But what about Brobdingnag, the land of giants? Three hundred years after the publication of Jonathan Swift’s masterpiece, Brobdingnagian giants have had nothing comparable to Lilliput’s commercial success. I know of a singular exception: Gulliver’s Restaurant in Irvine, California, has advertised a Brobdingnagian prime-rib steak, its largest bone-in cut. Beyond this, who remembers Gulliver’s humiliation at the hands of creatures for whom he is a plaything?

Walking in a field in Brobdingnag, Gulliver tries to leap over a cow-pat, only to land in it: he has “found myself just in the middle up to my knees”. He is then “filthily bemired”. The joke is not just scatological. The man who had been a giant among the Lilliputians is now reduced to a tiny, helpless creature, unable to preserve even his bodily dignity. In another scene, Gulliver is placed close against the enormous bodies of the maids of honor and confesses that “a very offensive smell came from their skins”. Their skins appear “so coarse and uneven, so variously colored”, with a mole “as broad as a trencher” and hairs “thicker than packthreads”. As a midget, Gulliver sees what ordinary human vision edits out: pores, blemishes, hair and smell. He discovers the repulsiveness of the human body at close range. Scale turns beauty into grotesquerie, and human self-regard into a matter of perspective.

You wouldn’t see this scene in toyshops. In fact, the novel’s afterlife has been strangely selective: posterity has preserved the spectacle while avoiding its prophetic and satirical edge. Modern adaptations have sanitized Swift’s original text. The 1939 Fleischer cartoon, produced in competition with Disney’s Snow White, turns the Lilliput voyage into a colorful musical romance between rival kingdoms. In the 1960 movie The 3 Worlds of Gulliver, Gulliver extinguishes a fire in the Lilliputian palace by spilling wine on it, rather than by Swift’s less decorous method. In the original, the wine he has drunk “made the wine begin to operate by urine”; he voids it “in such a quantity, and applied so well to the proper places, that in three minutes the fire was wholly extinguished”. His giant’s intervention saves the palace but enrages the empress, since making water within the royal precincts is a capital offense. Gulliver’s salvific piss becomes a breach of etiquette leading to the charge of high treason.

Like Lilliput, Laputa, the flying island, has also enjoyed a colorful afterlife. Hayao Miyazaki’s celebrated Japanese animated film Castle in the Sky (1986) borrows Swift’s name and image, turning the floating island into a world of lost technology, robots and adventure. The change is revealing. Swift’s Laputa satirizes intellectuals so absorbed in abstract speculation that they lose touch with the practical world below. Miyazaki makes the image more enchanting, though his floating civilization retains a darker dimension: the dangers of technological power detached from ordinary human needs.

It is Gulliver’s fourth and final voyage, to the land of the Houyhnhnms, that left the strongest impression on my memory. It is here that Swift turns his satirical gaze most directly on humanity. This land is also home to Yahoos, who resemble human beings but are presented as filthy, greedy and aggressive animals. The Houyhnhnms, by contrast, are horses whose reason appears to have freed them from the passions, prejudices and delusions afflicting humankind. Gulliver admires the horses and recoils from his own species. 

Swift makes the contrast physical before it becomes philosophical. The Yahoos are not merely morally ugly: they are repellent to the eye and touch. Gulliver describes their coarse bodies, hair, claws and animal appetites, concluding that he had never seen “so disagreeable an animal”. Their bodies — and their “strange disposition to nastiness and dirt” — seem to embody the nastiness of their dispositions. The Houyhnhnms, conversely, possess a cleanliness and composure that Gulliver finds almost exemplary. Their very name, he learns, signifies “a Horse” and, in its etymology, “the Perfection of Nature”. The opposition is deliberately disconcerting: the creatures we call beasts display a natural grace and order, while the animal most like ourselves appears degraded.

The ugliness of the Yahoos makes visible the greed and violence that polite society disguises. They clutch and hoard bright stones, digging for them “for whole days” and hiding them in their kennels, anxiously watching lest their fellows discover the treasure. Swift’s master also describes their “undistinguishing appetite to devour every thing that came in their way”. The image reaches beyond the animal enclosure to human acquisitiveness, status competition and consumer culture. It gives the name Yahoo, later adopted by an early internet giant, a rather less innocent resonance.

The Houyhnhnms’ virtues are described in equally uncompromising terms. “Friendship and benevolence,” Gulliver says, “are the two principal virtues” among them; these are not restricted to intimates, but extend to the whole race. They preserve “decency and civility in the highest degrees”, while remaining “altogether ignorant of ceremony”. Their reason is not the egotistic cleverness of human argument; instead, it “strikes you with immediate conviction” because it is not “mingled, obscured, or discolored, by passion and interest”. This is the clean, austere elegance of a society apparently free from vanity, faction and self-deception.

Yet Swift does not allow the reader to settle comfortably into admiration. The Houyhnhnms’ rational order has a chilling aspect, particularly in its treatment of the Yahoos. They debate “whether the Yahoos should be exterminated from the face of the earth”; one advocate argues that they are “the most filthy, noisome, and deformed animals which nature ever produced”. The very clarity of the Houyhnhnms’ reasoning threatens to turn cruelty into policy. Read after the genocides and campaigns of ethnic cleansing that scarred the 20th century, the passage seems chillingly prophetic. Swift may not have anticipated these later horrors literally, but he exposed how the language of rational order can be used to justify the elimination of a population declared inferior. Swift’s rational horses are not a utopia for human beings to imitate; their perfection may require the suppression of sympathy, attachment and individuality. The cleanly ordered society is categorically inhuman. Gulliver’s final voyage is not simply an endorsement of rational horses over irrational men: it is also a warning about what happens when reason, purged of fellow-feeling, becomes an absolute principle of social organization.

The Yahoos also suggest that beneath our elaborate claims to superiority, we remain animals, driven by appetites and rivalries. Here Swift, the Anglican clergyman who served as Dean of Dublin’s St Patrick’s Cathedral from 1713 to 1745, anticipates the challenge that Darwin would pose more than a century later to believers everywhere: how secure is the boundary between human beings and other animals? Swift’s challenge, unlike Darwin’s, may have been theological rather than biological. But his questioning of the prevailing assumption that humanity ranks above animals because it was created in the image of God is startlingly prophetic.

In a New York Review of Books essay, “All of Us Yahoos”, Aaron Matz makes a useful case for taking Swift’s vision seriously. Reviewing Dan Sperrin’s history of English satire, Matz objects to the tendency to treat satire chiefly as a political intervention tied to particular rulers, parties and crises. Swift certainly had his political targets, but the fourth voyage, especially, confronts us with what he called the “great foundation of Misanthropy” on which he had erected the whole book. The Yahoos are more than coded references to political opponents. They raise the possibility that the vices Swift anatomized in public life — vanity, greed, self-deception — are inseparable from human nature itself.

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There is a distinctly Anglo-Irish edge to Swift’s misanthropic vision. In his magisterial biography of Yeats, R.F. Foster describes what he calls “the laconic, visceral, uncompromising edge of the Anglo-Irish mind”. Swift exemplifies that quality: his impatience with cant, his relish for exposing pretension, and his refusal to spare the society in which he himself was formed. Yeats recognized a related quality in Éamon de Valera, whom he compared to Swift as an emblem of Ireland’s “turbulent self-assertion”. In Swift’s case, this self-assertion takes the form of a satire so corrosive that it turns against humanity itself.

It is hardly surprising that this aspect of the book has proved resistant to the toyshop. A cuddly horse is easy to manufacture; a Houyhnhnm is another matter. Yet Swift’s horses have a positive resonance in Ireland. In August 1972, while my infant daughters were enjoying the pony rides at the Dublin Horse Show with their mother, I wandered towards the entrance and witnessed a scene that has stayed in my memory.

An ancient blue Rolls-Royce drew up, and an elderly man in military uniform helped a passenger out of the car. The passenger was Éamon de Valera, now President of Ireland, aged 90: the great surviving nationalist icon of the 1916 Easter Rising against British rule. The setting was striking. The formerly Royal, now simply Dublin Horse Show, had long been associated with Anglo-Irish society, its equestrian traditions and the ascendancy of horse-mounted Protestants. Here was de Valera, whose political career had been forged in opposition to the British Crown, arriving in a world that might still have seemed the preserve of his adversaries. This was 1972, the year of Bloody Sunday, when the divisions between nationalists and loyalists, Catholics and Protestants, Ireland and Britain, in Northern Ireland were being irrigated with blood.

While I do not believe horses possess magical powers, there is a sense in which Swift’s Houyhnhnms point towards future reconciliation. In Ireland, the horse occupies a shared cultural world, crossing boundaries of class, political allegiance and religious tradition. The spectacle of de Valera at the Dublin Horse Show suggested a form of coexistence that political argument alone could scarcely achieve. The animal world offered a zone of connection beyond the sectarian ideological quarrels through which human beings define and divide themselves. Swift’s Houyhnhnms invite a radical vision of this thought.

What if humanity’s capacity for reason does not make it the pinnacle of creation? What if our ideological commitments, our self-righteousness and our belief in progress are precisely what make us ridiculous? An even darker twist to Swift’s prophetic connection between humans and animals came three years after Gulliver. In his Modest Proposal, published in 1729, Swift took the connection to its reductio ad absurdum. The Irish poor, an enduring burden on the landowners, are treated as livestock, their children converted into a commodity for consumption by the better-off. The bureaucratic tone adopts the language of economic rationality to expose a society whose treatment of the poor has already abandoned elementary human decency.

In our own time, documented cases of trafficking in human organs for transplantation offer a grim echo of Swift’s satirical nightmare. The UN Office on Drugs and Crime, in its Global Report on Trafficking in Persons 2024, records 175 detected victims of trafficking for organ removal across 25 countries during 2017-23. Swift’s Yahoos and the proposed consumption of Irish infants may belong to different satirical registers, but both unsettle the distinction between civilized human beings and animals fit for exploitation.

Perhaps this is why the horses matter more than the merchandise. They force us to question the assumptions on which we construct our claims to superiority. Gulliver’s fourth voyage leaves us with an uncomfortable question: if we judge humanity by its actual behavior rather than its claims about itself, would we find much to distinguish us from the Yahoos?

Gulliver himself supplies a devastating answer. Thinking of “my family, my friends, my countrymen, or the human race in general”, he sees them as “Yahoos in shape and disposition, perhaps a little more civilized”, who make no other use of reason “than to improve and multiply those vices” found among their animal counterparts. When Gulliver returns home, he is so alienated from humanity that he prefers the company of horses. And yet, would we really wish to live in a society governed by the Houyhnhnms’ austere rationality?

John Gray’s Feline Philosophy offers a quieter counterpoint to Swift. Gray finds in cats a form of animal wisdom that has little to do with reason, at least as humans understand it. We need not choose between the Yahoos’ appetites and the Houyhnhnms’ austere rationality. Cats neither aspire to rule the world nor feel obliged to justify their place in it. Animals may flourish without our destructive rivalries or our grand schemes for perfecting ourselves. In this view, we have much to learn from creatures that are not forever trying to improve themselves, or the world, in their own celestial image. Gray’s cats suggest that the lesson of Gulliver’s Travels is less about becoming rational than about abandoning our conviction that humanity is the measure of all things.

Some 86 years later, Britain is back Arabia, wooing a very different set of rulers. The Government has agreed to send an RAF Voyager tanker from its base in Cyprus to provide in-flight refueling for Saudi aircraft defending the kingdom against Houthi missiles and drones. Unlike Britain’s earlier direct strikes on the Houthis, in which RAF Typhoons took part, the present commitment is described as limited, time-bound and defensive. British support is not, officials insist, intended for Saudi strikes inside Yemen. Yet aerial refueling is never just symbolic. It enables aircraft to remain airborne longer, carrying Britain a little further into a war from which Saudi Arabia has spent years trying to extricate itself.

Britain supposedly withdrew from “east of Suez” more than half a century ago. In practice, though, it never entirely left, retaining close military relations with Jordan and Oman; a naval presence in Bahrain and the Gulf; and a defense industry tied intimately to the Saudi armed forces. As Sir William Patey, the former British ambassador to Riyadh, recently told the BBC, Saudi Arabia is Britain’s largest defense export market, while Britain is its leading supplier of advanced fighter aircraft. The relationship includes British-supplied Typhoons and air-defense systems, as well as continuing support for Saudi air operations under existing contracts. When Iran attacked Saudi Arabia, Patey added, Britain helped with the kingdom’s air defenses. The flags came down with the “winds of change”, then, but the infrastructure of influence survived.

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The Voyager’s mission may not be the return of former imperial power so much as the exposure of a continuing relationship normally hidden behind contracts, advisers and joint exercises. The Saudis, having been turned down by the United States, asked Britain to demonstrate that it remained a reliable partner. Andy Burnham then put the national-interest case more directly. “I go back to the point I made about cost-of-living pressures and acting to secure the interests of Britain and the wider region,” he said, “because of course Saudi Arabia has been experiencing attacks, is looking at potential further disruption, and we need to keep those pathways open.” The Houthis have seized the port of Mocha, and strategic Red Sea islands, tightening their grip on the approaches to the Bab al-Mandab, through which roughly a tenth of global trade normally passes. Their missiles have also reached Saudi territory, while attacks on energy infrastructure threaten pipelines designed to bypass the Strait of Hormuz. Altogether, that creates the possibility of a pincer squeeze on the world economy. What happens in the Gulf and Red Sea enters British and European politics through petrol prices, inflation and the cost of borrowing.

The crisis represents not simply the return of Mohammed bin Salman’s disastrous Yemeni war, but also the re-emergence in revolutionary form of Yemen’s ancient Zaidi political tradition. To treat the Houthis merely as an Iranian appendage threatening Western commerce is to misunderstand why bombing has repeatedly failed to subdue them. Iranian technology, components, training and revolutionary language have increased their power, and tied them to the so-called “axis of resistance”. Yet Tehran did not invent the movement and probably does not issue its daily orders. Its strength rests on the religious memory and political dispossession of Yemen’s northern highlands.

Zaidism differs significantly from the Twelver Shi’ism of Iran. Its name derives from Zayd ibn Ali, who died in revolt against the Umayyads in 740. In classical Zaidi doctrine, an imam did not inherit office automatically through an unbroken, divinely designated line. Rather, he had to be a qualified descendant of the Prophet through Hasan or Husayn, as well as learned, just, and also courageous enough to “come forth” against unlawful rule. The choice was elective only within this restricted sacred lineage. Armed resistance was not an accidental feature of legitimacy; it helped constitute it.

Zaidi imams ruled varying portions of the Yemeni highlands from the 9th century. Imam Yahya, who fought the Ottomans and consolidated an independent kingdom after 1918, was the last truly formidable representative of his order. His state was isolated and administratively thin, but he balanced tribes, including the Sunnis of the Tihama lowlands, dynastic claims, and foreign powers with considerable skill, including flirtation with Mussolini in the Horn of Africa. Italian connections alarmed the British in Aden, hence Freya Stark’s films and her appeal to the aristocratic pride of Yahya’s court. She contrasted Yemen’s hereditary religious hierarchy with a rampant appeal to dynastic snobbery, explaining that Hitler had been a paperhanger and that Mussolini’s father had been a blacksmith. Such details, she told her husband, “carry unexpected weight”.

