The day Marty McFly went back to the Middle East's future

What would a time traveller from the 1980s make of the Middle East today? asks Faisal Al Yafai

Dr Emmett Brown and Marty McFly in the Back to the Future trilogy. (Credit: Universal Pictures)

‘The present changes the past,” says the judge in Kiran Desai's The Inheritance of Loss. “Looking back you do not find what you left behind.” It works the other way with the future. Looking forward, you often only find the past.

Next week, on October 21, aficionados of the 1980s film Back to the Future and its sequels will be marking “Back to the Future Day”, that very specific moment when, in the second part of the trilogy, the main character is transported 30 years into the future, to a world of flying cars and mist-shrouded cities.

The imagined world of 2015 looked familiar to audiences in 1989, when the film was released: it was basically the same, just slightly different. People still lived in suburbs and went to work in cities. They drank branded drinks, wore branded clothes and still gathered in public spaces like cinemas and cafes to socialise.

Similarly, this region's real future would have felt familiar to the viewers in 1989, similar countries, similar conflicts.

If Marty McFly stepped from 1989 into today's 2015, he would find it surprisingly familiar. Iran’s relationship with America is still of vital importance. What the US and its allies do in Afghanistan still matters, there and abroad. Palestine is still under occupation. The US relationship with Iraq is still complex. The Levant (Syria this decade rather than Lebanon then) is in the midst of a civil war. History repeats itself, but the future is always subtly different.

There is one fragment of the Middle East in the film: when Marty, in 2015, goes to an 80s nostalgia cafe, he is greeted by robot waiters arguing with the voices and faces of Ronald Reagan and Ayatollah Khomenei.

The contortions of US policy towards Iran would have been very familiar to American audiences. The 1980s, just after the Iranian revolution of 1979, were the pivotal decade for US-Iranian relations. The nuclear deal just concluded this year with Iran is, in many ways, the first attempt to move on from a pose of confrontation defined by the Reagan administration.

Other politics have also come full circle. In 1989, the first intifada was raging in Palestine, just as the third appears to be brewing today. Thirty years on, the Israeli occupation continues and is getting worse. The Oslo Accords of the 1990s, the first real attempt to end the occupation, came out of the first intifada. Now, three decades on, Oslo is dead and there is nothing to replace it but the BDS movement.

Nor has the Russian-US rivalry gone. In 1989, the Russians had just left Afghanistan, exhausted by a proxy war with the US fought by the Afghan mujaheddin. Audiences would have found it completely unsurprising that the US and Russia appear to be fighting another proxy war in Syria today – although no one, not ordinary people nor analysts, could have predicted that the Taliban, an offshoot of the mujahideen, would today be America's enemies in Afghanistan, nor, especially, that the Soviet Union would collapse two years later.

And that's the problem with gazing into a crystal ball, even if peering just three decades down the line. Some things are obvious. But the real revolutions are unpredictable.

In the film, the technological wizardry that director Robert Zemeckis imagined was surprisingly similar to technology that existed in 1989: hoverboards glided and cars flew, but they were still, at their heart, skateboards and cars. The utter revolution in the developed world sparked by ubiquitous smartphones and internet access was unimaginable 30 years ago.

As with technology, so with politics. The challenges of 2015 were unimaginable 30 years ago. Yes, it was easy to foresee that there would be differences with Iran or Russia, both are important countries in a crowded region.

But it's the other things that no one foresees that affect the future, the unknown unknowns. The Arab Spring. The mutation of jihad. The twists and turns of politics which can lead one revolution to a Nobel Prize, as in Tunisia, and another, as in Syria, to the worst war in the world. The future can be grasped in outline, but the details are always shrouded. But it is the details that make the future.

If Marty McFly, stepping into today's 2015, with similar wars in similar countries, thought that nothing had changed in three decades in the Middle East, he would be profoundly wrong.

The 1980s were one of the worst, most volatile decades for the Middle East. Yet the situation today is both much better and much worse. Better because the Arab world has more power and autonomy than it did in the 1980s, and the world is safer and more interconnected. Worse, because the challenges are more complex, have rarely been faced on this scale, and require new ways of thinking about policy to solve – just as the world appears to be lurching from one global recession to another.

Is this particular 2015, this particular version of the present, worse than that imagined by the film? The answer is that it is particular. Politics and technology, culture and society, all could have moved in many different ways. For us, in 2015, they moved in one way.

As tempting as it might be to imagine going back to the past to alter the present – changing the outcome of Syria's war, stopping the invasion of Iraq, or whatever single event we imagine could have been altered – that, as the film showed, would only have its own negative consequences.

That's the problem with the future. No one ever sees it coming. But now that it is here, the challenge is not to alter the past, but change the present.

On Twitter: @FaisalAlYafai