FOR THE PAST FORTY YEARS, the Mediterranean and the Middle East have undergone immense upheavals. Throughout the twenty-first century, this region has been a central element in the convulsions accompanying the birth of a new world order. Unceasing, inflamed belligerence intersects with major international tensions and conflicts whose sequence and articulation the preceding pages have attempted to retrace.
In the aftermath of the October War of 1973, the emphasis shifted from the Israeli-Arab confrontation, which had been its organizing structure, to a dynamic of exploding oil prices feeding the parallel rise of political Islamism. It fragmented during the pivotal year 1979, when jihad in Afghanistan countered the Iranian Revolution. The antagonism toward the Jewish state from then on became subordinated to the collision between Shiite crescent and Sunni bloc. After closing out the twentieth century by delivering the death blow to the USSR in 1989, jihadism spilled outside the traditional Muslim space in spectacular fashion when al-Qaeda attacked the United States on 9/11. It was the opening trauma of the third millennium.
However, bin Laden’s strategies, as well as those pursued against him by Washington’s War on Terror, failed in 2005 when they were absorbed into the sectarian massacres of an occupied Iraq. But their legacy in the following decade would be the spread of ISIS from Mesopotamia to Europe’s marginalized banlieues. After a brief phase of democratic euphoria, the Arab Spring uprisings that suddenly cropped up in 2011 became its hostages. With the exception of Tunisia (even though the precarious economy jeopardized the freedoms achieved), the other countries involved teetered between authoritarianism or devastating civil wars. Their low point was the establishment of Islamic State’s caliphate in the Levant between 2014 and 2017.
This drama also affected the West, with millions of refugees and illegal immigrants crossing the Mediterranean or coming through Turkey. This set off a populist reaction by the extreme right, haunted by fear of a spreading Islam. It weakened Germany, Italy, Hungary, Austria, Spain, France, Belgium, among others and revived in parts of the native population the temptation of a return to totalitarianism, questioning the very spirit and continued existence of the European Union, already endangered by Brexit. This spirit of togetherness was simultaneously damaged by the American president, Donald Trump. Trump smashed multilateralism by withdrawing from treaties, among them the JCPOA constraining Iranian nuclear weapons production, but also others dealing with global warming and international trade. Pulling out U.S. troops from Syria in October 2019 was a final attempt at disentangling America from the Middle East. Meanwhile, Vladimir Putin basked in his Syrian successes, leveraging them to reassert Russian power, and China cast its web of power and influence across the Middle East with its “One Belt, One Way” new Silk Roads.
From what seems a hopelessly chaotic situation, there nevertheless emerge several structural factors for the world of tomorrow. This half-century, ruled by the sign of the Koran and the barrel, as we noted, was marked throughout by hydrocarbon inflation and an expanding political Islam. But this correlation no longer appears tenable for the medium term. Oil supplies keep increasing significantly, largely because of increasing exploitation of shale gas and oil, especially in the United States. At the same time, the accelerating shift to electric vehicles will continue to reduce demand. Crude oil prices dropped 70 percent between 2014 and 2016, sparking the Ritz Carlton Revolution in Saudi Arabia, the key Arab petromonarchy.
It resulted in Mohammad bin Salman, crown prince and Saudia Arabia’s strongman, taking drastic measures for reducing the kingdom’s dependence on rents. He pushed through a transformation in the nation’s moral code that sapped the authority of the Wahhabite ulemas, their entanglement with the ruling power, and sponsorship of Salafist expansion across the globe. This trend will not inevitably follow a straight line: the economic climate, the Saudi-Russia agreement on stabilizing oil production and boosting prices, and uncertainties revolving around Iranian exports all combined to give a short-term financial breather to Riyadh and Moscow. But the structural changes are inescapable. Straws in the wind are the announced intentions of speeding up the transition to the digital economy in the Gulf, evidence of what is on the mind of the leaders in these countries.
However, such moves do presuppose a distancing from the Salafist ideology, which, as it happens, is perfectly adapted for the virtual world. We need look no further than the online preaching of jihad, as in the future social media will be some of the chief vectors for proselytizing and spreading its ideology around the world. Still, that only involves the use of the computing tool, the consumption of data, or their manipulation. It is the high-tech startups that instead will be the producers of the new wealth of nations. However, the perpetuation of authoritarian regimes that stifle individual initiative by curtailing civil liberties do not augur well for entrepreneurial creativity by any means. But the failure of the democratization process carried by the 2011 Arab Spring and perverted by Islamism raises the issue of cultural reform with respect to dogma as a precondition for transforming the relationship between state and society.
Still, the confusion between what Koranic Arabic calls dīn (religion, or the beyond) and dunya (the world, here below) sets up an order that cannot escape submission to the sacred. It substitutes a divine sovereignty embodied in the Scriptures to sovereignty of the dēmos—the people constituted as nation. Rents—presented by their beneficiaries as a divine reward dispensed by the Almighty to his most hardline followers—destroy civil society because they stymie formation of wealth through work and entrepreneurism. They create a vicious cycle, allowing a monopoly on power by oligarchies defended by Praetorian Guards and legitimized by turbaned clerics, while the ruling powers spread some of the bounty around to buy social peace. What is more, rents shrink the horizon for change within the sacred register: the ruler is denounced as impious, perverse, and alienated from a transcendent Justice of which the dissident preachers claim to be the authentic exegetes. Such was the process ending in the establishment of the Islamic State.
