you by steps," for example, was thought to anticipate the theory of evolution.8 The Koranic per­ mission to marry four women, but to treat them with impartial justice, was interpreted by some Islamic reformers to mean the contrary of what had always been assumed: since no man can treat four women with equal justice, the Koran in fact com­ mands monogamy. Unfortunately, the reinterpretation frequently sounded more incredible to modern ears than the original gloss. Even so, one cannot help feeling that the reformers were driven more by reason than by faith. Mohammed Abduh, for example, was capable of writing, "If the reformers appeals directly to a morality or to a wisdom deprived of all religious character, he will have to build a new edifice for which there is neither ma­ terial nor labor. But if religion is able to raise the level of moral­ ity, . . . if the adepts of this religion are very attached to it, if finally one has less difficulty in bringing them back to this re­ ligion than in creating something new of which they are not 7

Sura ΧΠΙ, Verse 12, in Palmer translation, op. cit., p. 208. Sura LXXI, Verses 12-19 read: "What ails you that ye hope not for something serious from God, when He has created you by steps? Do ye not see how God has created the seven heavens in stories, and has set the moon therein for light, and set the sun for a lamp? and God has made you grow out of the earth, and then He will make you return thereto, and will make you come forth therefrom; and God has made for you the earth a carpet that ye may walk therein in broad paths." (Palmer, op. cit., pp. 501-502.) 8

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clearly conscious, why not have recourse to the religion, and why seek other less effective means?"9 More serious is the fact that since Jamal ad-Din (died 1897) and Mohammed Abduh (died 1905), there have been almost no reformist ulema or popularizers of equal stature or influence anywhere in the Islamic world. In the Arab world, the successors of these two reformers became increasingly divided among conservatives, extremists, and radicals.10 In Moslem India and now Pakistan, the brilliantly poetic philosophy of Mohammed Iqbal (1876-1938), reconstructing Sufism rather than orthodox Islam along modern lines, has remained an inspiration to many, but a practical guide to very few.11 The reformist ulema have not altogether won the battle even among their own group. Education, as far as it is under the control of the ulema, is still bound up with authoritarianism, rote learning, and a rigid devotion to ancient authorities—providing only already known solutions to already formulated problems. Where education is under secular control, religion is either neglected or enlisted in the service of the state. Where the influence of the ulema lingers, religion and science are still at odds, since even reformist Islam countenances only those scientific hypotheses that are consonant with revealed truth. Indeed, the ulema have no idea how great the issue really is since none of them have studied any of the major sciences of the twentieth century.12 As the Arab demand for social and physical science increases, most Arab intellectuals will be increasingly drawn to 9 Quoted by Osman Amin, "The Modernist Movement in Egypt," in Islam and the West, edited by Richard N. Frye, The Hague, 1957, p. 177. 10 Compare the views of the successive editors of the journal of the religious reformist movement in Egypt in Smith, Islam in Modern History, pp. 115-156. See also the recent discussion between Khalid Muhammad Khalid, From Here We Start, translated by Isma'il al-Faruqi, Washington, 1953; Muhammad alGhazzali, Our Beginning in Wisdom, translated by Isma'il al-Faruqi, Washington, 1953; Sayed Kotb, Social Justice in Islam, Washington, 1953. 11 HiS most significant work is The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam, Oxford, 1934. Among the most rewarding Western discussions of Iqbal are Smith, Modern Islam in India, pp. 98-127, 132-151; and Gibb, Modern Trends in Islam, pp. 74-84. "However, the work of a small number of outstanding young Moslem scholars trained in modern science and history, and inspired both by their faith and their critical mind may well be creating new foundations for Islamic reform. Among these university scholars may be mentioned Dr. Seyyed Hossein Nasr, an Iranian Shia Moslem, and Dr. Yusif Ibish, a Syrian Sunni Moslem.

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its pursuit—at the cost of ignoring a reformist Islam which has so far failed to relate itself to the modern world. Like orthodox Islam, its reformist offshoot is directly con­ cerned with the social and economic problems of daily existence.18 It formulates its attitude with awareness, though seldom with a thorough understanding, of capitalist, socialist, and communist alternatives. Reformist Islam proposes its system as a middle road between communism and capitalism, without the excesses of either. Its theories appear in a number of different forms. One school quotes the Koran to show that while private prop­ erty, unequal social status, and the accumulation though not the hoarding of wealth are justified,14 in reality these are not impor­ tant, for the treasures of earth ultimately belong to God,15 and none are to be regarded as highly as God's mercy.16 Wealth must be spent with neither extravagance nor waste, and above all, with compassion for those in need.17 Usury (interest in any amount) is forbidden.18 This school tends at times to assume a passive, de­ fensive stand, asserting that since Islam already includes the best of other economic systems, there is no need to tamper with it; that in fact, communism, socialism, and capitalism must be fought as perversions of ideal Islam. It supports the inherited system of landowning, whether it is based on the traditional political power of large landlords, on the fragmentation of lands brought about by the strict application of Islamic inheritance laws, or on lands divided only in usufruct under the same laws and leaving hun­ dreds of heirs for each lot with little opportunity for enterprising management. It relies on philanthropy and the zakat, a religious levy of about 2.5 percent on annual revenues, in lieu of taxes for social welfare. In short reformist Islam sometimes substitutes religious piety for economic reform. There are times when reformist Islam sounds as if it were a dynamic program for the modern welfare state. Consider a "See the Koran, Sura Π, Verses 278-285 for a characteristic example of the Prophet's interest in the economic details of daily life. »1 5 Koran, VI, 165; ΧΙΠ, 26. Ibid., XV, 20. ^ Ibid., XLm, 32. « JfcW., IX, 34; XVn, 29; XVII, 29; LXX, 24-25; LVII, 7. ™ Ibid., Tl, 275-280.

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CHOICES

Ramadan sermon on "Islam and Communism" by Abd al-Azia ben Abdallah, republished on June 27, 1951, in Al-Alam (Rabat), the newspaper of Morocco's then leading nationalist party, Istiqlal: "Islam guaranteed the workingman's living conditions before communism ever existed on earth. . . . Islam, however, not only encourages the people to demand and struggle for their rights, but even prescribes in its holy verses that those who give up their natural rights expose themselves to severe chastisement! . . . Islam has given to the poor liens both on capital and on the rich. It has guaranteed to all social classes equity in the field of life. Islam protects the whole of the people from hunger and nakedness. Islam has condemned the monopoly of wealth in the hands of any group to the prejudice of others. Islam has recommended liveliness and hard work and prescribed that no harvest can be obtained without tilling, no wealth without toil." When it speaks in such a fashion, one can only conclude that reformist Islam has severed all connection with orthodoxy except that of language. Orthodox Islam looks upon the universe as a sacred unity of man and nature, reality and idea, consciousness and existence. Reformist Islam perceives a conflict between man and uncontrolled nature, secular reality and religious truth, man's humanity and the increasing atomization of his social relations. It hopes to recapture Islam's lost unity by a philosophic reconstruction of revealed truth. By shifting the emphasis from the letter to the spirit of the Koran, it seeks to convert Islam into a set of broad formulas that make for pleasant social relations and emotional comfort. At worst, reformist Islam sometimes gives the impression of being at work to save not the world or men, but itself.19 Reformist Islam's present formulations lack one important attribute of a living religion—immediacy of assent. Reformists, for all their explaining and justifying, cannot yet offer a restatement of Islam that strikes a balance between "the broad and deep currents of a people's psychology and the inescapable forces of social evolution."20 The reformist ulema are unlikely to succeed. From the Prophet 19 20

Smith, Modern Islam in India, p. 84. Gibb, Modern Trends in Islam, p. 113.

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Mohammed forward, the orthodox interpreters of Islam have made themselves acceptable to the community by allying themselves with existing social institutions and so enlarging the consensus of belief. Indeed, the special strength of Islam's orthodox and even its heretics has always been that for them all things— sacred, secular, legal, ethical, intellectual, emotional, political, social, economic—are and ought to be related. Today, social institutions are in conflict and the consensus is broken. From an Islamic perspective, the failure of the reformist ulema is that they have managed no better than secular reformers in putting the pieces together again. The failure of the ulema to produce a new intellectual synthesis stems in part from an endemic weakness of orthodox Islam. Analytical philosophy has always seemed impious to the orthodox Moslem—a sacrilegious and ultimately doomed effort to lay bare God's essence, meaning, and purpose. In the relatively static world of the past, this weakness in philosophical inquiry made Islam more tolerant than Christianity of theological differences within (and often even outside) the Moslem world, and thereby contributed to the stability and, within limits, theflexibilityof the community. In the search for God, practice counted for more than reason. Now that practices, theories, and faiths are in conflict in the Middle East, the ulema, even when they consent to use reason, can only contribute additional opinions to the broken consensus. By continuing to be tolerant as long as Islamic dogma is not explicitly denied, the largest proportion of the ulema in the Middle East are likely to acquiesce, as they always have, in the policies of their secular rulers, but this time with uprooting and irreversible consequences. The Successful Reform of the Law of the Moslems As the ulema stand aside, whether by choice or necessity, the very center of orthodox Islam—Shari'a law—is slipping beyond the control of its guardians. Majid Khadduri has outlined the initial steps leading toward the secularization of Islamic law: "First, the adoption of Western legal rules and principles which [125]

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are either not adequately covered by the Shari'a or not mentioned at all by the Shari'a; second, the adoption of Western law which is in principle in conformity with the Shari'a but is not dealt with in such detail as would fit the conditions of modern life as influenced by the West . . . ; third, the adoption of Western law which may take the place of certain Shari'a rules that have become obsolete; fourth, the separation of the devotional and religious provisions of the Shari'a from those regulating daily life."21 The spirit with which secular law is being assimilated is even more significant than its structural form. Khadduri attributes the success of one of the leading architects of secular law, Abd alRassaq al-Sanhuri—the principal author of recent Egyptian, Syrian, and Iraqi civil codes—to the fact that al-Sanhuri "wisely abstained from discussing controversial issues that might have brought him into conflict with the ulema and interrupted his work." He proceeded "without going into a theoretical discussion on how the Shari'a generally should be modernized, or even trying to give a rationale to his scheme. . . ."22 His is a revolutionary work which is conservative in intent and style. He dares to revise revealed law by individual judgment, but he seeks to maintain respect for law by artfully sustaining at least the verisimilitude of historical continuity. By avoiding a discussion of principles, however, the conservative modernists have not only succeeded in quietly imposing their own revisions, but have failed to set clear limits to the revolution they began. In a community originally founded to perpetuate a revealed code of conduct as defined by the Shari'a, the Shari'a has by now ceased to be the primary source of ethics, and insofar as its rules survive in modern laws, it has ceased to be either divine orfinal.Even the last and strongest fortress of the original code—family law—has already yielded. By now, there are few Middle Eastern countries in which the laws bearing on polygamy, divorce, child-marriage, private religious endowments (waqf), and inheritance have not been decisively altered. 21 Majid Khadduri, "From Religious to National Law," in Mid-East: World Center, edited by Ruth N. Anshen, New York, 1956, p. 232. 22 Ibid.

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Once everyone was free to make judgments, it was clear that the Shari'a would have to give way. There was no longer a single highway into the future. The Turks did not bother to retain any part of the Shari'a. In 1959, at a congress of Arab lawyers for studying the unification of civil codes in Arab countries, the delegates at times differed so sharply among themselves that the Beirut police were called in to restore order.28 Even at the Arab citadel of Shari'a traditionalism, al-Azhar University in Cairo, Shaikh Khallaf could write ". . . the goal of the Law is only the welfare of men, and wheresoever lies the welfare of men, there is the Law of God."24 Thus divine law yields to man-made law, which is enacted not for a community of believers but for nations that neglect the traditional Islamic distinction among subjects on the basis of creed. At that point, the old relationship between the sacred and the secular, the expedient and the metaphysical, is forever shattered and must be built anew. Without the Shari'a, Islam possesses an all-powerful God without adequate guidance concerning his will, a holy book without agreed-upon interpretations, a religious emotion without clear ethical and social consequences, and authority in the community without traditional legitimacy. Those who would reform Islam strictly within the framework of the past lost their first and decisive battle when they themselves amended the past, and thus opened the door to innovation. By now, enough change has taken place so that even the ulema are no longer agreed on what constitutes an Islamic state. Islam, never the single vision posited by the ulema, has by now almost as many faces (and many of these, new) as there are Moslems. Today, any attempt to assert one interpretation of Islam, however hallowed by the past or sensitively reconstructed, as binding on all cannot help but become merely a partisan effort. Insofar as Moslems who have broken with the consensus of kin and tra28 New 24

York Times, September 7, 1959. Quoted by Richard H. Nolte, "The Rule of Law in the Arab Middle East," The Muslim World, October 1958, p. 306. In a similar spirit, Sheikh Muhib al-Din al-Khatib writes that if the just and pious second Caliph of Islam, Umar ibn al-Khattab, were alive today, he would devote himself to enlarging the middle classes. "Thawratuna al-ijtima'iyah" ("Our Social Revolution") Majallat al-Azhar, Cairo, December 1957, pp. 481-487.

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dition still acknowledge each other as "Moslems," it is by a common act of individual wills.25 Certainly far more educated Middle Easterners than Western orientalists have, proportionately, become indifferent to traditional Islam.28 Middle Eastern leaders may still use, although with diminishing frequency, an Islamic vocabulary as the most widely understood and least controversial means of communication.27 But Islam—not as political patter, but as a unique and ordained pattern for politics, economics, and society—is no longer practiced anywhere in the Middle East except in portions of the Arabian Peninsula. Even here, the substance, if not the form, is increasingly being diluted. The division among Moslems has gone so far that even those who still employ an Islamic vocabulary often can no longer understand each other. The delegates who arrived at the Islamic Colloquium at Lahore, Pakistan, in December 1957 found a leaflet in their mail which read: "Dear Delegates to the Islamic Colloquium. . . . You are already aware that this is an Islamic country and our Constitution is based on the Holy Quran and Sunna. Kindly therefore take care not to injure the feelings of the Muslims of this Islamic country, in any way, by saying things against Islam, its history, its culture, and its law."28 On the following day, the President of Pakistan, General Iskander Mirza, in welcoming the delegates, declared: "Islam is too dynamic and too eternal to be imprisoned in the requirements of a passing age. As the intellect of man develops into new dimen25 A point made by Gustave von Grunebaum in a paper presented to the Islamic Colloquium at Lahore, December 1957. It is characteristic of the modern situation that in India, which then contained at least 100,000,000 Moslems, and still contains about 40,000,000, "the most important and far-reaching enactment passed within the last half century is the Shariat Act, 1937, [which] is applicable to every Muslim, regardless of the school to which he belongs, but there is no definition of what, for the purposes of the administration of justice, is the definition of a Muslim." A. A. A. Fyzee, "Major Developments in Muhammadan Law in India, 1850-1950," an unpublished manuscript of a talk presented to a Conference on Islamic Law, Princeton University, November 1958. 26 ThUS Professor James Kritzeck, in "Portrait of Ahmad: A Report on a Typical Member of Egypt's Rising New Middle Class," writes, "Generally speaking, Ahmad is intellectually curious, but his lack of intellectual curiosity about his religion is sometimes exasperating." {Commonweal, December 11, 1959, p. 320.) 27 When President Nasser in December 1958 decided to warn Iraq, whose

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sions with the discoveries of new avenues of knowledge and science, his understanding of life and religion is bound to grow in similar proportions. . . . It is an irony of history that, while rejecting the institutions of organized priesthood, Islam has often fallen into the hands of priests. . . . On the one hand, the Mullah has woven into Islam a crazy network of fantasy and fanaticism. On the other, he has often tried to use it as an elastic cloak for political power and expediencies."29 Since then, it must be added, General Mirza has been ousted from the Presidency by another general who thought him not radical enough in dealing with Pakistan's problem and who abolished the constitution that had made Pakistan at that time the only formally designated "Islamic Republic" in the Middle East. The Triumph of Secular Leadership For the Moslems who are now taking the leading roles in Middle Eastern life, the battle has moved from the realm of religion into the realm of politics. "Relief of distress is sought not in a revision of doctrine but in a redressing of history."30 No one attacks Islam. Ataturk, the most far-reaching of the secularists, did not challenge the Islamic faith, nor did any of the political leaders who came after him. There was no need to challenge it. Reformist Islam opened the sluice gate and was swamped by the deluge. Traditional Islam still has many adherents among the peasant majority and not a few townsmen. No political leader is likely to outrage their sensibilities by deliberately speaking ill of secular-minded leadership shares with him common origins and goals, that its neutralism was leaning too far toward the Sino-Soviet bloc, he declared that their attitude was contrary to the spirit of Islam. When references to Islam did not change Iraq's policy, Nasser did not, however, deem it useful to enlarge on this theme. A real debate could only be supported on modern ideological grounds. 28 Rudi Paret, "Das Islamische Colloquium in Lahore: 29. Dezember 1957-8. Januar 1958," Die Welt des Mams, N.S. Vol. v, No. 3-4, 1958, p. 229. 29 Ibid. "Mullah" is another term to designate one of the ulema. 80 Smith, Islam in Modern History, p. 111. Kenneth Cragg writes in a similar vein: "Islam has always believed that the individual, not the community, is the source of 'heresy.' It is a corollary of this that social changes, not intellectual enterprise, must be the proper origin of religious redefinition." ("The Modernist Movement in Egypt," in Islam and the West, p. 160.)

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Islam. Almost all of them concentrate instead on eliminating particular Islamic institutions and customs that bar the way to the modern age. Their methods are many: financing secular schools and neglecting Koranic schools, favoring men with secular outlook in all government appointments, enlarging opportunities for women, making no allowance for easier working hours during the fasting month of Ramadan, generally rewarding new types of knowledge, values, and performance.31 When traditional Islam reacts by transforming itself into a religio-political totalitarian party, it can safely be challenged as a novel ideology rather than as a hallowed way of life.32 There will still be battles, but this particular war is over in the great majority of Middle Eastern states. The secularization of political leadership turned out unexpectedly to be even easier in the Middle East than in Western Europe, where the distinction between the things of Caesar and those of God did not prevent Christians from fighting each other long and fiercely. The secularization of the masses remains the great unfinished business in the Middle East. Perhaps the speed of secularization among the decision makers should not have been unexpected. Few Moslem rulers in history have made it the main business of state, as the Koran had intended, to enforce God's eternal laws. Administrative, criminal, civil, and commercial law had almost from the beginning of the Islamic community been separated from the domain of the Shari'a, though this separation was not formally and explicitly codified until the nineteenth century. Islam had also early reconciled itself to the separation between religion and the conduct of the state in foreign affairs once it acquiesced in the peaceful coexistence of orthodox Islamic states with Christian and heterodox Islamic nations.33 Most Moslems have therefore long been accustomed 81 Even changes in clothes have consequences for Islam. When Ataturk in 1925 compelled Turks to adopt the hat, he made prayer more difficult since a headcover is mandatory and the worshipper's head must bend over to touch the ground, and also made it harder to distinguish Moslem from non-Moslem. 32 See the next chapter. 33 The "principle of the peaceful relationship among nations of different religions, . . . perhaps the most revolutionary in Islamic legal theory, was for the first time embodied in a treaty signed in 1535 between Francis I of France and Sulayman the Magnificent, Sultan of the Ottoman Empire." (Majid Khad-

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to obey secular-minded rulers, or to avoid the law of sultans and ulema by frequently resorting to private vengeance, arbitration by tribal chiefs, and the subversion of justice through nepotism, bribery, personal influence, and casuistry. The ulema have always been steadfast, but unheroic.34 Many mosques have endowments, but there is no central churchly control over large properties to give added strength to a defense of sacred institutions. And not only the frequency of heresies and the popularity of non-orthodox mystic orders, but the very autonomy of social structures and functions discussed in the first chapter suggest that the Islamic community of the past was more united in the style of its certainties than in their substance. Yet even the end of certainty was eased by a number of historical factors. Few Moslems thoroughly understood the choices to be made between traditional past and modern present since in fact they were ill-informed about either. Islam had fallen into political, economic, and spiritual decay prior to the arrival of Western imperialism.35 (Witness the efforts of Ottoman, Wahhabi, and Sanusi reformers, each in their own way, to rescue their own society.) As against such a way of life—the days of greatest Islamic unfolding had passed centuries earlier—modernity often offered immediate advantages. Certainly, the great majority of Moslems had neither liberty nor property to lose in the death of the past. duri, "The Islamic System: Its Competition and Coexistence with Western Systems," Proceedings of the American Society of International Law, 1959, p. 51. See also his fundamental study, War and Peace in the Law of Islam, Baltimore, 1955, demonstrating that coexistence had been accepted in practice centuries earlier.) 84 Mohammed Abduh, for example, the founder of the Egyptian Islamic reform movement, said in 1905, when Egypt was still under British occupation, "but the matter of the government and the governed I abandoned to the decision of fate, and to the hand thereafter to arrange." (Quoted by Charles C. Adams, Islam and Modernism in Egypt, London, 1933, pp. 63-64.) As a result, Egypt's largest nationalist party, then led by Mustapha Kamil, went its separate way. See also H. A. R. Gibb and Harold Bowen, Islamic Society and the West, Vol. I, Part I, p. 72. 35 "The Kingdoms and crowns that the Moslems have lost in the course of history," Pakistan's President Ayub told his audience when he accepted an honorary doctorate of philosophy at Cairo University, "are far less important then the kingdom of the free and searching mind, which they lost in the process of intellectual stagnation." (New York Times, November 11, 1960.)

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Men who were born in the twentieth century grew up in an Islamic society that had already begun to question its verities. They no longer faced the same conflicts of adjustment that confronted their fathers.36 In "the constant invasion of the barbarians," that is, the continual generation of the young learning much about their world but little about this region's own heritage, there lie many opportunities for startling individual transformations in the midst of rapid social change. For Arabs probably more than for other Moslems, many Islamic memories remain precious for being also specifically Arab memories—perhaps the grandest of Arab memories. Nonetheless, it has become easier for all Moslems to discover and admire what other Asians and Africans and Latin Americans are doing in quickly changing their traditional way of life.37 Of the entire social and political inheritance of Islam, it is the force of consensus which has remained the strongest moral imperative in the Middle East. It still holds sway over many through the compulsion of family or village opinion, reinforced by faith in the infallibility of the consensus (ijma) of the charismatic Community of Believers.38 Increasingly, however, this insistence on the hallowed consensus is itself becoming a force for change as the pressure for conformity comes no longer from one's ancestors but from one's peers. Novel ideas can be accepted in the name of national unity. These new guides to conformity may now lead either toward See the analysis of the causes and consequences of that decay by various authors in Classicisme et declin culturel dans Vhistoire de Vlslam, Actes du Symposium International d'Histoire de la Civilisation Musulmane (Bordeaux, June 25-29, 1956) organized by R. Brunschvig and G. E. von Grunebaum, Paris, 1957. 36 For some men, the conflict ceased even earlier. Steppat remarks concerning the founder of Egypt's first nationalist party, Mustapha Kamil (died 1907) that he "did not need to move away from Islam in order to turn toward nationalism since he had never really submitted himself to Islam." Mustapha Kamil was the grandson of a wealthy grain merchant, the son of a construction engineer trained in Mohammad Ali's occidental schools; his mother was the daughter of an army captain. Although his father still hoped Mustapha might study at Al-Azhar, he did not oppose his son's decision to study at a French law school instead. (Fritz Steppat, "Nationalismus und Islam bei Mustafa Kamil," Die Welt des Islams, N.S. Vol. rv, No. 4, 1956, pp. 333 and 242-243. " I t is characteristic of that new spirit that while in the 1960's, 600,000 among the 430,000,000 Moslems of the world continue to go to Mecca on

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responsible freedom or away from it. In any event, the most active politically are aware that Moslems, like their neighbors, have many new alternatives before them. To these choices we now attend. pilgrimage each year (only 200,000 of these, however, coming from countries beyond the Arabian Peninsula), the gatherings that excite the public imagination and help to shape history are secular affairs like the Bandung Conference of 29 Afro-Asian nations in April 1955. 88 A concept explored by W. Montgomery Watt in Islam and the Integration of Society, London, 1961.

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Native Totalitarianism: the Sources of its Appeal have been disenchanted by the twentieth century. Amulets and local saints have waned in popularity, religious brotherhoods and guilds have lost in solidarity, and the thoughts of reformist ulema have become less relevant. But the needs and emotions which inspired these expressions of Islam are not dead. They reappear in twisted form in the various movements of neo-Islamic totalitarianism. In Egypt, the largest Arab state, such a movement has for decades been far more powerful and disciplined than the communist party. In 1948,1 the Moslem Brotherhood assassinated Egyptian Premier Mahmud Nuqrashi; in 1952, it was the only political party to avoid being immediately outlawed by the new military regime; and in 1954, its bullets missed in an attempt to assassinate President Nasser. Neo-Islamic totalitarian movements have played an important role elsewhere in the Middle East as well. The Fadayan Islam assassinated Iranian Premier Razmara in 1951; the Khaksar movement assassinated Pakistani Premier Liaqat AIi Khan in 1951. A similar Pakistani group, the Jama'at-i-Islam, in April 1958 won a majority of seats in the Karachi municipal assembly. Between 1953 and 1958, while Syrian stability wobbled under the pressure of the great powers and rival Arab states, the local Moslem Brotherhood alternately joined and fought pro-Soviet MANY MOSLEMS

x When the movement had close to a million members, as contrasted with about 5,000 for the Egyptian Communist Party.

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elements. In Jordan, at different times during 1958, it both defended and opposed the King. Until Nasser and the Arab Socialist Resurrection (Ba'th) Party each began in the 1950's to fashion organizational links among groups in the various Middle Eastern states, these Islamic movements formed the only political groups other than the communists that were in area-wide communication with each other. To call them "fanatics"—for in their concern for Islam they do not hesitate to kill fellow Moslems—is to indicate primarily that we cannot fathom their ambiguous, destructive intensity. To call them "extreme nationalists" is to mistake them for secular politicians. No nationalist in the Middle East, however extreme, is likely to join the leaders of Islamic totalitarian movements in saying that "my religion is dearer to me than my family and clan. My religion is the first country that I take shelter in," or to assert that nations have become "idols," and that national unity should never be purchased at the expense of religion.3 To say that they advocate "the application of religious precepts in the government of Moslem countries"4 is to confuse them with moral reformers. An acknowledgment of their anticommunism must not lead to the conclusion that they have chosen sides in the cold war; they are anti-communist because they are anti-Western; they reject communism as a creation of the Westernized modern world. The neo-Islamic totalitarian movements are essentially fascist movements. They concentrate on mobilizing passion and violence to enlarge the power of their charismatic leader and the solidarity of the movement. They view material progress primarily as a 2 During this period it reportedly had about 10,000-12,000 members, or twice as many as the Syrian Communist Party (New York Times, February 20, 1955). 8 These thoughts were expressed by a leading member of the Moslem Brotherhood, Sa'id Ramadan, in "Al-watan lillah" ("The Fatherland Belongs to God"), Al-Muslimun, Cairo, June 1953, pp. 30-32. 4 A frequent designation, here taken from an Associated Press dispatch from Cairo, November 28, 1954, New York Times, November 29, 1954. For an illuminating discussion by a member of the Moslem Brotherhood of how sharply the rule of the Brotherhood would differ from the practice of both contemporary and traditional Moslem states, see Muhib al-Din al-Khatib, "Mata wa kayfa yaqumu al-hukmu al-islamy" ("When and How Islamic Rule Takes Place"), Al-Muslimun, Cairo, November 1952, pp. 44-47.

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means for accumulating strength for political expansion, and entirely deny individual and social freedom. They champion the values and emotions of a heroic past, but repress all free critical analysis of either past roots or present problems. As a movement resisting the changes of a multiple revolution in telescoped time, this Middle Eastern version of fascism is also stamped, however, by a kinship with certain religio-political movements which spread in Western Europe at the beginning of its modern age. In the fifteenth century in Europe, as in modern Islam, groups arose which joined in the call for a religious Reformation, but opposed the alliance of the leading reformers with established secular authority. Instead, they adopted a militant social chiliasm—that is, they organized themselves for an immediate leap into the promised millennium.5 Islam shares with Christianity the sense of an inherent, preordained purpose in history ending in a cataclysmic judgment day. Moslems have indeed held to the vision of the millennium more constantly and deeply than most Christians, for Islam's code of righteousness promises the good society here and now. Moslems have been perennially ready for the mahdi, the messenger of God, who would lead the community in a religio-political leap into immediate fulfillment of all spiritual and material needs even before judgment day. The reconstruction of society through the "spiritualization of politics"6 has been a permanent theme of opposition politics in Islam. While European fascism was compelled to propagandize myths that were new to the majority of the population, neo-Islamic totalitarianism simply exploits the tradition of converting Islam in times of crisis into an apocalyptic vision of spiritual and political redemption. The Egyptian Moslem Brotherhood, for example, calls itself simultaneously "a reformist movement, an orthodox path, a mystic reality, a political society, an athletic group, a scientific and cultural organization, an economic corporation, and a social idea."7 5 For a detailed exploration of such movements in Europe, see Norman Cohn, TAe Pursuit of the Millennium, London, 1957. 6 The phrase quoted is from Karl Mannheim {Ideology and Utopia, London, 1952, p. 191), who laid most useful conceptual foundations for a discussion of such movements. Opposition movements in traditional Islam have been explored in Chapter 1. 'Anwar al-Jundi, Min Khutab Hasan al-Banna (From the Speeches of Hasan al-Banna), First Series, Damascus, 1938, pp. 14-15. Such a formulation

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Hasan al-Banna, the leader of the Egyptian Moslem Brotherhood until his death in 1949, embodied the principal elements that have shaped the neo-Islamic totalitarian movement. He was a product of reformist Islam. He memorized the Koran, worked as Imam and preacher for the village mosque, edited religious texts, and finally graduated first in his class in religion and Arabic studies from Dar al-Ulum, a relatively modern religious school, in 1927. He was a product of sufi (mystic) Islam. In his youth he fasted in months additional to Ramadan, founded the Society for the Prevention of Sin, regularly attended meetings of the Hasafiyah sufi order, and at the age of 16 was admitted to its ranks. Born in 1906, he was a modern man uprooted but unable and unwilling to accept his new freedom. He began as an apprentice to his father, repairing that characteristically modern machine for measuring efficiency and routinization, the watch.8 As he continued his education, however, he attended a school which, unlike other Egyptian schools at that level, taught no foreign language. Despite his higher education, therefore, the role of clerk or bureaucrat was bound to be closed to al-Banna in his country, where both business and government required English. Able, intelligent, and vigorous, he became a teacher of Arabic and, in his spare time, of religion. He lived in Ismailia, a town in the Suez Canal Zone. Also there were the headquarters of the foreign-owned Suez Canal Company and a base from which British military power could radiate through his country.9 Within Hasan al-Banna, the chiliastic, reformist, and uprooted modern elements were all transmuted into the ideology of a modern political movement. The Moslem Brotherhood rejects sufism's superstitions and corruptions, its reflection of social class divisions, its assumed un-Islamic origins, its factionalism, and its current acceptance of fatalism.10 Yet the Brotherhood made it easy for the Brotherhood to live at the same time in the traditional and the modern world. Whenever it was threatened by repression, it replied that it would confine itself to religious issues, meaning its propagandizing mission. Whenever it felt free to act, it declared it was concerned only with religion, since in Islamic tradition, religion comprehends all things. 8 His father belonged to an earlier generation of Islamic reform: he had been educated at al-Azhar at the time of Mohammed Abduh. 8 Hasan al-Banna, Mudhakkarat al-da'wah w-al-da'iyah, Cairo, 1957, pp. 5-82, passim. 10 Richard P. Mitchell, The Muslim Brotherhood, an unpublished doctoral

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retains sufism's striving for the millennium, and many of its organizational forms. The Brotherhood rejects reform Islam for its arid rationalism, yet accepts any of its arguments that would purify Islam from the accretions of its decadence and show it thus to be better than the most modern of ideas. The Brotherhood is itself a symptom of uprootedness, yet cannot accept modern uprootedness as the precondition of modern liberation. Such an ideology, based on an immediate acceptance of the distant past and the distant future, but not of the present, appeals to a particular surplus in the population: the peasant, with only a peasant's skill and opinion, but no longer with any land; workers already replaced or easily replaceable by other workers; students without jobs; ulema, Koran-reciters, and other religious officials whose status and opportunities are contracting under the impact of secularization; above all, as its hard core, white collar workers and members of the lower middle class who resent the monopoly of power and wealth of those who dominate the state, and who, without influence upon existing cliques and parties, are keenly sensitive to the pressure for social and economic space among the masses below them. AU of these groups share a deep concern for improving their lot within the traditional framework of status and values rather than within the freedom of a changing society. Some are fundamentalists by conviction who hold that anything new or strange is by nature wicked. The great majority, however—and that is why this movement has such great propulsion—has had no chance to acquire a stake in the modern world, and hence makes a virtue of their necessity. For many Moslems, especially in provincial towns, modernization in fact provides the first opportunity to turn to the past. The spread of literacy and communication gives a larger number than ever before the chance to read the traditional literature— and so grow attached to pre-modern ideas and values. As a result, theirs becomes a desperate attempt to gain upward mobility in a decaying social structure instead of the newly emerging sodissertation presented to the Department of Oriental Studies, Princeton University, December 30, 1959, (pp. 356-357), the most thorough first-hand and documentary exploration and analysis of this movement in any language.

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ciety. In a modern social structure, individuals can hope to raise or maintain their status only as individuals. Neo-Islamic totalitarian movements instead seem to offer the individual the chance to rise, indeed to find salvation, by merging his fate entirely with that of a group striving to resurrect an idealized past. Neo-Islamic totalitarian movements have also won support on other grounds. They are admired as rare among Middle Eastern parties for the consistency of their programs and the apparent honesty and sincerity of their leaders.12 Their opportunistic drive for power has allowed them to offer or accept temporary alliances with opponents with whom they share common enemies—for example, the Egyptian Brotherhood's alliance with King Farouk in 1946 and 1951, with factions of the antiFarouk Wafd Party in 1950, and in 1954 with General Nagib, who had earlier triumphed over both King Farouk and the Wafd Party. They have won adherents among Moslems frustrated by the failure of more liberal efforts to reform and maintain Islam and who, in fear of secularism and modernism, endorse the movement's puritanical intent to rescue a desecrated tradition. Some of the newly rich, and there were not a few who profited from the scarcity and inflation that followed World War II, have sought to purify and strengthen their social status by financing such movements of piety. Neo-Islamic totalitarianism have also won support from conservative politicians fearful of growing 11 Such a belated rekindling of tradition has also been observed elsewhere. In India, for example, the upper castes are becoming more and more Westernized and other castes are becoming more and more sanscritized; that is, they try to rise by accepting an idealized and puritan image of what good and proper people traditionally did. (See M. N. Srinivas, "Sanscritization and Westernization," in Society in India, edited by A. Aiyappan and L. K. Bala Ratnam, Madras, 1956.) In India, too, movements akin to the Egyptian Moslem Brotherhood—the Hindu Mahasbha and the SSR—turn this quest in an unpropitious environment into extremist political movements. In Ceylon, Buddhism has inspired similar movements which came to the fore in the 1956 elections. 12 "However we may differ in opinion with them . . . can anyone forget that the Moslem Brotherhood more than any other party saturated the soil of Palestine with sweat and blood? Can anyone forget that it is the Moslem Brotherhood which today is raising the flag of jihad against the English in the Suez Canal Zone?" (The newspaper Beirut, January 22, 1952, cited by Ishak Musa Husaini, The Moslem Brethren: The Greatest of Modern Islamic Movements, Beirut, 1956, a valuable study.)

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pressures from the left and intrigued by the notion that the brotherhood's organization of trade unions and students would at least serve to split these discontented segments of society. It has the same attraction that the National Socialist party held for despairing conservatives in Germany—seemingly the last available remedy that would change many things in a crisis except the established social structure. Also, mere membership can offer the boom of solidarity; mere power to obstruct, as through sabotage, can offer reassurance of strength to affect reality; mere adventurism can be a way of life. Variations among neo-Islamic totalitarian movements, and conflicts for control within them, thus often arise between those who prefer the tension of absolute order to the tension of absolute struggle, or between those who would assure popular docility through social welfare rather than through the fear of foreign enemies. Tactics This analysis of neo-Islamic totalitarianism began with a study of the mood and circumstances which are far more responsible for its growth than the appeal of its program. Indeed, the program is the symptom of a mood rather than a carefully planned resolution. Most of the program is concerned with tactics that express its mood. That is why tactics, too, deserve exploration before we enter upon the substantive aspects of this movement's program. Like fascism, neo-Islamic totalitarianism represents the institutionalization of struggle, tension, and violence. Unable to solve the basic public issues of modern life—intellectual and technological progress, the reconciliation of freedom and security, and peaceful relations among rival sovereignties—the movement is forced by its own logic and dynamics to pursue its vision through nihilistic terror, cunning, and passion. An efficient state administration is seen only as an additional powerful tool for controlling the community. The locus of power and the focus of devotion rest in the movement itself. Like fascist movements [140]

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elsewhere, the movement is so organized as to make neo-Islamic totalitarianism the whole life of its members. The Egyptian Moslem Brotherhood has both a visible part (but often outlawed and hence underground) and an intentionally secret part in its movement. Its cells are organized in a hierarchy of groups which the Brotherhood calls "families" and "clans." At each weekly meeting of the "family," the group discusses not only organizational and ideological matters but also the personal problems of its members. The members of the "family" also assume financial responsibility for each other.13 All members in all branches at each meeting renew their sworn allegiance to the head of the organization: "I hear and I obey."14 Only when a member had passed an examination and thus became an "active member," however, could he attend special meetings called by Hasan al-Banna himself. A portion of these members—about 40,000—were organized as "Rover-Scouts" and engaged in parades, athletics and streetfighting.15 This was merely the "General Circle." There was also a secret circle. In 1949, the Egyptian prosecutor testified that the secret apparatus admitted only men whose entire life histories were known; each had to keep a daily record (submitted to headquarters each month) of his activities in the recitation and memorization of the Koran, sayings of the Prophet, and prayers, in morning and evening athletic exercises, and in courses in law, weaponry, and first aid.16 After swearing secrecy on a Koran and a pistol, the members of the secret apparatus were organized in groups of five. These elite corps phalanxes had as their motto: "Absolute obedience without question, without hesitation, without doubting, and without shifting blame."17 It has been estimated that the secret 13

Mitchell, The Muslim Brotherhood, pp. 316-319. Article 13 of the organization's basic regulation, Qanun al-Nizam al-Asasi Ii Hay'at al-lkhwan al-Muslimin, published in Cairo, September 8, 1945. "The figure is claimed by the Moslem Brotherhood magazine Al-Da'wah, Cairo, April 15, 1952, which speaks for the more activist faction. 16 The prosecution's charge is reprinted in the newspaper al-Asas, Cairo, September 13, 1949. "Ahmad Amin, al-Sa'lakah wa al-Futuwwah fi al-Islam (Roguery and Chivalry in Islam), Iqra Series No. I l l , Cairo, April 1952, p. 26. 14

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apparatus, organized in late 1942 or early 1943, numbered about 1,000 members by 1948.18 Thus the movement permits those who feel superfluous to participate, through various levels of initiation, in a powerful mystery within a group which deems itself the elite among Moslems. The powerless it thus keeps powerless by extinguishing their personality, but it also increases their sense of importance by creating an intense feeling of identification with the leader of the movement whose power, emotion, and style of living pantomime the yearning of his followers. Thus it stimulates an intoxicating sense of nihilism in which the willingness to sacrifice one's self becomes more important than the object for which the sacrifice is made. Those who are sent to death as robots have the illusion of dying as martyrs. At meetings, this litany of slogans is shouted again and again: Allahu ghayatuna Al-Rasulu za'imuna Al Qur'anu dustumna Al-jihadu sabiluna Al-mawt fi sabil Illah asma amanina Allahu akbar, Allahu akbar

God is our goal! The Prophet is our leader! The Koran is our constitution! Holy War is our path! Death in God's service is our loftiest hope! God is greatest, God is greatest!

It is hardly surprising that there is so much talk about "the art of death" among the members of the Egyptian Brotherhood.19 For all their talk about resurrecting the splendor and power of Islam, the neo-Islamic totalitarian movements hasten the death of all they hold dear by their very approach. They seem to champion the paternalistic, egalitarian values of the tribe against the exploitation and normlessness of modern secular life. They seem to reassert the unity of law, morality, and society at a time when the old value system no longer finds general assent and the community is in fact living in diverging universes of understanding and "Mitchell, op. cit,, p. 341. 19 Mitchell, The Muslim Brotherhood, pp. 342-343. Hasan al-Banna recalled as a youth of meeting a merchant who took him and other youths to a cemetery to read to them sad tales of pious men and ordered them to lie for a while in newly dug graves to contemplate their fate and repent (Hasan al-Banna, Mudhakkarat, p. 16.)

