Dreams and Shadows: The Future of the Middle East - A Review

Wright, Robin. Dreams and Shadows: The Future of the Middle East. 2008. 464 pages. Acknowledgments. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $26.95

Robin Wright has been reporting on the Middle East for some thirty years, and she has spent enough time in the region to be familiar with a lot of the ins and outs. She knows a lot of people who know people, and that’s the key to her reportage. Ms. Wright isn’t into the sweeping, impersonal, top-down history that characterizes Samuel Freedman’s Choice of Enemies. Her account of the Middle East in the past few years is much more personal, and much more immediate.

Dreams and Shadows takes its title from a quote of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk: “Neither sentiment nor illusion must influence our policy. Away with dreams and shadows! They have cost us dear in the past.” The book is divided into ten chapters, one on the Palestinians, two each on Egypt, Lebanon, and Iran, one on Syria, one on Morocco, and one on the United States and Iraq. Each chapter, in turn, focuses on one or two political figures, figures outside of the governments, each trying in his or her own way to reform the old order. Wright’s purpose is to uncover what the people of the Middle East themselves want, as opposed to what we in the West might think to be good for them.

These vignettes don’t come to clear conclusions; Middle Eastern societies are in flux, and too much is happening now to let us see the ends of these movements. That flux and instability is nicely captured in the chapter on the Palestinians, in which Wright’s primary interlocutors are brothers. Khalil Shikaki was the head of the Palestine Center for Policy and Survey Research, a secular man, who had been a support for Yasser Arafat and Fatah for many years. His older brother Fathi Shikaki, a medical man, was a cofounder of Islamic Jihad. Wright also obtained an interview with Khalid Mashaal, the head of Hamas. The brunt of her story is that the Palestinians are so deeply divided among themselves that there is no chance of them arriving at a coherent policy. Moreover, they are an outstanding example of the extent to which secular nationalism has been so disappointing to the people that the religious movements are gaining support.

Wright provides us lengthy stories of Egyptians trying to reform their political system by opening it up, making elections more transparent, striking at the pervasive corruption. I had the sense of a deep futility here, as these people try to establish democratic norms in the face of Hosni Mubarak’s determination to have his son, Gamal, succeed him as Egypt’s dictator. Similarly, her Syrian reformer spend more time in jail or in exile than out organizing an alternative to the Baathist regime of the Assads. In Morocco, there are women fighting for women’s rights, while reform moves at exactly the pace set by King Mohammed VI, no faster, no slower.

Wright’s own optimism is strained in the last chapter, as she considers how the U.S. invasion of Iraq has set back progressive forces throughout the region. For one thing, a number of regimes have cracked down on the forces of reform in the name of fighting terrorism. For another, the example of chaos and violence in Iraq has made regimes even less interested in loosing the forces of change in their societies. Perhaps most importantly, the forces of democracy, feminism, and liberal values are now identified with the increasingly unpopular United States.

For me, the high point of the book was in the chapter “Lebanon: The Shadows,” in which Wright has an extensive interview with Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah. Nasrallah gives us a lot of insight into his thinking and plans, and Wright provides background and analysis that places the Shiite leader’s thinking in the context of the region. She concludes that the Israeli invasion in 2006, aimed at the destruction of Hezbollah, was a failure, but that Nasrallah made a critical error in provoking the attack, not least in failing to realize that his action in capturing/kidnapping Israeli soldiers would provoke such violent retaliation. Hezbollah’s ability to provide reconstruction aid immediately after that conflict made up in political gains a lot of what they may have lost in military credibility. And they still have bragging rights as the only Middle Eastern force that can claim to have met the Israelis in combat and not been defeated.

Oddly enough, the most hopeful chapters in the book are those on Iran. Too often, because, in part, of our government’s statements, we think of Iran as a closed society, a dictatorship, a sort of theocratic totalitarian state. Wright shows that, while the ayatollahs carry a lot of influence, there are active electoral politics in Iran. (After all, the election of Ahmadinejad was a major upset for the little-known mayor of Teheran.) There are restrictions on democratic processes, as there are in any country, and some of them are pernicious, but in Iran, unlike any of the other countries Wright surveys, the authentic voice of the people has a chance to be heard. Their democracy is not our democracy, and their policies are not our policies, but the Iranians are the one country in this group that may have broken through the “dreams and shadows” to a workable popularly-elected government.

Finally, while Wright states that she wants to find out what the people of the Middle East want for themselves, what sort of future they themselves imagine, it is evident that she, like many Americans, including the Bush administration, is disappointed that the emerging future of the Middle East isn’t living up to her expectations. Liberal, feminist, secular, progressive – these are not the adjectives one will be using to describe the Middle East for many years to come. I think we might be satisfied with prosperous, peaceful, tolerant, and popular – but those may be just my own dreams and shadows for this troubled region.