New Texts Out Now: Adam Hanieh, Lineages of Revolt: Issues of Contemporary Capitalism in the Middle East

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Jan 8, 2014 Region
[Cover of Adam Hanieh, \"Lineages of Revolt: Issues of Contemporary Capitalism in the Middle East\" [Cover of Adam Hanieh, \"Lineages of Revolt: Issues of Contemporary Capitalism in the Middle East\"

New Texts Out Now: Adam Hanieh, Lineages of Revolt: Issues of Contemporary Capitalism in the Middle East

By : Adam Hanieh

Adam Hanieh, Lineages of Revolt: Issues of Contemporary Capitalism in the Middle East. Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2013.

Jadaliyya (J): What made you write this book and what are its key themes? 

Adam Hanieh (AH): The book was written over the course of 2011 and 2012 and was intended as a contribution to some of the debates that emerged in these first years of the Arab uprisings. I did not want to write another narrative account of the uprisings themselves. This was partly because these were events still unfolding and shifting rapidly from day-to-day; it was also because there had already been several very useful books published along these lines, including, of course, Jadaliyya’s The Dawn of the Arab Uprisings. Rather, I wanted to present a longer-term view of the political economy of the Arab world in order to contextualize these revolts in the changing class and state structures of recent decades. I also aimed to address a number of myths and misconceptions about the region, which I believed tended to misrepresent the nature of the uprisings.

Along these lines, the book is not structured along individual country histories but rather tries to draw out general themes. There are four key arguments that run through the book:

First, I try to unpack the frequent refrain that we heard in early 2011 from many mainstream analysts and government spokespeople, namely, that the uprisings were simply a matter of dictatorship and political authoritarianism, and that if capitalist markets were allowed to flourish then all would be fine. A striking example of this perspective was Obama’s comment in a major policy speech of May 2011, in which he stated that the region needed “a model in which protectionism gives way to openness, the reins of commerce pass from the few to the many, and the economy generates jobs for the young. America’s support for democracy will therefore be based on ensuring financial stability, promoting reform, and integrating competitive markets with each other and the global economy.” Likewise, then-president of the World Bank, Robert Zoellick, had argued that the revolts in Tunisia occurred because of too much “red tape,” which prevented people from engaging in capitalist markets. In contrast to these perspectives, which continue to dominate the way that the uprisings are discussed, I argue that we cannot separate the political and economic spheres of capitalism in the Arab world. These are fused, and the forms of authoritarianism that are so prevalent across the region are a functional outcome of capitalism itself, particularly through the neoliberal period.

In a related sense, a second key focus of the book is to grasp, in broad outlines, the main features of capitalism in the region. I approach this by tracing the historically structured processes of class and state formation and their interlinkages across different spaces and scales: rural and urban; national, regional, and global. One chapter discusses neoliberal policy in the Arab world and another focuses on agriculture and the rural sector in North Africa. These policies have produced highly polarized outcomes. A tiny layer of the population linked closely to international capital benefits from its control over key moments of accumulation and exists alongside a growing mass of poor, dispossessed populations across rural and urban areas. Networks of production and consumption are integrated into the world market to varying degrees, but have consistently produced high levels of dependence on imports and an exposure to the vicissitudes of the global economy. Authoritarian state structures—distinguished by a particular dialectic of centralization and decentralization that I discuss in the chapter on neoliberalism—have been the essential driver of this lopsided capitalist development.

A third major theme that runs through the book is the manner in which the Middle East has been inserted into the world market and remains a key zone of global rivalries. In this regard, one chapter focuses on the military and political economic aspects of Western policy towards the region. I examine the use of financial instruments such as debt and foreign aid, as well as the range of trade and investment agreements that have proliferated over recent decades. This process has taken place in confrontation and interaction with indigenous social and political forces in the area. The unfolding process reconstituted patterns of state and class, opening the way to the penetration of neoliberal reform. It has altered the patterns of accumulation internal to the region itself, while differentially integrating various zones of the Middle East into the world market. These themes carry through two other chapters that consider the special place of Palestine and the Gulf states respectively. In the case of Palestine, I argue that we need to go beyond considering the Palestinian struggle as just a "human rights" issue, but rather see it as integrally connected to the ways that capitalism in the Middle East has formed under the aegis of Western domination. I believe this has important implications for solidarity efforts and also for how we assess quasi-state structures such as the Palestinian Authority.

