The Sheep Feared Only the Wolves

At the moment of slaughter, they understood the shepherd’s knife was no more merciful

By Samir al-Taqi

We need no recourse to Kalila wa-Dimna to sum up the predicament of the nation-state in the Middle East. Read the fable carefully: the wolf is not to be blamed for its greed. The blame lies in what the region’s peoples have become—dazed, drugged by their sectarian loyalties, waiting for the interloper’s knife.

Since 1916, there was an operational consensus in Washington, London, Paris, and Moscow to treat the Sykes-Picot borders—flagrantly artificial as they were—as a red line not to be touched. The struggle was over who would rule, not over the borders themselves. Today, that old consensus is collapsing in the open.

Tom Barrack, the American envoy to Syria and Washington’s ambassador in Ankara, keeps repeating that Sykes-Picot “divided Syria and the wider region for imperial gain, not for peace,” and that “the era of Western intervention is over.” He then adds the crux of his position: that Israel’s borders are not “final,” and that Washington has “the capacity” to act on that view in Lebanon and Syria. And so, though he disguises himself in anti-Western language, he in practice joins the most aggressive of colonial projects, reviving the American Bernard Lewis of 1992 and the Israeli Yinon of 1982.

Now Britain and America—and lately Russia—return to take part together in a fresh division of the Middle Eastern cake.

But wait. It is natural for outsiders to invest in fragility wherever they find it; this is what every great power has done since the Berlin Conference of 1884 carved up Africa with a merciless ruler, and since the mandate system, justified after San Remo in 1920 on the grounds that these peoples were “not ready” to govern themselves—the very logic Lord Cromer used to justify remaining Egypt’s de facto ruler for a quarter century. All of this is to be expected from a player who calculates his interest: energy corridors, regional allies, the balance of deterrence. There is no need for a moral indictment of behavior that is, in essence, the conduct of a state acting under the law of the jungle. This argument cannot be refuted from the outside; it must be refuted in practice from within, by these peoples proving their capacity to produce a state of citizenship.

The graver question: why, after a full century of nominally independent states, does the internal structure remain fragile, hollow, and exposed to every passer-by and invader—offering him a ready and cost-free partner, a local loyalty that identifies with him, giving real momentum to the present schemes to partition the region?

The flaw is the absence of the solidarity of the nation. Ibn Khaldun spoke of the cycle of states, from the solidarity (‘asabiyya) of the tribe to the settled solidarity of a stable nation. Then he described the conduct of the Bedouin: groups drawing their cohesion from the bond of blood, sect, or creed, not from the contract of citizenship—remaining incapable of urban civilization, of the “city-state,” the state of law, production, and taxation. This is precisely what the region reproduces today.

Those criminal regimes spawned by “Arab secularism,” from Saddam Hussein to Assad, were nothing but a bridge over which jihadist solidarity crossed to unleash its savagery at the expense of citizenship and the nation-state.

The jihadist and sectarian movements, in both their Sunni and Shiite branches, took over the reshaping of the region’s flock. They gnaw at the nation-state and hollow it from within, and woe to any state not monopolized by that jihadism: Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Popular Mobilization in Iraq, the Houthis in Yemen; and the Islamist jihadists across the Levant, from al-Qaeda and Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham to the “Islamic State,” all the way to the Muslim Brotherhood and its Palestinian branch, Hamas.

The result is the dismemberment of countries and the entrenchment of a recurring pattern—not passing bad luck, nor a foreign conspiracy: the constitutional sectarian quota system in post-2003 Iraq; the secession of South Sudan in 2011, driven by the North’s insistence on imposing sharia; the Houthi de facto authority that split Yemen in 2014; the Hamas coup in Gaza in 2007; Libya’s partition since 2014; and the sectarianism ablaze across the Levant.

In every case, the solidarity was not a foreign invasion but a local choice, made by the jihadist forces in defense of the interests of warlords, their mafias, and their militias. And now we would have to be blind not to see the creep of ISIS, the “parties of God,” and their kin across every corner of the region.

Here the dialectical synthesis completes itself: it is not the external “enemy” alone who plans, nor is the interior a mere executor—it is a genuine, functional collusion.

But history offers a counter-model too. When Muhammad Ali Pasha, in early nineteenth-century Egypt, tried to build a productive state with a regular army and an industrial economy, he collided with a European coalition that stopped him in 1840—yet he proved that initiative from within is possible, despite attempts to abort it from without. And when Habib Bourguiba in post-independence Tunisia deliberately chose to weaken the religious lodges and tribal solidarities in favor of a secular national state, imposing compulsory education and a civil personal-status law, he built—for all the flaws of his experiment—the closest Arab model of a state founded on citizenship rather than on sub-loyalties.

The difference between Muhammad Ali’s Egypt and Bourguiba’s Tunisia on one side, and the Iraq of quotas, the Lebanon of fragmentation, and the other states of sects on the other, is not a difference in the intentions of outsiders. It is a difference in the decision of the internal elite and oligarchy.

There is therefore no real use in condemning Barrack, or Lewis, or the Russian Dugin, or the Israeli Yinon. But perhaps we may grasp that the American shepherd will not change of his own will; he will only recalculate when the cost of chaos exceeds the benefit of influence. History teaches us this, from Britain’s withdrawal from Aden in 1967 to France’s retreat from Algeria in 1962: the calculations of “shepherds” change when the costs outweigh the gains of influence.

There will be no exit for any of the Middle East’s nations and peoples from this rotten cycle without a collective decision by their civic, non-sectarian majority—of every sect—to pay the price of vaulting over the wall: to reject the logic of appeasing compromise with all the sects and their militias, whatever the cost, however brutal and backward they grow. The logic of tribal solidarity must be warded off and confronted, for all its savagery and backwardness, whatever the price.

Many nations offer the power of example—nations that broke with their bloody past and their foolish solidarities. From Finland to Singapore to the United Arab Emirates, the model of the “productive bourgeois state” has been built: a formal economy set against the parasitic rentier one, where patriotism is measured by production and taxation, with a productive middle class—so that national belonging stands nobler and higher than any other allegiance.

What homeland do we bequeath to our children? Article link https://annah.ar/338519