The Middle East in chaos

Reuel Marc Gerecht

October 13, 2014, Vol. 20, No. 05

The great medieval historian Ibn Khaldun centered his understanding of history on asabiyya, which is perhaps best translated as esprit de corps mixed with the will to power. In his masterpiece, the Muqaddima, or Prolegomena, the Arab historian saw as the primary locus of asabiyya the tribe—a smaller unit than the ethnic group, and the most powerful military unit in Islamic history until the Mameluks perfected the use of slave soldiers. The concept ofasabiyya is helpful in trying to understand the Middle East today, after the second Iraq war (2003-09) and the Arab Spring (2010-12) together unhinged a dying political order throughout the region.

Today, no Muslim state in the Middle East has an asabiyya that peacefully and happily binds its citizens together. Unless new organizing ideas are embraced, we are likely to see the persistence of the Islamic militancy that has shaken the region. The prognosis isn’t good, in part because of highly counterproductive American actions. U.S. air raids against the Islamic State and other radical Islamic groups, which only stir the hornets but don’t destroy the nest, are unlikely to change the fundamental dynamic that keeps working against us. The surviving secular dictators and even the most religiously conservative kings see themselves as vulnerable to militant Islam because they know that their own legitimacy is questionable and that their rule strains against Islam’s deep current of righteous rebellion. The Islamic State’s call to the faithful is dangerous because its promise of a new conquest society appeals to young men. It offers the hope that this time the faithful might win.

As is well-known, modern Middle Eastern states, with the limited exceptions of Iran, Egypt, Morocco, and Turkey, were created intentionally or by default by Europeans and Westernized native elites who dropped older imperial or tribal ideals for more empowering modern imports. National consciousness, to the extent it existed, often wrapped around a monarch or an army or both. Even in Iran, Turkey, and Egypt, where geography, language, common culture, and shared travails forged the strongest sense of nationhood among Muslims, internal differences in ethnicity, language, and faith made the ruling elites always a little uneasy about where the people’s affections lay. Would most Kurds stay loyal to the Turkish Republic without the Turkish Army repressing them? Would Iran’s Kurds, Ba-luchis, Arabs, and Azeri Turks be attached to the Persian enterprise if Iranian armed might disappeared? Did Egyptians, searching for something beyond the tight confines of the Nile Valley to unite them, want to be pan-Arabist or pan-Islamist or both? Even in Iran, where an ancient culture put up stiff resistance to the Arab legions that conquered everything from the Pyrenees to Central Asia in the 7th and 8th centuries, the Islamic identity never lost that much ground as modern nationalism began to heat up under the Qajar (1794-1925) and Pahlavi (1925-1979) shahs. Despite the best efforts of Western or Western-inspired modernizers, everywhere in the Middle East, for everyone, religion is the primary identity—cherished and nurtured by fundamentalists and the common faithful or constrained, submerged, and coopted by nationalists and secularists. 

Secular military dictatorship among Muslims has been a double-edged sword: It helped to build nationalist consciousness; but its injustices and brutality degraded the legitimacy of the state, collapsed traditional mores and elites that had checked centralized power, and fueled the growth of Islamic fundamentalism, which inevitably questions, and often denies, nonreligious affections and loyalties. Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini and his clerical successors, who put mullahs at Iran’s political apex, would have been unthinkable without the Pahlavis’ bulldozing of the country’s traditions. The growth of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood since its founding in 1928 wouldn’t have been possible without the Westernization and militarization of the country’s ruling elite. Ditto for the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood, which grew as the Baathism adopted by the ruling Alawites (a minority in Syria who follow an offshoot of Shiism) became more savage and sectarian. The successes of al Qaeda and the Islamic State spring in part from the moral convulsions that have come from secular Muslim elites’ pounding the old orders into dust and conservative religious elites’ recoiling from secularism and feeling guilty about their own moral and political compromises with power and an alluring modernity (think of the oil-fed Saudi, Emirati, and Qatari religious establishments, which have done so much to propagate a stern, head-chopping faith). 

