Architects of a New Arab Consciousness

Note: This essay is adapted from Lawrence Pintak's  "The New Arab Journalist: Mission and Identity in a Time of Turmoil." Much of this chapter first appeared in The Middle East Journal.

 “Awake, O Arabs, and turn on your television sets.” So might Ibrahim al-Yazjii have begun his famous 1868 ode to Arab nationalism had he written it today. Watching the teeming crowds in Cairo’s Tahrir Square, ecstatic Tunisians and angry Yemenis, he would have noted that pervasive influence of Arab satellite television and the increasingly aggressive ethos of print journalism, bolstered by the Internet and other forms of digital communication, are fueling the rise of a new common Arab consciousness every bit as real as the “imagined communities” that Benedict Anderson, in his classic work on nationalism, tells us are at the core of the concept of nation. This new electronically-enhanced “imagined” Arab watan (nation) is bound together by many of the classic touchstones of nationalism theory: language, media and ethnie.

Live and incessant coverage of the uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt are just the latest examples of the degree to which television is helping to craft a new Arab consciousness that formed an overlay on – and in some ways superseded – national borders and religious divisions. It has been seen in studies demonstrating a link between television viewing and pan-Arab and pan-Muslim identity, in shifts of public opinion following major regional news events, and in surveys that show an increased affinity for the Arab world, even among nationalities politically alienated from the mainstream.  

The result is an increasingly cohesive Arab consciousness that has been given many names: Shibley Telhami’s “new Arabism,” Marc Lynch’s “new Arab public,” or what Khalil Rinnawi somewhat flippantly called “McArabism.” It all amounts to the same thing: an “imagined” community perceived, in large measure, through the camera lens and pen of the Arab journalist. 

Debates over which channels represented the interests of the Islamists and which those of Arab nationalism obscure the reality that in newsrooms from Casablanca to Sana’a the agendas of the two are blurring, producing a synergy of interests reflected on television screens across the region every day. Anthony Smith, another well-known theoretician of nationalism, argued that ideologies such as pan-Arabism and pan-Africanism create “border guards” who provide “a new panoply of symbols and myths, memories and values, that set the included national states apart.” In many ways, Arab journalists are the border guards – if not the architects – of this new imagined Arab watan. They reflect a worldview that largely transcends borders, a sense of self-identity that sets region above nation and religion above passport, and a commitment to political change that is infecting the body politic of the Arab world through the electronic virus of 24/7 news. 

“The genius of Arab Satellite TV,” observed Abderrahim Foukara, Washington, D.C. bureau chief for Al-Jazeera, “is that it [has] captured a deep-seated common existential pain called Arab sensibility and turned it into a picture narrative that speaks to something very deep in the Arab psyche.” 

Seeking Anderson in the Desert Sands

The role of communication in the formation of national identity was singled out early in the emergence of nationalism theory. In distinguishing between “people,” “nationality” and “nation” in his classic post-war work, "Nationalism and Social Communication," Karl W. Deutsch (1912-1992) focused on the transmission of ideas in the formation of a “people,” which he defined as “a larger group of persons linked by … complementary habits and facilities of communication.” John A. Armstrong, another leading thinker in the field, argues that different civilizations, whether Western Christendom or the Islamic umma, arrive at the point of nation-state from different directions. But at root, he believes, “myth, symbol, communication, and a cluster of associated attitudinal factors” ultimately combine to produce what he calls the “mythomoteur” or “constitutive myth of the polity” in every culture. Hobsbawm points to such disparate examples as the success of Nazi propaganda and the British royal family’s Christmas broadcast as evidence of the role of mass media in making post-1918 nationalism an element of everyday life. Through the press, cinema and radio “popular ideologies could be both standardized, homogenized and transformed.” While this facilitated the effectiveness of mass propaganda, that “was almost certainly less significant than the ability of the mass media to make what were in effect national symbols part of the life of every individual, and thus to break down the divisions between the private and the local spheres in which most citizens normally lived, and the public and national one.” 

This acknowledgement of the import of communications in the formation of national identity most famously finds its expression in Anderson’s concept of the “imagined community.” The nation, wrote Anderson in his now-classic text, “is an imagined political community:” It is imagined because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion.

Words are the fundamental unifying force of Anderson’s imagined community. “[T]he sacred silent languages were the media through which the great global communities of the past were imagined,” he wrote, referring to Christendom, the Islamic umma and the Chinese civilization. The rise of vernacular languages to replace the Latin of the Catholic Church laid the seeds for European ethnic nationalism, which was then fed and nurtured by changing economic structures, social and scientific discoveries. Linking it all was the spread of increasingly rapid means of communication.

Nothing perhaps more precipitated this search [for identity], nor made it more fruitful, than print-capitalism, which made it possible for rapidly growing numbers of people to think about themselves, and to relate themselves to others, in profoundly new ways. 

