- Smith, Lee.
The Strong Horse.
New York: Doubleday, 2010.
ISBN 978-0-385-51611-2.
-
After the attacks upon the U.S. in September 2001, the author, who had
been working as an editor in New York City, decided to find out for
himself what in the Arab world could provoke such indiscriminate
atrocities. Rather than turn to the works of establishment Middle
East hands or radical apologists for Islamist terror, he pulled up
stakes and moved to Cairo and later Beirut, spending years there
living in the community, meeting people from all walks of life from
doormen, cab drivers, students, intellectuals, clerics, politicians,
artists, celebrities, and more. This book presents his conclusions in
a somewhat unusual form: it is hard to categorise—it's part
travelogue; collection of interviews; survey of history, exploration
of Arab culture, art, and literature; and geopolitical analysis. What
is clear is that this book is a direct assault upon the consensus view
of the Middle East among Western policymakers which, if correct (and
the author is very persuasive indeed) condemns many of the projects of
“democratisation”, “peace processes”, and
integration of the nations of the region into a globalised economy to
failure; it calls for an entirely different approach to the Arab
world, one from which many Western feel-good diplomats and politically
correct politicians will wilt in horror.
In short, Smith concludes that the fundamental assumption of the
program whose roots can be traced from Woodrow Wilson to George
W. Bush—that all people, and Arabs in particular, strive for
individual liberty, self-determination, and a civil society with
democratically elected leaders—is simply false: those are
conditions which have been purchased by Western societies over
centuries at the cost of great bloodshed and suffering by the actions
of heroes. This experience has never occurred in the Arab world,
and consequently its culture is entirely different. One can attempt
to graft the trappings of Western institutions onto an Arab state,
but without a fundamental change in the culture, the graft will not
take and before long things will be just as before.
Let me make clear a point the author stresses. There is not the slightest
intimation in this book that there is some kind of racial or genetic difference
(which are the same thing) between Arabs and Westerners. Indeed, such a
claim can be immediately falsified by the large community of Arabs who
have settled in the West, assimilated themselves to Western culture, and
become successful in all fields of endeavour. But those are Arabs, often
educated in the West, who have rejected the culture in which they
were born, choosing consciously to migrate to a very different culture they
find more congenial to the way they choose to live their lives. What about
those who stay (whether by preference, or due to lack of opportunity to
emigrate)?
No, Arabs are not genetically different in behaviour,
but culture is just as heritable as any physical trait,
and it is here the author says we must look to understand the region.
The essential dynamic of Arab political culture and history, as described
by the 14th century Islamic polymath
Ibn Khaldun, is
that of a strong leader establishing a dynasty or power structure to
which subjects submit, but which becomes effete and feckless over
time, only to eventually be overthrown violently by a stronger force
(often issuing from desert nomads in the Arab experience), which begins
the cycle again. The author (paraphrasing Osama bin Laden) calls this
the “strong horse” theory: Arab populations express allegiance
to the strongest perceived power, and expect changes in governance to come
through violent displacement of a weaker existing order.
When you look at things this way, many puzzles regarding the
Middle East begin to make more sense. First of all, the great success
which imperial powers over the millennia, including the Persian,
Ottoman, French, and British empires, have had in subduing and ruling Arabs
without substantial internal resistance is explained: the empire
was seen as the strong horse and Arab groups accepted subordination
to it. Similarly, the ability of sectarian minorities to rule on
a long-term basis in modern states such as Lebanon, Syria, and
Iraq is explained, as is the great stability of authoritarian
regimes in the region—they usually fall only when deposed by
an external force or by a military coup, not due to popular uprisings.
Rather than presenting a lengthy recapitulation of the arguments in
the book filtered through my own comprehension and prejudices, this time
I invite you to read a comprehensive exposition of the author's arguments
in his own words, in a transcript of a
three
hour interview by Hugh Hewitt. If you're interested in the topics
raised so far, please read the interview and return here for some
closing comments.