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interests. But when Moslems were in fact linked by common bonds, they formed no secret societies to cement their solidarity. When they were in fact agreed on common values, they needed no totalitarian dictatorship to enforce their consensus. They never even bothered to organize a hierarchy of priests. These are not zealots, as Toynbee uses the term, who merely will "not retreat," who will "maintain an unbroken and unbending front" in the "observance of every jot and tittle of a traditional . . . law,"20 They recognize instead that they cannot stand where they are, yet will not allow growth, and consequently must dedicate themselves to death. Program A neo-Islamic totalitarian movement has no real interest in a program. Its chiliastic expectation makes the very effort towards producing a program irrelevant; the reformist Islamic component makes its actual program irrelevant since its closed system of deductive procedure insures an inner coherence at the price of isolation from the world; its modern involvement, however, makes an effort to form a program inescapable. The result is a program of repression and death for the insider, aggression and death for the outsider. There is also talk about Islamic "socialism." The "socialism" of the neo-Islamic totalitarian movements is much akin to that of the German Anabaptists of the sixteenth century and the German National Socialists of the twentieth century. The Anabaptists "tended to be uneasy about private property. . . . If in most of the groups, little attempt was made to introduce common ownership, Anabaptists certainly did take seriously the obligations of charitably dealing and generous mutual aid." But the ethics of "active brotherly love" and "great solidarity" apply only within each group: "the attitude to society at large tended to be one of uncompromising rejection."21 The Egyptian Moslem Brotherhood was exceedingly active in social welfare. It opened a number of free schools for the elimination of illiteracy and the fostering of religious culture; it set up 20 21

A Study of History, Vol. vra, pp. 580-625. Cohn, The Pursuit of the Millennium, pp. 273-275.

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special courses for university students who had failed their general examinations; it built cemeteries for the poor, and collected alms and fed the poor during the holy months; it established small hospitals and dispensaries. It organized help in times of flood and fought malaria. It founded seven commercial companies, in printing, spinning, weaving, engineering—all with shares owned by members of the Brotherhood.22 AU these measures were designed exclusively to strengthen the organization by swelling its numbers, its treasury, and its morale. Its economic program for society as a whole, however, is at once oddly specific and vague. In the special issue of its newspaper al-Ikhwan al-Muslimun of September 5, 1948, celebrating the twentieth anniversary of the founding of the Egyptian Moslem Brotherhood, the organization's program was spelled out in an extensive list of 46 planks. The economic program put first the organization of "the collection and spending of tithes and alms according to the spirit of Islamic legislation and using such money in indispensable charity schemes such as the creation of orphanages, asylums for the old and disabled, as well as the reinforcement of the army." Its second point forbade the collection of interest and its third promised "to encourage and increase economic enterprises and employ therein the unemployed and to get rid of foreigners occupying any positions there." Its fourth plank sought "to protect the public against the despotism of monopoly companies and to compel such companies not to be abusive and to get from them all possible advantages for the benefit of the public." Its seventh point said simply that the Brotherhood proposed "to encourage and raise the standard of the peasant and the industrial workers." The Syrian Moslem Brotherhood is somewhat more precise. It speaks of guaranteeing each worker his livelihood with minimum wages, and payments in case of sickness, and each peasant a minimum amount of property—and of assuring for both workers and peasants a spiritual atmosphere.23 The "socialism" of these organizations concentrates on foreign 22

Husaini, The Moslem Brethren, pp. 52-57. Ahdafuna wa Mabadi 'una (Our Aims and Principles), a pamphlet issued by the Central Committee of the Syrian Moslem Brotherhood, Damascus, 1945, pp. 8-10. 28

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rather than domestic capitalists. They are opposed, for example, to the granting of concessions to foreigners to exploit natural resources and would prohibit foreigners from acquiring real estate. By contrast, they believe that "the state, when in urgent need, should tap private wealth and the big utilities to the extent required by the highest needs of the nation, provided it does not kill the principle of private property and economic competition."24 That so little socialism should have so much appeal was a reflection of the dire social discontent which existed. In Egypt, no other party (at least prior to Nasser) had promised so much, and "socialism" had not been crystallized as an ideology anywhere in the Middle East. In an estimation of the long-range success of these movements, however, it must be noted that they lack any significant or coordinated program for the improvement of economic conditions. The primary operational objective is expansion of the power of the movement both within the group and without. Within the ranks of the Brotherhood, the dogmatic reinterpretation of Islamic purity sets no limit on the expansion of control over all aspects of the individual's life. Unlike orthodox Islam, which acknowledged that all men were born equally frail, neo-Islamic totalitarianism makes absolute demands upon the spirit. Individual privacy is abolished through methods hallowed by the precedent of earlier Islamic tyrannies and improved by techniques learned from the modern world—secret police, censorship, terror, propaganda. In contrast to the ten economic planks in the 1948 program, 30 deal with "Social and Cultural Aspects." In its second plank under that heading, the Egyptian Moslem Brotherhood is concerned "to find a solution to the position of women in order to raise their standards and to protect them in accordance with the Islamic spirit and to avoid such an important matter being dealt with by the perverse opinions of prejudiced writers." Four planks later, it is still in the midst of keeping "women from the use of cosmetics and the display of beauty." In Plank 9, it is positively eager to "encourage marriage and procreation by all possible means and to make special laws for the protection of the family." It would close down all cabarets and dancing halls (Plank 24

Husaini, The Moslem Brethren, p. 57.

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10); censor all plays and films (Plank 11); improve the wording of songs (Plank 12); use cafes for teaching illiterates how to read and write (Plank 17). It would punish severely all those who deliberately disobey the Moslem commandments by not fasting in Ramadan, by not praying, or by swearing (Plank 19); eliminate the use of foreign languages, foreign habits, and fashions in the family (Plank 27). Finally, it would increase the number of hospitals, doctors, and mobile clinics (Plank 29); and improve the condition of the villages by enforcing better order, cleaning, providing good water supplies, and improving cultural and educational standards (Plank 30). Politically, the 1948 program demands "the dissolution of all political parties and the direction of all the population's political efforts toward a single aim: the review and modification of legislation in order to co-ordinate it with Islamic laws from all points of view; . . . to develop relations among all the Islamic countries . . . and prepare them for the real conception of the question of the Caliphate." The movement itself would act as the intermediary—controlling, coordinating, mustering enthusiasm —between the people and the administration of the state. This is not traditional Islam. The neo-Islamic totalitarian movements find in the past—which was once a living, integrated whole—only those aspects which they want to look for. In this fashion, the neo-Islamic movements actually contribute to the distintegration of the traditional society which they seem eager to revive. Hasan al-Banna's own interest in Islamic theology was only one phase of his own spiritual transformation. The head of the sufi order that al-Banna joined "never allowed his educated followers to argue a great deal about the consistencies or inconsistencies of things or to repeat the arguments of the apostates and the free-thinkers or the missionaries before the people. He would say to them: 'Do these things in your private meeting places and discuss them among yourselves. As for the common people, in front of them, use practical and effective words which will direct them to the obedience of God.' Al-Banna was deeply affected by this trend."25 25 Ibid., p. 28. Compare this with the Anabaptists who, "in general, attached little importance either to theological speculations or to formal religious ob-

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This same deliberate neglect of analysis also infuses the movement's attitude toward contemporary ideologies. The characteristic response to democracy, socialism, and communism is that Islam includes all that is good in each of them and even surpasses them, being free of what is bad in them.26 In fact, there is no interest in modern ideas except for the techniques they might supply in enlarging the arsenal of power for fighting the modern age. Indeed, in un-Islamic fashion, neo-Islamic totalitarianism relegates the consensus of the community to a secondary role, so that achieving agreement on principles cannot become an issue to agitate the general population. Complete authority is arrogated to the movement, or rather to an absolute leader who incarnates the movement. The leader embodies the principle, and identification with him is the substitute for thought. Neo-Islamic totalitarianism compensates for this diminution of the importance of the individual at home by exaggerating the importance of the Islamic community in the world abroad. It opposes the abstraction of the nation bound by geographic limits which separate the believers from each other. It is not an extremist nationalist movement; it is anti-nationalist at home and abroad. Far beyond the recapture of Palestine, it advocates conquest and aggrandizement for the sake of the community of believers—an entity without territorial limits: "If the German Reich imposes itself as a protector of everyone who has German blood running in his veins, Moslem faith makes it the clear duty of every strong Moslem whose soul has drenched in the doctrines of the Koran to consider himself the protector of every other Moslem whose soul has also been drenched . . . in Islam. The doctrine is everything. And is faith anything other than love and servances. In place of such practices . . . they set a meticulous, literal observance of the precepts which they thought they found in the New Testament. In place of theology they cultivated the 'inner Revelation,' the direct inspirations which they believed they received from God—or, more often, which the leader of the group believed he received." (Cohn, The Pursuit of the Millennium, pp. 273-274.) Hasan al-Banna, in fact, frequently distinguished his own faith by calling it the "Islam of the Moslem Brotherhood." (Husaini, The Moslem Brethren, p. 62.) 26 Husaini, ibid., p. 33 and p. 160, note 112, cites three such typical responses in the writings of Hasan al-Banna.

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hate? Hereafter, we want the banner of Allah to fly high once more in those regions which were once happy in Islam and the voice of the Mu'azzin was heard praising God. But ill luck deprived them of the light. . . . Andalusia, Sicily, the Balkans, the Greek Islands—all these are Moslem colonies which must come back into the Moslem fold. The Mediterranean and the Red Sea must be two Moslem lakes, as they were before. . . . Following that, we would want to issue our call to the world, and subdue every powerful man to it completely, that there may be no confusion, and that all religions may be Allah's."21 Given the resources of the Middle Eastern states, such a drive is unlikely to be spectacularly successful. It could be sufficiently destructive, however, to undermine the stability of this area. The Fate of a Totalitarian Party The life cycle of a neo-Islamic totalitarian movement however, can be molded or cut short by forces that may not have the same impact on an ordinary political party. The very dynamics of a neo-Islamic movement prevent it from attaining stability or permanence. Its organized furor is a symptom of the loss of the vitality of a revelation and community formerly accepted as natural. The movement is led, in the view of the masses, by a mahdi figure who has come to set history once again in tune with the fundamental order of the universe. Not only the personality of the leader but also the movement's success necessarily become the touchstone of its genuineness. That is why its success, or its aura of success, implying sanctity, can quickly win adherents to its bandwagon. That is also why failure, or the aura of failure, can bring about a disaffection just as sudden. The Egyptian Moslem Brotherhood demonstrates these generalizations quite well. So far in this analysis, the data concerning the Brotherhood are drawn predominantly from the 1940's. What happened afterwards? Its principal organizational strength, the disciplined hierarchic structure, became its principal weakness. By early 1949, the Moslem Brotherhood had grown so powerful that the Egyptian Government determined to have Hasan al27

The Call of the Moslem Brotherhood, Cairo, October 1938.

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Banna assassinated. He was killed on February 12, 1949. The severe police repression that followed handicapped the movement; but it was the indecisive struggle for control of the position of "Supreme Guide" that proved most debilitating. As a result of this struggle, the organization became prey to the kind of infiltration which was calculated to hurt it most—infiltration at the top. To spare itself further internecine struggle and to escape continued repression, the Brotherhoodfinallyaccepted King Farouk's candidate as Supreme Guide. Judge Hasan al-Hudaybi was married to the sister of the private chamberlain of the royal family, and had various other connections with the King's entourage. Even after his new appointment in the fall of 1951, he remained a frequent visitor of the King.28 As a result of having to obey Hudaybi as faithfully as it had al-Banna, the Moslem Brotherhood was led to commit a number of grave tactical errors. Although the Brotherhood's brave slogans continued to attract support, the tame leadership provided by Hudaybi curbed the movement's penchant for political conspiracy during the final years of King Farouk's rule. "There is no secrecy in the Message," said Hudaybi, "and no terrorism in religion."29 This loss of drive during a crucial period in Egyptian history left the field free for latecomers without elaborate political organization—a handful of "Free Officers" under Gamal Abd al-Nasser's leadership. After the military coup in 1952, the Brotherhood was exempted from the decree dissolving all political organizations. It had a number of adherents and sympathizers among the army officers who overthrew the royal house; the Free Officers, lacking any organized civilian support, apparently toyed for a time with the idea of making the Brotherhood their popular arm.30 Soon, however, the Brotherhood made another error. Hudaybi thought himself free to issue commanding advice to Nasser's Revolutionary Command Council, speaking out against two of its major achievements—the land reform law and the Anglo-Egyptian agreement leading to the British evacuation of the Suez base. As 38

Husaini, The Moslem Brethren, pp. 113-124. Cited by Mitchell, The Muslim Brotherhood, p. 137. aa Ibid., pp. 155-160. 29

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a result, the all-too-freewheeling Brotherhood was curbed again. At this point, the movement fell prey to a disease that can readily beset a group that is desperately dependent on strong leadership because it knows no way of resolving conflicts peacefully. It split into three groups, Hudaybi's conservative and antiNasser faction, a secret apparatus which trusted neither Hudaybi nor Nasser, and a faction prepared to oust Hudaybi and collaborate with Nasser. Quite possibly without Hudaybi's knowledge, the secret apparatus attempted on October 26, 1954 to assassinate Nasser. AU six pistol shots missed, but over a thousand Brotherhood members were arrested, a few to be hanged and the rest sentenced to jail and hard labor.31 Even today, the Moslem Brotherhood remains potentially among Nasser's most important opposition. But encumbered by false leadership, it has missed its historic opportunity for the time being. The Varieties of Islamic Totalitarianism The Egyptian Moslem Brotherhood has been the largest native totalitarian movement in the Middle East and it arose in the largest of Arab states. Estimates of its Egyptian membership in the first five years after World War II vary from 300,000 to 1,500,000 in a country that then had an adult male population of about 7,000,000.32 How representative is the Egyptian Moslem Brotherhood of other neo-lslamic totalitarian movements in the area? No catalogue of such movements can be attempted here, but few Moslem states are without them. They are not homogeneous movements; some common tendencies are more predominant in one movement than in another. In Maulana Syad Abul Ala Maudoodi's Jama'at-i-Islami movement in Pakistan, for example, there was, until recently, much more emphasis on recruiting and placing into power a small elite. Only ulema, for example, 31 The Brotherhood was outlawed on January 13, 1954, and the regime also found it necessary to dismiss thirty members of the police and seven army officers for their association with the Brotherhood. See Mitchell, The Muslim Brotherhood, pp. 182-192 for Hudaybi's inability to discover the membership of the secret apparatus. 82 Seton-Williams, Britain and the Arab States, London, 1948, p. 88, estimates it at 300,000 to 600,000 members. The New York Times suggested 1,500,000 in a report on August 5, 1946, and 1,000,000 on December 9, 1948.

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are to be allowed to sit in parliament and on courts.83 Sons of gentry whose family lost property and status after the partition of the Indian sub-continent play a leading role within the movement, which has a membership of only a few thousand. The Khaksar movement of Pakistan, established in 1935 by Allama Mashriqi (who had secured the highest marks ever received by a student at Punjab University in mathematics, and later distinguished himself at Cambridge), is a para-military Islamic organization which, in contrast to the Jama'at-i-Islami, declares that it speaks both for the poor and for the infallibility of Islam.34 The Khaksars were responsible for the assassination of Prime Minister Liaqat AIi Khan in 1951. The dynamics of neo-Islamic totalitarianism need not appear (any more than does modernity) only in their full, pure form. In Saudi Arabia, for example, an earlier historical form (akin in name and purpose to one Hasan al-Banna formed in Egypt in his youth) is still in evidence—the "Society for Commanding Virtue and Forbidding Vice,"35 popularly known as the Mutawwi'un ("those who compel obedience"). As a governmental organization created about 1926 (no voluntary organizations are permitted in Saudi Arabia), this group reports directly to the King. It can raid and search on its own and request the police to make arrests; apparently it can inflict corporal punishment on its own authority. Its activities are in line with the puritanical doctrine of the Wahhabi sect, intent on curbing smoking, music, and dancing, though seldom, it is said, disturbing the pleasures of the rich or powerful. That Saudi Arabia is now increasingly being affected by the transformations that have created tensions in Islamic society elsewhere is suggested by the report of some observers that the younger graduates in religious studies at the Wahhabi 33 See Maudoodi's Islamic Law and Constitution, a collection of Maudoodi's speeches and essays, published in Karachi, November 1955. Also Freeland Abbott, "The Jama'at-i-Islam of Pakistan," Middle East Journal, Winter, 1957, pp. 37-51. By contrast, the Syrian Moslem Brotherhood has ascribed the "petrification" of Islam to the failure of the ulema to maintain contact with the people. {New York Times, February 19, 1955.) 34 Khaksar means "humble" and the organization's symbol is the longhandled spade. (See Wilfred Cantwell Smith, Modern Islam in India, pp. 235245.) Leonard Binder has published a detailed and penetrating analysis of Religion and Politics in Pakistan, Berkeley, 1961. 85 Hayat al-amr bil ma'riif wa al-nahy 'an al-munkar.

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Institute in Riyadh are becoming more fanatical in their views. They fear that their prestige and authority are on the decline. Even in Turkey, officially the most secular of Islamic countries, religion has not ceased to be a political issue, and the likelihood is that it will yet provoke much more conflict before it subsides. Honest, democratic balloting makes the Turkish peasant the kingpin of the electorate, yet he has been intellectually and socially more isolated from the Ataturk revolution, and has changed less than any other part of the population. Appeals to religion may yet become a major substitute for eliciting or retaining rural support, especially if the almost steady increase of economic benefits to the peasants that began during the past decade should cease, either because Turkish planners find good cause to reallocate the distribution of resources, or else because the economy falters. The growth of religious brotherhoods (dervish orders) with hallowed traditional names but highly modern purposes during the past few years has been increasingly reported in Turkish newspapers and exposed in court trials. A marriage of convenience between them and certain political parties which attack the reforms of Ataturk can by no means be excluded. In Iran, the Mullah Ayatollah Kashani has exploited religion with obvious political cynicism. When in 1950 a member of the Fadayan Islam (Devotees of Islam) assassinated Premier AIi Razmara, Kashani publicly and proudly claimed responsibility. The new Prime Minister, Mosadeq, released the assassin of Razmara from prison without trial, while Kashani, as Speaker of the Iranian Parliament, pledged himself to support Mosadeq. When Western opposition to Mosadeq was patently growing, Kashani turned against Mosadeq a month before the Premier's overthrow in 1953. Since then, one of Kashani's sons has worked actively with the Shah, another against him. Kashani himself at times worked with and against local communists, with and against the U.S.S.R. Clearly, neo-Islamic totalitarianism is not only a faith but a commodity. Political brokers will work with it, and perhaps, as in Kashani's case, because it seems of all political counters at once the most familiar, fascinating, and profitable. Elsewhere in the Middle East, especially in Syria and Egypt, a number of neo-Islamic groups have accepted financial support [152]

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and entered into tactical alliance with the communists against common domestic and foreign foes. Their common interest in undermining existing authority, the cynicism of both in employing any means deemed useful, and the fanatic conviction of each that it alone will ultimately triumph over both enemies and collaborators has rendered such temporary, opportunistic alliances possible. With communists as with its conservative allies, however, the neo-Islamic movement is only temporarily responsive to bargaining, and only tactically responsive to arguments. Arguments against its position are disqualified by the mere fact that they belong to or defend a world which its followers cannot accept and are committed to change. The Potentialities of Islamic and Post-Islamic Totalitarianism In the 1930's and 1940's, the choice for most Moslems who had retained their traditional values, but were discontented with their society, lay between nationalist regimes committed to the status quo and neo-Islamic resurrectionists. The political success of reformist nationalists in the 1950's assuaged discontent and captured popular imagination, in part by mobilizing the same emotions and satisfying the same demands for dignity and power that the neo-Islamic movements had in their own fashion raised earlier. The influence of the neo-Islamic movements has, as a result, declined. The potential following for such movements, however, continues to grow as nationalist reformers speed the process of modernization and thus inescapably incite the political consciousness of ever larger number of tradition-bound men by involving them in untraditional and unresolved problems. Some contemporary reformist nationalists, confronted with this growing pressure to cope with the demand of the uprooted for new and more secure roots, may well be tempted to accept the presence of an uprooted mass as an unalterable fact, and be tempted to maintain that mass in a continual state of emotional and political mobilization rather than engage it in the tasks of social reconstruction. Such a policy of expediency only could result in mounting unsolved social and economic problems, [153]

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domestic demagoguery and repression, and foreign adventurism. The end effect upon the country could be as damaging as that from rule by neo-Islamic totalitarianism. Ultra-nationalism is not the only secular approximation to neoIslamic totalitarianism. Middle Easterners who no longer accept the beliefs of Islam, but who are no more ready than the neoIslamic totalitarians to live without dogma and political magic, have been creating secular fascist organizations. Thus in 1952 Davoud Mochi Zadeh, whose father had been hanged after World War I as the leader of a terrorist neo-Islamic group, organized the Socialist National Workers Party of Iran (Sumka), inviting Iranians "to the suppression of self and to struggle against communism and the rotten world of democracy." Like the PanIranian Party, his group also called for the unification of the Caucasus, Afghanistan, much of Turkestan, and other neighboring areas into a Greater Iran.86 Similarly the Syrian National Social Party of Syria and Lebanon believes Syrians (rather than Arabs) to be the supreme "folk" of the Middle East. This party, organized along strictly hierarchic lines, has repeatedly engaged in violence in order to try carving out a Syrian homeland that would reach from the Mediterranean to the Persian Gulf. In Egypt, Ahmad Husain's Misr al-Fatat represented until 1952 the secular fascist equivalent of neo-Islamic totalitarianism.37 Such native totalitarian movements—whether Islamic or postIslamic—will probably continue to sprout in the Middle East until their roots can no longer find inviting soil. For Moslems to be propelled into the midst of a historical and social revolution when resources for experimentation, or even for minimal security, are still lacking cannot help but create a profound feeling of anxiety. It is precisely the strength and importance of neo-Islamic totalitarianism and its fascist and ultra-nationalist counterparts » New York Times, July 7, 1952. 87 See J. Heyworth-Dunne, Religions and Political Trends in Modern Egypt, Washington, 1950, pp. 103-105; Walter Z. Laqueur, Communism and Nationalism in the Middle East, New York, 1956, pp. 247-252. For references to similar groups in Turkey, see Kemal H. Karpat, Turkey's Politics: The Transition to a Multi-Party System, Princeton, 1959, pp. 262-270, 282-292, and 371-376.

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that they directly respond to these anxieties. It is precisely the danger of these movements that they respond with anxiety, deepening the existing abyss between leader and mass, believer and non-believer; unable to still anxiety except by resorting to dogma and the sacrifice of the individual; unable to still frustration except through solidarity in violence.

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Islam and Communism Two OPPOSING VIEWS of Islam's relationship to communism were until recently predominant—neither of them valid. One view held that Islam was a firm barrier to communism, and the other that Islam resembled communism so much that Moslems could easily accept it. Until the early 1950's, it was the pervasive view, especially among Western governments, that communism could not take root where Islam was strong. Thus, the House Committee on Foreign Affairs concluded in 1948 that its analysis "confirms what has long been known, namely that nothing in the history of the peoples, their psychology, or current stage in governmental and institutional development is particularly conducive toward receptivity to Communist propaganda or growth of Communist strength as such. This holds true for each of the main linguistic areas—Arabic, Turkish, Iranian—and main religions—Islam, Judaism, and Christianity."1 The other view carries to an extreme the analogies drawn by A. J. Toynbee, Reinhold Niebuhr, and H. R. Trevor-Roper, among others, between the expansionist ideologies of Islam and 1 Committee on Foreign Affairs, The Strategy and Tactics of World Communism, Supplement III, B. Communism in the Near East, Government Printing Office, 1948. For Moslem agreement with this point of view, see Mahmud Ahmad, Economics of Islam, Lahore, 1947; Mirza Muhammed Hussain, Islam and Socialism, Lahore, 1949; M. Siddiqi, Marxism and Islam, Hyderabad, 1951; "The Challenge of Communism and Islam," The Muslim Sunrise, Fourth Quarter, 1952; and Muhammed Rafl-ud-Din, The Fallacy of Marxism, Lahore, Institute of Islamic Culture, 1953.

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Bolshevism. Proponents of this view observe that both the communist party and orthodox Islam claim absolute and universal validity for a philosophy which explains the process of reality in all its aspects. Further, both are puritan in character, filled with missionary zeal and spiritual fervor, and demand the submission of the individual to the community and complete devotion to the articles of faith. Both movements have their prophets, saints, scriptures, and demonology, and are less tolerant of the schismatic, the heretic, and the apostate than of foreign sects. Both differentiate between unjust wars and holy wars. If compelled to do so, both acknowledge the possibility of co-existence and neutralism, but only as a qualification of the commandment to pursue and extirpate evil, and to convert the pagan in all those regions of the world that are not yet part of their domain, a crusade felt to be in tune with destiny. Such an interpretation has some merit, as we shall see, but not in this simple form. Indeed, if stated this baldly, these seeming similarities between Islam and communism are all the more likely to give rise to bitter opposition between them since, at least to this degree, the two movements can understand each other's threat. The orthodox Islamic reply to communism, however, labors under certain difficulties. The ulema who attack communists as hostile to Islam cannot point to contemporary attacks on Islam by Middle Eastern Communists. To postpone direct attacks on religion until they actually achieve control of the state—lest they deprive themselves of mass support while they still need it—is a tactic well established in communist theory and practice.3 The ulema, moreover, face an audience that is increasingly deaf to appeals in defense of traditional re2 An actual study of the way in which these two closed societies resemble each other, and hence might produce the same kind of political elan and foreign policies, has not yet been attempted, yet would prove most fruitful in revealing both contrasts and similarities between traditional and modern ideological empires. a For attacks against Islam after the communists acquired power, see Alexander G. Park, Bolshevism in Turkestan, 1917-1927, New York, 1957; R. Pipes, "Muslims of Soviet Central Asia," Middle East Journal, Spring and Summer, 1955; A. Bennigsen, 'Traditional Islam in the Customs of the Turkic Peoples of Central Asia," ibid., Spring 1958, pp. 227-333; Chantal Quelquejay, "Anti-Islamic Propaganda in Kazakhstan Since 1953," ibid., Summer 1959, pp. 319-327.

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ligion, and unlikely to be moved, except perhaps favorably, by the knowledge that Shari'a law and other traditional institutions have been stamped out in Soviet Central Asia, even though this audience may give thought to the human price that was paid for rapid development. Often, an audience that is more receptive to the arguments of the ulema is also eager to oppose all modern ideas, whether democratic or communist, on the valid ground that both undermine Islamic orthodoxy. The communists seldom attempt to capitalize on the seeming similarities between Islam and communism. To do so would endanger the communist claim to be a materialistic, scientific, historical movement. There is one exception. Like early Christianity, early Islam was also in part a protest against the abuse, corruption, and inequality of wealth; like Christianity, it insisted on love, compassion, and equality among all believers.4 As religious dogma adjusted itself to the worldliness of empire and the tremendous riches accumulated by the Companions of the Prophet, excessive devotion to the egalitarian spirit of the original revelation came to be considered a kind of left-wing deviationism.5 Communist critics have therefore been able to declare that the history of Islam and its institutions, soon dominated by the very powers which had at first opposed the Prophet, contradicts its original assertion of equality and fraternity. They assert that communists alone have the courage now to fulfill Islam's original promise of social and economic reform.6 "For examples, Koran, Suras XVIII, 29; LXX, 24-25; LVII, 7; II, 275-80; XV, 20; IX, 34. 5 AbU Dharr, the only Companion to oppose the trend of his time and to advocate the limitation of wealth to the immediate needs of the family, and the sharing of the rest, was sent by the third Caliph into forced residence in the desert. A book published in 1948 and based on his ideas was carefully studied by the ulema of al-Azhar University, who acknowledged Abu Dharr's piety but banned the book. Their fatwa (legal interpretation) noted that Islam respects property, and sets no limits to the legal accumulation of wealth except in demanding certain specified contributions for charity and the defense of the state, and in encouraging spontaneous offerings. This fatwa also justified the prevailing practice of land tenure and sharecropping. Orthodox Islam had justified the historical development of the Islamic community too long to be able now to take an independent lead in analyzing the social and economic consequences of that development. 8 Such propaganda appears to have found some response: "Islam's lofty principles, social and economic," said Shaikh Abd al-Karim al-Mashta, one of Iraq's ulema, "are the same as those adopted by Russian and the Socialist

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There are indeed profound differences between Islam and communism, but such differences cannot automatically or without distortion be counted upon to constitute barriers. Materialism and revolution are part of the spirit, though not the letter, of the Islamic inheritance. Those orthodox Moslems who by virtue of their wholehearted attachment to a traditional revelation patently cannot assimilate communism (or any other modern ideology) are now irrevocably diminishing in number and influence. They can doubtless still be mobilized into political action by playing on their fear or hatred of those who will not acknowledge the eternal holiness of the Koran, but only at the price of mobilizing the same sentiment against all change and modernization. Islam in this sense can by now afford only a temporary and opportunistic barrier against communism. There is one conceivable religious barrier which does not rest on the remnants of traditionalism or the propagandistic exploitation of them. That barrier lies in the possibility of a renaissance of Islamic culture "in which the ultimate meaning of existence shines through all finite forms of thought and action; the culture is transparent, and its creations are vessels of a spiritual content."7 Such a renaissance does not seem close in the Middle East. The Attractions of Marxism The barriers to communism that are specifically Islamic derive from the social rather than the religious aspects of Islam. To the degree that tradition survives, the Middle East is unready to receive modern ideas, including communism. There is not only erosion at work, however, to break the barriers of tradition. Islam actively prepares the field for communism when its continuing claim as a total way of life is mocked by its failure to solve the major contemporary problems of individual belief and social countries. They are the same principles that the Iraqi Communists want to apply here. . . ." Arab News Agency despatch, January 30, 1959, cited by Walter Z. Laqueur, "Arab Unity versus Soviet Expansion," Problems of Communism, May-June 1959, p. 46. 7 The definition is from Paul Tillich {The Protestant Era, Chicago, 1957), who acknowledges that such a culture still remains to be recovered in the West.

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action. Communism is peculiarly attractive for Moslems who are prepared above all to look for a modern revelation as total in its concepts, emotional appeal, and the social control it exercises as was Islam in the past. For Moslems thus transfigured by the crisis of their society, the similarities which have been previously noted do indeed become important, and communism becomes attractive both because of the fundamental similarity of its form and the fundamental difference of its content. These points began to be made for the first time in the early 1950's.8 Since then, only one writer has produced major analyses that relate the appeal of communism, Marxism, the communist parties, and the actual models of the Soviet state to Middle Eastern politics since the U.S.S.R. entered as an active participant in 1955.9 The matter thus deserves further exploration. Of the various components of communism, Marxism has a particular attraction for Moslems at a time when their society, in process of change, is becoming more unstable and unpredictable. At such a stage in history, Moslems who have preserved certain moral values of their religion despite their rebellion against the social irrelevance and intellectual inadequacy of their father's faith, and who are anxious to regain and enlarge the sense of community which was an intrinsic part of Islam, may well turn to Marxism.10 Marxism may appear to such Moslems to be a complete guide to a way of life. It seems to provide more modern answers than Islam to the fundamental questions concerning reality, and a sense of cooperating (through shared rituals, beliefs, and actions) with 8 See Manfred Halpern, "Implications of Communism for Islam," The Muslim World, January 1953; Bernard Lewis, "Communism and Islam," International Affairs, London, January 1954; Kenneth Cragg, "The Intellectual Impact of Communism Upon Contemporary Islam," Middle East Journal, Spring 1954. 9 Walter Z. Laqueur, Communism and Nationalism in the Middle East, New York, 1956, and The Soviet Union and the Middle East, New York, 1959. 10 "Fascism and Nazism, with their naked appeal to greed, hate, pride, and envy could in the long run address themselves only to the evil instincts of man, and were correspondingly limited. Communism, while exploiting these to the full, has also perverted to its service some of the noblest aspirations of the human race—as peace, social justice, the brotherhood of man—and has used them with deadly effect. We shall fail to understand and meet the threat of communism if we do not recognize its attraction for the best, though not the brightest, as well as for the worst spirits." Lewis, "Communism and Islam."

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the inevitable development of history toward a universal, classless, and prosperous community.11 Marxism's appeal arises not only from its dogma but equally from its dialectical, historical, and tactical ambiguities. Moslems do not find it difficult to assent to a Marx who, discouraged by the "fetishism of commodities," the alienation of labor, and the relocation of society under capitalism, sought to bring about a new society of free individuals in which alienated, distorted relationships of material production no longer determined the pattern of human life. In a society in which toil has never been thought to have either intrinsic dignity or instrumental value for individual purification or salvation, Marxism offers the Utopia of satisfaction on the basis of need rather than performance, stressing economic security primarily as a means toward the achievement of human freedom. To Moslems previously accustomed to a monistic view of life, Marxism therefore appears not as a materialistic approach rejecting spiritual values but rather as a new monistic philosophy projecting spiritual values upon a materialist base. Rejecting an Islam which, in their view, united the people only by binding the oppressed classes to the oppressor by submission, they would now save the community by subverting its present world view. Once Mohammed, they say, had to overcome the ties of kinship and an ancient polytheism in order to establish the community of believers. Now only Marxism seems radical enough to organize the community to deal with widespread want, toil, and injustice in the face of the first genuine historical opportunity to overcome them.12 For the majority of Middle Eastern converts to Marxism, the doctrine itself as a system of thought and a pattern for action 11 A statement such as this is clearly Islamic in spirit though obviously not in content: Marxist-Leninist theory "enables the Party to find the right orientation in any situation, to understand the inner connection of current events, to foresee their course, and to perceive not only how and in what direction they are developing in the present but how and in what direction they are bound to develop in the future." (History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union [Bolsheviks]), New York, 1945. 12 See also Donald G. Macrae, "The Bolshevik Ideology: The Intellectual and Emotional Factors in Communist Affiliation," The Cambridge Journal, December 1951.

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almost certainly has never been an object of detailed examination, study, and acceptance. By osmosis rather than by direct contact with its literature, Marxism's analysis of the causes and character of poverty, exploitation, and imperialism has become widely accepted in the Middle East. Though the Marxist analysis of imperialism is only partly true, it has won great popularity because it is in part true and because its truth (whatever the additional explanations) was dramatically experienced in the Middle East during a century of Western imperialism. Moreover, the modern West itself has failed so far to produce explanations of imperialism more convincing or at least equally simple.13 The Attraction of the U.S.S.R. as a Model of Rapid Progress But Marxism can also show another face, and hence attract yet another group, or reinforce its appeal among those to whom ends justify means or who find it plausible to see a dialectical relationship between these contrasting images of the future. Communism in Soviet practice has become a system in which the state is the sole reservoir of power and capital. The state rationalizes its production and bureaucratic apparatus under authoritarian leadership, places special emphasis on the requirements of urgent industrialization and military preparedness, and justifies its political, economic, and intellectual exactions by an ideology that is totalitarian. Such a system, seen from the outside, is attractive to people who are in a hurry to achieve progress and see no hope of accomplishment except through the use of force by a minority. The Soviet model thus seems to offer a prototype for the kind of revolution that will bring order in the present chaos. Middle Easterners attracted to this model are prepared to justify the police state on the grounds that contemporary Middle Eastern governments are also prepared to use repressive force, but without accompanying it by social reform. There also exists the widespread assumption among Middle East18 Most Middle Eastern countries have experienced only Western imperialism, and every country that experienced Russian or later Soviet intervention —Turkey, Iran, and Afghanistan—has also known Western intervention.

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ern Communists that the evils and errors of Soviet leadership will not, of course, be repeated when Soviet techniques are introduced in this area. Besides, those who are under the whip now will escape further whipping; they will be cracking the whip. The political and economic models provided by the U.S.S.R. are likely to have far more appeal in the Middle East than are those of Western Europe and the U.S., at least in the next decade. Like the U.S.S.R. a few decades ago, the Middle East is economically backward. Like the U.S.S.R., it seeks to achieve progress, status, and power in a hurry. Most Middle Eastern countries similarly begin with a lack of capital—hence would find it useful to force savings, use the state to direct investments, meanwhile keeping the standard of living of most consumers low. Also striking a responsive chord is the idea of a single political party dedicated to the subversion of the traditional order and, subsequently, the constant mobilization of the population in support of government objectives. The appeal of such solutions does not necessarily mean that Middle Eastern reformist nationalists will adopt a pro-Soviet orientation. Actually, it is Titoist Yugoslavia that has become one of the most attractive models for these reformist nationalists in recent years. It impresses many Middle Easterners as a country at once European in style and status, yet still in process of overcoming its economic underdevelopment. It is radical in its political, social, and economic approach, but willing to experiment, and it is eager to discuss political means and ends with less experienced Asians and Africans who could not expect equally open exchanges with other kinds of communists. For Egypt, certainly, Yugoslavia has become the chief model of successful neutralism and rapid progress in internal reform. Increasingly, modernizing countries are also learning from each other, whether from Nehru's India or the Turkey of Ataturk and his successors, from Bourguiba's Tunisia, Toure's Guinea, or Nkrumah's Ghana. Indeed, any comprehensive theory of social, political, and economic development of underdeveloped areas—a theory as yet attempted by no one, though desperately required—would surely have to proceed by viewing the development of the U.S.S.R. and the Middle East in a common analyt[163]

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ical framework, rather than imposing, whether propagandistically or analytically, the accepted descriptions of earlier ideologies in one country on later practice in another. Just as the acceptance of Marxism does not always redound to the benefit of the U.S.S.R.—Marxism historically, like Islam, has shown itself capable of many forms and deviations—even the acceptance of specific Soviet models need not favor Soviet aims. In the case of such imitation or creative adaptation as those undertaken by Ataturk and Bourguiba, at least, it is difficult to escape the conclusion that the Western cause was served instead. Indeed, accepting all the Soviet models mentioned so far would not call for a totalitarian, but only an authoritarian regime. The attractiveness of a totalitarian regime—one which, in contrast to an authoritarian regime, abolishes privacy—stems from three rather different considerations: (1) In justified or unjustified fears of foreign or domestic menace, an authoritarian regime can easily persuade itself that its police must henceforth probe private thoughts rather than merely enforce public behavior; (2) for reasons of ideological loyalty or on the pragmatic assumption that the regime could not survive without Soviet help or against Soviet pressure, an authoritarian regime may feel compelled to follow Soviet footsteps; or (3) an authoritarian regime may decide to speed up its campaign to instill production-mindedness within a single generation. Only the last motivation demands further explanation. The Middle East, like the U.S.S.R. at the time of the Bolshevik revolution, is a peasant society, and peasants work in tune with the seasons—working hard three to six months in most of the Middle East; then they rest and sit and wait. The discipline of the industrial work week is alien to them, and demands an entirely new spirit and sense of values. Such a new discipline can be established gradually. To change men's rhythm of life and their souls in a single generation in an environment that can, for the most part, afford to grant few immediate rewards for such a change of spirit requires a profound governmental concern with men's discipline, enthusiasm, loyalty, values, fears, and intentions—in short, totalitarian methods. There are other ways to progress, but they require either more resources or more time. [164]

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The Soviet practice of communism, which is obviously irrelevant for the needs of industrial countries, is an alternative for underdeveloped countries—the one that exacts great and grave sacrifices. Should totalitarian and Soviet-oriented regimes actually emerge in the Middle East, a major difference even within this group is bound to become apparent. Not all so-called underdeveloped countries have significant untapped resources. Some are poor in every resource except labor. In Egypt, which would probably double its present per capita income of about $150 per year yet not hope to escape poverty, communism would face tasks quite different from those it would confront in oil-rich and land-rich Iraq. Whether Soviet communism is a useable model for poor countries is doubtful. The Attraction of Chinese Communist Models When Walter Lippmann asked Chairman Khrushchev in 1959 about the relevance of communism to poor countries, Lippmann recalled that "I did not feel that he was willing to face the somewhat speculative question. . . ."u When Mehdi Ben Barka, a leader of a radical party in a relatively poor country, Morocco, was recently asked a similar question, he replied that there appeared to be a great distinction arising in the communist world, with the U.S.S.R. representing the "communism of the rich" and China the "communism of the poor." It is doubtful that the Soviet Union is a relevant model for a country such as Iraq which has excellent resources for economic progress if it will only utilize them wisely and efficiently. One could even argue that, once the world's technology has achieved major breakthroughs in food production and processing, cheap energy, automation, and birth control, the Soviet or Chinese model will not be relevant for any country. Certainly, most of the countries of the Middle East lack the prerequisites for rapid industrial growth which Russia possessed when the Soviets came to power. "When the Soviets started, they already had the boots, "Walter Lippmann, The Communist World and Ours, New York, 1959, p. 25.