The Prophet’s Community

Fundamentalists of all stripes have done well since World War II because others have done poorly. The Islamic State can attract hundreds, perhaps thousands, of Westernized Muslims from Europe and America—something that the Sunni jihad in Iraq against the invading coalition did not do—because it has tried explicitly to re-create the community of the Prophet Muhammad. As the Michigan historian Michael Bonner has put it, fundamentalists need “to create a link with an authentic Islamic past and recover an authentic Islamic practice.” All Sunni fundamentalists are obsessed with the Prophet Muhammad and his society, the first umma or community of the faithful. The neofundamentalists are primarily concerned with ethics and the salvation of each believer, while the Islamists want to build or seize a state and push Muslims closer to God by controlling the public square. Either way, this obsession with the prophet can extend to his first four successors, the Rashidun or “rightly guided” caliphs: Abu Bakr, Umar, Uthman, and Ali (d. 661). The centripetal eminence of the prophet and his companions in fundamentalist thought cannot be overstated. It guides the educated—Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the self-appointed caliph of the Islamic State, reportedly has a Ph.D. in Islamic jurisprudence—as well as those with minimal knowledge of Islamic history and the holy law, like many Western recruits of al Qaeda and the Islamic State. The prophet and his first community, which set the stage for the astonishing conquests of the Rashidun, are the spiritual and political gateway to Islam for Sunni fundamentalists. (Shiites, who view Ali, the cousin and son-in-law of the prophet, and his descendants as the only rightful heirs to Muhammad, have a different charismatic history.) 

In Western eyes, this attraction can look primitive, if not barbaric. In Muslim eyes, it’s historically familiar and vibrant. The Islamic State by the act of territorial conquest reestablishes a hopeful connection to the past, something that al Qaeda under Osama bin Laden was never able to do. The Saudi scion had to piggyback on others: in Pakistan, during the Soviet-Afghan war, on the Pakistani military; in Sudan, between 1991 and 1996, on the Islamist general-turned-president Omar al-Bashir; and in Afghanistan, after 1996, on Mullah Omar. Bin Laden’s theory of holy war—attacking the far enemy (the United States) over the near one (all the U.S.-supported despotic regimes)—was a tactical response to his predicament. Before 9/11, railing and plotting against America was less troublesome and religiously more appealing to his hosts than making war on the Saudi royal family or Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak. In theory, wounding America was supposed to set the example that would lead to a chain reaction by which good Muslims, in an unstoppable, indignant wave, would down them all. 

After 9/11, when it became apparent that an Islamist revolutionary wave was not to be, al Qaeda became a noticeably less optimistic organization. The Anglo-American invasion of Iraq briefly reanimated the mirage of Sunni Muslims rising, but that, too, faded in the hideous, satellite-TV covered, suicide-bombing carnage of Abu Musab al Zarqawi, the founder of a group called Unity and Holy War that later became Al Qaeda in Iraq, itself a forerunner of the Islamic State. More devastating, the conversion of Iraqi Sunni tribes into an anti-al-Qaeda, pro-American, pro-surge fighting force especially confounded al Qaeda’s propaganda. 

Al Qaeda remains an association of believers that seeks salvation through terrorism. It has no real moral mandate beyond making jihad a pillar of the faith and portraying martyrdom as the ultimate, perhaps the only, means of individual redemption. That frightful aspiration has a very limited target audience since its language and methodology don’t loudly echo Islamic history. What the French scholar Olivier Roy observed a decade ago about “radical militant jihadists”—that they “fight at the frontier to protect a center where they have no place,” that “they fight not to protect a territory but to recreate a [virtual] community”—is even truer of al Qaeda today. Bin Laden’s successor, Ayman al Zawahiri, and the regional jihadist organizations that give him their allegiance and have conquered a bit of real estate, keeps al Qaeda grounded, closer to the real-world travails of most militant Muslim Arabs. Zawahiri’s organization might otherwise become a much more eschatological group, pessimistic about the vitality and fraternity of Muslims, inclined to see most of them as irretrievably living in a state of jahiliyya or the ignorance of infidels. This is where the hard-core disciples of the Egyptian radical Sayyid Qutb live: in the depressing reality that they are eternally the vanguard, unable to convince or compel enough Muslims to join their cause. For such inward-looking militants, a good death is about the only reward. 

