A rchive Date
[ 16-10-2004 ]
Category
[ International Relations ]
sub-Categoy
[ Iraq ]
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[ http://www.bitsonline.net/eqbal/articles_by_eqbal_view.asp?id=78&cid=8
Islam and Politics
Book Review:
Kanan Makiya, Cruelty and Silence:War, Tyranny, Uprising, and the Arab World
[The Nation, 9 August 1993]
CRUELTY AND SILENCE: War, Tyranny, Uprising, and the Arab World. By Kanan Makiya. Norton. 367 pp. $22.95
Kanan Makiya's 1989 book Republic of Fear was published under the pseudonym Samir al-Khalil. This expose of Saddam Hussein's tyranny became a best seller during the Gulf crisis. In March 1991, after the cease-fire and during the uprisings in northern and southern Iraq, al-Khalil came out as Kanan Makiya at a suspenseful Harvard symposium and called upon the allied forces to "march into Baghdad" and remake Iraq on the model of Germany and Japan after World War II. In Cruelty and Silence he vents his fury at those intellectuals who did not back his call.
Makiya's Gulf War celebrity is partly rejected in the reception accorded his new book. A.M. Rosenthal devoted an essay in The New York Times (April 13) to "a new Norton book by Kanan Makiya, an Iraqi writer who speaks for freedom."
In The Wail Street Journal (April 7) Geraldine Brooks declared it "one of the most important books ever written on the state of the modern Middle East."
Rosenthal drew from the book a familiar conclusion: "No matter how much land Israelis surrender for peace, the next day they will wake up surrounded by regimes that survive by hate and sword."
No author can be held responsible for the uses to which his book is put. Nor should one's analysis be determined by the fact that adversaries may exploit it. In a letter to the Times, Makiya protested the unseemly advantage Rosenthal took of his critique of contemporary Arab politics. Cruelty and Silence nevertheless feeds anti-Arab and anti-Muslim hate-mongers in a way that is unhelpful to Makiya's stated mission of bringing a democratic order to the Arab world.
Three themes intersect in this book: witness, interpretation and indictment.
The witnesses provide narratives of the numbing brutalities that Saddam Hussein's regime has been inflicting on Iraq's people, in a sort of sequel to Republic of Fear. Intermingled with these accounts are analyses of the roots of tyranny and its various manifestations in the Arab world. A large portion of his book is given to indicting those Arab intellectuals whom Makiya deems responsible - through their silence and worse - for sustaining tyrants like Saddam Hussein.
The Gulf War opened up parts of Iraq to international media and human rights organizations. We now know more about the Iraqi regime's inhumanities, which increased toward the end of the Iran-Iraq war and during the popular uprisings in the spring of 1991. Makiya begins with an account of Iraqi atrocities in Kuwait, then focuses on the Kurdish north, which he visited for three weeks in November 1991 as part of a BBC-TV team, and the Shiite south. The horrors are recounted by witnesses, almost all of whom are educated men interviewed in Britain and the United States.
Makiya dilutes their narrative by inserting, much too frequently, his own interpretations and polemics. He rarely lets facts and witnesses speak for themselves. Makiya is also an eagerly credulous, and therefore unreliable, reporter. He reports as fact whatever he is told about Iraqi behavior, no matter how incongruous the story, find without verifying, proceeds to generalize from it. Some Iraqi soldiers bivouacked in the luxurious house of his first witness, a member of the Kuwaiti royal family. The intruders supposedly roasted a lamb on the second floor, where presumably there was no kitchen. They ate the lamb in the living room on the ground floor of the house, which had "numerous toilets", nevertheless they defecated around its half-eaten carcass, leaving behind the remnants of both food and feces. Makiya and the prince go on at some length about this fantastic image.
Iraqis committed worse crimes in Kuwait. But this story is not credible.
Particularly since the Gulf War, bigoted myths about both Iraqi and Kuwaiti behavior abound. Could this be one of them, or even a product of his witness's obviously fertile imagination? To explain the bizarre scene, the Kuwaiti prince summons Salvador Dali: "How could a human being think up something like that, I ask myself in front of Dali's paintings .... As much as there is creativity there is also sickness. Sick creativity. Yes, that was the force that was at work in Kuwait during the occupation." At another point a victim's crushed brain reminds him of "the rosy cheeks in a Renoir paintings." As we shall see later, Makiya is enamored of him, but this gentleman is not a credible witness.
