The Modern Middle East (76 page)

The potential for conflict over the waters of the Jordan River has been reduced in recent years since the signing of the Jordanian-Israeli peace treaty in October 1994, a major aspect of which revolved around terms for sharing the river.
³⁵
Israel’s withdrawal from southern Lebanon in 2000 reduced previous water tensions between Israel and Lebanon as well, this time over the Litani River. Nevertheless, tensions over the water-rich Golan Heights and the Yarmuk River continue between Israel and Syria.

The ongoing conflict between Syria and Israel over the Golan Heights tells us much about the larger issue of water in the Middle East. Throughout the region, water resources have been an afterthought in justifying larger military objectives and territorial ambitions once the conquests had already taken place. They have constituted additional benefits accrued to victorious parties, especially Israel, rather than serving as the original catalyst for a conflict. Rich underground water deposits or fertile river basins—as with the aquifers in the West Bank, Gaza, and the Golan Heights, or the land along the Nile, the Jordan, and the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers—have made the stakes higher in conflicts whose genesis had little to do with water. The harsh rhetoric of many of the warring parties, who often happen to share a
river, has muddled the distinction between
water scarcity
and
water conflict.
The crisis facing the Middle East today is one of water scarcity, not necessarily one of impending water conflict.

In fact, given the Middle East’s long history of aridity and scarce water resources, the region has a rich tradition of cooperation rather than conflict over water. Such a cooperative tradition, as well as the calculated benefits of cooperation compared to the costs of conflict, is likely to foster future agreements and further cooperation among the contending parties. In the words of two observers of the issue: “Middle Eastern water problems are not inherently different from those in other parts of the globe, and the doom-laden hypotheses which represent the dominant view in the literature of hydropolitics are greatly exaggerated. . . . Far from leading to military conflict, increasing water scarcity will concentrate the minds of those involved to find sustainable solutions and, to achieve this goal, the concerned parties will increasingly resort to coordinated, cooperative, and conciliatory arrangements.”
³⁶

Nevertheless, although the potential for international wars over water is not that great, the crisis of water scarcity continues, and it is projected to get more acute in the future as population levels rise and available freshwater sources decline. Numerous academic and practical solutions have been proposed, some more realistic and feasible than others.
³⁷
Each country has already embarked on ambitious water conservation schemes of its own, but it is unclear whether such measures are enough to address existing or impending scarcities. Averting a real crisis requires progress on a number of fronts, from lowering population growth rates to making water usage more efficient and ensuring more equitable access to all concerned. These are weighty tasks. The challenge lies in performing them.

When I started researching for the first edition of this book, on a trip to Iran in 2003, I was struck by the pervasive gloom I witnessed among people of all colors, rich and poor, urban and rural. Although my trip took place some fifteen years after the end of the Iran-Iraq War, the awful memory of that bloody and devastating conflict continued to cast a dark shadow over many people. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and continued tensions between Iran, Israel, and the United States also weighed heavily on people’s minds. But most of the complaints I heard had to do with people’s more immediate circumstances: high prices, traffic, overcrowded cities and unaffordable housing, unemployment, air pollution, petty restrictions, arbitrary officials and unpredictable government policies, unavailability of certain goods and services, lack of real democracy and fear of the state, and so on.
At least among a significant segment of the population, there was a palpable sense of hopelessness and despair. Although this was in Tehran, I could have been talking to an average person almost anywhere in the Middle East, whether in Cairo or Algiers, Rabat or Amman. After a while, I found the experience so dispiriting that I stopped asking people what issues concerned them the most.

It was these very feelings of despair and despondency that sparked the Green Movement in Iran in 2009 and the Arab uprisings in 2011. As the second decade of the twenty-first century approaches its midway mark, the Middle East appears to be standing on the precipice of political change once again. In places where they have succeeded, antiauthoritarian movements may well result in the establishment of democratic political systems, a process, as history teaches us, that can be prolonged and often fraught with setbacks and difficulties. If that indeed happens, such revolutionary movements can become models for the rest of the region to follow, as democratic contagions are seldom easily preventable. But the lessons of history are not all that encouraging. While the 2011 uprisings may go the way of Europe’s so-called Velvet Revolutions in 1989, they are just as likely to follow the pattern of the European revolutions of 1848, ironically often called “Spring of Nations” or “Springtime of Peoples.” These earlier revolutions left tens of thousands dead and brought chaos to countless others without ultimately improving their lives politically or economically.
³⁸
History’s choices—between ultimately inconsequential chaos and a hard-fought democratic order—depend on combinations of structural factors such as economics, international relations, and the resiliency and functions of political parties and other institutions, as well as the purposive choices of political actors, drafters of new constitutions, and the founding figures of the new orders. History is made through the interplay of structures and agency, and, at this critical juncture of political fluidity and change in the Middle East, how the two mix to usher in new political orders remains to be seen.

So far, the political history of the Middle East has been tormented and painful. And the challenges of the future are both formidable and numerous. But it does appear that the horrors of the past—though still possible to resurrect—are less and less likely to reemerge in the future. A quick glance at some of the challenges facing the region today and in the past is quite revealing. In the 1920s and 1930s, the primary task facing the elites and masses of the Middle East was to build viable territorial and political entities out of the ashes of the Ottoman Empire or the carvings of European colonial powers. In the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s, the region was torn by the forces of nationalism, military ascension and conquest, exile, defeat, and
subjugation. The 1970s and 1980s brought more wars and chaos, capped by the devastation of the Second Gulf War in 1990–91 and America’s war and misadventure in Iraq beginning in 2003. The forces and dynamics that gave rise to these bloody conflicts have not fully died down. Also, as long as the occupation of Palestinian territories by Israel continues and central authority has not been established in postinvasion Iraq and Afghanistan, there is bound to be more violence and bloodshed. But the challenges facing the Middle East today are qualitatively different from those of the past. The great problems today concern the environment, sustainable economic development, scientific progress, global economic competition, overall quality of life, and the crafting of democracies. These are, of course, major challenges, and the ability or willingness of the current slate of Middle Eastern policy makers to adequately address them is far from certain. But they are unlikely to directly or even indirectly cause international wars and bloodshed. If anything, they may foster greater regionwide cooperation and consensus. The future is not nearly as bleak as the past. In fact, it looks much brighter.

