Posts Tagged ‘Juan Cole’
Arab Political Crisis? It isn’t a Matter of Civilization and it isn’t Unique
Posted January 6, 2017
on:The Arab Political Crisis: It isn’t a Matter of Civilization and it isn’t Unique
Hisham Melhem has a piece on what he calls the collapse of Arab civilization.
The piece is riddled with contradictions and fuzzy thinking and with all due respect to Milhem, who is a knowledgeable and experienced correspondent, I am going to disagree with it vehemently.
I think he is arguing that Arabs bear a moral burden for the atrocities being committed in the region, and that they cannot duck it by blaming regional problems on European colonialism or the US invasion and occupation of Iraq.
Juan Cole posted on Sept. 21, 2014
Let’s take the 22 Arab League members (which include for political reasons non-Arabic-speaking countries like Somalia and Djibouti). There is nothing wrong with their civilization.
In the past 50 years, Arabic-speakers have gone from being perhaps 80% rural to being 80% urban. (There are still some significantly rural Arab countries like Egypt and Syria but even there the urban-dwellers are a majority).
Even Saudi Arabia, which a century ago had a lot of pastoral nomads, is now as urban as the United States.
They have gone from being largely illiterate to being, especially at the level of 15-30 year-olds largely literate.
The proportion with high school and college educations has skyrocketed. They have access to world news through satellite television.
Civilizationally, the average Arab today is way ahead of her parents and grandparents.
Obviously, the states of the Arab world are undergoing important transitions and some have collapsed. But state collapse is not the same thing as civilizational collapse, nor caused by it (whatever “civilization” is).
Why the states are collapsing is a good question for social science, but it isn’t the moral failing that Milhem makes it out to be, nor is it unique. I’d look at the following:
1. Demography.
The Arab world is full of states that have had relatively high rates of population growth for 150 years. I have a hypothesis that this population boom is related to global warming, which also began in earnest about 150 years ago, and which may have reduced pandemics in the region which we know were common and cyclical in the medieval and early modern period (“plague”).
Tunisia underwent a demographic transition and began leveling off, but most of the rest continue to have high birth rates (Egypt began to level off in 2005 but apparently the instability of the last three years has caused a new baby boom).
High rates of population growth can contribute to instability if there aren’t enough jobs for the waves of young people coming on the job market every year.
Gross Domestic Product is a matter of long division. So if the population grows 3% in a year, and the economy grows 3 percent, the per capita increase in GDP that year zero. Go on like that for decades and you’ll have economic and social stagnation. This is why China’s one-child policy was so smart. You couldn’t have had the post-1980 take-off in the same way if the rate of population growth had been like Egypt’s.
Is it an accident that the two countries that began undergoing a demographic transition in the 1970s, Tunisia and Turkey, are the two more stable ones in the region?
2. Productivity.
Most Arab states were under European colonialism in the 19th and until the mid-20th century. No colonial administration was interested in promoting industrialization (in contrast, e.g., to Meiji Japan, which was independent and cared about Japan’s place in the world).
Arab countries after WW II were mostly agricultural and poor. Some 80% of Iraqis were landless laborers and 2500 families had the best land, and a lion’s share of it, in 1958.
While there has been some state-led industrialization, about half of Syria’s population is still rural. Farming has low rates of productivity gain. And most urban workers are in services, which also aren’t characterized by much increase in productivity. High population growth plus low productivity growth equals economic and social stagnation.
3. The distortions of the oil economies.
Urbanization in Egypt, e.g., may have stalled out since the 1970s because workers that might have gone to labor in factories in Egyptian cities instead went to Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and the UAE. When and if they returned with savings, they often returned to their villages and opened a shop or other small business. The oil economies of the Gulf also drew off the more enterprising teachers and engineers.
Oil economies have hardened currencies because of the value of their primary commodity, which makes made goods expensive and harms handicrafts, industry and agriculture because export markets like India can’t afford these goods if they are denominated in a hard currency. (This phenomenon is known as the Dutch disease because the Netherlands suffered from it in the early 1970s when its natural gas industry took off).
Also, having small but enormously wealthy and authoritarian states like Qatar, Kuwait, the UAE and Saudi Arabia in the region is destabilizing. They spread money around to support their factions, who then fall to fighting and have the wealth to buy good weapons.
4. Aridity and climate change.
The Arab world lies in a longstanding Arid Zone stretching from Morocco to the Gobi Desert. Much of this region cannot engage in rainfall agriculture and depends on irrigation. But climate change is producing increased aridity over time, with long-term droughts. The collapse of Syria is certainly caused in some important part by climate change. Egypt also has a water crisis, and in villages in Upper Egypt protests over insufficient water were part of the unrest during the 2011 revolution and after.
