Khomeini, Said, and Sadat’s 1978

One of the most chastening lessons of the last century has been that history rarely keeps the appointments arranged for it by ideology. The 20th century is littered with years in which men believed they had seized the direction of time, only to discover that they had unwittingly pivoted to a new path. In 1917 and 1918, the Russian Revolution and the collapse of the Ottoman, Habsburg, and Hohenzollern empires replaced a world of dynasties with a world of nations and introduced, in the Soviet Union, a Communist superpower whose existence would polarize global politics for the remainder of the century. In 1945, the surrender of the Axis powers and the incineration of Hiroshima and Nagasaki opened the nuclear age, while the exhaustion of the European colonial empires set in motion a generation of wars, liberations, and improvisations whose consequences have never been settled. In 1968, the old left, which had staked so much on class and the seizure of productive power, began to be displaced from within by a new left increasingly preoccupied with culture, sexuality, race, language, and consciousness. In 1973, the Arab oil embargo seized the mechanism of global economic power and demonstrated that the postcolonial world could strike at the center rather than merely resist at the periphery. In 1989, the fall of the Berlin Wall closed one chapter so abruptly that serious men began to speak of history reaching its end.

Seldom remembered in this company is 1978. It produced no single image as iconic as the storming of the Winter Palace or the crumbling of the Wall, no flash of destruction as absolute as the mushroom cloud. Yet it may be that 1978 stands among the most consequential pivots of the century for the Middle East, and likely for the world. In that year, three events, all of them responses to the same crisis of the modern political promise, converged to end one era of modern politics and to inaugurate a new postmodern era in which all politics revolves around identity.

In Iran, the events were set in motion that would bring Ayatollah Khomeini to power the following year and make political Islam the most formidable identitarian movement of the late 20th century. In New York, Edward Said published Orientalism, a book that would transform the American academy and inevitably the American left and national politics. In Cairo, Anwar Sadat signed the Camp David Accords and published In Search of Identity, attempting to end Egypt’s revolutionary project and to return the country from Arab history to Egyptian place—an attempt that failed, although it left behind a lasting diplomatic achievement.