BARTLE BULL: REVIEW OF “A RAGE FOR ORDER” BY ROBERT F.WORTH
In early 2011, two young Syrian women named Aliaa and Noura whiled away spring mornings strolling to university or lying on Aliaa’s bed talking about suitors. Dark-haired Aliaa was the daughter of an Alawite military officer; blond Noura was the daughter of a well-known Sunni doctor.
They lived in Jableh, an ancient Phoenician port where the Sunni center of town, with its cafes and Mediterranean promenade, is surrounded by green hills of Alawite and Christian villages. Aliaa and Noura were the best of friends.
Then came the Arab Spring. In Syria, it began five years ago last month. By 2013, Noura was a refugee in Turkey, and Aliaa was worrying that, “if Bashar [al-Assad] falls . . . we, here, will all be in the niqab [the Muslim face veil], or we will be dead.” Noura had once promised to name her first daughter after Aliaa. Now the Sunni was accusing her former friend of trying to convert her to Shiism, and the Alawite thought she had discovered a pattern of Saudi links in her friend’s behavior during those happier days.
“Their friendship belonged to a world that no longer made sense,” writes New York Times reporter Robert F. Worth in “A Rage for Order: The Middle East in Turmoil, from Tahrir Square to ISIS.” “They had redefined each other, little by little, as enemies.”
ENLARGE A Rage for Order
By Robert F. Worth
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 259 pages, $26
The word for the Middle East depicted in Mr. Worth’s excellent book is agony—the agony of families and friendships ripped apart, of countless innocent victims, of a world where heroism is pointless and change just a detour on the path to a worse version of the cruel status quo.
Mr. Worth’s book is about the core of that tragic springtime story born five years ago: the “Arab republican states,” the five nations that in 2011 rose up against their longstanding regimes of secular nationalist strongmen.
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The Agony of the Arab Spring
Of the five countries where citizens rose up in 2011, only Tunisia is relatively stable and free. It also produces the most Islamic State recruits.