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Thank you for all coming this evening. My name is Toby Dodge, I'm the interim director of the Middle East Centre and I teach international relations in this very building at London School of Economics. It was with great pleasure that we're allowed to bring to you tonight a talk by Professor Gilles Capel, who's the profession chair of Middle east and Mediterranean Studies at Sciences Po. But simply by saying that I think neglects or undermines his reputation. I think he is without doubt one of the foremost Arabists in social scientists working on the Middle east. And his books have certainly shaped and guided my education from the Prophet and the Pharaoh in 1985 through the Revenge of God, Allah in the west and the Roots of Radical Islam. I think the Trail of Political Islam Jihad is one of my favorite books and it was, it was given to me by the late Fred Halliday upstairs before his tragic early death. And he said to me as he gave it to me, keep that close to you and you won't go far wrong. So I think we're lucky to have with us Gilles. And if anyone was closely reading the observer on Sunday, I thought you saw a very respectful and astute write up of his own work on North African Muslims in France. So we're lucky to have a multi talented and huge figure in Middle east studies with us who's going to speak on the dialectics of the Arab revolutions from 2011 to 2013 for roughly about 50 minutes, which will give us half an hour for debate and discussion afterwards. So please join me to welcome Xioukel.
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Thank you very much, Toby, for this over the kind introduction. I'm going to have to live with the expectation you raise. And this is going to be the big challenge of the evening. Thank you all for coming. It's always with an immense pleasure that I go back to come back to the LSC to perform my yearly duty of lecture in my capacity as. What is it exactly? A senior visiting fellow. That's the kind of species in which I'm classified here. For those of you who had a look at the previous lectures, it's always the same lecture, but the topic changes every year. And fortunately, events unfolding in the Arab world sort of contradict the conclusions of the lecture of the year before. So after three times in a row it's time for dialectics, right? So hence the dialectics of the Arab revolution. But as you will see, those dialectics are not really Hegelian because there are dialectics without aufhebung and things do not necessarily go in a process which makes history lead towards the enhancement of humanity. And maybe next year, if I'm still around, I'll give another lecture on the new phase of those dialectics. What I meant with this bizarre title was that if we look back as of February 2014, to the three and a little more than three years that have elapsed since December 2010, when a street vendor called Mohammed Bouazizi set himself ablaze in a small city of the Tunisian hinterland, Sidi Bouzid, then my contention would be that we could single out sort of three successive phases or steps in those revolutions. One that we could, that would mainly take place in 2011, that is the sort of the downfall of the Ancien regime. Well, actually, not of all the ancien regime, some of them. And we'll see that from year one, we can divide up the Arab world scene or stage in three subgroups. Group A, like North Africa, where the North African shore, from which the Ancien regime leaders and dictators, dictators were toppled. Then B, like Bahrain or Bitrul in Bahrain, Yemen, the Arabian Peninsula, where former dictators or rulers were not toppled or were replaced without being killed or having to go into exile. And then sea, like Syria or Sham, where the man is still in place and where the revolutionary process was hijacked by denominational conflict. So phase one, the attempt at toppling the ancien regimes succeeds in a part of the Middle east, doesn't succeed in two other parts. Phase two, the sort of landslide victory of the Muslim Brothers, Muslim Brothers winning elections, parliamentary elections in Tunisia, in Egypt, having a strong hands in Palestine, with Hamas being also strong in Yemen, leading the Syrian rebellion step after step, benefiting from the helping hand of Turkey in terms of organization, in terms of model, being significantly funded by Qatar. And then this phase two was the sort of the rise of the Brotherhood boosted by daily propaganda on Al Jazeera television. And then we have a third phase which sort of started in June 2013, which corresponds with the demise of the Brotherhood. Starts with change in Qatar in the Qatari leadership, followed by systematic backpedaling in Qatar's objective. Then we have the ousting of Mohammed Morsi in Egypt with the huge demonstration of June 30, and then the meeting of the military with some national leaders on July 3rd. Then we have a change in the course of the Syrian rebellion with the use of chemical weapons by the Syrian regime, right after General Sisi has had 1,000 Muslim brothers killed in two public squares in Cairo, and a major change in the developments of the Syrian Rebellion with the regime that was usually buried day after day, in Pandit's words, in 2011 and 2012, trying to be sort of revamped suddenly by the combined blessing of Russia and Iran. And something which had already been in the making since phase one, that is the Shia Sunni divide around the Muslim world took more and more steam. And then Iran came in the front stage and the opposition between Iran on the one hand and GCC countries on the other for the control of the Gulf that some on one side called the Persian Gulf and the others on the other side called the Arabian Gulf. So out of cowardice, I will just call it the Gulf had was taking place as a sort of protracted war on the Syrian battlefield, on the Syrian battlefield, which now extends to the neighboring Lebanese battlefield also. And the dialectics of the revolutions there again have changed. They're being encompassed in and a conflict which is not only local and regional, but also international and which echoes in a number of other areas as far as the demise of the Muslim Brothers is concerned. It went on and on. And Hamas, that had been sort of bought by Qatar, just like Arsenal or the Paris Saint Germain was bought by Qatar earlier on, suddenly felt itself found itself in isolation in Tunisia, where the Nahda Party had taken the lead after the October 2011 elections. They had to step out of government. And Al Jazeera today is not listened to anymore in the Muslim, in the Arab world, in Arabic at least, except by Muslim Brothers sympathizers. And we have a whole new system which is unfolding. So I'm going to try to put into perspective those three phases and also to see how they functions in the three zones which I mentioned earlier on North Africa, the North African shore on the one hand, the Arabian Peninsula, Zone B and the Levant Zone C. And see how those two kind of dialectics merge. Now, when we look back into the way the revolutions of the Arab world, whether or not we call them revolutions actually is even debatable. The events in the Arab world took shape. The, you know, we were sort of hostage to two kinds of preconceptions, two sets of preconceptions. Remember spring 2011. Everybody talked about the Arab Spring at the time. Arab Spring was set word that echoed the spring of the people of 1848 in Europe with this sort of widespread dimension. It also echoed the Prague Spring of 1968, even though both events