Dreams and Shadows: The Future of the Middle East Read Online Free

and the Arabs originated. It includes the cosmopolitan cities of new Beirut and old Damascus. It includes Palestinians who have lived more than a half century in squalid refugee camps as well as Gulf princes who own multiple palaces because of oil found under the desert sands. It includes the desert-dwelling Berbers and Bedouin nomads who roam with their camel-hair tents across the Sahara, the Sinai, and the vast expanses of Arabia. And it includes Kurds, who are the world’s largest minority without a state. Although they are not Arabs, they have significant numbers in Iraq, Iran, Syria, and Turkey.
    Political starting points vary just as deeply. Saudi Arabia has strict Sunni religious rule, while Iran is a Shiite-dominated Islamic republic with a constitution that draws on European law. Syria and Libya are secular states based on socialist ideologies. Kuwait, Jordan, and Morocco are still ruled by traditional monarchies.
    The range of freedoms is reflected in the region’s fashions: In Arabia, the national dress for men is the traditional loose-fitting white thobe, which looks like a shirt that extends to the ankles; for women in public, it is a shapeless black cloak with four layers of black veils. In contrast, Lebanese men can wear tight Speedo briefs on mixed-gender beaches, while many women favor whatever fashion is the sassiest, flashiest, or skimpiest.
    Economically, the peoples of the Middle East also have vastly different resources as tools for a transition. The region includes the earth’s richest nations, like glitzy Qatar, the tiny thumb off Saudi Arabia’s eastern coast that sits atop the world’s largest field of natural gas and has a per-capita income of $38,000. On the other extreme is exotic but densely populated Yemen on Saudi Arabia’s southern border, where the per capita income is a mere $500.
    The broader Middle East is not even a single geographic unit. The two dozen nations spread from northern Africa to western Asia. They stretch from Morocco on the Atlantic Ocean to Lebanon and Syria on the Mediterranean, from Egypt and Yemen on opposite sides of the Red Sea, to Iraq and Iran at the top of the Persian Gulf and Oman at its mouth. The region spans four time zones and 4,000 miles from east to west.
    Languages differ too. Using French and English, I once translated between Moroccans and Saudis who could not understand each other’s Arabic. Most Iranians speak Farsi and haughtily note their Indo-European rather than Arab roots. Kurds have their own language too.
    Although the region is associated with Islam, it is rich with religious minorities. One out of every ten Egyptians is a Coptic Christian. About fifteen percent of the Palestinians belong to disparate Christian faiths. The region is also home to Alawites, Armenian Orthodox and Catholics, Baha’i, Chaldeans, Druze, Greek Orthodox, Maronites, and many others.
    I once visited a fire temple of the Zoroastrians, who worship light as the symbol of a good and omnipotent God. Iran is the world center for the faith founded six centuries before Christianity. As the symbol of light, fires at the altars of their temples have burned continuously for centuries. Zoroastrian ideas about the devil, hell, a future savior, the struggle between good and evil ending with a day of judgment, the resurrection of the dead, and an afterlife had great impact on all monotheistic faiths, and even Buddhism.
    The largest Jewish population in the Middle East outside of Israel is also in Iran, which still has kosher butchers, Jewish schools, synagogues, and a first-rate hospital favored by many of the ayatollahs. In Tehran, I have attended a Hebrew class for children as well as a Catholic service at which wine was served—with government permission, in a country that otherwise outlaws alcohol—as part of communion. Iran’s parliament has five especially reserved (and proportionate) seats for Jews, Christians, and Zoroastrians.
    Because of the region’s diversity,