Since 9/11, the narrative of empowering Middle Eastern and Islamic “civil society” as a means of fighting “terrorism” became prominent in the West. Civil society is considered as a site for regulating political tensions and redefining new relationships between the state and global capital, and between private interest and the public good. Community organizations, women's groups, and Muslim faith-based charities were encouraged, yet their activities were carefully monitored. At the same time, nation-states were pushed to undertake a set of educational, legal, religious and gender reforms throughout the Middle East. How do we re-conceptualize state-civil society relations in the post-9/11 era? This double panel will draw on case studies from the Middle East, the United States and Europe to explore the tensions as well as the changing relationships between global governance and capital, law and national politics, and civil society actors.
To address these topics, we bring together contributions from sociology, anthropology, political science, law and the humanities. The first session investigates the ways in which the “war on terror” has shaped specific reforms enabling the state to position itself as “moderate” and “democratic”. It highlights programs such as the Middle East Partnership Initiative, which articulates the US fight against “terror” and neoliberal interventions in civil society. Non-state actors have opened multiple spaces in which to appropriate the Bush administration’s rhetoric of democratization in transnational mobilization against the Iraq war in Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Syria or in the “new era” of reforms in Morocco. The theme of reform is also highlighted through revisiting the 1949 Sanhuri civil code in Egypt in light of conflicting post-9/11 “Egyptian” or “Muslim” identities.
The second session examines how organizations cater to post-9/11 agendas while engaging with the state in their work to provide charity or justice in the context of globalization, migration, occupation, or post-civil war conflict. Whereas neoliberal economics is shaping the work of Sunni Islamic charities in Cairo, the imperatives of the “war on terror” are urging a transnational Shi‘i organization to engage with the British government in representing the United Kingdom’s Shi‘i minority. The conditions of Israeli occupation and post-Hariri Lebanon also influence different strategies of resistance. In Lebanon the rise of public voices and claims for reparation and justice are one way to address the legacy of Hariri’s assassination. Non-violent action is used by a Palestinian NGO to counter Israeli control over religious and non-religious sites.
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The “Middle East Partnership Initiative” (MEPI) is a US-led agenda for reforming states and societies in the Middle East along neoliberal lines. Established by the Bush administration in 2002, this program follows a political rationality of soft reforms through enhancement of citizen-entrepreneurship, women’s leadership and capacity building of civil society organizations, as means to uproot “terrorism” and spread “democracy”. The MEPI has so far monitored a wide range of “partnership” programs-- based in institutional settings in Washington, DC-- and raised funds to support the creation of networks of NGOs and civil society organizations and provide training and business opportunities for women.
In this project, civil society, women’s leadership, and private interest seem to hold together in perfect harmony and are directed toward spreading democracy and freedom in the Middle East. The questions remain: first, what are the assumed connections among these three levels of social engineering and political intervention? Second, what are the logics and truths informing this emphasis on gender and women’s empowerment in relation to the goals of spreading democracy in the Middle East?
I consider the MEPI as a technology of power aiming to create legitimacy for the unpopular US “war on terror,” through social engineering, monitoring of civil society and indirect political intervention. My paper will first discuss the grounding of the MEPI in liberal notions of freedom and normative definitions of civil society. Second, I will show the elective and paternalist grounds of the discourse of women’s empowerment and identify the ways in which the MEPI has created new subjects while reinventing the “missing” connections between civil society, private interest, women’s rights, and political authority in the Middle East. Third, I will discuss the tensions between a discourse of democratization, which would require making the state accountable to its own people, and the needs to support authoritarian governments that would contain the growing dissatisfaction about the very American policies in the region. I will conclude with an assessment of the MEPI in light of other regional forums led by NGOs, state professionals, entrepreneurs, and intellectuals across the region.
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Dr. Yasmine Farouk
In November 2003, the leader of the Iraq Survey Group, publicly recognized the absence of WMDs in Iraq before stepping down from his position. Before this date, the Middle East democratization imperative was, once again, sacrificed. The American administration needed the logistic cooperation of its Arab allies during its military operation in Iraq. One month after the fall of Baghdad, in May 2003, President Bush had praised the leaders of Saudi Arabia and Egypt since “with efforts of leaders like President Mubarak and Crown Prince Abdullah, the hope of peace is renewed”. However, Bush’s war motives were reorganized in his public discourses post-November 2003. Democracy, Human Rights and Freedom are once again the soul of his “mission” in the Middle East as was the case in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks.
