Common Ground News Service - Partners in Humanity (CGNews-PiH) for constructive & vibrant Muslim-Western relations
10 - 17 September 2006

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Inside this edition

1) by Marc Gopin

In the first of six articles on religious revivalism and Muslim-Western relations, Marc Gopin, James Laue professor of world religions, diplomacy and conflict resolution at George Mason University, explains the short falling of most post-Enlightenment policymakers and bureaucrats who are ill-equipped to understand and appreciate the new rise in religiosity around the world. “If religious revival is part of the illness of today’s extremism, the cure needs to appeal to the same thing – religious passion –in a manner that affirms the common bonds of social contracts in civil society. The best way to do this is by studying and supporting the extraordinary women and men who are doing just that.”
(Source: Common Ground News Service (CGNews), 12 September 2006)

2) by Kareem Elbayar

Kareem Elbayar, a law and international affairs graduate student at the George Washington University Law School, considers the legacy of 9/11 in the United States. Concerned that some of the American fallout of 9/11 has not been constructive, and looking at some of the successful ways that the United States has dealt with trauma in the past, Elbayar suggests that “Americans can accomplish great things…Let us harness our great national spirit and put it to good ends. Instead of being suspicious and hostile of Muslims, let us empower the 8 million Muslims living in America so that they can serve as our global ambassadors to the Muslim world, and so that they can show the world that the United States is not represented by Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib. Let us hold our leaders accountable for the mistakes they have made, the lies they have told, and the damage they have done. Let us fight once more on the right side of history.”
(Source: Ground News Service (CGNews), 12 September 2006)

3) by Dan Murphy

Dan Murphy, Christian Science Monitor correspondent, chronicles the life and contribution of Egyptian novelist and Nobel laureate Naguib Mahfouz. A beacon of tolerance and a Muslim who believed in the separation of church and state, Mahfouz, in the words of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, was “a cultural light who brought Arab literature to the world."
(Source: The Christian Science Monitor, 6 September 2006)

4) by Muhamad Ali

Muhamad Ali, a lecturer at the State Islamic University in Jakarta, looks at the internal turmoil that exists over Indonesian nationalism. He challenges claims that Indonesian nationalism is purely Islamic in nature or that it is a “Western import”. Instead he argues that “Indonesian nationalism should be tolerant in the sense that, whether religious or secular or mixed according to different communities, it should respect minorities and the marginalised, and at the same time it should respect other nationalisms outside itself. One of the outcomes of such tolerant nationalism is continued participation within the nation and peaceful coexistence and fruitful cooperation outside of it.”
(Source: Jakarta Post, 1 September 2006)

5) by Khalil El-Anani

Khalil El-Anani, a political analyst for Al-Siyasa Al-Dawliya magazine, critiques the Arab system, specifically the questionable effectiveness of the Arab League in the aftermath of the Israeli-Hizbullah conflict, but recognizes that criticism is not enough. “It is easy to criticise the Arab system and its institutions, including the Arab League. It is easy to criticise individual Arab states. But this is not going to get us anywhere. We have to address the roots of the problem. We have to look at the goals and common interests that connect the units of our system…We cannot keep thinking in terms of external threats alone. If anything good has come out of the war on Lebanon it is the realisation that we need an Arab system that works.”
(Source: Al Ahram, 31 August – 6 September 2006)
   

1) Counter religious extremism with religious compassion
Marc Gopin

Washington, D.C. - Zainab Al-Suwaij, an Iraqi-American Muslim woman and the president of the American Islamic Congress, empowers the poor women of Iraq by helping them express their rights and needs, such as providing for their children’s education. She risks her life on every trip to Iraq.

Pastor Sam Doe, a survivor of the Liberian genocide, made a commitment in 1990 to God to work for healing and peace after watching children die – one right in his arms – of war and starvation. That religious transformation has impelled him to embrace all children, even ex-child soldiers, in Western Africa, when no one else wanted them. He embraced them as a spiritual father to counter the work of their warlord fathers who had drugged them and indoctrinated them into a pseudo-religious militancy and genocidal fervour. Today, Sam works with dozens of people in a network of peace groups in Western Africa that innovate new approaches to develop civil society.