These sorts of causes have contributed to the difficulties the Arab world faces, not moral or civilizational deterioration. Of course, state collapse can create a social maelstrom in which horrific groups like ISIL can grow up. But they are typically caused by the other factors and attendant instability and displacement. They aren’t the original cause of anything themselves.
Nor are the Arabs alone even in the region. The brutality and disproportionate force deployed by the Israeli army in Gaza is another form of barbarism.
Singling out the Arab world is unfair. Spain came to be ruled from 1936 by a fascist military dictatorship, which lasted into the 1970s. The exemplar of civilization, the country of Goethe and Schelling– Germany– went fascist in the 1930s. Italy likewise had a fascist government from the 1920s, and it was overthrown by an American invasion, not by Italians alone.
Even in the past decade, Italy was demoted by Freedom House from being a first-tier democracy because of the corrupt and authoritarian practices of PM Silvio Berlusconi (journalists working for his media, and he owned a lot of it, were coerced to report positively on him). It is not at all clear that Europe would have ended up democratic, or would have done so quickly after the War, if left to its own devices.
What we think of democratic practices were imposed on Western Europe by the US. (Don’t believe that opinion. It is the way around)
Southeast Asia had its own difficulties transitioning from being agricultural and colonial to being independent, urban and industrial. Indonesia polished off hundreds of thousands of –some say a million– Communists in 1965.
Vietnam was in turmoil for decades and then turned to one-party dictatorship, remaining desperately poor.
Laos and Cambodia were destabilized by the American war in Vietnam. Of the 7.5 million Cambodians in 1975, about 25% were murdered in the Khmer Rouge genocide, i.e. about 1.88 million.
There isn’t any Arab country where a percentage of the population (25%) has been killed, similar to Cambodia.
The Algerian Revolution (1954-1962) cost between 500,000 and 1 million lives in a population of 11 million, but a large proportion of these were killed by French troops.
The Lebanese Civil War (1975-1989) probably killed about 100,000 out of 4 million, or 2.5 percent.
The Iran-Iraq War (1981-1989) probably left 250,000 Iraqis (some say twice that) dead, out of 16 million, with similar numbers of Iranian casualties.
The Arab-Israeli Wars, most of them Israeli pre-emptive wars, horrible as they were, were relatively low-casualty affairs as wars go– with casualties on the Arab side in the tens of thousands. Tunisia wasn’t involved in a war after WWII.
The US invasion and occupation of Iraq, which destabilized that country, resulted in excess mortality of between 200,000 and a million, in a population of 30 million since 2003 (and despite Melhem, I think we know whose fault this latter was).
One could also compare to Africa.
I won’t go into the massive destabilization and loss of life in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, whose destabilization began with Belgian policy that killed half the population. Over 5 million have died because of instability (and related disease) in DRC since 1995.
The fact is that European colonialism and neocolonialism has had a demonstrably destabilizing effect on the region. But Milhem is right that there are lots of other contributing causes. They aren’t, however, the ones he points to. Population growth, the shape of the economy, and resource-poverty (especially in water, which he mentions with regard to Yemen but only as a jeremiad) are all implicated.
Melhem’s piece stands in a very long tradition. After the fall of Baghdad in 1258 to the Buddhist and animist Mongol armies, many Muslim intellectuals concluded that God was angry at the Muslims for having become decadent, and so delivered them into the hands of the infidels from the East for punishment.
But the Mongol invasions were not a moral failing of the people of Iran and Iraq. They resulted in some important part from the sophistication of Mongol warfare.
Don’t beat yourself up so much, Hisham.
By the way, some of this is explained in my new book:
The New Arabs: How the Millennial Generation is Changing the Middle East
Muslims who sacrificed themselves to save Jews and fight Nazis in World War II
Posted September 14, 2014
on:
Meet the Muslims who sacrificed themselves to save Jews and fight Nazis in World War II
Given recent history, it’s a story that deserves retelling.
Note: For over a century, Muslems were ignored and dehumanized. It got worse after the Soviet troops vacated Afghanistan in 1989. Since then, Muslems were viewed by the west as “terrorists”. Obama is trying to say “Muslems are not representative of ISIS or Daesh since these extremist factions have no religion. This is the same mantra for all religions: the terrorists are the “black sheep“.
The following article is basically trying to wrap Muslems as forming an entity, regardless of their various initial nationalities they are from.
Michael Wolfe published this September 8, 2014
Britain issues a stamp to commemorate Khan. (Courtesy of the Royal Mail)
Noor Inayat Khan led a very unusual life. She was born in 1914 to an Indian Sufi mystic of noble lineage and an American half-sister of Perry Baker, often credited with introducing yoga into America.
