by Richard Bulliet, Agence Global, September 28, 2009

Iran’s Arab adventure had ostensibly grown from three separate roots, Islamic revolution, Shi‘ite solidarity, and sympathy for the Palestinians. But underlying each of these was a dream dating back to the overthrow of Prime Minister Mossadegh in 1953 — the dream of confronting and confounding American imperial arrogance. Now each of the three roots withered, and confrontation with the Great Satan faded from significance along with them.

The idea of an Islamic revolution leading to an Islamic republic that would reinvigorate the faith and reveal the viciousness of Western stereotypes of Islam had lost steam before the IRI was a decade old. Internal progress had been stifled by eight years of war with Iraq and by factional infighting that sapped governmental innovation and efficiency. Though public discourse of unprecedented vitality flourished after the revolution, other intellectual and philosophical trends superseded the concept of Islamic revolution per se. However, the death knell of constructive Islamic revolution was rung on September 11, 2001 when the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon elevated nihilistic violence in the name of (Sunni) Islam above the dream of creating a model religious state in (Shi‘ite) Iran. Instead of an Islamic republic, the ideologues of the new terrorism called for an autocratic Islamic emirate or an atavistic return to a universal caliphate that had not wielded significant political power for over a thousand years. In response, Islamic political parties everywhere put behind them the idea of an Islamic republic, and with it the Iranian model, and called instead for pluralistic electoral systems in which Islamist parties would be free to run for office, but not free to disempower rival non-religious parties.

The second root of Iran’s Arab policy, justice for the Palestinians, had long been subject to the condition that whatever the Palestinians themselves agreed to by way of a settlement with Israel would be accepted by the Islamic Republic of Iran. Thus the negotiations for a bicommunal state of Israel spelled the end of Iran’s courting of Arab public opinion. When Hamas signed on to the new constitutional order, which did not require it to disavow its rejection of a definitionally Jewish state, Iran had no choice but to go along. And the same was true of Hizbullah, Iran’s Lebanese proxy.

Hizbullah, however, enjoyed Iranian support not just because of its resistance to Israel but also because of its representation of Shi‘ite political claims within the Lebanese system. Throughout the saber-rattling era when the United States and the old Israel strove with all their might to demonize Iran, the specter of an Iran-led Shi‘ite alliance bringing an end to a millennium of Sunni dominance had been deployed unsuccessfully in an effort to persuade Sunni Arab popular opinion that fear of one’s Shi‘ite neighbor took precedence over support for the beleaguered Palestinians.

A geographically strained fantasy had conjured up the specter of the Lebanese Shi‘ite minority, spearheaded by Hizbullah, connecting through Syria (inconveniently a predominantly Sunni country) with a dominant (but not overwhelming) Shi‘ite political establishment in Iraq. When bits and pieces of support in Bahrain and the eastern province of Saudi Arabia were added in, this phantasm was portrayed as becoming potent enough to nullify the overwhelmingly Sunni majorities in Egypt, the Arabian peninsula, Turkey, Jordan, Palestine, and, of course, Syria. This absurdity rested entirely on the notion that an Islamic Republic of Iran armed with nuclear weapons could force the Sunni world to kowtow to the Hidden Imam. Yet no one ever proposed an actual strategy for Iran using nuclear weapons to this end. It was absurd enough to imagine Iran embracing regime suicide by initiating a grossly assymetical nuclear exchange with the old Israel. But Iran bombing Cairo? Riyadh? Abu Dhabi? The notion was ridiculous on its face, which made it doubly ridiculous when Sunni Arab regimes courted American and Israeli favor by saying how greatly they feared Iran’s Shi‘ite juggernaut.

As it turned out, once the Palestinians resolved their issues with the Israelis, Iran accepted their decision, and the appeal of the Islamic Republic to the Arab street began to fade. Without this hook into Arab public opinion, and with an Islamic republican form of government that had failed to impress the Muslim world, shared Shi‘ite belief became a weak rationale for Iran continuing to interfere in Arab political affairs. As for the goal underlying so much of the IRI’s foreign policy, confronting American arrogance, this too waned as American forces executed an orderly withdrawal from Iraq and plans were announced for Arab troops from the new IDF to take on security responsibility for the Arab Gulf. These plans took many years to accomplish in full, but long before then Iran took note of the changing geopolitical climate and executed a momentous turn away from the Middle East.

