Barry Rubin
(A review from 2011)
You want to know what's wrong with the study and analysis of the Middle East in the West in a single sentence? Ok, here it is:
Edward Said is treated like a guru and hero; Fouad Ajami isn't.
Said never took the slightest risk and lived a life of greatest
privilege. He was lionized by the intellectual elite. His work was
taught in universities and shaped the worldview of a generation of
professors and students.
Yet what Said said was disastrous for the Arabs themselves and for
Western intellectual life. He told the Arabs that they were innocent
victims who didn't need to do anything differently, thus guaranteeing
they stayed on the wrong road. He backed the Palestinian cause as
perfect (despite some criticisms of Arafat's dictatorial tendencies and
corruption) and thus didn't use his influence to turn it toward
moderation--away from radicalism, terrorism, and hatred--and a genuine
two-state solution.
Equally bad, he undermined Western pragmatism, Enlightenment values, and
scholarship by a Stalinist-type campaign to discredit all preceding
work on the region and substitute for it propaganda.
I will never forget standing at the door of a Middle East Studies
Association (MESA) annual meeting session listening to Said recite with
hatred in his voice a list of scholars who he said were "enemies of the
Arabs" to what can only be called a howling mob of professors. I had the
honor of being on that list.
At that moment, I thought to myself: "I am witnessing the death of
scholarship in American universities." If we had been living in a Middle
East society, the audience would probably have erupted from the hall to
beat up or kill those "enemies of the people."
Many years after his influence gained virtual hegemony, I am not aware
of a single book authored by any of his followers that is of lasting
value in the study of the modern Middle East. Not one. On the other
hand, environmentalists should protest the forest murders to manufacture
paper wasted on the ideological junk that is turned out on the region
by academics today.
While Said came from an incredibly rich family and was raised from
childhood as a Westerner (I personally witnessed him wearing earphones
to hear the Arabic translation into English at a Palestine National
Council meeting), Fouad Ajami came from a poor Shia Muslim family and
grew up in a Lebanese village.
Ajami's brilliance, balance, and genuine adherence to democracy along
with his people's welfare has been rewarded in the West with a response
ranging from intellectual persecution to mere neglect.
He's also a great guy in person. Only a few days ago, a Lebanese student
told me about meeting Ajami, who he didn't know, on a train ride and
how friendly and kind Ajami behaved toward him. I also had an extensive
conversation with a childhood friend about how Said used to make fun of
the Arabs in private in terms that would shock the socks off
the Politically Correct gang.
I'm leaving out a lot of detailed anecdotes about both men that demonstrate my thesis.
Pick up book and almost any article by Ajami and you will meet with a
truly creative and incisive mind. Arguably, he is the greatest living
thinker on the contemporary Middle East. (Lest anyone misread this as a
slight toward Bernard Lewis, I would say he is the greatest living
Middle East historian.)
If the West and the Arab world listened to Ajami rather than Said they would be both far better off.
All of this is by way of introduction to Ajami's latest article, "The Road to Serfdom and the Arab Revolt," published in the Wall Street Journal.
He raises the hitherto neglected economic angle on the Arab world's
recent history and opens the door to a fascinating comparison with
Western history. Ajami also adds an important point in understanding
what went wrong in the Arab world.
Though I already knew the basic points he made, Ajami's article inspired
me to see these issues in a different way. I reprint here in its
entirety:
"The Road to Serfdom and the Arab Revolt"
By Fouad Ajami
Wall Street Journal, July 8, 2011
The late great Austrian economist F.A. Hayek would have seen the Arab
Spring for the economic revolt it was right from the start. For
generations the Arab populations had bartered away their political
freedom for economic protection. They rose in rebellion when it dawned
on them that the bargain had not worked, that the system of subsidies,
and the promise of equality held out by the autocrats, had proven a
colossal failure.
What Hayek would call the Arab world's "road to serfdom" began when the
old order of merchants and landholders was upended in the 1950s and '60s
by a political and military class that assumed supreme power. The
officers and ideologues who came to rule Egypt, Syria, Iraq, Libya,
Algeria and Yemen were men contemptuous of the marketplace and of
economic freedom.
As a rule, they hailed from the underclass and had no regard for the
sanctity of wealth and property. They had come to level the economic
order, and they put the merchant classes, and those who were the
mainstay of the free market, to flight.
