Questions Answered?

The foregoing 84 posts have been an exploration of Islam, the Arab World and the Middle East essentially since a 'new' religion and prophet made central and southern Arabians and Muslims generally the ongoing historical players that they and their cultural descendents remain today. I explored the relationship of these groups to the 'West' and attempted to understand the groups based on what they believe and what they created in history. Mainly I explain how a religion became much more than a religion both for its adherents and for others. I hope I showed that these groups made worthy contributions to the world and needn't be written off as they often seem to be as a mere destructive force. The key is that historical forces and religion form each other and don't remain static. There are a few questions unanswered and I believe among them are: is there such a thing as a 'liberal' Islam or can one be made, how will the West and Arabs and Middle Easterners transform this history next and have I missed out by not examining non-Middle Eastern Muslims as closely?

Regarding "Liberal Muslims", this is the title of a work edited by Omid Safi that provides interesting examples of the views of a different kind of Muslim that I would recommend.

The Effects of Globalisation and Human Resource Issues in the Arab World and the Middle East will also answer many of these questions. The Recent History of Other Muslim Countries such as Indonesia and the Af-Pak Pashtunistan may well offer more answers.

Could we, in fact, learn from this History and the Muslims and Arabs?

Has the materialist West been able to learn anything from its struggles to emerge from colonialism relatively unscathed? Firstly we should return to the work on us (in the West) by Edward Said. The answers may be there somewhere.

Studying the Arab and Islamic Worlds and the Middle East Today

And now, how does one set about studying in this field.

The first thing we should remember is to try to understand the point of view of any author we intend to read and attempt to read authors on any subject with a variety of points of view (and even biases). Points of view can include things like sociology, history, anthropology, economics and political theory. Biases to watch out for include Orientalism as discussed by Edward Said in his work of that name.

The multi-volume Encyclopedia of Islam is a good if occasionally Orientalist and slightly dated starting point for any topics that have anything to do with Arabs, Muslims, the Middle East or Islam including Arab and Islamic countries and influential Muslims. The Encyclopedia Iranica is also in the process of being produced and other encyclopaedias and bibliographies may be useful. Learning a relevant language or two such as Arabic, Turkish, Urdu or Farsi may be useful for completeness of research opportunities. Consulting a specialist librarian for ideas on research methods and sources may also be useful.

If you want to know the very latest published research on a topic (only in European languages, though, for the time being) the Index Islamicus (at 016.9090976 in the Dewey decimal system) is a useful index to consult. The large Cambridge History of Arabic Literature in several volumes is also useful though some of its volumes are more useful than others. Most of the above reference works also have online versions. A large number of online databases of e-books and e-journals are also available at university libraries. The International Journal of Middle East Studies is a respected scholarly journal.

A History of the Arab Peoples by Albert Hourani (with an Afterword by Malise Ruthven) and The Arab World: Society, Culture and State by Halim Barakat are useful overviews with, respectively, historical and sociological perspectives. Neopatriarchy by Hisham Sharabi is another significant sociological work that I have previously discussed. As I mentioned above, always be aware of the biases that may occur in what you read.

Lebanon

Despite its relatively small size, Lebanon has historically played a significant role in the Middle East. Nevertheless its current role is ambiguous as long as there is a reasonable doubt as to whether it is in a process of disintegration or of returning to its prominent role.

The election of Michel Sleiman in 2008 was a positive sign and developments continue to be positive despite the rash of recent assassinations, which I discussed under my discussion of Syria but which don’t necessarily have only to do with Syria. The inherent instability in the current situation derives from an unstable history that commentators such as Condoleezza Rice and governments such as the US Bush administration and Israel’s have shown an interest in perpetuating. The most violent period in recent times embraced in some sense by such people was the civil war lasting from 1975 or 1976 to around 1990. A real understanding of the causes of the instability may contribute to resolution of many of the issues independently of the self-interested analyses outside the country or may in fact contribute to the disintegration of Lebanon as a state.

Geographically, Lebanon consists of the dichotomy of a somewhat rural and mountainous region and the remainder of the country including the coastal cities with their hinterlands and the southern valley region, which might best be termed Syria-Palestine.

Lebanon has been a distinct state since around 1920. Maronite Christians played a large role in this distinction coming about, having been concentrated in the Mount Lebanon area since the 16th Century. Together with the French, they proposed the formation of the “Greater Lebanon” which developed at first under the French Mandatory authorities. Ideologues sought to establish a Lebanese sense of nationality referring to the civilisations of the area included that of the coastal Phoenician trader and merchant settlements and their Canaanite cousins as well as the local Persian, Greek, Roman-Byzantine and Hellenistic (c. 400 BCE to 400 CE) forms.

It was ironic that those who promoted this coastal, mercantile and sea going identity tended to be the Maronite mountain dwellers. The other irony was that only the first two cultures were actually indigenous and the other groups didn’t even engage in major colonisation over the ‘Lebanese’ region they rather ruled over at various times. This ‘historical heritage’ was rather retro-fitted to contemporary Maronite aspirations than historically real and even at this time the Maronites were only a bare majority (if that) of the population of what then became Lebanon.