The grand mufti of Syria, Sheikh Ahmad Hassoun, is unrivalled as a passionate orator of Islam, yet he uses his sermons to inspire a Muslim embrace of all fellow human beings, especially Christian neighbours in Syria. He’s a staunch defender of their rights and their spirituality. He also doles out as much help as he can find for the poor every week. He drives extremists in his country crazy, not because he vilifies them, but because he competes with them effectively for the attention and appreciation of the impoverished masses.

This is the tip of the iceberg of a dazzling variety of vibrantly religious people who are quietly changing the course of history, one person at a time. It’s time for Western institutions, traditionally oblivious to religious actors, to recognise these extraordinary people and learn how they draw on the best in their religious traditions to support a peaceful, global society.

This won’t be easy, because those who run our major international and national agencies are not accustomed to making such connections.

Trained at the best intellectual institutions of the world, most policymakers and bureaucrats are children of the Enlightenment, so religious revivalism is a shock to their worldview. They had no idea that religion could be so resilient and adaptable to the contemporary world. That’s why many of them are unprepared to confront religious extremists.

From Iraq to Western Europe to the United States, it is clear that religion is on the rise and tending toward extremism in many places. It is also clear that religious militants are among the most highly adaptable groups on the planet today.

They run circles around traditional religious schools, places of worship, and clerical organisations – be they conservative, moderate or liberal. Militants use the Web and other media meaningful to youth, and they know how to mobilise the anger of hundreds of millions of the powerless and poor.

They are excellent at providing immediate and appealing forms of assistance in ways that most states utterly fail to do. They often have little religious authority but acquire it by the sheer force of popular appeal in a world increasingly dominated – or tyrannised – by mass appeal. Increasingly, religious authority is being acquired by how well extremists service the poor or how well they express their anger at injustice.

If we who believe in tolerance and coexistence want to build a better and more peaceful civilisation then we should learn adaptability from militant religious activists. We need to understand their appeal to the poor and the alienated and beat them at their own game.

We need to know when militants are setting a trap for us, expecting us to behave in predictable ways. We must learn what annoys them and do it, and learn what pleases them and stop it. They are pleased when governments ignore the poor, or when the West engages in any activities that are perceived to be bigoted against Muslims.

This is difficult to combat because militants go out of their way to commit crimes in the name of their faith, making it hard not to respond by holding millions of their coreligionists in suspicion.

But it is also true that militants are furious when Western society is appealing, or when moderate, non-violent religious leaders or organisations take care of the needs of the poor. With hard work, it is possible for states and traditional religious leaders to give people what the militants give them – a sense of honour, self-respect, care in the midst of trouble, and hope.

Not all terrorists are poor, of course. But the poor are definitely their target audience as they seek to build a new world order. Becoming more appealing than militants is going to take an entirely new way of thinking for world leaders, for traditional religious leaders, and for those who guide the major international agencies of development and aid.

If religious revival is part of the illness of today’s extremism, the cure needs to appeal to the same thing – religious passion – but in a way that affirms the common bonds of social contracts in civil society. The best way to do this is by studying and supporting the extraordinary women and men who are doing just that. These peacemakers are relatively unknown to the world and sometimes to each other. The West must spread the good news of their accomplishments, and use its prodigious wealth to support these heroes of the global community.

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* Marc Gopin is the James Laue professor of world religions, diplomacy and conflict resolution at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia. This is the first of six articles in a series on religious revivalism and Muslim-Western relations commissioned by the Common Ground News Service (www.commongroundnews.org).
Source: Common Ground News Service (CGNews), 12 September 2006, www.commongroundnews.org (http://www.commongroundnews.org)
Copyright permission is granted for republication.

2) ~YOUTH VIEWS~ 9/11 five years later: what’s our legacy?
Kareem Elbayar

Washington, D.C. - “You can always count on Americans to do the right thing,” Winston Churchill once said, “—after they’ve tried everything else first.” Five years after the attacks of 9/11, it is painfully clear that we are still trying other options.

9/11 was a singular event in American history, and it is time we Americans ask ourselves what the legacy of that national trauma will be. This is not the first time that a blow to the American psyche has been inflicted—but the nation always recovered and went on to prosper. Five years after Pearl Harbor, the United States had not only defeated the Axis powers in a two-front war but had also embarked upon the largest reconstruction and recovery project in the history of the world; five years after the assassination of President Kennedy, American society was permanently transformed by the passage of the landmark Civil Rights Act, which outlawed discrimination on the basis of race, colour, religion, sex, or national origin.

