Arab society's crunch points

A talk by Brian Whitaker at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, 26 January 2010



ONE OF the things I have always tried to do as a journalist writing about the Middle East is to look at it from the inside rather than the outside. What I mean by that is that I try to focus as much as possible on issues that concern people actually living in the region rather than the issues that affect western governments.

It’s not always easy, because newspaper editors – and their readers too – tend to have rather fixed ideas about what constitutes news from the Middle East.

I didn’t fully appreciate how fixed their ideas are until I started writing full-time about the region for the Guardian. I would meet people at parties who asked what my job was, and they would immediately assume that I was either a war correspondent or some kind of terrorism expert.

Obviously journalists can’t ignore the big conflicts but readers can easily get the impression that the Middle East is a region of death and destruction and very little else.

It’s important to remember, though, that millions of Arabs go through their entire lives without ever seeing a shot fired in anger, let alone firing one themselves.

This brings me to the title of my book, What’s Really Wrong with the Middle East, where you see the word “really” highlighted in red.

The point I’m making here is that there’s a discrepancy – quite a large discrepancy in fact – between the problems of the Middle East as perceived from the west and its problems as perceived by Arabs themselves. The priorities are different.

Although the book is a critique of Arab society, and in some respects quite a stern one, I wanted it to reflect opinions from the inside rather than the outside. So I decided right from the start to use Arab sources as much as possible – which I have done, with only a few exceptions.

My research included about 20 formal interviews with Arabs in various countries, most of them lasting an hour or more, and my aim was to keep them as unstructured as possible – basically to sit back and let people talk.

So I looked on the internet and found 10 critical statements about the Middle East – about politics, oil, the media, corruption, and so on. I sent this list to the interviewees and asked them to choose the statements they wanted to talk about.

This was where the distinctively Arab priorities really started to show up. In fact, the issues that figure most prominently in western foreign policy seemed to be nowhere near the top of my interviewees’ agenda (or at least not in the way they are usually framed).

For example, democracy was hardly mentioned as such, though there was a lot of talk about the lack of transparency and accountability, the lack of good governance and the need to get rid of corruption.

There was also one statement on the list that people wanted to talk about more than any other. So much so that towards the end I was saying to people: “Please, let’s not talk about that one, I’ve heard enough already.”

The statement in question was the title from from one of al-Jazeera's Doha Debates and it said: "The family is a major obstacle to reform in the Arab world."


I’LL COME BACK to this issue of the family in a moment but there’s one more point I’d like to make about the book and its title.

Although it’s mainly a critique of Arab society it’s also, less directly, a critique of westerm policy. I wanted to make a case for change in the Arab countries that would not be based on neocon arguments.

Several people have asked if the title of my book alludes Bernard Lewis’s famous book, “What went wrong?” Lewis, of course, was Bush’s favourite historian and Bush often turned to him for advice. So my answer is yes, I did have Lewis in mind when thinking about the title, though the book itself doesn’t mention him or his work.

Before Bush’s arrival at the White House in 2001, American policy towards the Middle East – and British policy too, for that matter – had been primarily about maintaining stability.

Bush and the neocons changed that, largely in response to the September 11 attacks which opened the way to more a radically interventionist discourse – especially interventions of the military kind.

In a major speech in 2003, Bush said:

Sixty years of western nations excusing and accommodating the lack of freedom in the Middle East did nothing to make us safe – because in the long run, stability cannot be purchased at the expense of liberty. As long as the Middle East remains a place where freedom does not flourish, it will remain a place of stagnation, resentment, and violence ready for export.

There were many things wrong with Bush’s policies but I think he was right to say we should not be “excusing and accommodating” a lack of freedom in the Middle East. I think he was also right to say that purchasing stability at the expense of liberty is a bad idea in the long term.

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