had actually turned rather sour, because in the end of 1848, Napoleon Bonaparte became president of France and then would become emperor. And in August 1968, as you know, Russian Soviet troops invaded Czechoslovakia. But nevertheless, at the time, the, the spring metaphor sort of stemmed of a sort of neo Hegelian man of the street, Hegelian Weltanschaung that came, like many intellectually transmittable diseases from America and something which I would call the Fucojamitis or something like that. That is that, you know, it's the end of history. Finally, the Arabs are just like us. They have discovered democracy. Forget about Bin Laden, forget about jihad, forget about Niqab, forget about everything. They're going to be just like us. Look at what's happening on the streets in Burgiba Square, in Tahrir Square. You have young boys and girls having, with their iPads, their ipods, their iPhones and their eyes, what have you. And they're just like us. And that's over. Then less than a year later, no one talked about Arab Springs anymore, but we only heard about the Islamist OSM or the Islamist Hall. And then we shifted from the Foucuilla to the Huntingtonosis, which is another intellectually transmitted disease coming from America, which is not Hegelian but rather Hopsian, with civilized wolves, if I may say so. And no way, I mean, there's nothing to do with the Arabs. I mean, it's all about jihad, bin Laden, Islamism, veil and what have you. And we don't have to trust them. And this, this is something that remains outside. It's not part and parcel of the movement of history as we would have liked to see it. And then the third phase, which no metaphor has been able to coin as of now, which is the demise of the brothers. So let's try not to use what Durkheim would have called in his days the preconceptions, or in the French original, that is to say, not to resort to what he called those kinds of concepts which were coarsely molded, that do not help us understand or decipher the complexities or the vagaries of reality, but correspond to our pre constructed Doxa, the opinion of the man on the street. And approach what we see with a system of metaphors that tend to make it look like something we already know, instead of trying to understand what is happening in the depths of the social movements which are unfolding. So let us go back step by step to the. To the first phase. And why is it that regimes were toppled in North Africa, were not toppled in, or not really toppled in the Arabian Peninsula, and then were taken hostage by civil war in Syria? Before we ask that, we may ask ourselves the question of how come those revolutions took place when and why and under what circumstances. When I did, I underwent sort of long journey, a number of journeys in the Arab revolutions from countries from 2011, March 2011 to February 2013, which I published the diary of those revolutions in volume in French, called Passion Arabes. What was very striking to me, when I talked to people in Upper Egypt and in the Tunisian hinterland and in Yemen and other places, they would all insist that something had happened to them on the social and economic level in 2010, by the end of 2010, that poverty was becoming unbearable, that prices of foodstuffs had raised and everything. And so there was something. And when you look back at the French Revolution, for instance, there is a consensus of historians now to underline the fact that in 1788, the year before Bastille Day, there were major economic problems in France. There was a severe drought, the prices of cereals skyrocketed. A number of people had to leave the countryside because they just were starving. And they fled to the Faubourg, the outskirts of, or the big cities, and so on and so forth. And they created a sort of mass of people who were discontent. Revolutionary ideas existed already. Voltaire and Rousseau and Diderot and others were around, but their ideas had not translated into social mobilization. And so, due to the fact that those economic and social circumstances change to a large extent, then the system was ripe in France for the building of a revolutionary conflagration. Now, when we look at the Middle east and North Africa, if you remember 2010, the summer of 2010, due to climate change, was a major year for shortages in cereals. The wheat fields in Russia were set ablaze because of hot summers, and so on and so forth. To us, this did not make a big difference, because the parts of our budget which is devoted to buying bread or pasta is very little. It is quite different in Upper Egypt or in southern or western Tunisia. And this led to a phenomenon of major discontent which brought a number of people who had started to come to terms with. With the regimes that they did not really like, but they thought they could make it one way or another. There was a means to make ends meet, and they could maybe have some upward social mobility and so on and so forth, and they would bear the duress of the repression and of the corruption. This, for a significant amount of people, started to be. To be a possibility. And that was translated by a sort of wave of suicides, of public suicides, self immolation by fire, particularly in North Africa, in Tunisia, in Algeria, in Morocco, and so on. And so forth. That's one thing. This was the general setting. Another very important issue is that 2010, 2011, comes something like a decade after September 2001. And September 2001 had benefited tremendously to authoritarian regimes in the Arab world. Because to make a long story short, many people in the west, or even many people in the. In the middle classes and upper classes in the Middle east and North Africa, thought that Ben Ali was better than Bin Laden, that is that an authoritarian regime was better than terrorism, turmoil and what have you. And that gave a sort of an extra 10 years to those authoritarian regimes. But from the mid 2000s onwards, after the failure of Al Qaeda in Iraq opposing the American allied invasion, this issue of terrorism was not as important. And therefore a number of people in the west, whether it be in Washington, in NGO networks like the Open Source of Institute and other things, many circles started to believe that those authoritarian regimes actually were more part of the problem than of the solution. And if there was no democratic opening, therefore, all opposition would be driven into armed position and would become prey for Ben Adams and his likes. Therefore, the fate of those regimes would. Was not as bright by the end of the first decade of the 2000s than it had been at first. Now it is in this setting that the Tunisian event took place on the Friday, December 17 to 2010, in Sidi Bouzid. In Tunisia, as was the case in Egypt particularly, and also in Libya, there were two things that were combined. You know, you had all those aging dictators who had in common that they dyed their hair tremendously. And Ben Ali went very far into that process because he even married his hairdresser, Leila Ben Ali, the one who dyed his hair. They combined authoritarianism. That is, those people had been shrewd enough to take power, to make a coup, to take power, but now they were aging. And also Due to the post 2001 extension, if I may say so, they relied more and more heavily on their security services and less and less of on political manipulation. And also they had become tremendously corrupt because the in laws, the nephews and what have you, were running the system. Corruption was rampant. And I always remember when I was a student at Sciences Po