Is the author's analysis correct? I don't know—certainly it is
at variance with that of a mass of heavy-hitting intellectuals
who have studied the region for their entire careers and, if correct,
means that much of Western policy toward the Middle East since the
fall of the Ottoman Empire has been at best ill-informed and at
worst tragically destructive. All of the debate about Islam,
fundamentalist Islam, militant Islam, Islamism, Islamofascism,
etc., in Smith's view, misses the entire point. He contends
that Islam has nothing, or next to nothing, to do with the present
conflict. Islam, born in the Arabian desert, simply canonised, with a
few minor changes, a political and social regime already extant in
Arabia for millennia before the Prophet, based squarely on rule by
the strong horse. Islam, then, is not the source of Arab culture, but
a consequence of it, and its global significance is as a
vector which inoculates Arab governance by the strong horse into other
cultures where Islam takes root. The extent to which the Arab culture
is adopted depends upon the strength and nature of the preexisting
local culture into which Islam is introduced: certainly the culture
and politics of Islamic Turkey, Iran, and Indonesia are something very
different from that of Arab nations, and from each other.
The author describes democracy as “a flower, not a root”.
An external strong horse can displace an Arab autocracy and impose
elections, a legislature, and other trappings of democracy, but without
the foundations of the doctrine of natural rights, the rule of law,
civil society, free speech and the tolerance of dissent, freedom of
conscience, and the separation of the domain of the state from the
life of the individual, the result is likely to be “one person,
one vote, one time” and a return to strong horse government as
has been seen so many times in the post-colonial era. Democracy in the
West was the flowering of institutions and traditions a thousand years
in the making, none of which have ever existed in the Arab world.
Those who expect democracy to create those institutions, the author
would argue, suffer from an acute case of inverting causes and
effects.
It's tempting to dismiss Arab culture as described here as
“dysfunctional”, but (if the analysis be correct), I don't
think that's a fair characterisation. Arab governance looks
dysfunctional through the eyes of Westerners who judge it based on the
values their own cultures cherish, but then turnabout's fair play, and
Arabs have many criticisms of the West which are equally well founded
based upon their own values. I'm not going all multicultural
here—there's no question that by almost any objective measure
such as per capita income; industrial and agricultural output;
literacy and education; treatment of women and minorities; public
health and welfare; achievements in science, technology, and the arts;
that the West has drastically outperformed Arab nations, which would
be entirely insignificant in the world economy absent their geological
good fortune to be sitting on top of an ocean of petroleum. But
again, that's applying Western metrics to Arab societies. When Nasser
seized power in Egypt, he burned with a desire to do the will of the
Egyptian people. And like so many people over the millennia who tried
to get something done in Egypt, he quickly discovered that the will of
the people was to be left alone, and the will of the bureaucracy was
to go on shuffling paper as before, counting down to their retirement
as they'd done for centuries. In other words, by their lights, the system
was working and they valued stability over the risks of change.
There is also what might be described as a cultural natural selection
effect in action here. In a largely static authoritarian society, the
ambitious, the risk-takers, and the innovators are disproportionately
prone to emigrate to places which value those attributes, namely the
West. This deprives those who remain of the élite which
might improve the general welfare, resulting in a population even more
content with the status quo.
The deeply pessimistic message of this book is that neither wishful
thinking, soaring rhetoric, global connectivity, precision guided
munitions, nor armies of occupation can do very much to change a culture
whose general way of doing things hasn't changed fundamentally in more
than two millennia. While change may be possible, it certainly isn't
going to happen on anything less than the scale of several
generations, and then only if the cultural transmission belt from
generation to generation can be interrupted. Is this depressing?
Absolutely, but if this is the case, better to come to terms with it
and act accordingly than live in a fantasy world where one's actions
may lead to catastrophe for both the West and the Arab world.
March 2010 