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and the straps to pull on, whereas contemporary Asia is, relatively speaking, still barefooted." The U.S.S.R. may well be a model for rapidly converting a good start into high accomplishment through exclusive state control over economic activity, and a ruthless use of controls to move the entire population and all resources in the "right" direction. But unlike most of the Middle East, it could make such a start and achieve its present development without having to confront with full force the problems of initial acceleration of savings, of expanding agricultural output to overtake rapid population growth, and of finding productive employment for urban and rural labor expanding at a frighteningly rapid rate. Much of Soviet development is a product of improvisation—as the scarcity of both pre-revolutionary Marxist and post-revolutionary Soviet writing on the modernization of underdeveloped areas implies, and a close examination of its history demonstrates. But for those tasks which will make or break Middle Eastern economic development, the U.S.S.R. has had neither to improvise policies nor develop doctrines.15 By now, having become a highly industrialized, powerful nation, the U.S.S.R. has by its very achievement ceased to be an innovating model of special relevance to underdeveloped areas. That is why Middle Easterners have in recent years been increasingly fascinated by the "communism of the poor." China appears to have several political and social attractions that the U.S.S.R. either no longer or else never possessed for some Middle Easterners. It is clearly Asian and not primarily European. It has overcome its inferiority and its inferiority complex, but it is not yet an advanced industrial and military power demonstrating its strength as such in the Middle East. Indeed, it is located at a much more reassuring distance than either the U.S.S.R. or the West. There was a time—perhaps it was still true a year or two ago—when the U.S.S.R. could speak to the Middle East, as the United States could not, in words that suggested that it knew what it felt to have been an underdog, to have been put on the "Most of the points made in this paragraph and all quotations, are drawn from Oleg Hoeffding's "The Soviet Union: Model for Asia? State Planning and Forced Industrialization," Problems of Communism, NovemberDecember 1959, pp. 38-46, an excellent analysis of the principal economic issues and facts involved.

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defensive, to have been exploited, yet now to be the elder brother of the poor. It may still seek to retain that image, but the advent of the Sputniks and its own assertions and demonstrations of power have altered the Soviet posture decisively. China for a time assumed the former Soviet mantle in Middle Eastern eyes. Its demonstration of what a country rich in poor people can accomplish by marshaling its labor seemed to be especially impressive. Commented the Moroccan Ben Barka, voicing perspectives almost certainly shared by many other Middle Easterners: "China presents itself as the country which has the greatest similarities with our own by virtue of its past, by the tremendous backwardness which it has had to overcome, and also by the errors committed at the morrow of its liberation. . . . Certainly the conditions under which the progress of China has been realized deserves to be fully analyzed [since] the economic and social, technical and cultural development of such a country poses the same problems as ours: problems of direction, planning, democratic participation of the masses involved in production, and problems also of foreign aid. . . . le " Yet the image of China has changed almost as rapidly as that of the U.S.S.R. Both first came dramatically to the attention of Middle Eastern leaders in 1955—the U.S.S.R. as an alternate supplier of arms, economic aid, and diplomatic support at that time to Egypt; China as a prominent member of the Bandung Conference of 29 Afro-Asian nations. By 1958, when the U.S.S.R. seemed as deeply involved as a partisan in Arab rivalries as Western powers before it, its special luster began to wane.17 So did China's when it allowed the leader of the outlawed Syrian Communist Party to condemn the United Arab Republic at a public ceremony in China attended by the U.A.R. Ambassador. And China later alarmed all Arabs, regardless of their partisanship, by attacking along a disputed border with India in 1959. This was an obvious breach of the Bandung spirit of peaceful 16 Probl&mes d'Edification du Maroc et du Maghreb, Quatre Entretiens avec El Mehdi Ben Barka, collected by Raymond Jean, Tribune Libre, No. 52, Paris, 1959, p. 50. 17 See the exchanges of sharp criticism between Cairo and Moscow over Iraq at the end of 1958 and early 1959.

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collaboration among all Afro-Asian nations, non-intervention in each other's affairs, and negotiation of all differences.18 Although the glitter of China, no less than that of the U.S.S.R., was soon dimmed, the study of the Chinese effort to conquer poverty continues. If Morocco, Tunisia, and Egypt come to resort, as well they may, to the formation of short-term conscripted labor battalions, the models are likely to be Yugoslav—but modified in the light of an examination of the errors of China. What counts are not so much the specific models that are borrowed as the system of action and thought of which they become a part. In the Middle East today, even the most reformist governments point with proud awareness to the fact that Islam in all its history has been largely free of religious inquisitions or political brainwashing. Traditional Islam never developed a cohesive social, political, and moral structure hierarchically interlocking peasant and Emperor, as in China or Japan. Islam always respected the privacy and inner freedom of the believer. For these reasons, it is argued, Islam is less prepared for total social controls than Japan in the nineteen thirties or China today. Such historical traditions, however, are not likely to deter forever leaders who have eclectically tried and joined various concrete models, yet failed to outpace the growth of their population. The majority of the people of the Middle East live in countries that are even poorer, per capita, than China was a decade ago or is now. If non-totalitarian roads fail, acceptance of the path of Chinese communism may well become in the Middle East the politics of despair of the left just as neo-Islamic totalitarianism has become the politics of despair of the right. Factors Hampering the Role of Communist Parties in the Middle East: Small Membership So far, our analysis suggests that communism, in its various aspects, must be counted as one of the serious political competi18 There was also considerable inclination among Middle Easterners in 1959 who had earlier thought of China as a useful countervailing force against both Soviet and American influence in the area to suspect that the more violently aggressive communist faction in Iraq was inspired by Chinese, rather than Russian, example and support.

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tors in the Middle East—an alternative stimulated far more than hindered by an Islam in crisis. It also suggests that, as an ideology or a cluster of practices, its appeal has special attractions and special limitations. These attractions and limitations also affect the fortunes of the local communist parties. The communist parties in the area from Morocco to Pakistan are all still quite small. Iran's Communist Tudeh Party became the largest in Middle Eastern history when it grew to about 40,000-80,000 members in 1953, but by 1963 it had been reduced to less than 2,000.19 The leading communist parties of the Arab world today are in Syria, with 1,500 members, and in Iraq, Egypt, and Morocco, with about 1,000 members each. In Egypt, the largest Arab country, seven small and outlawed communist factions have sometimes managed to coalesce into, at most, three major splinters; hence particular communist individuals have been more influential than any organized communist group. In Syria, which has long had the largest communist party in the Arab world, the party has remained outlawed before, during, and after Syria's membership in the United Arab Republic. A nationalist communist faction, including the former editor of the party newspaper, split off from the Syrian party in August 1959. In Lebanon, where outlawed communists have been consistently freer to operate during the past decade than anywhere else in the Arab world, they have been no more successful than any other local political party in breaking through the religious-ethnic allocation of all government positions to gain important influence. The fortunes of both communist parties in Iraq—one pro-Soviet, but apparently divided between a revolutionary and a constitutional faction, the other loyal to Iraqi nationalism—have waned since the excesses of the pro-Soviet group alienated government and people during 1959. The illegal parties of Jordan, Sudan, and Pakistan have, respectively, about 200, 1,500, and 3,500 members. In Arab Africa, no communist party now has important influence, and all of them are now outlawed. In Morocco and 19 AH figures on communist party strength in this chapter are based on Intelligence Report 4489, World Strength of the Communist Party Organizations (Unclassified), Bureau of Intelligence and Research, Department of State, January 1963, and earlier editions.

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Tunisia, the parties shrivelled from about 10,000 each to about one-tenth that size from 1946 to 1961. Freedom from French control was the principal interest of politically active Moroccans and Tunisians, and a party whose membership was predominantly French, whose principal target was "U.S. imperialism," and whose policy toward local independence was changeable and ambiguous could not fail to lose numbers and influence. A similar fate has now befallen the Algerian Communist Party. In Libya, the party is yet to be reformed after its small remnant of Italian members was exiled in 1951. In Turkey, consistent repression since 1925 and a broad popular sense of menace from the north has kept communist activities limited to a few cells. In Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, and Yemen, political repression has not yet permitted any political party to arise. Why are most of the communist parties of the Middle East still so small? The particular fortunes of most of these parties are detailed in the work of Laqueur.20 Problems that have bedevilled the development of all political parties in the Middle East are discussed in Chapter 14. Here we must discover the peculiar handicaps that face the communist parties in competing with others in the Middle East. Shifting and Unrewarding Communist Strategies The communist party has been handicapped by its own strategy. This fact becomes perhaps most apparent in a brief review of the many major changes in communist party strategy in this region from 1917 to the present in response to the changing world power balance, the forced pace of change within the U.S.S.R., and the social transformation in process everywhere in the world. Between 1917 and 1921, Soviet leaders not only favored world revolution but saw their foreign comrades make progress in that direction in, among other countries, Turkey and Iran. In Turkey, local communist forces, though of dubious orthodoxy, were supporting Ataturk's armies. In Iran, commu20

Communism and Nationalism in the Middle East. In Israel, where the party has about 2,000 members, of whom 500 may be Arabs, its total appeal has never exceeded 5 percent of the popular vote. It has been crippled by its anti-Zionist orientation in the Zionist state.

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nists were attempting to establish separate states in Azerbaijan and Gilan.21 By 1921, however, it had become clear to Soviet leaders that they lacked the strength to sustain the efforts of these foreign communist movements. Within the U.S.S.R., this retrenchment was reflected in the New Economic Policy; outside, it showed itself in an eagerness to improve relations with neighboring Middle Eastern governments at the expense, if necessary, of the local communist parties. In Iran and Turkey, communists by the thousands were thus left to the hangman. When, in September 1928, at the Sixth Comintern Congress, international communism shifted again to an emphasis on revolutionary activity, little response was possible in the area from Morocco to Pakistan. The two strongest communist movements had been decimated; the rest were as yet unimportant. The reversal of communist strategy in 1934—so helpful in the West, where fascism was recognized as a threat and where some liberal forces were ready to enter into a united front with communists to fight fascism—turned into a handicap in the Middle East. To unite with their British or French overlords against Germany and Italy was not attractive to Moslems who, when not neutral toward such a seemingly distant struggle, were drawn to the proposition that the enemy of their enemy might be their friend. Between 1934 and 1939, communists in the Middle East did succeed in drawing local or foreign resident Christians and Jews into their ranks—only to make it more difficult to attract Moslems during those two short years, 1939-1941, when their first real opportunity arrived. The year 1939, which in the West marks the desertion of communists from the battle against fascism, gave the party its first opportunity in the Middle East to woo followers with the area's most popular themes. In the light of the Nazi-Soviet pact, it became possible to recruit members to fight against British and French imperialism without regard to the war in Europe. Still, this chance netted the communists little. Religious and ethnic 21 Ibid., pp. 205-211; George Lenczowski, Russia and the West in Iran, 1918-1948, Ithaca, 1949, pp. 48-62; Dankwart A. Rustow, "The Communist Impact on Turkey and Iran, 1918-1954," an unpublished paper delivered to the Panel on International Communism, American Political Science Association, Chicago, September 11, 1954.

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minorities loomed too large among the communist core; where British and French influence counted, governmental repression grew in reaction to the new communist line. Moreover, the opportunity lasted for only two years. With the German invasion of the U.S.S.R. in 1941, World War II became to the communist a "patriotic war." By opposing any political activities against British and French imperialism that might hurt the war effort, the communists destroyed all chance of linking themselves with local nationalist movements until 1946. Since 1946, there has been evolving, gradually and not without contradictions, the present strategy of the communist parties —giving priority to the formation of a new broad popular front against the one menace facing the world—"American imperialism." There remained uncertainty in communist ranks, at least between 1946 and 1954, as to whether to limit collaboration to left-wing groups or collaborate with all nationalists. This problem was rendered more difficult by the ideological ambiguities of both clique and mass parties of the Middle East, and by the secret, non-party structure of the most successful local revolutionary groups.22 There remained uncertainty at least until 1952 also as to whether domestic revolution was still part of the new strategy or whether such revolutionary activity must be eschewed lest nationalists be frightened away from collaboration with communists against "American imperialism."23 How confusing a period this was, and how little the communist parties were able to profit from their new freedom to concentrate on themes closest to Middle Eastern hearts—"national 22 Thus "the Egyptian revolution of 1952 was described in a contemporary Soviet work, the Great Soviet Encyclopedia, as the action of a 'reactionary officers group linked with the USA' which had embarked on 'savage repression of the workers' movement.' Writing in 1953, L. N. Vatolina, an expert on Egyptian affairs, observed that since the revolution there had been increased persecutions of communists, democrats, and trade unionists, and that the peasants had been cheated of their rights by a purely 'demagogic' measure of land reform. In 1954, however, A. F. Sultanov said that the land reform law, while not solving the agrarian question, was undoubtedly a progressive measure. In 1956 I. A. Dement'yev said that Egypt, since becoming a republic, had been able to institute social reforms and to adopt an independent foreign policy; and a short work entitled Independent Egypt, published in the same year, represented the revolution of 1952 as the turning point in Egyptian history, as a result of which Egypt had become a 'bourgeois democratic state.'" (The Mizan Newsletter, A Review of Soviet Writing on the Middle East, February

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liberation" and "anti-imperialism"—is dramatized, indeed almost caricatured, by the fortunes of the Tunisian Communist Party. In 1946, it was one of the largest in the Arab world. By 1951, it had lost about four-fifths of its original membership of 10,000. Yet here was a country with a strong, and at that time unsatisfied, drive for national independence. Here also was a country with few resources and growing poverty, where more than half of all Tunisians who have any cash income were having to spend 90 percent of it on food, and with Algeria's high birth rate but without Algeria's safety valve of free immigration to France. Communist strength in Tunisia in 1946 was the harvest of an earlier and now discarded strategy. As a result of its support (albeit belated) of the French resistance effort, it had achieved a predominantly French membership. With such a cadre, it now proposed to campaign for Tunisian liberation from France. In February 1946, the Tunisian Communist newspaper L'Avenir had still attacked Tunisian leaders like Habib Bourguiba for allegedly collaborating with fascism, and had endorsed a French evolutionary program that would not lead to Tunisian selfgovernment in any foreseeable future. By August, communists were no longer in the French government, and L'Avenir apologized for its previous attacks and called for "an end to the colonial regime."24 Though the major turn in communist strategy in Tunisia came in the fall of 1946, zig-zags persisted in Tunisia (and, of exactly the same kind, elsewhere in North Africa) for another year and 1959, p. 4, published by the Central Asian Research Centre in association with St. Antony's College, Oxford, Soviet Affairs Study Group.) 23 Between 1946 and 1951 the communists engaged in guerrilla activities in Greece, Iran, India, Burma, Malaya, and the Philippines but not in Tunisia, Morocco, Syria, or Lebanon, where the communists had more members proportional to the population, than in India. 24 Though more limited and less publicized, the conflict between its European and colonial policies can involve the U.S.S.R. and its world communist movement no less than the U.S. in ambiguities and contradictions. The U.S.S.R. has so far even seen fit to borrow trouble (or been forced by its own restricted freedom of movement into such difficult maneuver) by making the party in metropolitan Europe the intermediary for instructions to parties in colonial and even former colonial areas. Thus the Algerian Communist Party apparently was unable to escape the onus of control from Paris until early 1958, when it cemented connections with the Italian Communist Party. See L'Unita, February 8, 1959.

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a half. The Central Committee of the Tunisian Communist Party, meeting on August 3-4, 1946, had called for a revision of the Franco-Tunisian Protectorate Treaty of 1881. Two months later, however, the communists noticeably played down the theme of national independence. The third balloting on the new Constitution was being conducted in France, and the communists wanted to present the best possible face to France. A year later, in October 1947, the communists proposed a new draft to replace the Protectorate Treaty but, contrary to Bourguiba's nationalists, called for Tunisia's inclusion in the French Union rather than complete independence.25 The Third Congress of the Tunisian Communist Party in May 1948 formalized and elaborated the new line of national liberation and anti-imperialism, but placed it into a context alien to nationalist concerns and tactics. The communists made the United States the primary target of attack, giving only second rating to "its valet, French colonialism," while continuing to stress the unity of interest between the French and Tunisian "working class."26 Prior to 1951, the party's tactics succeeded, moreover, in exposing its ideological preconceptions to the detriment of its larger strategy of marshaling support against U.S. power and influence. It took pains publicly to defend the Soviet recognition of Israel. It attacked the Arab League, which was supporting and subsidizing the efforts of Tunisia's nationalists, as a "bankrupt" association of "feudal lords" and "imperialist tools." It attacked Arab neutralists as individuals who lacked courage to associate themselves with the Soviet "camp of peace." It opposed the final U.N. decision leading to neighboring Libya's independence, which was endorsed by Tunisia's nationalists, because it would not put an end to "Western imperialist control" over that country. On September 4, 1948, in the pages of L'Avenir, the new Secretary General of the party, Maurice Nisard, noted that many comrades were discouraged, but declared that opportunities for them would increase. 25 NOt till April 1949 did the Tunisian Communists reject the concept of the26French Union. A similar priority of targets was, of course, enunciated by communist parties throughout the Middle East, and where specific reference to "working class unity" with a metropolitan European area was irrelevant, references to "proletarian internationalism" played the same role.

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Even though it was still voicing sectarian slogans which it would be compelled to yield after 1951, the party was already paying a price for its new pursuit. It was losing old members. In April 1948, AIi Djerad, one of the party's founders and then still its Secretary General, was expelled from the party as a "left-wing sectarian."27 Djerad, who is said to have spent a year in Moscow and two years in Moslem communities in the U.S.S.R., was opposed to the postponement of preparations for communist revolution inherent in the policy of collaboration with nationalist parties. He favored instead reliance on the urban proletariat and emphasis on the organization of a revolutionary cadre. By 1951, to be sure, Arabs had come to equal and perhaps to exceed Europeans in membership, but only because Europeans saw no future for themselves in the new line and were leaving the party. In January 1952, governmental repression for the first time hit the Tunisian Communist Party. By December of that year, lack of funds forced the party to give up its drab secondfloor apartment headquarters in Tunis. The decay of the Tunisian Communist Party in 1952 left for several years only three communist parties in all the region from Morocco to Pakistan important enough to deserve the attention of politically concerned Moslems—in Iran, Syria, and the Sudan. The Burden of Soviet Discipline The communist parties of the Middle East suffer from being under Soviet discipline. This burden is of two kinds. First, it limits their appeals to others in this highly nationalist region. The significance of the frequent, abrupt, and major changes of communist line entirely in response to the needs of the U.S.S.R. has not escaped most political leaders in the Middle East. No other party leader in this area finds it necessary, as do communists, to attend congresses in the capital of a major foreign power to reaffirm his devotion to a common international strategy. No other 27 The task of cleansing the party internally to carry the new line effectively became even greater after 1951, when the exclusive concentration of communist parties on foreign policy matters served to harden factional differences in a number of parties. The Iraqi party, as a matter of fact, found it impossible, because of internal disputes, to make the 1951 shift until 1953, and then only at the cost of leaving two factions behind.

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Middle Eastern political party has ever been specifically and publicly defended by the Premier of a major foreign power against purely local criticism as were Arab Communist parties recently by Premier Khrushchev.28 Middle Eastern leaders may make unduly optimistic assumptions about their own strength when they opportunistically collaborate with local communists. They may also entertain unduly optimistic hopes about the personal independence of particular communists whom they have long known as cousins, classmates, or fellow opportunists. In exploiting these two assumptions lie two of the principal opportunities for communist successes in the Middle East. But few, if any, Middle Eastern leaders have doubts about the discipline that ties communist parties as such to Moscow. A few politicians, misled by earlier Middle Eastern perspectives, have tried to use the communist party as a broker for securing the support of the U.S.S.R. for their own political career. (This may well have been the gambit attempted by Deputy Premier Khalid al-Azm of Syria in his drive for the Syrian Presidency just before others cut the ground under him by joining Syria to Egypt.) For the great majority of leaders, however, the risks in terms of prestige and political freedom of cooperating with a party that is directly tied to a foreign power continue to preclude such an adventure. Secondly, the burden of Soviet discipline has, again and again, spelled the near suicide of local communist parties. In part, that is already evident in the preceding brief account of the effects on parties of the many changes in strategy since 1917. Shaping policy in line with Soviet rather than local requirements has particularly hurt parties that have hitherto been among the most influential in the Middle East—the Iranian and the Syrian. Twice, in 1921 and 1946, the Iranian party was deserted by the U.S.S.R. at the cost of many communist lives after the U.S.S.R. no longer found it prudent to protect the separatist regional regimes which communists, obviously with Soviet encouragement, had established as springboards for further local triumphs. In 1953 the Communist Tudeh Party failed to seize power, despite its considerable strength, and allowed Premier 2a

New York Times, January 28, 1959.

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Mosadeq to be overthrown instead by conservative forces. The Soviet Union may well have deterred the Tudeh Party from acting in a situation so fraught with opportunity but also with grave dangers, considering that the U.S. and the U.K. were clearly prepared to enter the struggle by supporting countervailing forces in Iranian society.29 Moreover, it did not seem likely that the Soviet Union would have been able to capitalize on this victory by expanding into the rest of the Middle East. On the contrary, the expansion of Soviet influence on that scale and only after inescapably violent conflict would much more likely have served to frighten neighboring states into closer ties with the West. The consequence of abstention, however, was a drop of communist membership to less thanfivepercent of its former size. In Syria, the communists had been growing in influence during the 1950's. Among other reasons, this occurred because the U.S.S.R. had given them the most popular slogans anyone could voice: national liberation, anti-imperialism, Arab unity. But what the U.S.S.R. had given in principle it took away in practice at the most critical moment. When the majority of Syrian political leaders agreed to union with Egypt in 1958, the communists stood opposed. They obviously could not continue to support national liberation, anti-imperialism, and Arab unity at a point when these slogans proved most popular in explaining a move designed specifically to curb Soviet and communist influence. Lack of Internal Cohesion in Communist Parties Communist ideological convictions have not always been strong enough to transcend religious or ethnic differences. Such differences have repeatedly created internal conflicts and even schisms, or at least limited the appeal of the communist party in almost every Middle Eastern country.30 French and Arab Com29 Tudeh's acquiescence would only echo the arguments of the Greek Communists, the most experienced in guerrilla warfare and its consequences in the Near East. In 1951, they declared that it would be "cynical adventurism" even to prepare for revolution now. They argued that, while the task of isolating the U.S. internationally remains undone, communist revolutionary attempts can only serve to induce U.S. intervention. (KKE Draft Program, June 1951.) 30 ThUS, the principal Arab Communist, Khalid Bakdash, told his Syrian

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munists have been unable to collaborate effectively in North Africa; Arab and Kurdish Communists have pursued separate ways in Iraq; the communist parties in the two regions of Pakistan have remained autonomous. Unlike European communist parties, the communist party in the Middle East has no permanent clientele or predominant sway among the proletariat. The proletariat is only beginning to come into being and to become conscious of itself as a group.31 Party membership—both its hard core and its sympathizers—is drawn largely from the new middle class. Hence Middle Eastern communist parties are in constant competition with other parties for the same clientele. Repression or failures, encouragement or successes therefore affect their size and internal cohesion more quickly and more deeply than they could any class-bound communist party in Western Europe. A Mistaken Communist Image of Middle Eastern Society The communists are handicapped by the image of the Middle Eastern social structure imposed on them by their ideology. Until 1954, Soviet scholarship on contemporary politics and social change in the region from Morocco to Pakistan had suffered from a prolonged neglect.32 Since then, the volume of production has increased, but few notably concrete and discerning analyses have come from the pen of any Soviet or Middle Eastern communist writer.33 The most significant change in perspective followers: "We must clearly understand that most of our difBculties, the shortcomings of our work, and our lack of progress, in relation to the possibilities and readiness of the people, stem from the weak education, intellectual, and theoretical level in our ranks." ("Report to the Central Committee," January 1951, translated by Harold W. Glidden, Middle East Journal, Spring 1953, p. 220.) 81 See Chapter 6 on the character of the Middle Eastern working class and Chapter 15 on the role of trade unions. 88 See W. Z. Laqueur, "The Shifting Line in Soviet Orientalogy," Problems of Communism, March-April, 1956, pp. 20-26. 33 Rudolf Loewenthal has produced three useful bibliographies: "Russian Materials on Africa," "Russian Materials on Islam and Islamic Institutions," and "Russian Materials on Arabs and Arab Countries," all published by the Institute of Language and Linguistics, School of Foreign Service, Georgetown University, 1958. See also Roger Swearingen, "Asian Studies in the Soviet

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evident in substance since about 1946 and in quantity since 1954 is a new appreciation of the role of the middle class. "Serious mistakes have occasionally been committed in appraising the role of the national bourgeoisie in the anti-imperialist movement of the countries of the East," said the Soviet theoretical journal Kommunist in May 1955.34 Scholarly analysis was now to catch up with the political verdict rendered in 1951: "Even certain representatives of the big bourgeoisie, whose interests have also been infringed by the policy of the American imperialists, are far from being happy at the loss of national independence. They have been forced to assent that the working class stands in the van of the struggle for the restoration of this independence under the banner of the unification of all the forces of the nation. To unite these forces, an alliance between the working class—fighting for its own unity—and the middle strata is necessary, as always emphasized by the classics of Marxism-Leninism."85 It is one thing, however, to turn on a world-wide scale to the strategy of political alliance with the "middle strata," including even the "national bourgeoisie," in order to concentrate the broadest possible attack on the U.S. position in the cold war. Such are the transcendent requirements of the U.S.S.R. as a national state. But useful as it may be as a strategy of Soviet foreign policy, it is quite another matter to accept this formulation as a true image of Middle Eastern social classes and social forces. Such a distortion also serves to foil the elementary requirements of political strategy. It cannot clearly identify friend and foe, indeed, not even identify the class from which most communists are drawn. Union," Journal of Asian Studies, May 1958, pp. 515-537, and O. Edmund Clubb, "Soviet Oriental Studies and the Asian Revolution," Pacific Affairs, December 1958, pp. 380-389. 84 "For a Further Upsurge in Soviet Eastern Studies," Kommunist, May 1955, pp. 74-83. See also Ann K. S. Lambton, editor, Islam and Russia, A Detailed Analysis of An Outline of the History of Islamic Studies in the U.S.S.R., by N. A. Smirnov, London, 1956. 36 Jacques Duclos, Secretary of the French Communist Party, in For a Lasting Peace, for a People's Democracy, Bucharest, November 2, 1951. See also Bernard S. Morris and Morris Watnick, "Current Communist Strategy in Nonindustrialized Countries," Problems of Communism, September-October, 1955, pp. 1-6.

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Of the four pillars on which communist strategy was now to rest—workers, peasants, petit bourgeoisie, and national bourgeoisie^—the workers constitute at most, seven percent of the total population of the more industrialized countries and many are unskilled and unemployed—hence not yet conscious of themselves as "workers" in a Marxist sense. Workers have recently been gaining rapidly in importance as a political force in the Middle East, but nowhere (except in part in Iraq and the Sudan) as a result of communist activities. In any event, the emphasis placed by local communists on the working class as the principal force of revolution long antedates the emergence of a Middle Eastern proletariat as an important social or political force. Peasants—the proletariat's "principal allies in our country"— constitute the great majority—70 to 80 percent—of the local population, but with them the communists have so far achieved almost no contact.36 There are members of the "national bourgeoisie" who would ally themselves with the communist party.37 In contrast to its role in the West, the "national bourgeoisie" in the Middle East has been quite insecure in its position, socially, economically, and politically, even when it stood closer to the ruling institution than it usually does now.38 Political opportunism is rife among this class, and communists will not find it more reliable in a political crisis than others have.39 36 Bakdash's complaint remains justified: "Nearly 75 percent of its activity, whether in propaganda, organizing, or daily work, has been confined to petty bourgeois elements in cities and villages on the one hand and selected workers on the other. But the broad masses of workers and fellahin have received hardly any attention and have been the object of little of our political and organizing activity. . . . We have little experience in working in the rural areas and have little knowledge of the subject." {"Report to the Central Committee," January 1951, pp. 208 and 213-214.) 87 "National," as defined by the communists, is any member of the bourgeoisie, however rich, who has "not sold out to U.S. imperialism." 88 See Chapter 3. 89 Nor will the national bourgeoisie find the communists any less opportunistic. "In No. 1 of 1956 Sovetskoya Vostokovedeniye deplored the fact that t h e dialectical conception of the dual nature of the national bourgeoisie has been replaced by a one-sided conception of it as the faithful ally of imperialism in the struggle against the working masses.' But in No, 4 of 1959, Voprosy Istorii, the Deputy Director of the Institute of Oriental Studies, R. A. Ul'yanovkiy, complains that in Soviet orientalists' work during 1958, 'a sufficiently penetrating light has not yet been thrown on such questions as the essential

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The petit bourgeoisie—composed of the smaller scale entrepreneurs, traders, artisans, shopkeepers, salaried employees, and somewhat more prosperous peasants—exists, but not in the form and context recognized by Marxist-Leninist theory. Those of its members who own their means of production are far from being as independent politically as they often are in the West. They are deeply dependent on, and sensitive to, the contracts and policies of government, family connections, and established and relatively static commercial clienteles. For the same reasons, the property owning petit bourgeoisie has neither the numbers, strength, nor cohesion of purpose to act as a class. There is a partial awareness among Middle Eastern communist leaders that the four social classes who make up the pillars of contemporary communist strategy do not possess the character or play the role that strategy assigns to them. In his Report to the Central Committee, Bakdash wrote: "The main attention of our organizations is directed toward the creation of a lot of sound and fury around the Party and its slogans rather than toward the building up of bases and foundations among the workers and the masses of the fellahin, especially the poor among them. . . . How did this situation come about in our Party? . . . Like most Communist Parties in extremely industrially backward countries like ours, our Party grew up in a milieu far removed from Marxism— a milieu without any previous traditions of a labor movement or of socialist thought. . . . Owing to the circumstances of imperialist domination, feudal tyranny, and the weakness of the class struggle, it was natural that this noise should first attract those circles referred to as 'enlightened' from among the intellectuals, students, and certain enlightened workers. . . . Therefore . . . the general milieu and atmosphere in which our Party works are not yet proletarian, but are still petty bourgeois in character."40 opposition between the working class and the national bourgeoisie, class distinctions among peasants, the part played by the national bourgeoisie in the exploitation of the peasantry, the connection of the national bourgeoisie with foreign capital, the political parties of the bourgeoisie their ideology, strategy, and tactics at the present stage, and their attitude toward the socialist camp and towards the international communist and workers movement." (Mizan Newsletter, May 1959, p. 11.) «Bakdash, "Report to the Central Committee," January 1951, pp. 208-209. Italics his.

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The communists recognize that their leadership and core in the Middle East41 are drawn primarily from what they call "the petty bourgeoisie, and in particular, from the revolutionary inclined intelligentsia."42 From this recognition, that their very core is not yet constituted as it ought to be, the communists draw only one practical lesson: they must concentrate on recruiting workers, even to the extent that the constitutions of a number of parties in the area demand a longer probationary period for recruits who do not come from the working class. "As Lenin and Stalin teach us, the principal force of the patriotic democratic revolution is the working class. . . ."43 It is obviously advantageous to broaden one's following among the masses, and especially among a group that is likely to give increasingly vigorous and organized voice to its discontent. But the injunction to recruit workers is not merely pragmatically motivated. Marxist dogma concerning the role of the working class in shaping history compels this drive for labor support. Yet this emphasis on the working class entails several unreconciled conflicts. For, as Bakdash points out, it is a "wrong idea" for communist workers "to think that they represent the working class in the Communist Party and in other Party bodies. The truth . . . is that they represent the Communist Party among the workers. . . . The representative of the workers is the Communist Party as a whole, for it is the party and vanguard of the working class... . Every member of it. . . represents the working class and its higher interest. . . ."44 From that perspective there is no need for workers within the communist party at all. There is another unresolved issue. The so-called "revolutionary inclined intelligentsia" that now constitutes the core of Middle Eastern communist parties is more than a mere stratum or portion of the petit bourgeoisie. It is part of a social class that 41 And elsewhere in underdeveloped areas, as Morris Watnick made clear in "The Appeal of Communism to the Peoples of Underdeveloped Areas," Economic Development and Cultural Change, 1952, pp. 22-36. 42 "The Revolutionary Movement in the Colonies; Resolution of the Sixth World Congress of the Communist International," adopted September 1, 1928, International Press Correspondence, December 12, 1928, p. 1670. ^Bakdash, "Report to the Central Committee," January 1951, p. 207. Italics his. 44 Bakdash, "Report to the Central Committee," January 1951, p. 213.

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has all the historical attributes of a class and its own distinct class interests—a new middle class that is coming to dominate, and in several countries is already dominating, social, economic, and political life.45 A party which is kept by its ideology from freely acting as the champion of this new middle class, and must instead speak for the Kremlin's shifting interpretations of the interests of the working class, operates under a distinct handicap. The party's interest in the working class is not even an unadulterated advantage in wooing the latter group. For them, the communist appeal is blunted in the realm of foreign affairs by the fact that Moscow is conceded supremacy by all communist parties as interpreter of working class interests. In the realm of domestic affairs, communist party programs do not differ materially from those of any party of the new middle class committed to rapid economic progress. Both will need to harness and discipline the worker, discourage his immediate consumption, and increase his productivity.46 If such a forced march into the modern age ultimately also benefits the workers, both communist and noncommunist parties will be equally able to claim that, dialectically, they represented the "higher interests" of the workers all along. So far, communist analysts have not acknowledged that social change in the Middle East is coming about by revolution from the top, made by small groups representative of the new middle class and, if with working class support, then harnessed to the leadership and interests of the new middle class. Even writers within the Soviet bloc who would amend if not revise Marx have retained this ideological preconception that both distorts communist perception and mars communist capabilities in the Middle East: " . . . Traditional Marxist theory," writes one of Poland's chief planners, "probably attaches too little importance to the intelligentsia, especially its role in production. . . . A Marxist "This point is argued in detail in Chapter 4. "Neither communist nor non-communist leaders in the Middle East, however, have so far frankly acknowledged this point. By contrast, see an alternative to such a forced march proposed by the Indian socialist parliamentarian and trade union leader, Asoka Mehta, in "Asia: Industrialized Democratically," Dissent, Spring 1955, pp. 152-162, and "Asia: The Peasant's Way," Dissent, Summer 1955, pp. 213-220.

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analysis of this phenomenon is undoubtedly necessary. . . . [But the] very essence [of the intelligentsia] prevents it from being an independent force; it can only express the opinions and wishes of the working class. . . . It can help, but it is not the social force which can bring about social changes. The best proof of this are the numerous backward countries . . . which have a progressive intelligentsia on a high level but it is helpless because there is no working class which could support, realize, and transform the progressive ideas of the intelligentsia into an organized social movement."47 Communist parties could drop their blinders only at the cost of revising their fundamental ideological assumptions—namely that philosophy and history need the working class as their instrument, and that they must maintain their ties to the U.S.S.R. The same ideology that limits their present vision and strategy binds them to the U.S.S.R. as the center and guide for the international revolution of the "working class." There is one irony in this, and it may gradually have consequences. It has been well-argued that the Soviet revolution, led by a would-be middle class, has now succeeded in firmly ensconcing that middle class into power. If the U.S.S.R., as a result of a resolution of the cold war and an expansion of its economy were to draw freely the intellectual and political conclusions that are apparent in its own development, then the terms of the ideological and political contest in the Middle East and other underdeveloped areas would, of course, be transformed too. At this point, however, the Soviets still insist on seeing and saying less, including in the Middle East, than already meets the eye. The Competition of Nationalist

Movements

Nationalism has not only sensitized Middle Eastern politicians to foreign influence in domestic affairs but also pre-empted the field of mass organizations. How solid and pervasive this nationalism may be and how much it sets a limit to alignment with a foreign nation are controversial questions each deserving a 47 Oscar Lange, Some Problems Relating to the Polish Road to Socialism, Warsaw, 1957, pp. 27-29.

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48

separate examination. One thing is clear. The largest movements of the Middle East are those concentrating on nationalist aspirations. Hence men eager for political action or personal careers are likely to join, instead of communist parties however nationalistic in pretense, the great parties which have already attracted their friends and relations. Whenever such a movement has been strong and united, it has seen no reason to bargain for the additional support of a small band of communists. In such circumstances, the present strategy of the communist party contributes to the perpetuation of its weakness. By emphasizing its own endorsement of nationalist objectives and underplaying its evaluation of bourgeois nationalism as a mere phase in the transition toward communist-controlled regimes, the communists swell the membership of the dominant nationalist movement without enhancing their own separate influence. The Price of Rivalry The communists challenge the power of regimes that nowhere in this entire region are gentle with rivals for power. This is the simplest and one of the strongest and most enduring barriers to communist advances in the Middle East. Since it involves the very survival of existing political elites, the weight of this proposition is greater than any interest in improving relations with the U.S.S.R., its impact more direct than any ideological arguments. To be an effective barrier, however, certain conditions must first be satisfied. The ruling elite must be internally united, lest communists be sought as allies in intra-elite competition. The ruling elite must be politically sophisticated, lest it either accept communists as merely more radical nationalists or confuse all opposition elements with communists. The ruling elite must also, through constructive work, be able to avoid the kind of instability that breeds opposition and renders its own rule ineffective. These necessary preconditions greatly restrict the reliability of repression as a barrier against communist expansion. As a result of the handicaps under which they operate, com48 The influence of nationalism is discussed in Chapter 10, the problems of foreign orientation, in Chapter 19.

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munist parties have so far played only a relatively small role in the turbulent changes affecting the Middle East and North Africa. The other side of the ledger, however, also needs examination. The advantages that can accrue to the communist parties from the appeal of Marxism as a philosophy of knowledge and revolution, and from Soviet communism in practice as a model of organization and rapid material progress have already been explored. There are also advantages that specifically affect the fortunes of communist parties. Factors Favorable for Communist Activities Smallness in membership is no grave handicap to the achievement of power. Minorities have always dominated politics in the Middle East: both traditional expectations and the scarcity of modern skills grant extraordinary influence to small numbers of individuals. Groups of fewer than 50 overthrew Egypt's King Farouk under Nasser's leadership in 1952, engineered the union of Syria with Egypt in 1957, and, in 1958, curbed the powers of the absolute Saudi monarch. Fewer than 50 organized the overthrow of the Iraqi monarchy, and established military rule in the Sudan and Pakistan during 1958, and brought an end to Syrian-Egyptian union in 1961. In each case, this small revolutionary core could count on the disciplined support of at least the larger portion of the army. Ironically, this most revolutionary of eras is marked, not by popular revolutions, but by coups d'itat. In each of these instances, the coup came first, the attempt to organize mass support, if at all, afterwards. At present, communist capabilities for penetrating such small conspiratorial groups are inhibited by the very size, military exclusiveness, and secrecy of this nucleus, and also by communist strategy which calls for unity with nationalists rather than immediate violent efforts to take their place. These inhibitions have not eliminated communist opportunities. Iraq in the winter of 1958-1959 became a dramatic demonstration of how a hitherto quite small, suppressed, and splintered communist party could come suddenly to play a vital role. Many outside observers, however, tended to exaggerate communist [186]

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potentials in Iraq during that period. They tended to ascribe to successful communist propaganda an anti-Western outburst that had in fact been largely stimulated by long-pent-up resentment against the alliance of the reactionary Nuri regime with the West, and immediate and not entirely fanciful fears of possible Western intervention against the new junta. They suspected only communist influence at work in a political situation in which the new ruler, General Kassim, carefully sought to bring all major political forces in balance against each other because he trusted none of them. They overestimated communist capabilities, and were surprised when communist violence—in great part the fruit of undisciplined party factionalism and experimentation—quickly served to diminish the party's influence. In the highly unstable politics of the Middle East, communist opportunities are increased by the fact that numbers do not yet necessarily count.49 But the extraordinary alertness to communist infiltration which this volatile situation requires also demands, especially in the West, a particular sensitivity to the causes and potentials of collaboration between communists and nationalists in the Middle East. A peculiar Western pessimism, namely that in contacts between communists and others, one must always suspect that it is the non-communist who will become infected, can lead to premature Western reactions which may only serve to harden such contacts in the face of what is only too easily interpreted by nationalists no less than communists as foreign intervention.50 To call a party subversive is, however, not to brand it evil in 49 This is also true in the realm of intellectual influence. In Pakistan, for example, "Urdu literature . . . has witnessed remarkable development during the last two decades. The emergence of leftist writers like Faiz Ahmad Faiz, the late Sa'adat Hassan Manto (died 1956), Ahmad Nadeem Qasmi, and many others is indicative of the direction in which Pakistan's intellectuals are moving. These men have a wide audience. Each of the two recent collections of Faiz's poems have had a greater sale than any other book in Pakistan. Manto and Qasmi figure on every shelf and their Quarterly Journal is eagerly awaited in universities and offices. In recent years, some of them have started writing in local dialects, which may prove to be a movement of great significance. They are sensitive and brilliant men who believe in Communist theory and are convinced of its justice in practice. In a situation of extreme confusion and frustration . . . an ideology that is modern, that has an economic program to offer, and earnest, creative men to take up its cause, stands a fair chance of

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the Middle East where nearly every party is subversive. In the U.S., it is relatively easy to identify a party that may be committed to the overthrow of constitutional government by force and violence, and easier still to marshal public opinion against such a group. In the Middle East and North Africa, almost every party, ruler, and dynasty now in power seized control by overthrowing the previous regime. In this region of the world, constitutions are numerous, legitimacy validated by a broad consensus is rare, and respect for freedom under law, rarer still. This common resort to subversion strikes down more than governments. Political activity by itself also subverts faith and society in the Middle East. To become politically active means that a Moslem—who had once been certain about the single web that connected the meaning of life with its rituals, patterns, and loyalties—must separate the ideological from the metaphysical, the political from the divine. To take this step affects the very roots of Islam: to be active now is to uproot. In the Islamic past, the actions of most rulers were inspired by secular motives, but all of them took care to veil them, for the sake of popular support, in appropriate metaphysical terms. Today a nationalist ruler eager to make his country progress cannot escape inducting his entire people into secular activities. There is not even escape from subversion by resorting to either conservative or fundamentalist reactionary policies. The late Premier Nuri al-Said of Iraq, attempting to maintain existing institutions by repression, became, in effect, a more potent propasuccess." (Eqbal Ahmad, Pakistan an Islamic State?, an unpublished seminar paper, Princeton University, January 14, 1959, p. 24.) 50 It is at least possible that Western treatment as pro-communist of leaders of the Syrian Arab Socialist Resurrectionist (Ba'th) Party who opportunistically collaborated with communists from time to time between 1954 and 1957 may have helped to prolong this alliance. This same party was later to be a prime mover in uniting Syria with Egypt in order to prevent communist predominance, and its Iraqi branch one of the principal opponents of communist influence in Kassim's Iraq. By the time of the XXI Party Congress of the Soviet Communist Party in Moscow, Khalid Bakdash, the Syrian Communist chief, called the Ba'th "adventurers who resemble the right-wing socialists in Europe and rely upon the Yugoslav renegades have begun to play a very dirty game in the Arab East, the role of a gang isolated from the people, a gang of adventurers, spies, and saboteurs of the Arab Liberation Movement." (Moscow Radio, Soviet Near Eastern Service, February 2, 1959.)