The monarchy survived Yahya’s assassination in 1948, but not the republican coup of September 1962. Nasser sent an Egyptian army to defend the new republic. In one of the region’s more instructive confessional paradoxes, Saudi Arabia supported the Zaidi royalists. Wahhabi hostility to Shia belief mattered less than fear of revolutionary Arab nationalism. Britain also played a characteristically deniable role. Colonel David Smiley, an SOE veteran who had commanded the Sultan of Oman’s armed forces, advised Imam al-Badr’s royalists, and from 1964 directed a band of foreign soldiers that included former SAS men.

Britain is thus again assisting Saudi Arabia in a Yemeni war: but this time against Zaidi power rather than in its defense. The republic abolished the imamate but not the society that had sustained it. Zaidi scholars and descendents of Muhammad lost authority; Saudi-backed Salafi teaching expanded into the northern province of Saada; central government brought neglect, manipulation and intermittent repression. The “Believing Youth” movement began as a cultural and educational revival. Under the eponymous Hussein Badreddin al-Houthi, however, it acquired a fiercely political theology and the now notorious slogan against America, Israel and the Jews. When President Ali Abdullah Saleh tried to crush it, Hussein was killed, and six wars followed between 2004 and 2010. Saleh, the master tactician who boasted of dancing on the heads of snakes, later allied with the enemies he had persecuted. Forces loyal to him helped the Houthis seize Sana’a in 2014. When, in 2017, he changed sides again, and sought an accommodation with the Saudis, they killed him. The movement had swallowed the snake-charmer.

Saudi Arabia intervened in 2015 expecting a short campaign. Years of air strikes devastated Yemen — without dislodging the Houthis. Yet it would be their attacks on Red Sea shipping following the Gaza war that brought a local movement and international stage. Sympathy for Palestinians is genuine and consistent with Houthi ideology. It is also politically useful. Palestine lets the movement mobilize a war-weary population, humiliate Arab governments and claim a stature beyond Yemen’s borders. A missile need not hit its target to work. The credible threat alone diverts ships, raises insurance costs, and turns a sectarian militia into an actor capable of taxing the global economy.

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Britain therefore confronts a genuine danger. But it also risks repeating an old error: mistaking superior machinery for political control. Freya Stark’s projector succeeded because it formed part of diplomacy. It flattered, persuaded and communicated. The Saudi air campaign, by contrast, showed the limits of firepower, especially when there is no plausible Yemeni order waiting to replace the people being bombed. As the Yemen specialist Elisabeth Kendall has warned, air strikes may degrade Houthi capabilities while increasing their popularity. Britain can help intercept drones; it cannot refuel its way to a legitimate government in Sana’a. Nor is the alternative to the Houthis a single coherent state. The internationally recognized camp contains Saudi clients, former Saleh loyalists, Islamists, southern separatists and competing tribal and regional forces. The UAE has sponsored secessionist allies, especially in the south, while Saudi Arabia has generally insisted on formal unity. The regions of Hadhramaut and al-Mahrah have their own identities and patrons. Oman, with its long experience of discreet mediation and its own British military history, fears disorder on its frontier.

In short, an east-of-Suez strategy built on royal relationships may preserve regimes more readily than it creates states. The Government’s distinction between refueling defensive Saudi missions and enabling offensive operations is therefore crucial but fragile. Patey assumed that Riyadh had not asked Britain to join direct strikes on the Houthis. Saudi oil and civilian installations were being attacked, he argued, and helping the kingdom defend them was legitimate. That is persuasive as far as it goes. But tankers do not decide the purposes for which an alliance is used; ministers do. The record of the earlier Saudi campaign gives little cause for confidence. Jeremy Hunt, then foreign secretary, spoke of his “frank conversations” with Saudi counterparts about human rights, while the Government defended British arms sales by citing the “extensive British training” given to Saudi pilots and the programmers of its “smart bombs” to limit civilian casualties. RAF liaison officers worked in the Saudi air operations center, ostensibly to help the kingdom comply with international humanitarian law. A former British official who had worked with the Saudis dismissed that claim in a single word: “bollocks.”

Britain now needs transparent rules, parliamentary scrutiny and an answer to the obvious question of what happens if the aircraft sustained by the RAF Voyager move from intercepting missiles to striking targets inside Yemen. Humanitarian law cannot be outsourced to the adjective “defensive”. In 1940, British power appeared in Sana’a as flickering images; today it arrives as invisible fuel. All the while, the Houthis warn that east of Suez, history never stays offshore for long.

Whenever I see the word “Taliban” I always think of The Tempest. Caliban sings those lines after Stephano gets him drunk and persuades him that exchanging Prospero for another master amounts to liberation. The rhyme may be accidental, but rhymes are rarely innocent once they lodge themselves in the mind. Cognitive psychologists Matthew McGlone and Jessica Tofighbakhsh have identified a “rhyme-as-reason” effect: formulations that rhyme are processed more fluently and can consequently acquire a spurious sense of truth or fitness. Sound, in other words, can tempt the mind into looking for a connection in meaning. The resemblance between the words “Caliban” and “Taliban” proves nothing logically. But it suggests a track where the echo may lead.

Shakespeare’s Caliban — savage, slave, poet and dispossessed islander — offers an unsettling way of thinking about the movement that returned to Kabul five years ago, 20 years after America invaded Afghanistan in response to 9/11. At first sight, rhyme apart, the two names belong in radically different registers. The Taliban — literally translated as “students” — emerged around Kandahar, Afghanistan’s second largest city, in 1994 from predominantly Pashtun religious students and former mujahideen, many formed in the Deobandi madrassas of Pakistan’s Afghan refugee belt. Led by Mullah Muhammad Omar, they exploited popular disgust with the predatory warlords who had divided Afghanistan after the Soviet withdrawal, promising order, Islamic justice and disarmament. With substantial Pakistani assistance they captured Kandahar, swept northwards and took Kabul in 1996, establishing the Islamic Emirate that would shelter Osama bin Laden until its overthrow after 9/11.

Caliban, by contrast, is Shakespeare’s fish-smelling monster who claims the island as his inheritance and succumbs to alcohol in a manner later generations could readily associate with dispossessed peoples in America and Australia. He carries utterly different baggage — indeed, he has been made to carry almost every political burden imaginable. The dramatist Trevor Griffiths, surveying stage interpretations from William Charles Macready’s 1838 revival to the postcolonial productions of the Seventies, finds him successively represented as an “underdeveloped native”, revolutionary republican, Darwinian missing link, black slave and oppressed aboriginal. The retreat of the British Empire transformed the relationship again: Prospero increasingly became the colonizer and Caliban the colonized. Yet Shakespeare scholar Meredith Anne Skura, warning against doctrinaire versions of this reading, insists that the play is too slippery to be reduced to a tract about colonialism. Its very slipperiness is its strength.

Shakespeare does not allow Caliban to remain just a monster. He is certainly capable of monstrosity: his attempted rape of Miranda, with the intention of peopling the island with his own kind, cannot be wished away. Yet while the supposedly civilized characters routinely describe him in terms that diminish his humanity, Caliban himself possesses the most intimate knowledge of the island — its springs, berries, pignuts and hidden resources. A 20th-century Stratford program put the matter bluntly: the island belongs to Caliban “both by inheritance and by right”, because it is he who knows its terrain.

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His political claim is equally uncompromising: “This island’s mine, by Sycorax my mother, / Which thou tak’st from me.” By 1904 the radical journalist W. T. Stead could hear in those lines “the whole case of the aboriginal against aggressive civilization”, comparing Prospero’s blandishments to those used by Cecil Rhodes’s chartered company in southern Africa. Over the centuries, the analogy has kept on changing because Caliban himself will not settle comfortably into either category, savage or victim.

Nor does his language. Prospero and Miranda teach him words, expecting linguistic instruction to be part of civilization. Caliban discovers that language can also be an instrument of resistance: “You taught me language; and my profit on’t / Is, I know how to curse.” Yet the same creature who curses Prospero as a tyrant hears music where his supposed superiors hear nothing: “Be not afeard; the isle is full of noises, / Sounds and sweet airs, that give delight and hurt not.” The “savage” is aesthetically receptive to his world in a way that complicates the cultivated ducal exile’s account of him.

Actors throughout the 19th and 20th centuries repeatedly discovered this complexity. One critic insisted that however debased Caliban might be, he possessed “human feelings” and could win an audience’s sympathy. A 1974 production visually divided him between monster and noble savage, while his cry of “freedom” carried more passion than anything else in the performance. Derek Jarman’s wonderfully mannered 1979 film foregrounds this ambiguity through Jack Birkett’s compelling, grotesquely vulnerable Caliban. The repertoire of performances shows how much political meaning can gather around Caliban without being settled. 

The rhyme linking “Caliban” and “Taliban” may offer only an acoustic bridge, but the ambiguity is salient. In 2001 the Taliban were expelled from Kabul with astonishing speed. Mullah Omar fled Kandahar on a motorbike. Osama bin Laden escaped into the mountains of Tora Bora. Into the space they left arrived Prospero’s government, and with it came international recognition, constitutions, elections, NGOs, consultants, development targets and, behind them all, overwhelming American military power.

Then there was Ariel. Shakespeare’s sprite is invisible, airborne and astonishingly mobile; when Prospero wishes, he becomes visible to no one but his master. The American version consisted of satellites, drones, special forces, biometric databases and the communications systems through which an immensely sophisticated external power believed it could see and control Afghanistan. Twenty years before Kabul fell, Western forces possessed virtually every technological advantage imaginable.

What they did not possess was Caliban’s intimate knowledge. The Taliban survived in villages, valleys, madrassas, clan networks and cross-border sanctuaries. They understood relationships that could not easily be entered onto spreadsheets: which district commander had quarreled with which governor, which family grievance might be mobilized, which local notable could be frightened, bought or reconciled, when to fight and when simply to wait. They could be brutally coercive, but they were also indigenous to the political ecology in which they operated.

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The contrast with America’s Prospero, Ashraf Ghani, was painful. Ghani was among Afghanistan’s most intellectually accomplished citizens: anthropologist, former World Bank official, author of a book on rebuilding failed states. When I met him briefly at a conference in New York, he struck me as one of the most quick-thinking and brilliantly articulate people I had ever encountered. For myself, and many others, he represented the dream that Afghanistan might be reconstructed through expertise, institutions and international capital. Yet the republic over which he presided depended upon foreign money, foreign military power and administrative structures whose authority weakened drastically beyond Kabul.

When the Americans finally left, Ariel vanished with them. Or, to be more precise, Ariel ceased to serve Prospero. Some of his magic changed masters. The Taliban now carry American rifles, fly American helicopters and use Western smartphones.  

Yet another Shakespearean echo resonates here. Prospero’s power is inseparable from his books. Cast out of Milan, he remembers Gonzalo furnishing him from his library with volumes “that I prize above my dukedom”. Caliban has learnt the same lesson from below. Plotting Prospero’s murder, he tells Stephano that the first thing to do is seize the books: “for without them / He’s but a sot, as I am.” Then comes the blunt instruction: “Burn but his books! He had brave utensils — so he calls them — which, when he has a house, he’ll deck withal.” Caliban sees that the “brave utensils” are only the outward trappings of power; the real instrument of Prospero’s rule is the knowledge contained in his books. Destroy its source and the magic collapses.

Afghanistan has produced an ironic reversal. The Taliban have seized much of Prospero’s utensils without burning them: rifles, helicopters, smartphones, ministries, uniforms, even some administrative habits. But they have not accepted the assumptions that were supposed to come bundled with the machinery. Prospero’s library is not ornamental: it is the source of the magic that allows an exiled duke to command the island. For the Taliban, ultimate sovereignty belongs to the Qur’an and to the Sharia drawn from it. The discarded utensils of the American imperium may be useful, even indispensable. But the Taliban remain subordinate to a holy Book whose authority the occupiers never displaced.

Washington assumed that modernization would inexorably produce Westernization: that roads, schools, internet connections and elections would carry liberal values. Instead, the Taliban learned from America without becoming American. Caliban has learned to operate Prospero’s machinery while declining Prospero’s metaphysics.

The image should not be pushed too far. The Qur’an is not a magic manual, and Sharia is not reducible to a single book. The Taliban’s jurisprudence also draws on hadith, Hanafi law, Deobandi scholarship, clerical authority and Afghan custom. But as a Shakespearean echo, the contrast matters. Prospero knows that books make rule possible; the Taliban know that technologies can be borrowed without surrendering the textual authority by which rule is justified.

After the American withdrawal five years ago, the Afghan security forces, expensively trained and equipped, dissolved with extraordinary speed. Provincial capitals fell almost without resistance. Ghani fled Kabul for exile in Dubai. Twenty years after being driven into the wilderness, the supposedly defeated barbarian returned to Prospero’s island.

Yet the moral of The Tempest cannot simply be that Caliban was right all along. The play is more conflicted, and Afghanistan more tragic. The Taliban’s claim to indigenous legitimacy does not absolve them of what they have done with victory. Since 2021, they have progressively excluded Afghan women and girls from secondary and university education. They have sought to erase women from large areas of public life, restricted their employment and curtailed their freedom of movement. Meanwhile, Hazaras and other minorities remain exposed to discrimination and violence. Caliban, once restored to his island, may himself become Prospero.

Nor has restoration resulted in prosperity. A recent Afghanistan Analysts Network report describes an economy that contracted calamitously after the Islamic Emirate returned, followed by a recovery so fragile that GDP per head continues to fall. Behind those figures lie families exhausting one survival mechanism after another: savings disappear, possessions are sold, boys leave school, sons are dispatched on dangerous journeys to Iran. Women and children undertake poorly paid work at home or on the streets; the Taliban restrictions on women’s education and employment have denied them escape routes they might otherwise have used.

The result is a grim inversion of development. Families survive today by consuming tomorrow: schooling, assets and earning capacity are sacrificed to the immediate necessity of food and shelter. Yet the report reveals something that is easily missed from Kabul, Washington or London. Afghans do not simply wait upon the state. The social contract of reciprocal help — relatives lending money, neighbors supporting neighbors, families taking responsibility for one another — still operates, though poverty is placing it under severe strain.

Another recent AAN account catches this side of Afghanistan almost microscopically. A 40-year-old Kabul office worker with a slipped disc cannot afford the operation his surgeon recommends. He moves through several worlds simultaneously. He consults modern doctors and has MRI scans; visits hakims who bleed him and prescribe herbal powders; travels to a shrine in Paktia where a mullah ties a tawiz, an amulet containing sacred writing, to his arm; and finally returns to surgery when the pain becomes intolerable.

The story could be treated as an illustration of medical backwardness, but it is more revealing than that. It shows a society whose institutions overlap rather than replace one another: MRI scanner and shrine, surgeon and hakim, religious belief and modern medicine. Most strikingly, when the operation finally becomes unavoidable, formal provision does not rescue him. A friend unexpectedly repays a debt of 200,000 afghanis, enabling him to meet the hospital costs. After surgery he cannot afford physiotherapy, so another friend abroad sends him exercises to perform at home. Afghanistan is full of noises: some of them cacophonous, some of them sweet. This is what Caliban’s knowledge of the island may mean in less romantic language: knowing not merely mountains and pathways but the dense networks through which people actually survive.