in Paris, way back, I had a friend from Tunisia who made it much better than I did, because he became an entrepreneur in his country. And one day we were together in La Marsa and he would tell me, you know, Gilles, to be extorted by a cop, that is Ben Ali is hard enough, but, you know, extortion by a hairdresser can you imagine I can feel your pain. And you know, even the middle classes were fed up with that system. And so there was a system that did not work out anymore. Now, on the 17th of December, you have this man who's a street vendor, Mohamed Bouazizi, who sets himself ablaze because a female policeman or policewoman rather, seizes his scale because he has no license to no patent to sell his vegetables. And he sets himself ablaze. This is something, you know, that happened in other countries in Algeria or in other. Had happened already in Tunisia, in Morocco, and so on and so forth. But then, due to the peculiar circumstances in Sidi Bouzid, it leads to some phenomenon, incremental phenomenon, that will lead to. To the downfall of the regime and to revolution all over the Arab world. Strangely enough, in Sidi Bouzid, which is a small city, which is on the one hand farmland with olive groves, and on the other hand which is a dry land with people who survive on the miserable diets and who have to leave their farms because there is nothing to eat. So the outskirts of Sidi Bou Zid are crowded with people who fled the countryside. So Sidi Bouzid had a huge amount of unemployed people who had degrees, what they call in Tunisian dialects, coming from the French diplomat Chaumeur, that is people with degrees but without jobs. So they had organizations, associations of diplomat Chaumeur, who immediately saw the opportunity to use the self immolation by Mohammed Bouazizi and translate it into political language. And they would build a sort of founding and mobilizing myth about Boazizi's fate. They did not say that he was a street vendor because it would not allow enough people to identify with him. But they said that he had a degree and he could not find a job, and then he was compelled to sell vegetables. That was the sign, a demonstration that the Ben Ali system was corrupt and did not lead anywhere. So this sort of built up the myth of a young educated man who was compelled to sell vegetables and who was humiliated by a policewoman who had slapped him. Then there was another type of myth that was created at the second level. The first one was aimed at a constituency which was of more of a leftist nature, if you wish, mobilizing around social objectives. The other one aimed more at the conservative constituency, that is a man being slapped in public by a woman in a Muslim country, of course, it's shameful for manly honor. And therefore this sort of widened their appeal. The event took place on a Friday and on Saturday, Saturdays in Sidi Bouzid is the weekly market. The. The whole region comes to Sidi Bouzi to buy and sell products. And so those groups started riots with the police. The police killed people because they were not able to deal socially or politically with riots. They just were able to deal with it through repression and sheer repression. Because you had a dictator that was not able to think politically anymore. He relied on his secret services, essentially. And then that led to mobilization, strong mobilization. That mobilization then spread into the cities thanks to rural immigration from the countryside to the outskirts of Tunis. And in the cities you had a movement of merging of different social classes. The downtrodden from Sidi Bouzid and from the lower strata, together with people like my former friend who did not like to be extorted by a hairdresser, that is the middle classes that would merge against the ancien regime. And this merging of different classes, which Marx, in his famous book on the 18th of Brumaire, of Louis Napoleon Bonaparte, calls a moment of enthusiasm where different social classes merge in order to oust an ancien regime. This was in a way a revolution in the process, in the toppling of the ancien regime. But then, was it a revolution when it developed into regime change? Would people who possessed the means of production before the revolution remain the same as the ones who possessed means of production after revolution or not? This, we shall see, is quite different when we look at the events in the Arab world and we compare them with the Iranian Revolution of 1979, for example. Now, those events in Tunisia were developed largely, or were pushed largely by a young urban middle class that was media savvy, that was able to use the Internet, social media, and so on. And that's why those events were usually called or nicknamed at the time, the 2.0 revolution. Nevertheless, this perception of the revolutions that people saw on TV and so on was rather superficial. It did not assess significantly the movements that had a significant grassroots outreach and that could mobilize people, particularly when the second phase would come into being, that is organizing free elections and bringing people to the voting, to the polls. Now, that took place in Tunisia, and to a large extent, thanks to the Al Jazeera channel, this was broadcasted all over the Arab world and in Egypt. The example of the Tunisian youth that was able to topple a dictator was probably what allowed different Egyptian movements or associations that had already for the last five years, tried to mobilize constituencies against Mubarak regime that were harshly repressed, put into prison, tortured, and so on, so forth, was what allowed them to merge into a movement. And the funny thing was that when Egyptians saw Tunisian demonstrations on tv, this sort of mimicked them. And one actually, this is not, of course, something I said out of chauvinism, but the first slogan of the Arab revolution was in French. They would chant, de gage, I go away, leave on the streets of Burgiba street of Tunis. And so, you know, with Tunisian slang, digaj, digaj bin Ali digaj. And then the Egyptians would listen to that on Al Jazeera. Most of them would not understand. No one speaks French in Egypt except higher strata. And they would thought that it was a sort of talisman that, you know, that they could use and to topple their regime. But there is no G in Egypt, so it's only gi in Cairo. And they would say, digeg dgeg means chicken and doesn't work out. So they were compelled to translate it into Arabic and say. And then this is how it unfolded. This is half a joke, of course, but this is to underline the fact that there was this sort of snowball effect, which was helped mainly by TV channels and first and foremost by Al Jazeera television. In Egypt, the revolution did not take exactly the same pace, because in Tunisia, the army and the middle class that was represented in the officer corps threw Ben Ali out, put him on a plane to Saudi Arabia. Whereas in Egypt, where you had a much stronger military corps, the military put Mubarak aside in order to remain in power as a core. Now, this led to a year of uncertainty and attempts by the military to control regime change, which was ultimately unsuccessful. And in both cases, that led to elections in October in Tunisia and then December to February in Egypt. In Libya, the same process happened, except that there needed be significant foreign intervention, military intervention, British, French and America leading from the rear, as they said at the time, which was a process that had a rather efficient military planning but was largely devoid of political planning. And