It was in the 1950s that the foreign minorities who had figured
prominently in the economic life of Egypt after the cotton boom of the
1860s, and who had drawn that country into the web of the world economy,
would be sent packing. The Jews and the Greeks and the Italians would
take with them their skills and habits. The military class, and the
Fabian socialists around them, distrusted free trade and the marketplace
and were determined to rule over them or without them.
The Egyptian way would help tilt the balance against the private sector
in other Arab lands as well. In Iraq, the Jews of the country, on its
soil for well over two millennia, were dispossessed and banished in
1950-51. They had mastered the retail trade and were the most active
community in the commerce of Baghdad. Some Shiite merchants stepped into
their role, but this was short-lived. Military officers and ideologues
of the Baath Party from the "Sunni triangle"—men with little going for
them save their lust for wealth and power—came into possession of the
country and its oil wealth. They, like their counterparts in Egypt, were
believers in central planning and "social equality." By the 1980s,
Saddam Hussein, a Sunni thug born from crushing poverty, would come to
think of the wealth of the country as his own.
In Libya, a deranged Moammar Gadhafi did Saddam one better. After his
1969 military coup, he demolished the private sector in 1973 and
established what he called "Islamic Socialism." Gadhafi's so-called
popular democracy basically nationalized the entire economy, rendering
the Libyan people superfluous by denying them the skills and the social
capital necessary for a viable life.
In his 1944 masterpiece, "The Road to Serfdom," Hayek wrote that in
freedom-crushing totalitarian societies "the worst get on top." In words
that described the Europe of his time but also capture the contemporary
Arab condition, he wrote: "To be a useful assistant in the running of a
totalitarian state, it is not enough that a man should be prepared to
accept specious justification of vile deeds; he must himself be prepared
actively to break every moral rule he
has ever known if this seems necessary to achieve the end set for him.
Since it is the supreme leader who alone determines the ends, his
instruments must have no moral convictions of their own."
This well describes the decades-long brutal dictatorship of Syria's
Hafez al-Assad, and now his son Bashar's rule. It is said that Hafez
began his dynasty with little more than a modest officer's salary. His
dominion would beget a family of enormous wealth: The Makhloufs, the
in-laws of the House of Assad, came to control crucial sectors of the
Syrian economy.
The Alawites, the religious sect to which the Assad clan belongs, had
been poor peasants and sharecroppers, but political and military power
raised them to new heights. The merchants of Damascus and Aleppo, and
the landholders in Homs and Hama, were forced to submit to the new
order. They could make their peace with the economy of extortion, cut
Alawite officers into long-established businesses, or be swept aside.
But a decade or so ago this ruling bargain—subsidies and economic
redistribution in return for popular quiescence—began to unravel. The
populations in Arab lands had swelled and it had become virtually
impossible to guarantee jobs for the young and poorly educated. Economic
nationalism, and the war on the marketplace, had betrayed the Arabs.
They had the highest unemployment levels among developing nations, the
highest jobless rate among the young, and the lowest rates of economic
participation among women. The Arab political order was living on
borrowed time, and on fear of official terror.
Attempts at "reform" were made. But in the arc of the Arab economies,
the public sector of one regime became the private sector of the next.
Sons, sons-in-law and nephews of the rulers made a seamless transition
into the rigged marketplace when "privatization" was forced onto
stagnant enterprises. Of course, this bore no resemblance to
market-driven economics in a transparent system. This was crony
capitalism of the worst kind, and it was recognized as such by Arab
populations.
Indeed, this economic plunder was what finally severed the bond between
Hosni Mubarak and an Egyptian population known for its timeless patience
and stoicism.
The sad truth of Arab social and economic development is that the
free-market reforms and economic liberalization that remade East Asia
and Latin America bypassed the Arab world. This is the great challenge
of the Arab Spring and of the forces that brought it about. The
marketplace has had few, if any, Arab defenders. If the tremendous
upheaval at play in Arab lands is driven by a desire to capture state
power—and the economic prerogatives that come with political power—the
revolution will reproduce the failures of the past.
In Yemen, a schoolteacher named Amani Ali, worn out by the poverty and
anarchy of that poorest of Arab states, recently gave voice to a
sentiment that has been the autocrats' prop: "We don't want change," he
said. "We don't want freedom. We want food and safety." True wisdom, and
an end to their road to serfdom, will only come when the Arab people
make the connection between economic and political liberty.
Mr. Ajami, a senior fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution,
is co-chairman of Hoover's Working Group on Islamism and the
International Order.
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