Khaled A.M. Bayomi
Lund University
"Two overweening rulers cannot live in the same street, for if they do there will be war!" (An Egyptian saying)
These newly assembled organisations created several unique phenomena in modern Arab political history. The first was that the union in the Arab Maghreb embraced all the Arab states east of Egypt. Furthermore, it strengthened both Libya's and Mauritania's participation in the politico-economic collaboration in the Arab Maghreb. The second was that Iraq, which not long before had been Egypt's main rival for leadership of the Arab world, instead abandoned its efforts, joined the GCC, and worked with Egypt to build a new co-operative organisation.
Optimism was the prevalent emotion in the Arab world as it seemed that the Arabs would finally be reconciled and would effect a fruitful and broad base for co-operation. But on 2 August 1990 the Gulf region exploded yet again, which, quite apart from dashing the earlier optimistic expectations, was completely unexpected by many political commentators. In just a few hours Iraq managed to occupy the whole of Kuwait, a country which during the Iran-Iraq war had been Iraq's foremost ally in the Arab East. During that war Kuwait had been described by the Iraqi mass media as `the brotherland'. Does this mean that the war came as a bolt from the blue, or was it just a misunderstanding? One Arab king described events as `a difficult period that will soon pass'. Many politicians in the Arab world fastened on the word `crisis'. By the same token, the mass media in the USA and Western Europe described it as `the Kuwait crisis'.
Iraq annexed the whole of Kuwait and not just the al-Ruomila oil field and the two islands, Warbh and Bobian, that, for example, only a few weeks earlier King Fahed of Saudi Arabia had thought to be Iraq's goal. The UN Security Council agreed upon several resolutions that condemned Iraq and demanded an immediate and unconditional retreat from Kuwait. Already by the end of the second week of August several countries had sent military reinforcements to Saudi Arabia to protect it from the feared invasion from Iraq. The most important forces came from the USA, together with France and the UK. From the Arab world, forces were sent principally from Egypt and Syria.
When Iraq put forward its first peace initiative, it was revealed that Iraq saw the occupation of Kuwait as part of a much wider issue that also comprised, to the surprise of the majority of commentators, both the question of the civil war in Lebanon and the Palestinian question, including Israel's occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Iraq declared that it was prepared to discuss all these questions simultaneously. The logical conclusion is that Iraq wanted, by bringing up these issues, to use the occupation of Kuwait to strengthen its negotiating position, not just in relation to questions with direct bearing on the Gulf region but on the Arab East as a whole.
Regionally, Iraq's involvement in various important issues had previously met with failure. In Lebanon in December 1989 Iraq had strongly supported Michael Aoun in his struggle against all the signatories to the Taif peace agreement, an agreement that both Egypt and Saudi Arabia had thrown their weight behind. The preliminaries to a possible peace agreement between the PLO and Israel were conducted wholly by Egypt and Saudi Arabia in conjunction with Syria, something that ran against Iraq's views on this issue.
It was hardly surprising that the main international powers, the then European Community and the USA, and the regional powers involved - Israel, Iran, Turkey and, from the Arab world, principally Saudi Arabia, Syria, and Egypt - totally refused to link Iraq's invasion of Kuwait with the other issues.
The broad front of opposition to Iraq's actions led to resolutions on economic sanctions and a blockade of Iraq passing the UN Security Council in record time. Even so, it still took until 28 November before the Security Council passed the most important of these, Resolution 686, which was to become the legal grounds for the assembling coalition in Saudi Arabia to force Iraq `with all means' to leave Kuwait, and `to restore order and security to the region'. Iraq was given until 15 January 1991 to accept the UN resolutions and retreat from Kuwait. On 17 January the coalition forces, operating under the UN's aegis, attacked Iraq. On 28 February, after both Kuwait and Iraq had suffered intensive bombing, Iraq announced that it accepted the UN resolutions. The Arab states, by thereafter refusing to let their forces take part in coalition operations in either north or south Iraq, brought a halt to the fighting for the most part, although not entirely. It was apparent that the West European powers and the USA had different ends in mind than the Arab participants in the coalition, Syria, Saudi Arabia and Egypt.
The whole event was still referred to as the Kuwait crisis; yet another crisis in irrational Arab politics! For me personally it was very hard to accept that the invasion of Kuwait was just a crisis. Using the term crisis was much more the mass media's reductionist attempt to describe what happened.
