Factors in the Making of the modern Middle East

I want now to explain how the Middle East actually 'hangs together' today, so to speak (having considered what ideas have been and are around), and how that may also have a bearing on the rest of the world. While answering the question that we in the West seem to want answered (i.e. is the East a threat to the West?) I want to now consider in the course of this discussion how the West most certainly has threatened the East. L. Carl Brown famously wrote that the Middle East has been the most penetrated region in the world and this surely cannot fail to have had a critical negative impact upon it.

As I examine how well states are doing the job of ruling in the next few posts, I will naturally expose problems for which the solutions devised internally may well have to be major and possibly revolutionary changes. Some of the most important issues faced include issues of economic and social development, equality of resource allocation and treatment of women and minorities.

At the same time, there will be external pressures for change that result from a Globalised world and the interests of other states (both within and outside the region) conflicting with regional and local interests. Issues of relative democratisation and disparities of wealth between countries may also bring pressures to bear in the region.

For our purposes, as discussed at the outset of this blog, I consider the Middle East to include Arab and to some extent pseudo-Arab North and North East Africa, Arab and Israeli West Asia, Turkey and Iran (some include parts of the Caucasus, as I've also mentioned). Turkey is an especially interesting case because it may be able to play a special role of linking the Arab or certainly the Islamic world with the European world. Iran and Israel complete the roll call of the non-Arab states in the region.

The Arab world itself is, of course, geographically and historically divisible into various regions with unique characteristics. The least truly Arab area of the ‘Arab’ world, though with some claim to Arab status, is the North East African sub-region encompassing the Comoros Islands, Somalia, Djibouti and Eritrea. Farthest west is the Maghreb which includes Western Sahara (a disputed region), Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, Morocco and Mauritania. Nilotic Egypt, centred on one main river as it is, has tended to be relatively stable as a unified state when compared with Nilotic Sudan un-centred as it is on various Nile tributaries. These areas are far superior to the remaining Arab areas in terms of both Arab population numbers and land area. The Arab areas that remain are West Asia and the Arabian Peninsula.

Besides these differences, there are, as I mentioned, differences that have come about because of oil wealth being divided unequally. There are also a number of pronounced similarities that I would like to discuss now. Modern pan-Arab nationalism is a relatively recent phenomenon dating to the end of the Ottoman period. The Arab League was actually formed under the auspices of Britain in the 1940s. Regionalism has been too pronounced for the political unity first proposed in the 40s and current until the 60s, however, to be realised as European political unity is being much more in the European Union, for example.

There is obviously linguistic and also cultural and much historical contiguity in the Arab region. Foreign intervention has been overlaid over the common factors to produce divisions. Geography has also played a role, especially before the opening of the Suez Canal, however, in producing two zones with differing external and intra-zone trade interests, the Red Sea Eastern Zone and the Mediterranean Northern and Western Zone. Today this sense of two zones is less evident in government policies. The question of modernity, arguably especially on a Western model, versus tradition further divides governments from each other and their populations.

Globalisation generally is felt as an external threat from the West following a long line of others including from the possibly less hated Ottomans by many in the Arab region. There also remain major differences in the Arab world both within and between a variety of religions and between many tribal, ideological and ethnic identities.

In many ways, the governments of Egypt, Turkey and Iran have been best at managing the most diversity in the Middle East as a whole albeit often by the use of quite repressive measures. The legitimacy of political institutions of especially the Arab Middle East today was largely artificially created by Western powers and the weakened Ottoman power in the last century and this in itself is a potential problem for it. Democracy has not yet flourished in the region and that includes in Israel and Turkey. Most of the borders of the Fertile Crescent were essentially drawn up in line with the initially secret 1916 French-English Sykes-Picot Accord to serve essentially French and English interests. Israel was allowed to be created in the region specifically as a Jewish state at a time when Jews made up only around 33% of the population of the territory of the new state. Iraq continues to have an uncertain future today.

One of the most profound recent external influences on much of the Middle East (apart from Western rule or influence) has been Ottoman rule of the Arab region and parts of eastern Europe (from the Topkapi Palace in Constantinople (captured by Mehmet II) from almost the beginning) from the 13th Century (in the case of Anatolia and Eastern Europe) to the 16th and 17th Centuries (in the case of the Arab World) until the European-forced contractions of the 19th and early 20th Centuries.

