West Asia's failed revolution

THE NEW MIDDLE EAST
The World After the Arab Spring
Paul Danahar
Bloomsbury
480 pages; Rs 599

As BBC's Middle East bureau chief between 2010 and 2013, Paul Danahar had an invaluable ringside view of the extraordinary events shaping the region when the tyrannical regimes of the Old Middle East were coming to an end as a consequence of people's protests. In a sense, this was the endgame of the Cold War and of the collapse of the Soviet Union. "In the Old Middle East the unholy alliance between 'the land of the Free' and the world of dictatorships limped on because no one knew what else to do," Mr Danahar writes. It was people like ordinary school teachers, farmers and accountants who created a New Middle East, which "is a process, not a result and the present reality is religion, not nationalism or Arabism, is now the dominant force". This is the context of eight very well-written chapters dealing with Tunisia, Egypt, Israel, Iraq, Libya and Syria.

The Arab Spring began with the collapse of dictatorship in tiny Tunisia (2011) and spread to Egypt, where the famous Tahrir Square demonstrations finally compelled Hosni Mubarak to abdicate. This brought an era of collusion and corruption to an end. Anwar Sadat, an American puppet, replaced Gamal Abdel Nasser in 1973, after the latter's defeat to the Israelis in the 1967 "Six-Day War". In 1979, America succeeded in brokering a landmark peace deal between Egypt and Israel, but this development disheartened the democratic forces in the Arab world. They considered this deal Egypt's betrayal to the Palestinian cause. Sadat was eventually assassinated in 1981, and was succeeded by Mr Mubarak and his three-decade stranglehold on power. History stopped until, the author says, "Egypt had a first and noisy revolution in 2011".

The author correctly identifies Israel as the force of uncertainty in the region. He points out: "After the Arab uprisings very little unites Israel with the Arab States, but there is one thing they share ... struggling within their societies to reach agreement over the role and reach of their lives". This is reinforced in the chapter titled "Israel: It's complicated", which highlights the interconnection between the history of Judaism, religious Zionism, Islam and the territory of Israel and Palestine and the two-state theory. The author suggests that the "world has tended not to understand modern Israel because it has looked at it through the prism of the conflict with the Palestinians".

Israel is a West Asian country, but it is more than that, the author contends. "Like the rest of the New Middle East, God and the role of religion in society and politics are at the heart of the debate in Israel too. Israel is becoming more religious and more nationalist and … risks … becoming less democratic."

The other critical issue that is shaping both the Old and the New Middle East is oil. Had it not been for oil, the author says, the region would have been allowed to make its own mistakes and get on with the business of building democratic states. This geopolitical reality may change soon now that the United States is almost self-sufficient in oil.

Still, the scars of the Arab Spring are evident all over the region. If, on the one hand, the democratically elected Mohamed Morsi of Egypt is in jail and the Muslim Brotherhood and the army are confronting each other, on the other, the Sunni majority and the Shia minority are intent on killing each other in post-Saddam Iraq. Hard-line Islamists in Libya's "revolution" were "unique" among the Arab Spring uprisings; they held elections. Also, the population is majority Sunni Islam and, unlike Syria, it is homogeneous. The ongoing bloodbath in Syria and the emergence of Islamic fundamentalists, such as Al Qaeda, in the country need to be watched.

The author observes: "The Arab Spring was at first an ideological catastrophe for Al Qaeda... The peaceful overthrow of the American-backed dictator in Egypt by the people in [Ayman] al-Zawahiri's own hometown destroyed its arguments. The chaos in Syria gave groups like Al Qaeda another chance."

Indeed, Osama bin Lasden's death has not killed the ideology of Islamic fundamentalism. The link between the Old and the New Middle East or the whole Arab Islamic world is that Islam, the Quran and the prophet Muhammad continue to be the guiding factors for the rulers and the ruled; everyone rules or talks of revolution in the name of Islam.

The burden of this book is that the Arab Spring is a story of failed revolutions. Arab dictators have used Islam; Western powers have nurtured and nourished dictators and Islamic groups for oil; and the movement for democracy has surrendered before violent Islamic fundamentalists. The form changes; the substance remains the same.