By comparison, the Islamic State is much more optimistic and appealing. The scholar of militant Islam Emmanuel Sivan 30 years ago described Islamic radicalism as overwhelmingly in the “five-minutes-to-midnight” school. The Islamic State is more like “five-minutes-to-noon” in its promises. Baghdadi has rallied many Arab tribes in Iraq, as did the Prophet Muhammad in Arabia. The Islamic State has held its own in Syria, earning the tacit support of Turkey and Sunni fundamentalists in the Persian Gulf. Unlike al Qaeda, it has made the implementation of the holy law a central feature of its vision and rule. Westerners always highlight the cruelty of the sharia. But it is central to Islam’s communal identity. It’s essential for fundamentalists who want something more than jihad as spiritual glue. And even though many less faithful, modern Muslims now view a rigorous implementation of the sharia as undesirable, even immoral, it is often difficult for them to take issue publicly with the idea of the holy law being the fountainhead of society. Historically, sharia was the boundary stone for any Muslim realm: The House of Islam is where the holy law is applied. For modern fundamentalists, who have inherited Islam’s traditional uneasiness about prying into a believer’s personal, spiritual relationship with Allah, it is the only reliable way for a community to maintain its pact with the Almighty. Orthodox Jews can readily understand this extraordinary reverence for God’s law: It’s what makes them the chosen people. 

Lots of Sunni Muslim Arabs are undoubtedly horrified by the Islamic State’s haphazard and draconian application of the law, but those who are attracted to it, or are not particularly repelled by it (sometimes because their lives are already more or less in accordance with its ethics), may be sufficiently numerous among Iraq’s Sunni Arabs to keep the Islamic State viable on the battlefield—regardless of whether a new Iraqi Shiite government now tries to make nice with the most important Sunni tribes. Iraqi nationalism, though not dead, just isn’t that compelling for Sunnis. The Iraqi state, even when it was ruled by Saddam Hussein’s clansmen, inflicted a lot of pain on Iraq’s Sunni Arabs. And Iraqi nationalism has now probably been permanently compromised by the Shiites’ rise to power. Nationalism can no longer serve as camouflage for Sunni Arab hubris, the Sunni Arab birthright to run the country. In such tumult, for lots of Sunni Arabs, Islamists may not look so bad—so long as they don’t take gross liberties, as Al Qaeda in Iraq enthusiastically did, with Sunni Arab women. This could be the Islamic State’s Achilles’ heel: its treatment of other Sunni men’s women. The Islamic State’s men may be killjoys and, towards Christians, Yazidis, and Kurds, butchers, but if they prove sufficiently attentive to a cardinal virtue of the holy law—the sanctity of a (Sunni Arab) man’s home—they will likely be difficult to dislodge. For the faithful, since the Baath party seized the Iraqi state in 1968 and introduced the totalitarian’s contempt for privacy, this has become a fundamental issue. 

