FOUR DECADES BEFORE writing this book, I spent the year 1977–1978 in Syria on an Arab language scholarship at the French Institute in Damascus. For budding Arabists, it was the “Open sesame” that would admit us to the cave hiding the grammatical and phonetic secrets of the region that we loved. Careers in those days rarely started without a sojourn in Shām, as we called it among ourselves. This was the Semitic term both for the Levant and its traditional capital in the local dialect. In the orientation of Muslim geography, in which one faces Mecca from the west, Shām was to the left, or north, while Yemen, in the opposite direction, meant right or south.
Neither I nor my classmates could have imagined that, forty years later, this same Shām would become the rallying point in the French banlieues, or disadvantaged suburbs, for jihadists ready to join the Islamic State (also known as ISIS, ISIL, or Daesh) and massacre “unbelievers.” Initially, they concentrated on the Alawites, that esoteric sect to which Syria’s president at the time, Hafez al-Assad, belonged (his son Bashar was twelve years old during my Syria sojourn). It would be a mere prelude, however, to the French jihadists returning home and killing their “infidel” fellow citizens at the Bataclan night club and the French National Stadium on November 13, 2015. And, in my worst nightmares, I could not have dreamed that, in June 2016, I would find myself condemned to death for being an experienced Arabist. The sentence was passed by a Franco-Algerian member of ISIS from the cities of Roanne (in France) and Oran (in Algeria). He was then based in the Syrian town of Raqqa, designated by the Islamic State self-styled “caliphate”as its short-lived capital. The jihadist’s acolyte, the French-Moroccan killer of a policeman and his wife in the western French town of Magnanville, then posted the threat on Facebook.live. To my utter disbelief, this would force me to live under police protection in Paris in, of all places, the Latin Quarter.
But back in the late 1970s, of course, the internet was not on anyone’s horizon yet. The flat world atlas still consisted of bordered spaces mapped out and divided into so many countries with heavy, black lines. It differed little from the map of the Roman empire tacked up above the blackboard in my college classics course in 1974. This was the map that first set me to dreaming of the Middle East, so that I took ship from Venice the following summer for Istanbul, the Levant, and Egypt on a voyage of discovery to the physical lands I had looked at on the two-dimensional map. Back then, who could have foreseen the endless fissioning of the world’s minds and its imagery that cyberspace and online social networks would set off? Or, for that matter, could anyone have envisioned the mental confusion that would wipe out distance and perspective, blot out spatial and temporal reference points to make us lose our bearings forty years later?
While the Damascus I encountered in the late 1970s was still calm, chaos reigned in neighboring Lebanon. A civil war with its attendant private atrocities pitted the “Islamo-Progressive” camp against Christian Conservatives along political and confessional lines that testified to the entanglement of these two identities between Muslim progressives and Christian conservatives. The hybrid labels expressed a conflict over the armed presence of Palestinian refugees in Lebanon. It saw the mainly pro-Western, demographically declining Maronites struggle for power with Sunnis leaning toward the socialist camp—tagging them with the “progressive” attribute that today seems absurdly outdated. At the time, few observers were wise to the game played by the Arabian Peninsula’s oil kingdoms and Saudi Wahhabism, made fabulously wealthy by the dizzying rise in the price of oil in the wake of the October 1973 war. Their new riches let them take leading roles in the region’s virulent re-Islamization in attempts to quash the urbane spirit of the Levant of my youth. Nor could anyone have foreseen how the Iranian revolution would stir up the masses. It turned the hitherto marginalized Shiites, radicalized by this competing Islamist ideology, into the major political power in Lebanon and beyond. It was they who would now dominate a vast crescent of territories stretching across Syria and Iraq to Persia.
