The Arab world has for centuries sought to ensure that the Red Sea off Yemen at the southern tip of the Arabian Peninsula remains a largely Arab lake and that the reaches of the sea to the Indian Ocean are secure.
However, this has hardly ever been the case as repeated waves of voyagers from the long shores of East Africa and even from the Indian Sub-Continent have sought to establish presences at that strategic strait separating the Red Sea from the Indian Ocean. Arab thinking has always been cognisant that the narrow Red Sea gives direct access to the Hijaz, the location of Islam’s holiest sites, and to key demographic centres in Arabia, Sudan, and Egypt.
In the Gulf, where Iran intersects with Iraq, the Arabs have also for centuries been wary of Iran’s persistent desire to expand westwards towards the Levant and from there towards the Mediterranean. In the Arab psyche, this narrow border with Iran has witnessed numerous battles, in which the Arabs have sometime been seeking to expand their realms and at other times have been defending their land against Iran’s innate desire to expand its political influence and its cultural milieu westwards.
Often in the Arabs’ historical narrative, this struggle has seemed to be one between Arabness and Persianness, a fraught relationship whose tribulations have exerted a major influence over Arab and Islamic history.
At the other side of the Levant, at Syria’s border with Turkey, the Arabs have, again for centuries, been aware that it is at that geographic point that Arabness gives way to Turkishness. And as a result of that distinction, over many centuries and even before the Ottomans widened their territories south into the Levant and Egypt, the Arabs’ innate sense of their cultural identity had clashed with a Turkish feeling of responsibility for the destiny of the Islamic world. Arguably, this clash was at the core of some of the most important political transitions in Arab and Islamic history.
Hundreds of miles to the west, north and south of Gibraltar, the Arabs have been keenly aware that the kingdoms they built at that point of intersection between their world and Europe have collapsed, and with that collapse there has slipped away from the Arab collective consciousness some of the brightest episodes of Arab history.
In Sudan, hundreds of years ago Arab tribes established a major presence south of Khartoum that gradually evolved into a home that blended Arabness with the cultural riches they came into contact with and later incorporated into a unique expression of Arab socio-politics. But inherent in that cultural mix, and in the varied political entities that emerged from it, was a blurred vision, a confused perspective, in which the Arabs there often sought to extend their reach deeper into Sub-Saharan Africa, often ignoring their surroundings and fixing their gaze northwards towards Egypt and the Levant.
Arguably, Arab successes and failures have been discernible over the past 14 centuries since the Arab tribes expanded from the Arabian Peninsula to dominate their immediate neighbours through their ability, or inability, to assert their identity and interests over peripheral areas.
Today, Arab interests in all of these peripheries are exposed. Arguably, the situations in all of them are sores in the Arab psyche.
In Yemen, not only has war torn the country for over a decade, but the political divisions among the different constituencies that have exacerbated the war have stirred deeper religious divisions in the country than it has known for centuries, divisions that seemed to have been doused only a few decades ago.
This has happened at a time when non-Arab powers in East Africa have been slowly but surely building up their power to resuscitate national ambitions that for centuries have clashed with Arab interests along the Red Sea.
For two decades, Iran has managed to use the demise of the last Arab nationalist project in Iraq, which had committed crimes against its fellow Arabs and strategic sins against the interests of its own people, to not only expand westwards, but also to entrench its interests in Iraq’s socio-politics and political economy. While the Iranian project in the Eastern Mediterranean has been acutely weakened over the past year and half, Iran’s presence in Iraq has gained considerable value in the Iranian strategic calculus.
At the other end of the Levant, at the periphery where Arabness meets Turkishness, there has emerged a situation that the Arabs have not known for over a century since the fall of the Ottoman Empire. A new political and military elite composed of Arabs and non-Arabs and backed largely by Turkey is beginning to create a new political entity that is rapidly asserting its control over the whole of Syria. Given Syria’s strategic location and demographic depth, controlling the country means major influence over the entire Levant.
Commentators have argued that the emerging political entity here has replaced the regime led by former Syrian president Bashar Al-Assad, which long ago lost its way and became disconnected from its Arab nationalist roots, while also committing horrendous acts in the country and beyond. In this argument, the emerging power structure in Syria entails a promise of regeneration and peace and stability.
However, there is also another view, which says that this important part of the Arab world is returning, after a century of Arab control, to a situation reminiscent of Ottoman times, when the powers effectively controlling it comprised Arabs and non-Arabs and whose guiding ideology transcended Arabness.
From Gibraltar to the Eastern Mediterranean, the connections between the Arab world and Europe have undergone a subtle transformation over the past two decades. The political and cultural intersection between the southern and northern shores of the Mediterranean has become the scene of the deaths of hundreds, if not thousands, of desperate Arab young people willing to take the risk of drowning in order to escape the Arab world and reach the shores of Europe, where they are largely unwelcome.
This situation is a piercing testament to a collective Arab failure, not only concerning politics in the past two decades, but also concerning Arab development over at least the past half century. Inherent in this sad situation is a change in the nature of Arab-European interaction from that of friends or foes over centuries of rich civilisational exchanges along the shores of the Mediterranean to that of an unwanted seeker and a disinterested sought-after.
Many Europeans are happy to be totally disconnected from the Arab world. Only the fear of Arab migration to Europe keeps such segments of the European population concerned about developments on the southern shores of the Mediterranean.
In the final periphery, East Africa, where Arabness has for centuries reached out to Sub-Saharan Africa, war now rules supreme. The war in Sudan has eroded the pillars of the state, driven millions out of the country, including those with the best education and exposure to the world, and opened up the country to non-Sudanese and non-Arab political and military forces seeking to build interests and to exploit the country’s wealth through prolonging the war.
As a result, the Arabs have lost their solid political presence and cultural reach in that periphery for the foreseeable future. The Arab world now seems detached from East Africa, again at a time when forces in the region have wide-ranging ambitions and assertive attitudes.
This dilution of Arab influence at all the peripheries of the Arab world is unprecedented in at least a century.
The writer is the author of Islamism: A History of Political Islam (2017) and Egypt on the Brink (2010).
* A version of this article appears in print in the 20 February, 2025 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly
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