The Modern Middle East (8 page)

A survey of Middle Eastern political history highlights another important conclusion, namely the significance of Islam, from the very beginning, as both a moral order and a source of social organization and political mobilization. Repeated dynasties, the most notable and resilient of which were the Umayyads, the Abbasids, the Ottomans, and the Safavids, were inspired by the ideals and teachings of Islam and used their political power to spread it. A more cynical but equally valid interpretation would be to see Islam as a tool for political legitimation from the earliest times, manipulated, often mutilated, to suit specific political purposes. As the events of our own times demonstrate, the convenience of such use has not been lost on more recent generations of Middle Eastern politicians.

Finally, colonialism has a long history in the Middle East. The rhetoric of the Ottomans and what they stood for in real life, the caliphate, makes it easy to forget that their rule, especially outside their Anatolian heartland, was essentially colonial. The provinces were mostly considered backwaters, members of the
umma
good for the military protection of the Istanbul-based
dynasty and the raising of revenues. Whatever economic development occurred there was not so much for the sake of the local population as for the greater good of the empire. Mosques were built, roads and waterworks repaired, and forts erected only insofar as they served the purposes of the royal court in Istanbul. In fact, many previously prosperous regions and provinces were bled dry by tax farming. Compounding matters, many of the conservative
ulama
identified science and technology with Europe, the abode of Christianity and the crusading nemesis of Islam. Sacrificed in the process were industrial development and the emergence of local political institutions and practices. The ensuing problems of economic underdevelopment and skewed political institutionalization would only become magnified in the twentieth century.

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From Territories to Independent States

The end of the Ottoman dynasty marked the termination of caliphal rule as the Middle East had come to know it since the earliest years of Islam. The dramatic changes that were to come had actually started a few years before the death of the Ottomans, with Europe’s growing economic and military interests in the region and an incipient Arab revolt having expedited the sultanate’s demise. The more things change, goes the popular wisdom, the faster they change. This certainly applies to the political history of the Middle East after the end of the Great War, as the order of many things changed greatly and often did so with extraordinary speed. Though change was not new to the Middle East, the metamorphoses that occurred after the First World War took place faster and at a more fundamental level than those at almost any time in the past. More importantly, from our perspective, these were the changes whose effects and consequences the Middle East is still grappling with today.

Historic events, needless to say, do not occur in a vacuum, their underlying causes all too frequently having roots in other, previous occurrences that have set in motion multiple ripple effects. In the chapters to come, I highlight four defining periods in the life of contemporary Middle East: the interwar period, lasting approximately from the termination of the Ottoman Empire to the end of the Second World War; the 1940s and 1950s, when the state of Israel and its nemesis, Nasserism, were born; the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, during which the Arab world witnessed a shameful military defeat in 1967, a confidence-inspiring victory of sorts in 1973, and the rise and fall of oil prices; and the 1990s and the 2000s, in which the stifling repression of moribund states resulted in a series of national rebellions in 2011 that ushered in an Arab Spring. The events of 2011 set in motion a series of dynamics whose ultimate consequences will not be fully known
for some time to come. Three decades earlier, in 1978–79, a revolution in Iran also fundamentally changed that country’s politics and history, discussed in chapter 5. The 1967 and 1973 Arab-Israeli wars also deserve separate treatment of their own, given in chapter 4.

STATE FORMATION IN THE 1920S

The period between the end of the Great War in 1918 and the beginning of the Second World War in 1939 was an era of tremendous importance for the Middle East, one whose consequences still reverberate today, more than half a century later. What occurred in these fateful decades transformed the destiny of entire nations, created new countries, brought overt European rule to the region, resulted in the drawing and redrawing of national boundaries, and gave rise to new dynasties. Middle Eastern history has so many highlights that it is hard to settle on one as the start of the region’s “modern” era. But the interwar period is perhaps the strongest contender. History, of course, is not an event but a process, and the unfolding of this process at this critical juncture, from the late 1910s to the mid-to late 1940s, gave rise to the contemporary Middle East we have come to know. Historical processes neither occur in a vacuum nor are irrelevant to or disconnected from the past and the present, and many of the processes set in motion at the conclusion of World War I continue to unfold today. The legacy of European rule still affects domestic and foreign policies; the state building that started in the 1920s was only intensified in the 1950s and 1960s and in some ways continues today; and even borders remain contested and are the cause of conflicts large and small. The ghosts of the past still roam the Middle East.

