The Modern Middle East (2 page)

Acknowledgments to the Second Edition

Some five years after its original publication, the book continues to benefit from the input and advice of many colleagues and research assistants who helped with its original inception and its subsequent publication back in 2005. In the intervening years, countless friends and associates, and at times anonymous readers, have pointed out various ways in which the first edition could be improved upon. I am thankful for their input, their constructive criticisms, and their suggestions for improvement. I have been extremely fortunate to work with Naomi Schneider, my editor at the University of California Press, whose guidance, encouragement, and patience with delays were tremendously helpful in shaping the second edition. Grateful acknowledgment also goes to Simone Popperl, my superb research assistant on this book, especially for her help with updates to many of the tables appearing throughout the manuscript.

Any project of this magnitude is a product of love, and I have been extremely fortunate to be surrounded by a most loving family who selflessly gave me the time and the peace and quiet needed to complete work on this edition. My wife Melisa and our daughters, Dilara and Kendra, always provided the loving support and the emotional nourishment that I needed to work. For that, and for much more that cannot be adequately expressed in words, I dedicate this book to them.

Acknowledgments to the Third Edition

The current edition has benefited from the continued feedback of a number of colleagues and scholars, some of whom have read the book out of interest and many of whom have assigned it to their courses on Middle Eastern history and politics. I am particularly grateful to Murat Bayar, Gamze Cavdar, Steve Ceccoli, John Copp, Eugene Cruz-Uribe, Kareem Mahmoud Kamel, Tugrul Keskin, Bessma Momani, and Mahmood Monshipouri for providing invaluable feedback on improvements to be made to the second edition. Whatever shortcomings remain in the book are, of course, my own responsibility. Over the years, the research that has gone into this book has benefited from the labor of a number of exceptional research assistants. For this edition I was lucky to work with Dwaa Osman and Sana Jamal, both of whom worked meticulously on many of the tables and collected much of the data that appear in the book. Naomi Schneider, my editor at the University of California Press, remains by far one of the most wonderful professionals in the publishing industry with whom I have ever worked.

Any project of this magnitude is a product of love, and I have been extremely fortunate to be surrounded by a most loving family who selflessly gave me the time and the peace and quiet needed to complete work on this edition. My wife Melisa and our daughters, Dilara and Kendra, always provided the loving support and the emotional nourishment that I needed to work. For that, and for much more that cannot be adequately expressed in words, I dedicate this book to them.

Map 1.
The modern Middle East

This book examines the political history of the contemporary Middle East. Although it focuses primarily on the period since the demise of the Ottoman Empire, shortly after World War I, it includes some discussion of pre-Ottoman and Ottoman histories to better clarify the background and the context in which modern Middle Eastern political history has taken shape. The book uses a broad conception of the “Middle East” as a geographic area that extends from Iran in the east to Turkey, Iraq, the Arabian peninsula, the Levant (Lebanon and Syria), and North Africa, including the Maghreb, in the west.
Maghreb
is the Arabic word for “Occident” and has historically been used to describe areas west of Egypt. In modern times, it has come to refer to Tunisia, Algeria, and Morocco. Libya is also sometimes included as part of the Maghreb, but it is more commonly grouped with Egypt as belonging to North Africa.

Although there are vast differences between and within the histories, cultures, traditions, and politics of each of these regions in the Middle East, equally important and compelling shared characteristics unify the region. By far the most important of these are language, ethnicity, and religion. Much of Middle Eastern identity is wrapped around the Arabic language. Poetry and storytelling have historically been viewed as elevated art forms. As Fouad Ajami has observed, “Poetry, it has been said, was (and is) to the Arabs what philosophy was to the Greeks, law to the Romans, and art to the Persians: the repository and purest expression of their distinctive spirit.”
¹
Even in places where it is not the national language and is not widely spoken, as in Iran and in Turkey, Arabic, the language of the Quran, permeates life with its many expressions and phrases.

Another common bond in the Middle East is Arab ethnic identity. From Iraq in the north down to the Arabian peninsula and west all the way to
Morocco, ethnic Arabs predominate. There are, of course, significant clusters of other ethnic groups. A majority of Iranians are Persians, and Turks are predominant in Turkey. Apart from the so-called Arab-Israelis—Palestinians who found themselves in Israel’s borders when the country was born in 1948—Jews are the dominant group in Israel. As chapter 9 discusses, however, there is a debate as to whether Jews are members of an ethnic group or believers in a religious faith. Additionally, there are several “stateless” ethnic groups, by far the largest being the Kurds, who are mostly in southeastern Turkey, western Iran, northern Iraq, and northeastern Syria. There are also sizable Berber communities throughout the Maghreb. But despite these diverse ethnic communities, much of the Arab world remains ethnically homogeneous and strongly identifies with its ethnicity.

An even stronger bond uniting the region is religion, with some 97 percent of Middle Easterners identifying themselves as Muslim. That Islam is a whole way of life and not just a religion is a cliché. But regardless of their ethnicity, where they live, and what language they speak, the faithful share a compelling set of beliefs and rituals that transcend national boundaries with remarkable ease. At its strictest, Islam is austere and exacting. But even in its most liberal settings and interpretations, it permeates the life of the Middle East in ways few other phenomena do. Its relentless emphasis on community, its injunctions on the one billion faithful to all face Mecca in prayer and to fast together in the same month, its deep penetration of languages far removed from Arabic, its reverence for the Prophet Muhammad, who called for submission (
Islam
) to God (
Allah
)—all of these reinforce the sense of belonging to a whole far bigger than its individual, national components. Since the early decades of the twentieth century, Islam as a source of cross-national unity has steadily lost ground to state-specific nationalism, but it continues to be a powerful and compelling source of common identification among fellow Muslims around the world, especially in the Middle East.