It is worth noting that the main source of revenues for that so-called State—or dawla as its followers called it—was oil, smuggled in tank trucks across contiguous borders. It earned ISIS millions of petrodollars, making it the richest terrorist entity in the world. Rents, albeit in a criminal form, thus supported the Islamic State and its imposition of sharia, as shown ad nauseam by the innumerable videos of physical abuses, tortures, and beheadings inflicted on the bodies of resisters. These revenues were the monstrous culmination of the rentier state whose final eradication, leaving aside the terrible devastations, bequeathed as its epitaph the words “Fuck ISIS” scrawled on what remained of the minaret sticking out of the rubble of Mosul’s al-Nuri Mosque. It was from here that Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi had proclaimed the caliphate in July 2014, sanctifying the political order’s submission to a religious rule of which he was the guarantor.
The erasure of its territory completed the moral collapse of ISIS. This is true despite the fact that clusters of fanatics from the prisons of the French banlieues, from the expanse of the Syrian desert, and from the Mosul refugee camps perpetuate its deadly ideal. But the Islamic State’s defeat—interpreted as a divine test on jihadist discussion boards on social media—left its members at a loss for how to continue the fight.
For their part, the Muslim Brotherhood had suffered a historic setback with the ousting of President Mohamed Morsi in Cairo in July 2013. Their branches had previously had staying power, from Europe to Turkey to Qatar. But their ability to incarnate a pious, bourgeois alternative to the revolutionary disorder of the Arab Spring, making it a favorite of the Obama presidency as well as Al Jazeera, had by then gone out of fashion. In Turkey, even if the Islamic reference is still present in the ruling party AKP, the priority assigned to nationalism by President Erdoğan faced with Kurdish irredentism and Syria’s breakup relativizes support for the Brothers.
As for Qatar, in the fall of 2019 it could have celebrated having withstood a long embargo and blockade imposed by its Saudi and Emirate neighbors. Safeguarding its territory and interests, including the quest for hosting the 2022 World Cup, became the axis of its foreign policy and opulent soft power. Qatar now had priorities aside from the across-the-board support it had rendered to the Brotherhood in 2012. For Qatar’s Saudi rivals, homegrown Salafism went through an unexpected crisis in its relationship with the monarchy. The longer it continued and deepened, the more it deprived the Salafists of the unbelievable financial godsend that they had lived off for the past half-century. In the Shiite camp, credit for the successes achieved on the ground in Iraq and especially Syria accrued mainly to the Qods Force, commanded by General Qasem Soleimani. Although he incarnated the ethos of the Islamic Republic, today he also represents a nationalist military figure. Some see in him an alternative to a theocracy violently strained by the resumption of economic sanctions after the American withdrawal from the JCPOA.
Political Islam in its various guises thus underwent one of the great tests of its recent history. That observation in no way prejudges its capacity to rebound, as previously demonstrated. For instance, as noted in the first part of this book, after its defeat in Algeria and Egypt in 1997, jihadism mutated by projecting itself globally under the al-Qaeda brand. That organization’s failure then paved the way ultimately for the emergence of ISIS. This quasi-Hegelian dialectical movement went through three successive stages of affirmation, negation, and surpassing over the span of four decades. Has it exhausted its model of political mobilization with the perspective of the structural decline of oil rents? Or would it succeed in finding a new form of expression for galvanizing even the impoverished masses in countries with devastated economies and societies—like Syria, Iraq, Yemen, or Libya, to name the most tragic cases of the 2010 decade?
The responsibility of the jihadist firebrands and other Islamists is bound to these atrocities, and it is possible to conceive of their being called to account for them. But as became clear to me from a debate in April 2018 on the University of Mosul campus—where faculty buildings destroyed by the Western coalition bombing adjoined those ISIS had blown up—the blame for the chaos is spread around. In a city where part of the population made its accommodations with the caliphate of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, some of the speakers espoused the need for a deep-rooted cultural revolution. It would separate the sacred corpus, captured by its literalist exegetes, from both civil society’s organization and its relations with the state. But there were others who, no less stridently, cast suspicion on the West as a whole, accusing it of having created ISIS for the sole purpose of jointly destroying the countries which the West had in its grip. This conspiracy theory is very fashionable in the Arab world and is nourished daily on social media. It dates back to 9/11, when pride in having Muslims strike arrogant America blended with suspicion that Israel’s intelligence agency Mossad had carried out the attack so that those same Muslims would be blamed for it.
In Mosul, with seven hundred thousand people surviving in tent camps in the surrounding area, evacuated from their bombed housing, thinking themselves forgotten by national as well as international authorities, the extent of the destruction is nurturing a similar rancor. From this perspective, the reconstruction projects planned by UNESCO jointly with other organizations are of major importance. They will not only ease the suffering of the displaced, but also carry considerable symbolic power in building a post-ISIS renaissance. Should they fail to see the light of day, it is easy to imagine adverse consequences for the Middle East trying to emerge from chaos.
The Iraq projects would also constitute the testing ground for the Syrian reconstruction, a task of an even greater dimension, given the devastation the war has visited on the entire country and especially its cities, from Raqqa to Aleppo, Homs, and the Damascus suburbs. But this presupposes finding a political solution, which, as I am writing these lines (Fall 2019), remains in suspense while the balance of power on the ground continues to evolve. Foremost, a satisfactory culmination awaits a consensus between Russia and the Western countries as guarantors of a peace process. This will be the keystone for a virtuous reinsertion of the entire Middle East into the world order that would also enhance its security. Without it, the Levant’s renaissance will remain an empty promise.