What have we accomplished in the five years since 9/11? The entire world was horrified by those attacks, and although it is hard to remember now, the outpouring of grief and sympathy that Americans received was unprecedented. In Jordan, so many people came to pay their respects that the American embassy in Amman was forced to turn them away. The Organization of the Islamic Conference, representing the world’s 56 Muslim nations, condemned the attacks as “contradict[ing] the teaching of all religions and human and moral values.” France’s Le Monde newspaper ran the banner headline “Nous sommes tous Américains”—“We are all Americans.”

9/11 presented an opportunity for the American people once more to work together with foreign nations and to do something about the great problems of our time. Instead, our government chose to go to war in Afghanistan alone, oddly ignoring the offers of assistance from sympathetic nations the world over—and before that campaign was even complete, the government would again demonstrate its disdain for the world’s sympathy by starting an internationally condemned war in Iraq. Now we fight two very difficult wars in which tens of thousands of lives have been lost. And worst of all, these campaigns have no end in sight.

The Middle East remains terribly instable, seemingly on the verge of explosion at any moment. We have been lucky enough to avoid any new terrorist attacks in our country, but terrorist groups have struck or attempted to strike in Canada, Britain, Jordan, Spain, Egypt, Turkey, Israel, Saudi Arabia, India, Russia, and beyond. Anti-Americanism in nations all over the world has surged, and the suspicion and hostility of average Americans toward Islam and Muslims is likewise higher than ever. Meanwhile, our leaders talk of the “global war on terror” and confronting “Islamo-fascism,” but no one seems to know what these words actually mean, let alone how we will know when we have achieved our goals or what our goals actually are.

Five years after 9/11, it is time to stop and re-evaluate where we have gone. President Bush is right: 9/11 was indeed the first battle in what will be an ongoing war for the future of civilised people. But the term “war on terrorism” is facile and misleading. Terrorism, after all, is a tactic. It is not an ideology or a nation or a people.

The American people are sophisticated enough to understand the difference between Afghanistan and Iraq, or Iran and Palestine. It is time our leaders stop treating us like children; it is time to stop calling different fights in different countries against different enemies by the same name in the hopes that this will be enough to secure our unquestioning support.

Our battle is not against Islam or Muslims. It is not a fight against Islamic fundamentalism, or “Islamo-fascism,” one of the most absurd terms that has ever become a part of our national discourse. The Nazis called themselves Christians and believed that they were acting in conformance with God’s will—but no one ever called them Christian fundamentalists, or “Christiano-nazis”. Our fight—and it is one that we can and must win—is a battle against poverty, against lack of education, and against depravation of civil and political rights. These are the demons that must be slain, for they are the root causes of the despair, suffering and anger that so often lead to violence. As it happens, these demons are nowhere more prevalent than in Muslim countries in the Middle East, but this does not mean that we are fighting a religion with over 1.2 billion followers worldwide.

It is time again for America to embrace the moral high ground. How many billions have been spent on war, death and destruction since 9/11? Imagine if that money had been spent feeding the world’s hungry, educating the unskilled, ending gender inequality and securing the civil rights of refugees and other marginalised people? What if we attempted to actually promote democracy in the world by isolating and punishing all dictators, not just those who aren’t our “friends” and happen to rule over oil-rich countries? What if we focused on fully engaging in the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians to finally make real the two-state solution that all parties already know must be put into place? It is this last point that would do the most not just to make ourselves and our Israeli friends safer, but also to finally prove to the Muslim world that the US can be a fair and even-handed partner for peace.

Americans can accomplish great things. We have risen to the occasion time and again to remake the world into a safer and more just place. On this fifth anniversary of 9/11, let us recall the spirit of cooperation and unity that we all felt in the weeks and months after 9/11. Let us harness our great national spirit and put it to good ends. Instead of being suspicious of and hostile to Muslims, let us empower the 8 million Muslims living in America so that they can serve as our global ambassadors to the Muslim world, and so that they can show the world that the US is not represented by Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib. Let us fight once more on the right side of history.

It is our actions as individuals that will decide what the world will look like on the tenth anniversary of 9/11.

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* Kareem Elbayar is a law and international affairs graduate student at the George Washington University Law School. He wrote this article after attending the 9/11+5 Conference on American/Muslim Relations, hosted by Americans for Informed Democracy (www.aidemocracy.org). This article is distributed by the Common Ground News Service (CGNews) and can be accessed at www.commongroundnews.org (http://www.commongroundnews.org).
Source: Common Ground News Service (CGNews), 12 September 2006, www.commongroundnews.org (http://www.commongroundnews.org)
Copyright permission is granted for republication.