This Levantine civilization fascinated me and my classmates at the Institute in Damascus, and we projected our muddled fantasies on it. Frankly, we had read little, and only had a passing acquaintance with the body of works by travelers in the region since Volney or Chateaubriand, our forgotten predecessors. For the most part, we cultivated a crude leftism, an ideology that had dominated the student microcosm during the decade after May 1968. During the ensuing ten years, however, it had shed its original dogmatism. That left us with an imprecise doxa, a scattershot vision of the world oriented on a few certainties stamped by anti-imperialism and anti-Zionism. In wagering on their collapse, we placed our bets a priori on the Syria of Hafez al-Assad, the tip of the spear in resisting Israel.
Disillusionment was not long in coming. I loved the Syrian landscape, which reminded me of my familial village in the Nice countryside of long childhood vacations. It also evoked the epic of the Odyssey I had just read in my college Graeco-Latin humanities classes. However, this romanticized musing on the past could not for long obscure the brutality of a regime and the violence of a society that I experienced or observed firsthand. (Riad Sattouf, born that same year, 1978, captured this reality well in his 2014 graphic novel The Arab of the Future.) My classmates and I, used to the unfettered freedom of the Latin Quarter, learned to lower our voices in public and to suspect everyone as we lived life in a dictatorship “of the left.” We avoided speaking of those who had disappeared in the jails, and did not socialize with anyone who knew them. Amid all this, at the French Institute of Damascus, I met the researcher Michel Seurat, eight years my senior (born in 1947). It was a rare privilege. A superb Arabist and sociologist who had studied under Professor Alain Touraine, he dedicated himself to analyzing the Syrian regime. Domiciled later in Lebanon with his wife and young daughters, he would pay for his research with his life. Taken hostage on May 22, 1985 at the Beirut airport by a shadowy Islamic Jihad Organization linked to Teheran and Damascus, he died in captivity in 1986, maligned by his killers as “a specialist researcher spy.”
Even before this traumatic event, which left its mark on me and profoundly altered my outlook, the disillusionment born of the shocking reality of Syria had impelled me to return to Paris. Inspired by the esteem I felt for Michel Seurat, I dropped the by-then hybridized classic humanities-cum-ancient Arab civilization program I had been pursuing. Instead, to help me make sense of the drama playing out in the Middle East, which had me questioning my simplistic certitudes, I enrolled in political science studies.
Shortly after my admission to Sciences Po university in 1978, I had to confront another paradox: the onset of the Islamic Revolution in Iran. Despite my year in Damascus, I lacked the background necessary for putting into perspective both a revolutionary Islamization in Teheran, at once Shiite and anti-imperialist, and its reactionary Sunni and anti-socialist counterpart in Riyadh. At this time, moreover, started the cycle of turmoil driven by astronomical oil price increases and an intensifying political Islam that would pull the Levant apart. These two correlated phenomena have structured the past half-century, consuming the history of two generations. It was in the land of Shām that they reached a monstrous fever pitch with the proclamation of the ISIS caliphate at the start of Ramadan on June 29, 2014.
That year also saw an unexpected 70 percent drop in the price of crude. It forced a rethinking of medium- and long-term scenarios for developing the region, of its political, economic, and social models, and even of the place religion would occupy in it. This cataclysm had several causes, including shale oil production in the United States that would see it topple Russia and Saudi Arabia as the world’s top producer. But also at work were changes in consumer behavior in the OECD countries. There, the increased use of electric vehicles and consequent drop in demand for oil was starting to put permanent downward pressure on its price. These concurrent developments put into play the rentier economy we have come to associate with the Middle East for the past half-century. They also meant that a reckoning was in store for its corollary, the hegemony of political Islam, whose spread the oil kingdoms of the Arabian Peninsula and their Iranian rivals on the opposite shore of the Persian Gulf both had abetted.
A seemingly trivial event in late 2017 highlighted an unprecedented decoupling of the peninsular dynasties and institutionalized Salafism. It had provided religious cover for dynastic power, while it spread with royal backing throughout the Sunni Muslim world. On September 26, over the protests of the ulemas invoking their rigid conception of morality, King Salman of Saudi Arabia ordered that women would be allowed to drive in the kingdom after the end of Ramadan 2018. The royal decree came nearly twenty-seven years to the day—one generation later—when Saudi women on November 6, 1990 had taken the wheel in Riyadh, only to be chased down and castigated for their temerity.
