The Ground Beneath Their Feet
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A reinvigorated CoH [Cessation of Hostilities] would help the political process to mature as we press for the formation of a transitional government body with full executive powers that can start to rebuild Syria and Syrian society, with significant assistance from the international community.
But what, after five years of bloodletting, does “Syrian society” mean? We've seen in Iraq how difficult it can be to build a multi-sectarian country out of the ashes of war. Each country that has lived through the Arab Spring has its own complications – they may be less diverse or less violent, wealthier or more secular – but the same question obtains in all of them.In Syria the unity and euphoria of initial anti-government demonstrations quickly evaporated under Assad's bombs and bullets, pitting disenfranchised Sunnis against Alawites (the ruling sect to which Assad belongs); Kurds, who also have significant stateless populations in Turkey and Iraq, against Sunnis; and “moderate” fighters, whom the interventionists want to arm, against extremists like ISIS. How can these factions be reconciled when the only form of stability they once knew was dictatorship?Syria is only the most extreme example of a phenomenon that has recurred across the Middle East and North Africa in the wake of the Arab Spring. The protesters, with all their differences, have had little success maintaining unity under pressure. Robert Worth's new book, A Rage for Order, tells the story of the Arab Spring from the point of view of its participants. He knows how to get out of the story's way, and he has the rarest of reportorial gifts: the ability to write excellent prose. A Rage for Order is a prodigious feat of ground-level reporting, and a mournful one, too.The book begins in medias res, as Worth is rushing from Tahrir Square, the focal point of anti-government protests in Egypt, to Libya, where rebels are massing to topple Muammar Qaddafi's twisted funhouse regime. His opening reflections set the tone:
It was impossible to imagine that some of the young Egyptians who were with me on that ride would by year's end be fighting each other in Tahrir Square, the revolution's symbolic heart. They would divide into warring camps and ideologies, accusing each other of betraying the revolt that brought them together. Some would end up with ISIS in Syria, sawing the heads off rival soldiers in the name of God. Others would make common cause with the same military leaders they had fought in 2011 and applaud the massacre of more than a thousand Islamists in Cairo in 2013. The Libyans I'd met in those early days, so full of hope and laughter, would fragment into hundreds of militias, their country shattered by civil war. The same and worse was in store for many of the young rebels I met in Yemen, Syria, and Tunisia.
More than any others, it was the protests in Egypt that seemed to augur something new and hopeful in the Arab world. The Arab Spring began in Tunisia, but when Egypt followed, observers thought they discerned a pattern. Egypt has by far the largest population in the region, and its authoritarian regime was decades old, entrenched, supported by Western largesse.Like Tunisia's revolution, which took off after a despairing street vendor lit himself on fire, Egypt's was sudden and quickly grew beyond the control of the government. And like Tunisia's, it drew support from all quarters of society. Worth describes “a sudden but vast shift in perspective, as if the Earth had tilted on its axis.” Young members of the Muslim Brotherhood were marching side-by-side with tech-savvy secularists; Christians were forming human chains to protect Muslims while they prayed; volunteer doctors treated the wounded while soccer hooligans fought off regime thugs.Eighteen days after the occupation of Tahrir Square began, Hosni Mubarak was ejected by the Army. But the elections and the subsequent reign of the Muslim Brotherhood exposed fault lines that the revolution had papered over. Liberals were disorganized, and soon discovered that the Brotherhood and the more extreme Salafists were not only better organized, but had been engaging in what Worth calls “calculated self-restraint”: tamping down their religious rhetoric to avoid regime scrutiny. They won the Presidency and Mohammed Morsi, a stubborn and unimaginative man, became the leader of Egypt.He tried to translate the Brotherhood's religious program into legislation, and perhaps more importantly, did or could do little to revive Egypt's moribund economy, which had been as much a galvanizing force for the revolution as Mubarak's corruption and oppression. As the country grew restless, Morsi refused to bend, and foolishly attempted to rein in rival centers of power, the judges and the military. “His pigheadedness,” Worth writes, “amazed even his own ministers, who had been peeling off in droves.” Tahrir was occupied once again, but this time the liberals were protesting their former allies, and they looked away or even celebrated when the military met Islamist counter-demonstrations with deadly force. As Worth observes, “the demands for dignity and civic rights have given way to conflicts that loosened the very building blocks of social and political belonging. The protesters who chanted for freedom and democracy in 2011 had found nothing solid beneath their feet, no common agreement on what those words meant.”These radical shifts are neatly encapsulated in the story of Muhammad Beltagy. A “rising star” in the Brotherhood firmament when the protests started, he urged solidarity with Tahrir's occupiers and became the Brotherhood's de facto representative there. He made many friends among the liberals, who trusted him in part because he was willing to openly question the Brotherhood's leadership (the group's youth liked him for the same reason). As Morsi's rule degenerated into national acrimony, Beltagy continued to speak his mind but his pleas for compromise went unheeded. The Brotherhood's leadership even had him surveilled by Egyptian police. (In a sad illustration of the kaleidoscopic flux endemic to Egypt at the time, these same spies would turn on the Islamists in just a few months.)