Osama el-Ghazali Harb suggests in his study in The Gulf crisis and its consequences for the Arab homeland that in international politics and in academic contexts the term crisis is used to mean `a fast development of events that threatens to lead to the outbreak of war, and which requires speedy countermeasures to be taken with the object of preventing the outbreak of war'. [1] Harb adds that `it may be unfortunate that Western Europe and the USA described the whole thing as a crisis. But for us Arabs it is important that the process is not reduced to the word crisis because the consequences could be grave...The word crisis can mean that what occurred was an incidental event. The word crisis also merely stresses the political dimension of what happened, and in particular the political dimension as it ties in with the international relations of the parties involved'. [2] Harb's conclusion is that `what occurred in fact rises above the political dimension to the cultural, psychological, social, economic and historical dimensions'.
Iraq's invasion of Kuwait shows that, yet again, inter-Arab conflict is a principal cause of instability in the Arab East. The invasion will be understood as a sign of irrational Iraqi politics if one tries to understand the invasion as if it were merely a quarrel over oil prices, or a territorial dispute between Iraq and Kuwait. If the invasion is, however, seen both from the perspective of a protracted inter-Arab conflict and from the multi-dimensional perspective advocated by Harb, then it becomes something quite different. [3] The over-arching question then becomes: What was or is the relationship between the nahdah dilemma and the modern Arab state? This leads to the following specific questions:
It is worth stressing from the start that my intent here is not to give a detailed account of the background to the outbreak of the Iran - Iraq war, nor yet the war for Kuwait. Instead, an attempt will be made using a multi-dimensional, historical perspective that stretches back to the middle of the eighteenth century, to look closely at the nahdah dilemma, influencing and influenced by nation-building and reunification movements which had already begun during the Ottoman Empire and were continued by the subsequent independent states, and at the Arab states that as a result of their respective nahdah visions were on a collision course not only with each other, but also with their non-Arab neighbours Iran and Israel.
Nahdah is seen here as the process of altering society which in its early manifestation led, for example, the provinces' local rulers, waly, to press for reform of the Ottoman Empire, and later guided the independent states in their quest to reattain the heights of Arab-Islamic Golden Age of the eighth to the twelfth century.
It is important methodologically to separate two different periods of the nahdah process. The first began during the Ottoman Empire's rule, running from the middle of the eighteenth century to the collapse of the Ottoman state after the First World War. The second period began in the middle of the 1910s, when many of the existing Arab states were established after the European pattern, and continued up to the outbreak of the Kuwait War in 1990. One of the points to this division is that the ideals that were developed during the Ottoman Empire's rule have to be seen in their nineteenth-century context, when the Ottoman Empire was divided into various provinces or wilaya. The political atmosphere in the Arab parts of the Ottoman state was characterised more by Islamic-Arab nahdah visions than by purely Arab visions. With the foundation of the modern Arab states nahdah was given a slightly altered content and a wholly different structure. The nahdah dilemma was a dominating political factor in the independent Arab states during the second period, and influenced not only internal but also foreign policies.
During the first period we cannot talk about a conflict between states, however. Instead, the relationship must be seen as one of competition between the state's provinces, the wilayat, which dominated the historic capital cities in the Empire in carrying out their nahdah vision, their nahdah project. [5]
During the second period the Arab world in general and the eastern half, the Arab East, in particular was one of the most unstable parts of the world. The state held the central role in formulating policy during this time. Instability, however, gave rise to power being wielded at a inter-state level, but this is still within an Arab context. Newly created national boundaries have not always succeeded in protecting the Arab state from very strong political, economic, social and religious influences from other Arab states. It is hard to differentiate between intra-state and inter-state instability. The borders between intra-state and inter-state instability have been, and are still, very blurred; something in which the Arab world is perhaps alone. Therefore regional instability evident up to the First World War, and perhaps up to the present, appears in no small measure to have been intra-state conflict much than an inter-state. Instability in Lebanon in 1958, the Yemeni civil war of 1962 and Lebanon's civil war of 1976 are clear examples of how difficult it is to draw borders between an intra-state and inter-state conflict in the Arab East.
