Freedom Socialist •Special Edition• October 2001
A short history of Arab nationalismThe quest for justice and the roles of religion, geopolitics and class
In the decades following World War II, militant Arab nationalists inspired liberation fighters around the world. But today it appears that Arab nationalism, as a progressive force, has been eclipsed by reactionary Islamic fundamentalist groups like the Taliban. How did this happen?
Birth of an empire. Born on the Arabian Peninsula in the 7th century, Islam arose both as a religion, whose believers are called Muslims or Moslems, and the start of a new empire, which began by uniting the scattered Arabian tribes under a common rule, religion, and language.
The Islamic world eventually grew to include all of the Middle East (the Arabian Peninsula and other countries of Southwest Asia, plus Northeast Africa); most of the rest of northern Africa; other Asian regions including what are today Afghanistan and Pakistan; and places as far away as Indonesia. Islamic culture produced a flowering of science, art, mathematics, medicine, and architecture, and helped to provide the foundations for the European Renaissance in the 14th century.
First wave of nationalism fails to crest. In time, all Middle Eastern people, except for those of what are today Iran and Turkey, came to be considered Arab (defined by ethnicity and language, but not by religion). Also in time, however, other conquerors came to dominate the region.
Arab nationalism stirred against the repressive rule of the Ottoman Empire early in the 20th century, when the economy of the Middle East was still mostly feudal and agricultural. British and French imperialists, who had recently gained significant stakes in the area, pledged to promote Arab independence if the Arabs helped them fight and win World War I.
But the victorious imperialists broke their promises with impunity after the war, dividing the region among them into foreign-dominated “mandates” with artificial borders. The British, moreover, encouraged the aspirations of Jewish nationalists, or Zionists, to establish a separate Jewish state by taking over part or all of Palestine.
Threat to imperialist control. Zionism was fueled by the desperation of Jews fleeing anti-Semitic persecution in other lands, most horribly the pogroms (mass slaughter) in czarist Russia at the end of the 1800s and, later, Naziism in Germany.
In the 1930s, Jewish immigration to Palestine escalated, helped along by support from the West and terrorism against Arab inhabitants by gangs such as the Irgun. The threat Zionism posed to Arab Palestinians became a major rallying point for Arab nationalism.
The economic and geopolitical changes brought about by World War II, and the rhetoric of self-determination and democracy under which the conflict was waged, also provided a tremendous spur to Arab revolt, as it did to colonial revolutions around the globe. In 1956, Egypt defeated the French and British in a fight for control of the Suez Canal. In 1958, revolution exploded in Iraq and strikes and demonstrations in Lebanon. Algeria won liberation from the French in 1962.
Nationalism is not automatically either progressive or reactionary. Looked at in terms of how it affects world workingclass struggle, it can be either. The Arab nationalist upsurge after WWII was progressive — a challenge to the right of the dominant capitalist countries to control the rest of the globe as their needs for oil and profits dictated.
Problems of leadership. But Arab revolt suffered from a drawback common to revolts in many other places: a lack of thoroughly revolutionary leadership.
Most of the urban working classes in the Arab world were still small and politically inexperienced. The Communist parties of the area, the most well-established and influential socialist presence, followed the line of the bureaucracy in the Stalinized USSR, which ordered them over and over to back away from the international fight for socialism and stick to narrow national struggle.
At the same time, of course, the imperialists themselves were doing everything they could to keep leftists from making gains.
All this meant that Arab revolt failed to give birth to states where workers were in charge. New capitalist regimes, more modern in outlook but still largely dominated by foreign powers, came to the fore instead, often installed by military coups and/or the U.S.
Included among them were oil-rich, monarchist, still neo-tribal regimes like those in Jordan and the Persian Gulf states, which remain openly in the pocket of the U.S. and are among the most oppressive and undemocratic in the world.
In other countries, such as Syria, Iraq, Egypt, Libya, and Algeria, power was taken by homegrown, bourgeois nationalists who were not as reactionary, but had just as little interest in elevating workers. They opportunistically adopted fervently religious and anti-imperialist coloration when these were politically expedient. And some of them, initially, used socialist slogans and even adopted socialist charters to win the favor of workers.
But they too have repressed unions, radical organizers, and opposition parties, both liberal and left. Communist parties were brutally suppressed in Egypt under Nasser, for example, and in Iraq under the Ba’ath party.
Deadly alliance of CIA and fundamentalists. The United States, as the world’s new capitalist superpower, forced economic subservience and massive debts on most of these “independent” governments.
Early on, Uncle Sam recognized how useful patriarchal Islamic fundamentalists could be in keeping down Middle Eastern dissent, especially that of women and “infidel” Marxists.
The U.S. encouraged rightwing organizations such as the Muslim Brotherhood to destabilize leftish regimes in Egypt and Syria. And it backed Israel as the latter set up groups like Hamas to subvert left radicalization among Palestinians and colluded with Phalangist Christian reactionaries in Lebanon to massacre thousands of Palestinians in the Sabra and Shatilla refugee camps in 1982.
In 1978, the U.S. apparatus found itself in accord with the Muslim clergy, landlords, and monarchists who opposed the pro-Soviet revolution in Afghanistan, which introduced land reform, trade unions, and education for women.
The CIA abetted the coming together in Afghanistan of rightwing Islamic groups from all over the world, including Osama bin Laden and his followers. It then funded and trained these outfits to fight a civil war that reduced the country to rubble.
By the time the war was over, with the Taliban in power, it was clear that Islamic religious extremists were determined to fill the vacuum of populist leadership in the Middle East.
Revolutionary chapters still to be written. Progressive Arab nationalism after WWII was handicapped by historical circumstances. Stalinism dominated leftwing politics; the region’s working class was small and relatively undeveloped; the dramatic rise of feminism was still ahead; and U.S. imperialism had not yet been so thoroughly exposed and discredited as it was to become.
But conditions and consciousness are different now.
Moreover, the evidence is in: religious fundamentalists, bourgeois nationalists, military dictators, sheiks, and “leftist” compromisers have all failed utterly to bring social and economic well-being to the Middle East.
And rank-and-file fighters for Arab liberation have never given up, as shown today by the second inspiring Palestinian intifada and strikes and student rebellions in Iran.
Islamic fundamentalism, hopefully, is a last gasp from the past. When the alternative of principled socialist leadership arises, Middle Eastern workers will rally to it with the courage and militancy with which they have already marked their place in global history.
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