Photo by Jonathan RashadThe Egyptian army's helicopter pilots who flew over Cairo on that day would have seen Egypt's polarized politics inscribed on the city's face: two vast, opposed gatherings, each full of chanting crowds, each utterly self-contained and suffused with righteous rage.
The army issued an ultimatum, but Morsi wouldn't back down. In August 2013, soon after he was deposed, the Army moved in on Raaba and its sister demonstrations, killing over a thousand, wounding and jailing many more. The liberals, who stood shoulder-to-shoulder with them only a few years before, cheered the bloodletting. Beltagy escaped but was soon caught and jailed, where he languishes to this day, his organization in shambles, its members radicalized or demoralized, and the new friendships he made in Tahrir poisoned beyond repair by mutual distrust and the memory of murdered comrades.Worth’s signal achievement in A Rage for Order lies in showing how the question of political stability applies across the region yet is vastly complicated by the diversity of voices in each country. The personal narrative is his skeleton key: there is a small cast of characters in each country, carefully rendered but also symbolic. Each life is intricate and each person’s motivations are fluid; they defy easy categorization, and when one maps them onto their respective countries the result is an elegant rebuke to the one-dimensional portrayals that pervade Western media. Worth manages to do this while maintaining unity of theme: the difficulty of finding peace and order among traumatized people.In Syria, war threw old friendships into a harsh new light. Worth tells the story of Aliaa Ali and Noura Kanafani, best friends living in the relatively prosperous city of Jableh on the Mediterranean coast, who enjoyed going to school and taking rides together. Aliaa is Alawi, Noura Sunni, but sectarian difference hardly intruded on their lives before 2011. As the dominoes fell in Tunisia and Egypt, the atmosphere in Syria grew pregnant with tension. The Kanafanis cheered when the leaders of Yemen and Egypt fell; their neighbors, mostly Alawi, were apprehensive. Members of Noura's family took part in the protests and reported the regime's brutal response to her; Aliaa's brother was nearly killed in Egypt by Sunnis simply because of his sect. By the end of the book, Aliaa is embittered, fully embracing the fear and bigotry of her kinsman. Noura has become a refugee, devoted to conspiracy theories, posting pro-ISIS propaganda on her Facebook page. What Worth says elsewhere of Egypt is true here as well: “It was as if the hatred of the two sides had become a kind of reflector oven, the opposed metal surfaces beaming back and forth a mutual frenzy of madness and contempt.” In a peaceful country, their story suggests, the differences over which hundreds of thousands have been killed would amount to very little in the lives of these two women, and Aliaa and Noura would still be taking rides together.Of all the countries Worth chronicles, Yemen was in some ways the least likely to see revolution. It was by far the poorest, freighted with sectarian and tribal antagonism, and host to one of al Qaeda's most potent branches. Yet a revolution sprang up anyway and Ali Abdullah Saleh, who had ruled a unified Yemen for 22 years, was forced to step down. Worth describes the upheaval through the eyes of Saeed, a nearly destitute, middle-aged man who had been protesting the regime in one way or another for four decades. He and the peasants from his hometown of Ja’ashin had been staging periodic demonstrations in Sanaa, Yemen’s capital, for some time, and when the Arab Spring broke out they formed the nucleus of the protest movement, which even spread to the tribes, who were often at war with each other but found common cause in their disdain for Saleh’s corruption.“Each country fell apart in its own way,” Worth says of the aftermath of the Arab Spring. In Yemen, it was due in large part to the intervention of external powers: Saudi Arabia (and by extension the United States) and Iran (though its role in supporting the Shiite Houthis is often exaggerated). And here is the only real flaw I can find in the book. A Rage for Order is, as Worth says in the introduction, “not a comprehensive history of the Arab uprisings.” Instead, it is:
a much more selective effort to make sense of their fallout: the collapse of political authority across much of the Arab world, whether through war or sheer disintegration, culminating in the establishment of the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq. The story is told through people whose lives intersected with the uprisings and their aftermath… I touch on Iraq only in passing, because the American invation of 2003 imposed on it a somewhat different trajectory…. I have little to say about the role of the United States and other Western powers, because I believe it was mostly secondary… The Arab political landscape was certainly changed by the American invasions of Iraq, but the forces that propelled the uprisings of 2011 were, in my view, indigenous.
