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| The Islamic State: keeping ahead of the situation. |
Nature abhors a vacuum, and will often work overtime and at the weekends to fill one. In the Middle East it has pushed productivity to new heights with the creation of the Islamic Caliphate, a fully-fledged monstrosity that has leaped to life in a comparatively short time span, filling the vacuum left by the West's vetoing of the system that emerged in the post-Ottoman Islamic world as a tentative step from medievalism to modernity.
That system, typified by the likes of Kemal Ataturk, Saddam Hussein, Muammar al-Gaddafi, and the Assads – and to a lesser extent by Gamal Abdel Nasser and the Shah of Iran – was a secular-leaning, trans-tribal nationalism, often with a socialist tinge, overlaid – thanks to a brief period of Anglo-French control – on areas with badly drawn borders. In Iraq and Syria it went by the name of Ba'athism, but it could also be more generically (and oxymoronically) referred to as Secular Islamic Statism (SIS).
