CHAPTER 3

Islamism and the Middle East: A World in Disorder

THE MIDDLE EAST has been the chrysalis of three of the world’s great religions. From its stern landscape have issued conquerors and prophets holding aloft banners of universal aspirations. Across its seemingly limitless horizons, empires have been established and fallen; absolute rulers have proclaimed themselves the embodiment of all power, only to disappear as if they had been mirages. Here every form of domestic and international order has existed, and been rejected, at one time or another.

The world has become accustomed to calls from the Middle East urging the overthrow of regional and world order in the service of a universal vision. A profusion of prophetic absolutisms has been the hallmark of a region suspended between a dream of its former glory and its contemporary inability to unify around common principles of domestic or international legitimacy. Nowhere is the challenge of international order more complex—in terms of both organizing regional order and ensuring the compatibility of that order with peace and stability in the rest of the world.

In our own time, the Middle East seems destined to experiment with all of its historical experiences simultaneously—empire, holy war, foreign domination, a sectarian war of all against all—before it arrives (if it ever does) at a settled concept of international order. Until it does so, the region will remain pulled alternately toward joining the world community and struggling against it.

THE ISLAMIC WORLD ORDER

The early organization of the Middle East and North Africa developed from a succession of empires. Each considered itself the center of civilized life; each arose around unifying geographic features and then expanded into the unincorporated zones between them. In the third millenniumB.C., Egypt expanded its influence along the Nile and into present-day Sudan. Beginning in the same period, the empires of Mesopotamia, Sumer, and Babylon consolidated their rule among peoples along the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. In the sixth century B.C., the Persian Empire rose on the Iranian plateau and developed a system of rule that has been described as “the first deliberate attempt in history to unite heterogeneous African, Asian and European communities into a single, organized international society,” with a ruler styling himself the Shahanshah, or “King of Kings.”

By the end of the sixth century A.D., two great empires dominated much of the Middle East: the Byzantine (or Eastern Roman) Empire with its capital in Constantinople and professing the Christian religion (Greek Orthodox), and the Sassanid Persian Empire with its capital in Ctesiphon, near modern-day Baghdad, which practiced Zoroastrianism. Conflicts between them had occurred sporadically for centuries. In 602, not long after a plague had wracked both, a Persian invasion of Byzantine territories led to a twenty-five-year-long war in which the two empires tested what remained of their strength. After an eventual Byzantine victory, exhaustion produced the peace that statesmanship had failed to achieve. It also opened the way for the ultimate victory of Islam. For in western Arabia, in a forbidding desert outside the control of any empire, the Prophet Muhammad and his followers were gathering strength, impelled by a new vision of world order.

Few events in world history equal the drama of the early spread of Islam. The Muslim tradition relates that Muhammad, born in Mecca in the year 570, received at the age of forty a revelation that continued for approximately twenty-three years and, when written down, became known as the Quran. As the Byzantine and Persian empires disabled each other, Muhammad and his community of believers organized a polity, unified the Arabian Peninsula, and set out to replace the prevailing faiths of the region—primarily Judaism, Christianity, and Zoroastrianism—with the religion of his received vision.

An unprecedented wave of expansion turned the rise of Islam into one of the most consequential events in history. In the century following the death of Muhammad in 632, Arab armies brought the new religion as far as the Atlantic coast of Africa, to most of Spain, into central France, and as far east as northern India. Stretches of Central Asia and Russia, parts of China, and most of the East Indies followed over the subsequent centuries, where Islam, carried alternately by merchants and conquerors, established itself as the dominant religious presence.

That a small group of Arab confederates could inspire a movement that would lay low the great empires that had dominated the region for centuries would have seemed inconceivable a few decades earlier. How was it possible for so much imperial thrust and such omnidirectional, all-engulfing fervor to be assembled so unnoticed? The records of neighboring societies had not, until then, regarded the Arabian Peninsula as an imperial force. For centuries, the Arabs had lived a tribal, pastoral, seminomadic existence in the desert and its fertile fringes. Until this point, though they had made a handful of evanescent challenges to Roman rule, they had founded no great states or empires. Their historical memory was encapsulated in an oral tradition of epic poetry. They figured into the consciousness of the Greeks, Romans, and Persians mainly as occasional raiders of trade routes and settled populations. To the extent they had been brought into these cultures’ visions of world order, it was through ad hoc arrangements to purchase the loyalty of a tribe and charge it with enforcing security along the imperial frontiers.

In a century of remarkable exertions, this world was overturned. Expansionist and in some respects radically egalitarian, Islam was unlike any other society in history. Its requirement of frequent daily prayers made faith a way of life; its emphasis on the identity of religious and political power transformed the expansion of Islam from an imperial enterprise into a sacred obligation. Each of the peoples the advancing Muslims encountered was offered the same choice: conversion, adoption of protectorate status, or conquest. As an Arab Muslim envoy, sent to negotiate with the besieged Persian Empire, declared on the eve of a climactic seventh-century battle, “If you embrace Islam, we will leave you alone, if you agree to pay the poll tax, we will protect you if you need our protection. Otherwise it is war.” Arab cavalry, combining religious conviction, military skill, and a disdain for the luxuries they encountered in conquered lands, backed up the threat. Observing the dynamism and achievements of the Islamic enterprise and threatened with extinction, societies chose to adopt the new religion and its vision.

Islam’s rapid advance across three continents provided proof to the faithful of its divine mission. Impelled by the conviction that its spread would unite and bring peace to all humanity, Islam was at once a religion, a multiethnic superstate, and a new world order.

THE AREAS ISLAM had conquered or where it held sway over tribute-paying non-Muslims were conceived as a single political unit: dar al-Islam, the “House of Islam,” or the realm of peace. It would be governed by the caliphate, an institution defined by rightful succession to the earthly political authority that the Prophet had exercised. The lands beyond were dar al-harb, the realm of war; Islam’s mission was to incorporate these regions into its own world order and thereby bring universal peace:

The dar al-Islam, in theory, was in a state of war with the dar al-harb, because the ultimate objective of Islam was the whole world. If the dar al-harb were reduced by Islam, the public order of Pax Islamica would supersede all others, and non-Muslim communities would either become part of the Islamic community or submit to its sovereignty as tolerated religious communities or as autonomous entities possessing treaty relations with it.

The strategy to bring about this universal system would be named jihad, an obligation binding on believers to expand their faith through struggle. “Jihad” encompassed warfare, but it was not limited to a military strategy; the term also included other means of exerting one’s full power to redeem and spread the message of Islam, such as spiritual striving or great deeds glorifying the religion’s principles. Depending on the circumstances—and in various eras and regions, the relative emphasis has differed widely—the believer might fulfill jihad “by his heart; his tongue; his hands; or by the sword.”

Circumstances have, of course, changed greatly since the early Islamic state set out to expand its creed in all directions or when it ruled the entire community of the faithful as a single political entity in a condition of latent challenge to the rest of the world. Interactions between Muslim and non-Muslim societies have gone through periods of often fruitful coexistence as well as stretches of antagonism. Trade patterns have tied Muslim and non-Muslim worlds more closely together, and diplomatic alignments have frequently been based on Muslim and non-Muslim states working together toward significant shared aims. Still, the binary concept of world order remains the official state doctrine of Iran, embedded in its constitution; the rallying cry of armed minorities in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Libya, Yemen, Afghanistan, and Pakistan; and the ideology of several terrorist groups active across the world, including the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL).

Other religions—especially Christianity—have had their own crusading phases, at times exalting their universal mission with comparable fervor and resorting to analogous methods of conquest and forced conversions. (Spanish conquistadores abolished ancient civilizations in Central and South America in the sixteenth century in a similar spirit of world-conquering finality.) The difference is that the crusading spirit subsided in the Western world or took the form of secular concepts that proved less absolute (or less enduring) than religious imperatives. Over time, Christendom became a philosophical and historical concept, not an operational principle of strategy or international order. That process was facilitated because the Christian world had originated a distinction between “the things which are Caesar’s” and “the things that are God’s,” permitting an eventual evolution toward pluralistic, secular-based foreign policies within a state-based international system, as we have seen in the previous two chapters. It was also driven by contingent circumstances, among them the relative unattractiveness of some of the modern crusading concepts called on to replace religious fervor—militant Soviet Communism preaching world revolution, or race-based imperialisms.

The evolution in the Muslim world has been more complex. Certain periods have inspired hopes for a convergence of approaches. On the other hand, as recently as the 1920s, a direct line of political succession from the Prophet Muhammad was still asserted as a practical reality of Middle Eastern statecraft, by the Ottoman Empire. Since this empire collapsed, the response in key Muslim countries has been divided between those who have sought to enter the new state-based, ecumenical international order as significant members—adhering to deeply felt religious beliefs but separating them from questions of foreign policy—and those who see themselves as engaged in a battle over succession to universal authority within a stringent interpretation of the traditional Islamic concept of world order.

Over the past ninety years, the exponents of each view have represented some of the outstanding figures of the era; among them are counted some of the century’s most farsighted statesmen and most formidable religious absolutists. The contest between them is not concluded; under some Middle Eastern governments, believers in state-based and faith-based universal orders coexist, if occasionally uneasily. To many of its faithful, especially in a period of resurgent Islamism—the modern ideology seeking to enforce Muslim scripture as the central arbiter of personal, political, and international life—the Islamic world remains in a condition of inescapable confrontation with the outside world.

