(photo credit: Twitter)
Islamic State has already shown how this can be done when it used new leadership techniques, narratives and technology to reinvent Jihad.
Like IS, pan-Arabism also seeks to transform society and establish a
new transnational Arab identity. Both offer a romantic notion of the
future that elicits an emotional rather than a rational response. The
one based on a perverse interpretation of Islam is brutally spartan and
exclusionary while the other has the potential to offer a bottom-up,
broad tent ideology that means it can easily absorb other already
existing groups.
The big difference is that while IS used the malaise of Arab and
Western societies and combined that with savage violence as theatre to
achieve its grisly goals, pan-Arabism holds out the promise of much more
positive change, as well as economic benefits.
Its appeal lies primarily in the notion of a pan-Arab identity and Arab
unity which Arab intellectuals and elites have always found attractive.
At its core is the belief in an Arab “super culture” extending across
the region from North Africa to the Gulf, albeit with many variances
under that umbrella.
Another important attraction of pan-Arabism is that it promises to
put Palestine back at the top of the agenda. As Arab public opinion
surveys have consistently shown, this remains an important issue among
ordinary people even in countries which have now signed the Abraham
Accords. The 2019-2020 Arab Opinion Index,
a public opinion survey across the Arab world conducted by the Arab
Center for Research and Policy Studies in Doha, Qatar found that 88% of
all Arabs polled (2019/2020) oppose recognition of Israel and nearly the
same proportion (81% of respondents) supported the sentiment that the
various Arab peoples constitute a single nation, in contrast to 16% who
agreed with the statement that “the Arab peoples are distinct nations,
tied together by only tenuous bonds.”
Beyond the romantic vision of Arab unity, pan-Arabism is remarkably
non-ideological about how society should be organised leaving the door
open for other ideas and input. This relative pragmatism gives it a
protean quality that enables it to be many things to many different
people. Crucially, it makes pan-Arabism an ideology all opposition
groups can rally around, whether intelligentsia, artists, Jihadis,
Muslim Brotherhood, liberals, or leftists, and this is what gives it its
political potency.
In the 1960s Arab leaders themselves publicly espoused pan-Arabism
because they thought it would help keep them in power, even though in
practice they only paid lip-service to the idea because doing more would
have put their own positions at risk. Today Arab leaders still pay
pan-Arabism lip service but at the same time they invest heavily to try
to counter its appeal with their own narratives and the kind of
top-down, state-sponsored, hard-edged nationalism as seen recently at
events like Saudi Foundation Day, UAE Commemoration Day and during Sisi’s pharaonic shenanigans.
During the Arab Spring itself, removing the boundaries that divided the Arab states from one another did not feature
in the demands of those taking part. In retrospect that now appears to
have been a mistake, given how it has since become clear that the Arab
dictators and the Israeli Occupation are all interlinked, making it nigh
on impossible to tackle any of them individually without tackling them
all simultaneously and collectively.
For example, democracy in Egypt was rolled back
by Israel and the Gulf, while Israel maintains its occupation and siege
of Palestine with Egyptian support. Meanwhile Gulf autocrats depend on
Egypt’s repression of democracy and political Islam to maintain their
own domestic power base, while the Egyptian military dictatorship
depends on Gulf petrodollars. This is the Gordian knot that defeated the
Arab Spring revolutions, one that IS attempted to and that pan-Arabism
still has the potential to cut.