Thugocracy

Tal al-Malouhi, aged 18, was arrested by the Assad regime in December 2009. She still hasn’t been released. Her crime was to write blog posts and poems about Palestine. One might think that an ‘Arab nationalist’ regime – which is what the Assad regime claims to be – would be pleased that teenage girls were showing solidarity with Palestine, the Arab nationalist cause par excellence. But one would be wrong. In Assad’s Syria, nobody should show solidarity with Palestine without first receiving permission. Nobody should do anything without receiving permission. Even organising a pro-regime march could result in imprisonment, torture, and quite possibly death. Because in Assad’s totalitarian state, taking any kind of initiative is absolutely haram.

Here I’m concerned not with what God forbids and permits, but with what the taghout does, the hyper-authoritarian – he who steps so far over the limits that he claims the powers of God to forbid and permit. I will make use of three books as I think about the taghout and what he has done to the Arab world. Two focus on Syria, but the first – Alex Rowell’s We Are Your Soldiers: How Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser Remade the Arab World – examines the archetypal Arab dictator, he who built the police state model adopted by tyrants and thugs across the region.

Criticism of Nasser is still controversial in the Arab world, and no critical biography has been published in Arabic. Amongst large sections of a previous Arab generation, Nasser was wildly popular. Still today, quite a few remember his iconised image with a blurred rose nostalgia. They remember that he talked big against the big powers, and even went to war against them. They hold him as a standard against the craven, impotent, self-interested regimes of today.

Alex Rowell, We Are Your Soldiers: How Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser Remade the Arab World (Simon and Schuster. London. 2023)

Jaber Baker and Ugur Umit Ungor, Syrian Gulag: Inside Assad’s Prison System (I.B. Tauris. London. 2023)

Azmi Bishara, Syria 2011 – 2013: Revolution and Tyranny Before the Mayhem (I. B. Tauris. London. 2023)

Nasser is tied up in memory with other faces and aspects of the cheery 1950s and 60s – like Um Kulsoom, and the golden days of the Egyptian cinema, and the Non-Aligned Movement. It was a historical moment brimming with culture, optimism, and enthusiasm. It felt as if the Arabs – and all the Muslims with them, and the ‘third world’ in general – were about to shake off their shackles and stride purposefully, all together, into the future.

But then they didn’t. They limped and floundered in a shrinking present. Defeat followed defeat, and Egypt, the Arabs, reality itself was diminished. So some look back longingly at Nasser and his age. There’s a great deal of sad irony in this, given that Nasser was a major cause of the current humiliations. Because the strong man made society weak.

All of his wars led to defeat. He lost the 1956 Suez war, though he (or Egypt) had right on his side, and nobody expected poor Egypt to defeat the empires of Britain and France – joined now by an eight-year-old Israel in the ‘tripartite aggression’. It was not the Egyptian army but the United States that compelled the three aggressors to withdraw. This compulsion confirmed the decisive post-WW2 power shift from Europe to America, and it allowed Nasser to snatch a political victory from the jaws of defeat. Eleven years later, Nasser catastrophically lost the Sinai (and Gaza) to Israel, and in only six days. And the media he controlled lost touch with reality. Even as Israeli tanks raced westward, his radio stations announced epic victories.

Instead of preparing slowly and carefully for a confrontation with Israel, Nasser had sent the Egyptian army to Yemen in 1962, backing a military coup by soldiers who admired his example. Like Muhammad bin Salman half a century later, he expected to scatter his tribal opponents within a few weeks, but instead became bogged down for years. When victory proved elusive, Nasser’s Egypt turned to atrocity, bombing hospitals and marketplaces. It became the first state since World War One to use chemical weapons, perpetrating at least 450 chemical attacks and killing at least 800 people. The next state to do so was Baathist Iraq, against Iranian cities, and then at Halabja in Iraqi Kurdistan; and the next after that was Baathist Syria, in the Ghouta in August 2013, and on numerous other occasions since. Both Baathist regimes were built on the Nasserist model. Their rhetoric was nationalist, but they never directed these terrible weapons at imperialist or Zionist armies, only at Arab men, women and children, or at their Kurdish countrymen, or their Iranian neighbours.

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