“I acknowledge there is no God but God, and Abraham is the friend of God.”
— engraving inside Jaffa Gate, the Old City of Jerusalem
“The European side,” Sayyid Abu Musameh, Hamas’s former leader in Gaza, proudly explained when giving me the directions to his new flat in Istanbul.
The address was a consolation of sorts. Though he had visited Britain and addressed a meeting at the House of Commons in 2005, ever tightening restrictions on proscribed organizations had barred him from the European Union thereafter. He had left Gaza in 2012, seeking both medical treatment and an escape from siege and despair. At least for the time being, Israel’s cyclical offensives had rendered futile his repeated appeals for peace, not just between Palestinian and Israeli governments but between their peoples.
Instead he had joined other Islamists from across the region in devoting his energies to forming a parliament of elected members from across the Muslim world that one day, he hoped, might elect a caliph. Unlike Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi’s tyrannical version, his newfound caliphate would be the product of elected representatives, something akin to the European Union. Undemocratic states would be barred. Non-Muslims could elect the caliph but not become one.
For all its shortcomings, Abu Musameh’s neo-caliphate provided a framework for managing transnational sectarianism. Since the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, the region’s regimes had struggled but failed to turn monotheistic religions—which were essentially universal in application—into stable nation-states. Despite or perhaps because of their brutal, sometimes milleticidal tendencies, each continued to arouse the opposition of other millets. By working within a region-wide framework, Abu Musameh reasoned, each millet would have no alternative but to balance and regulate its intra-millet relations. Instead of rival states, millets would regain their Ottoman role as part of a pan-regional alliance. If milleticide is the product of carving the region into sectarian states, milletocracy is its antidote.
Abu Musammeh’s new order owes much to a past one. Under Ottoman rule, millets managed their communities, not territory. Each millet was autonomous, enforcing its own laws and raising its own taxes. Inasmuch as it was led by a religious leader whose religious courts applied religious law, it was a theocracy. But its powers were also extra-territorial, applying to all members of the confession regardless of their location. In that sense the millet’s remit extended much further than the confines of the region’s current regimes. The authority of the chief rabbi of Istanbul stretched from the Nile to the Euphrates. Next to his reach, the Jewish settlers’ aspirations for Greater Israel are myopic.
To Western powers and secular nationalists who attribute the region’s murderous intent to its religious zeal, giving any more rein to the forces of sectarianism is anathema. The endemic wars of religion are ample testimony of how dangerous a force they remain. Yet with or without western blessing, religious leaders will continue to galvanize the region’s masses and induce them to gird arms. Absent a mechanism for taming it, sectarianism will continue to wreak havoc region-wide.
Liberals will fret that the formalization of a confessional system will erode individual liberties. Yet the current approach scarcely offers better. For all their pretensions to guarantee personal liberties, even the region’s most progressive regimes remained beholden to religious personal laws. In Jordan, Israel, and Lebanon, religious courts continue to prevent individuals from marrying outside their sect. Precedent would suggest, moreover, that once existential fears subside, religious leaders can display uncanny pragmatism. In Najaf, the hawza’s newfound confidence has prompted long-cloistered and reclusive ayatollahs to open their shrines and seminaries to other faiths and engendered a new theology of inclusiveness, which amounts to a reformation. Should their fears of exclusion similarly ease, the region’s Sunni clergy, too, might rediscover the traditions of tolerance and openness that for more than a millennium characterized Islam and ensured that caliphs and sultans—far more than their Christian counterparts in Europe—protected, preserved, and patronized the Middle East’s plethora of ancient sects. If the Imam Ali Mosque shrine can open its doors to non-Muslims, so might Mecca one day. Reintegrated into the region, Sephardi rabbis might also recover their aptitude for latitude from a time when Muslims, Christians, and Jews shared the same shrines. In terms of tradition as well as theology, they might recognize that the current hostilities are an aberration.
Decades of accumulated vested interests will undoubtedly complicate the path back from nation-state to milletocracy. Governments will balk at surrendering their exclusive hold on territory, which for a century they have invested in holy attributes. Their education systems and media, which foster suspicion of other millets, have had a profound impact on the public consciousness. Reopening public space to other millets ostracized for decades will not come naturally to younger generations taught to fear and fight them.
