The tectonic plates of the Middle East

What was first dubbed "the Arab Spring" has clear ambitions of prolonging itself beyond one season or one year. The revolution in a hitherto unknown and uninteresting Tunisia had began a shift of the tectonic plates in the Middle East and like every major shift, it is unlikely to come back to the original configuration. Pundits and analysts of the region - some who have been travelling around, living in and following the region for decades, others newfound enthusiasts - are anything but short of breathtaking predictions of what will and will not happen in the Middle East.

Assad will fall in two months. Brotherhood will not come to power in Egypt. Qaddafi will be able to hang on to his forty plus year old reign. Tunisia will not be ruled by Muslim Brotherhood. Lebanon will become an annex of the Syrian conflict. Jordan and Morocco will follow the revolutionary path. Bouteflika will not be able to hang onto the reins of Algeria. All wrong. The only prediction that has sadly stood the test of time is the view that no peace between Israelis and Palestinians will be made.

What all these analysts, old and new, have forgotten, is that the Middle East is a place that has proven to be explosive exactly when no one is paying attention or peaceful exactly when everyone expects it to implode. Lebanon has for two years withstood the temptation of joining the same confessional war that has torn Syria into a million of factions of official and unofficial rebels, fighters, militants and soldiers. The Jordanian and Moroccan kings have both managed to reshuffle the deck of cards dealt to them to appease their subjects. Algeria sails on slowly but surely, despite displaying all the preconditions of the revolutionary fervour that has infected its two neighbours.

The Libyan conflict, once subject to everyone's attention, seems to have disappeared into the oblivion, as if the vast territory of this tiny country has shrunk on the geopolitical zero-sum game. Yemen, a soup long time brewing, has finally spilled out of the pot and made the pretty blind "world leaders" notice that it joined Afghanistan as the next party place for Al Qaida, and one from which it will be difficult to smoke out. Tunisia, a tiny country with no strategic importance and no difficult neighbourly relations has acted as a precursor, highlighting why the "transition" of its more populous, confessionally richer neighbouring countries (i.e. Egypt) will be infinitely more more complicated.

Indeed, the Egyptian revolution has come a full circle: from worldwide support of Mubarak (despite multiple rigged elections and obvious instances of crony capitalism), to his overthrow and imprisonment (conveniently on the basis of the same charges), the election of Morsi on a forty percent ticket (applauded as a demonstration of islamic democracy only to be heavily criticised on the same charges, i.e. incapacity to combine Islam and democracy), overthrow of Morsi by the army, which is now in the hot seat for having oversteps over its "democratic powers". By now, it is clear this is a game of musical chairs and the buck will not stop here.

All in all, the Tunisian and Egyptian experiments have shown us that democracy and Middle East is not as easy to conjugate in a single sentence as the "western powers" would like us to believe. The experiment of Palestinian democracy, encouraged by the same powers a few years earlier should have demonstrated the dangers of blindly promoting democracy, while at the same time believing that only non religious parties deserve to win. The trick with democracy, it seems, is that letting people choose may have the consequences we are not prepared to accept, but slaves to our own democratic rhetoric, all we can do is refuse to deal with the democratically elected leaders. Not very courteous indeed.

The more courageous, even if less politically correct solution would be to say that we see a tension between "islamic" on the one hand and "democracy" on the other. That would be untenable on multiple accounts, not least because it would be a serious criticism not only of Turkey, but also of other allies in the Gulf, all of whom except for the bellicose Qatar are on the "right" side of the equation. Indonesia and Malaysia might also not take that well. A perhaps more accurate statement is that Arab countries have not been able to adapt their versions of islam to democracy, whether it be Wahhabis in Saudi Arabia, Shia in Lebanon or Sunnis of Egypt.

As we see versions 2.0 and 3.0 of the Arab Spring sail by, the map of the entire Middle East is being re-drawn and world leaders can be quite fairly accused of severe near sightedness. While they are busy ascertaining whether or not chemical weapons - once the no-cross line for Barak Obama - was used in Syria, they forget that the lines that have helped to draw between various countries in the Middle East make even less sense now than when they were casually established in the first place. And hence, that what happens in Iraq has an echo in Syria and what happens in Yemen in Saudi Arabia, and what happens in Jordan in Israel.

Western leaders are slaves to the maps as they were established by their predecessors, though the reality of economic and social relations in the region continue to nonchalantly transcend these maps. Christians in Syria have now joined in masse their Lebanese counterparts, the Kurds are dealing in the triangle between Syria, Turkey and the now booming Erbil, the Shia of Lebanon are living on a lifeline from the now poor yet generous Iran. Only the Sunnis seems to be scattered in confusing mosaic of religious factions and political outlooks that has made it difficult for a Sunni corridor to emerge in the region, especially now that the Turkey-Qatar-Saudi alliance looks quite frail.

