Blame It All on Tribalism: From Beirut to Jerusalem Got It Backwards

I am not a big Thomas Friedman fan. So when I read his famous 1989 book From Beirut to Jerusalem before traveling to Lebanon this summer to work as a reporter, I was surprised to discover an accurate and still-relevant description of the political landscape of the Middle East in the 1980s. As Friedman describes the nearly ten years he spent in Lebanon and Israel, he shows an impressive empathy with the fears and hopes of people on all sides of the regions conflicts – not only in Beirut and Jerusalem, but also in Ramallah, Damascus and Tel Aviv.

Still, the book has serious shortcomings. They are often difficult to spot because Friedman is a persuasive writer and his analyses are grounded in the hard-to-refute gravity of first-hand experience. But the faults are most evident when Friedman tries to answer the fundamental questions of the book (implied more than articulated): Why is the Middle East so intractably married to conflict, and how can the United States offer more practical policy solutions to the strife?

In answering these questions – quite unsatisfactorily, as it turns out – Friedman relies on the typical methodology of a journalist. He witnesses many pivotal events first-hand. He interviews major political figures such as Yasser Arafat, activists like an American Jewish teacher in Palestine, as well as more common folk (often serving him in some capacity as taxi drivers, golf caddies and the like). While a journalist’s approach is necessarily more immediate and less scholarly than an academic’s, it is not Friedman’s information-gathering methodology that does him disservice in his attempt to answer his underlying questions about the nature of conflict. Rather, he is failed by his assumptions that superficial political realities directly mirror deeper causes, and that the political vocabulary of the region’s inhabitants today – tribe, sect and nation, for example – have a self-evident antiquity that need not be questioned.

A typical explanation that Friedman repeatedly offers to his question about the underlying cause of Middle East conflict is that the indigenous politics of the region are dictated by something called “Hama Rules”. Hama Rules are those that Friedman says the late Syrian president Hafez al-Assad observed when he brutally suppressed the Muslim Brotherhood in the Syrian city of Hama in 1982, which resulted in the death of an estimated 20,000 people, many if not most of them civilians. According to Friedman, Hama Rules mean viewing all battles as zero-sum games in which ultimate allegiance must be paid to tribe. He uses the Rules as a paradigm not just to explain Syria but also Lebanon, Israel and Palestine. Friedman cites three major “traditions” that define Hama Rules. The first, “tribe-like politics,” are inherited from their “purest original form among the Bedouin of the desert,” where allegiance to tribe and absolute retribution for transgressions were the only way to survive in a harsh environment. The second tradition is “authoritarianism,” which Friedman says is endemic to the Middle East because effective rulers of empires had to use it to tame the “primordial, tribe-like loyalties” that would have otherwise rent their empires apart. The final tradition is that of the nation-state, which, Friedman writes, European powers imposed on a region not organically predisposed to such organizations.

In Friedman’s account, Assad’s attack on Hama, though vicious, was also a logical response to indigenous Middle Eastern political realities. “[Assad] has managed to rule Syria longer than any man in the post-World War II era,” Friedman writes. “He has done so by always playing by his own rules …. Hama Rules.” According to Friedman, Assad understood that in the Middle East such force was necessary to impose the system of a nation state against the tide of “tribe-like loyalties” and “retrogressive … elements” like “Islamic fundamentalism”. [1]

Friedman in no way approves of the violence that Assad’s army wrought upon the innocent people of Hama. But he almost sympathetically contrasts Assad’s understanding of Hama Rules to the bumbling idealism of some Israeli and American leaders. The architects of Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in 1982, Friedman argues, believed Lebanon’s Christians to be kindred spirits who would form a durable alliance based on a similar understanding of the world. In so many words, Friedman says that what these Israeli idealists did not realize is that Lebanese Christian leaders were native sons of the Middle East who intuitively played by Hama Rules. For them, allegiances to groups other than tribe and sect were easily discarded friendships of convenience that had no deeper ties to sentiment. Thus, the alliances eventually proved weak.

