A route leading to the fortified Green Zone area in Baghdad, Iraq, 2016.
Choose a leader who will invest in building bridges, not walls. Books, not weapons. Morality, not corruption.
—Rise Up and Salute the Sun:
The Writings of Suzy Kassem
Small walls are all over the Middle East. Each one is a testament to the terrorist violence now endemic there. You can see them in Baghdad, Damascus, Amman, Sana’a, Beirut, Cairo, Riyadh—indeed, in almost every capital city. These concrete barriers and blast walls have sprung up around embassies, charity headquarters, international organizations, police stations, army barracks, government buildings, housing compounds, churches, hotels, and even whole neighborhoods.
On one side is normal life, car horns hooting, street vendors hawking their goods, pedestrians going about the business of a busy capital city; on the other is a version of normal life, with office workers, government officials, civil servants, diplomats. They too are going about their daily routine, but in the knowledge that without the concrete blocks outside their windows, the guards at the entrances to the premises, and possibly a checkpoint at the end of the street, at any moment a truck bomb could bring down their building, or a group of terrorists could burst into their place of work.
It is no idle threat. The list of attacks that came before the walls went up is long. In the wider Middle East more than 150 have occurred this century, including at compounds in Riyadh housing foreign workers; hotels across Egypt’s Sinai province and in Jordan’s Amman; oil facilities in Yemen and Algeria; churches in Baghdad; the US consulate in Benghazi; the Bardo Museum in Tunis; and the Iranian parliament and shrine of Ayatollah Khomeini.
The walls went up in these at-risk urban centers in response to the many attacks. The template for this type of wall construction was the Green Zone in Baghdad, whose perimeter was built after the 2003 invasion of Iraq to protect the American-led provisional government in the post-Saddam years. Constituting a huge area of central Baghdad, the Green Zone was ringed by giant concrete slabs, similar to those we see in the walled section of the West Bank. In the Green Zone you got used to hearing explosions from rockets landing within the perimeter, but a more frequent sound was the distant dull thud of a mass-casualty car-bomb explosion or suicide attack on the outside, a constant reminder of what life was like for ordinary Iraqis and the American troops in the real world.
Some of the main roads leading from the airport to the Green Zone were lined with concrete blocks in a bid to prevent roadside bombs. As the threat grew, so did the extension of the blocks to secondary routes. They became so common that the US military had official names for the different types. They were named after US states: a Colorado was medium-size, at six feet tall and three and a half tons; the Texas was large, at six feet eight inches and six tons; and the Alaska came in at twelve feet and seven tons. The barriers saved lives, but were far from foolproof against “shaped” roadside bombs, which projected the force of a blast in one direction and could penetrate some walls. The barriers were costly, in blood and treasure; each block cost more than $600. Multiply that by thousands and eight years of occupation—the financial cost was in the billions.
Nevertheless, the walls came to be part of fighting an urban war, and building them an inherent part of America’s military planning. Soldiers became adept at the skills required and could put up over a hundred blocks in a single night, sometimes under fire. As religious tensions between the Sunni and Shia populations grew and were deliberately exacerbated by militias on both sides, whole neighborhoods began to be walled off. The concrete saved lives, reducing the ability of the Sunni and Shia militias to get at civilian populations and foreign workers, but each slab was like a headstone and played its part in burying the idea that overthrowing Saddam would result in a stable Iraq.
Instead, the invasion of Iraq contributed to the destabilization of several countries, the growth of violent Islamist ideology, and eventually the creation of a vast lawless space from which violence was projected in all directions. The subsequent Arab uprisings that started in 2011 in Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya (which many wrongly called the Arab Spring, expecting that it would lead to large-sale reform across the region) may well have occurred anyway—we can never know. But when they did happen, each country had a coterie of jihadists trained in Iraq.
Many people used to believe that solving the Israeli/Palestinian issue would result in greater stability in the wider region, but that theory has been blown apart by the convulsions of the Arab world over the last few years. Now, with the conflicts in Iraq, Libya, Syria, Egypt, and Yemen, we have seen that the instability across the region has little to do with the situation in Gaza City, Ramallah, Tel Aviv, and Haifa.
