Bouazizi and The Spark of Nationhood

Over the last decade we have noticed a big rush in the Arabian community, in what is currently known as the GCC states, for genealogy quests. Unfortunately for the most part, such quests are not based on thorough research of written records and archives, nor on proven subject-related research methods. Weak authenticity can be traced partly to the lack of access to records written in foreign languages of international powers that had ruled the region, such as the Ottomans, the Portuguese and even some English manuscripts and records that might not be available to the average researcher.

On the other hand, Arabic-based archives for the last few centuries are either scarce or inaccessible due to formal censorship and the lack of genuine effort for documentation and historical recording. However, there are other sources of data such as personal letters, biographies, wills, poetry and eye witness accounts that were preserved by some aficionados. One might see a good start in formal initiatives to preserve local histories from these personal sources in the Center for Kuwaiti Studies under the leadership of Al-Ghunaim brothers. The Kuwaiti government had started the initiative in the aftermath of Kuwait’s invasion by its immediate neighbor Iraq. Preserving oral and local history of the populace of Kuwait was very important to make the Kuwaiti legal stand of independence against any neighboring claims of appropriation.

During the last decade, the GCC region observed hundreds of online forums setup for the purpose of discussing oral history of the region. The majority of these websites are devoted to publishing tribal and ethnic data that would otherwise be unavailable to the public. The internet has become the arena for ethnic and tribal solidarity with a spirit akin to that of the "fraternity egoistic" culture. One should ask why people, especially of the younger generations, would choose to search for solidarity along tribal roots, after decades of establishing statehood in the Arab Gulf region. Did the state fail over half a century to build loyalty and an identity of nationhood in the hearts of the young who were born and raised in the so-called modern state?

It is a fact that the functional role of the tribe, defined as a social structure for physical and economic security, has been dead for a long period of time.  Nevertheless, Politicians and sociologists alike opt to think that tribalism in its functionalist historic spirit still exists. From the politicians’ perspective, it is a pragmatic banner to indicate the legitimacy of the current political structures, which stems from the nature of the society itself, which is tribal. For the sociologists, it is a readymade tool of analysis, a justification away from deep rooted problems that require dedication and close observation of changes in social phenomena in contemporary Gulf societies. 

Historically the tribe was the mechanism by which groups of people within the Arabian Peninsula’s desert would collude to survive the scarcity dilemma of the environment. During those times such collusions were based on blood lineages around a real or imaginary ancestor; however, it was often the case that an Arabian tribe was an agglomeration of several groups of different blood lineages, which came together as necessitated by environmental and dispute-related factors. Hence tribes rather than individuals possessed control of the collective ownership of land, and reigned with a great level of independence and sovereignty within the agreed upon distribution of lands. It can be said that tribes behaved as mini states in their internal and external relationships, while international powers had left them as they were due to the unattractive prospects of the Arabian desert. When Western colonial powers first arrived in the Peninsula in an attempt to control trade routes passing the Arabian Gulf, they were determined to control the sea routes and the Gulf’s important seaports. Individuals and tribes who opposed them were stigmatized as pirates and lost their political power later on. Those who collaborated with the colonials had a better chance of survival and stability. Then, with the discovery of oil, the scene completely changed with the formation of new city states, which facilitated the oil industry’s development and exportation to the energy thirsty industrial machine in the West. During the last fifty years oil revenues facilitated the creation of newly built capital cities with high rise buildings, infrastructure and huge funding to the education sector, but the path through which these city states would be transformed from sheikdoms to civil society-based systems is unclear.

Arab Gulf societies nowadays are not tribal in the functionalist sense anymore, especially within the smaller states of the Gulf. One's tribe does not function as the economic and physical security as it once did in the past; today one is employed by the state and defended by the state. However "neo-tribalism", or glory to the tribe as perceived through numerous websites and internet forums, is on the rise, discussing long forgotten issues of tribal glory and/or decline. Neo-tribalism is only a reaction to the continuity of the traditional mode of governance. The building of nationhood and confederation, and the encouragement of civil society institutions across the GCC states is the only safeguard for the political and economic viability on one hand and the security of the region on the other. Neo-tribalism is a red flag for nationhood’s absence.      