Meanwhile the Emir, Hibatullah Akhundzada, governs in Kandahar from something like Prospero’s cell: rarely seen, surrounded by clerical advisers, issuing commands whose authority rests ultimately on sacred texts rather than social or political consent. His Afghanistan is a landlocked “island”. His staff may not be magical, but has the weight of religious legitimacy. The symbolism is not invented by outsiders. At Kandahar’s Khirka Sharif, lines of Qur’anic calligraphy run through the decoration around the shrine that houses the Prophet’s cloak. In April 1996, Mullah Omar carried that cloak onto the roof of the main mosque before thousands of ulema and fighters. The assembled scholars acclaimed him Amir al-Mu’minin, Commander of the Faithful. Sacred text, sacred relic and political sovereignty were made to reinforce one another. A few months later, the Taliban captured Kabul.

Yet while decrees issued from Kandahar have religious authority, they are far from absolute. In reality they encounter the messy density of Afghan society. Families improvise around them; religious practice intersects with custom; money circulates through networks of debt and obligation; people move between official and unofficial institutions according to necessity. The Afghan state may prohibit, prescribe and punish, but it does not exercise a totalitarian type of control. That is another lesson the West was slow to learn: power in Afghanistan has rarely been identical with government. The state may issue decrees, but villages, families, ulema, businessmen, elders and local authorities determine the extent to which they become reality.

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Those networks now extend far beyond Afghanistan. For some young men, the escape route leads westwards through a clandestine economy that has become increasingly sophisticated. An Afghanistan Analysts Network investigation found young Afghans traveling through Turkey, Bulgaria, Serbia and onwards towards Italy, France, Germany, Ireland — and Britain. Journeys are arranged through professionalized smuggling networks using GPS, encrypted messaging, TikTok advertising and hawala, the informal money-transfer system built around personal knowledge and trust, that functions here as a kind of escrow account. A passage from Turkey to Italy can cost €6,000 to €8,000; some networks have graduated from facilitation to extortion, kidnapping and violence.

For British readers accustomed to encountering Afghans at the other end of this journey — in debates over small boats and “illegal migration” — the connection is worth making. Europe’s harder borders have not abolished the traffic. In parts of the Balkans they have helped turn what was once a loose diasporic network of guides and fixers into a profitable criminal industry. The young man crossing the Channel may be the final visible link in a chain beginning with the economic and political constriction of Taliban Afghanistan.

And this takes us back to the Bard. The deep ambiguities in The Tempest lie not in deciding whether Prospero or Caliban are good or bad guys. They involve the much more difficult questions about who possesses the right to rule the island, who possesses the knowledge required to rule it, and what happens when supposedly superior outsiders mistake magical or technological mastery for political legitimacy.

Skura’s caution is helpful. She argues that the colonial interpretation can itself become reductive when every difference between Shakespeare’s island and colonial history is treated as irrelevant and every contradiction as further evidence of domination. Caliban lacks many of the stereotypical attributes Europeans assigned to New World peoples, and Shakespeare repeatedly complicates any straightforward identification. Skura’s larger point is that the personal and political cannot finally be separated. Prospero comes to the island as the victim of Antonio’s usurpation, but responds by becoming master over Caliban: the exile who has lost his dukedom recreates hierarchy in miniature. Caliban becomes a screen onto which Prospero projects the appetite and disorder he disowns; mastering him allows Prospero to rehearse the recovery of authority.

The Afghan story reflects a similar pattern of replication. To explain why the Taliban defeated the republic is not to endorse their theocracy. Their rootedness may confer a kind of authenticity without conferring virtue. Conversely, the ideals proclaimed by the international intervention — education, women’s rights, constitutional government — do not become worthless because the political structure erected to protect them proved catastrophically fragile. Nor should “indigenous” be confused with humane. The restored Caliban may now be the ruler, but his regime has deliberately deprived half the island’s population of opportunities that might make their lives less desperate.

The rhyme, then, can still trigger meaningful perspectives. Shakespeare refuses the comforting choice between enlightened Prospero and the uncouth monster. The native claimant may indeed be brutal, lustful and dangerous; he may also know his island better than the civilizer who has taken possession of it. The civilizer may bring books, knowledge and extraordinary powers; he may also mistake possession for legitimacy. And books themselves can serve more than one sovereignty.

At the end of The Tempest, Prospero says something Western policy rarely admitted in Afghanistan. Looking at the creature he has repeatedly called slave, monster and devil, he declares: “This thing of darkness I acknowledge mine.” Even that line refuses a simple interpretation. Does Prospero mean that Caliban belongs to him — the last assertion of colonial possession? Or is he recognizing something of himself in the figure he has spent the play defining as Other? Skura points out that critics have argued both ways: the acknowledgment can be dismissed as another act of appropriation, yet its poetry reaches beyond Prospero’s behavior and momentarily destabilizes the distinction between civilization and darkness.

Twenty-five years after 9/11, Afghanistan leaves us with much the same discomfort. The Taliban are not simply medieval intruders who somehow captured a modern state. They arose from Afghan history, from war, religion and social structures — but also from the violence, alliances and unintended consequences of outside intervention. And the Afghanistan they now rule is not simply “Taliban Afghanistan”. Beneath the Emir’s decrees lies a deeper and denser reality: women sewing for pennies, boys abandoning school for work, migrants sending money home, relatives lending to relatives, doctors scanning spines, hakims mixing mountain herbs and mullahs tying amulets beside ancient shrines. Some of its young men are also moving through Balkan forests, climbing fences or waiting for boats across the Channel. It is battered, improvisatory and profoundly local — yet connected to us in ways British politics notices only when those connections wash up on a Kentish beach.

Ban, ban, Ca-Caliban. Ban, ban, Taliban.

The rhyme itself proves nothing. But perhaps that is why it lingers. It connects two figures whom powerful outsiders prefer to define as barbarous, and asks the disturbing question Shakespeare leaves hanging over his enchanted island: whose island was it in the first place — and what does its owner do with it once he gets it back?

Britain considered the issue less decisively than Sweden in December 2024, when the Conservative MP Richard Holden introduced a Bill prohibiting marriage between first cousins. Although he cited genetic risks and coercion, his more original argument drew on conclusions reached separately by the anthropologists Joseph Henrich and Jack Goody: cousin marriage helps preserve clan power by keeping property, loyalty and opportunity within the extended family.

Holden was opposed by Iqbal Mohamed, the independent Muslim MP for Dewsbury and Batley, who argued that prohibition would stigmatize minorities and prove difficult to enforce. Education, genetic screening and protection against forced marriage were preferable. Yet Mohamed also acknowledged the institution’s economic logic: cousin marriage strengthened family bonds and put families on a “more secure financial foothold”.

The two MPs were describing the same institution from opposite ends: Holden emphasizing the power the clan exercises over its members, Mohamed the protection it offers. Where governments are weak or indifferent, the extended family can become bank, welfare office, employment agency and court of appeal. But protection has a price. People who depend on the family cannot easily defy it. 

The liberal response to this issue tends to stop at individual consent. Are two adults entitled to marry? Are minorities being stigmatized? These are necessary questions, but they can obscure the distribution of power within which consent is exercised. Multiculturalism is acutely conscious of injuries inflicted on minorities while often reticent about systems of authority exercised within minority cultures. 

On the face of it, cousin marriage has little to do with Middle Eastern investments in the Shard, Canary Wharf or Manhattan office blocks. Still less do they appear connected to the Trump family’s increasingly intimate business relations with the dynasties of the Gulf. Yet they belong to the same structural landscape: a form of social organization resting upon blood, marriage, personal knowledge and reciprocal loyalty. This is very different from the other kind of social organization, more common in the West, which assigns property and authority to artificial persons — courts, universities, offices, companies and states — that exist independently of the mortal individuals temporarily occupying them.

Such distinctions can be traced back to the Middle Ages. Western modernity, following its millennium-long gestation within the Catholic Church, depended not upon abolishing the family but upon creating institutions powerful enough to compete with it. Goody, writing as an anthropologist specializing in kinship, and Henrich, drawing much later on comparative psychology and cultural evolution, arrived independently at versions of this argument. Both suggest implicitly that Max Weber’s celebrated account of the Protestant ethic and the emergence of capitalism begins much too late.

Weber explained the rise of capitalism partly through the moral psychology of ascetic Protestantism. Calvinists, uncertain of their salvation, looked for evidence of election in disciplined work, sobriety and accumulation. His argument is illuminating, but Protestantism encouraged capitalist behavior only because Latin Christendom had already constructed the institutional base upon which capitalism could build. Antwerp had become Europe’s leading commercial center under Catholic Habsburg rule before Protestant Amsterdam absorbed much of its displaced trade, capital and expertise. Venice, Genoa and Florence were wealthy long before the Reformation.

The more fundamental institutional revolution was Catholic. From late antiquity onwards, the Western Church attacked many of the reproductive arrangements through which kin groups preserved property and power. Its marriage program — arguably the most far-reaching exercise of social engineering in history — prohibited polygyny, concubinage, divorce, adoption and remarriage, as well as unions within widening circles of blood and affinity. In 517, for example, the Synod of Epaone in Burgundy decreed that unions with first and second cousins were incestuous and henceforth forbidden, along with marriage to stepmothers, widows of brothers, sisters-in-law and aunts by marriage. The prohibition was extended to the seventh degree by Pope Gregory III in 732, and reaffirmed throughout the medieval period, although enforcement was uneven. The prohibition was later reduced to kinship of the fourth degree.

The Church’s stated reasons were scriptural and theological. Marriage created “one flesh”, and the incest prohibitions were held to protect the sacramental purity of marriage. But the institutional effect was also material. By restricting heirs, remarriage and the means by which lineages recovered property, the Church made it easier for wealth to pass into monasteries, bishoprics and charitable endowments. In his seminal work The Development of the Family and Marriage in Europe (1983), Goody argued that this was no accidental by-product. By the Reformation, the Church and its affiliates had become the largest landholders in Germany and doubtless much of northern Europe. 

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The consequences, intended or otherwise, were revolutionary. Marriage restrictions weakened large kinship groupings. They encouraged smaller households, unions outside the lineage, voluntary associations and trust between unrelated people. In The WEIRDest People in the World (2020), Henrich argues that populations subjected most intensively to the Church’s rules gradually became more individualistic and more disposed to trust strangers. The Church did not merely preach universal brotherhood; it interfered with the institutions that made family the principal source of social identity. It broke the clan in order to save the individual soul.

But weakening kinship created a new problem. If property, authority and memory were no longer transmitted exclusively through blood, where could social continuity reside? The answer was the corporation, an originally ecclesiastical structure later secularized and appropriated by business. An abbey survived its abbots; a bishopric its bishops. Masters and students passed through Oxbridge, but the university and its colleges remained. Kings died, but the Crown endured. Offices, endowments and obligations acquired an existence independent of the bodies temporarily administering them. 

While promising eternity to believers’ souls, the Church created an earthly analogue of eternity in law. The corporation was an immortal body, distinct from the mortal governors, shareholders and employees composing it. Property could belong not merely to a proprietor and his heirs but to an institution that never died — the “dead hand” of mortmain. Protestantism may have supplied capitalism with Weber’s “this-worldly asceticism”. But it was Catholic canon law that supplied the indispensable legal fiction of corporate personality. Eternity, a diminishing expectation with the growth of religious skepticism, migrated from heaven to Companies House and Wall Street. 

The theological ancestry of the modern company is curiously neglected in conventional accounts of secularization. As I used to explain to my students, Jesus Christ was, in this structural sense, the original president of Coca-Cola and of every other corporation operating under Western law. The Enlightenment did not simply expel religion and leave autonomous reason in its place. It inherited legal and metaphysical inventions developed over many centuries by the Latin Church.

The contrast with Islamic societies is stark, though it is not a contrast between commercial sophistication and backwardness. Muslim jurists developed complex rules governing trade, credit, inheritance, partnership and charitable endowments, sustaining commercial networks from the Atlantic to the Indian Ocean when much of northern Europe remained economically primitive. But Islamic law did not develop corporate personhood in the same expansive and adaptable form as Latin canon law. The waqf (Islamic trust) could preserve property for generations, but its purposes were fixed by its founder. Commercial partnerships remained tied to particular individuals and might dissolve when a partner died, whereupon his share passed among prescribed heirs, often fragmenting the estate.

Nor did Islamic law generally challenge endogamous marriage. Cousins are absent from the prohibited degrees enumerated in the Qur’an which also expressly mentions cousin categories among those permitted to the Prophet. In many Arab societies, marriage to a father’s brother’s daughter became especially valued, a practice seen by critics as a way of circumventing female rights of inheritance. Studies have generally placed consanguineous marriage at roughly two-fifths to more than half of all unions in Saudi Arabia, although rates vary by region and have declined in some younger and urban populations. Combined with inheritance rules, such marriages retain property and obligations within the extended family and reinforce lineage solidarity.

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A related contrast appears in legal culture. Western justice came to revere the idea of depersonalized justice symbolized by the blindfold statue of Lady Justice holding a balance: abstract rules applied without regard to the litigants’ identities. Lawrence Rosen’s studies of Moroccan courts describe a different philosophy. The qadi assesses reputation and character, and seeks a settlement that restores workable relationships between contending parties. His authority lies not simply in imposing a rule from above but in knowing how the parties stand within a web of obligations. The relevant distinction is between trust vested in procedure and trust vested in personal knowledge.

The Western achievement was not moral superiority but the institutionalization of mistrust, nourished by the doctrine of original sin. Because human beings were assumed to be greedy, partial and mortal, offices and procedures were constructed to constrain and outlast them. Authority belonged — at least theoretically — to the office rather than the office-holder or their family. Official rules made nepotism harder: appointments could be challenged, accounts audited and conflicts exposed. While the West never eradicated favoritism, it forced favoritism to disguise itself.

It is here that Gulf sovereign wealth funds enter the picture. A sovereign fund, such as Norway’s, is supposed to embody depersonalized capitalism: professionally managed, globally diversified and capable of yielding revenue across generations. Yet in a Gulf monarchy it may also operate as an investment arm of the ruling establishment — simultaneously national treasury, investment company, diplomatic instrument and development agency. Its assets belong nominally to the state, but senior princes appoint managers, determine strategic priorities and use investments to cultivate relationships abroad. A decision may be commercially rational while also serving diplomacy, prestige and dynastic security. 

The results are visible across Western cityscapes. Qatar’s fund owns Harrods and the Shard, jointly controls Canary Wharf Group and holds a substantial stake in Heathrow. Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund owns Newcastle United and has invested in Lucid, Uber and a multitude of technology and entertainment ventures. It also supplied $2 billion to Jared Kushner’s Affinity Partners even after an internal advisory panel reportedly raised objections. Qatari and Emirati funds initially invested about $200 million each; in 2024 Qatar’s investment authority and Abu Dhabi-based Lunate supplied a further $1.5 billion between them.

