Arab nationalism and Islamism have been tremendously destructive forces for Middle Eastern societies. Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser, Syria’s Hafez and Bashar al-Assad, Yemen’s Ali Abdullah Saleh, and Libya’s Muammar Qadhafi each sought to remake their society as paradigms of Arabism at the expense of minorities and the debt of their own history. The same holds true for the Islamism that Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini imposed on Iran beginning in 1979.
Over the past two years, I have spoken to educators, historians, and cultural preservationists from Libya to Oman. They all agreed that the Arabism that has dominated for decades has deprived a younger generation of the mosaic that Middle Eastern and North African countries once took for granted. Yemenis, for example, never learned about the Himyarite Kingdom that flourished in southern Arabia for six centuries, mostly as a Jewish state, until 525 ce when an Ethiopian kingdom conquered the Himyar. While the Houthis embrace the slogan, “Death to America, Death to Israel, Curse the Jews, Victory to Islam,” the irony is that likely all the Houthis have Jewish ancestors.
The Arabism that has dominated for decades has deprived a younger generation of the mosaic that Middle Eastern and North African countries once took for granted.
Nor has there been sustained focus in Oman about the Magan civilization (2300–550 bce) that provided much of the copper to Sumer and the Akkadian Empire, enabling Bronze Age advancement. While Oman is neither Sunni nor Shi’i but Ibadi, an esoteric branch of Islam that dates to debates from the new religion’s first decades, Saudi preachers proselytize to young Omanis, especially in the tribal Dhofar region bordering Yemen. While the late Sultan Qaboos and his cousin and successor Sultan Haitham promote pride in the broad expanse of Omani history, both before and after the arrival of Islam, the education system has yet to catch up. This leaves young Omanis more susceptible to Wahabi propaganda and interpretations.
The same is true in Libya. Today, Libya is among the most conservative societies. Libyan Prime Minister Abdul Hamid Dbeibeh shelters a “grand mufti,” Sheikh Sadiq al-Ghariani, who mirrors the religious interpretations toward women and minorities as the Islamic State. Benghazi, perhaps the most cosmopolitan city in the country, while tolerant towards national and religious minorities, remains socially conservative. Today, Libya has perhaps the best-preserved Roman ruins in the world after Rome itself. Leptis Magna is a UNESCO world heritage site, winning the status when UNESCO was more interested in cultural preservation than politics. Cyrene, in the Green Mountain region of Libya, was almost deserted when I visited last month. While school groups occasionally visit after exams are complete, Libyans traditionally prefer to ignore their historical importance during the Roman Empire. This is self-defeating as it automatically diminishes the country and its sense of place within the Islamic world, especially juxtaposed to Cairo’s Al Azhar and the Great Mosque of Kairouan in Tunisia.
In Afghanistan, the issue is not only ignorance of the pre-Islamic past, but also ignorance of Islamic exegesis that embraced tolerance. Many Afghans recognized the Buddhist heritage of the country. Prior to the Soviet invasion and the country’s descent into decades of civil war, tourists would come to view the sixth-century Bamiyan Buddhas. When the Taliban dynamited them in 2001, they not only destroyed an element of Afghanistan’s pre-Islamic past but also sought to shut the door on centuries of Islamic interpretation and practice that accepted the Buddhas’ presence and saw nothing threatening about that past. The same can be said about the ruins of Palmyra in Syria, whose Greek and Roman ruins are only the tip of the iceberg in a settlement that dates to the neolithic. While the Assad regime was odious, its willingness to embrace and preserve its past kept the Islamist fringe at bay, at least until December 2024.
In Iran, too, popular appreciation for pre-Islamic heritage has had a moderating effect on society, even if not the ruling regime. Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini sought to erase Persia’s pre-Islamic heritage through neglect, if not physical destruction. When I visited Persepolis and nearby Naqsh-e Rostam, I was one of only four tourists at the site that day. While Iranian governments lamented the paucity of tourists visiting the country from whom they could extract hard currency, the Islamic Republic made visiting Persepolis difficult, especially given its symbolic importance for the Iranian monarchy he had overthrown. Khomeini likewise sought but failed to diminish the importance of Nowruz—the pre-Islamic Persian New Year—in society. Even language became a battleground, as the clerics chose Arabic loan words over Old Persian roots in their rhetoric, leading many Iranians to do the opposite to show their resistance to the Islamic Republic. The appreciation of the pre-Islamic past did not blunt the terror of the regime, but it did become a brake on Khomeini’s ability to remake society and gave the public a nationalist identity around which to resist Islamism.
When students learn about religious diversity and tolerance in the golden age of their societies, they may begin to question the losses inherent in religious repression.
Certainly, awareness of the past is not a magic formula. Many countries draw direct links to past empires to bolster their own claims to separate identities and legitimacy, especially given the artificiality of twentieth-century borders. The Lebanese had the Phoenicians, the Kurds had the Medeans, and Iraqi President Saddam Hussein depicted himself as the successor to Babylonian Emperor Nebuchadnezzar II. That linkage did not make Saddam moderate, though, although he did keep religious if not political space open for Christians and Yezidi in society.
Awareness of the past is not a magic formula. It alone will not bring liberalism to the Middle East, but academics in the region are right to lament that a new generation is growing up both blind to the diversity their region once enjoyed and susceptible to simple but false formulas proposed by those who wish to start history only with the rise of the Prophet Muhammad or the invasion of his armies. When students learn about religious diversity and tolerance in the golden age of their societies, they may begin to question the losses inherent in religious repression and question those whose dogmatism is as strong as their historical ignorance.
Every Yemeni should learn about the Himyarites. Every Omani should know about the Magans, and Libyans and Syrians both should learn their role in the Roman Empire. Iraqis from Sulaymani to Sadr City should understand what happened to their society when Arab nationalists and Baathists expelled the Jews, and learn about the falsity of the religious interpretations that the Islamic State used to justify their enslavement and slaughter of Yezidis and Shi’a. Sometimes, regional integration begins not in the present, but in appreciation of the past.
