Can the Arab World Survive Until 2079?

In 1979, two events took place which shook the Middle East to its core and still reverberate today.  The first of course was the Iranian revolution.  This swept out the authoritarian, often brutal pro-Western Shah of Iran and replaced it with the fundamentalist Islamic regime currently led by supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.  Perhaps though the more important event was the takeover by fundamentalist Islamic radicals of the Grand Mosque in Mecca.  On November 20, 1979, approximately 600 militants seized control over Islam’s holiest site, claiming that they were fighting against a Saudi regime that had introduced secularism into the Islamic world.  They demanded that Saudi Arabia return to its fundamentalist Islamic roots.  The siege lasted until December 4, 1979 when Saudi troops stormed the Mosque, gassing and killing many of the militants including its leader, Muhammad Abdullah al-Quahtani.

In response to the siege, Saudi King Faisal imposed stricter Islamic rule into the kingdom, including giving the Saudi religious police more authority.  45 years later, that return to fundamentalist Islam has reshaped not only Saudi Arabia but indeed the entire Arab world, as well as much of the broader Islamic world. While most of the world races into the future, the Arab world often appears obsessed with returning to the past.

Nowhere is this truer than in the treatment of women.  While Western nations have numerous issues with China, in both the West and the East there is a rush to educate their populations so that they can compete in a world of rapidly changing technology.  Indeed in the United States institutions of higher learning are regularly flooded with applications from Chinese nationals, including many women.  That clearly is not the case in the Arab world.   Just this year the Taliban in Afghanistan banned the showing of a woman’s face in public as well as even banning the sound of her voice.  Earlier the Taliban had banned women getting an education.  In Iraq, a draft law would make it legal to marry a girl as young as nine years old.

Given the importance of technology, how long can societies exist that exclude over half of their available human capital?  If the last two weeks are any indication, the answer is not long.  For twenty years Iran has been arming and training Hezbollah’s military wing.  Observers believed that it now was a formidable foe to Israel, one that the Jewish state would be reluctant to attack as Hezbollah’s arsenal could cause enormous damage to Israel.

That still might prove to be the case, but in just two weeks Israel has completely decapitated Hezbollah and compromised its communications.  Hezbollah fighters remain heavily armed but at this point appear capable only of acting independently without substantial coordination.  That can cause damage to a foe but cannot truly threaten it.

The impacts of this overpowering influence of a medieval religious creed are astounding.  Arab expatriates in the West are remarkably successful.  Some of the most important people in the world of technology (Steve Jobs), finance (Muhammad el-Arian), music (Freddy Mercury) and other forms of endeavor have been or are of Arab descent.  And yet the societies in their ancestral homes seem to do anything to prevent their talents from flourishing.  In the history of the Nobel Prizes, only 13 have ever been awarded to citizens of Arab countries.  Citizens of Israel alone have won 13.

In a world where the most powerful axes each are moving rapidly forward, it is difficult to see how the Arab world survives moving in the other direction.  At some point the vital interests of either the East or the West are going to collide with the Arab world.  Should such a conflict arise, the Arab world will have no chance.  For the last year the Arab world has embarked on an almost unprecedented propaganda and military offensive against Israel in light of October 7.  This has succeeded in increasing international antisemitism and isolating Israel in the world community, but has done nothing to benefit the Arab world.  Gaza is destroyed, Lebanon appears on its way to the same fate, the Houthis in Yemen are being heavily bombed, perhaps 41,000 residents of Gaza are dead, Hezbollah is decimated.  What exactly does the Arab world have to show for the last year?  Indeed, what does it have to show for the last 76 years?

It is possible that the psychological shock of the decimation of the Hezbollah leaders over the last two weeks will results in a reevaluation in the Arab world of its social structure.  That would be a good thing.  If that doesn’t happen, the future of the Arab world is quite dim. and getting progressively dimmer.  The fire lit by the siege of the Grand Mosque in 1979 may be extinguished long before it observes in centennial in 2079.