Hisham Bustani

Hisham Bustani is a Jordanian writer and activist, and the author of four
collections of short fiction. Renowned for his contemporary themes, style,
and language, he has been described by al-Ra’i as "bringing a new wave of
surrealism to [Arabic] literary culture, which missed the surrealist
revolution of the last century." Bustani’ s work has been translated into four
languages with English-language translations appearing in prestigious
journals across the US, UK, and Canada, including World Literature
Today, The Common, andThe Literary Review. His third short-story
collection, The Perception of Meaning, won the 2014 University of Arkansas
Arabic Translation Award. Thoraya El-Rayyes, a Palestinian Canadian
translator, lives in Amman, Jordan. Her translations have appeared in
numerous journals, including Banipal, Open Letters Monthly, and World
Literature Today, among others.
History Will Not Be Made on This Couch

translated by Thoraya El-Rayyes

To the revolutionaries of Egypt who left

their couches and burnt their televisions
It’s raining again. Like the winters of my childhood. But my head has changed and is
covered in scars. It’s not as light as it used to be.
It’s raining. A shower of the Imam’s heavy words falls on my head from the nearby
minaret.
The last Friday in January isn’t a regular day in my room. Inside the TV, streets are
flooding with colorful drops of people, stones, and barricades. Every now and then a
barrage of bullets thunders, along with the lightning of Molotov cocktails.
The call for prayer gets louder along with my headache and I start diving and diving in
search of the child/myself buried under layers and layers of betrayal.
“The people. Want. To bring down the regime.” The rain shouts as it becomes a stream
that slides down the asphalt road and sinks down a drain right above my head. I feel
cold and don’t dare to reach out from under the covers to change the station. My hand
would freeze on the way, then rot and fall off.
Stones and spit and political analysts and speeding cars running over demonstrators
and conspiring friends and groups of worshippers buying vegetables outside the
nearby mosque their cars blocking the street and an official motorcade complete with
sirens emptying the city and I am cold.
“Aaaaammeeeennnn.”
I will lose my hand.
“Aaaaammeeeennnn.”
I said: I will lose my hand.
“Aaaaammeeeennnn.”
Okay then.
“LEAVE already! Have some shame!” The laborer is shouting at the door of his embassy
in Amman. A laborer who would rot in the dead pharaoh’s cellars if the tyrant is
resurrected. There will be no demonstrators at the border officers’ kiosk, but he shouts
all the same, and men in ties smile for the cameras as they search for someone to lead
the chants. “Where are the chant leaders?” says one of the men in ties to the air, and
then to his mobile phone: “Where are the banners?”
“Have some shame!”
“Where are the banners?”
“LEAVE already!”
I hold an umbrella with a broken handle, and there is no rain. The rain has stopped. In
my living room sit a newscaster, political analysts, and the voice of the imam filled with
spit. I open the umbrella, curl up underneath it, and find a paper, a pen, crumbs of
speech and a sudden sound: trrrrrnnnn. A text message: “U never complain. Anyway
I’ll leave u to finish what ure doing. I wish I was with u to hold u tight and tell u I have
the world in my arms.”
Trrrrrnnnn. A text message: “The thugs. They r killing us.”
Trrrrrnnnn. A text message: “Comrade, I didn’t expect that from u. I’ll never speak to u
again.”
Trrrrrnnnn. Trrrrrnnnn. Trrrrrnnnn. Stones and spit and political analysts and speeding
cars running over demonstrators and conspiring friends and groups of worshippers
buying vegetables outside the nearby mosque their cars blocking the street and an
official motorcade complete with sirens emptying the city and I am cold.
How will I find that child/myself? How?
The television is on fire, and history isn’t being made on this couch.
The television is on fire, and the remote control doesn’t change history.
The television is on fire, and I am here, in front of it.
Let me die then.
Amen.
Nightmares of the City

1. The Building That Sees, Hears and Speaks

The building is dark and dismal, haunted by ghosts of people who used to drift through its rooms and
apartments and stumble up and down its stairs. The building also sees, hears and speaks: its eyes
stare through the windows and wall cracks, it hears through the drainpipes and bathroom windows
that open onto the airshaft. And as for its speech… Ahhh, its words!
On the second floor, I could hear my uncle and his wife yelling as if an old record was stuck on the
scratch of their endless disagreements: “you bitch”, “you lowlife”, and the sound of glass smashing
and doors slamming and the building shivering as if it were in a freezer.
I was always alone, sitting on the front stairs every day as if I was waiting. Waiting for a bus to take
me far away, a bus that never came. Once I imagined it would fall from the sky, but what fell was a
tile that grazed my perfumed smell and shattered on the ground. I sprang up and looked upwards:
there was no one on the roof, and the roof wasn’t tiled anyway. I’d remember this moment when it
would rain tiles someday soon.
My uncle and his wife hit each other. He has a lot of debt and she has to polish the glass of her
framed photo in front of everyone. But the wall cracked, the nail slipped and so the photo fell
breaking the frame, the glass and everything. My uncle ran away from home, his debtors and
everyone. He slinked out from under the eyes of his sleeping wife to Cairo, slinking until he died.
That morning, the noise of the wife hitting the children broke out and when she passed by me with
her handbag, I was still sitting on the front stairs waiting for the bus. She spat on me, as the sound of
children crying descended from amidst the wreck.
2. The Bus That Never Comes
It is green like the grass of meadows, its door doesn’t close, its windows have no glass and its seats
are roses. Its passengers are all of my friends: Dante, Stendhal, Yann Tiersen, Mureed al-Barghoti,
Zuheir abu-Shayeb… Ah, and it is full of cats, and birds. It runs on wheels made of music with no
driver and no fare collector.
Every time it stops at a station, everyone gets off. They spread a mat and circle around cups of wine,
pieces of cheese, garlic yoghurt and dark bread freckled with nuts. To one side, there is a garbage
bag: soldiers throw in their boots and rifles, the informer throws in his eyes and ears, the tart throws
in her high heels, the student throws in his teacher, the opportunist throws in his position, the
prostitute throws in her society, and the deified leader throws in himself.
Only then does everyone drink for love and freedom. They undress and each describes the details of
their faults, deformities and neuroses. They converge in a huge orgy becoming one body and then
disintegrate into their own selves again. They climb back into the bus, hand in hand, and head to the
next station.
But the bus never comes.
3. The Room of Ghosts
Ahhh, the words of this building…
The home of my widowed grandmother is on the ground floor. She was widowed before I was born,
and she has stayed in the building even as it emptied of its other inhabitants.
“I made friends with the traces that their fingers left behind next to the light switches on the wall,
and with their dust building up under the sofas. If I leave, I’ll have nothing left of them. Here, at least,
I have their ghosts.”
“Here, the first of my children tripped and bled. And over that cupboard your father hid from his
father after he’d broken the window and seen a black belt in an angry hand seeking him out.”
She walks past corners and pieces of furniture telling stories. Only the second floor brings her to
tears. “I’ll never see him again,” she said when he slinked away to Cairo, and when he died there. It
was only the locked room at the end of her hallway that she never talked about, and that I wasn’t
allowed to go near.
Some days I’d wait until she wasn’t looking and stick my ear to the keyhole. A heavy sound would
seep into my ear, the heavy sound of speechless pain.
One day when I was bored of waiting for the bus and my stomach began to grumble, I went to her.
But there was no one on the ground floor. “Grandma…” I called, wondering where an old woman,
barely able to walk, would go and where she could have passed from, since I’d been glued to the
building’s entrance since the morning.
The house was very clean: the walls and floors shone brightly. There were no finger traces around
the light switches, and no dust under the sofas. Everything was very new as if had been just
unwrapped. As for the door of the forbidden room, it stood open.
When I tiptoed closer and peeked into the room, I was shocked by the darkness and the clear sound
of speechless pain. When my eyes got used to the darkness, I saw my grandfather sitting next to a
bed, back bent like arches of an old bridge, leaning his head on a hand pressed against his eyes as he
choked back tears. On the bed, a small black creature lay unmoving. It was me, charred and stiff.
With all the terror stored up in my memory about haunted rooms, rooms full of mice and rooms
under the stairs, I exploded out of the room, running from the apartment, out of the building, to the
street.
Behind me, sobs of heavy pain were still clear, still speechless.
4. A Fly-By Visit To What Had Been
I ran out of the room, running from the apartment, out of the building, into the street. My breath
was fast and my pulse was banging like the drums of war. I felt it pricking in my veins, in my ears, in
my temples and I almost exploded. In a moment, I gathered all my strength and looked back. I was
standing, dressed in black, at the building’s entrance. As my eyes met my eyes, I ran after myself and
almost tripped. Suddenly, a dark nightfall fell and I collided with a high wall. “This is the end of the
road” a rough voice shouted.
I turned quickly and found myself in front of myself, face to face. My adrenaline surged, my pupils
dilated to the maximum, I started to shake – meanwhile I was completely silent, calm like a grassy
hedge, my facial expressions wiped blank with an eraser and dyed with lemon concentrate.
I was struggling to open my eyes. I wanted to wake up. Invisible fingers closed my eyes tight. I
gathered all the strength left in my body, turned it into a chisel and hammer that I slammed to open
my eyelids. Haaaaaahhh, I inhaled withdrawing all the air in the room, and exploded in tears.
I almost died from sleepiness, but I didn’t want to go back to that room, that street, the wall blocking
the road, the other me, and the feeling of not being able to open my eyes. I was shivering.
* * * *
She heard children’s voices from a distance. She dried her tears and looked out the window…
There were four of them, leaving their school, next to Jabal Lweibdeh’s water tank overlooking Jabal
el-Qal’a. They were wearing shorts made by a prudent housewife and later inherited by their
brothers. She read the sign: “Islamic School of Science – founded by Tayseer Zebyan”. The year was
1946.
The kids walked along the dirt road until they reached the stone hedge that encircles Tash’s orchard.
They jumped over it and filled their little empty stomachs with green almonds and figs. They also
filled their pockets, for the day was long. As they crossed to the other side of the orchard- jumping
over the hedge again- a field spread out before them overlooking Wadi Saqra with Jabal Amman
rising behind it. In that field, they arranged stones and split into two teams to play. She heard them
say: Gird o shara. She didn’t know that game.
When they had finished the game, they sat on the hill looking far towards the bull-drawn wagons of
the Circassians as they climbed a dirt road winding up between the orchards from wasat-il-balad and
curving towards Wadi el-Seer. They started to play again, conspiring against large stones and rocks
and pushing them over the hilltop to the belly of the valley, then converging on what slid out from
underneath: a snake, a scorpion, a lizard. The lizard, they knew, was more valuable than other
reptiles, for its blood could be painted on the palms to acquire exceptional immunity against the
teacher’s stick.
When the descending sun approached the horizon, the children searched for their wild dessert:
furgo’. They ate it with relish and before the sun sank behind the hills, they would have already
gathered grasses from the earth for their dinner: dandelion, purslane and rocca. A mother’s request
is never ignored.
At the water tank, and before scattering home, the four children looked at her, waved goodbye with
their small hands and as darkness fell they vanished.
Reassured, she closed her window and faded away into a deep sleep.
5. The Day It Rained Tiles
At the building’s entrance I was still sitting, totally naked, waiting for the bus when the sky became
overcast with clouds I’d never seen before: gray-white and so close to the ground that their fine
particles were visible to the naked eye and made you sneeze. Their thunder was a constant metallic
screech.
Moments passed and then the first drop fell: a tile shattered next to me on the ground. “But the roof
is not tiled,” I said to myself as a second tile fell, followed by a third, and a fourth, then a heavy
shower of tiles, stones, windows and pieces of furniture.
I ran to take cover from the downpour of tiles. I crossed the street to our neighbors’ house and
jumped on their porch, looking back at the opposite side. Thick grey fog rose up from the ground,
covering everything.
When the grey cloud dispersed, I saw a yellow monster with metallic teeth and round feet of black
rubber sitting over the building, or what used to be the building.
With the glass eye at the center of his small head, he winked at me roaring with a voice that
produced a tail of smoke. Then the sky became overcast with clouds that I’d seen for the first time in
my life only moments ago, and the metallic thunder clapped.
6. Downtown
Welcome to Abdali.
Welcome to large holes in the ground, and thin metallic giraffes rotating about their axes carrying
boards of concrete and piles of brick and iron.
Welcome to what will become the ‘New Downtown’ of Amman. As it happens, Amman never had an
old downtown; Amman had a ‘wasat-il-balad’. But in the age of canned things and canned beings,
Amman will have a ‘Downtown’, and maybe even a ‘Centre Ville’ like Beirut. The umbilical cord with
Beirut is tied from both ends. Beirut’s Solidere is the same as Amman’s. The silky glove that
demolished and develops is the same. The profits-by-the-billions pour in the same pocket. Only the
commissions go to different pockets, as do the people.
Welcome to Abdali.
At the edges of historic Jabal Lweibdeh, bulldozers started their work. The project is expanding even
before the property has been bought from the people. Everything is pre-determined. The destiny of
the people is relegated to an authority that cannot be resisted.
In a bygone era, Amman’s mischief-making boys pushed large stones and rocks over Jabal Lweibdeh
and into the depth of Wadi Saqra in search of snakes, scorpions and lizards underneath. Their happy
screams rang out when they found a new friend under the stones and chased it with their small feet.
Today, it is the stones and blocks of concrete that roll people over Jabal Lweibdeh and send their
memories, history and photographs crashing to the bottom. Once the old buildings are overturned,
what’s underneath is smashed by a huge foot leaving a mark dozens of meters deep.
Welcome to the new Downtown of Amman.
Behind the giant colorful billboards that fence the area with illusions of the future, there is nothing
but dust, cranes, holes and workers shipped in from faraway countries, their sweat rung out of them
without consequence.
Under a burning sun that slaps the flat ground stripped of its trees, people, and memories, a
beautiful girl- scorched by the yellow rays- is running terrified in no specific direction as if someone is
chasing her. She suddenly stops to say: “This is where the building used to be” then runs again and
once more stops: “No, this is where the building used to be.” She runs, and runs, and runs. This is
where the building used to be, no it was here, no here.
After a short while, there are actually people chasing her: the security group commissioned to guard
the elite investment.
When they catch her and ask what is she looking for and what she wants, she replies, gasping for
breath: “the stop of the bus that never comes.”
——————————————————————————————–
Yann Tiersen: A musician and composer from the district of Brittany in France. Le Phare (The Lighthouse) is one of his most
astonishing works.
Mureed al-Barghoti: One of the most important Palestinian poets. He was born in Deir Ghassaneh near Ramallah in 1944.
His book of poetry Midnight and his memoirs I Saw Ramallah have been translated into English.
Zuheir abu-Sahyeb: Despite his few published books, he is considered one of the prominent poets to emerge in Jordan
during the 1980s. He lives in Amman.
The four kids in 1946 are A.H. Shuqair, A.F. Bustani, Muhammad Khamis and his brother Shafiq Khamis.
Amman, the capital of Jordan, was located originally on seven hills, three of which are called Jabal Lweibdeh, Jabal el-Qal’a
and Jabal Amman. In Arabic, jabal means mountain or hill, and wadi means valley. The valley between Amman and
Lweibdeh hills is called Wadi Saqra.
Wasat-il-balad: The Arabic word for downtown.
Tash’s orchard: An area planted with fruit trees located on Jabal Lweibdeh, and owned by Muhammed Tash. It vanished
under residential blocks.
Gird o shara: A now extinct game played by boys in old Amman. The literal translation is ‘monkey and banners’. Two teams
play this game, each put a small flat rock on its edge (the monkey), and behind it stand three larger flat rocks (the banners).
Each team tries to drop down the opponent team’s monkey and then its banners by throwing stones at them.
Furgo’: An edible wild plant. The edible part is a piece the size and taste of chestnut and is buried underground like a
potato. It is known by its distinct white flower.
Abdali: The name of the project of Amman’s ‘New Downtown’.
Solidere: The company that ‘developed’ Beirut’s downtown area. Downtown Beirut is now known as ‘Downtown’ or
‘Centre Ville’ in English and French. But it is never referred to using the Arabic name. Solidere was largely owned by the
Hariri family, who also owned the company that is ‘developing’ the Abdali area in Amman. In Arabic, Hariri means ‘silky’.
7. The Album of Forgotten Photographs
An Indian construction worker found these photographs in a torn album found under the wreck of the building. It was
deposited at the Jordanian Archaeological Museum in Jabal el-Qal’a. The text underneath each one is copied from what was
written in blue ink on the back of the relevant picture.

