Shifting Sands: The Unravelling of the Old Order in the Middle East

by Raja Shehadeh

At a time when the Middle East dominates media headlines more than ever - and for reasons that become ever more heartbreaking - Shifting Sands brings together fifteen impassioned and informed voices to talk about a region with unlimited potential, and yet which can feel, as one writer puts it, 'as though the world around me is on fire'?
Collecting together the thoughts and insights of writers who live or have deep roots in there, Shifting Sands takes a look at aspects of the Middle East from the catastrophic long-term effects of the carving up of the region by the colonial powers after World War One to the hopes and struggles of the Arab spring in relation to Egypt, Iran and Syria. And it asks questions such as: what is it like to be a writer in the Middle East? What does the future hold? And where do we go from here?
For all those who are wearied by the debates surrounding the Middle East - often at best ill-informed and at worst, defeatist propaganda - this intelligent, reasoned perspective on life in the Middle East is a breath of fresh air.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Middle East, Politics

208 pages, Paperback

First published August 6, 2015

About the author

Raja Shehadeh (Arabic: رجا شحادة) is a Palestinian lawyer, human rights activist and writer. He is the author of Strangers in the House (2002), described by The Economist as “distinctive and truly impressive”, When the Bulbul Stopped Singing (2003), Palestinian Walks (2007), for which he won the 2008 Orwell Prize, and A Rift in Time (2010). Shehadeh trained as a barrister in London and is a founder of the human rights organization Al-Haq. He blogs regularly for the International Herald Tribune/The New York Times and lives in Ramallah, on the West Bank.

Reviews

[Paul Bryant · Rating 3 out of 5]

In 1915 the governments of France and Britain were staring at the hideous mounting piles of bodies but contemplating what would happen when they won the war against Germany…and its ally the Ottoman Empire. This strange enormous and ancient empire (1299-1923) was Turkey plus the Middle East plus North Africa. It was vast. I know nothing about it, except it barges into all of the other history books I read. The History of the Ottoman Empire is on my to do list. But, you know, a lot of things are. In 1914 Grand Vizier Said Halim Pasha stumbled into the First World War on the side of Germany and so unwittingly signed the empire’s own death warrant.

The British already had an Empire but they also had complete faith in their ability to run the entire planet, so adding half of another one would be no trouble, a few promises made here and there, a couple of conferences. There were therefore three big promises made : one, to the Arabs, that they would be independent; two, to the French, that they could control everything north of a line in on a map. The Sykes of the famous Sykes-Picot Agreement said “I should like to draw a line from the “e” of Acre to the last “k” in Kirkuk.”. And three, that was the Balfour Declaration of November 1917 which promised the Jews British support for a homeland in Palestine. This latter was the doing of David Lloyd George, the British prime minister, and Avi Shlaim, in the first essay, says

His support for Zionism was based on a huge overestimate of Jewish influence. In aligning Britain with the Zionist movement, he acted in the mistaken – and anti-Semitic – view that the Jews turn the wheels of history. In fact, the Jewish people had little influence other than the myth of clandestine power.

When the war was done and the victors came to gather their spoils, they drew more than one line. Countries which never existed before suddenly appeared on the map, poof! – just like that. Because we westerners said so. A contemporary observed:

Iraq was created by Churchill, who had the mad idea of joining two widely separated oil wells. Kirkuk and Mosul, by uniting three widely separated peoples, the Kurds, the Sunnis and the Shiites.

So the constant refrain of this collection of essays is that none of these countries, and none of the regimes which took hold in them, had any “legitimacy”.

It is this absence of legitimacy that has been a central feature of Middle East politics ever since the old order was blown away.

The essayists do not ask the question if the “old order” of Ottoman rule itself had any legitimacy – it would seem very clear that it had not, it was an Empire, of course. They also do not investigate what constitutes “legitimacy”. Especially in the sorry situation the people of Egypt and Syria find themselves in, caught between “Islamist” and dictatorial alternatives. I imagine there’s a whole lot of people in both countries who want neither. We would only have to ask the stream of Syrian refugees trudging every day into eastern Europe.

TEA BREAK



Taking a break from writing this review I turn on the tv news, and lo, a new biography of David Cameron (British prime minister) is excoriating him for his imperialist incompetence in Libya – in 2011 British planes helped to bomb Gaddafi out of Tripoli and this typical Western bull-at-a-gate whiff-of-grapeshot arrogant intervention toppled Libya into the anarchic mess we see today.

