The secular Sunni Arab saw himself as the natural centre of the modern Middle East. For decades he ran ministries from Damascus to Baghdad, shaped intellectual life in Beirut and Cairo, filled the officer corps of republican armies, edited newspapers, built universities, and spoke confidently in the language of Arab nationalism. Today, much of that world is gone.

By Nadia Ahmad
The modern Arab state, secular, centralised, nationalist, was largely built around this urban Sunni political culture, even when power itself rested in military hands or authoritarian families.

The collapse of the secular Arab republic did more than weaken states. It shattered an entire political identity. Among the least discussed casualties of this transformation may be secular Sunnis themselves.

At first glance, that sounds almost paradoxical. Sunnis remain the demographic majority across much of the Levant. But numbers alone do not guarantee political confidence or social cohesion. A community can remain numerically dominant while becoming psychologically fragmented and politically uncertain.

That is increasingly the condition of the secular Sunni in the post-Arab nationalist Middle East.

In Syria, Lebanon, and parts of Iraq, the old Sunni urban middle class that once carried the language of secular nationalism now finds itself squeezed between collapsing institutions, sectarian polarisation, militia politics, and competing regional projects far larger than itself. The irony is striking.

For decades, secular Sunnis did not see themselves as a vulnerable sect seeking protection. They saw themselves as the political atmosphere of the Arab republic itself, the social centre around which the modern state would organise.

But once the state began to fracture, they discovered something uncomfortable. Unlike other communities in the region, they possessed neither strong sectarian solidarity nor an organised ideological machine capable of surviving state collapse.

In Lebanon (and Syria), the Druze had the mountain regions, while Christians relied on churches and international networks. Shiite movements built disciplined armed structures and regional alliances. The Kurds developed autonomous political geography.

The secular Sunni, meanwhile, often had only the state. And once the state weakened, so did the identity attached to it.

The Syrian war accelerated this crisis dramatically. Before the conflict, cities like Damascus and Aleppo still carried remnants of a secular Sunni bourgeoisie shaped by commerce, education, bureaucracy, and state institutions.

Their worldview was not primarily Islamist. It was urban, civic, and deeply tied to the republic's continuity.

Many of these families had already spent generations investing themselves in the machinery of the state. Their children became engineers, military officers, professors, civil servants, businessmen, doctors, and administrators. Their ambitions were tied to stability, not revolution. Even when they criticised the system privately, they still depended on its continuity.

But the destruction of Syria, followed by the exile of President Bashar al-Assad to Russia, transformed the political landscape completely.

Entire neighbourhoods emptied. Ancient urban classes fragmented across Istanbul, Dubai, Berlin, Paris, and the Gulf. Some entered exile carrying degrees, memories, and fragments of a vanished republic. Others remained physically inside Syria while becoming emotionally detached from the country's political future altogether.

As militias multiplied and ideological factions hardened, the secular Sunni increasingly found himself politically homeless. He did not fully belong to Islamist movements. He feared jihadist radicalism and distrusted sectarian militarisation.

Yet at the same time, he no longer believed the shattered secular state could restore the order that once gave him political confidence. What emerged was a strange new reality in the Levant: a socially large but politically orphaned class.

And political orphanhood changes psychology.

The secular Sunni of the older Arab republic believed in ministries, universities, diplomacy, civil institutions, and the prestige of statehood itself. But younger generations grew up watching states collapse in real time. Their political education came through checkpoints, blackouts, migration, militias, and economic breakdown.

That generational shift matters.

A generation raised during the era of Arab nationalism still carried emotional loyalty toward the republic even after its failures. But many younger Sunnis no longer possess the same attachment. Their memories are not of functioning states but of economic collapse, corruption, sectarian deadlock, and endless regional wars.

For many of them, ideology itself now feels exhausted. They look less for grand narratives and more for systems that work.

Which state still functions? Which institutions survive crises? Which army monopolises force instead of competing with militias? Which passport still holds value?

These are no longer abstract political questions. They are questions of survival. And they slowly dissolve the ideological certainties that once defined the Arab political imagination.

This is where Israel quietly re-enters the Levantine conversation in a way few people publicly discuss. Not necessarily as a beloved state. Not as a cultural model. And certainly not as a replacement for Arab identity.

But increasingly, for some secular Sunnis, Israel appears as something else entirely: one of the few functioning state structures in the eastern Mediterranean.

That perception is rooted less in ideology than in comparison.

While much of the Arab world fragmented into militia zones, sectarian paralysis, failed economies, or exhausted authoritarian systems, Israel maintained institutional continuity, military coherence, technological development, and economic functionality.

Even many critics of Israel privately recognise this contrast, though few are willing to articulate it openly.

This does not erase the Palestinian issue or decades of conflict. It does not suddenly produce emotional reconciliation. The memory of wars, displacement, occupation, and regional humiliation remains deeply rooted across the Arab world.

But politics in the Middle East has increasingly become shaped less by ideology and more by exhaustion. Exhausted societies often begin reassessing realities they once considered untouchable.

For secular Sunnis raised on the promises of the modern Arab republic, this creates a deep psychological contradiction.

Because Israel increasingly resembles what many Arab republics once promised they themselves would become: a functioning state, a technologically advanced society, a coherent military structure, and an institutional system capable of producing continuity rather than permanent collapse.

Emotional perception often shifts long before politics does. The deeper crisis here is as much existential as it is geopolitical.

The secular Sunni now faces pressure from several directions at once. Islamist movements accuse him of cultural betrayal and Westernisation. Sectarian actors view him as politically unreliable. Economic collapse pushes many toward emigration.

The disappearance of strong secular institutions leaves him without a clear political home. Increasingly, he resembles someone wandering through the ruins of a republic that no longer exists.

This helps explain why many secular Sunnis across the Levant speak less today about ideology and more about normal life. They want electricity, functioning airports, salaries, universities, public order, and institutions capable of surviving beyond slogans.

In another era, those would have sounded like modest civic expectations. In much of today's Middle East, they sound almost revolutionary.

The tragedy is that secular Sunnis once imagined themselves as the architects of Arab modernity. Now many experience themselves as refugees from its collapse.

In Lebanon, this feeling is especially visible. Parts of the old Sunni mercantile and professional class of Beirut increasingly feel trapped between economic ruin, sectarian paralysis, and the slow erosion of the Lebanese state itself.

Families that once measured success through education, banking, trade, and regional business networks now speak primarily about emigration. In many Beirut cafés, conversations that once revolved around business opportunities now revolve around visas, foreign universities, and where the next generation might build a future.

Entire districts of the capital carry the atmosphere of a class quietly preparing for departure.

In Syria, many secular Sunnis remain displaced not only geographically but psychologically, unable to embrace Islamist alternatives fully yet unable to recover the secular republic they once inhabited.

This has created an unusual convergence between secular Sunnis and older Middle Eastern minorities.

For generations, minorities such as the Druze, Christians, and Alawites developed political instincts shaped by vulnerability and survival. Secular Sunnis traditionally viewed politics from the perspective of majority confidence.

That confidence is no longer guaranteed. And when a former majority begins to feel politically vulnerable, its worldview can change very quickly.