If we were to look at other Arab Republic states, which are fairly older than those of the Gulf, and are denoted in large as "nationalistic" and nontribal, we can see a new rush for geopolitical divisions and subdivision. This cancerous rush for state divisions and subdivision in the Arab world is going in the opposite direction of transnational integration that is growing everywhere else in the world. These divisions are promoted on lines of ethnicity and religion, which were supposed to have dissolved   with the creation of Arab Republics. Since the existing boundaries of Arab states have been defined by European colonial treaties in the after effects of the Ottoman’s decline, the demarcation of these boundaries were not based on ethnicity or religion, but instead tore tribes, ethnic and religious groups across several states. Then why after all these years of common living we see new demands along lines of ethnicity or religion.

The Arabian Dream that was promised to the Arabs by the European powers against the Ottoman Empire came to a halt after the First World War, as the whole region was divided into several European protectorates. After the Second World War, especially during the early 1950’s, many Arab protectorates revolted against the European powers and their traditional Arab leadership counterparts, and the new states of Arab republics were born, all of which were created and defended by the military. The transfer to democratic civil society never materialized.

Nationalism, was supposed to unite the new Arab republics which had all the ingredients for this union. As a matter of fact those who led the movement of Arab nationalism were in fact Christian Arabs. They had embraced Islam as the mainstream religion, which did not constitute a threat to their choice of religious belief, many Christian Arabs study the Quran as the optimum text for the teaching of the Arabic language; there are even intermarriages between Arabs from different religions, and in some countries such as Egypt and Palestine, Muslims and Christians fast according to the other's doctrine during their fasting days to express shareness and solidarity.  Furthermore, Arab nationalism at the time was not looked at from the genealogical point of view but from a cultural and linguistic stand. Those who were looked at as being of a distinct ethnic group, such as the Kurds, the Berbers or the Africans are considered Arabs from the stand view of the nationalist movement. Defining these groups according to ethnicity would be a faulty path. One cannot determine what ethnicity means in this region, the oldest spot of human history. In actuality, archeological and historical research bring increasing evidence that those who are considered nowadays as ethnically distinct from Arabs are in fact Arabs in the pure genealogical sense, i.e. that such minority groups have descended from prehistoric and ancient Arabian tribes that migrated throughout the Arabian Peninsula, or Africa and Asia. Such tribes spoke ancient forms of the Arabic language. Examples of this would be the Aramaics in Syria, the Assyrians and Chaldeans in Iraq, the Berbers in Northern Africa, the Coptics in Egypt, the Nubians of Sudan, most of those populating East Africa, the Baluch in Southern Persia, and the Eastern Jews who are said to be descended from the ancient Bani Aber tribe of Arabia.  

If such was taken to be the truth, then why did we not see the manifestation of the Arabian Dream of integration, a dream of oneness, of one Arab state or union come true? The failure to unionize even according to pure economic benefits of free trade agreements, and the free trade areas in the region have become the rhetoric of public seminars rather than true genuine efforts. Moreover, why do we now see disintegration within each Arab nation state?

Although one cannot ignore external factors and the role of international powers for new demarcations within the region, which are expectedly based on newly discovered oil and gas fields. Other geopolitical interests of international powers helped to keep the status quo of many autocratic and military based regimes against social demands of democracy. But it is certain that there also exist the suitable internal environments, ready to be harvested by such external economic interest. A new rush of dissolution within Arab nation states began in Sudan and prepared for in Iraq, and it is uncertain where the rush will end. What we see now boils back to the Arab political elite’s theory of justice, the “We Know Best” attitude. The Intra-regional disparities of development, regardless of ethnicity or religion, are the main factors of political divorce within Arab nation states. The South of Sudan happened to be predominantly Christian. Would Darfur, which is predominately Muslim, be of any difference?