It does not take a major leap of imagination to recognize that what was true in Europe 500 years ago has profound implications for the modern Arab world. Where newspapers and books produced in vernacular languages united European peasants into new collective identities, satellite television has facilitated the spread of Modern Standard Arabic (MSA), often called “news Arabic,” which is emerging as a bridge that forms an overlay above the many varieties of colloquial Arabic heard in the region. And where the mobility of the industrial revolution produced a class of workers who broke down barriers of national identity, Arab journalists from North Africa, Lebanon, Syria, Palestine and Jordan who have migrated to media of the Gulf and London are part of what Anderson called the “countless, ceaseless travels” that contribute to the rise of an imagined community.

Journalistic Agenda-setting

Media theory tells us that journalists both drive public opinion and reflect it; they influence the agenda and are influenced by it. By comparing how Arab journalists and the Arab public – about which, and to whom, they report – respond to questions about politics, religion and society it is clear that the region’s journalists stand on the borderlands of Arab identity. They represent a fusing of Muslim and Arab worldviews, leading the body politic in directions that reinforce a sense of shared consciousness.

Nationalism is not a political principal alone. It is also a sentiment. Thus identity is the heart of any discussion of Arab consciousness. “Nationalism is first and foremost a state of mind,” wrote Hans Kohn (1891-1971), an early nationalism theorist; it is “an act of consciousness.”  The “state of mind” of Arab journalists is one in which borders blur and “Arab” consciousness trumps all others. And it is a worldview that is at once more secular and more “Arab” than that of the public-at-large. 

Blood and Treasure

“Nationalist sentiment,” according to Gellner, is “the feeling of anger aroused by the violation of the principle, or the feeling of satisfaction aroused by its fulfillment. A nationalist movement is one actuated by a sentiment of this kind.”  In the context of the daily bloodshed of the Arab world, this is a critical point. The theme of unity forged in the face of the Other makes frequent appearances in the various theories of nationalism. Anderson insists that popular nationalism is always mobilized “in a language of self-defense.”  After vernacular literature, Hastings identified a “long struggle against an external threat” as having the most significant effect on formation of national identity. “It arises chiefly where and when a particular ethnicity or nation feels itself threatened in regard to its own proper character, extent or importance.”  

The Balkanization of the former Yugoslavia, the war between Armenia and Azerbaijan, and the simmering strife between India and Pakistan are all examples of this nationalism in the face of the Other. But confrontation does not only produce feudalization. It can also engender broader associations; especially when facilitated through the media. According to Smith, “the increased power of modern mass communications to amplify and broadcast” cultural and historic differences binds peoples more closely to a shared ethno-history and heritage when they feel under threat.  It is in this defensive role that he believes “pan” nationalisms have their greatest impact. The rapid growth of telecommunications and mass media, according to Smith, creates the possibility that “regional associations based on ‘Pan’ nationalisms can generate overarching cultures and identities that compete with, or even replace, national state and ethnic identities,” an eventuality left open in Anderson’s description of the “finite, if elastic boundaries” of the imagined community. 

The journalistic border guards of the Arab media are a critical factor in forging this sense of an overarching Arab/Muslim regional identity in the face of both the domestic and external Other.  

The Borderlands of Identity

Writing of two Palestinian notables prominent in the early twentieth century, Rashid Khalidi observed that they embodied a variety of loyalties: Among these allegiances were Islamic solidarity, Arabism, Palestinian patriotism, opposition to Zionism, party political affiliation, local Jerusalem loyalties, and family linkages, as well as a commitment to liberal constitutionalism, administrative reform of the state apparatus, and the spread of learning.

That synergy of interests between proponents of Arab nationalism, nation-state nationalism, Arabism and Islamism is echoed in the attitudes of Arab journalists today. Arab journalists are at the forefront of a cyclical convergence of interests between Arab nationalism, nation-state nationalism and Islamism. 

Ernest Gellner’s theory of nationalism as a “sentiment” sparked by “the feeling of anger aroused by the violation of principle, or the feeling of satisfaction aroused by its fulfillment” can be seen reflected in the attitudes of both Arab journalists and their publics. Anger at U.S. policy, frustration with the region’s totalitarian elites, disillusionment with the clergy, disenchantment with the plight of the poor and disenfranchised – these and other responses are evidence of the existence of what AbuKhalil calls wihdat hal (unity of situation), providing validity to the argument made by Eickelman and Piscatori that there exists an “implicit consciousness of common notions” among Arabs of all political and religious stripes that “becomes apparent when the shared assumptions are violated or attacked.” 

