Politically the great hopes of the Arab spring of 2011 were dashed, while sporadic echoes of popular uprisings have recurred in Lebanon, Algeria, Sudan, and Iraq, thus far with little substantial, structural effect. Libya and Yemen have collapsed, while the Syrian civil war, still unresolved after almost a decade, has displaced half the country’s population. The Arab Gulf states–that, in recent years, have purchased about one quarter of all weapons sold on international markets–remain unable to defend themselves against embargoed and
increasingly impoverished Iran.
The tunnel of modern Arab history, in sum, has been long and dark, with the brief exception of national liberation in the 1950s and 1960s. The promises of national independence, however, which if fulfilled would have bolstered national and personal dignity, were not realized. The paucity of success over some two centuries has undermined beliefs in national competence and achievements, without which dignity and the respect associated with it are hard to sustain.
Attitudinal evidence of an Arab dignity deficit is provided by recent survey research. It is for example the principal finding of Shibley Telhami’s The World Through Arab Eyes: Arab Public Opinion and the Reshaping of the Middle East. Drawing on a decade of polling data and the slogans and behavior of protesters in 2011, he claims that the uprisings were driven primarily by a widespread demand for dignity.1
The Arab Barometer, which since 2006 has conducted six “waves” of polls in 14 Arab countries, includes several attitudinal dimensions which can be viewed as providing at least indirect measures of respondents’ sense of dignity. Among these dimensions are those of trust in public and private institutions. Weak, corrupt institutions or even the perception that they are so militate against citizens’ feelings of dignity. Successive polls reveal remarkably low institutional trust. Well less than half of respondents state they have some or a lot of trust in public and private institutions. The one exception among governmental bodies is militaries, which enjoy far and away the highest level of trust. This aberration likely reflects inadequacies of parliaments, judiciaries and executive
bureaucracies, hence the perceived need for effective governance to be provided by a coercive agency, hardly a basis for a strong sense of individual or collective dignity.2 Substantially more than half of respondents say they distrust such private institutions as banks, universities, and hospitals. Judging by these assessments of its organizations and institutions, the Arab world is viewed in the eyes of its people as bordering on Hobbesian–a threatening, insecure existence in which individuals cannot rely on the effectiveness or impartiality of the collective bodies that impact their lives.3
This raises the question of the balance between external and internal causes of the dignity deficit. For Telhami the guilty parties are external, most especially western nations whose humiliations “have left many Arabs with a wounded sense of national pride, but also a desire for political systems with elements of Western democracies.”4 Telhami interlaces the book with observations about Arab dignity and resentment of U.S. policy toward the Israel-Palestine conflict.
In a review of Telahmi’s book David Pollock
challenges this formulation, noting that while
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The promises of national independence, which if fulfilled would have bolstered national and personal dignity, were not realized. The paucity of success over some two centuries has undermined beliefs in national competence and achievements, without which dignity and the respect associated with it are hard to sustain.