Arab cities are the centers of their f-ups

Original Sin
By Rami G. Khouri

If you want to appreciate a common malaise that afflicts the entire Arab world, look at its cities, which project an external veneer of urbanism even as inhabitants live lives mainly according to village and tribal values. Retribalization, ethnic compartmentalization and localized militarization are occurring on a large scale, as formerly mixed neighborhoods slowly disentangle into more homogeneous districts defined by religion, ethnicity, tribe or some other collective identity.

One of the great ironies in the Arab world during the past generation, since the 1970s, has been the contradictory trend toward bigger and bigger cities, without the parallel benefits of that phenomenon of richness that has always defined the really great cities of the world - a sense of cosmopolitanism, of transcending one's local space to interact with and be part of the larger world, often literally the whole world when speaking of commercial and cultural interaction.

In the period before the 1970s, before most Arab regimes were taken over by soldiers and thugs, the majority of leading Arab cities reflected several profound traditions: they were open to foreign and regional traders, absorbed immigrants from other lands, welcomed and benefited from foreign institutions that were often established by religious missionaries, such as hospitals and schools, easily absorbed new ideas and norms from abroad, and were naturally comfortable with a very wide variety of local and foreign lifestyles manifested alongside each other.

Then, unlike today, you rarely saw armed soldiers on every other street corner. And never did a soldier stop you at the entrance of a government building and ask you where you came from or where your father was born. The armed guards of the narrow sectarian state did not need to determine if you were legitimate or otherwise on the basis of your territorial or tribal origin. Now they do. At airports, government departments and other landscapes of crude power projection, many ordinary Arabs are routinely asked about their family origins.

This is probably the single most irritating example of both the frailty and brutality of the centralized Arab security state these days: afraid of its own citizens, it must categorize them by their primal affiliation rather than by their identification with the country itself. By behaving this way, the typical Arab government, in fact, degrades, even invalidates the citizenship of its own citizens. It signals to them that their equal rights as citizens have been replaced by their relative rights as members of tribes that enjoy different levels of personal esteem and civil privileges, in an essentially caste system of first, second and third class citizens. In return, we all get to go to a new shopping mall every other month.

Iraq, Palestine, Lebanon, Sudan, Yemen, Algeria and other Arab lands that have suffered serious internal warfare are the most extreme examples of a trend that pervades most of this region. As central state authority fractures or becomes belligerent against some of its own people, citizens no longer see the government and central armed forces as their protectors. Ordinary people seek protection and identity in many other forms that are available and pertinent: tribe, clan, neighborhood, religion, ethnic sect, ideological group, criminal gangs dealing in drugs or guns, and other such groups that provide collective defining identities.

It was not always like this, though, as we are reminded in a timely and incisive new book, "Heart of Beirut: Reclaiming the Bourj," by Lebanese sociologist Samir Khalaf, who heads the Center for Behavioral Research at the American University of Beirut. It has just been published by London's Saqi Books, and recounts how Beirut's traditional central square, the Bourj, developed its pivotal public role over the centuries, and, more significantly, how it repeatedly absorbed local and foreign influences to reinvent itself as a vibrant, cosmopolitan and fun place that also reflected collective norms and identities.

The Bourj has always had the capacity to both affirm and transcend narrow identities, allowing the natives to assert themselves while wandering into adjacent and shared landscapes defined by Lebanese, Arab and Western "others." Here, as in other once-great Arab cities, was a place where people went to satisfy their "need for wonder, exhilaration, exposure to new sensations, worldviews and the elevation of our appreciative sympathies - which are all enhanced through connectedness with strangers ..."

The most defining element of a public sphere, Khalaf says, is inherent "precisely in its ability to transform closed or cloistered spaces into more open ones and thereby to facilitate the voyaging, traversing and crossing over."

There is not much "crossing over" taking place in Arab cities these days, but rather the opposite is happening, as communities retreat into their own cloistered spaces, often guarded by kids with Kalashnikovs. Beirut's Bourj epitomized Arab urban civility and cosmopolitanism for nearly a century, due to several distinct and related elements, which Khalaf summarizes as follows: "First, the predisposition of the Bourj to incorporate and reconcile pluralistic and multicultural features; second, its inventiveness in reconstituting and refashioning its collective identity and public image; third, its role in hosting and disseminating popular culture, consumerism, mass entertainment and often nefarious tourist attractions."

The next time an Arab official or soldier asks me where I come from, I am going to tell him I come from the Bourj, from a place where different people forged common strength. And if he asks me where I am going, I will also say I am going to the Bourj - to reclaim an Arab legacy of urban sensibility, coexistence, civility and multicultural fun .