Perhaps unintentionally, Friedman’s analyses elevate warmongers like Assad and then-Israeli defense minister Ariel Sharon – whom he also portrays as understanding Hama Rules – to the status of antiheros. The reader is left with the impression that these men are somber realists who have resigned themselves to the facts of Middle Eastern life – always tribal and inevitably brutal. They know that they must be willing to shed blood for their causes, and pursue their goals to their extreme conclusions. Their errors, in Friedman’s depiction, are more related to their fatalism or to strategic miscalculations than they are to other possible motivating factors. Thus, even as Friedman aggressively condemns the Israeli-Phalangist organized massacre at the Sabra and Shatila Palestinian refugee camps – a story he broke for the Times – he also sees it as a logical extension of the Hama Rules.

The assumptions behind this explanation of the Middle East are deeply flawed. A quick analysis of Friedman’s definition of Hama Rules shows why.

Friedman takes it as a given that the fundamental state of Middle Eastern society is that of “tribe-like loyalties”, which are rooted in the biological and geographical realities of the region. His phrase describing these loyalties as being in their “purest original form among the Bedouin of the desert” sets off alarm bells in the head of any anthropologist trained in the last 25 years. In fact, the notion of a “pure original form” in a human society is grafting of language from the racial “sciences” of the 19^th and early 20^th Century – the same theories that were used to justify slavery, colonialism and apartheid, in turn. The description casts culture as an extension of race, and tribalism as a sort of pernicious gene in the DNA of Middle Easterners. The unspoken message of such a description is that there is something wrong with the Semitic people of the region. It is ironic because Friedman himself is Jewish, but the message is a deeply anti-Semitic one. It does not help at all that he describes tribalism as an inevitable product of environment, seemingly letting these stiff-minded Middle Easterners off the hook – their backwards mentalities are not, strictly speaking, their fault. Worse, this assumption of a quasi-genetic tribalism infects the rest of Friedman’s analysis. It’s also just plain wrong – through the ages, Middle Eastern societies have often been polyglot, multi-religious and multi-ethnic havens of cosmopolitanism, not primordial stews of tribalism.

Authoritarianism for Friedman is a natural reaction to tribalism. In support of this conclusion, he glosses over (in six pages) 1,400 years of Middle Eastern history – from the earliest Islamic dynasties to Saddam Hussein and al-Assad – to show that authoritarianism has always been the means to effect unity in the region. This summary brutally simplifies the complex histories of many peoples and religions into a single, manageable narrative that supports Friedman’s thesis. No region in the world has such a single-trajectory history, and Friedman’s account is so short on details that it is hard to know where to start in showing its inaccuracy. Suffice it to say here that through the centuries Arab and Ottoman leaders advanced countless innovations in governance that did not involve authoritarianism.

The point that Friedman should have started with in describing his Hama Rules – but which he mentions almost as an afterthought – is European powers’ imposition of nation-states on the Middle East. For Friedman, this has only aggravated the natural conflicts set up by the existing patterns of tribalism and authoritarianism. What Friedman does not consider – and what is closer to the truth – is that Europe’s political cartographers may have invented or amplified the patterns of tribalism and authoritarianism to justify and implement their projects of colonialism. Friedman simply continues this Western tradition. It is true that Lebanon, Syria, Israel and Palestine have no long-standing or innate existence as political entities. But the emphasis on tribalism as part of Middle Easterners’ essential character, and the use of authoritarianism as a means to suppress them, are tools that Europeans marshaled to great effect to impose their will.

“Hama Rules” may indeed be an observable, contemporary way of approaching politics in the Middle East. But in explaining the rules’ provenance, Friedman effectively observes the setting sun and concludes that it orbits the earth. His condescending understanding of Middle Eastern societies means that he casts the United States as a savior that can free Middle Easterners imprisoned by their own cultural backwardness: Middle Easterners have chose “passion” and “tribe” over “modernity” and “expanding economies”, Friedman writes, concluding that “Arabs and Israelis … desperately need someone to free them from the paralyzing past.”