Makiya treats documents carelessly. The Nation published excerpts from his book alleging widespread use by Iraq's government of rape as a political weapon [see "Rape in Service of the State," May 10]. The defining symbol of this section is Aziz Salih Ahmad, who, we are told, is a "name on an index card measuring 3 x 6 inches which first came into my possession in the form of a fax in the summer of 1991." This document from the General Security Organization of Iraq describes the fellow's activity as "Violation of Women's Honor." "Aziz Salih Ahmad" says Makiya, "is a civil servant paid a salary to rape Iraqi women" This dramatic evidence serves also as the lead for Stanley Reed's review in The New York Times Book Review (June 27).
Makiya reproduces what he calls "a facsimile of the entries on the card (with the handwritten entries shown in italics)." Iraq's official language being Arabic, the author's English translation cannot possibly be a facsimile. In any case, the document he received "was hard to read," Makiya says, "being the fax of a fax of a photocopy following probably in the wake of many other photocopies." He concludes, nonetheless, that the document "tells us about how widespread the practice of rape must have become in order for such paperwork to be routinely generated." He then proceeds to identify the roots of rape in "Arab-Islamic culture."
Makiya has misconstrued the document on which this quite sensational part Eqbal Ahmad teaches fail semesters at Hampshire College and is a writing fellow of the MacArthur Foundation's Program in Peace and National Security. of his book is based. Since the Gulf War, many Iraqi documents have reached human rights organizations and scholars. None I spoke with had found evidence pointing to rape as a systematized practice in Iraq. I am, nevertheless, familiar with the 3 x 6-inch index cards Makiya mentions. These are not employment cards as he thinks.
They are records apparently of persons under surveillance or in custody of Iraq's security department. On the top left, the translation of the Arabic al-quyud al-sirriyaa should read "Classified," not "Secret Contracts." Shuhra, which Makiya translates as curriculum vitae, simply means profile. The last category - nashatuhu - correctly rendered by Makiya as "Activity," identifies the alleged crime and/or political circumstances of the person in question. Among the index cards before me, one person's Activity is listed as "member of Kurdish Democratic Party," another is described as "goes to Iran," a third is labeled a "brawler."
Aziz Salih Ahmad may have been accused or convicted of rape. He was not a card-carrying rapist. This is not to say that crimes of rape do not occur in Saddam Hussein's regime. Iraq observers who were asked said that there was evidence to sustain that charge. They nevertheless found Makiya's methods unprofessional, his reporting unreliable and his conclusion unwarranted.
"He leads his subjects," said one human rights expert. "Look at the way he questioned that kid, Taimour." Taimour miraculously survived a gruesome massacre of his extended family during Iraq's anti-Kurd campaign of 1988 (and was sheltered for two years by an Arab family). Many foreign agencies and journalists have interviewed him. The only interview printed at some length in this book - but not in full and with gaps filled by the author's commentary - reveals Makiya's proclivities and method. He leads the boy, who stubbornly refuses to follow. Here is an example:
Makiya: What do you feel about the Arabs?
Taimour: Good.
M: Who did all these terrible things to you?
T: The Arabs.
M: So how do you feel about them?
T: I don't say all Arabs. I just say that ....
M: Did someone tell you to say these things? I want to know how you feel. I don't care what anyone told you to tell me. I want to know how you are feeling inside. Who did this to you, the government or the Arabs?
T: The government.
Makiya is angry at Arab writers who view Kuwait as an "archaic" state and an "imperialist creation" or Kuwaitis as "wastrels" and "corrupt." It's his right to be angry. But then he claims that the "roots of this kind of prejudice run very deep in Arab tradition" in a "style of discourse" called hija', which he describes as a "poetic form found among Arab tribes from pre-Islamic times" He identifies al-Mutanabbi (A.D. 915-965), a great medieval poet, as a master of hija' and links him to Nizar Qabbani, a contemporary poet whose 1989 satire on sheikly profligacy, Abu Jahl Buys Fleet Street, Makiya found offensive. He brings hija' up again later when he argues that Arab nationalism "has always derived great strength from the existence of such a common ground with Islam or with a pre-Islamic Arab Bedouin tradition like hija'." Lest the likes of A.M.
Rosenthal find in it yet another proof of the Arab being a "hate civilization," I hasten to point out that hija' is not a uniquely Arab "poetic form" In English, it is called satire; lampoon is its vulgar version.