It was after the end of the First World War that the wilayat that lay within the boundaries of the vast Ottoman state began to take on the characteristics of nation states similar to those in Europe after the Peace of Westphalia in 1648. [6] It was a process which the colonial powers, above all France and Britain, were in great part responsible for. Naturally, the colonial powers did not created these states out of nothing. They were often geographically linked wilayat which the colonial powers brought together and set borders round, as, for instance, in Iraq's case, where the state was comprised of three separate wilayat , Basrah, Baghdad and Mousel. In Greater Syria, however, the colonial powers divided a unified geographical region into various different states and areas, viz. Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, and Palestine (which has since become Israel and the West Bank and Gaza Strip).
It is not unusual for instability in the Arab East to escalate into open war, sometimes with the direct involvement of great powers such as Britain and France, an example being the Suez War of 1956, sometimes with the indirect involvement of the superpowers, the USA and the former Soviet Union, as with the June War in 1967 and the October War in 1973.
The considerable popular support demonstrated for Iraq during the Kuwait War by Yemen, Sudan, Jordan, Libya, Morocco, Algeria, and Mauritania, among the Palestinians and among some parts of the Syrian and Egyptian populations shows what potency the reunion of the Arab nation - in its turn considered an essential precursor to nahdah - has as a mobilising element in the Arab world. The population there, the normal people and the intellectual élite, suddenly subordinated their self-identification as Moroccan, Egyptian, Yemeni and so on to another, all-embracing identification that had always existed and was valid for the whole Arab race. For a short time the national boundaries that had been carefully strengthened by the independent Arab states over seventy-odd years lost much of their relevance.
Minor conflicts that had been one of the reasons for the pursuit of nahdah, had, in the course of the twentieth century, built up into a kind of regional inter-state war. Occasionally agreement was arrived at between the so-called conservative Arab states, as, for example, in the war between 1924 and 1924 for the province of Hedjaz between the Hashemite royal family led by al-Sherif Ali Ibn el-Hussein, King of Hedjaz, [7] and the al-Saud clan under its leader Abdel-Azez Ibn Saud al-Saud, Sultan of Nadjed. [8] During this war Ibn Saud captured the two holy cities, Mecca and Medina. Control of the holy cities was one of the most important elements in the Saudi Arabian nahdah project.
The war against Israel in 1948 was to be the first in which the young Arab states fought against a common enemy. [9] The conflict that raged over whether the British mandate of Palestine should be given its independence, escalated into open war. Five Arab states pitted themselves against UN Resolution 179 that allowed the division of Palestine into two separate states, one Jewish and one Arab, but each and every one went to war with their own goals in mind. Victory for Israel in the war was not a concept they entertained. But the Arab states' defeat made Palestine the next most important issue after the issue of the political system in the Arab world. Both of these questions were to leave an indelible mark on Arab Eastern politics in the decades that followed. Ahmad J. Ahmad, in his pioneering study of the inter-Arab conflict, has concluded that the Palestine question became the next biggest cause of conflict next to the political system in the Arab world after the end of the Second World War. [10] The liberation of Palestine became a symbol for the nahdah struggle for all the Arab states, and even for Iran during its Islamic state period.
Arabic literature is full of descriptions of how the victorious powers redrew the national borders in the Arab East after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire during the First World War. Views on the colonial powers' roles in creating the extant Arab states differ, but the study of inter-Arab relations has been, and remains to this day, an emotional issue in Arab research. The way in which, for example, Egypt's conflict with al-Saud, or the Hashemite-Saudi conflict, gave the great powers the chance to push through their plans is a question that has generally been ignored by Arab scholars. The tendency to place all the responsibility on imperialism or on Zionism is, however, well represented. The Arab states' responsibilities for the redrawing of the borders is considered solely as having given rise to more divisions.
