The dangerous myth of ‘Arab unity’

At the heart of the instability of the Middle East is the myth of ‘Arab unity’. It’s a myth that is often promoted by the United Nations which, since 7 October, has repeatedly shown itself to be sympathetic to the most reactionary forces in the Arab world.

Speaking at the Arab League Summit in Bahrain in May, UN secretary-general António Guterres blamed divisions within the Arab world on ‘outsiders stoking sectarian tensions’. He urged the attending Arab states to break ‘the vicious circle of division and foreign manipulation’, which he condemned for causing terrorism and undermining a ‘prosperous future for the people of the Arab world’.

Far from promoting a stable and prosperous future, this mirage of ‘Arab unity’, and the obsession with blaming nefarious ‘outsiders’, is only holding the Middle East back.

Indeed, the illusory quest for ‘Arab unity’ is what gave us Islamism and Baathism. These ideologies, at the heart of both brutal regimes and terror groups, have claimed hundreds of thousands of lives in the Middle East and beyond. They have also distorted and erased thousands of years of cultural richness, nuance and diversity – not unlike the totalitarian ideologies of the 20th century.

For the most part, Guterres’s ignorant and obsequious comments also reflect a fantasy of an Arab history that never actually happened. The closest Arabs came to unity was during the first few decades of Islam – a faith which grew out of attempts to unify the Arab tribes into a single nation. Within 24 years of the death of Muhammad in 632 CE, however, the early Muslims had already succumbed to internal divisions.

In 656 CE, the third caliph of Islam, Uthman, was assassinated. This set in motion Islam’s ‘First Fitna’, or schism, which led to the division of the Islamic world into the Shia and Sunni sects we know today. A few decades later, the first siege of Mecca occurred. The Umayyad armies of one caliph, Yazid I, who ruled from Damascus, attacked the forces of a rival caliph, Abd Allah ibn al-Zubayr, who held Mecca.

Yazid failed to take Mecca and, without access to the holy city, the Umayyads were stripped of the prestige that came from being able to make a pilgrimage. In response, the successor to Yazid I, Abd al-Malik ibn Marwan, built the Dome of the Rock in newly conquered Jerusalem to reclaim the prestige of hosting the Hajj. In other words, the building that has come to symbolise the simplistic narrative of ‘resistance’ against Israel’s ‘settler colonialism’ since 7 October, is not only a product of Arab disunity, but also an emblem of imperial conquest.

The split between Damascus and Mecca was eventually resolved when Abdel-Malik sent his most brutal general to quash al-Zubayr’s rebellion in 692. In a modern world frozen stiff by the fear of offending Muslim sensibilities, it is worth remembering that no group has desecrated more Muslim holy sites, nor spilled more Muslim blood, than Muslims themselves.

Like any other global civilisation, sectarianism and division are the very substance of Arab and Muslim history. It is only in the recently invented fictional narratives spun by Islamists, Baathists and leftists that Arabs and Muslims have ever been peacefully ‘unified’. Indeed, it was not some imaginary unity against outsiders, as defined by modern ideologues, that allowed Arab and Muslim civilisation to flourish. Instead, it was the openness to outside influences and global trade, the reverence for knowledge built on translations of Greek, Persian and Indian works, and the impulse to build and beautify that led to the justifiably named Islamic ‘Golden Age’.

Guterres’s comments not only ignore this history, but also placate the most regressive and reactionary forces in Arab society. Groups like Hamas and Hezbollah are not defined by what they wish to build and achieve, but by what they want to oppose and, in the case of Israel, destroy. They do not look to the future, but rather – like the Nazis that inspired them – to some imagined past glory destroyed by scheming outsiders.

Worse still, Guterres’s comments are out of date. Much of the Arab world is increasingly disdainful of the old, sectarian resentments of those generations that initiated botched wars against Israel in 1948, 1967 and 1973. After the Arab Spring in 2010, many Arabs are now acutely aware that Islamists are not democrats, but dictators in waiting. Groups like the Muslim Brotherhood, and their leftist allies in the West, might still flog the dead horse of ‘Islamist democracy’, but a new generation of Arabs increasingly wants to build alliances with Israel and the West. They want to break free from the repressive darkness and endemic failure that Islamism offers.

Fear of this awakening in Tehran and Doha is why Hamas unleashed the horrors of 7 October. This is not speculation: the head of Hamas’s political bureau, Ismail Haniyeh, has repeatedly condemned Arab attempts at normalising relations with Israel. Following 7 October, he even celebrated the role of Palestinians deaths in derailing this, saying: ‘The blood of the women, children and elderly… awakens within us the revolutionary spirit.’

Likewise, the late president of the Islamic Republic of Iran, Ebrahim Raisi, openly praised the deaths of Palestinians in the Gaza conflict earlier this year. In a televised address, he claimed that these Gazan deaths were a necessary sacrifice toward ending Israel’s ‘shameful normalisation operations’. He was referring, of course, to the 2020 Abraham Accords: a series of bilateral agreements on Arab-Israeli normalisation mediated by the Trump administration. Since these accords were initiated, Israel has established diplomatic ties with the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Sudan and Morocco.

Despite its best efforts, Hamas and its sponsors have failed to kill off the momentum for peace that these accords set in motion – and it’s not hard to see why. Many in the Middle East are sick of the politics of grievance and desperate for a positive vision of the future. They also don’t want to live under the suffocating, enforced uniformity of Islamism. Most Arabs see their religion as a common cultural thread, weaving through a vast range of national and personal identities. They do not view it as a barrier to engagement with the Western world.

The forward-looking vision of this new Arab generation stands in bright contrast to the stuffy, disempowering grievance narrative of Guterres’s speech. More power to them.

Alaa al-Ameri is the pen name of a British-Libyan writer.