Despite the unpopularity of the missionary, the mission was long awaited for in this region. Since 2001, American governmental and non-governmental civil society projects provoked some active reactions from non-religious Arab civil society actors. Political developments inside Iraq further encouraged these actors to seize the political impasse of their rulers. However, the organized mobilization of these actors testifies of more than just a response to the American call for freedom. The close observation of their mobilization from 2003, with a look back to 2001, reveals different appropriation strategies of the American project. While all actors relied on American pressure on Arab regimes, the internalization process of this external pressure followed independent domestic trajectories that sometimes contradicted American initial plans.
In my paper, I expose the strategies of non state actors and follow them in three of the region’s key state players: Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Syria. In doing so, I will rely on political sociology theories as well as on empirical data personally collected from the three fields. The paper starts by presenting the immediate popular mobilization against the war with special emphasis on Arab transnational anti-war networks. I then expose what I call the second space of mobilization, that is the space of domestic civil societies. The paper ends with a brief evaluation of the reasons behind the inability of non-state actors to influence regime policies in the region.
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Heba Sewilam
In the last decade, with several international crises involving Islam and Muslims, like the bombing of Gaza, the invasion of Iraq and 9/11, academia has shown particular interest in the early 20th century codification movement in Egypt. Egyptian and Western academics alike have written works assessing the civil code of 1949 drafted by Abdel Razzaq Al-Sanhuri. These voices mostly hail Sanhuri for successfully blending Western codification, patterned on the French code, with Islamic law, infamously known in the West as Sharia, resulting in a government in line with the Western view of a “moderate” Middle East. Their attempts occlude, first, that the codification was and indeed is a legal tool to assert “Egyptian” identity, supported by the Egyptian government, against the conflicting “Muslim” identity, supported by the majority of Egyptian society. I am understanding “Muslim” identity to mean a reminder of the obligation to uphold Sharia without any consideration for nationalism. “Egyptian” identity refers to giving preference to Egypt’s national interests even if this necessitates siding with non-Muslims against Muslims. Second, the codification was viewed among contemporary popular intellectuals as emptily mimicking aspects of Sharia to effect this subsuming of the popular “Muslim” identity. To prove these two assumptions, the paper first compares Sanhuri's position on the right to khayar (unreasoned contractual termination) with its equivalent in Sharia to show that the codification movement aimed to take Sharia’s place in the Egyptian legal system. Second, the paper reviews the resurgence of Sanhuri's popularity among Western-affiliated acedemia and its role in supporting the Egyptian identity, albeit indirectly, by undermining the legal doctirnes of Sharia versus the "legal achievements" of Snahuri.
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Dr. Nasser Yassin
The post-9/11 global war on terror reshaped the dynamics of post-conflict reconstruction with serious implications on the affected populations. The paper discusses the political ramifications in the process of rebuilding - physically and socially - war-torn societies and explores the roles of state and civil society actors in such process. It examines the case of the Palestinian refugee Camp of Nahr el-Barid in Lebanon that was destroyed in summer 2007 as result of clashes between the Lebanese Army and the Fateh El-Islam militant group, an Islamist group that found refuge in the Camp.
The paper analyzes the discourses and practices of various actors - international, national and local; state and non-state - involved in re-building Nahr el-Barid. The paper looks into how each of these actors conceives its role in rebuilding the camp, reflecting tension between conceptions of protection and sovereignty over the refugee populations and their spaces. The tension is reflected at three levels: local, relating to the degree of "power" sought by the inhabitants in running their local affairs through the Nahr el Barid Reconstruction Commission for Civil Action and Studies; national, relating to the Lebanese state's plan for reconstruction of Nahr el Barid that stems from a perspective of enhancing sovereignty through "management of refugee populations"; and international, relating to the UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) "responsibility of protecting" Palestinians through the reconstruction of the Camp, as mandated by the international community. The paper argues that the tension in the discourses of various actors is underpinned by the ways they construct concerned populations in relation to their civilian status.
