Hisham Melhem is the Washington bureau chief of Al-Arabiya, the Dubai-based satellite channel. He is also the correspondent for Annahar, the leading Lebanese daily. Follow him on Twitter @hisham_melhem

There is something malignant in the brittle world the Arab peoples inhabit. A murderous, fanatical, atavistic Islamist ideology espoused by Salafi Jihadist killers is sweeping that world and shaking it to its foundations, and the reverberations are felt in faraway continents. On the day the globalized wrath of these assassins claimed the lives of the Charlie Hebdo twelve in Paris, it almost simultaneously claimed the lives of 38 Yemenis in their capital Sana’a, and an undetermined number of victims in Syria and Iraq. Like the Hydra beast of ancient Greece this malignancy has many heads: al Qaeda, the Islamic State, Sunni Salafists and Shiite fanatics, armies and parties of God and militias of the Mahdi. This monstrous ideology has been terrorizing Arab lands long before it visited New York on 9/11, and its butchers assassinated Arab journalists and intellectuals years before committing the Paris massacre of French journalists, cartoonists and police officers.

The devil’s rejects of this ideology engage in wanton ritualistic beheadings while intoxicated with shouts of Allahu Akbar, oblivious to the fact that most of their victims are Muslims. They are perpetuating mass killings and rapes, uprooting ancient communities, declaring war on the great pre-Islamic civilizations and religions of the Fertile Crescent, and managing to turn large swaths of Syria and Iraq into earthly provinces of hell.


The time of the assassins is upon us. And the true tragedy of the Arab and Muslim world today is that there is no organized, legitimate counterforce to oppose these murderers—neither one of governments nor of “moderate” Islam. Nor is there any refuge for those who want to escape the assassins.

Instead, there is only the grim promise of further disintegration. Last year, the area stretching from Beirut on the Med to Basra at the mouth of the Gulf became a long front of Sunni-Shiite bloodletting. The religious and ethnic minorities in the region are cowering with fear and loathing. In this fragmented world identity politics and parochial loyalties are the powers that move the people. The region is being contested now by the Islamic State and Iran, which is for all intents and purposes a prominent, even if not fully recognized, member of the international coalition fighting the dark forces of the Islamic State. Just think of this surreal scene: Iran, the only Shiite theocracy in the region, is fighting the Islamic State, the radical claimant of an ephemeral Sunni Caliphate. In 2014 many Arab lands, from Yemen to Libya, oscillated between despair and disintegration. There is no room for moderation or reform or tolerance in theses societies. The weak nation-states are getting weaker and falling apart at the seams. Without reconstituted nation-states there can be no serious societal, political or religious reform.

Along with the disintegration of the states, and deepening sectarian conflicts, the various communities are not only clinging to their identity politics, but becoming more religious, though not necessarily more pious or spiritual. Islamization and attachment to religious symbols, dogmas and rituals are the dominant concerns of many youths, particularly those carrying out the military struggles. The Shiites of Lebanon and Iraq—two states that previously were known for their “secular” pleasures and rich cultural heritage and vibrancy—are abandoning these traditions. Lively music is shunned and replaced with religious songs, young men wear black and grow beards, and you rarely see uncovered women in most Iraqi and Syrian cities. In Iraq, movie theatres are disappearing in most cities outside Baghdad. Egypt has long since lost the once famed cosmopolitanism of Alexandria to the Salafists. In Lebanon, Hezbollah is turning Beirut into a Tehran on the Med, while the Sunni fundamentalists are turning the country’s second largest city, Tripoli into their own Qandahar on the Med. Can we still talk about reform and moderation to challenge the murderous ideology intellectually?

After the defeat in the 1967 war with Israel, Arab intellectuals, artists, political activists and exiles found themselves drifting towards Beirut, the only Arab equivalent of a shining city on a hill. As a teenager, I witnessed the incredible cultural and political ferment that dominated the debates about the real causes that led the Arabs to such a nadir. I attended debates, watched first-rate theatre, read real soul-searching articles and books. The best and the brightest of Arabs walked and graced the streets of Beirut. Poets, novelists and scholars I read from afar came to partake in the mission of a lifetime. Critical inquiry was the operating principle. That old defiant Beirut made it easier for my generation of Arabs to search and find some answers in those years that preceded the 1973 war, when the defeated Arab regimes were able to claim a partial victory of some sort and to restore the old order. It was a brief moment of hope and enthusiasm.

That is all gone now.