The vast majority of the book consists of personal narratives, but there’s necessarily some contextual, explanatory material, and the choice to largely omit the role of the West (or, for that matter, Russia) is a mistake. “In each country,” Worth writes, “the loosening of state authority seemed to unspool a related set of assumptions, as if all these strands were part of some larger Ottoman fabric that could no longer be rewoven.” But it is also true that the Ottoman Empire was ripped into pieces after the First World War, that Europe and later the United States became the guarantors of a glibly demarcated state system which they had carved out of Ottoman land. It’s Russia that is propping up Bashar Assad today, America whose invasion of Iraq spawned ISIS, and America that enables the mass starvation and death resulting from the Saudi bombing and blockade of Yemen at this very moment. Better than almost any book before it, A Rage for Order shows how deprivation and violence can tear people apart, which is why it’s so jarring to find great power complicity in that violence given so little attention.“Saeed told me he no longer understood his own country,” Worth writes near the end. By that point Saeed's lament has become a familiar refrain. Earlier in the book Worth meets a Syrian refugee and cautions him about the dangers of crossing the waters to Europe. The refugee “laughed incredulously. ‘You do not know what we have been living in Syria,’ he said. ‘We left because we see no future in our homeland at all. You have a choice: to fight with one of the parties, or get arrested or killed. Or you get out.’” Abu Ali, a man who joined ISIS and fled after witnessing its brutality, tells Worth “The Arab world was falling apart… and he saw no future there.” An ex-Brotherhood member wonders, “Where are we going? Oligarchy? Theocracy? I am confused. I never before wanted to leave Egypt. Now I am thinking I have no place here.” Ahmed, a disillusioned Egyptian liberal, is despondent: “It’s over, the revolution’s finished….when you see the people who were together in Tahrir killing each other, there’s no point anymore.” Ahmed’s journey mirrors so many others in its breadth and brevity, crossing an entire spectrum of identity and belief in a frighteningly short span of time: after disappearing for a while, he resurfaces in a remote corner of Syria, a fully-committed member of ISIS. He then kills himself in a suicide bombing in Iraq.“The protesters of 2011,” Worth concludes,
had dreamed of building new countries that would confer genuine citizenship and something more: karama, dignity, the rallying cry of all the uprisings. When that dream failed them, many gave way to apathy or despair, or even nostalgia for the old regimes they had assailed. But some ran headlong into the seventh century in search of the same prize. They wanted something they had heard about and imagined all their lives but never really known: a dawla that would not melt into air beneath their feet, a place they could call their own, a state that shielded its subjects from humiliation and despair.
It is this drive, for dignity and belonging, that unites the Arab Spring's disparate participants. But they are united by very little else, at least right now. What would a democratic Egypt look like? How can Yemen, currently split into three warring factions, ever unite? How can Libya, which is even more fragmented, satisfy its dozens of militant groups? What does it mean to speak of a “Syrian society”? No one has an answer.____Greg Waldmann is the Editor-in-chief of Open Letters Monthly, and a native New Yorker living in Boston with a degree in International Affairs.