Next, enter Crown Prince Mohammad ben Salman, a mere thirty-two years old, a first for this kingdom ruled by old men. He was intent on revamping the Saudi labor market, inclusive of newly mobile women, as an insurance policy for the post-oil era. In November 2017, he therefore launched a broadside against the extremism to which the country had been committed since 1979. That was a watershed year, which began with Ayatollah Khomeini’s triumphant return to Teheran and ended with the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, setting the stage for jihad in that country. 1979 was also the year Pandora’s box opened, unleashing the global Islamic terrorism plaguing us to this day. It is thus the essence of the Saudi-Wahhabite system that is suddenly in question, after dominating the Middle East ever since oil was used as a political weapon to produce a victory in the October 1973 war between Israel and the Arab states. How the two sides referred to that conflict—as the Yom Kippur War and the Ramadan War respectively—was a telling symbol of how religious dogma would invade the political sphere in the years ahead.
The following pages will seek to put into perspective these chaotic decades, and then reflect on possible ways of breaking with them. This half-century coincides with the experience I gained on the ground as witness, observer, and chronicler—to the point of being condemned to death by ISIS for my studies. Hence, these pages will reflect a personalized mindset guiding the selection and organization of the facts. As such, trivial events that I find revealing will be projected against a background scan of the long term.
The four chapters of part I provide a lineal synthesis of the first four decades, starting with the October War of 1973 and ending with the uprisings known as the Arab Spring that became reality in the winter of 2010–2011. These forty years saw the rise of Islamicized politics and jihad gradually spiraling over the planet. They started in the year 1979, with the fighting in Afghanistan and the Americans going in with guns blazing in response to the Iranian revolution. This initial outburst of modern-day jihad would succeed with the USSR’s demise ten years later. Successive chapters will deal with the three phases of this jihadism that was visited upon the United States on September 11, 2001 in a backlash that was both stupefying and dramatic. It was an arresting start of a Christian millenary overlaid by an improbable Islamist millennium. This retrospective will draw on the half-dozen works I have published on the topic, ranging from Prophet and Pharaoh (1984) to Beyond Terror and Martyrdom (2008). But, in doing so, I will retain and organize only the material that strikes me as relevant today for interpreting the crucial phenomena marking the 2010 decade.
These perplexing ten years, covered in part II, began with the immense optimism of the Arab Spring of 2011. Then ISIS proclaimed its Islamic State, spurring the generalized spread of Islamist terrorism to European territory. That decade eventually saw the fall of the ISIS caliphate in the autumn of 2017 as Raqqa was liberated on the heels of the reconquest of Mosul. In between, democratic uprisings giving rise to immense hopes were juxtaposed with the sheer horror of ISIS, authoritarian regimes seizing the reins contrasted with the flourishing of rogue states and lawless areas. The analysis of these contradictions will call on field studies and research I conducted on both sides of the Mediterranean.
Fed by questions I addressed in The Arab Passion (2013) and Terror in France (2015), in these chapters will pass in review the six countries that underwent an Arab upheaval—Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Bahrain, Yemen, and Syria. I give added consideration to Iraq because the ISIS monster was born where it joins Syria. Thanks to the demise of ISIS in late 2017, we are far enough removed to put the happenings of this tragic period into perspective. I have made every effort to pull together a comprehensive picture from the mass of facts we have only recently come to know—or experienced violently—firsthand. My primary goal is to distill these reflections into teaching points that join the history of the moment in a continuous arc with the long memory of the preceding decades. As the reader will see, it is the Levant—and especially Syria—that constitute the heart of this book and thus have more pages devoted to them. I am convinced that the crises shaking the Mediterranean and the Middle East crystallized in this area and were driven to extremes there.