The Empire was quite fluid, linguistically speaking. Arabic remained the first language of most people in the Arab region of the empire. The Ottomans themselves initially used Persian as their language of literature and Arabic as their language of law and religion. The rulers were however, after all, Turkish and so they also spoke Turkish. Therefore Turkish became a third language of the ruling class and the first language of the military and administration. The bureaucracy was meticulous and has consequently provided a large amount of material for today’s historians and other researchers in Turkish.

Formally, the Ottoman law was based on Hanafi Islamic jurisprudence and provided by a system of muftis (experts who were formally qualified to issue legal opinions) and Qadis (the judiciary) down to muezzins (who formally call Muslims to prayer), all public servants provided from the ranks of the Islamic ulema, and the regime’s legitimacy also derived in part from its political control of the Islamic holy sites of Mecca, Medina and Jerusalem. The sultans adopted the title “Servant of the Two Holy Mosques” for themselves with reference to their control of the main mosques of the first two cities. It was illegal, however, to issue a ruling (fatwa) against the Sultan (Sultana?) under the sedition law formally making him (her?) above the Islamic law, although rulings against the government were permissible. Mosque-building was a priority throughout the Empire as was construction of walls in Jerusalem.

Legitimacy, as always, derived also from the ability to maintain an orderly society. Within that society, trade guilds, or taifas, affiliated with Sufi taifas helped the government to maintain that order by providing an orderly system of feedback between the government and the various valued economic groups in the society. The hat makers’ guild has thus historically been responsible for the enormous head dresses of some Sufi orders.

Local autonomy within the Empire was reasonably common provided the local leaders were loyal to the Sultan. Elements of his rule tended to be oppressive, however, although he was an equal opportunity oppressor including the Turks in his oppression and perhaps even singling them out for more oppression than other ethnic groups. The Ottomans were also formally tolerant of the other religions and sub-religions practiced in the Empire but were, in fact, somewhat biased in favour of their version of orthodox Sunni Islam. Under the so-called millet system, local religious leaders were permitted to lead autonomously (and were generally also therefore considered answerable to the Sultan for the behaviour of) their flocks. They also represented them to the larger community and leadership structure. In original Qur’anic Arabic millet meant specifically a religious community but in Turkish it had come to refer also to national communities. Efforts to promote a more equal system for non Sunni Muslims began in the 19th Century.

From around 1830, the Ottomans began to modernise as they witnessed the increasing technology and techniques of organisation being employed in European wars and the increasing threat to themselves from Europe. As the army modernised in response to the external threat, Muslims including Arabs were conscripted into the services which had been previously formed from non-Muslim slaves garnered from around the Empire. Slaves in the army had always traditionally been able to advance socially to quite lofty levels in Ottoman society by means of good service in the army.

Suleyman Qanuni (the Lawgiver), or "the Magnificent" in English usage, adopted a modernised legal system and it ultimately permitted a great deal of legal impunity to European traders and expatriates who had first been permitted to live and trade in the Empire in his reign (the thin end of a giant wedge as it turned out). Europeans began noticing especially Christian minorities in the Empire and their treatment by the authorities was soon used as a pretext for European intervention in the region. Each European state seemed to pick out a favourite cause. The British, for example, chose the Druze (not being able to find an analogous religion to the Church of England in the Ottoman Empire) while the Catholic French had a close association with the Maronite Catholic Christians.

The Arab provinces, after early on being ruled centrally, soon came to be more autonomously ruled under the Ottomans. This was natural for reasons of geographical isolation in outlying provinces such as those in North Africa, for example, but local ruling dynasties (even Druze and Maronite Christian ones) were soon also established in areas such as Mount Lebanon and Palestine, for example.

Arab notables were ranked in the Ottoman tradition and often also had an Ottoman identity (especially before the Nahda). The highest rank was pasha, or governor of a province, responsible directly to the Grand Vizier, or Prime Minister, of the Sultan. Pashas were generally at first generals and bureaucrats who had received training centrally in the military/bureaucratic schools of the capital of the Empire.

The Arabs as a race had a special significance in the Empire, too, as in some sense the race that originated Islam. They also constituted a large portion of the total population of the Empire especially once the European colonies were lost. There were more Arabs than Turks, for example. The Arabs also experienced the Nahda in the 19th and 20th Centuries, as I've mentioned at length in earlier posts. The concomitant rise of Turkish nationalism was thus matched by a new Arab nationalism in this period. As conditions continued to worsen for them in the 20th Century, they thus became gradually less prepared to continue to live within the Turkish Ottoman Empire.