The final theme that runs through the book is the argument that we need to take seriously the development of the regional scale over the past period. What I mean by this is that we should critically re-assess the methodology of much academic writing on the region that divides the Middle East up into separate "ideal types"—such as authoritarian, republican, monarchical states—and then proceeds to delineate supposed similarities and differences on this basis. I criticize these approaches for their methodological nationalism, that is, their assumption of the nation-state as the natural and given vantage point from which to consider the political economy of the region as a whole. In contrast, I argue that the vast flows of capital and labor across borders means that processes of class and state formation striate national boundaries; for this reason, the nation-state cannot be understood as a self-contained political economy separate from the ways it intertwines with other spatial scales, namely the regional and global. It is thus impossible to understand processes of class and state formation without tracing the way these cross-scale relations develop and interpenetrate—how these relations become part of the very nature of the nation-state itself. Most important to this reconsideration of the regional scale is the role of capital from the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC). A chief premise of this book is that the internationalization of GCC capital has transformed the political economy of the region, becoming internalized in the class/state structures of neighboring states. I examine this process both theoretically and through an empirical investigation of various markets, particularly key sectors of the Egyptian economy.

I think all these themes have direct political implications. These include questions such as the impact of the global economic crisis and what it might mean for the politics of the region, our understanding of the relationship between national and regional struggles, how we assess the role of the military in places such as Egypt, the nature of movements such as the Muslim Brotherhood, and whether the orientation towards a so-called patriotic bourgeoisie (ra’s al-maal al-watani) as a progressive force makes any sense in the current context.

J: What particular topics, issues, and literatures does the book address?

AH: The book cuts across a variety of different disciplinary literatures. Within the domains of political science and political economy, I engage with some of the debates around the relationship between state and class formation, and the notion of civil society. The book argues against institutionalist perspectives that treat the state as a disconnected, all-dominating "thing" rather than as a social relation formed alongside the development of class. As I have pointed out above, I attempt to show that the authoritarian guise of the Middle East state is not anomalous and antagonistic to capitalism, but is rather a particular form of capitalism in the Middle Eastern context. This necessarily involves dealing with debates around the nature of class itself, and here I attempt to advance a non-reductive account of class that both avoids the standard Weberian accounts of class as simply a category of income, status, or "interest groups," and simultaneously guards against economistic views that tend to set up class as an abstract category shorn of its particularities. This means, for example, that it makes little sense to speak of class in a concrete sense without also acknowledging that it is simultaneously gendered as it forms. Moreover, in the Middle East context, as well as globally, class formation cannot be understood without tracing movements of people across and within borders—it is thus also marked by distinct and concrete relationships between geographical spaces. There are also various forms of labor exploitation that take place within both rural and urban sectors. These processes need to be considered concurrently if a full picture of class formation is to be grasped. 

I try to situate these processes within the context of the world market, and this inevitably means engaging in the debates around theories of imperialism, the particular role of the United States within the global economy, and the nature of emerging powers such as China and Russia. A very interesting and wide-ranging debate has raged over the last two decades around these issues within the wider political economy/international relations literature, and I strongly believe that much writing on the Middle East is not sufficiently attuned to these questions at a theoretical level. Given that our region is arguably the most important zone of the global economy in which the various rivalries and inter-dependencies of global powers are played out, I think it is striking that little attention is shown to these questions beyond merely descriptive accounts often based upon rather superficial assumptions. I am particularly interested in how these global factors intersect with the form of social relations at the national and regional scales—and how these social relations, in turn, help to shape the global.

J: How does this book connect to and/or depart from your previous research?

AH: My previous book, Capitalism and Class in the Gulf Arab States, follows a similar methodological and theoretical perspective, although focused particularly on the six GCC states. This earlier book made some tentative arguments around the importance of internationalization of Gulf capital for the Arab world, and I try to flesh this out with a deeper empirical investigation in Lineages of Revolt. I feel that often the role of the Gulf is looked at through the lens of religion, sectarianism, or geo-political questions, rather than located in the way that the Gulf’s position in the region has changed over the past period. The role of the Gulf states needs to be incorporated into any assessment of neoliberalism in the Arab world. The dramatic restructuring of class relations that occurred in tandem with neoliberal reform not only enriched national capitalist classes backed by authoritarian states, but also acted to strengthen the position of the Gulf states within the wider regional order. These patterns are not separate from the Gulf’s existential link with US power—both represent different modalities of the way that the Middle East is inserted into the world market. 

In this manner, the book also reflects a long-standing interest in theories of neoliberal capitalism and its impact on the Arab world. In the book I explore the specificities and similarities of neoliberal reform processes across different zones of the Middle East, in particular North Africa and the Palestinian West Bank. One of the things I have emphasized in the book is that this is not just a question of capital and the state; it is also closely connected to forms of labor exploitation and, consequently, migration. There are ongoing, massive flows of people across the region, which make the Middle East one of the most important sources and destinations of migration in the world today. These are closely related to the processes of class formation I analyze in the book, and carry important implications for political and social movements in the region. Along these lines, I have drawn upon my research interests on labor migration within and to the Middle East.

