Worth - A rage for order : the Middle East in turmoil, from Tahrir Square to ISIS

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In memory of Muhammad Abdelmalik al Mutawakel (19422014), whose bravery and wisdom inspired many

On a gray winter evening in late February 2011, I threw my bags into the back of a beat-up minivan in Cairo and climbed inside. I was joining a caravan of reporters and aid workers and ride-along Egyptians headed for Libyas open border. We drove all night under a moonless sky, pulled along like driftwood on the great wave of revolutionary feeling that was crashing on the Arab world in those days.

I had just spent the most thrilling and bewildering weeks of my life in Tahrir Square. To say I had not expected them is ludicrously mild: I would have told you revolution in Egypt was impossible. I had been living in the Middle East on and off for more than seven years, and Cairo was a place that made me almost physically sick with its atmosphere of fatalism and decay. I had gone home to America that Christmas with no plans to return to the region: my tenure as The New York Times s Beirut bureau chief was over. Id seen too many suicide bombings in Iraq, too many assassinations in Lebanon, too many young men and women who lived sad, closeted lives. I thought I knew the Arab world too well to be surprised.

Seven weeks later, all this knowingness was gone. Cairo had proved me wrong again and again. As we drove westward across the Egyptian desert, I had a feeling in my chest I hadnt known since childhood: a sense that the world was being remade before my eyes. Crossing the Libyan border at dawn, I saw graffiti spray-painted in black across the abandoned guard posts: MAY SAFETY BE WITH YOU, SONS OF THE JANUARY 25 REVOLUTION . A long-haired Libyan rebel waved us on, grinning ecstatically. Benghazi, on the road ahead, was in rebel hands. Everyone assumed that Tripoli could not last long. And after that? Yemen, Syria, Saudi Arabia? The dominoes were falling, and the tyrants would soon be gone. What would come afterward was less clear. In that moment, to be cold and reasonable felt almost like treason.

It was impossible to imagine that some of the young Egyptians who were with me on that ride would by years end be fighting each other in Tahrir Square, the revolutions symbolic heart. They would divide into warring camps and ideologies, accusing each other of betraying the revolt that brought them together. Some would end up with ISIS in Syria, sawing the heads off rival soldiers in the name of God. Others would make common cause with the same military leaders they had fought in 2011 and applaud the massacre of more than a thousand Islamists in Cairo in 2013. The Libyans Id met in those early days, so full of hope and laughter, would fragment into hundreds of militias, their country shattered by civil war. The same and worse was in store for many of the young rebels I met in Yemen, Syria, and Tunisia.

Five years after the outbreak of the Arab Spring, its original message appears to have been wholly reversed. The demands for dignity and civic rights have given way to conflicts that loosened the very building blocks of social and political belonging. The protesters who chanted for freedom and democracy in 2011 had found nothing solid beneath their feet, no common agreement on what those words meant. In some countries, the state collapsed, while in others it survived as a kind of parodic self-exaggeration, its popular base frayed and defensive. Each country fell apart in its own way. In Libya, the rebellion empowered local militiaswhether tribal, ethnic, or regionalthat saw no reason to relinquish their fiefdoms. In Syria, sect became the dividing line. In Yemen, it was often clan or tribe affiliation. Sectarian gangs cannibalized the state, echoing the rivalry of their Saudi and Iranian paymasters. More and more, it felt irrelevant to speak the language of sovereign nations, with so many people in the former Ottoman world living outside the control of any recognized government. The Kurds of Syria and Iraq were independent in all but name. Parts of southern and northern Yemen had cut all ties to their nominal rulers. Most notoriously, some ten million people were living at the mercy of the self-declared Islamic state. The bedrock of modern Arab societiesborders, governments, systems of lawwas more vulnerable than anyone had guessed, or so it seemed.

Why did we not see it coming? Looking back, I think it was partly a willed refusal. It was the dictators and their agents who were constantly warning that the revolts would end in civil war and Islamist bloodlust. Theyd been saying so for yearseven before the uprisingsand all the while doing everything they could to make those predictions come true. Faced with such cynicism, it was natural to insist on believing in an alternative, no matter how unlikely. The protesters could rise above their own divisions only by believing it was possible.

This leap of faith was itself an achievement for a people whod grown resigned to the clich of Arab fatalism. You couldnt help rooting for them. After living in the region for years, I too was sick of people invoking history as the Middle Easts great burden and scapegoat. When I told a Syrian friend in 2013 that I was preparing to write this book by reading more about the history of her country, she pleaded, Please, just dont make it seem as if we are always doomed to repeat the past.

I promised I would not. But the past has a way of creeping back in at exactly those moments when you try to disavow it. I remember seeing maps in the hands of Libyan exiles who were on their way back home to claim property in 2011 and 2012. The maps were usually yellowed and creased, having been kept in a desk or file cabinet for decades, like buried treasure. Each seemed to describe a different country: Libya, it seemed, was a matter of perspective. Some of them were more than a century old, in Ottoman Turkish. Some were in Italian or English, from the colonial period. Some were more recent, in Arabic. The claims often overlapped, because the owners had left or been expelled from the country at different times, and the authorities who had created the mapsa city, a region, a colonial powerhad succeeded each other with no sense of common identity. Some families were laying claims to huge areas where government buildings and courthouses now stood. Most were smaller, a house or a farm that had been stolen, a piece of family heritage that had never been forgotten. The owners saw no reason why they shouldnt get them back. They didnt seem to understand that their maps were a civil war in miniature, a palimpsest of clashing aspirations. There was no one to adjudicate any of their claims. So they began taking the law into their own hands, buying guns and evicting the people living in their villas.

Weak national bonds were part of the problem, as were tribes, but these things could not fully explain what made the revolts of 2011 slide into something so much darker. In a way, that larger question was the one people had been asking for centuries about Arab crises and defeats, and the answers themselves have become a vast literature full of its own factionalism and gall. You could begin the story more than a thousand years ago in the battlefields of Iraq. You could begin it in 1839, when the Ottoman sultan first began the reforms that would dissolve his empire and unmoor the Arabs. You could start in 1919, with the failed liberal revolution in Cairo. You could even go outside the Middle Eastmany people didand say the Arabs were having their version of the Thirty Years War, or of the European revolutions of 1848. These analogies often said more about who was speaking than anything else. The combatants in the Arab civil wars have their own dates and starting points, and some of them have been contagious. In June 2014, shortly after declaring their new caliphate, the jihadi fighters of ISIS tweeted pictures of themselves using a bulldozer to crash through the earthen berm that forms the frontier between Syria and Iraq. They announced that they were destroying the borders of Sykes-Picot, the popular term for the map imposed on the Middle East by European colonialists a century ago.