Part III dwells on the events following the downfall of ISIS and the heralded defeat of the Syrian rebellion, up to Donald Trump’s decision to pull out U.S. troops from northeastern Syria in October 2019, to the troublesome reshuffling of regional cards between an assertive Turkey, a defiant Iran, and Vladimir Putin as the regional kingmaker in the wake of American redeployment. In these chapters, I take the measure of the tectonic shifts these events foreshadow. Much of this material I gathered firsthand in crisscrossing North Africa, the Near East, and the Middle East. It should allow us to see in sharper relief a set of hypothesized scenarios applicable to both shores of the Mediterranean—for better or for worse. What does the future hold for jihadism and Salafism, the fragmenting of the Sunni bloc, and the wrenching changes underway in the Arabian Peninsula? Will Iran secure its hegemony over the Shiite Crescent, or will confrontation with the America of Donald Trump turn its success into a Pyrrhic victory? How will Vladimir Putin’s Russia, its great power status regained thanks to its involvement in the Syrian problem, arbitrage between an improbable set of allies like Israel, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Iran? And what about Europe, caught in the heart of a crisis zone whose main front is a Mediterranean permeable to terrorists and refugees? Will it overcome its passivity and reassert itself as a geopolitical protagonist? With its institutions at a standstill and Brexit looming, can it only fecklessly watch the centrifugal pressures brought by parties both of the extreme right and of a leftist populism infused with rising Islamism in its marginalized banlieues?
The neglect of the Mediterranean and the Middle East by the American superpower ramping up as the major shale oil and gas producer is building up. It started during Obama’s presidency, and his successor Donald Trump has doubled down on it in spectacular fashion. The forty-fifth American president, “making America great again,” decided he couldn’t care less about the intricacies of foreign policies that had brought unsavory military action from Afghanistan to Iraq, while they had a huge cost for taxpayers and a heavy toll on American lives—more than seven thousand soldiers died between the commencement of the retaliatory attack on Afghanistan in the wake of 9/11 and the final pullout from Iraq in 2016. And a significant amount of the dead came from Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin—three of the swing states that gave victory to Donald Trump in 2016. But would such a focus on domestic policies, aimed at winning reelection in November 2020, lead to some new form of isolationism that could shield America, in the post–9/11 world, from attacks on its soil? Or, on the contrary, would such a pullback be perceived as a sign of weakness signaling the decline of the American hegemon, thirty years after the disappearance of its Soviet rival when the Berlin Wall fell on November 9, 1989? And to that extent could erratic White House decisions strike back with a vengeance, pushing unresolved issues in the Middle East onto the presidential campaign agenda to the incumbent’s detriment—as happened in 1980 when Iran cost Jimmy Carter his reelection?
President Trump took exactly such a step on January 2, 2020, when he ordered General Qasem Soleimani to be killed by a drone as the charismatic Iranian military strongman’s convoy was leaving Baghdad airport. Tension had escalated between Teheran and Washington in Iraq—the only country where there was some sort of coexistence between two erstwhile enemies—after a mob under the guidance of pro-Iran militias had attacked the U.S. embassy in Baghdad the previous days. Such one-upmanship raised the stakes of conflict and crises in the Middle East to an unprecedented level, while also involving the U.S. presidential election into the type of foreign military action that the incumbent had previously disdained.
These uncertainties compel Europe to step up and shoulder its obligations. In configuring this effort, restoring the Levant represents a high-stakes necessity. True, the region has been deprived of its lifeblood by the diaspora of its most enterprising people to the shores of the Persian Gulf. But, with the future Gulf impacted by the structural decline of crude prices, they may also return home in the near future. Further, with the opposing forces exhausted by the slaughter, the Levant can reaffirm its role as linchpin between Europe, the West and the Middle East, and as key to their mutual survival. This would pave the way for averting a cultural showdown that can only perpetuate the turmoil of the past decades. By defining the outlines of this imperative, the present work intends to make a modest contribution to foreseeing our future—away from chaos.