The tectonic plates of the Middle East are now permanently disjointed and the map of the region a hundred years from now might look as surprising to our followers as the map of the region one hundred years ago looks to us. Regardless, the truth is that no one quite knows how far and how fast these plates will move. We simply don't know what the Arab Spring will be called when the dust settles. What we do know is that we played a near sighted game, choosing to interfere in Libya and not in Syria, going to Iraq and not dealing with Iran, unconditionally supporting Saudi when it "dealt" with the situation in Bahrain. If we lose the Middle East to China and Russia, it would not have been because they offer better alternatives, it is because we - the West - have played a rotten game.

Constructing bubbles

When I was a child, the machine that produced bubbles - those perfectly round, rainbow-coloured, miraculous products of soap and water - fascinated me. With each blow, a bubble came out predictably similar shaped and coloured and yet unique in its route and final destination. Some flew just a few centimetres until colliding with another bubble or object, resulting in an unspectacular explosion. Others flew up and up in the air, hurting my eyes as I desperately tried to stare up at the sunny sky to follow their trajectory and witness how long such a temporary creation as bubble can last. 

When we grow up, we stop blowing bubbles. Years later, as we pass by vendors of gadgets blowing bubbles in the air and children happily running after them, we nostalgically remember those moments when a bubble could bring moments of such intense happiness. Twenty, thirty, forty years later, it takes much more than a soap bubble to bring that warm tangling feeling to our hearts. Or does it? When do we stop blowing and following bubbles, secretly hoping that ours will fly the furthest and somehow, miraculously disappear in the oblivion without exploding?

Probably never. As we grow up and old, the metaphysics of the bubble changes but never the desire  that our bubble be different than all the others, that it flies the farthest, somehow outpacing all the others as they struggle against the wind and all those random curveballs that life throws in our way. With time,  instead of observing the bubble race from the outside, as independent observers thrilled at the moment of happiness afforded by a combination of soap and water, we create bubbles that define the perimeter of our happiness, the circle of our comfort zone. 

And with that almost imperceptible transition, we risk becoming prisoners of our bubble, voluntarily surrendering our freedom to observe the bubble race carelessly from the outside. As we pack more luggage in our own bubble - memories, hurt, love, hatred and desires - our bubbles become heavier and less competitive with others, but being sealed inside, we no longer see that. Instead, we define our bubble by our religious identity, our social class, our professional route and just like this, the possibility of our bubble to intersect with other bubbles grows narrower. 

And as as our bubble become an instrument of exclusion, we lose sight of the vast space where we are flying. What we believe is that instead we stand to gain identity, roots, habits, and a place we call home: a place where we might or might not live, but one to which we are always happy to come back to, almost as happy as we were as children blowing that perfect bubble in the clear sky. But what is home? In English, the word home is any place to which one comes back to at night: it could be a motel, a seven star hotel or a tent - anything but an open space which would automatically connate homelessness. 

This distinction between home and homelessness is not trivial because the latter is not a sign of an unbearable lightless of being - of a bubble gone wildly out of control - but a sign of failure, of an inherent inability to fit into the social fabric, or at the very least of a terrible streak of misfortune, leading to the absence of home, to the absence of a bubble that we can inhabit. Homelessness - whether forced or self-imposed - is the absence of a bubble and while it may liberate us to see things we could not see otherwise, it comes at a price too high for most. 

The late Lebanese American journalist Anthony Shadid wrote that in Arabic the word bayt - literally translated as house - connotes more than a physical home. Bayt is a sense of belonging to a place, a metaphysical connection that is beyond the walls of a place to which we return on a daily basis. Perhaps bayt is a better equivalent of our childhood bubble than home, a weightless sphere where we inhabit our own version of a fairy tale with perhaps no universally happy end, but one that makes us want to smile as we look into the vast sky. 

Bayt is not necessarily inconsistent with homelessness, at least in the English language sense of it. To me, bayt is more about that place where we think we belong, despite everything that we know and believe about ourselves, despite all that might be factual and therefore logical. And it is a journey to this place that makes for a life, for a light bubble that floats and that we control ever so lightly and whose trajectory depends on other bubbles with which it collides or does not collide, as a result of the direction of the wind of fate. 

Conversations with a Limousine Driver

On her last trip to Cairo to complete her book, Chloé is greeted by a man proudly presenting himself as her limousine driver. Abu Sid Hom spends the following week obediently chauffeuring her around the buzzing metropolis until a car accident opens a old wound. In a space of two hours, her image of him is uprooted, as he takes her from Cairo to Beirut in a family drama that in the same broad sweep overturns her perception of herself.For a complete version of the book, please visit:http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00B6TEE6A