Was It Really 3 Years Ago?

Was it really 3 years ago? I remember standing in Bab Touma square, on the edge of the Old City of Damascus, saying goodbye to a group of friends at the end of a pleasant evening spent in one of the city's many restaurants. It was about 11.00pm when a loud bang came echoing towards us from the direction of Mount Qasioun. Our conversation abruptly halted, everyone was momentarily shocked, looking at each other for some kind of clue about how to react to what had just happened. "That didn't sound like thunder"
I remember saying, there was some nervous guffaws and a few other throwaway comments. Then, as abruptly as it had gone, the previous jovial mood returned and we all pushed the strange interruption out of our minds. By the time I had returned home the whole incident had been forgotten. It was only the next day that I learned that the loud bang had marked the final moment of Imad Mughniyeh, a senior Hizbullah intelligence officer widely credited with involvement in the devastating bombing attacks upon US and French bases in Beirut in October 1983.  Mughniyeh was killed when a car bomb, planted outside his home in the otherwise quiet and nondescript Kfar Souseh district in south-western Damascus was detonated by remote control.  The United States and Israel are the main suspects in the killing, although both have continued to deny any direct involvement.

Now, three years on, the explosion which killed Imad Mughniyeh continues to reverberate around the region, with renewed Israeli and Hizbullah sabre-rattling marking the anniversary of the killing (the usual threats and counter-threats), including the highly provocative announcment that Iran was sending a warship plus support vessel through the Suez Canal to be deployed in the Med (for the first time since the fall of the Shah).

During this period Iran and Hizbullah have been keen to situate themselves as allies of the proverbial 'Arab street'. For example, Iranian officials have congratulated the protesters for overthrowing Mubarak and Ben Ali and, during the televised speech given by Hassan Nasrallah (Secretary-General of Hizbullah) on Wednesday, people in the audience waved Egyptian and Tunisian as well as Lebanese and Hizbullah flags. The clear message was that the self-styled 'Resistance' welcomed the overthrow of pro-Western authoritarian regimes, and wanted to claim affinity with the peaceful protesters epitomised by Tahreer Square, Cairo. Conversely there has been a lot of nervousness in the Western media about the possible hijacking of these same protests by the 'Muslim Brotherhood' or other 'sinister' 'Islamist' elements, vaguely defined but presumed to be 'against us and our values'.

Happily, I believe that this is mostly nonsense. As I have hopefully shown long-term readers and friends, the Middle East is a wonderfully large and diverse place. America's loss doesn't have to be Iran/al-Qaeda/the Muslim Brotherhood's gain [delete as applicable]. In the same way that Iran had to quickly climbdown, and cancel it's planned transit of Suez, so those overconfident predictions by woefully underqualified 'experts' about the inevitable 'Islamist' takeover in Cairo and Tunis will also soon have to be retracted.

If I take a single message from the current protests across the Middle East (and we have to be careful not to lose sight of the fact that each country has it's own unique dynamic and character - what is happening in Bahrain is totally different from how events are playing out in Yemen etc), it is that huge numbers of people are rejecting the status-quo - and that includes within the Islamic Republic of Iran itself. The one slogan that has united all the protesters has been 'the people want to overthrow the system' ("ash-sha'ab yureed asqat al-nidhaam"), first heard in Tunisia and then taken up by protesters in each of the other countries in turn [unfortunately my lack of knowledge of Farsi doesn't permit me to fully get to grips with the chants of protesters in Iran!]. Those banners which have been critical of America have tended to be focussed on the hypocrisy and injustice of supporting brutal dictatorships whilst anti-Israeli sentiment has also been muted, confined to a delegitmising role (e.g. Mubarak portrayed with star of David on his forehead, suggesting he is working for the Israelis and not for the Egyptian people).

It's hard to remain optimistic in the face of ongoing police and army brutality in Libya, Bahrain and elsewhere. However, in recent weeks the people of the Middle East themselves have shown us the fallacy of the hitherto prevailing simple (lazy?) dualistic choices of Muslim/Christian, USA/Iran, Sunni/Shia, Islam/modernity, freedom/stability, violent resistance/domination, Westernisation/traditionalism. Instead, through their non-violence, diversity and pluralism they have demonstrated that a new paradigm which does justice to this complexity is sorely needed. It's not going to happen overnight but I have every hope and confidence that, inspired by recent events, we will get there eventually, inshallah. :-)

Updates:

The Iranian ships reportedly transitted the Suez Canal on 20/21 Feb 2011.

In the meantime, Robert Fisk has written an interesting article about the non-religious nature of the protests which is worth checking out here.

Finally, this picture acts as a nice rebuttal to the notion that the protests in Bahrain can be reduced to Sunni-Shia antipathy. [thanks again to Maryam al-Khawaja]