Islam is a foundational element of the Middle East, influencing its political, social and geopolitical arrangements. Not just faith, but an instrument of identity, power and resistance, it remains central to the region’s present and future.
For the peoples of the Middle East, Islam is not just a religious faith, it is a pivotal element around which both social and political arrangements have developed.
Although all religions have an influence on the societies that profess them, Islam shows itself to be a special case in some respects, forming the very foundation of political authority and institutional legitimacy.
Indeed, in Islam, the distinction between the earthly dimension and the divine sphere tends to blur. Religious law (shari’a), even when interpreted in a secularized form, continues to be perceived as “lowered from heaven to earth”, revealed by God, and thus endowed with a higher authority.
Islam is therefore described as both religion and worldliness, in Arabic din wa dunia: religion is a dimension of the world and the world is justified from the perspective of religion.
This, however, does not imply that religion wants to make itself a state. The Islamic tradition has conceived of political and religious authority as complementary but distinct.
A clear example is the caliphate, one of the central political symbols of classical Islam, the meaning of which is “vicariate.”
The caliph is, according to tradition, the vicar of the Prophet Muhammad, his successor, but only in a political sense. Indeed, he has no religious prerogatives or legislative power: his role is to ensure law enforcement and guide the community in the political and military spheres.
His legitimacy derives from the community itself (ummah), through the mediation of the ulema, the scholars of Islamic law and also responsible for the interpretation and application of sacred texts.
Since its official abolition in 1924 by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk in Türkiye, the figure of the caliphate in Islamic culture has been mythologized to such an extent that it represents the greatness and authority of Islam, thus becoming a mobilizing force: it is the image of a past glory that must be sought to be rebuilt, it is a banner of political vindication.
The crisis of the caliphate was intertwined with the impact of Western modernity and the concepts it brought with it, especially that of the nation-state.
Indeed, Middle Eastern peoples have had to adapt to political-administrative structures and intellectual categories that depend on this concept and yet were born and derived from Western culture.
Indeed, the introduction of the modern state has imposed new categories, such as those of borders, national identities, parliamentary representation and political parties, which have often proved incompatible with Islamic political traditions.
In many Middle Eastern countries, identities continue to be based primarily on ethnic, tribal or religious ties, rather than on a sense of national belonging. This causes political boundaries not to coincide with the actual distribution of populations, generating deep rifts both within individual states and throughout the region.
Clear examples of this are still war-scarred contexts, such as Libya and Syria, where different factions vie for control of central power. However, similar tensions (while not necessarily escalating into armed conflict) are present in almost every country in the Middle East.
The imposition of the nation-state, therefore, has aggravated an already latent political-institutional and ideological crisis that began with the abolition of the caliphate.
Responses to this crisis have been diverse and multifaceted. Some currents sought to combine modernity and tradition through forms of secular nationalism or through broader projects, such as pan-Arabism and pan-Islamism.
Important was the advent of pan-Arabism, a movement born in the post-Ottoman context and strengthened after World War I, which aimed to unify the Arab peoples under a single linguistic and cultural identity.
It found institutional expression in the League of Arab States, founded in 1945.
However, the selfishness of the various peoples and the lack of real political cohesion led to the failure of the initiative, exacerbated by the defeat in the 1967 Six-Day War, which marked the final crisis of the pan-Arab dream.
The failure of these solutions to create a shared sense of belonging and internal fragmentation thus fostered the rise of Islamism, even in radical forms. According to this current, in fact, the failure of nationalist and pan-Arabist projects lay precisely in their detachment from religion and their cultural subjugation to the West.
It was in this context that movements such as the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt (founded in 1928) emerged, which advocated the need to reform society through Islam, but by gradual and institutional means.
In other cases, as with al-Qaeda or ISIS, Islamism has taken the form of violent radicalism, which rejects the international order en bloc and aims at the establishment of a global Islamic state.
To this day, Islam continues to be a central element in the geopolitics of the Middle East. Its centrality is evident in conflict dynamics, in the formation of regional alliances, or, again, in internal divisions within various countries.
In this context, Islam is not limited to being a mere religious doctrine, but represents a strategic lever of internal political legitimacy and external influence, useful in consolidating power and strengthening ethnic, national or regional identities.
In this sense, Islam is not a legacy of the past, but a force that continues to shape the region, representing one of the main levers to guide the future of the Middle East.