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In 2014 just 5 percent of the global population lived in the Arab world, but they suffered 45 percent of the world’s terrorist attacks, 68 percent of global conflict–related deaths, and housed 58 percent of its refugees. Some countries have fallen apart; in others the cracks are showing; and in still others the divisions are hidden beneath the surface and could reappear at any moment. The wars and uprisings have laid bare the huge rifts in the Arab-dominated countries. A sense of Arab unity remains as they share a space, a language, and, to an extent, a religion; but pan-Arab unification remains a distant dream.
Religion is one of the biggest divisive factors. In 2004 King Abdullah of Jordan coined a controversial phrase when speaking about a “Shia crescent.” He was referring to the expansion of Iranian influence, following an arc from Shia Iran’s capital, Tehran, running through the now Shia-dominated Iraq capital, Baghdad, on to Damascus in Syria, where the ruling Assad family is descended from a Shia offshoot sect (Alawites), and ending in the Shia Hezbollah stronghold of south Beirut in Lebanon. This was highly unusual language in a region in which everyone knew that sectarian tensions existed, but preferred not to highlight them. King Abdullah was aware of the risks of sectarianism, however. In a 2007 newspaper interview, four years before the war in Syria broke out, he gave a prescient warning of what might be coming: “If sectarianism deepens and spreads, its destructive effect will reflect on everyone. It will foster division, polarization, and isolationism. Our region will drown in a conflict whose outcome cannot be foreseen.”
The Sunni/Shia split within Islam has been present since the seventh century and thus is almost as old as the religion itself. The schism was about who should lead Islam after the death of Muhammad in 632. The Shi’at Ali, or “partisans of Ali,” are what we now call the Shias. They held that leadership had to remain in Muhammad’s family line and supported his cousin and son-in-law Ali ibn Abi Talib as caliph. What we now call Sunnis are those who disagreed, arguing that leadership should come from learned men within the community. They prevailed after killing one of Ali’s sons, Hussein, at the Battle of Karbala (680) in what is now Iraq.
Ever since, each tradition holds that the other is not the true way of Islam; the Shias, for example, only recognize religious leaders who they say are descended from the Prophet through Ali and Hussein. Fast-forward fourteen hundred years and that difference is now manifest in many small but, to the believer, important ways that mark one sect from the other.
None of this is Koranic law, but just as everywhere else in the world, as the centuries pass and communities group together in separate neighborhoods, differences grow—and small differences in daily life can be writ large when it comes to politics. The names given to children are mostly not exclusive to one side or the other, but generalizations can be made. For example, it’s unlikely someone named Yazid would be Shia, as Yazid is said to be the man who killed Hussein. In some countries the way a person dresses or the length of a man’s beard would suggest whether the person was Sunni or Shia, and when you enter the homes of religious families, you can see paintings and posters indicating which sect they adhere to. The Sunni and Shia clerics wear different garb—it is unusual, but not impossible, to see a Sunni cleric wearing a black turban. The manner of praying also differs: Sunnis tend to fold their arms at times in the service when the Shias have their arms by their sides.
The majority of Arabs are Sunnis, but the Shias are a majority in Iran, Iraq, and Bahrain, and they form a substantial minority in Lebanon, Yemen, Kuwait, and Saudi Arabia, where they are concentrated in the east of the country. What unites the two sects—belief in the Five Pillars of Islam—is usually enough for them to live in peaceful coexistence, but those who find themselves in a minority do sometimes complain that they are being discriminated against and are shut out of government and other aspects of public life. Periods of tension have always at times led to sustained outbreaks of violence at both the local and regional levels. We are living through one such outbreak now.
In the Saddam era, Iraq was dominated by the minority Sunni population, but after he was overthrown, Shia groups became more powerful; militias on both sides have carried out multiple bombings and shootings to further their political aims. Iraq suffers from more terrorist attacks than any other country—nearly three thousand incidents in 2016, with over nine thousand dead—the Islamic State (IS) being responsible for the worst of them. Having originated in Iraq following the 2003 US invasion, IS became one of the most notorious and widespread terror organizations, extending its presence across the Middle East, including Syria, Libya, Yemen, and Egypt. Most governments in the region are aware that IS could filter into and destabilize other areas with its extremist views and violent activities and are keen to prevent that from happening.