The Arab East, despite the colonial powers plans, has not witnessed the growth of nation states within the nation-building parameters set out in the Arab East in the 1920s. The territorial Arab state failed to put in place the framework of any kind of independent national identity. This was the result of the inter-relationship between the newly founded state as an existing fact, and the political nahdah project that the state adopted its moving spirit. Elbaki Harmassi stresses in his socio-cultural study of the Arab states that `there is a basic contradiction between the functions undertaken by the state and the nature of the general ideological atmosphere, a contradiction which leads the individual not to take the state and its decisions seriously'. [11] Loyalty is not given to the actual state because the provincial state itself, through its struggle for unification within a larger Arab state, undercut the development of such an identification. Harmassi says in this context that `There is loyalty, but not to the state, there is consensus, but not around it. In this case, authority is severed from the law and power from moral authority. The orders of state are implemented. Projects are achieved. The individual state provides the country with infrastructure, education, employment, organisation, etcetera. All these achievements do not, however, bring loyalty to, or consensus around, the state. This is especially the case if its propaganda is a constant reminder that this is only a stage towards the achievement of the greater Arab State'. [12]
The state has been, and is still, the driving force in the region's politics. It can be said that the existing territorial states in the Arab East were constructed to become nation states, but after seventy years they have still not moved beyond existence as sub-national states. [13] Identification with the Arab nation, al-umma al-arabiyya, or the Muslim nation, al-umma al-islamiyya, can embrace and exist in parallel with three other planes of identification. The first level is identification with the new state, the second with an ethnic and/or religious group within the state, and the third with a geographical region, for example Greater Syria. Harmassi believes that there is a difference between the Maghreb states - those of the western half of the Arab world - and the Mashreq states - those in the eastern half - when it comes to the relationship between identification with the state, al-wataniyya, and identification with the Arab nation, al-qaumiyya al-arabiyya. In the larger Maghreb these identifications are integrated and rarely conflict, whereas in the Mashreq they come into conflict with each other much more often. [14]
The collision Harmassi speaks of between identification with the territorial state on the one hand and with the Arab nation on the other can be traced back to the middle of the eighteenth century. At that time, in the Nadjed area, the first religious revivalist movement in modern Arab history emerged and was given the name al-Muoahdiyn. The movement was stressed the expression of Arab-Islamic identity more than Turkic-Islamic, and amongst other things argued that the Caliph should once more be of Arab descent. The movement's followers identified themselves first and foremost as Muslims but with an emphasis on their Arab descent. The relationship between Islamic identity and the Arab identity was at that time unarticulated.
In Egypt there was a strong emphasis on Islamic identity that was general amongst the religious élite in al-Azhar in Cairo. That said, Egypt's confrontation with Istanbul, caused by popular demands for the appointment of Muhammed Ali as waly over Egypt, strengthened the tendency to promote Cairo as the alternative to Istanbul as capital city of the Empire. This was an important component in Mohammed Ali's political nahdah project which we will consider in more detail later. Despite Egypt's defeat in the 1840 war, the province, as a result of the London Treaty, began to take on the character of an independent state that was only nominally under the control of the Caliph in Istanbul. Increased interaction with the European continent, above all with France, brought with it new concepts such as `citizen', `nation' and `state', as well as impulses from the blossoming of European nationalism. This contributed by strengthening even more the independent Egyptian identity. By the turn of the nineteenth century and during the first two decades of the twentieth, identification with the Egyptian provincial state had become quite strong within some of the political parties struggling to shake off the British forces that had been invited into Egypt in 1882 by the Egyptian regent al-Kidiwy Tawfik. Identification with the Egyptian nation was not in itself, however, set on a head-on collision course with identification with the Islamic nation, al-umma al-islamiyya, or with the Arab nation, al-umma al-arabiyya.
The rise of the provincial state in the Arab East brought with it a growing will amongst the regimes to make use of their provincial identity, as in Egypt and Iraq for example, with the aim of giving particular strength to the Arab sub-national state and its nahdah project. The emphasis on Egyptian identity that, for example, President Sadat made in the latter part of the 1970s, happened at the same time as the Egyptian constitution clearly expressed that the Egyptian people were part of the Arab nation and pursuing the goal of a total Arab entity. In the same way we can see that President Saddam increased the emphasis on Iraqi identity during the war with Iran, whilst pressing on with far-reaching Arab nationalistic propaganda during the whole of the 1980s. Khaldoun al-Naqueeb suggests that the problematic of dual identification with both a sub-national state, el-quter, and with the Arab nation is a unique feature of Arab political propaganda. He has written that `identification with the sub-national state has been more tactical, which differentiates it from identification with the Arab nation, which is a permanent feature'. [15]
This differentiation between identities is important for the understanding of the course of the formation of inter-Arab relations in the Arab East, and of relations with the non-Arab neighbouring countries, from the 1920s to the end of the 1980s.
