The Jihad Catalyst: The New Syria and the Future of the Middle East
As someone who grew up in a dysfunctional family under years of abuse as a child, and as someone who left that environment and underwent a profound transformation over many years in a healthy one, I believed I had completely shed the person I had been programmed to become. However, on my first visit to my home country, after six years of living in a peaceful environment, just a few hours after arriving at my family’s house, I was involved in an ugly physical fight with my brother. For a moment, I could not recognize who that person was. I had left a world where violence was the norm. I had become a peaceful Christian. I had become someone who, when attacked or offended, controls his temperament and does not react aggressively. So what happened? Why, the moment I stepped back into the old environment, did a completely different person emerge?
In psychology, behavioral reinstatement refers to the return of previously extinguished behaviors when the original learning context is restored. Individuals who appear fully assimilated into new moral or social systems revert when formative contexts are reintroduced. Adults who have adopted egalitarian norms unconsciously resume rigid hierarchies when re-embedded in family or clan structures. Migrants who comply with liberal legal frameworks reassert honor-based practices when surrounded again by their original language, authority figures, and communal enforcement. Former addicts or offenders relapse when they return to the streets, relationships, or routines where the behavior was learned, reactivating the original habit circuitry. Even outside pathology, professionals who operate with restraint in rule-bound institutions often display aggression, deference, or tribal loyalty when institutional oversight dissolves.
Core beliefs acquired in childhood are not opinions that can be replaced at will; they are structural elements of personality formed during periods of maximal neural plasticity and asymmetrical authority. Developmental psychology is clear that early belief systems, about authority, morality, threat, loyalty, gender, honor, and the meaning of violence, are encoded before reflective reasoning is fully developed. They are absorbed as descriptions of reality, not propositions to be evaluated. Later socialization can suppress, reinterpret, or strategically override these beliefs, but suppression is not erasure. What appears as change is usually the acquisition of inhibitory controls layered over earlier schemas, controls that depend on continuous environmental reinforcement. When those reinforcements weaken, through stress, isolation, or re-immersion in formative contexts, the original beliefs reliably reassert themselves because they were never deleted from the cognitive architecture. This is why genuine transformation is rare, slow, and unstable, and why societies that assume beliefs can be overwritten by exposure alone consistently overestimate the durability of assimilation.
The collective childhood of Muslims
Societies acquire their core beliefs through the same mechanisms by which individuals do: early, repeated formation under conditions of authority, trust, and moral asymmetry. Schools transmit hierarchies of truth, what is admirable, shameful, permissible, and sacred, long before students possess the cognitive tools to contest them. Houses of worship encode metaphysical frameworks that define ultimate meaning, obligation, and transgression, anchoring moral intuitions beyond the reach of policy or law.
At the collective level, schools, houses of worship, and media function for societies much as parents function for individuals: they provide the first moral architecture through which reality is interpreted. In Islamic societies, these institutions raised children to believe that Muhammad and his companions are the perfect examples. When I was in second grade, the Arabic language curriculum included the story of Abu Ubaida, a companion of Muhammad, beheading his own father during the Battle of Uhud, and how Allah revealed a Qur’anic verse praising his act. In mosques, we learned that Islam would eventually rule the world, that through jihad the man-made laws of the world must be replaced by the law of Allah, and that jihad is the shortest road to heaven. The martyr, according to the Qur’an, is placed above all other classes. Non-Muslims are seen as the enemies of Allah and must be fought until they convert, are subjugated, or killed. Women are described as having half a mind, their value half that of a man, and they are said to constitute the majority of the inhabitants of hell.
To this day, the majority of Muslims in the fifty-six Islamic countries are still being parented on these values. However, the political systems in these countries, Islamic in name only, because to be truly Islamic would require the application of Sharia and rule by what Allah has revealed, create a public environment that differs from the one that nurtured these core beliefs. They suppress any manifestation of the political aspects of Islam. They jail dissidents. They ban movements and organizations that seek to materialize these core beliefs.
As a result, the majority of people in these countries are controlled by the enforcement of anti-Islamic laws that force them to adapt and suppress their core beliefs. Yet those beliefs remain ready to erupt whenever individuals are exposed to elements reminiscent of the original environment. During the Gaza wars between 2006 and 2025, the same people who otherwise acted as normal, law-abiding citizens took to the streets chanting slogans identical to Hamas or al-Qaeda rhetoric. The celebrations across the Islamic world on 9/11 revealed the same pattern. The resurgence of an environment compatible with core beliefs pulls people into behavior that reflects those beliefs.
However, some countries, such as the UAE, did not nurture a jihadist environment from the outset. Sheikh Zayed had a vision that was inherited by the current leaders of the UAE. As a result, the software installed in the core belief system of Emiratis shares structural similarities with that of other Islamic countries, but its substance is radically different. The UAE preserved the shell of Islam but never embraced its political ambition or passed it on to the population since its inception in the 1970s. This does not mean the UAE reformed Islam or adopted a different interpretation. It is the same Islam, but analogous to a child born into a dysfunctional family who spends most of his childhood with a healthy grandmother, visiting his parents’ house only occasionally, and is therefore formed differently.
The Syrian catalyst
The introduction of the nation-state to the Middle East after the fall of the Islamic Caliphate created a deep dissonance between religious teaching and political reality. Semi-secular leaders aligned with the West suppressed Islam and fought Islamic movements, or contained them, to maintain control, while simultaneously allowing them to indoctrinate the population. These leaders engineered a formula in which Islamic movements were exiled from the political arena in exchange for control over religious and educational institutions. The result was Western-aligned leadership presiding over societies that were profoundly anti-Western.
In Syria, the Muslim population challenged Assad in the 1970s because he belonged to the Alawite sect, which Sunni Muslims regard as non-Islamic. They attempted to assassinate him twice, massacred hundreds of Alawite officials, and destabilized the country for a decade. In response, Assad became a dictator and crushed them in Hama in 1982. From then until 2011, the Assad regime and his son ruled Syria with an iron grip, completely suppressing any manifestation of Islam.
In 2011, with the Arab Spring, jihadists took over the revolution and fought a long war against Assad for fourteen years, until a former leader of ISIS and al-Qaeda emerged as interim president with the blessing of the United States, at the request of Qatar and Saudi Arabia. This incalculated step is catastrophic and threatens to throw the entire region into chaos.
The hundreds of thousands of fighters who belonged to ISIS and al-Qaeda during the war, and who have now become the official army, judges, educators, and imams of Syria, have created a catalyst that will force the majority of Sunni Syrians into behavioral reinstatement compatible with this environment. This environment is the materialization of the core beliefs embedded within them.
Sunni Syrians who had acted as obedient citizens under Assad’s suppression, the moment a jihadist regime took power and created an environment suitable for the resurgence of compatible behaviors, declared enmity toward minorities, the Alawites, the Druze, and the Kurds. With very few exceptions, thousands were massacred, kidnapped, raped, and beheaded because the catalyst was activated.
The situation in Syria today is the culmination and incarnation of what the Palestinian cause has represented in the imagination of Muslims worldwide. Palestine functions as a catalyst for the surfacing of enmity toward Jews, an enmity embedded in the core identity of Muslims across the world.
The legitimization of a jihadist regime in Syria, even if al-Sharaa is a CIA asset, is the perfect formula for taking millions of children who grew up in violent environments, whose behavior was merely contained, and placing them back into a violent environment capable of reinstating those behaviors. The result will be the rapid transformation of the country into a hub for terrorism.
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