J:  Who do you hope will read this book, and what sort of impact would you like it to have?

AH: I hope the book will be of use to people interested in the political economy of the Arab world and that it helps to shift the ways these issues are typically framed in popular and academic discourse. For those people who may be experts on individual countries or sub-regions of the Middle East, the book will hopefully provide some food for thought on how the wider regional and global contexts shape national processes. Part of the motivation for writing this book was also a desire to engage with people working on wider political economy issues, but who may not be that familiar with the Middle East situation.

Many of the questions that inspired this book draw upon experiences over the last decade or so in various campaigns and solidarity movements around Palestine and other struggles in the Middle East. The book is very much informed by these political debates, not least in the way that I attempt to integrate the question of Palestine into the wider regional political economy. In this sense, a lot of what I write in the book reflects a collective thinking-through and shared experiences with many very inspiring people across the world, rather than any particular individual endeavor. I would be very pleased if the book gives something back to these movements, and I have tried to write it in such a way that it can be useful to activists in the Middle East, or solidarity movements outside the region.

Excerpt from Lineages of Revolt: Issues of Contemporary Capitalism in the Middle East

From Chapter One

Conventional accounts of political economy in the Middle East tend to adopt a similar methodological approach, which begins, typically, with the basic analytical categories of “state” (al-dawla) and “civil society” (al-mujtama’ al-madani). The former is defined as the various political institutions that stand above society and govern a country. The latter is made up of “institutions autonomous from the state which facilitate orderly economic, political and social activity” or, in the words of the Iraqi social scientist Abdul Hussein Shaaban, “the civil space that separates the state from society, which is made up of non-governmental and non-inheritable economic, political, social and cultural institutions that form a bond between the individual and the state.” All societies are said to be characterized by this basic division, which sees the state confronted by an agglomeration of atomized individuals, organized in a range of “interest groups” with varying degrees of ability to choose their political representatives and make demands on their political leaders. The institutions of civil society organize and express the needs of people in opposition to the state, “enabling individuals to participate in the public space and build bonds of solidarity.” The study of political economy becomes focused upon, as a frequently cited book on the subject explains, “strategies of economic transformation, the state agencies and actors that seek to implement them, and the social actors such as interest groups that react to and are shaped by them.”

A conspicuous feature of the Middle East, according to both Arabic- and English-language discussions on these issues, is the region’s apparent “resilience of authoritarianism”—the prevalence of states where “leaders are not selected through free and fair elections, and a relatively narrow group of people control the state apparatus and are not held accountable for their decisions by the broader public.” While much of the world managed to sweep away dictatorial regimes through the 1990s and 2000s, the Middle East remained largely mired in autocracy and monarchical rule—“the world’s most unfree region” as the introduction to one prominent study of authoritarianism in the Arab world put it. A dizzying array of typologies for this authoritarianism has been put forward, characteristically dividing the region between authoritarian monarchies (the Gulf Arab states, Morocco, Jordan) and authoritarian republics (Egypt, Syria, Algeria, Yemen, Tunisia). These authoritarian regimes are typically contrasted with a third category, the so-called democratic exceptions, in which “incumbent executives are able to be removed and replaced.” Israel is frequently held up as the archetype of this latter group—with Turkey, Iran, Lebanon, and Iraq (following the 2003 US invasion) also included, each with a varying “degree” of democracy.

An entire academic industry has developed around attempting to explain the apparent persistence and durability of Middle East authoritarianism. Much of this has been heavily Eurocentric, seeking some kind of intrinsic “obedience to authority” inherent to the “Arab mind.” Some authors have focused on the impact of religion, tracing authoritarian rule to the heavy influence of Islam, and the fact that “twentieth-century Muslim political leaders often have styles and use strategies that are very similar to those instituted by the Prophet Muhammad in Arabia some 1400 years ago.” Similarly, others have examined the source of regime legitimacy in places such as Saudi Arabia, where the “ruler’s personal adherence to religious standards and kinship loyalties” supposedly fit the “political culture” of a society whose reference point is “Islamic theocracy coming from the ablest leaders of a tribe tracing its lineage to the Prophet.” Other more modern explanations for authoritarianism have been sought in intra-elite division, leaders’ skills at balancing and manipulating different groups in society—so-called statecraft, natural resource endowment, and the role and attitudes of the military. All these approaches share the same core methodological assumption: the key categories for understanding the Middle East—and, indeed, any society—are the state, on one hand, counterposed with civil society, on the other.

