by Efraim Karsh
About the author: Efraim Karsh is a professor and director of Mediterranean studies at King's College at the University of London. He is a coauthor of Empires of the Sand: The Struggle for Mastery in the Middle East.
Since its formation in the wake of World War I, the contemporary Middle Eastern system based on territorial states has been under sustained assault. In past years, the foremost challenge to this system came from the doctrine of pan- Arabism (or qawmiya), which sought to “eliminate the traces of Western imperialism” and unify the “Arab nation,” and the associated ideology of Greater Syria (or Suriya al-Kubra), which stresses the territorial and historical indivisibility of most of the Fertile Crescent. Today, the leading challenge comes from Islamist notions of a single Muslim community (the umma). Intellectuals and politicians, denouncing the current system as an artificial creation of Western imperialism.....
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