Makiya's other libels against Islam and Arab culture are far too sophomoric - and tasteless - to be recounted here. He has not a positive thing to say about the values and traditions - tribal, communal, spiritual or aesthetic - that bind the peoples of the Middle East. The world he sees is engulfed in "cruelty and silence." In this bleak world of murder, torture and rape, tradition is on the side of tyrants. It is not surprising that Makiya saw American arms as the only hope of rescue, and that he feels betrayed by those who did not.
But inadvertently the book does occasionally illuminate other Middle Eastern realities: The Shiite rebels who took over Najafafter Iraq's defeat in 1991 behaved in a deplorable fashion. Prisoners were summarily executed; mobs maimed government employees; looting was wide-spread. On the third day, the city's grand Ayatollah, Abul Qasim al-Khoei, issued an appeal: "I urge you to be exemplars of noble Islamic values." The Ayatollah identified assaults on life, honor and property as "foreign to our Islamic morals." His appeal was heeded.
So it was traditional legitimacy and values that helped restore a semblance of humanity and order to Najaf.
The silence of which Makiya accuses Arab intellectuals is more than a failure to speak out. His indictment contains multiple counts, ncluding mythomania, the practice of mystifying and glorifying tyranny and casting dictators as national heroes; "escape-goating," the tendency to blame others - the West, Israel and imperialism - for Arab failures; lack of empathy with the tyrants' victims; victimhood, the denial of failure and defeat; triumphalism, the tendency to portray defeats as victories; and perpetuation of the "pathology" of the modern "Arab culture of hate."
Makiya names names. "My purpose is not personal," he assures us in the beginning, "but my style is," By the book's end, the purpose is barely discernible. Writers under his fire provide a veritable who's who of dissident Arab intellectuals. They include Mahmoud Darwish and Adonis, great poets both residing in Europe. But European exiles are not his only targets; among those he attacks are: Abdelrahman Munif, arguably the best contemporary Arab novelist, who fives, stripped of his Saudi citizenship, in Damascus, Ilyas Khouri, who continues to write from embattled Beirut, a besieged but fearless opponent of sectarian politics and state tyranny; Hassanein Heikal, Egypt's best-known journalist, who resides in Cairo, a respected but unpopular figure among contemporary Arab rulers; and Mohammed al-Jaberi, best known for his monumental Critique of Arab Thought, who writes from Morocco.
It is difficult to verify many of Makiya's allegations because he often cites unpublished speeches of even such prolific writers as Heikal and Noam Chomsky; both claim that Makiya has misquoted them. "He is a consummate liar," says Chomsky flatly, and in seven single-spaced pages refutes him. Edward Said stands out as Makiya's favorite target, a fact gleefully noted by several reviewers, including Rosenthal and Brooks. Fortunately, in Said's case Makiya's assertions can be checked against texts. The exercise reveals a pattern of distortion.
Makiya draws this contrast between Said and himself. "Said spoke approvingly of a popular source of conspiratorialism in the Arab world, namely asking of every piece of writing, who is this person really speaking for? As they say in Arabic, min warrah?, who's behind him." Makiya adds: "The fundamental difference between myself and Said can be boiled down to the fact that whereas I reject the very asking of such questions of any human being, he approves of them."
Said actually took a position quite the opposite of what Makiya alleges.
Responding to an interviewer's questions about the impact of the Gulf crisis on Arab culture, Said replied: "Almost all of what is now published in the daily newspapers... is politically motivated in the narrow and most vulgar sense. To write, you have to be affiliated with a particular line or regime or ruler....
But the first question people will ask is not whether what the writer is saying is true or not, but who is this person really speaking for. As they say in Arabic, min warrah? "Who's behind it." There is now, because of the war, a general collapse of cultural institutions in the Arab world."
Michael Massing, writing in the April 26 New Yorker, described several other examples of this sort. In effect, Makiya associates Said with all the ills that in his view afflict the Arab world. He accuses Said even of "invent[ing] and reinvent]ing]" a discourse that is "indifferent to and irresponsible toward the real problems of Palestinians under occupation." He argues that Said's Orientalism "operates through a populist ethos of Arab prejudice," as such it has a corrupting influence on adults and youth alike. Orientalism, he says, is "modeled after Chomsky's work on the connection between the Vietnam War and notions of objective scholarship." And it received attention in the West "largely because its author was a Palestinian, just as Republic of Fear was taken seriously only after Saddam Husain had invaded Kuwait and its author was an Iraqi." Makiya concludes, "It is time we face up to such home truths."
