from “Il Programma Comunista” no. 6, 1958

This is not the first time we have dealt with the causes of the Arab split. Above all, we must remind the reader of the article ‘The Chimera of Arab Unification through Pacts between States’, which we published in this paper last year, in no 10. A few days before the anti-monarchist movement in Jordan had ended in bloodshed. We all remember the unfolding of those events. The success achieved by the Amman despot, supported by the U.S. VI. Fleet and the desert tribes against the Egyptian-backed Pan-Arabic movement not only marked a turning point in Jordan’s internal politics, as it caused an open split between the Arab monarchies (Jordan and, with it, Iraq and Saudi Arabia) and the republics leading the Nasserist agitation within Islam (Egypt and Syria).

 

The Latest Split

 

The split determined at the time of the Jordanian crisis became fully apparent in recent days with the proclamation of the United Arab Republic federating Egypt and Syria. And it was immediately countered by the Arab Federation that arose from the union of Iraq and Jordan. For those who follow events in the Middle East, new constitutional inventions are not unexpected. They serve to confirm that the Arab split continues more bitter and ruthless than ever.

Arab unification through pacts between states continues to be a vain chimera. To put it into practice it must change direction; it cannot rely on changes in the existing established order, but on the contrary on its total overthrow. That is, it must follow the revolutionary path.

The important question is to see which political movement is up to taking on the tremendous task of leading the Arab revolution. But we cannot, at least for now, deal with it, as first of all it is necessary to study the historical causes that have prevented the state unification of the Arabic-speaking peoples of Asia and Africa from being achieved.

In these few lines we do not claim to have exhausted such a daunting task, or even to have set out a complete plan of it, but only to have dealt, and not even in a definitive manner, with the considerable problems that are connected with it.

First of all, how should the question be posed? We think it can only be put in these terms: “What historical factors prevent the formation of an Arab nation-state, by fostering the perpetuation of the nefarious sub-nationalism of today’s artificial Arab states, and acting against the unifying tendencies that flow from the commonality of language, racial origin and traditions that distinguish the peoples inhabiting North Africa, from Morocco to Egypt, and West Asia, from the Sinai Peninsula to the Persian Gulf?”

Those who believe they can answer this question by tracing all of the causes of the split which is tearing the so-called Arab world apart to capitalist imperialism give an incomplete view of the phenomenon. And one can well understand why, if one considers that the division and “balkanization” of the Arab nation occurred long before imperialism arose. Indeed, the ancient tribes that burst out of Arabia further to Muhammad’s social religious revolution and conquered their present locations in Asia and Africa didn’t to all practical purposes form a nation in spite of the ties of blood and culture. Only for a short time did the Caliphate succeed in imposing the authority of a central power over the vast Islamic empire. To say, therefore, that the division of the Arabs is an effect of imperialistic domination is not accurate. Instead, it is true that imperialistic domination has been able to pursue its ends precisely by exploiting the powerful historical factors which, since the 10th century, have prevented the unification of the Arabs.

In other words, in order to explain the immediate cause of the Arabs’ subjection to capitalist imperialism, we must have recourse to the infighting which manifested in the existence of numerous Arab states and statelets, which were different in size but equally powerless when it came to escaping the grip of imperialist exploitation and oppression. But to explain the disunity only by imperialist intervention would be to incur a tautology. In fact, the causes of Arab division are intimately linked to the epic Muslim conquest itself.

The Past Cycle

Islam, codified in the Quran, was the ideology of the social revolution of the nomadic desert peoples, as dedicated to cattle breeding in normal times as to the exercise of raiding, who rose up against the powerful mercantile oligarchy prevailing in Mecca. Cattle herders—the Bedouins—and small farmers constituted, at the time of Muhammad’s preaching, the overwhelming majority of the inhabitants of the Arabian Peninsula. Over them stood the class domination of the merchants of Mecca, who monopolized the maritime trade across the Red Sea and the caravan transports linking the hinterland with the ports on the coast, when they were not directly operating the junction of the overland route, along Sinai, with the trade currents from Europe and Asia. In their hands was concentrated all wealth, not excluding foodstuffs, which the nomadic tribes, when drought decimated their herds, were forced to buy at exorbitant prices. A not uncommon instance in the history of revolutions, Muhammad was a ‘fugitive’ from the ruling class who had passed into the revolutionary camp, having been—until the Hegira—a wealthy merchant of the powerful Quraysh tribe.

Because of the special historical conditions under which it took place, the Mohammedan revolution could only be an application on a collective scale of the Bedouin raid, that is, of a lower form of wealth expropriation. The Islamic “holy war” was originally a social war against usury and the arrogance of wealth. But the revolution, having emerged victorious from the social war, could only achieve its aims on condition it transformed itself into an agrarian feudalism, as the barbarian conquerors who had overthrown the Roman Empire had done in Europe. To this the natural conditions of the country themselves were opposed, much of it being desert. In the history of Islam, the desert plays a role of primary importance, which proves that it is material conditions that “shape the destinies” of peoples, as some like to express it.