It is little wonder, then, that 14 years after the publication of From Beirut to Jerusalem, Friedman supported the American invasion of Iraq. That debacle suggests that what Middle Easterners really need is liberation from colonialism disguised as benevolence, encoded in the lies of a fictitious history that some of our most respected journalists continue to promote.

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[1] As a matter of accuracy, it should be noted that Islamic “fundamentalism” is actually a more recent movement.

Nationalisms in the Middle East

Question: According to Gelvin, “All nationalisms arise in opposition to some internal or external nemesis. All are defined by what they oppose.” Do you agree? Discuss in reference to a specific Middle Eastern case in the 20th Century.

Many nationalists would be loathe to admit it, but national units – distinct, bounded groups of people who have an exclusive homeland, language and other attributes – are largely historical fictions.

Most historians now agree that nationalities are constructed, not “natural” entities that existed since time immemorial. A glance at the pre-World War I Ottoman Empire confirms this. Cities like Damascus, Baghdad and Salonica were multiethnic, multireligious tapestries whose denizens’ diversity defied attempts at identifying the cities’ truly indigenous groups.

But with the fall of the Empire, and the participation of its former territories in the modern system of nation-states, nationalism became a necessity of independence throughout the Middle East. As nationalists in every region looked to history for experiences and culture around which to build a viable identity, they did so – as did nationalists everywhere – in opposition to other groups who they defined as nemeses of the nation. The history of the modern Middle East testifies to the truth of Gelvin’s assessment that all nationalisms “are defined by what they oppose.”

The history of Syrian nationalism is an interesting example of this phenomenon because the extreme diversity of the region made the creation of a common national identity an especially daunting task, in contrast to other emerging nations in the Middle East. In Egypt, the construction of nationhood was not such a stretch. Cairo and especially Alexandria were very diverse, but Egypt’s countryside was largely Sunni Arab and was unified by the Nile River and the unbroken history of empires that had founded themselves upon it. Syria, in contrast, held within its artificial boundaries Christians, Jews and Muslims of many different sects, including Alawi, Shia and Druze; it also included a variety of languages in addition to Arabic, including Aramaic, Kurdish and Turkish. As “Syrians” faced the possibility of independence after World War I, around what shared characteristics were they to rally? To answer this question, Syrian nationalists have – as Gelvin argues – constructed their identity in opposition to a nemesis. In fact, all Syrian attempts at nationalism were fundamentally attempts at throwing off the oppression of foreign powers. In every nationalistic creation of common identity, there was a foil.

In the early struggle for independence, the occupying French were the target, and this helped the young nationalists overcome the challenging diversity of the people they claimed to represent. After suffering terribly through World War I (Cleveland writes that more than 600,000 people in Greater Syria may have died during this period), Syrians were then subjected to the direct rule of the French. The French chopped up Syria into Lebanon (the Maronite area), a Druze state, an Alawi state and the states of Aleppo and Damascus. Then, the French dominated the political and bureaucratic systems of these regions, limited the growth of institutions of self-government and supported these endeavors with “an all pervasive intelligence service” and a standing garrison of some 15,000 troops (Cleveland:222). In addition to their crippling of institutions, the French made liberal use of violence. In 1925 and 1945, in the most egregious cases, the French savagely suppressed uprisings through the shelling of civilian areas in Damascus.

This oppression created for Syrians a common nemesis, in Gelvin’s mold, irrespective of their religion, class or ethnicity. In response, Syrian nationalism grew where none had existed before. For those that stressed Islam, the religion became a political, anti-imperialist force in a way that it had never been before. For regionalists, being Syrian morphed from an abstraction based on history – with little relevance to daily life – to a reason for unity against the French. And for Arab nationalists, the word “arab” changed from being a derogatory term that city-dwellers used to describe Bedouin to a term of pride that represented the strength of the unity of millions – the kind of unity that could resist the imperialists most effectively (Gelvin 202).