Whether the label is Rinnawi’s “McArabism” or Telhami’s “New Arabism,” the data argues for the emergence in the Arab newsroom of a Rawlian “overlapping consensus” among the various streams of political thought in the Arab world today, a “new” Arabism borne of a new electronic regional public sphere. As Marc Lynch explains:

What makes this new Arab public “new” is the omnipresent political talk shows, which transform the satellite television stations into a genuinely unprecedented carrier of public argument. What makes it “Arab” is a shared collective identity through which speakers and listeners conceive of themselves as participating in a single, common political project. What makes it a “public sphere” is the existence of contentious debates, carried out by and before this self-defined public, oriented toward defining these shared interests.

In some ways, Arab journalism – like Arabism itself – has come full circle. What modern journalists see as their mission closely tracks the worldview documented among Arab journalists in the early 1950s by diplomat-turned-scholar Tom McFadden. The mission of those early Arab journalists “was defense of their liberty, of independence, of Arab unity and of renaissance,” Ghassan Tueni, the grand old man of modern Lebanese journalism, told me as he ruminated about the history of Arab journalism over coffee one day. The 1950s were a time when the confluence of Islamist and Arab nationalist agendas reached a peak with the Free Officers’ coup in Egypt. In the following decades, Arab news organizations became mouthpieces of rival nation-states as the remnants of Arab nationalism itself died on the smoking battlefields of the ’67 war. Now, in the enervated atmosphere of the post-9/11 Middle East, the political consciousness of Arabs is being reawakened and reconnected in the virtual space between borders, as the conscience of Arab journalists is relit. 

Back in the ’50s, McFadden identified five priorities of Arab journalists: (1) To fight against imperialism; (2) to fight against Zionism; (3) to fight for Arab nationalism and Arab unity; (4) to fight against government corruption and weakness; and, (5) to fight for the reform, modernization and democratization of Arab society. Today, the fight against imperialism, Zionism and government corruption; the fight for Arab unity, and the effort to drive the reform, modernization and democratization of Arab society can all be seen in the mission of 21st century Arab journalists and the evolving attitudes of the Arab public. 

For someone familiar with the revolution in the Arab media, it is hard to read Anderson’s descriptions of the role of print media in the rise of 18th century nationalism without mentally substituting “Arab television” and considering the equivalent 21st century effect. The 20 million books printed by the year 1500 helped spark “a colossal religious propaganda war … a titanic ‘battle for men’s minds;’”  while today, some 400 Arabic language satellite channels reach tens of millions of viewers even as the West and the Islamic world are engaged in a global “war of ideas.” In 1535, a worried François I banned the printing of any book in his realm, a move doomed by the fact that books were being published in the states all around him; today, Arab governments fight a losing battle to stem the tide of information pouring into their countries through trans-border television, the Internet and a host of new media. Print-capitalism created “languages-of-power,” just as Arab satellite television is today institutionalizing an evolving and unifying form of spoken Arabic; and where the French and American revolutions were “shaped by millions of printed words into a ‘concept’ on the printed page, and, in due course, into a model,” satellite television journalists and their counterparts in the region’s terrestrial media are today fueling opposition movements and inspiring made-for-television events like Lebanon’s “Cedar revolution.”

If, as Anderson believes, “[p]rint-language is what invent[ed] nationalism” in eighteenth century Europe, is it any wonder that “Arabic satellite television stations are causing a cataclysmic change in Arabic language patterns and cultural representation”?  And if, as he contends, print-capitalism fed the imagined communities of the nation-state, is it much of a leap to expect that regional broadcast-capitalism would feed some form of regional imagined community in the Arab world? As Anderson put it in 1983, just three years after the launch of CNN and almost a decade before the first Arab satellite channel, “we are simply at the point where communities of the type ‘horizontal-secular, traverse-time’ become possible.”

There is another parallel: This one to the early spread of Arab nationalist thought. As the press became a political force in the late 19th century, “all contenders of power tried to befriend, control, or liquidate” offending journalists. With the modern Arab media revolution, history was, unfortunately, repeating itself. An array of pressures shapes the output of Arab news organizations in the 21st century. 

Depending on where they operate and for whom they work, the political economy of the Arab media means that virtually all Arab journalists operate under some degree of overt censorship, psychological pressure, threat of physical violence, and/or corporate strictures. Others face more basic challenges, like poor salaries and a lack of professional training. Make no mistake, the ownership of the pan-Arab television channels – if not the journalists themselves – have a financial and professional stake in fostering a pan-Arab perspective, but the data shows that pan-Arab and “domestic” journalists alike share a similar worldview and occupy a common space on the borderlands of Arab identity.