This state/civil society dichotomy underlies another frequent (although not unchallenged) assertion made in the literature on the Middle East—that of a two-way, causal link between authoritarianism and the weakness of capitalism. According to this perspective, authoritarianism not only means that political and civil rights are weak or absent but also that the heavy hand of state control interferes with the operation of a capitalist economy. Individuals are prevented from freely engaging in market activities while state elites benefit from authoritarianism by engaging in “rent-seeking behavior”—using their privileged position to divert economic rents that pass through the state for their own personal enrichment and consolidation of power. Authoritarian states seek to dominate and control economic sectors through their position of strength, allocating rents to favored groups in order to keep society in check. In the Middle East, as a result, “private property is not secure from the whims of arbitrary rulers...[and] many regimes have yet to abandon allocation for alternative strategies of political legitimation, and hence must continue to generate rents that accrue to the state.”

Within this worldview, the agency of freedom is neatly located in the realm of the market, while tyranny lurks ever-present in the state. The history of the region is thus characteristically recounted as a long-standing struggle between the “authoritarian state” and “economic and political liberalization.” Told from this perspective, the narrative usually begins with the emergence from colonialism in the aftermath of World War II, when various independence movements sought a definitive end to British and French influence in the area. These independence movements were typically led by militaries or other elites, which seized power in the postcolonial period and began an era of “statism” or “Arab socialism.” By the 1980s, however, these authoritarian states would come under severe strain due to the inefficiencies of state-led economic development and the desire of increasingly educated populations for greater economic and political freedom. These pressures for economic liberalization were compounded in the era of globalization by the ethos of “democratization” that swept the globe through the 1990s. There was—as two well-known scholars of the Middle East put it—a “direct correlation between economic performance and the degree of democracy...the more open and liberal a polity, the more effective has been its economy in responding to globalization.” Authoritarian states that had “waged literal or metaphorical wars against their civil societies and the autonomous capital that is both the cause and product of civil society” might sometimes choose the “right” economic policies, but these were inevitably “dead letters in the absence of implementation capacity, which only a dynamic civil society appears to be able to provide.” Capitalism was, in short, best suited to—and a force for—democracy.

This logic was widely replicated outside of academia through the 1990s and 2000s, forming the core justification for a wide-range of so-called democracy promotion programs. Integral to this was the US National Endowment for Democracy (NED), established in 1983 and funded by the US State Department. NED, in turn, supported other organizations such as the National Democratic Institute (NDI) and the International Republican Institute (IRI)—linked to Democratic and Republican Parties respectively—and bodies such as the Center for International Private Enterprise (CIPE) and the Solidarity Center (affiliated to the AFL-CIO). A host of other private corporations and NGOs were also involved. Through these institutions, the US government focused on programs that twinned the extension of neoliberal policies with the democracy promotion agenda in the global South. As then president George W. Bush noted in 2004, this policy was based around “free elections and free markets.” It was a form of democracy understood in the narrow sense of regular electoral competitions, usually waged between different sections of the elite, which largely aimed at providing popularly sanctioned legitimacy for free market economic measures. While organizations such as NED, NDI, and IRI were the most visible and explicit face of this policy orientation, all international financial institutions were to employ the same basic argument linking “free markets” and “a vibrant civil society” with the weakening of the authoritarian state.

In this vein, the response of Western governments and institutions to the revolts of 2011 and 2012 was largely predictable. Instead of viewing the Arab uprisings as protests against the “free market” economic policies long championed by Western institutions in the region, they were framed as essentially political in nature. The problem, according to the Western angle, lay in authoritarianism, which stifled markets, and the popular rage expressed on the streets of the Middle East could thus be understood as pro-capitalist in content. US President Obama noted, for example, in a major policy speech on the Middle East in May 2011, that the region needed “a model in which protectionism gives way to openness, the reins of commerce pass from the few to the many, and the economy generates jobs for the young. America’s support for democracy will therefore be based on ensuring financial stability, promoting reform, and integrating competitive markets with each other and the global economy.” Likewise, the president of the World Bank, Robert Zoellick, argued that the revolts in Tunisia occurred because of too much “red tape,” which prevented people from engaging in capitalist markets. This basic argument would be repeated incessantly by Western policy makers throughout 2011 and 2012—autocratic states had stifled economic freedom; “free markets” would be essential to any sustained transition away from authoritarianism.

[Excerpted from Lineages of Revolt: Issues of Contemporary Capitalism in the Middle East, by Adam Hanieh, by permission of the author. © 2013 Adam Hanieh. For more information, or to buy a copy of this book, click here.]
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Abdel Razzaq Takriti By :
Abdel Razzaq Takriti

New Texts Out Now: Abdel Razzaq Takriti, Monsoon Revolution: Republicans, Sultans, and Empires in Oman, 1965-1976

Abdel Razzaq Takriti, Monsoon Revolution: Republicans, Sultans, and Empires in Oman, 1965-1976. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2013.