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gandist for change than an effective reformist regime might have been. The Moslem Brotherhood, by radicalizing traditional values, selecting out of a once integrated whole those principles which will now best serve aggression and defense, thus destroys both past and present. The communist party is merely another subversive party. The communist party is therefore capable of winning sympathy not only within the realm of the ambiguity created by its own advocacy of nationalism and anti-imperialism, but also within the large realm of tolerance resulting from the fact that most political parties play similar roles and use similar methods, and that ideologies are not yet clearly differentiated. Almost all parties are marked by conspiratorial activity and violence when out of power, repressive measures when in power. Communist infiltration of other parties and the building of fellow traveling organizations are also facilitated by the fact that ideological distinctions on the left have only recently been put to the test in the Middle East and hence remain somewhat blurred. In the West, prolonged scholarly study, as well as bitter debates, served to clarify and differentiate liberal democratic, democratic socialist, and communist positions. Furthermore, decades of practical experience in actual political competition tested and sharpened these distinctions. This sorting out is still incomplete in the Middle East, though in the Arab East, communist violence in Iraq during 1958 and 1959, contrasting with Nasser's rapid crystallization of socialism during that period, helped to bring home the vital distinctions. The survival of traditional loyalties sometimes helps to obfuscate party differences. Just as Druze mountaineers will loyally follow the heir of one of their leading feudal families, Kamal Jumblatt, in support of the socialist party he created, so the leader of the Syrian Communist Party, Khalid Bakdash, can rely on the vote of his fellow Kurds whose knowledge of communist doctrine is quite uncertain. Middle Eastern communists, like Middle Eastern tax evaders with cousins in important positions, can still sometimes avoid jail in the midst of repressive measures or gain "furloughs" from their jail sentence. Even the most damaging truths about the communist party— [189]

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that it is the willing arm of a world-wide conspiracy led by a foreign state—can be beclouded, though not removed, by the fact that other parties in the Middle East have been known to be subsidized and influenced by certain Western nations, or by neighboring Middle Eastern states. Indeed, this accusation does not always stimulate a response unfavorable to the communist party. Certain Arab leaders of 1917-1921 were clearly prepared to draw on British support in order to free themselves of Ottoman rule, and others, like Nuri al-Said, remained in permanent alliance with the U.K. to strengthen themselves against domestic and regional rivals. In the same manner reliance on the U.S.S.R. may be sought by Arabs today on opportunistic as well as ideological grounds.51 Repression, being common as well as commonly ineffective in the Middle East, has served further to obscure the difference between communists and others. Because communists and other parties share common persecution and common immediate objectives—to overthrow the government in power—contacts become frequent in a context conducive to sympathetic personal and political exchanges. The resulting confusion about differences among the parties has not solely benefited the communists, of course. Confusion has also been created in communist ranks, and a wide gap persists between its small hard core and a rather unreliable membership of fellow travelers, sympathizers, and opportunists. But on balance, such a confusion in political values, methods, and policies cannot benefit parties seeking to create or conserve stable institutions as much as it can the communist party. The communist party is a relatively more disciplined movement than most other parties, more capable of self-denial in postponing final rewards, less corrupt, more hard working, and more intent upon demanding hard work from people at large. Although the communist party is one of the most puritan of Middle 81 In Malaya, many joined the communist party precisely because it was known to be an instrument of the U.S.S.R. Without foreign support, they reasoned that their guerrilla war could not succeed. They deserted the party when they discovered that Soviet support was not forthcoming. (See Lucian Pye, Guerrilla Communism in Malaya, Its Social and Political Meaning, Princeton, 1956.)

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Eastern political movements, this point should not be overstated. It applies much less to its membership, which suffers from considerable turnover, than to its hard core. Some non-communist parties—for example, Tunisia's Neo-Destour—have achieved more elan and discipline on more democratic foundations. The word relatively needs to be underscored. Still, in many countries of the Middle East its greater discipline is apparent. What accounts for it? However mistaken it may be, communist doctrine is one of the few modern doctrines so far popularized in the Middle East that provides historical justification for sacrificing the present for the sake of a materially better future—the not too distant future if Soviet example be a guide. Democratic socialism has so far had difficulties, both in theory and practice, in showing a way to progress relevant to any but the most highly developed areas of the world. Democratic capitalism has shown itself to be similarly confined. An authoritarian state socialism is communism's principal competitor in the Middle East.52 Part of the inspiration for the latter doctrine is nationalism. It is the most popular of all in the Middle East and it, too, is capable of inspiring great and prolonged sacrifices. But state socialism cannot succeed without invidiously destroying, rewarding, or disciplining segments of a society that expected to be rewarded equally under the standards of nationalism. This conflict of interests often confuses, or renders powerless, or fragments the leadership of state socialist regimes which usually have neither sufficient experience nor ideology to guide them. The communist party, however, possesses an ideology which, despite all its distortions, ambiguities, and sudden reversals, at least addresses itself to the problems of social change and the requirements of political power and organization. In its dogmatic assertion of truth, its demands for disciplined solidarity among its members, and its opportunities for manipulating men and events, communism grants its members, much like the neoIslamic movements, great and immediate rewards rare in the present Middle Eastern environment. It frankly exposes exploitation, even if it will not insist on forcing its remedies on a local 62

For a more detailed analysis of this alternative, see Chapter 12.

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government when such activities would embarrass the foreign policy objectives of the U.S.S.R. It is aware that the population as a whole must be mobilized, but once in power, the communists would exceed any other party in ruthlessly compelling sacrifices from workers and peasants. It is boldly anti-imperialistic, and says it supports the right of any nation to pursue independent foreign and domestic policies, yet nothing in Soviet ideology or action so far would justify such an assertion except as an example of cynical opportunism. Parties which would offer effective competition to the communists, however, cannot content themselves with exposing the hollowness or the price of communist virtues. They must be able to offer greater and more solid virtues of their own. The Potentials of Communism What are the chances that communist parties will be able to seize power in the Middle East? The preceding discussion has suggested that the barriers the communist party faces are not all high or solid, but neither are its advantages all unqualified. For the most part, the discussion thus far has been concerned with factors rather than forces. We must now look at both the Middle East and the communist parties in motion. The role and character of Middle Eastern communist parties are changing. Present communist strategy places a premium on non-violent action as most likely to marshall broad support for eliminating or neutralizing American influence in the area.63 However, to postpone revolutions intended to alter the structure of society, and meanwhile allow participation only in violent actions that are dedicated to "national liberation," is a course bound to change the character of communist parties. A hard core with faith and discipline will probably remain orthodox. But as time passes, will the communist party continue to attract men eager for a quick and radical overturn of society when it has in 03 I have explored the relationship between the Communist parties and political violence in this region in greater detail in Chapter 12 of Communism and Revolution, edited by C. E. Black and T. P. Thornton, Princeton, 1964.

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fact become a movement that will not revolt in order to achieve sole control until that day when the United States has been isolated internationally and can no longer intervene effectively? For a time, aided by the propaganda of its enemies, the communist party will undoubtedly be able to attract such men on the strength of an earlier reputation. But how long will it be before the composition of its membership is likely to change as the revolutionary-minded are drawn off to other parties? Already changes of marching orders have during the past decade caused important factional splits within nearly every communist party in the area. Three factions usually emerge: (1) Those who joined the party because they wanted a revolution and are therefore intent on having one. (2) Those with the same idea who, prevented by Soviet policy from fulfilling it in the present, insist at least on making preparations now for revolution in the future. (3) Those who concentrate on gaining the broadest possible local support for the foreign policy objectives of the U.S.S.R., eschewing all talk or action that might frighten away bourgeois elements with the specter of revolution. Only the last is orthodox. The persistence of this last strategy over a long period of time is likely to have several consequences, none useful to the communist party. The frequency and bitterness of factional splits in the party may well increase. The violent encounters, even in jail, among three such factions that rendered the Iraqi Communist party impotent between 1951 and 1953 and led to the emergence of two separate parties in 1960 is an illustration of what is possible. Such breaks may be avoidable. The most revolutionary of the three factions will often be able to blame its inaction on local realities and sofindit possible to remain united with the rest. The second faction, provided it is prudent enough to stay underground, may often be given a limited freedom by the third, and orthodox faction, in part as a sentimental or precautionary warrant of its own sustained revolutionary fevor. And as long as the party as a whole is gaining in strength and influence, the leaders of the unorthodox factions may easily find it possible opportunistically to repress their differences in order to share in their [193]

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party's victory.64 Nonetheless, these are fundamental differences. If the United States is not successfully isolated and revolution must therefore be further postponed, splits in the communist movement are likely to become more common and more profound. Such a development could bring in its wake a novel situation. The communist faction least likely to act under Soviet instructions is most likely to engage in revolution and involve Western interest. In the midst of cold war tensions, such an eventuality could produce either dangerous confusion or startling detachment. It will also create increasing opportunities for Communist China to support the revolutionary communist faction in areas where it never had influence before. It will pay to be well-informed about factionalism in communist parties. The evolution of the communist movement in turn suggests that the two principal threats of communist control in the Middle East will increasingly arise from two sources. One is opportunism on the part of particular nationalist leaders. They may gamble in the midst of a revolutionary situation on their ability to enlarge the control of their own faction over a pluralistic revolutionary movement by drawing on communist support while intending to prevent the capture of the movement by communists from within. The other threat lies in the opportunity on the part of the communists to appear to be the most dynamic, yet constitutional, opposition party. To offer themselves, not as a revolutionary movement, but as the party that will be more effectively nationalist, anti-imperialist, and reformist than any party now in power gives the communists greater respectability than ever before, and considerable drawing power. How readily a communist party can succeed when it has no important competitors in the realm of social reform was demonstrated in Guatemala prior to 1954 and Malaya prior to 1956. The changing power constellation in each country, and especially the range of actual communist competitors, thus deserves constant attention. Who competes with whom is more important "The recent history of the Indian Communist Party illustrates this possibility particularly well. (See John Kautsky, Moscow and the Communist Party of India, New York, 1955.)

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than who represses whom. The main repressive force, the army, is no longer an obedient servant of constituted authority. In many countries, it now attracts the most ambitious and able of the new middle class, and thus already reflects the political divisions of Middle Eastern society. In short, there is no firm barrier to the Communist party—neither its own shortcomings nor the repression from existing authority are enough—except a competitor with a better program and more effective organization.

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CHAPTER 10 FROM UNORGANIZED INSECURITY TO ORGANIZED INSECURITY: NATIONALISM

The Meaning of Nationalism and why is it the most popular political ideology of the Middle East?1 The external factors that molded it are clear enough. The Middle East's encounter with a freer, more productive, and more powerful Western civilization compelled its peoples to try to discover anew their own identity and purpose and to seek more effective means for saving or regaining their integrity and cohesion. Both Ottoman rule and Western imperialism hastened the growth of nationalism in most of the Middle East, sharpened its intensity, and shaped many of its political tasks. Although part of the Middle East's environment, even some of its major roads to national self-discovery and selfassertion, has been fashioned in interaction with influences from abroad, the people of this area have, nonetheless, had to find their way themselves. A highly selective memory of Islam and each local cultural heritage is also part of contemporary nationalism. These traditions, however, cannot define the core of nationalism, for they belong to a pre-nationalist age. Nationalism was invented WHAT IS NATIONALISM

1 The pioneers in the analysis of nationalism are themselves keenly aware that such questions remain open. "What has given great vogue to nationalism in modern times?" asked Carlton Hayes toward the end of The Historical Evolution of Modern Nationalism, only to reply, "We really do not know." (New York, 1931, p. 302.) After writing more than a dozen studies of nationalism, Hans Kohn welcomed Louis L. Snyder's The Meaning of Nationalism (New Brunswick, 1954) as "the first introduction" and "starting point" to an "interdisciplinary inquiry" of nationalism which has become "urgent and important." (Foreword, p. ix.) Analytical studies of Arab, Turkish, Iranian, or Pakistani nationalism remain scarce.

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in modern times. The particular historical events that lie at the origins of Middle Eastern nationalism cannot explain its present fervor. We must search more deeply to understand the role and significance of the nationalism of this region. The argument of this chapter is that nationalism is the principal political manifestation of social change in the Middle East. Nationalists exist because there is social change, and hence the basic problem confronting nationalists is not nationalism but social change. This framework of analysis and action is relevant not only to the Middle East but to other areas, both Western and non-Western, for all of us now live in a world in which traditional ideas and relationships are being questioned, and nationalism has become the first universal faith. There has, of course, always been a sense, even a pride, of community. Common kinship, culture, and religion served in the past to cement people. Common language, culture, environment, religion, or race remain the most popular criteria for defining the attributes of nationhood. Yet look closely merely at the countries of Northern Africa from Egypt to Morocco and these criteria turn out to be nearly irrelevant. Although the great majority of the people in each of the five territories are Arabs by culture and language and Moslem by religion, they continue to live as five distinct nations within boundaries that, except perhaps for Egypt, 2 "The word 'patriotism' first cropped up in the eighteenth century, and 'nationalism' only in the nineteenth. In French, nationalisme is to be found once in 1812; the oldest example of 'nationalism' in English dates from 1836, and then, remarkably, with a theological significance, namely for the doctrine that certain nations have been chosen by God." ("Patriotism and Nationalism in European History" in Johann Huizinga's Men and Ideas, New York 1959, P- 99.) In Egypt, the discussion of the difference between patriotism and religion and the meaning of nationalism seems to have begun in 1880 when Shaikh Husain al-Marsafi, in al-Kalim al-Thaman {The Eight Words), tried to explain such words as watan (fatherland), ummah (nation), and siyasah (politics) "which are on the tongues of the present-day younger generation." Two decades later, Mohammed 'Umar, in his Hadir al-Misriyin (The Present State of the Egyptians), (Cairo, 1902) still endeavored to explain to his readers the distinction between "nationalism" and "religion." (J. Heyworth-Dunne, An Introduction to the History of Education in Modern Egypt, London, 1938, p. 287, note 2.) For traditional terms employed to define the Islamic community see Louis Massignon, "L'Umma et ses synonymes: notion de 'communaute' sociale' en Islam" in Revue des Etudes Islamiques, Annees, 1941-1946 (published 1947), pp. 151-157. Also see Haim cited here in note 12.

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have little geographical or historical significance. National interest, not culture, language, or religion, will determine whether they will unite in the future or remain apart. If by language and culture the people of Northern Africa are intimately connected with the Arabs east of Suez, and by religion with 430,000,000 Moslems from Nigeria to the Philippines, by race they are connected with half the world. The Tunisian, for example, has been created, in generous parts, out of Berber, Phoenician, Roman, Vandal, Jew, Arab, Italian, Spaniard, Turk, Negro, and Frenchman, and Tunisia's neighbors are, by race, almost as cosmopolitan or even more so. Yet their racial mixture will not let them fashion links that their nationalism cannot countenance. Racial distinctness, however, proves no barrier. Those blue-eyed, blond, or red-haired North Africans who speak Berber—a language which seems to have no kinship with any other living tongue in the world—are no less nationalist than other Moroccans and Algerians who have discovered—and this discovery is essential —that the social tissues of the past are irreparably torn. What are the essentials of nationalism? Are the state and the nation inseparably connected? The state alone, as a legal, administrative entity, has never been stable, efficient, or heroic enough in the Middle East to inspire any devotion. Egypt has been a state ever since the state was first invented; it discovered itself as a nation only about three-quarters of a century ago. Like the other states of Arab Africa, it became most conscious of being a nation during the period when it lacked an independent government. Does nationalism begin with the rediscovery of the glories of a people's past? In Algeria's case, there is no Algeria to be rediscovered. This object of bloody nationalist struggle did not exist until a foreign nation created and unified it and gave Algerians, after 1848, their first century of history as a separate people. Nowhere are the principal nationalist leaders characteristic representives of the traditional culture. Is nationalism merely a sudden awakening to a fact that was always true—to a prose one had always spoken? Most Middle Eastern countries rediscovered their own past from the work of Western scholars and learned the language of nationalism in [198]

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French and English rather than through their own tongue. That does not warrant the common assumption, however, that the Middle East, in adopting nationalism, is taking over a "Western" ideology. The West, entering the modern age earlier than the Middle East, developed nationalism sooner too. Nationalism, like inductive scientific thought, was at first as alien to the traditions of medieval Islam as it had been to medieval Europe. But nationalism, like science, is ultimately bound to no particular civilization and its various forms can be assimilated by any people that sheds its previous closed system of thought or social structure. Is strong nationalist pressure required to achieve independence? If so, Libya—which had independence thrust upon it by the United Nations—would not be independent today. Is a strong pervasive sense of nationality required to operate a state in the modern world? If so, the Sudan—divided into an Arabized, Moslem north and a largely pagan, negroid south—could not have survived until now. Is the growth of effective nationalist strength directly related to the length of a people's exposure to modern social change? If so, Tunisia and Morocco could not both have achieved independence in the same month of 1956. Tunisia, open to European and Ottoman influences for three centuries, possessed a sturdier middle class and a better organized working class upon becoming independent than most of the countries of the Arab East. Morocco preserved its independence and most of its medievalism from the encroachment of both Europe and the Ottoman East until the twentieth century. Less than five decades later, its nationalist and its labor movement had shown as much strength, determination, and skill in ending French control as had the nationalist and labor movements in Tunisia. Faced with these apparent inconsistencies, Europeans have sometimes concluded that Middle Eastern nationalism is not real, while Middle Easterners have often concluded that nationalism, albeit in a different guise, had been there all the time. H. L. Featherstone examined A Century of Nationalism and concluded that "nationalism is not capable of scientific definition."3 3 H . L. Featherstone, A Century of Nationalism, New York 1939, p. 6. Particularly good, critical reviews of attempts at definition are to be found in

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When Gamal abd al-Nasser came to power in one of the world's oldest states as the leader of one of the world's most articulated nationalist movements, he cried, "If anyone had asked me in those days what I wanted most, I would have answered promptly: to hear an Egyptian speak fairly about another Egyptian. To sense that an Egyptain has opened his heart to pardon, forgiveness, and love for his Egyptian brethren. To find an Egyptian who does not devote his time to tearing down the views of another Egyptian.. .. The word T was on every tongue. It was the solution to every difficulty, the cure for every ill. I had many times met eminent men—or so they were called by the press—of every political tendency and color, but when I would ask any of them about a problem in the hope that he could supply a solution, I would never hear anything but T."4 Had even Nasser concluded that Egyptian nationalism is not real? On the contrary, his very complaint is an authentic voice of nationalism. Nationalism has become the most appealing rallying cry of this age of social change because it allows man to crystallize and express the tension between the self he could once take for granted and the self he now asserts all the more painfully and vociferously because he is not sure what he is, what he is worth, and how he may be secure. The transformation of all previous bonds of kinship, culture, and religion has converted the matter of being into a problem. Nationalism allows modern man to join with all who share his uncertainties in the quest for a new solidarity, for a definition of himself and his group. Obviously a man will love his own folk more dearly than any other ("nationalism" has always existed in this sense), but who are a man's "own folk" to be in this new age? Is a man born in Fez to give his first loyalty to his wife and children (to one wife or to several, to his daughters no less than his sons), or to his father, his tribe, to Fez, to Morocco, to the king, to the Istiqlal Party, or to its offshoot, the National Union of Popular Forces, to North Africa, to France, Louis L. Snyder, The Meaning of Nationalism, op. tit., Frederick Hertz, Nationality in History and Politics, a Psychology and Sociology of National Sentiment, London 1944, and Chapter I of Karl W. Deutsch, Nationalism and Social Communication, New York 1953. 4 Gamal abd al-Nasser, Egypt's Liberation: The Philosophy of the Revolution, Washington, 1955, pp. 35-36.

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to the Arabs, to Islam, to God, to humanity, to himself alone?5 This problem never arose with such scope and complexity before the modern age. The hierarchy of loyalties was clear. Ideally, and usually also in practice, it began with one's loyalty to the head of the family, who determined the next link. Now loyalties are in competition and the nation itself, even in the Middle East's sovereign states, remains a promise rather than fulfillment. Nationalism as a Necessity Yet the price of nationalism has so often run high, especially since all neighboring states are using the same, but non-convertible, currency of nationalism, that one is entitled to ask—is nationalism necessary?6 Certainly it is not an ideology sufficient to be an end in itself; but its popularity is justified and justifiable on the ground that no other vital steps toward controlling social change can precede it. Before the modern age began, small and ascetic communities in static balance, making and meeting no new demands, had no cause for nationalism. Today, however, such balance is threatened everywhere, even in such strongholds of tradition as the Arabian Peninsula, by the impact of competing domestic aspirations and foreign pressures. Communities cannot help but mobilize themselves. As the modern age continues, it may become possible to create grounds for greater courage—for autonomous individuals, freely associating themselves with others, with groups varying as the purpose varies, and for the emergence of units larger than nations. To strive beyond nationalism may be too much to ask of most men so soon after the soul-shaking transformation of traditional society began. 5 The nationality law of the United Arab Republic, for example, having to grapple directly with the definition of "Arab" no less than "Egyptian" or "Syrian," derived its definitions from past, present, and future. It defined an Arab as a person who enjoys the nationality of the UAR, Arab territory as the Egyptian and Syrian regions. The Minister of Interior in Cairo may grant Arab nationality to a person born in Arab territory to a foreign father provided the father was born in the Arab homeland, defined by law as the area between the Atlantic Ocean and the Persian Gulf where the majority of the people speak Arabic or embrace Islam. The president of the UAR can grant Arab nationality to any foreigner who has rendered outstanding services for the state or for Arab nationalism, and to heads of Arab religious sects, (alAhram, Cairo, Iune 25, 1958.) 6 For a recent assessment ending in doubt on this score, see EHe Kedourie's Nationalism, London, 1960.

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Nationalism also has the virtue, in the Middle East as elsewhere, of constituting recognition of the minimum necessities of political participation in the modern world. Organization must precede reform: the "Political Kingdom" must be established first before, in Albert Camus' phrase, men who have been rescued from destiny can deliver themselves from chance.7 In a world in which family and tribe are no longer stable or large enough, where the traditional Islamic state based on dominance and submission may be large but not stable enough, and where the community of true believers is undermined by the decay of a traditional faith, nationalism can establish a new and effective unit for collective bargaining with other groups. To these needs Middle Easterners are particularly sensitive, since most of them obtained their national independence within the memory of living men. They know that, however beneficial colonial rule might have been in introducing a modern structure of administration and economy, the foreigner never intended fully to integrate the local population with the people of his own imperial country nor allow the local peoples freely to find their own roots. The persistence of colonial rule in most countries of the Middle East until the end of World War II therefore delayed the resolution of the imbalances between aspiration and resources, education and jobs, population growth and opportunities, revolution and consensus, that make the present problem so total in scope. When the opportunity at last arrives for the mobilization of 7 The reference to the "Political Kingdom" is drawn from the opening address by Ghana's Prime Minister Kwame Nkrumah to the All-African Peoples' Conference in Accra, December 8, 1958: "My first advice to you who are struggling to be free is to aim for the attainment of the Political Kingdom— that is to say, the complete independence and self-determination of your territories. When you have achieved the Political Kingdom, all else will follow. Only with the acquisition of political power—real power through the attainment of sovereign independence—will you be in a position to reshape your life and destiny." The passage in Albert Camus reads: "[Lucretius] has to admit, however, that atoms do not aggregate of their own accord, and rather than believe in a superior law and, finally, in the destiny he wishes to deny, he accepts the concept of a purely fortuitous mutation, the clinamen, in which the atoms meet and group themselves together. Already, as we can see, the great problem of modern times arises: the discovery that to rescue man from destiny is to deliver him to chance. That is why the contemporary mind is trying so desperately hard to restore destiny to man—a historical destiny this time." (The Rebel, New York, 1956, p. 30.)

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the entire community to deal with the imbalances produced by social change, nationalist rule may turn out to be no better, or even worse, than colonial rule. In a world desperately in need of supra-national authority to enforce international law, it may even seem a dubious premise to suggest that the mere persistence of the nation-state in the Middle East is a major advance. It is true that the national state is increasingly being transcended by the creation of larger units, voluntarily (as in Western Europe) or under duress (as within the Soviet bloc). What has not been so obvious is that if the Sudan (the size of all European NATO nations combined, containing peoples speaking more than a hundred different languages) remains united, it will be succeeding as Europe has not yet succeeded in building a nation equivalent in size and variety to that of a continent. Similarly, the success of Iraq, Lebanon, and Syria in holding together so many large heretical Moslem and non-Moslem, Arab and non-Arab communities within their respective boundaries, and for almost all Middle Eastern states to have achieved cooperation among tribes and clans which for centuries had been fighting each other are no mean accomplishments. In the Middle East, nationalism already represents unification, albeit incomplete, of different languages, tribes, races, and religions. It is a nationalism already equivalent structurally to that force striving for European unification, ahead of it in some areas, behind in others.8 There are, of course, a number of states in the Middle East that are independent but not yet nationalist. The state of Lebanon, for example, is based on the co-existence of ethnic and religious groups, Saudi Arabia on the co-existence of tribes. Such co-existence has always been precarious, and is especially so in modern times when kinships and religious groups lack the cohesion to speak for all their members. Such a balance is forever shattered when too many individuals begin to want to attain status on the basis of universalistic standards of skill and talent, regardless of birth, and when political and economic institutions cannot achieve efficiency and stability on any but such standards. These standards, which tear the web of traditional bonds, can be satisfied only within a larger unit which can shelter the individual 8 The forces for regional, rather than national, unity or disunity are dealt with as the main concern of Chapter 18.

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while he establishes new relationships and reward him for transcending parochial values. Even these nations will need to enter the age of nationalism. The Nation as an Accident However necessary nationalism may be as a principle of organization, the membership of each particular Middle Eastern nation is largely accidental. Common territory, race, culture, religion, and language are useful elements in the making of any nation, but none are essential. The word nation derives from nascere, to be born. The crux of the matter, however, is not birth into a kinship group—that is no longer enough—but into a new community of experience. The crux of the matter is the experience of men who start from the common background of a closed traditional society, and discover that the social transformation that is the modern age leaves them defenseless within and without, as individuals, believers, and members of groups, unless they fashion a new solidarity. For the common experience of the past was the repetitive experience of a closed universe. The common experience of the modern age is the experience of constant change and diversity in a world in which all questions may be opened and no answer is final. Those who are born into this condition of life will be encumbered or aided by many accidents. The territorial frontiers in the Middle East that, in most instances, have for less than half a century marked off a particular people's experience with the modern age from that of its neighbors have almost all been arbitrarily drawn by foreigners. What may begin as an artifice, however, soon develops its own institutional network, and hence its own political and even sacred magnetism. Such a framework of political and economic institutions exercises a strong, independent force in developing loyalties and reconciling rival allegiances within a territory—much more so than is often conceded by nationalist ideology with its emphasis on will, spirit, and myth. Its greater institutional inheritance may well help to explain why Turkey takes its nationalism more for granted than the Arab world, where institutions and cadres had to be created anew. [204]

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Even within a few decades, however, most Middle Eastern states, regardless of their artificial or recent origin, have sprouted a nationalism different in tone or intent from that of neighbors of the same race, language, original culture, and religion. A nation may be formed from a group anywhere between a single tribe and humanity. There is nothing predestined about the size or composition of the group that may form a nation; only the process itself and its consequences are predictable. If, upon actual analysis, such factors as language or religion turn out to be useful but not essential in the formation of nations, one can still learn a good deal about nationalism by asking why nationalists have talked so much about them. In men's search for new roots, nationalism is now a better answer than tribalism, but not as complete an answer as tribalism once was. People in a nation are, at best, only in utilitarian or symbolic contact with each other. Closer relations are possible, but these one can enter only as an autonomous individual. Despite the multiplication of oaths and mass meetings, the sense of belonging to a nation never quite matches the secure sense of kinship and the patterned relationships within a tribe—hence all the hunting in this modern age for additional links among men who in fact are bound by little beyond their common fate. Only those who do not yet feel linked as individuals would look so hard for bonds; only those not yet secure would be so anxious; only those not yet sure about how they compare to their neighbors would worry so much about prestige. What they find in the past may well link them—but only in the context of their common fate. If all of them have always spoken Arabic, it only means that they now face the common task of escaping its ancient, implicit images and concepts, modernizing its vocabulary, and narrowing the gap between written and colloquial Arabic that now impedes the growth of literacy.9 If all of them shared in the historical experience of living under Arab or Islamic institutions, they now share the burden of transforming or discarding them. If they have always lived within the same frontiers, they now share the problem of 9 See Eli Shoubi, "The Influence of the Arabic Language on the Psychology of the Arabs," Middle East Journal, Summer 1951, pp. 284-302, and the

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prospering together by finding modern methods for utilizing the resources their territory offers. If they were once expert in propitiating uncontrolled natural forces which they did not comprehend, they must now become skilled in understanding uncontrolled social forces that cannot be propitiated. Pride in the past can be a strong cement for unity but it is no substitute for any of these tasks. Indeed, nationalism, despite the seeming reassurance of its interest in the past, actually generates new anxieties. It must derogate older loyalties—especially those to family, village, tribe, and the community of believers—before it can fulfill itself. It must capture not the sole but certainly the supreme loyalty of all people within the state. In this battle for loyalties, the nationstate, joined by all the forces of social transformation, often succeeds in destroying the old more readily than in creating new institutions that will assure solidarity, safety, and welfare as satisfyingly as did traditional structures in a traditional world. Partial successes entail their own kind of conflict and confusion: a civil servant who gives special consideration to his young nephew is no longer sure whether he did right, or whether his young nephew can be counted on to return the favor. Government itself, the integrating mechanism of the nation-state, has only in a few Middle Eastern states begun to give some assurance of legitimacy and stability. Modern political leaders may try to cement the nation-state by evoking the emotions of unity that once existed in the Islamic or the Arab tribal community, only to pay the price of undermining the national status of the Christian Arab or the nonArab Moslem.10 For the sake of easing social communication, such leaders thus obscure the very novelty of nationalism, for nationalism arose in this area in large part because the Islamic and tribal community failed. replies thereto: Charles Issawi, "The Arabic Language and Arab Psychology," ibid., Autumn 1951, pp. 525-526, and Abou Hadeed, "Psychology and the Arabic Language," ibid., Winter 1952, pp. 112-114. 10 Efforts to bridge differences between Christian and Moslem Arabs, for example, are likely to be successful only if the "true religion" referred to is in fact neither traditionally Christian or Moslem: "True nationalism can in no case be incompatible with true religion, because it is in essence nothing except

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The Popularity of Nationalism If nationalism is merely a novel crystallization of new tensions in human relationships, why is it more popular than any other Middle Eastern ideology? The fervor of Middle Eastern nationalism draws not only upon the compulsions of necessity but also on fundamental psychological mechanisms. In the midst of all the uncertainties as to status, ideas, and goals that accompany the transformation of Middle Eastern society, no other ideology demands fewer commitments. Nationalism can assert itself without at the same time demanding loyalty to any particular form of government or society, economic organization or values, or any particular religious beliefs. No other ideology presents as cheap a bargain. It offers and demands the most intense form of "togetherness" even before there has been a genuine encounter of individuals and issues. Thus one of the basic attractions of nationalism is precisely that it is nothing more than an organization of insecurity.11 Identification with the movement of nationalism is stimulated by the feeling, often enough a reflection of reality, that neither the individual nor his nation has yet attained status in the world. To define one's self in terms of the group—even though this group is composed of men no more secure than one's self—is nonetheless to benefit from the organization of insecurity. Each can then agree what he is even before any has discovered, or in the midst of transformation rediscovered, who he is. As this fictitious, corporate personality emerges, not only is there the greater strength of number, but also number renders faceless and hence acceptable deeds that no individual would dare commit for himself. It allows people to expand their power by concerning themselves, not so much with the morality of what is a spiritual movement which aims at the regeneration of the inner force of a nation and the realization of its mental and spiritual potentialities. . . . It neither opposes nor contradicts any religion, but accepts them all. . . . As for true religion, it emanates with nationalism from the same spring." (Costi Zurayq, Al-wa'i al-Qawmi [National Consciousness] Beirut, 1938, pp. 126-127.) 11 TrIe phrase, as indeed the title of this chapter, is borrowed from Karl Mannheim, Man and Society in an Age of Reconstruction, New York, 1949, p. 129.

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being done, but who does them. And identification with the nation makes it possible to express all the anxiety, frustration, and hatred that accompanies the transformation of Middle Eastern society, yet to direct these emotions, not against one's self or one's own group which might well be destroyed by them, but against the foreigner. There is not only a psychological attraction to nationalism, but also its appeal as an idea. If an idea is to be successful, especially in a period of transition, it must not seem so novel, so alien, that it prevents communication. Here nationalism has a peculiar advantage. It can more readily exploit the symbols and emotions of the tribal and heroic past than any other movement save that of neo-Islamic totalitarianism, yet, unlike the latter, give them modern secular content.12 The range, tone, and style of most Middle Eastern discussion of the unique character of each regional nationalism mirror— this is one of the ironies of nationalism—the discourse of nationalists everywhere in the world.13 We have therefore neglected to repeat its manifest content here and concentrated instead on its latent meaning. Its content, however, is changing. Although, as late as the 1950's, one could still easily find examples of writings that put Islam above the nation, that still asked what "Arabism" was, or inquired whether Arab nationalism transcended the boundaries of any particular Arab nation,14 a new trend has been clearly observable in more recent years. The newest nationalist writings—especially those inspired by Nasser in Egypt, Bourguiba in Tunisia, and Ben Barka in Morocco—are activist and reformist in character, and self-critical rather than apologetic, 12 Sylvia G. Haim, in "Islam and the Theory of Arab Nationalism" (Die Welt des Islams, N.S., Vol. IV, 1955), examines the transformation of a number of Islamic concepts and concludes that although nationalism "introduces into Islam features which may not accord with strict orthodoxy, it is the least incompatible, perhaps, of modern European doctrines with the political thought and political experience of Islam." 13 See such summaries as Nicola A. Ziadeh's "Recent Arabic Literature on Arabism," Middle East Journal, Autumn 1952, and Hazem Zaki Nuseibeh, The Ideas of Arab Nationalism, Ithaca, 1956. For readers who know no Arabic, Inside the Arab Mind: A Bibliographic Survey of Literature in Arabic on Arab Nationalism and Unity, compiled and annotated by Fahim I. Qubain, Arlington, Middle East Research Associates, 1960, can provide an excellent and concise view of nationalist discussions. 14 For such a sampling, examine Abi Nu'man al-Muhajir, "al-Asabiyah al-

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aggressive, or romantic.18 A similar change can also be observed in Pakistan. In large part, this change of spirit reflects the arrival of a new class. For nationalism appeals not only as an idea but as the ideology of a class. Nationalism first emerges in the Middle East when the traditional bourgeoisie finds sufficient frustrations and incentives in a changing environment to try to oust the foreign overlord and run the country in its own interests. A different spirit of nationalism emerges somewhat later when a new salaried or would-be salaried middle class arises and no longer finds it possible to achieve its interests on any but a national scale, and deliberately sets out to mobilize society for common tasks. Nationalism is popular in several varieties. There are countries where the nation-state is being treated as a community organized to strengthen the individual—and the modern age began, after all, with the rediscovery of the individual—to explore himself and relate himself to his world to the fullness of his capacities. It is difficult to speak confidently of countries in the Middle East where the foundations for such a life may soon be secure, though a majority of them seem to be striving in this direction at least some of the time. Sometimes nationalism becomes a resting place, a useful formula for linking the masses to the reassuring sentiments of the past and the new elite to the reassuring vested interests acquired in the present without allowing a vague sense of dread to become a conscious recognition that nationalism is a symptom of change. (Iraq before the revolution of 1958 exemplified this tenuous phase.) Frequently nationalism remains among the islamiyah fawq al-asabiyat" ("Islamic Group Loyalty Is Above All Group Loyalties"); Al-Muslimun, Cairo, April 1953, pp. 23-25; Ishaq Musa alHusayni, Azmat al-fikr al-arabi (The Crisis in Arab Thought), Beirut, 1954; Mohammed Zaki Baydun, "al-Ummah wa al-qawmiyah," ("The Nation and Nationalism"), Al-Adib, Beirut, September 1959, pp. 33-35; 'AIi Budur, "alTatawwur al-ijtima'i" ("Social Evolution [of the Arab Community]"), Al-Adab, Beirut, March 1959, pp. 9-10, 61-63; Emir Mustafa al-Shihabi, "al-Qawmiyah wa awamilha" ("Nationalism and Its Factors"), Majallat al-Majma' al-ilmi alarabi, Damascus, July 1, 1958, pp. 372-379. 15 Michel Aflaq's Fi sabil al-ba'th al-arabi, Baghdad, 1953, with its assertion of Arab nationalism on existential rather than rational grounds would seem to constitute a midway point in this new trend. See Leonard Binder's detailed exposition of this view in "Radical-Reform Nationalism in Syria and Egypt," Muslim World, April and July 1959, pp. 96-110 and 213-231.

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masses a novel word for an ancient spell—the charisma that always adheres to the region, albeit larger now, where only the true believers are to be found. In still other countries, but not only in the Middle East, the championship of nationalism has often become a defensive strategy of rulers both against threatening neighbors who are no less bent on a frightening quest for reassurance, and also as a diversion of domestic pressures for social change.16 The Limitations of Nationalism Nationalism is a limited ideology. It can create new states, but each state, once created, has its own problems. Like the nationalization of industry, the nationalization of human souls solves only the problem of who is to be in charge, not the problems of stability or purpose.17 Before power is achieved, it may be possible to argue, for example, that "it is not true that the essential goal of North African unity is that daily bread be assured every North African. . . . The goal that the Maghreb pursues in its historic battle against colonialism is that of liberty before bread. The peoples of North Africa do not want bread in slavery."18 The establishment of the nation-state, however, only frees men for the task of making themselves free. The individual's freedom and bread remain to be won. Moreover, those who rely on nationalism in the modern age can suffer the same fate as those who in the past relied on tribal asabiya (a sense of solidarity and virtue)—their state may disintegrate. Ibn Khaldun, the most profound analyst of the decay of traditional Islamic states, could not imagine how a state, once alienated from the tribe that founded it, could retain its asabiya. A society that had never succeeded in fashioning 16 These formulations, though incomplete, suggest that a typology of nationalism developed on the basis of the political function it plays in the course of social change—a useful task which cannot be attempted here—would easily be applicable to both non-Western and Western history. 17 When the Moroccans, in support of their exiled Sultan, were boycotting European goods in 1955, sellers of hashish were said to be increasing their sales by whispering that it was nationalist to buy hashish because hashish is a native product and tobacco is not. (Maroc-Presse, January 10, 1956.) 18 Moujtahid (the newspaper of the Algerian FLN), July 22, 1958.