As a child, she and her parents escaped the chaos of revolutionary Moscow in a carriage belonging to Tolstoy’s son. Raised in Paris in a mansion filled with her father’s students and devotees, Khan became a virtuoso of the harp and the veena, dressed in Western clothes, graduated from the Sorbonne and published a book of children’s tales — all before she was 25.
One year later, in May 1940, the Germans occupied Paris. Khan, her mother, and a younger brother and sister fled like millions of others, catching the last boat from Bordeaux to England, where she immediately joined the British war effort. In 1942, she was recruited by Churchill’s elite Special Operations Executive (SOE) to work in Paris as a wireless operator. Her clandestine efforts supported the French Underground as England prepared for the D-Day invasions. Among SOE agents, the wireless operator had the most dangerous job of all, because the occupation authorities were skilled at tracking their signals. The average survival time for a Resistance telegrapher in Paris was about six weeks.
Khan’s service continued from June 1943 until her capture and arrest by the Gestapo in October. Her amazing life and eventual murder in Germany’s Dachau prison camp in September 1944 are the focus of a PBS film I co-produced that is airing this week. In researching her story, I came across quite a number of other Muslims who bravely served the Allied cause — and sometimes made the ultimate sacrifice. History is rich with examples of their daring heroism and split-second decisions that helped defeat the Nazis.
Behic Erkin, the Turkish ambassador in Paris, provided citizenship papers and passports to thousands of Jews (many with only distant claims to Turkish connections) and arranged their evacuation by rail across Europe. One fateful day, Necdet Kent, the Turkish consul-general in Marseille, stymied the shipment of 80 Turkish Jews to Germany by forcing his way onto a train bearing them to their likely death and arranging for their return, unharmed, to France.
Abdol-Hossein Sardari used his position at the Iranian consulate in Paris to help thousands of Jews evade Nazi capture. Later dubbed the Iranian Schindler, he convinced the occupying Germans that Iranians were Aryans and that the Jews of Iran had been Iranian since the days of Cyrus the Great — and, therefore, should not be persecuted. Then he issued hundreds of Iranian passports to non-Iranian Jews and saved their lives.
Ahmed Somia, the Tunisian co-director of the French Muslim Hospital outside Paris, organized weapon caches, facilitated Resistance radio transmissions, treated wounded Resistance fighters, and helped save many downed U.S. and British pilots by hiding them in fake T.B. wards where Gestapo and French gendarmes feared to go.
Khan was posthumously decorated with the highest British and French civilian and military honors, but so were other Muslims, including standout heroes among the 2.5 million British Indian troops fighting Axis forces around the globe.
In this largest volunteer army in recorded history, Muslims (roughly one-third of the force), like Hindus and Buddhists, played prominent roles.
In a letter to President Roosevelt during the war, Churchill pointed out that Muslim soldiers were providing “the main army elements on which we [the British] must rely for the immediate fighting.”
In 1944-45, the French Army of Africa, joined to de Gaulle’s Free French Forces, was expanded to 260,000 men, of whom 50% were North African, the great majority being Muslim, while another substantial group were Senegalese Muslim riflemen. These forces invaded Italy and helped liberate southern France.
According to American historian Juan Cole, fighting these dark-skinned Africans in “Aryan” Europe, and losing to them, dismayed many German soldiers steeped in trumped-up theories of racial inferiority.
Eastern Europe offered more examples.
In the Balkans, for instance, only 200 Jews lived in Albania before WWII. Yet by war’s end, almost 2,000 Jews lived in the country, because so many had fled Greece, Austria and other locations in Europe to take shelter there among the predominantly Muslim population, which hid and protected them.
As Cole wrote elsewhere, commemorating the 70th anniversary of D-Day: “While a few Muslims did support the Axis, out of resentment of Western colonialism and hopes that the rise of an alternative power center would aid their quest for independence, they were tiny in their numbers compared to the Muslims who not just supported the Allies… but actively fought on their behalf.”
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One of the jobs of documentary film is to rescue stories that fall out of the history books.
Khan’s account, and others like it, seems at odds with the history of the modern Middle East, whose combatants — whether Arab, Turkish, Iranian or Israeli — may want for their own reasons to bury stories about Muslim-Jewish collaboration.
But these tales should be remembered and honored. It is my sincere hope that with the story of Noor Inayat Khan, we have done just that.
“Enemy of the Reich: The Noor Inayat Khan Story” will air on PBS stations nationwide on Tuesday, September 9th. Viewers should check their local listings.
(Michael Wolfe is a poet and the co-founder of Unity Productions Foundation. His latest film is “Enemy of the Reich: The Noor Inayat Khan Story.” He is also author of “The Hadj: An American’s Pilgrimage to Mecca.”
Show me in maps: Iraq-ISIS Conflict
Posted June 27, 2014
on:

ISIS partial or complete control Contested Recent fighting
Al Waleed There were unconfirmed reports that government forces had fled. Frightened police officers, reached by telephone, said that the army had already left and that the police scattered when militants arrived. | Qaim ISIS captured this crossing on Friday. Bukamal, on the Syrian side, was also out of government control, with groups including the Free Syrian Army and Al Nusra Front maintaining a strong presence. | Rabia Kurdish forces secured this crossing following the fall of Mosul. Yaroubia, on the Syrian side, is controlled by Kurdish forces of a different political affiliation. |

2003
Sadr
City
Kadhimiya
Adhamiya
BAGHDAD
Green Zone
Baghdad
Airport
Tigris River
2 MILES

2009
Adhamiya
Huriya
BAGHDAD
Green Zone
Amiriya
Baghdad
Airport
Tigris River
2 MILES
2003: Before the Invasion
Before the American invasion, Baghdad’s major sectarian groups lived mostly side by side in mixed neighborhoods.
The city’s Shiite and Sunni populations were roughly equal, according to Juan Cole, a University of Michigan professor and Middle East expert.
2009: Violence Fuels Segregation
Sectarian violence exploded in 2006. Families living in areas where another sect was predominant were threatened with violence if they did not move.
By 2009 Shiites were a majority, with Sunnis reduced to about 10 percent to 15 percent of the population.
• Kadhimiya, a historically Shiite neighborhood, is home to a sacred Shiite shrine.
• Adhamiya, a historically Sunni neighborhood, contains the Abu Hanifa Mosque, a Sunni landmark.
• The Green Zone became the heavily fortified center of American operations during the occupation.
• Sadr City was the center of the insurgent Mahdi Army, led by the Shiite cleric Moktada al-Sadr.
• Huriya was transformed in 2006 when the Mahdi Army pushed out hundreds of families in a brutal spasm of sectarian cleansing.
• More than 8,000 displaced families relocated to Amiriya, the neighborhood where the Sunni Awakening began in Baghdad.
• Adhamiya, a Sunni island in Shiite east Baghdad, was walled and restricted along with other neighborhoods in 2007 for security.
• Neighborhoods east of the Tigris Riverare generally more densely populated than areas to the west.
Source: Dr. M. Izady, Columbia University’s Gulf 2000 project

ABOUT 100
MILES TO
MOSUL
ABOUT 50 MILES
TO KIRKUK
Power
plant
1
Tigris
River
Oil refinery
Employee
dormitories
Village
Employee
village
Village
Smoke plume
at 10:30 a.m.
Wednesday.
Baiji
ABOUT 115 MILES
TO BAGHDAD
1 MILE