Jadaliyya (J): What made you write this book?

Abdel Razzaq Takriti (ART): I first encountered the Dhufar revolution in a seminar on social movements in the Middle East convened by Amir Hassanpour. This was the longest running major armed struggle in the history of the Arabian Peninsula, Britain`s last classic colonial war in the region, and one of the highlights of the Cold War in the Middle East. It took place in a corner of the Arab world that is endowed with unique geographic characteristics, boasting striking highlands covered with wild fig and tamarind forests, and cloaked for a quarter of the year with the monsoon mist. Considering its temporal longevity, remarkable social and cultural dimensions, and ideological intensity, I was shocked to discover the dearth of studies on Dhufar and its revolution. Retrieving neglected aspects of its history has been a driving ambition ever since. The availability of new archival and personal collections, as well as greater (if still limited) openings for conducting serious oral history work, rendered this goal achievable.

When I began my research in 2005, the Arab revolutionary tradition of the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s was widely overlooked and generally misunderstood. Back then, revolution seemed an outdated concept, a lingering term from a bygone era. Moreover, silencing or recasting the revolutionary past became an essential feature of the historiography produced by proponents of the status quo. Traces of the revolutionary story were only to be found in the undoubtedly substantial, but primarily journalistic, works from the 1970s. Accordingly, the outlooks, experiences, lives, and ambitions of Arab revolutionaries were erased by regime narratives, colonially-minded accounts, and the growing (but yet remarkably superficial) counterinsurgency literature. History is regularly unkind to the defeated, the marginal, and the oppositional. This is even more the case when writing history becomes the suppression of an inconvenient past in the service of the present, or even the celebration of colonialist deeds. In contrast to the practice of describing the revolutionaries from without, I sought to offer a more persuasive account from within.

J: What particular topics, issues, and literatures does the book address?

ART: As I began writing on the Dhufar revolution, the need to situate it within the broader histories of Oman, the Gulf, and the Arab world as a whole became clearer. Far from being an isolated incident that occurred in a vacuum, Dhufar belonged to the Bandung and post-Bandung generation of anti-colonial movements. As well as being significant in its own right, it offered a superior vantage point for considering a whole range of regional and global developments. Tracing the journey of its cadres required inquiring into the history of regional Nasserist mobilization, the origins of the Gulf branches of the Movement of Arab Nationalists (in which leading Dhufari cadres were active), the complex web of republican alliances that were developing in the 1950s and 1960s, the rise of Maoism and the New Left, and the consolidation of global “communities of revolution” throughout the period under consideration. 

Initially, my intention was to write solely about the revolution, aiming to protect the memory of the Dhufar revolutionaries from what E. P. Thompson had elegantly described as “the enormous condescension of posterity.” However, the further I ventured into the realm of historical reconstruction, the more I realized that the story of the republicans was intimately tied with the tale of the Sultanic regime and its British patrons; completely disentangling them would have rendered our understanding of both extremely deficient. Indeed, one of the principle arguments put forth in Monsoon Revolution is that the construction of the current Sultanic state was decisively influenced and shaped by the revolution. Not only did the revolution pre-date the state, but it expedited its emergence and endowed it with many of its specific features which were initially developed with an eye towards revolutionary containment, suppression, and co-optation.

Generally speaking, any political system dominating a particular social order is bound to utilize mechanisms of social control so as to reproduce and perpetuate itself. However, in the case of Oman, what we had was not a system reproducing itself, but rather a new order being born. The external patron (Britain) replaced an old structure belonging to the days of the Raj (the Princely State of Sultan Said bin Taimur) with a new creation (the bureaucratic absolutist state of Sultan Qabous). This actuality suppressed two potentialities: the emergence of a revolutionary republic under the leadership of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Oman and the Occupied Arab Gulf (PFLOAG); or, alternatively, the development of a constitutional monarchy headed by Sultan Qabus’ reformist uncle, Tariq bin Taimur.       

This argument departs from the broader literature on the theory of revolutions, as well as the specific body of work on Oman. With regards to the former, there is a great deal of state-centrism that does not allow for approaching revolutions that pre-date (and in fact generate) the modern state, especially in colonial and semi-colonial settings. As for the latter, it is dominated (save for a few critical works such as those of Marc Valeri) by accounts that treat the state in isolation from its social and political setting, mainly focusing—in a manner bordering on hagiography—on the initiative of the Sultan. In contrast, Monsoon Revolution suggests the need for closely studying the relationship between colonialism and absolutism and for examining the monarchical question in modern Arab history in much greater detail. My own explanation for the underdeveloped nature of this field of investigation is that it is influenced by the political atmosphere. Whereas republican dictatorship is widely condemned and critiqued in the English speaking world, little attention is paid to the absolute monarchies that were sustained by direct and indirect forms of Anglo-American support.