In addition to the important, uniting phenomena of ethnicity, language, and religion are the curse and the blessings of a common historical heritage. Much of the Middle East, with the exceptions of Iran and Morocco, experienced centuries of Ottoman rule, generally from the mid-sixteenth century up until the waning years of the nineteenth century. The Ottomans’ hold on the Middle East was often tenuous and frequently interrupted. Over the centuries, however, for better or for worse, from their capital in Istanbul they managed to leave their imprint on such far-off places as Cairo, Tripoli, and Tunis. Once the Ottomans were gone, the British and the French took their place, leaving on their colonial possessions their own distinctive
marks. Perhaps the biggest relic of British rule, aside from the drawing of artificial national borders, was the institution of monarchy, which they secured in almost all the lands they ruled, from Egypt to Jordan, Iraq, and the Arabian peninsula. The French colonial inheritance was less political and more cultural, although in the Levant they left behind republican systems that mimicked their own. For the French what mattered most was the superiority of their civilization, and they ensured its posterity by making French the lingua franca of the Maghreb. Today, urban Moroccans, Algerians, and Tunisians speak and study in French with as much ease as they converse in Arabic. This, of course, is the case with millions of others in francophone Africa as well.

Nevertheless, the powerful forces uniting the Middle East—religion, ethnicity, and language—have at times also been sources of division and conflict. In many historical episodes subtle differences in dialect or ethnic identity have served as powerful catalysts for the articulation of national or subnational loyalties and even political mobilization. The Middle East, it must be remembered, is far from monolithic and homogeneous. Its differences have been a source of both strength and inspiration and, at times, violent bloodletting; witness the tragedy of Lebanon or the torment meted out to the Kurds.

In studying the Middle East, it is often tempting to overlook the region’s rich diversity in geography, politics, and culture. Any book purporting to examine the political history of the modern Middle East is bound to remain at a certain level of generalization and not pay the necessary attention to the many, multifaceted differences within the various Middle Eastern countries and communities. This book, I am afraid, is no exception. I have taken care throughout to highlight the existence of differences, both between and within the countries and the peoples discussed, and I hope that the reader remains mindful of them as well. Nevertheless, I feel compelled to apologize to those groups whose identities or destinies may not be as thoroughly covered here as they should have been.

When the “modern” era of the Middle East begins is a matter of some debate. For our purposes here, I have taken it to be in the 1920s, after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, when state systems as we have come to know them today began to be established throughout the region. But the political and historic phenomena that the Ottomans represented had roots far deeper in Middle Eastern and Islamic history than the early decades of the twentieth century. I decided, therefore, to go further back, much further back, and briefly retell the story of the Middle East since the appearance of Islam and how it shaped subsequent historical events in the region. Islam
dramatically altered the life and historic evolution of the Middle East, but its appearance by no means marks the beginning of Middle Eastern history. As chapter 1 makes clear, this was an arbitrary starting date, for I had to draw the line somewhere, and I chose to do so with Islam’s beginning. Had this been a work on the
complete
political history of the Middle East, it would have had to start with the earliest days of human civilization, along the banks of the Tigris and the Euphrates in modern-day Iraq.

In addition to simple convenience and an arbitrary starting date, a deeper logic guides the choice of the chapters that follow and the topics they discuss. Politics and history are both dynamic and changeable
processes.
Thus the examination of either one in a snapshot is incomplete without attention to successive past developments. Contemporary political issues in the Middle East are deeply rooted in past historic and political events: consider, for example, three of the most central issues, the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, economic development, and the nature of prevailing state-society relations within each country. The present manifestation of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict resulted from the outcome of the Arab-Israeli wars, which were a product of competing varieties of nationalism, shaped by the machinations of Western colonial powers, who had gone to the Middle East once the Ottomans collapsed, and so on. The same line of inquiry could be applied to current state-society relations in the Middle East or to each country’s level of economic development.

On the basis of this logic, the book is divided into two parts, one focusing on political history and the other on some key issues that resonate throughout the region. Part I lays out the historical context for the Middle East. It begins with a sweeping chapter on the history of the Middle East from the earliest days, when geographic considerations and military conquests led to the establishment first of cities and then of civilizations around them, up until the demise of the region’s last major imperial power, the Ottomans. Chapter 2 continues the historical narrative, concentrating on the period between the two world wars and looking at the nature and trials of independence and state building. The emergence and rapid spread of nationalism throughout the Middle East is discussed in chapter 3, and the two resulting Arab-Israeli wars in 1967 and 1973, each spectacular in its own way, are examined in chapter 4. Nationalism, state building, and political consolidation (or lack thereof) led to one of the most dramatic developments in the contemporary Middle East, the Iranian revolution of 1978–79, which is discussed in chapter 5. Revolutions and wars are seldom far apart, and both the 1980–88 Iran-Iraq War and the so-called Second Gulf War in 1990–91 and its aftermath are covered in chapter 6. This chapter ends with
a discussion of the causes and consequences of the U.S. invasion of Iraq in April 2003 and its eventual withdrawal from the country in 2011.

The historical processes discussed in chapters 1 through 6 have had profound consequences for the contemporary politics of the Middle East, especially with regard to the overall nature of state-society relations in each country and the relationships between states. Part II discusses four of the most important current political manifestations of longer-term historical processes: the evolution of state institutions and the challenges they face; the question of democracy; the Palestinian-Israeli conflict; and the challenges of economic development. This is by no means an exhaustive list of the defining features of the region’s contemporary politics. But it represents some of the most salient phenomena whose scope and consequences go beyond mere diplomacy, economics, or politics. These are the core issues that have shaped and defined contemporary Middle Eastern politics. They have had ramifications not only for the countries involved but for the region and the world as well.