In Yemen, civil war broke out in 2005 between rebel Shia Houthi forces and the Sunni-led government, with Iran backing the Houthis while Saudi Arabia, among others, supports the Sunni groups; both IS and al-Qaeda have also been active in the conflict. The violence intensified and spread across the country after 2015, killing thousands and displacing over 3 million. By November 2017, the situation was described as “the world’s worst humanitarian crisis” by UNICEF, exacerbated by widespread famine and cholera outbreaks.
Syria has split along mostly sectarian and ethnic lines: Sunni, Shia, Alawi, Kurd, Christian, Druze, and so on. President Assad’s father, Hafez, had bound the country together under a vicious secular dictatorship, but once the violence began in 2011, those shackles were quickly cast off. The civil war in Syria is one of the most violent and complicated conflicts in the world, with multiple players involved (including foreign military intervention from Russia, Turkey, the USA, and others). Iran backs the Assad regime, while Saudi Arabia supports some of the Sunni rebel groups. IS has again had a major role in the conflict, although by the end of 2017 it had lost almost all the territory it had previously gained in both Syria and Iraq. Atrocities have been committed by all sides; the government has even been accused of using chemical weapons against its own people. As a result of the widespread violence, millions have been displaced within the country, and millions have fled as refugees.
These and the other Middle Eastern conflicts have other underlying causes, but religion is a major factor in the increasingly bitter divisions. The split between Sunni and Shia is wider now than it has been for centuries. This is partially driven by state politics: the fierce regional rivalry between Sunni Saudi Arabia and Shia Iran has exacerbated the problem as both vie for influence. The differences between them also stem from ethnicity, one being Arab, the other majority Persian, and from the usual rivalries between powerful states, but the language used by both sides has a clear sectarian edge. Hard-line Sunnis now talk of the Safawis—the Arabic name for the Persian (Iranian) Safavid dynasty, which faced off against the Sunni Ottoman Empire. Both Iran and Saudi Arabia want to be the leading power of the Islamic countries; they have conflicting economic policies, for example in oil production and sales, and as we’ve seen, they take opposite sides in religious conflicts that break out in other countries across the region. Both have also accused each other of supporting terrorist groups and their activities. In response, across the Middle East and North Africa, this era of division is giving way to an age of walls.
Saudi Arabia has built hundreds of miles of fence along its northern and southern borders, Kuwait has fenced off its frontiers, and Jordan has fortified its border with Syria; to the north the Turks have built a wall ten feet high and seven feet thick along its border with Syria, while the convulsions in Libya have led Tunisia and Egypt to construct fences along their frontiers.
The barrier building in Jordan is the most technologically impressive, even if the reasons for it are the most depressing. The wars in Syria to its north and Iraq to its east have resulted in hundreds of thousands of refugees flooding into the country. The Hashemite Kingdom began shoring up its defenses in 2008, aware that the violence and chaos in Iraq might spread. This was three years before the Syrian war broke out, but even then, the region’s instability and the growth in international terrorism induced the Obama administration to offer assistance to its ally. At first the initiative was modest, with plans to build watchtowers along a sensitive thirty-mile stretch of the Syrian border sometimes used by smugglers. As Syria descended into chaos and IS threatened to bring its terror into Jordan, the project expanded, as did the cost. Jordan is 95 percent Sunni, and IS intended to promote its extreme beliefs in a fragile and religious country.
Washington, DC, funded the Jordan Border Security Program out of the Pentagon’s Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA), the Raytheon company being awarded most of the contract. A 160-mile-long high-tech security fence along the Syrian frontier now has watchtowers, night-vision cameras, and ground sensors that can detect movement five miles from each side of the border. A similar structure covers 115 miles of the Iraq border. The DTRA’s website says the world “can be downright scary” and notes the use of WMDs in both Syria and Iraq. Its work on the fence, it says, “is a great example of how we are Making the World Safer from weapons of mass destruction.”