There is nothing inherently sinister about Arab ownership of Western property. American private-equity firms, Russian oligarchs, European luxury conglomerates and British pension funds do not acquire moral purity merely by being Western. Gulf funds employ highly trained professionals and seek financial returns. Petrodollar capital, however, emerges from political systems in which personal confidence, dynastic authority, discretion, patronage and reciprocal obligation remain central to governance. Its influence lies not only in formal ownership but in the field of access, gratitude and dependency surrounding it. 

The Khaldunian paradigm is helpful here. Ibn Khaldun, the 14th-century North African historian and political theorist, understood political power as arising from asabiyya — group feeling, or clannish solidarity. A ruling house governs because its members possess a cohesion unavailable to more fragmented populations. In time, luxury and dependence weaken that solidarity, exposing the dynasty to replacement by a tougher group arriving from the margins. 

Far from escaping this logic, the Gulf monarchies have modernized it. Oil revenues allow ruling families to transform lineage solidarity into ministries, sovereign wealth funds, global portfolios and high-tech security services. Kinship has not disappeared into the anonymized structures of the bureaucratic state; bureaucracy has become an instrument through which dynastic cohesion operates internationally. The Gulf sovereign wealth fund is Asabiyya Inc. 

Patrimonial capital becomes especially potent when it encounters Western elites predisposed to behave in like fashion. Kushner’s Affinity Partners offers the clearest example. After serving in Donald Trump’s White House, where he played a central role in Middle Eastern policy, Kushner obtained billions in commitments from Gulf sovereign funds. 

The scandal does not depend upon proving a crude exchange of policy for payment. It lies in the blurring of public and private realms. A president’s son-in-law conducts diplomacy with hereditary rulers and then receives capital from funds answerable to those ruling establishments. Public service creates private relationships; private relationships produce commercial opportunity; commercial interests shadow future public policy. The form may be corporate, but the substance is courtly. 

With Trump’s return to power, the overlap between his family’s businesses, diplomatic connections and political authority has become ever more conspicuous. Sons, sons-in-law, golf buddies, property developers, cryptocurrency promoters and Gulf princes inhabit the same web of transactions. The problem is larger than corruption in its prosecutable form. Bribery law assumes a reasonably clear distinction between public office and private gain. Today, that very distinction is being eroded, bringing about what could be described as “re-feudalisation”. Under feudal arrangements, government was personal: land, jurisdiction, family alliance and military obligation formed a single web. A favorite might simultaneously be ambassador, financier and beneficiary of royal patronage. The sovereign’s household was not neatly separable from government.

The modern state emerged by extracting office from the household. Treasury funds ceased, in theory, to be the ruler’s private money, while diplomats and civil servants served an institution rather than a family. These principles were never perfectly realized. But hypocrisy — the tribute vice pays to virtue — acknowledged the institutional ideal: nepotism had to be concealed because public and private interests were understood to be different.

Constitutional government still depends upon offices whose purposes cannot be privately inherited, purchased or repaid. It requires decision-makers capable of distinguishing friendship from duty, and national resources from family assets. Once that separation collapses, elections may mask continuity, but real power reverts to a pre-modern feudal order.

The Swedish ban on cousin marriage concerns much more than an uncomfortable minority custom. It asks whether liberal societies can discuss the institutional consequences of kinship without subjecting families to ethnic prejudice or romanticizing national culture. Cousin marriage endures because it performs vital economic and political work: it concentrates trust within the lineage. Prohibition alone cannot dissolve that structure. People will not abandon the protections of kinship merely because the state declares them undesirable; the state must demonstrate that its institutions are worthy of trust.

The medieval Church’s marriage prohibitions redirected trust outwards, towards voluntary associations and the artificial persons of the abbey, city and state. The modern West was built through that long and incomplete transition from blood to office, household property to corporate property, and personal rule to institutional authority. Today, that movement appears to be going into reverse. Citizens are invited to regard cousin marriage solely as a private choice while presidents convert public office into family opportunity. Governments speak the language of transparency while courting funds that combine national wealth with dynastic power. The artificial persons created to restrain kinship — the state and the corporation — are being reoccupied by kin-based households.

Sweden has outlawed the marriage of first cousins. The more difficult task is preventing the return of government by aunts and uncles, cousins, sons, sons-in-law and their cronies.

In Facial Justice, England has been devastated by the nuclear armageddon of a Third World War in which most of humanity has perished. In the New State that emerges, beauty is rationed, envy criminalized, and an unseen ruler governs survivors through loudspeakers. Freedom has been exchanged for security, individuality for fairness, and politics for management.

The ruler is known as the DD, or Darling Dictator. He addresses the populace as “Patients and Delinquents” in the reassuring tones of a radio host. Equality and Envy — the two Es — are the positive and negative poles of the regime. If one citizen possesses what another lacks — especially female beauty, grace or charm — resentment follows, threatening social harmony. Physical differences that confer distinction must therefore be managed: women judged too attractive are “betafied” by surgery and compelled to wear standardized masks lest they provoke jealousy among their less favored sisters. Those judged too plain may be improved. The state does not abolish beauty. It regulates it.

What sounded absurd in the Sixties now feels oddly familiar. We inhabit a culture obsessed with facial images: filtered faces, injectable faces, algorithmically rewarded faces. We denounce beauty privilege while monetizing attractiveness on an industrial scale. Hartley, who was probably gay, though perhaps not sexually active, was described by Ottoline Morrell as a well-mannered, dull, fat man. He grasped that physical appearance would become political terrain.

His insight strikingly anticipated arguments about female appearance in Iran and other Muslim societies, long before words like hijab, chador and burqa entered the Western lexicon. In the Islamic Republic, female appearance has long been a matter of state concern. Compulsory veiling, morality patrols, regulation of adornment, suspicion of autonomous female beauty: these are not incidental features but part of a wider attempt to police the public sphere.

Veiling is usually justified in terms of modesty: protection against spiritual harm, challenges to personal space and privacy, and the potentially disruptive effects of the male gaze. Yet many educated Muslim defenders also present it in egalitarian terms. The veil, they argue, reduces the erotic and status competition generated by female display. This competition is not only between men. Women compete with other women in the currency of appearance and desirability; men compete for access to that currency and for the honor associated with controlling it. Hartley would have recognized the logic instantly. Beauty confers individual social capital. Therefore, like other forms of capital, it must be managed.

A woman may lose sleep over another woman’s eyelashes as easily as a man may lose his reason over her face. Hartley’s satirical observation is that envy, once treated as a political principle rather than a moral infirmity, can justify almost anything. If beauty wounds the unbeautiful, beauty must be corrected. If distinction generates grievance, distinction must be flattened. If desire unsettles public order, desire must be masked.

Iran also supplies a paradox Hartley would have relished. For decades Tehran has been one of the world capitals of cosmetic surgery, especially rhinoplasty. Nose jobs became so common that bandages themselves turned into status symbols, sometimes worn by women who could not afford the actual procedure. Alongside this ran a discreet market in hymenoplasty: the restoration of virginity through surgery in a society publicly committed to premarital chastity. Beneath official modesty flourished a commerce in self-presentation, concealment and bodily correction.

Hartley’s New State works by the same contradiction: moral severity above ground, restless vanity below. His heroine, Jael 97, is not liberated from beauty by the regime’s doctrine. She is made more conscious of it. The mask that is supposed to abolish comparison intensifies it. The women who have been betafied remain alert to gradations of face, figure and charm. They read one another’s defects and advantages with the acuity of prisoners studying rank. The more the state tries to abolish vanity, the more vanity migrates into coded signs, furtive glances and forbidden longings.

Michel Foucault, who famously enthused about the Iranian Revolution of 1978–79, saw in it a form of political spirituality: a revolt against the deadening managerialism of Western modernity. He was fascinated by a popular uprising that seemed not merely economic or ideological, but metaphysical — a revolt conducted in the name of sacrifice, martyrdom and collective transformation. What he seems to have missed was that rebelling against managerial discourse simply generates new management criteria. The Islamic Republic did not abolish bureaucracy. It sacralized it, bringing the body, the street, the classroom, courtship ritual and the female face under new forms of supervision.

Hartley, who came from a privileged background and despised proletarian aspiration, saw more clearly than Foucault how regimes will “discipline and punish” whatever their revolutionary provenance. They may govern not only through prisons and police, but through faces, clothing, shame, sexual codes and approved emotional display.

His insight gives Facial Justice a relevance far beyond Iran. It applies wherever appearance becomes a moral index; wherever language is policed less by law than by fear of social exclusion; wherever individuals learn to anticipate the judgment of unseen wokeism. Nobody commands; but everyone must comply. He anticipated the way contemporary, market-driven power prefers to regulate conduct without seeming tyrannical. His unseen dictatorship rules through announcements, inspectors, slogans and the mediated presence of loudspeakers. Citizens hear the Voice more often than they see authority embodied. Public life becomes a sequence of nudges, rituals and behavioral corrections. Hartley’s inspectors are not jackbooted thugs but smiling officials in magnificent flamboyant outfits. They cajole rather than bully. 

Similarly, Hartley’s language regime has many contemporary echoes. Citizens must navigate verbal booby-traps. Formulaic gestures accompany approved terms. One says the right thing in the right tone at the right moment, even though, as in most tyrannies, accepted speech may be coupled with hints of ironic disdain. Any formal slippage is not merely mistaken but morally suspect. Effective censorship works in this manner. If people internalize the code, the censor need not bother.

Facial Justice also anticipates the marriage of politics and therapy. In the New State, cinemas show murders and violent crime not for pleasure but as aversion treatment. Emotional responses are recalibrated by experts. Today’s equivalents are milder, but the impulse is recognizable: trigger warnings, compulsory sensitivity training, therapeutic disciplinary language, institutional concern with “harm”, “safety”, “trauma” and “wellbeing”. These terms may often be necessary and humane. Hartley’s warning is not that distress is unreal, but that once distress becomes a governing category, authority acquires a new moral vocabulary. The patient must be protected from himself; the delinquent must be cured of his delinquency; the citizen must be adjusted.

Hartley’s satire, though gentler than Orwell’s, has bite, with green, even hippyish conceits about nature in the nuclear wasteland. Flowers are scarce and revered because plants are believed to suffer. Trees too acquire an almost sacred status: to damage one is treated less as practical vandalism than as moral transgression. Plastic and synthetic replicas are safer and more manageable than living plants. This should be read as a warning against moral systems that lose proportion. Once politics becomes a competition in purity, absurdity is quick to follow.

Why did Hartley, best known for The Go-Between, write so bizarre a fantasy? One answer may lie in his old-fashioned Tory dislike of the leveling temper of post-war Britain: ration-book drabness, bureaucratic earnestness, the suspicion of privilege and excellence. But Facial Justice is more than a hymn of Waugh-like reactionary nostalgia, though there may be elements of such. It is also a protest against confusing resentment with justice.

Here the book still has relevance. Much contemporary rhetoric promises dignity but delivers flattening. We are urged to celebrate diversity while distrusting distinction, praise individuality while policing deviation, expand freedom while narrowing acceptable opinion. The contradiction is not accidental. Modern egalitarian culture often wants difference without hierarchy, identity without inequality, self-expression without offense, beauty without envy, and freedom without risk. These are admirable aspirations until they are made administratively compulsory. Hartley recognized that a society which cannot tolerate the wounds produced by comparison may end by mutilating the things compared.

The invisible ruler in Facial Justice gives the novel particular relevance to contemporary Iran. Richard Bulliet — Professor Emeritus of Middle Eastern History at Columbia University and one of America’s foremost scholars of Iran and Islamic society — recently reflected on the possibility that Mojtaba Khamenei, son of the former Rahbar, or Supreme Leader, may not just be avoiding public appearances for his own safety, having seen his father and much of his family wiped out in an American air strike. He may choose to remain unseen while authority continues to flow through networks of Revolutionary Guards, and other officials. In Shi‘ite political theology, absence need not mean weakness. The Hidden Imam is absent yet sovereign. His invisibility, like that of Hartley’s Darling Dictator, can deepen his mystique. The DD is heard everywhere, seen rarely, and therefore enlarged by imagination. Visibility can diminish rulers. Distance can magnify them.

Donald Trump is the opposite temperamentally. He craves visibility, camera angles, crowds, instant reaction. Yet Trumpism too depends on symbolic mediation: the staged gesture, the social-media blast, the prop on the desk. His approach is exemplified by the notorious red button joke: according to various accounts, Trump likes to toy with visitors using a red button on his desk. He presses it with theatrical gravity, lets alarm spread around the room, then a butler appears with a Diet Coke on a silver tray. According to Miles Taylor, a former senior official in Trump’s first administration, the joke is meant to display presidential power while making light of it. Whether apocryphal or not, such stories capture something psychologically plausible about Trumpism: immense authority staged as entertainment. 

The deeper danger, as journalist Simon Tisdall has argued recently, is that when nuclear-armed states behave impulsively, theatrically and without visible strategic discipline, they encourage precisely the proliferation they claim to prevent. If countries conclude that only atomic weapons guarantee survival, then brinkmanship becomes advertisement. Iran did not possess a bomb before the present war. After the US-Israeli bombardment, threats of stone-age annihilation and the endless deferment of diplomacy, Iranians may now conclude they really need one. Nobody goes after North Korea.

The red button joke is an emblem of personalized sovereignty reduced to theater. This is why I believe Hartley explains aspects of the present better than many fashionable theorists such as Michel Foucault. He saw politics moving beyond the old opposition between dictatorship and democracy into a stranger zone where democratic forms survive while behavior is increasingly managed; where equality becomes moral theater; where rulers may be hidden priest-kings or hyper-visible celebrities, yet both depend on symbolism more than statesmanship.

The deepest insight of the novel, however, is that catastrophe strengthens the appetite for control. Hartley’s New State is born from atomic devastation. Scarcity, trauma and fear make citizens accept rules they might once have mocked. Safety becomes sacred. After disaster, masks feel reasonable (remember Covid?). Hartley imagined what follows when catastrophe and triviality meet: a civilization rebuilt not on wisdom but on managed grievance. 

Orwell warned that power might one day stamp on a human face forever. Hartley suggested a colder, more plausible paradigm. Power would first improve the face, standardize it, veil it, correct it, cover it with something hygienic and approved — then ask us to smile behind the mask.

The Easter Rising of 1916 and the martyrdom of Husayn at Karbala more than 12 centuries earlier may belong to radically different historical worlds. One was an abortive insurrection in the capital of “West Britain”; the other a 7th-century massacre on the plains of Iraq, when Husayn, the Prophet Muhammad’s grandson, was slaughtered with his family by the forces of the Umayyad caliph Yazid. Both, however, acquired their enduring force from the afterlife of sacrifice. In each case, bloodshed was transfigured into drama, defeat became moral victory, and death became a claim upon the living. Patrick Pearse, architect of the Rising, understood this instinctively. His language of “blood sacrifice” was not just a metaphorical flourish — but a statement of political theology. 

