A new history of the Middle East for the TikTok – Latest News
Has there ever been a area dissected in public discourse as exhaustively as the Middle East, but misunderstood nearly universally?
Ask somebody what the phrases “Middle East” conjure, and odds are you’ll hear an assortment of solutions starting from “Gaza,” and “Israel-Palestine,” to the “ayatollahs” or the “Strait of Hormuz.”
Posing that query on a US faculty campus will more than likely spur more colourful responses round the “genocide” and “ethnic cleansing” of Palestinians.
What you probably won’t hear about are the labyrinthine histories, the empires, the rulers, coups, assassins, poets, fanatics, sects, alliances, the myriad peace processes and lethal civil wars stretching throughout 19 states from Morocco’s Atlantic coast in North Africa to the shores of the Persian Gulf in western Asia.
“There is now a kind of internet-created social-media TikTok vision of the Middle East,” historian Simon Sebag Montefiore advised the New York Post, “one that bears no resemblance to the actual players and the stakes that are in conflict in the Middle East.”
Correcting this extreme data drought, Montefiore has produced an terribly bold and sweeping history of the Middle East, “The Cauldron: The Making of the Modern Middle East,” spanning more than 500 pages and beginning in 1900 with the twilight period of the Ottoman Empire proper up to the US-Israeli assassination of the second Supreme Leader of the Islamic Republic of Iran, Ali Khamenei, in February 2026.
One of the most startling conclusions Montefiore attracts in “The Cauldron” is that the West has held a trance-like, “fetishistic” obsession with Israel-Palestine and the Holy Land, a fixation that has produced a preponderance of media consideration on the Israeli-Arab battle and the battle in Gaza which, over the span of 80 years, has killed roughly 150,000 people.
Yet, our own period, he notes, has seen “gigantic catastrophes” we seldom broach, “including the tragedies of Algeria in the 1990s (200,000 killed), then Iraq (500,000) and Syria (600,000) and Sudan which is in a tragic class of its own — two million were killed in its first civil wars; 300,000 in the Darfur genocide.”
Francois Georges-Picot Public Domain/ Wikipedia
Another fallacy Montefiore dismantles is that Israel distinguishes itself in in the present day’s Middle East as a new state surrounded by historical nations. That’s largely why his chronology begins in 1900, not with the First World War, the Sykes-Picot pact of 1916, the Balfour Declaration of 1917 or the UN Partition Plan of 1947, as different histories are likely to.
In 1900, the area was nonetheless dominated by the Ottoman Empire and ruled from Constantinople by an Ottoman sultan. But after 1918, it was carved up by the imperial powers, notably Britain and France, who, Montefiore tells The Post, “created a series of new states and new entities that have now become part of the Middle East. We think of these nations as long-standing but they’re not. They’re very recent and, in fact, all of them really became independent after World War II, along with Israel.”
Soviet Communist chief Joseph Stalin is proven in a picture taken from a police file. Getty Images
While huge in scope, “The Cauldron” is written in a manner that’s equally accessible to regional consultants and neophytes, with the area’s history advised via the compelling and, at instances, insidious characters who helped forge the Middle East we all know in the present day.
One of the first characters launched is a dashing “young prince,” Ibn Saud, who, together with a band of 33 warriors “armed to the teeth with swords, spears and British Martini-Henry rifles,” raided Riyadh at daybreak on Jan. 13, 1902, to revive his household — the House of Al-Saud (later the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia) — to energy, heralding what Montefiore phrases as starting of “the modern history of the Middle East.”
Prince Emir Faisal, second son of King Ibn Saud of Saudi Arabia, stands in entrance of a portray. Bettmann Archive
The forged of protagonists and antagonists grows more vivid from there: Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the founder of the Turkish Republic who proclaimed, “bloody revolutions are solid … bloodless ones are not permanent.” Reza Khan, the 6-foot-6 Cossack officer who was topped Shah of Iran in April 1926 at the age of 48. Qatar’s founding sheikh, Jassim bin Mohammed Al Thani, an “exuberant, swashbuckling warrior-emir-poet,” who, between 1850-1900, “fathered fifty-six children and fought a series of wars to win independence for his tiny bleak peninsula.” Joseph Stalin, who sought to control elements of Iran in the early Nineteen Forties. And British prime ministers Neville Chamberlain and Clement Attlee who, earlier than and after the Second World War respectively, “offered a Palestinian Arab state and no Jewish entity along with severe restrictions on Jewish immigration.”
The actual power of “The Cauldron” is that it’s complete and unsparing of critique.
Kemel Ataturk Corbis by way of Getty Images
Ayatollah Khomeini, the chief of the Islamic Revolution of 1979, is described as “a murderous modern revolutionary and political strategist of the rank of Lenin, Stalin or Mao.”
Montefiore is simply as blunt about Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu and his post-Oct. 7 strategy, faulting him for promising whole victory, “but while the IDF developed effective tactics to fight Hamas, even in its tunnels, Israel lacked a strategy, conducting bloody but ultimately unproductive offensives subject to the whims of its inept coalition and the pressures exerted by America and Europe.”
According to Montefiore, the Islamic Revolution of 1979 was a “world-changing epochal moment” for the area. The subsequent transformative occasion might be one other revolution in Iran, one wherein “the Islamic Republic will fall.” When it occurs, he provides, “it will probably be very surprising and happen very quickly.”
Montefiore notes that Tehran seems to be stronger when it’s at battle since its ideological and infrastructural edifice is constructed on battle — a mindset of “warfare and martyrdom and a cult of fighting and death” rooted partly in the conventional Shiite narrative of struggling and martyrdom, and notably the Mahdiist theology, which holds that an apocalyptic battle of end-times will carry the coming of the Mahdi, or Messiah.
“Iran’s leaders saw that America could be checked because it had a short attention span,” he tells The Post. “It had small tolerance for losses of people, and it constantly had elections every four years, like every democracy, and that meant it was incredibly inconsistent.”Especially at a time when misinformation and outright fallacies abound about this area, I might go as far as to enterprise that historians in the present day occupy one of the most important locations in society to protect history and enshrine fact.
The view from the Dome of the Rock on the Temple Mount in the Old City of Jerusalem is seen in 1975. Getty Images
“Our responsibility as historians in America and Britain,” Montefiore says, “is to stand up and be unafraid to contradict conventional wisdoms, surging conspiracies, witch hunts, purity tests, pile-ons that are used to crush debate … and to say persuasively, ‘this is what happened.’ ”
“The Cauldron” is an important primer for those that are interested in the Middle East and — particularly in in the present day’s surface-level, TikTok-explainer, attention-deficient digital age — search substantive background earlier than formulating their views on one of the most turbulent but dynamic areas in the world. Montefiore’s argument is nearly deceptively easy: Before deciding what the Middle East means, study what occurred there.
Jonathan Harounoff is a British creator and the host of “UNscripted with Jonathan Harounoff.”