In the early twentieth century, three primary sets of players emerged in the politics and diplomacy of the Middle East: the two main European powers at the time, namely Britain and France, and local political actors and individuals who went on to assume historic importance. The slow death of the Ottoman Empire left a power vacuum, with the result that all these players sought to enhance and augment their own interests in the region. In doing so, they engaged in competition and rivalry, but at times they also cooperated and colluded with each other, covertly as well as overtly.

Britain’s diplomacy in the Middle East at this time was based on three main interrelated and reinforcing objectives. Britain’s biggest concern by far was the security of its hold over the “crown jewel,” India, especially against possible encroachments by Russia and France. This meant ensuring
not only that India’s neighbors complied with British interests, thus necessitating active British attention to Iran, but also that the shortest maritime route to India for the British navy, through the Suez Canal, remained under British control. By one estimate, at the time of the canal’s opening, a British ship would take only forty days to sail from England to India through the Suez Canal, as compared to five months around the Cape.
¹

For the next three decades or so, until the strategic waterway was finally nationalized by a new, revolutionary government in Cairo in 1956, much of British policy in the Middle East revolved around the defense of the Suez Canal. In large measure, given that on a couple of occasions the British had faced military difficulties in confronting the Ottoman forces—most notably in the famous battle of Gallipoli and briefly in Palestine—it was the security of the Suez that prompted Britain to ensure that Palestine and Transjordan were in friendly hands. In Palestine they intervened directly, although, as we shall see below, their policies there were often confused and contradictory. In Transjordan, they oversaw the creation of a nominally independent country over whose foreign policy, economy, and military they retained control.

Second, especially given the expanding British navy’s insatiable fuel requirements, Britain was keen on maintaining secure and free access to newly discovered oil along the northern tier of the Persian Gulf. Consequently, as the historian Roger Adelson put it, the Persian Gulf was turned into a “British lake.”
²
Third, and perhaps most important, was the concern of what to do with the territories soon to be partitioned from the Ottoman Empire. The Ottomans were seen by the Europeans as sick and dying, and the fate of their vast empire, including their prized capital of Istanbul, formed the heart of the so-called Eastern Question.
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To safeguard its interests and expand its influence in the aftermath of the Ottomans’ death, Britain, as we shall see presently, embarked on a series of historic diplomatic initiatives, the most important of which were the Hussein-McMahon Correspondence, the Sykes-Picot Agreement, and the Balfour Declaration.

French objectives in the Middle East were similar, if less clear. Not having a crown jewel like India to protect, France had a less coherent policy toward the Middle East. France appears to have had two primary motivations: competition with other European powers, namely Britain and Germany, for acquiring more influence in the Ottoman territories; and the protection of the region’s Christians, many of whom were historically concentrated in the Levant. As far as competition with its European neighbors was concerned, France was alarmed—as was Britain—by the German
construction of the Baghdad Railway beginning in 1903. The attempt to finance and build a competing railway from Syria to Baghdad was representative of this competition.

Like Britain’s, most of France’s interests in the Middle East at this time revolved around commercial investments. On the eve of World War I, the French held fully 60 percent of all Ottoman loans, compared with Germany’s 21 percent share and Britain’s 14 percent.
⁴
French private investors were active throughout the Ottoman lands, as shown by their initial financing of the construction of the Suez Canal, along with some Egyptian financiers, under the auspices of La Compagnie Universelle du Canal Maritime de Suez. In this regard, toward the beginning of the twentieth century, France and Britain decided to cooperate rather than compete. In 1904, they signed an agreement commonly referred to as the Entente Cordial. According to the terms of the agreement, France would retain a free hand in the Ottoman colony of Morocco in exchange for giving Britain free rein in Egypt. “His Britannic Majesty’s Government,” the treaty stipulated, “recognise that it appertains to France, more particularly as a Power whose dominion is coterminous for a great distance with those [
sic
] of Morocco, to preserve order in that country, and to provide assistance for the purpose of all administrative, economic, financial, and military reforms which it may require.”
⁵
Nevertheless, despite what the agreement claimed, for France control over the Ottoman territories in the Maghreb—most notably in Algeria, which it had invaded in 1830, and Morocco and Tunisia—was not an economic or demographic necessity. It was, rather, a consequence of the desire to restore France’s waning imperial glory.