In their stupidity, the British supplied the necessary martyrs. What might have remained a failed rebellion became the founding narrative of the Irish state — a drama replayed in commemorations, monuments, and even the naming of railway stations after the dead heroes. The molding of martyrdom into nationhood also opens avenues for satire, when the language of redemption, once detached from lived suffering, becomes performance. Seán O’Casey saw this with pitiless clarity in Juno and the Paycock. His Captain Boyle, a man sustained by bluster and fantasy, converts St Paul’s grave defiance — “O death, where is thy sting?” — into music-hall bathos: “Death, where is thy sting-a-ling?” The line gets a laugh, but it should also give pause.

In Shia Islam, the paradigm is older, deeper, and more systematically ritualized. The martyrdom of Husayn is not simply remembered; it is re-enacted. Through the commemorations of Ashura — with processions, lamentations, ritual self-flagellations and passion plays — Karbala is made permanently present. It furnishes what might be called a “grammar of endurance”: oppression confirms rather than negates the moral order; suffering anticipates vindication. The parallel with Ireland is not exact, yet in both cases geography is secondary to narrative. What matters is the structuring idea: that unjust death generates authority, that sacrifice binds community, and that loss can be converted into a durable political resource.

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By Anonymous Seafarer

This grammar acquired a specifically national form in Iran with the Safavid revolution of the 16th century. Here the new ruler Shah Ismail shifted from being the awaited imam or messianic figure of his Turkoman followers and adopted Twelver Shiism as the state religion. In Twelver Shiism, the true imam in the line of Ali and Husayn remains in “occultation”. This means that his awaited return, at which point he will bring about universal peace and prosperity, is deferred indefinitely. In adopting this theology, Shah Ismail did more than enforce a doctrinal shift. He also marked out a civilizational boundary. Iran came to define itself not only against its immediate rivals but against the Sunni ecumene dominated by the Ottoman Empire, whose legal and institutional life was shaped by Hanafi legal orthodoxy. The adoption of Shiism thus functioned as a form of geopolitical differentiation: a way of inscribing religious distinctiveness into the fabric of statehood, not dissimilar to the way Ireland resisted the imposition of Anglican Protestantism by embracing Roman Catholicism, a doctrine imposed on the ancient Irish church by enthusiastic Vatican appointees. 

Over time, Persian historical consciousness became fused in part with a sacred history whose emotional center, like that of Ireland, lay outside the nation’s borders, at Karbala, while its eschatological horizon pointed toward the return of the Hidden Imam — one whose return will signal the end of the world — in the line of Ali and Husayn. The result was a national identity underpinned by a narrative in which injustice, suffering and deferred redemption were not contingencies — but structuring principles.

Seen in this light, the resilience of the Islamic Republic — which has both confounded and annoyed Trump — is hardly surprising. What sustains it is not simply repression, nor even ideology in the narrow sense, but a historically sedimented fusion of religion, memory and nationhood. External pressure, instead of weakening resolve, risks activating precisely those symbolic frameworks that transform adversity into confirmation of purpose. This is not confined to Iran. Across the Gulf, in Bahrain and in Saudi Arabia’s Eastern Province, Shia communities remain politically marginalized. In Lebanon, their more activist community faces obliteration by Israel. The 2016 execution of the cleric Nimr al-Nimr in Saudi Arabia was intended as deterrence. Instead, it functioned as martyrdom — a contemporary re-enactment of the Karbala paradigm, especially with its transnational resonance. Pressure on Iran cannot be neatly contained within its borders. It touches a wider theater in which sacrifice remains a potent political force.

The Irish comparison is illuminating precisely because it is asymmetrical. Irish Catholicism formed part of a universal Church extending far beyond the island, while Twelver Shiism was historically a minority tradition that became nationalized. Yet both sustained identity under pressure through narratives of suffering and perseverance. In Ireland, after all, Catholicism functioned as a carrier of national identity under Protestant domination; in Iran, Twelve Shiism performed a comparable role vis-à-vis a wider Sunni world. In both cases, martyrdom provides a language through which political weakness can become the catalyst for moral agency.

The complementarities are not total. Irish national identity, articulated largely in the English language after the erosion of Gaelic, and the Vatican’s historic preference for Latin over the vernacular, lacked the linguistic distinctiveness that often anchors nationalism. It therefore required symbolic intensification. The cult of 1916 compensates for that absence. Martyrdom, in this sense, becomes a substitute for language: a means of binding community through shared acts of remembrance rather than through linguistic difference.

Yet there are instructive parallels when it comes to education. In mid-20th-century Ireland, the Catholic Church exercised a form of soft theocracy, controlling schools, shaping curricula, and supplying a moral intelligentsia through institutions such as the famous Maynooth seminary. If the language of sacrifice helped sustain Irish Catholic identity under external domination, it was the later exposure of clerical abuse that corroded its moral authority from within. From the Nineties onwards, a succession of official inquiries — most notably the Ryan Report and the Murphy Report — laid bare a pattern that was not merely episodic but systemic: the abuse of unmarried mothers and their children by clergy and religious orders, compounded by institutional habits of concealment, transfer, and denial. What shocked Irish society was not only the scale of the wrongdoing, but the disjunction between the Church’s historic role as guardian of national virtue and its failure to protect the most vulnerable within its care.

The consequences were profound. A Church that had once exercised near-hegemonic influence over education, welfare, and the moral imagination of the state found its authority abruptly relativized. Attendance at Mass declined, vocations dwindled, and the deference that had long insulated clerical authority gave way to scrutiny, anger, and, in many cases, indifference. The symbolic economy of sacrifice — so central to both Catholic devotion and nationalist memory — was inverted. No longer did suffering signify redemption; it testified instead to betrayal.

For now, the Irish case may diverge from the Iranian one. After all, while the Islamic Republic has certainly faced its own crises of legitimacy, its clerical establishment has not been discredited by a comparably documented pattern of abuse against children within religious institutions. The persecution of gay behaviors, however obnoxious, may not yet be seen as conflicting with mainstream Islamic values. The erosion of authority in Iran proceeds along different lines — political repression, economic mismanagement, generational estrangement — rather than the moral implosion triggered in Ireland by revelations of clerical wrongdoing. But the crash may yet come: if and when the horrors of the brutal repressions earlier this year come to light. 

Perhaps Ireland will point the way. Maybe O’Casey’s instinct about the fragility of sacred language is instructive. Here the idiom of martyrdom that once underpinned national cohesion now carries a more ambivalent charge: still potent as memory, but no longer sustained by an unquestioned ecclesiastical authority. Once the credibility of the institution that utters it is compromised, the rhetoric of sacrifice risks tipping into parody. The distance between “thy sting” and “sting-a-ling” is not merely comic. It marks the point at which a culture ceases to believe its own consolations.

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There’s an irony here. The educational system overseen by the Church proved unexpectedly effective. The rigor of the Leaving Certificate, often contrasted favorably with the British A-level system, helped produce a highly literate and analytically capable population. The same structures that enforced conformity also cultivated habits of critical judgment. When the Church’s moral authority collapsed in the wake of abuse scandals, those habits enabled a remarkably swift cultural shift. Within a generation, Ireland moved from one of the most observant societies in Europe to one of the most secularized.

A comparable paradox may become visible in Iran. The Islamic Republic has invested heavily in education, expanding literacy and higher education to levels that place Iranian students in competitive global standing, particularly in science and engineering. Despite rules forcing them to adopt the headscarf, women have achieved striking levels of educational attainment. As the researcher Rasmus Nielsen has noted in his global survey of secondary science education, the teaching of science, including evolution, in Iran is on a par with that of most Western countries. 

The comparison with the Sunni world is instructive here. Even in relatively secular countries such as Turkey the teaching of evolution — a prerequisite for basic science education — has been marred by culture wars similar to those raging in parts of America. In Saudi Arabia, Iran’s principal Sunni rival, evolution is barely mentioned in secondary education texts except in advanced biology courses, where it is introduced as “a fallacious and blasphemous theory derived by the Englishman Charles Darwin, who denied Allah’s creation of humanity”. 

As in Ireland, Iran’s educational attainment carries an inherent tension. A system designed to reproduce ideological conformity has helped create a population capable of questioning the very structures that govern it. The protests that erupted with the 2009 Green Movement, and after the death of Mahsa Amini 13 years later, were not only about patriarchal rules and clerical authority. Instead, they revealed a deeper contradiction between clerical governance and an educational agenda oriented toward modernization.

The contradiction has intellectual and theological roots. Ernest Gellner’s distinction between Islam as a “cult of the Book” and Christianity as a “cult of the Person” requires modification in this context. It applies most neatly to Sunni Islam and Protestantism. But Shiism, with its focus on the Hidden Imam and its eschatological expectation of return, introduces a principle of personal mediation closer to Catholicism. Its theology, like Catholic Thomism, contains rationalistic elements that can assist the advancement of science. Authority is not confined to text; it is embodied, transmitted, and anticipated. This eschatological horizon intensifies the dramaturgy of sacrifice. Karbala is not merely remembered; it is unfinished. Its resolution lies in the future. 

The Iranian intellectual tradition reinforces this dynamic. Shia thinkers from the Ismaili tradition that holds to a Living Imam — that is, a living, present spiritual leader rather than a hidden one — articulated a vision in which reason and revelation were intertwined, and in which truth possessed dimensions that could not be reduced to text alone. One might call this “pre-verbal” revelation. Such frameworks facilitated Islam’s expansion into non-Arab intellectual milieus — from Gujarat to the High Pamirs — where conversion required philosophical depth as well as legal adherence. They also helped embed belief in a structure where adversity itself is meaningful, where suffering confirms rather than undermines the moral order.

What emerges from this comparison is not a simple analogy, but a warning. When sacrifice becomes foundational, politics is tempted to follow suit. The dead acquire authority over the living; compromise begins to resemble betrayal. Pearse’s rhetoric of blood sacrifice has long made Irish liberals uneasy for that reason. The revolutionary deployment of Karbala in modern Iran has similarly enabled the mobilization of grief as a political resource.

Predictions of imminent collapse in Tehran, whether issued from Washington or Jerusalem, have often proved misplaced. You can bomb bridges and clinics, assassinate leaders, tighten sanctions — or even blockade ports and take over ships. But what you cannot easily dissolve is a solidarity rooted in a narrative that interprets suffering as moral, even ontological, vindication. The retreat of the Church in Ireland shows that such structures can eventually unravel, but only from within, and often through the unintended consequences of the very institutions that sustained them. Iran may yet follow a similar path, but not by bombs.

Today’s headlines suggest that neither Wotton’s irony nor Callières’ restraint has survived the new diplomacy. Washington says talks with Tehran are “going very well” even as military preparations continue. Iran denounces the terms as one-sided while keeping the diplomatic door ajar; European ministers warn that the conflict cannot be separated from wider confrontations with Russia. In an era of “policy by tweet”, then, what presents itself as realism looks, on closer inspection, like something older and less stable: a return to personalized statecraft, part feudal pageant, part mafia-style armed bargaining.

Donald Trump stands at the center of this shift. His postponement of threatened attacks, while marshaling troops and marines for a possible ground invasion, reflects a businessman’s transactional approach to international affairs — one that has had some purchase in the Western Hemisphere. But Iran is not Venezuela. Here, the same method risks producing not leverage but escalation, hardening positions into what increasingly resembles the religiously charged confrontation encouraging the same ideas of martyrdom and sacrifice that allowed Iran to weather the Iraqi onslaught of the Eighties.

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By Michael Lind

What we are witnessing, in short, is not merely a crisis over Iran but a transformation in the culture of international policymaking. Late-night tweets by an aging leader now reverberate globally in real time. This marks a departure from the centuries during which international affairs, however imperfectly, were conducted through institutional channels that imposed a degree of predictability. In the digital era, diplomacy appears to be reverting to something closer to a pre-Westphalian condition: less governed by procedure, more by impulse; less mediated by institutions, more by personalities. Between Wotton’s irony and Callières’ restraint lies the enduring tension at the heart of diplomacy: the management of truth, trust and interest within a shared framework of rules. That framework — laboriously constructed over centuries — now looks shaky indeed.

Diplomacy, as it originally evolved, was designed precisely to restrain the arbitrary exercise of power. It became what the writer and diplomat Sir Harold Nicolson called a “skilled and difficult art”, embedding political action within recognized procedures governing the transition between war and peace. Its central premise was simple: states, not individuals, are the primary actors in international affairs. The contrast with today is striking. Decisions once filtered through diplomatic channels are now compressed into social media declarations, often addressed as much to domestic audiences as to foreign governments.

Marshall McLuhan’s famous aphorism that “the medium is the message” captures the significance of this change. A tweet is not merely a message conveyed through a different medium; it alters the nature of the act itself. It is immediate, public, performative. It collapses the distance between deliberation and declaration, bypassing the slow accretion of consensus on which diplomacy depends. In such a space, ambiguity — once a resource of diplomacy — becomes a liability, even as clarity can easily slide into provocation.

This transformation is reinforced by the erosion of formal diplomatic channels. In the Iran crisis, after all, negotiations have involved not only established officials but also informal envoys operating through fluid and sometimes opaque lines of communication. Steve Witkoff’s globetrotting is a case in point. All the while, European diplomats view such arrangements with skepticism, questioning both their coherence and their credibility. The result is a curious inversion: the most powerful state in the international system seems to be undermining the very structures that make diplomacy intelligible. To see how much of a departure this represents, it is worth recalling how those structures first emerged.

In the ancient world, envoys traveled between courts bearing messages that could avert — or precipitate — conflict. The Greeks developed rules governing treaties and war; the Romans treated agreements as legal instruments while manipulating them to advantage; Byzantium professionalized negotiation through trained envoys. Yet these practices remained personal. Rulers negotiated with rulers; alliances were sealed by marriages; agreements depended on honor as much as law.

It was only from the later Middle Ages that diplomacy acquired more robust institutional form. Wotton’s dig aside, the Venetian Republic provides a striking example here. Its diplomatic archive contains documents covering a formidable nine centuries, from 883 to its eventual destruction by Napoleon in 1797. This can be read as a vast parchment intelligence network, mixing gossip with sharp observations from the courts of Europe and beyond. The famous “relazioni” analyze neighboring states in forensic detail — measuring rulers, armies and economies with cool detachment.

For the Venetians, and soon for other Europeans too, policy became cumulative, grounded in institutional memory and precedent more than personality alone. These developments culminated in the Peace of Westphalia. Concluded at the end of the Thirty Years’ War, and involving some 190 delegations, it established the principle that states — territorial units governed by sovereign authorities — were the primary actors in international affairs. The system that followed was refined in later settlements, notably the Congress of Vienna, which codified rules of diplomatic precedence and representation.

That legacy is now under strain — not just from social media, but also the provenance of the new diplomacy’s leading actors. To understand Middle Eastern politics, particularly its manifestations in the Gulf, it is well worth starting with the Muqadimma, by the renowned North African scholar Ibn Khaldun. Born in Tunis in 1332, he is often seen as a precursor of Western political and social theorists from Machiavelli to Marx. Leadership, according to Ibn Khaldun, exists through superiority, and superiority through a concept he calls asabiyya. An Arabic word, it is usually translated as “group-feeling” or “clannism”.