BREAK OVER

So, the beginning point of this book is the declaration that

The post-1918 peace settlement is at the very heart of the current conflicts between the Arabs and Israel, between Arabs and other Arabs, and between Arabs and the West.

One WW1 field marshal summed it up :

After the ‘war to end all war’ came the ‘peace to end all peace’

Isis, we know, has come to tear up this false division of the Muslim lands into fake countries which blatantly do not work as countries. But they have not come to unite Muslims in brotherhood, as we see each day in the news.

Khaled Fahmy’s essay “Opening Politics’ Black Box” is all about the tribulations of Egypt and was very interesting. He asks

We the people have been in a state of constant rebellion for the past 200 years… why has it proved so difficult for us to end our status as subjects in our own country and to force our state to treat us as citizens? Five reasons stood. And still stand, in the way of democracy in Egypt, and indeed in the whole of the Arab world.

The five reasons :

1. Despite their deafening rhetoric, Western powers have not spared any effort to thwart our struggle for democracy…. Washington did not miss an opportunity to support our dictators.
2. Not only has the century-long Arab-Israeli conflict sapped our energy and diverted precious resources, but our despots have also used it cynically to postpone indefinitely democratic reforms.
3. Oil-rich despotic regimes could interfere in our country and support anti-democratic forces.
4. Our inability to look back to our modern history and choose a moment we would like to resurrect. We have no “reset button”.
5. We have opened another Pandora’s box, that of political Islam

This all sounds reasonable until you ask who this “we” is which Mr Fahmy is writing in the name of. We the people. Well, some of the Egyptian people are the Muslim Brotherhood who got Morsi elected democratically in 2012, in the teeth, I assume, of opposition from Western governments and “oil-rich despotic regimes”. But maybe Mr Fahmy was glad to see the back of Mr Morsi because he embodied the Egyptian version of “political Islam”. So who are we the people?

The next essay, by Tamim Al-Barghouti, circles around another unexamined fact. It confesses that the Middle East is made up of “societies divided by ethnic and religious rivalries… old tribal/provincial rivalries”, and Lord knows, that appears to be very true. So even without the interference and manipulation by Western imperialism and oil-rich despotism we have the dismal prospect of these countries (if they are countries) full of populations who despise each other. Where does all this internecine hatred come from ? We hear about the Sunni/Shiite split – something akin to he Protestant/Catholic binary opposition in Christianity. We see that Europe had its couple of centuries of war and brutality between the two groups of Christians. Then an accommodation was reached. The Sunni/Shiite division has not found any accommodation since the 7th century. I would suggest that’s a long time not to find a way of existing peacefully with your co-religionists. Justin Marozzi says

The sectarian tensions that bedevil the region today have existed in Iraq since Baghdad was founded in the late 8th century.

Al-Barghouti says (p94)

Wars among communities of tens of millions, such as the Shiites and the Sunnis, are unwinnable. Despite the brutality, in time all factions will come to realise that no one can eliminate the other.

What’s that? Does this author think that that’s what they really want to do? Eliminate the other? Or was that just an unfortunate turn of phrase?

These essays are a reasonable place to start thinking about this whole panorama of horrible problems but they really do not go very far and they tiptoe around the most difficult aspects. More difficult thinking is needed.

[Benjamin C · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is the most cogent writing I have read on the Middle East.

Last month in Jerusalem, I popped into the Educational Bookshop, asked a very kind man what his favorite book was, and he handed me a copy of "Shifting Sands". I’m now very grateful for his recommendation, and in turn recommend this book to you. I appreciated the trove of knowledge embedded in each essay, the diversity of thought and liberal optimism of the writing, and the brevity and straightforward nature of the words. A must read!!!

[David Kenvyn · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book began life as a series of talks at the Edinburgh International Book Festival in 2014. Nick Barley, the Director, was prescient enough to realise that the politics of the Middle East are incredibly important for the peace and security of the world in which we live. So he asked Raja Shehadeh and Penny Johnson to edit this collection of essays as a way of helping us all to understand what is happening. I can only hope that our legislators read it before they take any decisions that will lead us all further into war, destruction and revenge attacks.