From the beginning of the history of Christianity, various forms of it (and not just the Maronite form now in communion with the Catholic Church of Rome) and Islamic rule (from 641 CE) have had major impacts on the region now called Lebanon. The Antiochene Patriarch over the region was formally associated with the Eastern Roman Empire centred at Constantinople/Byzantium before the early Islamic conquests of the 7th Century as one of the five patriarchs of the early church (the others being based at Rome, Constantinople, Alexandria and Jerusalem). The local church was divided, however, between (at least) Melkites (named for the Arabic for king as it was the local ruler’s religion), Monophysites and Maronites. The Melkite church later (in the 16th Century) further divided itself into the original followers of the Eastern (Orthodox) rite and the newer group supportive of a Roman rite such as the one already adopted by the Maronites.

The Maronites were the earliest movement of the Roman Catholic rite (inspired by a 5th Century monk, Mar (Saint) Maroun, hence their name, but actually begun as a rural monastic movement in the 7th Century called Bayt (House) Maroun). Inspired by divisions between the bishops of rural and urban regions, the Maronites actually first named their own Patriarch of Antioch in around 600 CE while the movement was in its infancy. Antioch is now part of southern Turkey, as I’ve mentioned, and the Maronite patriarch now resides in Lebanon (most of the other four current Patriarchs of Antioch now reside in Damascus as mentioned before under Syria).

While the Maronites were originally more geographically spread, they finally came to be associated especially with the Mount Lebanon area. Under the Ottomans, they certainly came to be the majority in that small region and Maronite dynasties occasionally formally ruled locally in the Ottoman period. Alternatively, Druze dynasties were also permitted to rule occasionally in the local region. This Ottoman form of apportioning office to the two groups seems to have crystallised an oppositional style of identity politics in Lebanon based on religion from an early period that has persisted until today with the aid of continual reinforcement in external decisions concerning Lebanon.

The upshot was the Maronite idea of a Greater Lebanon beyond the Mount Lebanon area extending over the territory that became Lebanon constitutionally largely under confessional Maronite control. It is also part of the Maronite narrative today that many Maronites preferred at the time to concentrate on the independence of Mount Lebanon rather than on extending their control over further areas (where the majority were not Maronite). Maronite delegations proposed an independent Mount Lebanon to Faysal in the period before he was deposed as King at Damascus by the French. There was also naturally Sunni opposition to the idea as Sunnis had generally controlled the areas (now slated for Maronite control) for extended periods. The Druze and Greek Orthodox populations in the Mount Lebanon area were also generally opposed to the largely French-inspired Greater Lebanon.

Especially once the powers of Mount Lebanon extended their control to ‘Greater’ Lebanon, groups besides the Maronites and Druze became significant. Both Sunni and Shi’a Muslims and other Christian groups were constitutionally included in the confessional power structure of the expanded polity. Today Hassan Nasrullah of the main Shi’a party, Hizbullah, and other local Muslims, having become inured to the idea of a separate Lebanon, still require that it include them with justice in proportion to their changed relative proportion there demographically. As the fertility rate of especially Shi’a Muslims has evidently been higher than that of Maronite Christians (who have also had a higher emigration rate), the Lebanese ‘solution’ has been to cease the conduct of regular censuses (the last was conducted in 1930 under the mandatory authorities when the Maronites were still a (bare) majority in ‘Greater’ Lebanon.

Formally, seventeen sects are ironically celebrated in the Lebanese constitutional morass that has produced and continues to produce both significant political tension and military mayhem in recent times. Nevertheless, cooperation across confessional lines over the last century has also been a feature of the system and this has not often been noticed by the Western media, cooperation being apparently less newsworthy or less in keeping with a certain dialogue being promoted.

The three notable periods of difficulty, however, were the three main civil war eras – one in the 19th and two in the 20th Century. The Druze and Maronites especially have actually generally lived relatively peacefully together in the Mount Lebanon region since the 11th Century with a fair degree of intermarriage among the patrician families. Today we have access to histories of the region produced from the 16th Century by both Druze and Maronite historians and can nevertheless recognise the slight confessional biases of the authors from those times on. Ottoman Turkish policy in the region was to promote the idea of sharing between the two groups but it is open to question what this Turkish idea meant: sharing as in a meal when a dish is placed in the centre of the table for common consumption or as in when a cake is divided to be separately consumed. There is a separate word in Arabic for each of these forms of sharing but the second form has perhaps unfortunately been the preferred form of ‘sharing’ in Lebanon over its recent history.

The first of the modern struggles in Mount Lebanon was at first precipitated by the power vacuum that followed the withdrawal of Muhammad ‘Ali from the area in 1840. The Druze/Maronite strife which followed was ‘settled’ by a sharing arrangement determined under Ottoman auspices. The strife was essentially tribal (and in particular based in the conflicting interests of ambitious aspirant ruling families) rather than based purely on religion. ‘Ali’s rule had been especially favourable to the Christian families after a long period of relative Druze dominance and the settlement of qa’imaqamiyyatan division was the Ottoman replacement. The result of the failure of this system was the more infamous civil war of 1861 after which the area was made a single Mutasarrifiyya under a non-Lebanese Christian Mutasarrif and the indirect control of the Wali of Damascus.