What it doesn’t say is that the barrier is also helping to keep American military personnel in Jordan safer. Officially, only a few dozen US military personnel are based in Jordan; in reality there are usually at least several hundred, but they work mostly out of sight on Jordanian military bases. These fictional low numbers can be sustained in official documents so long as those in the country are “deployed” and not “based” there. Jordan may be an American ally, but the government prefers not to be seen as too close to the superpower to avoid inflaming anti-American sentiment among the minority of its population considered to be Islamists.
The border fences constructed by the Saudis are even longer, and costlier, than those in Jordan, but they were also built with American assistance. The Northern Border Project covers over 550 miles of the Iraq frontier. It has a triple fence, a giant sand berm, thirty-two “response stations” linked to seven command-and-control centers, all backed up by 240 quick-response vehicles.
Relations between Saudi Arabia and Iraq are difficult. Many Iraqis blame Saudi Arabia for exporting its fierce interpretation of Sunni Islam and thus helping to create IS, which has caused so much bloodshed in their country; and since the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, a Shia-dominated Iraq has grown closer to Iran. However, in 2017, in an effort to draw Iraq away from Iran, Riyadh began a charm offensive and even invited high-profile Iraqi politicians to visit. Relations between the two countries have improved in recent years, but for now Iraq remains more closely aligned with Iran.
To its south Saudi Arabia has fenced off part of its border with Yemen. This project began in 2003 and, as with Jordan’s original plan for the Syrian fence, was originally designed to reduce arms- and people-smuggling from dirt-poor Yemen into the far richer Saudi Arabia. At first the Saudis concentrated on stopping vehicles by placing sandbags and concrete blocks in the crossing areas in the mountainous terrain to the southwest. However, in 2009, after Shia Houthi rebels from Yemen staged a cross-border raid and killed two Saudi guards, Riyadh sanctioned the building of fences with electric sensors to prevent people from crossing on foot along a stretch of frontier about a hundred miles long. The Houthis’ military campaign was aimed at achieving greater autonomy in Yemen, but on occasion it spilled across into Saudi Arabia’s Jizan province, turning the Saudis against them. This hostility increased once the Saudis perceived that their main regional rival, Iran, was assisting the Houthis.
When Yemen’s civil war broke out, al-Qaeda strengthened its position in the country and used it as a launching pad to move people into Saudi Arabia. So now Saudi Arabia had the triple problem of Shia Houthi fighters and cross-border raids, migrants crossing illegally, and al-Qaeda, which has sworn to overthrow the royal family, all pressing up against its southern frontier; so the fence was deemed even more necessary. The fence still leaves hundreds of miles of the border open in the desert areas to the east, but here the distances are so great, and the conditions so brutal, that it is harder to evade patrols and there are fewer crossings.
As well as the problems along its borders, Saudi Arabia is also aware of the threat of internal division. Although the country is utterly dominated by Sunnis, with Shias composing at most 15 percent of a population of 33 million, that minority is largely concentrated in the eastern provinces, where most of Saudi Arabia’s oil fields are located. The Shia-dominated provinces are growing restless: they say that their communities are grossly underfunded and that they are shut out of national life—charges the government denies. Given this potential source of trouble, the ongoing instability of Yemen, and the fractures in Iraq, Saudi Arabia is in no mood to consider tearing down the barriers it has put up and constantly looks for ways to improve them.
Kuwait is also keen to maintain a buffer between it and Iraq, despite the fall of Saddam Hussein in 2003, as the two countries have a long history of conflict. Kuwait was established as a sheikdom in the Anglo-Ottoman Convention of 1913, but Iraq’s governments have never accepted what are essentially British-drawn borders and have at various times claimed the oil-rich state as its nineteenth province.
Iraqi forces invaded Kuwait in 1990 but were driven out by a US-led coalition. Kuwait then constructed, literally, a line in the sand between the two countries. A six-mile-deep barrier consisting of three parallel sand berms arose along the entire length of the border. Parts were topped with barbed wire and had tank ditches in front of them. It was meant to keep the Iraqis out, but in 2003, during the next US-led invasion, the Americans had to cross the hurdle to get in. This major operation required breaching the berm in several places simultaneously and at such speed that the defending Iraqis couldn’t attack columns of single-file vehicles and halt the advance in its tracks. The Americans pulled it off, and ten thousand vehicles came through, most heading, ultimately, for Baghdad.