This terrible ideology has grown in the arid political, cultural and economic, environment that was created since the Second World War by a weak state system bereft of modern accountable institutions, by praetorian regimes, predatory political classes, reactionary educational systems, and compromised intellectual and religious elites. Western, mainly U.S., support and sponsorship of a number of autocratic Arab regimes—which engaged in massive violations of human rights of their peoples as well as occasional military interventions, sometimes with disastrous results, like the invasion of Iraq—have provided this ideology with a veneer of legitimacy in the eyes of its true believers.

After each act of terror, a stunned world—mostly the Western countries—asks: Where are the elusive moderate Muslims? How come they don’t pick up the gauntlet thrown at their faces by the armies of fanaticism? And after each atrocity, many stunned and indignant Arabs who find themselves on the defensive say in disbelief: No true Muslim would do this, and Islam does not condone the killing of innocent civilians. Others are quick to cling to conspiracy theories, blaming a list of convenient villains that includes the United States and Israel where the Central Intelligence Agency and the Mossad are usually ascribed, in imagination, extraordinary powers to perpetuate the destruction of the twin towers and the creation of the Islamic State. Sometimes legitimate questions are asked: Why is it fine and legitimate to lampoon the Prophet Muhammad while it is illegal to deny the Holocaust? But such questions are drowned in the blood that the fanatics spill, when they kill cartoonists and moviemakers because they have “insulted” the Prophet of Islam.

Muslims should stop living in denial that their religion, like Christianity and Judaism before it, is susceptible to more than one interpretation, and that now it is being “distorted” by zealots driven by unfathomable political or metaphysical “missions.” The truth is that the death-embracing ideology we are grappling with, which gave us recently a “Caliph” whom not even central casting could compete with, has roots deep in our history. It is based on an extreme and fanatical interpretation of the sacred texts that Muslims revered for more than 14 centuries. But Muslims should take solace in the fact that their religion, (this is true also of Christianity and Judaism) was once and for a long time a shining city on a hill. That city had different names throughout history; it was once named Damascus, then Baghdad, then Cairo, then Córdoba then Istanbul… Yet since religion is not the religious text in isolation, but the actual lived experience of the community of the believers, there is always the hope that improved economic and political conditions which restore self-confidence and security can lead to open, tolerant, even progressive interpretations of the religious texts.

When Muslim Córdoba was the jewel of Europe in medieval times, the Muslims there had the same Quran and Hadith as the Islamic State does today.

The killings in Paris comprise the latest chapter in a tragedy that began with the controversy and outrage that surrounded the publication in the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten of 12 cartoons of Prophet Muhammad. Arab and Islamic commentary at that time was mostly framed as “conspiracy” against Islam, a new cultural “crusade” and with some commentators and religious leaders calling for organizing “days of rage.”. The violent demonstrations in many Muslim majority states, encouraged by religious zealots and professional anti-Western pamphleteers, resulted in the death of scores of people. Few Arab and Islamist commentators framed the issue as one of free expression and pleaded with the Muslim public opinion in Europe and beyond to understand and accept the centrality of the concept of free expression in Europe. Fewer Arabs were willing to accept European criticism of Arab and Muslim double standards when it comes to the publication of anti-Jewish images and cartoons, or the destruction of The Buddhas of Bamiyan, Afghanistan by the Taliban.

The initial reaction in the Arab world after the Paris killings was varied with official condemnations from governments and religious institutions like Al-Azhar University in Cairo, and from commentators who denounced it and expressed fear that it could worsen the conditions of Muslim communities in Europe and strengthen the extreme right and Islamophobia in France and the rest of the continent. Ironically, the condemnations of Arab states and Al-Azhar and the League of Arab States of the Paris massacre were swift, compared with the way some of them took their sweet time last summer to denounce the mass killings and the expulsion of the Christian and Yezidi communities in Iraq at the hands of the Islamic State.

However, there were also the usual “we condemn, but…” kind of commentaries expressed on television and written by columnists. France’s (and not surprisingly America’s) policies in the Middle East—including strangely the International coalition’s war on the Islamic State—are in part responsible for the attack. Some in the Lebanese media claimed that France was now drinking its own poison, or “fighting its own terror, and another theme was to ridicule the ‘idiotic sympathy’ with France that some Arabs are expressing. One Qatari journalist claimed that France was behind the attack to justify military intervention in Libya, and an Egyptian television commentator proclaimed himself “happy” with the terror attack because it will ‘force the west to change its approach to [the Islamic State] now that they have seen that terror could reach them.”

