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EDITORIAL: Fear of the Arab powder keg

Saudi King Abdullah has warned that the situation in the ‘Arab region’ — from the Palestinian territories to the Gulf — is potentially explosive. It is a “powder keg”, he said. The Palestinians are fighting among themselves, and Iraq “is about to slip into the darkness of strife and mad struggle, and so is Lebanon”. The Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) leaders he was addressing in Riyadh are all alarmed by the escalating dangers that threaten to spill over from Iraq’s sectarian war and the nuclear standoff that pits a defiant Iran against the West.

The GCC states (Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Bahrain and Oman) see internal trouble coming in the wake of Iraq’s turmoil. As Arabs, they opposed Arab nationalism that bound the various sects together in the Middle East for a long time. The term ‘Arab’ now being used tends to signal the limits of Islamism with which they have replaced Arab nationalism. In fact, it seems that, just as the Middle Eastern experiment with Arab nationalism was exhausted of its potential, the Islamism model too has reached its end.

Arab nationalism was based on the bond (asabiyya) which the Arabs felt on the basis of language. It militated against the modern nation-state and it offended the other asabiyya of faith. In fact pan-Arab feeling carried in its womb a republican ambition that threatened the monarchies and princely realms in the Middle East. But pan-Arabism could not stand tall in the face of the compulsions of the nation-state and collapsed when challenged by the ‘national interest’. It was only later that the Islamism paradigm promoted by Saudi Arabia won the day.

The Islamism model has ended up emphasising another kind of internal asabiyya, especially when propelled by the Sunni identity leveraged with Saudi funds. It has been the tendency of the Muslims to define themselves more precisely that compelled the non-Sunni identity to ‘discover’ itself. This was further exacerbated by the Islamic Revolution of Iran in 1979 when the Saudi model was challenged from within Islamism. That is when the world realised for the first time that Shia minorities existed in many states of the Gulf and in Lebanon on the Mediterranean coast. Now Kuwait says that almost half of its population is Shia. Ironically, though, before the emergence of Khomeini’s Iran the Shia in Kuwait were the most integrated minority of all the Shia in the Arab region.

Shia minorities are asserting themselves for rights. In some cases, Shia majorities living under oppressive Sunni rule are demanding the empowerment they deserve under the democratic principle unknown to the Arabs in general. But even those Sunnis who oppose the monarchies and dictatorships are ready to give battle to Shia populations, which once again, exposes the Arab reluctance to accept the pluralism of democracy. Al Qaeda arose as the outfit that wanted to fight only the United States, but today it is a sectarian organisation killing the very Shia community that opposes the United States.

It is a pity that the very Arab states in the Gulf that are trying to break out of the fundamentalist stranglehold with the help of a free economy feel themselves under a threat (read Iran) that subordinates the economy to ideology. This despite the fact that in the last ten years the GCC economies have proved that they can be the next model that might actually work where the pan-Arab and Islamism models have failed. During the American invasion of Iraq, the economies of the Gulf have boomed, some of them directly from the war itself. Pakistan too has made good economic progress after the state began abandoning the religious paradigm under external duress.

Meanwhile, all other moulds of change are predictable failures, including democracy if it is practised by the Muslims. All over the Arab world a transition to democratic rule will bring fundamentalists to power who may not go away soon because of their ability to impose a durable oppressive government like Iran. The free-economy model could have survived but for the American folly in Iraq. Now the Sunni Arabs are threatened by Shia Iran and Shia Arabs living on the margins of the greater Arab society. The GCC states must take these facts well to heart.

The GCC states are led ideologically by Saudi Arabia. To some extent Kuwait has succumbed to the strict Wahhabi type of Islam because of the effort of its rulers to democratise Kuwaiti society. In other GCC states, however, a de-emphasis on the Saudi brand of Islam will defuse much of the internal tension. For instance the Shia (Akhbari) of Saudi Arabia simply want better human treatment not secession; in Bahrain too more rights will calm the Shia (Shaykhi) who are Arab first and differ from Iran (Usuli) in their strain of Shiism. As far as the threat from Iran is concerned, the Gulf is secured by the American 5th Fleet headquartered in Bahrain.

In Pakistan, the Islamism experiment has failed, as proved by the compulsion of reforming the Hudood laws and by the spread of sectarian mayhem. The state must realise that when the Founder of Pakistan spoke on 11 August 1947, he was speaking for the future of Pakistan. This is the lesson that the GCC leaders must also revisit. This will guard the religion — which Muslims treasure — as well as make their states viable in today’s world. *

SECOND EDITORIAL: The US-India nuclear deal is done

The two houses of the US Congress have endorsed the civilian nuclear cooperation deal that President Bush signed with India. Today, President Bush will sign it into law, after which India will sign ‘a bilateral agreement with the US, conclude a safeguards agreement with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and have the 45-member Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG) modify its rules, so that its member states can sell nuclear supplies to India’. No major difficulty is expected to be encountered in finalising any of the three deals.

President Bush lost the support of Congress on everything but his deal with India which will open the Indian market to American companies selling nuclear-related goods. If there was any political underpinning to rewarding India like this, it has evaporated. India is not required even to take steps to discourage Iran from making its bomb. Experts in the US say Washington will live to regret this deal too as all nuclear restraint under the NPT vanishes in the coming days. *

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