During the 20 years preceding the rise of the Islamic State, numerous self-proclaimed Islamic emirates popped up, in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Africa, and Yemen. The most famous, the Taliban regime of Mullah Omar, was similar to Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi’s recent creation in Syria and Iraq. It enthusiastically embraced sharia. Though himself a Pashtun, Mullah Omar was hostile to tribal loyalties, Pashtun elders, and the famous traditional code of conduct, thePashtunwali. He gave no ground to clerics. He imagined himself the “commander of the faithful”—a term that harks back to the rightly guided caliphs and the early, hugely successful campaigns of conquest. It implies leadership based on merit (at least among Sunnis), on action as much as right belief. Mullah Omar’s vision—ethically clear and tribe-free—has proved durable among the Pashtuns. It may not captivate a majority of Pashtuns, but it probably remains sufficiently compelling among young men, as it was in the mid-1990s, to outflank any other asabiyya on offer. 

So far, the Islamic State has run roughshod over Arab Sunni customs in Iraq and Syria and has been more severe with religious minorities than were the Taliban in Afghanistan. It would not be surprising to learn that Baghdadi wants to make Iraq and Syria into a minority-free zone, just as Umar (d. 644)—the first caliph to bear the title amir al-mu’minin, an austere man beloved by Muslims for his burning faith and unyielding sense of justice—ordered the Hijaz, the heartland of Arabian Muslim power, off-limits to non-Muslim residents and made Mecca and Medina exclusively Muslim cities. When Baghdadi proclaimed himself a caliph, he suggested that he recognized no juridical authority above his own. Classical Islamic jurists stressed that caliphs were servants of the sharia, that their legitimacy depended on its faithful execution. Yet the early caliphate also had a charismatic dimension. Caliphs could interpret the law; they could innovate. 

For today’s commanders of the faithful, juristic free-lancing has a cost: Mullah Omar and Baghdadi have angered Muslims who love the color and custom and eccentricity that traditional Islamic societies can nurture or ignore. Yet Omar and Baghdadi attract young men. Baghdadi’s promise of a new conquest society—a chance to get even for young men who’ve not hitherto enjoyed much fortune, in the Middle East or in the West—is naturally tempting. Add the Islamic State’s anti-Americanism, and it’s not surprising how well the organization has done. Even before Barack Obama started bombing its soldiers, the Islamic State was more explicitly and violently anti-American than the early Taliban. Even after the Clinton administration fired cruise missiles at al Qaeda/Taliban training camps in Khost Province in 1998, Americans could receive visas and safe-conduct passes for travel through Taliban-held territory. Decapitation wasn’t a concern for Western journalists.

The Nectar of Anti-Americanism 

Part of the appeal of the Islamic State for European and American Muslims no doubt is its much more explicit but less costly anti-Americanism. The Sunni jihad against the Americans in Iraq was painful; the vast majority of the non-Iraqi holy warriors who confronted American soldiers in Mesopotamia probably died. But Barack Obama’s bombing campaign against the Islamic State is unlikely to greatly raise the fear factor for Western Muslims serving within its ranks, since the death tolls won’t come close to what the U.S. Army and Marine Corps dished out in Iraq. The airstrikes, if that is all the United States does under Obama, may well make jihadist recruitment easier. Also, the anti-Shiite nature of the holy war in Iraq and Syria today is sharper than that of the fight against the Americans in Mesopotamia. The Iraqi Shiites, no longer depicted as victims on any major Arab satellite station, are no longer fighting American soldiers. With Iraqi, Lebanese, and Iranian Shiite support, the Alawite Bashar al-Assad has probably slaughtered more Sunni Muslims than any Shiite in history. The Islamic State will surely become even more intensely anti-American with Washington now at war with it—and not with the region’s Shiite overlords.

Conspiracy is the coin of the realm in the Middle East. Washington has been in a de facto tactical alliance with the Assad regime since the president’s red-line debacle in the summer of 2013. And it is clear to any sentient observer, let alone a conspiratorial one, that when Obama talks about Iran, his tone and manner change. Before Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei crushed the pro-democracy Green Movement in Iran in the summer of 2009, Obama’s hopefulness about the possibility of better relations with the Islamic Republic was a defining feature of his Middle East policy. President Hassan Rouhani’s election and the nuclear talks have partly reanimated this sense of possibility. As the president remarked to the New Yorker’s David Remnick: “Although it would not solve the entire problem, if we were able to get Iran to operate in a responsible fashion—not funding terrorist organizations, not trying to stir up sectarian discontent in other countries, and not developing a nuclear weapon—you could see an equilibrium developing between Sunni, or predominantly Sunni, Gulf states and Iran in which there’s competition, perhaps suspicion, but not an active or proxy warfare.” In other words, the president envisions a regional entente where all parties act responsibly and cautiously and peacefully (that is, like him). 