Ever since the opening of Silk Road trade to China around the third century B.C.E., Iran’s fortunes had depended far more on events taking place to the north and east than on those taking place to the west. Though Alexander the Great had conquered Iran from the west in pre-Silk Road times, and the Arab armies of Islam were to do so again in the seventh century C.E., Iran’s mountainous borders with Iraq and Turkey made it largely invulnerable to conquest from the west. It eastern frontier, however, was porous. Scythians, Hephthalites, Oghuz Turks, Mongols, Uzbeks, and Afghans invaded with comparative ease on different occasions. Similarly, Khazar Turks, Georgians, and Russians periodically threatened from the northwest. For its own part, Iran’s westward military ambitions aimed less at conquest than at protecting the country from Ottoman invasion. But to the north and east, Iran repeatedly sought aggrandizement with powerful monarchs marching again and again into Afghanistan, India, Central Asia, and Georgia.

This military track record was hardly surprising given Iran’s linguistic and ethnic linkages. Persian, the native language of about half of Iran’s population, was closely related to languages spoken in Afghanistan, Tajikistan, and Pakistan while Azerbaijani Turkish, Iran’s second most common tongue, was even more closely related to the languages of Turkey, Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Kazakhstan. By comparison, Arabic speakers in Iran amounted to only three percent of the population, and Persian was nowhere spoken in the Arab lands.

When the term “the Middle East” had become common in both scholarly and popular usage after World War II, Iran had been included as an integral part of the region despite its many dissimilarities. This was because the Cold War division of the world into regions was based on the geopolitics of imperialism more than on language, religion, ethnicity, economics, or geography. For all practical purpose, “The Middle East” was defined as the area to the west of British India, to the east of French North Africa, and to the south of “the Stans,” the Muslim lands incorporated into the Soviet Union. More importantly, it was a region believed to be endangered by Soviet expansion and communist subversion. Iran, in its Shi‘ism, its never having been part of the Ottoman Empire, its relative independence during the post-World War I period when French and British imperialists were humiliating the Arab world, and eventually its Islamic revolution, had little in common with the other countries of the region it was assigned to.

Oil, exceptionally, was a shared preoccupation. But countries that were blessed with sufficient oil reserves to become major exporters had no intrinsic tie to one another beyond a common interest in nationalizing their oil industries and maintaining high levels of production and profit. In these respects, Iran did indeed have interests in common with Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and the Gulf emirates, but also with Venezuela, Indonesia, Mexico, and Nigeria. Oil was not just a Middle East thing.

Iran’s reassessment of its geopolitical situation in response to the progress being made in the Israel-Palestine arena took the form of looking to the east and the north. Russia and China had won Iran’s confidence by protecting it from devastating international sanctions over its nuclear program. India and Pakistan were in dire need of pipeline access to oil and gas from Iran and the Stans. Afghanistan was a serious security concern because of its seemingly endless instability, deeply engrained Taliban animosity toward Shi‘ism, and the flood of opium smuggled across its Iranian border. All of these factors contributed to Iran’s growing orientation toward the countries of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO).

At its outset in 2001, the SCO had brought together Russia, China, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, and Turkmenistan in a series of mutual security agreements. But its perspective had soon expanded to encompass international trade matters, and representatives from Iran, Pakistan, India, and Mongolia began to attend its meetings as observers. With the Chinese, Indian, and to a lesser degree Russian economies among the first to recover from the Great Recession of the Obama years, the idea took hold of consolidating the relations adumbrated by the SCO and thus stealing an economic march on the still languishing European Union and the United States. Russia, China, India, and Iran became the four anchors of a regional bloc that encompassed the world’s most dynamic economies, largest domestic markets, and most abundant untapped sources of minerals and hydrocarbons.

Though Iran was the smallest of the big four, its role was pivotal, as was that of the United States. Building on the trust gained from cooperating in Afghan security matters and in appreciation of Iran’s hands-off policy toward Iraq, the Obama administration had used the carrot of lifting American obstacles to pipeline building to wring from Iran a commitment, subject to verification, to freeze its long-range missile program and never assemble or test a nuclear weapon. The resulting Iranian pipeline ventures from the Caspian region to Pakistan and India brought Iran into the heart of the SCO structure. Though instability continued to be endemic in the ungovernable mountain core of what came to be thought of as Pakghanistan, the new sources of energy and political cooperation helped the Islamabad government recover its equilibrium.

Nevertheless, SCO collaboration fell far short of what was achieved by the EU, with its fifty-year head start. Once through the Great Recession, the Europeans finally agreed to admit Turkey as a member. Twenty years later they admitted Morocco and Tunisia and agreed to candidacy status for Algeria. Behind the opening to North Africa was a growing realization that the grandchildren of the veiled or bearded Muslim immigrants of the late twentieth century had become pretty much indistinguishable from other Europeans, and that North Africa would continue to be the best source of labor for European economies beset by low birth rates and large populations of retirees. Just as Turkey had instituted innumerable reforms to meet the EU’s political, economic, and social standards, so the Moroccans and Tunisians — and more reluctantly the Algerians — opened their political systems and adopted EU-stipulated corrective policies.

