“THE ARABS’ STRUGGLE FOR FREEDOM CONCERNS US DIRECTLY”

As we are overwhelmed by headlines that grow more appalling each day, Jean-Pierre Filiu, historian of the contemporary Middle East, invites us to take a healthy step back with his book Les Arabes, leur destin et le nôtre. Histoire d'une libération (The Arabs, Their Fate and Ours. History of a Liberation).*
In it he provides a detailed overview of two centuries of the Arab peoples’ struggle for freedom, a struggle repeatedly thwarted yet relentlessly renewed. For Filiu, an understanding of this history is essential if we are to support the democratic renaissance of the Arab world. 

• You begin your account of the links between Europe and the Arab world with Napoleon’s expedition to Egypt. Why?

Jean-Pierre Filiu: Arab historians themselves consider Bonaparte’s expedition to Egypt in 1798 as the founding moment of the Nahda, literally the Arab “Renaissance”, a multifaceted movement of constitutional development, religious aggiornamento, economic modernisation and cultural effervescence. It was also a watershed for France, as the traditional alliance with the Ottoman Empire, concluded in 1536 between Francis I and Suleiman the Magnificent, gave way to a desire to win over the Arab peoples against Constantinople. The now oft forgotten paradox is that the French Revolution conceived of the Arabs as Arabs, while they still widely regarded themselves as Muslims.

• What role did religion play in the Arab Renaissance?

Filiu: The Nahda, this “renaissance” that developed over the course of the nineteenth century, saw a close association of movements that we would now refer to as “nationalist” and “Islamist”, terms that were not current at the time. It was indeed an assertion of the Arab identity against colonial expansion, in a “nationalist” vein, and against Ottoman rule, in an “Islamist” vein, because the Turks were accused of having led to the decline of Islam by monopolising the caliphate. Figures as diverse as Emir Abdelkader in Algeria or Abderrahmane Kawakibi in Syria combined these “nationalist” and “Islamist” registers, which nowadays are presented as contradictory.

• The 1920s were marked by what you call the West’s betrayal of the Arabs. What did this involve?

Filiu: During the First World War, the Arabs engaged as allies of France and Britain under the leadership of Sharif Hussein of Mecca. Their contribution to the defeat in the Levant of the Turkish army, where German advisors played an important role, was decisive. Yet in 1919-1920, the Arabs, far from being treated as allies, were delivered to French and British “mandates”. We are still paying the price of this betrayal, which opened the gates of Mecca to the Saud family and their Wahhabi followers, the only Arab force which remained resistant to the Nahda.

• You stress that the Arab nations’ struggle for their independence pre-dates the wars of decolonisation. Why is this important to remember?

Filiu: We are too quick to forget the peaceful uprising that swept through Egypt in 1919 and forced Britain to recognize its independence, at least formally. The Arabs, dare I say it, “invented” non-violent civil resistance many years before Gandhi! But the colonial powers everywhere preferred facing armed insurgencies rather than civil protests, as indeed Arab dictatorships nowadays prefer confronting armed jihadism to negotiating with political movements. This militarisation of the Arab resistance deeply transformed the form of mobilization, which until then had been pluralistic and open, in favour of pyramid structures that suppressed any internal dissent.

• Over the following two decades, events such as the oil shock, the worsening of the Cold War, and the Iranian revolution took a heavy toll on the region. How did the situation change?  

Filiu: I call the period from 1970 to 1991 the “generation of relinquishment”. It opens with the “Black September” in Jordan, marked by the defeat of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), but also by the death of Nasser and by Hafez al-Assad seizing power in Syria – the only Arab despot to establish a dynastic system. It ends with the Iraqi people’s uprising being crushed by Saddam Hussein. The United States stood passively by while these massacres took place, concerned solely for the liberation of Kuwait from Iraqi occupation. This period, with the “oil shock” of 1973 and the Islamic Revolution in Iran in 1979, saw widespread political regression, due to a growing sectarian polarisation encouraged by Sunni Saudi Arabia and Shiite Iran. The Kuwait crisis itself was to cause a split in Sunni Islam between the Muslim Brotherhood, Salafists and jihadists.

• Did September 11 not awaken the West to the scope of the Islamist threat, already well known in Arab countries?

Filiu: Strategically, the “global war against terror” that the Bush administration launched after the attacks of September 11, 2001 represented an absolute boon for authoritarian Arab regimes. Once again, they denied their peoples’ aspirations and equated the slightest sign of opposition to “terrorist” subversion. The United States’ disastrous invasion of Iraq in March 2003 aggravated the democratic impasse, as it established a militia- and sectarian-based system on the ruins of Saddam Hussein’s tyranny. The region’s despots, from Muammar Gaddafi in Libya to Ali Abdullah Saleh in Yemen, could then brandish the threat of Iraqi chaos to keep their people subjugated, while vaunting to Washington their rather debatable contribution to the fight against Al Qaeda.

• In reading your book, it seems clear that the support that western countries gave the Arab Spring was haphazard. Despite this, was the Islamists’ subsequent ascendancy not inevitable?

Filiu: The expression “Arab Spring” already reflects a short-sighted appreciation of the vast protest movement that shook the Arab world in early 2011. Instead of grasping it as a systemic, hence inevitably long-term crisis, policy-makers and analysts demonstrated an impatience only partially explained by the rapidity of the fall of Ben Ali in Tunisia and Hosni Mubarak in Egypt. It was obvious that the Islamists, served by a seasoned apparatus and able to combine the vote for order (particularly moral order) and the vote for a break with the “old regime”, would win the first free elections. Yet this was enough to make many smart and not-so-smart observers turn away from the Arab world, quick to denounce “the Islamist Autumn”. However, the most serious threat to democratic transition lay less in this than in a fierce counter-revolution, which has reached the heights of horror in Syria and Yemen.

• You explain that the recruitment of jihadists in the West is also due to the fact that Daesh is encountering resistance on home ground?  

Filiu: Freedom’s assassins are the same in France as in Tunisia. I am convinced that the attacks that brought bloodshed to Paris in January 2015 and to Tunis in March 2015 were inspired by the same man, a French-Tunisian jihadist named Boubaker Al-Hakim, now high up in the Daesh hierarchy. That is why I called my conclusion “From Charlie to Bardo,” in reference to the two targets of these terrorist commandos. Understanding the processes at work is essential if we are to avoid the sort of dangerous generalisations that only play into the hands of the jihadists.
In this sense, my book is a contribution to public debate, as the Arabs’ struggle for freedom concerns us directly. But this book also provided the basis for the course I taught in Arabic this summer at a camp for Syrian refugees in Jordan. We share the same history, here and there. It is high time to accept this as an opportunity and a promise.

Les Arabes, leur destin et le nôtre. Histoire d'une libération - Jean-Pierre Filiu, La Découverte, August 2015.