Dawn: Only the Arabs can solve their identity crisis

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YES, Nouri al-Maliki stubbornly refused to govern inclusively in Iraq. Yes, the rule of Syria’s Assad family has been brutal. And yes, Muammar Qadhafi left Libyans with little in the way of national institutions when he fell. But the pathologies of these leaders go only so far to explain the stunning failure of three major Arab states.

The Arab world is caught up in a broader struggle. It is being whipsawed between competing and not entirely satisfying notions of what it should mean to be Egyptian, Syrian, Iraqi, Libyan, Yemeni or Lebanese — to name just a few places where conflicts over nationalism, identity and citizenship are most pronounced. Until Arabs figure out who they are and what kind of countries they want to live in, there is little Washington can do to help.

In many ways this is an evolution of a debate that has been going on since the 19th century, when Islamic reformers, nationalists, liberals and everyone in between bristled under European domination. By the mid-20th century, Britain and France had left or were driven out of the region, and new elites — Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser, Algeria’s Houari Boumediene, Tunisia’s Habib Bourguiba and, later, Hafez Assad and Saddam Hussein — rose to lead the modernisation of their respective countries.

Questions of identity were seemingly resolved through the anti-colonial struggle and a semblance of progress. Although there was some rhetoric about Pan-Arabism, the prevailing sentiments of the age were captured in the revolutionary triplet, “Algeria is my country, Islam is my religion, and Arabic is my language.” Variations could have been coined in any number of Middle East countries.

The Arab elites of the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s eventually became a conservative old guard, and their revolutionary ardour was replaced with tired platitudes. They defined the national identities of the countries they led with a mixture of old-school anti-colonialism, economic nationalism and historical mythologies sprinkled with paeans to the importance of Islam.

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