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enduring political loyalties above warring families and tribes must now learn to build a state resting upon the cooperation of individuals. Such a state requires a new society for its foundation. Because of opportunism, shortsightedness, lack of political and economic skill, or a shortage of needed resources, many leaders persevere in national mobilization without ever passing on to social reconstruction. But the failures of nationalists have also more profound causes deriving directly from the inner and peculiar connection between nationalism and the transformation of society in this modern age. It is the special character of this social transformation that it changes a once closely integrated and static system unevenly; it creates imbalances. One social imbalance in particular produces a profound obstacle to both national mobilization and social reconstruction. A modern, educated, but small and mostly urban, minority faces a large tradition-oriented mass. No rulers of the Middle East ever attempted to mobilize so large a mass whose view of the world was so different from their own. Imbalances produced by social change are among the major causes of the uneasy existence of Syria as a separate nation-state. The nationalists of Syria face the task of overcoming age-old religious and ethnic divisions among a population of about four million, of whom only about 60 percent are Sunni Arabs. (Kurds, Alawis, Druzes, Greek Orthodox, and Armenians are each more than 100,000 in number, and nine other minority groups have more than 10,000 members.)19 The Sunni Arabs have themselves long been traditionally divided among those whose culture is either urban, peasant, or nomad. The two largest cities have always been sharp rivals for political and economic supremacy, with Aleppo (398,000) often oriented toward the Iraqi capital of Baghdad rather than Damascus (395,000), while the third largest city, Homs (130,000), has been striving at least for parochial autonomy. The changes in structure and values that are necessary to transform this mosaic of separate loyalties into a new devotion to the common tasks of the nation-state are made harder by the deadlock that the partial transformation of Syria has created 19

The Middle East, A Political and Economic Survey, London, 1958, p. 453.

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among the social groups that make up the politically active minority. The landowners, the older bourgeoisie (largely Christian), the new middle class, the workers have each either grown, declined, or split internally just enough to be able to act only as veto groups: none are strong enough to take lasting domestic initiatives. As the only ideology that can, for prolonged periods, cement people without committing them to particular social or economic programs, nationalism alone in Syria has held most of the various veto groups together in the face of serious pressures from outside —from Turkey, Iraq, Jordan, and the West, Israel, the U.S.S.R., and Egypt. These pressures have exposed, however, the inadequacy of nationalism as a political alternative in itself. As Nasser once wrote, "to be successful, the political revolution must unite all elements of the nation, build them solidly together, and instill in them the spirit of self-sacrifice for the sake of the whole country. But one of the primary features of social revolution is that it shakes values and loosens principles, and sets the citizenry, as individuals and classes, to fighting each other. . . . For us, the terrible experience through which our people are going is that we are having both revolutions at the same time."20 When the political hold of a ruling nationalist group is unstable domestically, and the state insecure abroad among regional rivals and great powers, the local leaders are not likely to risk shattering a unity built only on nationalist convictions by deliberately taking sides in the social revolution already upon them. The Syrian example indeed suggests a more compelling obstacle: none of the groups may have the strength to come to terms with the social change around them. The result of concentrating exclusively on one manifestation —nationalism—rather than its essence—social change—can result in temporary failure as a nation-state, as the Syrians demonstrated between 1958 and 1961. Others may not be as lucky as were the Syrians in finding none-too-alien receivers and in being able to justify their course on grounds of a larger (Arab) nationalism. The recovery of independence seems merely to have permitted the Syrians to return to their earlier travails. 20

Nasser, The Philosophy of the Revolution, pp. 40-41.

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The imbalances that mark Middle Eastern society in the midst of its transformation cannot be prevented from toppling governments and nations simply by attempts to curb opposition at home in the name of national unity, or to externalize the dire domestic problems of power, welfare, and justice by pretending that such problems arise only in dealings with foreign nations. Less demagoguery, better administration, or the discovery of more resources will not, by themselves, remedy the situation in any lasting way. The real issue is whether Middle Eastern leaders will be inspired by nationalism to organize new institutions large enough and flexible enough to deal with social change. There are many ways to fail. Resources and skills may in fact turn out to be inadequate, and an unsatisfied population aroused to new expectations may not remain content with organized insecurity, but rather seek refuge in organized violence. Courage may be lacking in making internal enemies—the price of controlled social change. Such nationalists, in resting content with nationalism alone, will merely symptomize the travail of their society and will finally be destroyed by social change. Others may deliberately concentrate on mobilization as an end in itself. This kind of ultra-nationalism then tends to become a secular version of neo-Islamic totalitarianism; that is, fascism. Or shortsighted nationalists may also be overthrown by those who have moved beyond nationalism in their own fashion; both communists and neo-Islamic totalitarian groups like the Moslem Brotherhood, for example, are not content merely to organize insecurity. They believe they know what history has appointed and how to hurry men to their preordained fate. Nationalism, being a new phenomenon in history, thus offers a novel choice. Nationalists can produce a new unity based upon power alone, but they run the risk of being consumed by the forces of change they have not mastered. They can also capitalize upon unity and power in order to create new roots for their society. If they succeed, they will inevitably transform nationalism too, making its fundamental concerns no longer the inner search for identity, solidarity, and self-esteem, but rather the self-confident and perhaps also self-possessed and responsible pursuit of the national interest in relation with others. [213]

CHAPTER 11 TRANSFORMING THE PRESENT: THE QUEST FOR FREEDOM AND AUTHORITY

The Radical Requirements of Democracy is probably the most radical political alternative facing the Middle East today. Democracy, as we shall consider it here, presupposes no particular institutional models, but rather certain ground rules and values: (1) belief in the validity of man-made laws; (2) respect for legal institutions and processes even if one disagrees with particular decisions or laws; (3) the enactment of all laws with the participation of representatives of all major social and interest groups; (4) the enforcement of the same rules for ruler and ruled; (5) the right of opposition groups who accept these ground rules to act as if they were, potentially, the future government; (6) legal guarantees for individual rights—both for the free play of reason and conscience and for participation in public life. How much transformation these concepts demand of men and authority in the Middle East! They imply the emergence, indeed the rewarding, of a new kind of individual willing to act on grounds of moral duty and technical competence even if his judgments break beyond the bounds of consensus of the one solid social and political unit he has ever known—the kinship group.1

CONSTITUTIONAL DEMOCRACY

1 A political system may operate successfully on the basis of resolving conflicts among kinship groups rather than individuals. A constitutional system may formalize the rules of the game among kinship groups, castes, corporate bodies, and classes no less than individuals. Democracy, however, rests historically on concepts of individual freedom, and however large the number content to enjoy or acquiesce in democracy passively, such a system requires that its active participants act in the light of individual freedom and the rules required to preserve the same freedom for other citizens.

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To permit democrats to act, society must grant room to a loyal opposition. For the secular-minded minority that provides most of the political leadership in the Middle East today, such a grant of freedom would first require the achievement of a center of authority embodied in institutions acknowledged by all as legitimate, and strong enough to survive diversities of opinion and conflicts of interest. For the great majority of the more traditionalminded constituency, such a grant demands a break, not with God, but certainly with the God of their fathers. The God of their fathers permitted no distinctions to be made between the sacred and the secular, the ethical and the legal, between ultimate concerns and what may be prudent or expedient. In actuality, Islamic orthodoxy acquiesced in the secular wilfullness of individual tyrants even while it dogmatically maintained that no individual could interpret for himself the revealed laws of the Koran. Folk Islam propounded the duty of revolution by the community against impious rulers, but did not grant the individual greater political freedom than orthodoxy did. As long as the central authority of the state asserted itself as absolute, and the law on which it was based as sacred, individual initiative was bound to be either presumptious, subversive, or blasphemous. As a result, differences over political, social, and economic issues in the past could be resolved only through brute power, neglect, schismatic heresy, casuistry, or through the changing balance of tensions among the permanent cast of the political drama. To suppose that any opposition could be loyal would require Moslems to acknowledge that God's revelation was, despite their impression over the centuries, neither final nor perfect, and that believers may honestly differ on what men should make of themselves or alter in their universe.2 Democracy demands an acceptance of politics as the art of the possible and as an art that anyone may practice. But what is possible in an area of scarce resources and skills when everyone tries to practice this art? For the sake of becoming only relatively poor instead of remaining very poor—for the sake of doubling 2 For a most fruitful discussion of social change in terms of the tension between the sacred and the secular, see Howard Becker's "A Sacred-Secular Evaluation Continuum of Social Change," in Proceedings of the Third International Sociological Conference, Amsterdam, Vol. rv, 1954, pp. 19-41.

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per capita annual income from $75.00 to $150.00 in twenty years—most Middle Easterners will need to work much harder, and sacrifice hallowed habits, values, and relationships. Any honest, democratic ruler who presented such a future plainly to a largely tradition-minded majority would almost certainly find himself losing the next democratically held election. In the Middle East neither the acquisition of power nor the absence of power is to be faced with equanimity. Traditional elite and modern counter-elite have not enough common values or even common language to permit them to agree to disagree. Yet men who are denied power in a society in which population is increasingly pressing on resources and the gap between expectations and accomplishments is growing are not inclined to wait patiently for another opportunity. Not only individually but historically, the opportunity may not come again. There are many ways of making progress while resources remain adequate to feed the population. Twenty years hence, when the population of the MiddleTiast will have doubled, the alternatives in many countries will have become fewer and harsher. Thus, instead of political brokers stimulating, clarifying, delimiting, accommodating, and compromising on issues among various classes and interest groups, political relationships in the Middle East tend even now either toward violence against a particular leader or a sense of identification with him. Violence destroys democratic processes. Identification—at least the kind that shrinks the ego of the follower by substituting that of the leader's—prevents democratic processes by destroying the autonomous perception and assertion of the individual, and rests instead upon the sacred strength of the leader's charisma.3 One experienced Middle Eastern economist, Charles Issawi, sees as obstacles to democracy the handicaps among these countries in "size of territory and population, level of economic development, distribution of wealth, industrialization, homogeneity of language and religion, degree of education, and habit of co3 There is, of course, also a rational sense of identification, resting on a perception of common interests, values, ideas, and sympathies. This distinction leaves entirely open the question whether non-rational identification serves, in any particular instance, a good or evil cause, or whether rational identification rests on accurate perception.

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operative association."4 Even this abbreviated list of handicaps leads Issawi to the conclusion that "a long and arduous road lies ahead."6 Freedom and Authority in Traditional Islam There are writers, however, who argue that the traditional tribal structure experienced democracy in practice, that Islam contains the essential roots of democracy, and that no one could be more individualistic, and hence more determined to act in freedom, than the Arab—or Berber or Turk or Iranian or Pakistani. Some Middle Easterners have argued that the traditional tribal council could become an indigenous base for contemporary democracy. It is true that in these councils the older men of a village or tribe consider themselves equal to one another and that accession to leadership is dependent on the acknowledgment of the community. But is it democracy in the twentieth century to fasten the individual to his kinship group and to make his status dependent on agreement with its consensus? Can Middle Eastern countries achieve either stability or progress by strengthening the power of traditional families and tribes, giving formal dignity to their rivalries and bargains? It is now a fact of life that most of these small units have already lost their self-sufficiency, if not their pride, and have yielded predominant power to national governments. The institutional habits of the past continue to have important ideological and practical consequences, however. The survival of the traditional expectation that, after consultation has taken place, it is the obligation of the minority to incline before the majority, predisposes Middle Easterners to accept reformist regimes of a kind sometimes known as "popular authoritarianism" or "plebiscitary democracy." As a community above the reality of tribes, traditional Islam was built ideally upon the equality of believers under a law revealed by God and to be executed, without right of further legisla4 "Economic and Social Foundations of Democracy in the Middle East," in Walter Z. Laqueur, The Middle East in Transition, p. 35. s Ibid., p. 51.

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tion, by the temporal ruler. It is doubtful whether any reference to demos is relevant when law is only to be obeyed but never to be revised or amended. The very possibility of any but a monopoly of political power is ignored in the theory of orthodox Islam.8 In practice, however, Moslems have not merely passively submitted to God's law. The consensus (ijma) of the Community of Believers is an acknowledged source of Shari'a law, though one must not do violence to historical memory by forgetting that this consensus was almost from the first officially restricted to the ulema, who closed the door to individual reinterpretation of Shari'a law to all, including themselves, after the tenth century. Nonetheless, consensus in different forms remained an active force throughout Islamic history. The consensus of kinship, regions, classes, guilds, brotherhoods, even town quarters, has been alive enough to maintain patterns of Islam distinct from orthodoxy, to moderate or even challenge official policies, and, within limits, to assimilate new ideas and activities. On the other hand, neither revealed law nor the common agreement of the community was ever translated into institutions strong enough to curb the tyranny of sultans permanently or to insure civil or political equality among all subjects of the state: there was no independent court, no organized church, no feudal aristocracy, no strong propertied class, no general assembly. The tensions among autonomous groups persisted at the cost of preventing the emergence of a common sense of citizenship in the state. Orthodox Islam defined freedom in terms akin to those of Marxism: the right to do what is necessary to serve a community conforming to history's highest law. Islamic practice, molded by political tyranny and economic oppression and scarcity no less than God's revelation, fashioned freedoms complementary to such a state. There was the freedom to escape dogma, tyranny, or exploitation by being indifferent, by smoking kif or hashish or chewing gat, or by conforming without thought, and hence feeling no burden. A tribe might escape history, and conformity with the 6 Neither was there any concept of a collectivity of individuals with powers to act as a juridical personality. (See J. H. Kramers, "L'Islam et la Democratie," in Orientalia Neerlandica, Leiden, Netherlands' Oriental Society, 1948, pp. 223-239.)

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larger culture, by seeking isolation in the mountains, or following only its own customs during periods of anarchy. There was the freedom to seek a "higher freedom" by dying in holy war; by seeking mystic unity with God, whether by contemplation or ecstasy. There was a certain freedom to be had, too, by softening tyranny through nepotism, bribery, casuistry, and hypocrisy, or through the protection of guilds and religious brotherhoods, or through speculation in ideas or money. For a few, there was temporary freedom to be had at the pinnacle of power—freedom from the obligations of family and tribe, from work, from obeying others, even from revealed law itself. But all these freedoms were fragile and inherent in the functioning of the system and did not threaten its foundations. None of the freedoms that characterize the modern age are provided for in this traditional system and all of them subvert that system. Moslems may now reasonably argue that the time has come to interpret "consensus" and "freedom" in the spirit of the twentieth century. But to borrow Islamic terms such as ijma for consensus does not alter the problem of organizing a new common agreement and institutionalizing consultation among separate individuals, and still co-existing modern and traditional interests. To return to Islam for vocabulary may ease the task of gaining verbal assent, but perhaps at the price of obscuring the difficulties of moving from Islam to democracy. The obstacles to be faced touch the very authority on which modern government is to be founded, its form of organization, and the kind of individual needed to make it function. Can a state derive its authority and the sanction of its laws from the consent of the governed, and at the same time draw upon divine revelation in a sense that makes consent and representation at best complementary to an immutable constitution, and at worst redundant?7 Yet, can a state be democratic, and ignore the religious traditions which still define and inspire the morality and social cohesion of the great majority of its people? The answer is 7 These questions are elaborated by Kenneth Cragg, "Religious Developments in Islam in the 20th Century," Journal of World History, Vol. in, No. 2, 1956, who also cites a useful Moslem contribution to this discussion, Kemal Amin Faruki, Ijma' [Consensus] and the Gate of Ijtihad [Individual Judgment], Karachi, 1954.

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clear, no less in logic than in contemporary Middle Eastern practice. A secular state (which sunders the traditional links between religion, politics, and society) and makes modernization rather than Islam its ultimate criterion of the necessary and the good (in action if not always in words) cannot as yet be democratic. The majority is not yet ready.8 Many Middle Easterners have argued, with considerable support from hopeful Western observers, that the traditional individualism of their compatriots provides a firm foundation for democracy. But there are two kinds of individualism, and one of these sustains democracy while the other prevents growth or makes its survival problematical. An "individualist by ideal" prefers to use his own judgment; an "individualist by default" uses his own judgment only when society does not or cannot enforce its established ways.9 The Moslem has been an "individualist by default". The Moslem's assertion of individual freedom has not been akin to the modern Western view that man, being the most creative part of an evolving creative process, has the duty to actualize his potentialities. In popular Islam, an unseen world demands continual propitiation; in orthodox Islam, the believer has been given rules to guide his entire conduct by a God so powerful that only submission is possible. In his immediate social world, loyalty to family ideally reigned supreme over truth or self in any judgment. In response to tyranny and anarchy in the political realm, bending with the wind became the habit of survival. Not that the Moslem's submission therefore became mechanical. Frequently, fervently, and shrewdly he has sought to assert his personality wherever, by some default in the system, he could break through. Fatalism in Islam exists only in polarity with rebellion. The constant tension between these two poles indeed explains why fatalism can exhibit itself with dignity10 and why 8 This point is argued with great cogency by Wilfred Cantwell Smith in Pakistan as an Islamic State, Lahore, 1951, a book written at a moment when Pakistan was still attempting to become both democratic and Islamic and had not yet turned, as it did in 1958, into a secular authoritarian road. 9 1 owe these definitions to an unpublished draft, "Some Aspects of 'Individualism' and the Problem of Modernization in China and Japan," presented to the American Council of Learned Societies Annual Meeting on Individualism in Asia and the West, January 24-25, 1957, by Professor Marion J. Levy of Princeton University. 10 Ignorance, poverty, and disease, which have always marred that sense of

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rebellion has so often been merely momentary, impulsive, or unsure. It is a canny kind of individualism that has been shaped in reaction to a universe overwhelming in power, and therefore does not easily lead to voluntary integration in large communities or sustained interest in politics. Individualists by default are likely to grow rapidly in number in the Middle East as the process of modernization destroys older structures and standards and opens up new areas of activity still lacking accepted standards to guide individual judgment. In this setting, policy making on a decentralized basis becomes exceedingly difficult. For individualism by default can be extremely subversive of effective capital formation, social planning, and political cohesion.11 Such "individualists" may make the exercise of authoritarian or totalitarian rule more difficult; they make democracy, which has no substitute for the individual, impossible. Indeed as they fail by such individualism to attain the prosperity of modern life, they are even more likely than others to turn to that action in which fatalism and rebellion are synonymous— sacrificing their individuality to a totalitarian movement. The Search for Democracy in the Middle East Still, everyone talks about democracy in the Middle East; no form of governmental organization is more popular. Even authoritarian rulers champion it by defining their regimes as being, in a special sense, democratic,12 or by promising to guide the state toward democracy. That democracy should be valued so highly is an extraordinary phenomenon, especially after the failure or defeat of parliamentary government in almost every dignity, are now combined with a new uncertainty whether any of these must now be endured, and hence have readily moved the Moslem closer to the pole of rebellion. 11 This paragraph merely translates into a Middle Eastern environment Levy's insights on China and Japan (see Individualism in Asia and the West). 12 For example, after General Iskander Mirza declared a state of emergency throughout Pakistan and dissolved the Constituent Assembly, the Minister of Information and Broadcasting explained that Pakistan, like the United States and Great Britain, would henceforth have a "controlled democracy," where "in the ultimate analysis, the leader of the party that wins the vote controls the Parliament, controls the government, and controls every activity of the people of the country." (New York Times, December 5, 1954.)

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Middle Eastern country which has tried it; after a century of resentment of imperialist rule by nations which were, at home, democratic; and after the spectacular success of communism in the Soviet Union. Some of this talk about democracy, of course, is mere talk. Actually, the concept of democracy is just beginning to be clarified by discussion or practice. Its popularity as a word is due in part to the fact that the modern political vocabulary of the Middle East was learned largely from England and France, that using it seems to validate the speaker's status as a modern leader, and makes it easier for him to make political claims on the democratic conscience of the West. It also eases recruitment and mobilization of other social classes by the small elite that leads the nationalist and social revolutions. Democratic slogans seem to validate minority leadership by asserting that its rule is of and for the people and (by their sense of identification is, or by further reforms soon will be) by the people.13 The agitation in behalf of democracy is carried on as lustily by people whom we have here called individualists by default as it is genuinely felt by individualists by ideal. But all this talk about democracy is not entirely instrumental or propagandistic. It is also a manifestation of new social conditions. Every citizen is in fact now in motion and insists, though still in varying degrees, on being accounted for.14 Leaders can no longer hope to maintain themselves in power by relying merely on the support of an army or certain tribal sheikhs or certain landowners. It is not only that the assertion of one's self as 13 Constitutions in the Middle East are often declarations of intentions rather than agreed upon fundamental laws. It was thus quite natural that Adib Shishakli, upon his election as President of Syria in 1953, should declare that "the Constitution is a program of government [and a] guide for the people." (Damascus Radio, July 11, 1953.) " W h e n the press is free, but elections are not, the clash of reality and expectations about democracy can take grotesque forms, as witness this item from a Damascus newspaper after the May 1957 by-elections: "As a result of government terror, pressure on the public, mobilization of all resources of the state, exploitation of ministerial influence, threats and slander directed against all citizens, more than 100 cases of kidnapping, attacks and threats of armed force, and straight bribery, Malki won by 2,645 votes." (Reported by the Economist, May 18, 1957, pp. 604-605.)

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spokesman for a nation conjures up expectations by all citizens within it; nations in fact are being formed and are looking for spokesmen. Democracy is the only concept of government that allows all men to participate in making rules and distributing benefits. Therefore democracy has become the word. Despite such pressures for democracy, the barriers remain greater still. What is at stake in Middle Eastern politics now is the substance of beliefs and the fate of society. In the midst of such a transfiguration, it is not yet possible to treat politics as an autonomous sphere of life. Political democracy has social, economic, and psychological preconditions.15 The road to democracy in the Middle East cannot start from democratic political institutions. In order to reach these institutions, democrats must begin by accepting their inescapably subversive and radical role in the present environment, and deliberately bring about the social and economic changes which are necessary before democracy can reign. The Authoritarian Road to Democracy Despite all the ambiguities in the language of politics in the Middle East, one thing at least is clear. No arguments by any of the rulers for the special virtues of authoritarianism are based on dogmatic assumptions concerning the inescapable laws of history, but rather are entirely contingent in character. Their arguments are thus not novel in political theory and can be examined quite apart from the heat and bias of contemporary Middle Eastern 1B Professor William J. Newman neglects this fact when, arguing for "Liberal Government for 'Backward States' " (Commentary, March 1959, pp. 212-221), he declares that liberalism tries to do "one" thing: "provide a framework of government which combines order and freedom so that change can take place without violence." Professor Carl Friedrich's statement, cited by Newman, that "constitutionalism is about the only system of government which seems able to get along without . . . agreement on fundamentals" is only partly true. To agree to disagree implies either that there are in fact no fundamental differences or that no one is prepared to do battle. Neither applies to the partisans of the Middle East. Part of Newman's greater hope for liberalism in underdeveloped areas arises from his concentration on constitutionalism as divorced from democracy ("the liberal form of government is very much at home with elite and elite leadership") and his more cheerful analytical perspective ("man is a free agent and no one can say what decisions will be made in these states and by what people or what groups. . . . " ) .

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affairs. They were already well articulated a century ago by John Stuart Mill. In a chapter devoted to the proposition "That the Ideally Best Form of Government is Representative Government," Mill asserts that the acceptance of despotism can be excused, but only if "the dictator employs the whole power he assumes in removing obstacles which debar the nation from the enjoyment of freedom."16 Hence any despot who eternalizes a political dogma or institutionalizes terror inescapably excludes himself from this company. Speaking of peoples who have yet "some lesson to learn, some habit not yet acquired," Mill notes— and many of today's Middle Eastern leaders echo him—a number of instances in which a non-representative government would be not only unavoidable but "preferable." Speaking of areas where tribes have long been independent, Mill says that "a race who have been trained in energy and courage by struggles with Nature and their neighbors, but who have not yet settled down into permanent obedience to any common superior, would be little likely to acquire this habit under the collective government of their own body. A representative assembly drawn from among themselves would simply reflect their own turbulent insubordination."17 Not only lack of obedience but "extreme passivity, and ready submission to tyranny," make a people unfit for representative government, Mill suggests. "Many a people has gradually emerged from this condition by the aid of a central authority, where position has made it the rival, and has ended by making it the master, of the local despots, and which, above all, has been single." Such a ruler "was long compelled by necessities of position to exert his authority as the ally, rather than the master, of the classes whom he had aided in effecting their liberation. In this manner a central power, despotic in principle though generally much restricted in practice, was mainly instrumental in 16 J. S. Mill, Considerations on Representative Government, Oxford, 1948, p. 141. Steven Muller, in a paper "On the Problem of Opposition Parties in the New Commonwealth," delivered to the 59th Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, Washington, D.C., September 10-12, 1959, thanks David Spitz for urging him to reread J. S. Mill. Hence I owe thanks to both of them for causing me to reread Mill for the first time in the light of non-Western politics. "Ibid., p. 154.

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carrying the people through a necessary stage of improvement, which representative government, if real, would most likely have prevented them from entering upon."18 Such was in fact the accomplishment of Ataturk, and is the intention of the present leadership in a majority of Middle Eastern states. Societies that "have had considerable practice in exercising their faculties on village or town interests, and have even realized a tolerably effective popular government on that restricted scale, . . . may yet have but slender sympathies with anything beyond, and no habit or capacity of dealing with interests common to many such communities. I am not aware that history furnishes any example in which a number of these political atoms or corpuscles have coalesced into a body, and learnt to feel themselves one people, except through previous subjection to a central authority common to all."18 Mill mentions other considerations where it is "not equally obvious that the government of One or a Few would have any tendency to cure or alleviate the evil." In the Middle East, these arguments carry particular conviction to members of a new middle class that is educated in modern ideas and skills in a fashion so different from the illiterate mass of the population that they become almost a separate and distinct society. This new middle class is likely to be struck by the force of contrast when "strong prejudices of any kind; obstinate adherence to old habits; positive defects of national character, or mere ignorance, and deficiency of mental cultivation, if prevalent in a people, will be faithfully reflected in their representative assemblies: and should it happen that the executive administration, the direct management of public affairs, is in the hands of persons comparatively free from these defects, more good would frequently be done by them when not hampered by the necessity of carrying with them the voluntary assent of such bodies. . . . Under those conditions, government by the representatives of the mass would stand a chance of depriving them of much of the benefit they might derive from the greater cultivation of the superior ranks. . . . The best prospect of improvement for a people thus com18 19

Ibid., pp. 154-5 Ibid., p. 156.

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posed lies in the existence of a constitutionally unlimited, or at least practically preponderant, authority in the chief ruler of the dominant class. He alone has by his position an interest in raising and improving the mass of whom he is not jealous, as a counterpoise to his associates of whom he is."20 The New Authoritarians and the Old Mill's arguments, with their intrinsic concern for the purposes for which authority is used, help to explain the persistence of authoritarian rule in the Middle East, even though a new age has been ushered in. For the first time one can distinguish two kinds of authoritarian rulers. The rulers of the past—whether traditional oligarchs or representatives of a recent status quo resting on the alliance between landowners, army, bourgeoisie, and frequently foreign overlords—all based their power on a calculus of personal relations. They based it upon the tribal sheikh whose uncle was killed, whose nephew was rewarded, whose pockets were filled; upon the expectation of future favors through a third cousin; upon the fear of losing a favor not earned on grounds of talent or skill. Such a power, like Nuri al-Said's in Iraq, cannot be peacefully passed on to a successor. The web of loyalties must each time be created anew: the successor must himself have killed, rewarded, intimidated in order to have all strings in his own hands. Such authoritarian rulers have thus always been vulnerable. The calculus of personal relations is sensitive above all to the anticipation of future favors, not past gratitudes. In the modern age, those who base their power on these personal relations are much more vulnerable than ever before. They are barred, by the very nature of the ties that created their power, from engaging in reforms that might harm existing relationships —not only between those who count and those who do not, but any that would destroy the traditional social pattern in which politics is still synonymous with the calculus of personal relations. Neither new dams nor new policemen are adequate substitutes for reforms of the system itself. That is why rulers like Nuri, who seek to preserve themselves 20

Ibid., pp. 157-9.

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by conserving this traditional pattern, are doomed to do little that comes to grips with the transformation of their society. Yet this transformation has brought into existence everywhere in the Middle East men who, by virtue of their opinions, lack of connections, or sheer number cannot hope to find a place in the traditional matrix of politics. Their weight sooner or later cannot help but overthrow a system that refuses to contain them. Though all Middle Eastern rulers are vulnerable to subversion, conspiracy, and assassination, the implications of their overthrow vary sharply from country to country: when King Hussayn or the Shah of Iran or Nuri al-Said yield their power or their life, their end marks the end of an age; but the end of a Nasser or a Kassim would mark only the end of a phase within the new era. None of the political minorities striving for control of their society, even the moderates, will be able to avoid having to acquire power sufficient to counter-balance the power of vested interests, the harshness of the environment, and their own small number. In the present state of the Middle East, it is not possible to escape a choice between oligarchies. Whether extremists win, however, or else moderates or radicals succeed, remains still an open choice depending in each country on how grave the imbalances are that social change has created, the power constellation among domestic movements, and the balance of benefits and pressures from outside. The distinction that counts among oligarchies today is between those who consciously and deliberately lead a social revolution in order to catch up with the revolutionary consequences of social change among their peoples, and those who merely seek to survive while they can, in style if possible. The Turkish experience under Ataturk demonstrates that it is possible for authoritarian rulers to lay the foundations for democratic participation. The partial reversion toward repressive measures on the part of later Turkish governments does not derogate from Ataturk's achievement. It proves merely what has always been known, that the struggle for freedom knows no final battles. The new authoritarians will not necessarily accomplish more than the regimes they displaced. Indeed, in an area of the world which is just beginning to crystallize its modern perspectives and [227]

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in which resources and skills are scarce, it is not always easy to tell whether a particular ruler cannot, will not, or does not know how to deal with social change. The new rulers have, however, several major advantages over their predecessors. They are the first authoritarian regimes to share certain basic bonds with the politically active masses. They are not deterred by interests of their own from embarking upon fundamental reforms to improve the daily life of the majority. Hence they can at least purchase time by speaking new thoughts even if they turn out in the end to fail in their new deeds. Far less dependent on the calculus of personal relations than the older regimes, they will also be received with far less skepticism when they speak for the entire nation; that is, for all who are no longer bound together by the web of personal loyalties.21 Resort to demagoguery characterizes the new authoritarians even more than the old, who felt less compulsion to address the demos. The new authoritarians are more sensitive to the persisting gap between popular needs and national achievements, and also to the need for maintenance of enthusiasm and a spirit of sacrifice. For the new authoritarians, demagoguery is a genuine symptom of the uncertainties, confusions, and emotions which leaders and followers share. It is a means of achieving communication that instinctively or deliberately will remain endemic until Middle Easterners have consciously re-established themselves and their society on a stable base. Another bond between the new rulers and their followers is nationalism. Those who have not yet succeeded in defining their individual identity find it more comforting to define themselves in terms of a group. Since the nation still remains to be built, nationalism can so far only grant the solidarity of a common passion. The uses and power of such a passion—the strongest and most pervasive in all the Middle East—have been examined 21 NoIe, for example, Nasser's rejection of this calculus of personal relations: "I remember visiting once one of our universities where I called the professors together and sat with them in order to benefit from their scholastic experience. . . . It was unfortunate that none of them advanced any ideas; instead, each confined himself to advancing himself to me, pointing out his unique fitness for making miracles. Each of them kept glancing at me with the look of one who preferred me to all the treasures of earth and heaven. I recall that I could not restrain myself. . . ." (Gamal Abd al-Nasser, The Philosophy of the Revolution, pp. 36-37.)

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in the preceding chapter. Here it remains only to be noted that a ruler who uses his power in behalf of this common quest for identity is likely to be forgiven more by his constituents for demanding sacrifices, or even lying or killing, in behalf of the group than if he were a ruler acting merely in behalf of a dynasty or clique. Most of these bonds are reactions to, not actions toward, the challenges that face leaders and followers in this region. They may buy time for a particular ruler, and so also perpetuate authoritarian rule. Only the effort that removes the barriers to freedom and progress can also put an end to authoritarian rule. Toward Representative Government How can a nation pass from unlimited to representative government? Even one of the most enlightened of twentieth century authoritarian rulers in the Middle East, Kemal Ataturk, twice repressed opposition groups that had organized without his consent. Once he changed his mind and turned against an opposition party he himself had encouraged to grow.22 The Middle East has particular difficulties in finding an answer, having for some decades mistaken parliamentary for representative government. Parliaments there have been in the Middle East —those of pre-Nasser Egypt and Syria and pre-Kassim Iraq readily come to mind—but they have usually been controlled by a small group of leaders traditionally entrenched in society. To accommodate themselves to this structure created for them by foreigners and often welcomed by them as evidence of their own modernity, politicians used its imported language, and termed as "political parties" the various and changing coalitions of deputies with those few outsiders to whom they dispensed or on whom they depended for favors. Mill describes most perceptively the inability of such legislative bodies to hold the government to account on behalf of a larger constituency: "When nobody, or only some small fraction, feels 22 For the first thoroughly documented analysis of the latter episode, see Walter F. Weiker, The Free Party of 1930 in Turkey: Loyal Opposition in a Rapidly Modernizing Nation (a doctoral dissertation submitted to the Departments of Politics and Oriental Studies, Princeton University, May 19, 1962).

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the degree of interest in the general affairs of the state necessary to the formation of a public opinion, the electors will seldom make any use of the right of suffrage, but to serve their private interest, or the interest of their locality, or of some one with whom they are connected as adherents or dependents. The small class who, in this state of public feeling, gain the command of the representative body, for the most part use it solely as a means of seeking their fortune. If the executive is weak, the country is distracted by mere struggles for place; if strong, it makes itself despotic, at the cheap price of appeasing the representatives, or such of them as are capable of giving trouble, by a share of the spoils; and the only fruit produced by national representation is that, in addition to those who really govern, there is an assembly quartered on the public, and no abuse in which a portion of the assembly are interested is at all likely to be removed."23 Thus there were, for example, 45 different cabinets in Iraq between 1921 and 1950, 31 of them between 1932 (when Iraq became independent) and 1950. Yet all the cabinet posts rotated only among about 120 politicians, and General Nuri al-Sa'id remained the principal power behind most governments for almost two decades until a revolution in 1958 altered the entire political and social structure of Iraq.24 There are many local and foreign observers of past parliaments in Egypt, Syria, and Iraq, and contemporary parliaments in Iran and Jordan who have argued, akin to Mill, that when "the evil stops here, the price may be worth paying, for the publicity and discussion which, though not an invariable, are a natural accomplishment of any, even nominal representation."25 In all these Middle Eastern countries, however, it would be hard to say whether such a spectacle, on balance, accomplished some useful 28 24

Mill, Considerations on Representative Government, p. 153. Khadduri, Independent Iraq, pp. 29-30 and passim. The rules of the game in the Middle East during the parliamentary era we have been discussing included certain representational requirements: it was permissible to rig elections, but it was not permissible to exclude your most prominent opponent, at least if your opponent, whatever his particular vested interest, was a supporter of the status quo. Exclusion often brought rebellion. This was the experience of the AIi Jawdat cabinet which broke the rules of the game in Iraq in the fall and winter of 1934-35. (Ibid., pp. 50-53.) It was also the experience of President Chamoun of Lebanon in 1957-1958. 25 Mill, Considerations on Representative Government, p. 153.

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purpose by raising the idea of popular rights, or whether it did more harm by corrupting the popular conception of what democracy might be.26 For if, as Mill realizes, "instead of struggling for the favors of the chief ruler, these selfish and sordid factions struggled for the chief place itself, they would certainly, as in Spanish America, keep the country in a state of chronic revolution and civil war. A despotism, not even legal, but of illegal violence, would be alternately exercised by a succession of political adventurers, and the name and forms of representation would have no effect but to prevent despotism from attaining the stability and security by which alone its evils can be mitigated, or its few advantages realized."27 A dominant single party controlled by a modern Middle Eastern authoritarian ruler whose objectives are "tutelary"—whose function "is not only control and mobilization, but also political acculturation, the preparation of the ground for the emergence of a Western-type associational system and of a Western-type party system with a coherent, responsible, and loyal opposition"28 —may well find it useful to establish a parliament. Such a parliament, however, is likely to place beside the executive, "not as controllers but as subordinates, a body representative of the superior caste, which by its objections and questionings, and by its occasional outbreaks of spirit, keeps alive habits of collective resistance, and may admit of being, in time and by degrees, expanded into a really national representation (which is in substance the history of the English Parliament). . . ."29 26 Certainly the task of those who recognized the fundamental advantages of achieving a truly parliamentary regime was rendered more difficult. "We should not attribute the weakness of representative constitutional government and its failure in Arab countries to the parliamentary system itself," writes Cecil Hourani, currently an adviser to Tunisian President Habib Bourguiba, "but to certain special circumstances most of which still exist." Pointing to the fact that Arab constitutions were not fashioned primarily in response to internal political forces and hopes, he adds, "Before we decide that a constitutional system is unsuited to Arab countries, we should be sure that it was really tried out." "Mustaqbil al hukm al-dasturi fi al-bilad al-'arabiyah" ("The Future of Constitutional Government in Arab Countries"), al-Abhath, Beirut, March 1953, p. 59. 27 MiIl, Considerations on Representative Government, pp. 153-154. 28 Almond, "A Comparative Study of Interest Groups and the Political Process," p. 276. 29 Mill, Consideration on Representative Government, p. 159.

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To achieve even this degree of representation, it is necessary to move beyond the kind of parliamentary regimes which typified the Middle East in the 1940's and most of the 1950's—those in which the influence of members reflected not so much their parliamentary skill or popular support as the traditional weight of their kinship group or their extensive ownership of land. Such "parliamentarians" have every interest to prevent the broadening of representation to include new classes of men with new perspectives on status and power. They have no use for either cadre or mass parties since their own status is unrelated to, if not actually exploitive of, any larger constituency. The emergence of the new middle class as the dominant element in society enlarges, but still sets limits to the feasible representation of the community at large in parliament. AU the political parties of the Middle East that are genuinely based on cadre or mass support are now being led by members of the new middle class. This class, as we have seen, may well divide its political allegiance among a variety of modern ideologies. But what characterizes all its choices is that, in contrast to the perspective still typical of the majority of the population, this class is modern in substance and concerned to satisfy, in the first instance, its own interests or those of one of its segments. The peasants and workers of the Middle East are becoming receptive to political recruitment, but they are not yet ready to organize themselves. Representation of the mass is therefore most likely to be confined for some time to leaders drawn from this newly dominant class or beholden to it. There are likely to be other limitations to a meaningful parliamentary representation of the general population. Parties in competition for a mass clientele of illiterate and inexperienced voters may be prone to engage in strategies for victory that will confine the range of issues to only a few, and may well distort these for the sake of winning. Or if an election has the not unlikely result of creating a parliament truly representative of the full spectrum of existing interests—(1) traditional landowners, traditional religion, wealthy commercial middlemen, (2) members of the new middle class devoted to authoritarian state socialism or state capitalism, and (3) members of the new middle class devoted to [232]

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communist, neo-Islamic, or ultra-nationalist extremism—no political compromise, not even genuine discussion, becomes possible. A multi-party parliament may be able to legislate, or at least be "the nation's Committee of Grievances and its Congress of Opinions,"30 but only as long as a single party in fact remains predominant. Such an institution is a clear improvement over the single party governing alone in that it forces the governing party to justify itself almost continually to a constituency far larger than its own party ranks. The requirements of public debate help to crystallize a shift from the conflict of cliques to the conflict of orientations. It keeps alive the tension between ruler and ruled that remains the mark of authoritarianism no less than democracy, and keeps the ruler from sliding over into totalitarianism, whose crime is that it seeks to make the slave consent to his slavery. Those who demand a parliament that is to be the free and peaceful market place of bargains among landlords, peasants, industrialists, workers, secularists, traditionalists, communists, neoIslamic totalitarians, socialists, and ultra-nationalists—are asking for more than the contemporary Middle East is capable of achieving. A viable parliament demands a political system which is "characterized by a homogeneous secular political culture . . . a multi-valued, political culture, a rational-calculating, bargaining and experimental political culture. It is a homogeneous culture in the sense that there is a sharing of political ends and means."31 For want of such a homogeneous secular culture, the parliaments of Pakistan and the Sudan failed to survive in 1958 and the Lebanese parliament barely managed to survive a civil war which put into question the religio-ethnic balance which its membership is intended to reflect.32 The Middle East may not in the foreseeable future success30

Mill, ibid., p. 172. Almond, "Comparative Political Systems," p. 398. See Khalid Bin Sayeed, "Collapse of Parliamentary Democracy in Pakistan," Middle East Journal, Autumn 1959, pp. 389-406; Helen A. Kitchen, "The Sudan in Transition," Current History, July 1959, pp. 35-40; Nabih Amin Faris, "Report on Lebanon," Middle East Report 1959, edited by William Sands, Washington: The Middle East Institute, 1959, pp. 39-41. 81 82

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fully complete the transition from authoritarian to democratic regimes. The danger seems less that the powerful will be corrupted by power than by the fear that they still do not have enough power to avoid being overwhelmed by their problems. It may, oddly enough, be the successful authoritarian ruler who is most likely to prepare the ground for constitutional democracy. His success, from any perspective, will be tested by whether he has given adequate employment to the growing reservoir of men powered by new skills and knowledge. Such men may yet try to coerce or cajole others, as they themselves may be coerced or cajoled. But from such men, more than any other, is also likely to come the substance, strength, and confidence which inspire individuals to insist that power be shared.33 33 These issues are further explored in Chapter 14 dealing with the role of political parties.

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CHAPTER 12 TRANSFORMING THE PRESENT: SOCIALISM FOR THE FEW, FOR THE MANY, OR FOR THE AGGRANDIZEMENT OF THE STATE?

