Fantasy politics in the Arab world

The power of self-delusion in the Arab world is a fascinating phenomenon. Take politics: instead of being honest about our disagreements we like to pretend that they somehow resemble western political conflicts. We get carried away and start using words like ‘leftist’, ‘liberal’, and ‘neo-liberal’ to give some depth to our confused fumbling, like a teenager trying to unhook a bra while desperately trying to come up with excuses. Those political categories are metaphors at best in this part of the world; our politics is driven mainly by narrow pragmatic considerations that have nothing to do with those imported political categories.

So imagine my surprise today when I saw the headline ‘Enlightenment First’ in an editorial by Khaled Saghieh in Al-Akhbar. But what I mistook for an epiphany turned out to be yet another example of political cross-dressing. The gist of the column is that liberals in the Arab world are working in the service of dictatorships under the pretext of promoting reform and modernisation. Using recent examples from Egypt and Tunisia, Saghieh argues that ‘liberals’ are publicly supporting bids by corrupt rulers to stay in power. The threat of political Islam has apparently caused those liberals to ally themselves with dictators, an alliance that they justify through the need for development.

The politically incorrect necktie: on boycotts and secular coercion

A Lebanese friend recently revealed on a social networking website that he had bought a tie from Marks and Spencer. This otherwise insignificant revelation provoked a tirade of angry comments from Lebanese vigilantes that chided the irresponsible tie-wearer on his unpatriotic choice of neck wear. Even though I was aware of the M&S boycott policy as being one of the cornerstones of anti-Zionism among the Arab Diaspora, I was taken aback by the intensity of the reaction and people’s willingness to publicly chastise someone simply because of their fashion choices. This militant censoriousness is chiefly practiced by people who regard themselves as ‘secular’, and even liberal, making it much more problematic. It points to the disturbing emergence of a secular piety that is far more insidious than one stemming from a religious worldview.

Before I left for Britain several years ago, I was instructed by several Lebanese friends on the necessity of boycotting M&S because of its ‘support for Israel’. Some assured me that all the profits that it made on Saturdays went directly to the IDF. The blunt way of phrasing the argument insisted that every pound spent in M&S translated into bullets fired at the Palestinians and the Lebanese, and no one would want to live with this burden on their conscience. But aside from the veracity of the claims, which I will come back to, this argument fails to comprehend the reasons for Israel’s military superiority. This superiority is not attained through private and public foreign aid but because Israel is an advanced industrial economy that is capable of developing advanced weapons through a combination of industrial and technological development.

Elbaradei Presidential Bid: Low-grade Messianism

The hopes hanging on the possible candidacy of Mohamed Elbaradei for President of Egypt reflect the de-politicization of Egyptian society and its misplaced faith in technocrats as agents of political change.

In a scene emblematic of the Egyptian people’s desperation for any signs of political change, hundreds of people gathered in Cairo’s airport to greet Mohamed Elbaradei on his return to Egypt after three decades of living abroad. Elbaradei, the former head of the International Atomic Energy Agency and the 2005 Nobel Peace Prize recipient, had fuelled speculation about his possible candidacy for Egypt’s presidential elections due to be held next year.  The crowd’s excitement is understandable: the incumbent Hosni Mubarak has been in power since 1981 and Egypt has been under Emergency Law rule since he took office. Yet there was a hint of artifice about the airport encounter: the posters of Elbaradei held by the crowd were too slickly designed, the scene itself had a whiff of orchestration about it.