Still, what is undeniable is that since the partition of Palestine in 1948 up until 2011, the Middle East was a continuous theatre of war of broadly two kinds – one that had set Israel against its Arab neighbors and another that had put pan-Arab nationalists in opposition to pro-Western monarchies.
Today, the countries that make up the Middle East and North Africa region continue to have many things in common. But what is increasingly evident with the passage of time is their divergent approaches to almost every issue, resulting in what can perhaps be described as a multi-speed and multi-vision Middle East.
The tensions between Israelis and Palestinians, being one of the biggest underlying concerns of Arab and Muslim populations, simmer on the backburner, flaring up now and again. However, the issue has been overshadowed by a raft of other conflicts and disputes whose effects on the region have turned out to be equally destabilizing.
Admittedly, the Middle East and North Africa region was never a monolithic political, religious or sectarian unit, whether at the height of the Ottoman Empire or in the heyday of the Arab conquests. Cycles of despotism, discontent, uprisings, and crackdowns have been as much a feature of the regional landscape as olive groves and trade caravans.
But in the present time, with a large number of states regarded as fragile or failed due to a mixture of factors, notably poor governance and prolonged unrest, the political and socio-economic gaps and disparities between these and the more stable Middle Eastern and North African countries are getting palpably wider.
They are all still members of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, the League of Arab States, and similar groupings, but their governing elites’ political beliefs and perceptions of statecraft have so little in common that any loud proclamations of unity must necessarily be viewed as attempts to paper over the cracks.
If there is any one country that embodies the contradictions of the Middle East and North Africa, it is perhaps Qatar. In theory, it belongs to the small but affluent bloc known as the Gulf Cooperation Council. Like its GCC partners, Qatar has a free-market economy, is heavily dependent on cheap Asian labor, and views the US as its ultimate security guarantor.
In practice, however, Qatar’s ideological stance on most geopolitical issues is closer to (Sunni Islamist) Turkey and (Shiite theocratic) Iran. Although Islamists and Iran do not see eye to eye on many issues, they both assume they have a common enemy in Israel as well as the avowedly anti-Islamist bloc comprising the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, and Egypt.
Gas-rich Qatar has deep pockets that have enabled it over the years to buy social influence and disarm a long list of prospective critics and competitors: New York media newsrooms, the White House, Middle East analysts, media watchdog groups, sports bodies, even armed groups active in Libya, Gaza and Syria.
At the same time, Qatar’s wealth and hospitality insulate it from criticism by Islamists of its peculiar domestic marriage of Western norms and Wahhabi traditions, and its simultaneous courtship of, say, Israel and Hamas or the US and Iran. But other conservative countries of the Middle East do not quite have the options available to well-heeled Qatar.
Iran of course is the most obvious example of a failed experiment in illiberal theocracy. Additionally, the Iranian model of political stagnation, unwarranted militarism, and economic chaos has, for all practical purposes, sealed the fate of three countries within its unwritten sphere of influence – Syria, Lebanon, and Iraq.
Because a powerful section of the polity in each of these multi-sectarian and multi-ethnic states is convinced that the psychological rewards of being an Iranian satellite or ally outweigh the tangible costs and risks, there seems to be no light at the end of the tunnel for the hapless general population.
Among those affected by the atmosphere of pessimism resulting from Shiite Islamist muscle-flexing, Muslim Brotherhood politicking, and violent jihadi extremism are the Kurds and like-minded communities, whose dream of seeing more modernizing policies being adopted in their part of the world has remained just that.
In an ideal world, these groups would have seceded from their respective countries and hitched their wagons to the West, if not to the Arab Gulf states. But in the real world where power mostly flows from the barrel of a gun, wisdom dictates the need to coexist with the proxies of Iran and Turkey as long as the hardliners have the upper hand in Tehran and Ankara.
As things stand, it is impossible to predict which of the competing ideological schools of the Middle East will prove successful in the long run. For now, those Arab countries with proudly liberal social and economic policies and strong defence forces have the best chance to engage with, and attract investors and technological talent from, the wider, non-Islamic world. But the long run is a different matter of course.
Whichever way it goes, the multi-speed, multi-vision Middle East is here.
 | Arnab Neil Sengupta is an independent journalist and commentator on the Middle East. The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the position of Rudaw. |