Europeans were interested by this time in both taking sides in such conflicts and interfering directly in Ottoman affairs if possible (and did). Despite European armies and missionaries, however, the half century between this civil war and the time of the First World War was relatively peaceful. During that latter war, however, the French and British saw their chance and agreed basically to divide the Middle East between them in the infamous and then at least semi-secret Sykes-Picot agreement.

The French Mandate following the First World War, of which Lebanon was a part, was the result of that agreement and the Allied defeat and dissolution of the Ottoman Empire. The French were fond of the idea of le Grand Liban and thus extended the territory of Mount Lebanon to incorporate other parts of what is now Lebanon. This new entity was also promised independence in 1920 but true independence was first seriously proposed on the French side in 1943 and finally achieved in 1946 under the auspices of the Free French victors of the Second World War.

In the years that intervened between the promise and the reality a partly unwritten and arguably partly self-contradictory ‘national charter’ and ‘national pact’ became the sectarian Lebanese constitution which has not been actually superseded and which effectively provided for, in order of precedence and political power, a Maronite president, a Sunni prime minister and a Shi’a speaker of the parliament. The Druze tended to be given the senior military offices and Defence Department positions. Various ministries also tended to be made provinces of specific ethnic and religious groups by constitutional convention.

The sectarian and intra-sect rivalries inherently brought into sharp relief by such an arrangement of patrician families regardless of the feelings at the grassroots were reminiscent of the problems of the previous ‘sharing’ arrangement of the Qa’imaqamiyyatan era. In the period immediately following the final constitutional negotiations in the 1940s, the Sunni grassroots, for example, preferred a Druze leader to their own leadership, which had brokered the final constitutional arrangements.

‘Balancing’ of power in this way proved a precarious business. Even within sects, disunity was a product of this system, only mitigated by sectarian enmities that saw the sects unite under certain patrician families at certain times. The changed demographic system alone deals out problems for any system so welded to such a demographic basis for sharing power. The unwillingness to conduct a census for nearly a century is indicative of the difficulties foreseen to be inherent in regularly conducting such tests of the status quo ante system. It is believed, for example, that the Shi’a, who have been allocated the least important of the three major political offices, are now rightly aggrieved as they now form the majority of Lebanese.

The second modern civil war occurred in 1958. It was comparatively minor, over issues of national identity and followed by the rule of a former general, General Shihab, and reforms. The background to the conflict was the Cold War, the takeover of neighbouring Syria by Nasser in 1958 and Nasserism more generally. The tradition of a former general’s rule and reforms ending a period of strife now appears entrenched in Lebanon having occurred at least twice since. General Sleiman’s recent presidency was arguably in that tradition although reforms have perhaps been relatively slight. Certainly the announcement of his presidency appears to have calmed a recent period of Lebanese strife following the central bombings and violence in the north.

The third modern civil war began in 1975 or 1976 and lasted until 1990. The war was complicated also by Israeli invasions: in 1978 (when the South Lebanese Army was formed under Begin) and in 1982 (when Sharon as Israeli Defence Minister famously gave cover to massacres by a Christian militia group as he sought PLO operatives). The US also had some somewhat unwelcome but possibly stabilising involvement in Lebanon in the period.

All of these wars had similar causes: social justice and equitable ‘sharing’ was sought in each case. Despite withdrawing from each of its first two sorties into central Lebanon (during the third war), Israel remained in Southern Lebanon and finally retreated from all but the disputed Shebaa Farms region in the year 2000 once the cost of the attempt at continued occupation (and re-occupation of central Lebanon) was realised. Israel’s attempted return to (at least) the south in 2006 was also a failure. Thus Israel is regarded by many as having been effectively forced from Lebanon by the Lebanese on three or four occasions in around twenty years without appreciable assistance from any actual Lebanese government force.

Hizbollah was the force that ultimately made the cost of occupation (of the south especially) too great for Israel (although other resistance forces preceded it) and its current leader, Hassan Nasrallah, remains active in Lebanese politics. Today’s parliamentary blocs are complex because of all these internal and external ruptures and convoluted religious, political, ethnic, tribal, local and family histories and loyalties. There are two basic blocs, however. Michel Aoun has been aligned with Hizbollah, Amal and the Communists. Incidentally, the Communists are made up mainly of Shi’a, probably because of the unfairly lowly constitutional position of that majority ethno-religious group. The Future Bloc is made up of the son of Rafiq al-Hariri, Siniora, Christians, Druze and some Sunni Muslims.

Palestine/Israel

Palestine has had an especially fraught recent history. Both religious and secular Zionism and Palestinian interests have conflicted for some time in the Palestinian part of the Arab world south of Lebanon, north of Egypt and between the Mediterranean and the Jordan river in particular. Part of it is now generally regarded as Israel (including Jerusalem which is disputed) and two Arab regions known as the West Bank and the Gaza Strip the former of which still contains a large number of Jewish ‘settlements’ (all ‘settlements’ having been now removed from the Gaza Strip).

Since the Oslo agreement of 1993, a ‘peace process’ has formally existed in the West of Jordan region as a whole which has also included other countries such as those of the Arab League and those represented by the so-called “Madrid Quartet” of the US, the EU, Russia and the UN. There has in fact been a surfeit of process yet peace has been wanting. Failure of the process to bring actual peace has been conventionally blamed on extremists on both the Israeli and Palestinian Arab sides but this may not give the full picture.

