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to radical movements, as the case has been in Somalia or Sudan. Political leaders who try to submit political Islam to the aims of building a national state and legitimation of their policy of the country's modernization commit a grave error. Islam is an ideological system, which cannot be adapted to solving particular political tasks.
It looks likely, Vladimir Karyakin says, that the failure of the idea of an Arab national state is of an irreversible character. The events in North Africa sand the Middle East show that the West has received no dividends so far from the abolition of the regimes disliked by it. Instead of them come social chaos and on the wave of it - movements of radical political Islam.
Author of the abstract - Valentina Schensnovich
2018.03.013. VASILY KUZNETSOV, IRINA ZVYAGELSKAYA. PROBLEMS OF STATEHOOD IN THE MIDDLE EAST // "Svobodnaya mysl," Moscow, 2015, P. 18-31.
Keywords: Middle East, Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Bahrain, Israel, nationalism, Islam, federalization, modernization.
Vasily Kuznetsov,
PhD(Hist.)
The Head of the Center for Arab and Islamic Studies,
Institute of Oriental Studies, RAS
Irina Zvyagelskaya,
Dr.Sc.(Hist.), Professor,
The Center for Arab and Islamic Studies
Chief Scientific Officer, Member of the Academic Council,
Institute of Oriental Studies, RAS
As a result of social, ethnic, tribal, confessional and ideological contradictions and differences many Arab states of the Middle East and North Africa have found themselves in a very
difficult situation recently. This is a conclusion made by scholars of the Orient Valery Kuznetsov and Irina Zvyagelskaya (Institute of Oriental Studies, Russian Academy of Sciences). A sharp deterioration of state management and growing chaos have become a byproduct of the "Arab spring" whose initiators and actors pursued their own aims, among which were the overthrow of the old elites and access to power and resources.
Speaking of the overall revision of the old state model, which took shape in the region in the process of the national-liberation struggle in the first half of the 20th century, the authors of this article examine this new model and whether it can be applied to the concept of national state.
States whose independence is connected with the cultural idea and internal cultural homogeneity can be regarded national. Ethnicity is politicized and gives birth to nationalism when ethnic community existing in certain boundaries believes that ethnic bounds should coincide with political ones, and the nationality of the ruling elite should be the same as that of the state's subjects. Nationalism does not emerge at the early stages of human history, it is an off-spring of industrial society. A developed industrial society is based on the innovative activity and new technologies. It needs educated people, and the education of a competitive member of society costs much, inasmuch as good education and qualification training are really expensive. New forms of self-realization emerge. Culture is influenced by the changes of the character of labor. The system of communications grades local differences and contributes to the distribution of homogeneous culture. To make society homogeneous through education (without it society will not be able to answer the requirements of modern production) is one of the tasks of state power. At the same time the emergence of independent states under the powerful impact of national-liberation movements puts into motion the mechanism of new nationalist movements in each of the states inhabited by national minorities striving to reach their own statehood.
In the Middle East the formation of modern states was taking place in the context of national-liberation movement and anti-colonial struggle. It developed under the strong influence of western nationalism within whose framework ever new national states emerged in Europe during the 19th - 20th centuries, in which common values and mutual liabilities came to the fore, along with identity with the state and community of culture accompanied with ethnic differences. At the same time Eastern nationalism developed also on the basis of anti-Western sentiments and pragmatic or emotional denial of western models. Despite the fact that both Western and Eastern nationalism were based on the idea of self-determination, there were serious differences between them. The borrowing of Western ideologies along with denial of Western types of social and state organization became one of the major specific features of building independent states in the Arab East,
Arab nationalism basing itself on the cultural community of the Arabs lost in the main aspect, namely, recognition of common rights, obligations and values. Even a successful construction of certain states was influenced by the dominating agrarian system, ethno-confessional and tribal loyalty and did not submit to Western rules of the creation of dominating civil identity.
The only formal exclusion in the Middle East was the state construction project of Israel influenced by Western nationalism and materialized within the framework of the British mandate, which soon became too narrow for it.
The main difference of Jewish nationalism from Arab nationalism was that the construction of a new state was made by people of European origin (including Russia). For them European models of state construction were organically natural and could not be rejected due to the fact that the emergence of the state was going on in the battle against British colonialism.