The story begins one hundred years ago when two diplomats, one British and one French, met to consider how best to divide up the spoils between their respective countries, when the Ottoman Empire collapsed. There was no real indication at the time that this was going to happen, as the disastrous Gallipoli campaign made clear, but Sykes and Picot did not want their countries to fall out whilst they were allies in the war against Germany, Austria-Hungary and the Ottoman Empire. So they drew a line in the map, the Sykes-Picot Line, from the E of Acre to the last K of Kirkuk and France was allocated what lay to the north-west while the British Empire gained the territories to the south-east. Neither man cared what the indigenous peoples of these lands wanted for themselves. They saw the deal as a way of preventing conflict between two imperial powers. This is as good a place as any to start if you want to understand the politics of the modern Middle East.

The British were already playing with fire. They were encouraging the Sharif Hussein, the ruler of the Hijaz and the protector of the holy cities of Mecca and Medina, to rise in rebellion against his suzerain, the Sultan. This was because the Sultan, in his role as Caliph, had declared holy war against the British, the French and the Russians. The British, not understanding that their Shia Muslim subjects were not likely to take any notice of a Sunni Caliph, regarded this as a threat. So they stoked the fires of Arab nationalism, hoping for a revolt throughout the Fertile Crescent.

The third stick of dynamite that the British threw into the fire was the Balfour Declaration, the promise of Palestine to the Zionists. The French meanwhile were encouraging the ambitions of minorities, especially the Maronite Christians of what became Lebanon and the Alawi sect of Shia Muslims in Syria. And so the stage was set fora century of conflict from the Mediterranean to the Persian Gulf

These essays look at the ways in which the politics of the region have been affected by the decisions taken a century ago. Of course, the imperial powers were not responsible for all the tensions in the Middle East.

As Justin Marozzi notes in his essay, "A Long View from Baghdad", the conflict between Sunni and Shia since the Ummayyads seized the Caliphate following the assassination of Ali ibn Abi Talib in the seventh century (CE). Marozzi tells how on the death of the Abbasid Caliph Abu Jafaar al Mansur, his son and successor entered a locked room, expecting to find treasure and had found, instead, the dead bodies of Shia leaders and their families, catalogued so that they could be identified. [The Abbasids had particular reason to fear the Shia, having encouraged them to revolt in the belief that they would replace the Ummayyads with a descendent of the Caliph Ali, not another Sunni dynasty.] None of this, as Marozzi points out, exempts the countries that have interfered in the affairs of the Middle East from their responsibilities. It is a simple recognition of the fact that not all the troubles of the Middle East are of their making.

The heart of this book, however, is not the scheming of France and Britain, the two Imperial powers, nor the way in which the USA inherited what had been created. Nor is it really about the way in which the USA, lobbied both by Zionists and the Oil industry, has intervened in the affairs of the region, usually to the detriment of the aspirations of ordinary inhabitants of those countries. And it is ordinary people, in all their glorious diversity, in their incredible tenacity, in their day-to-day heroism, who are at the heart of this book.

The authors are at pains to make clear that the Middle East was an area of cultural diversity, in which many religions flourished, in which many languages were spoken and with a heritage stretching back thousands of years. The epicentre of this story is the series of events that became know as "The Arab Spring", and the authors look at the achievements and failures of that year. It also looks at the fallout in the two non-Arabic speaking countries of the region, Turkey and Iran.

I am not going to attempt to summarise what the authors tell us about the region, because the complexities are enormous and, as is inevitably the case with fifteen authors presenting their views of events, they sometimes contradict each other. What is clear, however, is that there are no simple answers, especially in the case of intervention in Syria. The three essays in the section called "Syria in Crisis" should be essential reading for any decision-maker and, preferably, before they make a decision. They should that there are no simple solutions to dealing with DAESH, ISIL or whatever you want to call it. The fact that ISIL stands for the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, a European term for Bilad-al-Shams or Syria, is indicative of that complexity. Of course, ISIL is also a European term, the Arabic being DAESH, and the significant point is Al-Baghdadi's claim to be the Caliph, the Commander of the Faithful, the successor to the Prophet.