Arab political elites love their proximate surroundings in the capitals of the nation states even if resources are drawn from other unfortunate regions. Proximity is not only geographical but also in terms of proximity to friends, proximity with business partners, proximity with in-laws, etc. Republic states that were created by overthrowing kings and sultans were reborn through new versions of republic monarchies of statehood. Moreover, traditional monarchies in the Arab world did not succeed in transforming into constitutional monarchies, regardless of the overuse of buzzwords such as Democracy, Transparency, Human Rights and Development. Nation and statehood is a matter of form rather than substance in the mind of the average citizen who is sometimes deprived of the simplest natural rights such as the right to property. We have seen property appropriation by the state in the crudest of manners, even within the so-called more open and outward looking states. The Appropriation Acts are pseudo-legalized under a wide slogan of public interest or public utility, where the word "public" is defined according to the "proximity" principle we mentioned earlier, or as the popular quote says "away from the eye, away from the heart". In other Arab military-based regimes, the average citizen is deprived of the most basic and natural right of decent living.

Bouazizi’s suicidal death that touched the soul of every home in the Arab world is a manifestation of the loss of hope for decency and honor, considered the simplest return to the individual from the act of being a member of a nation. Why do we commune in the first place if the collective being we commune to is hijacked by individuals and groups that stand for their outright personal and economic interests, and not only that, but for their pure whims of right and wrong at the expense of the collective conscience?

Political elite groups in the Arab world suffer from a complex of being “above" the people in their intelligence. The idea that they know best, that they rule crowds of unappreciative, ignorant, backward fiends and immature beings. Bin Ali’s in-laws shared business with every successful enterprise in Tunisia while unemployment was wide spread among highly educated people, not only that but his regime deprived people from practicing their basic religious beliefs, so what is there to live for then? We can see evidence of the “We Know Best” complex in the statement of one Arab official who marginalized the Tunisian people’s uprising that forced the Tunisian ruling group to flee the country, by questioning and oversimplifying the deep-rooted seeds of this societal mutiny. We heard another official questioning the motive and credibility of the young man who tried to follow Bouazizi’s stand in Egypt by burning himself. In his case, the young man was saved by another who was passing the street at that same moment and saw him on fire. The Arab official said that this young man remained alive only because he was not truly genuine in his effort to commit suicide. Then contrary to his expectation the uprising burst in Egypt. It is this complex of “super-intelligence”, and the "I know what is best for you” mentality of the political elite in dealing with statehood affairs, which impacts the basic rights of individuals; a dead-end fallacy.

The public suicide that moved the hearts and the souls of the people in societies where the act of taking one’s life is deemed a dire sin from a religious point of view has to be understood from one significant lens. In a very abstract sense, if the nation fails to provide the individual the solidarity which may be considered the equivalent moral payoff for the abdication of his individual identity to the nation, then the rationale of a nation’s existence in the individual’s mind becomes absent. This absentee factor has consequently led to the migration of highly educated individuals, or what is called the “brain drain phenomena" from the Arab states. Here the individual chooses to leave a nation for another that would satisfy this moral payoff. The feeling of not belonging has paradoxically led to wide spread financial and institutional corruption. The reinter behavior of “pack as much as you can while you are here" is not punished in the international community as other types of crimes against humanity are. The rent seeking or the reinter being here is far superior and enlarged in his mind by a degree that swallows the whole collective being. It is an illustration of the nation’s failure to satisfy the moral payoff for the individual.

We are delighted to see the freeze of Bin Ali’s assets in the banks of Switzerland; this can be seen as a sign of international commitment to penalize acts of theft against other nations. Contrary to the group of "brain drain" the latter groups choose to drain the nation's wealth and to delay economic and social development by "free riding" at the expense of the rest of the individuals within the agreed upon nation. "Public suicides for the greater good" in the Arab world is a new manifestation of the absence of nationhood. It is the opposite face of the reinter group’s behavior. Here the individual being is minimized to nil because of the nihility of the collective being. Death is a form of leaving the nation, which stand’s as an artificial form without genuine substance. The insanity of this departure, meant to awaken the rest of the individuals of the endangered collective conscience and being. It was the average population that took the lead of answering Bouazizi’s last feat to save the nation. Party and political opposition leaders were invisible until after the spark ignited by the layperson’s random response in the street. One can only hope that the capitalization on this spark will not be hijacked yet again, transformed into a new shape rather than real substance for another several decades in Tunisia. The trigger of his death split open deep wounds in Egypt and other Arab states for genuine reforms. The Tunisian spark of conscience has to be safeguarded and protected in the interests of all Arabs. Only then, can we say that Arabs have at last found their true path to civil society.