This brings us to a closely connected issue examined in the book: the question of sovereignty arrangements and their underlying principles. Inspired by the literature on traditions of war (particularly the work of Karma Nabulsi), I increasingly came to appreciate that Dhufar was not just an insurgency that solicited a successful counterinsurgency; it was a contest over sovereignty, pitting widely divergent republican and monarchist understandings and practices of the term. The features of that contest were shaped by geographic and political processes unfolding over the course of the previous century and a half. The British imperial role in determining the outcome of these processes was decisive, leading to remarkable structural transformations within the Omani geographic and political spheres.

In the pre-British era, the Omani political order was shaped by local dynamics revolving around three polycentric sites of authority: the tribes; the Imamate; and the ruling dynasties.  Sovereignty, in its absolutist sense as summa potestas, could not be sought or attained by dynastic rulers. The most that could be achieved was control over some major towns and forts and the successful accumulation of customs from coastal trade. Following the British arrival, relations between tribal, Imamate, and dynastic political structures were gradually transformed. Dynastic rulers progressively came to depend on foreign patronage as their basis of power, and this distorted established patterns of interaction with other local actors. Thereafter, “imperial sovereignty” was imposed. I deployed that concept in a limited political sense and defined it as a dominant foreign power investing local authority in an indigenous body of its choosing, while retaining a degree of control over that body. Rather than focusing on the suzerain relationship between empire and vassal (expressed in the word “suzerainty”), my intention was to account for the role of empire in shaping local sovereignty arrangements. Here, I endeavoured to understand the process that has been identified by Sugata Bose as the colonial replacement of a concept of “layered and shared sovereignty that had characterized Indian and Indian Ocean polities of the pre-colonial era” with an imported notion of “unitary sovereignty.”

Monsoon Revolution shows that imperial sovereignty was imposed in three phases: the Raj Phase (1861–1954), during which the coast of Oman was gradually controlled and Dhufar was annexed; the Oil Phase (1954–1965), over the course of which the Omani interior was subdued and the Imamate and its al-Jabal al-Akhdar rebellion suppressed; and, finally, the Revolutionary Phase (1965–1976), whose peak was the confrontation between imperial sovereignty and the revolutionaries in Dhufar. The latter were committed to a vision that emphasized “popular sovereignty,” believing that the source of authority was the people rather than the Sultan. While constantly fighting for that vision, they regularly reconceptualised and transformed their ideological stances and programs. In my effort to understand this phenomenon, I was drawn into diverse arenas of investigation, ranging from Arab republican intellectual history to the vernacularization of Marxism-Leninism in agrarian settings. I was fascinated to discover that South–South connections in Arab intellectual history played a much more important role than is usually accounted for during the period concerned. The thought and practice of the revolution was heavily influenced by Afro-Asian and Latin American traditions, rather than being predominantly shaped by European models. The same could be said for revolutionary culture, an stimulating subject to which I dedicated a full chapter, surveying the literary, cinematic, photographic, and journalistic output of the revolution.

Examining the political and intellectual processes that were unfolding in Dhufar was an important component of Monsoon Revolution. Yet this was not enough. It was necessary to account for the social and economic bases of these developments. Human relations are not free-floating; no matter how subjectively driven, they are conditioned and constrained by material realities. A close analysis of these realities—and the radical attempts at their transformation—was crucial. This led me to focus on revolutionary programs that sought to undermine tribalism, eradicate slavery, and spread literacy. It also led me to study the role of women in waging the armed struggle as well as challenging established gender relations.    

One final theme I wish to highlight is that of solidarity and its transnational manifestations. Monsoon Revolution suggests that the concrete relationships that sustained the revolution reflected the growth of tricontinental solidarity networks and communities of revolution. Accounting for these networks was an fundamental dimension of this work, and so was the effort to elaborate the ways in which the Anglo-Sultanic structure was dependent on global networks of imperial and monarchical solidarity (stretching from Iran to the US). Indeed, the book ends with a close analysis of the social, cultural, and political implications of the clash between the two networks as it unfolded in Dhufar in the context of the Cold War.

J: Who do you hope will read this book, and what sort of impact would you like it to have?

ART: I hope that Monsoon Revolution would be viewed as an addition to the empirical and theoretical literature on anti-colonial revolutions, featuring as it does a major local case study that is a microcosm of broader regional and global trends. Furthermore, I feel that historians of post-Second World War Arab intellectual, political, social, and cultural history may find interesting empirical and theoretical points of engagement with the book. More narrowly, I believe that it may add to the process of generating new avenues of investigation in Gulf history. Hitherto, the field has been dominated by the focus on resources and regimes. A popular history of this sort—placing dynamic social movements at the center of the story—could potentially contribute, however modestly, to reconsidering our understanding of the region.

