In part one the factual history of the decline and fall of modern Muslim empires, countries and dictators was described. This article will try to explain why that happened and why the Islamic regimes, whether the Ottoman Turks, the Egyptians, Libyans, Jordanians, Syrians, Iraqis, Pakistanis, Lebanese, and now the Iranians, are such political and military losers on the international stage.
The first thing to know about the recent history of the Islamic Middle East is that for hundreds of years it was dominated by the Islamic Ottoman Empire. It was Sunni Muslim Turks who dominated and subjugated the mostly Sunni Arabs of the Middle East all the way from Libya, Egypt to Palestine, Mesopotamia and the Arabian Peninsula.
The Ottoman Empire lasted for just over six hundred years before it was dissolved in 1922. For over four hundred years, from 1516 to 1917 the Islamic Ottoman Empire ruled the Jewish homeland of Eretz Yisrael until it was taken over by the British and then finally returned to the Jews in 1947.
The Ottoman Turks despised the Arabs that they ruled with an iron fist. A mentality of subjugation to the Turks set in all over the Arab world. The Ottoman Turks tied their fate to the losing Central Powers during World War One (1914-1918) and as a result the Turks lost their caliphate to the British and French. However, the Islamic Turkish Ottoman empire was dubbed the "sick man of Europe" as it was already rotting and falling apart and losing its backbone before World War One even broke out. Like a rotting structure, all that was needed was to kick in the depleted door and it was to fall, something that the British eventually accomplished.
In the aftermath of WWI, the British and the French decided that the new Arab Islamic regimes should be ruled by Emirs, Sheiks and Kings who would be subservient to the directions of the British and the French governments. Therefore Egypt, Jordan, Iraq and Syria got Arab kings. In Arabia the Americans pushed out the British and supported their own candidates for a King from the house of Saud, hence the birth of Saudi Arabia.
Virtually all these newly established monarchies were eventually overtaken by military dictators who succumbed to their own megalomania, power hungriness and delusions of grandeur.
In Egypt, King Farouk (1920-1965) was overthrown in a coup d'état by the Egyptian army. From this debacle arose the Egyptian dictator Colonel Gamal Nasser (1918-1970) who formed an alliance with the Soviet Union and was obsessed with waging war with Israel, allowing Egypt to be used as a base of terrorism against Israel and Israelis. Nasser was a delusional megalomaniac and his vision of destroying the Jewish state was shared by his successor Anwar Sadat (1918-1981) who launched the 1973 Yom Kippur War against Israel.
These dictators did not develop Egypt's political or economic systems, keeping all power close to their chests and they themselves were corrupted by that power. They fancied themselves latter Islamic warlords and warriors fighting for the pan Arab cause, aiming for the destruction of Israel. You can't build a country, let alone a civilization on such narrow, despotic and cruel foundations.
With the end of the First World War in 1918, the British set up the Arab Kingdom of Syria headed by King Faisal I (1885-1933) in 1920. Faisal was expelled by the French who took control of Syria and he went on to become the King of Iraq. The colonial French powers tried to implement various types of governments but basically the political situation in Syria was always unstable and after Syria's independence from France, the Syrian army took control. The French ruled as the Mandate for Syria and Lebanon until 1946 after which a hodgepodge of Syrian governments, rulers, dictators took power and vied for control that continued with the 1963 coup d'état that brought the Assad dictators to power. They ruled until their overthrow in 2024/5.
From the time the Ottoman Turks lost control of Syria in 1917 until the present time, Syria has never known political stability, always falling under the powers of warmongers against Israel and persecutors of their own people in inter-clan and internecine struggles.
After the defeat and expulsion of the Ottoman Turks as a result of the First World War (1914- 1918), Mesopotamia, also known as Iraq, was under British domination. Three successive Arab Kings ruled it: King Faisal I (1885- 1933); King Ghazi (1912-1939); King Faisal II (1935-1958) the last of whom was assassinated and overthrown in a coup d'état that resulted in a series of military juntas and dictators. The worst of these was also the last one, Saddam Hussein (1937-2006), who was overthrown by the United States.
They were driven by a relentless hatred of Israel and antisemtism towards Jews. Like Egypt and Syria under dictatorial rule, Iraq adopted a so-called Baathist ideology that mingled Islam with Socialism, striving to arm themselves to the teeth in the delusional struggle to dominate their neighbors and to ultimately conquer the Jewish state of Israel, while their own population languished in dire poverty.
Libya was ruled by the Turkish Ottoman empire from 1551 to 1912 when it passed into the control of Italy. Italy colonized Libya from 1911 until 1943 when it was liberated by the British during the Second World War (1933-1945). From 1951 to 1969 Libya was ruled by King Idris (1890-1983) who was then overthrown in a coup d'état by Colonel Muamar Gaddafi (1942-2011) who was backed by Egyptian dictator Colonel Abdul Nasser. Gaddafi became notorious as a chief backer of international terrorism and in particular for his obsession with defeating the state of Israel.