Muhammed Khamis (first row, first from the right), Shafiq Khamis (first row, second from the right), A.F. Bustani (first row,
second from the left), and A.H. Shuqair (first row, third from the left), with their teacher Akram al-Khatib (middle) in front of
the Islamic School of Science.

Picture of the four friends and other members of the boy scouts of the Islamic School of Science. The school building
appears in the back.
The honorable visitor Sheikh al-Tayyeb al-Okabi al-Jaza’iri from Algeria (middle of the picture). To his right is Sheikh Nadim
el-Mallah. The founder and principal of the Islamic School of Science Tayseer Zebyan appears on the top right side of the
picture.

A.H. Shuqair (right) and A.F. Bustani (left) and other friends
A.F. Bustani in front of Jabal Lweibdeh’s water tank
Voices Within

I am just a lonely ruin of a place.

The rooms inside me are empty, unfurnished – and my only window is darkened, blocking out the
light. There is a metal screen on it that electrocutes the birds and assures me continuous silence.
In the parlour (that is what I imagine this room might be) lies an old double bass. If you put your ear
up against the wood, you will hear the sound of reverberating laughs stuffed inside. But right now it
is depressed, like the steps that I drag along the sidewalks when I go out. Its pegs are missingand its
strings broken, no blood runs through the veins of its music.
Some note sheets strewn about the place, and many pieces of small glass that look like mosaic tiles.
Could it be glass from a mirror that once hung on the wall? I do not know. No one knows. The double
bass player was the last person to drift in – like perfume – and like perfume, he vaporised.
No one has been in those rooms, even once, since the music stopped playing. I started passing that
house of ghosts quickly, head down, whistling to ward off the noises I might imagine coming from
inside.
Many cockroaches. Many, many dead cockroaches. A carpet of dead cockroaches covering the floors.
It is clear that a cockroach massacre happened here. All of them are light in colour and medium
sized. They are enveloped in a kind of beauty, lying on their backs, unmoving. They remind me of
myself, and of my rooms – repeated rows of kindred rooms, lying on their backs. Who would want to
wade into all that death?
Some paintings must have been hanging here. Not anymore, but their outline on the wall has created
new paintings that fit the state I am in. Every one of them, a frame of dust and dirt bordering a space
that used to be white and is now closer to grey, with a nail jutting out from the top.
If you are a good listener, the nail will tell you how many mummified memories had hung on it. The
nail will tell you how hanging memories always look like a mountain climber who stumbled and is
now clinging on to the ledge of a rocky cliff.
If you are observant, you will see that all the nails are there in their places but the mountain climbers
(unfortunately for them) have fallen. Maybe that is what explains the moving glass mosaic on the
floor. Maybe it is pieces of me. Aren’t we our memories, as they say? Don’t we break into thousands
of pieces after every fall?
I sometimes hear a distant howling coming from my far reaches. Have I become a pile of stones
inhabited by solitary creatures of the night? And those wild grasses that have sprung up everywhere
and grown long… the trees will tell you how many children played beneath them once. The
pomegranate tree will tell you how many stones it has been hit with so its high-hanging fruit would
fall. Now, rotting pomegranates fall by themselves and no one picks them up.
I pass this house of ghosts quickly, without looking. I pass it on my route that takes me to this same
house, every time. Every day, I change the route and every day my hurried steps lead me here.
I am just a lonely ruin of a place, that all roads lead to. I am the heart of a labyrinth whose twisting
paths head in one direction, towards me. I will never knock on its door, but will keep passing by it
hurriedly, running away from what I imagine to be voices within.

Translated from the Arabic by Thoraya El-Rayyes

The City Is In My Chest by Hisham Bustani

January 24, 2014

Translated from the Arabic by Thoraya El-Rayyes

Algiers
It’s no wonder the city looks exhausted. It is besieged by history, and history besieges you within it
like a foot stamping down on your lungs, everywhere and from every direction. As if it is heavy
water—you try to lift your head above the surface but cannot, for hovering above you is ‘Abd al-
Qādir al-Jazā’irī, raising his curved sword in the square that carries his name; and at the corner of the
Milk Bar Café, Zahra Ẓaryf-Biyṭāṭ planted a bomb, like a rose dedicated to a future love. The main
shopping street is called Diydowsh Murād and at the corner of the National Museum of
Contemporary Art is a framed stone plaque: The Martyr Muhammad Al’araby Ben Mahidy. And—of
course—the street is named after him. The Governmental Palace is fenced with pictures of the Group
of Twenty Two, and towering over the space is the Martyrs’ Memorial—a giant torrent, defying
gravity so that water from the earth can inseminate the water of the sky; a torrent of white blood
that rises from the Museum of the Revolution to touch the clouds. A foot stamping down on your
lungs, everywhere and from every direction.
It’s no wonder that the city has exhausted me as I chased its multiplying phantoms, just as it exhausts
me when I summon memories of Amman, empty of phantoms. My city is one of those cities that
hates itself, does not want to have a memory. My city erases its history as it happens, with a rag
soaked in delusions of progress. Forging from an annihilated void to a void that annihilates. And so, it
stays suspended in the air or falling in a bottomless abyss, weightless and without mass. And nothing
weighs down on your lungs but the heavy traffic and the vileness of human beings.
Sidi Faraj
I sit on the beach hoping to unwind, only to meet the gaze of the French warships on the horizon and
thousands of soldiers stumbling between bullets and sword thrusts as they begin their conquest of
the country. Here too? The organizers of the National Theatre Festival prefer to host their guests
away from the heaviness of the city, but they don’t know that those who peer closely at the edges of
the resort will be pushed down further by the intensity of history.
There is a colonial port, built next to the tomb of the saint who gave his name to this area. I asked
around about him but didn’t get a clear answer. Who was that sleeping behind a closed blue door,
under a blanket of trees? When did he live? When did he die? Why was he buried here, next to the
sea? I imagine him walking on water between the ships in a dusty old gown, carrying a stick, at the
crucial moments between the death of light and the resurrection of darkness. When his gleaming
eyes reveal him, he returns quickly to his stone bed, smiling. This is where he received the French
and where he bid them farewell, without even flinching. He knew and so sleeps undisturbed until this
day.
‘Ezz Aldiyn Mujuwby Square
The thespian who was baptized in blood imposes his presence on the French Opera House that
Algerians have converted into their National Theatre. To one side Tontonville sits upright like a
petulant cat, a café where intellectuals and students mix with people passing in the street. There is
great wisdom in having the theatre in the middle of the city, the middle of the old city center, the
middle of the crowds, and at the point where colonial Algiers meets Ottoman Algiers. That meeting /
insemination / anger / merging / separation / acceptance / refusal / interaction / struggle /
colonisation / liberation / independence / yesterday / today / and tomorrow. This is the true
laboratory of culture. This is how it should be. Sudden, and in the middle of the city.
Out of the corner of my eye I catch a glimpse of him in the corner of the square. The bare chested
man with bare feet. He is the logical conclusion of a theatre that imposes its space on passersby,
expanding through their presence. The beautiful vagrant. He was there every day, and as soon as the
musicians light up the place with their long horns and rousing chants, the dancer hidden within him
emerges without reservation. Without an introduction. Without clothes worthy of the occasion.
Without pretention. He is the leading man in the Theatre of the Square, and the musicians are
background actors. I will not forget that ecstasy. That backward tilt in the spine, forward tilt in the
abdomen. Those graceful, erratic movements of the legs and arms as they redraw the lines of the
thin body. Today, my friend, you are the leading man. We are your audience, your desolate
backdrop, and here I am writing you down so that you outlive me. Dance. Dance.
On the way to the Riyadh Hotel
Atop a motorcycle, a policeman and flashing light ride ahead of us. Algeria is one of those rare
countries (maybe the only one) that treats visiting writers and artists like distinguished guests—real
VIPs with official motorcades and security escorts who clear the road and pass through police
checkpoints without stopping. In your own country, they make a point of ignoring you and here you
are treated like a head of state. The bus drives along and fills up with empty chatter and people’s
attempts to hook up. The window is open; air laden with seaside humidity enters the bus, colliding
with my face on the way in. I try to withdraw from the inane clamour around me, two sentences
flash in my head: “The air is dense. It slaps me time after time, leaving traces of its sticky fingers on
my face.” I know these flashes well, it is a new story taking shape. It came to me here, at 10:30pm on
a bus heading to the hotel in the company of chatty, horny artists. I ask for a pen. No one has a pen,
not even the driver. The sentences are breeding in my head and I repeat them over and over as if
memorizing a sacred chant until we arrive. I run to the restaurant to borrow the waiter’s pen and
receipt paper, and write.
The story born on a bus
The air is dense. It slaps me time after time, leaving traces of its sticky fingers on my face. This city is
exhausted, this is its exhalation. When the surgeon split my chest open, he found buildings whose
color has washed away and paint has cracked. In one of the windows, a woman was telling her
neighbor: “My husband isn’t up to it anymore” as she turned a demitasse of Turkish coffee upside
down to read her tragedy. In another window sat a potbellied man in his underwear burning
cigarettes. He looked like my mother’s husband, who died forgotten with a leg eaten away by
diabetes. On the horizon is the sea, a stretch of blue covered with waiting ships. There is no one on
the dock by the port, the cranes are still and steam rises, giving more strength to the hand that slaps
me. And that bright light in my eyes—a dazzling sun, several suns circling and circling and then fixed
in the ceiling of the operation theatre. The surgeon takes off his bloodied gloves and slaps the nurse
on her ass before leaving. He leaves a few tubes in my mouth to be taken out later—then I wake up.
A black cat on a fence wails, then jumps into a dumpster half full of garbage. Children close its lid,
light a string of small firecrackers and open the lid just long enough for the big crackle to take place in
that metallic prison. I don’t know if a universe was forming at that moment in that dumpster, or
whether Schrodinger knew if the cat was dead or alive. The children have run away, and the observer
is in the operation theatre, and the city is in my chest, and I am waking little by little to the sound of
empty chatter.
They told me that they have replaced my heart, but I know there is something wrong. Sometimes my
new heart stops beating. I take it out and speak to it, but that does nothing to ease its depression, its
darkness. I take a bite out of it and chew, feeling the taste of exhaust fumes, crowds and traffic jams.
I spit, cursing the misery that doesn’t stop forming within me, renewing and cloning itself in different
forms. A swaying white ghost walks past a building window and then, a stabbing pain in my arm. I
open my eyes and curse, the nurse steps back—I cannot tell if she is beautiful or ugly.
So be it.
Now I am a fish. The water I swim in is transparent and clear, but—unlike the pond they pulled me
out of—it is surrounded by a solid wall in every direction. I swim over here and collide with it. I swim
over there and collide again. A transparent jail this time. When food arrives from above I surmise
there is no barrier there and jump, proving myself correct. But alas, my misery does not stop
renewing itself—there is no water where I have jumped. I fall onto an alien surface and start to
shiver, choking and suffocating until I become a lifeless corpse, eyes staring into a void.
It was I who carried the small, golden corpse and dug a hole for it under the giant loquat tree that
was so much bigger than both of us. I hear a murmuring above, and there appear the heads of men I
know well. “Hey, you up there!” I yell. But the sound stays in my mind. My tongue does not move
and my mouth does not open. Their faces have disappeared now, and in their place are handfuls of
dirt that keep falling and slapping my face time after time, like dense air.
I will retire to bed now.
At least somebody knows I am alive.
I.
A note on the text: In 2012, the author visited Algiers to participate in the National Theatre Festival.
This piece was commissioned by the festival for an anthology on Algeria by writers from around the
Arab world. This essay was also published in the author’s latest short story collection, Inevitable
Preludes to an Eventual Disintegration (Cairo: Dar al-Ain, 2014), and appears here in translation for
the first time.

Glossary
‘Abd al-Qādir al-Jazā’irī (1808 – 1883) led the struggle against the French colonial invasion of Algeria in the mid-19th
century. He was exiled to Damascus, where he died.
Zahra Ẓaryf-Biyṭāṭ was a freedom fighter in the National Liberation Front of Algeria. Her best known operation was the 1956
bombing of the Milk Bar café, which was frequented by French colonists. She was imprisoned in 1957 and released in 1962,
as part of a presidential amnesty to mark the independence of Algeria. In Arabic, her first name means “flower”.
Diydowsh Murād (1927 – 1955) was a member of the Group of Twenty Two, a group that played a decisive role in
fomenting the Algerian Revolution which resulted in the country’s independence from colonial rule. He was one of five
members of the first revolutionary committee created by the group and was known as “Le Petit” because of his short
stature. He was martyred in the Battle of Duwwār Al-Ṣawādeq.
Muhammad Al’araby Ben Mahidy (1923 – 1957) was a key figure in the armed struggle of the Algerian Revolution that led
to the country’s independence. He was tortured to death by the French, and is the author of a famous epigram from the
Algerian Revolution: “Throw the revolution into the street, and the people will embrace it.”
Sidi Faraj is the area from where the French launched their colonial invasion of Algeria. It is named after a local saint who
was buried there.
‘Ezz Aldiyn Mujuwby (1947 – 1995) was an actor and stage director, as well as the Director of Algeria’s National Theatre. He
was assassinated by Islamic terrorists near the theatre’s back door.
Revisiting misconceptions about “chaos” in the Arab
region

The first misconception is the existence of a “true”, supra-historic Islam. A raging fight is currently
taking place of who truly represents “Islam”. Is it ISIS, al-Qaida, the Muslim Brotherhood, or the
versions promoted by different Arab regimes? Presidents Barack Obama and François Hollande have
also made their contributions on that aspect by declaring that extremists don’t represent “true”
Islam.
My argument is that there is no such thing as a supra-historical “reality” of Islam that is “pure” and
“virtuous” as opposed to an evil, violent misrepresentation; or the opposite. Islam, like all other
religious and ideological doctrines, is based on texts, and texts are always open to different
interpretations that might be explanatory, historic, symbolic, representational, deconstructionist,
critical, etc. All such interpretations are equal since they are based on subjective opinions serving
certain interests.
There are different readings to the set of different texts of Islam, each tailored to serve a political
structure or purpose, resulting in contradictory formats of what is thought to be a single entity.
Ruling elites have always had their versions of Islam, mainly based on incriminating dissent and
promoting the subordination of lay people to those in charge, resulting in a pacifist, politically-sterile
version of Islam; the opposition also had their versions, generally based on the non-representation of
the rulers to the “true essence” of Islam, where man is enslaved only to God but to no other,
resulting in a militant, politically-active version of Islam. Both versions are exclusivist, enforcing their
own version of Islam as the only “true” one: confiscating politics, and suppressing dissent. A claim on
a “true” Islam (whatever the version was) is only aimed at concentrating power, confiscating political
debate, and crippling opposition.

