[quote=BB]
I went with religion, considering that's fairly easy to justify and an objective of a fair bit of people in that part of the world nowadays.
[/quote]

Even in your more reasonable case does there exist a chance to expose 'subfactionalism', as we may call it, within the Middle East. Obviously the grand Sunni-Shia split and their various branches, but also the case of the Bahá'í Faith, Mandaeism, the Yazidis that we hear so much of nowadays, Ibadi Muslims in Oman, the whole Wahhabi bunch of shenanigans, the status of Israel and the Jewish state.

Not to mention the dual-denominations of Christianity in the Balkan peninsula and the Greek peninsula and insular territories.

And I'll conclude this by noting that nigh all historical 'superstates' if they can be called such exploited superfactionalism above nationalism or religious factionalism to maintain their power and control. Take, for example, the case of the Habsburg supremacy in Austria, the policies of the Sublime Porte in the Ottoman Empire, the whole states' rights vs federal power in the USA, cult-development and hyperstatism as well as oppressive policies in the USSR and to some extent the latter Yugoslavia, ethnic classism in various Chinese dynasties, indeed, even in my own Crimean state here does there exist a cohesive federal ideology centred about sometimes forceful national disregard and oft-violent 'enforcement' of socioeconomic equality. All of these examples highlight the importance of controlling factionalism in a superstate.