The revolution that had ignited civil war among the Arabs didn’t come to a standstill after the Islamic hosts had conquered and unified, under the leadership of the “Prophet”, their atavistic homeland—Arabia. Since it could not achieve its aims internally, as many still remained, first-time revolutionary fighters and new converts, who were excluded from the spoils, it was obliged to smash the borders of the neighboring states. Thus, the Mohammedan “holy war” took on under his successors—the Caliphs—the forms of a barbarian invasion, which was impetuous and irresistible because along its path its ranks were swelled with all the oppressed and exploited. These converted enthusiastically to the new religion, an inflammatory revolutionary ideology that appealed to the humble and the poor and repelled with apocalyptic curses the rich and the usurers. It was not very long before the tremendous social eruption had invaded and submerged the two great Empires which in the East traditionally perpetuated, against the “barbarians”, the function formerly performed by Rome in the West, namely the Byzantine Empire and the Sassanid Persian Empire. True “prisons of peoples” and centers of the most refined forms of class domination, they opposed Muslim conquest in vain. They are a formidable example of how mighty and ancient, but conservative, states can be bent by other states of recent or even nascent formation, made invincible by the revolutionary fury that drives them!

In just a few years, from 632, the date of Muhammad’s death, to 720, the Muslim conquest extended across an immense territory. From the Sind (the southeastern region of present-day Pakistan) it extended to beyond the Pyrenees. The Persian Sassanid empire had been destroyed by it, the Byzantine empire enormously mutilated. Asia Minor, Syria, Palestine, Roman Egypt, the Maghreb were lost to Byzantium. The Visigoth monarchy of Spain was wiped out and vanished into thin air, the centuries-old Sassanid empire, encompassing present-day Iraq and Iran as far as Amu-Daria, was thunderously collapsing, and its ancient cities, such as Baghdad, were becoming the centers of the new civilization of the Quran. An immense revolution was transforming the world. All the more surprising, reflecting on this, appears the inability of the Arabs, magnificent conquerors, to create a nation-state for themselves.

In this respect the Arabs perhaps represent a unique case among conquering peoples. The Mongols, for example, succeeded in founding empires much larger than the Muslim one, but they didn’t occupy the territories they had conquered for long, eventually withdrawing to their original homeland or remaining ethnically absorbed by the native populations. The Arabs, on the other hand, managed to superimpose themselves on the subjugated populations, indeed, to turn the conquered territories into their homeland; but they failed utterly in their attempt to overcome their barbaric particularism and give themselves a unified political government, a nation-state. This would enormously delay, as we can see today, the historical development of Africa and the Middle East.

To tell the truth, there was a time when it seemed that the unitary tendency would necessarily prevail in the incandescent Islamic world, the era, that is, which saw the Caliphate pass into the hands of the dynasty of the Umayyads (660-750). Under them, Islam reached its maximum territorial extent, then began its ineluctable decline.

The Umayyads, diverging somewhat from Quranic political orthodoxy, attempted to liquidate separatism, deeply rooted in the traditions of a people who had wandered for centuries in the desert knowing no other form of social coexistence than the nomadic tribe, unamenable to any form of constraint other than that exerted by the forces of nature. It was an experiment barely sketched out. The grand political design of a national, absolutist and hereditary monarchy, resting on a military and civil bureaucracy that would ensure that the center of power would have regular control over the vast empire, was to fail miserably. The forces of atavistic Bedouin anarchism were to prevail over the centralizing and national tendencies. Primitive tribal communalism, collectivist within and anarchic without, had enabled the desert nomads, herders of sheep and camels and relentless raiders of caravans and peasant villages, to overwhelm the merchant aristocracy of Mecca. It had provided the sustenance of fanatical faith and fabulous courage to the Mohammedan revolution. But it operated negatively when, after the Islamic militias had exited Arabia and conquered the immense empire, it was a matter of giving it a political structure that would ensure its continuity.

Some may marvel that we attribute to primitive Bedouin communism a certain negative influence. But for Marxists, communism is not an idol to which one can only sing hymns of praise. There exists a primitive communism that marks the exit of the human species from the bestial state of its existence, and as such it is a revolution of immeasurable importance, perhaps the greatest of all revolutions. By consociating, the anthropoid became man. What greater homage can Marxism pay to primitive communism? All that exists, and will still exist, between primitive communism and modern communism is, for the Marxist, an infamous but necessary parenthesis in the existence of the species.

The ruinous split between Shiites and Sunnis, that is, between the old guard of Islam that had accompanied the Prophet in his emigration (the Hegira) from Mecca to Medina and the innovators, was to cause the final collapse of the still fragile structures of the Arab nation-state. The Abbasid dynasty that seized the Caliphate in 745, driving out the Umayyads, was soon reduced to the rank of those feudal monarchies which the overbearing power and remoteness of the feudal lords empties of any effective authority. The Caliph was reduced to the rank of a mere head of the Islamic religion, almost devoid of temporal power. The dismemberment of the empire was rapid and irreparable. As early as a few years after the dynastic upheaval, the Umayyad exiles who had escaped the vengeance of the winning party took refuge in Hispania and founded an independent emirate there. Later, the Maghreb and Egypt also became virtually independent of the Baghdad government. By the turn of the century, the involution was complete. The Caliphate had been reduced to ruling over, and not even directly, Iraq alone; Islam was divided among numerous more or less independent dynasties; the Arab nation-state appeared less than a dream.