As the twenty-first century neared its end, Turkey, Morocco, and Tunisia were firmly a part of the European orbit, and Algeria was headed in the same direction. At the other end of the old Middle East, Iran was firmly a part of the SCO orbit. As for the eastern Arab world, it formed an orbit of its own based on the financial and petroleum resources of the Gulf and the military, commercial, and scientific dynamism of the bicommunal Israeli state. The other Arab states of the region attached themselves as best they could to the Jerusalem-Dubai axis.

Apart from these political transformations, the century also witnessed remarkable changes in the world Islamic community. Iran’s Islamic revolution had proven a false dawn. Though important amendments to the Islamic Republic’s constitution had been made after the death of Ayatollah Khomeini, it took two more rounds of amendments to make the political system workable. The obstructive power of the Guardian Council and various ambiguities concerning the authority of the Governing Religious Jurist were the targets of the reformers. But the intrinsically Shi‘ite character of the Jurist’s role prevented the IRI from being regarded as a model anywhere in the Sunni world.

As for the perpetrators and theoreticians of revolutionary or jihadist violence in the name of Islam, changes in the political arena greatly lessened their appeal to ordinary Muslims. Agreement on a bicommunal Israel not only eliminated the perennial fear of Jewish oppression and expansion, but it also brought to the fore a new generation of influential Arab leaders dedicated to moving beyond the bad old days of war and intifada. Similarly, the American withdrawal from Iraq and plans for a transfer of security responsibility in the Persian Gulf, combined with a reversal of the American commitment to the survival of neo-Mamluk Arab regimes, took the anti-American wind from al-Qaeda’s sails. Militant groups continued to train and operate in remote locales in Pakghanistan, Somalia, and elsewhere, but the tide of violence had clearly begun to ebb by 2025.

New measures to reinstitutionalize religious authority within Sunni Islam contributed as much to rolling back the tide of violence as the more obvious political developments. Authoritarian regimes, some of neo-Mamluk and some of monarchical character, had originally contributed to the decline of Sunni religious authority by forcing conformity on their scholarly Muslim establishments and at the same time educating a new generation of politically aware and technically capable citizens. The resulting loss of respect for the traditional scholarly authorities had made room for a diversity of ambitious Muslims, many of them with only limited expertise in religious matters, to propagate militant views among a discontented public.

The oppressive responses of the authoritarian rulers had fallen heavily on moderates who wanted to accomplish their religiously inspired political programs through electoral and parliamentary means. This rejection of moderation had discouraged many citizens and thereby empowered the violent end of the Islamist political spectrum. The gradual opening of the political systems in the authoritarian states now reversed that process. Moderate Islamist democrats working with some credible hope for success attracted popular followings, and the advocates of violence and revolution lost ground accordingly.

Turkey, Indonesia, and Malaysia led the way in creating fully democratic majority Muslim polities with Morocco, Tunisia, and Algeria following more slowly under the goad of EU accession. As for the Muslim diaspora in Europe and the Americas, new educational and intellectual initiatives fostered firm convictions that minority status in pluralist and structurally secular polities was acceptable according to well-reasoned interpretations of Muslim law and tradition. In an effort to diminish friction between old Islamic intellectual centers, such as Egypt and Saudi Arabia, and the new ideas emerging in diaspora and Asian Muslim communities, the Organization of the Islamic Conference took the lead in organizing new forums for sharing ideas about Islam and identifying areas of consensus and areas where different communities might respectfully agree to disagree.

This diffusion of Muslim religious authority to diaspora, minority, and geographically peripheral (from the point of view of Egypt and Saudi Arabia) communities cannot be considered the final step in the dissolution of the concept of the Middle East because it took place in stages as the more dramatic political changes were taking shape. But it constituted an essential element. Though “the Middle East” of the Cold War era had been constructed in response to the vagaries of western imperialism, there had always been a common sense understanding that the historical center of Islam, including the territories that had once made up the medieval caliphate, had a legitimate claim to being the territorial focus of a worldwide Muslim community. But in the twenty-first century, the Muslim community finally became as global in thought and authority as it long had been in faith.

So the Middle East disappeared. North Africa and Turkey went with Europe. Iran went with Asia. The eastern Arab world revolved around a new axis running from Jerusalem to Dubai. And the world’s Muslims found ways of leading religiously fulfilling lives wherever they happened to live.

Richard Bulliet is Professor of History at Columbia University and author of Islam: The View from the Edge and The Case for Islamo-Christian Civilization.

Copyright © 2009 Richard Bulliet – distributed by Agence Global