The Arab world faces a spectrum of different possible futures after a transitional period of 15 years.
The past 15 years of Arab history will be remembered as a transitional period.
What happened before it could be seen as a stalemate in which many in the elite of Arab politics had sought to maintain the status quo at all costs, only to reap the results of doing so when change uprooted their regimes and in many cases shattered the networks that had sustained their power.
Yet, the promise that came with such change also quickly disappeared, and large sections of the Arabs were left with crushed dreams. Many had to flee their homes to build futures in far-flung places.
As this series of articles has aimed to show, the past 15 years brought some achievements and many failures. But transitions are, by definition, transient. They ought to lead the societies undergoing them to new destinations. Amidst the few achievements, many defeats, and various challenges that the Arab world has seen over the past 15 years, we are now looking forward to a spectrum of possible futures.
One future entails the further division of the Arab countries, whether at the periphery or at the core of the Arab world. In optimistic scenarios, such a division could usher in forms of federalism that would maintain some cohesiveness in the national security and sense of identity of the countries concerned. Federalism could, in some cases, spare these societies further infighting, and with time it could become a workable way for them to establish functional political and economic institutions and ways of operation.
In other scenarios, however, some of the Arab countries concerned could witness sharp divisions in which segments of their societies cleave away from others and in the process destroy the national identities that have held them together over the past century and since the fall of the former Ottoman Empire.
In these scenarios, time could wither the commonalities that have held their social groups together. We might see a regression towards the situation that existed in parts of the Arab world centuries ago, in which statelets with narrow identities, often in the fold of Arabness and often against it, became the norm.
This could give rise to a wave of thinking in which minorities, particularly in the wider Levant, see their future as being better served in enclaves and not in large and centralised countries with an overarching Arab identity. Such a situation would be yet another devastating blow to the notion of Arab nationalism, which has in any case been on a weakened trajectory for at least three decades.
In such a scenario, religious factionalism and sectarianism would thrive. The more different communities in the Arab world, especially minorities, take refuge from the threats they perceive in larger identities, the more insular these communities will become and the more sectarianism will be entrenched as the political anchor and frame of reference for them.
If these minorities embrace isolationism and insularity, the same mindset will likely prevail amongst the majority. In this scenario, older or newer forms of Political Islam, as well as of Political Christianity, would return or emerge in different parts of the Arab world, primarily but not only in the wider Levant.
Amidst such factionalism and sectarianism, we could see new versions of coalitions of minorities in the face of headwinds they sense are coming from within the majority. Even within the majority itself, in this scenario we would likely see the return of old distinctions, for example the emergence of new expressions of Political Sunnism and Political Shiism.
The larger Arab countries with more cohesive societies are not threatened by such divisions. But they still face a set of acute challenges, in which the economic and the political float over what appears to be a calm ocean of social consensus. But the social and economic pressures that some of these societies have been subjected to for many years, and the lack of avenues in them for expressing frustration, could make these waters erupt in nasty storms.
In the glamorous centres of the Arab modernisation that is currently taking place largely in the Arabian Peninsula, the future appears to be glittering with potential. Although that glitter could entail gold as well as cheaper metals, what seems to be coming to these societies is more progress and more opportunities.
Yet, greater detachment from the rest of the Arab world, and a search for new forms of identity, especially amidst skewed and diverse demographics, also seem to be on the cards. These societies will have to think carefully about their place in the world, and many in the Gulf might find the model of world cities such as Singapore now and Hong Kong in a previous period inspiring.
But world cities always face the difficult task of creating and maintaining a balance with the larger powers from which they have different interests. This is far from easy, and it is fraught with risks, especially at a time like ours in which global geopolitics are undergoing a radical realignment.
The societies of the Arabian Peninsula have major resources at their disposal, and some of them have demonstrated marvellous agility and shrewdness over the past two decades in dealing with challenges and opportunities in the region and beyond. Yet, these societies might well be forging their futures at a time when many of their segments could be sailing away from the culture to which they have been anchored for centuries.
Whether in the parts of the Arab world that will likely see further polarisation and potential divisions, or in the parts that could witness further socioeconomic challenges, or where the future seems full of potential yet also of large questions about identity and destinations, the Arab countries are constrained by the reach and power of non-Arab actors whose projects have been colliding on their territories.
This situation is the result of an Arab failure, not just over the past 15 years, but also over the past five decades, to create a workable socio-political project in which a majority of the Arab world’s people believe. During those five decades, all the political projects that had once stirred the imaginations of a sizable section of the Arabs have collapsed. And in the resulting vacuum, the Arabs have almost unconsciously abdicated responsibility for their future.
As the Egyptian Nobel Laureate Naguib Mahfouz portrayed this situation in his novel “Adrift on the Nile,” something is dead and perhaps a crime has been committed (in this case against the Arab future), but the onlookers are divided between the bewildered, the perpetrators, the resigned, and the forsaken.
Arab prospects in the foreseeable future need not be like that. As this series of articles has demonstrated, there exist in all parts of the Arab world generators of power, sources of dynamism, real wealth, and a drive amongst large sections of young Arabs to forge a future for themselves and different realities for their societies.
Yet, talk of potential without a serious will for change would be delusional. As a well-known idea in Islamic theology has it, the Divine does not change the conditions of a group of people until they change the conditions within themselves.
Transitions could point towards the Elysian Fields or be the omens of an approaching purgatory in which atonement for long-accumulating sins will be long and painful. Arab collective choices over recent years have put many Arab societies on the route to the latter. Yet, Arab history also includes moments, admittedly rare, in which the Arabs at moments of peril saw the abysses they were approaching and managed to find the will to create different and brighter futures.
* The writer is the author of Islamism: A History of Political Islam (2017) and Egypt on the Brink (2010).
* A version of this article appears in print in the 20 March, 2025 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly
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