Move over, Dorian Gray.
I may not be objective in this regard; Edward Said is my friend. However, Said's writing is on the record and readily available. During the Gulf crisis he wrote several articles that condemned Iraq's invasion of Kuwait and also opposed the American drive to war. In The New York Times (January 11, 1991) he wrote of the "tragic nature of what is unfolding - a collision between the anachronistic but still powerful ideologies of western imperialism and Arab nationalism." He was unsparing in his criticism of Arab nationalism as "inexact, unresponsive, anomalous, even comic," whereby "allegory, complicated symbolism, and innuendo substitute for common sense," and of Arab states' "propensity to violence and extremism that began with Iraq's aggression against Kuwait and continues in the Iraqi-Kuwaiti-Saudi-Egyptian drive to war."
Three observations are important here. One: Most of the intellectuals Makiya denounces opposed Saddam Hussein's aggression in Kuwait; they also opposed America's massive intervention. Two: None of them would share Makiya's assessment of the American intervention as altruistic, and none subscribed to his view that "once the United States chose to shoulder the responsibility... it acquired an obligation to the people of Iraq to end things differently," i.e., to conquer and remake Iraq. Three: Some of Makiya's observations in this book read like warmed-over Said, Adonis, al-Jaberi and Munif. Ironically, he attacks these writers while cannibalizing their ideas.
The last observation applies especially in the case of Said, whose record as a dissenting Arab intellectual is three decades older than Makiya's. Said's Question of Palestine (1979) could not be published in Beirut because it offended the Syrian government. His column in' the Arabic journal al-Majalla was discontinued because the Saudis disapproved. In 1981 he was disinvited, as I was, from a conference in Baghdad because he had protested Iraq's human rights violations. In 1979, 1983, 1986 and 1991 he displeased various RL.O. leaders because of his criticisms of their policy. And for the advocacy of his own people's rights he has lived with multiple menaces, including death threats. To accuse someone like that - and there are about a dozen such persons Makiya has attacked by name - of collusion with tyranny is bad morals and bad politics. For one who claims to care for the Middle East's democratic future, it is also self-defeating.
Makiya is fight in saying that "Arab intellectual, religious and official opinion ignored what was going on in Iraq during March and April 1991." Today, those Arabs, along with most of the Western world, are sitting through the genocide of Muslims in Yugoslavia. But his insistence on blaming Arab culture and Arabism for everything that is wrong in the Middle East, as well as his conclusion that "intellectuals who generate the ideas" are responsible for tyranny, not the regimes "that wield the guns," bears no relation to reality.
Makiya's adulations are equally misdirected. Take his first witness, the Kuwaiti prince. Makiya proffers him as an example of the new Arab who "today speak[s] to us in a language that so engages [us] with their world as to turn their words into a new kind of poetry." His sensibilities" - "he is curious, perceptive, and open to the outside world" - are contrasted with those of intellectuals Makiya criticizes. Here is a glimpse of this man's "sensibilities".
In occupied Kuwait, a Palestinian water carrier sheltered the prince, perhaps saving his life. Hanan, a Palestinian woman, stood by him "even more forcefully." One would expect this uniquely open-minded man to return compassion to Palestinians who were brutalized and expelled en masse from "liberated" Kuwait. Instead, Khalil was angry at them, Makiya explains, because many had supported the Iraqi occupation. Intones Makiya: "For even the most thoughtful of Kuwaitis there was no longer any romance in being a Palestinian. His feelings in this regard far exceeded those he expressed toward Iraqis." As she saw her people tormented, "Hanan, for her part, rediscovered her Palestinian roots. She came to the conclusion that her only true home lay in a future Palestinian state." Makiya concludes from this sorry episode that "in different ways Hanan and Khaled/Khalil found out who they were as a consequence of what Saddam Husain did to Kuwait."
A sequel is worth noting, "Khalil" was the prince's pseudonym during the Iraqi occupation. Makiya was deeply moved on hearing that his witness had borrowed Makiya's own pseudonym. His real name is Khalid Al Nasser Al Sabah. He is "a athematician by education, an artist by disposition, and an investment banker "by profession." He lives in London.