The sub-national state in the Arab East has been in a state of perpetual crisis since it was instituted. But is it just a question of legitimacy, or is it a conflict between the political cultures that goes into the very foundations of the sub-national state and the Arab-Islamic political culture that stresses al-umma? Bahgat Korany feels that there is a `collision between grass-roots political culture (based on a `pan' concept, whether Islamic or Arab) and the `foreign' political culture (based on the territorial concept)'. [16]
Thus the geographical basis of the identification problematic in the Arab world
is important. It makes a discussion of the geographical divisions of the Arab
world an all the more necessary preliminary to a discussion of nation and
nationalism in the Arab world.
Conceptual problems
1. The Arab East and the geographic division of the Arab world
In Western European and American literature the eastern parts of the Arab world
have been saddled with not fewer than five different names over the last
hundred years, from the Near Orient at the start of the nineteenth century to
the closely related Middle East today. There has probably never been any other
area of the world given so many names in such a relatively short time as has
the eastern half of the Arab world. As a rule the terms `Mellanöstern' or
`Mellersta Östern' are used in Sweden at present, although it is less
usual to discuss the terms' scope and history.
`Arab world' is a geo-cultural term based on human reality. `Middle East' is politically a very vague expression. It is a term often used to mean different things depending on the countries it is used to embrace. Some people include in the Middle East Israel, Iraq, Jordan, Syria, the eastern parts of Iran, the northern parts of Saudi Arabia, and the north-eastern parts of Egypt. [17] Others use the term to indicate the area from Iran and Turkey in the east to Morocco in the west. [18] For the most part the definition of `Middle East' depends on the questions on which a given study focuses. When the Arab states in the eastern half of the Arab world are the subject, then the term used is often the `Arab Middle East'. [19] All this means that the general population, seeing experts and politicians on television and reading learned works on the subject, in general has widely differing versions of what the term `Middle East' actually means. [20]
What does the confusion stem from? Edward Said has asserted in his much commented-on book Orientalism that the term `Middle East', and similarly `Orient', `Near Orient' and `Mellersta Östern', came from the study of orientalism. Orientalism in its turn is the result of `a particular closeness experienced between Britain and France and the Orient, which until the early nineteenth century had really only meant India and the Bible Lands'. [21] The term's existence in Swedish usage was characterised during the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth centuries by the British and French hegemonical understanding of the Orient. Since the end of the Second World War it has been more influenced by the American usage.
It is not just a question of which name one should use to label an area; it is also a question of `we' and our understanding of a distant `them'. A general attitude towards `everyone' living in the Arab world has been encapsulated in Said's description: `On the one hand there are Westerners, and on the other hand are Arab-Orientals; the former are (in no particular order) rational, peaceful, liberal, logical, capable of holding real values, without natural suspicion; the latter none of these things'. [22]
There is a quantitative as well as a qualitative difference between the Franco-British concept of the Orient and the American one dating from the era of pax Americana after the Second World War. [23] The American conceptualisation of the Orient can be traced right back to the beginning of the twentieth century. `Middle East' first appeared as an expression in 1902 used by an American naval historian, Mahan, in an article that discussed British naval strategy in relation to Russian and German interests in Iran and Iraq. In Britain the term was used for the first time in the House of Lords in 1911, while during the inter-war period and then particularly during the Second World War its use became increasingly common. Meanwhile, the American usage began to take a hold in Britain, demonstrated in 1940 when the British set up a military command for the `Middle East' in Cairo.
It is extremely restricting to limit and define an area relative to the outbreak of conflict and not vice versa, as with the `Gulf War' and `the Gulf'. As a result of this approach even the term `Middle East' tends to be limited solely to those states that are involved in the Palestinian conflict, as when President Bush talked during the Kuwait War of `the conflict in the Persian Gulf and the Middle East'. This outlook is not fruitful when studying a particular conflict, and nor can it be considered as objective to cram together those parties directly involved in a conflict into one and the same term.
The transition from the French and British hegemonical usage to the American is reflected clearly in the alterations in Swedish usage, from terms based on the word `Orient', thus `främre Orienten' and `Fjärran Orienten', to those such as `Mellersta Östern' and `Fjärran Östern' and finally, since the 1960s, the American-inspired `Mellanöstern'.
In considering the kind of questions that are focused on in this work, the European-centred conceptual apparatus is hardly suitable. To be able to study themes that depend on identification with a geographical area, a sub-national state and an Arab nation, it is necessary to take as starting point a conceptual apparatus that defines the region in terms of the majority of its population and only thereafter to look for any conflicts and their genesis. [24] All states in the eastern half of the Arab world are members of the Arab League, one of the largest Arab integration projects since the Second World War.