The problem with condemnations by “moderate” governments and institutions is that they rarely go beyond words, and they never go to address old stereotypes and long-held negative attitudes towards Western countries or non-Muslim groups, especially when the same governments have been responsible over the years for steering their official media and the intelligentsia beholden to them to direct their wrath against the same parties that now they claim they are supporting.

Of course there are many modern, moderate Arabs who are usually genuinely shocked by these acts of terror, but their expressions of sympathy can do little to change cultural and societal attitudes and assumptions. That is because, once again, these moderate voices do not constitute organized groups, parties or movements capable of engaging in meaningful political activities. Take Egypt for example. Four years after the “January Revolution” of 2011 that overthrew President Hosni Mubarak, where are the “moderate” political forces? In these tumultuous years, the country was first under the direct control of the military, which ruled by fiat, then by an elected president, Mohamed Morsi of the Muslim Brotherhood, who did not rule as a “moderate”’ or as a democrat when he tried to exclude others, until he was overthrown by the military, which led later to the killings of almost a thousand Egyptian civilian supporters of Morsi in the streets in the bloodiest moment in modern Egyptian history.

The irony was that when the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF) was in charge of Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood supported them. After the coup, led by Field Marshal Abdel-Fattah el-Sisi, who later won the presidency, the other Islamist force in the country, the Salafist party al-Nour, threw its support behind the military against the MB. Many of the so-called liberals and secularists, who initially led and organized the uprising that overthrew the Mubarak family, turned out to be totally bereft of the skills and culture to organize themselves as a competitive political movement, but worst still when they established their illiberal tendencies when they turned against the elected president and supported the putsch.

Recently, President el-Sisi made what some have called a dramatic call for a “revolution” in Islam aimed at adopting modern or reformist interpretations of the faith that would eschew intolerance and violence. But when the leader of a coup against the traditional entrenched Islamist movement in the country poses as an Islamist reformer, one has to wonder why. Clearly, this is an expedient call by a leader who wants to assert his religious bona fides in his ongoing battle with the MB and the other radical Islamist groups waging a campaign of terror against his government. El-Sisi wants to use the conservative Al-Azhar, which depends on the financial sponsorship of the Egyptian government for its sustenance, to lead the campaign. But the last thing the Egyptian president, who has been waging his own campaign of intimidation against Egyptian civil society, activists of all stripes, local and foreign journalists and international NGOs, is to really empower an Egyptian institution.

Can El-Sisi afford an independent Al-Azhar questioning not only the violence of the terrorists, but also the violence of the state that he controls, in the form of torture, arbitrary arrests and subtle and not so subtle intimidation of reformers? This episode should put to rest any hope by anyone who believes that officially sanctioned religious institutions like Al-Azhar in these undemocratic states can initiate meaningful religious reform, or engage in open and serious religious discourse, knowing full well that such discourse will lead inevitably to open political discourse. The reality is that there is not in the Sunni Arab world one single religious institution that is not controlled or sponsored by its government—and which is therefore illegitimate in the eyes of the people.

Western politicians and scholars anticipating or asking for meaningful political and religious reforms by the non-existent organized “moderates” in today’s Arab world will be better advised to be patient and bid their time. Can those living in Baghdad, Aleppo, Sana’a, and Tripoli—just to name few Arab cities—be blamed if they were not shocked by the killing of the Charlie Hebdo twelve in Paris? Not is only Islam’s religious text being distorted, a whole Arab generation has been totally desensitized by unspeakable violence. More than 76,000 Syrians were killed in 2014, making it the deadliest since the beginning of the uprising. In Iraq an average of 1,000 people were killed each month last year. No one has a clear idea about the number of the maimed and the missing, and of those uprooted, and those being claimed by the waves of the Mediterranean while sailing aimlessly seeking a foreign shelter. Counting the numbers of dead and wounded in those countries that went through the baptisms of uprisings is too grim a task.

The tragedy of the Arabs circa 2015 is that they no longer have institutions that can save them from the murderers, just as they no longer have a Beirut that will embrace them and give them intellectual sustenance and a fleeting chance to engage in introspection after an atrocity like the one in Paris—to ask themselves the hard questions that only they can pose and answer. Alas, the old Beirut is no more, just as the old Alexandria is no more. We are left with the faded memories and lamentations of a world that cannot be restored any time soon. It is indeed the time of the assassins, and they are, for now, unopposed by their own people.