In Sunni Arab eyes, the president’s words mean only one thing: Shiite Iranians—not Sunni Arabs—are the key to the Middle East. It is they who need to be propitiated. That’s why the president backed down from bombing Bashar al-Assad, while he bombs fearsome Sunni fighters. That’s why he keeps giving ground in the nuclear negotiations, ratcheting up American acceptance of the Islamic Republic’s nuclear progress. That’s why he abandoned the Sunni Arabs of Iraq to Shiite domination. Unintentionally, to be sure, the president may have created a perfect conspiratorial storm of Sunni Arab resentment. Sunni radicals, who underscore the equality of men before God, will not fail to note that the five Arab states who joined the Americans in air attacks against the Islamic State are all monarchies dependent on the U.S. military—Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates, and Jordan. 

No Religious Competition 

In the Middle East, there is now no significant religious antibody to the Islamic State. The region’s dictators and kings have little religious authority. Saudi Arabia, which has been the great engine for spreading a stern, unmerciful interpretation of Islam throughout the world, cannot now preach a more benign faith. Its identity and internal political legitimacy are inextricably tied to its Wahhabi creed, an Arabian take on Sunni Islam’s harshest school of law, the Hanbali rite. Also, as monarchies, Saudi Arabia and the other rich Gulf oil states will always be playing defense. Islam’s relationship with kingship is uneasy, even though Islamic history, as Ibn Khaldun recounts, is mostly a succession of dynasties. The foundational period of Islam was so violent—three of the four rightly guided caliphs were murdered—in part because Islam’s political-religious marriage creates standards that inevitably excite and disappoint the faithful. As Princeton’s Michael Cook puts it: “It was the fusion of this egalitarian and activist tribal ethos with the monotheist tradition that gave Islam its distinctive political character. In no other civilization was rebellion for conscience sake so widespread as it was in the early centuries of Islamic history; no other major religious tradition has lent itself to revival as a political ideology—and not just a political identity—in the modern world.” Many Westerners like to point to kings—the Saudi, Jordanian, and Moroccan usually top the list—as bastions against radicalism. The Jordanian and Moroccan kingdoms are, but whatever moral authority they still have at home (and King Abdullah of Jordan is nearly running on empty) isn’t exportable. Against the Islamist and populist waves that have battered the region since 2011, they do their utmost just to hold on. And the Saudi way of holding on, imitated now by the lesser monarchies of the Persian Gulf, is to support the Wahhabi version of the faith, which inevitably means supporting fundamentalists who haven’t (yet) turned against the House of Saud. 

The dictatorships, however, are in even worse shape. Egypt’s newest general-turned-president-for-life, Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, likes to opine about the need for religious reform in Egypt, which, properly translated, means that he wants to find a way to deny the Muslim Brotherhood and other militants any religious legitimacy. This approach is well-worn—Gamal Abdel Nasser, Anwar Sadat, and Hosni Mubarak all tried to shape Egypt’s religious sentiments through police-state harassment, subventions, and direct control of Al-Azhar, the renowned religious seminary that has been losing prestige in the Sunni world in direct proportion to its subordination to Egypt’s modern rulers.