3) In writer's work, a vanishing Arab world
Dan Murphy

Cairo – The life of Naguib Mahfouz, the Egyptian Nobel laureate who died last week, in many ways charts the rise and fall of a generation of Arab intellectuals who came of age during independence, imbued with socialist and nationalist values they expected would lead their nations to prosperity and prominence.

A believing Muslim, Mr. Mahfouz, like many of his colleagues, was committed to the separation of church and state, represented in the independence-era slogan of "religion is for God, the nation is for all."

"He expressed enlightenment and tolerance that reject extremism,'' Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak said after Mahfouz's death on Aug. 30. "He was a cultural light who brought Arab literature to the world."

More than anything, the man considered by some to be the father of the Arab novel loved Cairo. He rarely left his native city, and his most celebrated works were set amid the alleys and lanes of Islamic Cairo, portraits of the city and those who inhabit it.

But in the last half of his long life, the secular dreams of his youth, and the hope that Egyptians would be delivered from poverty by independence, faded under the weight of a rising, politicised Islam and the failure of the secular state to deliver social justice.

There could be no starker evidence of a changing society than the 1994 attack on him by an Islamic militant that nearly claimed his life. He had always held controversial opinions here, most notably his support for Egypt's peace treaty with Israel, but he was a low-profile figure largely ignored by the government and the public.

Then in 1988, his quiet labour was disrupted when he was awarded the Nobel Prize. The following year, Iran's Ayatollah Khomeini called for the murder of Salman Rushdie for the alleged crime of blasphemy. The blind Egyptian sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman, later jailed in America for the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center, followed Khomeini's lead and appeared to call for Mahfouz's murder in a 1989 interview.

Had Mahfouz been murdered for his allegorical 1959 book "Children of the Alley," in which a poor Cairo father represents God and his sons Jesus, Mohammed, and other prophets, Mr. Rahman said Mr. Rushdie would never have dared to write "The Satanic Verses,'' notwithstanding the fact that Mahfouz's book was banned across the Arab world.

On Oct. 14, 1994, as Mahfouz left his house with a friend to attend his legendary weekly diwan with other writers and thinkers at a Nile-side cafe, a man stabbed him in the neck. At his trial the attacker, later executed, said he was inspired by Rahman's comments.

"He was the number one soft target in Egypt,'' says Raymond Stock, an American translator and writer currently working on a biography of Mahfouz. "To the Islamists, he symbolised unbelief and support for Israel - all the things they hate the government for. They couldn't get to the leaders, so they went after him."

But Mahfouz, who worked as a government censor in his early years, could at times be contradictory. He supported the peace treaty with Israel, but also defended the use of suicide bombers by Palestinians in their struggles with the Jewish state.

A martyr for free expression to some after his stabbing, he voluntarily agreed with Islamic authorities at Al Azhar University to withhold publication of "Children of the Alley," even after the government lifted its ban following the attack. After that decision, "some of his closest friends accused him of betraying fellow writers,'' says Mr. Stock.

But it was a decision much appreciated by Islamists. Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood issued a statement mourning his passing and praising him as a pious man. "A lot of the things he wrote were wrong, but his agreement with Al Azhar not to publish that blasphemous work was a sign he understood his mistake,'' says Abd al-Munim Abu al-Futuh, a member of the Brotherhood's guidance council.

The attack left the then 83-year-old Mahfouz unable to grasp a pen for years, though it didn't end his hunger for contact with his other friends and writers. Until the last months of his life, he still kept up his weekly salons, his wry and self-effacing presence the glue that held together a dwindling number of Egyptian intellectuals.

"He was the most hail fellow, well-met sort of person that you could imagine,'' says Stock.

In his final years, says Stock, Mr. Mahfouz was a supporter of Mubarak, going so far as to publicly endorse him for president in the country's last election, and the government in turn embraced him as a popular figure whose glory they hoped would reflect upon them. That was a sharp turn from his views on Mubarak's immediate predecessor Anwar Sadat, who was murdered by Islamists for his peace deal with Israel.

Mahfouz loathed Mr. Sadat for his infitah, or “open door”, policy that reduced the role of the state in Egypt's economy and in providing social welfare, and allowed for more foreign and private investment. He saw the policy as a betrayal of the socialism that Egypt needed, and as the unintentional fuel for the rise of militant Islam.

