Jordanian-Palestinian spiritual mentor of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi
Abu Musab al-Zarqawi
Jordanian founder of al-Qaeda in Iraq/the Islamic State
Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi
Iraqi leader of the Islamic State
Muqtada al-Sadr
Iraqi leader of the Sadrist Movement
Saddam Hussein
President of Iraq, 1979–2003
Nouri al-Maliki
Prime minister of Iraq, 2006–14
Haider al-Abadi
Prime minister of Iraq, 2014–current
Ali Sistani
Leading grand ayatollah in Najaf
Abu Jaafar al-Darraji
Senior commander of the Badr Organization
Mohammed Dahlan
Palestinian politician, security advisor to Abu Dhabi crown prince
Mansour Malik
Founder, Islamic Law Chambers
Sayyid Abu Musameh
Former leader of Hamas in Gaza
Like many before me, my career in the Middle East was born of the thrill of the region’s diversity. In Damascus, where I studied Arabic in the 1990s, going to different places of worship was as natural as a stroll in the park. Mornings might take in a synagogue service, lunchtimes an Orthodox mass, evenings the salah prayer at Ibn Taymiya’s mosque, followed by a late-night hammam, a Turkish bath. Faith was theatrical, spectacular, wholesome, and uplifting.
It feels a lost world. At work, my reporting is limited ever more to the dreary cycle of violence. Instead of covering the region’s vibrancy and creativity, most of my articles describe its demise. “More than 100,000 killed in one of Middle East’s bloodiest years,” was the headline with which the Financial Times rang in the New Year in 2015. None of the conflicts it listed—in Syria, Iraq, Israel and Palestine, Yemen, and Libya—showed any sign of waning, let alone ending. With each article, one’s admiration for the region turns that bit more into pity.
This book is born of the gnawing question of how a region that for half a millennium was a global exemplar of pluralism and religious harmony has become the least tolerant and stable place on the planet. Through six essays from the field, the book explores the causes of the decline, and offers a few pointers for a recovery. Those hoping for a prescriptive template for resolving the Middle East’s multiple crises will be disappointed. What they will find is a fresh approach for examining what has gone wrong, and perhaps a paradigm for understanding what might put it right.
In 1923, a Norwegian arctic explorer, Nobel Peace Prize winner, and the first League of Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, Fridtjof Nansen, devised a mass population exchange that became known as the Lausanne Convention. “Unmixing the populations of the Near East will tend to secure true pacification of the Near East,” he reasoned. Building on the Wilsonian principles of national self-determination, his convention wound up the last vestiges of the Ottoman Empire in southeastern Europe after six centuries of religious co-existence. It provided for the “compulsory exchange of Turkish nationals of the Greek Orthodox religion established in Turkish territory, and of Greek nationals of the Moslem religion established in Greek territory.” In the months that followed, 1.6 million people were displaced across the dying empire, many from communities that had never seen sectarian conflict.
Forcible population transfer was not a novel phenomenon. Encouraged by Europe’s Christian great powers, for almost a century Christian nationalist movements had sloughed off Ottoman rule in southeastern Europe and purged their countries of their Muslim past. Russia, Bulgaria, Macedonia, and Greece killed and expelled hundreds of thousands of Muslims, as if revisiting Spain’s Reconquista on southeastern Europe. But Nansen was the first to achieve diplomatically what others had achieved by war, and give the transformation of the Ottoman Empire’s heterogeneous society into homogeneous societies an international stamp of approval. George Curzon, who as Britain’s foreign secretary was one of the key negotiators, hailed “the advantages which would ultimately accrue to both countries from a greater homogeneity of population,” and set about unmixing and partitioning Britain’s other colonies along similar lines. The British government partitioned first Jerusalem—in which under Ottoman rule Muslims, Christians, and Jews all mingled together—into separate religious quarters, and then Palestine itself.
Communal segregation had ancient roots. From the outset, Ottoman sultans had administered their diverse empire on sectarian lines, devolving authority to the leaders of their multiple faith communities, or millets. Patriarchs, chief rabbis, and Muslim clerics headed semi-autonomous theocracies that applied religious laws. But while the millets governed their respective co-religionists, they had no power over land. The empire’s many millets shared the same towns and villages with other millets. There were no ghettoes or confessional enclaves. Territorially, the powers of their respective leaders overlapped. I have called this system of overlapping religious powers milletocracy.
The unmixing of sects that the Lausanne Convention propagated in the Near East triggered a century of wars designed to turn holy communities into holy lands. Millet fought and evicted millet in the struggle to create gerrymandered enclaves that turned religious minorities into majorities. Across the region, a heterogeneous population was subject to attempts to sift, order, and refashion it as a patchwork of homogeneous ones. Far from delivering the pacification Nansen promised, the process has resulted in an ongoing program of secticide, or milleticide, which, as the Financial Times’s stark headline recorded, has only intensified over time.
Where religion under the Ottomans had been inclusive and at ease side by side other faiths, boxed inside borders its xenophobic and intolerant traits came to the fore. The faith community acquired the attributes and trappings of a nation-state. Defense of the land took precedence over universal values. Service in the military became the supreme expression of loyalty to the community. The new leaders, who were generals, not men of religion, highlighted the martial, nationalist, and exclusive aspects of their tradition. Some dismissed religious precepts altogether and fashioned a secular sectarianism. The millets of the Ottoman Empire mutated into truncated land cults that regarded other millets suspiciously as existential challenges.
Thus transformed, the region’s millets proved as ruthless as contemporary jihadis. The generals of the Young Turks eradicated the Armenian millet in Eastern Anatolia and the Greek Orthodox millet in the west. Jewish nationalists extirpated 85 percent of Palestine’s Muslim millet, and then erased their memory by relandscaping what for centuries had been a multi-cultural land. Arab nationalist leaders in return expelled all but a smattering of their ancient Jewish millet. In the latest chapter of milleticide, the Islamic State has homogenized the core of the region whose mosaic of Yazidis, Assyrian Christians, and Shia Muslims Islam had preserved for 1,400 years.
Holy Lands explores the prospects for countering the territorial exclusivism that has seeped in from Europe and reviving the region’s indigenous norms. Rather than look to external mechanisms for conflict resolution, it seeks to find remedies innate to the region. The first part maps the