Notes

1.
Fouad Ajami,
The Dream Palace of the Arabs: A Generation’s Odyssey
(New York: Pantheon Books, 1998), p. 80.

1. FROM ISLAM TO THE GREAT WAR

1.
Ira Lapidus,
A History of Islamic Societies
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 7.

2.
In the southern city of Mecca, where Islam first appeared, the three pagan goddesses Lat, Manat, and Uzza would later become sources of great controversy in Islamic history, inspiring, in the late twentieth century, a controversial novel entitled
The Satanic Verses
by Salman Rushdie (New York: Viking Books, 1989).

3.
While viewing themselves as the defenders of Christianity in the East, the Byzantines are said to have held a more tolerant attitude toward Muslims and other “infidels” than their European coreligionists farther west. Sir Steven Runciman,
The Fall of Constantinople,
1453 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1965), p. 2.

4.
Albert Hourani,
A History of the Arab Peoples
(Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1991), p. 128. For more on markets and trade in the ancient Middle East, see Morris Silver,
Economic Structures of the Ancient Near East
(London: Croom Helm, 1985), especially chs. 5 and 6.

5.
Fred M. Donner, “Muhammad and the Caliphate: Political History of the Islamic Empire up to the Mongol Conquest,” in
The Oxford History of Islam,
ed. John Esposito (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 13.

6.
The dog had been domesticated as early as twelve thousand years ago in Southwest Asia. The specific animals domesticated during the Neolithic Revolution included the sheep, pig, and cow. See David Christian,
Maps of Time: An Introduction to Big History
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011), pp. 218–22.

7.
Archaeological evidence from ancient Mesopotamia (modern-day Iraq) suggests that cities were first established and grew sometime between 3100 and 2800
B.C.
Daniel Snell,
Life in the Ancient Near East,
3100–332
B.C.E
.
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), p. 19. Jericho, first a village and now a city in present-day Palestine, was the earliest continually occupied settlement, dating from 8000
B.C.
to the present.

8.
Hourani,
History of the Arab Peoples,
p. 104.

9.
For the role of irrigation in the rise of states, see Karl Wittfogel, “Hydraulic Civilizations,” in
Man’s Role in Changing the Face of the Earth,
ed. William Thomas (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1956), pp. 152–64; Theodore Downing and McGuire Gibson, eds.,
Irrigation’s Impact on Society
(Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1974); and Walter Coward, ed.,
Irrigation and Agricultural Development in Asia: Perspectives from the Social Sciences
(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1980).

10.
Works on the geography of the Middle East are few and far between. For three of the better examples, see Colbert C. Held,
Middle East Patterns: Places, Peoples, and Politics,
2nd ed. (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1994); Alasdair Drysdale and Gerald Blake,
The Middle East and North Africa: A Political Geography
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1985); and Graham Chapman and Kathleen Baker, eds.,
The Changing Geography of Africa and the Middle East
(London: Routledge, 1992).

11.
Held,
Middle East Patterns,
pp. 160–61.

12.
Ibid., pp. 384, 404.

13.
World Bank, “Urban Population (% of Total),” 2011, Development Indicators Database,
http://data.worldbank.org/topic/urban-development
.

14.
Ibid. Given increased rates of rural-urban migration in recent decades across the Middle East, as in much of the rest of the developing world, it is increasingly difficult to draw cultural, and in some respects spatial, distinctions between the city and the countryside. Therefore, even in Middle Eastern countries with large urban-based populations—Algeria at 73 percent, Iran at 69 percent, Iraq at 67 percent, Jordan at 83 percent, and Turkey at 71 percent—growth in the number of urban residents does not necessarily imply assimilation into the urban mainstream, or what social scientists generally refer to as “urbanization.” Data from World Bank, “Urban Population (% of Total),” 2011, Development Indicators Database,
http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.URB.TOTL.IN.ZS
.

15.
Snell,
Life in the Ancient Near East,
p. 148.

16.
Such works are too numerous to mention individually here, but some of the more notable ones are Hourani,
History of the Arab Peoples
; Lapidus,
History of Islamic Societies
; Esposito,
Oxford History of Islam
; and Arthur Goldschmidt Jr.,
A Concise History of the Middle East,
6th ed. (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1999).

17.
What follows is a brief account of the Prophet Muhammad’s life based on traditional narratives. Problems facing historians writing on the life of the Prophet are the lack of original, contemporary documentation and the
interpretative nature of many later accounts of his life. See Donner, “Muhammad and the Caliphate,” pp. 5–6. For a detailed account of the Prophet’s life based on early Islamic sources, see Martin Lings,
Muhammad: His Life Based on the Earliest Sources
(Cambridge: Islamic Text Society, 1995).

18.
See Richard Bulliet,
The Camel and the Wheel
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975), pp. 105–6.

19.
Maxime Rodinson,
Muhammad
(New York: Pantheon Books, 1980), pp. 103–5.