The possible Syrian paths to nationhood all focused on different shared characteristics. What each approach to nationalism had in common, though, was a rejection of the identity of the oppressor.

The regional identity was the most inclusive identity, and it is the one on which the Syrian Social Nationalist Party (SSNP) based its promotion of the Syrian nation when Antun Sa’adah established the party in 1932. This identity drew on the historical links of Greater Syria – today’s Palestine, Lebanon and Syria – to argue for the cultural integrity of this corner of the Eastern Mediterranean as a nation. This national identity did not directly draw on religion or language; conceivably it could have included all the diverse groups that inhabited the region in nationhood. Perhaps because this diversity would have been too much at odds with the modern notion of nation, or perhaps because of the centrifugal economic factors Owen and Palmuk outline, the SSNP ideology was not the one that came to define Syrian nationalism. (The party is still active, however, especially in Lebanon.)

Then, there was the option of building the nation around religious identity. Along these lines, the Lebanese Druze notable Amir Shakib Arslan “advocated a militant Islam” and “sought to reconstruct the bonds of Islamic solidarity” throughout the Middle East, a message that gained widespread credence in the 1920s and 1930s (Cleveland 236).The Muslim Brotherhood emerged in Egypt during the interwar period, as well, similarly stressing religious bonds and the importance of social and economic justice. But while the Muslim Brotherhood would become a potent and often violent force in Syrian politics in the 1970s and 1980s, it was not a major part of the Syrian nationalist movement in it early years. And while Arslan’s ideas gained traction, they did not spearhead the nationalist movement either in Greater Syria or in what actually became the present-day country of Syria. Syria was too diverse: a pan-Islamic bond was simply not inclusive enough. No one vision of Islam could be applied to all the Muslims in the region, let alone the many sects of Christians or the tens of thousands of Jews who still lived in Damascus and Aleppo at the time.

Pan-Arabism was the nationalist movement that won out in Syria, partly because it balanced inclusiveness with a better fit to the modern definition of nation. It described a group of people who shared a common language and heritage, even if they were from different religious backgrounds. Like the SSNP, Arab nationalism was profoundly secular. Michel Aflaq, a Damascene and one of the founders of Baathism, was a Greek Orthodox Arab, just like Antun Sa’adah. But unlike the SSNP, pan-Arabism chose the unity of all Arabs and the effective exclusion of the region’s small non-Arab minorities (such as the Kurds) over the fragmentation of the Arabs by region.

But even more than its inclusiveness, pan-Arabism won out because it was most at opposing the nemesis of French domination. Like the other two nationalisms – based on Islamic unity and region – that arose in Syria and elsewhere in the Arab world, pan-Arabism was founded in opposition to the imperialists of the era. Pan-Arabism succeeded because it opposed this enemy more effectively than any other – a united Arab front provided the strongest threat to European occupation of Arab lands.

The Baath party gained strength through the post-independence years precisely because it asserted its opposition to imperialist powers more forcefully than any other movement. After the French withdrawal from the region, these powers became increasingly nebulous, but they existed in the shadows of any debate on patriotism. Nationalistic economic policies, like those of Hafez al-Assad and Gamal Abul-Nasser, were implemented with the objective of limiting the influence of these nemeses. Through the latter part of the 20th Century, Syria’s nationhood was consolidated in opposition to Israel and to the Muslim Brotherhood.

Even today, there is a sense that Syrian nationalists must always highlight the threat of enemies of the nation in order to buoy the concept of the nation. Centrifugal forces – ethnic, religious and political – always threaten to disturb the nation’s integrity; the existence of a nemesis keeps them at bay. Nationalism is a powerful force, and since the overt threat of oppression by the French faded, there is always a space in nationalist ideology for the common enemy – that most binding of forces – to fit in. I recall an SSNP banner I saw in Lebanon in 2006:

Wa laisa lana min ‘ado yuqatilunana fi dinina wa ardina wa huqina illa al yahud.