to some extent, it resembled the Iraqi situation, where the army of Saddam Hussein crumbled, where Saddam Hussein was ultimately captured and killed. But then the political aftermath of the military intervention did not follow suit. So whatever the circumstances, and I have no time to go back, go down to details, in the three North African countries, the ancien regimes were toppled. They were toppled also, as opposed to the two other zones, because whatever happened politically in Tunisia, that would have no consequence on the price of oil at the gas station, and it would have no consequence either on the core issues of the other core issue of the Middle east or the Arab world, that is the Arab Israeli conflict, it was rather marginal in Tunisia, definitely in Libya also, even though there is oil in Libya and even in Egypt, which we tended to tend to place at the heart of the Arab world as a neighbor to Israel. But Egypt had been bought out of the conflict largely by American funding. So it was not central anymore after the conflict, after the peace process. So therefore regime change could happen. Toppling of the ancien regimes could happen in the Arabian Peninsula, in Zone B. It was different. It was different because there were in the place of the world where a lot of the hydrocarbons that fuel, if I may say so, the world economy flow out of and one quarter of the amount of hydrocarbons crossed the Hormuz Straits on a daily basis. And had Bahrain become a Shia country controlled by its majority Shia population, had it become a staunch ally of Iran, as Iraq had become, courtesy of the American neocons, therefore Saudi Arabia and Qatar, whose oil fields and gas fields were around the island of the Bahrain, would have felt totally jeopardized. And therefore, a month after the revolution started In Bahrain on 14 March 2011, a military intervention by GCC forces. First and foremost, Saudi Arabia aborted the revolution in Bahrain. And people in the west or in the liberal middle classes in the Middle east who had backed revolutions in North Africa looked the other way because they were not favorable to the fact that the balance of the hydrocarbons production in the world would be toppled. In Yemen, the revolution was to some extent watered down, largely also because Saudi Arabia feared that the Shia minority, the ideological movements of the Houthis that was prevalent in the northern part of Yemen bordering Saudi Arabia would make inroads into Saudi territory. And the Houthis were perceived also so as boosted by Iran. And therefore transition was engineered under Saudi and international control in order to oust smoothly President Ali Abdullah Saleh and replace him by his vice president. So in the Arabian Peninsula this change was engineered differently due to the oil issue. And major oil and gas producers like Saudi Arabia or Qatar reacted differently to the challenge. Saudi Arabia was outwardly against what happened. They feared that it would create tremendous turmoil, cost them a bundle, and they used a lot of monarchs private money to fuel the state budget. In March 2011, when King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia came back from America, where he had undergone surgery, he pumped $130 billion in out of the family's monies to be used in the state budget to buy social peace by legitimacy and so on and so forth. So they were very hostile to any kind of change. The same was true for the United Arab Emirates. And Sheikh Abdallah, the Foreign Minister of the uae, was the last one to visit Mubarak before his downfall. Whereas Qatar had a rather different policy. Qatar from the start boosted the Muslim Brothers, considering that they were the outcome of the crisis, that they were the ones who could become the new leaders of the Muslim of the Arab world and that they would be the sponsors of this new hegemon, if you wish, that would replace the former Western leaning leadership in Zone three or Zone C rather, that is Syria. Democratic movements started against the Assad regime as they had started started in other countries. The same slogans were used. The Sha' Ab Yulid is gotten Nizam. The people want the downfall of the regime. And it started in earnest. There were peaceful demonstrations every Friday and so on and so forth. And then due to mounting repression from the regime, rebellion turned into violence. Desertions in the army and so on and so forth. Defections in the army and the movement of rebellion, which was originally non denominational in nature through the statements of the Free Syrian army, became hijacked more and more by the confessional and dominational dimension of Syria. Syria is a fragmented country, just like its other Levant neighbors, Lebanon and Iraq. And the war in Lebanon had. The civil war in Lebanon had pitched Christians against Muslims before it pitched Sunnis against Shias. And the wars in Iraq and the last one in the aftermath of the American and allied invasion had also pitched Shias against Sunnis, Arabs against Kurds and so on, so forth. And Syria was no different. And on the one hand you had a coalition of the minorities under the aegis of the Alawis. And on the other hand, Napoleon position, which was overwhelmingly Sunni in character. And there again, within the turmoils of the Syrian rebellion, the Brothers, the Muslim Brothers pushed both by Qatar funding, Qatari funding and by Turkish help. And Turkey was and still is under the control or the aegis of government or a party, the akp, which is an inheritor of the Muslim Brothers in its Turkish version. Then the rebellion in Syria became more and more Islamist and Muslim Brother in nature. Then phase two, phase two starts with elections in Tunisia in October 2011, in Egypt and in Libya and in other countries. And much to the surprise of many, the groups that or the parties or the organizations that managed to get the biggest number of votes are the Muslim Brothers. Why is that? Because the Brothers benefited from two things. On the one hand, they were the most repressed under the ancien regime. So they had a sort of legitimacy because they were the most prominent Figures in the opposition, they were martyred, if you wish, as prisoners, as oppositionists. And also they were very well organized. In some countries, like Egypt for instance, they had become a sort of second state. You had the state number one, which was the state run by the military that dealt with weapons with Israel, with, with foreign affairs. And you had a sort of state of below that was run by the Brothers, which dealt with welfare, with charities, with education, with food stamps and so on and so forth. And so they were the ones who were able to provide services on a daily basis. They were very well organized, they were disciplined and they brought people to the voting booths. Strangely enough, in Egypt, and this had not been foreseen by many actually they were not only the brothers who had a landslide victory at the booths in Egypt, but also the Salafists. The Salafists, until the very last days of the Egyptian revolution, had not moved at all in favor of the revolution. On the contrary, they remained, if not faithful to the ancien regime, at least neutral. And Salafism in general, following its Saudi inspiration, is not hostile to the powers that be. I mean, they are not into politics. They would rather build constituencies at grassroot level, make people have a pious life, grow beards, wear niqabs and so on and so forth that resist violent confrontation against the state. And in Egypt, actually they were even