In the early Islamic system, nonaggression treaties with non-Muslim societies were permissible. According to traditional jurisprudence, these were pragmatic arrangements of limited duration, allowing the Islamic party to secure itself from threats while gathering strength and cohesion. Based on a precedent set by the early Islamic state in entering truces with foes it eventually vanquished, they were limited to terms of specific duration, up to ten years, that could be renewed as needed: in this spirit, in the early centuries of Muslim history, “Islamic legal rulings stipulate that a treaty cannot be forever, since it must be immediately void should the Muslims become capable of fighting them.”

What these treaties did not imply was a permanent system in which the Islamic state would interact on equal terms with sovereign non-Muslim states: “The communities of the dar al-harb were regarded as being in a ‘state of nature,’ for they lacked legal competence to enter into intercourse with Islam on the basis of equality and reciprocity because they failed to conform to its ethical and legal standards.” Because in this view the domestic principles of an Islamic state were divinely ordained, non-Muslim political entities were illegitimate; they could never be accepted by Muslim states as truly equal counterparts. A peaceful world order depended on the ability to forge and expand a unitary Islamic entity, not on an equilibrium of competing parts.

In the idealized version of this worldview, the spread of peace and justice under Islam was a unidirectional and irreversible process. The loss of land that had been brought into dar al-Islam could never be accepted as permanent, as this would effectively repudiate the legacy of the universal faith. Indeed history records no other political enterprise that spread with such inexorable results. In time, a portion of the territories reached in Islam’s periods of expansion would in fact exit Muslim political control, including Spain, Portugal, Sicily, southern Italy, the Balkans (now a patchwork of Muslim and mainly Orthodox Christian enclaves), Greece, Armenia, Georgia, Israel, India, southern Russia, and parts of western China. Yet of the territories incorporated in Islam’s initial wave of expansion, the significant majority remain Muslim today.

NO SINGLE SOCIETY has ever had the power, no leadership the resilience, and no faith the dynamism to impose its writ enduringly throughout the world. Universality has proved elusive for any conqueror, including Islam. As the early Islamic Empire expanded, it eventually fragmented into multiple centers of power. A succession crisis following Muhammad’s death led to a split between Sunni and Shia branches of Islam, a defining division in the contemporary Islamic world. In any new political enterprise, the question of succession is fraught; where the founding leader is also regarded as the “Seal of the Prophets,” the final messenger of God, the debate becomes at once political and theological. Following Muhammad’s passing in 632, a council of tribal elders selected his father-in-law Abu Bakr as his successor, or caliph, as the figure best able to maintain consensus and harmony in the fledgling Muslim community. A minority believed that the matter should not have been put to a vote, which implied human fallibility, and that power should have passed automatically to the Prophet’s closest blood relation, his cousin Ali—an instrumental early convert to Islam and heroic warrior whom Muhammad was held to have personally selected.

These factions eventually formed themselves into the two main branches of Islam. For the proponents of Abu Bakr and his immediate successors, Muhammad’s relationship with God was unique and final; the caliphate’s primary task was to preserve what Muhammad had revealed and built. They became the Sunnis, short for the “people of tradition and consensus.” For the Party of Ali—Shiite-Ali (or Shia)—governance of the new Islamic society was also a spiritual task involving an esoteric element. In their view, Muslims could be brought into the correct relationship with Muhammad’s revelation only if they were guided by spiritually gifted individuals directly descended from the Prophet and Ali, who were the “trustees” of the religion’s hidden inner meanings. When Ali, eventually coming to power as the fourth caliph, was challenged by rebellion and murdered by a mob, the Sunnis treated the central task as the restoration of order in Islam and backed the faction that reestablished stability. The Shias decried the new authorities as illegitimate usurpers and lionized the martyrs who had died in resistance. These general attitudes would prevail for centuries.

Geopolitical rivalries compounded doctrinal differences. In time, separate Arab, Persian, Turkish, and Mughal spheres arose, each theoretically adhering to the same global Muslim order but increasingly conducting themselves as rival monarchies with distinct interests and distinct interpretations of their faith. In some cases, including much of the Mughal period in India, these included a relatively ecumenical and even syncretic approach stressing tolerance of other faiths and privileging practical foreign policy over sectarian imperatives. When beseeched to wage jihad against Shia Iran by fellow Sunni powers, Mughal India demurred, citing traditional amity and an absence of casus belli.

Eventually, the momentum of the world project of Islam faltered as the first wave of Muslim expansion was reversed in Europe. Battles at Poitiers and Tours in France in 732 ended an unbroken string of advances by Arab and North African Muslim forces. The Byzantine defense of Asia Minor and Eastern Europe maintained, for four centuries, a line behind which the West began developing its own post-Roman ideas of world order. Western concepts began to be projected into Muslim-administered territories as the Byzantines marched back, temporarily, into the Middle East. The Crusades—forays led by orders of Christian knights into the historic Holy Land that Islam had incorporated in the seventh century—took Jerusalem in 1099, establishing a kingdom there that endured for roughly two centuries. The Christian reconquista of Spain ended with the fall of Granada, the last Muslim foothold on the peninsula, in 1492, pushing Islam’s western boundary back into North Africa.

In the thirteenth century, the dream of universal order reappeared. A new Muslim empire led by the Ottoman Turks, followers of the conqueror Osman, expanded their once-minor Anatolian state into a formidable power capable of challenging, and eventually displacing, the last vestiges of the Byzantine Empire. They began to construct a successor to the great Islamic caliphates of earlier centuries. Styling themselves the leaders of a unified Islamic world, they expanded in all directions by conflicts cast as holy wars, first into the Balkans. In 1453, they conquered Constantinople (Istanbul), the capital of Byzantium, geostrategically astride the Bosphorus Strait; next they moved south and west into the Arabian Peninsula, Mesopotamia, North Africa, Eastern Europe, and the Caucasus, becoming the dominant littoral power in the eastern Mediterranean. Like the early Islamic Empire, the Ottomans conceived of their political mission as universal, upholding “the order of the world”; sultans proclaimed themselves “the Shadow of God on Earth” and “the universal ruler who protects the world.”

As its predecessors had a half millennium earlier, the Ottoman Empire came into contact with the states of Western Europe as it expanded westward. The divergence between what was later institutionalized as the multipolar European system and the Ottomans’ concept of a single universal empire conferred a complex character on their interactions. The Ottomans refused to accept the European states as either legitimate or equal. This was not simply a matter of Islamic doctrine; it reflected as well a judgment about the reality of power relations, for the Ottoman Empire was territorially larger than all of the Western European states combined and for many decades militarily stronger than any conceivable coalition of them.

In this context, formal Ottoman documents afforded European monarchs a protocol rank below the Sultan, the ruler of the Ottoman Empire; it was equivalent to his vizier, or chief minister. By the same token, the European ambassadors permitted by the Ottomans to reside in Constantinople were cast in the status of supplicants. Compacts negotiated with these envoys were drafted not as bilateral treaties but as unilateral and freely revocable grants of privilege by a magnanimous Sultan.

When the Ottomans had reached the limits of their military capabilities, both sides occasionally found themselves drawn into alignments with each other for tactical advantage. Strategic and commercial interests occasionally circumvented religious doctrine.

In 1526, France, considering itself surrounded by Habsburg power in Spain to its south and the Habsburg-led Holy Roman Empire to its east, proposed a military alliance to the Ottoman Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent. It was the same strategic concept that caused Catholic France a hundred years later to align itself with the Protestant cause in the Thirty Years’ War. Suleiman, viewing Habsburg power as the principal obstacle to Ottoman ambitions in Eastern Europe, responded favorably, though he treated France’s King Francis I as an unmistakably junior partner. He did not agree to an alliance, which would have implied moral equality; instead, he bestowed his support as a unilateral act from on high:

I who am the Sultan of Sultans, the sovereign of sovereigns, the dispenser of crowns to the monarchs on the face of the earth, the shadow of God on earth, the Sultan and sovereign lord of the White Sea and of the Black Sea, of Rumelia and of Anatolia, of Karamania … To thee who art Francis, king of the land of France.

You have sent to my Porte, refuge of sovereigns, a letter … you have here asked aid and succors for your deliverance … Take courage then, and be not dismayed. Our glorious predecessors and our illustrious ancestors (may God light up their tombs!) have never ceased to make war to repel the foe and conquer his lands. We ourselves have followed in their footsteps, and have at all times conquered provinces and citadels of great strength and difficult of approach. Night and day our horse is saddled and our sabre is girt.

A working military cooperation emerged, including joint Ottoman-French naval operations against Spain and the Italian peninsula. Playing by the same rules, the Habsburgs leapfrogged the Ottomans to solicit an alliance with the Shia Safavid Dynasty in Persia. Geopolitical imperatives, for a time at least, overrode ideology.

THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE: THE SICK MAN OF EUROPE

Ottoman assaults on the European order resumed, the most significant of which reached Vienna in 1683. The siege of Vienna, broken that year by a European army led by Eugene of Savoy, marked the high point of Ottoman expansion.

In the late eighteenth and, with increasing momentum, throughout the nineteenth century, European states began to reverse the process. The Ottoman Empire had gradually become sclerotic when orthodox religious factions at the court resisted modernization. Russia pressed against the empire from the north, marching toward the Black Sea and into the Caucasus. Russia and Austria moved into the Balkans from east and west, while France and Britain competed for influence in Egypt—a crown jewel of the Ottoman Empire—which in the nineteenth century achieved various degrees of national autonomy.

