About 30 years ago, while I was at Duke University, a Lebanese-American student of mine approached me to ask if I would be willing to co-author a book with him.

I asked him about the subject matter, and he answered without any hesitation: “The Failing Arab.” I pondered a bit and told him that it would be both too harsh and unfair to define the Arabs as such. Plus, we would stand being accused of Orientalism!

And after all, look around and you will see those Arab immigrants, many of whom have accomplished great success in their adopted lands.

My point here is that there must be something that was holding the Arabs back when they were in their homelands.

More than a decade ago, professor Bernard Lewis addressed the issue of Muslims’ decline in his detailed historical study, “What Went Wrong?”

Looking at the Arab condition today, the proper question should be: What is wrong? What is it that brought the Arab region to the point of a meltdown?

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As I see it, the root cause of the failure is the failed Arab state, which since its establishment in the post-World War I period has not evolved into a national political entity or a European-style nation state.

Rather, it remained, using the Swedish social scientist Gunnar Myrdal’s term, a “soft state,” buffeted by internal and external forces. And throughout the post-independence period it was held intact under a Leviathan authoritarian structure.

Today, the latest cycle of violence sweeping the region shows the inherent fragility of the Arab state, as it faces disintegration.

Indeed, from the start the infantile post-independence Arab state came under the onslaught of two conflicting ideologies that crossed borders on the map: The Arab nation (the pan-Arabists) and the Islamic nation (the Islamists). Two mythical paradigms that stood opposed to the nation-state paradigm and impeded the process of nation-state building based on citizenship and participation.

National identities, which never cohered, are now increasingly overwhelmed by those stemming from religion, sect or tribe.

What does it mean today to be Iraqi, Syrian, Lebanese, Yemeni or Libyan? Any meaningful identification seems to require a compound name in reference to one’s ethnic, tribal, religious and sectarian affiliation – all suggesting a political identity less civil and more primordial.

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States in the Middle East are becoming weaker, unable to provide security within their territory, losing control to nonstate actors (militias and the like) operating within and across borders, with terrorist groups roaming all over the place wreaking havoc. A condition akin to what Thomas Hobbes called the “state of nature,” where life is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.”

What kind of a state is Libya whose parliament just recently voted with an overwhelming majority (111 out of 124) on a resolution, asking the United Nations for “immediate intervention to protect its citizens?”

What kind of a state is Syria, whose murderous criminal rulers have waged war on its people, with the help of foreign sectarian militias and powers? The country is reduced to rubble (not unlike Dresden, Germany, or Grozny, Chechnya), with 8 million Syrians becoming internal and external refugees. It’s the crime of the century!

In 1986 old Aleppo – the place where I grew up and walked through its ancient quarters and souks – was declared a World Cultural Center by UNESCO. In 2006 Aleppo was named the Capital of Islamic Civilization. Today, in 2014, Aleppo is the epicenter of barrel bombs, death and destruction.

What kind of a state is Lebanon, whose center is held hostage by the superior power of Hezbollah, which is beholden to Iran since its creation by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard in the mid-1980s?

What kind of a state is Iraq, which was aptly described by King Faisal shortly before his death in the mid-1930s, as a collection of deeply divided peoples, “devoid of any patriotic ideas, connected by no common ties, prone to anarchy, and ready to rise against any government whatever.”

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During the pan-Arab nationalist epoch between the early 1960s and the late 1970s, secular authoritarian rulers sought to downplay, even dismiss, sectarianism or ethnicity by superimposing a contrived national identity, embracing all peoples, in theory, in a broader civic concept of national belonging.

In Iraq, the pan-Arab nationalist ideology propagated by the ruling Ba’ath Party was essentially a Sunni minority project forced upon the Shiite majority and the Kurds. With the destruction of the Ba’ath Party by the U.S. in 2003, and with no new civic society concept to replace Ba’athism, political identity degenerated into sectarian affinities, which became the sole organizing principle of the country’s politics.

Likewise, Ba’athism in Syria served as a mask for Alawi sectarian domination and repression of the Sunni majority. The state became a means of oppression by a family-run dynasty, not unlike a mafia operation.

With the onset of the Syrian revolt in 2011, the brutal violence unleashed by the Alawi state, coupled with the total indifference of the world community, has plunged the country into a prolonged civil war, enabling the rise and spread of the Islamic State group.

Equally, regime change in Libya and Yemen has ended in failing states. The demise of Moammar Gadhafi has prompted Bedouin tribalism and militia warlordism that would be hard to stitch together into a functioning nation-state, which was never the case in Libya. And today the country is spiraling into chaos.

In Yemen, tribal-regional feuding and sectarian division pose major impediments to statehood. And now the country seems to slide into a sectarian civil war, pitting the Sunni majority against the Iranian-supported Houthi Shiite minority.

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As for Egypt, the initial promise of political democratization following the ousting of Hosni Mubarak’s military-backed regime in 2011, went unfulfilled.

The electoral victory of the Muslim Brotherhood, with its exclusionary Islamist ideology, translated into absolute majority rule, which rendered democracy less viable.

A year later, the Arab Spring democracy was terminated by a military coup, and the country relapsed into military autocracy under the pretext of stability and security.

Though Egypt is the country with the strongest historical sense of statehood in the Arab region, it has become a divided society, burdened by the heavy weight of its social and economic problems, and it will probably take a decade or more to recover from its travail.

The region’s trajectory seems troubling: Soft states unable to safeguard their territory; militias and terrorist groups proliferating and gaining greater influence; borders violated and even erased; a local political culture devoid of democratic ethos and norms, with elections used to gain and consolidate power, not share it; and a pervasive religious discourse that has become all the more divisive.

But most alarming is that statehood in Syria, Iraq, Libya, Yemen and even Lebanon shows deep malaise and appears on the verge of collapse.

This conjecture is merely to point out that the turmoil in the region may very well be a prelude to a transformative juncture in Mideast history.


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