used by the Egyptian ancient regime against the Muslim brothers as Islamists who were not confrontational. They were not interested in going into politics originally. And when I was in Egypt in the spring of 2011, I, I had a number of interviews with leading Salafists who said, no, we are not going to go to the booths. Things change in the summer of 2011 largely, or that is at least my assumption, because Saudi Arabia was not pleased at the prospect of having Muslim Brothers who they see as their main competitors in the field of Sunni Islam, as the only ones winning in Egypt. And therefore they push the Salafists in order to be part and parcel of the winning group. So phase two, you have those majorities of Nahdah, that is Muslim Brothers of different brands in Egypt, Libya, balanced majority, but Muslim Brothers having the lead Egypt in Yemen, also the brothers being strong. And within the Syrian revolution, also the brothers leading in Palestine, Hamas looking like it was taking over. And Hamas that had until then been largely in alliance with Iran, even though it's Sunni party, leaned increasingly towards Qatar. And even the Emir of Qatar even paid a visit to the Gaza Strip, of course, with the blessing of the Israelis and sort of, as I said, bought back Qatar from the Iranians. All this took place under the aegis of the Qataris, who not only boosted the brothers an Al Jazeera and funded them tremendously, but who also convened numerous meetings in Doha where they would have Ghanousi from Tunisia, whoever from Egypt, from Turkey and so on, so forth, so that people would, would come together and they would also have Arab nationalists who were their former enemies, who were tipped so that they would work together in a sort of alliance between Islamists and nationalists, with Islamists the leading power and Turkey playing a very strong role. So this was phase two, something which took place both in the countries where regimes had been toppled within the Syrian rebellion and in Yemen, but simultaneously there was a mounting tension during phase two between Shias and Sunnis. Bahrain had started the, the events. And I remembered I was in Qatar and I did a long interview with Sheikh Yusuf Al Qardawi, to whom I said in a rather flattering manner, so Fadila Tashayk, you started everything, didn't you? He said, yes, I did. And you know, I asked, I made a fatwa on Al Jazeera so that Kasafi would be killed. I told Mubaraka to leave. And you know, I was there in the five revolutions. I said five, well, let's say Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Yemen, Syria. Well, you're missing one. What about Bahrain? No, this is not a solid, thorough. This is not revolution, this is protest. And you know, it's not revolution because it was, it was something that was boosted by the Iranians and they want, Bahrain is an Arab country and they want Bahrain to become Persian and it's not a revolution at all. And so on and so forth. So therefore this anti Iranian and this anti Shia dimension became very strong already during phase two, started with Bahrain, Significant also in the watering down of the Yemeni revolution and first and foremost becoming big fault line in Syria. In Syria, where Muslim brothers and Salafists started to conceive the war as a jihad of Sunnis against heretics, against Rafida, Shias or Alawites, Alawites and what have you. And so while in phase two, you had this overwhelming victory of the brothers, with President Morsi elected in Egypt in June of 2012 by a small margin, but elected nevertheless. Then you had the fault line, the Shia Sunni fault line that was becoming more and more significant. Now, one thing about why the brothers were prevalent during phase two, not only because they had their own constituency, that is, as I mentioned earlier on, they had a sort of hero, martyr image, they had discipline, they provided services. But they also benefited from the fact that a significant amount of the middle classes, even though they were not Islamist, were fed up with the military regime. Something that had happened in Turkey even before the Arab revolutions, where a number of Turkish secularists were so pissed with the sort of secularist fascist generals that they would rather vote for AKP because it was perceived as part and parcel of civil society, right? And in Tunisia and in Egypt, even more, this also happens, and my estimate is that Morsi got probably one third of his votes in June from people who were not at all Islamists and who voted not for Morsi, but against General Shafiq, who was the last his opponent on the second round and who was Mubarak's last prime minister. Now, phase three. Phase three sees this, which, as I mentioned, started, starts in late 20, late spring, 2013, June, early early summer, sees something which is really a total change of situation of things, that is the demise of the brothers. The brothers thought they were reigning supreme. Qatar was the center of the world and the big hegemon of the Arab world. I remembered I did some interviews with Waddah Khanfar, a Muslim brother by origin and by ideology, who had been for eight years the director general of Al Jazeera and who explained to me what was his vision of the. Of the Arab world, what he called the Orient, the shark, which would now escape the sort of flee from the yoke of the colonial west that would become a center of the world power system in its own capacity and that would be ruled by an identity that was essentially Muslim brother in nature. And I heard that explain. I heard him explain that to me in Qatar. And then I met him in Istanbul at a meeting where he said the same thing in front of Turks, which was something I was not used to listen to the mouth of an Arab. And he addressed a Turkish constituency of Erdogan sympathizers and said to them, you know, I've always looked at Istanbul as my capital city, which was to Arabs, something strange said by a Palestinian. And he said, even though I'm an Arab, my two grandfathers were martyred under Turkish uniform. Well, everybody clapped. And so something where he was trying to mold a new Middle east that sort of overcame the divisions between Arabs and Turks and what have you, and was Muslim brother in nature, regardless of origins, languages and so on and so forth. Now, what happened and how come it did not work out for the brothers? For a number of reasons, and this is not yet entirely clear, because it's a process in the making. It's history in the making one of them was that Qatar was, was. Had tremendously overstretched. And they were caught in a sort of hubris. Qatar has 200,000 citizens, I mean, people who carry Qatari passports, which is not much, not all of them work on a daily basis from dawn to dusk. And even if you're very rich, it is complicated to challenge the whole world when you're such a small country. And Qatar had managed to make its way because this sort of reconciled people, they bridged gaps that they organized peace conferences between Palestinians, between Lebanese, between what have you. They had good relations with everybody. And suddenly when they took sides with the brothers, they immediately antagonized a number of very powerful powers in their immediate environment. They antagonized Saudi Arabia because the Muslim brothers in Egypt, in Tunisia and Palestine, where have you. On which the Qataris counted, were in their view, a sort of human resource that could balance the thousands of Sanafi preachers that were produced on a yearly basis by Saudi Arabia. Something of course, that antagonized the Saudis