Talisman Gate, Again Spotting Ripples and Trends in the Middle East. The Middle East has changed; it faces a period of abiding unpredictability“The one thing the Americans had to get right was not to conflate the defeat of the jihadists with the defeat of Sunnis in the public mind.”[N. Kazimi, Civil War 3, 2. I wrote that line a year ago. It was premised on what the jihadists had been projecting about themselves: that they were protectors of Sunnis, namely in Iraq and Syria, and more generally, that they were the redeemers of Sunnidom. That the jihadist enterprise would bring back a sense of dignity and purpose to the heirs of a once great civilization, since brought low by the connivance of turncoats with malignant foreign agendas. It is a compelling argument, replete with floridly- argued reasoning and symbolism.

It also stands on firm footing, for it plays up existing narratives of victimhood and conspiracy. The jihadists suggested a shortcut through historical progression with the promise of reversing it. Inspired by the past, they offered a blueprint for what the future would look like, while audaciously making the case that peoples once great deserved to be great again. They were visionaries making great sacrifices on behalf of Muslims everywhere, facing down colossal odds, and lifted up by divine grace. Theirs was a revolution with a strategy as grand as the stakes: the resurrection of the caliphate. In 2. 01. 4, they came close to their goal. Many enemies mobilized against them.

• Recently, I was re-reading Gertrude Bell’s, The Desert and the Sown, an account of her early twentieth century travels in Ottoman lands that today would be parts of.
• Directed by Nuri Bilge Ceylan. With Muhammet Uzuner, Yilmaz Erdogan, Taner Birsel, Ahmet Mümtaz Taylan. A group of men set out in search of a dead body in the.
• · C omplete Book of 850 Years Predictions by Hazrat Naimatullah Shah Wali (R.A.) with a lot of explanations and summary of future predictions (at pages 53 to.
• Muhacir, Macırlar, or Muhajir, is a term used to refer to an estimated 10 million Ottoman Muslim citizens, and their descendants born after the dissolution of the.
• When a good deed unwittingly endangers his clan, a 13th-century Turkish warrior agrees to fight a sultan's enemies in exchange for new tribal land. Watch trailers.

A caliphate (Arabic: خِلافة ‎‎ khilāfa) is a state under the leadership of an Islamic steward known as a caliph (/ ˈ k æ l ɪ f, ˈ k eɪ-/, Arabic. TOP WEDDING PLANNERS, PHOTOGRAPHERS. CATERERS! & MORE. plus. Settling In How to Prepare for a Saudi Wedding. Special Feature The Historical Najdi Wedding.

But any setbacks were temporary and explained away as the Divine testing the purity and resolve of His devotees. The ultimate victory would arrive in phases as Sunnis came back, in bigger and bigger numbers, to what the jihadists were offering. There was no other way. The danger to Sunnidom was existential. Either Sunnis would muster the civilizational wherewithal to take control of their destinies, or their progeny would be subjugated by their oppressors—the armies of Christendom, the Jews, local potentates, the Shias, etc. The grand narrative underwriting the grand strategy of the jihadists went unmatched by the coalition of local and international forces confronting the Islamic State. That one thing—convincing the larger body of Middle Eastern Sunnis that the collapse of the jihadist ‘caliphate’ is not a measure of their own collective ineffectualness—has been botched.

The bungling began during the Obama years, but the beginning of the Trump presidency held the promise that a good enough, and a fast enough, remedy could be attempted in the final stretch of the current phase of the jihadist challenge, epitomized by the ability of the Islamic State to control a major Middle Eastern city for the last three years. That promise, though, has been squandered. You would have missed it had you blinked. It was lost when Trump’s inaugural overseas trip instead of offering a sense of purpose to Sunni populations resulted in some meek measures concerning terror financing and the establishment of a propaganda center.

Optics matter. Timing matters. The narratives we weave, matter. By every metric, if the aim was to convey a sense of Sunni empowerment, then very little was achieved over the last few weeks. We can find no solace in believing that it is still early in the administration’s term; that better policies shall be arrived at with time and experience. There were already ten years on the clock, and the opportunity, showing up as unexpectedly as Trump’s election, will prove fleeting. There are no do- overs.

Those living through the events that portend tragedies seldom understand that what they are witnessing amounts to a last chance. I don’t know what the ramifications will be; the broken Sunni communities in Iraq are too exhausted and are consequently unlikely to host more turmoil. I’m not sure the same can be said about Syria, and certainly there’s ample dry powder strewn about elsewhere in the region—as one observer put it to me recently—for mischief to catch fire. The little math we can do demonstrates that it has become exceedingly difficult to plot out what comes next. Accepting this realization should compel us to think anew about the region.

Or we can cross our fingers and hope that the vision on offer by the jihadists had few takers because it was fundamentally implausible in the eyes of their target audience. Maybe regular Sunnis are not that worked up about their place in the world.

Maybe sectarianism is not that potent of a motivator. Maybe most people just want to get on with their lives. After all, if the jihadist message was so compelling, how come the larger region did not catch fire? Why didn’t the millions who ended up under jihadist rule fight to the last man, woman and child in defense of ‘their’ caliphate?

I do not have plausible answers to these questions. I just know that the jihadists are rational strategists. I could see how the message they crafted for the Middle East was resonant and powerful.

The jihadist vision was left for dead a few times before, but came back. Each time bigger. So why didn’t it tip the scales into permanence this time? Maybe it was too bold, too quick, too shocking. But what if the next time around the conditions are different, and while the jihadist message remains unchanged, the receptivity of their audiences and their willingness to act changes? Have the forces arrayed against the jihadists a grand strategy of their own that matches the magnitude of jihadist ambition? Absolutely not. I envy those who can live with such odds, who can insouciantly shrug at such uncertainty.

With the liberation of Mosul a few days ago it is time to take stock of where things stand: the opportunities missed, the defects in methodology, the lay of the land. We can expect a widening bifurcation between two camps engaged in a debate about the region’s future. One is likely to call the challenge posed by jihadism largely over. The opposing camp will argue that it is far from over. I count myself in the latter. The impasse forming between the temptation to over- celebrate and the temptation to over- agonize will devolve into ecumenical squabbling, with a dose of ad hominem sniping. Lost in the din is the lamentable fact that we have arrived at this point bereft of a good- enough plan, and we are proceeding forth without much of one, never mind a strategy.

It will be difficult to rise above the noise, to reflect, and to accurately understand what we are seeing. Harder still is quantifying what ‘far from over’ may actually entail. I am here to argue that it is too late for ‘good- enough plans’ that can keep uncertainty manageable. Even if by some miracle a grand strategy is adopted by world and regional powers, I see little use for it. The unprecedented levels of uncertainty before us will prove too unwieldy. The die is cast. The approaches responsible for getting us to this point must be identified clearly.

Their redundancies within the debate should be settled. It is amazing what a few weeks can portend on the timelines of history. Such a portentous stretch of time had just passed us by. And even if I fail at describing what the implications of that are, I sense, in my gut, that they are terrifying. If there is to be a way to fix this, then it must be civilizational in scope and ambition. Watch Miss Congeniality 2: Armed And Fabulous Tube Free.

Middle Easterners need to fundamentally re- engineer their societies, economies and cultures. America can help to guide the process, and to tip the scales when necessary. Anything short of that is too uncertain of an outcome from this point on.

The two camps of the debate must answer for just how much uncertainty they are willing to live with. Trump’s style, had it been coupled with an actual strategy, could have garnered significant dividends.

It could have made up for lost time, and previously wasted opportunities. The signs were very promising in the days leading up to his meeting with President Erdogan on May 1.