So let’s consider some pre-Oslo history. Israel was formed in 1948 as a Jewish state in a territory where the majority of the population was Arab Muslim and Christian. In the process around 500 Arab villages and towns were virtually emptied in an ‘ethnic cleansing’ that involved both threats and actual large scale violence committed against Arab civilians by Jews. Most of the Arab population of the territory now called Israel (not counting Jerusalem) fled in that year at first to the Gaza Strip, the West Bank and mainly neighbouring countries.

In 1967, Israel extended its control to the West Bank and Gaza Strip by an occupation which formally continues today, 43 years later, despite a military withdrawal from the interior of the Strip. It also occupied the Golan Heights region of Syria and other areas and ultimately annexed Jerusalem. In contrast with 1948, in the occupied Palestinian areas there was much less success in ‘cleansing’ the areas of Palestinians than there had been in 1948 in what became Israel. There was also an immediate international call for Israel to withdraw from these occupied areas gained in the 1967 war.

Despite Arab successes in the 1973 war, the situation was virtually unchanged by it in the occupied Palestinian zones and in the late 1970s Israel expressed interest in quickly encouraging 2,000,000 Jewish settlers to settle in the West Bank in particular. To date, no more than around half a million have, in fact, settled there.

In 1979 the anthropologist Rosemary Sayigh produced her Palestinians: from Peasants to Revolutionaries (with a foreword from Noam Chomsky) which examines the psychological effects of the creation of Israel and the occupation on Palestinians (not all peasants but certainly all of a class with limited options whether formerly living in the city or country) living in the refugee camps especially in Lebanon. The work is an anthropological-historical one that refers back to Ottoman Palestinian village peasant life. It attempts then to explain what it may be that turns peasants into revolutionaries. A strong work-ethic impeded by camp life, lack of educational opportunity (actually a ‘lost generation’ educationally) and a strong and disrupted but persistent land-connection and local identification are a few of the suggested catalysts.

Class divisions were also apparently a novel and negative feature that rose to prominence only in the camps and thus contributed to a revolutionary (possibly Maoist) mind-set (influenced by people of the merchant class such as George Habash). There has been a 2007 revised edition of this work. Palestinians living in Lebanon (especially of these lower classes), whether living in the camps or able to live elsewhere, are particularly unpopular (and disadvantaged due to a lack of job opportunities) in Lebanon. Conditions in Syria aren’t markedly better for them although the situation in Jordan may be significantly better.

The issue for peace seems to revolve around the apparent incompatibility of both religious and secular Zionism with containment of the territorial ambitions of Israeli Zionists within the boundaries of the current state of Israel. As a result of those ambitions, Israel finds itself between two stools in that it is unwilling to relinquish control of land yet unwilling to annex the West Bank or Gaza Strip. Annexation of this land without a substantial degree of politically unpalatable further ethnic cleansing would produce the also politically unpalatable so-called demographic problem that Israel fears. A Jewish state in a region where the majority is not Jewish offends secular ideas of democracy and incites both religious and secular fears of being unable to prevent a re-takeover of political control of such a large concentration of Jews by the majority non-Jewish population. Even in Israel-proper today there are well-founded fears that within a relatively short period of time the majority of the population is likely to be non-Jewish. On the other side of the debate, the equally intransigent ideology that demands the return of all of Palestine to pre-1948 virtual Arab rule brooks the existence of no Jewish state at all.

The ‘third way’ of a ‘two state solution’ is still the most popular idea in both Israel and the occupied territories. It also appears to be the current proposal of the Arab League for a final settlement of the so-called ‘Middle East conflict’ between Israel and its Arab and Islamic neighbours and the region. Under the League proposal Israel would withdraw to its pre-1967 borders and a degree of re-settlement of Arab refugees would occur. The status of some special cities and holy sites (notably Jerusalem and Abraham’s tomb at Hebron) would also need to be finally established to the satisfaction of all parties (and possibly the status of existing large Jewish settlements in the West Bank determined).

The Oslo Accords which allegedly heralded a ‘peace process’ and provoked such optimism were in actual fact modelled closely on the apartheid-like Allon Plan of the late 1960s for West Bank partition. The Accords proposed the entrenchment of a large Jewish presence in the West Bank especially in the Jordan Valley and in the formerly predominantly Arab city of Jerusalem. Only three percent of the West Bank was actually to be truly under Palestinian control (and even that would not have been total control and would have been in three or four divided enclaves). In the decade and a half of this ‘peace process’, meanwhile, the Jewish ‘settler’ population in the West Bank has roughly doubled.

While the 2000/01 plan arrived at with the assistance of the retiring President Clinton may have been a slight improvement that isn’t saying much. The general tenor remained unchanged and, to compound the injustice, the walls that have now been built have tended to conform to this unfair plan as if the Israeli government intends to present the un-agreed divisions to the Palestinians as a fait accompli. Thus the Israelis, from their position of strength, have continued illegally supporting settlement activity and assumed they have the right to any Palestinian land, illegally retained, that they choose. The Palestinians, meanwhile, are consequently exhausting all legal possibilities for resisting clearly illegal actions on the part of Israel and acceptance of the meagre ‘homelands’ that have effectively been offered them with little change since the West Bank was first occupied by Israel more than 40 years ago.

