The Epic Arab Trek Between God and Gun

Hold on to your seats, for the four most powerful and influential Arab countries -- Syria, Iraq, Saudi Arabia and Egypt -- are simultaneously experiencing significant, sometimes violent, internal changes that touch on the most basic elements of identity, power and national authority. What happens in those countries in the years ahead will shape the region for generations perhaps, perhaps creating new patterns of stable statehood on the way. Saudi Arabia does not experience the upheavals of Iraq, Syria and Egypt, but its own new internal dynamics portend historic changes underway in that country and throughout the Gulf region -- because some citizens no longer accept blindly to follow the rules of the 18-19th Century foundational tenets of the Saudi-Wahhabi alliance.

The worsening carnage throughout Syria, the sharp increase in killings by bombings and ethnic cleansing in Iraq in the past few months, and the open confrontation between the armed forces and the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt are stark reminders of where the modern Arab world stands today on its quirky road to modern statehood. Syria, Iraq and Egypt capture the leading political challenges that face the Arab world: How to shape a stable and equitable pluralistic society? How to achieve an acceptable balance of authority among military and civilian forces? How to assert religious values in daily and public life without falling into the trap of theocratic autocracy or an artificially imposed secularism from above? (The fourth regional challenge -- how to achieve sustained socio-economic development with social justice -- is another topic for another day).

That these three historical Arab powerhouses all are experience deep conflict or uncertainty is the inevitable consequence of our recent history since the 1950s. We navigate today the national wreckages, social carcasses and political diseases of several generations of security-based state-building that provided a thin surface stability, but never buttressed this with the durable substance of genuine citizen-anchored nationhood.

The surge in killings in Iraq -- over one thousand died in July -- is most troubling for revealing the combination of weak state security capabilities in the face of resurgent attacks by groups that largely kill their victims by the dozens purely on the basis of their sectarian identity. The inability of the Iraqi state to protect its prisons or defend its own citizens is bizarrely juxtaposed against the determination of much of the Iraq state and society’s determination to send troops and assistance to support the embattled regime of Syrian President Bashar Assad. This completes a trans-West Asian linkage of Iranian, Iraqi, Syrian-Assadi, Lebanese-Hezbollah, and Palestinian-Hamas-Islamic Jihad parties that have been working together for some years to maintain their collective roles and interests in the region.

The battle in Egypt brings into the open an important fault line that has been operating at low intensity beneath the entire region for nearly the past century: Is it only about whether individuals and society are shaped by the divine promise of religious values, or by the post-1770s temporal handiwork of civic-political-national institutions that have been totally hijacked by security agencies in the modern Arab world? God or gun, in fact, is really the only basic choice that Arab citizens have faced in recent generations, and it is both unfair and unworkable. The big tragedy is that in those opportunities that they have had to date in the Middle East or South Asia, both religious and military leaders have proved to be fully and embarrassingly incompetent at the business of promoting productive, just and stable societies.

Egypt now reveals the determination of tens of millions of typical Arab citizens who seek that elusive middle ground between gun and God, which is simply pluralistic citizenship and accountable governance under the rule of law. Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Tunisia, Libya and Egypt offer different examples of the hard, slow quest for this goal. Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states offer another example, which defines citizenship primarily as consumerism, with unaccountable governments spending hundreds of billions of dollars to provide their nationals with every possible material need.

Yet, more and more Gulf states’ nationals also seek that elusive middle ground between living in a perpetual shopping mall but having no right to vote or express a political/social opinion on how the state spends its money at home or abroad. Hundreds of Gulf citizens are being jailed or indicted in court for actions like expressing an opinion on Twitter or Facebook. The sharpest recent example was last week’s decision by a Saudi court to sentence a certain Raif Badawi to seven years in prison and 600 lashes for creating a website where Saudis could share their views on the public role of religion and other such issues. In their own ways, some Saudi and other Gulf citizens have now also embarked on that epic journey from a traditional, patriarchal, collective society defined mainly by faith and family, to one in which individual citizens have many more rights and options to live out their lives.

Rami G. Khouri is Editor-at-large of The Daily Star, and Director of the Issam Fares Institute for Public Policy and International Affairs at the American University of Beirut, in Beirut, Lebanon. You can follow him @ramikhouri.