This might be completely nuts, but is there any way that the ideas of Jamal al-Din al-Afghani and Marxism could be synthesized AND this synthesis could have significant influence on the politics of the Middle East?
This is al-Afghani:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jamal-al-Din_al-Afghani
His ideas of "solidarity of all Muslims against foreigners" just seem so ripe for integration with Marxism. A world where a "vanguard Peoples' Caliphate" takes over to prepare the population and eventually the whole world for the final state of society, where all willingly submit to Allah and produce what they can, freely drawing on the rest of the world and all that has been gifted to humanity by Allah. The most likely place I could see this emerging is in a continuing Ottoman Empire after the Great War, where the Ottomans remain neutral. Another option might be in a European-dominated Iran.
This is al-Afghani:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jamal-al-Din_al-Afghani
His ideas of "solidarity of all Muslims against foreigners" just seem so ripe for integration with Marxism. A world where a "vanguard Peoples' Caliphate" takes over to prepare the population and eventually the whole world for the final state of society, where all willingly submit to Allah and produce what they can, freely drawing on the rest of the world and all that has been gifted to humanity by Allah. The most likely place I could see this emerging is in a continuing Ottoman Empire after the Great War, where the Ottomans remain neutral. Another option might be in a European-dominated Iran.