A young Syrian rebel speaks

Anthony Shadid was there:

As we prepared to leave, Iyad turned to me and said: “We’ve already won. We’re victorious now. I lived a life of terror, fear and killing, and now I’m free.”

Before the uprising, Iyad said, his life had been boring, even suffocating. He had a degree in business and economics, but jobs were scarce. The incentive to revolt was more ambiguous, though; he’d had enough of the humiliations, the propaganda, the hypocrisy, and now, finally, he could do something about it. No one encouraged him to go down to the first protest in Homs in March at the Khalid bin Walid mosque. No one had to. “I’m a person now,” he said. “I can say what I want. I love you if I want to love you, I hate you if I want to hate you. I can denounce your beliefs, or I can support them. I can agree with your position or disagree with it.” We shed the last of our belongings for another ride. “We’re not waiting to live our lives until after the fall of the regime,” he went on. “We started living them the first day of the protests. We began our lives.”

Book alert for students in HIST 4505

Issue resolved: Gregory of Tours:  Glory of the Martyrs will be available at a reasonable price.

Young supernova

From Astronomy Picture of the Day.

Battle in the Early Middle Ages: Expertise and controversy

"Historian on the Edge" provides us with an expert summary of his views on early medieval warfare.

I say "expert" rather than "authoritative" because as he points out, there are no authorities on this subject, only controversialists.

Highly recommended for students in my upcoming fourth-year seminar.

Image:  Conan as barbaric warrior.

Qs and Ks and other ways of transliterating Arabic

The Arabist explains:

 I was meeting with a bunch of business people who know no Arabic and little about the Middle East. The conversation turned to Libya and one of them turned to me and asked why there were so many spellings of Qadhafi's name. What follows is what I said, which is very much what Kal of TMND argues, except I put it in laymen's terms, without the phonetics.

In Arabic, Qadhafi's name is spelled القذافي which if you drop the article, means ق - ذ - ا - ف - ي or q - dh - a - f - i. The "q" letter is almost unique to Arabic (sometimes called "the language of the qaf" — sorry, it's the language of the dhad, not qaf!) and often transliterated as a "k", since its pronounciation can be difficult for non-Arabic speakers. It is standard in classical Arabic and places like Fes in northern Morocco, but northern Egyptians, urban Syrians and others often pronounce this letter as a glottal stop, while southern Egyptians and Bedouins most often pronounce as a "g", as in "go". (This is why in Syria upscale Damascenes call the regime "the government of the Qaf", because pronouncing the letter is a country bumpkin thing to do, and Eastern Sunnis and Alawites — long dominant in the regime — often do it). Hence you see Qadhafi, Kadhafi or Gadhafi. The "dh" sound also has no equivalent in many languages as a standalone letter, and to top it off is made emphatic by a shedda — a kind of accent that indicates the letter should be doubled, which is why academics use the unwieldy "Qadhdhafi." And the "dh" is often not pronounced as such — in most colloquial Arabics, it is pronounced "d". I'm not sure why it might be pronounced "th", but perhaps this was used in Qadhafi's passport because it is close to the English sound in "the", which sounds very much like "dh". I always write Qadhafi because it's simple and faithful enough without being completely anal, like Qadhdhafi.

Sultanistic dictatorships

From the Globe and Mail's Chrystia Freeland:

“When you play the game of thrones, you win or you die. There is no middle ground.” That’s a line from Game of Thrones, a new HBO television series, but it could just as easily refer to the no-holds-barred battles we are watching in Libya and Syria. What is hardest to grasp is how these regimes are both strong and brittle. Their rulers are ruthless dictators prepared to do whatever it takes to stay in power – and for decades that can work. Until, suddenly, it does not.

We are not very good at understanding the win-or-die dynamic of these sorts of political systems: Not so long ago, everyone – from the U.S. State Department, to Harvard, to the London School of Economics, to Vogue magazine, to blue-chip Wall Street money managers – treated the Assads and the Gadhafis like rulers capable of gradual liberalization and even democratization.

Part of the problem is that the Cold War habit of mind, with its division of the world into two rival, ideologically cohesive camps, dies hard. Its legacy is our tendency to look for a new, black-and-white division, this time into democracies and dictatorships. But modern dictatorships come in many different varieties. The ones that are collapsing in the Middle East are examples of what are known as “sultanistic” dictatorships.

According to Jack Goldstone, a professor at the School of Public Policy at George Mason University in Virginia, the defining characteristic of such a dictatorship is that it has no purpose apart from maintaining the leader’s personal authority. “A sultanistic regime is one in which the leader of a country has managed to gain control of all the levers of state power,” Mr. Goldstone said. “No one has any secure rights, and the leader rules with absolute authority.”

Richard Snyder, a professor of political science at Brown University in Rhode Island, said sultanistic regimes – which he prefers to call personalistic dictatorships or neo-patrimonial dictatorships – are all about the guy on top. “People get goodies for being close to the ruler. That’s the essence of it,” he told me.

Sultans establish their power by making sure no one else has any – or at least any that is independent of the sultan himself. That means that sultans intentionally hollow out their own government institutions.

Successful sultans, Mr. Goldstone said, also work to make and to keep their societies divided: “The ideal arrangement is to be supported by many elite groups, none of which are inclined to support one another.”

The corrosive sense of personal humiliation that inspired so many participants in the Arab Spring was not accidental – it is central to how sultanism works. “Under a sultanistic regime, because nobody has any rights, they all feel humiliated and subject to the whims of the ruler,” Mr. Goldstone said.

But modern-day sultans have an Achilles heel. The techniques they use to establish and maintain power make them very, very strong when they are in charge – Mr. Goldstone said sultans have more personal authority than medieval monarchs did – but also make their regimes extremely brittle. If a revolution starts, it can succeed swiftly.

“The armed forces need to decide, ‘How many of our own people do we need to shoot to keep the boss in power?’ ” Mr. Goldstone said. “If the boss looks strong, the whole regime looks strong. But if the boss starts to look weak, it crumples fairly quickly.”

That is the good news. The bad news is that the brittleness of sultanistic regimes is a mixed blessing: It helps the revolutionaries when they are in the streets, but it complicates the task of nation-building after they win.

A smart dictator eviscerates his country’s institutions; rules by personal fiat, not by law; and creates a divided society in which sycophancy and corruption are the paths to prosperity. Citizens of such societies lack even a shared set of values; they live in what Mr. Snyder calls “a belief vacuum.”

That is why it will be neither a failure nor a betrayal if the best the Libyan rebels manage to establish is a weak democracy that is unstable, divided and inefficient. Effective democracies take generations to build.

It is easy to cheer the fall of the sultanistic dictatorships. Now is the moment to remember to be patient when their humiliated and divided people find it is a struggle to build a government that is not quite so bad.<\blockquote>

 Update:  Sultanistic?

The falls turn orange