Nor was the presidency of George W. Bush marked by any real change, at least on the part of Israel or the US. The Palestinians were partly supported by an attempted but ultimately abortive academic and cultural boycott of Israel and reasoned advocates for a ‘one state solution’ in which the state is neither Arab/Islamic nor Jewish covering the entire area of what is now called Israel/Palestine have grown slightly more popular as issues with the ‘two state solution’ have again become more evident, however. In-principle-supporters included the late Jewish academic, Tanya Reinhart, and still include the Palestinian American commentator ‘Ali Abunimah among a significant number of other Jewish and Palestinian commentators and academics. The boycott is still being encouraged at pacbi.org (the website of the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel). Two other websites of interest ultimately promoting a peaceful and just solution are fmep.org (the Foundation for Middle East Peace website) and passia.org (the Palestinian Academic Society for the Study of International Affairs website which contains a variety of good maps).

In his 2009 speech in Cairo, President Obama has asked the Arab world to eschew violent resistance but clearly not all kinds of resistance and made clear (as he has continued to make clear) his absolute opposition to further Israeli settlement activity.

These forbearances and peace between Israel and the Arab/Islamic world are necessary prerequisites for either a two or a one state solution. Some state discrimination still exists within Israel against its Palestinian citizens (despite the efforts of Israel’s superior court) which would need to be eliminated entirely. With regard to Gaza, further freedoms would need to be permitted rather than further repressions imposed. Gaza is currently effectively a large Israeli gaol for its Palestinian population dependent upon UN food aid. Israel’s Ha’aretz newspaper is especially sympathetic with the struggles of Palestinians to live with dignity in the region.

The Way Forward?

Are successful boycotts possible? The way forward is problematical for both sides. Is another non-violent action likely to produce results? Violence may have reduced the harshness of the occupation by increasing its cost but is violence the most efficient solution? It may actually prove to be the least efficient solution (for both sides).

Israel has certainly won the propaganda war but Zionist interests may be, in fact, over playing their hands by introducing further violence. The incursion into a Gaza that was already a prison and the perception that Israel tends to practice excessive retributions may be beginning to change perceptions internationally in favour of the Palestinians. Successful Palestinian propaganda based on these new events may soon prove to be the ultimate and most efficient solution to the problems (for both sides, in fact).

How this propaganda can work remains problematic in a world with a highly politically savvy yet extremely radical class of Israelis, the Hardalim (not to be confused with the similar but perhaps more moderate Haredim). This substantial demographic group has been involved in settlement activity throughout Israel and the West Bank including in Jerusalem and ultimately seeks nothing less than a Jewish theocracy throughout a Greater Israel which may also extend well beyond the area usually regarded as Palestine today.

Can external pressure be brought to bear on Netanyahu’s Israeli government? The election of Barack Obama as US president is probably as promising a development as the election of Netanyahu was a negative one. Prime Minister Olmert as much as admitted that an international campaign similar to the campaign against another apartheid regime (in South Africa) would work. This may be possible with the current regime of the US. The Arab world (at least at regime level) continues to be unable to unite around this issue with sufficient insistence (usually for essentially capitalistic reasons).

Turkey

Here in Australia we've just commemorated Anzac Day and today it's its holiday so it turns out to be a timely occasion to consider who the people were that the Anzacs faced at Gallipoli at dawn on April 25 1915.

The recent history of Turkey, of course, must take into account firstly its Ottoman past and then (especially after that war) the imprinting upon it of the nationalistic revolution that brought about the modern Turkish state.

The Ottoman ruler’s relationship with his subjects, or flock (ra’iya – also used in some Arabic Christian contexts) was that of a ruler to his subjects. Nationalist ideas of a nation state replaced this binary relationship in the imaginations of Turkish Ottoman elites quite gradually, actually. The idea of the Sultan ruling a multi-ethnic, multi-religious empire was thus replaced by that of the citizen of the republican and more homogeneous Turkish nation gradually while the actuality when it came seemed rather more revolutionary. This more homogeneous paradigm was thus formed in such a way that remnants of old Ottoman attitudes were necessarily (due to the exigencies of time) permitted to survive in Turkish culture, attitudes, bureaucratic forms and indeed the Turkish relationship with Europe.

The Turkic peoples first came into contact with Islam in the 9^th Century when the ‘Abbasid caliphs brought them from outside the caliphate as slave-soldiers. It was possible from an early period to rise through the ranks of the slave army to achieve great power as evidenced by at least two great Turkic dynasties of rulers in Egypt as early as that first century of contact, the Tulunids and the early 10^th Century Ikhshidids. From the mid 11^th Century Turkic peoples became associated with Islamic power also in the Mashriq as the Seljuk Dynasty. They had succeeded in conquering Asia Minor (now roughly the territory of modern day Turkey excluding the European bit) where the Arabs had previously run out of puff after the early Islamic conquests. The Seljuks had never been slaves, however.

A small Turkic group now known as the Ottomans who had in the process settled in and eventually controlled a small corner of Asia Minor finally broke out of the confines of that small territory to ultimately control most of the Arab lands and parts of Eastern Europe including finally the Eastern Roman Empire’s Christian former capital city of Constantinople which we now know as Istanbul. They were in turn influenced by the Arab and European cultures over which they then reigned.