Convulsed by internal disturbances, the Ottoman Empire was treated by the Western powers as “the Sick Man of Europe.” The fate of its vast holdings in the Balkans and the Middle East, among them significant Christian communities with historical links to the West, became “the Eastern Question,” and for much of the nineteenth century the major European powers tried to divide up the Ottoman possessions without upsetting the European balance of power. On their part, the Ottomans had the recourse of the weak; they tried to manipulate the contending forces to achieve a maximum of freedom of action.

In this manner, in the late nineteenth century, the Ottoman Empire entered the European balance as a provisional member of Westphalian international order, but as a declining power not entirely in control of its fate—a “weight” to be considered in establishing the European equilibrium but not a full partner in designing it. Britain used the Ottoman Empire to block Russian advances toward the straits; Austria allied itself alternately with Russia and the Ottomans in dealing with Balkan issues.

World War I ended the wary maneuvering. Allied with Germany, the Ottomans entered the war with arguments drawn from both international systems—the Westphalian and the Islamic. The Sultan accused Russia of violating the empire’s “armed neutrality” by committing an “unjustified attack, contrary to international law,” and pledged to “turn to arms in order to safeguard our lawful interests” (a quintessentially Westphalian casus belli). Simultaneously, the chief Ottoman religious official declared “jihad,” accusing Russia, France, and Britain of “attacks dealt against the Caliphate for the purpose of annihilating Islam” and proclaiming a religious duty for “Mohammedans of all countries” (including those under British, French, or Russian administration) to “hasten with their bodies and possessions to the Djat [jihad]” or face “the wrath of God.”

Holy war occasionally moves the already powerful to even greater efforts; it is doomed, however, whenever it flouts strategic or political realities. And the impetus of the age was national identity and national interests, not global jihad. Muslims in the British Empire ignored the declaration of jihad; key Muslim leaders in British India focused instead on independence movement activities, often ecumenical in nature and in partnership with Hindu compatriots. In the Arabian Peninsula, national aspirations—inherently anti-Ottoman—awakened. German hopes for pan-Islamic backing in the war proved a chimera. Following the war’s end in 1918, the former Ottoman territories were drawn into the Westphalian international system by a variety of imposed mechanisms.

THE WESTPHALIAN SYSTEM AND THE ISLAMIC WORLD

The 1920 Treaty of Sèvres, signed with what was left of the Ottoman Empire after World War I, reconceived the Middle East as a patchwork of states—a concept heretofore not part of its political vocabulary. Some, like Egypt and non-Arab Iran, had had earlier historical experiences as empires and cultural entities. Others were invented as British or French “mandates,” variously a subterfuge of colonialism or a paternalistic attempt to define them as incipient states in need of tutelage. The Sykes-Picot Agreement of 1916 (named after its British and French negotiators) had divided the Middle East into what were in effect spheres of influence. The mandate system, as ratified by the League of Nations, put this division into effect: Syria and Lebanon were assigned to France; Mesopotamia, later Iraq, was placed under British influence; and Palestine and Transjordan became the British “mandate for Palestine,” stretching from the Mediterranean coast to Iraq. Each of these entities contained multiple sectarian and ethnic groups, some of which had a history of conflict with each other. This allowed the mandating power to rule in part by manipulating tensions, in the process laying the foundation for later wars and civil wars.

With respect to burgeoning Zionism (the Jewish nationalist movement to establish a state in the Land of Israel, a cause that had predated the war but gained force in its wake), the British government’s 1917 Balfour Declaration—a letter from Britain’s Foreign Secretary to Lord Rothschild—announced that it favored “the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people” while offering the reassurance that it was “clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities.” Britain compounded the ambiguity of this formulation by seemingly promising the same territory as well to the Sharif of Mecca.

These formal rearrangements of power propelled vast upheavals. In 1924, the secular-nationalist leaders of the newly proclaimed Republic of Turkey abolished the principal institution of pan-Islamic unity, the caliphate, and declared a secular state. Henceforth the Muslim world was stranded between the victorious Westphalian international order and the now-unrealizable concept of dar al-Islam. With scant experience, the societies of the Middle East set out to redefine themselves as modern states, within borders that for the most part had no historical roots.

The emergence of the European-style secular state had no precedent in Arab history. The Arabs’ first response was to adapt the concepts of sovereignty and statehood to their own ends. The established commercial and political elites began to operate within the Westphalian framework of order and a global economy; what they demanded was their peoples’ right to join as equal members. Their rallying cry was genuine independence for established political units, even those recently constructed, not an overthrow of the Westphalian order. In pursuit of these objectives, a secularizing current gained momentum. But it did not, as in Europe, culminate in a pluralistic order.

Two opposing trends appeared. “Pan-Arabists” accepted the premise of a state-based system. But the state they sought was a united Arab nation, a single ethnic, linguistic, and cultural entity. By contrast, “political Islam” insisted on reliance on the common religion as the best vehicle for a modern Arab identity. The Islamists—of which the Muslim Brotherhood is now the most familiar expression—were often drawn from highly educated members of the new middle class. Many considered Islamism as a way to join the postwar era without having to abandon their values, to be modern without having to become Western.

Until World War II, the European powers were sufficiently strong to maintain the regional order they had designed for the Middle East in the aftermath of World War I. Afterward the European powers’ capacity to control increasingly restive populations disappeared. The United States emerged as the principal outside influence. In the 1950s and 1960s, the more or less feudal and monarchical governments in Egypt, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, and Libya were overthrown by their military leaders, who proceeded to establish secular governance.

The new rulers, generally recruited from segments of the population heretofore excluded from the political process, proceeded to broaden their popular support by appeals to nationalism. Populist, though not democratic, political cultures took root in the region: Gamal Abdel Nasser—the charismatic populist leader of Egypt from 1954 to 1970—and his successor, Anwar al-Sadat, rose through the ranks from provincial backgrounds. In Iraq, Saddam Hussein, of comparable humble origins, practiced a more extreme version of secular military governance: ruling by intimidation and brutality from the early 1970s (at first as de facto strongman, then as President beginning in 1979) to 2003, he sought to overawe the region with his bellicosity. Both Hussein and his ideological ally, Syria’s shrewd and ruthless Hafez al-Assad, entrenched their sectarian minorities over far-larger majority populations (ironically, of opposite orientations—with Sunnis governing majority Shias in Iraq, and the quasi-Shia Alawites governing majority Sunnis in Syria) by avowing pan-Arab nationalism. A sense of common national destiny developed as a substitute for the Islamic vision.

But the Islamic legacy soon reasserted itself. Islamist parties merging a critique of the excesses and failures of secular rulers with scriptural arguments about the need for divinely inspired governance advocated the formation of a pan-Islamic theocracy superseding the existing states. They vilified the West and the Soviet Union alike; many backed their vision by opportunistic terrorist acts. The military rulers reacted harshly, suppressing Islamist political movements, which they charged with undermining modernization and national unity.

This era is, with reason, not idealized today. The military, monarchical, and other autocratic governments in the Middle East treated dissent as sedition, leaving little space for the development of civil society or pluralistic cultures—a lacuna that would haunt the region into the twenty-first century. Still, within the context of autocratic nationalism, a tentative accommodation with contemporary international order was taking shape. Some of the more ambitious rulers such as Nasser and Saddam Hussein attempted to enlarge their territorial reach—either through force or by means of demagogic appeals to Arab unity. The short-lived confederation between Egypt and Syria from 1958 to 1961 reflected such an attempt. But these efforts failed because the Arab states were becoming too protective of their own patrimony to submerge it into a broader project of political amalgamation. Thus the eventual common basis of policy for the military rulers was the state and a nationalism that was, for the most part, coterminous with established borders.

Within this context, they sought to exploit the rivalry of the Cold War powers to enhance their own influence. From the late 1950s to the early 1970s, the Soviet Union was their vehicle to pressure the United States. It became the principal arms supplier and diplomatic advocate for the nationalist Arab states, which in turn generally supported Soviet international objectives. The military autocrats professed a general allegiance to “Arab socialism” and admiration of the Soviet economic model, yet in most cases economies remained traditionally patriarchal and focused on single industries run by technocrats. The overriding impetus was national interest, as the regimes conceived it, not political or religious ideology.

Cold War–era relations between the Islamic and the non-Islamic worlds, on the whole, followed this essentially Westphalian, balance-of-power-based approach. Egypt, Syria, Algeria, and Iraq generally supported Soviet policies and followed the Soviet lead. Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Morocco were friendly to the United States and were relying on U.S. support for their security. All of these countries, with the exception of Saudi Arabia, were run as secular states—though several drew on religion-tinged traditional forms of monarchy for political legitimacy—ostensibly following principles of statecraft based on the national interest. The basic distinction was which countries saw their interests served by alignment with which particular superpower.

In 1973–74, this alignment shifted. Convinced that the Soviet Union could supply arms but not diplomatic progress toward recovering the Sinai Peninsula from Israeli occupation (Israel had taken the peninsula during 1967’s Six-Day War), Egyptian President Anwar al-Sadat switched sides. Henceforth Egypt would operate as a de facto American ally; its security would be based on American, rather than Soviet, weapons. Syria and Algeria moved to a position more equidistant between the two sides in the Cold War. The regional role of the Soviet Union was severely reduced.

