The Turning Point of the Middle East

Towards the end of the 1970s, the left-wing movements were dominant, but also in deep crisis. In Syria and in Iraq, power was seized by a tiny clique, which constantly fragmented in a brutal process of ‘purification'.

However, the crisis of the left took place while the Middle East was still in a revolutionary moment, a fact that differentiated it from many other parts of the world. In spite of the Sandinista revolution of 1979 and the following civil wars in Latin America, the 1980s represented the years of world-wide de- radicalisation. In Europe, for instance, the left-wing movements which advocated violence lost all credibility after the murder of the former Italian prime minister Aldo Moro in 1978. In the Middle East, in contrast, the revolutionary and ‘anti-imperialist' passions were still alive, but could not be satisfied any longer by left-wing discourse and mobilisation.

The major events which took place in 1979 were in no way related to each other. Recognition of Israel by Egypt was the outcome of a long process of rapprochement between Cairo and Washington. This act of ‘betrayal' to the ‘resistance front' was a deadly blow to ‘Arab socialism'. The occupation of Afghanistan by the Soviet Army, which had more to do with internal conflicts within the pro-Soviet regime of Hafizullah Amin than with world-wide geopo­litical competition, created the feeling that Moscow was taking the path of the Western capitals as a new imperialist force. In contrast, the occupation of the Ka'ba in Mecca by a small Islamist group led by a Mahdist figure called Juhayman al-Otaybi (executed in 1980) seemed to suggest that Sunni Islam, which was represented until then as a regional pawn of Washington, could in reality have strong revolutionary and anti-Western potential. As far as the most dramatic event of the year, the Iranian revolution, was concerned, it was the outcome of a year-long contest, tremendously reinforced by the participation of the Shia clergy and the bazaris. The involvement of these strata transformed the revolution into an extremely radical and yet ultra-conservative one.

These events were totally disconnected from each other, but in a context in which the left was losing ground, they could easily interact and project Islamism onto the new revolutionary horizon. The assassination of President al-Sadat in Egypt in 1981 and the Islamist uprising of Hama in Syria the following year¹¹ were at once consequences and new manifestations of a region-wide radical Islamism. More importantly, through its prolongation via the Iran-Iraq War, the Afghan jihad and the Lebanese civil war, reconfi­gured by Iranian involvement in the Lebanese Shia community, the year 1979 produced some long-lasting effects.

These three wars, and state coercion in countries such Iraq and Syria, which reached an unprecedented level,^{[179] [180]} claimed more than a million lives and provoked the internal and external displacement of many other millions. The Palestinian camps in the Middle East, which were an exception in the world of the 195os-197os, became a model for other refugee communities. As importantly, in contrast to the 1967 and 1973 Yom Kippur wars, during these new wars the violence of regular armies and security forces and the violence of non-state actors widely interacted throughout the region. The first con­sequence of this evolution was the organisation of a military transhumance from many parts of the Arab countries to Peshawar and/or the Afghan front. In fact, the Afghan War gave birth to a dark romanticism, attracting some 35,000 young men from different geographical, sociological and economic backgrounds. Some of these militants (Bin Laden, the very wealthy Zawahiri and the very poor al-Zarkawi, al-Suri, al-Libyi, etc.) remained active until around 2010. The second consequence was that the frontiers, which accord­ing to the 1648 Westphalian model constituted ‘bordered power containers’,^[181] were transformed into zones producing violence. The Islamist actors were not the only ones to take part in this evolution: Palestinian organisations, Kurdish fighters from Iran, Iraq and Turkey, Iranian opposition groups or Iraqi Shia movements were also involved, both in the armed transhumance of this period and in the production of border-area violence.

One of the most important outcomes of the post-1979 evolution in the region was that Peshawar and Teheran imposed themselves as Sunni and Shia ‘model-producers' for almost the entire Arab world - and well beyond - at the expense of other models, be they Western, Soviet or Arab ones. The previous left-wing references vanished almost totally in the region, the former ‘Tri-Continental region' making way for a narrowed but still highly hypothetical Islamic universalism. The generation of Arafat and Leyla Khaled, the well-known Palestinian hijacker, and Nasser, al-Assad and Saddam Hussein, marked the emergence of young militants who had a military-virile body language redolent of ‘oldness' and the past. In contrast, the new generations of militants found their leaders in the old figures such as Ayatollah Khomeini, who was 80 when the Iranian revolution took place, and later on the Palestinian Sheikh Yassin (1937-2004). Living proofs of authenticity and loyalty to the sacred causes, these new leaders called on the generation of their grandchildren to accomplish sacrificial and self- sacrificial forms of violence to keep the ‘cause' alive.