The Arab Awakening, Tariq Ramadan’s contribution to the fast-growing body of literature on the Arab uprisings, begins with a request for the Arab world to ‘stop blaming the West for the colonialism and imperialism of the past…and jettison their historic posture as victims.’ This is an encouraging start, and hopes for a refreshing change of tone from the author are further bolstered by a sentence which would not be out of place in the pages of a journal of the American neoconservative right: ‘some people are quick — too quick — to rejoice at the collapse of American power. The same people may be unaware that what might replace it (given china’s new predominance and the emergence of India and Russia) could well lead to a regression in social and human rights…’
Unfortunately, such hopes are dashed within pages of the book’s first section, which looks at the West’s role in the uprisings and where we are met with one of the major themes of the book; what Ramadan terms as the ‘made to order uprisings.’ Having read about the involvement of American NGOs such as Freedom House in training small groups of Arabs in non-violent protest, democracy and mass mobilisation, Ramadan proceeds to make vast and largely unreferenced claims that fall dangerously close to the realms of conspiracy theory. He argues that, rather than being the product of generations of pent up rage against injustice and lack of government accountability, the uprisings were conceived and imported by the American government, which paid NGOs to prepare Arab citizens to overthrow their governments.
Considering America’s wholly cynical and resource driven involvement in the Middle-East, why then, asks Ramadan, did the US government help train activists and bloggers in the tactics required to unseat the very rulers that they were allied to? A good question, and one which appears to contradict his characterisation of US involvement in the region, though he manages to find a convenient way to explain this away. Through training the next generation of leaders and influential figures, the United States, he claims, has tried to stay one step ahead of the game after assessing that the times of the American-backed strongmen in the region were coming to an end. Thus, even this seemingly altruistic attempt to foster openness and liberal values in the Middle-East was nothing more than yet another cynical ploy by the US to continue controlling the region as it entered a new era.
Alas, this neatly packaged theory is baseless, and Ramadan makes no effort to provide any reliable sources to back it up. Presumably unlike him, I have spoken to people who worked on these programmes and they have confirmed that, although there was training taking place with the financial backing of the State Department, it was far from being part of a single, coherent strategy to train the future ousters of the Arab dictators. The purpose of the training was not to prepare young Arabs to overthrow their governments, but was instead focused on how to begin and then nurture a process of gradual reform and democratisation within their countries.
Ramadan argues that, despite having dropped its former allies, America has not altered its approach to the region, which continues to be defined by a neo-imperialist desire to retain control and influence. To further illustrate this, he points to the apparent discrepancy in how the US dealt with Libya and how it is now dealing with Syria. Having removed Gaddafi from power using the rhetoric of freedom and democracy, Ramadan asks why the US is not doing the same in Syria. A fair question, and one that requires much unbiased analysis, something Ramadan sadly appears unwilling to do. Instead, the reason for America’s varied responses is down to oil: Libya has it, Syria does not. Such a simplistic conclusion avoids a number of crucial considerations, not least the huge cache of chemical weapons Assad has at his disposal, or that a similar NATO mission in Syria would be vastly more technically and logistically complex than it was in Libya. Ramadan presents Obama’s decision to oust Gaddafi as a straightforward oil grab, while the reality is again not so simple. Reports from the time show quite clearly that Susan Rice, Obama’s UN envoy (who is still haunted by America’s inaction during the Rwandan genocide while she was Clinton’s Africa advisor) and Samantha Power, one of his special assistants, argued long and hard to convince a very hesitant Obama to pursue humanitarian action.
In the second section of the book, Ramadan focuses on what he describes as ‘the Islamic reference’ in his discussion of how Arabs must use Islam as a basis from which to formulate their own political system. He suggests that the dichotomy between secularism and Islamism in the Arab world is a false construct, imposed by secular imperialists who wish to create obstacles to the spread of Islam. For the region to move forward, people must bridge the Islamist/secularist divide. The Islamists, according to Ramadan, have already begun to do this through their rejection of the term ‘Islamic state’ (opting instead for ‘civil state’) and their supposed acceptance of the democratic principle. Though he does little to prove it, Ramadan argues that mainstream Arab Islamists do not wish to impose a theocracy, and suggests they will pursue something akin to the Turkish model, where Recep Tayyip Erdogan has overseen the (debatable) liberalisation of his party’s Islamist trends.
Despite what many of his critics will no doubt accuse him of, this is not an attempt by Ramadan to stealthily put forth to Western intellectuals a case for the foundation of Islamist theocracies in newly liberated Arab lands. Instead, Ramadan’s musings in this section must be read in the context of the inspiration he has drawn throughout his career from the late 19th century Islamic scholar, Jamal-al-Din al-Afghani. Afghani developed the first strain of revivalist, political Islam, and is often closely (though unfairly) associated with the more conservative and literalist strands of political Islam of the early to mid 20th century, including the Muslim Brotherhood. Indeed, historians like Nikki Keddie and Elie Kedouri have put forward convincing arguments which show that, far from being a pre-cursor to the ultra-conservatism found in much of today’s Islamist movements, Afghani was highly critical of religion and even doubted the divine origins of the Koran. Yet, as Keddie puts it, he saw in Islam an anti-colonial ‘indigenous tradition, something not borrowed from Western oppressors, which might form a basis for building a more independent, rational, and reformed society.’ For Arabs to be truly free of Western colonialism, Afghani believed that they could not simply import the Western Enlightenment of their colonial masters, but rather had to formulate a system which, though in line with the modern virtues found in developed liberal democracies, had origins which were rooted in Arab culture and history.
It is therefore no coincidence that at the beginning of this section Ramadan refers to Afghani to frame his own ideas about the future of the Arab uprisings. For Ramadan, Islam is not only compatible with the universal values embodied by Western liberal democracies, but it is also the source of many of them. He hopes that Islam can be used to for an ‘endogenous production of values’ which will contribute to a society and political system that can prosper while also remain immune to Western influence or control.
Much of Ramadan’s writing in this section is theoretical, posing ideas and questions about issues surrounding applied Islamic ethics, and it may indeed provide the basis for new ways of applying religion to public life in the region. However, it is impossible to ignore the fact that modern attempts to include an ‘Islamic reference’ in a country’s political system have rarely resulted in the establishment of the kind of system Ramadan would like to see. Pakistan, to take but one example, has hardly lived up to Muhammad Ali Jinnah’s vision of a secular, democratic country which uses the principles of Islam as a moral compass. In fairness, Ramadan is not unwilling to acknowledge the dangers of such an approach, writing that Islam has in the past been used by regimes to induce guilt, justify oppression and infantilise citizens.
As with many of Ramadan’s conclusions, only time will tell if the recent liberal transformations of mainstream Arab Islamist groups are genuine, and that the movement is indeed
‘mutating’ into a modern, liberal political movement which can contribute to the future of the Arab world. Despite providing interesting (if somewhat long-winded) new thoughts on how to
approach the issues of Islamism and secularism in the Middle-East, the book will ultimately be a disappointment to those looking for the latest information and analysis on the uprisings. The
simplistic anti-Western and conspiratorial tone of much of the book is further exacerbated by its lack of enough primary sources or interviews with young Arab activists or influential politicians,
and this year is likely to see much better attempts at navigating such a complex and important development in world history.
Alexander Meleagrou-Hitchens is a Research Fellow at the International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation and a PhD candidate at King’s College London
The Arab Awakening by Tariq Ramadan is published by Penguin. (£20)
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