This leads us to the second

misconception: The apolitical
nature of extremist Islamic groups.
The Islamist extremist religious
groups plaguing the Arab region, are
not just “religious fanatics”, or
unrestrained psychopaths. In their
core, they are political constructs
representing a very violent reaction
to the status quo.
In his essay “ISIS is a revolution”,
Scott Atran compared ISIS to the
French and other known revolutions, and mentioned the use of terror as a political tool (the
guillotine vs. sword beheadings). He made clear that terrorism is a tool of political protest and
change.
What are the terrorists protesting and what do they want to change? The same thing the Arab
uprisings came out to accomplish, but to a different end: the removal of subordinate, corrupt,
fragmented, oppressive regimes (keep in mind that Arab regimes oppressed both secular and
religious opposition all the same).
There is one major difference however: The massive crowds of the Arab uprisings, who generally
hoped for political democracy, economic equality and public liberties had no political structures
capable of enforcing their demands and building their alternatives; throughout their long reign, the
Arab regimes had made an excellent career in destroying and coopting such structures (political
parties, trade unions, etc). The only institution that was left alone was religion, and on different
levels: a formal state-sponsored follow-the-ruler version of Islam; a socially-based advocacy-type of
organized Islam that was a good tool/ally to the regimes during the leftist/nationalist tide of the
1950s-1970s, well-institutionalized because of state tolerance (the Muslim Brotherhood); and a
modern, fundamentalist, networked, militant, armed Sunni Islam that was sponsored by the USA and
Saudi Arabia during the Cold War to fight a proxy war with the Soviets in Afghanistan (the
Mujahedeen), and a similar Shiite version sponsored regionally by Iran after the 1979 Islamic
Revolution.
It is worth noting that all those versions of Islam exist in a subtle continuation. Revisionist and
reformist Islam was politically and socially suppressed and is confined to elitist intellectual circles.
Thus it was only normal – having no competition from destroyed secular civil groups – that well-
organized, trained, financially able, socially rooted and politically supported Islamist groups (terrorist
and non-terrorist) would take over the scene alongside the regimes.

Enter third misconception: The silence

about the role of global and regional
powers, and the historic effects of
Colonialism. Interventionist policies that
have succeeded the colonialist era in the
Arab region made sure that the
subordinate, corrupt, oppressive regimes
are maintained and sustained. In his recent
book “Arab Development Denied”, Ali Kadri
argues correctly that the Arab regimes
benefited economically and politically from
de-developing the post-colonial Arab
“states”, crippling them and pushing them further into poverty. Those failed “states” that destroyed
the social fabric over decades of corrupt rule, and resulted, naturally, in failed social movements and
the rise of extremely violent Islamic opposition movements, were maintained by internal oppression,
but more importantly, by external sponsorship.
Another aspect is the role of interventionist policies in facilitating, sponsoring and supporting
terrorist groups. In addition of the clear example of the Mujahedeen (precursors to al-Qaida), the US
invasion of Iraq in 2003 is another: the country was left in sectarian chaos, where Iran and its
sectarian satellite groups had the upper hand, paving the way for al-Zarqawi’s version of al-Qaida to
gain foot and get support from rival regional powers and Sunni social formations, especially as their
power struggle (guised under a Shiite/Sunni conflict) expanded into Syria.
To try to understand and affect change in a reality means we have to look at that reality as it is,
rather than looking at it as a set of superficial misconceptions:
Different versions of Islam are different representations of political and power structures; this cannot
be resolved by proposing yet another imaginary, supra-historic “essence” of Islam.
Reality is found in politics: Instead of a state-security-based approach to deal with the current
situation in the Arab region, a human-security-based approach towards the problems of corrupt
regimes, de-development, poverty, unemployment, inequality, and the complete failure of the post-
colonial Arab “states” and regimes will be more productive. The first approach serves only the
continuation of the cause of the problem.
Also, we should focus on the destructive role of global powers and regional players via military,
political and economic interventionism that is initiating and fueling the “fire”, and the multiple
benefits they are extracting from the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people, the destruction of
entire societies, and generating terrorism as this proceeds.
Dissonances of the Arab Left

To talk of the secular democratic leftist project in

the Arab world is to talk of crisis – a crisis that is
manifest in two ways. First, there is the
fundamental question of whether such a project
even exists in a coherent and comprehensive
form, rather than as a mere collection of
statements and propositions that contradict one
another, and the foundations they allegedly rest
upon. The evidence for such incoherence is clear
in the way that political parties and the
individuals who claim to adhere to the project
present it with expediency, selectivity and dema-
goguery. In contradiction with the values they
claim to embrace, these ‘leftists’ often refrain
from engaging in the major struggles that
produce and form their alleged project
Second, there is a lack of penetration of the project’s propositions into the depths of the social
formations and classes that have the most to gain from achieving its goals. There is no social subject
that adopts the values of the project. Most who claim adherence to it are from the middle classes
and are attracted to its partial ‘openness’ and social liberty, which do not, for them, result from an
existential and epistemological crisis (class alienation), or from a consciousness of real economic and
social marginalization and repression (class consciousness). For this reason, leftist discourse takes on
no more than a social-liberal form, whilst the oppressed classes become attracted to social and
religious conservatism, and become its main audience.
The secular, democratic and leftist project encompasses a wide range of political currents and
proposals. This article will restrict itself to discussing the ‘leftist’ current, which includes a diverse
spectrum of communists, nationalists and progressives. The Arab uprisings have unveiled the grand
structural crises that plague the Arab Left and revealed its inconsistencies, ruptures and fear of the
movement of history; along with its dependency on Arab regimes and the military interventions of
the very international powers it claims to oppose. The reality of these popular uprisings and the fact
that no political parties, leftist or otherwise, have played any significant role in instigating them, or
shaping their later paths, provide us with a way to understand these crises.
Scarcity of theory
The Arab Left emerged in the context of anti-colonial struggles. Its discourse was formed in the era of
Third World national liberation movements in the wake of World War II and the ascendance of the
Soviet Union as a second world power on a par with the United States. Its discourse has hardly
evolved since that era, for many reasons. First, there is the incompletion to this day of national
liberation projects, arising from the objective impossibility of achieving their goals within the borders
set up by colonialists for the purpose of holding the territories they mark at bay: dependent, socially
distorted and devoid of emancipatory potential. Second, there is the lack of significant intellectuals –
with the exception of Mahdi Amel, Samir Amin and a few others – who are capable of delving into
the social and economic structures and formations in order to demarcate those segments of society
that have the most interest in progressive change. Third, there is the authoritarian and Stalinist
structures of most Arab leftist parties, which disable critical thinking and theoretical argumentation.
Party education, at best, has been limited to echoing the opinions of the political bureau and
chairman of the party, while indoctrinating party members to view their decisions in the same way
that the adherents of religious currents view the scriptural interpretations of their leaders.
Political discourse needs an intellectual ground; otherwise, in the long run, political practice becomes
chaotic and unproductive. We can see this clearly in the course of the Arab uprisings. In the absence
of intellectual grounds upon which peoples’ movements can unfold, and in the absence of
organizations capable of actualizing such grounds, popular uprisings soon reach a crisis. They become
unable to ‘bring down the system’ because no new or alternative system exists. A certain disdain for
‘theorization’ has seeped into the minds of the new generation of activists, in the wake of an era in
which political organizations were machines producing political theories designed to justify their
incompetence in changing reality. Many of the young activists are thus solely focused on ‘working on
the ground’, without ‘wasting time on theorizing’, forgetting that theory provides any political
movement with its rationale and prevents its subversion by opponents.
Division and fragmentation
Arab left organizations have probably suffered the most divisions and ruptures of any political
organizations in recent times. In 1964, the Syrian Communist party became two parties, one in
Lebanon and the other in Syria. The Jordanian Communist Party also divided along similarly national
lines: one Jordanian, the other Palestinian. The Arab Nationalist Movement (Harakat al-Qaomiyyeen
al-Arab) split into at least three Palestinian fronts. The Ba’ath nationalist party split into two
conflicting parties in Syria and Iraq. And as if that is not enough, the Syrian Ba’ath became aligned
with Iran, the Arabs’ ‘national enemy’ against Iraq, the Arab ‘national brother’ during the first Gulf
War. Then it fought militarily against Iraq, again under the command of the ‘American imperialist
enemy’ in the second Gulf War.
Left political practice has often been plagued with qutri (an Arabic political term meaning ‘territorial’
or based on the boundaries of the post-colonial states) ‘specificities’ that have contributed to
legitimizing colonial divisions as ‘natural’ divisions. Left political parties that were founded on the
idea of the struggle against colonialism came to recognize colonialism’s most direct outcome, namely
the qutri (territorial) state. Moreover, they came to accept positions contrary to their fundamental
principles under the guise of ‘political specificity’. For example, most Arab communist parties did not
object to the Iraqi Communist Party’s participation in the governing council set up by the US
occupation in Iraq in 2003. The party remains a partner in the ‘political process’ that was set up with
the sponsorship of the occupation, and continues to take a sectarian shape. 1 Such brazen complicity
with the occupation was considered by other communists as a necessary response imposed by the
‘specific circumstances’ of the Iraqi political scene.
Another blatant example of such hypocrisy is the Left’s position on Syria. Many leftists and
nationalists have not hesitated, in the name of Momana’ah (an Arabic political term that designates
certain regimes and organizations blacklisted by the US government as rejecting US hegemony in the
region), from supporting the Assad regime, a regime whose vices of corruption, political repression,
economic liberalization and recognition of Israel’s legitimacy are all too similar to those of the other
(subservient) Arab regimes.
The claim to qutri specificity thus opens the door to disavowing unified action and turns every local
reaction into a locally specific strategy. It thus hinders the construction of collective action that
transcends subjective interest. Unified action becomes merely an act of solidarity. There is a huge
difference between considering oneself, whether as an individual or as an organization, to be part of
an action, on the one hand, and considering oneself to be merely in solidarity with an action, on the
other; between being a participant in an action and being supportive of it.
Mistaken alignment with Arab nationalism
Numerous studies have investigated the impact of the European model of the nation-state, as an
embodiment of capitalist interests within a designated geographical space, on the emergence of the
Arab nationalist movement in the mid-nineteenth century. Arab nationalism did not arise in response
to a national bourgeois class trying to solidify its control over a certain geographical area which
constituted its national market. Notwithstanding Arab discontent with the Ottoman Empire and the
desire for independence from it, and notwithstanding determinants of Arab common language and
history, and ‘national sentiment’, Arab nationalism did not emerge out of any historical and material
necessity. Further, it has never produced a discourse that was uncontaminated by romanticism,
egotism and future ambitions about establishing ‘a unified and powerful Arab super-state’ that
would put the Arabs back in their deserved place on the political-economic map of the world –
presumably, as the Arab Umayyad empire once did.
It is dreams of power and empire, then, not of justice and equality among human beings, and not of
removing coercion and persecution from the world, that have animated and motivated these
nationalists. To this day, Arab nationalists cannot answer the basic questions of who is an Arab, and
how he or she is to be distinguished from other human beings; or what the position should be
regarding non-Arab populations that inhabit the region and form an equally authentic part of it. Any
consistent answers to these questions would transport us to the human sphere, which would
invalidate Arab nationalism, while any answers that adopt racialist or culturalist conceptions of Arab
nationalism – both of which are exclusivist and lead to domination and sometimes even fascism –
would morally discredit it.
The truth is that nationalist discourse is often underlain by racist disdain for non-Arabs. Nationalism
is an appeal to asserting the nation’s specific identity and character, which makes it distinct from
others. It is an idea and a movement of struggle towards establishing a state for Arabs. 2 It is easy to
detect racist contempt whenever non-Arabs are the object of nationalist discourse. Iranians are
demonized as Persians or Safavids, while Turks are Turanians or Seljuks. Kurds are portrayed as being
entirely agents of Israel. Many studies have been dedicated to proving the Arab origins of the
Amazigh or Berber people, as if that were a prerequisite for them to qualify as a respectable and
honourable people, in attempts to convince them to give up their culture in favour of Arab
nationalist ideals. Nationalist discourse antagonizes Jews and Judaism, rather than Zionism and
Zionists. It perceives the struggle in Palestine as being against Judaism as a religion, rather than
against Zionism as a settler-colonial movement. 3
While leftists around the world stage protests and activities in support of Arab causes (in Iraq,
Palestine and the Arab Spring uprisings), it is rare to see Arab demonstrations in solidarity with non-
Arab causes in other parts of the world. It is also rare for the Arab Left to adopt and defend the issues
of migrant labour. Indeed, it often regards non-Arab migrant labour as a demographic, cultural and
security threat to the region. In that, the Arab Left seems to resemble the European Far Right in its
attitude towards immigrants. Nationalist discourse is isolationist in its essence. Although Esmat Saif-
el-Dawlah starts his definition of Arab nationalism by denying that it means ‘isolation from the
causes that touch the whole of humanity, or any group within it’, he reasserts this isolationism later
on by limiting partnership in other causes to ‘the extent they affect national existence and its
movement’. Human considerations are always circumscribed by the measure of national interest,
and not vice versa. Saif-el-Dawlah also asserts:
national existence is just a specific existence.Therefore it is an addition to, and not a subtraction
from, the existence of other human groups. Thus, nationalism becomes a relationship of acceptance
and respect for the specific existence of each human society.
On this definition, ‘humanity’ seems no more than a collection of ‘specific existence’ enclosures. This
is an isolationist conception not dissimilar to concepts of sect or tribe. In fact, we could substitute the
word ‘nationalism’ in the above quotation with ‘sectarianism’ or ‘tribalism’, without causing the
definition to break down. Either can represent a specific mode of human existence formed around
religion and close kinship, or, in modern cases, race and ethnic culture, or even some other
contingent collectivization.
Furthermore, the nationalist argument for ‘the nation’ – which has not yet been fully formed within
the nation-state – does not entail a class dimension, or any distinction between the oppressor and
the oppressed. Indeed it covers up such dimensions of internal rupture and disparity. Nationalism
also faces several inconsistencies and ideological ruptures, since it first borrowed a socialist
economics and secularism, but then, in its more recent versions, turned to liberalism and the free
market combined with faith campaigns, or Islamist-nationalist conferences in other versions. For all
these reasons, nationalist discourse has generated an ethnic chauvinism against Persians, Kurds,
Berbers and Turks, a qutri (territorial) chauvinism against other Arabs, and sectarian and religious
chauvinisms, facilitating the employment of these divisions by the local regimes or world powers. In
Jordan, for instance, some leftist nationalists have come to the defence of the qutri state by abetting
and deepening the fabricated division between East Bank Jordanians and Jordanians of Palestinian
descent. 5 On the larger Arab scale, many leftist nationalists support Hizbullah’s sectarian
intervention in Syria and go into self-denial when it comes to the Shiite ideology that the party
adopts, and its adherence to the wilayat al-faqih (Governance of the Shiite Islamic Jurist) regime in
Iran.
Thus, the Left has failed, under the influence of nationalist proposals, to establish a truly emanci-
patory project that aims at justice for all the region’s peoples, including the so-called ‘ethnic
minorities’, like the Kurds and the Berbers. These minorities are an authentic component of the
region’s populations and their causes should be a fundamental part of any project for liberation.
They should not be treated as foreigners (confined within the concept of their own specific circle of
existence), nor have to adopt an Arab identity in order to gain legitimacy (by being assimilated into
the Arabs’ specific circle of existence).
Rights to social liberties
The position of the Left should be the fierce defence of social liberties and freedom of belief and
expression. However, for many reasons (including the Left’s alliance with Islamists prior to the Syrian
uprising), the Arab Left seems to be shy about its social propositions, when or if it actually believes in
them.
(Here, I would exempt the Left in Tunisia, Morocco and Algeria.) It seems shy about defending
freedom of expression and belief, particularly when it comes to atheism or criticism of the Abrahamic
religions. Freedom seems here to take on only a narrowly political meaning. The mainstream Left
avoids talking about the reproduction of power relations within the family, and it offers no explicit
and detailed historical critique of religion. There is no left talk of the role of religious belief systems in
banishing critical thinking, or maintaining the patriarchal structures of society.
Above all, the Arab Left is plagued with homophobic prejudice. It does not recognize homosexuals’
rights to their sexual preferences. It sometimes even regards homosexuality as the outcome of an
imperialist/Jewish conspiracy, 6 despite the support of many queer organizations for Arab causes in
Palestine and Iraq (before and after the occupation), as well as their active participation in and
advocacy for these causes.
Alignment with the Arab regimes and their qutri states
Realizing the impossibility of any emancipatory project that operates within the boundaries of the
qutri territorial state, I have attempted with many Arab comrades to build a new and open form of
anti-imperialist coalition, one that, we hoped, would transcend the borders of nation-states. The title
we gathered under was ‘Towards an Arab Peoples’ Alliance for Resistance’. 7 We wrote a basic
document formulating the political basis for this project, which was signed by dozens of leftist and
nationalist individuals and groups, across the Arab world. However, our work on the project lasted
only from 2005 to 2008. After four years, all that remained was the electronic mailing list bearing its
name.
The second paragraph of the founding document stated:
the ruling classes and the prevailing regimes in the Arab states are dependent on imperialism and
subservient to its interests. Therefore, they can never be on the side advocating for people’s
interests. The ‘reform’ promulgated by these regimes is, in fact, nothing but a lie. Struggle against
them is an essential part of struggle against imperialism.
This has been the leftist (and Arab nationalist) ‘strategic understanding’ of the reality of the Arab
regimes since the mid-twentieth century. However, one would be astonished at the distortion of this
38 strategic understanding by some of the signatories of the document. For some, the Syrian regime
has now become a ‘resistant’ entity and not only a Momana’ah one. And the Arab uprisings (except
for the Bahraini uprising, which is associated with the axis of Momana’ah for them) have all become
– retrospectively, after the start of the Syrian uprising – an American–Israeli–Saudi–Qatari
conspiracy. Whole populations, whose revolts these leftists have been eagerly awaiting, suddenly
became agents controlled and manipulated by outsiders!
Thus, many ‘left nationalists’ turned into fierce apologists not only for the Syrian regime, but also for
the Arab qutri state itself, the one which they used regularly to denounce as a product of the colonial
era. For them, the fall of the Syrian regime and of the qutri state in general has come to mean
‘chaos’. As if the Arab political system is no longer itself a chaos repressed by coercion. And, by the
same logic, the Arab regimes acquired ‘states’, although the modern Arab state has little in common
with the modern state. 8 These regimes have only the will of the ruler, with no law, no governing
institutions and no justice – to the extent that in some of the Arab republics the sons of the president
inherit their father’s rule.
In Egypt, one of the most vibrant and powerful of the Arab uprisings, where people have succeeded
in decapitating three regimes in a short period of time, by protesting in massive numbers against
Mubarak, the Military Council and the Muslim Brotherhood (MB) governments, many leftists inside
and outside the country have subsequently rushed to support the military coup against the MB
regime on 3 July 2013, which represents a direct return of the old regime that reigned before the
uprising of 25 January 2011. 9 Instead of working to strengthen the nascent protest movement and
contribute to building its organizational frameworks and strategic platforms, the Egyptian Left has
turned to the most absurd and propagandistic apologetics to justify the military’s brutal crackdowns.
Although there are a few leftist groups, such as the Revolutionary Socialists, who oppose the Muslim
Brotherhood and the military alike, their position remains an exceptional one and can be regarded as
minoritarian on the spectrum of the Egyptian Left.
Xenophobic incitements
It is precisely because the Arab leftist project lacks a clear intellectual foundation that anyone who
wishes to call him- or herself a leftist can do so, even as his or her proposals contradict the
fundamental principles of the Left. In this context, we can understand why some leftists are
demanding the isolation of Syrian refugees in Jordan. Some of them even demanded the banning of
refugees from political activity, and called on the Jordanian regime to intervene in implementing this
by force. 10 We have also seen some leftists mythologizing (qutri) national identities and national
belonging, by effacing the histories of colonization that produced such identities and by regarding
any mode of belonging other than to one’s ‘homeland’ as traitorous.
In Egypt, the fervent nationalism accompanying the 3 July military coup has unleashed waves of
xenophobic hatred and even fascistic attitudes. Many leftist and nationalist figures have participated
in escalating such intolerance by incitements against non-Egyptians in Egypt, particularly Palestinians
and Syrians. 11 They have also taken part in producing an isolationist and chauvinistic discourse that
denies the right to speak about Egypt to non-Egyptians, and denies the status of being Egyptian to
anyone who opposes military rule. Such nationalism is certainly double-edged, as it victimizes the
Egyptian and the non-Egyptian alike, by denying the former the right to differ at the same time that it
relegates the latter to an inferior order. One amusing example of this was a television host’s demand
that a well-known Egyptian football player, Abu-Trikah, be expelled from the national team on the
grounds that his position against the military amounted to renouncing his Egyptianness. ‘Let him play
for Hamas or Turkey’, the show’s host said, implying: let him play with those inferior, external others
who support the Muslim Brotherhood. 12
In Jordan, the situation is not much better, as an isolationist Jordanian nationalism is securing a
foothold in opposition circles and becoming increasingly identified with the ‘progressive Left’. Many
of these Jordanian nationalist politicians and intellectuals maintain close ties to the government’s
intelligence services and have even admitted working with them. 13 One, Mowaffaq Mahadin, has
written in the most exalted terms about military elites in the Arab world, representing them as the
only ‘civilized’ institution capable of holding together a turbulent and potentially explosive mass of
divided and ignorant peoples. 14 In another article, he emphasizes the centrality of state security to
order and places it ‘above any other regard’. Such sloganeering has always been part of the
propaganda of the Arab regimes justifying the persecution and oppression of dissenters. 15
No significant role
Leftist groups have not played any significant role in the Arab uprisings. Instead, they have
participated in ‘legitimate’ political work, supporting the deceptive claim that change is possible
‘from within’. Their complacent participation has contributed to the aura of democratic legitimacy
which surrounds and covers up the oppressive and divisive practices of authoritarian regimes.
The Arab uprisings arose spontaneously and escalated exponentially. They were initiated by a
segment of society that had been almost wholly politically neglected: middle-class youth who were
often regarded as hopeless. As a result, the Arab ‘Left’ suddenly faced its impotence and realized its
intellectual, political and strategic bankruptcy. It crashed violently into the realization of its own
organizational incompetence and lack of any popular extension. It found that it was completely
unable to participate in the making of the new reality. What to do then? It resorted to accusing the
Arab uprisings of ‘subservience’ and made them into an element of a universal conspiracy. It ended
up struggling for the preservation of the official Arab system and its qutri state. The Arab armies,
which had previously been regarded as protectors of Israel’s borders and maintainers of the Arab
regimes, became, with a breathtaking stroke of political transmutation, the single most important
guarantor of sovereignty and independence. The Sykes–Picot states and their subservient
governments had now to be defended against ‘chaos and disorder’. 16 Denial of history reached a
remarkable level, with the portrayal of the Syrian regime in almost utopian terms. All of its massacres
and crimes, such as Tal-Za’atar, its military participation with the USA against Iraq in Hafr El Batin, its
alignment with Israel’s allies in the Lebanese civil war, its joining in the Madrid conference for ‘peace’
with Israel, were simply forgotten. Instead, the regime is depicted as working day and night to
liberate the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights.
Opposed to this strand of the Arab Left is another that has become allied with the United States and
the imperialist powers. This started in the context of the US advocacy for ‘democratic transition’ in
the Arab world before the uprisings. The Iraqi Communist Party, which participated in the governing
council established by the US occupation, set the precedent for this sort of complacent alliance with
US imperialism. Many have followed in its footsteps, fully exposing their unprincipled hypocrisy by
working with the very Arabian Gulf monarchies that they had always diagnosed as reactionary and
subservient, or by working with religious and Salafist groups opposed to the Left, both ideologically
and politically. These alliances with religious groups find their roots in previous alliances between
some on the Left and more ‘moderate’ religious groups like the Muslim Brotherhood.
Is there a Left in the Arab world?
To be on the Left is to focus one’s awareness on class division, and to predicate one’s movement on a
diagnostics of the oppressor–oppressed and exploiter–exploited oppositions, siding with the latter
against the former. To be a leftist is thus to work diligently, first, on specifying and elaborating the
mechanisms of oppression and control, and then on dismantling them to enable the exploited
majority to liberate itself from the hegemony of the minority that monopolizes politics and the
economy. Being a leftist also involves siding with struggles for sexual and gender liberation, against
patriarchal structures. It means supporting and working for the liberation of both women and men
from gender stereotyping and the gendered distribution of rights, such that sexual practice becomes
a matter of personal choice. The Left understands that those who do not conform to the socially
accepted norms of gender and sexuality are often subject to forms of social coercion and oppression,
which oblige the Left to come to their defence.
A leftist position means an unwavering opposition to colonialism and settler-colonialism, an
opposition that does not recognize the legitimacy of colonizers and their fabricated entities, and that
does not compromise with the mechanisms of colonial domination and their consequences.
The Left is internationalist. It recognizes that its struggle is directed against capital as a globalizing
force, and requires an alternative that is also global, transcending national and ethnic boundaries.
Further, a true Left never belittles the migrants and the jobless, or those who flee the torments of
their home countries searching for work and better lives. Instead, it must stand with and embrace
them as the material that constitutes its core project.
In conclusion, one can state that, with very few exceptions, the mainstream Arab ‘Left’ is not a Left at
all. It is an intellectual void incapable of producing a political discourse consistent with its premisses
or with the frame of reference that it claims to belong to. What exists in reality are ‘leftist’
organizations and ‘leftist’ individuals who are similar in their political composition to the Arab
regimes. They avoid thinking, philosophy and reading. They distance themselves from the social
platforms that constitute their project. They collaborate with those they oppose – the Arab regimes
and the qutri/territorial state on one side, and the imperial and reactionary forces on the other – and
legitimize them. Failure is the inevitable outcome for a project whose foundations rest on such
incoherence. This is no Left. It is rather a compilation of psychological complexes and dissonances.
The Left has not yet been born in the Arab world, and therein hope remains.
Translated from Arabic by Samir Taha
“Up to now, the regime has been successful in
absorbing the movement and fragmenting it”