General Sisi apparently feels that he is in a strong position to redirect the faith in Egypt since he views his mandate, executed through a coup d’état and managed elections, as a populist backlash against the Muslim Brotherhood’s short tenure in government. Although some in the West, especially among those who tend to view the region through an Israeli-security lens, really want to believe that Mohamed Morsi’s turbulent, 12-month presidency was sufficient to discredit its version of Islam, this probably isn’t so. Islamic fundamentalism has been gaining strength in Egypt for a hundred years, powerfully so since Israel’s crushing military victory in June 1967. The Brotherhood and the Salafists together captured two-thirds of the vote in the parliamentary election held in late 2011 and early 2012. While massive street demonstrations against Morsi’s presidency in June 2013 may well have signaled a collapse in popularity for the Brotherhood, it’s difficult to know given the coordination between the military and the secular opposition in planning the coup. It’s highly unlikely that the country’s deeply religious culture has changed much at all. General Sisi’s apparent and probably sincere conservative religiosity is actually part of this evolution, which has touched the army as it has every other part of Egyptian society. As it rapidly ages, Sisi’s dictatorship is likely to give ground in exactly the same way that Sadat and Mubarak did to a more militantly religious culture as a means of fortifying the regime’s base. 

It’s possible that a combination of Sunni Arab military forces on the ground could defeat the Islamic State, which would damage its appeal, especially for Western radical Muslims who’ve gone to Syria to participate in a reenactment of history. But it’s hard to see this happening. The military forces of the nonjihadist Syrian opposition are under severe pressure from the Assad regime and have never been meaningfully supported by the West. They could not take control of territory from the Islamic State—assuming the United States could apply sufficient airpower to fracture the Islamic State (a dubious military proposition). The Nusra Front, a brave band of holy warriors affiliated with al Qaeda—but also tied to many within the Free Syrian Army because Nusra has behaved fairly well toward the nonjihadist Syrian opposition—would be the most likely Sunni beneficiary, at least in the short term. America’s military campaign against the Islamic State in Syria is likely to seriously benefit only one party: the Alawites. 

In Iraq, the situation isn’t much better. Iraq’s Sunni Arabs, who are only 20 percent of the country’s population, are destined to be sorely disappointed in Baghdad regardless of who is prime minister. They want what the Shiites will not give: a veto on government policy. A permanent and satisfactory devolution of power to the Sunni Arabs and the Kurds was conceivable under American auspices; without American power on the ground to husband the process, such an arrangement would probably be stillborn. It would take lots of American soldiers in Iraq to reassure the Sunni Arabs that the future could be different from the past. Hard power has a way of changing people’s calculations. But it requires a commitment, costly in American blood, that simply will not be forthcoming under President Obama.

A new Iraqi Shiite Army, supplied and tutored by Washington and/or Tehran, might march forth to conquer northern Iraq. But that doesn’t seem likely either. The Islamic State’s victory over the Shiite-led Iraqi Army in northern Iraq strongly suggests that the Iraqi armed forces have sustained a systemic breakdown. There are many reasons for this collapse—salient among them President Obama’s eagerness to withdraw military advisers, logistics, and tactical air support—but one important factor was surely that many Iraqi Shiites, even under Iraqi Shiite officers, aren’t yet keen on military service. It’s a job with a paycheck—an unalloyed good in a country where crushing poverty is widespread. But except for elite units, which the American military spent a lot of effort molding, the martial life has unpleasant memories for the Shiites. Lording it over the Arab Sunnis, their former tormentors, must have lost some of its appeal in urban combat on Sunni soil. And the Shiites—unlike Iraqi Sunnis, who are accustomed to rule and who deceive themselves about their numbers—have a strong sense of when they are moving beyond their realm. (This would not be true of former prime minister Nuri al-Maliki, a man of considerable hubris and ambition.) A new burning nationalism may arise among the Shiites—waves of Sunni suicide bombers in Baghdad and the holy sites might be just the thing to kindle the requisite aggression. Iraqi nationalism has long had a place among the Shiites, who always viewed the pan-Arab affectations of the Baath party as ideological camouflage for Sunni minority rule. Fondly recalling their large role in the 1920 revolt against the British, Shiites like to think of themselves as the truer Iraqis. 