The one ideological issue uniting Arab views was the emergence of Israel as a sovereign state and internationally recognized homeland for the Jewish people. Arab resistance to that prospect led to four wars: in 1948, 1956, 1967, and 1973. In each, Israeli arms prevailed.

Sadat’s national-interest-based switch to, in effect, the anti-Soviet orbit inaugurated a period of intense diplomacy that led to two disengagement agreements between Egypt and Israel and a peace agreement with Israel in 1979. Egypt was expelled from the Arab League. Sadat was vilified and ultimately assassinated. Yet his courageous actions found imitators willing to reach comparable accommodations with the Jewish state. In 1974, Syria and Israel concluded a disengagement agreement to define and protect the military front lines between the two countries. This arrangement has been maintained for four decades, through wars and terrorism and even during the chaos of the Syrian civil war. Jordan and Israel practiced a mutual restraint that eventually culminated in a peace agreement. Internationally, Syria’s and Iraq’s authoritarian regimes continued to lean toward the Soviet Union but remained open—case by case—to supporting other policies. By the end of the 1970s, Middle East crises began to look more and more like the Balkan crises of the nineteenth century—an effort by secondary states to manipulate the rivalries of dominant powers on behalf of their own national objectives.

Diplomatic association with the United States was not, however, ultimately able to solve the conundrum faced by the nationalist military autocracies. Association with the Soviet Union had not advanced political goals; association with the United States had not defused social challenges. The authoritarian regimes had substantially achieved independence from colonial rule and provided an ability to maneuver between the major power centers of the Cold War. But their economic advance had been too slow and the access to its benefits too uneven to be responsive to their peoples’ needs—problems exacerbated in many cases where their wealth of energy resources fostered a near-exclusive reliance on oil for national revenues, and an economic culture unfavorable to innovation and diversification. Above all, the abrupt end of the Cold War weakened their bargaining position and made them more politically dispensable. They had not learned how, in the absence of a foreign enemy or international crisis, to mobilize populations that increasingly regarded the state not as an end in itself but as having an obligation to improve their well-being.

As a result, these elites found themselves obliged to contend with a rising tide of domestic discontent generating challenges to their legitimacy. Radical groups promised to replace the existing system in the Middle East with a religiously based Middle East order reflecting two distinct universalist approaches to world order: the Sunni version by way of the regionally extensive Muslim Brotherhood founded in 1928, Hamas, the radical movement that gained power in Gaza in 2007, and the global terrorist movement al-Qaeda; and the Shia version through the Khomeini revolution and its offshoot, the Lebanese “state within a state” Hezbollah. In violent conflict with each other, they were united in their commitment to dismantle the existing regional order and rebuild it as a divinely inspired system.

ISLAMISM: THE REVOLUTIONARY TIDE—TWO PHILOSOPHICAL INTERPRETATIONS*

In the spring of 1947, Hassan al-Banna, an Egyptian watchmaker, schoolteacher, and widely read self-taught religious activist, addressed a critique of Egyptian institutions to Egypt’s King Farouk titled “Toward the Light.” It offered an Islamic alternative to the secular national state. In studiedly polite yet sweeping language, al-Banna outlined the principles and aspirations of the Egyptian Society of Muslim Brothers (known colloquially as the Muslim Brotherhood), the organization he had founded in 1928 to combat what he saw as the degrading effects of foreign influence and secular ways of life.

From its early days as an informal gathering of religious Muslims repelled by British domination of Egypt’s Suez Canal Zone, al-Banna’s Brotherhood had grown to a nationwide network of social and political activity, with tens of thousands of members, cells in every Egyptian city, and an influential propaganda network distributing his commentaries on current events. It had won regional respect with its support for the failed 1937–39 anti-British, anti-Zionist Arab Revolt in the British mandate for Palestine. It had also attracted scrutiny from Egyptian authorities.

Barred from direct participation in Egyptian politics but nevertheless among Egypt’s most influential political figures, al-Banna now sought to vindicate the Muslim Brotherhood’s vision with a public statement addressed to Egypt’s monarch. Lamenting that Egypt and the region had fallen prey to foreign domination and internal moral decay, he proclaimed that the time for renewal had arrived.

The West, al-Banna asserted, “which was brilliant by virtue of its scientific perfection for a long time … is now bankrupt and in decline. Its foundations are crumbling, and its institutions and guiding principles are falling apart.” The Western powers had lost control of their own world order: “Their congresses are failures, their treaties are broken, and their covenants torn to pieces.” The League of Nations, intended to keep the peace, was “a phantasm.” Though he did not use the terms, al-Banna was arguing that the Westphalian world order had lost both its legitimacy and its power. And he was explicitly announcing that the opportunity to create a new world order based on Islam had arrived. “The Islamic way has been tried before,” he argued, and “history has testified as to its soundness.” If a society were to dedicate itself to a “complete and all-encompassing” course of restoring the original principles of Islam and building the social order the Quran prescribes, the “Islamic nation in its entirety”—that is, all Muslims globally—“will support us”; “Arab unity” and eventually “Islamic unity” would result.

How would a restored Islamic world order relate to the modern international system, built around states? A true Muslim’s loyalty, al-Banna argued, was to multiple, overlapping spheres, at the apex of which stood a unified Islamic system whose purview would eventually embrace the entire world. His homeland was first a “particular country”; “then it extends to the other Islamic countries, for all of them are a fatherland and an abode for the Muslim”; then it proceeds to an “Islamic Empire” on the model of that erected by the pious ancestors, for “the Muslim will be asked before God” what he had done “to restore it.” The final circle was global: “Then the fatherland of the Muslim expands to encompass the entire world. Do you not hear the words of God (Blessed and Almighty is He!): ‘Fight them until there is no more persecution, and worship is devoted to God’?”

Where possible, this fight would be gradualist and peaceful. Toward non-Muslims, so long as they did not oppose the movement and paid it adequate respect, the early Muslim Brotherhood counseled “protection,” “moderation and deep-rooted equity.” Foreigners were to be treated with “peacefulness and sympathy, so long as they behave with rectitude and sincerity.” Therefore, it was “pure fantasy” to suggest that the implementation of “Islamic institutions in our modern life would create estrangement between us and the Western nations.”

How much of al-Banna’s counseled moderation was tactical and an attempt to find acceptance in a world still dominated by Western powers? How much of the jihadist rhetoric was designed to garner support in traditional Islamist quarters? Assassinated in 1949, al-Banna was not vouchsafed time to explain in detail how to reconcile the revolutionary ambition of his project of world transformation with the principles of tolerance and cross-civilizational amity that he espoused.

These ambiguities lingered in al-Banna’s text, but the record of many Islamist thinkers and movements since then has resolved them in favor of a fundamental rejection of pluralism and secular international order. The religious scholar and Muslim Brotherhood ideologist Sayyid Qutb articulated perhaps the most learned and influential version of this view. In 1964, while imprisoned on charges of participating in a plot to assassinate Egyptian President Nasser, Qutb wrote Milestones, a declaration of war against the existing world order that became a foundational text of modern Islamism.

In Qutb’s view, Islam was a universal system offering the only true form of freedom: freedom from governance by other men, man-made doctrines, or “low associations based on race and color, language and country, regional and national interests” (that is, all other modern forms of governance and loyalty and some of the building blocks of Westphalian order). Islam’s modern mission, in Qutb’s view, was to overthrow them all and replace them with what he took to be a literal, eventually global implementation of the Quran.

The culmination of this process would be “the achievement of the freedom of man on earth—of all mankind throughout the earth.” This would complete the process begun by the initial wave of Islamic expansion in the seventh and eighth centuries, “which is then to be carried throughout the earth to the whole of mankind, as the object of this religion is all humanity and its sphere of action is the whole earth.” Like all utopian projects, this one would require extreme measures to implement. These Qutb assigned to an ideologically pure vanguard, who would reject the governments and societies prevailing in the region—all of which Qutb branded “unIslamic and illegal”—and seize the initiative in bringing about the new order.

Qutb, with vast learning and passionate intensity, had declared war on a state of affairs—brashly secular modernity and Muslim disunity, as ratified by the post–World War I territorial settlement in the Middle East—that many Muslims had privately lamented. While most of his contemporaries recoiled from the violent methods he advocated, a core of committed followers—like the vanguard he had envisioned—began to form.

To a globalized, largely secular world judging itself to have transcended the ideological clashes of “History,” Qutb and his followers’ views long appeared so extreme as to merit no serious attention. In a failure of imagination, many Western elites find revolutionaries’ passions inexplicable and assume that their extreme statements must be metaphorical or advanced merely as bargaining chips. Yet for Islamic fundamentalists, these views represent truths overriding the rules and norms of the Westphalian—or indeed any other—international order. They have been the rallying cry of radicals and jihadists in the Middle East and beyond for decades—echoed by al-Qaeda, Hamas, Hezbollah, the Taliban, Iran’s clerical regime, Hizb ut-Tahrir (the Party of Liberation, active in the West and openly advocating the reestablishment of the caliphate in a world dominated by Islam), Nigeria’s Boko Haram, Syria’s extremist militia Jabhat al-Nusrah, and the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, which erupted in a major military assault in mid-2014. They were the militant doctrine of the Egyptian radicals who assassinated Anwar al-Sadat in 1981, proclaiming the “neglected duty” of jihad and branding their President an apostate for making peace with Israel. They accused him of two heresies: recognizing the legal existence of the Jewish state, and (in their view) thereby agreeing to cede land deemed historically Muslim to a non-Muslim people.

