Away from Chaos: The Middle East and the Challenge to the West

This book was originally published in French in 2018 under a slightly different title: Sortir du chaos: Les crises en Méditerranée et au Moyen-Orient (Away from Chaos: Crises in the Mediterranean and the Middle East), and the original title is really more appropriate, as the book is nearly all about the crises, not the challenge to the West. In the French original, the challenge was not even to the West but rather to Europe; it was explained at the end of the introduction that declining American engagement means that Europe must “shoulder its obligations,” especially with regard to the Levant, the nexus between Europe and the Middle East. In the English translation, the Levant becomes the nexus “between Europe, the West [my emphasis] and the Middle East” (8). What those obligations are, we discover at the end of the book.Away from Chaos is really a political history of the Middle East and the Levant since the 1973 War. It is arranged chronologically, and the first two parts, Kepel writes, draw on several of his earlier books. Part I covers the 1973 War to the Arab Spring relatively quickly, in four chapters. Then the pace slows, and part II covers the end of the Arab Spring to the fall of ISIS in three chapters, with part III bringing us to late 2019 in another three chapters.The book assumes no prior knowledge of the history of the region, and part I provides the necessary background for parts II and III. Chapter 1 goes back to the Suez crisis, when a tripartite Anglo-French-Israeli force invaded Egypt and “had to withdraw under international pressure” (or, in French, under “American and Soviet pressure”) to the Afghan jihad. Chapter 2 covers both early jihads in the Middle East and early conflicts in Europe, on which Kepel is an authority. The last Soviet forces left Afghanistan in February 1989, the same month in which Ayatollah Khomeini issued the Rushdie fatwa, as Kepel reminds us. This set the scene for the murder of Theo van Gogh (2004), the Danish cartoon crisis (2005), and the Charlie Hebdo attack (2015). Then came the Iran–Iraq war, troubles in Lebanon, the rise of Hamas, and the refusal of three Muslim girls in a French school to remove their veils. All these are understood as cases of Islamization. There is also mention of the Enlightenment. This is, of course, one way that these events are seen in France. Then comes the Algerian Civil War, the invasion of Kuwait, and Bosnia. Chapter 3 covers al-Qaʿida and, more briefly, the American Neo-Conservative response, and a short fourth chapter completes this part.Part II tells in considerable detail the story of the Arab Spring and subsequent events in Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya, the three countries where the old regime fell, and then in Bahrain, Yemen, and Syria, the three countries where a Sunni–Shiʿi dynamic proved decisive. These stories are sometimes illuminated by reference to discussions that Kepel himself had with leading figures at the time, for example with an Egyptian general who revealed in advance the army’s strategy of allowing the Muslim Brothers to take power in the expectation that they would then discredit themselves sufficiently for the army to reassert control. Kepel writes that he did not take this very seriously at the time, but a year and a half later, this is exactly what happened.Kepel makes an interesting comparison between the Tunisian and Egyptian experiences. One factor, he suggests, is that the Tunisian middle classes were stronger than the Egyptian middle classes, which failed to connect with the Egyptian poor. Then there was the “grip in which the Brothers and the generals had Egyptian society, which prevented the revolutionaries from moving on to erect democratic institutions” (148–49), itself the consequence of the Egyptian demographic explosion and consequent extreme poverty and dependence on foreign aid, provided by parties that valued stability above all. He also observes, writing just before the extinction of Tunisian democratic institutions at the hands of Kais Saied, that “Europe has a vital interest in sustaining Tunisian democratization by seeing it become better integrated in the northwest Mediterranean prosperity zone” (169). Sadly, this is one thing that Europe never did. Otherwise, Europe is largely absent from these later chapters.Part II ends with the fall of ISIS, and part III then brings the story of events mostly up to date, from the Saudi–Qatari spilt and recent events in Iraq, Syria, and Iran involving Turkey, Russia, Israel, Qatar, and the UAE, to the policies of President Trump.In the book’s conclusion, Kepel returns to Europe, which, he writes, has been affected by the aftermath of 9/11 with millions of refugees crossing the Mediterranean and producing “a populist reaction by the extreme right” and “the temptation of a return to totalitarianism” (320). All is not just chaos, however. There are some important new developments. The oil wealth that financed much of what has happened since the 1973 War, including ISIS, is not going to last that much longer with shifts toward other energy sources. Saudi Arabia is trying to change as a result, but authoritarianism is not good for entrepreneurship. Even without Saudi support, Salafism still thrives on the internet, and the Islamist alternative to democracy is not going to go away either. Given all this, the obligation that Europe must shoulder (in the language of the introduction, which is not actually used again here) is to reach “a consensus between Russia and the Western countries as . . . the keystone for a virtuous reinsertion of the entire Middle East into the world order” (324). In late 2019, when Kepel finished the book, no one expected the new turn in Russian–Western relations that followed the Russian invasion of Ukraine. A grand settlement in the Middle East still seems far away, and previous attempts by outsiders at grand settlements do not provide encouraging precedents.Away from Chaos provides a comprehensive and detailed political history of the contemporary Middle East. As such, it will be particularly useful to the new generation of students, which did not live through these events. Time passes quickly, and the Arab Spring happened when today’s (2024) eighteen-year-olds were five. The book has three issues, however. One is that it is sometimes excessively detailed, which may make it difficult to see the forest for the trees. The second issue is that it is short on analysis. There is some analysis, including the interesting comparison between Tunisia and Egypt mentioned above, but not enough. And, thirdly, much of what analysis there is consists of a simple binary pitting Islamism and/or Salafism against democracy and, it seems to be implied, reason. Even when some attention is paid to Egypt’s underlying economic and demographic problems, for example, Islamism is also blamed, since “Islamic proselytizing . . . encourages unbridled reproduction, seeing in it the promise of armies of jihadist soldiers that would swamp the world” (139). Islamism and Salafism certainly matter, although I am not sure how much influence they really have on the Egyptian birth rate, but there are many other factors that matter as well, and more attention to them would have produced a more nuanced and more informative understanding of recent events in the Middle East. Chaos is random, and the Middle East only seems chaotic when we fail to understand it. We should probably not blame Kepel for the title, however, as the book was originally published by Gallimard, a mainstream French publisher, and was evidently written for a mainstream audience. The general public in France, as in many other countries, certainly tends to see the Middle East as chaotic. In fact, it just needs to be better understood.