*8 8* NEXT to nationalism, no ideology in the Middle East is more popular than socialism. Indeed, the plenitude of parties today that are socialistic in content if not in name contrasts startlingly with the near absence of such parties, genuine or otherwise, thirty years ago, and with their small size and number even fifteen years ago, at the end of World War II.1 The open and avowed popularity of socialism is a phenomenon of the 1950's. Arising so recently, and in an era of repression and one-party regimes, socialists of whatever stripe have not yet had opportunity to clarify the great differences among themselves. In all countries from Morocco to Pakistan since World War II, the names of scarcely half a dozen parties have borne the official label "socialist." Of these, the Egyptian Socialist Party, led by Ahmed Hussein, was in fact fascist; the Socialist Republican Party that staged a brief appearance during the Sudanese elections of 1953 was comprised of pro-British sheikhs hunting for urban support; the Islamic Socialist Party of Syria was just another name for the neo-Islamic totalitarian Moslem Brotherhood. A Turkish Socialist Party was founded in 1946 but outlawed that same year. The Arab Socialist Resurrectionist (Ba'th) Party, a recognizably socialist party, has overt or covert branches in Syria, 1 In the early 1930's, characteristic of the handful of socialist groups with limited membership were a Turkish group, whose opinions were best expressed in the magazine Kadro (see Kemal H. Karpat, Turkey's Politics, pp. 70-72), and the Ahali group in Iraq (see Majid Khadduri, Independent Iraq, Oxford, 1951, pp. 71-75).

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Iraq, Jordan, Egypt, and Lebanon, but in each of these countries it faces competition from other movements which, despite a great variety of names, all champion "socialism." As an instrumentation of government policy, socialism in the Middle East greatly antedates its endorsement as an ideology. Its future, both in government and as a body of systematized thought, is likely to owe as little to European models as its past. To explain Middle Eastern "socialism," therefore, one must fall back on sociological analysis rather than socialist theory. The Tasks of Socialism in the Middle East The proclaimed goals of European socialism were the destruction of economic and hence political domination by "monopoly capitalists" and the more equitable distribution of income and goods. Its principal moral aim was to end the exploitation of man by man. Middle Eastern socialists confront a situation in which the most powerful economic organizations are either still owned by foreigners or already owned by their own government. Urban workers constitute little more than, at most, about seven percent of the population, and many of these remain unorganized, unskilled, and recently arrived from the rural countryside where most men remain miserable sharecroppers. Poverty is all that is available at the moment for more equitable distribution. Socialism in the Middle East thus begins a long way from its goal. The lessons of Western European socialism cannot be readily applied, for the Middle East will not recapitulate the West's development, even in telescoped form. The virtues of capitalism are already being questioned by the majority of the new salaried middle class and governments are curbing its free operation even before a strong, native, modern capitalist class has emerged. The arguments used against capitalism differ from the indictments of that system by European socialists. For historical reasons, the capitalists of the Middle East have been relatively smaller and more insecure as a class than their European counterparts. Most of them have been interested in quick turnovers rather than longterm investments. An unusually large number have the tenuous minority status of being Christians or Jews. Modern capitalism [236]

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appeared originally in many areas of the Middle East as harbinger or in the wake, of Western imperialism. Socialism in the Middle East has therefore always been strongly nationalist. When the largest and most important private enterprises are owned by foreigners, and the next largest by local entrepreneurs often dependent on them, to be pro-capitalist seems to make one appear pro-British, pro-French, or pro-American. Hence acts of nationalization are above all declarations of national independence. Not only have such giant enterprises as the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company and the Universal Suez Canal Company thus been nationalized without pitting socialist and private capitalist against each other in domestic political conflict, but also the role of government has generally become decisive in the economy of all Middle Eastern countries in recent decades without much ideological debate. Historically, the state in this region of the world has always been the principal owner of capital (often of the source of capital, land), the principal source of contracts, and the supervisor of the rules of trade and production. State ownership, control, and guidance is an inheritance of the Middle Eastern economy. But if the state is now the largest employer in the majority of Middle Eastern countries, there are also new reasons for it. Broadly speaking, foreign enterprisers no longer consider it wise to invest, and domestic enterprisers do not yet think it prudent or are not yet sufficiently capable or skilled. Certainly, even when the latter do appear (and there are some remarkably able local capitalists), there are not enough of them to lay the foundations in infrastructure and investment sufficient to assure rapid progress for the nation as a whole. Only the state remains to mobilize capital and skills. The call upon the state to intervene, and to do so quickly and decisively, also arises from the increasing pain of poverty in the Middle East. In many countries during the past few decades an already low standard of living has been reduced still further: modern sanitation and public order have prolonged life, and there are now more people on poor land. In many countries, the disparity between rich and poor has become both greater and more visible. Many of the rich became richer only recently, in [237]

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the period of scarcity and inflation following World War Π. They call to mind a similar group in pre-revolutionary Russia: "As Russia became industrialized, in a sudden rush of activity which took place around the turn of the century, there were clearly apparent the absence of an adequate tradition of responsibility and restraint on the part of the capital-owning class and a general lack of preparedness, on the part of the state and of society gen­ erally, to cope with the new strains. This industrial development, proceeding largely on the basis of individual enterprise rather than of widely distributed corporative ownership, was marked by sudden accumulations of fortunes in the hands of individuals and families not always well prepared for such affluence. Often the mode of expenditure of wealth appeared to other people as little creditable as the means by which it had been accumulated. . . . Such conditions often bore greater resemblance to the pattern of early Industrial-Revolution capitalism, as Marx had described it, than to conditions in advanced Western countries. This fact may well have had something to do with the success of Marxism in Russia. The Russian industrial capitalist was generally visible in theflesh,and as often as not he had the rotundity, and sometimes (not always) the vulgarity and callousness, of the capitalist of the early Communist caricature."2 Poverty, in turn, now produces more discontent than ever before. There are now more things that the poor cannot buy. Pov­ erty is also harder to endure since for the first time Middle East­ erners have come to believe that it can be cured. In the beginning the poor were enlisted in the cause of nation­ alism by being told that imperialist exploitation was the cause of their misery. Sovereignty came, but their misery continued. Some­ times it grew worse. It was true, of course, that the first regimes to inherit power in independent Middle Eastern countries often represented a wealthy oligarchy. But in this part of the world, not even those who call for a change of ruling groups and a reorganization of the economy can bring about an early end of poverty. What is actually needed are patience, hard work, selfdiscipline, and a profound change of values, even enforced sac2

George F. Kennan, "America and the Russian Future," Foreign Affairs, April 1951, p. 353.

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rifices. These are harsh demands. Yet the rapidly growing numbers of the poor, and of a dissident, educated, would-be salariat without jobs, have convinced the dominant salaried middle class that it must either employ the apparatus of government to deal with poverty or perish. The Faces of Socialism If socialism has produced few ideological theoreticians in the Middle East, it is perhaps because socialism has come about through necessity rather than reasoned conviction. The result often is an unsure grasp of political and social problems. Few socialists are yet knowledgeable in dealing with the transformation that was already revolutionizing politics, economies, and societies even before socialists first appeared on the Middle Eastern scene. The use of governmental power unchecked by a philosophic commitment to the freedom and welfare of the majority has, however, sometimes resulted in a Middle Eastern "socialism" that benefits only the few. Some leaders have nationalized foreign enterprises merely for the sake of political expediency or even as a substitute for new investments, thereby creating new employment only in the displacement of foreigners. Governmental organization and control thus become a profit-sharing system whose benefits are restricted to those who hold political stock in the ruling group. Others, like Ataturk, have employed government initiative primarily for strengthening the power of the nation-state and its technocratic elite rather than augmenting the welfare of the majority. These forms of "socialism," however, are yielding increasingly to a much more far-reaching variety. It is becoming more difficult in the Middle East to avoid giving socialism a social (and not merely a nationalist) content. Let us look at one of the Middle East's major socialist parties—the Arab Socialist Resurrectionist Party, commonly called the Ba'th Party3—and one of the major practitioners of Middle Eastern socialism, Gamal abd al-Nasser, to see what roads are being taken. 3

Its full name in Arabic: Hiz* al-ba'th al-arabi al-ishtiraki.

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The Ba'th Party grew out of a merger in 1953 of two parties: the Arab Resurrectionist Party, founded in 1947 by the Christian Arab Michel Aflaq (who quit the communist party in 1944) and the Moslem Arab Salah al-Din Bitar; and the Socialist Party founded by the lawyer Akram Hourani in 1950. The Ba'th's constitution is the program of "a national, populist, revolutionary movement fighting for Arab unity, freedom, and socialism."4 Its nationalism is marked by its devotion, not to any particular Arab state, but to the Arab people as a whole, combatting "all other denominational, factional, parochial, tribal or regional loyalties." Its headquarters are now in Damascus, but they "may be transferred to any other Arab city if required by the national interest." The resurrection of which the party speaks gives Islam a special but subordinate place: "The Arab nation is distinguished by its special merit, revealed by its repeated awakenings. It is marked by the abundance of its vitality and inventiveness, and its tendency toward reform and resurgence." Islam is never mentioned by name; the implication seems to be that it belongs to the era of an earlier awakening. This socialist party begins its programmatic statement by declaring that "socialism will guarantee the continuous growth of the nation in its spiritual and material development; and it will guarantee close brotherliness among its individual members." The Ba'th Party "is a revolutionary party: it believes that its main goals of reawakening Arab nationalism and building socialism cannot be achieved except by revolution and struggle. The party believes that to rely on gradual evolution and partial reform threatens these goals with failure." Although the party in its revolutionary goals is concerned with "all intellectual, economic, social, and political aspects of life," its constitution says nothing about necessary first steps to these ends, but leaps at once into a world of free democracy and 4 For an English translation, see both Leonard Binder, "The Constitution of the Arab Resurrection (Ba'th) Socialist Party of Syria," Middle East Journal, Spring 1959, pp. 195-200, and the corrections of this translation by Nicholas L. Heer and Howard E. Koch, Jr., Middle East Journal, Autumn 1959, pp. 487489. The translation in this chapter is based directly on the original text, Shark dustur hizb al-ba'th al'arabi al-ishtiraki (no publisher or date), and hence differs occasionally from both of these English versions.

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socialist welfare. Government will be "representative and constitutional," and elected in "free" and "honest" elections; administration will be "decentralized," the judiciary "will be protected from and independent of every other authority." "Intellectual labor is one of the most sacred kinds of labor. It will be incumbent upon the state to protect intellectuals and scholars and to encourage them." At the same time, workers will participate in the management of factories, and, in addition to wages fixed by the state, will share in the profits. Land will be redistributed: large industries and utilities nationalized; ownership and inheritance, "within the limits of national rights," are otherwise "natural and protected rights"; the state will both require and guarantee employment; "comprehensive" economic planning will be the order of the day. Except for a great deal of talk about "revolution and struggle" little attention is given to the means for transforming society into something better. The talk instead is about the need for unity. In a collection of speeches and editorials by the Ba'th's chief ideologist, Michel Aflaq, this need is reiterated time and again.5 "Freedom, socialism, and unity are fundamental aims and equal in importance. One cannot be separated or postponed from the rest. But there is also no doubt [so runs the next sentence] that unity, which expresses the all-inclusive Arab character, has a priority and a prime significance which Ba'thists should not disregard.6 Or, "socialism is the body and unity the spirit."7 But somehow the spirit always overshadows the flesh: "The problem of the distribution of wealth . . . is a critical problem which occupies first place in our thought and struggle, but we never regard it as the original problem. It rather stands in the way of perceiving the real problem . . . reviving the spirit of our nation. . . ."8 The political chief of the party, Akram Hourani, resolves the matter on purely pragmatic grounds. Any person, he writes, irrespective 6 Ma'rikat al-masir al-wahid (The Battle for a Common Destiny) Beirut, Dar al-Adab, 1958. 6 Ibid., p. 18. Or see the two sentences following each other on p. 37: "In accordance with our single perspective on the Arab cause, we do not believe it possible to separate Arab unity and socialism. Arab unity is higher and superior in the hierarchy of values than socialism." 7 Ibid., p. 38. s Ibid., p. 35.

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of motives, who divides the national front at this stage assists imperialism. The motto shall be "more devotion and unity." The resolution of disagreements about methods and plans for Arab welfare must await victory.9 The compelling need to fashion national unity in Middle Eastern countries, as well as the unresolved conflicts over national interests among Middle Eastern socialists, continues to make socialism ancillary to nationalism. Increasingly, however, its connection with nationalism is becoming closer and more secure. When Hourani wrote the editorial just quoted, Syria was being severely shaken by internal conspiracies and foreign pressures. At such a moment, and such moments have been frequent since World War II, Middle Eastern socialists sometimes shrank from dividing the nation by pushing for reallocation of power and benefits, or even merely by clearly outlining the sacrifices required before socialism can benefit the many. That attitude is changing. Since 1958, the severe political conflicts within Syria and Iraq, and between these and several other Arab states and Egypt, have never been over the meaning of nationalism alone, but invariably also over the adoption of socialism. This change is especially evident in the performance of President Nasser. As late as 1959, he still spoke feelingly of the problem of finding his way: The Egyptian "revolution (thawrah)," said Nasser, "must be understood, in reality, not as a simple change of the individuals in power—this would be a coup d'etat (inqilab)—but as the attempt to change the foundations of society. If we examine the state of the country in the light of the past seven years, we must frankly admit that the revolution has not been achieved. It is today only at the threshold. . . . The revolution carried out by the Egyptian army was not the reply to an urgent need of society. In truth, it was more than that—a reaction to a mortal danger, gathering all the forces of the country • al-Ba'th (Damascus weekly) March 23, 1957. Even at such a point socialists remain clearly distinguishable from another group which uses the word "social" {'ijtama'i—an adjective referring to society) rather than "socialist" {'ishtiraki—an adjective referring to cooperation) to describe itself. The Syrian National Social Party, like similar parties in France, Italy, and Spain, believes that if anything is needed, it is discipline and purification rather than freedom and reform.

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and mobilizing them for a decisive struggle. In any case, however, the army did not have any exact idea of the needs and aspirations of the people, and years of experiment and error were required before we could learn what these were. . . . Though it felt the need for a radical change in society and state, the army knew neither the way nor the means of achieving this; it was completely lacking in experience and preparation."10 With all his candor, Nasser is too modest in suggesting that he knew no more in 1959 than in 1953 when he wrote the Philosophy of the Revolution. To be sure, he has not yet become a philosopher-king, and there are as yet no Middle Eastern or foreign theoreticians who have dealt with the issues that men like Nasser encounter in transforming their own society.11 Nasser and his colleagues have not yet written more clearly than the Ba'th Party about socialism, but since about 1956 it may at least be said that his practice has been more explicit and more far-reaching than his theory. He, like other governing leaders drawn from the new middle class, has discovered that rulers can no longer avoid giving priority to the pressure from below for opportunity and status. Socialism for the sake of a technocratic elite, as in Ataturk's Turkey, is no longer enough. Those who mean to avoid the extremes of communism and neo-Islamic totalitarianism are left with only three choices: temporary survival through repression; temporary adventurism through ultra-nationalism; or hard work over a long time, even if marred by repression and demogoguery, to achieve welfare for the many. All three roads demand national unity. AU three are easy to justify in the name of national unity. Even welfare-minded leaders can neglect the claims of nationalism only at their peril. But, as we have already observed in Chapter 10, nationalism can help to mobilize a nation, but it cannot keep nationalists alive. Some Middle Eastern leaders, for example Tunisia's Bourguiba and Morocco's Ben Barka, early recognized the need for giving 10 Gamal 11

abd al-Nasser in an interview with al-Ahram, Cairo, July 2, 1959. The American socialist leader Norman Thomas says of his conversation with Nasser: "He is clearly an advocate of the welfare state," but "I questioned the President about his understanding of democratic socialism and got no very clear answer." ("Notes on Socialism in the Middle East," Dissent, Summer 1958, p. 250.)

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nationalism a social content.12 Nasser, who has appeared to be much less consistent, may therefore be worth studying in this regard. Within a year after the July 1952 revolution, Nasser had written that "we are going through two revolutions, . . . a political revolution by which [a people] wrests the right to govern itself from the hand of tyranny . . . and a social revolution, involving the conflict of classes, which settles down when justice is secured for the citizens of the united nation." He anticipated inconsistencies: "It was not within our power to stand on the road of history like a traffic policeman and hold up the passage of one revolution until the other had passed by in order to prevent a collision. The only thing possible to do was to act as best we could and try to avoid being ground between the millstones, . . . however contradictory our actions might at times appear."13 The "Six Objectives of the Revolution"—"elimination of imperialism and its helpers, elimination of feudalism, elimination of monopoly and its domination of the government, the establishment of universal social justice, the formation of a strong, patriotic, national army, and the creation of sound democratic life"— were constantly kept before the public. The need for "work, sweat, and effort" over a period of "many years" remained a steady theme in Nasser's speeches. Democracy, it was made clear, would come only gradually: "There will be democracy and freedom, but we must first be free from exploitation, despotism, and slavery. I cannot understand how there can be freedom if I am not free to find my bread and make a living, and free to find employment."14 Socialism and cooperatives had immediate priority: "We consider that the state has tutelage over both private and public property, and the responsibility for the protection of the individual against all economic and social exploitation."15 In 1959 the government undertook to finance 60 percent of the new projects during the following years, and thereby double Egypt's 12 The views and activities of these two leaders are discussed in detail in Chapters 14 and 15. 18 The Philosophy of the Revolution, pp. 39-44. "Nasser, in a speech broadcast over the Egyptian Home Service, April 30. 1954. "Nasser, in a speech broadcast over the Egyptian Home Service, August 9. 1959.

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standard of living within a decade. In the meantime, it continued to subsidize the four staples of the Egyptian poor—tea, sugar, wheat, and kerosene. By 1962, Nasser had nationalized all large Egyptian enterprises, expanded land reform, and placed all important sectors of the economy under the control of sociahst planners. He also raised taxes to 90 percent on incomes above $23,000 ( £ E 10,000), placed workers on company boards of directors, and introduced profit-sharing for employees. The West's major encounters with Nasser have drawn attention primarily to his nationalism. It was easy to miss the socialist features that were connected even with the most dramatic nationalist events. These critical moments demonstrate how much the progress of socialism in the Middle East depends on the successful or at least fortuitous solution of nationalist grievances, and also how this close connection between socialism and nationalism can inhibit rational long-range planning. When Nasser startled the world by acquiring arms from the Soviet Bloc, he also used the Bloc to an even larger extent as a source of credits for the economic reconstruction of Egypt. When Nasser suddenly reacted to the biting American withdrawal of a previously offered loan by nationalizing the Suez Canal Company, he put into execution merely sooner than expected a plan then already under study for acquiring additional local revenues for economic development through ownership of the canal. After the Anglo-French Israeli invasion of Egypt came the Egyptianization of foreign banks, insurance companies, and importfirms,all of which made the Egyptian state a still weightier factor in the control of the Egyptian economy. It made the next step easier. The Industrial Organization Law of April 1958 allowed the government to consolidate standing enterprises, to establish guaranteed monopolies for private or public firms, and to control the type, amount, and quality of all goods to be produced.16 When Nasser attempted during the 1950's to persuade or force other Arab states to join with him in the establishment of a single, united Arab state, he was motivated in part by the undeniable fact that only such a state would possess sufficient domestic re16 Law No. 21, Official Journal, United Arab Republic, No. 7 bis A, April 29, 1958.

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sources to allow Arabs of the entire region to make rapid economic progress. The socialism of the newly independent and underdeveloped countries may look strange to an orthodox socialist. It looks less so if one compares it to the actual evolution of many Western European socialist parties whose ideology in recent decades has, as in the Middle East, often become indistinguishable from the general concepts of the welfare state. The principal support of such socialists now also comes from the salaried middle class, and their principal political concerns are also often nationalist.17 Middle Eastern states have, however, more unfinished nationalist business. There are also additional significant differences between Western and Middle Eastern socialism. Socialists in the West have little to say about the accumulation of capital and for some time now have aimed their criticism at abuses of wealth and production. The socialists of the Middle East cannot offer anything but an equality of wants—poverty without exploitation. Nor are they ready to publicize the implications of their problem: it does not seem quite socialist (or nationalist) to depend for capital on the largesse of foreigners (some capitalist, some formerly imperialist, some communist, some socialist) and above all on the sacrifices of the great majority of one's own workers and peasants. Middle Eastern socialism has never worried about an issue that has long constituted a theoretical and practical problem for Western socialists, and has become a matter of dogma for Soviet communists. No Middle Eastern socialist movement insists on calling itself the representative of the working class. Such movements in the Middle East are always in fact, and usually in theory, based on an alliance among the new middle class, the workers, and peasants, with the first group clearly in charge. This is true even of the most radical socialist movements. As a result, an entire mythology concerning the historical role of the working class has been avoided, although another populist mythology concerning an undifferentiated "general will" tends to take its place, 17 It was, after all, the Socialist Premier Guy Mollet who enlisted France in the military campaign against Egypt in 1956, in part in order to help preserve French colonial controls in Algeria.

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though with few illusions on the part of the guiding leadership. Socialists in the Middle East are not burdened with the dogmatic assumption that private ownership of the means of production is the exclusive or inevitable source of exploitation. They are, of course, eager to fashion the means of production, but while this task is unfinished, they are essentially indifferent to property relations. They are skeptical of the virtues of private enterprise, but are not opposed in principle to any form of private enterprise that is productive and non-exploitive. Their socialism invariably envisages a mixed economy, with the government, however, clearly in charge of the mixture. What is even more important, they are alert to the fact that governmental enterprise can also be corrupting, unprogressive, and exploitive. If Middle Eastern socialism thus tends to be undogmatic, it still lacks sufficient practical theory (in common with everyone else) for the rapid but non-totalitarian development of backward areas. If it lacks adequate theoreticians, it is at least in the hands of politicians who are responsive, much of the time, to real needs. Socialism in the Middle East is post-communistic. This is a fact of enormous significance. In contrast to both the West and the Soviet Union, all socialist parties were founded later than the communist parties, and almost everywhere they have become more powerful than the latter.18 Socialism has a competitive advantage because its nationalist loyalty is beyond doubt, and, unlike its European counterparts, works not merely for amelioration but also for radical changes in the social structure. Because the overthrow of the landlords and the rise of the new middle class turned out to be a startlingly simple and almost entirely bloodless affair, there has been no major reaction against socialism as an ideology. Except from the communists and neo-Islamic extremists, who proclaim a "socialism" of their own, criticism has been largely directed toward performance and personalities. It is, however, a socialism that has not yet received its full test: it calls for sacrifices now for the sake of welfare later, for authoritarianism today in return for democracy tomorrow. We have dis18 Cf. Sidney Lens, "A Report on Asian Socialism," Dissent, Winter 1955, pp. 56-65. Also Saul Rose, Socialism in South Asia, London, 1959, especially pp. 263-267.

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cussed elsewhere the crucial problems that socialism will eventually have to face.19 We note here only that if the attempt to create a socialism for the many is only partly successful, there can easily be a reversion to a "socialism" for the few and demagoguery for the many. Middle Eastern socialists will need to prove their capacity, under conditions of great scarcity, to use power and share sacrifices ascetically without being tempted to convert their ideology into that brand which German fascists called "national socialism." 19 Chapter 11 discusses the tension between power and freedom; Chapters 13-16, the risks and opportunities in the instruments involved; Chapter 17, the possible costs.

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INSTRUMENTS OF POLITICAL MODERNIZATION

THE authoritarian, socialist, and nationalist rulers of the Middle East and North Africa have, with varying degrees of enthusiasm and success, concentrated on four instruments for mobilizing their societies for rapid political modernization—military bureaucracies, political parties, trade unions, and civil bureaucracies. These spearheads of the salaried middle class are examined in the four chapters that follow. Our focus thus is on institutions that can organize large masses of men and intergrate them, with authority, into the new body politic. Other available instruments for creating a new political culture—the family, schools, and the media of communication—have been neglected in the present volume. In the Middle East, the search for effective institutions is borne of a double emergency. Most institutions now in existence are inadequate either to deal with the imbalances and frictions in all areas of life which have already been produced by uncontrolled social change, or to satisfy the growing aspirations for developing a productive modern society. Both political emergencies require the rapid building of institutions that can introduce an element of constancy and control in the midst of continuing social change.

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*8 8* The Army's Traditional Role have governed a majority of the Middle Eastern countries almost continuously for at least a millennium. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that during 1962 the army ruled five of the eighteen countries between Morocco and Pakistan (Egypt, Syria, Sudan, Iraq, and Pakistan), and constituted the most crucial organizational support of the government in at least eight others (Iran, Jordan, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Afghanistan, Turkey, and Algeria). Since 1930, military coups have overturned governments on at least thirty occasions in this area, and at many other times pressure from the army or an army faction proved decisive in altering the composition of government and the direction of policies. There has never been a tradition in the Middle East of separating military from civilian authority. On the contrary, the common way for a leader in traditional Islam to form a state (that is, to achieve rule over people not his own kin) was to conquer. Religious conversion might create the nucleus of an empire or win additional adherents, but conquest invariably was the main expanding force. AU new states began under rulers who combined in their person both military and civil authority. The Prophet Mohammed and the caliphs after him always bore the responsibility of being "Commander of the Faithful." Once a conquered realm had grown so large that the ruler could no longer rely on his own tribesmen to defend it (because their spirit had become too indolent from the enjoyment of the fruits of [251] SOLDIERS

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conquest, or too dangerous as nearest claimants to the throne, or their number insufficient), the ruler customarily resorted to mercenary or slave armies. Thereafter, given the usual weakness of civilian institutions manipulated by interlocking directorates of fickle favorites unable to match the strength of the army, it was only a matter of time until the ruler became the captive of his military protectors. Thus, within two hundred years of the Prophet Mohammed's death, or from about 830, the caliphs of Baghdad had lost all but their titular power in the Islamic empire to mercenary soldiers. By the end of the eleventh century, the greatest Islamic medieval theologian, al-Ghazzali, acknowledge the fiction of the Caliphate and admitted that "government in these days is a consequence solely of military power and whosoever he may be to whom the holder of military power gives his allegiance, that person is the Caliph."1 The sultans of the final Islamic empire, the Ottoman Empire, often reigned under military duress in Constantinople and so, with even greater frequency, did the rulers of Algiers, Tunis, and Cairo and other Islamic areas which sometimes acknowledged the suzerainty of Constantinople. When thefirstIslamic empire was being created in the seventh century, a number of factors combined to give special status to military leaders by identifying their fortunes with the interests of several vital segments of the society. The impetus for military conquest was sustained by the inbred enthusiasm and organizational readiness of Arabian tribes for perennial raiding, the profit interests and urge for secular power which motivated the urban Meccan dynasty, and the religious injuction to the new Community of Believers to expand the realm of Islam by "holy wars." However, by the ninth century, mercenary or slave armies took the place of voluntary fighters at the core of the military establishment. Individual officers intervened in politics both to enhance their own wealth and power, and to protect the continuity of the army as the instrument of their predominance. When Islam's expansion was finally contained, power and wealth could be gained only at the expense of other Moslems, 1 Kitab al-lktisad fi'l-I'tikad, p. 107 cited by Gibb and Bowen, Islamic Society and the West, Vol. I, Part 1, p. 31.

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and the political unity of the Community of Believers was lost. Then bribery, nepotism, and assassination were frequent tolls paid on the road to power, but the roads themselves led in two principal directions. Booty and land could be seized by expansion into the lands of rival Moslem rulers. The other course was maintenance of sufficient order at home to make tax-farming profitable. Since these two methods of political aggrandizement were the basic purposes for which states were created by most rulers after the first four pious caliphs, the predominance of the military, or a merger of civil and military authority, remained the common form of government long after the initial stages of empire building. From Praetorian Guard to Advance Guard What is novel in the present-day Middle East is not control by army officers. What is new are the groups for which the army speaks and the interests it represents. In this century, army coups have ceased to mirror merely the ambitions of individuals. Instead, they reflect larger forces and issues than were once involved in the frequent changing of the guard. The army has become the instrument of the new middle class.2 The transformation of the army from an instrument of repression in its own interests or that of kings into the vanguard of nationalism and social reform usually began with its unintended subversion by its traditional masters. The royal commanders wanted to borrow the "cutting edge" of Western civilization to 2 "The difference between two regimes more than a century apart are instructive," writes Morroe Berger in Military Elite and Social Change: Egypt since Napoleon (Princeton University, Center of International Studies, 1960, Research Monograph No. 6, p. 30). Egypt's "Muhammad AIi wanted an efficient military force and modern technology. In the process of attaining these ends he had to begin to modernize other institutions such as medical care, education, and administration, though he was not interested in the latter as ends in themselves. . . . Under Nasser an existing, already Westernized military elite consciously undertook to infuse a new spirit into the nation, to modernize social relations directly and not merely the economy and the technology of the society. Nasser wants a strong military force and a modern technology too, of course, but he also knows that he must create a modern nation to achieve such goals."

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defend themselves better against its encroachments.3 The change came first in the Ottoman Empire, where the sultans in the late eighteenth century began to invite European army instructors and, in so doing, opened the door to new ideas regarding administration, production, and, ultimately, social and political goals. With the deposition of Sultan Abd al-Hamid II in 1908, it became "clear that . . . the sultans had moved into a new era, when they no longer had to deal with secret palace intrigues or the revolt of disaffected sections of their troops, but were faced with the openly expressed will of political parties—representatives of large groups of the people— . . . backed by responsible military forces."4 With the victory of Kemal Ataturk in the early 1920's, the transformation of the army was completed in Turkey. In the Arab world the first inklings of a new spirit in the army had come in 1882 when the revolt of Colonel Arabi against Turkish and Circassian predominance in the Egyptian army officer corps, and against the foreign control of Egyptian finances, attracted the sympathy and support of oppressed fellahin who bore the brunt of paying the foreign debt. That rising, however, was followed by British occupation and more than five decades of British control over the Egyptian army. Elsewhere in the Middle East also, the assumption of political control by European powers delayed the rise of independent, strong, local armies, or else turned some of them—especially in Jordan, Sudan, and Pakistan—initially into strong supporters of the power which trained them. Army revolts were thus delayed, and were not infused with the spirit of social reform until, somewhat tenuously, the Iraqi army coup of 1936.8 It was the Egyptian army coup of 1952 that marked the beginning of the end for traditional army regimes in the Arab world. The modernization of the armed forces of the Middle East, though a powerful catalyst for internal social change, was of no avail against foreign enemies. The successors of Mohammed 8 Lewis V. Thomas and Richard N. Frye, The United States and Turkey and Iran, Cambridge, 1951, p. 51. 4 A. D. Alderson, The Structure of the Ottoman Dynasty, Oxford, 1956, pp. 71-72. 6 See Majid Khadduri, Independent Iraq, pp. 83-115.

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AIi, the first Egyptian ruler to modernize the army early in the nineteenth century, were defeated by British armies in 1882; the Ottoman Empire was defeated by European arms and Arab rebellion in World War I; the fight of the Arab forces in Syria and Iraq in 1920 against the French and British Mandate was in vain; the Iraqi army was overwhelmed by British troops in 1941. The Iranian army, the special favorite of the modernizing Reza Shah, yielded without fighting to British and Soviet occupation in 1941; the modern Arab armies were defeated by Israel in 1948; the modern Egyptian army overcome by Israel, Britain, and France in 1956. There have, nonetheless, been noteworthy examples of cour­ age and competence. The core of the Tunisian and Moroccan army is composed of experienced World War II, Indochina, and guerrilla fighters. The majority of the Libyan, Sudanese, and Pakistani army are veterans of World War II. Individual officers in all Middle Eastern armies have risked their lives in combat. The Algerian Army of Liberation withstood an extraordinary and prolonged test. Still, no local army is strong enough to defend itself against any non-Middle Eastern power, and none except Turkey and Israel can hope to defeat that Middle Eastern neigh­ bor whose attack it most fears. Since the end of World War II, all nations of the Middle East have spent millions of dollars to make their armed forces more modern and powerful. For the five-year period between 1954 and 1959, the sums expended range from about $50,000,000 6 for Yemen to about $1,000,000,000 for Egypt. Yet their rel­ ative military backwardness has remained inescapable, given the present distribution of power in the world and the degree of industrialization, research, planning, and organization required to maintain an independent modern war machine. These strategic facts strike Middle Eastern nations, perhaps more so than any other group of nations, as being invidious. The Middle East is beset by so many rivalries and conflicts that the possibility of local warfare never seems remote. Since the end β Israel probably spent over $600,000,000 on defense during this same period. Its armed forces of about 61,000 are capable of being enlarged to about 220,000 within two days of mobilization.

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of World War II, almost half of the nations of this region have found themselves in combat with French or British troops. The area has also experienced the threat of Soviet military pressure, the landing of American troops, and politically inspired maneuvers of the U. S. 6th Mediterranean Fleet. It has therefore been particularly difficult to find adequate substitutes—arranged from within or without—for the anxious yet patently ineffectual attempt of each Middle Eastern nation to establish its own military security. Modern Moslem rulers are also stimulated to glamorize arms by a climate of world opinion in which the mass media still rank relative military strength second only to relative sexual attractiveness. And the mass media now shape the perspectives of the area's new middle class more pervasively than any other source of communication. This is occurring, moreover, in a culture which still places manliness and courage above most other values.7 It was defeat in the Palestine war that set off the first chain of army coups in the Arab world under the leadership of the new middle class. Defeat in that campaign, which was a most unexpected shock, encouraged radical attempts to correct the basic causes. The debacle also illuminated the relationship between external and internal weaknesses in the Arab world. "Listen," said a comrade to Nasser as they lay surrounded by Israeli troops at Faluja, "the biggest battlefield is in Egypt." Nasser felt himself "thrust treacherously into a battle for which we were not ready, our lives the playthings of greed, conspiracy and lust, which have left us here weaponless under fire. . . . Over there is our country, another Faluja on a larger scale."8 The Arab fighters in the Palestine war soon discovered that their rulers had failed them. After decades of talk about Arab unity, their leaders were divided on war objectives, and several were plainly giving priority to seizing more Palestinian territory ' Daniel Lerner, The Passing of Traditional Society: Modernizing the Middle East, pp. 43-75; 7 and 152. 8 GamaI abd al-Nasser, The Philosophy of the Revolution, pp. 22-23. See also Constantine K. Zurayk, The Meaning of the Disaster, translated by R. Bayly Winder, Beirut, 1956, and Musa al-Alami, lbrat Fllastln {The Lesson of Palestine), Beirut, 1949, summarized and translated in The Middle East Journal, October 1949, pp. 373-403.

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rather than to gaining ultimate victory. Their rulers were also incompetent. After years of anticipating this particular war, they could not plan a common military or diplomatic strategy. Furthermore, they were corrupt: they had appointed commanding generals whose craft lay only in non-military fields, who had failed to get arms that could be trusted to fire, and who had not bought sufficient arms with allocated funds. Moreover, they did not seem capable of reform. After the defeat, these same rulers began everywhere to squash or delay investigations of the reasons for the debacle. They clearly intended to maintain their old favorites in office and to reharness the army to its chief traditional burden—the task of internal repression. This same kind of incompetence and corruption was common in other Middle Eastern countries besides those involved in the Palestine war. Therefore the kind of shock treatment experienced by the Arab countries surrounding Israel was not always required to start army officers plotting coups d'etat, or to sensitize them to those blows of poverty, disease, exploitation, and ignorance that constitute the daily defeats of Middle Eastern life. The Army's Special Virtues as Political Instrument One reason why officers showed an acute awareness of the chronic ills of their countries during the late 1940's was that as young men they had undertaken military careers in the first place to escape the frustrations of civilian life. The failure of the traditional elite of landowners and propertied bourgeoisie to expand the civilian economy and to give greater responsibility and status to the civilian bureaucracy turned ambitious young men toward the army, one of the country's few expanding modern bureaucratic organizations. This phenomenon was first observable in the Ottoman Empire in the late nineteenth century,9 but was delayed in Egypt until the late 1930's because the British did not permit Egypt to open the military academy to all social ranks until 1936. There has been no shortage of recruits: "Not infrequently, high school teachers and lawyers, dissatisfied 9

Ernest E. Ramsaur, Jr., The Young Turks: Prelude to the Revolution of 1908, Princeton, 1957.

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with their professions, or believing that their ambitions can better be attained in the army, enter military schools and resume their public careers in the mihtary service. General Nagib is not the only one who had a background in law before he entered military training, and those who for a short time served as teachers may be counted in the hundreds."10 The more the army was modernized, the more its composition, organization, spirit, capabilities, and purpose constituted a radical criticism of the existing political system. Within the army, modern technology was eagerly welcomed and its usefulness and power appreciated. By contrast, the political system showed greater inertia, inefficiency, skepticism, and greed in utilizing the products of modern science. Within the army, merit was often rewarded. In civilian politics, corruption, nepotism, and bribery loomed much larger. Within the army, a sense of national mission transcending parochial, regional, or economic interests, or kinship ties seemed to be much more clearly defined than anywhere else in society. As the army became modernized and professionalized, the traditionalist elements within the civilian sector found army service less to their taste, in large part because it was harder for them to compete on terms relevant to the new tasks cf the military and acceptable to the code of the new middle class. In Egypt, for example, "except for the royal family, there was no aristocracy, and the sort of landowners and traders who might have led the Armed Forces were too busy enjoying their wealth to be bothered with military service. The officer corps in consequence was largely composed of the sons of civil servants and soldiers and the grandsons of peasants."11 As the army officer corps came to represent the interests and views of the new middle class, it became the most powerful instrument of that class.12 The army's great strength lay in the "Majid Khadduri, "The Role of the Military in Middle Eastern Politics," American Political Science Review, June 1953, p. 517. (This article is reprinted as "The Army Officer: His Role in Middle Eastern Politics," in Social Forces in the Middle East, pp. 162-184.) 11 Mohammed Nagib, Egypt's Destiny, New York, 1955, pp. 14-15. 12 In a more cautious formulation, Morroe Berger wrote: "It is often said that the present military regime seeks to 'represent' the middle class. If it does, it is not the present middle class it seeks to represent—a middle class of the

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kind of men who joined it, the opportunities at their disposal, and the weakness of competing institutions. In contrast to most Middle Eastern political parties, armies are disciplined, wellorganized, and able to move into action without securing the voluntary consent of their members. In contrast to modern Middle Eastern bureaucracies, armies are less likely to diffuse responsibility within the hierarchy and are more prone to rebel against the status quo. This combination of discipline and defiance remains almost unique among Middle Eastern organizations. Only in Tunisia and Morocco have political parties (supported by trade unions) shown superior capabilities, and thus shaded the political importance of die army. Almost everywhere else, a modern army has offered the most power to those who most wanted it. They have served as national standard-bearer when others who claimed that role proved irresponsible and ineffective. They have supplied an education in modern technology when industry was too scant to provide it, a disciplined organization without peer, and a unity in the face of the corrupt and unprincipled competition of domestic interests and the threat of foreign imperialism. Little wonder, therefore, that many of the most enterprising members of the new middle class have been attracted to it. The special caliber of the army leadership has been evident. Willingness to fight for one's convictions has been more common in the army than in the political system. Almost all of the military men who gained political prominence in Egypt, Syria, Iraq, Sudan, Algeria, and Jordan during the 1950's had risked their lives in military battles and their liberties in political conspiracies. To have led or participated in contemporary guerrilla activities, or to have risked or endured imprisonment for political activities, counts for much, even (as the contemporary Tunisian and Moroccan leadership demonstrates), when one is a civilian. The soldier, however, often has had more power and hence older kind of clerical government bureaucracy, the liberal professions and small trade. Rather, it seems to look toward a middle class with technological, managerial, and entrepreneurial functions, a class that is now only taking shape. The military regime, it might be more accurate to say, has really been seeking to create a class to represent." (Bureaucracy and Society in Modern Egypt, Princeton, 1957, p. 185.)

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opportunity to translate courage into action than either politician or bureaucrat.18 Nasser said much the same thing when he noted that "the situation demanded the existence of a force set in one cohesive framework composed of men able to trust each other; a force with enough strength at its disposal to guarantee a swift and decisive action. These conditions could only be met by the army."14 The compulsion upon army officers drawn from the new middle class to take over a government is overwhelming: to have such dreams, knowledge, and capabilities, and yet to yield first place to the power, status, and ideas of the traditional elite in a political system that lacks all the virtues the army possessed, is more than can be endured. Being closest to the ruling elite and knowing its faults so well, an army which failed to act would seem to implicate itself in the misdeeds of the elite. When the traditional elite assigns to the army the primary task of maintaining domestic order, it gives to the army what is in effect a political mission. It thus also offers the army the temptation of making political choices. Throughout the Middle East, the army's opportunity to seize control could scarcely have been greater. Constitutions were too new and too often imposed from outside to express or create consensus among peoples who either still believed that law could be based only on the word of God, or had long put all laws in question through casuistry and tyranny, or else were not yet agreed on the methods and objective of government. Parliaments, parties, political brokers, and bureaucracies remained blunt and ineffective instruments while the rule of traditional kings and landlords endured. Elections were almost invariably rigged, and the press silenced or controlled. The traditional elite itself failed to establish organized and responsive relationships with the rest of the population. It had always exploited the great 13 Mosadeq fell from office in Iran in large part because he tried, with only the power of a prime minister and party coalition leader, to break the alliance between the monarchy and the army and, from the outside, to reorganize army leadership. Courage he had, but his power was not equal to that of the army. (L. P. Elwell-Sutton, Persian Oil: A Study in Power Politics, New York, 1955, p. 206.) 14 Nasser, The Philosophy of the Revolution, p. 42.