When the British pulled out of their "crown jewel" colony in 1947 in the non Arab Indian subcontinent, they divided it between mainly Hindu India and predominantly Muslim Pakistan. That split in and of itself is estimated to have resulted in the deaths of at least one million Hindus and Muslims who died in the bloody "crossfire," as the partition of the Indian subcontinent was done in a decidedly non-surgical manner.
India, a majority Hindu nation, has been able to continue with the British democratic and parliamentary system keeping its democracy alive, Pakistan has drifted in and out of military coup d'états and dictatorships ruled under martial law.
In 1956 Pakistan renamed itself the Islamic Republic of Pakistan, but the first elections were only held in 1970 after which civil war broke out. Next came the intervention of India with the Indo-Pakistan war of 1971 that resulted in the secession of Eastern Pakistan, now Bangladesh. Bellicosity and war cannot build a stable nationhood.
The brief above histories of five examples of leading modern Islamic countries, Egypt, Syria, Iraq, Libya, Pakistan reveal an identical pattern:
After hundreds of years of colonial and imperial rule and control by foreign powers, whether the Ottoman Turks (who themselves were a corrupted and a depleted "has been" Islamic empire), or under the latter day British, French and even Italian rule, one sees that the modern colonial powers tried mainly to establish Islamic monarchies for the Arab countries and a parliamentary system for Pakistan.
This in itself was perhaps not such a bad idea, as one sees that the so-called (relatively) "moderate" Arab Islamic states of Saudi Arabia, Morocco, Jordan and the mini-Gulf states run by sheiks and emirs have withstood the test of time. Still, in terms of modern political systems they are archaic countries that hark back to the Feudal System of the Middle Ages and ancient times since they have refused to democratize and modernize politically.
What emerges from a hazy desert mirage-like image is a picture of Arab and non-Arab Islamic countries of having no concept of an egalitarian system of government "of the people, for the people and by the people." As sure as night follows the dusk, with no political, social or psychological mechanism of accountability to follow and care for the people they rule, Arab governments are by and large authoritarian and sink easily into dictatorships and rule by military strong men and dictators. Their generally Islamic populations accept this state of affairs as "normal" and if anyone dares to think differently they are treated harshly and eliminated.
Now comes the case of Iran, also known as Persia, a non-Arab and non-Indian people but nevertheless fanatically Muslim. Iran shares the fate of the other Islamic nations in that in spite of having its own long history, in modern times it was under the thumb of British and American hegemony.
Iran has never been truly democratized. From 1925 to 1979 it was ruled by the Shahs of the Pahlavi Dynasty who were basically autocratic kings. Mohammad Reza Pahlavi (1919-1980) was the last Shah of Iran until he was overthrown by the Islamic Iranian Revolution of 1979 that was led by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini (1900-1989) who in turn was succeeded by Ayatollah Ali Khamenei (b. 1939). The Ayatollahs have ruled Iran with iron fists as the supreme leaders of Iran since 1979.
These Islamic states veer from subjugation to imperialistic and colonial control towards rule by absolute monarchs who are rigid and fossilized in their political conceptions. They are often in turn overthrown by military people or ideological and fundamentalist fanatics, or all of the above, who brook no nonsense and continue with the only form of rulership that those cultures know. They then tend towards extreme militarism, threatening their neighbors and instigating wars, spending their countries' financial fortunes on weapons and denying their people the benefits of their countries' wealth.
Above all of this, they are all rabid antisemites and have delusions of grandeur about how they can try to wipe out the Jewish state of Israel and the Jewish people, something they keep on failing to do (instead of benefitting from their thriving Jewish neighbor). As Albert Einstein famously said: “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result”!
Rabbi Yitschak Rudomin was born to Holocaust survivor parents in Israel, grew up in South Africa, and lives in Brooklyn, NY. He is an alumnus of Yeshiva Rabbi Chaim Berlin and of Teachers College-Columbia University. He heads the Jewish Professionals Institute dedicated to Jewish Adult Education and Outreach - Kiruv Rechokim. He was the Director of the Belzer Chasidim's Sinai Heritage Center of Manhattan 1988-1995, a Trustee of AJOP 1994-1997 and founder of American Friends of South African Jewish Education 1995-2015. From 2017-2024 he was a docent and tour guide at The Museum of Jewish Heritage - A Living Memorial to the Holocaust in Downtown Manhattan, New York. He is the author of The Second World War and Jewish Education in America: The Fall and Rise of Orthodoxy. Contact Rabbi Yitschak Rudomin at izakrudomin@gmail.com