In his short novel "The Day the President was Killed,'' focusing on a poor family in the days before Sadat's assassination, he chronicles the hardships and disillusion created by the government's economic failures, how so many Egyptians and Arabs have been left feeling adrift in a modern age that has yielded few fruits.

But while still critical of those economic policies that Mubarak carried forward, he saw Egypt's current leader as offering the best possible course. "I think he was very practical-minded,'' says Stock. "He saw Mubarak as building on the best of Sadat with his more grandiose excesses. During his time in power, Egypt had not fallen apart against great odds and Mubarak didn't participate in any foreign adventures."

Nevertheless, the author never gave up on his socialist ideas, or his ties to the people of Cairo's streets - even as the bars and cafes of his youth were either given over to the tourist trade, or vanished altogether.

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* Dan Murphy is a correspondent for the Christian Science Monitor. This article is distributed by the Common Ground News Service (CGNews) and can be accessed at www.commongroundnews.org (http://www.commongroundnews.org).
Source: The Christian Science Monitor, 6 September 2006, www.csmonitor.com (http://www.csmonitor.com)
Copyright © The Christian Science Monitor. Permission for publication can be obtained by contacting lawrenced@csps.com.

4) Promoting tolerant nationalism, beyond religious versus secular
Muhamad Ali

Manoa, Hawaii - The commemoration of Independence Day every August 17th leaves certain crucial questions unanswered, despite all the underlying spirit, associated symbols and colourful celebrations. One such question is whether Indonesian nationalism was and continues to be secular or religious.

Scholars have attempted to provide answers to this delicate and complex question, but most of them are trapped in a dichotomous opposition between the religious and the secular. In fact, for many Indonesian Muslims, Christians, Buddhists, Hindus and Confucians, nationalism is both secular and religious.

Pancasila is the philosophical basis or code of ethics of the Indonesian state based on five principles: belief in the one and only God, just and civilized humanity, the unity of Indonesia, democracy guided by the inner wisdom in the unanimity of the deliberations of representatives and social justice for the whole of the people of Indonesia. It has become the ambiguous yet accepted ideology of Indonesia's nationalism. But what can we, as a nation, gain from it?

Most Western literature on Indonesian nationalism argues that historically the emergence of nationalism was attributed to the rise of secular leaders such as Sukarno and Hatta (both being graduates of the Dutch educational system) and a secular print media, including Budi Utomo and the Indonesian National Party of Sukarno. Nationalism is believed to be a Western import, and it was secularly educated leaders who introduced the concept to this new country.

Many have challenged this argument. Michael Francis Laffan, in his Islamic Nationalism and Colonial Indonesia (2003), argues that Islam played a crucial role in the rise of Indonesian nationalism. According to him, it was Muslim scholars and leaders, influenced by Islamic reform movements in Mecca-Medina and then Egypt, through their religious organisations (such as Syarikat Islam, Nahdlatul Ulama and Muhammadiyah), publications and activism, who worked in anti-colonial movements during the early 20th century. These two arguments stand upon their own emphasis of certain movements and individuals in selected moments of history.

The essence of nationalism is patriotism, or love of the native land. This love of the native land has very constructive impacts on the life of a nation. By this spirit of love, all members of a nation are willing to work hard to build their country into a prosperous and peaceful one. Also by this spirit, self-determination arises and can become a strong force in self-improvement and nation-building.

In interfaith meetings, every religion attempts to argue that nationalism and patriotism are sanctioned by their religious beliefs, and their gods teach them to love their country and to work hard for it. This may be called religious nationalism, for the absence of a better term, to suggest that nationalism and religion are not incompatible in the heart and minds of many of these religious peoples.

If one says nationalism was and is Islamic, then a question may arise: Were there only Muslims who fought against colonialism? They were a majority certainly in the struggle against colonialism, but were there Protestants, Catholics, Hindus, Buddhists, Confucians and non-religious peoples in nationalist movements?

This question leads to the very problem Indonesia has faced again and again: Is Indonesia truly a pluralistic nation? To the latter question, many Islamic political parties and leaders have only one answer: that it was Muslims who played the main role in gaining and keeping independence and therefore it is the Muslims' right to determine the direction of the nation by their particularistic laws.

