“My love is not for places or for lands. My only passion is for the lightning flash,” wrote Ibn Arabi, a philosopher who in 1200 C.E. set out to travel across the war-torn chaos we now call the Middle East. Ibn Arabi’s reaction to the conflicts, fanaticisms, and hatreds of his time was to develop an idea he called “The Absolute”—Wahdat al-wujud, or the unity of being—which combined his own Sufi Islam with other faiths and dreams with such a generosity of spirit that his critics accused him of heterodoxy and heresy. His ideas were complex and often obscure, but today they seem startlingly modern, tolerant, and hopeful.
Journeying from his native kingdom of Murcia, in Islamic Spain, through a Maghreb ruled by revivalist conquerors called the Almohads, to Cairo, Mecca, and Damascus, Ibn Arabi judged people by their worth, not their identity, and ideas by their value, not their origin.
Now as then, the Middle East is a region where wars destroy people, places and civilizations, yet also give rise to auspicious conjunctions and technical ingenuities. As Abu Tamman ibn Aws wrote in his “Ode on the Conquest of Amorium” in 838 C.E., “knowledge sparkles on the tips of lances.” In today’s hurtling, interconnected world, wars are fought in arenas that did not exist just 20 years ago—not only battlefields of men and heavy metal but multiple echelons, some high tech, digital, multimedia, and even intergalactic, others distant, indirect, and improvised, guerrilla-style.
Neat triumphs do not come often, and when they do, they are as transient as the apogees of empires. The consoling superiority of military ingenuity is short-lived: The other side always catches up fast, and many new technologies empower the weaker party against the mighty, granting brave resisters survival and even victory. In what I call iPhone-and-dagger societies, berobed warriors in Toyota pickups can use game consoles to direct drones that doom gleaming million-dollar fighter jets—and may one day sink an aircraft carrier.
In the past quarter century, one of the most important changes in the region has been the rise within it of new great or median powers willing to manipulate the legacy of the European imperial powers that ruled before 1945, and to defy or challenge the superpowers that dominated during the Cold War. The United States, Russia, and China still intervene in the Middle East, but in a manner that is Olympian, erratic, and inconsistent. Behind them lurks a deeper conflict of entire systems: the open world, still (just) led by America, versus the closed world that is the axis of China and Russia. A parallel, simultaneous battle, centered within the Middle East, rages among different versions of, or attitudes toward, the practice of Islam and its complex relationship with the West.
Despite the superpowers’ insatiable appetite for mastery and resources, they are often absent, and the Middle East abhors a vacuum. Yet the region now lacks the type of hegemon that dominated it in the past, such as the Akkadians, Persians, Ottomans, and the Anglo-French.
Regional powers today are ambitious to dominate not just their own neighborhood but lands beyond. In the past 10 years, three of them—Turkey, Iran, and Israel—have come to command the region’s preeminent military forces. Saudi Arabia has taken the place of Egypt as leader of the Sunni world. But paramilitary proxies that live in caves and deploy missiles can hold regional powers at bay—as the Houthis have proved. At the same time, the luxury monarchies of the small Gulf states, some of which were obscure quasi-colonies only a few generations ago, have come to exercise influence and power far beyond the region—in Africa, South Asia, and even Europe and America.
[Thomas Wright: The price of defeat in Iran]
New and seemingly improbable alignments are coming into being under the whoosh of missiles. Perhaps the most extraordinary has been the de facto alliance of Israel and the United Arab Emirates against Iran. Certainly few would have imagined just a decade ago that Israeli units or advisers might be deployed in the Emirates itself—1,400 years after Mohammed defeated the Jewish tribes of Arabia, 1,700 since the Jewish kingdom of Himyar (now Yemen). Pakistani, Egyptian, Iranian, and Ukrainian military contingents now serve in Arabia, marking a convergence of the Middle East theatre with those elsewhere, and increasing the dangers of conflict fusion.