On June 24, The New York Times reported that "Kuwait has asked Interpol to arrest two members of the royal family." One of them is Khalid Al Nasser Al Sabah. The two princes were entrusted with the management of a "Fund for Future Generations," which is worth up to $100 billion. Among the charges under investigation is the possible theft of $4 billion to $5 billion of public money. In demanding their prosecution Kuwait's parliamentary opposition risked violating a law that forbids criticism of anyone in the royal family. Speaker Ahmad Al-Saadoun told Parliament that the managers of the Kuwait Investment Office in London acted "like another Saddam who invaded Kuwait financially, not militarily."
No thinking person, least of all the intellectuals Makiya attacks, would question the need for drastic changes in the Middle East toward a democratic and sovereign future. For this is the worst of times in Middle Eastern history.
Never before has it experienced such tragic convergences of wealth and weakness, material resources and moral bankruptcy, imperialism and obscurantism. Tyranny has subsisted for decades on populist rhetoric no less than imperial support. Governments have grown normously like malignant tumors on civil society, and national sovereignty has been mortgaged to personal ambitions and dynastic interests. In the era of decolonization, Arabs alone have been subject to conquests and colonization.
People have protested, often under religious and ethnic flags, only to suffer extreme reprisals. Intellectuals have been forced to choose between collaboration on the one hand and silence, death, imprisonment and exile on the other. In such an environment, all sorts of pressures, personal circumstances and temperaments define the risks one takes. No one should presume to judge morally what another . failed to do, least of all those of us who have lived abroad, as Makiya has done since 1967.
Makiya writes with the shallowness and zealotry of a convert. In fact, for several years before becoming a celebrated Iraqi "dissident" he worked for Saddam Hussein's regime - from abroad. His collaboration began about six months after Hussein had executed hundreds of people, including a third of his colleagues in the Revolutionary Command Council, and become Iraq's President.
In December 1979 Makiya Associates of London contracted for a large construction project in Baghdad. In a January 6, 1992, New Yorker profile Lawrence Weschler reported that Kanan Makiya, the firm's chief administrator, "threw the office into this new project with enthusiasm." Even today, he admits to no wrong. "Somebody had to do it, and it might as well have been done well," he told Weschler. "I see no problem with that." The connection endured into the mid-eighties. Noteworthy fact: During this period Makiya was active also in a London-based left-wing group and took several pseudonyms-including Mohammed Ja'far - as a "security" measure.
Saddam Hussein had embarked on an ambitious plan to rebuild Baghdad. Makiya Associates' relationship with the regime flowered, involving millions in contracts, with Hussein taking a personal interest in them. Their enormous projects included the building of Baath Party headquarters. Mohamed Makiya did the designs; his son coordinated the enterprise. Kanan Makiya had found a way to keep himself clean: He worked via telex, did not go to Baghdad and did not design. He told Weschler, "I didn't draw a single line. I just organized the whole thing"
At the end of 1983, Kanan decided to leave London and came to live in the United States. He offers this as an act of conscience. Facts belie this claim:
First, the war with Iran had all but wrecked Hussein's architectural ambitions. In 1983 Makiya Associates listed no new contracts with Iraq. (In 1984, however, they contracted to design the "Ceremonial Parade Grounds" in Tikrit, Hussein's hometown.) Second, Makiya stayed on the firm's board of directors. Third, as a board member, he awarded himself a generous stipend from the firm, a fact that prompted The New Yorker to comment that, "in effect, Saddam Hnssein became not only the principal subject of Kanan's book but, unwittingly, its principal sponsor as well."
I doubt that Makiya finds this behavior unsavory. Cut off from traditional Muslim values and also having lost his acquired Marxist moorings, he is a man adrift, afflicted by a terminal case of self-love. The contrast with his thoughtful and honest father - believing Muslim and gifted architect - emerges from the New Yorker profile. With his rationalizations, dual lives, pseudonymons pretensions, ill-founded hates and self-absorption, Makiya is a mess, just the type the media would find suited to personify the good Arab.
So, min warrah? - who's behind Makiya? It is a bad question. No one should care.
Far too many persons and things - leaders and opinion makers, bombers and destroyers, war makers and propagandists-remain ahead of him. The media award and extol him because he serves their purpose: He confirms their stereotypes about Arabs and Muslims, argues that imperialism exists only as an alibi for Third World tyranny, calls for an activist American role in remaking the Middle East and bashes the betes noires - e.g., Edward Said and Noam Chomsky - of the Western right and center. Above all, after Communism's demise a book like this can be pressed into demonizing Islam as the latest menace to Western civilization.
 World Fact Book (CIA)]
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