But bereft of an answer to the region’s problems other than conflict management, most of the regimes offer no vision for a more harmonious future, and many indeed only prime them for fresh bouts of conflict. Over time that lack of vision will drain them of support from a public that knows the region deserves better.
Foreign powers, too, desperate to see stability restored, know that reliance on the current crop of regimes is no better than a short to medium-term punt. In search of a respite from war, international mediators relaunch peace processes in fitful spurts in the almost messianic belief that they might deliver an elusive endgame. As in the past, they focus on border demarcation and partition as if all that eluded resolution was the right formula for putting the warring parties into separate boxes. Few stopped to ask whether the problem might be the paradigm itself, or ask the millets whether they really wanted to be boxed.
Rather than invest their efforts in engineering the right dimensions for, say, Israeli and Palestinian states, mediators might have greater success helping both parties break down barriers. Access and movement agreements that incrementally help lower barricades could do more to resolve conflict than talks on border demarcation that only build them higher.
Too often sidelined from negotiations, traditional religious leaders have a key role to play not only in mobilizing public support but also in bringing to the table the centuries of experience they have in successfully managing intra-millet relations. More concerned with preserving holy communities than holy land, they may be better equipped than politicians in devising ways of protecting the millet, while more equitably distributing resources and land. Across the region religious leaders have consistently opined that human life is more sacred than territory, and backed proposals that relinquish exclusive claims on land for genuine peace.
Holy sites are a case in point. While secular politicians and foreign mediators treat them as disputes over real estate, religious leaders can draw on past traditions of shared places of worship, and endorse their restoration of overlapping rites of worship. In Istanbul, local Muslim and Christian leaders have broached reconsecrating the Hagia Sophia, previously the seat of the Byzantine patriarch and favorite mosque of the Ottoman caliphs, instead of the current drab godless museum. Beneath its dome, Muslims might again pray on Fridays, Christians celebrate mass on Sundays, and tourists visit the museum on other days. Religious leaders could also lobby for the reopening of traditional pilgrimage routes governments blocked when they sealed their frontiers. They should consider jointly tabling a proposal for Israel to let Muslims from Gaza and the West Bank pray at alAqsa Mosque, and for the Arab League to provide a safe passage for Israelis to access Jewish shrines in Egypt, Morocco, and the more stable parts of southern Iraq.
In the wake of increased religious traffic, other access and movement restrictions would seem anachronistic, too. Merchants could press for an end to sieges, boycotts, trade sanctions, and tariffs. The Arab League could leverage direct flights to Tel Aviv as the flip side of a package to lift Israel’s closure of Palestine’s air and seaports. A Lebanese entrepreneur could be encouraged to relaunch the Haifa-to-Beirut ferry service, taking Tel Aviv’s clubbers to Beirut and bringing together Palestinian families separated for four generations. National railway networks could study the feasibility of reopening the coastal railway that ran along the East Mediterranean coast from Alexandra via Palestine to Beirut. The possibilities seem fanciful, until one remembers how the region functioned in the past, when Lebanese travel agents printed their ski brochures in Hebrew.
Where religious leaders and merchants led, politicians could churlishly follow. As old social norms regained their footing, scare-mongering might lose some of its currency. Governments could experiment with reciprocal residency agreements, providing for Palestinian refugees to move across borders that are currently closed. The old Jewish quarters of Beirut, Baghdad, and Bahrain could slowly regain their old patrons. Jaffa would again become an Arab economic and cultural hub, with cinemas once screening Arabic and Hebrew films alike. The prospect of a Middle East Schengen Agreement, providing for the unfettered movement of people and goods across the region, as in Ottoman times, would fall into reach.
A final step in the process would see the restoration of transnational millet rule. Local district councils would be entrusted with managing municipal affairs, while pan-regional millet leaderships would administer, regulate, and safeguard their own confessional groups. With collective rights determined solely by members of the millet, issues of comparative and combative demographics would lose some of their import. Jews could remain a majority in their legislature, no matter how many Sunnis there were, and would no longer need to place another millet under military occupation to secure their existence.
