Pity the Middle East; its sorrows come in battalions. Over the past five weeks alone, Egypt's generals have overthrown President Mohamed Morsi in a coup that has cost scores of lives, as Syria has continued hacking itself to pieces. A Tunisian opposition leader has been assassinated and Iraq has suffered its worst violence in years. "The birth pangs of a new Middle East", is how Condoleezza Rice, former President George W Bush's secretary of state, described Lebanon's "Cedar Revolution" of 2006; she spoke too hopefully, and too soon. The region went into labour with the Arab Spring of 2011, but it would take unusual clairvoyance to predict how the offspring will look. It may be a monster.
Some things are a bit clearer. Those hated "lines in the sand", artificial borders drawn across the Levant by Britain and France after the First World War, are finally being buried; for Syria and Iraq the future holds either a managed transition to some kind of federal arrangement or – as seems more likely – a driverless Balkanisation at breakneck speed. The second is that the Arab "voice" that made itself heard in more than a dozen countries since Tunisia erupted into revolution at the beginning of 2011 will not be silenced. The people of the Middle East may be divided over what is good for them, but they are no longer afraid to issue their demands – in the streets and violently, if necessary.
In no large area of the world are the principle of the nation state and the character of that state as disputed as they are in the Middle East, and yet English-language reporting on the Arab Spring and its effects has prioritised keeping up with events over analysing them. The late Jon Leyne, who reported on the Egyptian uprising for the BBC (and who died last week), was a thoughtful exception to this rule. Now Paul Danahar, a veteran BBC bureau chief, offers his account of "the world after the Arab Spring", as he puts it in The New Middle East.
Danahar is a well-travelled journalist who was awarded an MBE for leading the BBC team that covered the American entry into Baghdad in 2003. He divides his book into sections devoted to such hotspots as Egypt, Libya, Syria and Iraq, as well as to the US response to events. There is a smattering of horror (Danahar was the first to report last year's massacre by Syrian government forces in the village of Qubair) and an exotic frisson (the artist Francis Bacon declaring that he would "like to get into bed with Colonel Gaddafi"). On the whole, though, The New Middle East contains little to surprise an even moderately attentive reader of the foreign news. The world after the Arab Spring is more complicated than it was. America's support for Middle Eastern dictators was unwise. The obvious holds no terror for Danahar. "History," he writes, "has given us some unbelievably evil rulers." He goes on to inform us that "in war, seconds and inches are the difference between life and death".
Some of Danahar's speculations already look shaky. He writes that the Arab Spring has left "a stronger Sunni, and a weaker Shia, Islam," but this is debatable in the light of the continued resilience of the Assad regime and its Shia backers, Iran and Hezbollah, not to mention the setbacks suffered recently by the Sunni Muslim Brotherhood. To his statement, "God has returned to the Middle East," one might reply: "did he ever leave?"
Much of this goes to show the hazards of extrapolating from events whose precise significance will only become apparent after years or even decades. As the historian François Furet wrote of the French Revolution of 1789, it did not "come into port" until the proclamation of the Third Republic almost eighty years later. Touching 19 Arabic-speaking states, besides non-Arab neighbours such as Turkey and Iran, the Arab Spring's legacy is likely to be even more patchy and contested. It is surely no coincidence that the place Danahar writes about with the most authority has been affected only tangentially by the current convulsions: Israel. He reports perceptively on the internal contradictions of the Jewish state, from militant settlers to the ultra-orthodox Haredim. "Israel," he concludes, "is becoming more religious and more nationalist, and those two things put it at risk of becoming less democratic." That prognosis and the advancing years of the last Palestinian leader of national stature to favour a negotiated settlement, Mahmoud Abbas, underline the difficulties facing John Kerry as he hustles the parties back into the negotiating room.
An alternative to Danahar's all-in style is to dissect one aspect of the Middle East to try to understand how it operates; this approach works well for the American political scientist Carrie Rosefsky Wickham, whose excellent new history of the Muslim Brotherhood reveals much about the most influential political organisation in the Middle East, shedding light in the process on the Brotherhood's inability to cope with the transition from opposition movement to government for all Egyptians. Generous, pious and efficient, the Brotherhood has also been regarded with unease and distrust almost since its inception in the 1920s – a paradox that partly explains its calamitous recent collapse in public affection. (According to polls, Morsi's popularity went from 80% last autumn to 30% shortly before the coup.)
Ambiguity, Wickham insists, is intrinsic to the Brotherhood. For long periods, the movement and the regime were not so much enemies as reluctant cabin mates. For the benefit of his backers in the West, Mubarak blamed the Brotherhood for all Middle Eastern terrorism. The brothers milked what sympathy they could get as a repressed opposition. All the while, between spikes of brutal confrontation, the two sides tolerated each other – within limits. As recently as 2010 the movement's supreme guide publicly wished Mubarak well when the then-president travelled abroad for medical treatment.
In or out of power, the main question concerning the Brotherhood is its aptitude for modern democratic politics. Wickham gives no definitive answer because there is plenty of evidence both for and against – she has experienced no "'aha' moment when the 'true' nature of the Brotherhood is suddenly revealed.'"
Instead, over more than a decade, her research in both Arabic and English has revealed several brotherhoods, oscillating between secrecy and transparency, modernity and the example of the Prophet Muhammad. The tradition has produced neo-fascist militias as well as democratic modernisers such as Abdel Moneim Abu el-Fotouh. He split from the Brotherhood in 2011 after being convinced, as one commentator put it, that democracy means "supporting whatever the people choose, even if it contradicts Islam or rejects it in principle". This leads Wickham to muse whether el-Fotouh can be called an Islamist at all. He won a creditable 17% of the 2012 presidential vote that brought Morsi to power.
Wickham's research was financed by the Carnegie Corporation, in New York. One wonders how long American institutions will maintain interest in a place from which their government clearly wants to withdraw. The answer may be connected to the readiness of the US and other countries to use expensive processes such as fracking to shift the weight of oil and gas production away from the Middle East. For many Americans, retreat would be a blessed relief. In the words of one political scientist cited by Paul Danahar: "There is a kind of fatigue with spending all our time and energy on a part of the world that doesn't seem to be very responsive to us."
To be fair to the US president, he is only carrying out the promise to disengage that he made before coming to power – and which made him popular around the world. But some sages now miss the old western readiness to get involved in remote spots. One of our own, of course, is David Miliband, who as he leaves these shores to take up his new position as head of International Rescue, laments the West's inertia in the face of the Syrian tragedy and warns of "a decade of disorder". This all takes me back to VS Naipaul's sour prediction in the New Republic last year that nothing will come of the Arab Spring but "chaos, one-man rule, which is how these things usually end in the Muslim world". One hopes that it will not be 80 years before he is proved wrong.
• Christopher de Bellaigue's Patriot of Persia is published by Vintage.