The satellites that transmit pan-Arab television and the Internet cables that carry the content of the region’s newspapers do not recognize the lines in the sand imposed by colonial powers, and, in some – but certainly not all – senses, those lines are also being erased in the imagination of the Arab people. Just as Habermas saw “the informal circuit of public communication” serving as a fundamental building block for the emergence of a new European identity,  so, too, are changes in the patterns and structures of Arab media having an impact on journalistic self-identity. The array of nationalities in the newsrooms of pan-Arab satellite channels and newspapers and their decided news emphasis on the regional over the local, the emotional over the mundane, the touchstone “Arab” and “Islamic” issues of the day over “domestic” topics like jobs and sewer lines, combine to enhance the trans-border worldview of the journalists working there. And the reporting of those pan-Arab journalists, in turn, influences journalists working on purely domestic news organizations who admire them for the new style of aggressiveness and professionalism that they have introduced. 

Underpinning Arab society, according to Islamic Studies professor Ibrahim Abu-Rabi, are “a constellation of competing ideologies.” The sum of these forces, he has written, “is different from one Arab country to another and might also be different over time.” The same can be said of the political winds within Arab newsrooms from Casablanca to Sana’a. The secular, nation-focused orientation of Arab journalists over the past half-century has given way to a worldview that combines a heightened sense of Muslim identity with a position at the forefront of the “new Arabism” – in which Arab and Muslim goals coincide. This new worldview was summed up by Al-Jazeera anchor Muhammed Krichen. Standing in the channel’s newsroom one afternoon as he was about to go on the air, I asked this Algerian national to define himself. He did not hesitate: “I am an Arab, Muslim journalist,” he proudly replied. That multi-faceted identity is shared by countless reporters and editors in newsrooms across the Arab world. It is an identity unique to this particular time in the development of Arab journalism and this moment in the political and social evolution of the Arab world. 

Meanwhile, after a historic cycle spanning the twentieth century, during which Arab nationalism transitioned through Ba’athism and Arab Socialism, Syrian Nationalism and Nasser’s Arabism, Arab nationalism has now returned to a form in which causes and shared ethnic, linguistic and cultural norms serve as an overlay on a regional map depicting nation-states that few would readily see erased. The realities of modern Arab politics, now as then, mean that the Arab League often cannot even muster a quorum for a ministerial meeting, much less reach agreement on mildly controversial issues of regional and international policy. A “pan-Arab” nation in which Gulf royals, secular autocrats and Lebanese jointly rule is almost beyond imagination. Yet satellite television and new media means that those disparate nations and groups are also bound together in a new Arab consciousness mediated by the constant mutual exposure to the very external threats that lay at the core of earlier waves of pan-Arab impulses. 

“At moments of intense collective crisis, this notion of common membership can expand dramatically, almost overnight, and erase or subordinate differences between members of a single national community,” Middle East historian Michael Provence has written. “The Syrian revolt of 1925 was such a moment of crisis.”  In many ways, this, too, is such a moment.

The “illusion of relative homogeneity against the hegemonic foreigner” that Juan Cole and Deniz Kandiyoti say contributes to “incipient ‘national’ cohesion” is readily apparent on the TV screens each day. Their use of quotation marks around the word “national” to emphasize it as a relative term underscores its applicability in the pan-Arab context, for the new Arabism of the 21st century is not the Arab nationalism of a half-century ago. Like communism, the purist ideas of its early Arab nationalist ideologues were corrupted by opportunistic politicians and bled dry in the prisons of the authoritarian regimes they spawned. Today’s new Arabism is an idea shorn of its Socialist Utopian pretensions, representing not a monochromatic political ideology, but a philosophy – a way of seeing the world – that at once lives within and transcends political boundaries, bringing under its wings Arabs from the slums of Beirut and the palaces of the Gulf who “share common sentiments” about Palestine, foreign hegemony and the plight of the Arabs and Muslims; are part of a common “cultural and linguistic heritage” of which Islam forms an essential base; and, whether secularists or devout Muslims, are united by a sense of despair, frustration and anger – wihdat al-masa’ib, the “unity of disasters.”  

Few today seriously speak of regional political unity or a realignment of borders, much less suggest that national identifications be shed. What Abukhalil calls the “dreamy” nationalism of Michel Aflaq has been abandoned. In its place is a new, many-faceted “Arab self;”  still uncertain, still taking form, but one which unites Arabs in, if not in a common ideology, then a broad shared worldview that can be glimpsed anywhere within the “finite, if elastic boundaries”  of the Arab world. 

In the early 1980s, describing the rise of nationalism in Latin America, Benedict Anderson wrote, adding his own emphasis, “[N]either economic interest, Liberalism, nor Enlightenment could, or did, create in themselves the kind, or shape, of imagined community. … In accomplishing this specific task, pilgrim creole functionaries and provincial creole printmen played the decisive historic role.”  Like those provincial creole “printmen,” 21st century Arab journalists are playing their part in creating the new Arab imagined community; for it is their identity and worldview that is echoed in, and reinforced by, newspapers, radio stations and television channels across the Arab world every day as they write the narrative of a tumultuous and intensely complex new chapter in the evolution of Arab consciousness.

© Lawrence Pintak 2011. Reprinted with permission.