Such a transformation is not a mere flight of fancy. Similar ideas are already garnering traction. In 2010, a group of Israeli and Palestinian experts drafted a proposal entitled “One land—two states,” providing for the creation of parallel Israeli and Palestinian states “each covering the whole area” between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River and “decoupling the link between state and territory.” Under this model, Jews and Palestinians would vote for separate parliaments but be free to live wherever they chose. Amongst the parties to the 230-page document were not only academics and artists but retired generals. (Curiously, while looking to the future the initiators failed to mention the historical roots: only a century ago the region operated on the basis of parallel authorities holding sway in the same territory.)
Lebanon offers a foretaste of how such a system might look. In 1989, Saudi Arabia needled the factions that had waged a 15-year civil war—characterized by car bombs, Western hostage-taking and civilian massacres—into signing the Taif Agreement. The agreement distributed power among the country’s three predominant sects—Maronite Christians, Sunnis, and Shias—giving each a formal role in government, while leaving each to regulate its internal affairs. Twenty-five years on, Lebanon, the most parlous and least populous Arab state, has survived the turmoil of the Arab Spring better than almost any other Arab state. Where previously regional rivalries magnified internal divisions, wrenching the country’s fragile confessional matrix apart, under the Taif system the leaders of each sect became stakeholders with vested interests in keeping the system intact. The collapse of one could have led to the collapse of all. Pluralism was not a liberal luxury but a fundamental criterion of stability. While neighboring Syria collapsed into sectarian bloodletting and drew in Lebanon’s own sects, Lebanon itself has largely ridden out the storm.
The Islamic State remains a threat and a thorn to the region, but in historical terms it is a containable one. In many ways it conforms to the regional norm of the past century. Across much of the Fertile Crescent Sunni Arabs are also seeking to join the regional club of millets that have turned into states. For all its self-publicized barbarity, al-Baghdadi’s caliphate butchery compares favorably to that of the armies which carved their own states out of the Ottoman Empire, and—despite their acts of genocide and sectarian cleansing—still secured seats at the UN. Even in its infancy, IS can claim to have instituted a more tolerant system than its Saudi antecedents. It allows women to drive, treats foreign Muslims as equals and not indentured labor subject to the Gulf system of kifalah, or sponsorship, and (unlike Saudi Arabia) still lets some Christians go to church. “The safest place to be a Christian in Syria is in Raqqa,” says a Western ambassador monitoring the treatment of Christians, with only a mild dose of irony. In areas under IS control, extortion and hostage-taking have been stamped out, he says. “The city’s churches have been stripped of their icons, but Christians are otherwise free to pray.” Shiism might be a heresy, but in accordance with maslaha, the sharia principle of communal interest, IS still provides safe passage to Shia truckers smuggling its oil and wheat. The best antidote to IS would be to address the communal grievances from which it derives its strength. In a region prone to eschatological dramas, emotions have a habit of subsiding as quickly as they flare.
The task of devising a Taif framework for the region might not be as daunting as it appears. Though as seemingly hidden as the twelfth imam, pluralism remains an ideal across the region. The strange resistance of the region’s governments to finally demarcate their borders despite Western urging suggests too that they are not as ready to definitively cut the Ottoman umbilical cord as they sometimes profess. From Israel to IS, the region’s borders remain in a state of flux. Despite ample opportunity to break away, Iraqi Kurdistan has yet to sever its ties with Baghdad. Even Israel, which has done more than any other state to divorce itself from the region, produces more Ottomanists—graduates of Ottoman history—than any other country bar Turkey. “Israel is not the island we sometimes think,” says Miri Shefer-Mossensohn, a Tel Aviv Ottomanist. “Whether we like it or not, we are part of this region’s past.” Palestinians are no less nostalgic for the openness of Ottoman times. Before the imposition of siege walls, Gaza’s port was Palestine’s largest. There is much that still binds the region to its past. Given the right framework, sectarianism may yet be the sinew that pulls the region together—not the centrifugal force that wrests it apart.
When they erected the walls of Jerusalem, its Ottoman patrons had a notice engraved into the southeastern gate through which ran the road to Abraham’s city, Khalil or Hebron. Rather than welcome travelers with the shahada, or testament, of one millet, Islam, it did so in the name of a prophet all the city’s communities shared. “There is no God but God,” read the engraving. “And Abraham is the friend of God.” The sign is still standing. Few care to notice such an inclusive message today, but perhaps one day more will.