All this expansion and convergence make the very expression Middle East—once defined by a Levantine fulcrum, Ottoman past, Arab culture, and perennially insoluble Israel—Palestine conflict—no longer fit to describe the panorama before us.
Looking back over the past half century, Iran’s Islamic revolution makes 1979 a world-changing epochal moment as significant as 1789 and 1917. One of the curiosities of the modern era is that the non-Arab, Shiite Iranians gave birth to the Sunni Arab movement of radical Islamist-nationalism. But Sunni and Shia have cohabited and intermingled for millennia. The radical doctrine of “resistance”—Muqawama—developed in Beirut in the 1960s, linking Marxism, anti-colonialism, and anti-imperialism to the righteous vanguard of the Palestinian cause. The Iranian revolutionary ideologue Ali Shariati understood that the idiosyncrasies of Shiite doctrine and ritual made it particularly suitable for revolutionary resistance and martyrdom—what he called “Red Shiism.”
One could argue Islam was not so much radicalized after 1979 as revolutionary thought was Islamized. In Muslim societies, Islam is indivisible from politics. The ultimate battle is not between Islam and secularism, the Lebanese economist Nadim Shehadi has written, but between “a liberal Islam allied with the West versus a radical Islam in confrontation with the West.” Iran’s ruling ayatollahs loathed the Gulf Arab monarchies (“the Riyadh camel-grazers,” in Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s words) almost more than they hated America and Israel, because they were the successful model of an alternative, prosperous, and open-minded society.
[Robert Kagan: Iran unleashed]
Some of the Arab monarchies have become citadels of the open version of Islam. But this is a recent, fragile achievement, dependent on particularly inspired leaders in Saudi Arabia and the Emirates—and, since 1991, on a period of safety under American protection that may already be over. The monarchies’ successes derive in part from their nature, the fact that most were not created by European empires or ever fully colonized, and instead developed organically—sometimes at the tip of a sword wielded by swashbuckling warrior kings, such as in Saudi Arabia.
The luxury monarchies rose thanks to a blend of vision, perceived security, the ability of absolute rulers to move quickly, and a bounty of fossil fuels. Oil was not the only factor: Morocco in 2025 overtook South Africa as Africa’s leading industrial economy. The cosmopolitan cultures and mercantile traditions of the Gulf—whose entrepôts always traded with India, Africa, and Europe—produced a measured pragmatism prefigured by Muawiya, the 7th-century Umayyad caliph who ruled the vast Arab empire. “I never apply the sword when the lash suffices,” Muawiya said, “nor the lash when my tongue is enough. If there is even one thread binding me to my fellow man, I do not let it break. If he pulls, I loosen. If he loosens, I pull.” Has the art of politics ever been better expressed?
The past half century, and especially the past two decades, have seen an astonishing increase in the Middle East’s global influence, especially on Washington. In the 1970s, Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Israel maintained legendary lobbies in D.C. Today, the Saudis, the Pakistanis, the Turks, and the Gulf states have curated deep influence—though Israel’s access may be in danger of a precipitous decline. The reach of tiny Qatar all across the Western world is unparalleled.
Yet these are bellicose and unpredictable times. A harsh new realism seems likely to sweep away the structures and traditions of statecraft that have governed the region since the foundation of the Arab League in 1945 and OPEC in 1960, replacing them with multilayered and overlapping security arrangements. Some of the region’s nation-states are in crisis: New states already seem to be emerging from Sudan, Libya, Yemen, and Somalia. Ultimately, new sorts of states, including parastates and federations, with new borders, will likely take shape.