This body of thought represents an almost total inversion of Westphalian world order. In the purist version of Islamism, the state cannot be the point of departure for an international system because states are secular, hence illegitimate; at best they may achieve a kind of provisional status en route to a religious entity on a larger scale. Noninterference in other countries’ domestic affairs cannot serve as a governing principle, because national loyalties represent deviations from the true faith and because jihadists have a duty to transform dar al-harb, the world of unbelievers. Purity, not stability, is the guiding principle of this conception of world order.

THE ARAB SPRING AND THE SYRIAN CATACLYSM

For a fleeting moment, the Arab Spring that began in late 2010 raised hopes that the region’s contending forces of autocracy and jihad had been turned irrelevant by a new wave of reform. Upheavals in Tunisia and Egypt were greeted exuberantly by Western political leaders and media as a regional, youth-led revolution on behalf of liberal democratic principles. The United States officially endorsed the protesters’ demands, backing them as undeniable cries for “freedom,” “free and fair elections,” “representative government,” and “genuine democracy,” which should not be permitted to fail. Yet the road to democracy was to be tortuous and anguishing, as became obvious in the aftermath of the collapse of the autocratic regimes.

Many in the West interpreted the Tahrir Square uprising in Egypt as a vindication of the argument that an alternative to autocracy should have been promoted much earlier. The real problem had been, however, that the United States found it difficult to discover elements from which pluralistic institutions could be composed or leaders committed to their practice. (This is why some drew the line as between civilian and military rule and supported the anything-but-democratic Muslim Brotherhood.)

America’s democratic aspirations for the region, embraced by administrations of both parties, have led to eloquent expressions of the country’s idealism. But conceptions of security necessities and of democracy promotion have often clashed. Those committed to democratization have found it difficult to discover leaders who recognize the importance of democracy other than as a means to achieve their own dominance. At the same time, the advocates of strategic necessity have not been able to show how the established regimes will ever evolve in a democratic or even reformist manner. The democratization approach could not remedy the vacuum looming in pursuit of its objectives; the strategic approach was handicapped by the rigidity of available institutions.

The Arab Spring started as a new generation’s uprising for liberal democracy. It was soon shouldered aside, disrupted, or crushed. Exhilaration turned into paralysis. The existing political forces, embedded in the military and in religion in the countryside, proved stronger and better organized than the middle-class element demonstrating for democratic principles in Tahrir Square. In practice, the Arab Spring has exhibited rather than overcome the internal contradictions of the Arab-Islamic world and of the policies designed to resolve them.

The oft-repeated early slogan of the Arab Spring, “The people want the downfall of the regime,” left open the question of how the people are defined and what will take the place of the supplanted authorities. The original Arab Spring demonstrators’ calls for an open political and economic life have been overwhelmed by a violent contest between military-backed authoritarianism and Islamist ideology.

In Egypt, the original exultant demonstrators professing values of cosmopolitanism and democracy in Tahrir Square have not turned out to be the revolution’s heirs. Electronic social media facilitate demonstrations capable of toppling regimes, but the ability to enable people to gather in a square differs from building new institutions of state. In the vacuum of authority following the demonstrations’ initial success, factions from the pre-uprising period are often in a position to shape the outcome. The temptation to foster unity by merging nationalism and fundamentalism overwhelmed the original slogans of the uprising.

Mohammed Morsi, a leader of the Muslim Brotherhood backed by a coalition of even more radical fundamentalist groups, was elected in 2012 to a presidency that the Muslim Brotherhood had pledged in the heady days of the Tahrir Square demonstrations not to seek. In power, the Islamist government concentrated on institutionalizing its authority by looking the other way while its supporters mounted a campaign of intimidation and harassment of women, minorities, and dissidents. The military’s decision to oust this government and declare a new start to the political process was, in the end, welcomed even among the now marginalized, secular democratic element.

This experience raises the issue of humanitarian foreign policy. It distinguishes itself from traditional foreign policy by criticizing national interest or balance-of-power concepts as lacking a moral dimension. It justifies itself not by overcoming a strategic threat but by removing conditions deemed a violation of universal principles of justice. The values and goals of this style of foreign policy reflect a vital aspect of the American tradition. If practiced as the central operating concept of American strategy, however, they raise their own dilemmas: Does America consider itself obliged to support every popular uprising against any nondemocratic government, including those heretofore considered important in sustaining the international system? Is every demonstration democratic by definition? Is Saudi Arabia an ally only until public demonstrations develop on its territory? Among America’s principal contributions to the Arab Spring was to condemn, oppose, or work to remove governments it judged autocratic, including the government of Egypt, heretofore a valued ally. For some traditionally friendly governments like Saudi Arabia, however, the central message came to be seen as the threat of American abandonment, not the benefits of liberal reform.

Western tradition requires support for democratic institutions and free elections. No American president who ignores this ingrained aspect of the American moral enterprise can count on the sustained support of the American people. But applied on behalf of parties who identify democracy with a plebiscite on the implementation of religious domination that they then treat as irrevocable, the advocacy of elections may result in only one democratic exercise of them. As a military regime has again been established in Cairo, it reproduces one more time for the United States the as yet unsolved debate between security interests and the importance of promoting humane and legitimate governance. And it appears also as a question of timing: To what extent should security interests be risked for the outcome of a theoretical evolution? Both elements are important. Neglecting a democratic future—assuming we know how to shape its direction—involves long-term risks. Neglecting the present by ignoring the security element risks immediate catastrophe. The difference between traditionalists and activists hinges on that distinction. The statesman has to balance it each time the issue arises. Events can occur whose consequences—such as genocide—are so horrendous that they tilt the scale toward intervention beyond considerations of strategy. But as a general rule, the most sustainable course will involve a blend of the realism and idealism too often held out in the American debate as incompatible opposites.

The Syrian revolution at its beginning appeared like a replay of the Egyptian one at Tahrir Square. But while the Egyptian upheaval unified the underlying forces, in Syria age-old tensions broke out to reawaken the millennial conflict between Shia and Sunni. Given the demographic complexity of Syria, the civil war drew in additional ethnic or religious groups, none of which, based on historical experience, was prepared to entrust its fate to the decisions of the others. Outside powers entered the conflict; atrocities proliferated as survivors sheltered in ethnic and sectarian enclaves.

In the American public debate, the uprising against Bashar al-Assad was dealt with by analogy to the removal of Mubarak and described as a struggle for democracy. Its culmination was expected to be the removal of Assad’s government and its replacement with a democratic, inclusive coalition government. President Obama articulated this position in August 2011, when he publicly called on Assad to “step aside” so that the Syrian people could vindicate their universal rights:

The future of Syria must be determined by its people, but President Bashar al-Assad is standing in their way. His calls for dialogue and reform have rung hollow while he is imprisoning, torturing, and slaughtering his own people. We have consistently said that President Assad must lead a democratic transition or get out of the way. He has not led. For the sake of the Syrian people, the time has come for President Assad to step aside.

The statement was expected to mobilize domestic opposition to Assad and lead to international support for his removal.

This is why the United States pressed for a “political solution” through the United Nations predicated on removing Assad from power and establishing a coalition government. Consternation resulted when other veto-wielding members of the Security Council declined to endorse either this step or military measures, and when the armed opposition that ultimately appeared inside Syria had few elements that could be described as democratic, much less moderate.

By then the conflict had gone beyond the issue of Assad. For the main actors, the issues were substantially different from the focus of the American debate. The principal Syrian and regional players saw the war as not about democracy but about prevailing. They were interested in democracy only if it installed their own group; none favored a system that did not guarantee its own party’s control of the political system. A war conducted solely to enforce human rights norms and without concern for the geostrategic or georeligious outcome was inconceivable to the overwhelming majority of the contestants. The conflict, as they perceived it, was not between a dictator and the forces of democracy but between Syria’s contending sects and their regional backers. The war, in this view, would decide which of Syria’s major sects would succeed in dominating the others and controlling what remained of the Syrian state. Regional powers poured arms, money, and logistical support into Syria on behalf of their preferred sectarian candidates: Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states for the Sunni groups; Iran supporting Assad via Hezbollah. As the combat approached a stalemate, it turned to increasingly radical groups and tactics, fighting a war of encompassing brutality, oblivious on all sides to human rights.

The contest, meanwhile, had begun to redraw the political configuration of Syria, perhaps of the region. The Syrian Kurds created an autonomous unit along the Turkish border that may in time merge with the Kurdish autonomous unit in Iraq. The Druze and Christian communities, fearing a repetition of the conduct of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt toward its minorities, have been reluctant to embrace regime change in Syria or have seceded into autonomous communities. The jihadist ISIL set out to build a caliphate in territory seized from Syria and western Iraq, where Damascus and Baghdad proved no longer able to impose their writ.

The main parties thought themselves in a battle for survival or, in the view of some jihadist forces, a conflict presaging the apocalypse. When the United States declined to tip the balance, they judged that it either had an ulterior motive that it was skillfully concealing—perhaps an ultimate deal with Iran—or was not attuned to the imperatives of the Middle East balance of power. This disagreement culminated in 2013 when Saudi Arabia refused a rotating seat on the UN Security Council—explaining that because the traditional arbiters of order had failed to act, it would pursue its own methods.

