From Deep State to Islamic State - The Arab Counter-Revolution and its Jihadi Legacy
Jean-Pierre Filiu (Hurst, London, 2015)
The French historian Jean-Pierre Filiu has attempted to connect the past to the present in this highly topical and ambitious work that looks to chart how the Arab Revolutions, which he wrote about optimistically in 2011, have been crushed by a combination of authoritarian regimes and jihadis. It is a 'study of the repressive dynamics designed to crush any hope of democratic change' (x) that looks to use a parallel with the Mamluks', who ruled Egypt from 1250 to 1517, to understand how a military elite in particular were able to 'hijack the post-colonial independent states and establish their military dictatorships' (p.125). Filiu combines the Mamluk history with a broad look across the Middle East and North Africa with a focus on Algeria, Yemen, Egypt, Syria and Tunisia, in just over 250 pages.
The hijacking of independence movements is a rip-roaring tale of purges, coups, exiles, state of emergencies and the ubiquitous 'Communique Number Ones'. Once in power the new 'Mamluk' rulers 'demonstrated an exceptional capacity to survive at any cost, especially when this cost is paid by their own population' (p.135). This 'deep state' as Filiu describes it, does not rely on oil which allows them an adaptability in the face of challenges such as the Arab revolutions and the author takes pains to point out the 'fundamental difference' between Mamluk authoritarian regimes and aspiring totalitarian systems of Libya and Iraq (p.80)
A large focus is place on the history of Egypt with Filiu quoting the economist Samer Suleiman who wrote that 'Egypt's story in the last quarter century had been the story of regime success and state failure' (p.152). Filiu charts how the 'Mamluks' survived the transition of Tantawi to Sisi via a 'tripartite alliance between militarised intelligence, politicised judiciary and criminal gangs' (p.167) and warns that Sisi 'could prove more devastating than all the previous Mamluk adventures' (p.247)
Filiu speculates that it was the 'passivity' (p.179) of the West post the violence in Egypt that gave Assad the confidence to use chemical weapons in 2013, he also makes the point that the brutal repression in Syria is because 'it was far easier for the military clique to handle civil strife than peaceful demonstrations' (p.192). By contrast in Tunisia the more successful revolution was helped by the emasculation of the army which 'nipped in the bud other potential Mamluks' (p.84)
Where things become somewhat blurred is in Filiu's analysis of the 'jihadi legacy' of the book's title. Throughout he describes the jihadi threat as a 'strawman' that was used by Arab Mamluks' to blackmail Western powers in order 'to extract a "protection" bounty against a threat that they largely generated themselves' (p.127). Filiu quotes Bernard Rougier on the Assad regime needing the jihadi threat as 'a key component of its (the regime's) survival stems from the comparison he nurtures abroad with a worse threat than itself' (p.147). In Yemen whilst Saleh played with 'jihadi fire' it was the 'jihadi bogeyman is a trump card that can prove lethal to any political process' (p.200) The author is not clear on assessing the scale of the jihadi threat despite arguing that 'abandoning the Syrian revolution had only consolidated the jihadi threat and extended its capacities' (p.205) and Filiu has tragically been overtaken by events in writing that 'the jihadi threat seemed more or less contained in Tunisia' (p.230)
The book would have benefitted for longer endnotes and is prone to occasional dubious throwaway comments as to the more recent history, for example it is by no means clear that former Iraqi Prime Minister Maliki was a 'staunch ally' of Assad (p.206) simple because both had links to Iran. In addition just adding 'Mamluks' to everythinf does not a theory prove and Filiu's 'Mamluk template', whilst a powerful mechanism to understand the operations of the 'deep state' across the Middle East, needed a fuller explanation.