More to the point, drawing on asabiyya allows us to more clearly understand this shift in practice. In Khaldunian terms, power rests not on abstract institutions but on the cohesion of ruling groups, often organized around family or clan, and buttressed by endogamous practices such as marriage between first or second cousins. The force of asabiyya resists impersonal structures and tends to revert, under pressure, to personalized forms of rule. Across the Arab Gulf , petrodollar wealth has reinforced these patterns. In these tribal monarchies, political authority remains tied to ruling families whose internal cohesion — not public legitimacy — underpins the state.

Iran, for all its authoritarianism, presents a more complex model, combining clerical power with electoral mechanisms and a layered constitutional structure. Seen in this light, the drift towards personalized diplomacy reflects a convergence: the erosion of the public domain in the West meets the persistence of kin-based systems elsewhere. The comparison with the medieval world becomes instructive. Before the modern state system, political authority was personal. Kings operated within networks of kinship and rivalry; agreements were contingent; reputation was central. Conflict could be ritualized. Jousting offers a suggestive parallel: a controlled encounter governed by rules, yet driven by personal honor. Victory conferred prestige; defeat entailed humiliation. The contest was as much about display as outcome.

There is, however, a crucial asymmetry. Israeli and US reliance on targeted assassination reflects the logic of personalized power. Yet applied to Iran, it risks confusing visibility with vulnerability. Unlike many Arab regimes, Iran possesses a dense institutional structure in which authority is distributed across clerical bodies, elected institutions, and the security services. Power resides not in individuals alone but in an interlocking system capable of absorbing losses and regenerating leadership. The paradox is clear: strategies based on personalized power can fail against systems whose resilience lies in institutional depth.

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Has MBS made a fatal error?

By Malise Ruthven

No less important, the feudal approach to foreign policy is also bewildering for everyone else. European leaders, already divided over Iran, respond not to coherent strategies but to shifting signs from Washington. The lack of consultation undermines trust; volatility undermines credibility. Nor are regional actors themselves exempt from these challenges. Personalized diplomacy may allow for rapid engagement, but it also undermines predictability. Relationships become central — but also fragile. For the Gulf states, particularly the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia, the implications are vast.

If, after all, American policy appears contingent on personal relationships rather than institutional commitments, the incentive to hedge increases. This may take the form of diversified alliances or, more ominously, the pursuit of independent deterrence. Reports that Saudi Arabia is gathering uranium, together with its longstanding links with Pakistan, raise the question of whether Israel’s regional nuclear monopoly will remain uncontested. Such calculations belong not to a stable order but to a system in which trust is eroding and guarantees are no longer taken at face value.

Of course, none of this implies a simple return to the medieval past. States remain powerful, and institutions persist. But the balance between institutional constraint and personal agency is shifting. And unlike the jousts of old, the consequences will not be contained to sport.

And why did the two powers strike in broad daylight on Saturday 28 February? Was it because Mossad, the Israeli intelligence agency, or the CIA tipped them off that Khamenei and his entourage would be above ground in their compound rather than in their night-time bunkers? Did the Israelis in effect “bounce” the Americans into attacking Iran on that day?

Historians will no doubt debate these questions if, as seems likely, Benjamin Netanyahu and Donald Trump fail to unseat the authoritative institutions of the Islamic Republic. Given the lack of a coherent opposition in Iran, there is a real possibility that forces loyal to the regime — the Revolutionary Guards and Basij militias — will simply unite under a new Supreme Leader and maintain the momentum that saw thousands slaughtered after the street protests in January, meanwhile unleashing the kind of bloody “forever war” that Trump has pledged to avoid.

But the uncertainties raised by this war also lead to a more immediate question. Given the chaos triggered by the attack — canceled flights through three of the world’s largest airport hubs; thousands of tourists stranded in Dubai; the closing of the Hormuz Straits; punishing hikes in oil and gas prices — what can the Gulf states have been thinking?

Before the February attack, the conventional wisdom held that the petrodollar monarchies — including Saudi Arabia — were urging restraint on Washington and (more distantly) Tel Aviv. What they feared were precisely the consequences that have now come to pass: Iran — the wounded animal — launching missile and drone attacks against targets across the Gulf that host US forces. Strikes or attempted strikes have hit the United Arab Emirates (including the Al Dhafra air base and sites in Dubai), Bahrain (near the US Fifth Fleet headquarters in Manama), Kuwait (Ali Al-Salem air base and Shuaiba port), Qatar (areas around Doha and US facilities), and Saudi Arabia (notably the Ras Tanura oil hub). Civilian infrastructure has also been affected, including Dubai airport, hotels, and port facilities, largely as a result of missile impacts or debris from interceptions.

The pattern suggests that Iran’s strategy is to target US military infrastructure and energy nodes across the Gulf while signaling that the region’s economic lifelines are exposed in the event of escalation. The Gulf energy infrastructure remains vulnerable — as was dramatically demonstrated in September 2019, when drones and cruise missiles struck the Abqaiq processing facility and the Khurais oil field in Saudi Arabia. The attack temporarily knocked out roughly 5.7 million barrels per day of production — about half of Saudi output and nearly 5% of global supply — making it the largest sudden disruption in oil market history. Although Iran’s allies, the Yemeni Houthis, claimed responsibility, Western intelligence agencies concluded that the weapons and planning bore the Islamic Republic’s hallmarks. Production was restored within weeks, but the strike exposed the extraordinary fragility of Gulf energy infrastructure and the global economy’s continuing dependence on it.

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Given the damage predicted — and already inflicted — on Gulf oil production, not to mention the tourism industry, the voices urging caution sounded eminently reasonable. It was therefore surprising to learn from the Washington Post and other sources that Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS) played a behind-the-scenes role in encouraging Trump to attack Iran.

According to several officials familiar with the discussions, the crown prince held multiple private phone conversations with Trump in the weeks preceding the US-Israeli strikes. In these calls, he reportedly urged Washington to act quickly, warning that Iran would become “stronger and more dangerous” if decisive action were delayed. There may have been other links as well. As I reported in my book Unholy Kingdom, MBS formed a personal bond with Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, an Orthodox Jew with close links to the Netanyahu family. During Trump’s first term, when the scandal over the murder of Jamal Khashoggi was in the headlines, MBS and Kushner were reported to have been in contact via WhatsApp, with Kushner acting as the crown prince’s most important defender in the White House. As the late Martin Indyk, the former US ambassador to Israel and a leading Middle East expert, told The New York Times at the time; “the relationship between Jared Kushner and Mohammed bin Salman constitutes the foundation of the Trump policy not just toward Saudi Arabia but toward the region”. There has been no suggestion since Trump’s return to power that the “WhatsApp bromance” has been fractured.

The Post reported that MBS’s behind-the-scenes lobbying contrasts sharply with Saudi Arabia’s public emphasis on dialog with Tehran. Saudi officials have repeatedly stated that they do not want a regional war and would not allow Saudi territory or airspace to be used for an attack. Privately, however, the crown prince and other Saudi officials, including his brother, the defense minister Khaled bin Salman, reportedly argued that the moment was strategically favorable for confronting Iran and degrading its missile and military infrastructure.

These communications occurred amid a broader effort by regional allies to influence Washington’s decision. Kushner’s friend, Benjamin Netanyahu, has long advocated US strikes on Iran, with Israeli officials also pressing the White House to act. The Post reported that the combined pressure from Israel and Saudi Arabia helped shape Trump’s final decision to authorize large-scale attacks despite US intelligence assessments that Iran did not pose an imminent direct threat to them.

One of the most destabilizing developments in contemporary Middle Eastern politics has been the sectarianization of geopolitical rivalry; this is what happens when strategic competition between states becomes reframed as a religious confrontation between communities. The current war risks accelerating that process dramatically. What began as a campaign to neutralize a nuclear program could easily be interpreted across the Muslim world as a coalition of Israel, the United States, and Sunni monarchies against a Shi’a sovereign state. If that perception spreads, the conflict may mobilize actors far beyond Iran’s borders: militias, religious movements, and sectarian networks whose motivations extend beyond conventional state interests. Once political conflicts acquire sacred meaning, they become far harder to resolve.

Supporters of the strike argue that decisive action will destabilize Iran’s regime and perhaps open the way for a more pragmatic leadership. Intelligence analysts have reportedly even considered scenarios in which factions within the Revolutionary Guard might assume power and pursue accommodation with the West.

History suggests caution. Regimes built around revolutionary ideologies rarely moderate under external pressure. Stalin’s regime, for example, was strengthened by Hitler’s attack on the Soviet Union; its collapse in 1990–91 came only after a prolonged period of declining Cold War tensions. More often than not, external conflict — especially aerial bombardment — serves to radicalize. If this conflict becomes widely interpreted as a struggle between rival religious visions of history, it could ignite precisely the kind of sectarian confrontation that has repeatedly destabilized the region over the past two decades, when Sunni leaders such as Jordan’s King Abdullah saw themselves facing a “Shi’a crescent” following the fall of the Sunni dictator Saddam Hussein. At that point the arc of Shi’a influence stretching from Iran via revitalized Shi’as in Iraq and Alawite-dominated Syria to the Mediterranean.

The departure of the Assad regime from Damascus, the weakening of Hezbollah in Lebanon, and now, the attacks on Iran, might suggest to Sunni rulers that Shi’ism is on the retreat globally. However, revolutionary activism inspired by Khamenei’s “martyrdom” among Shi’a populations in Bahrain or the oil-bearing  province of Saudi Arabia may present a more menacing challenge. The Saudi kingdom’s clerical establishment are quiescent but not “defanged” as MBS pursues his program of social modernization and they could remobilize if a Shi’ite revolutionary menace was perceived as emerging from within the confines of the state. Then, short of the kind of quick, decisive strike that Trump might have envisaged after his actions in Venezuela, we are into something far more intractable: a contest of sacred narratives among the three great Abrahamic traditions.

When a conflict becomes framed through religious narratives of martyrdom and sacrifice, defeats can easily be transformed into moral victories. Geopolitical calculations and theological narratives have converged. Netanyahu’s need for political triumph, Saudi Arabia’s strategic rivalry with Iran, American evangelical support for Israel, and Iranian revolutionary theology have all contributed to the atmosphere in which war has broken out. When strategic rivalry between states becomes entangled with domestic political incentives, ideological movements and religious expectations, volatility increases.

The centrality of martyrdom to Shi’a political theology only exacerbates that risk. The death of Imam Husayn at Karbala in 680AD has long provided the Islamic Republic with a powerful symbolic language through which suffering can be transformed into moral vindication. The assassination of Iran’s supreme leader risks reinforcing precisely this narrative, helping the regime to present itself as the victim of unjust aggression, with the anti-government protesters dismissed as treacherous agents inspired by Mossad and victims of Western manipulation.

At the same time, Israeli politics has been undergoing a profound ideological shift. The coalition sustaining Netanyahu’s government includes figures such as Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir. Their outlook is shaped by currents of religious Zionism that see the modern state of Israel as part of a redemptive historical process. Within this worldview, the restoration of Jewish sovereignty over the biblical lands is not simply a political development but a step in the unfolding of sacred history. Conflict with Israel’s enemies therefore acquires a metaphysical significance.

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America itself appears to be increasingly under the sway of extreme religious ideology, with a parallel narrative existing between American evangelical Christianity and Jewish messianism. (The denouements of these end-times scenarios may differ radically, with Jews expecting redemption while their evangelical supporters expecting Jewish conversions to Christianity, but this doesn’t affect contemporary theo-political forces). Millions of evangelical voters interpret Middle Eastern politics through a dispensationalist reading of biblical prophecy in which the modern state of Israel plays a central role in an unfolding divine plan. The US ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee frames Israel’s conflicts not merely as geopolitical struggles but as episodes within a larger biblical drama. Within the MAGA political coalition, this constituency carries enormous influence, reinforcing support for Israel not only through strategic calculations but also through theological conviction.

It bears repeating: when wars acquire eschatological meaning, they rarely end quickly — or predictably.

There is, however, another possible perspective. One geopolitical objective of Washington’s confrontation with Iran may be to weaken a state that has become an important partner for both Russia and China. Yet the Chinese leadership has previously demonstrated that diplomacy in the region need not follow the logic of confrontation. In 2023, President Xi Jinping’s government brokered the unexpected rapprochement between Saudi Arabia and Iran, reopening diplomatic relations after years of hostility.

That episode suggests that even in a region long defined by rivalry and proxy conflict, political imagination can sometimes achieve what military force cannot. Whether the current crisis will leave room for such diplomacy remains the unanswered question.

The Saudis, backed by President Donald Trump, have of course denied that the murder was officially sanctioned, claiming that a rogue outfit was responsible after an argument got out of hand. However, the killing and dismemberment by the infamous bone saw were recorded in brutal detail by Turkish intelligence; and credible authorities, including senior intelligence officials such as Agnès Callamard, former UN special rapporteur on extra-judicial killings, have been unequivocal in their verdicts. Callamard’s report into the “execution” is damning: “Evidence points to the 15-person mission to execute Mr Khashoggi requiring significant government coordination, resources and finances… Every expert consulted finds it inconceivable that an operation of this scale could be implemented without the crown prince being aware, at a minimum, that some sort of mission of a criminal nature, directed at Mr Khashoggi, was being launched.” Just in case Prince William is in need of some small talk.

Of course, a visit by a senior member of the Royal Family is never just ceremonial. It is an act of diplomacy, and symbolism too. The moral endorsement of the British crown will be cherished by the Saudi regime, which likes to think of itself as “royal” in the grand tradition of the Western monarchies, despite its parvenu origins. But Prince William’s visit raises uncomfortable questions — not only about Middle Eastern realpolitik in an era of shifting alliances, but about the values that the United Kingdom claims to uphold.

These questions have become especially acute in the wake of a recent High Court judgment against the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. It concerned Ghanem al-Masarir, a Saudi dissident living in Britain since 2003. Through his popular YouTube channel, The Ghanem Show, recorded in Wembley, al-Masarir uses satire to expose corruption and human rights abuses within Saudi Arabia. His reach is vast, amassing over 300 million views, primarily from audiences inside Saudi Arabia who seek alternatives to state-controlled narratives and pro-regime bots.

But the authorities are aware of him too. Al-Masarir has been under constant harassment since 2004. He claims that a large check was forged in an effort to break him financially; that his phones were infiltrated with Israeli-manufactured Pegasus spyware; that he was followed and assaulted in broad daylight; and that he received explicit death threats from individuals linked to the Saudi royal court. The most violent incident, al-Masarir says, occurred in August 2018 he was followed from a cafe and assaulted by two men near the Brompton Road entrance of Harrods. Al-Masarir alleged that during the beating, the attackers repeatedly shouted: “Who are you to talk about the family of al-Saud?” and “How dare you curse Prince Salman, we won’t allow it!” They called him a “slave of Qatar” and threatened to “teach him a lesson”. When an English friend who was with al-Masarir told them they were protected by the Queen and British police, the attackers retorted: “Fuck London — their queen is our slave and their police are our dogs.”