There is no doubt that the November 2012 events in Jordan dubbed Habbet Tishreen by many
activists in recollection of its 1989 counterpart, the April Uprising, or Habbet Neesan, are
unprecedented. Although both were triggered by an increase in the prices of oil derivatives, the 2012
version seems to have been much more radicalized in its approach to the ruling regime, especially
the Hashemite monarchs/family and the king himself.
Before 2012, it was the virtue of the ultra-brave to publicly criticize the king and the royal family:
they usually spoke with evident hints and innuendo, but without going the full route to directly
uttering the name of the king. Criticizing the king and the royal family was simply not tolerated under
Jordanian law, and it is still punishable by one to three years in prison. The law incriminating this sort
of criticism has perhaps the world’s most absurd name for any legislation: literally, the ‘Law on
elongating one’s tongue about the monarch’!
I was not one of the brave ones, but while others directed their criticism to ‘the government’, I have
always referred to “the political authority” in my articles, making a point that governments do not
rule in Jordan, they are mere executives, and the decision-making lies somewhere else, in spaces on
a higher level: The Royal Court and the General Intelligence Agency (Mukhabarat).
All the Power to the King
Constitutionally, the king in Jordan holds absolute powers, and at the same time, he remains
unaccountable. The country is often falsely referred to as a “constitutional monarchy.” The most
recent of these references came in King Abdullah II’s interview with Jon Stewart on The Daily Show,
September 25, 2012. A kingdom with a constitution that gives absolute powers to the monarch
cannot be called a constitutional monarchy; it is rather a medieval rule-by-divine-right state. Just
check the list below and you’ll get a feel of what I am referring to:
1 - The King appoints the prime minister and ministers and dismisses them (article 35 of the
Constitution).
2 - The king ratifies the laws and promulgates them (article 31 of the Constitution).
3 -The king issues the orders for holding parliamentary elections (Article 34-1 of the Constitution).
4 - The king has the power to dissolve the parliament (article 34-3 of the Constitution).
5 - The king appoints and dismisses the upper house of parliament (articles 34-4 and 36 of the
Constitution).
6 - The king is the supreme commander of the armed forces and all the security apparatus (article 32
of the Constitution).
7 - The king appoints the judges of the constitutional court (article 58-1 of the Constitution).
8 - Judges of the civil and sharia courts are appointed and dismissed by a royal decree (article 98-1 of
the Constitution).
And complementing all those powers:
9 - The king is immune from any liability and responsibility (Article 30 of the Constitution).
10- The criticism of the king is criminalized (Article 195 of the Penal Code).
Abdullah II: Weak performance and detachment from old guards
The late King Hussein was all-powerful, and he was able to concentrate all political might into his
hands and manipulate the internal Jordanian scene. He was untouchable, and so were all the king’s
men.
King Abdullah II, a last-minute stopgap choice called upon to replace the then regent to the throne
Prince Hassan (Hussein’s brother), is weak. He was not trained to be king, nor does he have the
innate substance of politicians. He spent his princely days at the wheel of speeding cars (he was a
champion of the Jordan Rally in the 1980s and 90s) and puffing-up of the special operations
battalions in the Jordanian armed forces. He introduced his own men into the game. The new king’s
men were no different than the old except in one thing: both were corrupt, both were neoliberal (let
us but recall that World Bank and IMF reforms started in the late 1980s in Jordan, and that was the
cause of the 1989 April Uprising). Yet significantly, the Western-educated business-efficiency-
oriented new guards lacked the support of social structures: the tribes. They had no social depth.
The old guard (while in power) maintained huge social connections with their tribes, many of which
were designated leaders of their tribes. And for that reason, a small part of the corruption benefits
funneled down to the social infrastructure in different forms (jobs, university scholarships, direct aid,
etc). This was very important for the stability of a clientele state like Jordan.
Whereas the notorious 1993 one-man-one-vote elections law (still in effect today) tremendously
strengthened the tribes and turned them from social units into political ones, the continuous
detribalization at the top of the regime’s bureaucracy was doubtless placing the regime on a collision
course with the tribes.
By detribalization here, I do not mean ‘Palestinization’. Many of the new guards are of eastern
Jordanian descent, but they lack tribal connections and influence. They are more Westernized (thus
dubbed ‘the digitals’), and did nothing more than to complete the privatization of the public sector
that had already started under King Hussein and the old guard; but the corruption they maintained
did not seep to the bottom.
Global economic crash and the Arab Spring
Things started to get uglier with the global economic crash. There was no money handed out for free
anymore. Now the post-crash motto was ‘everyone for himself’ (after all, even the EU is considering
kicking out Greece!). There was no extra money to finance corruption. Suddenly, all the real-estate
projects sponsored by the Gulf regimes came to an abrupt halt. Amman became cityscape studded
with unfinished building projects, jobs were lost, and having everything privatized, the government
went broke with a debt of over US$22 billion that was mainly used to finance corruption. The wave
of increasing taxes and de-subsidization of basic commodities (including petrol derivatives)
accelerated. More and more people became impoverished; finding people making a living out of
picking up leftovers from the trash became a usual scene in Amman; the heaps of trash themselves
became a common (and evil-reeking) scene in a city that boasted its cleanliness for decades. This was
due to the inability of the Amman municipality to buy new garbage trucks, and that was the same
municipality that boasted its surplus of cash a decade ago!
As the regime went broke, something else erupted: the Arab spring. Jordan’s protests were nothing
like what other Arab countries experienced, since it was elitist (comprised of the regular activists,
“opposition” politicians and political parties), small (except when the Muslim Brotherhood
participated), benign (demanding “reform” rather than the removal of the regime), and lacking a
unified common objective.
Gradually, the government managed to increase prices bit by bit with successive decisions, which
were largely below the radar screen of public attention. But the last increase was a whopper, and
was duly noticed. Prices for fuel (including gasoline and diesel used for heating) increased
significantly. The price of a gas jar (used for domestic cooking and heating) increased from JD 6.50
(US$ 9) to JD 10 (US$14), a 54% increase in fell swoop. All impacting heavily on the poorer
socioeconomic strata, and in addition, and since the costs of electricity and transportation are
dependent on petrol derivatives, the increase automatically triggered a similar increase in the price
of almost all commodities. Now popular rage exploded. But once again, the explosion was absorbed.
A politically barren landscape
Politically Jordan is a terrain, which in a sense is burned to the ground. The regime has played its
cards well over the years. The ‘classical’ opposition was subdued starting in 1989 by incorporating
them into the regime’s fabric through a process of ‘legalization’, ‘infiltration’, and then further
subduing them by ever tighter laws restricting their activities. The social fabric is fragmented by
regime-fabricated and regime-sponsored divisions along a divide based on citizens of eastern
Jordanian origins vs. citizens of Palestinian origin. Those of eastern Jordanian origin are further
divided into regions, tribes, families, etc. The ‘internal conflicts’ that result from these divisions are
sparked by trivial issues based on narrow interests, again: something rather characteristic of a
clientele state.
The ‘alternative’ opposition, portraying itself as ‘more radical politically’, was in fact worse than the
classic opposition. Whereas the old opposition parties drew on the broader ideologies of
internationalism, pan-Arabism and Islamism, the ‘alternative’ opposition based itself on an
isolationist Jordanian identity; patriotism was the most prominent feature of a new self-proclaimed
‘left’.
This went along well with the regime’s plans of building a “Jordanian identity” in theory: in 1989, the
regime insisted on ‘Jordanizing’ the classic parties, insisting that they must be exclusively local and
must cut all ties with the Arab and international arena. In 2002, the regime initiated a huge PR
campaign under the slogan ‘Jordan First’, and then ‘We Are All Jordan’. This served to trap the
political scene in a fabricated identity based on the colonial-grounded ‘state’: an identity that is
divisive (useful to recall that a large proportion of Jordanian citizens are closely tied to Palestine and
the Palestinian struggle), chauvinist (based on narrow patriotism, blind loyalty to the king and the
royal family, hailing the security apparatus and the flag), and futile (since one cannot build a
liberation project based on a colonial-based functional state with a colonial/regime-fabricated
identity).
In practice, the regime opted for subdividing the people along tribal and regional lines through its
continuous adoption of the “one-man one-vote” election law.
The opposition, accused of being ‘Palestinian’ by the regime and its proponents, fell in the trap, and
became obsessed with proving its Jordanian authenticity, its Jordanian roots, its Jordanian programs,
and even its Jordanian dialect and dress code! Even the Islamists started having these identity-based
conflicts which increased to the point where Rohayyel Gharaibeh, a prominent leader of the Islamic
Action Front, led the formation of a current inside the Islamic movement based along the
Jordanian/Palestinian division line.
The opposition, and thus any ‘extended’ spontaneous protest, lost any overarching potential. It
became easy to label, to manipulate and utilize, and thus to contain. It was playing on the home
ground of the regime.
Why did the November events fail to mature into a full-blown uprising?
1 - The upsurge was relatively large, but not massive. Unlike the previous protests in Jordan, the
November events were not exclusively elitist in origins, but the number of people who turned out,
although large, did not reach the critical mass needed to hold ground. This is partially due to the
Palestinian/Jordanian divide and the fact that the Jordanian identity remains unsuitable as an
overarching identity.
2 - It lacked serious conviction. People dispersed and went home. They did not occupy squares. They
did not hold ground. This is because they did not achieve critical mass, and they did not agree on the
single achievable goal of bringing down the regime. Some segments of the protesters did raise that
slogan, but many ‘opposition’ forces and figures were against this and declared their pro-regime
position very loudly. The vast majority of the main players in the regime and the strands of
opposition wanted the regime as such to stay. They do not have an alternative plan. The old guards
probably wanted a change at the apex of power to finalize their power grip, but nothing more. A
change in seats, not a change of regime.
3 - The opposition organizations sold out the protests. The Islamic brotherhood declared that they
did not want the regime to leave, stressed that they were only reformists (and thus are against a
revolutionary option), and made it clear many times that the slogan ‘The people want to bring down
the regime’ (which was chanted many times in the November events) does not represent them.
Khaled Kalaldeh, the former leader of the Socialist Left (a ‘radical’ group of the alternative
opposition) declared the same thing. And even before the November events, the classical
Leftist/pan-Arabist parties declared that they would participate in the upcoming elections, which
were still to be based on the notorious Jordanian-style ‘one-man one-vote’ law which was the reason
for boycotting the previous elections!
These elections were propagandized by the regime on a wide scale as Jordan’s equivalent to the Arab
spring, and did every trick possible to insure a wide participation. Embarrassed by the November
events, those parties declared that they would ‘suspend’ their participation! Self-proclaimed
opposition figures became some sort of a mouthpiece for the regime: Soud Qubeilat (a former
political prisoner and a former president of the Jordan Writers Association) wrote an article
supporting participation in the regime-sponsored elections based on the same law that was
unanimously opposed by the opposition. Muwaffaq Mahadin (another self-proclaimed opposition
figure and the current president of the Jordanian Writers Association) went as far as promoting the
regime’s “state and security first” rhetoric, which is often used to justify political repression.
Nahed Hattar, another self-proclaimed opposition figure, publicly declared his connection with
Muhammad al-Thahabi the Head of General Intelligence Department (the Mukhabarat) and
promoted him as a “patriotic figure” in an article published in the Lebanese paper al-Akhbar. Al-
Thahabi has recently been convicted in a corruption case and is serving time; he was also known for
paying journalists in what was known as al-Thahabi’s list, a list of mukhabarat-sponsored journalists
that neither were investigated by the government nor by the Journalists Association, for obvious
reasons!. Hattar is the master theoretician of the isolationist ‘Jordanian identity’ and is well-known
for his negative views regarding Jordanians of Palestinian origin. He was also one of the staunchest
supporters of the regime’s elections, calling the protesting groups to join it.
4 - The division regarding Syria, which is a huge divide in Jordan. This reflected a lack of unity and
trust between the different opposition groups and activists who were active on the ground. Vocal
supporters of the Syrian regime – who include all the ‘leftist” and pan-Arabist parties, many of the
“opposition” figures and writers (such as all those mentioned in point 3 above), and others –
reproduced their theoretical positions on the Arab post-colonial states and took back their early
support of the Tunisian and Egyptian uprisings, and adopted a new pro-state, anti-chaos rhetoric.
This of course was extended to Jordan, so they were a ‘push’ factor countering the possibility that
the November events might expand into a full-blown uprising. Many of those figures and parties
perceive Jordan’s ‘stability’ to be closely bound up with the stability of and support for the Syrian
regime.
5 - External factors: Jordan is historically known as a buffer state. It shields Israel (the West’s most
valuable and most vulnerable ally in the region) from its ‘hostile’ Arab surroundings. With the rise of
Iran as a regional power, the buffer function took on an extra dimension: Jordan now shields the
‘Sunni’ Gulf States form the ‘Shiite crescent’, a hypothetical area that extends from Iran in the east,
running through Iraq and Syria, to Lebanon in the west; the term itself was first mentioned by King
Abdullah II himself. Jordan has continuously maintained its stability within the explosive region it is
located in. This is not the result of blind chance. The buffer function of Jordan is very valuable to
Israel, the US, the EU, and the Gulf states.
These key players ensure (through a combination of financial aid and a security-based approach) that
things will never get out of control in Jordan. Bahrain recently called on the Gulf States to help Jordan
in its crisis. The Gulf States will not tolerate the fall of a monarchy by means of a popular uprising;
this is a direct threat to them and a direct inspiration to their people. This is why they offered Jordan
and Morocco (the only non-Gulf Arab monarchies) membership in the Gulf Cooperation Council.
A step forward despite the failure
Two major advantages were achieved by the November events in Jordan. First, the taboo of
criticizing the king and the royal family was broken. The chants in the November demonstrations
were unprecedented since 1989; they were clearly directed at the king, the royal family and the
regime. Some of the demonstrations called for a republic in Jordan.
Second, the people have now an easier access to the street for demonstrating their grievances.
Up to now, the regime has been successful in absorbing the movement and fragmenting it. The old
guard, with its deep social connections and thus strong nexus with some of the protest movements
and opposition figures, constitute the most successful of the regime’s wings. They succeeded in
eliminating the new guard, putting many of them as scapegoats on corruption trials, while
immunizing themselves against corruption allegations. They now rule the scene.
Prospects for the future? There are none. Jordan is like Lebanon, inherently designed to be void of
any context for independence and sovereignty. Any movement aspiring for liberation in Jordan must
build its strategy on a wider regional scheme that involves (at a minimum) Palestine and Syria, if not
the Gulf and Iraq as well. Any other perspective will be entrapped and easily manipulated. The
protests of November 2012 are only the latest in a series of proofs of this.
The Alternative Opposition in Jordan and the Failure
to Understand Lessons of Tunisian and Egyptian
Revolutions