The greatest and most longstanding influence on the Ottomans as a Turkic people was naturally the Arab culture but a European outlook was also manifested in the outlook of Mustapha Kemal who came to be called Atatürk (Father of the Turks). He believed when he came to power in an acceleration of the Westernisation that had begun under the Ottoman Sultans, modernisation and secularisation (mainly of the new Turkish political system). This attitude and orientation to the West was possibly at least partly also induced by what he may have regarded as the treachery of the Arabs against the Ottoman state during the First World War when they revolted against it with the support of the British including T.E. Lawrence (of Arabia). At the same time he may have sought to make a statement that Turkey was Asian (as it is mostly in Asia geographically) and Turkish rather than European by moving the capital from Istanbul most of which is on the European side of the Bosporus to Ankara in the centre of Anatolia (or Asia Minor) on the Asian side.

Atatürk’s nationalist ideas especially were clearly originated in the Ottoman period. Subjects of the Ottoman state had been influenced for some time by nationalism from Europe and even European nationalist movements in the Ottoman lands themselves (inspired in part by French revolutionary ideas) which had virtually brought about the end of Ottoman rule completely in Eastern Europe, where large numbers of non Turks such as Greeks, Hungarians and Slavs lived. The state had approached the gates of Vienna on more than one occasion in an earlier era. Following this reversal, both the Arabs and Turks thus saw the potential ‘national’ political advantages of national pride. The Arabs in the Fertile Crescent and in coastal Arabia had been somewhat closely controlled by Ottoman Turks for some time. Egyptians and North Africans had generally been less closely controlled and Morocco was not even under the formal control of the Ottomans (Muhammad ‘Ali’s dynasty was governing Egypt and European powers (England and France (and Italy in Libya)) had come to govern North Africa). The Turks were eager to learn to govern the Arabs (and the Armenians – the other remaining subject race) as a ruling race from an obviously resurgent Europe and the Arabs became eager to throw off the remaining shackles of this very attempted government using the same ideas. The similar hopes of the Armenians were, of course, brutally suppressed in a series of 20^th Century massacres. The Turks of the early 20th century were especially influenced by the racial and nationalist ideas then being touted in Germany.

But before that, in the 19^th Century, the Ottoman state tried to forestall its demise as a multi-ethnic Turkish-ruled empire with the modernising so-called “Tanzimat” reforms to its millet structure. The German ideas nevertheless naturally produced a crisis in this ethnically, confessionally and linguistically diverse empire that could not be forestalled. On the Turk side, the nationalists insisted on Turkish as the only possible official language for the empire. This naturally provoked an indignant nationalist impulse in the other sides, encouraged as they were by the modernising changes which had given them new possibilities in a novel system of representation.

The upshot of all the nationalism was the formation of the nationalist “Party [or Committee] of Union and Progress” (also known to history as the Young Turks) by a group of Turkish army officers that included Atatürk and that attempted a coup in 1908 to overthrow the Sultan. The reference in their name to “Union” reflected the group’s desire to maintain the Turkish/Arab/Armenian union. The reference to “Progress” reflected a time of optimism regarding the future of this empire and a desire to actively reach for that future with progress from the present circumstances.

Turkish nationalism was the clear background to the events leading up to the First World War and the British, of course, wisely sought to exploit the strong Arab nationalism the Turkish nationalism had produced. As we know (and apparently to the intense personal shame of T.E. Lawrence expressed in his famous “Seven Pillars of Wisdom” account of the war-time Arab revolt against the Ottomans) the British exploited a passion with promises it chose not to fulfil. During the war, while they were still encouraging the Arabs to fight for their independence, the British and French had secretly agreed to divide much of the Arab land between them and the British Foreign Secretary further supported a “national home” (although not necessarily a state) for the Jews in the so-called Balfour Declaration of 1917.

The Turks, ostensibly the real enemy of the Western powers, thus emerged from the war with a Turkish homeland, Turkey, while the relatively innocent Arabs and Armenians received something much less from a dictated peace (the Turks themselves had had to repel a post-armistice allied attempt at occupation of at least part of Anatolia). Kemal (later Atatürk) played a leading role in this successful repulsion and consequently acquired the islamically significant Arabic honorific, Ghazi (Warrior - in modern day Turkish it would be spelled Gazi).

His coming to power would mark the beginning of a great programme of major reforms. The red flag with white crescent and star was virtually all that he didn’t change (although even it was legally standardised in 1936). The fez was outright banned and he personally adopted either a bare head or western head attire. Ironically the fez is actually Western being derived from head gear worn first in the Ottoman Greek colony and by non-Muslims. Turks also began to become more secular in attitude and attire more or less voluntarily under his influence. Mehmet V and VI continued for a while as figureheads only but the Sultanate (and alleged Ottoman Caliphate) was finally ended completely in fairly short order. As long as Kemal lived and despite its nomenclature of republicanism, the state thus effectively became a one-party and secular dictatorship.

The context of this confident secularisation of the new Turkish state was actually a cynical process of asserting a religious basis to what was a dying and essentially secular Ottoman system by occasionally claiming the title Caliph by the last few Sultans.