In 2010, al-Masarir was befriended by an individual claiming to be a Master’s student in the UK who repeatedly attempted to persuade him to travel to Italy or Egypt. He later discovered this man’s true identity: Rajeh al-Baqmi, the head of Saudi intelligence at the Saudi embassy in London. He also encountered Maher Mutreb, a Saudi intelligence officer at the embassy, who made an explicit warning that he should never leave the UK. This might have been a back-handed threat with a hint of protection, suggesting that unlike their Russian counterparts who were prepared to murder co-nationals in London or Salisbury, Saudi mafiosi are more comfortable conducting their nefarious operations outside the UK, in countries such as Turkey.

Mutreb is clearly not to be messed with. A brigadier general commanding the Saudi hit squad or “Rapid Intervention Force”, it was he who led the team charged with killing and dismembering Khashoggi, assisted by Dr Salah al-Tubaigy, a forensic pathologist who is thought to have wielded the bone saw. In the audio recordings revealed by Turkish intelligence — the Saudis had failed to sweep the consulate for bugs — it is Mutreb’s voice that dominates. “Keep pushing, don’t remove your hand!”, followed by: “It’s over, it’s over, it’s over,” with the sounds of plastic sheets and the whine of an electric saw. While there is no audio directly linking the Crown Prince to the Khashoggi murder, the circumstantial evidence is compelling. In a separate audio, leaked by the CIA, the phrase “tell your boss” occurs in a conversation between Mutreb and the Crown Prince’s de facto chief of staff, Saud al-Qahtani. As Bruce Riedel, a former CIA analyst, told The New York Times: “A phone call like that… is as close to a smoking gun as you’re going to get.”

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The disclosures implicating MBS in the murder will certainly be ignored in the current White House — whose incumbents include the Crown Prince’s close friend, Jared Kushner, the President’s son-in-law. But is it really always necessary for the UK to toe the US line? At the very least, the High Court ruling in the Ghanem al-Masarir case should give the Palace — and the Foreign Office — pause for thought. Saudi Arabia initially attempted to claim immunity under the 1978 State Immunity Act. However, the court ruled in 2022 that the Kingdom was not immune to these claims. After the Saudi state failed to pay court costs and its appeal was struck out, the final judgment was delivered on 26 January. Judge Pushpinder Saini found that on the balance of probabilities the Kingdom had been responsible for the physical attack on al-Masarir and for hacking his phone: “The KSA had a clear interest and motivation to shut down the claimant’s public criticism of the Saudi government.”

In its ruling, the court awarded al-Masarir more than £3 million in compensation for the psychiatric harm caused by hacking his phone as well as the physical assault. This marks a significant benchmark in the defense of human rights — though, given its refusal to take part in the legal proceedings, there is no certainty that the Saudi government will actually pay.

Nevertheless, any concerns that the British state has about criminality are outweighed by realpolitik. As David Hearst, an astute Middle East observer, has argued, a profound realignment is underway in the Arab world. It is not driven by palace intrigues, tribal rivalries, or the usual contests between regional proxies. Nor is it about Iran or political Islam — the two habitual anxieties of Sunni Arab rulers. And unlike the Arab Spring, it has not emerged from popular uprisings or mass protests. Yet its consequences could be just as far-reaching.

What has changed, according to Hearst, is that the region’s most populous Arab states — above all Saudi Arabia and Algeria, and potentially Egypt — have begun to recognize the threat of a shared project of Israel and the United Arab Emirates to reshape the Middle East. Their fear is that Tel Aviv and Abu Dhabi intend to fragment Arab-majority or Arab-leaning states. This would enable the Israelis and Emiratis to control key maritime chokepoints, such as the Straits of Hormuz and the Bab el-Mandeb, and entrench military and economic dominance across the Red Sea, the Horn of Africa, and beyond.

This strategy is already explicit in Israel’s actions: in its efforts to create de facto enclaves in Syria protecting the Druzes and Kurds; in its recognition of Somaliland, which gives it a foothold in the Horn of Africa; and in its general efforts to weaken Arab polities where national unity tends to be problematic. For the UAE, fragmentation has been a long-running method of power projection. It’s visible in Libya, where the UAE has provided military support to General Khalifa Haftar against the UN-supported government in Tripoli; in Sudan, where the UAE backs the genocidal Rapid Support Forces against the central government; and in southern Yemen, where the UAE armed and empowered the Southern Transitional Council (STC) in pursuit of a separatist state aligned with Emirati interests and open to ties with Israel.

Indeed, Yemen is the decisive fault line in the plan for regional fragmentation. What began as a campaign against the Muslim Brotherhood-linked al-Islah movement evolved into a broader attempt to carve out an Emirati client state in the south, centered on the port of Aden and extending east into the Hadhramaut valley. The separatists’ attempt to take over the port of al Mukalla in the Hadhramaut region at the end of last year proved a turning point. Saudi Arabia, now encircled on its southern frontier, felt that Emirati ambitions were now threatening its security — and duly responded with force. Backing official Yemeni government troops, it bombed STC positions in Mukalla, reversing much of Abu Dhabi’s decade-long project in a matter of days. Almost simultaneously, Israel’s recognition of the separatist government of Somaliland (it is the only UN state to formally do so) confirmed Saudi fears that these were not isolated moves but elements of a coordinated strategy across both sides of the Bab el-Mandeb.

The rift between Mohammed bin Salman and his former mentor, the Emirati president Mohammed bin Zayed, was now gaping. The pair were once close partners in resisting the Muslim Brotherhood and allied movements. Now, Riyadh has not only confronted Emirati proxies militarily but also publicly reframed Abu Dhabi as a destabilizing actor. The Saudi media attacks on Mohammed bin Zayed have been blistering, depicting the UAE’s president as a disruptive force rather than the trusted ally of yore.

And the break reflects a deeper recalculation. Saudi Arabia understands that its strategic weight — in terms of population, territory, and oil power — far exceeds that of the UAE. Once you remove the expat community living in Dubai and Abu Dhabi, there are barely one million Emirati citizens. Abu Dhabi may specialize in covert action and proxy warfare, but it cannot prevail against Riyadh when vital Saudi interests are at stake.

Meanwhile, Washington under Donald Trump has intensified Saudi unease by treating global energy resources as prizes to be seized and threatening to depress oil prices, undermining the kingdom’s fiscal stability. Riyadh has concluded that US military power does not equate to responsible governance, and that American adventurism routinely generates chaos it cannot manage.

So the Saudi turn is not moral but strategic. By resisting Emirati-Israeli plans for regional fragmentation, Riyadh is positioning itself as an autonomous Arab power, potentially aligning more closely with Turkey, Egypt, Algeria — and perhaps, even long-term, with Iran. What it favors is a regional security order independent of Washington and Tel Aviv.

Given the emerging regional configurations, the British government — and the Palace — would be right in thinking that Britain’s interests align more closely with the Saudi Kingdom which, like it or not, is emerging as a leading player in the region and a potential source of stability rather than with the disruptive UAE. But does all this mean that the heir to the throne must cosy up to his murderous Saudi counterpart?

Prince William has cultivated an image as a thoughtful, socially conscious public figure — engaged with environmental issues, interfaith dialogue, and the responsibilities of leadership. It does not befit that persona for him to associate himself too closely with a regime implicated in surveillance, murderous violence, and repression. If William proceeds with the visit, he will need to find ways of expressing a certain distance from his hosts. He should certainly decline any invitations to inspect MBS’s yacht, Serena. According to the anonymous Saudi activist who goes by the name Mujtahid, Jamal Khashoggi’s fingers are kept on board as a trophy.

In a bid to wean his nation off its oil addiction, de facto ruler Mohammed bin Salman (MBS) has approved the building of numerous such resorts to lure high-end tourists to the kingdom. The most egregious, and least plausible, is a ski resort planned for the arid mountain town of Trojena, which plans to pump out snow for three months a year for the merriment of international ski bums. This energy-guzzling resort forms part of Neom, MBS’s futuristic giga-project in north-west Saudi Arabia. If you look it up online, you will find a fantasy world of yachting marinas, soaring buildings, and elegant people in European attire exploring the rugged beauty of Arabia and its dazzling Red Sea coast.

For many Western architects hedged by planning laws at home, the lure of building in Saudi Arabia’s wild west is irresistible — despite the nation’s abysmal record on human rights and the environment. Even after the murder and dismemberment of The Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul in 2018, at the hands of a team sent specially from Riyadh, the architectural bonanza continues apace. According to Architects’ Journal, dozens of UK architecture firms are understood to be involved in Vision 2030, the array of projects overseen by MBS, of which Neom forms a part.

One of these firms is Foster + Partners. Although English architect Norman Foster stepped back from the board overseeing Neom after Khashoggi’s murder, his practice has only deepened its engagement. It is currently designing a two-kilometer-high tower near Riyadh, set to be the world’s tallest; a six-runway “aerotropolis”; and what is described as “the world’s first fully immersive experiential marine life center” at the Amaala Red Sea resort on the Gulf. For his role in building Neom’s airport, Foster has been strongly reprimanded by the Architects Climate Action Network (ACAN), which stated that “based on Saudi Arabia’s reputation for human rights abuse, slavery, and deaths in construction, working on projects there which are not critical would be unethical” — and contrary to the Royal Institute of British Architects’ professional code of practice.

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Meanwhile, more than a dozen beautiful football stadiums are also being designed by global architects including Populous and Foster + Partners. These are under construction or renovation ahead of the 2034 World Cup, which was awarded by FIFA to Saudi Arabia last December amid controversies about changed voting procedures and the concerns of human rights organizations.

In accepting such fantastical commissions, Western architects are choosing to overlook not only the murder of Khashoggi, but also the fallout from MBS’s massive construction projects. The region where Neom is located is the heartland of the Huwaitat tribe — rivals to the Al Saudi. According to human rights group ALQST, Saudi authorities have illegally displaced local tribes to make way for Neom, and cracked down violently on tribe members who resisted eviction. Several have been sentenced to execution. Today, the Huwaitats’ goat-hair tents have been replaced by temporary trailer-parks, housing more than 100,000 bureaucrats and construction workers.

Since then, The Wall Street Journal has exposed malpractice and corruption at the highest level of Neom, with senior executives who were banned for corruption in Europe still practicing freely in Arabia. As the newspaper put it, MBS “allows what many consider bad behavior as long as an executive delivers on his vision”. Meanwhile, on the ground, workers on The Line are reportedly subjected to 16-hour days and poor working conditions. An ITV documentary aired last October, Kingdom Uncovered: Inside Saudi Arabia, estimated that 21,000 workers from Nepal, India and Bangladesh have died since 2016 while working on Saudi’s giga-projects.

If bad behavior won’t give MBS pause, perhaps the project’s finances will, as hoped-for foreign investors are deterred less by human rights abuses than Neom’s dubious economic prospects. According to the WSJ, a draft board audit last summer estimated the amount required to complete Neom by 2080 at $8.8 trillion — that’s 25 times more than the annual Saudi budget. The audit found “evidence of deliberate manipulation” of finances by “certain members of management”, aided by McKinsey & Co.

Yet it seems little will tear MBS from his futuristic vision. And so it is worth asking what Neom’s design reveals about its autocratic patron. The jewel in Neom’s crown is The Line, a steel and glass structure some 170 kilometers long with mirrors for walls and cascading terraces with plants and ponds. Nothing about its design seems “Islamic”. The original model was devised by veteran American architect Thom Mayne, who, unlike the late Tom Payette, designer of the impressive Aga Khan hospital in Karachi, has no experience of working in Muslim environments. Before designing the hospital, Payette, at his client’s request, visited numerous sites from Spain to Pakistan to study different styles of Islamic architecture. The idea was to learn how qualities of Muslim living as well as architecture could be incorporated into the hospital’s design. So far Mayne has made no such efforts.

It might not be too outlandish to describe Mayne’s linear vision as “Islamically illiterate” in terms of both its aesthetic as well as its social vision. While there may not be a consensus about what constitutes “Islamic architecture” globally, the rhythmic opposition of earth-bound domes and soaring minarets that characterize iconic masterpieces like the Taj Mahal in India or the Selimiye Mosque in Edirne, Turkey, are conspicuously absent. As Mayne himself explained to the Saudis, The Line’s rectilinear structure was inspired by deconstructing a map of New York.

In awarding the contract to Western designers oblivious of Muslim contexts, MBS and his apparatchiks demonstrated either an ignorance of the aesthetic and cultural traditions prevailing in the Muslim world, or, more probably, a disdain for them. Such contempt was on full display when the Al Saud clan destroyed the Ottoman fabric of Mecca, turning the holy city of Islam into a replica of Las Vegas.

In a recent plea to UK architects, Khashoggi’s widow, Hanan, told the Architects’ Journal: “I’m proud that you are helping Saudi Arabia to develop, and this is what Jamal wanted, but please speak to them [Saudi Arabia’s ruling royal family] and remind them there is unfinished business here, which is Jamal.” It seems unlikely that in Saudi Arabia, a Disneyland for ambitious British architects, that Hanan’s plea will make the slightest headway. As J. Robert Oppenheimer, father of the atomic bomb, supposedly said when asked to explain the appeal of working on atomic weapons: “When you see something that is technically sweet, you go ahead and do it.”

The message from Donald Trump’s peace talks on Tuesday is clear: Saudi Arabia is now the most influential Arab country. Far outranking Egypt, the kingdom is well placed to benefit from America’s freewheeling new foreign policy, especially given that MBS enjoys remarkably close relationships with figures at the very heart of Trumpworld. From making peace with Israel to securing nuclear weapons, the second Trump term could transform Saudi foreign policy.

From a Saudi perspective, arguably the most significant US presence at the talks in Riyadh was not Rubio, or even National Security Advisor Mike Walz, but rather Steve Witkoff. Trump’s Middle East envoy, and sometime golf buddy, was the President’s pick to meet Putin in Moscow last week. According to Trump, the encounter lasted “for a very extended period” — and that isn’t the only sign of his influence.

Witkoff, like Trump, is a billionaire real estate magnate who knows how to get things done. Even before his boss was formally inaugurated, and as the Biden administration faced blockages with the Gaza hostage deal, Witkoff defied convention (being Jewish himself) by conspicuously insisting that Benjamin Netanyahu break the Sabbath to meet him. Though not at that point officially in post, Witkoff then flew to Doha, where he spent time with Biden’s own Middle East envoy, Brett McGurk, who for his part praised the meeting, telling the Washington Post of a “very close partnership” that even extended to friendship.

As Trump’s envoy to a notoriously unstable region, Witkoff will doubtless face formidable obstacles. But in a diplomatic landscape where personal fixers are increasingly replacing professionals from the State Department, he’s unlikely to be outflanked by officials who work by the book. And in MBS, Saudi Arabia’s de facto leader, he also finds a partner deeply familiar with the world of Washington-Riyadh diplomacy.

Trump himself has always set great store on his relationship with the Saudis. During his first presidency, in May 2017, Riyadh was the first foreign capital he visited. In part, this preoccupation can be understood strategically, with the country a huge market for American weaponry, and a key to shoring up Israel and US Gulf allies against pressure from Iran.