It is often claimed that Muslims gave up seven words of the Jakarta Charter (with the obligation for Muslims to observe their religious beliefs) and presented it to non-Muslims of the nation as a gift. For them, Pancasila was often seen as a gift to the pluralistic nation, compromising Islamic ambitions to make the nation-state an Islamic state.

Thus it is hardly present in the minds of the Muslim majority that Protestants, Hindus, Buddhists, Confucians and others, whether or not they identified themselves as such, participated in the struggle against colonialism, and have long contributed to the development of the nation.

Pre-independence nationalism was to get rid of the Japanese and the Dutch, but post-independence nationalism was to contribute to the development of the country in all aspects of life. Some post-independence nationalists argue that nationalism should today mean anti-neoimperialism, economic imperialism in the form of capitalism (and its representative institutions) and so forth.

More recently, some Nahdlatul Ulama leaders issued a manifesto that criticises new modes of imperialism in the form of external forces imperialising Indonesia economically, politically, culturally and intellectually. This neo-nationalism is sometimes linked to particular religious interpretations as well.

How should we resolve this question? There is no one answer to this. Nationalism is perhaps neutral in itself. It is a good thing to love one's country. Every community in the world today, including the Muslim world, has accepted nationalism as the best political ideology.

But we are facing excesses of nationalism: Aggressive nationalism which tries to impose one's nationalism onto other nations near and far. Between nations, tolerant nationalism, either religious or secular, should be promoted.

Indonesian nationalism, either religiously or secularly based, can have excesses and extremes as well. Extreme nationalism, for example, forces minorities to adopt the overarching political agenda that they would otherwise reject because it does not suit their needs and interests.

An extreme nationalism wants to civilise the margins (indigenous believers, religious sects, new religious movements, mountain and jungle tribes, and so forth) by way of imposition without respect for their particular conditions and needs. Within a nation, there needs to be a balance between nationalism and multiculturalism.

Thus, we should now go beyond secular versus religious nationalism. It is time to promote a more substantive and tolerant nationalism: strong, solid, but respecting other concepts of nationalism and nationalities within and without the country. Tolerant nationalism is a love of one's country manifested in various aspects of life, but not at the expense of the destruction of other peoples within and beyond the constructed boundaries.

Indonesian nationalism should be tolerant in the sense that, whether religious or secular or mixed according to different communities, it should respect minorities and the marginalised, and at the same time it should respect other nationalisms outside itself. One of the outcomes of such tolerant nationalism is continued participation within the nation and peaceful coexistence and fruitful cooperation outside it.

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* Muhamad Ali is a lecturer at State Islamic University, Jakarta. He is working on his doctoral thesis on Islamic knowledge and power relations in colonial and postcolonial Indonesia and Malaysia at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, under the East-West Center, Honolulu. This article is distributed by the Common Ground News Service (CGNews) and can be accessed at www.commongroundnews.org (http://www.commongroundnews.org).
Source: Jakarta Post, 1 September 2006, www.thejakaratpost.com (http://www.thejakaratpost.com)
Copyright permission has been obtained for publication.

5) Rethinking the Arab system
Khalil El-Anani

Cairo - When Iraq was invaded, analysts deplored the lack of cohesion in the official Arab system and bemoaned the inefficacy of the Arab League, which is the strategic arm of this system. Major Arab countries were fiercely admonished for failing to stop the invasion. The late Edward Said said that the invasion was a catastrophe on a scale approaching that of 1948. But worse was to come.

Israel's invasion of Lebanon in summer 2006 once again shook the Arab system to the core. There is nothing new about Israel's brutality, but the implications for the Arab world were immense. There are three reasons for the public disenchantment. First, the Arab system seemed confused about its priorities and thus failed to come to the help of a member country. Second, Arab inaction encouraged Israel to act with more brutality and impunity. Third, outsiders seemed to decide the course of the conflict according to their agenda, on top of which is the creation of a new Middle East.

Some analysts see the crisis of the Arab system as a temporary one related to the changes in the international order following 9/11. The implication here is that we should let the whole thing blow over rather than introduce radical measures. Other analysts focus on restructuring the Arab League rather than rethinking the strategy that gave birth to that institution six decades ago.

The Arab official system is in deep crisis. The war on Lebanon has made that much clear. On at least two occasions, the Arab League admitted its inability to deal with the war. Arab foreign ministers wanted to refer the war to the UN Security Council simply because they couldn't take a unified stand on the matter. Also, the Arab League failed to hold an emergency summit to discuss the war. A system designed to protect its members from foreign threats has apparently ceased to function.