The following year, Iraq may no longer have been a strategic threat to Kuwait, but the Kuwaitis still wanted a new, better barrier between them. Under UN legal supervision, a location was agreed upon by both sides, and a 135-mile-long fence has since been erected from the Iraqi border town of Umm Qasr to the border triangle where Iraq, Kuwait, and Saudi Arabia meet. Like so many other countries in the Middle East, Kuwait is trying to guard itself against the proliferating violence in Iraq and also stop illegal immigration into its much wealthier economy.
Turkey, meanwhile, is more concerned about the threat posed by Syria and is building a wall along part of the border. It is supplemented by trenches, a floodlighting system, watchtowers, surveillance balloons, thermal imaging, radar, a targeting system, and small armored vehicles called Cobra IIs, which drive along the wall using cameras mounted on angled cranes to peer over the top. Having sided with the opposition to Assad and taken an active role in the conflict, Turkey is now trying to stop refugees and terrorists entering from Syria. But Turkey has another concern in the Syria conflict, and that is the growing strength of Kurdish groups taking part in it.
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When we talk about the Middle East, we often think of “the Arabs” as if they are interchangeable, or a monolith, whereas in fact the region is home to numerous peoples, religions, sects, and languages, with minorities such as the Kurds, the Druze, the Yazidis, and Chaldeans.
The Kurds are the biggest minority, with about 30 million in the Middle East. Estimates vary, but suggest about 2 million are in Syria, 6 million in Iraq, 6 million in Iran, and 15 million in Turkey. It’s often said they are the world’s largest nation without a state, although the Tamils in Sri Lanka and India might argue with that. The national subdivisions of the Kurds are further divided into about a hundred tribes that adhere to different religious sects and speak a number of languages, which are also split into different dialects and alphabets or scripts.
While a movement seeks to create a nation-state of Kurdistan, the Kurdish people, given their differences, geographical locations, and the opposition of existing states, are unlikely to be unified by one state. The Turkish military incursion into northern Syria in early 2018 was mostly to split Kurdish forces and ensure a mini statelet could not be formed out of the wreckage of Syria. The 2017 nonbinding referendum in Iraqi Kurdistan, backing independence, was supposed to be a step toward the great Kurdish dream, but Turkey and Iran will not permit a united Kurdistan that includes an inch of their own territories. In Iraq, the central government responded to the independence vote by sending in the army to seize the Kurdish-controlled oil city of Kirkuk with the message that neither plans for independence nor expansion out of traditionally Kurdish-dominated areas would be permitted. Within Iraq the Kurds are split into two tribal configurations, with similar splits in other areas. The Kurds suffer discrimination within the countries they find themselves split among. Those in Iraq have particularly bad memories of Saddam Hussein’s “socialist” Ba’ath Party. It gassed thousands of them during the brutal Anfal military campaign of the 1980s, and killed thousands more in the following decade.
This brutal authoritarianism wasn’t at all unusual for governments across the Middle East, and many—not just the Kurds—have suffered the consequences.
What went wrong in the Arab world? Just about everything. What has been tried as a solution to the problem? Just about everything.
Many reasons are given for the problem. Religion, for example, has caused great rifts, as we have seen. Colonialism resulted in the creation of nation-states whose boundaries ignored traditional cultural divisions—peoples who once thought of themselves as different, and who had been governed differently, were now expected to pledge loyalty to an entity some felt they had little in common with, while others who had previously identified as a single community were split down the middle. The geography of the region provided most areas with little natural wealth, and not all those blessed—or, depending on your view, cursed—with oil shared its profits equitably. What wealth there is often seems to be squandered by the elite, and poverty and a general lack of economic and social progress are widespread.