Mar 22 2011
["Dialogue." Image from unknown archive.]
In Jordan, no one seems to have learned from the
lessons of Tunisia and Egypt. Especially not the
“opposition,” which can be divided into the
“official” opposition and the “alternative”
opposition.
The "official" opposition—comprised of the
legalized opposition parties and professional
associations—still seeks weak reformist goals that
constitute a continuation of its collapsing course
that began in 1989 (the year marking the end of
martial law in Jordan and the onset of the so-called “democratic era”). This official opposition is
made up of three broad sets of groups: the Islamists, featuring the Muslim Brotherhood and their
political wing the Islamic Action Front; the nationalists, including two Ba’thist parties (one connected
to the Iraqi faction and the other to the Syrian faction); and the leftists, including the Jordanian
Communist Party, the Popular Unity Party (affiliated with the Popular Front for the Liberation of
Palestine), and the People’s Democratic Party (affiliated with the Democratic Front for the Liberation
of Palestine). This official opposition (which resembles all the official oppositions around the Arab
world) has been subjected to substantial and incisive criticism over the past two decades—
particularly around their absorption into the regime structure and inability to deliver meaningful
political change—and there is no need to expand here on this issue.
The “alternative” opposition that has presented itself as the option capable of filling the political void
is not much better: (1) It has an “East Bank Jordanian” isolationist character; (2) it bases itself on a
post-colonial identity that does not enjoy an internal consensus; (3) it resonates with the political
authority’s identity propaganda (“Jordan First” and “We are all Jordan”, both regime-sponsored PR
campaigns for the building of a “Jordanian national identity”). Also significant is the fact that this
“alternative opposition” has close ties to the “old guard,” one of the two competing factions within
the Jordanian regime that has been partially marginalized when the young King Abdullah II ascended
to the thrown and introduced his own faction into the ruling elites comprised of young
businesspersons (locally dubbed “the neoliberals”). The members if the “old guard” are no less
“neoliberal,” for it was them who started the implementation of IMF reforms, the privatization drive,
and the withdrawal of the state from its social roles.
Influenced by the protests in Tunisia—which were then at their peak—the first “Day of Rage” in
Jordan (called for by the “alternative opposition,” to be further defined below) was launched on
Friday January 14, 2011, with a modest gathering of some 500 people. The official opposition
boycotted this event, but as the Tunisian revolution surged to success, they turned out in massive
numbers the following Friday, January 21, 2011, raising the turnout to 10,000 demonstrators. On the
third Friday (January 28), the number of demonstrators decreased. By the fourth Friday (February 4),
the demonstration was divided into two separate parts: one held at the usual downtown location,
while the other kilometers away at the office of the Prime Minister. The divisions will probably
increase because of the presence of the “isolationist” element within the opposition forces, and the
concentration of this element in the primary reformist demand presented by the “alternative
opposition” (and later on adopted by the official opposition): removal of the Prime Minister Samir al-
Rifa’i (who was sacked later as expected) and the formation of a “national unity” government.
What are the constituents of this “alternative opposition”?
Its main elements include the Jordanian Social Left Movement, the Jordanian National Initiative, the
National Progressive Current, the National Committee of Military Veterans, the Jordanian Writers
Association, the Nationalist Progressive Current, in addition to very small groups such as the
Democratic Youth Union, the Philosophy Society, the Socialist Thought Forum, the Assembly of
Circassean Youth, and the Association Against Zionism and Racism.
All the above-mentioned groups with the exception of the National Progressive Current, the National
Committee of Military Veterans, and the Nationalist Progressive Current) form the so-called
“Movement of the Jordanian People.” And all those groups (without exception) form "The Jordanian
Campaign for Change – Jayeen,” and are closely allied at both the politics and logistical levels.
A brief review of these groups will give us a clearer idea of what they actually represent: Nahed
Hattar, the current leader of the National Progressive Current, the previous leader of the Jordanian
Social Left Movement, and one of the main figures of the “alternative opposition,” wrote an article--
that has since been removed from the internet--in which he revealed he had had several “long
brainstorming meetings” with the Director of the General Intelligence Department. He also wrote an
article--that has also since been removed from the internet--defending this director after he left his
position, describing him in both articles as “one of the symbols of the Jordanian National Movement”
(6). Omar Shaheen, a current leader in the Jordanian Social Left Movement, wrote saying that those
meetings came about with the consent and blessing of the movement. Furthermore, both the
National Progressive Current and the Jordanian Social Left Movement were among the first who
promoted the isolationist post-colonial identity as one on which a national liberation movement can
be based.
Others share this isolationist vision. The Jordanian National Initiative, which calls for the crystallizing
of a “Jordanian identity full and complete” as well as the formation of a Jordanian national
movement that is separate from a Palestinian one. This is constructed to deal with “Jordanian
society” and “Palestinian society” as separate isolated entities that share common interests. The first
version on the Jordanian National Initiative’s website was decorated with the “Jordan First” and “We
are all Jordan” symbols. The Jordanian Writers Association is one of the largest recipient of
governmental funding through the Ministry of Culture and the Municipality of Amman, with most of
its leaders and prominent figures being either employed in the government’s cultural and media
apparatus or receiving an array of diverse benefits from it.
The leader of the Nationalist Progressive Current participated in the November 2010 parliamentary
elections, which were considered a continuation of the fragmentation of the Jordanian social fabric
into clans, families and regions and thus widely boycotted. The elections and the elections law were
also regarded as constituting a knock-out blow to any possibility of genuine reform.
Perhaps most indicative of their identity politics, none of these groups seriously worked on
integrating the Palestinian refugee camps within the initiative of the “days of rage.” The only time
one refugee camp participated modestly (al-Baq’a camp in the first “Day of Rage”), it was
disregarded in the call to protest issued by the Jordanian National Initiative, mentioning all other
locations. Some organizations in the Jayeen coalition regard the Palestinians as reservoirs of
neoliberalism and place them in class conflict with eastern Jordanians.
Another important aspect of the “alternative” opposition is that many of the organizations are
different addresses for the same group of people. It can safely be said that the Jordanian National
Initiative, the Jordanian Writers Association, the Socialist Thought Forum, the Philosophy Society,
and the Assembly of Circassean Youth are all different faces of the same group of individuals basically
organized in the Jordanian National Initiative, closely followed by the Democratic Youth Union and
the Jordanian Social Left Movement.
The main problem with this “alternative” opposition is largely reflected in the initial and principal
goal of its mobilization, and which was subsequently adopted by the official opposition: the removal
of Samir al-Rifa’i and his cabinet as well as the formation of a “national unity” government. It is well
known in Jordan that ministers are “executors.” They are not persons empowered to draw up
policies and strategies. Demanding a ministerial change will yield nothing on the strategic level and is
considered a subtle attempt by those who are demanding the change to replace the people they
want to oust.
Absent—both then and now—are discussions on the legitimacy of political authority in Jordan. In
fact, what happens is the opposite: both the official and the alternative oppositions consider the
head of the political system to be some sort of moderating sage. This is despite the fact that
constitutionally he is indeed the head of three centers of power—the executive, the legislative, and
the judiciary. Both the official and the alternative oppositions call for “a change in policies, not a
change in regime.” For example, the Muslim Brotherhood stated that “the Islamists in Jordan call for
reform, not a total change. We acknowledge the legitimacy of the regime.” The Jordanian Campaign
for Change (Jayeen)--that includes all the alternative opposition groups--stated that “the King is the
only constant in Jordanian politics” and stressed his constitutional immunity.
As a result of these dynamics, what was expected eventually happened: the al-Rifa’i government was
sacked, and an old guard figure, Ma’rouf al-Bakhit, a former general and a previous ambassador to
Israel, was appointed Prime Minister (PM) and subsequently formed his cabinet. Also as expected,
there was general relief in both opposition circles. The National Committee of the Military Veterans
and the leadership of the National Progressive Current clearly welcomed the new PM. The
spokesman of the Jordanian Campaign for Change (Jayeen) described the appointment as a “step in
the right direction," while Mahdi al-Sa’afin (a young leader in both Jayeen and the Jordanian Social
Left) stated that “the Jordanian Campaign for Change will give the assigned PM a chance to execute
the reform program.” On the official opposition front, “the previous slogans for removing the
government disappeared,” along with the sit-in by the Islamists and other legalized parties, as they
opt to give the al-Bakheet government a “trial period.”
Leaders of the Jordanian National Initiative (Jayeen) and the National Assembly for Change met with
Prime Minister al-Bakhit after having refused to meet with his predecessor. However, after thugs
atttacked demonstrators on February 18th demonstrators--as the police "failed" to capture a single
one of them--those very same leaders apologized for conducting a meeting with the PM claiming that
they "thought the PM had the authority to rule, then found out he did not." This is of course a
misleading "apology" since everyone in Jordan knows who actually rules and that the PM and his
cabinet are executors. This apology was followed by the prime minister's denunciation of the attack
against protests and a promise to protect the next demonstration, which was indeed "protected"
along with the distribution of water juice as was the case in the first demonstrations.
Do the participants in the Jordanian “days of rage” think that the ousting of a minister or a prime
minister, or implementing some sort of governmental change, will be sufficient to make fundamental
economic, social, and political change in the country? Do they remember the vast campaign against
the former Minister of Planning Basem Awadallah, an official seized upon as the sole and primary
reason for economic collapse and corruption in Jordan? Awadallah was fired, nothing changed, the
economic situation continues to worsen, and prices continue to skyrocket. Later, Samir al-Rifa’i, the
young newcomer to government from business, was demonized as being the one responsible for
decades of corruption. His departure was—like Awadalla’s—played up as the magical solution to
everything. It must not be overlooked that these processes of demonization indicate the isolationist
tendency of the alternative opposition. Despite the presence of a large array of influential
“neoliberals,” the ones selected for demonization are almost always from a Palestinian background
and unconnected to large clans or eastern Jordanian families. In an unprecedented recent
development, Queen Rania (who is of Palestinian origin) was targeted by clan figures as being a
symbol of corruption and was compared to Laila Tarabulsi, the wife of the ousted Tunisian dictator
Ben Ali.
If given the capacity to form a government, does the alternative opposition think that it can
transform the country from dependence towards both sovereignty and independence, despite the
fact that Jordan relies heavily on foreign aid, and can be as easily strangled as the Gaza Strip?
Within the existing formulas, whoever joins the government based on a local “national” agenda will
have only one of two choices ahead: resignation, or “dealing with reality.” The reality of the
Jordanian postcolonial state is structural subordination, corruption, and functionality. Forming or
joining a government is the first step in joining the political elite whose rules and machinations have
been set by the political authority, and are impossible to escape.
We should not forget that the political authority during the reign of the late King Hussein had the
unique characteristic of absorbing the opposition. It even absorbed those who attempted coups
against him, transforming them into ministers, ambassadors, and even directors of intelligence. The
absorption of the opposition constituted an important pillar that disappeared during the new reign
when priorities shifted towards the young business personalities loyal only to profit and disengaged
from any regional or clan anchorage. Accordingly, the political authority in Jordan established a class
identity, whereas the opposition is working toward diluting the class divide by trying to join the
regime’s structure and push against the old guard and personalities that once more seek to tie the
ruling elite to the traditional constituents of the regime. This will obscure the emerging class
structure and tensions, resulting in prolonging the corruption and subordination cycles. The demand
for a “national unity” government further reflects the desire of those excluded from the power
structure to regain their positions inside it and get their share of the cake. It surely does not reflect a
desire in a “total change” that remaining outside the power structure would help ferment. This is
most recently indicated by the participation of Khaled Ramadan--of the Nationalist Current--and
Khaled Kalaldeh--of the Social Left Movement--in the regime-sponsored "National Dialogue
Committee.
To conclude: the “alternative opposition” lacks the basic requirement of being independent from the
political authority; and it has adopted an isolationist discourse at the level of identity and at the
scope of liberation. This isolationst discourse dilutes any real attempt for the identification and thus
maturation of class conflict.
However, the lessons of Tunisia and Egypt did not fall on deaf ears, at least not when considering
those of the political authority! It reintroduced subsidies for basic commodities previously de-
subsidized; it announced an increase in the monthly wages of public-sector workers; and it hosted
opposition figures in the state-owned television station. Moreover, it did not ban the “Day of Rage”
demonstrations nor did it request permission for it to go ahead. There was no police presence during
those demonstrations; in fact, some policemen distributed juice and water to the demonstrators.
The regime in Jordan has grasped the lessons from Tunisia and Egypt. The opposition has not!
Jordan's New Opposition and the Traps of Identity and
Ambiguity