As America called on the world to honor aspirations to democracy and enforce the international legal ban on chemical weapons, other great powers such as Russia and China resisted by invoking the Westphalian principle of noninterference. They had viewed the uprisings in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Mali, Bahrain, and Syria principally through the lens of their own regional stability and the attitudes of their own restive Muslim populations. Aware that the most skilled and dedicated Sunni fighters were avowed jihadists in league with al-Qaeda (or, in the case of ISIL, disowned by it for tactics that even al-Qaeda considered too extreme), they were wary of an outright victory by Assad’s opponents. China suggested it had no particular stake in the outcome in Syria, except that it be determined by “the Syrian people” and not foreign forces. Russia, a formal ally of Syria, was interested in the continuance of the Assad government and to some extent in Syria’s survival as a unitary state. With an international consensus lacking and the Syrian opposition fractured, an uprising begun on behalf of democratic values degenerated into one of the major humanitarian disasters of the young twenty-first century and into an imploding regional order.

A working regional or international security system might have averted, or at least contained, the catastrophe. But the perceptions of national interest proved to be too different, and the costs of stabilization too daunting. Massive outside intervention at an early stage might have squelched the contending forces but would have required a long-term, substantial military presence to be sustained. In the wake of Iraq and Afghanistan, this was not feasible for the United States, at least not alone. An Iraqi political consensus might have halted the conflict at the Syrian border, but the sectarian impulses of the Baghdad government and its regional affiliates were in the way. Alternatively, the international community could have imposed an arms embargo on Syria and the jihadist militias. That was made impossible by the incompatible aims of the permanent members of the Security Council. If order cannot be achieved by consensus or imposed by force, it will be wrought, at disastrous and dehumanizing cost, from the experience of chaos.

THE PALESTINIAN ISSUE AND INTERNATIONAL ORDER

Amidst all these upheavals in the Middle East, a peace process has been going on—sometimes fitfully, occasionally intensely—to bring about an end to the Arab-Israeli conflict, which for decades has resulted in an explosive standoff. Four conventional wars and numerous unconventional military engagements have taken place; every Islamist and jihadist group invokes the conflict as a call to arms. Israel’s existence and military prowess have been felt throughout the Arab world as a humiliation. The doctrinal commitment never to give up territory has, for some, turned coexistence with Israel from an acceptance of reality into a denial of faith.

Few topics have inspired more passion than how to reconcile Israel’s quest for security and identity, the Palestinians’ aspirations toward self-governance, and the neighboring Arab governments’ search for a policy compatible with their perception of their historic and religious imperatives. The parties involved have traveled an anguished road—from rejection and war to halting acceptance of coexistence, mostly on the basis of armistices—toward an uncertain future. Few international issues have occupied such intense concern in the United States or commanded so much of the attention of American presidents.

A series of issues are involved, each having developed its own extensive literature. The parties have elaborated them in decades of fitful negotiations. These pages deal with only one aspect of them: the conflicting concepts of peaceful order expressed by the negotiators.

Two generations of Arabs have been raised on the conviction that the State of Israel is an illegitimate usurper of Muslim patrimony. In 1947, the Arab countries rejected a UN plan for a partition of the British mandate in Palestine into separate Arab and Jewish states; they believed themselves in a position to triumph militarily and claim the entire territory. Failure of the attempt to extinguish the newly declared State of Israel did not lead to a political settlement and the opening of state-to-state relations, as happened in most other postcolonial conflicts in Asia and Africa. Instead, it ushered in a protracted period of political rejection and reluctant armistice agreement against the background of radical groups seeking to force Israel into submission through terrorist campaigns.

Great leaders have attempted to transcend the conceptual aspect of the conflict by negotiating for peace based on Westphalian principles—that is, between peoples organized as sovereign states, each driven by a realistic assessment of its national interests and capabilities, not absolutes of religious imperatives. Anwar al-Sadat of Egypt dared to look beyond this confrontation and make peace with Israel on the basis of Egypt’s national interests in 1979; he paid for his statesmanship with his life, assassinated two years later by radicalized Islamists in the Egyptian military. The same fate befell Yitzhak Rabin, the first Israeli Prime Minister to sign an agreement with the Palestine Liberation Organization, assassinated by a radical Israeli student fourteen years after Sadat’s death.

Within Lebanon, Syria, and the Palestinian territories—especially in Gaza—considerable military and political power is now held by radical Islamists—Hezbollah and Hamas—proclaiming jihad as a religious duty to end what is usually denounced as the “Zionist occupation.” The ayatollahs’ regime in Iran regularly challenges the very existence of Israel; its erstwhile President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad called for its extirpation.

At least three viewpoints are identifiable in Arab attitudes: a small, dedicated, but not very vocal group accepting genuine coexistence with Israel and prepared to work for it; a much larger group seeking to destroy Israel by permanent confrontation; and those willing to negotiate with Israel but justifying negotiations, at least domestically, in part as a means to overcome the Jewish state in stages.

Israel, with a small population (compared with its neighbors) and territory and a width of just 9.3 miles at its narrowest point and some sixty miles at its widest, has hesitated to cede territory, particularly in areas adjoining major population centers, on behalf of what may turn into a revocable document. Its negotiating positions therefore tend to be legalistic, elaborating definitions of security and political assurances that have a combination of theoretical sweep and occasionally grating detail, with a tendency to reinforce the very passions a peace process is designed to overcome.

In the Arab world, the Palestinian issue has lost some of its urgency, though not its importance. The key participants of the peace process have diverted energies and reflection to dealing with the emergence of a possibly nuclear Iran and its regional proxies. This affects the peace process in two ways: in the diplomatic role major countries like Egypt and Saudi Arabia can play in shaping the peace process; and, even more important, in their ability to act as guarantors of a resulting agreement. The Palestinian leaders cannot by themselves sustain the result of the peace process unless it is endorsed not just in the toleration but in the active support of an agreement by other regional governments. At this writing, the major Arab states are either torn by civil war or preoccupied with the Sunni-Shia conflict and an increasingly powerful Iran. Nevertheless, the Palestinian issue will have to be faced sooner or later as an essential element of regional and, ultimately, world order.

Some Arab leaders have proposed to make an Arab-Israeli peace that reconciles Israel’s security concerns with Arab emotions by conceding the State of Israel as a reality without formally granting it legitimate existence in the Islamic Middle East. Israel’s basic demand is for binding assurance that peace will involve a kind of moral and legal recognition translated into concrete acts. Thus Israel, going beyond Westphalian practices, demands to be certified as a Jewish state, an attribute difficult for most Muslims to accept in a formal sense, for it implies a religious as well as a territorial endorsement.

Several Arab states have declared their willingness to establish diplomatic relations with Israel if it returns to the 1967 borders—a cease-fire line in a war that ended half a century ago. But the real issue is what diplomatic relations imply in terms of concrete actions. Will diplomatic recognition of Israel bring an end to the media, governmental, and educational campaign in Arab countries that presents Israel as an illegitimate, imperialist, almost criminal interloper in the region? What Arab government, wracked by pressures ignited in the Arab Spring, will be willing and able to publicly endorse and guarantee a peace that accepts Israel’s existence by a precise set of operational commitments? That, rather than the label given to the State of Israel, will determine the prospects of peace.

The conflict of two concepts of world order is embedded in the Israeli-Palestinian issue. Israel is by definition a Westphalian state, founded as such in 1947; the United States, its principal ally, has been a steward and key defender of the Westphalian international order. But the core countries and factions in the Middle East view international order to a greater or lesser degree through an Islamic consciousness. Israel and its neighbors have differences inseparable from geography and history: access to water, resources, specific arrangements for security, refugees. In other regions, comparable challenges are generally solved by diplomacy. In that sense, the issue comes down to the possibility of coexistence between two concepts of world order, through two states—Israel and Palestine—in the relatively narrow space between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. Since every square mile is invested by both sides with profound significance, success may in turn require testing whether some interim arrangements can be devised that, at a minimum, enhance the possibility of a practical coexistence in which part of the West Bank is granted the attributes of sovereignty pending a final agreement.

As these negotiations have been pursued, the political and philosophical evolution of the Middle East has produced in the Western world a study in contradictions. The United States has had close associations with parties along the entire spectrum of Middle East options: an alliance with Israel, an association with Egypt, a partnership with Saudi Arabia. A regional order evolves when the principal parties take congruent approaches on issues that affect them. That degree of coherence has proved elusive in the Middle East. The principal parties differ with respect to three major issues: domestic evolution; the political future of the Palestinian Arabs; and the future of the Iranian military nuclear program. Some parties that do agree on objectives are not in a position to avow it. For example, Saudi Arabia and Israel share the same general objective with respect to Iran: to prevent the emergence of an Iranian military nuclear capability and to contain it if it becomes unavoidable. But their perception of legitimacy—and Saudi sensitivity to an Arab consensus—inhibit the promulgation of such a view or even very explicit articulation of it. This is why too much of the region remains torn between fear of jihad and fear of dealing with some of its causes.

The consequences of the religious and political conflict described in this chapter present themselves as seemingly distinct issues. In fact, they represent an underlying quest for a new definition of political and international legitimacy.