very strongly. Also, in order to counterbalance Saudi influence and to sort of keep at bay from Saudi appetite, the Qataris had traditionally played the Iranian cards. Now, with their funding of the Syrian rebellion, they also antagonized significantly the Iranians. So there were courts between two very strong powers, between the Saudi hammer and the Iranian anvil, if you wish. And it became extremely difficult for them. They also started to antagonize world powers to which they were friendly. In France, for instance, they bought soccer TV rights and bought football clubs like they did in France, Britain. But then in France we have a religion which is French cinema. And the French movie industry derives, is funded mainly by soccer rights, soccer TV rights. Therefore, they antagonized a very significant element of the French economy and French capitalism, even though they were at the time very close to former French president Nicolas Sarkozy. So there was sort of strong Qatar bashing campaign in France. And you know, their sort of, their lenient and ecumenical image started to be shattered. The same thing happened with the World cup, the football, soccer World cup, where not only did they manage by whatever reason to have a, to have the FIFA people vote for them, but they also tried, it's not yet for sure now, but they were on their way to have the World cup take place during the winter season. Now if you do that during the winter season, you antagonize the whole soccer system of Britain, of Germany, of Italy, and then you, you face very, very powerful enemies. Well, everybody knew there were slaves working in construction in Qatar and other GCC countries, but no one gave a damn about it. Now in the British press it's very blatant. Every other week you have on the front page in one of the British dailies or in other countries dailies, files about mistreatment of people from India, from Sri Lanka. In Qatar, human rights, which are not respected, people dying, buying, building stadiums and so on and so forth. And so this was something that was clearly, that started clearly to create problems for them. And within the Qatari establishment there were fears that, that this sort of hubris led to a crash, to a collision, to the breaking of the country. And that led to the fact that within Qatar there was a succession that did not keep in power the over powerful Prime Minister Hamid bin Jassem, who was the key architect of this policy, of this Muslim brother policy, but that ousted him completely and led to the fact that Crown Prince Tamim managed to seize power entirely and marginalize Hamid bin Jassam. And since then there's been significant backpedaling and Qatari interests, I mean per se, have overcome the financing of the Muslim brother revolution everywhere for fear that the Qatari state would not resist this tidal wave. In Egypt, there was another issue. Not only was the Egyptian or Tunisian performance in government not very good, but also. So the brothers and I will just concentrate on the Egyptian case, antagonized a lot of their constituencies because of their authoritarian leanings. They antagonized, say the third of the votes that had gone to Morsi because they were against Shafi. So they lost the majority. And also because they were such a closely knit group, it was, it became perceived by a number of people in Egypt that they could, if they were not brothers, card carrying, if I may say so, brothers, they could not have access, I'm through. They could not have access to the state system anymore. They could not bribe anyone. They could not. They would be excluded. And this led to a sort of mounting confrontation which finally turned out as the massive demonstration on June 30, followed by the military takeover and the ousting of the brothers. A couple of things to conclude which shows us how those dialectics functioned. After Ramadan, In August of 2013, General Sisi had the army fire at brothers demonstrating or brothers sittings in Cairo. Approximately 1,000 people died. President Bashar Al Assad of Syria sent his congratulations to General Sisi and said that I had told you those Muslim brothers are terrorists. And the week after you had Bashar al Assad using chemical weapons to kill a little more 1,500 people in the Ghouta in the eastern outskirts of Damascus. And then you had this big change suddenly when France, Britain, America said that Bash Al Assad was an enemy of mankind, that they would intervene. And then the front started to crumble. Sergei Lavrov moved a pawn on the chessboard. Syria agreed to destroy its chemical weapons arsenal under the supervision of Russia, which was both a judge and a lawyer in that case. And that led to the fact that the Western backing of the Syrian revolution started to melt down. While in the Syrian revolution, something had happened which probably was comparable to what had happened in Algeria in the 1990s, that is that thanks to the action of Syrian intelligence, as had been the case in Chechnya, also in Algeria, jihad was inoculated into the revolution. So it would explode, it would disintegrate. So remember the Armed Islamic Group in the Algerian civil war that were so horrendous that people, even though when they were against the military, turned against them. Now we have a situation where the brothers have been marginalized in all the countries that I mentioned, where military regimes are back in countries like Egypt, for instance, and where the Syrian revolution is now perceived in a way which is completely different from before, not only because Bashar Al Assad and his regime seem far more powerful than they were perceived a year before, but also because in the west now a lot of people live in the fear of jihadists leaving from Leicester Aubervilliers or Minchin or wherever to Syria, coming back and starting a sort of Al Qaeda terror campaign again inside of Europe. So we're seeing a sort of Arab revolutions in reverse in a way, with consequences that might unfold on domestic policies of European countries, issues of refugees and so on and so forth. And to an extent, our conception of those revolutions are now totally blurred by the recent developments. Add to that that the traditional alliances of the west, including with Saudi Arabia, are trying to change. They are being challenged because right after the. The Syrian regime seemed to be slightly reinforced. Then negotiations were opened with the Iranians, who opened the negotiations because they felt that they were in a situation of relative strength in the Russian Shiite front, as opposed to the Sanafi Sudani front. And this is where we are now. I believe this is where we are now. And the situation for the future is quite unpredictable. The categories which we used originally to try to decipher those revolutions, that is, whether it was the Arab Spring, the end of history motto, or the Islamist autumn, the clash of civilizations has led into something quite different, which is a war inside of Islam, a sort of fitna, a war for Muslim minds, if I may say so, which is pitting Sunnis against Shias. And this is this fault line again, which is now prevalent. And one question which we may ask ourselves is to what extent the Arab Israeli conflict, which was one of the keys to decipher the issue in the Middle east, together with the oil problem, whether or not the Israeli Arab conflict is still central to our analysis of the Middle east, or it's the Shia Sunni fault line, which is becoming at least temporarily prevalent. And with this question, I will leave you and turn to. Excellent.