Some of the provinces had sub provinces with another level of rule. For example Mount Lebanon, Jerusalem, the Hijaz and Yemen were sub provinces. In these sub provinces, dynasties of rulers tended to form. The Hijaz was ruled by the family of the Sharif of Mecca, claiming descent from Hasan, Muhammad’s grandson. The Sayyids of Hadramawt in Yemen (near the current Omani border) claimed descent from Muhammad’s only other grandson, Husayn, and commanded similar prestige. However the ruler of Yemen was traditionally the current Imam of the local Zaydi Shi’a School. These sub provincial rulers, while formally responsible to their pashas, might occasionally appeal decisions of the pasha higher up the chain by force of personality.

Syria and Iraq were both rich regions of the Empire and Syria was additionally important to the Ottomans for being on both major pilgrimage routes and the so-called Silk Road.

In Egypt, one of the largest provinces with no sub provinces, the pasha continued to be forced to pay some attention to the opinions of remnants of the former Mamluk dynasty for some time. Muhammad ‘Ali put an end to that one day soon after becoming pasha by giving them a particularly treacherous banquet after which he had them all massacred. He also contended with and managed the prestige of al-Azhar.

The rank and file Arabs of the Empire, however, who generally lived tribal lives but had also been influenced by European nationalist ideas, began to feel oppressed by things like the new requirement of conscription as the Empire fell under threat. At the same time, the virtual independent dynasty formed by Muhammad ‘Ali from 1805 provided a model for further moves in the direction of fuller independence generally for Arab peoples and Wahhabism in Central Arabia provided another somewhat popular moralistic and much less secular and pluralist model.

The main rival of the Ottomans was the Ja’fari Shi’a Safavid regime in Persia. The rivalry was mainly expressed in the relatively peaceful practice of monumental building (notably in Isfahan) and in trade (especially with Europe). This rivalry may have contributed to some extent to Sunni/Shi’a rivalries that exist today, however. The other main rival of the time in the region (which competed in similar ways) was the Mughal Empire in South Asia.

The other major influence on the Middle East in recent times and an ongoing one was and is, of course, European. The first direct encounter with a European military excursion was the brief French occupation of parts of Egypt under Napoleon from 1798 to 1801 ended by British actions.

Europe and the Middle East had interacted since at least the Middle Ages, however, as discussed previously. Southern Iberia and parts of Eastern Europe had been conquered and European Crusaders had briefly conquered parts of the Middle East especially in the Eastern Mediterranean. Besides military contacts, trade missions were also engaged in, notably by the Italian city states of Genoa and Venice but also by Marseille and even British missions occurred (hence the knowledge of ‘Eastern types’ displayed in the works of Shakespeare, for example).

In the time of Suleyman the Magnificent, the European traders had been virtual supplicants hoping to trade with the great Ottoman trading power. European technology and learning was not at that time more advanced than in the Middle East and, in fact, was probably significantly less advanced. The balance of power began to shift, however, around the time of the discovery of the New World by Columbus in 1492 just before Suleyman’s reign commenced in 1494. Europe began to flourish in terms of pure knowledge and also in technological terms. Competition in trade was finally evened out and began to favour the Europeans especially with the mastery of the high seas of several militant European nations. By the late 18th Century (and especially by the early 19th Century once Napoleon’s ambitions within Europe were dashed), England and France had become the pair of nations to beat in terms of colonial and mutual world trade domination ambitions and rivalry. They were both interested in the Red Sea and Mediterranean trade routes that had for centuries been of especial interest to the Arabs and the Ottomans.

Napoleon first established a relationship with the Sharifs of Mecca and then engaged himself briefly in Egypt, as I've mentioned above. By 1860, France had established an Algerian colony (at first merely at Algiers on the coast) that officially ended only in 1962. The British had occupied Aden and South Yemen generally in 1839 (and continued to do so until 1967) in support of their trade with 'British' India. A number of other Arabian states now forming the United Arab Emirates had relations with Britain in the 19th Century leading to their name in English for some time being the Trucial States.