KEY Towns attacked
Bomb attacks
ABOUT 140 MILES
TO MOSUL
MILES FROM
CENTRAL BAGHDAD
ABOUT 80 MILES
TO KIRKUK
70
Adhaim
JUNE 15
Samarra
JUNE 11, 13, 17
60
Al-Mutasim
JUNE 14
Dhuluiya
JUNE 12
50
Ishaqi
Muqdadiya
The Iraqi army retook control of Ishaqi and Muqdadiya on June 14. In Muqdadiya, a Shiite militia assisted the government forces.
40
Dujail
JUNE 14
30
Militants took control of several neighborhoods inBaquba on June 16 but were repulsed by security officers after a three-hour gun battle.
Baquba
JUNE 16, 17
Tarmiyah
JUNE 11
20
Falluja and many towns in the western province of Anbar have been under ISIS control for about six months.
Tigris
River
10
At least five bomb attacks occurred in Baghdad, mainly in Shiite areas, in the week after the rebel group took Mosul.
Sadr City
Kadhimiya
Falluja
Bab al-Sheikh
Al-Bab Al-Sharqi
Baghdad
Saidiyah

100
80
60
Attacks That Could Be Attributed to ISIS
40
20
2004
2005
2006
2007
2008
2009
2010
2011
2012
2013
Mosul
Kirkuk
Baghdad
IRAQ
Basra
2004
51 attacks
2005
58 attacks
2006
5 attacks
2007
56 attacks
2008
62 attacks
2009
78 attacks
2010
86 attacks
2011
34 attacks
2012
603 attacks
2013
419 attacks
2004-05 The group emerges as “Al Qaeda in Iraq” following the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq. Its goal is to provoke a civil war. | 2006-07 The group’s February 2006 bombing of one of Iraq’s most revered Shiite shrines ignites sectarian violence across the country. After merging with several other Sunni insurgent groups, it changes its name to the Islamic State of Iraq. | 2008-10 I.S.I. claims responsibility for more than 200 attacks, many in densely-populated areas around Baghdad. | 2011-12 The group is relatively quiet for most of 2011, but re-emerges after American troops withdraw from Iraq. | 2013 Seeing new opportunities for growth, I.S.I. enters Syria’s civil war and changes its name to reflect a new aim of establishing an Islamic religious state spanning Iraq and Syria. Its success in Syria bleeds over the border to Iraq. |
Sources: Global Terrorism Database, National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (attack data); Congressional Research Service; Council on Foreign Relations; Long War Journal; Institute for the Study of War

Mosul
Area of
detail
Tikrit
June 13
June 10
Mosul captured
Baghdad
IRAQ
Jalawla
Kirkuk
Sadiyah
June 11
Tikrit
captured
Basra
June 12
Dhuluiya captured
June 11-12
Samarra
Tigris R.
About 110 miles
Attacks in
the days after
Mosul captured
30
June 11
Parts of Baiji
captured
20
30
Baghdad
Ishaki Dujail
June 14
Taji
Lake Tharthar
Falluja
Ramadi
Euphrates R.
After capturing Mosul, Tikrit and parts of a refinery in Baiji, insurgents attackedSamarra, where Shiite militias helped pro-government forces.
Then, they seized Jalawla and Sadiyah but were forced back by government troops backed by Kurdish forces. They continued their moves south by Ishaki and Dujail.
ISIS control of cities
Partial or complete
Contested
Attacks since Mosul
Sources: Caerus Associates, Long War Journal, Institute for the Study of War

TURKEY
Hasakah
Mosul
Erbil
Aleppo
Raqqa
Kirkuk
Deir al-Zour
IRAN
Baiji
SYRIA
Tikrit
Homs
Jalawla
LEBANON
Samarra
Dhuluiya
Damascus
IRAQ
Baghdad
ISRAEL
SAUDI
ARABIA
JORDAN
KUWAIT

Mosul
Kirkuk
Baiji
Tikrit
Dhuluiyah
Samarra
Ramadi
Baghdad
IRAQ
Falluja
Tigris
Euphrates River
Basra
Predominant group
Sunni Arab
Shiite Arab
Kurd
50 MILES