The current capabilities of the Arab system obviously exceed its expectations. Not only that: current expectations often impede the smooth functioning of the system. Although there is no paucity of arguments for unity, wishful thinking alone cannot produce a working regional system. The desire for unity has supplanted the pragmatism that is necessary for any regional system to operate.

Analysts often jump to conclusions before examining the root causes of the problem. This is why they criticise the Arab League instead of looking at the historic dilemma that has to do with the Arab world's self- perception. With every Arab crisis that comes along, analysts wonder whether the Arab system is capable of meeting its responsibilities. This, however, is the wrong question, and because we ask it so often, we're as far as ever from the answer. Criticism of the Arab League has become the easy way out. It has turned into a smokescreen that hides the real problems of the Arab system.

Since the creation of the Arab League in 1945, the perceptions, goals, and functions of the Arab system have shifted. The Arab system needs to adapt to two sets of changes: domestic politics changed and so did the public's perception of the role of the system; and the international scene shifted in a way that had far-reaching repercussions for the structure and efficacy of the Arab system. In both cases, the Arab system failed to keep pace with new developments.

From the 1948 catastrophe to the 1967 disaster, the Arab system managed to function somehow. It even survived the "moral" dilemma of the 1978 peace treaty. Even the Iraq-Iran war didn't seem to shake the system to the roots. But decay has finally caught on. The façade of homogeneity has finally proved too thin to hide the ideological and cultural dilemmas inherent in the Arab system.

The first serious divisions emerged over Iraq's invasion of Kuwait in 1990. These divisions demonstrated the flaws inherent in the way member countries perceived the system's functions and goals. The divisions got worse during the 1990s, for the system lacked a corrective mechanism. Despite its pernicious ailment, the Arab system had its moments of clarity. One of those moments was in 1996, when Egypt called for a summit after Israel's extreme right took office.

Another was in 2000, when a summit was held in support of the second (Al-Aqsa) Intifada. But the Arab system was not willing to address its own tribulations, and sooner or later its malaise became evident to all and sundry. Harmony was gone, but the cracks were papered over rather than appropriately addressed. The system was supposed to learn from its difficult moments, but it never did.

Will the Arab system succumb to pressure from outsiders? Will it implode from within? Will non-Arab scenarios, such as "the new Middle East", surpass it? These questions are all relevant now.

During the war on Lebanon, some major Arab countries took positions that seemed shocking at first glance. But these very positions, odd as they may have seemed, could serve as a harbinger of a new Arab system. Perhaps functionality will finally replace the top-heavy demagoguery that characterised the Arab system for the past 60 years. It is refreshing, for once, to see nationalist-inspired realism replace the bravado of collective action. A lot, of course, would depend on how closely the vision of the regimes reflects the interests of their nations.

The Arab system is a system for collective action. But this collective action should tally with the public's sentiments, not with the desire of leaders to posture and jockey for power. Regional bonds are meaningful only so long as they tally with the interests of each Arab country. This is the point one has to keep in mind whenever reform of the Arab system is brought up.

A methodical rethinking of the dynamics of the Arab system is in order. We have to assess our ability to work in harmony, and we need to recognise our limitations. The trick is to motivate various countries to remain within the system. And just as important, the system has to recognise and adapt to changes on the international scene. In other words, we have to strike a balance between our capabilities and expectations.

It is easy to criticise the Arab system and its institutions, including the Arab League. It is easy to criticise individual Arab states. But this is not going to get us anywhere. We have to address the roots of the problem. We have to look at the goals and common interests that connect the units of our system. We have to look at the old bonds and ask ourselves if they can still keep the system together. My guess is that we have to rebuild the Arab regional system on more durable and meaningful foundations. We have to think of what each country wants.

We cannot keep thinking in terms of external threats alone. If anything good has come out of the war on Lebanon it is the realisation that we need an Arab system that works.

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* Khalil El-Anani is a political analyst for Al-Siyasa Al-Dawliya magazine published by Al-Ahram. This article is distributed by the Common Ground News Service (CGNews) and can be accessed at www.commongroundnews.org (http://www.commongroundnews.org).
Source: Al Ahram, 31 August – 6 September 2006, www.ahram.org.eg/weekly (http://www.ahram.org.eg/weekly)
Copyright permission has been obtained for publication.

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Posted by Evelin at September 16, 2006 04:47 PM