[260]

THE ARMY

politically inarticulate majority and had disaffected the loyalties of the new generation of the politically conscious by failing to deal effectively with social change or national defense. Such status quo oligarchies also often placed their national loyalty in doubt by retaining unusually close relations with former imperial powers. When the Middle Eastern military finally determined "to occupy high political office through the weapons of its own profession"15 it did so with a minimum of violence. Because of its clear-cut preponderance of strength, the army can win victories with far less loss of blood than if the masses were engaged. Since it does not constitute a separate military caste but rather a segment of the salaried new middle class, it is far more inclined than predecessor regimes to maintain itself in power by accepting rather than repressing pressures for change in the structure of the society. The Size and Composition of the Military Bureaucracies We know little about the internal structure of the military bureaucracy in the Middle East; hence the blanks in the table below. One can only speculate about other facts and their significance. Among these are (1) the average age of officers (colonels tend to come to political power in their thirties: are majors, who are usually in their late twenties, too young to initiate coups?); (2) the number of officers in each grade (in several Arab states there appear to be very few generals: are colonels in their thirties stimulated to political ambition in part because they have reached the top in the army?); (3) the number who graduated from military academies at home or abroad (Sandhurst, St. Cyr, Benning, or Soviet training institutes) or who rose without schooling. (The difference between Ayub [Pakistan] and Nasser [Egypt] may in part be the difference between the English Military Academy at Sandhurst and the Military Academy of Egypt; also, how important are school ties 15

Khadduri, "The Role of the Military in Middle Eastern Politics," p. 511.

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INSTRUMENTS OF POLITICAL MODERNIZATION

cementing solidarity in military conspiracies?)16 The table, which clearly shows a trend toward the schooled officer who enters a local academy as a result of passing examinations and is often promoted in the same fashion, cannot tell us why candidates today choose the army. By now it is true of all Middle Eastern civilian and military bureaucracies that there are many more applications than vacancies. The relative economic attractiveness of the army as a career is suggested by the large sums allocated to it. National comparisons are difficult to make, however, not only because of lack of information but because sometimes the amounts cited (in Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, for example) include foreign military aid, and sometimes (as in the case of Syria) do not. The salaries paid are generally high, considering that the average annual per capita income in most of the Middle East ranges from $50-$ 150. To army pay, moreover, should be added free food, housing, medical care, transportation, and other fringe benefits. Further research might usefully compare the salaries of the military bureaucracy with those of the civilian bureaucracy and those of merchants and professionals. Similarly, it would be profitable to compare the size of officer corps and armies with the hard core and following of past or present political parties in each country. (Figures available for other Middle Eastern countries suggest that estimates for the blank spaces should be made on the basis of one commissioned officer for every 15-30 men.) All figures cited in the table below may be considered correct within a ten percent margin of error. 16 Army organization may make it peculiarly difficult for generals to succeed in politics unless they are uncommonly blessed with charisma, political skill, or incompetent opponents. It can hardly be a statistical accident that colonels far outnumber generals and majors among emerging politicians in all underdeveloped areas. Is it that majors can still hope for advancement, generals are already content, colonels without illusions about a future left unremedied? Is it that generals are seldom in direct command of operational units, that captains and lieutenants command units too small for overthrowing of government, and that majors are normally the assistants of colonels who command units just large enough for the purpose, and that colonels therefore are best situated for properly assessing where the army as a whole will stand? Is the difference in age between generals and colonels sufficient to imply that a general's coup will reflect political perspectives of an earlier generation and hence, given the rapidity of change in underdeveloped areas, perspectives already less relevant to the task than those of a colonel?

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10,000,000

5,000 (1954)

1,000

250

30,000"

10,000 9,000

50,000 35,OOOe

Saudi Arabia

Yemen Lebanon

Iraq Jordan

Iran

Turkey Afghanistan Pakistan

22,000,000

110,000

11,000

13,000

150,000

460,000 50,000 260,000

•The term military forces includes army, navy, and air force, but not police forces, which are often considerable. "In addition, there are about 10,000 national police. ' In addition, there are about 25,000 auxiliary troops, used as territorial and frontier guards.

200,000

28,000,000 12,000,000 85,000,000

6,500,000 1,500,000

45,000 17,000

1,700

400,000

5,000,000 1,500,000

6,000,000

4,000

Syria

12,000

80,000°

Egypt

1,000,000

Sudan

4,500

Libya

4,600,000

10,000,000 3,650,000

25,000

250

Total Population 10,000,000

60,000

Algeria Tunisia

Size of All Military Forces in 1949 20,000 (1956)

27,000,000

135,000 12,000

Country Morocco

Size of Officer Corps 900

1,500 (1956) 1,500 (1952) 70,000

Size of All Military Forces in 196330,000"

4,500

3,700

1,350

3,500

2,000

$2,200

1,250

1,500

700

1,200

1,000

$1,200

200

1,300

400

500

600

700

$960

60

1.32

2.76

84 375

480

200

$32

Yearly Pay Yearly Pay Yearly Pay Yearly Pay of Second of First of of Colonel Lieutenant Sergeant Private

"About half of these constitute the Saudi Army, half the tribal White Army; a portion of the former, the Royal Guard Regiment, is about 2,500 strong. * In addition, there are about 15,000 frontier guards.

230,000,000 (1956/57)

75,000,000 (1959/60) 440,000,000 (1956/57)

8,000,000 (1956)

150,000,000 (1958)

225,000,000 (1958/59) 80,000,000 (1959/60)

15,000,000 (1959/60)

Expenditures for Military Forces $45,000,000 (1961)

THE STRUCTURE OF THE MILITARY BUREAUCRACY (cont'd) Country

Selection and Promotion of Men

Selection and Promotion of Offic

Morocco

Former Moroccan members of French army and former members of guer­ rilla Moroccan Army of Liberation.

Moroccans trained as former NC in French and Spanish armies oi officers in French and Spanish π tary academies.' Now also at Moi can Academy. Promotions by ab and political reliability.

Algeria

The army of independent Algeria is composed of men recruited since 1954 for guerrilla warfare. Their alle­ giance has been molded in part by their service in particular military districts in Algeria, or else by training in exile in Tunisia. Algerian Premier Ahmed Ben Bella announced plans in 1963 to reduce the army from 135,000 to 35,000 men. Former members of guerrilla fighters and French army and now selection among conscripted of loyal NeoDestour Party youth members. Pro­ motion by education, ability, and po­ litical reliability.

Tunisia

Libya Egypt

Syria Sudan

Saudi Arabia

Yemen

Lebanon

Enforced universal conscription for three-year periods. Promotion by ex­ amination. Universal conscription and volun­ teers. Promotion by seniority and proficiency. Life-time volunteers who until recent years tended, like former conscripts, to come largely from Negroid pagan tribes of southern Sudan. Three-year volunteers with occasional impressments. Special selection for ability and political reliability for Royal Guard Regiment. Lifetime volunteers with occasional impressments. Some non-commis­ sioned ranks are retained by inherit­ ance within specific families. Volunteers for prolonged periods.

Tunisians trained as former NCO' French army or as officers in F R Military Academy. Promotions ability and political reliability.

Written examination for admissio Egyptian Military Academy. Pre tion initially by examination, hi, ranks by political reliability length of service. Graduation from Military Acadi Promotion by political reliability length of service. Written examination among gr ates of secondary schools for ad sion to military college. Until 1 all officers were northern Mosler Volunteers from among families political and social prestige. Pre tion by personal influence, poli reliability, length of service, efficif Volunteers from among families political and social prestige. P K tions by personal influence. Christians, graduates of French tary schools, predominate in nun over Moslems and Druses.

* An unusually large number of officers are drawn from Berber-speaking tribes unliks Moroccan population at large of whom only about one-third are Berber-speaking; the speak Arabic.

[264]

THE STRUCTURE OF THE MILITARY BUREAUCRACY (cont'd) 'ntry [an

cey

ianistan istan

Selection and Promotion of Men Conscription. Three-year enlistments. Promotion by education and time in grade. Unevenly enforced conscription for two-year periods. Promotion by education and time in grade. Enforced universal conscription for two-year periods.

Unevenly enforced conscription for two-year periods. Seven-year volunteers, three-quarters of them drawn from Punjabis, secondly Pathans (both West Pakistani) are given physical, aptitude, and intelligence tests before admission.

Selection and Promotion of Officers

Graduation from Military Academy. Promotion by personal influence and political reliability. Graduation from Military Academy. (All high school graduates are required to train for 18 months as reserve officers.) Promotion by seniority. Graduation from Military Academy. Promotion by personal influence. Senior officers British-trained, usually Pathan or Punjabi (both West Pakistani). Junior officers commissioned during World War II. Thereafter four-day tests and interviews before admission to Military Academy.

Contrasts in the History of Middle Eastern Armies Although the armies of the Middle East have much in common, this does not prevent different kinds of personalities from rising to the top—martinets and moderators, men relying on charisma and men with powers of organization, good strategists but mediocre tacticians, shrewd tacticians with no sense of strategy. Officers do not come in a single mold and hence each army regime has a distinct character. The histories of the armies also vary as much as the histories of the nations they represent. The contrasts between Turkey and Syria are especially instructive. Turkey has had every reason to take pride in its military tradition and strength. Its army under Kemal Ataturk created modern Turkey in the face of military intervention by Western armies and maintained it in the face of threats from the U. S. S. R. Its prestige has helped it to secure better arms, better pay, better clothes, and better food than it had had for hundreds of years. After 1924, the army as an institution [265]

INSTRUMENTS OF POLITICAL MODERNIZATION

left the political arena. It believed it could afford to do so because its own men were solidly established in the top positions of the executive and the Grand Assembly.17 Social reform, economic progress, and international recognition were patently the fruits of its success. By making it obligatory for all fellow officers active in politics to resign from the army, Kemal Ataturk also neutralized the latter as a ready springboard for further coups. Later regimes compelled all high school graduates to serve 18 months as reserve officers and so linked civilians to an army that served as a school for citizenship, literacy, and obedience. The Turkish army would probably have been content with its veto power if its professional strength had been kept up and if the broad objectives of Ataturk had suffered no retrogression. Its re-entry in politics in May 1960 was due not to its own ambitions but to Premier Adnan Menderes' attack on the inheritance of Ataturk. He had made concessions to religious traditionalism, curbed political freedom, and weakened the economy. Above all, he attempted to utilize the army as a police force for destroying the opposition party. To maintain its neutral role in politics, the army overthrew Menderes. Within less than two years, it had succeeded in establishing firmer constitutional, if not yet also political, foundations for Turkish democracy, and cautiously withdrew once more to its barracks and its accustomed role as "Guardian of the Revolution." The Syrian army, by contrast, has suffered from many political and military handicaps. For centuries Syria had been governed as a province or a possession of other empires. For only ninety years, and that thirteen centuries ago, was it the seat of an imperial realm under the Umayyad dynasty. When it finally achieved its independence in 1943, its frontiers were those arbitrarily drawn decades earlier by Europeans. A sense of military loyalty and mission was difficult to create in such an entity. Under Ottoman rule until the end of World War I, Syrian officers served in Ottoman armies only outside their own country. " F o r figures demonstrating the preponderance of the military until 1937, see Frederick W. Frey, "The Two-Edged Sword: The Army in Turkish Politics" (mimeographed), June 1960, drawing upon his larger study of Turkish parliamentary politics now being completed.

[266]

THE ARMY

Under the French mandate, Syrian officers were outranked by French officers, and the enlisted men were deliberately recruited by the French from linguistic and religious minorities. While the French remained in charge, the politically most active urban Arab Moslems were clearly discouraged from applying for military service since they were also the most nationalist Syrians.18 To turn this Syrian army into a truly national instrument after 1945 was an immense task that was far from completed when, in 1948, it was called upon to fight the Israelis. Defeat stimulated the Syrians to grant the army henceforth the largest appropriation in the national budget. By the end of 1951, the country had 23,000 men under arms but was probably capable of defending itself only against an unlikely invasion by the Lebanese. Profound discontent with civilian incompetence and corruption gave rise to a succession of military coups between 1949 and 1953. But the rapid changes in military rule from General Husni Za'im to Colonel Sami Hinnawi to Colonel Fawzi SiIu to Colonel Adib Shishakli and the early collapse of military power proved that the Syrian army was also still too weak to impose its will on the nation's civilian population.19 The failure of these four military dictators after 1953 convinced the more radical military factions that the army could probably assure its predominance by going one step further—breaking the social and economic position of the traditional elite and relying entirely on the political movements of the new middle class. By early 1955, there seemed to be agreement among army leaders on this objective. The extreme right had been eliminated.20 An uneasy 18 One son of a landed family of Hama, attracted by the free education at the nearby military school (much as a number of now prominent civilian Americans were drawn by its technical excellence and free tuition to West Point), emerged to become Nasser's principal ally in Syria, namely Colonel Sarraj. (Most of the material in the last two paragraphs and this footnote is drawn from an unpublished manuscript by R. Bayly Winder, "The Modern Military Tradition in Syria," prepared for the Faculty Seminar of the Program in Near Eastern Studies, Princeton University, March 5, 1959.) 19 The first two army coups are analyzed by Alford Carleton, "The Syrian Coups d'Etat of 1949," Middle East Journal, January 1950, pp. 1-12. All of them are dealt with by Nicola A. Ziadeh, in Syria and Lebanon, New York, 1957, pp. 93-172, passim. 20 In April 1955, Col. Adnan Malki, the assistant chief-of-staff and G-3 of the Syrian Army and one of the principal army adherents of the socialist Ba'th

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MODERNIZATION

collaboration had been stimulated among moderate, leftist, and communist army elements by the growing pressure upon Syria by Western and neighboring pro-Western states. Between 1955 and 1958, civilian leaders could no longer play politics without consulting the army. The intervention of the army in politics did not cure the ills of Syrian society. By 1958 the dominant army faction had strength left only for a desperately idealistic remedy—to try preserving the influence of the reformist pan-Arab group in Syria by uniting the country with Egypt. In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man may become king. Army leadership, however, can provide no political remedies unless it can transcend the political and social divisions of the country sufficiently to act as its vanguard. Since the break-up of the United Arab Republic in 1961, the army in Syria, as during the mid-1950's, once again resembles a divided but armed parliament. In nine Middle Eastern countries, independent civilian rule had preceded the creation or modernization of the army, and so provided an opportunity for fashioning the military as a civilian instrument. In Egypt, Sudan, Lebanon, Syria, and Pakistan, however, the government proved unable to exploit the advantage it initially enjoyed. In Jordan a large number of officers are already in jail or in exile; it is only as a unified body that the army has not crossed the line to stand against the King. Libya's army is still in process of creation, and hence its role is not yet fixed. It may intervene in politics if the country does not soon agree upon a new ruler to govern after the death of the aging, childless King. In only two countries of this region, Tunisia and Morocco, do armies remain subordinate to civilian rule. Beginning in 1956, the civilian leadership of Tunisia's dominant Neo-Destour Party carefully selected the officers of the army, the national guard, and the police from among politically reliable elements of the guerrilla resistance movement. In 1957, officers trained in the Arab East who might sympathize with Nasser were eased out. However, in party, was assassinated by a member of the Syrian National Social Party, representing the extreme right. This act provided the justification for a successful purge of the right wing of the army.

[268 ]

THE ARMY

early 1963, President Bourguiba foiled a conspiracy, joined by a number of army officers, to overthrow him, allegedly for moving in the direction of more socialism. The Tunisian army may well intervene in politics again if it did not approve of President Bourguiba's successor. The main body of the Moroccan army was recruited by French officers among Berber-speaking mountain tribes in a country that is predominantly Arab in language and culture. After independence in 1956, this army, though still largely commanded by French-trained Berber officers, was enlarged from 20,000 to 30,000 men by the addition of guerrilla fighters of the Moroccan Army of Liberation. It is under the control of the King instead of being responsible to a civilian cabinet. Until recently, the army has had no political temptations, hence no political tests. If the hitherto constitution-minded King, Hassan II, should find his power threatened, however, he would probably not hesitate to engage it as a partisan in his behalf, perhaps at the cost of splitting it politically.21 The example of the Pakistani army, which seized control of the government in 1958, illustrates that even the most professional army can in a brief time be transformed into a political body. Prior to the coup, the Pakistani army had been carefully recruited. Regiments were often composed of the sons of earlier recruits. Its officer corps had been selected from the leading families of martial tribes. The status of officers was as high as that of the top echelon of the civil service. For several years after Pakistan became independent in 1947, army officers lived better than most civilians, enlisted men better than civilian workers.22 But the rapid change in the relative position and character of social classes in Pakistan, especially during and after World War II, was soon mirrored in the composition of the officer corps. Elements from the new middle class entered in large numbers through emergency commissions granted to civilians during World War II, by promotion from the ranks, and since 1947 by 21 "There are regular reports of dissension between the younger, more nationalist officers recruited since independence and their seniors who have served the French." (The Economist, March 4. 1961.) 22 In 1957 there were over 3,000 applications for 80 officer candidate vacancies at the Pakistan Military Academy.

[269]

I N S T R U M E N T S OF P O L I T I C A L

MODERNIZATION

national examinations. The sons of prominent families who once constituted the core of the officer group have since risen to the top, but they no longer directly shape the perspectives of the battalions. From a way of life, the army was converted into a job. Inflation of numbers as well as currency began to sap the perquisites of status. Paternalism, when it survived, became favoritism. As the new middle class entered the army, however, its new values also increasingly became important in the army even though the coups of the generals—Mirza and Ayub—in 1958 still reflect only this transition in social structure rather than its conclusion. When the status of classes, professions, and politics itself are still embattled, it is unlikely that the army, as the strongest and most modern institution, will remain apolitical. When the ruling institution owes its survival exclusively or predominantly to the army, or lacks the strength to confirm its own successor, armies are not likely to remain outside of politics. The Circumstances of Army Intervention Political intervention by armies that have long been apolitical tends to differ, in the first stages, from intervention by armies whose officer corps has already become a latent or disguised political party. A previously unbroken record of loyalty to authority usually means that the coup is staged by the commanding general, urged on perhaps by a faction within the civilian regime. The break with the past is therefore not sharp, at least at first. The general usually has little need to consult many of his fellow officers before taking action, and because of his attitude toward politics he tends to be inexperienced and disdainful of all political acts except those that depend on charisma and command.28 His initial conservatism, however, is likely to yield in time to pressures from an officer corps that has become conscious of its political opportunities and a public that has certainly ceased to be apolitical. 23 FOr a detailed exemplification, see Helen Kitchen, "The Government of General Abboud," and "The Army" in the special Sudan issue of Africa Special Report, January 1959, pp. 3-4, 17, and 5; also Peter Kilmer, "A Year of Army Rule in the Sudan," World Today, November 1959.

[270]

T H E ARMY

An army's intervention in politics may reflect the entire range of middle class ideology. During the single year 1958, the army acted in Lebanon to fashion a compromise among competing political and ethnic groups that might once again assure the army's own political neutrality. The army intervened in the Sudan to support a moderate regime that could no longer be sustained by the army's civilian friends. It intervened in Pakistan to bring about those political, social, and economic reforms that previous regimes had been unwilling to undertake. It intervened in Iraq to alter the entire social structure. Limitations of Army Rule As a ruling power, an army has several extraordinary advantages. Because of historical circumstances, Middle Eastern armies often tend to produce more able, honest, and decisive leadership than any other institution. Because of its vantage point and the values for which it stands, an army can also speak more convincingly than most other institutions about the changes that a society requires to defend itself.24 For men in a hurry who want to make a forced march into the modern age, the army can impose a revolution from above. Armies in power, however, are often subject to the vices of their virtues. The special problems they face in relating themselves to the rest of the body politic and in ultimately yielding again to civilian control deserve analysis in some detail. An army's weapons are its strength; but when the army is speaking for the new middle class, arms are most effective domestically if they remain unused. An army symbolizing nationalism and social change that spills the blood of any whom it cannot successfully label as anti-colonialist and reactionary risks splitting its own following and its ties to the rest of society. It cannot afford to become a Praetorian guard once again. The army's strength also lies in its discipline, but its leaders usually are less skilled than politicians in gaining consent by means other than direct M

Guy J. Pauker, in "Southeast Asia as a Problem Area in the Next Decade," World Politics, April 1959, pp. 325-345, makes a similar diagnosis and prescription for that part of the world.

[271]

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MODERNIZATION

command. Its system of communication is very efficient for messages that move from the top down; it works less well for those that start at the bottom. An army often shows special skill in making contingent plans for the most effective use of men, machines, and organization. This capacity, however, has been warped in the Middle East by a tendency toward conspicuous consumption: most rulers of the area have habitually ordered more arms from the Soviet bloc and the West than they could effectively absorb. This tendency has also been reinforced by continued military dependency. Military planners in the Middle East cannot yet firmly calculate requirements since they cannot be certain that they will be able to buy from the great powers what they need, or how soon their potential enemy will be able to offset such purchases. These persisting obstacles to rational military planning and the resultant excessive military spending do not make Middle Eastern armies the ideal sponsors and supervisors of economic planning. It is an army's business to calculate sacrifice and to make such sacrifice dutifully. But to calculate who shall pay for economic development by remaining poor or working harder, and what moral price must be paid for forceful change in traditional institutions, takes reason and courage of a different sort. The army's esprit de corps is due in large part to its separation from civilian society, its training in a unique style of lfe, its special uniform, its monopoly of weapons .How readily will such a body encourage wider participation in political activities or feel obligated to account to outsiders for its stewardship? Politics is not warfare, and the army's virtues would remain virtues only if society as a whole were converted into a garrison state. The problem of conversion is a serious one. Having experienced the effectiveness of a hierarchic, disciplined organization, army leaders turned politicians often have trouble organizing their newer and far larger constituency. It was perhaps natural for Nasser to suppose "that the whole nation was ready and prepared, waiting for nothing but a vanguard to lead the charge against the battlements, whereupon the nation would fall in behind in serried ranks . . . as the ordered advance proceeded toward the great objective. . . . Crowds did eventually [272]

THE ARMY

come, and they came in endless droves—but how different is the reality from the dream! The masses that came were disunited, divided groups of stragglers."25 But when a whole society is in process of revolution, there can be no "serried ranks." Social unity can be built only by dealing with the problems of society; it will not jump into being by command. Efforts by Middle Eastern military leaders to form mass parties, with the exception of Turkey, have so far failed. One reason is a grave shortage of vital skills. The traditional hierarchy of valued occupations has not yet changed and is still out of balance with modern needs. There are too many lawyers and clerks, and too few organizers and managers, especially at a time when the vast majority to be mobilized are illiterate and premodern in values and skills. Neither in Egypt nor Syria, where attempts by army leaders to form effective political mass movements have so far failed, are there sufficient experienced cadres for such a task. Even officers with political experience are usually skilled only in agitation and conspiracy among small groups, not in persuasion, mediation, and organization among large ones. It is the charismatic leader (frequently a military man) who is still the most attractive political remedy in the Middle East. For most Middle Easterners, in fact, the issue has not yet become military vs. civilian rule. The question for the mass remains: which leader has the more powerful charisma? When men "renounce loyalty to the tribe and the divinities of the tribe, their responsiveness to sacredness, their readiness to discern sacredness does not necessarily die; instead it seek new objects. . . . The nation becomes the charismatic object [and] the political leaders who live in the modern sector of their respective societies, and who are usually less immediately involved in a traditional way with the sacred, are legitimatized in their own eyes by their permeation with the sacredness of the nation."26 Great and powerful as the uses of charisma are, the elite drawn from the middle class cannot avoid isolation from its constituency 25

Nasser, The Philosophy of the Revolution, pp. 32-33. Edward Shils, "The Concentration and Dispersion of Charisma: Their Bearing on Economic Policy in Underdeveloped Countries," World Politics, October 1958, pp. 3-4; p. 2. 26

[273 ]

INSTRUMENTS OF POLITICAL MODERNIZATION

if it relies only on charismatic leadership. Rulers and ruled no longer share the same moral or intellectual universe. There will be no common universe unless the new middle class creates it. The army's monopoly of force also is no longer as efficacious as it was in the Islamic past when, subject only to the challenge of superior arms, it could dominate a stable social system. Force today cannot, by itself, hope to remold the relationships of individuals and social classes, once thought natural and Godgiven, into a new balance capable of motion. The Army as a Partisan in Conflicts Within the New Middle Class and with Other Classes Among all the limitations of army regimes, there is one that is far-reaching and that cannot be transcended. The army in politics cannot become an institution above the battle. It intervenes as a partisan, representing a new class with whom the majority in the country does not yet share a common consciousness. It is itself a most sensitive mirror of internal conflicts within the new middle class, reflecting the fissures of partisanship and ideology that differences in age group, education, and opportunity can create. It will be unable to avoid factionalism within the ruling junta unless the whole junta, or its dominant faction, is securely anchored in a well-organized movement representing at least the new middle class. Since the army constitutes a ready-made symbol of national unity and strength, the presence of the army may easily veil the need for establishing regular institutions for discussions, decision, a^d review, and for articulating a framework of means and ends that can serve as ideology. Civilians cannot shroud the requirements of politics as easily. Forceful efficiency alone can produce only a temporary stability which is soon destroyed by the continuing pressures of uncontrolled social change. By itself, military rule can be no substitute for the art of politics.

[274]

T H E ARMY

Making Army Regimes Unnecessary The final touchstone of achievement for an army regime is its success in making its continued existence unnecessary. This it can accomplish by transforming itself into a civilian regime or, much less likely, yielding supremacy once again to civilian institutions. Annies have been created for preventing or making war, and for holding societies together domestically by force if all other cement fails. For governing itself, and achieving other social and economic ends, mankind has evolved a number of more useful, if at times equally authoritarian, institutions. To create an environment in which these institutions can at last function invariably has been the announced purpose of all army regimes derived from the new middle class. In the Middle East, this conversion to civilian government may be easier than in other cultures. Most officers turned politicians, as we have seen, joined the army not so much in pursuit of the military life as in pursuit of a career in the most powerful, dynamic, and expanding bureaucracy the country offered. How can army regimes (and their constituency) make sure of such a conversion? The Middle East cannot yet duplicate the conditions which have contributed to the evolution of military rule in Latin America. In Latin America, strong, property owning, and industrially productive upper middle classes and parties and trade unions increasingly act as countervailing forces to the military. In several Latin American countries, there are also expanding economic opportunities which make an army career relatively less attractive to the most ambitious than it formerly was. In the Middle East, the evolution toward more lasting civilian rule faces greater obstacles. In Turkey, the example created by Ataturk in transforming army rule into civilian rule, and the existence of several responsible democratic parties carried enough weight to persuade General Gursel to end his military regime by November 1961— eighteen months after his own coup.27 If the new parliament fails to function effectively, however, there is little question that the 27

See Dankwart A. Rustow, "The Army and the Founding of the Turkish Republic," World Politics, July 1962, esp. pp. 543-552. See also Daniel Lerner

[275]

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military "Guardians of the Revolution" will take new political initiatives. In Egypt, Nasser has so far, with great political skill, eliminated the Revolutionary Command Council—the core of his fellow conspirators—as the principal organ of government. In its place he has substituted a civilian cabinet, retaining only a portion of former Council members for its portfolios. In addition, he has created, after several abortive attempts, a parliament of freely proposed candidates who could not be formally nominated until they had been carefully screened by him prior to a free election. With this cadre of secondary leaders, linked in part to the people and not disloyal to him, and with a partially reformed bureaucracy, Nasser has made major progress toward civilian involvement in government. At the same time, he has converted many army officers into government administrators, diplomats, trade union supervisors, and directors of government owned corporations. In Iraq, General Kassim's relationship to civilian institutions from 1958 until his overthrow in 1963 consisted only in the precarious business of playing political parties off against each other. In Pakistan and the Sudan, the ruling generals have eliminated all parties and made no effort to form any of their own, relying largely on the civilian bureaucracy to mobilize popular support. Establishing autonomous civilian institutions, however, is only the first step toward the end of army rule. The army is not likely to be tempted to confine itself once again to its proper business until all major professions of the new middle class, and especially the army, have a secure status in society and the body politic, and the nation has secure status in the international community. It remains all too easy for the army to insist on an extraordinary role for itself in the Middle East as long as there are no sure barriers to the renewed outbreak of Arab-Israeli hostilities, while Arab rivalries remain chronic, and while Western nations remain and Richard D. Robinson. "Swords and Plowshares: The Turkish Army as a Modernizing Force," World Politics, October 1960, pp. 19-44. In Iran, Colonel Reza Khan established a new royal dynasty in 1925, but civilian government has been for most of the period since then, and is now, deeply indebted to army support.

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tempted to try to regain lost positions in the area by military intervention. Furthermore, Soviet intentions toward its Middle Eastern neighbors remain uncertain, the Soviet bloc and the West freely compete in supplying local arms, and Middle Easterners remain acutely anxious to show their strength after centuries of foreign rule. Spectacular success at the foreign and domestic tasks of government is probably the surest guarantee that a military regime will transform itself, and that the rest of the army will become a professional interest group, or at least no more than a political veto group. Failure, even the threat of it, readily reinforces the original nature of a military regime as a hierarchy of organized violence. The modern age has increased the difficulties, even for Middle Eastern armies that would prefer to return to the barracks, of attempting to define their proper sphere of occupation. They know that they cannot hope to defend themselves for long against aggression by the great powers, even in a war involving conventional weapons. They may recognize that the most effective prolonged defense for them against such encroachments is probably guerrilla warfare, but preparations for the latter appear neither impressive nor prudent for internal political stability. They cannot plan for weapons systems adequate to meet the challenge of their local neighbors because a single lucky purchase can upset existing balances. Even armed internal repression for the first time runs counter to the acknowledged ideology of the new middle class leadership. At such a point in history, the professional task of Middle Eastern armies becomes obscure and even uninviting. The thought of switching the emphasis in army training to literacy, patriotism, and vocations, and in military tasks to engineering and construction, is only now beginning to be heard. There is likely to be a permanent end to army intervention only when the body politic has achieved a new solidity and cohesion which, in organizational terms, means a new middle class that has established firm links with workers and peasants. The new middle class, by itself, will be unable to keep the army out of politics as long as the latter remains its better organized, better trained, better armed segment. [277]

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Probable Problems and Trends During the Next Decade So far, the armies of the Middle East have been under relatively conservative or moderate leadership. Army-led governments have generally concentrated on ridding the country of evils associated with imperialism, corruption, and inefficiency. These regimes have moved only gradually into programs of basic reforms aimed at creating a new society. Such moderation has especially characterized the regimes of the generals in power today—including Ayub (Pakistan), Shehab (Lebanon), and Abboud (Sudan). Their strength is based, not merely on seniority, but on their successful transmigration in spirit and skill from the outlook of traditional landowners and tribal chiefs, who once were the generals of the Middle East, to the perspective of the new propertied middle class. These generals have had a rare incentive for making this transition and developing a moderate conservative orientation. Their vested interest, the army, is an institution whose mission rests on ancient principles, whose relative strength gives these leaders a sense of security, whose membership and purpose gives them a national perspective, and whose character demands the perpetuation of such conservative values as discipline, hierarchy, honor, competence, and hard work. At the same time, their relative detachment from their social background by virtue of service in the army, and their inescapable interest in technology and in maintaining the army's (and the country's) strength, has made them realize that they must make great alterations in existing conditions if their interests are to prosper. Such a perspective may not be enough, however. The small propertied middle class in the Middle East usually does not appreciate how many radical and rapid changes will be required in their society before a much larger and stabilizing propertied middle class can come into being.28 To many Western observers, it has seemed that colonels such 28

Thus, few sharecroppers are likely to get farms of their own under General Ayub's land reform, because farms of less than 500 acres—and in many instances, farms of larger acreage—are exempt from expropriation. Most of the officers who now support the general, though by no means all Pakistani officers, come from such farms.

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as Nasser constitute one extreme fringe among the officers who have come to the fore as politicians in the Middle East during the twentieth century; and generals such as the late Nuri al-Sa'id of Iraq, the other. Such a view of alternatives is bound to be shortsighted. Especially if army rule is politically and economically unproductive, there is little reason to suppose that new middle class leadership in the Communist Party, in neo-Islamic totalitarian movements such as the Moslem Brotherhood, or in secular fascist movements such as the Syrian Social National Party could not ultimately achieve a similar degree of hierarchy, organization, discipline, emotional commitment, and readiness for violence, and so challenge army regimes through mass demonstrations—or through infiltration of the armed forces, or through alliances with a faction of army officers. Communist, fascist, and neo-Islamic colonels and generals have so far only briefly crossed the horizon. To speak only of communists: Turkish Communist armies fought in support of Ataturk until 1921. Ten Pakistani army officers, including Major Generals A. Khan and W. Ahmed, and Brigadier M. Latif, were tried in March 1951 for participating in what the government alleged to be a communist conspiracy to seize control of the country. Colonels Yussif Sadiq and Khaled Muhi ad-Din were accused of communist sympathies by Nasser and excluded from the Revolutionary Command Council in 1953. (Khaled Muhi ad-Din, after having been allowed to become editor of al-Massa, was imprisoned by Nasser on March 9, 1959.) Over 650 Iranian officers accused of conspiring with the Tudeh Party or the U. S. S. R. were arrested in the fall of 1954, and several score of them were sentenced to death. General Afif Bizri, thought by many to be a communist sympathizer or a party member, became Chief of Staff and Commander-in-Chief of the Syrian armed forces in August 1957, while Lt. Col. Mohammed Jarrah, who had similar views, became Assistant Chief of the Gendarmerie at the same time. Both retained their offices until early 1958. In Iraq, after the July 1958 coup, a number of officers with communist sympathies held important positions in the government for a time. Particular military regimes may be able to deal effectively [279]

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with subversion by extremists. However, the military itself is not immune to subversion. Army leaders can fail again and again as politicians without the army's ceasing to be the principal source of political leaders reflecting various strata and ideologies of the new middle class. At present, army officers in most Middle Eastern countries are drawn almost entirely from the new literate middle class. Enlisted men are almost entirely drawn from illiterate tribesmen and peasants, and have no chance of promotion from the ranks. As literacy spreads and universal conscription is increasingly enforced, the divisions of society will be increasingly reflected through all the ranks of the army. If these divisions remain unbridged, and the army's leadership and its rank-and-file divide to fight in opposing causes, the army may suffer a prolonged eclipse both as a political and as a military institution. In that event there may be no segment of society to take the place of the new middle class, no institution to take the place of the army—no group that by its common interests and norms can set limits to personal leadership, yet give continuity to authority. There would be a vacuum instead into which the individual opportunist or fanatic can move.

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customary to assume that political parties are not as important in the Middle East—or in other underdeveloped areas—as individual leaders and that few political parties matter at all. This view still had some validity during the 1940's. During the 1950's it became outdated. It is now quite apparent that individual leaders, however impressive their charismatic powers, will be unable to construct a single and enduring "political culture"1 unless they build effective political parties. A number of Middle Eastern leaders have perceived this need—and variously illuminated its ramifications by their failures and their successes. There is no substitute yet devised for political parties as agents of modernization—i.e., in creating and maintaining a new political culture. The common polarities of many past analyses of Middle Eastern parties have been one-party regimes vs. multi-party regimes, oligarchical regimes vs. parliamentary regimes. But in the present historical period of rapid social change, the important distinction in the character of parties is whether they remain centered upon individuals or crystallize instead around an ideology, that is, whether party life is moving from a conflict of cliques to a conflict of orientations. The important distinction in the function of parties is whether they mean to secure the supremacy of a single individual, interest, region, or class, or whether they mean to initiate all individuals for the first time in the modern age into a common political culIT HAS BEEN

1 "Every political system," writes Gabriel A. Almond, "is embedded in a particular pattern of orientations to political action." This pattern, never as explicit or systematic as any particular ideology, or necessarily as overt as a political party, he terms a "political culture." ("Comparative Political Systems," The Journal of Politics, Vol. 18, 1956, p. 396.)

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ture. Parties organized in defense of particularistic economic, ethnic, or regional interests, or small cliques temporarily joined by calculations of personal advantage and pretending to the name of parties, are dealt with only as they tangentially or by default affect the process of modernization. The totalitarian parties committed to the rejection of the present in the name of a dogma that envisages a preordained leap into the past or future have already been discussed in Chapters 8 and 9. We have ignored the otherwise useful distinction between dictatorial parties whose monopoly is ensured through open or disguised coercion, and the dominant party whose monopoly rests on its successful rallying of the politically active majority during the struggle for independence—not on coercion or the deliberate exclusion of competitors. The latter type (exemplified by India's Congress Party) does not now exist anywhere in the Middle East and North Africa. That even the former type of party is capable of moving toward democracy is exemplified in this chapter especially in the discussion of Turkey and Tunisia. This chapter is concerned primarily with that kind of political party—now favored in the Middle East—which sees itself as a non-totalitarian, yet predemocratic instrument of political modernization. Political Parties as the Chief Architects of the New Political Culture The Islamic community from the seventh to the twentieth century was an aggregation of autonomous communities which never achieved a common sense of citizenship. In the modern age, when all strata of society are being affected by political issues, and the terms of all issues are new, the need has become all the more acute for institutions that can effectively initiate diverse groups into a common state and society: for example, Arabs, Kurds, Sunni Moslems, Shia Moslems, Nestorian Christians, Syrian Orthodox Christians, Armenian Orthodox Christians, Yazidis, Sabaeans, Baghdadis, army officers, Diwaniyah tribesmen, Istiqlal party members, unskilled workers—which is merely an incomplete way of saying all Iraqis.2 Schools can 2 This point can be put more abstractly. Especially in a period when all traditional relationships have been undermined or at least put into question, there

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provide basic knowledge and teach prospective citizens how to think, and so prepare for participant politics, mass media can inform and influence their audience, but they cannot become vehicles of organization; armies leave civilians outside their ranks; parliaments demand intense political activity by a small number of individuals; elections restrict political opportunity to a few occasions. No other existing institution in the Middle East is capable of instilling a sense of citizenship and organizing public participation in political decisions as effectively as political parties. Only a party can be in daily contact with the constituency, teach, propagandize, or put pressure upon that constituency to adopt new ideas and patterns of action. Only a party can stimulate involvement in campaigns for literacy and higher production no less than particular political issues, and gather new talents and thus regularize recruitment into the new elite. Political parties have peculiar advantages as instruments of social change. They are a form of organization unknown in traditional Islamic society. Hence insofar as they are not novel disguises for restricted traditional cliques, but rather truly voluntary associations operating in a public realm, they cease being organically related to the old social structure and so can move themselves and others beyond the established order. Only parties can link leaders and masses in almost daily contact. The problem of contact is all the more acute because it arises in the modern age in paradoxical form: the involvement of the masses in politics sharpens the authority of leaders and of personal forms of authority—for none is as readily comprehensible and reassuring—yet never has personal political contact been as difficult to achieve as in a mass society.3 A political party offers an opportunity for binding together four forces which can resolve this paradox and create a viable political culture: is bound to be dire need for learning new "orientations of functional significance to the operation of a system of complementary role-expectations." This definition of "socialization" is drawn from Talcott Parsons, The Social System, GIencoe, 1951, pp. 207-208. In this sense, our analysis focuses on political parties as the chief agents of "political socialization"—a phrase which might well head this chapter if popular political discourse were not so likely to suggest a quite different and highly ideological reading quite unrelated to its useful and precise meaning in a more clinical prose. 3 Cf. Maurice Duverger, Political Parties, p. 168.

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charisma, ideology, organization, and accountability to an increasingly larger constituency. There is no escape from discussing these separately and in sequence, but they are effective only in combination—both because they reinforce each other and also act as checks and balances against each other. The Harnessing of Charisma In times of social crisis, when customary institutions and values are threatened, losing potency, and can no longer attract implicit assent, men often search for charismatic leaders. They put their trust in the seemingly magically heroic personality, relying upon his policies above all because they accept the man. In periods of social change, the charismatic leader may often serve as the model of the new human being required by the newly evolving pattern of life, and succeed in encouraging, by his very example, a rapid transformation of existing attitudes. It may well be fortunate that at a moment when almost everything is changing or in doubt, and experienced, knowledgeable men are still scarce, people find it possible at least to unite behind an inspiring leader. Pakistan's political development was doubtless greatly handicapped by the death of several of its most inspired leaders soon after the country achieved independence, and by the country's inability quickly to discover successors of equal charismatic appeal. This special gift of seeming grace in leaders, however, appears as readily in fanatics and adventurers as it does in saints and politicians. Unless bound to countervailing forces, charismatic leaders can destroy individual judgment, indeed, individuals and institutions. To perpetuate a new sense of direction requires more powerful magic than the luck that may attend a particular personality. The problem of Middle Eastern governments in the modern age is to routinize charisma by attaching it to secular institutions, at least until these are accepted as legitimate.4 4 Max Weber, The Theory of Social and Economic Organization, translated by A. M. Henderson and Talcott Parsons, New York, 1947, p. 363. For the ensuing discussion of the routinization of charisma, Weber (esp. pp. 363-392) has, of course, been indispensable. For a different society analyzed from a similar perspective, see David E. Apter, The Gold Coast in Transition, Princeton, 1955, esp. pp. 294-324.