Turkey and Iran have for various reasons been less affected directly by European influence than the countries of the Arab world. Nevertheless oil has been the curse for Iran that it has been for many of the Arab countries that I discuss below. In its case, the Shah suffered for not responding to calls for consultation with powerful class coalitions over his reformist agenda in his country (especially over land reform and engagement with the West) essentially because oil wealth reduced his incentive to seek a religious legitimacy that he ultimately found he needed. The result was of course a popular revolution sponsored by powerful authoritative classes. As discussed below with respect to some Arab countries, then, Islamism (in this case sponsored by a powerful ulema class) was the result of and not the cause of obstacles to democratisation the first being oil wealth and another being Western interests.

A justified suspicion of the West and its ideas including as they did the ‘divide and rule’ tactics which had supported Western hegemony also contributed to a suspicion of the very rational and liberal democratisation which many politicians of the West now claim to seek for the Middle East while they blame Islamism as an obstacle to it.

Iran has had a history of class distinctions not shared by Turkey which makes Turkey a very different type of country. As oil has not been the crutch it has been in Iran, Turkey has been more disposed than Iran to significantly industrialise (to the great benefit of many Turks). Turkey has also assumed (more or less grudgingly, perhaps) something of the role of a US-friendly buffer state between Europe and the Arab world that has not been a position available to Iran.

Iran and Turkey are, however, both relatively well-defined as nation-states when compared with most Arab states and Israel. In the case of Turkey, while being internally relatively homogenous, ethnically, externally Turkic peoples also exist in the region bordering Turkey so there is no exact correspondence between the state and the nation. In Iran, the situation is more or less reversed; while the Persian diaspora is relatively contained, several minority ethnic groups are significant within Iran as they are too in many Arab countries. The borders of both of these non-Arab countries were also largely determined by local forces whereas the borders of most Arab countries were essentially determined by the English and French.

In Sudan, too, a country to the immediate south of Egypt, whose name means black in Arabic but whose authoritarian government definitely promotes an Arab identity, the government is centralised and complex issues remain to be resolved. Sudan was actually invaded by Muhammad ‘Ali with the support of the British in 1899 after a period of control by the Mahdi (mentioned in an earlier post) and his supporters and formally became Anglo-Egyptian Sudan. After 1922, full control passed to the British until 1955. Problems left unresolved by the British in their many years of deliberately non-interventionist but dominating occupation have been argued to be the seeds of the many problems there today.

The Maghreb’s recent history has been mixed. Tunisia and especially Algeria were not well served by the so-called French ‘protectorates’. Libya has now been ruled since 1969 by Muammar al-Qaddafi despite both democratic and socialist pretensions. Morocco is a modernising monarchy with relatively strong union power. Mauritania was also quite progressive before recent set-backs to this progress.

The fairly brutal and persistent French occupation of Algeria proved to have arguably the worst consequences over the longest period for stability. The occupation was famously opposed in the middle of the 19th Century by Amir ‘Abd al-Qadir. The French colons were allowed to occupy and exploit the best land in the country confiscated from the locals. In the cities, they tended to settle next to the centres (Kasbahs) of old Algerian cities, whence the word Kasbah came to refer to the “Arab quarter” of Maghrebi cities. The French novelist and philosopher, Albert Camus was famously a French colon born in Algeria.

The French language was taught compulsorily in all public schools as the predominant teaching language leading to a cultural rupture between the Arab middle classes taught French in these school and the other classes taught only Arabic in the traditional Islamic elementary and other private schools. This pattern was also repeated in other French colonies. Incidentally, the brutal occupation ultimately didn’t help the colons adapt to normal life well. Following the bloody Algerian independence war, many of the privileged colons in Algeria later became the snooty and therefore hated pied noir in France after their forced exile from unrealistic privilege in Algeria.

The area known as the Fertile Crescent was first affected subtly by the West as the Ottomans sought to reform their government in response to a perceived Western threat. Part of it (now roughly Syria and Lebanon) was briefly occupied by the Albanian Ottoman ruler of another part of it, Egypt, Muhammad ‘Ali and his son and successor, Ibrahim.

From the 1860 Lebanese civil war (produced by the power vacuum that followed Ibrahim’s withdrawal) until 1914, Western interest and influence became more direct and increased. Ostensibly, the initial interference was to protect minorities in the area of Lebanon during the war and its outcome was that the Europeans determined (with the Ottomans) that the ruler of the Lebanese portion of the Crescent should be an Ottoman Christian citizen from outside the local area. The rural Syrian and Lebanese silk industries were also affected by the decision of Europeans to make silk locally, leading to an influx of Christian former rural silk producers into the cities. Eventually, mission schools and European novelties became prominent in the Crescent as the influence increased.

