2024 In Review: Open Diary

MANY YEARS AGO, at the height of the Arab Spring and the mass demonstra­tions that led to the downfall of Egypt’s strongman Hosni Mubarak, I read a piece in The Spectator which may not have passed muster today. The brilliant writer, whose name I unfortunately cannot recall, was having a dig at the sudden mushrooming of contemporary Egyptologists at dinner parties. The competition, hesuggested, was not merely between those who could pronounce Tahrir Square, or, rather, El-Tahrir Square, with the right guttural intonation, but those who knew the names of the streets that were adjoining the Square.

Apart from the two large tapestries that were purchased from vendors along the Suez Canal by my maternal grand­father in the late-1930s and which hang prominently in my sitting room in Kolkata, my connection with Egypt is rather tenuous. Like most tourists, I have visited the Egyptian collections in the British Museum, at the Met in New York and at the museum in Vienna but, alas, the connections between the culture of the Pharaohs and those who swore allegiance to the Muslim Brotherhood are rather tenuous. The emotional connect that some Egyptians have with their glorious past and the biggest source of tourism revenue would have been strictly notional had President El-Sisi not engi­neered an army coup in 2014 to extricate Egypt from the post-Mubarak mess and possible descent to Islamist chaos.

Most of us used to snigger and even fulminate against the dictators in North Africa and the Middle East.

The one and only Colonel Gaddafi with his retinue of female body­guards was perceived as half a joker and half a global menace. He was also the source of patron­age for different revolutionary groups, some of whom were cranks and others dangerous killers.

Then there were the regimes in Iraq and Syria. Ideologically, they claimed to be Baathists, which suggested they were for Arab unity to decimate both Israel and their opponents within the country. There was an Iraqi student I knew in London in the late-1970s. He was like any other student in every respect, except for the fact that he was absolutely petrified of fellow Iraqis. He suspected most of them of being informers.

The Iranian students in the days when the Shah was in power were, almost without exception, opponents of the regime. Some used to express their hostility quite vocally but most of the others kept their misgivings under wraps.  They were all afraid of the Savak, the Shah’s dreaded secret police that had a reputation for both efficiency and ruthlessness.

On December 7, from the vantage point of my club which is located just off Oxford Street in London, I observed many hundreds of excitable Syrians—almost invariably all male—walk through the bitter cold waving their country’s flag. They were accompanied by cars blaring their horns incessantly and filled with people who didn’t seem to be capable of any gainful employment. They were celebrating the collapse of the Assad regime in Syria, the regime, many of those who were inter­viewed on TV seemed to suggest, that had made them refugees in Europe.

Like the Iranian students who cel­ebrated the departure of the Shah from Tehran in 1979 with unconcealed glee, the joy of Syrian exiles in Europe at the fall of the Assad regime was telecast all over the world by the likes of BBC, CNN and Al Jazeera. The celebration of the ex­iles was given a booster dose by the tribe of the Middle East experts in the media and stationed in umpteen research institutes and think-tanks. Almost all of them tried to put a gloss over the ‘rebels’

that had emerged from thin air and swept away the Assad regime. After the first day of prevarication when Aleppo fell, the name Hayat Tahrir al-Shams (HTS) began to emerge. The uninitiated—and that included me—were informed that this was a splinter group from the Al-Qaeda and had been listed by the US (which enjoys its reputation as a certify­ing authority) as a terrorist organisation. Its leader Abu Mohammed al-Jolani even had a price on his head.

These revelations would have suggested that the ophthalmologist Bashar al-Assad had, in fact, been overthrown by an Islamist rebel army. In short, the clear suggestion was that the world was witnessing a replay of what happened in Afghanistan once the people of the US had left it to President Joe Biden to fulfil its obligation to play policeman to the world.

Such a narrative didn’t quite suit the narrative of the Western media organisations. Having labelled Assad a villain who was acting at the behest of President Vladimir Putin of Russia and Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei of Iran, it was always going to be difficult to suggest that there was a new bearded wonder who was potentially worse than the dynastic autocrats. Consequently, the narrative has been reshaped.