Since October 7 and the Iran war, the luxury monarchies are no longer the peacefully sybaritic domains of influencers, footballers, supermodels, and gangsters, but will have to balance military force against cultural mission in the quest for survival and leverage. They will fear and loathe Iran, but it looms too large, too lethal, and too close to ignore, and they will seek safety in expensively armed accommodation while trying to curate prosperity, secured by overlapping conjunctions between spheres and powers. Both South Asian giants, India and Pakistan, and both Slavic titans, Russia and Ukraine, will likely play larger roles—and even station forces or advisers—in the Middle East in the future as security zones converge. After the war, there will be fewer art galleries and skyscrapers, more drones and Iron Domes. Luxury monarchies will become military monarchies.
America will remain the paramount power and coveted protector. Yet its capricious ambitions, its pomp and plenitude, its abuse of long-standing friendships, its mercurial interventions and angst-driven withdrawals make it an ever less reliable ally. America is big enough to recover from its neo-Tsarist follies, but many Middle Eastern powers will never trust it again. Many states will instead turn to China, which will expand its reach as planetary hegemon through its Belt and Road Initiative, deploying commercial ports, military bases, a global fleet, and alliances with new friends weary of American fecklessness. Not for nothing does Xi Jinping so often laud the Ming Dynasty treasure fleets that visited Hormuz, Oman, and Jeddah under the eunuch admiral Zheng He.
The region’s three preeminent military powers—Turkey, Israel, and Iran—combine force with fragility. Turkish power is restrained and strengthened by NATO membership, U.S. support, and European Union relationships. But President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s survival in power depends on repressing opposition politicians while his economy falters. He regularly heralds neo-Ottoman influence over Syria, Lebanon, and Israel: “Jerusalem will be ours,” he says. Few Arab nations wish to become vassals of a neo-Ottoman “sultanate,” nor do they welcome Erdoğan’s version of the Muslim Brotherhood, and the war he threatens with Israel could ruin Turkey’s Eurasian role.
Israel is even more contradictory—swaggering and insecure, overreaching and underprepared, secular liberal and militaristic messianic, spectacular in tactics, impoverished in strategy. However superior its military, its way of war—overdependent on its peerless, sophisticated air force and secret agency Mossad—has become bombastic and bloody, yet inconclusive. Whoever leads it, Israel has no choice but to defend itself against Iran, its belligerent satraps and their destructive mission. For all its dynamism and eclecticism, Israel is hobbled by its own politics. The Judaic republic could even be wrecked by an intra-Jewish civil war, perhaps triggered by its religious-fascist politicians and overmighty paramilitaries, with their campaign to achieve Jewish supremacy in the West Bank through pogroms against Palestinian civilians.
To thrive, the ingenious Jewish state needs to convert technological talent and military success into creative coexistence and regional alliance. That begins with a pathway to Palestinian self-determination—which requires an Israeli leader capable of reassuring Palestinians that Israelis can envisage a peaceful Palestinian entity on their borders, as well as a pragmatic Palestinian leader capable of persuading Palestinians to accept an outcome that is well short of Israel’s destruction. Indeed, Palestinian leaders would need to accept the reality of the permanent Israeli presence and complete the circle by convincing a majority of Israelis that a shared, peaceful future is possible. All this seems far off after the trauma of October 7 and the Gaza war. Nonetheless it is essential, existential, and still achievable.
No beast in the jungle is so dangerous as a wounded tiger: Iran. With every crisis and every misstep of its enemies, its ruling kernel hardens. Its messianic praetorian oligarchy, now led by veteran generals emboldened by war, will surely reflect that only nuclear arms can safeguard their regime. For now, that regime will survive through a form of geostrategic blackmail paid by America and Arab states. Rearmed by Russia and China, it will pursue its Islamic-resistance mission aided by weakened but lethal proxies. Its real challenges will come after the guns go silent, when it can only maintain itself through barbaric repression. It will subside from within when no one expects it.
The architecture of trade is likely to change as a result of the Iran war. New pipelines that would have reduced the importance of strangle grips like Hormuz and Mandab were never built due to the instability of Iraq and the Levant, and a taboo on running them through Israel. It is now more than possible that the pipelines will be built from the Gulf to Levantine ports and even, if Israel is governed sensibly, to Haifa, just as the British planned in Sykes-Picot back in 1915. In a few years, Hormuz will matter less.