Since the end of the ‘Abbasid caliphate in 1258 (with the fall of Baghdad to the then pagan Mongols) with which the Ottomans thus sought to associate themselves, there had in fact been no further caliphates and to the extent that caliphate was claimed in this interval it appears to always have essentially depended on genealogy rather than any clear religious virtue of any ruling dynasty. A family member of the last ‘Abbasid caliph’s family (the last actual Caliph had been killed in Baghdad by the Mongols in 1258) had been immediately cultivated for their own purposes by the Mamluk rulers of Egypt. He was given the title Caliph, Muhammad’s alleged mantle and a sceptre but no actual power – either religious or secular. This regime was finally defeated by the Ottomans, who at that point and for many centuries appeared to have no real interest in claiming the title of Caliph, in the 16^th Century. Selim I was more interested in expropriating the mantle and sceptre than the alleged Mamluk Caliph of Cairo. He accepted merely the title “Servant of the Two Holy Shrines [of Mecca and Medina]”. In any event acceptance of the name Caliph has never really proved anything about the religious flavour of a regime. The Umayyads (who preceded the ‘Abbasids) were certainly less inclined to pay even lip service to Islam than their ‘Abbasid successors who were no angels themselves in their actual lives.

After the attempted use of the title Caliph by the most recent ailing Ottoman Sultans was finally put an end to by Kemal, King Fouad of Egypt briefly flirted with the idea of assuming the title for himself but he ultimately didn’t consider it politic to do so. The noted Jewish Orientalist, Bernard Lewis, apparently had a variety of connections with this family of the last Ottoman 'Caliphs'. Fouad had ‘grown his beard out’ in order to seem more worthy of the title and had a fake genealogy prepared for the purpose of the claim but neither he nor the title were considered sufficiently important at the time to warrant much attention and he simply allowed the claim to drop. The so-called khilafa movement for the restoration of a (the) Caliphate began at about this time, ironically mostly in India which had never in fact been ruled by any ruler claiming the title Caliph.

Returning now to the modernisations, a major one was the Romanisation of the Turkish script which had previously used a slightly modified Arabic script (since the 11^th Century following the Persian adoption of the script in the 10^th Century). This certainly indicated a Western orientation.

Turkish is an Altaic language which means it’s closely related to Finnish and Korean. The sound formerly represented by the Arabic Jeem (ج) as used in Jamil was now represented by a “c” and the guttural Arabic Kha’ (خ) was now represented by “h”. Thus the Arab name we usual write in the West as “Khalil” would be denoted in Turkish by “Halil” and this Arabic guttural sound thus also became less pronounced in spoken Turkish.

Along with this reform, attempts were made to reduce the number of Arabic words in the language when European words were available to be co-opted instead. The result of these reforms that led to most children being taught only new Turkish was that by the late 1920s they were limited in reading the words of any of their parents who had been slow to learn the new Turkish. Young Turks were now also faced with the need to learn Arabic in order to understand state archives written in Turkish that were then only a few years old. The word for culture that had been an Arabic inspired “madiniyat” became “kultur” following the German “Kultur”. The word for school which had been “madrasa” became “okul” after the French “école”. These cultural rifts are similar to those faced by Serbs (who use an essentially Cyrillic script) and Croats (Roman) and Hindi (Devanagari-Sanskrit) and Urdu (Arabic) speakers. The two pairs also speak essentially the same language as the ‘neighbouring’ one but are limited in written communication by the learning of different scripts. There is a movement today to translate Ottoman archives that has run into difficulty finding a sufficient number of competent translators due to the script and word changes together with an Ottoman love of now-nearly-unintelligible abbreviations.

Religion was clearly a special target of this new regime and of course the main target was Islam in this predominantly Muslim nation. As well as removing Islam from most of the symbols of state it was to be removed as much as possible from public life and the social and cultural space of Turkey. The rather extreme French ideal of laïcité was the model here. Sufism, which had been quite popular, was completely banned. The Naqshbandi and one or two other orders had been especially popular. While the traditional call to prayer that can generally be heard in majority Muslim nations was not abolished, it and public prayers in general were to be made in Turkish rather than the traditional Arabic. The Ottomans had begun to regulate religion and Kemal continued the trend towards more of this regulation. All Islamic religious functionaries from the high mufti (senior jurisprudent) to the lowly muezzin (who performed the call to prayer) became effectively functionaries of the state. Sufi properties became property of the state in a manner reminiscent of Henry VIII’s dissolution of the monasteries. Although Islam had been banned from politics, Kemal always remained a Muslim, however.

With regard to the female wearing of the veil he nevertheless convinced several of his female relatives to dispense with wearing it. There was no general veil ban, however, as there had been a fez ban for the men. The veil was thoroughly disapproved, however. A female politician could expect to be thoroughly castigated should she attempt to wear the antiquated veil in the modern majlis. Subsequently, actual bans were introduced in certain public places. In contrast to the disapproval then, today the wives of both the President and Prime Minister (both of whom belong to a moderate Islamist party) publicly wear the veil and this is accepted.