The Arab Human Development Report 2002, written by a group of eminent Arab intellectuals led by the Egyptian statistician Nader Fergany and sponsored by the United Nations Development Programme, best summed up the situation for the twenty-two Arab countries. The report noted that education levels and life expectancy were up, and child mortality rates down, but that was just about the sum total of the positives. The authors removed from their statistics a traditional measure of success, income per head, on the grounds that the massive energy wealth of a few countries, which trickled down to only a few people, skewed the numbers. They then added internet access and freedom levels to create the Alternative Human Development Index. In a cutting sentence they concluded, “The region is richer than it is it developed.”
In particular, they highlighted what they called the Three Deficits that were holding the region back. First, because it lacked certain freedoms, the Arab world had failed to keep up with global knowledge in science, political thought, and comparative religion. Relatively few books translated from languages other than Arabic are freely available across the region. Second, and related to this, was the failure to embrace developments in communications in order to disseminate what knowledge was available. Third, women’s participation in politics and work was the lowest in the world.
The lack of civil rights and freedom of speech and the blatant censorship in most Arab countries meant that, despite reasonable spending on education, the money was misused, and the results were poor. The report said that in the past one thousand years fewer books have been translated into Arabic than are translated into Spanish in Spain in one year. Internet use was restricted to just 0.6 percent of the population.
A generation of progressive Arab intellectuals and politicians took the report as a wake-up call, but progressives are a minority in the Arab world, and not enough were in positions of authority to bring about change. Almost twenty years on, things are worse. By 2016, according to the UN’s Arab Development Report, internet penetration had massively increased to above 50 percent, but overall the Three Deficits were still holding the region back. Arab regimes remained ruthlessly aggressive against dissent, individual liberties were still curtailed, many of the ideas of the outside world continued to be unwelcome, and eleven Arab countries were suffering internal conflicts.
Many Arab secularists blame the problems and lack of freedom on what is sometimes referred to as “the closing of the Arab mind.” This refers to the ending of the practice of ijtihad. The direct translation of the word is “effort,” but it means the interpretation of religious problems not precisely covered by the Koran or the hadith—the reports of what the Prophet Muhammad did and said. For several centuries any learned Muslim scholar could come up with original thinking on religious questions, but by the end of the Sunni Abbasid caliphate (750–1258), it was declared that the gates of ijtihad were closed. The laws and interpretations laid down by the great men of previous generations were not to be questioned.
Some argue that this “closure” has held the Arab world back, and in modern times it has become one of the great divides within Arab societies between those seeking reform and those holding firm to tradition. If this theory is true, it would go some way to explaining why other cultures, which share a lack of freedoms and human rights, have developed and challenged Western countries in technology and economic progress; Singapore and China come to mind. Arab culture is deeply respectful of tradition and authority, and less open to change than that of many other regions. One man seemingly trying to change this is the new crown prince of Saudi Arabia, Mohammed bin Salman (widely referred to as MbS). In what appears to be a carefully thought-out plan, the king of Saudi Arabia, Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud, bestowed the title of crown prince and significant powers upon his thirty-two-year-old son. Both men appear to have concluded that the kingdom will not survive with its current economic base and societal norms. The crown prince unveiled his Vision 2030 economic model, diversifying the economy away from its reliance on energy. Part of this was the hugely controversial reform to allow women to drive by the middle of 2018, as he realized a modern economy cannot ignore 50 percent of its workforce. As 2017 ended, he followed this up with a purge of hard-liners. The crown prince, along with other Gulf State allies such as Abu Dhabi’s crown prince Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, is trying to break out of the traditional straitjacket but knows he must tread carefully. In this they are mostly supported by the younger generations in their societies.
Politically, the Arabs have tried nationalism and faux socialism, and they have experienced the strong leader. Life under jihadist rule in the shape of IS is another failed system, while some live under the hereditary power of royal families. Of all these regimes the latter has tended to be the most stable and, starting from a shockingly low base, relatively benign, but no system the Arabs have yet tried has succeeded in uniting them in a successful nation-state at peace with itself, nor as a region, despite the unifying factor of language.
