There are echoes of pre-revolutionary Iran in the wider Middle East |
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Soumaya GhannoushiThe Guardian, Friday 13 February
Ripe for revolution
A blinkered west has created conditions in the Middle East that mirror those of late 1970s Iran Thirty years ago the world awoke to a great volcanic eruption in Iran that transformed the country's face and sent tremors across the globe. A mass movement of popular protest had succeeded in doing what few had thought possible. The Shah's heavily fortified regime was no more - a mere chapter in the country's long past.
For all the religious euphoria that has marked the revolution, its root causes are in reality more sociopolitical than theological. After all, theology cannot create revolution if its conditions are not seething in society's gut and within its political forces. The vast wells of popular anger that erupted at the end of the 1970s were fed by grievances that had been building for years. At the forefront of these was the corruption and despotism of the Shah and his regime; the widening circle of sociocultural marginalisation, fuelled by pseudo-modernisation; and the regime's acquiescence to foreign interventions, particularly from the US.
There is much about this pre-revolutionary Iranian scene that would appear familiar to the observer of the wider Middle East today. While the region's modern history has been mired in a string of crises associated with a fragile post-colonial state, its ills have been further aggravated by the erosion of legitimacy that has accompanied the last few decades. Its first source - national liberation - faded with the departure of the independence generation, and the rise to power of a new breed of colourless technocrats and generals.
And as the promises of development and progress vanished into the smoke of the shanty towns, the Arab state lost its last refuge from its citizens. Stripped of all cover, it degenerated into a terrifying oppression machine. The more depleted its legitimacy, the greater it relied on the police, internal intelligence apparatuses, and on the support of foreign patrons - much like the Shah. Most Arab regimes would not survive without the perpetual use of violence against their citizens and opponents - aided and abetted by their "friends" and allies.
Egypt may represent the clearest manifestation of this state of affairs. For the last decade, its 80-year-old president has been preoccupied with ensuring the accession of his son, Gamal, to the throne of the republic. In the meantime, his country, the most populous in the Arab world, sinks deeper into degeneracy, with receding regional influence, rampant corruption, and millions teetering on the verge of starvation.
What we have before us is a deadly recipe for explosion. By the 1990s, with the collapse of communism and Bush Sr's attack on Iraq, most Arab regimes had reached their sell-by date. Thanks to their "business as usual" Euro-American allies, their expired lives were extended. But one cannot see how they can escape mortality much longer, amid a sea of crises and surging popular anger.
Of course, this is not to say that the Iranian scenario will be replicated in Egypt - or other Arab countries - or that another Khomeini will soon emerge. History does not repeat itself. What is doubtless though is that many components of the Iranian dynamite are today raging beneath the surface of imposed "stability", especially as new sociopolitical forces are entering the stage on the ruins of the discredited official elite.
Four months before the Shah was forced to flee, the CIA issued a report describing his regime as stable. The shah, it predicted, "is expected to remain actively in power over the next ten years". Things haven't changed much since. The same state of wilful oblivion is still in play. Blinded by short-term interests, western governments insist on seeing things in the region as they want, not as they are. In truth, they are the real makers of revolution in the Middle East.
• Soumaya Ghannoushi's book on the directions of political Islam will be published later this year
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Soumaya Ghannoushi: There are echoes of pre-revolutionary Iran in the wider Middle East
Good starter for discussion, and basically correct.
I would like to see more detail on the prerevolutionary vs revolutionary situations today though.
In relation to 1979 conditions are far more fragile throughout the Middle-East. In the pressure-cookers of Egypt and Pakistan in particular.
What happened in Iran was the combined revolt of the urban left and workers, whose main political leadership was Tudeh (Euro-Communists, neo-Stalinists) who didn't go for power, and the rural poor, led by the mullahs, who did go for power. The rural poor fell to the mullahs cos the Tudeh ignored them (cf the progressive urban regime in Afghanistan under USSR protection, which also ignored the rural poor). The Tudeh, given revolutionary, class-independent leadership (not fawning on the bourgeoisie with rotten Popular Front ideas, handed the revolution to the Mullahs by default, and paid the price.
A similar process is likely in Pakistan today. The US is pursuing a divide and rule policy to split the country into mutually hostile regions, and is violating Pakistani airspace every day - in fact such violation was one of O'Bamas first orders. Pakistan is not just seething (as is the case in Egypt) but is about to boil over. Since the voluble left is even blinder and thicker than it was in Iran, power will once more pass to fundamentalist extremists by default. End of story in Afghanistan for the imperialists, and a huge boost to Iran to stand up to the US once more. A boost for independence forces in Iraq too. And a model for the enraged masses in Egypt and the oppressed in Saudi-Arabia. God knows what the effects would be on India or Israel or Turkey - just to take a few states in the immediate vicinity of such a development.
The current lick-spittle pro-imperialist regimes in Egypt, Pakistan and Saudi would be missed as little as the Shah in Iran in 1980 or the Tsar in Russia back in 1918. Drowned without trace in the cesspool of history.
And the US (along with its lickspittle co-imperialists) would suddenly find it had lost an arm and a leg in one of its most important and resource-rich bridge-heads/enclaves in the world. Roughly comparable to the loss of the Subcontinent by British imperialism after WW2.
These are huge geo-political changes waiting to happen, and the result will not depend on US military might but on the internal struggles between progressive urban working-class forces (all the others having sold out to imperialism) and reactionary rural "religious" forces, and which of them is hungriest for power. The internal struggles that will break out, that is, when the immediate joint objective of removing the alien oppressors has been achieved.
Just sit back and watch - it'll all be on TV, and now you know what's gonna happen and how to interpret the nonsense that our pundits will be spouting when it does happen.
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