The Cauldron: The Making of the Modern Middle East

the awakening of the Arab Nation and the latent effort by Jews to reconstitute the ancient Kingdom of Israel.’ They were, he warned, ‘aspirations likely to seriously conflict until one of them wins’.

The sense that the modern Middle East is more ungovernably violent than other regions – for the most part – is a historical illusion. Even today, in times of war, it can always get worse.

Ten beggars can sleep on one rug,’ wrote the Persian poet Saadi Shirazi, ‘but two kings can’t share a country.

Islamism promotes itself as a restoration of ancient purities, but it is very much a modern ideology – like religious Zionism or Evangelical Christianity.

It is perhaps human nature to reduce the recent past to homilies of goodies and baddies but that is not the main task of history.

The most enduring empire since the Romans was the Islamic realm of the Ottomans, who ruled with various levels of splendour, ineptitude, brutality and tolerance, and whose empire ended in racist genocide and total defeat.

the moral vortex of social media, its algorithms and hysterias now themselves a factor in world affairs that is sporadically as powerful as a drone swarm – and oft-

In those years, Arab and Jewish nationalism started to develop together. European visitors raised on the classics reintroduced the names of Roman provinces – Syria and Palestine – which were embraced by Arab intellectuals. The word Palestinian – Filastini – was first used by the Arab short-story writer Khalil Beidas in 1898; in 1911 Issa el-Issa, an Arab Christian, founded a newspaper in Jaffa named Filastin.

It was an extraordinary moment in world history when something – the fall of the Ottoman empire – that had been anticipated for three centuries suddenly happened in three weeks.

Balfour watched ‘three all-powerful, all-ignorant men carving up continents’.

The pantomime of pretending that some of these entities are functioning states leads to a specialised art of international cosplay.

None of the string of Middle Eastern promises would have been made at any other time. Each reflected a particular circumstance in the moment of their promulgation, as the Russian front collapsed in the east and a grinding bloodbath took place at Passchendaele on the Western Front.

is easy to forget that, for four centuries, one of the Great European Powers was Islamic.