But the Iraqi Shiites don’t yet appear to be burning to use their vastly greater numbers militarily. And there is little chance that Tehran will decide to send substantial armed forces into Iraq. Most radical Shiite Iraqis have a profound Arab side to their identity. Iraqis who have served with or been trained by Iranian Revolutionary Guards often are quick to tell you that the irrepressible Persian sense of superiority vis-à-vis Arabs got really annoying. The Iranians appear to be well aware that they cannot, outside of the holy pilgrimage cities in Iraq, show themselves in numbers, let alone openly try to command the Iraqi military. And as both Iraq’s and Iran’s leaders probably know, a little Islamic State, in both Iraq and Syria, is good for the Islamic Republic. In Iraq it keeps the sectarian division hot and Iraqi Shiites dependent upon their Persian “uncle.” In Syria it creates a sharp contrast between Bashar al-Assad’s savage but Christian-friendly regime and the wild-eyed Sunni jihadists on the other side. It was unsurprising to find Muhsin al-Fadhli, the recently deceased leader of the Khorasan group, an al Qaeda outfit inside the Nusra Front, in Syria after a long residence in Iran. 

Fallen Brotherhood

If one scans the Middle East, it’s hard to see any force capable of dismantling the region’s ever-more-virulent Sunni Islamic fundamentalism. Before June 2013, there was one. Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood was the Islamic State’s natural antithesis, since it sought to reanimate the Prophet Muhammad’s community through democracy. It’s quite likely that had the clandestine Syrian Muslim Brotherhood been able to gain greater ground against the Assad regime, it, too, would have embraced the ballot box. But under the Assads, membership in the Brotherhood has been a capital crime; the organization was completely unprepared when the Arab Spring struck Syria in 2011.

The Brotherhood may have started off as a secretive organization that hoped to capture the state through murder and an alliance with the army, but it evolved into a vastly more populist outfit that firmly believed most Muslims to be good Muslims. The Brotherhood was trying to tackle the confounding question facing all Muslim fundamentalists in the 21st century: How do men of faith balance the holy law with the growing appeal of democracy among Muslims? Iran’s vibrant, often brilliant, and increasingly jailed and exiled dissident clergymen have tackled this question more forthrightly because the oppressors in the Islamic Republic are Shiite clerics. They have increasingly bent the holy law in the direction of popular sovereignty. Sunni Arabs are not nearly as progressive, in great part because they’ve been operating in an even more difficult, intellectually authoritarian environment. However fitfully, the Muslim Brotherhood was trying to adapt to modernity.

Its efforts earned it the wrath of the Saudis, who fear the Brothers and their lay populist Islamism more than they do the historical pretension of the “caliph” Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. President Morsi and the Brotherhood were well on the way to getting slapped down by Egyptian voters in the next round of parliamentary elections when the Egyptian Army aborted the process. A rejection at the polls would have provoked further convulsions, dissent, and reflection within the movement and among fundamentalists beyond Egypt’s borders. With the coup, an unbridgeable divide has opened up between secularists and Muslims who see politics as an extension of their faith. Secularists have wedded themselves to military rule, since any new embrace of democracy would bring back a vengeful Islamist threat. Islamists angrily view secularists as fair-weather democrats, unwilling to abide by majority rule. This is a recipe for much more violence, terrorism, and perhaps revolution if the Egyptian military ever cracks.

