North Africans place al Qa'eda in check

The war of ideas in the Middle East now looks very different. People power has accomplished what al Qa'eda could not.

 

Wherever he is in the world, Ayman al Zawahiri, al Qa'eda's No 2, must have watched the events in Egypt's Tahrir Square with his own mixture of shock and awe.
This is a man who, as a member of Islamic Jihad in Egypt, plotted to overthrow the regime of Hosni Mubarak's predecessors. He must have watched as the Egyptian people - unarmed young men and women in their 20s and 30s, the vast majority of whom only know of presidents before Mubarak from their history books - managed to do in a few days what his groups spent decades plotting to accomplish. In his hideout in the cities or mountains of Asia, a small part of him must have died.
It wasn't just al Zawahiri's ambitions that ended in Tahrir Square. Buried beneath the rubble of Mubarak's presidency are the ideological underpinnings of the group he now runs. Al Qa'eda's modus operandi has always been predicated on the idea that only violent struggle can overthrow the corrupt regimes of the Arab world. Now, without firing a shot, the Egyptian people proved otherwise.
In Tahrir Square, Arabs dealt a more significant blow to al Qa'eda than 10 years of US bombardment around the world. That represents a significant victory for the young people of the Arab world.
The war of ideas across the Middle East now looks very different. What happened in the cities of Egypt and Tunisia have overturned two of the big ideas that have plagued the region for decades: the idea that the old order could only be removed by violent resistance or by the emergence of a strong leader.
Over the past two weeks in this column, I have tried to explore what model might come next in North Africa.
In the first column, I looked at the demise of Cold War ideas in North African political thinking. In the second, I outlined what might come next, arguing that Islamist-dominated governments in North Africa wouldn't be the nightmare the West sometimes imagines. The greater danger, I argued, was a prolonged period of chaos or instability, leading either to a loss of confidence in democracy or to the imposition of order by a radical fringe.
And now, to the Arab Spring, which has poured water over many ideas and ideologies that have formed in the region over the years.
Many of the ideas of violent jihadism found an expression in the turbulent post-Nasser period of 1970s' Egypt. In particular, Islamic Jihad, of which al Zawahiri was a member, waged a campaign of terrorism against the Egyptian state to try to form an Islamic government. Islamic Jihad came to the conclusion that involvement in politics was worthless, that the Egyptian state, with its significant security apparatus, could only be overthrown by force.
Islamic Jihad was eventually broken up by the Egyptian government, but some of its members and its ideas found their way to other parts of the world. Al Zawahiri, in particular, influenced the intellectual development of Osama bin Laden, and al Qa'eda's ideology eventually evinced the same ideas on a broader scale: that only by force could Arab regimes and US influence in the region be overthrown.
Although the young people of the Arab world have mostly proven those claims false, that doesn't mean al Qa'eda's brand of violence won't still recur. As long as its recruiting sergeants continue to point to US wars, Israeli occupation and Arab autocrats, they will be able to bring in naive recruits - but their ideas have been dealt a severe blow.
For jihadis, there may be worse to come. If Egypt or Tunisia can build a pluralistic political system that succeeds in beginning to solve some of the chief challenges those countries face, the jihadist narrative will be further undermined and a model will be established.
Of course, if, as I wrote last week, chaos prevails in North Africa, there is a good chance jihadis may try to use it as a base for operations, as in post-invasion Iraq. And if another strongman emerges or Egypt slips back into autocracy, al Qa'eda will be able to claim that the whole basis of a pluralistic system doesn't work and that an Islamic theocracy is the only workable solution.
The second idea overturned by the North African revolts is the notion that a strong leader would emerge to unseat these regimes.
This idea has been wrapped up with Arab nationalism for decades, for two reasons. One is that many of the republics of the Arab world find themselves facing similar political and social challenges, so a charismatic leader who solved the issues in one country could solve them in others.
The second is that the idea of Arab nationalism has since the 1950s been embodied in the person of Gamal Abdel Nasser, the charismatic Egyptian president whose influence spread far beyond Egypt's borders. Even now, leaders are compared to him.
Nasser embodied an entire political movement. The interesting part of North Africa's revolutions is that they are faceless, leaderless - and effective.
Interestingly, the cultural affinity that underpins Arab nationalism has been on show in every demonstration since Tunisia's revolution. The protesters in Egypt and elsewhere were explicitly following Tunisia, saying, in banners, in person and in deed, that if the Arabs over there could do it, we can do it, too.
That has led some theorists to suggest that Arab nationalism might be making a comeback. But it's important to understand that Arab nationalism was a political interpretation of a much broader social attitude. The Arabs feel themselves to be related, in some unspecified, amorphous way. This is broadly a cultural affinity rather than a political position.
In reality, this feeling is much closer to the Anglosphere, the undefined cultural affinity, bound by language, that links Britain, a significant chunk of North America, Australia and New Zealand, as well as other places, such as South Africa. This Arabsphere is deeper, however, because it is popularly thought to contain an ethnic component.
It has, however, not been translated into a political union, partly because the Arab world is too large and too diverse. Any cultural affinity between the Arabs on show in North Africa is different to the nationalism of Gamal Abdel Nasser, of nationalism as a political project, under one charismatic leader. As Arabs of a particular age have lamented for some time, there is no new Nasser on the landscape.
What is true is that some of the figures from Nasser's era are still part of the modern political landscape. Al Zawahiri, who plotted to assassinate Nasser's heir, is still a figure in this struggle of ideas. Hosni Mubarak was sitting beside Anwar Sadat when the latter was assassinated by a member of Islamic Jihad. In TV footage from the time, al Zawahiri can be seen speaking about Islamic revolution.
He is still speaking today, but from the sidelines. Neither Nasser nor al Zawahiri represents the future of the Arab world - the people singing and marching in the capitals of Tunis and Cairo ended that idea.
At the beginning of this trilogy I wrote that it was hard to see the destination their uprising would reach. Weeks on, the revolution is still moving, still forming the future even as we speak.
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