The contemporary Middle East cannot be explained through twentieth-century identity concepts. Transnational projects that once claimed to define the Arab world have now given way to the strict logic of the nation-state and security competition. In this context the idea formulated by Fawaz Ajami former dean of the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University and a figure close to American neoconservatives in his late 1980s article in Foreign Affairs titled The End of Pan-Arabism is now not merely a historical interpretation but an analytical framework for understanding the current regional situation—a situation in which...