The great dream of a united Arabia was evident in the proclamations of the 1916 Arab Revolt. But it was only ever a dream, and the divides between its peoples almost certainly mean it will never be realized. The Arab professor Fawaz Gerges admits that the outlook is gloomy: “Time and again Arab rulers battle each other for influence and power and frequently interfere in the affairs of each other. . . . These fierce rivalries have had debilitating effects on the Arab state system and have caused mayhem and civil wars. The system is broken.”
With no solid democratic platform upon which to build, the Arab nation-states have failed to gain the loyalty of the majority of their peoples. As the 2016 UN report says, “Young people are gripped by an inherent sense of discrimination and exclusion,” thus leading to a “weakening [of] their commitment to preserving government institutions.”
We’ve seen the cracks appear in the edifice of the European Union, where they are leading to a partial retreat into nationalism. The difference in the Middle East is that the Arabs are less rooted in the concept of the nation-state and have not fully embraced ideas about individual liberty; therefore, when government institutions break down, many people retreat to the precursors of the nation-state—religion, ethnicity, and the tribe.
As the Sunnis, the Shias, and the tribes and ethnicities withdraw behind their physical and psychological walls and the nation-states weaken, their religion offers them self-respect, identity, and certainty. On this basis the Islamists can construct a worldview according to which socialism, nationalism, or even the nation-state itself is a cancer and that Islam is the answer. They build ideological barriers around themselves that become so high that those behind them can no longer see beyond them. Thus imprisoned in narrow minds, some come to see the “other” as infidel (kafir), unbeliever, Safawi, worthy only of being subjugated or killed. Once immured, it is hard to ever come back.
One explanation for this is poverty and poor education. Neither factor can be ignored; however, too much importance is attached to them, giving rise to the belief that if you eradicate poverty and improve education, you eradicate Islamist ideology. This does not take into account the huge numbers of highly educated jihadists, whose ranks are each year swollen by university graduates, especially those with engineering degrees. Nor does it explain why some of the most violent ideology springs from the richest country in the region—Saudi Arabia. Without question, better living standards and higher-quality secular education are part of the solution, but ironically, another wall is needed here, the one built in most successful modern societies—that between religion and politics.
Because Islam is an all-encompassing way of life, many practitioners find it difficult to take religion and ethnicity out of politics. There is nothing in the Koran along the lines attributed to Jesus—“Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s; and to God the things that are God’s.” Without this disconnection, religious law tends to underpin or even dominate secular law, and the prevailing religion or sect will ensure that its version of religion and law is the one adhered to.
In contrast, in Europe the formation and organization of political parties along ethnic or religious lines has largely been eradicated. Most political parties attract support across wide and varied sections of society, and religion doesn’t play much of a role in government and policy making.
However, in the Middle East, memories of “secular politics” are those of despotic rule—the Ba’ath Party of Syria and Iraq are examples. Both pretended to be secular socialist parties above ethnic and religious divides, but both brutally suppressed their populations. This has led some people to mistrust the ability of secular parties to defend their interests, and they turn instead to the party that supports their religion.
For now the Arab countries and peoples remain divided and ravaged by conflict, both within and between countries. The Saudis and Iranians play out a geopolitical regional battle that, when it reaches the local level, manifests itself in the ancient Shia/Sunni rift, which in turn also plays out in conflicts beyond their own borders. So many of the conflicts across the region—such as the war in Iraq—allowed similar fissures to surface, with the ensuing violence and extremism rippling across borders. Caught up in the maelstrom are minorities such as the Christians, Yazidis, and Druze.
The dream of pan-Arab unity has turned into the nightmare of pan-Arab divisions. Once these sectarian demons are unleashed, the suspicion and fear of the “other” take years, sometimes generations, to be reversed. The patchwork quilt of nation-states such as Syria has been ripped up, and the design pattern of any future states is still unclear. A generation of young, educated, urban Arabs are seeking to put the divisions behind them, but the weight of history holds them back.
The Egyptian president Anwar Sadat said the following words in a speech at the Israeli Knesset in 1977, referring to the Arab-Israeli conflict; but more than forty years on they still apply, right across the region: “Yet, there remains another wall. This wall constitutes a psychological barrier between us; a barrier of suspicion; a barrier of rejection; a barrier of fear, of deception; a barrier of hallucination without any action, deed, or decision.”