First, it is being argued that the Syrian events should occasion immense satisfaction to the West because it has given a bloody nose to President Putin. Since Syria was Russia’s biggest ally in the region—and the place Assad had to flee to prevent being lynched by his en­emies—the regime change is a big defeat for Russia. In the heyday of the Soviet Union, Moscow exercised a controlling influence over the pro-socialist regimes in Egypt, Syria, Iraq, and Libya. Today, with the fall of the regime in Syria, Russia is practically friendless in the region, un­less one counts the remnants of the Pal­estinian Fatah organisation, still clinging precariously to the fast-disappearing remains of Yasser Arafat’s Palestinian patch in the West Bank. Likewise, the regime in Iran has lost one of its most trusted Shia outposts in the neighbour­hood. The new Sunni rulers are unlikely to be too kindly disposed to the minority Alawis who have tasted power through the Assad family for nearly five decades.

Second, just as the re-conquest of Afghanistan by the Taliban was accom­panied by the self-serving narrative that this Islamist regime was different from the one presided over by Mullah Omar, the fall of Damascus generated the propaganda that HTS and its leadership had struck a moderate tune. It is being said that the new regime wants to bring all Syrians together, including liberals, Christians, Kurds and the Alawis. The only community I found missing from the list was women. That was significant because in the past five decades, under both the Assads, Syrian women had made great strides forward. There were hardly any women in the cheering crowds that greeted the rebel soldiers firing jubilantly in the air.

Let’s hope I am wrong, and the BBC experts are right. However, beginning with the Iranian revolution of 1979, experience shows that the replacement of the dictators, who spouted pan-Arab, Nasserite and socialist rhetoric, by the Islamists has invariably led to the creation of socially regressive regimes. The women in Iran have risen up in revolt against the compulsory wearing of hijab, for which they have been merci­lessly persecuted. Let’s hope that this doesn’t happen in Syria.

There is a grim reality that we must face up to. Democracy, as we know it in India and the West, invariably degener­ates into chaos and anarchy, as happened in the aftermath of the Arab Spring. There is a highly regulated Islamic de­mocracy, akin to the socialist democracy that once existed in eastern Europe, that prevails in Iran, and where each presi­dential election brings out fables about a ‘moderate’ triumph. In places such as Afghanistan, the pretence of democracy has been shed and it is the rule of the mullahs in alliance with the military. Chaos has been averted in places such as Egypt, the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia. What is common to all the three is that the guiding principle of government is enlightened autocracy, a system that the Islamic world seems to prefer. It is not for me to speculate over the linkages (real or perceived) between Islamic theology and autocracy, but clearly there must be something. Is it just a mere coincidence that the only de­mocracy—however flawed and illiberal as its critics claim—in the Middle East is Israel, a Jewish enclave in an Islam-dominated zone?

Hosni Mubarak, Saddam Hussein, and the Assad family have been pilloried for their high-handedness, tyranny and unresponsiveness to democratic impulses. The claims are all true and they would have failed every test set for them by the high priests of uprightness in the European Union. However, what also bound the three and, for that matter, Sheikh Hasina in our neighbourhood, was the realisation that unless Islamism is somehow kept in check, it will come to unleash civil strife and conflict. Neither Iran’s Reza Shah Pahlavi nor the recently exiled Bashar al-Assad were personifications of goodness. But they weren’t model examples of badness. They merely navigated their way through illiberal societies and undemo­cratic civilisations with medieval brutal­ity, using fear as deterrence.

I can’t judge how their rule benefit­ted their countries, but they certainly helped make the world a less dangerous place. As we enter 2025, the clash of civilisations Samuel Huntington wrote about, is becoming a near certainty.

Abu Mohammed al-JolaniArab SpringDamascusgeopoliticsHosni MubarakSaddam HusseinSyria