Apr 20 2011

[Chair of the National Dialogue Committee. Image from

Petra News Agency.]
There are two major tribulations in Jordan from which all
other issues stem.
The first is the autocratic authority that dominates the role
of all “state institutions” (i.e., the Cabinet, the Parliament,
and the Judiciary). This autocratic domination is legally
sanctioned by the Jordanian constitution:
· Article 26 states that “The Executive Power shall be
vested in the King, who shall exercise his powers through his
Ministers.”
· Article 35 states that “The King appoints the Prime Minister and may dismiss him or accept his
resignation. He appoints the Ministers; he also dismisses them or accepts their resignation, upon the
recommendation of the Prime Minister.”
· Article 34 states that “(i) The King issues orders for the holding of elections to the Chamber of
Deputies in accordance with the provisions of the law; (ii) The King convenes the National Assembly,
inaugurates, adjourns, and prorogues it in accordance with the provisions of the Constitution; (iii)
The King may dissolve the Chamber of Deputies; (iv) The King may dissolve the Senate or relieve any
Senator of his membership.”
· Article 36 states that “The King appoints members of the Senate and appoints the Speaker from
amongst them and accepts their resignation.”
· Article 98 states that the “Judges of the Civil and Sharia Courts shall be appointed and dismissed
by a Royal Decree.”
In addition to all those powers vested in the king by the constitution, Article 30 of the constitution
further states that “The King is the Head of the State and is immune from any liability and
responsibility,” while Article 195 of the Penal Code criminalizes any criticism of the king making it by
punishable by a prison sentence of one to three years.
This autocratic authority is the source of corruption, the elimination of civil liberties, the dominance
of the security apparatus over society, and the lack of respect for citizens’ dignity. It has overseen the
privatization of public institutions and the withdrawal of state-provided social safety nets as the state
became midwife to a political comprador class whose narrow interests government policy caters to.
The second tribulation is the set of state-sponsored identity divisions: a “Jordanian” identity on one
side, and a “Palestinian” identity on the other. The former divides into an unlimited number of
regional (north, south, center), clan, and family identities. These divisions facilitate the manipulation
of the social whole, diverting it from the main struggle for liberation towards smaller internal
struggles over the benefits and privileges offered by the political authority. As these smaller conflicts
erupt, the political authority positions itself as both mediator for all and guarantor for each of the
struggling fragments.
Despite the extreme clarity of these tribulations, opposition forces--especially the newly-emerging
“alternative opposition”--decides to look away from them and leave them unaddressed for many
reasons.
One reason for this is the need to form the widest coalition possible, which is achieved by
formulating vague, ambiguous, and subsidiary demands effectively making them unrealizable since
their condition of possibility remains untouched. In addition, such demands are prone to
opportunistic interpretation and use by each group within the coalition, each according to its own
priorities, agenda and relations.
A related reason opposition forces are silent on the core tribulations is the presence of isolationist
groups within the opposition’s coalition that call for the withdrawal of citizenship from Jordanian
citizens of Palestinian origin as well as the complete disengagement of Jordan from the West Bank.
Those groups proclaim that “there will be no solution before solving the problem of Palestinians in
Jordan," reframing the right-of-return as an internal existential struggle rather than being a core
issue for struggling against “Israel.” These isolationist groups conceive of a “Palestinian comprador”
class and blame it for corruption and the selling-off of the public sector. The isolationist groups
within the opposition coalition block any movement away from the “Jordanian” and “Palestinian”
identities and towards the formation of a third collective trans-state identity, one that unifies the
people in a liberationist project.
Another reasons is that certain “leaders” of this opposition are clearly connected with currents and
personalities within the political authority, most notably the “old guard” who lost their position with
the ascendance of King Abdullah II. This old guard has recently been empowered by the wave of
protests that are sweeping the country. One such leader openly met with the former head of the
General Intelligence Department, Muhammad al-Thahabi, while the latter was in office and
described him in newspaper articles as a “national leader.” Other “leaders” welcomed the
appointment of the current PM Ma’rouf al-Bakhit and met with him, while one of them is heavily
connected with Taher al-Masri, a former PM and the current head of both the Senate and the
regime-sponsored National Dialogue Committee. This connection enables those “leaders” to
negotiate with the political authority and attain personal or closed-circle benefits outside the
interests of the general public that is yet to formulate a broad-based political project.
The fourth reason is the near-suicidal attempt of these opposition coalitions to prove their Jordanian
authenticity vis-à-vis their identity by the strict adherence to wearing red kuffiyyas (not white/black
ones that symbolize Palestine), adopting a beduin dialect, propagandizing the support of clans (a
mechanism also used by the political authority with no means to substantiate both claims), playing
the songs of Omar al-Abdallat that celebrate regional divisions, airing the royal anthem, cheering
“Long Live the King”, and almost-exclusively presenting speakers of eastern-Jordanian origin. All this
did not happen in a pro-regime rally, but rather in the March 24 Youth Movement’s sit-in at the
Jamal Abdel-Nasser Square in Amman on March 24-25, 2011. The sit-in was dispersed by extreme
violence, resulting in the death of 57-year-old Kahiri Sa’ad and the injury of hundreds. All the
insistence on the “Jordanian identity” by these demonstrators did not protect them and they were
labeled–despite all their efforts—Palestinians. The counter-mobilization was based on this very
premise. The demonstrators failed to comprehend that a “Jordanian identity” implies absolute
loyalty to the regime, and that the political authority, its thugs, and the social sectors it mobilizes
views any member of the opposition as “Palestinian” even if his great-great-great-grandfather was
born on the East Bank (i.e., contemporary Jordan). An illuminating example of this was the demand
by MP Muhammad al-Kuuz—who is of a Palestinian origin—for the protesters—many of whom were
Jordanians of East Bank origin—to be expelled to Palestine via the Shaykh Hussein Bridge. From the
vantage point of the political authority, the “Jordanian” is the loyalist and the “Palestinian” is the
opposition, whatever the details are (i.e., royalist, reformist, revolutionary).
What happened on March 24-25, 2011 in Jamal Abdel-Nasser Square in Amman should serve as an
alarm bell for the opposition in Jordan, especially the youth groups operating on the grassroots level
who consider their movement independent of any top-down influence or alternatively overestimate
their ability to neutralize such influence. The alarm is concerned with the opposition being trapped in
the above-mentioned constraints resulting in its political paralysis.
An exit from this dilemma exists in the following points:
1) Eliminating the ambiguity in the political demands of the opposition by further articulating and
then consolidating them into one: a new constitution that returns the authority back to the people
and protects civil liberties. All other demands regarding corruption, poverty, and so on can spring
from this main demand.
2) The current “leaders” of the opposition should step aside and stop their opportunistic drive which
was paid for dearly by the people in 1989, when the uprising in the south was co-opted by the
National Charter Committee and a “political reform” process transformed the then-banned and
vibrant political parties into docile inactive structures effectively killed democracy under the banner
of democracy. Now, in place of the National Charter Committee we have a National Dialogue
Committee. The former committee worked on laws regarding elections and political parties, and the
latter committee is working on those very same laws! History is repeating itself, but with a new set of
opposition leaders. Those “leaders” are free to fight for their own place in the system, but not on the
backs of the demonstrators.
3) Projecting a broad-based alternative to the identity divisions. Neither the “Jordanian” nor the
“Palestinian” identities can be productively utilized. A sectarian or a racist identity cannot be utilized
to eliminate an opposing identity of the same caliber. The identity portfolio managed by the political
authority in Jordan in collaboration with the Palestinian factions should be completely discarded.
Palestine does not belong to the Palestinians, it belongs to all those who want it liberated and to
those whose interests are accomplished through its liberation. This is evidenced by the historical
record, geographic realities, and socioeconomic relations. A “Jordanian national movement” and a
“Palestinian national movement” are impossible to separate in Jordan. The movement is one, and it
has to struggle in both arenas. Any trend that proposes the contrary seeks to deepen the split, not
bridge it.
4) Renouncing isolationist groups and detaching them from the body of the opposition coalition.
Confronting the isolationist Jordanian identity with an open and democratic one, as some groups of
the new opposition have discussed has proven to be a failure in the Jamal Abdel-Nasser Square
demonstrations. The “Jordanian” identity is pre-loaded with the pre-requirement of complete loyalty
to the regime. The opposition cannot reclaim and reproduce this identity. An important topic to be
mentioned here is “citizenship”. It is understood that citizenship is the legal status of an individual
within the state, and the attainment of all political, social and economic rights connected to this legal
status. Identity is an individual identification of loyalty, whether it was a class, social, political or
religious loyalty. Identity is how an individual defines him or herself. One can be an Arab American or
a Muslim French or a working-class Swede. Citizenship should have no connection with identity and
the rights designated to a citizen should not be attached to identity and loyalty. Can “citizenship” or
the “citizenry” approach be a solution in Jordan? Not at all, since such an approach will be
automatically considered “Palestinian,” a reaction to those who demand withdrawing citizenship
from Jordanians of a Palestinian origin. Thus the challenge remains of building an identity that
transcends the “Jordanian”/”Palestinian” divide.
The Failure of the Arab “State” and Its Opposition

Tribal fighters loyal to Sadiq al-Ahmar, the leader of the Hashed tribe, walk in front of a bullet-riddled
building in Sanaa 10 April 2012. (Photo: REUTERS - Mohamed al-Sayaghi)