The Levant, where France’s extensive and long-standing presence was motivated by its desire to protect the region’s Christian population, was somewhat of an exception. The European powers and even the Sublime Porte had come to recognize France’s special role as the protector of the Levantine Christians, especially the Maronites. French charity organizations and schools were founded throughout Syria. In 1875, French Jesuits established the University of St. Joseph in Beirut. Before World War I, some fifty thousand Syrian students were attending French schools, as compared to only twenty-three thousand pupils in schools of all other nationalities.
⁶
Not surprisingly, when the French and British carved up the Asiatic Ottoman territories in the Sykes-Picot Agreement, Mesopotamia (Iraq), Arabia, and Palestine became British protectorates, while the Syrian and Lebanese protectorates went to the French. As for the Maghreb, which the French had generally come to consider not as colonies but rather as provinces
linked to the mother country, independence had to come through warfare.

This is where the third set of actors, the local nation builders, came in. Some of these men—most notably Kemal Atatürk in Turkey, Reza Pahlavi in Iran, Mohammed V in Morocco, and Habib Bourguiba in Tunisia—were determined to end the backwardness of their peoples and the domination of European powers. Others, such as members of the Hashemite and Ibn Saud clans, realized that they could not acquire power without the support of the outsiders dominating their land at the time and therefore entered into strategic alliances with the British, or, in a few instances, with the French, or with both.

The Middle East of the early twentieth century also saw the unfolding of three interrelated and reinforcing developments. One was the Arab Revolt launched against Ottoman rule in June 1916. The revolt began in the Hijaz, led to the establishment of a short-lived dynasty in Syria, and eventually resulted in a longer-lasting (though still impermanent) monarchy in Iraq. The revolt was the product of a series of ten communications between its chief protagonist, a certain Sharif Hussein in Mecca, and the British high commissioner in the newly declared protectorate of Egypt, Sir Henry McMahon. The Hussein-McMahon Correspondence was part of a second phenomenon that characterized the larger Middle East at the time, namely the allocation of colonial territories called mandates and the drawing of maps through a series of bilateral and multilateral treaties. All treaties that affect borders and national designations are of historic importance, but some of the more important ones signed or issued around this time were the Sykes-Picot Agreement (May 1916), the Balfour Declaration (November 1917), the Conference of San Remo (April 1920), and the Treaty of Sèvres (August 1920). A third, related feature was the birth of countries carved out of former Ottoman territories: Turkey, Palestine, Syria, Lebanon, Transjordan, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia. Of these, Palestine had the shortest life span, ceasing to exist in 1948 and being replaced by Israel.

The Arab Revolt is important in two respects. First, it marked the beginning of the dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire in the twentieth century.
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Second, it ushered in an era of extremely close relationships between Britain and those who came to eventually rule Transjordan and parts of Arabia, including Iraq. British policy in the Middle East during and immediately after World War I was largely determined by its concern for the protection of two of its strategic possessions—India and Egypt—whose importance was magnified thanks to the opening of the Suez Canal.
⁸
During the war, after much internal policy debate and in order to deflate the potential ferocity of a holy war (
jihad
) declared by the Ottoman sultan on the Allied Powers, Britain searched for an ally to check the Ottoman threat from within. From the Islamic heart of the empire came Mecca’s ambitious local ruler, Hussein ibn Ali, whose title of Sharif, denoting descent from the Prophet’s family, had earned him a certain amount of prestige throughout the Hijaz.
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