SAUDI ARABIA

With some historical irony, among the Western democracies’ most important allies through all of these upheavals has been a country whose internal practices diverge almost completely from theirs—the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabia has been a partner, at times quietly but decisively behind the scenes, in most of the major regional security endeavors since World War II, when it aligned itself with the Allies. It has been an association demonstrating the special character of the Westphalian state system, which has permitted such distinct societies to cooperate on shared aims through formal mechanisms, generally to their significant mutual benefit. Conversely, its strains have touched on some of the main challenges of the search for contemporary world order.

The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia is a traditional Arab-Islamic realm: both a tribal monarchy and an Islamic theocracy. Two leading families, united in mutual support since the eighteenth century, form the core of its governance. The political hierarchy is headed by a monarch of the Al Saud family, who serves as the head of a complex network of tribal relationships based on ancient ties of mutual loyalty and obligation and controls the kingdom’s internal and foreign affairs. The religious hierarchy is headed by the Grand Mufti and the Council of Senior Scholars, drawn largely from the Aal al-Shaykh family. The King endeavors to bridge the gap between these two branches of power by fulfilling the role of “Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques” (Mecca and Medina), reminiscent of the Holy Roman Emperor as “Fidei defensor.”

Zeal and purity of religious expression are embedded in the Saudi historical experience. Three times in as many centuries (in the 1740s, the 1820s, and the early twentieth century) the Saudi state has been founded or reunified by the same two leading families, in each case affirming their commitment to govern Islam’s birthplace and holiest shrines by upholding the most austere interpretation of the religion’s principles. In each case, Saudi armies fanned out to unify the deserts and mountains of the peninsula in waves of conquest strikingly similar to the original sacred exaltation and holy war that produced the first Islamic state, and in the same territory. Religious absolutism, military daring, and shrewd modern statesmanship have produced the kingdom at the heart of the Muslim world and central to its fate.

What is today Saudi Arabia emerged from Turkish rule after World War I, when Ibn Saud reunified the various feudal principalities scattered across the Arabian Peninsula and held them together by patriarchal allegiance and religious devotion. The royal family has since faced daunting tasks. It governs tribes living in the traditional nomadism and fiercely loyal to the crown, as well as urban concentrations approaching—in some cases surpassing—those of Western metropoles, though placed like mirages across otherwise barren plateaus. An emerging middle class exists in the context of an age-old, semifeudal sense of reciprocal obligation. Within the limits of an extremely conservative political culture, the ruling princes have combined a monarchy with a system of consensus by which the far-flung members of the extended royal family have some share in decisions, and ordinary citizens have gradually been granted a degree of participation in public life.

Millions of foreign workers—Palestinians, Syrians, Lebanese, Egyptians, Pakistanis, and Yemenis—combine in a mosaic held together by the bond of Islam and respect for traditional authority. Every year several million Muslim travelers from across the world arrive in Saudi Arabia simultaneously to perform the hajj—a pilgrimage to Mecca to perform rites sanctified by the Prophet Muhammad in his own lifetime. This affirmation of faith, obligatory for able-bodied believers to perform at least once in their life, confers on Saudi Arabia a unique religious significance as well as an annual logistical challenge undertaken by no other state. Meanwhile, the discovery of vast oil reserves has made Saudi Arabia wealthy almost without parallel in the region, generating an implicit challenge to the security of a country with a sparse population, no natural land borders, and a politically detached Shia minority living in one of its key oil-producing regions.

Saudi rulers live with the awareness that the covetousness of their neighbors might translate itself into attempted conquest—or, in an era of revolution, potential sponsorship of political or sectarian agitation. Conscious of the fate of nearby nations, they are inevitably ambivalent about economic and social modernization—knowing that an absence of reform may alienate their youthful population, while reform undertaken too rapidly may develop its own momentum and ultimately endanger the cohesion of a country that has known only conservative monarchy. The dynasty has tried to lead the process of social and economic change—within the pattern of its society—precisely in order to control its pace and content. This tactic has allowed the Al Saud to produce just enough change to prevent the accumulation of potentially explosive social tensions while avoiding the destabilizing effects of overly rapid change.

Saudi foreign policy, for most of the existence of the modern Saudi state, has been characterized by a caution that has elevated indirectness into a special art form. For if the kingdom pursued a very forward policy, if it made itself the focal point of all disputes, it would be subjected to entreaties, threats, and blandishments by far more powerful countries, the cumulative impact of which could endanger either independence or coherence. Instead, its authorities achieved security and authority by remoteness; even in the midst of crises—sometimes while carrying out bold changes of course that would reverberate globally—they were almost invariably publicly withdrawn and detached. Saudi Arabia has obscured its vulnerability by opaqueness, masking uncertainty about the motivations of outsiders by a remoteness equally impervious to eloquence and to threats.

The kingdom maneuvered to keep itself out of the forefront of confrontation even when its resources sustained it, as was the case in the oil embargo in 1973, as well as the anti-Soviet jihad in Afghanistan of 1979–89. It facilitated the peace process in the Middle East but left the actual negotiations to others. In this manner, the kingdom has navigated among the fixed poles of friendship for the United States, Arab loyalty, a puritanical interpretation of Islam, and consciousness of internal and external danger. In an age of jihad, revolutionary upheavals, and a perceived American regional withdrawal, some of the obliqueness has been set aside in favor of a more direct approach, making its hostility and fear of Shiite Iran explicit.

No state in the Middle East has been more torn by the Islamist upheaval and the rise of revolutionary Iran than Saudi Arabia, divided between its formal allegiance to the Westphalian concepts that underpin its security and international recognition as a legitimate sovereign state, the religious purism that informs its history, and the appeals of radical Islamism that impair its domestic cohesion (and indeed threatened the kingdom’s survival during the seizure of the Grand Mosque of Mecca by fanatic Salafis in 1979).

In 1989, one of the kingdom’s disaffected sons, Osama bin Laden, returned from the anti-Soviet jihad in Afghanistan and proclaimed a new struggle. Tracking Qutb’s script, he and his followers founded a vanguard organization, al-Qaeda (the Base), from which to mount an omnidirectional jihad. Its “near” targets were the Saudi government and its regional partner states; its “far” enemy was the United States, which al-Qaeda reviled for supporting non-sharia-based state governments in the Middle East and for supposedly defiling Islam by deploying military personnel to Saudi Arabia during the 1990–91 Gulf War. In bin Laden’s analysis, the struggle between the true faith and the infidel world was existential and already well under way. World injustice had reached a point where peaceful methods were useless; the required tactic would be assassination and terrorism, which would strike fear into al-Qaeda’s enemies both near and far and sap their will to resist.

Al-Qaeda’s ambitious campaign began with attacks on American and allied facilities in the Middle East and Africa. A 1993 attack on the World Trade Center displayed the organization’s global ambitions. On September 11, 2001, the offensive reached its apogee by striking New York, the hub of the world financial system, and Washington, the political hub of American power. The deadliest terrorist attack yet experienced, the 9/11 assault killed 2,977 within minutes, nearly all civilians; thousands of others were injured in the attacks or suffered severe health complications. Osama bin Laden had preceded the attack with a proclamation of al-Qaeda’s aims: The West and its influence were to be expelled from the Middle East. Governments in cooperative partnership with America were to be overthrown and their political structures—derided as illegitimate “paper statelets” formed for the convenience of Western powers—dissolved. A new Islamic caliphate would take their place, restoring Islam to its seventh-century glory. A war of world orders was declared.

The battlefield of that conflict ran through the heart of Saudi Arabia, which eventually—after al-Qaeda mounted a failed attempt to overthrow the Al Saud dynasty in 2003—became one of the organization’s fiercest opponents. The attempt to find security within both the Westphalian and the Islamist orders worked for a time. Yet the great strategic error of the Saudi dynasty was to suppose, from roughly the 1960s until 2003, that it could support and even manipulate radical Islamism abroad without threatening its own position at home. The outbreak of a serious, sustained al-Qaeda insurgency in the kingdom in 2003 revealed the fatal flaw in this strategy, which the dynasty jettisoned in favor of an effective counterinsurgency campaign led by a prince of the younger generation, Prince Muhammad bin Nayif, now Saudi Interior Minister. Even so, the dynasty was at risk of being overthrown. With the surge of jihadist currents in Iraq and Syria, the acumen displayed in this campaign may again be tested.

Saudi Arabia has adopted a course as complex as the challenges facing it. The royal family has judged Saudi security and national interests to lie with constructive relations with the West and participation in the global economy. Yet as the birthplace of Islam and protector of Islam’s holiest places, Saudi Arabia cannot afford deviation from Islamic orthodoxy. It has attempted to co-opt radically resurgent Islamist universalism by a tenuous amalgam of modern statehood and Westphalian international relations grafted onto the practice of Wahhabism, perhaps the most fundamentalist version of the faith, and of subsidizing it internationally. The outcome has at times been internally contradictory. Diplomatically Saudi Arabia has largely aligned itself with the United States while spiritually propagating a form of Islam at odds with modernity and implying a clash with the non-Muslim world. By financing madrassas (religious schools) preaching the austere Wahhabist creed throughout the world, the Saudis have not only carried out their Muslim duties but also taken a defensive measure by making its advocates act as missionaries abroad rather than within the kingdom. The project has had the unintended consequence of nurturing a jihadist fervor that would eventually menace the Saudi state itself and its allies.