Westerners had a difficult time seeing Egypt’s intra-Muslim struggles clearly, in part because the Muslim Brotherhood was, in so many ways, repulsive. Under the best of circumstances, democracy in Egypt would have been far from Western ideals. Its brief growth sharpened the expression of Egypt’s vast ocean of anti-Americanism, anti-Zionism, and anti-Semitism—all of which flourish in both secular and Islamist variants. Democratic change in Egypt wasn’t about establishing a liberal democracy; it was about making Muslims reconcile their conflicting passions through the ballot box. With time, with faction, a more liberal—though by Western standards still distasteful—society might have developed. That great debate—a chance for a new asabiyya expressed by Muslims voting and achieved by peaceful change—has been aborted. The Arab militaries and monarchies are resurgent, which means that they will build societies far more conducive to hard-core fundamentalist thought than fundamentalists on their own ever could have. 

America in Retreat

The United States now faces only really unpleasant choices. It could have brought its considerable weight to bear in Egypt when Morsi was first elected, against the Egyptian military and security services, who so openly remained a threat to democracy’s future, and against Morsi and the Brotherhood, whose authoritarian temptations were also apparent. Washington could have stayed in Iraq—both the cost and casualties in 2011 were small for a superpower. More and more U.S. soldiers will inevitably go back to Iraq if President Obama is serious about dislodging the Islamic State from its conquests. Without American boots on the ground, the Iraqis will not be able to do it. 

American paramilitary support to the Syrian opposition revolving around the Free Syrian Army is long overdue, and perhaps the president, after all his trepidation, is now willing to commit serious resources and what’s left of his credibility to the project. Back in the 1980s, however, it took years for Washington to finally supply the Afghan mujahedeen with powerful weaponry. And even longer for Washington to make the Central Intelligence Agency get serious. And once the Soviet Army withdrew, Washington lost interest. Afghanistan was too far away, resources were too scarce, it was difficult to understand Afghan politics, Afghans were primitive, and we were tired. This time round, America could stay in Afghanistan—call it a 30-year project—and prevent a resurgent Taliban and al Qaeda from reclaiming the country. President Obama may think the “good war” has become an unnecessary one, but if he’s still in office when Ayman al Zawahiri triumphantly returns to Jalalabad, where bin Laden arrived from Sudan in 1996, he may rethink his change of heart. A victory of the Taliban and al Qaeda could present a situation where Sunni jihadists and Arab and Iranian Shiite radicals actually control a majority of what historians used to quaintly call “the classical Middle East.” 

And then there are the nuclear negotiations, where the White House keeps giving ground to Iran’s continuing progress toward a bomb. The Islamic Republic’s pursuit of nuclear weapons is a strategic game-changer, which is why the clerical regime, whether led by pragmatics or hardliners, has doggedly kept advancing. All of the region’s problems, especially those that hurt us, will worsen when the mullahs go nuclear. President Obama could stiffen his spine and make his red lines as firm as those of the supreme leader. He could encourage Congress to pass more powerful sanctions instead of telling the New Yorker that he will veto any new bill threatening the Islamic Republic. He could go to Europe and thank our allies for the oil embargo and all the other sanctions that have brought considerable pain to Tehran, and lead them to do more. Obama could challenge Khamenei to blink and, if he doesn’t, obliterate his nuclear program. 

Against our Middle Eastern enemies, it seems doubtful the president is going to do anything particularly aggressive. The United States is in retreat, and our enemies and friends know it. It’s a decent bet, a few months out, that Obama’s bombing runs against the Islamic State will further this impression. The Middle East is in free fall. If Ibn Khaldun were observing the region today, he would say that the barbarians are at the gate and the dynasts are in trouble. He would look for the stronger asabiyya. He wouldn’t find it in Cairo, Baghdad, Riyadh, Amman, or Washington. He’d look toward the frontier, in the fierce march lands of Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. A good Sunni but a better historian, he’d look at Tehran and linger. He’d warn that smaller numbers with the right motivation can often bring down larger, better-armed foes. He’d never say, as President Obama often does, that the radicals are just extremists, divorced from their fathers’ religion. He’d remember the proud, and often successful, predecessors to these barbarians. He’d immediately recognize the asabiyya of a reborn faith.

Reuel Marc Gerecht is a contributing editor to The Weekly Standard and a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.