‘Fractured Lands’ delves into turmoil in Middle East
Journalist profiles six caught in region torn apart
For all the stories we read about the Middle East, comparatively few of them discuss the actual combatants, civilians and refugees as people, making it all the easier to dehumanize them.
Veteran journalist Scott Anderson aims to set the record straight in “Fractured Lands: How the Arab World Came Apart.” Focusing on six individuals, Anderson aims to use their stories in making sense of the larger story promised by his subtitle.
Laila, 61, is an Egyptian mathematics professor who, with her husband Ahmed, “had been Egypt’s most celebrated political dissident couple for over a decade” long before the 2011 revolution ousted President Hosni Mubarak (Laila’s older sister is novelist and political commentator Ahdaf Soueif).
Majdi, 31, was a Libyan Air Force cadet who became an unwitting stooge for Moammar Gadhafi’s government — before watching his beloved, disintegrating country become a refuge for the Islamic State.
Azar, 42, is a doctor who comes from a celebrated line of Kurdish freedom fighters in Iraq — and who nurses an implacable hatred for all Arabs in the wake of ISIS atrocities against his people.
Wakaz, 22, is among those ISIS members committing such atrocities. Anderson’s profile supports his claim that disaffected young men don’t ordinarily join ISIS because of religion, but rather for the same reason such men join gangs in the United States or Mexico: because it gives them purpose and power (Anderson also suggests that Trump’s “vitriolic bombast” against Islam simply parrots ISIS rhetoric and gives ISIS greater legitimacy).
Majd, 24, has the misfortune of being from Homs, known as the “Stalingrad of Syria” because of the intense and protracted fighting there during the civil war. The middle-class son of an electrical engineer, his seemingly comfortable future is blown apart as he gets caught in the crossfire of rival factions wondering why he won’t join up and fight.
Khulood, 36, is the daughter of an Iraqi radiologist; she is still in college studying English when the American invasion unexpectedly propels her to prominence, resulting in a meeting with President George W. Bush in late 2003. Her takeaway: “If this is the man who controls our future, I think we are in trouble.”
Anderson dates the current “unraveling” in the Middle East to the disastrous 2003 American invasion rather than the 2011 Arab Spring. He rehashes familiar ground involving the bungles during that first critical invasion year, including the failure to guard munitions stockpiles while disbanding the Iraqi army and banning all members of Hussein’s party, many of whom had been forced to join, from public employment.
Nearly all of what Anderson offers regarding the bigger picture — which sweeps from the post-World War I carve-up of the Ottoman Empire through the refugee crisis of the past few years — will be similarly familiar to anyone following the news.
Furthermore, Anderson’s efforts to link his broad historical overview to his individual stories can be awkward, while distorting the history itself.
The national origin of the individuals included here determines the shape and scope of the narrative (we hear almost nothing, for example, about the Gulf states, the powder keg that is Lebanon, Palestine or the Tunisia that birthed the Arab Spring).
Furthermore, history as seen through these six individuals — all but one of them economically comfortable, three of them from renowned families and all six relatively secular — provides little sense of what ordinary people believe or what propels them to act. Anderson can’t explain why so many Egyptians support a dictatorship. Or the role religion plays in Syria and Iraq.
What we’re given instead is Anderson’s conviction — not entirely wrong — that what drives Middle Eastern politics is often tribal rather than national.
This observation prompts Anderson to muse that forcible ethnic relocation, of the sort practiced in Eastern Europe and India after World War II, may be the only way forward. But he also rightly worries that the enclaves keep getting smaller and more exclusionary, further fracturing a world that’s already come undone.