Published Thursday, April 19, 2012

After one year of the Arab uprisings that initially exploded in Tunisia and swept like wildfire
throughout the Arab world, it became very clear that the spark, which has resulted in the removal of
three oppressors so far, was spontaneous. That does not mean that the explosion had no preludes.
On the contrary, the people were squeezed with each passing day, but those uprisings clearly
showed that even in the absence of an organized catalyzing formation (revolutionary party,
revolutionary class), an explosion takes place when a certain threshold is reached, a critical mass.
Uprisings in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet-bloc states came about through the work of
organized opposition groups and parties (like Solidarity in Poland), and by decades of calm covert
undermining, infiltration, and propaganda undertaken by the West. By contrast, the Arab uprising
was not led by an organized opposition. Instead, it came as a surprise to the imperialist circles that
historically backed their client oppressor regimes.
The Failure of the Post-Colonial Arab “State”
Following the British-French-Italian colonialism of the Arab region, the Europeans left behind an area
that they deliberately divided into “states”. These were designed so as to leave no possibility for their
becoming truly independent and sovereign. They also left a watchdog and an easy solution to
assuage their anti-Semitic-burdened consciousness: “Israel,” a colonial-settler state that would
maintain the imperialist design in the wake of the physical withdrawal of its patrons.
The post-colonial states were subordinate by design, by their innate nature of being divided and
incomplete, and by the ruling class that followed colonialism. The homogeneous collective of people
that included many religions, sects, and ethnicities was also broken down. Colonialism fueled internal
conflicts, and the subsequent Arab regimes maintained that tradition and kept in close alliance with
the former colonizers. Alliance here is an overstatement. A subordinate structure cannot build
alliances. It is always subordinate.
Thus, the post-colonial Arab “state” was everything but a state. Concepts like “the rule of law” or
“governing institutions” or “citizenship rights” did not apply. Countries were run with a gangster
mentality. There were no “traditions” or clear sets of rules that applied to all. Unlike the model of a
bourgeois democracy where rules, laws, and traditions maintain and preserve the capitalist system
and apply to all its components, this form was not present in the post-colonial Arab “state.” The
ruling class were free to issue laws, revoke laws, not implement laws, not implement constitutions,
amend constitutions, forge fraudulent elections, embezzle, torture, massacre, confiscate basic rights,
indulge in blatant corruption, fabricate identities, and pass on the presidency from father to son.
The example closest to the modern post-colonial Arab state is the Free Congo State (1885-1908)
which was the private property of the Belgian king Leopold II, along with all its people, resources, and
2.3 million square kilometers territory. The post-colonial Arab state is nothing but an expanded
feudality. Its head answers to imperialist powers that pay certain amounts of “foreign aid” and
finance and train armies and police, all to keep people beyond the explosion point using a
composition of fear and the fulfillment of very basic needs that are portrayed as grants and the
accomplishments of the ruler. The same imperialist powers that paid their bribes in “aid,” worked
hard through IMF economic-restructuring schemes and World Bank loans to dismantle any possible
internal independent growth, and worked hard to privatize the public sector.
The Arab regimes, reigning over a further subdivided space that is economically and politically
destroyed, extracted their authority from external delegation and internal terror, and succeeded in
transforming themselves into a buffer, a guarantor for all the divided segments. They succeeded in
absorbing almost all opposition frameworks into their structure, and in producing coreless governing
institutions, thus giving themselves much longer life spans than one would expect for such a system.
The failure of the Arab “organized” opposition
Just as the imperialist centers and Arab regimes failed to predict the time of the onset and the
magnitude of the Arab uprisings, so did opposition organizations. The latter were not part of it. Nor
did they work toward it. Nor did they add any value to it after its onset.
With a few exceptions (like the Kifaya movement in Egypt, the Islamic al-Nahda Party and The
Workers’ Communist Party in Tunisia, and some intellectuals in Syria), the organized Arab opposition
(political parties, unions and other organizations) seldom challenged the Arab regime and its system.
While the interwar period saw the emergence of a number of ideological movements that sought to
rectify the colonialist design for the region, many such groups were either tamed or became
absorbed in the status quo. The opposition regularly sought acknowledgement and legitimacy from
the Arab regimes. The opposition wanted to be “legal,” and it followed the “rules” set by the regimes
and accepted their reign.
Thus, the organized Arab opposition was actually a factor of stability for the Arab regimes, adding to
their longevity. It was not until people took things into their own hands, rejecting the legitimacy of
the Arab regimes and acting autonomously, away from the established opposition via more creative
forms, that things started to move.
A quick review of how the organized opposition behaviour following the uprisings can provide a clue
as to how they acted during the uprisings and in the period that led up to them. The Muslim
Brotherhood in Egypt never challenged the Mubarak regime. On the contrary, it periodically sent
comforting signs showing that they wanted the Mubarak regime to continue. The Muslim
Brotherhood in Egypt did not participate in the early days of the uprising, and after the uprising it
backed the Military Council and its oppression of the demonstrations of January 2012. Many of the
so-called leftist and nationalist organizations in Jordan, Palestine, and Lebanon are currently backing
the Bashar Assad regime and its massacre in Syria.
The organized opposition often dreamt of a moment when the people would rise up against their
oppressors. Rightfully, they diagnosed the Arab regimes as tools of imperialist intervention and the
main obstacles to any liberation project. Now they ally themselves against the people and with the
regimes. They do so because they are empty. Over the years they failed to present any alternative,
neither in theory or in practice. They are empty and they are afraid of a future outside they are
unable to control, comprehend, or contribute to. Like Israel, they “know” the current regimes. What
will happen next is something they don’t know, and they lack the capacity to influence it. So – just
like Israel – they’re willing to stand against it.
The Unity of the Oppressed in the Arab World
Pan–Arabism often dreamed about a unified Arab homeland, but other than military coups that
ultimately transformed into local oppressive regimes, it lacked any tools to fulfill that dream. Some
independent Arab Marxists worked for some sort of “union of the oppressed.” The people of the
Arab world are diverse and were fragmented by different factors along sectarian, religious, and
ethnic divides. It is only when the oppressed realize that they are united by their own miserable
status that people tend to mobilize en masse and achieve their common goals. This was what
actually happened in 2011.
The mobilization in Tunisia, Egypt, and Yemen fulfilled that requirement, so it was partially
successful. By contrast, the mobilization in Jordan was made along the local pathogenic divide (those
of Palestinian origin vs. those of East Jordanian origin), so it was doomed to failure and can be
understood as a movement within the regime rather than one from outside it.
Another key lesson was proven by the immediate contagion of the uprising phenomena throughout
the Arab world. What started in Tunisia echoed with different volume levels from Morocco in the
West to Bahrain in the East. There is a material integration of people’s interests. For example,
continuity can be seen in the almost automatic demonstrations across the Arab world against Israel
when it regularly and bloodily attacks Palestinians. This was further stressed by the same continuity
when confronting the Arab regimes. The people of the Arab world find depth, support, and power in
one other, and they tend to be inspired by each other, and they still think that their cause is one. No
wonder, then, that the colonialist powers and their successor dependent Arab regimes fought hard
to maintain the isolationist division of the post-colonial states.
It is no surprise then that Arab uprisings are finding it difficult to proceed beyond the conditions of
colonially-fabricated states. The uprisings must seek solutions beyond the crippling designs in order
to break from subordination and become a true revolution.
Arab Uprisings: Progress, But Not Yet a Revolution

A protester, wearing a Guy Fawkes mask, stands in front of Egyptian military police standing guard
near the Ministry of Defense in the Abbassiya district of Cairo 30 April 2012. (Photo: REUTERS -
Mohamed Abd El Ghany)

Published Saturday, May 5, 2012

There is no real class formation in modern Arab societies. The post-colonial Arab “state” is a political
and economic disaster area that has yet to advance into the industrialized era. Its social fabric was
deformed by imposing and/or magnifying divisions and fragmentation. It transformed the
collaborative self-sufficient gatherings – based economically on farming and grazing in rural areas;
pillaging and grazing in desert areas; and commerce, crafts, and some manufacturing in cities, with
each social group having its own traditions and rules that applied to all members – into malformed
consumerist social formations. These formations come in the shape of family, clan, sect or ethnicity
for identity, solidarity and protection.
These formations live on the periphery of a globalized service sector, and are governed by regimes
that largely destroyed local economies in exchange for a model based on foreign aid. This is a
corporate-dependant, commoditized, service-based model, where the ruling class is the
representative of global corporations: a comprador formation with interests opposed to local
industrialization and production. In countries where natural resources are abundant, the
governments opted for exporting raw materials rather than investing in and manufacturing goods
with them. Instead, the money was sucked away in a cycle of corruption and parts of it were
redistributed down to the people as a form of a “grant” from the benefactor ruler.
The shockwaves of Arab uprisings gradually sent more educated young people to the streets as
unemployed, impoverished, and desperate individuals.It is hard to identify a class division based on
interest or contradiction. What we find is a well-defined ruling class generally composed of the head-
of-state, close aids and relatives, businesspeople representing foreign corporations, and high-ranking
security officials (usually all intertwined in the same matrix of corruption). Below lies a vaguely
defined middle class composed of professionals and service sector employees, and an impoverished
stratum of daily workers, craftspeople, and unskilled workers. At the bottom lingers the unemployed,
heavily influenced by tribal, religious, sectarian, and ethnic loyalties.
Privatization of the public sector and opening up the market to foreign investors further suffocated
what little local production was left. With the “state” having nothing to live on other than an ever
increasing taxation on commodities, services, and income, more and more of the middle class
collapsed into poverty in a number of Arab countries.
The main remedy for this situation was injecting pockets of impoverishment and possible protest
with small amounts of benefits and money barely sufficient to keep it below the explosion threshold.
This was done by distributing some of the oil money (in oil-producing countries) or some of the
foreign aid money and benefits through “projects.” This mechanism proved efficient for a long period
of time, and was successful in neutralizing popular protests, until the global economic crash in 2008
and the subsequent collapse of the neoliberal economy.
If there was a direct single catalyst for the Arab uprisings, it was the global collapse of money
markets, and the resultant shockwaves it sent around the world.
In the Arab world, the shockwaves gradually sent more educated young people to the streets as
unemployed, impoverished, and desperate individuals. Adding to that, the confiscation of political
rights (and thus the confiscation of the future), the tremendous humiliation of dignity, coupled with
relatively free and uncensored new tools of communication set the stage for an uprising.
In Tunisia, Mohammad Bouazizi, the iconic figure who initiated the chain reaction, had all of the
above-mentioned elements. He was an educated, young, and impoverished individual who was
insulted by a policewoman confiscating his unlicensed vegetable cart. His self-immolation sent fire
through the dry grass of Tunisia and the Arab world. The desperate middle-class youth of Egypt were
the initiators of the January 25 uprising, whereas it was the impoverished rural areas that initiated
the uprising in Syria.
Uprising or Revolution?
If we were to swiftly inspect the models of the 1789 French revolution and the 1917 Russian
revolution, we’ll find three characteristic pillars on which they are based.
First: revolutions accomplish complete economic and social change and move society from one era to
another (feudal to bourgeois in France, feudal to socialist in Russia).
Second: revolutions are preceded by theoretical and philosophical discourses generated by avant-
garde philosophers and thinkers reflecting the interests of the rising class or group. Those discourses
present futuristic visions, solutions, perceptions, predictions, structures, values, and so on.
Revolutions are later based on them or endeavor to accomplish them (the visions of Rousseau,
Montesquieu, Voltaire, and others in France; the visions of Marx, Engels, Lenin in Russia).
A revolution is fueled by class interest or the ideology of a revolutionary party while an uprising is
fueled by anger and frustration.Third: there is a revolutionary class or a revolutionary group (or
party) that embarks on achieving class interests, or promoting the philosophical discourse that
requires a material existence expressed socially by class interests.
Those characteristics are not found in the current Arab uprisings. The future might prove otherwise
on the first point, but the second and third points certainly do not apply.
Moreover, a revolution is fueled by class interest or the ideology of a revolutionary party while an
uprising is fueled by anger and frustration. A revolution presents a comprehensive social, economic,
and political program for change that was pre-meditated and based on philosophical discourses. An
uprising has no such program and has no philosophical discourse. A revolution has a leading class or a
leading party, whereas an uprising has no clear leadership.
What we are experiencing in the Arab world is a number of generalized uprisings. They may develop
and mature into revolutions, they may regress, and they may experience setbacks, but we should not
have excessive expectations. The crucial step forward has been accomplished: people in the Arab
world have risen up against their corrupt and subordinate regimes. Their rising up has been written
in blood. There is no turning back. This uprising is now carved deep in the general consciousness of
the people, and they will not bow down to future oppressors, whoever they may be. But until this
moment, we’re still short of a full Arab revolution.
The Islamist Complex: Will the Left Rise to the
Challenge?

A young boy waves a black flag inscribed with Islamic verses at a rally of Tunisian Salafi Islamists in
the central town of Kairouan 20 May 2012. (Photo: Reuters - Anis Mili)