A definite manifestation of a revision of the model is a tendency to change the administrative-territorial system of states. In the case of Yemen, Syria and Libya the idea of federalization
conceals the attempts of the local authorities and Western experts to invent a model of preserving statehood in the situation of the weakening or disintegration of the institutions (or in the case of Libya the abolition of the system of personal power disguising the absence of institutions). The Iraqi experience has shown that such strategy has definite limits - unity of a federation depends on the presence of consensus between regional elites concerning the division of access to the country's resources and on the interests of third countries. In case of a violation of inter-regional balance or a change of the international situation the system becomes extremely vulnerable. However, in other countries (Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Egypt, and others) the crux of the matter lies not in federalization as such, but factual decentralization or other forms, including elements of federalism in the system of state management.
As to Lebanon, the point actually is hidden federalization aimed at balancing the interests of localized ethno-confessional groups. The Lebanese experience has largely been borrowed by Americans in organizing new Iraqi statehood. In Algeria, and especially in Morocco, it served as a means of maintaining autonomy of individual regions of the country controlled by Rabat -part of Western Sahara in Morocco, and Kabylia in Algeria. In both countries regionalization or federalization seems unfeasible (in Algeria this problem is viewed in the light of Berber separatism). In Tunisia the question of "disfavored" regions was put to the fore in 2011 in the context of granting the elites of these regions an access to power and the country's financial resources.
Another manifestation of revision is re-examination of the identity of state power and attempts to increase its religious aspect. The most active in this respect were the Islamist forces which ruled the roost in Tunisia and Egypt for the first couple of years after the revolutions in those countries.
In various states, irrespective of their domestic political situation, their governments began to pay more attention than; previously to the religious identity of the authorities. Such
tendencies are connected, evidently, with the actualization of the problem of cultural-historical and confessional identity of societies This problem reveals prevailing ethno-confessional identity over national one. This is related to the countries, which are in the throes of civil wars and conflicts - Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Libya (in this case we do not mean ethno-confessional identity, but ethno-tribal one). But apart from them, we also have in mind Bahrain, where under the guise of democratic calls and slogans there is the Sunni-Shia confrontation between the authorities and the opposition.
The basic traits and the very possibility of another model of statehood (not the traditional Arab-Muslim) should be determined by the character of the modernization of regional societies. According to modern sociological research, modernization processes are taking place in a different manner in different societies.
The theory of multiple modernities gives an answer as to why modern societies in the East differ so much from Western societies. At a time when structural changes were taking place in post-colonial societies, structural changes of ordinary institutions, the emergence of new ones, and newly appearing social and ideological models were modern by their nature, but at the same time reflected the influence of dominating political culture. The emerging movements and parties putting forward anti-Western slogans could be aggressively nationalistic or fundamentalist, yet remain modern.
In the Muslim East secularism, bon ton, etc. have somewhat different character and are understood in another manner than in Europe, with due account of the specificities of Islam and its society. There can be talk of separating religion from politics, but never from the state, which has always retained complete control over the activity of religious institutions and turned to religion for legitimating the most important political decisions.
Turning to religion and its politicization becomes a characteristic feature of the modern epoch and a determining
factor in searching for a new model of statehood in the region. Such is the conclusion of most researchers of the problems of the Muslim world.
Author of the abstract - Valentina Schensnovich
2018.03.014. OLGA BIBIKOVA. ROLE OF SUNNI AND SHIA CONTROVERSIES OF THE SITUATION IN THE MIDDLE EAST // "Ekonomicheskie sotsialno-politicheskie i etnokonfessionalnye problem afro-aziatskih stran," Moscow, 2017, IOS RAS, P. 175-188.
Keywords: Shiism, Sunnism, Imamah, religious differences, political rivalry.
Olga Bibikova, PhD(Hist.)
Institute of Oriental Studies, RAS
The author analyzes evolution of Sunni and Shia controversies the Middle East. Rivalry of Shias and Sunnis goes back to Islam roots, which began after the death of the prophet. The majority of Sunnis, i.e. adherents of the orthodox line, in the world is about 90%, Shias - 10% of Muslim population of the planet. Accurate data on the total number of Muslims in the world don't exist, but it is thought to be - 1.5 billion. According to data of 2002 24 million of residents of Iraq 60% of the population (Arabs and Kurds) profess Islam of Shia Muslim sense, 35% are Sunnites (Arabs and Kurds), 3% are Christians.
Birthplace of Shia Islam is Iraq. Shias pilgrims visit holy sites on the territory of this country - Nedzhef city where there is a tomb of Ali, the first imam of Shias, cousin and good- brother of the Prophet, and Karbala where in 680 the Prophet's grandson Hussein of Ben Ali was killed, and then Iranian Mashhad, where the 8th Shia Muslim imam Reza is buried. The fate of imam Ali al-Reza (the Persian name - Reza) demonstrates that at the end of the VIII century Sunnis and Shias were at enmity. According to the