New transcontinental blocs may come into being. A Sunni affinity could include Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan; another could bind together India, Israel, Kazakhstan, Greece, Cyprus, Ethiopia, Somaliland, Bahrain, Morocco and the UAE. The Abraham Accords lost some of their glow after October 7—and more after Iran attacked the Gulf states. But they represent a worldview. An India–Middle East–Mediterranean pathway would make sense for Saudi Arabia and Lebanon, but that would require engaging Israel. Who knows what this month’s election could bring?
The new Arab-Islamic era is also playing out in Western societies. Europe is now home to large, growing, and ever more politically powerful communities of Muslim immigrants and their children. The coming decades will see the political consequences of that influence and the reaction to it. At the same time, a movement of Western activists seeking to influence the fate of the Holy Land has grown so intense and widespread that Israel-Palestine has become a domestic issue in many parts of Europe and North America. This is just the latest chapter in the West’s strange proprietary interest in the Holy Land, which started late in the first millennium after Christ and is still going strong.
Between 1914 and the 2000s, this spirit worked in favor of a Jewish state; in the past 20 years, the same obsession has inverted against it. The emotional, ideological campaign to replace the Judaic republic with a state of Palestine is ostensibly secular but often has the feel of a religious movement, even a crusade.
[Graeme Wood: Israel can’t postpone its reckoning forever]
Simplification is always the enemy of history. Significant parts of the Middle East have long been neglected, if not ignored, by the West. This moral selectivity has been joined by a missionary activism wildly detached from the reality of geopolitics. Yet, again and again, the West has dramatically changed the history of the Holy Land—notably in 1099, 1918, 1947, 1991, 2003, 2026. Today’s activism could influence Europe’s befuddled governments and America’s polarized politics. A deeper irony is that Western Europe, which was chased out of the Middle East during decolonization, may well find itself pushed back in by its own electorates—a new sanctimonious imperialism.
We do not yet know if the post–October 7 wars will mark the end of the jihadist aggression the 1979 revolution fostered—or reinvigorate it with a new legend of Iranian defiance. The Gulf vision of a Muslim society that is directed but tolerant and prosperous is a vibrant rebuke to the Iranian ayatollahs and Hezbollah gunmen who offer only killing and poverty tempered by the promise of paradise. But it requires safety to thrive while its rival revels in mayhem. Which way will triumph? Blood or honey? The choice belongs to the peoples themselves.
Ignorance is the father of righteous certainty, hatred, and slaughter; knowledge is the mother of respect for others, alliance, sharing, and tolerance. Knowledge is an elixir, the antidote to the poisons of supremacy, bigotry, and ignorance. Peace is only possible when a majority in any society hears and accepts the narrative of the others.
“As you conduct your wars,” wrote the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish, “don’t forget those who seek peace.”
Don’t seek “the peace of a ceasefire,” warned the Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai. “Let it come like wildflowers, suddenly the field must have it: wildpeace!” Perhaps we need to let the poets command the armies.
“If only,” wrote Darwish, “I were a candle in the dark.’”
Yet those candles still flicker in Istanbul, Marrakesh, Cairo, Abu Dhabi, Isfahan, Tel Aviv, and Beirut—a golden inheritance that was history’s gift to them alongside the fires of conquest, resistance, and hatred. The mystic Ibn Arabi saw more than just candles in the dark. He saw ‘“that miracle: the garden amidst the flames,” and, traveling through his Middle East of chaos and conflict, left us advice on how to live today: “I follow the religion of Love whatever way Love’s caravans are heading.”
*Sources: Mary Evans / Bridgeman Images; Marwan Naamani / AFP / Getty; Hulton Fine Art Collection / Getty; PHAS / Universal Images / Getty.
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