As in Egypt, under these influences health outcomes improved and transport, culture and literature also underwent developments as railways and presses went into overdrive (in the case of the latter, producing a lively range of books and journals for a new class of voracious idea-consumers, especially in Syria). While the relatively direct Ottoman control of the presses in Syria-Lebanon saw emigration of many Syrian journalists to the more liberal Egyptian regime, clubs and societies proliferated in Syria.

Education in mission schools created a division similar to the one caused in Algeria mentioned above once a more comprehensive national system was adopted, only in reverse. The new public school system became the Arab-speaking majority system unlike in Algeria where it was French speaking middle class system, while the private system became the European-speaking system favoured in this case by the religious minorities supported by the Europeans following the civil war. Thus the region entrenched a cultural rift between groups based on religion under the influence of European ‘protection’.

During and after the First World War, the French and English decided to formally divide up the region between them as ‘protectorates’. In 1915, Britain agreed to post-Ottoman Arab self-determination with the Sharif of Mecca in the Hussein-McMahon agreement as it sought Arab assistance in the war while secretly making the Sykes-Picot agreement with the French.
Also during the war, the Balfour declaration supported the setting up of a Jewish homeland in the region. Finally, the Treaty of Versailles implemented only British and French aspirations even against objections of US negotiators espousing the principles of the Wilson '14 point plan', regarded as naïve in the Old World, which favoured national self-determination.

The British and French Mandates survived until the 1940s. Pressure then continued to be exerted following the war both by the old colonial masters and the new powers, the US and the USSR, under the influence of the Cold War. Iraq (the remaining part of the Fertile Crescent), in particular, has had the dubious distinction of ‘benefiting’ from large oil reserves. States that have ‘benefited’ from oil rents have ironically tended to feel less external or internal pressure to democratise, as I've mentioned, as low taxes and oil-funded social welfare have lessened internal incentives to ‘rock the boat’ and Western oil dependency has generally inhibited powerful countries from exerting external pressure. There is little change to these circumstances in Iraq today.

The division of the Fertile Crescent by the English and French and more local divisions in Arabia have had the effect that the Arab nation has been formally divided at least partly from outside in the East of the Arab world and partly internally. As a result further nationalist forces have sprung up that have produced their own dynamics. The forces are divided between local, regional and pan-Arab affiliations along with pan-Islamic(ist?) ones. Even many Saudi Arabians have Saudi as well as their famed Muslim and Arab identities and Kuwaitis discovered a local identity (as invaded and demoted peoples are prone to do) following the invasion of Kuwait by Iraq. Equally, Palestinian identity has been forged by circumstances created by the creation of Israel.

All of these Arab parties continue to regard themselves as part of the larger Arab nation, however. This identity was arguably first spurred on as a result of the loss by the Ottomans of their Eastern European territories to nationalist independence movements and, ironically, also Turkish nationalism. Much later, both the formation of Israel and the leadership of especially Nasser in Egypt (despite the historically self-contained nature of Egypt) produced a general pan-Arabist resurgence that was, however, dealt a severe blow following the defeat of the Arab forces in the Six-Day War of 1967 by Israel.

The states of the Fertile Crescent thus suffer in terms of their legitimacy in many Arab eyes from a sense of only being a part of the whole Arab state appropriate to at least their Eastern region. Having emerged from French and British rule in the mid 20th Century, at first (and perhaps still) whether they had become truly independent from those countries was also doubtful. Iraq formally achieved independence first in 1933 (informally, though, it was only really achieved with the Ba’ath-backed coup of 1958). The French relinquished their formal control in the region in 1946 and then followed the remainder of the British ‘possessions’ to Israel and what is now Jordan and Israeli-occupied Palestine.

These twin issues of pan-regionalism and suspicion of external influence quite apart from the Israeli influence have caused significant conflict in the recent history of the Crescent. Added to these problems, inexperience at self-rule was also a serious issue and Western-trained elites actually tended to resist change from the dependent status. Jordan, Israel/Palestine and Iraq were (and arguably are) of course in the British sphere and Lebanon and Syria were (and arguably are) in the French sphere and at least part of such affinity as exists today between Lebanon and Syria is probably connected with a shared history as French mandates. The US, too, continues to exert its own less subtle form of influence.