Hypocrisy and Arab empire
Daniel Clarke-Serret’s book “Pax Arabica” forces the Arab world to face history and itself.
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There comes a time when societies must face the reality of what they’ve done. That is, they must acknowledge and struggle with their history and, often, their historical crimes.
All the nations of the West and, of course, Israel are regularly admonished on this point, usually by those who refuse to reciprocate in any way. In his book Pax Arabica, Daniel Clarke-Serret takes on perhaps the most prominent of these hypocrites: the Arab world.
In the process, Clarke-Serret holds a mirror up to the Arab world’s constant claims of victimhood and thus reveals the true victimizer. As he puts it, “The so-called Arab world is not oppressed. They are not suffering from genocide, ethnic cleansing, or apartheid, at least not from foreign hands. Rather, they are the oppressors who are audaciously and shamefully causing all these ills.”
Accusations of Islamophobia and racism will no doubt immediately follow, but Clarke-Serret points out in short order that his assertion is not fomenting hate but represents a return to historical truth.
“Which foreign power was it that invaded the entirety of the Levant and North Africa?” he asks. “Which distant people is it that imposed its religion on the unwilling at the barrel of the gun? And which racist interlopers have deemed it their God-given right to slowly but surely cleanse all non-believers from the indigenous lands of others?”
Indeed, whatever the virtues of Arab society, its constant execration of other societies—and racist assaults on Jews—usually appear to be little more than projection. Amidst the cries of racism, settler-colonialism, imperialism, and so on, we are faced with the history of an Arab world that only exists because of racism, settler-colonialism, imperialism, and innumerable other crimes.
Clarke-Serret makes his points in order to posit that the Arab world and thus the Middle East—with the sole exception of Israel—is an empire by any other name. It is one in which only one people with one religion is permitted to dominate an entire region, denying sovereignty to Kurds, Maronites, Yazidis, and numerous other, smaller peoples that it often relentlessly persecutes in the cruelest manner.
“Both the Mongols and the British are overshadowed by the most successful Empire of all time,” he writes. “An Empire that exists to this very day. An Empire so insidious that it has gaslit the world into believing that it is no empire at all. That they are the native people of all of the Middle East and North Africa and most audaciously of all that they are at the forefront of the fight against ‘Western imperialism.’”
The response to this, Clarke-Serret admonishes, should be the “de-colonization” of the Middle East by fostering the creation of nation-states for all its peoples. He states: “We do need unity in this world, but not Arab unity. We need the unity of free peoples coming together in liberty with respect and understanding for the other. We need a Middle East of different, but mutually respecting, nations.”
“There needs to be an independent Israel, an independent Kurdistan, an independent African Western Sudan, and an independent Christian state in Lebanon,” he urges. “Pan-Arabism—the remnant of medieval Islamic Jihad—needs to retire into the history books for good.”
Using examples from Sudan, Nigeria, and elsewhere—where non-Muslims and non-Arabs are being brutally slaughtered, enslaved, and otherwise abused—Clarke-Serret exposes the Arab world’s imperialist hypocrisy, saying, “The Arab Empire is an expression of all that we must set our face against: Superiority, slavery, submission, theocracy, expulsion, ethnic cleansing, and inequality.”
The vanguard of this empire, he posits, is currently “Palestinianism,” which he sees as a fundamentally imperialist and colonialist ideology.
He asserts that Palestinian “nationalism” is not, in fact, “a national movement for self-determination. … As clearly set out in the PLO Charter, Palestinianism is the Vanguard of the Pan-Arab Empire. It is a temporary identity that must be maintained until the non-Arab Jews are expelled from the Middle East and or at least denied their sovereignty as a free, indigenous, Middle Eastern people. It is more an agent of Jewish non-self-determination than a vehicle for Palestinian national actualization.”
In such a situation, Clarke-Serret posits that genuine national self-determination is the only thing that can roll the empire back. Quite rightly, he points out that “If self-determination has any value, it is to create power structures for the powerless.” And it is the Kurds, the Maronites, the Yazidis, and others who are powerless; while the non-Arab and non-Muslim Nigerians, Sudanese, and Israelis are the ones facing the robbery of their power by those who already possess more than enough to be satisfied by any rational measure.
Along with this, Clarke-Serret points to the hypocrisy of the Western left, for whom Islam is the only beautiful empire, the glorious exception to all their professed values. He writes, “Progressive organizations are infected by an absolutist anti-imperial ideology that colors all their geopolitical and historical interpretations,” but this ideology is not, in fact, anti-imperialist. The left’s ideology posits, rather, that some empires are more equal than others, and has thus become a collaborator in the modern continuation of the ancient Arab conquests.
Pax Arabica is a welcome antidote, insightful and ferocious in equal measure. It is, at times, a bit too ferocious, running to the polemical and exhortatory in a manner that lacks proper sobriety. There are also moments of excess, such as Clarke-Serret’s proposal that the Palestinians be placed in a non-sectarian state called “Levantia,” which is at best a fantasy.
Nor could a true “de-colonization” of the Middle East, however desirable, occur without enormous regional upheaval and war. As a result, it is likely that slow liberalization, such as is occurring in some Arab states, is preferable to grand gestures toward total liberation.
Moreover, one cannot ignore the fact that many Arab states are moving away from the ancient belief in conquest. The Abraham Accords, which have held despite a bloody war in Gaza, are proof enough of this, and there is the possibility that, if the Accords expand, Arab imperialist ambitions will come to an end by sheer force of history. Clarke-Serret does not consider this at sufficient length.
Nonetheless, there are plenty of ferocious and polemical defenses of the Pax Arabica by innumerable apologists for imperialism and terrorism like Edward Said and Rashid Khalidi. A ferocious and polemical response to them is long overdue. In writing one, Clarke-Serret is stronger in history and logic than the apologists, and certainly possesses a moral clarity and historical accuracy they would never dare embrace.
More than anything else, however, Clarke-Serret states a simple but too often silent truth: Morality is reciprocity. If the West must face history and itself, so must everybody else. As long as the partisans of Arab imperialism do not, no one in the West is obligated to listen to a single word they say.