The kingdom’s strategy of principled ambiguity worked so long as the Sunni states were largely governed by military regimes. But once al-Qaeda appeared on the scene, the ayatollahs’ Iran established its leadership over a militant revolutionary camp across the region, and the Muslim Brotherhood threatened to take power in Egypt and elsewhere, Saudi Arabia found itself facing two forms of civil war in the Middle East, which its own proselytizing efforts had (however inadvertently) helped to inflame: one between Muslim regimes that were members of the Westphalian state system and Islamists who considered statehood and the prevailing institutions of international order an abomination to the Quran; and another between Shias and Sunnis across the region, with Iran and Saudi Arabia seen as leaders of the two opposing sides.

This contest would unfold against the backdrop of two others, each posing its own tests for regional order: American military actions to oust the odious dictatorships in Iraq and Libya, accompanied by U.S. political pressures to bring about “the transformation of the Greater Middle East”; and the resurgence of Sunni-Shia rivalry, most devastatingly during the Iraq War and the Syrian conflict. In each of these, the parallel interests of Saudi Arabia and the United States have proved difficult to distill.

As a matter of regional leadership, balance of power, and doctrinal contention, Saudi Arabia considers itself threatened by Shia Iran, as both a religious and an imperial phenomenon. Saudi Arabia sees a Tehran-led archipelago of rising Shia power and influence running from Iran’s Afghan border through Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon to the Mediterranean in confrontation with a Saudi-led Sunni order composed of Egypt, Jordan, the Gulf states, and the Arabian Peninsula, all in a wary partnership with Turkey.

The American attitude toward Iran and Saudi Arabia therefore cannot be simply a balance-of-power calculation or a democratization issue; it must be shaped in the context of what is above all a religious struggle, already lasting a millennium, between two wings of Islam. The United States and its allies have to calibrate their conduct with care. For pressures unleashed in the region will affect the delicate latticework of relationships underpinning the kingdom at its heart and administering Islam’s holiest places. An upheaval in Saudi Arabia would carry profound repercussions for the world economy, the future of the Muslim world, and world peace. In light of the experience with revolutions elsewhere in the Arab world, the United States cannot assume that a democratic opposition is waiting in the wings to govern Saudi Arabia by principles more congenial to Western sensibilities. America must distill a common understanding with a country that is the central eventual prize targeted by both the Sunni and the Shia versions of jihad and whose efforts, however circuitous, will be essential in fostering a constructive regional evolution.

To Saudi Arabia, the conflict with Iran is existential. It involves the survival of the monarchy, the legitimacy of the state, and indeed the future of Islam. To the extent that Iran continues to emerge as a potentially dominant power, Saudi Arabia at a minimum will seek to enhance its own power position to maintain the balance. Given the elemental issues involved, verbal reassurances will not suffice. Depending on the outcome of the Iranian nuclear negotiations, Saudi Arabia is likely to seek access to its own nuclear capability in some form—either by acquiring warheads from an existing nuclear power, preferably Islamic (like Pakistan), or by financing their development in some other country as an insurance policy. To the extent that Saudi Arabia judges America to be withdrawing from the region, it may well seek a regional order involving another outside power, perhaps China, India, or even Russia. The tensions, turmoil, and violence wracking the Middle East in the first two decades of the twenty-first century should therefore be understood as layers of civil and religious strife carried out in a contest to determine whether and how the region will relate to any larger concept of world order. Much depends on the United States’ capacity, skill, and will to help shape an outcome that fulfills American interests and that Saudi Arabia and its allies consider compatible with their security and their principles.

THE DECLINE OF THE STATE?

Syria and Iraq—once beacons of nationalism for Arab countries—may lose their capacity to reconstitute themselves as unified Westphalian states. As their warring factions seek support from affiliated communities across the region and beyond, their strife jeopardizes the coherence of all neighboring countries. If multiple contiguous states at the heart of the Arab world are unable to establish legitimate governance and consistent control over their territories, the post–World War I Middle East territorial settlement will have reached a terminal phase.

The conflict in Syria and Iraq and the surrounding areas has thus become the symbol of an ominous new trend: the disintegration of statehood into tribal and sectarian units, some of them cutting across existing borders, in violent conflict with each other or manipulated by competing outside factions, observing no common rules other than the law of superior force—what Hobbes might have called the state of nature.

In the wake of revolution or regime change, absent the establishment of a new authority accepted as legitimate by a decisive majority of the population, a multiplicity of disparate factions will continue to engage in open conflicts with perceived rivals for power; portions of the state may drift into anarchy or permanent rebellion, or merge with parts of another disintegrating state. The existing central government may prove unwilling or unable to reestablish authority over border regions or non-state entities such as Hezbollah, al-Qaeda, ISIL, and the Taliban. This has happened in Iraq, Libya, and, to a dangerous extent, Pakistan.

Some states as presently constituted may not be governable in full except through methods of governance or social cohesion that Americans reject as illegitimate. These limitations can be overcome, in some cases, through evolutions toward a more liberal domestic system. Yet where factions within a state adhere to different concepts of world order or consider themselves in an existential struggle for survival, American demands to call off the fight and assemble a democratic coalition government tend either to paralyze the incumbent government (as in the Shah’s Iran) or to fall on deaf ears (the Egyptian government led by General Sisi—now heeding the lessons of its predecessors’ overthrow by tacking away from a historic American alliance in favor of greater freedom of maneuver). In such conditions, America has to make the decision on the basis of what achieves the best combination of security and morality, recognizing that both will be imperfect.

In Iraq, the dissolution of Saddam Hussein’s brutal Sunni-dominated dictatorship generated pressures less for democracy than for revenge—which the various factions sought through the consolidation of their disparate forms of religion into autonomous units in effect at war with each other. In Libya, a vast country relatively thinly populated and riven by sectarian divisions and feuding tribal groups—with no common history except Italian colonialism—the overthrow of the murderous dictator Qaddafi has had the practical effect of removing any semblance of national governance. Tribes and regions have armed themselves to secure self-rule or domination via autonomous militias. A provisional government in Tripoli has gained international recognition but cannot exercise practical authority beyond city limits, if even that. Extremist groups have proliferated, propelling jihad into neighboring states—especially in Africa—armed with weapons from Qaddafi’s arsenals.

When states are not governed in their entirety, the international or regional order itself begins to disintegrate. Blank spaces denoting lawlessness come to dominate parts of the map. The collapse of a state may turn its territory into a base for terrorism, arms supply, or sectarian agitation against neighbors. Zones of non-governance or jihad now stretch across the Muslim world, affecting Libya, Egypt, Yemen, Gaza, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Nigeria, Mali, Sudan, and Somalia. When one also takes into account the agonies of Central Africa—where a generations-long Congolese civil war has drawn in all neighboring states, and conflicts in the Central African Republic and South Sudan threaten to metastasize similarly—a significant portion of the world’s territory and population is on the verge of effectively falling out of the international state system altogether.

As this void looms, the Middle East is caught in a confrontation akin to—but broader than—Europe’s pre-Westphalian wars of religion. Domestic and international conflicts reinforce each other. Political, sectarian, tribal, territorial, ideological, and traditional national-interest disputes merge. Religion is “weaponized” in the service of geopolitical objectives; civilians are marked for extermination based on their sectarian affiliation. Where states are able to preserve their authority, they consider their authority without limits, justified by the necessities of survival; where states disintegrate, they become fields for the contests of surrounding powers in which authority too often is achieved through total disregard for human well-being and dignity.

The conflict now unfolding is both religious and geopolitical. A Sunni bloc consisting of Saudi Arabia, the Gulf states, and to some extent Egypt and Turkey confronts a bloc led by Shia Iran, which backs Bashar al-Assad’s portion of Syria, Nuri al-Maliki’s central and southern Iraq, and the militias of Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza. The Sunni bloc supports uprisings in Syria against Assad and in Iraq against Maliki; Iran aims for regional dominance by employing non-state actors tied to Tehran ideologically in order to undermine the domestic legitimacy of its regional rivals.

Participants in the contests search for outside support, particularly from Russia and the United States, in turn shaping the relations between them. Russia’s goals are largely strategic, at a minimum to prevent Syrian and Iraqi jihadist groups from spreading into its Muslim territories and, on the larger global scale, to enhance its position vis-à-vis the United States (thereby reversing the results of the 1973 war described earlier in this chapter). America’s quandary is that it condemns Assad on moral grounds—correctly—but the largest contingent of his opponents are al-Qaeda and more extreme groups, which the United States needs to oppose strategically. Neither Russia nor the United States has been able to decide whether to cooperate or to maneuver against each other—though events in Ukraine may resolve this ambivalence in the direction of Cold War attitudes. Iraq is contested between multiple camps—this time Iran, the West, and a variety of revanchist Sunni factions—as it has been many times in its history, with the same script played by different actors.

After America’s bitter experiences and under conditions so inhospitable to pluralism, it is tempting to let these upheavals run their course and concentrate on dealing with the successor states. But several of the potential successors have declared America and the Westphalian world order as principal enemies.

In an era of suicide terrorism and proliferating weapons of mass destruction, the drift toward pan-regional sectarian confrontations must be deemed a threat to world stability warranting cooperative effort by all responsible powers, expressed in some acceptable definition of at least regional order. If order cannot be established, vast areas risk being opened to anarchy and to forms of extremism that will spread organically into other regions. From this stark pattern the world awaits the distillation of a new regional order by America and other countries in a position to take a global view.