Beyond the scholarly level, and more importantly for me, I hope that Monsoon Revolution will be read by revolutionaries, activists, and engaged audiences in the Global South in general, and the Arab world and Oman in particular. At this historical juncture, the need for greater awareness of the Arab revolutionary tradition scarcely needs to be highlighted. Monsoon Revolution retrieves a small, but significant, aspect of that tradition. On a less immediate level, the book fulfils a basic function, which is to offer some access to information that is denied to the Arab public by regimes of censorship. Aside from hearsay and discrete verbal transmission, it is very difficult for Omanis to retrieve basic information on their own history. This book—which engages with thousands of pages of classified documents—adds to the reservoir of knowledge available on the history of this wonderful country, demystifying many episodes, ranging from the annexation of Dhufar in the nineteenth century to the planning and implementation of the July 1970 coup. Furthermore, by reconstructing the history of the revolutionaries on their own terms, utilizing their own literature and oral testimonies, the book hopes to reconnect Omani people with their own popular history, which ultimately belongs to them. To that end, I am currently preparing an Arabic translation of this work, and I aim to make it available as soon as possible.  

J: What other projects are you working on now?

ART: Currently, I am co-editing (with Dr. Karma Nabulsi of Oxford University) a major scholarly website on the history of the Palestinian revolution, spanning the years 1948-1992. This website, which is due to be launched very soon, will feature a wealth of primary materials as well as a carefully developed online teaching curriculum. The volume and range of oral and written sources that will be presented will enable close consideration of the Palestinian revolutionary tradition, as well as the practices and thoughts of the cadres that launched it. Dr. Nabulsi and I are also co-authoring a book on the subject that draws on a broad range of previously unavailable sources. This is an incredibly exciting project, and it has given me the precious opportunity to reflect on one of the largest and most persistent global anti-colonial struggles of the past century.     

Excerpt from Monsoon Revolution: Republicans, Sultans, and Empires in Oman, 1965-1976

In this context, the quest for cultural transformation did not come from above, but from below, propelled by major socio-economic changes and the experience of Dhufari migrant workers in the Gulf. Subalternity is a status that the marginalized try to break out of, whenever possible, and migrant Dhufaris were no exception. As was seen earlier, they encountered novel conceptions and practices in places like Kuwait and sought to integrate themselves into the broader Arab cultural sphere. At the initial launch of revolutionary activity, their cultural agenda was limited. However, a more expansive vision was inaugurated in the aftermath of the Hamrin conference of 1968, initiating a vigorous form of cultural transformation.

At the outset, it must be emphasized that this endeavour reflected a global pattern shared with other tricontinental contexts. In his Culture and Imperialism, Edward Said perspicaciously notes that “if colonialism was a system, as Sartre was to say in one of his post-war essays, then resistance began to feel systematic too.” Dhufari revolutionary culture was one node in this system, heavily influenced by a cultural style, outlook, discourse, and mode of expression that emanated from left-wing movements operating in other regional centers, especially Palestine and South Yemen. The latter in turn were embedded in a cultural system that included movements ranging from the Cuban to the Vietnamese.

Revolutionary culture was not simply a functionalist instrument. However, this did not mean that it did not play particular political and social functions. One of the most important was to legitimate the revolutionary endeavor by situating it within a broader tradition. The mechanism by which this was done was to constantly assert an organic connection with other revolutions, be they historic or contemporary. Classics of revolutionary literature were often cited, reproduced, and distributed. These ranged from Progress Publishers’ official Soviet translation of Lenin’s biography to Brecht’s “From a German War Primer.” Classic slogans, such as the Spanish Civil War’s “No pasarán!” (Lan Yamuru) were circulated. However, pride of place was given to the Palestinian revolution. References to it are to be found in a wide range of poems, essays, interviews, posters, and drawings, and enormous space was given to Palestinian voices in Dhufari revolutionary publications. This did not only reaffirm Dhufari commitment to Palestine, but it also endowed the Dhufar revolution with a crucial cultural means of legitimation. As noted by Michael Hudson in his seminal study of legitimation politics in the Arab world, there exist core “All Arab” concerns that have a major impact on the legitimacy of any particular order. The “legitimacy of given leaders in a given state is determined to an important extent by their fidelity to these core concerns” and “Palestine is the foremost all-Arab concern, although not the only one.”