While the disapproval of the veil was an issue while Kemal was ruling, of much more concern to the majority was that he had become a dictator. In the universities an ideology was also introduced that also attempted to downplay the significant of the Arabs in Turkish history. Turkey became linked instead with great Turkic civilisations that predated Islam and in some cases even Christianity. The 4^th Century emperor, Attila the Hun, thus became a much admired figure and as a result Attila became (and remains today) a popular given name in Turkey.

Major social changes might have been expected to follow from this suppression of religion. People were now relatively free to drink alcohol, go dancing, not fast and not pray as a matter of personal choice. Nevertheless, as Muslims, the people generally chose not to exercise this relative freedom. In fact, many regarded the new personal freedom itself as a persecution of the religion. The symbolism of the state (devlet), people (halk) and representative republic (cumhuriet) now assumed an importance that they didn’t possess in the Ottoman Empire and it is ironic that all three words were derived from Arabic. In contrast, for example, with the Pahlavis in Iran, Kemal had no interest in establishing a dynasty after assuming power, as dictatorial as he may have been in life.

A slow democratisation process followed Kemal’s death in 1938. The next president was also a military man, General İsmet İnönü. Other parties came to be accepted. The Kemal party was essentially nationalist and there were soon also both socialist and essentially democratic parties. The legacy of the Kemalist constitution, however, was (and continues to be) that the Turkish army saw itself (and sees itself) as having the very particular role of maintaining the newly secular nature of Turkey and keeping religion out of politics, whatever this may mean for democratically elected governments. By contrast, the last Ottoman constitution was explicitly Islamic admittedly out of the then demands of realpolitik in introducing the novel concept of a written constitution. Many constitutions in the Arab world continue to be explicitly Islamic for similar reasons.

This army position thus derives partly from a certain pride in the success of one of their number, Kemal, in progressing beyond the deprivations of the First World War brought on under the old constitution by means of stripping the old constitution of its essential religious phoniness. Several coups with varying degrees of success in at least the 1950s and 60s were the result when democracy produced governments that appeared to wish for a return to a religious basis for secular politics and life generally. The government of Adnan Menderes was one of those governments thought to be errant. It began in 1950 and ended in 1960 with the arrest and execution of Menderes. One of his reforms was not permanently reversed by the junta who had deposed him, however. It was the return of the Arabic call to prayer. There was evidently a period of transition until the late 1960s, however, before the old musicality returned again to the Arabic call in Turkey (according to Professor Ahmad Shboul of the University of Sydney). The multi party system was restored from the 1960s but the army remained watchful, as it remains today with a very devout but moderate party in government, for any further ‘constitutional breaches’.

As far as the partial ban on the wearing of the headscarf by Muslim women is concerned it is probably a step too far towards secularism in a Muslim country. It probably makes more sense in a country like France which still maintains a partial ban and was lifted by the current Turkish government. This was viewed as a grave anti-secular development by a number of secularists in Turkey and the constitutional court subsequently overruled the government's change. However, while it was certainly disapproved of, even Pahlavi Iran had no actual ban on the headscarf. The Ayatollahs there went to the other extreme of course and that extreme, too, is today being challenged. Several secularist intellectuals in Turkey have expressed concern that the recent lifting of the ban was a first insidious stage on a slippery slope leading to more radical Islamising reforms. The battle with elements of the military and the secularism debate continues in Turkey.

In the modern world, Turkey is engaging with the European Union and this move is supported by many Turks who see Turkey as a natural part of Europe (Turkey has already been a member of NATO for some time despite being far from the North Atlantic). Since the recent flood of new admissions, however, there are now already 27 EU states and Turkey is being made to jump through hoops before being further considered. Even if they are able to jump through the hoops there may be considerable opposition from current member states as many Europeans regard the EU as properly an essentially Christian union. In order to counteract this opposition Turkish proponents of membership therefore tend to emphasise the secular nature of the Turkish state. It’s therefore easy to see how important maintenance of that secularity may be for Turkey’s future alliances.

There are also many within Turkey who wonder whether the EU hoops are actually worth jumping through if such discrimination is significant and suggest seeking more natural alliances rather in Turkic Central Asia newly independent from Russia. Alliances with other Middle Eastern countries are also under consideration despite the linguistic differences (which also exist to a significant extent between Turkey and Turkic Central Asia).

The third possible option under active consideration within Turkey (existing beside alliance with either ‘the East’ or ‘the West’) is national self-reliance. This may well have been Kemal’s intention in moving the capital city of Turkey to the centre of Anatolia although he himself was born in Salonika in Greece. He saw Turkey as Anatolia but had no special affinity with the Arab leaders of his time, either, although he met early with the then king of Iraq, King Faisal. Oil has been a major factor in the closeness that he promoted then with the Arab world and also with Iran.

Turkey was also a founding member of the Organisation of the Islamic Conference (OIC) in 1969 suggesting that Turkey was not averse to a religious rather than purely geographical basis of alliance (somewhat ironically perhaps for this secular state). The OIC’s current Secretary General is in fact a multi lingual and erudite Turk, Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu. The current crop of politicians and Turks are returning to observance of pilgrimage to Mecca, which further tends to cement this alliance at all levels.

At the same, Turkey has recognised Israel for many years now, indicating its independence, although it appears many current politicians would wish to reverse this recognition in the unlikely event that it was politically possible in Turkey to do so (given Turkey’s fruitful current alliance also with the US).