“We have no enemy that fights us in our religion and our rights except for the Jews.”
Should that nemesis fade, surely another will rise in its place, and Syrian nationalism will chug onward.

Cited works

Abrahamian, Ervand, Iran between Two Revolutions

Cleveland, William, A History of the Modern Middle Eas.t

Gelvin, James, The Modern Middle East.

Owen, Roger and Sevket Pamuk, Middle East Economies in the Twentieth Century.

Rahnema, Ali, ed., Pioneers of Islamic Revival.

Political Islam in the Middle East

Question: To what extent do the models of political Islam put forth in the Iranian revolution depart from or parallel other Islamic political movements in the 20^thMiddle East?

Popular American concepts of Islamic political movements in the Middle East tend to see them as anachronistic anti-modernists who want to return the region to a system of governance that it experienced long ago.

But as a Palestinian journalist in Damascus once told me, commenting on the Iranian ulama: “I can dress like King Arthur, but that doesn’t make me medieval.”

In fact, the models of political Islam put forth in the Iranian revolution are distinctly part of the international political order and unprecedented in pre-modern history. In this respect, they parallel all models of political Islam put forward in the 20^th Century. In its nationalistic undertones and use of Western political institutions, Iranian political Islam resembles movements like Hamas, the Muslim Brotherhood and Hezbollah (notwithstanding differences in sect). At the same time, political movements like those behind Al-Qaeda, while also distinctly modern and dependent on the contemporary system of political institutions, depart markedly from the Iranian brands of political Islam. Such movements call for a struggle that transcends national borders and has less clear objectives in terms of governance and social justice.

The political Islam behind the Iranian revolution was by no means the first Islamic political movement, but it was one of the most successful. The factors that drove the movement were the same as those that drove political Islam everywhere. First, there was the corruption of the existing government. After the CIA assisted the reinstatement of Mohammed Reza Shah over the non-aligned populist Mohammed Mossadegh in 1953, the government grew steadily away from its people. Its manipulation by the United States was obvious. Abrahamian writes that the Shah “received technical assistance from the Israeli intelligence service, as well as from the CIA and the FBI” to establish the feared police force, SAVAK (419). The Shah sold out the oil nationalization that Mossadegh had worked so hard for, and he used his new power to “crush” all opposition parties (Abrahamian 419). The economy suffered severely and the numbers of urban poor swelled. A bitterness spread in Iran and hopes for Mossadegh’s model of a secular nationalism faded. It was in this atmosphere that Ayatollah Khomeini spread his message of an Islamic state via “cassettes, telephone lines, and networks of ulama” (Gelvin 286).

While the Iranian revolution asserted its goals as the creation of an Islamic state, the driving force behind its popularity seems to be its opposition to the repression and foreign intervention that it rallied against. In this, it was like other nationalistic movements in the region. While it professed an Islamic ideal, its aims were distinctly Iranian. The most potent aspect of its Islamic side seems to have been the cultural authenticity of the Ulama, which stood in stark contrast to the Shah’s Westernized manner and habits of excess. But beyond the Ulama’s authenticity as a longstanding Iranian cultural fixture, the revolution made use of just as many Western institutions and ideals as it did Islamic. Gelvin points out that the new name of the country, the Islamic Republic of Iran, includes a word that has no basis in Islamic history – “republic.” In fact, the Iranian revolution promised to deliver a decent government to Iranians according to Islamic principles of social justice and law, making use of the extant political institutions, which were mostly transplants of European provenance. “Rather than Islamizing the nation, it might be argued that the revolution nationalized religion,” writes Gelvin (291).

The Iranian revolution is a good starting point for examining other Islamic political movements in the Middle East both because it inspired a new era of the phenomenon, and because its causes and modalities resemble those of even those Islamic political movements that preceded it by half a century. Norton’s description of Shia populism is one that resonates with many different varieties of political Islam, whether Sunni or Shia: “Hopes born of education, urban migration and other facets of social mobilization are often thwarted by ineffective, corrupt or unresponsive government. Thereby [sic] fostering a ripe opportunity for populist ideologues to mobilize support” (Rahnema et al 191). Throughout the 20^th Century, this mobilization has often been an Islamic one.