- [73:35]
A
Do you want to take questions from.
- [73:36]
B
There or do you want to.
- [73:41]
A
Right, thank you. We have some time left for questions, so if you want to stick your hand up, say who you are, and then ask your question, that would be great. You've stunned the audience into silence. Yes, sir. Do you want to bring the microphone?
- [74:01]
C
From the beginning, I had a sort of mechanical interpretation for spring, not as a season, but as a mechanical spring.
- [74:21]
B
As a what? A mechanical spring. Oh, yeah.
- [74:24]
C
And that spring was released by removal of Saddam Hussein. And this kind of dialectical analysis, which is based on the.
- [74:49]
A
Could we bring it towards a question, please? Thanks.
- [74:53]
C
Yes, my question is that we cannot interpret, we cannot analyze what happened in Arab worlds or in Middle east according to dialectical.
- [75:16]
B
Okay, we've got that point.
- [75:17]
A
Can we have a question?
- [75:18]
B
Thanks.
- [75:19]
D
Is that it?
- [75:21]
B
No, no dialectics.
- [75:22]
C
No, my metaphor is for spring is not a season.
- [75:29]
A
Okay, that's great metaphor.
- [75:31]
B
Thank you. All right.
- [75:32]
A
Thank you. Can we have another. Yes, you have.
- [75:36]
B
Thank you.
- [75:37]
E
Thank you for the lecture. But I'm just curious.
- [75:39]
A
Your mic's not on again.
- [75:43]
E
Is that working?
- [75:44]
B
Yeah, that's better.
- [75:44]
E
Thank you for the. The lecture. But I'm just curious to see where Jordan is among all of these Arab Spring. Like, where does Jordan stand?
- [75:53]
B
Jordan.
- [75:54]
E
Yes.
- [75:55]
A
So thank you. The spring dialectics in Jordan. Another question? Yes.
- [76:06]
B
Okay.
- [76:07]
D
You quoted the Shia Sunni split.
- [76:09]
B
Is there not also a major split.
- [76:12]
D
Between the secular view of the state and the caliphate or Islamicist view of the state? I can recall that Erdogan went to Cairo, I think, in. In autumn 2012 or maybe 11, and he gave a speech in favor of the secular state, even though obviously Erdogan has a very Islamicist tinge to that. But I think that's important also in the early stages of the Syrian conflict and perhaps also in Tunisia.
- [76:48]
A
Excellent. So we have the spring or dialectics, their use, Jordan and where it's going, and then the secular versus the Islamist view of the State.