The lack of an Arab nation-state fashioned after the national monarchies that were being formed in Europe had historical consequences of colossal importance. It is easy to think that a firmly constructed Arab nation-state could have prevented the victories pulled off by the Crusades. Was it not after all from that era that Europe was opposed to it, and acquired supremacy over Africa? And if we consider that the blows inflicted on Arab power by the Crusader armies laid the groundwork for the ruinous invasion of the Mongols and, later, for the Ottoman conquest, we have a complete picture of the negative repercussions that the Arabs’ failed unification had on the history of three continents.

Wishing to leave the field of conjecture and staying on historical terrain, a conclusion emerges, from the study of the historical cycle of the Arabs, that may seem almost obvious. Because of their inability to establish a nation-state, the Arabs turned from being conquerors to conquered, and were cut off from historical progress, that is, condemned to remain at the bottom end of feudalism while the states of Europe were preparing to emerge from it forever and thereby acquire world supremacy.

We can now easily explain the historical causes of the fall of the Arabs under the yoke of imperialistic domination. We know, that is, that two orders of causes contribute to maintaining the Arabs’ present state of disunity and powerless, which is the condition for the perpetuation of imperialist exploitation: the centuries-old conservative traditions within, and the foreign interference from without ***. What does this mean politically? It means that the Arab world must take upon itself the tremendous task of a twofold struggle: social revolution and national revolution, revolt against the reactionary classes that hand down outdated traditions and against the foreign occupiers. Only victory achieved in in both these camps can ensure the triumph of Arab unity from the Atlantic Ocean to the Persian Gulf.

 

The Game of Imperialism

By following the path already taken, the “balkanization” of the Arabs will reach its extreme consequences. The Arabs will wall themselves off more and more within prefabricated states, that is, states manufactured by imperialism and its agents, states poisoned by a depressing squalor, disheartened by insurmountable impotence, and which will consume their futile existence in infighting. At present who knows how many inter-Arab blocs there are. It now looks like the two rival federations vying for the accessions of the other states (the Syrian-Egyptians managed to get Yemen’s vote, the Iraqi-Jordanians are still at the stage of courting the Persian Gulf sultanates), might be joined—and opposed!—by the Maghreb Federation, advocated by Muhammad V and Bourguiba, which is expected to include Morocco, Tunisia and Algeria when the latter gains independence. But it is already known from Bourguiba’s anti-Nasserist speeches that the planned federation is oriented in favor of the West and against pan-Arabism. Then there are to be counted the double-dealing states such as Saudi Arabia, Lebanon, and Libya that have one smile for the Arab League (why on earth do are they still keeping it going?) and two smiles for the State Department.

But imperialism does not sleep soundly. The alarmed invocations of the “Russian danger”, the novelizations of “Russian infiltration” in the Middle East and Maghreb serve to hide the real fear. What the European bourgeoisies, and with them U.S. imperialism, really fear is the Arab unification movement making real progress. Think of the enormous consequences that the formation of an Arab unitary state would entail? It would mark the end of colonialist domination in the whole of Africa, not just in Arab Africa, but also in the rest of the continent inhabited by peoples of the black race, riddled with profound tremors of revolt. The myths that the ruling class fabricates for itself aim to inculcate in the minds of the oppressed classes the prejudice of the pointlessness of struggling against the existing order. Well, who can measure the gigantic revolutionary impact that the collapse of the myth of the superiority of the white race will have?

Fragmented, divided by ignoble dynastic issues, devoured alive by the bloodsucking foreign capitalist monopolies who willingly cede large slices of the oil profits, entangled in the deadly military alliances of imperialism, the Arab states not only instill no fear in the various imperialisms but serve as pawns in their diabolical game. But what if the Arabs, having overcome their suicidal disunity, succeeded in establishing a nation-state embracing all of the African and Asian territories inhabited by the Arab peoples? Would we have only the awakening of the whole of Africa? No, we would achieve, all of us who militate in the field of communist revolution, much more. We would get to witness the final, irrevocable death sentence of old Europe, of this rotten, corrupt, deadly bourgeois Europe, tainted with reaction and more or less disguised fascism, which for forty years has been the inexhaustible hotbed of imperialist war and counterrevolution.

Therefore, we are for the Arab national revolution. Therefore, we are against the rulers of Arab states who either openly pursue separatist and reactionary aims (the Middle Eastern monarchies) or aim for superficial reformism and collaboration with the West (Bourguiba, Muhammad V). And neither can we, as the Moscow communists do, unconditionally support Nasser’s pan-Arab movement, because there is too much reactionary ballast, despite the vain attempts of clever demagogic trickery to disguise it. The nation-state will not be founded by them. Each one of them likes to pose as a champion of Islam. But their Islamism is to that of Muhammad’s comrades, as the Christianity of the Catholics is to that of the catacomb agitators.