A new, post-9/11, Middle East

There is no better place to take the pulse of Arab and Muslim sentiment than Cairo, historic Mother of the World, pioneer or hub of the two great movements that swept the region in recent times, the pan-Arab secular nationalism of which President Nasser was the champion, the "political Islam" that came into its own with Nasserism's failure and decline. Today, from air-conditioned think tanks on the banks of the Nile to the sweltering alleyways of the splendid but dilapidated mediaeval city, the preoccupation with the two things, the Israeli-Palestinian struggle and US plans for possible war on Iraq, that seem most fateful for the future, is overwhelming. "Bin Laden may have lost a lot of his appeal," said Diaa Rashwan, an expert on Islamic fundamentalism, "but that doesn't mean the US isn't hated; it is, more than ever, and more, now, from an Arab than an Islamic standpoint."

In a workshop in the City of the Dead, hard by the elaborate, 15-century tomb of Sultan Qaitbai, Mohamed Ahmed carries on the ancient, glass-blowing craft of his forefathers on a day when, even without the additional heat of his furnace, the temperature stands at 45 centigrade. "What makes you think that Bin Laden really did it?" he asks, giving voice to a still widespread popular suspicion, "Bush is just using him to put us down.'' The future is dark, he added. Indeed, much darker, for most Arabs, than might have appeared in the immediate aftermath of that apocalyptic atrocity, because, one year on, it seems clearer to them in its consequences. It is a momentous, double crisis, an external and an internal one, of which they are almost everywhere taking cognisance. The two are inextricably intertwined. Long maturing, Bin Laden, in fact, brought both to a head.

As they see it, the US's post-11 September "war on terror" now boils down, essentially, to an assault on themselves. For in the Bush universe of good versus evil, it is essentially they, with Iran thrown in, who are the evil ones. In the collision to come, the Arabs risk further massive blows to all those ideals and aspirations - independence, dignity, the unity and collective purpose of the greater Arab "nation" -- which, after centuries of foreign conquest and control, the pan-Arabism of Nasser so triumphantly, if defectively, embodied; a reversion to quasi-colonial subjugation of old.

Internally, they are dismally ill- equipped to meet the external challenge, racked as they are by all manner of social, economic, cultural and institutional sicknesses. These, the US says, are the very conditions which threw up Bin Ladenism. Few Arab opinion-makers would dispute it, or doubt their societies' desperate need of root-and-branch reforms, ushering in democracy, human rights, accountability.

There is no more compelling measure of that than the UN's newly released Arab Human Development Report. It describes a Third World region which has fallen behind all others, including sub- Saharan Africa, in most of the main indices of progress and development; whose 280 million inhabitants, despite vast oil wealth, have a lower GNP than Spain; whose annual translation of foreign books is one fifth of Greece's; 51 per cent of whose young people would emigrate if they could. A prime cause of this backwardness, say the report's exclusively Arab authors, is that the peoples of the region are the world's least free, with the lowest levels of popular participation in government. "Those who wonder why Afghanistan became a lure for some young Arabs and Muslims," wrote Jordanian columnist Yasser Abu Hilala, "need only read this report, which explains the phenomenon of alienation in our societies and shows how those who feel they have no stake in them can turn to violence." Yet most Arab regimes have ignored this damning verdict on themselves. "The fact is," said Nader Fergani, the report's Egyptian lead author, "that governments that were repressive in the first place have in the past year become more so. They have not learned the lesson of 11 September -- but neither has the US."