In the late 1920s, the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt grew on social circumstances that closely resembled those that came about in Iran 50 years later. At the time, Egypt had gained nominal independence but suffered from constant British intervention. Its government was composed of a Westernized elite who had little connection to the common people. The Muslim Brotherhood advocated for a realignment of Egyptian society according to Islamic principles, but not for a scrapping of all modern institutions of government. The parallels with the Iranian revolution can be traced long into the period of Egyptian independence, even though the Brotherhood is a Sunni organization and the Iranian revolution is, of course, Shiite. As in Iran, the experiment of secular nationalism was tried and failed, and the Muslim Brotherhood increased its popularity as Egyptians grew increasingly alienated from their leadership under Anwar Sadat and Hosni Mubarak. While nothing as sweeping as the Iranian Revolution has come to pass in Egypt, the possibility of such a movement is one of the great fears of the Mubarak regime.

Hamas is another political group with an Islamic orientation with many parallels to the Iranian Islamic political movement that led to revolution, though it has completely different origins. When Hamas was founded in 1987, it was not modeled after the Iranian Revolution. But like the Iranian revolution, it was – and still is – essentially a nationalist movement that articulates its principles according to Islamic ideals. As such, it is – like the Iranian movement and the Muslim Brotherhood before it – a distinctly modern creature. As we learned in lecture, Hamas’s essential appeal is its uncompromising opposition on behalf of a native population (Palestinians) to a foreign-influenced oppressor (Israel).

Then, there is Hezbollah. To the outside world, the party is sometimes mistaken for one with a pan-Islamic vision and (oddly enough because it represents a completely different sect and people) sometimes confused with Hamas. But Hamas – like the other Islamic political movements – is a distinctly Lebanese nationalistic organization that professes to be guided by the principles of Islam in its endeavors. It grew out of Shia opposition to Israeli occupation in southern Lebanon – just like the other movements grew in opposition to foreign oppression. Hezbollah’s religious orientation gave it credibility with the marginalized Lebanese Shia, out of whom the movement coalescent from several different groups in the early 1980s. And while Hezbollah has ideological links to Iran and is politically supported by Syria, it has never attempted to expand outside of Lebanon. Far from being a completely unprecedented kind of movement, it is essentially a nationalistic militia that makes use of Islamic symbolism, language and principles – as well as numerous European institutions and ideas.

This is, by and large, the story of Islamic political movements in the Middle East. They tend to be spurred by the same forces, and use the same existing frameworks for discourse and action that their secular opponents use. Rarely do they seriously challenge the international system of Westphalian states.

The exception, of course, is Wahhabi-inspired groups like Al Qaeda that are not bound to any specific territory. American-Saudi cooperation, as we learned in our lectures, spawned such groups to counter the Soviet presence in Afghanistan. With that threat vanquished, the groups became a sort of liberation movement without a distinct population in need of liberation, and have turned their energies to a broader quest for Islamic purity. It should be noted, however, that even this movement depends on the existence of modern political structures for its existence; it was, after all, born out of wars between them.

In the particulars of their manifestations, models of political Islam in the Middle East vary greatly. They represent different sects and assert roles for religion in the state of varying magnitudes. But the undercurrents of nearly all the models are strikingly similar: they are viable, nationalistic movements that draw on their Islamic orientation for authenticity and for guiding principles. They arise in response to similar circumstances. Far from being throwbacks to an earlier era, they make effective use of modern political systems and institutions. Their clothes may look medieval, but everything else about them is decidedly contemporary.

Cited works

Abrahamian, Ervand, Iran between Two Revolutions

Cleveland, William, A History of the Modern Middle Eas.t

Gelvin, James, The Modern Middle East.

Owen, Roger and Sevket Pamuk, Middle East Economies in the Twentieth Century.

Rahnema, Ali, ed., Pioneers of Islamic Revival.