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Charisma by its very nature cannot assure stability but can only originate the foundations upon which stability may be established. Part of the leaders' charisma needs to become routinized in bureaucracy—a set of offices that is not really institutionalized until it can survive the rise and fall of political leaders and political parties. Bureaucracies, however, are in touch with citizens only as they execute orders. Only parties can organize enthusiasm on the basis of a solidarity of interests with citizens outside the government. The routinization of charisma in political parties becomes possible as the leader makes consistent use of that organization, speaks in its name, and lends it his mantle. In the Middle East, leaders and parties who successfully win national independence together have several signal advantages in this respect. To both leader and party a charisma will then already adhere, validated for both by heroic triumph in behalf of the community and its homeland. Both will already be experienced in maintaining an organization under conditions of adversity. Both, upon victory, are likely to possess a relatively unresented monopoly of control to give them confidence and time for routinization. That even they sometimes fail to establish enduring institutions may well be due to weaknesses of organization, ideology, and accountability to a larger constituency. It is to the problems of organization that we turn next. The Novelties of Voluntary Political Association The political party is still a novel instrument of collaboration in the Middle East. It is a voluntary organization in a region that hitherto had known only organizations based on kinship, religion, force, economic survival, or on coalitions of personal interests. Organizing a party of autonomous strangers to deal with public affairs is a new and unfamiliar art. Following upon the establishment of a number of secret political societies in the second half of the nineteenth century, the first important cadre parties began to emerge in the Middle East only in the first decade of the twentieth century. The Young Turks Associations were united in 1908; the National Party was founded in Egypt by Mustafa Kamil in 1907. The first mass party in the Middle East [285]

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was the Egyptian Wafd, formed in the fall of 1918 by Sa'ad Zaghlul—but by the late 1930's it had lost its contact with the masses. Few men join political parties until traditional social and political units become uncertain sources of concrete satisfactions, of useful, and above all hallowed ideas, and of solidarity. For a Middle Easterner to become a member of any party is thus to pay dues to a new age. Organizers and members may not be altogether at ease with each other. Organizers are likely to be almost entirely drawn from the salaried new middle class. If they confine their recruitment to other members of that class, they will leave the majority of the population to potential political rivals. They will also fail to establish a single political culture, and hence fail as agents of modernization. It is also difficult to organize well when the organizer entered a new age only a few years ahead of most members. The middle class is still so new that it is just beginning in most countries to overcome the cultural barriers between urban and rural inhabitants, between those literate in the ideas of a new world and those literate in tradition, or illiterate in both. It is not easy to attract stable support at a time of rapid transfiguration of the individual, of the relevance of his accustomed group loyalties, and of the truth of his values. In this uncertainty, membership in "devotee parties"5 such as the Moslem Brotherhood or the communist party (which, through its front organizations, is adjusted to exploit various degrees of faith) offers a certainty and solidarity—a sacred movement—more akin to ties of kinship and religion than parties that are secular and pragmatic. There is not only the task of recruiting but also the problem of restricting membership. While a party must mobilize more than one class to become a mass party, it is not in its interest, as Nasser learned to his chagrin in Egypt, to enlist the entire nation. If everyone is in the party, why should anyone bother to be in it? A conflict of strategies therefore arises and is seldom consciously resolved. If the party contains a multitude that lack discipline and understanding of issues, it will be ineffective. A comprehen5

The phrase is Duverger's, Political Parties, p. 70.

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sive nationalist party may not be eager to purge itself lest it encourage the growth of rivals; yet if it accepts all who favor "nationalism" and anti-imperialism," what will serve to inspire the party by distinguishing it from all other patriotic inhabitants? The Uses and Abuses of Ideology Truisms do not constitute programs. Parties in the Middle East will not be capable of inducting their followers into a new po­ litical culture or of guiding change effectively unless they be­ come ideological parties. This sounds at first glance like a recipe for profound mischief. Daniel Bell comments: "What gives ideology its force is its passion. . . . A social movement can rouse people when it can do three things: simplify ideas, establish a claim to truth, and, in the union of the two, demand a commit­ ment to action."6 Similarly, Professor Shils observes: "It has been the belief of those who practice politics ideologically that they alone have the truth about the right ordering of life—of life as a whole, and not just of political life."7 By assuming that "politics should be conducted from the viewpoint of a coherent, comprehensive set of beliefs which must override every other consideration," ideologists make impossible the pursuit of "civil politics" based on the "virtue of the citizen who shares respon­ sibility in his own self-government" with the understanding that no virtue is final and that every virtue costs something in terms of other virtues.8 A passion for dogmas that will once and for all fix loyalties and shape decisions has often been the bent of ideological politics. Much political doctrine in this part of the world, as elsewhere, consists of basic symbols of sentiment and identification whose function it is to arouse shared emotions of enthusiasm, faith, and loyalty, and plausibly to explain situations which leaders have not been able to predict or control in a fashion that can sustain β Daniel Bell, "The End of Ideology in the West," Columbia University Forum, Winter 1960, pp. 4-7. 'Edward Shils, "Ideology and Civility," The Twentieth Century, July 1959, p. 3. 8 Ibid., pp. 1, 4, and 6.

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9

morale. For some time to come such emotionally inciting and arational doctrines may well remain an inescapable aspect of Middle Eastern mass politics. Whenever they are allowed to become the core of political ideologies, they can easily produce a mood that becomes a substitute for constructive action, as in ultra-nationalism, or engender a spirit of dogmatic rigidity in the midst of rapid change, as in neo-Islamic totalitarianism, or be used to justify, as in communism, the sacrifice of all other values for dogma's sake. Yet there is a distinction to be made which is not merely analytical but reflects concrete differences in actual Middle Eastern practice. There is another aspect of ideology—the explicitly formulated framework of means and ends, the rational, experimental, and programmatic element in political ideas.10 The practice of, among others, Turkey's Ataturk and Tunisia's Bourguiba demonstrates that the two aspects of ideology—the rational and the passionate—can both be utilized politically, but in a style and combination which minimizes the corruption of reason. Ataturk sought deliberately to stir and stimulate passion in politics. The political tasks which his society faced were enormous and the sacrifices and efforts involved were unlikely to be contributed merely as the result of cool calculation. The principles of Ataturk's revolution—nationalism, secularism, populism, etatism—attracted the deep emotional and intellectual commitment of many. But these principles never became political myths to be both believed and admired without question.11 They were strong and clear enough to set broad limits (for example, 9 This formulation is drawn in parts from C. E. Merriam, Political Power, New York, 1934, pp. 113ff, Lasswell and Kaplan, Power and Society, pp. 116123, and Levy, The Structure of Society, p. 169. 10 This aspect of ideology is sometimes excluded by definition. Erich Fromm, for example, has usefully distinguished two meanings of the term rationalization. Sociological rationalization refers to the way in which a social process becomes organized and systematized. Psychological rationalization is the construction of plausible excuses for one's action. When the latter is socially patterned, adds Fromm, it becomes an ideology. (In Dissent, Winter 1954.) We have adopted essentially the same distinction, but defined the term ideology differently on the premise that in political practice, ideology usually contains both kinds of rationalization, and that the crucial question is—how much of each? 11 Ataturk at one time also encouraged the invention of the "sun-theory" according to which all the world's languages owed their origin to Turkish—but

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nationalism was to be non-expansive, secularism was opposed to archaic religious practices but not to religious faith). As the fruits of decades of earnest and, at least within the emerging new middle class, open discussion, they remained flexible and never received final codification as a comprehensive and coherent doctrine. Ataturk felt no compulsion to arrogate to the newly emergent secular state a sacred and totalitarian task—to create a new faith. As a result, he became neither the prisoner of his own doctrine nor the executioner for its sake. He remained free to learn, experiment, and change. Growing discussion and participation among politically alert Turks became possible at least without being permanently confined to an authorized political grammar and vocabulary. Passion in Turkish politics was being harnessed primarily to buttress Ataturk's charismatic position and to support each individual, concrete act of policy. Passion attached itself less intensely to the less-crystallized, and indeed still-evolving symbols of the revolution and its ideology. Hence Ataturk remained free, within broad limits, constantly and with an open mind to weigh strategies and costs in transforming his society. An ideology that passionately fuses political myth and political requirements can devour even its adherents. A party that offers merely a set of political planks may not possess enough that is relevant to an age in which not only political power but the sense, spirit, and survival of the whole society are at stake. There are Middle Eastern parties whose program, implicitly or explicitly, expresses the aims of a vested interest group, or of a traditional class, or else the perpetuation and opportunistic exploitation of existing popular preconceptions. None of these will save a party, or a country, for long. Egypt, for most of the years between 1907 and 1952, was alternately controlled by parties offering one of these three kinds of program, and so failed to deal with social change. None of these parties—however large some grew during this period—have survived. In Iraq, most parties this was a temporary and uncharacteristic aberration of new-found pride. (See Bernard Lewis, "History-Writing and National Revival in Turkey," Middle Eastern Affairs, June-July 1953, pp. 218-227.)

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organized during the Mandate period gradually died after the achievement of independence in 1932. They had differed only on how independence was to be won, and most of them had little desire to come to grips with internal changes thereafter.12 If a political party accepts the task of becoming one of the principal agents of social transformation, its success depends upon the adoption of an ideology in tune with rapid change—a framework of values, methods, and direction concerned with all issues of modernization, and therefore without a final comprehensiveness, a final coherence, or a final intensity. Such an ideology, given the Middle East's scarcity of expert analysts and practitioners in problems of social, political, and economic change, is seldom likely to be the intellectual creation of a single man. In practice it is more likely to emerge as the product of continual and intense discussion and bargaining among leading members of the new middle class. Organization and accountability to a larger constituency must accompany the tempting powers of charisma and ideology if the vital encounter with political realities is to be maintained. In today's Middle East, however, there is a tendency to infuse ideology with too much passion and also, obversely, to ignore the task of clarifying political doctrines intellectually. The daily, unexpected exigencies of power that confront any elite, whatever the class from which it springs and the ideology it cherishes, are bound to muffle the clarity and consistency of thought and expression of party leadership. One particular obstacle to ideological clarification looms large—the dominant role of nationalism among ideologies. When independence is gained, as it is in most states of the Middle East, by a single party uniting many different political and social views under one nationalist banner, there is often a reluctance to split such a large and comprehensive political vehicle by refining its ideological orientation. Every politician everywhere in the modern age prefers to speak in the name of all the "people." In an area of great scarcities and inequalities, and in an era of a plurality of rapidly, but unevenly, changing values, populism can be a mask for almost any pro"Khadduri, Independent Iraq, pp. 31-35.

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gram, or else a nostalgic emotionalism for no program but immediate satisfaction. An ideology concerned not only with nationalism but also with social reform cannot help identifying domestic enemies. As long as landowners dominate the state and exploit the majority of its people, for example, there will be no opportunity for important reforms. As long as education remains under religious control, only the past will be memorized. As long as extremist movements such as the Moslem Brotherhood and the communist party are not decisively kept out of power, the freedom to choose future courses may come to an end. Bribery and nepotism may be endemic, but it takes political courage to name names. A call for sacrifices to be made for future investments will find many unwilling to subject themselves to an equality of wants. Thus, however prudently and shrewdly a party may proceed in transforming society, it cannot avoid making domestic enemies. And however reluctant it may be to publish this fact by formalizing its ideology, a party's leadership will find it difficult to win and keep the kind of following it requires unless its path and purpose are made clear. Accountability in One-Party Regimes A party that perceives itself as an agent of modernization may act to establish a one-party state on the grounds that only a single party can make sure that it is a truly national organization. A plurality of parties at this stage of development is likely to give scope to movements representing only particularistic economic, religious, ethnic, or regional interests, and hence prevent agreement on long-range planning; only a single party can sustain a determined course of economic development for a sufficiently long time to secure the foundations of national unity and prosperity; only a strong, single, national party can keep the army subordinate to civilian administration and the bureaucracy alert and efficient, only a single, well-organized party can marshal public opinion, which is by no means any longer feeble in the Middle East, or protect itself against coups by a score or less who can otherwise still overthrow Middle Eastern governments; only [291]

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a party with a clear monopoly of control can undertake those farreaching reforms in the social, economic, and political structure which are needed to remove the barriers to democracy. Nowhere in the Middle East where single-party states have emerged, as in Egypt or Tunisia, is the situation a regression from democracy simply because no effective constitutional democracy had preceded such regimes. In contrast to the totalitarian neo-Islamic and communist parties, no one-party regime now in power in the Middle East justifies its right to govern alone in terms of dogmatic assumptions concerning the laws of historical development.13 The arguments for taking an authoritarian road in the Middle East may be strong—but what are the odds that a political party so oriented will actually move in the direction of more democracy rather than more authoritarianism? The great obstacles involved have been explored elsewhere in this book.14 One optimistic note may be sounded, however, which stems from the very structure and substance of this analysis. If a party chooses to face the problems of modernization and social change, and hence accepts the task of creating a new political culture, it will find that one requisite for its success is the institutionalization of accountability to an increasingly larger constituency. If a party is to be effective as an agent of modernization, it will need to attract as its nucleus a cadre of politically sensitive and skilled men, not merely party hacks awaiting favors. It will need to listen to experts and, for the very survival of their craft, allow them to debate, even if it does not always accept their advice. If a 13 Middle Eastern communist parties have their own reasons, however, at this point of the area's political evolution for being explicitly opposed to the one-party state. Thus the Communist Baghdad daily, Sawt al-Ahrar, on November 11, 1959, simultaneously defended the one-party system of the U.S.S.R. while opposing the formation of a single national party under the leadership of General Kassim. In the Soviet Union, it asserted, deducing from dogma rather than fact, that there are no longer any classes requiring separate defense of their interests by separate parties. Inspired by a concern for tactical advantages rather than freedom, it observed that Iraqi "democracy springs from . . . the nature of the multitude of its classes, interests, and aspirations." 14 Chapter 11 attempts to translate the polemics of these non-totalitarian, yet pre-democratic parties into political theory—an art still neglected in the area itself—and to explore viable relationships between freedom and authority in the Middle East. Chapter 17 relates this issue to the requisites and probabilities of political stability.

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regime intends to be effective in creating a new political culture, it will also need to reach out for mass support, and teach new standards and patterns of political behavior. Such efforts will inevitably involve more flow of ideas and demands from the top to the bottom than the reverse, and much distortion and propaganda will accompany that flow. However, if contact is to be maintained, the leadership will have to know what conceptions, expectations, and criticisms are in fact current among the masses so that their own communications relate to real emotions and concerns. If the local party branches meet regularly, much autonomous discussion of political issues is bound to be generated. This dialogue will be uneven, but, in contrast to earlier political relationships, almost constant. It is quite unlikely, given the rapidity of social change and the varieties of its expressions in the Middle East, that any leader should ever be so omnipotent as to manipulate this dialogue entirely to his own satisfaction. These points must not be exaggerated. Manipulation of cadre and ideas alike is becoming, if anything, a more refined art, distorting the process of political accounting to the constituency in many countries, not only in the Middle East. To turn skepticism into cynicism, however, is to miss certain potentialities. From a recognition of these requisites under single-party regimes, grew, as we shall see in the following section, the parliaments of Tunisia and Egypt, and the multi-party system of Turkey. We shall now take a brief look at several case histories: (1) political parties that come closest to possessing all the attributes they require—charisma, organization, ideology, and accountability to a larger constituency—namely those of Morocco and Tunisia, yet parties which in their contrasts with each other help illuminate the relative weight of each factor; (2) a political party that failed in its first attempts because it neglected most of these requisites, and is now trying again with these in mind, namely that of Egypt; and (3) a multi-party parliamentary regime that evolved from a one-party regime, namely that of Turkey. These cases will reveal many of the difficulties and potentialities of oneparty regimes. Other types of political parties are neglected here since it is one of the basic estimates of this volume that clique parties will almost certainly not succeed in modernizing the Mid[293]

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die East, and multi-party systems which precede the attainment of a modern political culture are unlikely to endure.15 Morocco and Tunisia: Modernizing Parties in Action In Morocco, the Istiqlal Party was until about 1958 referred to simply as "al-hizb" or "the party" rather than the Istiqlal, as was the tendency in French and English newspapers.16 From its inception the largest of Moroccan political organizations, the Istiqlal—which grew out of nationalist movements of the 1930's and was formally organized in 1944—has seen itself as "a means of political, social, and cultural education .. . a true school where the human being learns to serve his country and his fellow patriots."17 It does not want all Moroccans to join, however. Members must undergo probationary periods, and are not finally accepted until their candidacy is reviewed by both local and regional bodies. Nonetheless, by 1958, the Istiqlal had about 1,600,000 members in a country of 10,000,000 inhabitants. Istiqlal leaders themselves acknowledge that about 250,000 of the party's members are active and well-informed, and about 80,000-90,000 are militants capable of organizing local activities, explaining the party's purposes, and making major sacrifices of time and money to the party's cause.18 The Istiqlal organization is based on cells of between 25 and 400 members, sub-sections, and sections divided among 17 regions which are each supervised by an inspector and a regional 16 In Iraq, where since 1960 a number of parties have come to share similar perspectives toward political modernization—and where a modern political culture is thus already in existence among factions of the new elite—coalition government might prove a feasible mode of attaining further political modernization. 16 All the material in the first three paragraphs of this section is drawn from Political Change in Morocco, a doctoral dissertation by Douglas E. Ashford (Princeton University, September 18, 1959), one of the most detailed expositions of political institutions and their activities we possess for any Middle Eastern or North African country. A condensed version was published by the Princeton University Press in 1961. " F r o m the Istiqlal Party newspaper al-Alam, December 29, 1955, cited by Ashford, p. 481. 18 It is particularly remarkable that its proportion of membership to the total population among that third of Morocco which speaks Berber is almost as large (13 percent) as among the Arabic-speaking inhabitants (19 percent).

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committee. The three officers of each cell elect the officers of a sub-section, two of whom from each sub-region represent the section committee and in turn elect one member to sit on the regional committee. The regional inspector, appointed by national headquarters, reviews all elections. A Political Committee of about 40 members has in recent years acted as the Istiqlal's governing body, while its formal supreme authority, the Congress, meets rarely and does not initiate issues and decisions. Of all these institutions, the inspectors are perhaps the closest in touch with both the top and the base of the party. It is their job to organize new sections and sub-sections, review the admission of new members and all disciplinary actions, supervise the submission of reports from the subordinate levels, and guide the party's major campaigns. They are salaried officials, earning about $300 a month, and are equipped with a car and clerical assistance. Once a month they convene at party headquarters in Rabat for two or three days to hear reports from the top party leadership and Istiqlal members of government. "These reports . . . do not appear to be passively reviewed, but are open to questioning and debate." In turn, these inspectors meet about once a month with their sections to explain the subjects covered at Rabat. In addition, central and regional cadre schools have trained several thousand militants for two- or four-week periods since 1956, in part to fill gaps created by the departure of skilled Istiqlal members for government positions. Although efforts are being made to have at least one literate officer per cell, known as the instructor, who can read the parry's Internal Bulletin to the cell and give literacy lessons, normally only every fourth or fifth cell now has such an officer. These links of organization and accountability—themselves not without charismatic overtones, since similar (if less bureaucratic) patterns of operation had been practiced before independence under conditions of great danger, clandestineness, and although the former are largely rural. Ashford also estimates that if only 10 percent of the members pay dues regularly, the party would have an income of slightly under $500,000 a year, not counting special contributions from wealthy donors.

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19

repression —are further reinforced by the frequent speeches and rallies of the heroes of the party, especially Allal al-Fassi, throughout Morocco. In a country that had been isolated from the main currents of European, Ottoman, and modern Arab thought at least until the first decade of the present century, and then was governed until 1956 by France without free Moroccan participation, the building of a party of such magnitude and organization is an extraordinary accomplishment.20 Nonetheless, in January 1959, the Istiqlal split, and the Democratic Istiqlal Party, restyled later that year as the National Union of Popular Forces (NUPF), emerged from its ranks. The new party, no less than the old, believes in "collective direction, discussion at the base, and the extension of national responsibilities to all levels of the population."21 The novel element in the National Union, as its leader, Ben Barka, declared, is that "the NUPF marks the changeover from organizations centered on personalities to those based on ideologies."22 This had been the weakness of the Istiqlal. It contained leaders like Allal al-Fassi, 'alim and descendent of an 'alim2B of Fez. Fez, one of the oldest cities of Morocco, had changed its culture and faith even by the middle of the twentieth century far less than Rabat, not to speak of Casablanca, Morocco's largest city, which 19 TtUY en of the 16 inspectors Ashford interviewed had been imprisoned for some period during the nationalist struggle between 1952-1955. 20 There are other Moroccan parties, but these are all quite small and play only a minor role. It is characteristic of the emerging political consensus of Morocco that all parties feel compelled to oppose "feudalism" and favor "socialism." However, the Popular Movement—led by Captain Mahjoubi Ahardane, one of the principal organizers of the Army of Liberation, and Dr. Abdelkrim Khattib, a Casablanca surgeon married to the daughter of the hero of the Riffian War, Abd al-Krim—speaks primarily for the mountain Berbers and rural countryside, especially in the Riff. During the Riffian disorders in the fall of 1958, both leaders were arrested for a time. (For their program, see the Ahardane interview with Vie Frangaise, Casablanca, April 24, 1959). The Democratic Party of Independence, led by Mohammed Hassan Wazzani, speaks for the more conservative, but secular urban elements. Its course, like that of the still smaller Unity Party, led by Mekki Naciri, has often been opportunistic. (For the present program of the former, see Vie Frangaise, Casablanca, April 17, 1959). 21 Mehdi Ben Barka, the organizer of the new party was also one of the Istiqlal's principal organizational innovators. 22 La Vigie Marocaine, Casablanca, January 26, 1959. 23 'alim is the singular of ulema, signifying scholars of Islamic tradition. Al-

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had been a mere village at the turn of this century.24 The Istiqlal also contained French-educated Ahmed Balafrej, its Secretary General, son of an upper-class Rabat family and founder of Istiqlal-supported, coeducational, secular, and higher level free schools. One of its most generous financial supporters was Mohammed Laghzaoui, a self-made businessman who, after independence, was appointed Director of National Security under the King's sole authority, and who was expelled from the Executive Committee of the Istiqlal in 1958 for allowing the police to intervene ruthlessly in Istiqlal's public demonstrations. Until 1959, the Istiqlal also held Mehdi Ben Barka, who spoke for labor and youth.25 Son of a policeman, Ben Barka trained at Algiers University before he became a professor of mathematics and subsequently president of independent Morocco's Consultative Assembly. Thus the Istiqlal could not speak with a single, clear, and emphatic voice on the political destiny of post-independent Morocco. Although the Istiqlal had frequently declared that "independence is not an end but a means," and had sponsored "Operation Labor," a cooperative farm project, and the building of the "Unity Road," these slogans and actions were largely initiated by those who subsequently broke away because they discovered that such efforts marked the outer limits of the existing Istiqlal consensus. The new National Union of Popular Forces proclaimed that "there is no contradiction whatsoever between the interests of the various classes among the Moroccan people."26 It is a more closely knit alliance than the Istiqlal, being composed primarily of the younger members of the new middle class and the majority of the trade union movement.27 It has especially attracted those Fassi's father taught at the famous Karouine University at Fez; AUaI al-Fassi himself, having passed the examination for 'alim but having been denied the title for refusing to declare himself loyal to the French Protectorate, taught Islamic subjects unofficially to large audiences. 24 Roger LeTourneau, Fe~s Avanl Le Protectorat, Casablanca, Societe Marocaine de Librairie et D'Edition, 1947, especially p. 585, note 1, and pp. 453-471; 481-494; 585-624. 25 See "Mehdi Ben Barka, Ie rebelle," Le Monde, January 30, 1959. 26 See the Manifesto of its Constituent Congress, September 6, 1959. 27 ItS National Administrative Committee of 33 contains several of the principal trade union leaders, five teachers, three journalists, three administrators,

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members of the Istiqlal who organized armed resistance against France while al-Fassi and his fellow-leaders were in prison or exile, and these include particularly men who arrived in the city only recently from the rural countryside. It is on this base that Ben Barka intends to broaden the National Union into an alliance of workers and peasants with the new middle class.28 As a result, the ideology of the new National Union is much more explicit than that of the old Istiqlal. It is based on "leadership, planning, and democratic association" and on "austerity and work."29 In the wake of this split, the perspectives of the rump Istiqlal have also become crystallized. Although al-Fassi still speaks of social and economic progress, he now focuses his attacks on the National Union by accusing it of constituting a "heresy," while rallying the remains of the Istiqlal around the "defense of Islam and tradition against 'secular materialism,' if not monarchial faith against revolutionary spirit."80 He also concentrates much attention on the need to liberate Mauritania, Ifni, Rio de Oro, Ceuta, and Melilla. By early 1960, the increasingly sharp contest for control of the government between the National Union and its various opponents, including the Crown Prince and the army, was being kept in bounds only because King Mohammed V still remained the supreme legal, traditional, and charismatic arbiter of the public realm. When, upon the death of Mohammed V, Crown Prince Hassan became both King and Prime Minister, he reafone lawyer, six businessmen, almost all of them in their forties or younger (Ben Barka was born in 1920), rather than in their fifties like Istiqlal leader al-Fassi. The Istiqlal Party had apparently become dominated by the "older generation," at least from the viewpoint of a country in which half the people are under 20 years old. Ashford found that, of the delegates to the August 1956 Congress of the Istiqlal, two-fifths were in the 20-30 age group, another two-fifths in the 30-40 age group, but that the bulk of both these groups had joined before 1952. Only 11 percent of the delegates had joined during or after the resistance period (1952-1956). At the Fourth Annual Congress of the National Union of Moroccan Students held at Agadir, August 22-28, 1959, only 3 of the 110 delegates present spoke for al-Fassi, and two of these were graduates of Karouine, the traditional Moslem University. (See al-Ayyam [Casablanca weekly], August 27, 1959, and al-Tahrir, Casablanca, August 28, 1959.) ^Probtemes d'Edification du Maroc and du Maghreb, p. 30. 29 Manifesto of the Constituent Congress of the National Union. 80 See al-lstiqlal, the French-language newspaper of the party, January 31, 1959, quoted by Ashford, Political Change in Morocco, p. 582.

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firmed his father's promise that Morocco would move toward constitutional and more representative government. Formally speaking, progress in that direction may be noted. In actuality, however, the King is attempting to become the country's chief modernizer while avoiding dependence on any political party. It remains an open question whether and at what price parties of this caliber may be prudently ignored. The Neo-Destour (New Constitution) Party of Tunisia seems almost to be a twin of the Istiqlal, yet it has experienced none of the travail of the Istiqlal. The comparisons are instructive. The Neo-Destour, like the Istiqlal, was founded in the 1930's, is organized on the basis of cells and, until recently, federations, with a corps of internal party inspectors. In 1959, it contained about 350,000 members in a country of 3,650,000 inhabitants, or about 25-30 percent of all adult males. About 100,000 of these members, from 18-25 years of age, were organized in youth groups, disciplined enough to be called upon at times to reinforce the police at public demonstrations. Furthermore, about 300,000 Tunisians, many in addition to their individual membership in the Neo-Destour, were members of the General Union of Tunisian Labor, the Tunisian Union of Artisans and Merchants, the National Union of Tunisian Farmers, the National Union of Tunisian Women, the General Union of Tunisian Students, and the Tunisian Boy Scouts—all affiliated with the Neo-Destour. Unlike the Istiqlal, however, the Neo-Destour's control over its affiliated organizations has never been seriously challenged, and its membership is distributed evenly in proportion to the population everywhere in the country.31 This may be partially due to the fact that Tunisia is a more homogeneous country than Morocco. Only a few thousand Tunisians speak Berber in contrast to the Arabic-speaking majority; in Morocco, about onethird of the population speak Berber, and many parts of the 81 Based on unpublished figures presented by Douglas Ashford to the Princeton University Conference on Current Problems in North Africa, December 15, 1959. For two excellent recent discussions of the Neo-Destour Party, see Clement Henry Moore, "The Neo-Destour Party: A Structure for Democracy, World Politics, April 1962, pp. 461-82 (based on his forthcoming doctoral dissertation), and Keith Callard, "The Republic of Bourguiba," International Journal, Winter 1960-1961.

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country are mountainous, making communication difficult. The Neo-Destour's advantage may also stem from Tunisia's earlier political evolution. In Tunisia, the split in the umbrella-like nationalist movement (akin to India's Congress Party) took place in 1934 when the Neo-Destour broke away from the Destour Party. In Morocco, this same splitting did not take place until 1959. The charismatic character of the Neo-Destour's leader, Habib Bourguiba, who is also President of Tunisia, has never had to suffer serious competition.32 In Morocco, King Mohammed V had far greater charismatic appeal than any Istiqlal leader. Within the Istiqlal, al-Fassi has never been more than first among equals. Moreover, the Istiqlal was forced by pressures from without and weaknesses within to forego certain vital sources of charisma. With most of its top men arrested or in exile after 1952, the Istiqlal leadership was unable to retain control and inspiration of the entire resistance movement against France. While Bourguiba became the "Supreme Warrior" of Tunisia's resistance, leadership in Morocco at the crucial historical moment devolved on only a portion of the Istiqlal and the charismatic sanctionflowingfrom the activities of this period therefore has to be shared with other organizations—in rural areas with the Army of Resistance, in urban areas with trade unions and separate terrorist groups. The Neo-Destour, in contrast to the Istiqlal, did not have to wait to be called to power in an independent country, nor then share its power with other parties, and always at a lower level than that of a royal house. On the contrary, the Neo-Destour, from the beginning of independence, when it was voted into power in a free election, has been entirely in control of government, and Bourguiba has been the uncontested leader of both party and government.33 No other party matters; both the Old 82 The royal Beylical family had lost its popular appeal sometime before its deposition as Tunisia's ruling house by Bourguiba in 1957. 88 A Secretary General of the Neo-Destour, Salah Ben Youssef, contested Bourguiba's power briefly in 1955, and lost. His timing, at the very least, made it a hopeless attempt. He opposed negotiations with France and demanded a return to violence at a point when Bourguiba's diplomacy had clearly placed independence within grasp. Exiled to Egypt, he was accused of making attempts

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Destour Party and the Communist Party are moribund. Until recently, Bourguiba has been the chief executive and legislator, with power also to appoint and transfer judges. Almost from the beginning of independence, Bourguiba has discussed political problems in regular weekly "fireside chats" on the radio, and in many visits to all parts of the countryside. His party and its front organizations are continually active in explaining, mobilizing, supervising, and recruiting'. Each party cell, containing between 50 and 1,000 members, continues to be part of a party intelligence network that was shaped under conditions of repression and clandestineness of the pre-independence days. No position is filled in the civil service or army, no job in any government controlled enterprise, and no scholarship granted without approval of the party, even if party membership itself is not essential. The party not merely links the people to the government, it cannoi be ignored. To prevent slackness in the face of sheer size, and corruption and abuse in the face of such power, Bourguiba has been strict— but humane. There is little corruption in Tunisia; neither is there an atmosphere of police terror. Much has been accomplished by the sheer spirit of trust and devotion. Most of the leaders share a similar intellectual and social background (much more so than the leaders of the Istiqlal), and have known each other for decades under the most trying political, economic, and personal pressures. Unlike the Istiqlal, the party has kept itself young and disciplined. Thus in late 1958, Bourguiba abolished the headquarters of the regional federations, where oldfightershad tended to relax into sinecures or abused their influence, and replaced them with young inspectors responsible to the national center. Much has also been done by prevention. The 15 Regional Governors, almost all of them quite young, are never sent to a region in which they have been born or raised. They may acquire no real estate or business interests in their area without permission of the Secretary of State for Interior. And those who disagree do not necessarily remain in the wilderness. When the newsto assassinate Bourguiba, and several of his accomplices have been sentenced to death in recent years by Tunisian courts. In 1961, he was himself assassinated while in Germany.

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paper L'Action was suspended in the summer of 1958 for its sharp criticism of Bourguiba's foreign and domestic policies, one of its editors, Mohammed Masmoudi, was also dropped from the Neo-Destour's Political Bureau and removed as Ambassador to France. By year's end, however, he was back in the Political Bureau and made Secretary of State for Information.34 Similarly, Ahmed Ben Salah, after disagreeing with Bourguiba and so seeing himself ousted as Secretary General of Tunisia's trade unions, soon returned to the fold to receive a cabinet appointment. In fact, it is in Neo-Destour's relationship with labor that its strength and character are most apparent. The trade union's membership is almost as large as that of the Neo-Destour Party (about 250,000) and, indeed, over half of the dues-paying members of the Neo-Destour are also members of the General Union of Tunisian Labor (Union Generate Tunisienne du Travail— UGTT). In Morocco, the trade unions were for four years autonomously allied with the Istiqlal, having been organized in 1955 before the Istiqlal had quite reconstituted itself as a disciplined organization after the years of repression; in 1959, the trade union movement became an equal partner of the Istiqlal splinter, the National Union of Popular Forces. In Tunisia, on the other hand, they have always remained the Neo-Destour's junior partner. The Tunisian union cannot avoid recognizing Bourguiba's power: he controls the Neo-Destour Party and no leader matches his popularity; he controls the police, the press, and could influence the courts. Few jobs are to be had without Neo-Destour approval. There are also positive reasons for the alliance. In contrast to Morocco—where the new middle class had to share its leadership of the Istiqlal with men who received a traditional Moslem education, descended from notable families, or possessed major business interests—both the Neo-Destour and the Tunisian 34 Masmoudi renewed his newspaper criticism of Bourguiba in the summer of 1961 after the French massacre of largely ill-armed and unarmed demonstrators against the remaining French military base at Bizerte caught the Tunisian President off guard. This time Masmoudi was dismissed from the party and all official positions for having resorted, as Bourguiba told the Tunisian people, to public criticism rather than discussion within the party.

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trade unions were under almost exclusive control of the new middle class. These two organizations therefore find it easier than parallel organizations in Morocco to share the same perspectives on the need for unity, reform, and austerity. When they differ, there is ample opportunity for continuous discussion. All trade union and Neo-Destour factions are represented in the latter's Political Bureau. Trade union leaders head the Ministries for Commerce and Industry, Agriculture, Education, and Social Affairs. Thus they consult and are consulted: they also know first-hand the tough realities of Tunisian life and share in responsibility for its successes and failures. They remain junior partners, but they also know that there lies behind the appearance of the Neo-Destour as a mass party that explicitly disavows class struggle, as in the disavowal of Morocco's new National Union of Popular Forces, the reality of a class alliance between the new middle class and the workers.35 The trade unions recognize that they cannot compete against the charismatic personality of Bourguiba and the superior organization of the Neo-Destour. The Neo-Destour knows that it could not maintain a superior organization or a united country without the support of the trade unions. The Neo-Destour is committed ideologically to account for the use of power to an increasingly effective constituency. On November 8, 1959, Bourguiba kept his promise to hold free elections for an Assembly that for the first time in Tunisian history would possess legislative and financial powers. Although only Neo-Destour members, including 16 trade union figures, were elected, the arena of discussion and action has been broadened. Extraordinary power has been employed to fashion a new political culture, and now power is being relaxed in the confidence of a new consensus. The Neo-Destour's experiment has benefitted from several special advantages. Tunisia has a cultural homogeneity rare in North Africa or the Middle East. It has been continually open 86 In contrast to Morocco, the Tunisian traditional bourgeoisie and many Moslem religious leaders stand discredited as a result of their collaboration with France. In Morocco, most of the traditional bourgeoisie did not thus discredit itself and retains considerable influence, while religious leaders could be found in both the French and nationalist camps.

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for centuries to currents of thought coming from all shores of the Mediterranean. Its prolonged struggle for independence was carried on under unified leadership which succeeded in enlisting the majority in well-organized and sacrificial campaigns. But the Tunisian experiment may yet fail. Being still fresh and novel as an experiment, it could suffer severely by the early death of so capable and charismatic a guide as Bourguiba. Even more serious is the great shortage of economic resources in the face of a rapidly growing population. The Neo-Destour, under such pressures, might suffer a split between its party and its trade union affiliate. Such a split need not by itself mean the end of stable government. If the competition to satisfy the sheer necessities of life does not become unbearable, if the military does not become partisan in its own cause, and if a split within the Neo-Destour does not exclusively pit a new middle class party intent upon austerity for the sake of long-term gains against a workers' party intent upon immediate rewards—all grave "if's"—a fruitful encounter could ensue. If both splinters accept, albeit in different degrees, a common consensus resting on socialism, nationalism, and guided democracy, they may be able to acknowledge each other's presence in the political realm since they could thus concede legitimacy to each other. Egypt: Learning from Failure Egypt elected its first consultative Assembly of Notables in 1866 and organized its first open political party in 1907—each the earliest of its kind in the Arab world. Nonetheless, its parliaments and parties experienced few periods of sustained freedom and effectiveness and were forced to yield to military rule in 1952. The reasons seem clear. First, all critical powers affecting Egypt's social and economic structure, no less than all its foreign and domestic relations, always remained under the control of the king, and the king was usually under the influence of the British Residency. The result was a constant but unevenly balanced struggle between the king's friends and those political leaders who wished to serve non-royal [304]

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interests, whether those of the nation or their own. The first Egyptian ruler to find warrant in the Koran for the thought that he should govern with the advice of his people,38 the Khedive Isma'il, established the Assembly of Notables to serve his own needs. He required domestic support against increasing foreign pressures, and needed the appearances of a constitutional monarchy to receive more favorable European loans. Although this Assembly, composed largely of village notables, thoughtfully discussed the administration of agriculture, finance, and justice, Isma'il kept a strict rein. The Assembly could receive no petitions, and had to meet in camera.31 When, in 1878, a petition signed by 1,600 was presented to the Khedive stressing the absolute necessity of modern representative institutions for the sake of orderly communal life, the Khedive, with British and French advice, responded by firing both the chief petitioners and dismissing the Assembly. Thus the road was left open for the only remaining force, the Egyptian Army under Colonel Ahmed Arabi, to stage a coup for the first time in modern history in behalf of nationalism and reform. British occupation of Egypt in 1882 put an end to this first army coup, though it was to fail at Suez in 1956 to put an end to the second. A new advisory Legislative Council and Assembly were established in 1883. Yet when, on March 2, 1907, the Khedive Abbas II received a petition for the creation of a really effective Assembly, he replied that this request "was too important to be dealt with by . . . the Assembly."38 The Constitution of 1923 opened an era that might have been more liberal—two-thirds of the Parliament could now override the King's veto—had that constitution also marked a willingness on the part of the King and the British to accommodate themselves to major changes in Egyptian political, economic, and social relationships. This was not the case, and consequently a structure suited to bargaining and compromise was destroyed both by outright battles among irreconcilable forces and by the means used to avoid such battles. As parties inside and outside 86

Sura 42, Verse 38. Jacob Landau, Parliaments and Parties in Egypt, New York, 1954, pp. 9-22. "«Ibid., p. S3. 37

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parliament strove for fundamental alterations in the system—at least in ending British influence and curbing the King's—the King reacted by revising the liberal constitution, or ruling without constitutions, rigging elections, curbing the freedom of press, assembly, and speech, and, with his resources as largest landowner in the nation, bribing party factions and parliamentarians. It is unlikely under such circumstances that an effective party system could have come into being, whether inside or outside of parliament. But the parties that grew up also contributed faults of their own. The first to arise, Mustafa Kamil's National Party, concentrated on a foreign issue—the removal of British controls —and in the domestic realm confined itself to constitutional and educational reforms designed to give greater scope to the new professional groups. Apart from a single appeal for industrialization, there were no allusions to economic questions.39 "It is more than doubtful if Kamil or his chief adherents, most of them members of well-to-do families, actually appreciated the great social gap between the rich and the fellahin, with no influential middle class to bridge it. As is manifest in their official programmes, they were not particularly concerned with Egypt's social problems; and up to 1907, towards the end of his life, Kamil himself, in his speeches and articles, exhibited but little interest in the lot of the fellahin."40 The Wafd party, beginning in the fall of 1918, became under Saad Zaghlul's leadership the first truly national party in Egypt with an organization sufficient even outside the principal cities to win any election. Though its leadership drew from a broader component of society than the National Party—including professional men, landowners, industrialists, and members of the intelligentsia—it focused its attention just as exclusively on ending British controls and limiting royal prerogatives. When the first of these goals came within much closer reach through the Anglo-Egyptian Treaty of 1936, the Wafd lost its elan and much of its hold on the salaried and would-be salaried new middle class and the urban workers. To the growing pres88 Charles Issawi, Egypt, An Economic and Social Analysis, London, 1947, p.