Yet he had friends there too. In his May 2017 visit, Trump was accompanied by his son-in-law Jared Kushner. The latter had formed a strong personal bond with MBS, at that point the kingdom’s deputy crown prince. Over the course of private conversations, and hinting too at Kushner’s friendship with the Netanyahus, the pair likely decided they could short-circuit the usual diplomatic process and forge a peace between Israelis and Palestinians — all while outflanking other regional actors. Never mind that Kushner had no knowledge of the region, beyond his family’s support for Israeli non-profits supporting Jewish settlements in the Palestinian territories of the West Bank: his friendship with MBS made him influential.

Some American officials believed that the Saudis and their Emirati allies were treating Kushner as a “useful idiot” in their designs against the Islamic Republic. But Kushner and his friends in the White House could also see the advantage in having an ally in the Saudi court at a time of growing, if unacknowledged, alignment between Israel and the Gulf monarchies. As Martin Indyk, a former US diplomat, told the New York Times: “The relationship between Jared Kushner and Mohammed bin Salman constitutes the foundation of the Trump policy not just toward Saudi Arabia but toward the region.”

After the shocking murder of Jamal Khashoggi, a Saudi journalist killed at his country’s consulate in Istanbul, Kushner’s relationship with MBS came under growing public scrutiny. Revelations about their “bromance” took an especially sinister turn when it appeared that Kushner might be less interested in brokering Middle East peace than in having the Saudis rescue his own family’s finances in exchange for helping them acquire nuclear weapons.

Thanks to a disastrous investment in a New York property, complete with the apocalyptic address of 666 Fifth Avenue, the business Kushner shared with his father Charles was in dire straits. Kushner Jr looked to the Qatari sovereign wealth fund, but they turned him down. He was rescued instead by Brookfield Asset Management, a company that owns Westinghouse Electric, a nuclear services business hoping to sell nuclear reactors to Saudi Arabia. Riyadh has always claimed it wanted the technology for civilian purposes, even as it insisted on producing its own nuclear fuel, rather than buying it more cheaply abroad.

Shortly after being rebuffed by the Qataris, and in his role as Trump’s senior foreign policy advisor, Kushner provided critical US support for a diplomatic assault on Qatar. After a long period of tension, with Qatar seen as much more friendly to the Muslim Brotherhood and to Iran, with which it shares the world’s largest field of natural gas, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) ultimately blockaded the country. According to media reports at the time, Kushner was instrumental in undermining efforts by the then Secretary of State Rex Tillerson — a seasoned oil man familiar with the region — to end the standoff. Soon enough, Tillerson himself was out, peremptorily dismissed by Trump in March 2018.

The Khashoggi scandal initially embarrassed the first Trump administration, not least because the victim was well known in Washington and had friends on Capitol Hill. The manner of Khashoggi’s death — he was first strangled, then brutally dismembered — hardly helped. Yet after talking on the phone to both Saudi’s king and its crown prince, Trump bought into the story that the killing had been the work of rogue actors. Here, Kushner’s role appears to have been pivotal. Though officials had tried to restrict his communications with MBS, in accordance with protocols that members of the National Security Council should participate in all calls with foreign leaders, the two men continued to talk and text on WhatsApp. With US intelligence agencies concluding that the killing may have been ordered by MBS himself, Kushner became the prince’s most important defender inside the White House, perhaps unsurprising when the duo are on first-name terms.

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MBS can now rest assured he has a powerful friend in the White House. Yet challenges remain, particularly since the horrors of the Hamas massacre and the annihilation of Gaza that followed. From a personal perspective, the crown prince has said he has no interest in the “Palestinian issue” — but must take account of the fact that his young population does. Before the Hamas attack, his aims were clear enough. In return for “normalizing” relations with Israel in line with the Abraham Accords, signed by the UAE and Bahrain, the Saudis would secure a comprehensive security deal with the United States. Notably, that included backing for its stop-start nuclear ambitions. The October 7 atrocity put paid to that project. As even Joe Biden acknowledged, one of the reasons Hamas attacked Israel was because the Saudis were about to “sit down with” their old rivals in Tel Aviv.

On this particular issue, Trump’s foreign policy could yet cause the Saudis problems. Think about it like this: can MBS really go along with Trump’s mad scheme to take over Gaza, and ethnically cleanse its Palestinian population, while also maintaining that there must be an irreversible “pathway” to Palestinian statehood — a scheme Netanyahu has devoted his whole career to wrecking. It would be ironic indeed if Kushner’s friendship with one Middle Eastern ruler scuppered his plans with another.

There may of course be some wiggle room here. On Fox News, Steve Witkoff suggested that Trump’s resettlement plan — rejected by Jordan and Egypt — was really his way of starting a new conversation: “Now you have the Egyptians saying we have a plan, the Jordanians are saying we have a plan, and people are really engaging in really important cogent discussions…We are actually engaged in a productive conversation around what is best for Gaza and how do we make peoples’ lives better.” At a summit in Cairo later this month, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Qatar, Egypt, and Jordan are expected to put forward the Arab plan for Gaza. Having dangled before Trump a $600 billion investment in the US and the promise of a reduction in oil prices, MBS won’t be without leverage.

***

Malise Ruthven’s latest book, Unholy Kingdom: Religion, Corruption and Violence in Saudi Arabia (Verso), is out on 25 February.

The unexpected collapse of Assad’s regime, propped up by Russia and Iran, was the result of years of meticulous planning by Hussain al-Shara’a, known as Abu Mohammed al-Jolani, leader of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) — an offshoot of al-Qaeda based in the Turkish-protected enclave of Idlib outside of Assad’s control. An astute operator who currently appears to prioritise governing Syria over messianic dreams of global jihad, Jolani timed his offensive to benefit from the US-sponsored ceasefire between Israel and Iran-backed Hezbollah, when the latter’s fighters had been withdrawn from Syria or neutralised. Meanwhile, Russia was preoccupied with Ukraine.

Assad’s fall is a major blow to Iran and a victory for Israel in its drawn-out contest with the Islamic Republic. But the biggest winner is probably Turkey, whose leader Recep Tayyip Erdoğan is a “soft” supporter of Islamism. The power vacuum created by the fall of the Assad’s regime, with soldiers abandoning their units, leaves the country with a number of forces outside of Jolani’s control. These include the Syrian National Army —  a militia supported by Turkey — as well as Iran-linked Iraqi militias and Kurdish forces in the north-east. The southern border has its own cluster of militias, including some manned by the Druze minority.

Jolani has signalled inclusiveness, ordering his fighters not to “instil fear” into people of different sects. The Shi’ite minorities, such as Alawites and Ismailis, will be feeling especially vulnerable, given the extent to which they relied on Assad’s Alawite-dominated Baathist regime for protection. Yet there is no guarantee that Jolani will succeed in asserting his authority over the mosaic of Syria’s different faith or ethnic communities, which tend to arm themselves in times of civil strife. While a majority of Syrians are Sunni, its society contains a large diversity of ethnic and religious communities including Alawis, Armenians, Assyrians, Chechens, Druzes, Catholic and Orthodox Christians, Ismailis and Turkomans. Before the civil war erupted, in 2011, polarising religious forces between Salafist-oriented groups supported by Turkey and Saudi Arabia, Syria had an impressive record of permitting pluralist religious spaces, though not political dissent.

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Assad’s fall is sure to have unnerved Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS), along with other wealthy Gulf rulers. While they may relish the Iranian setback — two of Iran’s “axis of resistance” allies, Assad and Hezbollah, have effectively been sent off the field — the deeper implications of Syrian regime change must seem threatening. After years of civil war, during which some half a million people were killed and 14 million displaced, and which saw cities such as Aleppo pulverised by Russian air power and Syrian air force barrel bombs, the situation appeared to have been stabilised. The mainly Sunni rebels were safely contained in the north-western enclave of Idlib. And in May 2023, Syria was readmitted to the Arab League, a mark of “normalisation” supported by Saudi Arabia and the UAE.

Now, the region has fallen to chaos again. The kings and emirs of the Gulf have good reasons to fear that the recent scenes of jubilation in Damascus and other Syrian cities could become harbingers of a new Arab Spring. After all, popular feeling against repressive political structures often poses a threat to incumbent regimes, especially to dynastic rulers such as the Assads or Sauds. As the Israeli analyst Zvi Bar’el observes: “When militias take over a country, regardless of their ideology, it threatens traditional regimes that rely on authoritarian control. Such success as was seen in the Arab Spring, is contagious and encourages the revival of organisations and rebel movements.”

Saudi Arabia was relatively unaffected by the Arab Spring in 2011. A “Day of Rage” announced on Facebook aimed at imitating the massive street protests occurring in Cairo and other Arab capitals, but the movement fizzled out after would-be demonstrators received messages on their phones threatening fines or national expulsion. By contrast, in neighbouring Bahrain, where a Sunni dynasty presides over a restive Shi‘a majority, there were weeks of sit-ins and protests. The Saudis eventually sent troops across the causeway to assist the island’s government in restoring order.

The Assad regime may come to loom large in the annals of human torture and misery after a decade of civil war. But the Western-friendly Saudis, who are not currently facing the threat of internal conflict, can hardly be described as laggards in this area, with their high levels of political repression. Since MBS became the de facto ruler in 2015, around 1,400 people have been executed by the state, including minors.

The triumph of Jolani, and his Turkish backers, poses a dilemma for MBS. He and other Gulf rulers may be happy to see the anti-Western “axis of resistance” defanged, based as it is on a “Shi‘ite crescent” stretching from Iran to the Shi‘ite heartlands of southern Lebanon. The Saudi kingdom was founded on an alliance between the tribal power of the Al Saud family and the explicitly anti-Shi‘ite ideology of Wahhabism — and, for a long time, its strategy was to foster a disdain towards or even hatred of Shi’ism that persists to this day. When the Sunni minority in Iraq felt vulnerable after the US invasion that removed the (Sunni) Saddam Hussein, Saudi clerics spread fear of the Shi’ite danger, warning against the murder, torture and displacement of Sunni Iraqis. After the Arab Spring uprisings that lit the fuse of civil war in Syria, the Saudi government adopted a policy of “‘sectarianisation”. Madawi al-Rasheed, a historian and anthropologist, sees this as “a deliberate counter-revolutionary strategy…deployed to exaggerate religious differences and hatred and prevent the development of national non-sectarian politics”.

More than a decade ago, the emergence in Syria of a Sunni-dominated regime of neo-fundamentalist or “salafist” colouring would have suited the Saudi agenda perfectly. Over the years, the Saudi regime has spent billions of petrodollars promoting salafism (a neo-conservative type of religiosity, with emphasis on outward observance) throughout the Islamic world. According to several estimates, the sums spent by the Saudis on dawa (evangelism) prior to 2016 ranges from $70 billion to $100 billion. This dynamic dates back to the oil-boom years of King Faisal (r. 1964-75), who saw the Muslim Brotherhood and other salafist movements as necessary counterweights to the secular-oriented Arab nationalism promoted by Egypt’s charismatic leader Abd al-Nasser. Muslim Brotherhood exiles, such as Muhammad Qutb, brother of the movement’s leading intellectual Sayyid Qutb, were welcomed to teach in the Saudi kingdom, where Muhammad’s students included the young Osama bin Laden.

The Iranian revolution of 1979 and, more strongly, the attacks on New York and Washington in 2001 (with 15 of the 19 hijackers hailing from Saudi Arabia) led to an eventual volte-face in Saudi religious orientation. The change was epitomised by a state-sanctioned sermon delivered by Shaikh Abdulrahman al-Sudais, imam of the Grand Mosque in Mecca, hailing the vision of MBS as the “young, ambitious, and divinely-inspired” crown prince, comparable to the great Umar ibn-al-Khattab, second caliph of Islam or “deputy” to the Prophet Muhammad. The sermon, broadcast live on cable networks and social media, was delivered less than three weeks after the murder and physical dismemberment of Jamal Khashoggi in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul. A former champion of the Saudi regime, Khashoggi was like Erdoğan a “soft” supporter of the Muslim Brotherhood — a movement that includes not only hardened jihadists such as Jolani, but constitutionally minded politicians such as Rachid al-Ghannouchi, leader of the Ennahda Party in Tunisia. The Brotherhood, once championed by King Faisal, is now anathematised in both the Gulf (with the exception of Qatar) and Washington as the primary threat to dynastic rule.

The Saudi volte-face was a necessary prerequisite to the Abraham Accords signed between Israel, Bahrain and the UAE in September 2020, (and later with Sudan and Morocco). It was negotiated in part by Donald Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, a family friend and political supporter of Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu. In September 2023, Saudi Arabia was on the point of “normalising” relations with Israel, with Riyadh allowing journalists to write op-eds in their favour, and MBS himself telling the US Fox News that “every day we get closer” to a deal. The October 7 attack by Hamas, killing more than 1,200 Israelis and taking several hundred hostages, put paid to these prospects, as Israel’s counter-attack on Gaza produced Dresden-like scenes of urban devastation and many thousands of civilian casualties. Last November, at a gathering of Islamic leaders in Riyadh, the Crown Prince even used the “G-word”, accusing Israel of carrying out “collective genocide” against the Palestinian people in Gaza.

Although the Gaza war may be coming to an end, “normalisation” between the Saudi kingdom and Israel now seems a distant prospect — even if Kushner returns as his father-in-law’s Middle East adviser next year. The international outrage caused by the Gaza counter-attack, along with genocidal statements by some Israeli leaders and the evident failure of the Biden administration to restrain its Israeli ally, has put the lid on normalisation for the foreseeable future. While Saudi Arabia, unlike Qatar, lacks a free press, polls are sometimes permitted. A rare poll published in December 1993 by the Washington Institute for Near East Policy found that 90% of Saudis think that Arab countries should sever all ties with Israel “in protest against its military action in Gaza”.

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Thanks largely to the Gaza war, and to the failure of the Trump administration to retaliate in support of the Saudis after an Iranian attack on the oil refinery at Abqaiq in September 2019, Saudi Arabia has pivoted away from US dependency. The Saudi-Iran rapprochement in 2023 was brokered, not by Kushner or the White House, but by President Xi Jinping of China. When the Chinese president visited Riyadh in December 2022, he was given fulsome honours. Not only was he greeted with a purple carpet, but Saudi jets escorted his plane streaming the green and white colours of the national flag. When Secretary of State Antony Blinken went to visit, MBS kept him waiting for some 12 hours before granting him an audience.

Saudi Arabia’s orientation away from the West and towards the global south is heralded by its upcoming membership of Brics. It will join the existing acronymic members — Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa — alongside Iran, the UAE, Argentina, Egypt and Ethiopia. Though faced with declining oil revenues, MBS may be heartened by the fact that he is now able to trade oil products in the Chinese currency, avoiding the sanctions imposed on Russia by US dollar leverage. And despite the cutbacks on his ambitious plans for Vision 2030, aimed at weaning his economy off oil, a future in a world market dominated by China and the global south could be rosy indeed. That is provided he is clever enough, or lucky enough, to avoid the fate of Saddam Hussein or Muammar Gaddafi — or, indeed, of Bashar al-Assad.