Published Wednesday, May 23, 2012

Since the Arab uprisings were not class-based, have no philosophical backbone, and lack a leading
revolutionary party to drive the movement towards defined socio-economic and political change, the
ground was set for the rise of institutionalized currents that already had a substantial presence,
chiefly the Muslim Brotherhood and other Islamist factions.
Historically, political Islam served as a close ally to Arab despotic regimes, especially in the 1950s and
1960s when it was used as a tool to confront the expansion of nationalist and leftist currents. In
Jordan, for example, the Islamists were allowed to stay legally active during the period of martial law
(1957-1989) while all other parties were banned. They were permitted to establish institutions,
associations, banks, hospitals, schools, universities, and a huge network of social support
organizations, in addition to their leading of Friday prayers and their activities in key government
institutions like the Ministry of Education. The Salafi movement was completely nurtured and backed
by the US and its subservient ally Saudi Arabia during the Cold War. It was used primarily in
Afghanistan against the Soviets and later spread throughout the world.
It was only when Islamist groups grew too strong for government manipulation and became a
possible threat that the regimes unsuccessfully tried to move against them. It was too late. The
Islamists had already opened channels with the US administration, and began to present themselves
as a possible, more efficient and more popular replacement for the Arab regimes.
It was only when Islamist groups grew too strong for government manipulation and became a
possible threat that the regimes unsuccessfully tried to move against them. It was too late. The
Muslim Brotherhood of Iraq (The Islamic Party) were part of the US occupation’s governing council
headed by Paul Bremer. It also continued to participate in the puppet Iraqi government that was
erected under the occupation, with its leader Tariq al-Hashemi taking the position of vice president.
In Syria, its local Muslim Brotherhood chapter entered into a coalition with former vice president
Abdul-Halim Khaddam, a pro-Western Syrian renegade official. Egyptian former Muslim Brotherhood
leader Abdel Moneim Abul Fotouh (now running for presidency in post-Mubarak Egypt) had no
problem declaring that the Brotherhood would respect all international agreements signed by the
Egyptian governments and that they accept Israel’s right to exist. Hamas (the Muslim Brotherhood of
Palestine) went through the election process in the West Bank and Gaza based on the Oslo
agreements, and after their victory and taking over of authority in Gaza, they have declared many
times that they would accept a Palestinian state within the 1967 borders, thus acknowledging the
legitimacy of “Israel.”
I have extensively written in Arabic as far back as 2007 that the Arab regimes’ crackdown on Islamists
is a result of their perception that Islamists are becoming more powerful and are presenting
themselves to the US and Europe as a possibly more efficient alternative. Arab regimes feared that
the external factor would play the decisive role, so they continuously launched PR campaigns about
Islamist extremism, intolerance, terrorism, and so on. The Arab regimes were afraid of the day when
Islamists might take their place with American/European blessing. That day came, but the external
factor had little to do with it.
Post-Uprisings: Islamist Rise to Power
The Islamist landslide win in the post-uprising elections was not the intended result of the Arab
uprisings, but it is the logical one.
When a regime falls in the absence of a revolutionary alternative, the political forces that will rise to
power are those that are the most organized, most opportunist, and most accepted by the global
powers.
Egyptian, Tunisian, Iraqi and Moroccan Islamists have already begun suppressing liberties, especially
related to the arts and media.Decades of US and Arab regime sponsorship of political Islam, allowing
it to grow and hold a strong ground while other progressive currents were oppressed under the
banner of the “battle against communism,” is one of the main important factors that led to Islamist
growth. Even the “war against terrorism” and its underlying theoretical ground (“the clash of
civilizations”) further empowered Islamist currents and deepened their social penetration by creating
a propaganda-driven identity crisis that found its solution through a mechanical defensive back-to-
roots reaction.
Aftermath: A Step Forwards or Backwards?
After one year of the Arab uprisings, the general perception in Egypt is that the regime is still holding
on strongly with the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF) in power. The catastrophic
oppression of the January 2012 demonstrations around the Ministry of Interior is testimony to the
military’s lingering power. As far as Egyptian revolutionaries are concerned, none of their desired
goals have been fulfilled.
The Islamists rose to power through elections in both Tunisia and Egypt, and they would probably
win similar elections in Syria. Egypt’s Islamists backed the SCAF against the demonstrators during
their pre-presidency-elections honeymoon, while Egyptian, Tunisian, Iraqi and Moroccan Islamists
have already begun suppressing liberties, especially related to the arts and media.
That does not mean that the uprisings were a step backwards. On the contrary, breaking the curse of
fear, realizing people’s power, fearlessly taking the streets and ousting long-lasting dictators, paying
the price of blood for liberation, dignity, basic rights, social justice and political participation have
broken the shackles of the past. It will be embedded in the collective consciousness of people for
generations to come. The experience is indelible in a historical perspective, and people will rise up
again in the face of any possible future oppressor, albeit Islamists, NATO or the military apparatus.
Liberty obtained by blood is hard to surrender.
If the second step of a revolution has yet to arrive, that does not dismiss the initial step toward
change, nor does it discount the eventuality that progress will indeed occur. Revolutions are usually
preceded by turbulence, and need time to mature and ripen.
The people of the Arab world never had the chance to mature as a social structure, going from
Ottoman domination to colonialist subjection to division and the rule of Arab regimes. The internal
social mechanisms were obstructed and deformed. The time has come for the emergence of a social
and political conscience now that space for public discourse has finally become available following
decades of authoritarian repression. The rise of Islamists will be accompanied by the rise of an
opposing secular trend that will clearly defend its rights and convictions. There will no longer be an
alliance between Islamists and progressives against imperialism and Zionism. Islamists have opted for
dialogue with imperialism and they have few objections to a capitalist economy. In fact the so-called
“Islamic economy” is nothing but a capitalist economy with Islamic spices, as Maxime Rodinson
clearly elaborated in his book Islam and Capitalism. While the Arab uprising has its roots in economic
frustration from a vastly impoverished Arab population, the Islamist option offers little economic
change that would improve their livelihoods. The Islamists now are required to deliver heaven on
earth, not in the sky, and since they have no alternative program, they will ultimately fail.
The rise of Islamists will be accompanied by the rise of an opposing secular trend that will clearly
defend its rights and convictions. So why fear the Islamist rise? Let the Islamists rule, and fail. Let the
Islamists expose their opportunist positions on imperialism and Israel. Let the Islamists contradict
their double speech on liberties by suppressing social freedoms, arts and literature. Let the Islamists
maintain the capitalist model which will leave impoverished Arab populations with no hope. Exposing
the Islamist shortcomings will aid the formation of a true unashamed secular, leftist, and anti-
capitalist current, which will be forced to present theoretical arguments, confront reality and deliver
answers and programs.
Social and political maturity will take time in a region where modern political culture is being born. Its
development will not come without a cost, and unless Islamists can fulfil the extremely high
expectations of an agitated Arab people, the future looks promising for leftists.
For the people of the Arab world to win their liberation, they need: a trans-border, trans-ethnic,
trans-religious, trans-sectarian unity, a unity of the oppressed; social justice outside and beyond the
capitalist model; true freedom of expression, of the arts and literature, coupled with social freedoms.
Only the Left can deliver. So it’s time to get to work.
The Delusion of the "Clash of Civilizations" and the "War on Islam"
by Hisham Bustani
The rhetoric about a "clash of civilizations" and a "war on Islam" has found its way easily into Arab
intellectual discourse, where it has taken solid root, along with other similar "concepts" (or what I'd
rather call "non-concepts" -- like the term "terrorism" -- since they are extremely vague and yet
ideologically loaded) that were manufactured in imperialist centers. So it becomes of extreme
importance to ask: Is the "clash of civilizations" an independent topic or is it a camouflage term for a
struggle that actually embodies something else?
Ongoing Clashes or the End of History?
Following the collapse of the socialist bloc and the end of the Cold War, two theorists arose to
prominence with pronouncements on the "tendency" of the moment. The first of these is Francis
Fukuyama, who spoke about the "end of history": the final and total victory of capitalism,
accomplishing final stability, and the maintenance of capitalism as the ultimate socioeconomic
system for humanity. Fukuyama's capitalism was the resolution of all conflicts, the ultimate
dissolution of dialectical materialism and its infamous law of unity and contradiction of opposites.
The second theorist, contrary to Fukuyama, did not perceive the end of history as the fruit of
capitalism's supposed victory. Samuel Huntington formulated the concept of the "clash of
civilizations" as he saw a crystallization of another conflict, the conflict of Judeo-Christian civilization
with Eastern civilizations as an emergent node (Islam, Buddhism, etc.). In this sense, history is still
open, and capitalism still turbulent, still far from reaching stability.
It is clear that the two concepts are contradictory.
Fukuyama: The Failure of Idealism
Fukuyama expressed an idealist metaphysical liberal ideology inspired by the capitalist state's
"values, institutions, democracy, individual rights, the rule of law and prosperity based on economic
freedom"1 -- more of a capitalist welfare state model where state-sponsored social security, health
care, education, and reasonable labor rights are present as a social buffer. This model was presumed
to continue and provide contentment for humanity.
Fukuyama's idealism did not help him pinpoint the fact that capitalism's main aim is increasing profit,
regardless of any other consideration. The welfare state as constructed by the capitalist system was
only a price it was obliged to pay for the prevention of the "communist threat," a model that
promised more social justice, more equality, and more distribution of wealth amongst
people. Therefore, capitalism had to "invest" part of its profits to halt the contagion of a model
promising more social justice. The welfare state was "cheaper" than confronting labor turmoil and
possible revolutions inside capitalist states.
According to the simple law of cause and effect, once the cause is terminated (here the socialist
bloc), capitalism will stop financing the welfare state, it will also abandon the state based on the rule
of law, and an accelerated transformation from the liberal model to the neoliberal model will take
place. This is the objective transformation that Fukuyama failed to see: the capitalist state discarding
its contributions to health care, education (example: proposing constitutional amendments in Greece
to allow private-sector universities, thus provoking student demonstrations in early 2007), and labor
rights (example: amending labor laws in France provoking demonstrations in early 2006, amending
the pension system in France provoking wide strikes at the moment), in addition to fleecing labor in
capitalist states with the labor of the South -- a dual benefit for capitalism: (a) decreasing labor wages
and (b) reformulating the struggle as a labor-labor struggle, Northern labor against Southern labor
instead of all labor against capitalism!
Finally, the single power left on the scene had to invade the world for three main reasons:
1. To gain direct control over global resources and strategic geopolitical locations to prevent
other rising rivals (China, Europe) from threatening its status.
2. To fill in the gaps left by the previous (now eliminated) other superpower.
3. To eliminate any active or anticipated resistance to this project of global hegemony.
This was the final blow to Fukuyama's illusions of eternal stability. Some, astonished, ask: "how on
earth did the 'civilized' world reach this stage?" But the "civilized world" did not reach this stage; it
was already embedded in the organic structure of capitalism, waiting for the right moment in history
to surface.
Fukuyama misread the writing on the wall: history did not end, neither did conflicts, and stability
under capitalism with its neoliberal ideology was not achieved. Therefore, Fukuyama was finally
compelled to admit the failure of his thesis and declare his opposition to the project of the
neoconservatives.
Huntington: Metaphysical Materialism
Huntington had a more materialist basis of discussion, he understood that conflicts within history are
still open, but like Fukuyama, he is metaphysical, and puts forwards a dual speech of delusion and
justification by defining the reason of conflicts as that of inherent characteristics of civilizations.
Huntington's dual ideology forms the most perfect platform for internal and external capitalist
propaganda. Internally, by conceptualizing that imperialist aggression against others is essential and
necessary for the existential preservation of the Judeo-Christian civilization that is threatened by the
savages. And externally, by deforming the struggle over resources and geopolitics (a materialist
struggle) into another, based on religions and civilizations (a metaphysical struggle).
How can we better understand Huntington's dual delusion?
The Internal Delusion
The clash of civilizations thesis portrays an imminent danger threatening the people of the
North. This danger must be confronted and crushed at the source, in its place, before it expands and
reaches "us." This danger is not about marginal details; on the contrary, it is total, encompassing all
aspects of life-as-we-know-it. It is a danger against civilization itself, in its essence. Therefore, the
battle against it is about life and death, it is a battle of life and death. In this way, the "Empire of Evil"
(Reagan's classic Cold War coinage) is reproduced in a more abstract manner. It is the ideal enemy of
neoliberal capitalism: ghostly, never to be caught, destroyed, or precisely-defined and hence highly
malleable.
In addition, the racist content of Huntington's theory (which stirs a deep subconscious chord
resonating in the "white" populations of the North) must not be underestimated as it puts the
"civilized whites" (Americans and Europeans) against the "colored savages" -- Arabs, Africans,
Chinese, and peoples of Southeast Asia. The racist discourse springs from the recent colonialist past
of capitalism and from the much more distant Hellenic racist democracies, where many roots of the
current "democracies" in the North lie buried. This racist string is still "active" and expresses itself in
silent forms: The previously mentioned 2006 demonstrations against labor laws in France attracted
huge support from the progressive scene in Europe, whereas the protests of the suburbs that swept
France months earlier (autumn 2005) did not attract such a support. Why? The labor law
demonstrations were "white" while the suburb protests were "colored."
The External Delusion
Misleading the people under attack is the other important aspect of Huntington's "clash of
civilizations," redefining the nature of the clash from an attack for the control of markets, resources,
cheap labor and resources, to a "crusade," a religious war, a war on Islam, a war of "civilizations" --
from a materialist act to metaphysical expression.
By the end of 2001, after the September 11 attacks, in an article published in Newsweek, Huntington
formulated a stunning title for the new millennium: "The Age of Muslim Wars,"2 while Fukuyama
writing in the same issue and in the same direction, penned a piece entitled "Today's New Fascists,"3
a phrase that found its way to George W. Bush in 2006.
It is worth noting the actual impossibility of distinguishing between what is related to "civilization"
and what is related to "religion" in both the Arab mainstream intellect and Huntington's speech
alike! As oppressed people, many succumbed to this game and adopted the same propaganda
speech marketed by the neoliberals. Many in the Arab and Muslim worlds (both intellectuals and
commons) say that "there is a war on Islam," exactly like Huntington says. Political Islam currents
have become very fond of this thesis because it attracts more people to sympathize with them as
being under attack. The words of George W. Bush about his crusades in Iraq and his frequent
encounters with God became more attached to memory than the actual deeds of stealing Iraqi oil,
taking over infrastructure projects by corporate behemoths (like Bechtel), and the iron defense the
US gave to the Iraqi Oil Ministry while leaving the entire country (with all its administrations,
universities, and museums) open for looting. All of the latter becomes "senseless" in the context of
Bush's war on Islam.
It is much too simple to prove the US neoliberals never came as Christian missionaries, nor did they
come as the prophets of modernity (Both Huntington and Fukuyama portray Islam as being
contradictory to modernity). The massive armies that landed in Iraq were not followed by
missionaries for Christianity or modernity. They were followed by corporate business people. The
US actions prove the lies of their propaganda: killings, destruction, torture, and rape prove the lie of
freedom, democracy, and human rights; while support for sectarianism and ethnicism proves the lie
of modernity.
Falsifying the struggle, and deluding the oppressed by making them adopt the neoliberal propaganda
as a true strategy, will result in generating resistance mechanisms that are incapable of
accomplishing victory against the aggression, because, on the one hand, they will be fighting an
illusion -- a propaganda ghost diverting attention away from the objective basis of the struggle -- and,
on the other hand, they will be contributing to the empowerment of imperialism and its propaganda
by their reverse adoption of it: the two contradictions are present together in objective unity and
illusory struggle.
Is Islam a Target of Imperialism?
Islam is not a target on its own. The true targets are resources, markets, wealth, and sensitive
locations from a geopolitical perspective. Whatever obstacles there were on the way to acquiring
these targets, they are to be crushed. The Communist Party of the Philippines, FARC in Colombia, the
current governments of Cuba, Venezuela, and Bolivia, all of those are non-Muslim, but they are
attacked fiercely by US imperialism because they are an obstacle on the way to dominating
resources, markets, and wealth.
Imperialist handling of each obstacle is governed by many conditions related to the size of the
wealth/market/resources in question, the geopolitical context, and the magnitude of the existing or
expected resistance. The presence of huge oil and gas reserves, its "unequalled strategic position,"
and the presence of potential centers that could break free from US global domination and comprise
relatively independent centers (Nasser's Egypt, Saddam's Iraq, post-revolution Iran) -- all these
factors made the territory from the Arab East to Central Asia the favorite "arc of crisis" (or "crescent
of crisis" if you want to give it a religious dimension!) and the main field of operations. The fact that
most of this region's inhabitants are Muslims does not mean that there is a true religious origin to
the intervention!
Another point: Africa, an entire continent, is still being exploited for its wealth in oil, diamonds, and
other resources; its people are being slain by the hundreds of thousands on a daily basis by "civil"
war, famine, AIDS, malaria, and direct military intervention, atrocities that are much larger in
quantity than what goes on against Arabs and Muslims. But since they have the privilege of being
completely absent from the media outlets, they don't exist! Is the African example a war on
Islam? Africa is one clear example that the religious wars are only fairytales.
A third point: imperialism has no problem with Islam. Even Huntington says: "The age of Muslim
wars has its roots in more general causes. These do not include the inherent nature of Islamic
doctrine and beliefs, which, like those of Christianity, adherents can use to justify peace or war as
they wish."4 Fukuyama goes even further: "There is some hope that a more liberal strand of Islam will
emerge. . . . Muslims interested in a more liberal form of Islam must stop blaming the West for
painting Islam with too broad a brush, and move themselves to isolate and delegitimate the
extremists among them."5 It is clear that the problem is not Islam, but a resistant Islam, and, to be
more specific, the problem is solely the "resistant" part, since any other formula of Islam is
acceptable.
The Other Side of the Coin: Interfaith Dialogue
The division based on religion is a delusional division. A Muslim Arab is like a Christian Arab, they are
either part of strata that are connected to imperialism and its interests, or part of the exploited and
oppressed population. Religion has no relation here or causal relevance. Therefore, the notion of an
interfaith dialogue is just as delusional as that of a clash of civilizations. Two points prove this:
First, an interfaith dialogue postulates dispute as the normal starting point -- otherwise there
would've been no dialogue in the first place! This way, it positions people from the start as
antagonists.
Second, it diagnoses the current struggles as religion-based and therefore conflicts that can be solved
or diluted by a dialogue of religions, totally disregarding the objective basis (hegemony, exploitation,
occupation, etc.).
The main issue is not that of a Muslim, Christian, Jew, or non-believer. The issue is that there is an
oppression and exploitation that must be confronted. In this context, a Jew who calls for the
elimination of the Zionist entity "Israel" is an ally, whereas a Muslim who establishes relations with it
is an enemy.
Interfaith dialogue is another attempt to divert attention away from the main contradictions with
imperialism and its real aims.
Conclusion: Always a Clear Vision
The aim of imperialism is to depredate, dominate, and exploit. On the way to accomplishing these
aims, it wants to crush any resistance, regardless of its form and ideological content.
The rhetoric about a "clash of civilizations" arose after the fall of the Soviet Union and the socialist
bloc because the US needed to move to fill the gaps created by the absence of a second global
power. This movement took three forms: internal (restrictive and repressive laws that targeted
freedoms and social benefits), towards the East (expansion into Central and Eastern Europe and the
ex-Soviet republics), and towards the South (Arab region and Central Asia). It was the latter that
showed a more fierce resistance due to the historical roots of the struggle.
The struggle against imperialism is a multidimensional class struggle. Religious subterfuges are either
tools to buy time (interfaith dialogue) or tools that strengthen the imperialist project and weaken its
opponents (clash of civilizations).

1 Francis Fukuyama, "Their Target: The Modern World," Newsweek, December 2001-February 2002 (Special Davos
Edition), p. 60.
2 Samuel Huntington, "The Age of Muslim Wars," Newsweek, December 2001-February 2002 (Special Davos Edition), pp. 6-
13.
3 See the cover title of Fukuyama's article in Newsweek, mentioned above.
4 Ibid, page 9.
5 Ibid, page 63.