If Palestine was important for the legitimation of any regime, it was immeasurably more crucial for revolutionary movements. This form of legitimation was not just externally useful: it held immense internal significance. To appreciate its scale, one must bear in mind that the roots of the Dhufari leadership went back to the Movement of Arab Nationalists, a formation that was primarily established to create an Arab response to the Palestinian nakba of 1948. Thus, when a respected Palestinian figure like Sakher Habash wrote poems for Dhufar, he was not only contributing to a process of cultural legitimation outside Dhufari revolutionary circles. Such an act was appreciated at an intimate level, reaffirming the revolutionaries’ desire to take a step towards liberating Palestine by changing the prevailing reality in the Gulf. Likewise, Palestinian revolutionaries, especially on the left, had a deep affinity for Dhufar and their writings on Gulf revolutionary themes were far from instrumental. One of Sakher’s poems entitled “Palestine is Dhufar” explains the emotion underlying them:

The earth is filled with storms
Oh wound that cures a wound
Oh hurricane that embraces a hurricane
Who understands the language of revolutionaries
except for other revolutionaries?
The faces of hope look alike on the pages of fire
And Palestine is Dhufar 

Such verses of solidarity were unsolicited; they reflected true feelings of camaraderie, motivated by a common experience and a shared moral universe.

Beyond the realm of the poetic, a plethora of Palestinian motifs are to be found. But they do not stand alone. Rather, they lie at the heart of an intersecting web of global words and images that constituted the repertoire of revolutionary culture, and formed the basis for an alternative worldview. The two main Dhufari periodicals, the weekly Sawt al-Thawra and the monthly 9 Yunyu, played a major role in constructing this worldview, which was principally achieved by constant references to other struggles, especially tricontinental ones. This referential system fundamentally affected such acts as news reporting…Three types of news were deemed fit to print: reports on the revolution; coverage of the regime and its regional and international backers; and items on global revolutionary movements and socialist states. The third named are particularly interesting from the standpoint of revolutionary culture. Such was their frequency and diversity that they kept cadres informed of the latest trends in the tricontinental world. In Popular Front publications, we find numerous stories of revolutionary beginnings, such as an April 1974 special interview with an Ethiopian “progressive struggler”—conducted even before the establishment of the Derg—on the growing movement against Emperor Haile Selassie in that country. The interview was featured under the title “Ethiopia: The Revolution of Humanity, Freedom, and Bread.” Despite the mobilizational title, it was characteristically rich in empirical detail, providing in-depth updates and information presented in a descriptive manner.

More celebratory, if no less detailed, coverage was given to revolutionary victories. For instance a six-page article on the victory of the people’s war in Vietnam was presented under the headline “Glory to the Fighting People!” Here, the descriptive material was intensified with declarative statements of opinion, dates, and incidents intermingling with normative assertions. A strong sense of identification is present throughout the article, the Vietnamese struggle presented as a matter of pride for every reader, and indeed for the entirety of humanity. Its ultimate victory was portrayed as a profound cause for hope: “one day in the bright future, our children will be able to play freely, in the same way that Vietnamese children do now.”

Such interviews and reports contributed to a cultural structure of reference that constituted, anchored, and disseminated the revolutionary worldview. Every printed item reflected this outlook. Letters congratulating states on their independence were published in full, supporting their leading revolutionary parties. These letters reasserted to Omani readers their belonging to the global community of revolution and informed them of the achievements of other liberation movements. They also elaborated the Popular Front’s position with regard to the internal dynamics of each struggle. For instance, readers of the letter sent to President Agostinho Neto on the occasion of Angolan independence were informed that “the People’s Movement for the Liberation of Angola is the sole legitimate representative of the Angolan people,” essentially signalling that the Omani revolutionary leadership stood with the Cuban and Soviet-backed MPLA in its conflict with American supported UNITA and FNLA.

Editorials also expressed support for “sister revolutions.” There was hardly an event that they did not cover, ranging from the first Communist Party of Cuba conference in 1975 (which was attended by the PFLO Secretary General, Abdel Aziz al-Qadi) to the eleventh anniversary celebrations of the Zanzibari revolution. Major anniversaries were given huge coverage, an opportunity to provide a historical overview of the particular cause under consideration. October 1917 was annually celebrated with fanfare, and so were the Palestinian, Yemeni, Chinese, Cuban, Algerian, Egyptian, Iraqi, and Vietnamese revolutions. Even obituaries were laden with political meaning and anti-colonial sympathies, promptly published whenever a major international revolutionary figure died. As such, every editorial, anniversary piece, and obituary licensed a discourse of revolutionary affiliation, reflecting incorporation into the anti-colonial cultural system.

[Excerpted from Abdel Razzaq Takriti, Monsoon Revolution: Republicans, Sultans, and Empires in Oman, 1965-1976, by permission of the author. © 2013 Abdel Razzaq Takriti. For more information, or to order the book, click here.]