The Arab world from the Persian Gulf to the Atlantic, and from the Urals to the
southern fringes of the Arab Sahara, is seen by the Arabs as the Arab homeland
for the Arab nation. More than ninety percent of the population is Muslim and
have Arabic as their mother tongue, whilst up to eighty-five percent of the
population consciously choose to identify themselves as Arab in the first
instance. The Arab world in this sense is also a geo-cultural and political
entity. Traditionally, the Arab world has been divided into four geographical
areas: the Arab Maghreb; the Nile Valley; the Arab Mashreq; and the Arab
peninsula. [25] I will be departing somewhat
from the traditional divisions, but, before elaborating on this, I will first
give an overview of the traditional version of the Arab world's regions,
beginning with the westernmost.
I. The greater Arab Maghreb
Maghreb is an Arabic word that means `west' or `time and place where the sun
sets'. In Swedish the term `Maghrebstaterna' is used to indicate the states in
North-West Africa. [26] `Maghreb' is also used
as a geographical term to differentiate Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia from the
rest of North Africa. In Arab political usage Maghreb has three different
applications used for three different levels of meaning. The first, al-Maghreb,
is the Arab name for Morocco. The second, `Arab Maghreb', is used to describe
Morocco, Tunisia, Algeria and the northwestern parts of Libya. The third,
`Greater Arab Maghreb', comprises the area denoted by `Arab Maghreb' with the
addition of Mauritania and the remainder of Libya.
II. The Nile Valley
`The Nile Valley' is used to mean Egypt and Sudan, together with the eastern
parts of Libya. In the geographical sense the Nile Valley constitutes the
central region of the Arab world. [27]
III. The Arab Peninsula
The `Arab Peninsula' is the area from which the Arabs originally came. The term
covers the following modern states: Saudi Arabia; Kuwait; Bahrain; Qatar; Oman;
the United Arab Emirates or UAE; and Yemen. `Arab Peninsula' is also use to
comprise several smaller regional divisions, to whit Yemen (Yemen and the
south-western parts of Saudi Arabia); the Gulf (Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, Oman,
the UAE and the north-eastern parts of Saudi Arabia); Nadjed (eastern Saudi
Arabia); and Hedjaz (the Saudi Arabian coastal district that runs the length of
Red Sea).
IV. The Arab Mashreq
The fourth and, in the twentieth century, most mutable region is al-Mashreq
al-Arabi, which directly translates as `the Arab East'. It consists of the Arab
states of Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, Palestine, and Syria. The region that these
states form is defined in different ways depending on the identity it is wished
to emphasise. Some talk of `Greater Syria', derived from the population's
identity with a Syrian nation which not only embraces present day Syria, but
Jordan, Israel, Palestine, Lebanon and Cyprus too. The `Fertile Crescent' is an
orientalist term that similarly describes the Greater Syria region. al-Shaam is
yet another old geographical term that can mean just the city of Damascus, but
is also used to mean the whole of Greater Syria.
Already at the beginning of the twentieth century there was the tendency in the Arab world to see the `Arab East' as including Egypt as well as the whole Arab Peninsula and the traditional Arab East. The `Greater Arab East' is the geo-political term for these three regions. In order to study the Arab world's regional politics of the last two hundred years with the nahdah process as starting point, and in particular the earliest nahdah project, that of Muhammed Ali and the al-Muoahdiyn, the term `Arab East' is used here in its widest sense.
The political, economic and cultural inter-dependence of Egypt and the traditional Arab East on the one hand, and the Arab Peninsula on the other, is both inextricable and considerable. This relationship has meant that, during the second half of the twentieth century, the smaller regions in the Greater Arab East have become more readily influenced by events in other parts of the area. A radio broadcast by Nasser was able mobilise a considerable section of the community in the Arab world as a whole and in other parts of the Arab East in particular. However, el-Imam al-Khuomayni's speeches broadcast on radio and television did not have the same effect in the 1980s, principally for linguistic reasons. In the Arab East the entire population can watch the first episode of a television series which is often Egyptian. As for religious matters, events in al-Azhar arouse immediate interest in the whole Arab World, and vice versa. This cannot be said to be the case between, for example, Turkey, Iran and Israel on the one side and the Arab East on the other. [28]