- [76:56]
B
Well, I'll start in reverse. Whether I mean, Shia vs Sunni is only relevant as a fault line as much as political actors are able to mobilize this divide, if you know, to have strong constituencies pitted against each other. Because if you look back in the 15 centuries of history of Islam, there has always been Sunni, Shia divides. At times they were menial. I mean, they did not carry any significant cleavages that would not bring people into killing, make people kill each other. At some other times, due to some circumstances, they would for the time being, in a country like Syria, it is prevalent. But you're right, because when you say that it's not the only cleavage and the sort of secularist versus Islamist is also present, does not have the same magnitude. But if you look at Egypt, for instance, definitely what was at stake in the mobilization against Morsi in June 2013 was a reaction of people who were anti Islamists. And the same was true also in Tunisia, where the debate on the constitution and the ousting, the pressure to oust a Nahda, was engineered by forces which defined themselves as secularists. Not to say that they are not Muslims, but they clearly did not share the Shah Sharia worldview, if you wish. So this is a subsystem. But as of now, the main fault line, because this is where the biggest war is taking place, is Syria. And this is where the biggest economic interests are at stake, that is in the Gulf, are what is called Shia versus Sunni or Iranian versus Arabs or some Arabs because other Arabs are Shia and Iraq is predominantly Shia and allied with Iran in that matter. So whether or not this will last forever is not for sure. And this is one thing which is at stake in the negotiations between Iran and the West. On the nuclear issue, can we foresee that President Rouhani and his team are leaning closer to a sort of less radical Islamist stance if they are being reintegrated into the international community after a positive outcome of the negotiations. I mean, this is one of the hypotheses which is on the table, which of course not everybody shares. And you know, debate on that issue is rampant in the US now with the pro Israeli lobby considering that sanctions against Iran are the only way out. Whereas some other forces consider that you have to boost the negotiation process in order to strengthen the hand of the less Islamists within the Iranian establishment. Right. But as of now, the this, if I may say so, this contradiction is secondary to the Shia Sunni contradiction because this is the one which is bringing in the biggest amount of money of weapons. This is where People are dying and so on. But this is evolving all the time. Look, for instance, at the issue of jihad in Syria, where, from what we read, and it's of course, very difficult to confirm, but even in Saudi Arabia now, there is a lot of debate on Syrian jihad. Some in Saudi Arabia government circles are being afraid of the fact that Syria is turning like Afghanistan, where they originally funded the jihadists with the blessing of the CIA until jihadists turned against Saudi Arabia. Right. And in Syria, you now have a number of radical jihadi groups who attack Saudi Arabia and say that, you know, they worship the barrel and the dollar instead of worshipping Allah and so on, so forth. Things which, you know, remind us of what happened in the early 2000s with al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, engineering bombings and turmoil in Saudi Arabia between 2003 and 2006. So to what extent is this fault line sustainable in terms of the policy of the different actors is a question mark. And if I have another lecture next year, maybe we shall see that where we were this year will have been overcome by different contributions. Predictions in terms of Jordan. Well, Jordan, I believe, is the Jordan domestic situation pales in front of the regional issues. And the plight of Jordan now is that they have to deal with a huge number of Syrian refugees and that the monarchy is very worried by the fact that turmoil amongst those refugees might spill over into Jordanian society and therefore Jordan. The Jordanian government benefits from a rather strong commitment from the west. So that nothing, let's say, not much changes in the kingdom. A number of countries like Jordan have sort of managed to remain marginal to the Arab revolutions. I mean, not to mention Iraq, which is into its own problems, but which, when you think of Jordan, you think of Algeria and Morocco, for instance. It looks like for some reasons they were not taken into the turmoil. Last year I gave a series of lectures in Morocco, and the year before, Moroccans were sort of, you know, anxious to get into the Arab revolutions. They sort of feared, they were shameful that they didn't have their revolutions. A year later, there were sites of relief that Morocco had not turned, like Libya, like Egypt, like Syria, and so on and so forth. So there is a sort of caution now amongst people who would have liked to go down and to follow the. The revolutionary line because of the backlash that followed. In terms of spring, I'm not sure I fully understood the question, but as I mentioned earlier on, I believe that those seasonal metaphors are not really apt at understanding or deciphering the phenomena that we're trying to analyze that we should use different tools of analysis, which are the ones, if you were, as I mentioned facetiously, or so I hoped. In the beginning, it was dialectics without aufhebung, so it was not leading to progress. It was not a mechanical hegelia, post Fukuyama, if you wish, dialectic system. On the other hand, it was a system where contradictions were taking place year after year and were building an image that I was trying to come up with.
- [87:02]
A
We have to draw an end to this meeting in a minute, but I'll take one final round of questions. Yes, you may.
- [87:13]
E
As a fiercely secular Arab and Lebanese, I obviously do not agree with the Muslim brother. As a fiercely secular Arab and Lebanese, of course I do not agree with the Muslim Brotherhood. But do you think it's a bit premature to talk about their demise, especially in the way that they're being treated today, so that being clamped down, especially in Egypt, is the most obvious example, so that they would probably be strengthened, if only underground?
- [87:40]
A
Well, if you leave that question to sum up on, and just also where you think Qatari foreign policy is going as well, because it was the Brotherhood and Gatar which were the kind of.
- [87:49]
B
Center of your talk as far as Qatar is concerned, I believe that what is now prevalent in Qatar is their state interests. And, you know, the days of Hamid Ben Jassem, I believe, are over. It became too dangerous. And, you know, the future of the small GCC states is open to questions. I mean, they can only survive if there is a balance of power in the region. If Qatar is a sort of hubris that antagonizes both Saudi Arabia and Iran, it's not sure that we shall still have a Qatar in 15 days. 15 years. 15 years unconscious. Now, as far as the Emmaus or the Brothers, you're right, because you know, you cannot wipe out movements, particularly in Egypt, that have been used to confront repression for eight decades. And Egypt now, I mean, Sinai is off limits, clearly. And when you look at the map of unrest in Egypt, in Cardaha, in the Middle Valley, it's precisely the map where you had unrest in the 1990s under Mubarak and where the Brothers have strong constituencies. So as of now, because of the amount of repression in Egypt, they cannot participate in the political process. But we do not really see anything that the present government of Egypt is delivering in order to create a political alternative in Egypt, for the time being, the benefit for the third from the $13 billion which are pumped into the Egyptian economy, courtesy of Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and the uae. To what extent is that sufficient to build a legitimacy for the present Egyptian political system is of course very questionable. And now what is very striking in Egypt is that, you know, people who were liberals and who were like you seem to be very keen on human rights and so on and so forth, were so panic strikes under Morsi, were so fearful that, you know, they would back everything that would be done so that the brothers would not come back. Maybe it's a short sighted policy, maybe it's not moral, but from your point of view, but I believe that as of now it is still a rather strong feeling in Egypt whether or not it will last. That is not sure at all. And depending on what the CC government will be able or not to deliver.
- [91:40]
A
That's a great line to end, I think. We thank Professor Kapel for a fascinating, incredibly ambitious and wide ranging talk and we look forward to his next. He told me coming over that Fitna was the War for Muslim Minds. Its title came to him when he was lecturing in this very room. So we assume the next book will also be. The title of the next book will be derived from the magic and the insight that was shared in the Hong Kong Theatre tonight. Thank you very much.