The one thing that we have to remember as we try to come to terms with what has been done by our governments and others in the Middle East, is that the people who live there are ordinary people, just like you and me, and they have ordinary concerns like eating, keeping warm and well, clothing themselves and having occasional fun. That is the essential point of this book. The last essay "Palestine and Hope" by one of the editors, Raja Shehadeh, makes that point very well. Raja Shehadeh was born in Ramallah in 1952, after the flight of his family from Jaffa in 1948. He was a witness of the Israeli effective annexation of the West Bank following the 1967 war. He still lives in Ramallah which was at the heart of both intifadas.. He believes in a peace negotiated through a recognition of the rights of both Israelis and Palestinians. It is a hope that may be very difficult to achieve at this juncture of history. But it is a hope that people of goodwill throughout the world must work for, because that way lies the road to a lasting peace for the whole region.

It struck me that it is significant that this book is called "Shifting Sands". There is a New Testament story about a man who builds his house upon sand. The sands shift in the wind, and the house collapses. That is what will happen to any solutions imposed on the region that do not accommodate the aspirations of the ordinary people who live there. It is a prescient title for a vital book

[Lucy Davison · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wow I’ve just realised I hadn’t finished a book in two months! And how strange that it was a book of essays on the society, politics and history of the Middle East that got me out of my reading slump. This attests to just how much of a page turner it was.
I found this in a charity shop by chance and what a gem it is. I liked to read an essay or two at night before bed, they were so engaging and digestible, filled with facts, insights and optimism for such a complex and tumultuous region. I particularly loved the first half of the book and the chapter on ‘post-ottoman syndrome’ and ‘cracked cauldrons: the failure of states and the rise of new narratives’ also the chapter on Turkey.
I would recommend this book to anyone wanting to get a grasp of the situation that’s been unfolding in the middle. This is a perfect book for taking such a huge and complicated subject and breaking it down into sections and chapters that address the history, present and future of the region as well as focussing on specific countries and concepts. You can tell the writers are passionate about what they do and the countries they are from/ write about, while the issues they discuss are often bleak there is always a sense of optimism and prevailing human spirit.

[K · Rating 5 out of 5]

this book is a gift, a careful unfolding of a map obscured to many, a careful tracing of the scars caused by the imperialist nonsense that carved up the middle east. it took me 6 months to read because i felt like every chapter i read was like cracking open a secret room the world always tried its best at hiding.

this book is the antidote to the fuzzy outlines my western mind carried when i thought of the middle east and the levant as a whole for much of my own life. its a perfect starting point, i believe, for anyone confused and scared at so much as their lack of an inner map of the middle east. it wont tell you everything, it wont pretend to, and that is the point. everything is still alive. i have been recommending this book for 6 months straight and i do not see myself stopping in this lifetime.

[Graeme · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book grew out of five panel discussions on the Middle East at the Edinburgh International Book Festival in August 2014. In it, editors Raja Shehadeh and Penny Johnson and a top-notch group of writers provide valuable insights into what is happening in the Middle East from a range of cultural perspectives. Despite the picture of chaos and despair painted in the Western media, there is a strong consensus that the aspirations which found expression in phenomena such as the Arab Spring and the Gezi Park resistance will endure and that something more positive and stable will emerge beyond the collapse of the botched post-Ottoman settlement contrived by the Western Powers.

[Neil Johnstone · Rating 5 out of 5]

A really interesting book and it was great to hear some brief history of the middle east, awesome writing from these writers. Good to hear that not all muslim are terrorists as the british press would have us believe.

Nice to hear some positive stories from these muslim majority countries of protests and people that actually dont take corruption from thier goverment, where as in uk mps got a 10% pay rise and the vast majority of our weak society did f**k all. Sadly me included.

Apathy is our greatest national teasure.

[Katie · Rating 3 out of 5]

Confession: I did not have the time to read all of the essays in this collection. However, a few that I read were quite engaging and illuminating. Due to writer's bias and often convoluted composition, I did not give more stars. Such a book needs to be celebrated - needs to exist - but I was disappointed that the content wasn't more accessible to the layman.

[Vikas Datta · Rating 5 out of 5]

A splendid evocation of this tortured, embattled region, how it became that way, and what paths are available.. for more read: https://in.news.yahoo.com/toil-troubl...

[Sophia · Rating 4 out of 5]

A perceptive, sensitive and illuminating look at the Middle East today. Really worth reading if you want to understand the history behind today's conflicts, as well as to learn more about what it means to be a writer in and of the Middle East.

[Vikas Datta]

A succinct but most incisive view of the region..

[Sarah · Rating 5 out of 5]

A necessary reading for anyone interested in the region.