Kareem Shaheen writes:

As the US prepared to invade Iraq in the winter of 2003, my father and I were in Mecca, taking part in the annual hajj pilgrimage. We surged with a great mass of humanity in the millions to pray atop Arafat, the mountain of mercy. We slept under the open sky on the pebbles strewn throughout Muzdalifa, a plain near the holy city. Before the hajj we had taken evening strolls in Medina, the Prophet Muhammad’s city, often walking by Shia worshippers chanting mournful hymns by the resting places of his family and companions in the Baqi’ graveyard.

I was 17 at the time, and I am still bewildered at how quickly it all unraveled, how thoroughly that momentary sense of unity and fraternity was destroyed in my mind in the immolation that followed. Throughout the Arab world, and in the Muslim world beyond it, the 21st century — and particularly its second decade — will be remembered for the litany of catastrophes that devastated entire nations and struck at the very idea of the moral arc of the universe.

It is too easy to elucidate these tragedies. They are too numerous, their enormity only more alarming in hindsight. The Muslim caliphate, an idle dream colored by myths of former glory, was resurrected in a brutal and fevered nightmare of atrocities piled upon crimes against humanity. The emergence of ISIS and the horrors it wrought will likely spell the end of ideologically driven political Islamist movements in the Middle East, much like the crushing defeats of the 1967 war undermined pan-Arab nationalism.

A nine-year civil war in Syria with half a million dead undermined every international norm in warfare, from the targeted bombing of hospitals to the use of chemical weapons. It fueled the largest mass migration since World War II, and the rising tide of right-wing populism across the globe, whose uniting force is anti-Muslim hatred. The governments of the world’s two most populous countries launched sweeping projects to question the legitimacy of hundreds of millions of Muslim citizens and break their spirits. Revolutions gave way to crushing tyranny throughout the Middle East, the tyrants themselves turning against each other in a cold war that destroyed the idea of any kind of shared destiny. New forms of injustice are invented every day. [Continue reading…]