The Shaping of the Modern Middle East (3 page)

Conquest from the desert is a recurring theme in the history of the Middle East. Many waves of invasion, migration, and settlement have burst into the cultivated lands. Some, like those of the Accadians, the Canaanites, the Aramaeans, and the Hebrews in antiquity, were of Semitic peoples from the Arabian wilderness; others came southward from the steppelands of Central, northern, and eastern Asia. The last and greatest of the Semitic invasions was that of the Muslim Arabs in the seventh century, which inaugurated medieval Islamic civilization; the greatest of the steppe invasions was that of the Mongols in the thirteenth century, who, in the judgment of some historians, ended it.

The immediate impact of the Mongol conquests was certainly great, but their subsequent effects have been much exaggerated. At one time, Mongol brutality was blamed for the decline of Islamic civilization and, indeed, for all the failings of the Middle East and its peoples between the thirteenth and nineteenth centuries. Outside romantic and apologetic circles, this view has been generally abandoned, as increased knowledge of Islamic history, on the one hand, and closer experience of brutality and destruction, on the other, have shown us that the damage done by the Mongols was neither as great nor as lasting as it seemed to historians of a more innocent age than our own. The Mongols did not destroy Arab civilization, which had passed its prime long before they appeared; nor did they destroy Islamic civilization, which, in a predominantly Persianized form, achieved a new flowering under their rule.

But Islamic civilization, though not destroyed, was undoubtedly transformed by the coming of the steppe peoples. The great migrations of these peoples into the Middle East had begun before the Mongol conquests, in the tenth century, when the Turkish tribes of Central Asia crossed the Jaxartes and began their march of conquest westward. They ended in the period after the death of Tamerlane, the last of the great steppe conquerors, in 1405. During these four centuries of invasion and domination from the steppe, the whole pattern of life and government in the Middle East was changed.

Thereafter, there were no more invasions from the desert or the steppe. When the Wahhabis in eighteenth-century Arabia, moved by a new religious fervor and a new expansionist drive, tried to emulate the feats of their ancestors by invading Syria and Iraq, they were stopped on the desert borders and hurled back. The Ottoman Empire, then in the last stages of decrepitude, succeeded with ease where the mighty empires of Rome and Persia had failed. The difference was, of course, the technological superiority of the stronger power over the weaker, which began with the advent of the first firearm and has been growing ever since. The Persian and Byzantine armies faced the desert invaders with weapons little, if at all, better than those of their enemies; the Ottomans stopped them with guns.

Here and there the desert is broken by rivers, which can be used for irrigation. Two of the most important countries, Egypt and Iraq, are essentially river valleys. Both have societies of great antiquitycertainly the most ancient in the area, perhaps in the world. Both have agrarian economies based on elaborate artificial irrigation, using the floodwater of the rivers and requiring large numbers of workers and of skilled technicians, controlled by a central administrative authority. This need determined the evolution of the system of land tenure; it also encouraged the growth of strong, centralized governments, at once bureaucratic and autocratic, and of a corresponding tradition of political thought and behavior.

The rich harvests of the irrigated river valleys produced more than was needed for simple subsistence and made possible a level of specialization previously unknown and the development of new skills and enterprises. Already during the fourth millennium B.C., the city dwellers of Iraq and Egypt organized trade by land and sea to bring them the timber and minerals that they lacked. No less significant was the invention of writing. The growth of the cities, of temple and palace stores, and of a form of government required some system of accounts and records. To meet this need, the specialized "mystery" of writing came into being and, with it, a new social class of scribes and clerks and the revolutionary possibility of recording, accumulating, and transmitting knowledge.

Most of the oldest urban centers and the earliest written records known to mankind come from the Middle East. Later, both urbanism and writing were transformed by the contributions of many peoples inside and outside the region. The Phoenician alphabet, replacing the complicated pictorial and syllabic scripts of the ancient Egyptians and Babylonians, enormously facilitated and accelerated the development of writing. The Greek polis, with its participating citizens and its inquiring thinkers and scientists, opened new paths in the culture and government of cities. At the time of the advent of Islam in the seventh century A.D., North Africa, Egypt, the Levant, and Asia Minor had for centuries been under Greco-Roman rule or influence, and such great cities as Alexandria, Caesarea, Antioch, and Constantinople were centers of Hellenistic civilization.

The older cities of the interior-Thebes, Jerusalem, Damascusthough also subject to Hellenistic influence, preserved an older Middle Eastern tradition. This tradition was still stronger in Iraq, which, although by that time largely Christian, was not incorporated into the Greco-Roman world but was a part-and indeed the metropolitan province-of the Persian Empire. The Islamic world created by the Arab conquerors united, for the first time since Alexander the Great and for a much longer period, both the eastern and western parts of the Middle Eastern region and included the river valleys and ancient centers of both Egypt and Iraq.

These two have for millennia been rival centers of power, and their modes of thought and organization have profoundly influenced the neighboring countries. It was from these centers that, in remote antiquity, civilization first arose and spread in the Middle East, in these centers again that, after the long eclipse from Cyrus to Muhammad, the new imperial civilization of Islam was born and grew to greatness. Since the Middle Ages, Egypt has, by superior numbers and economic resources, decisively outstripped Iraq, although the wealth accruing to the latter from oil sometimes obscures but does not remove this inequality.

Egypt and Iraq have not always been the rival masters of the Middle East. There have been other centers of power in the area, the seats of empires that for long periods dominated the more ancient lands. North and east of the plains and valleys that make up the Fertile Crescent lie the great, high plateaus of Iran and Anatolia, clearly marked off from them in geographical configuration, population, cultural tradition, and political experience. These lands were greatly influenced by the Semitic civilizations of the Fertile Crescent, in both their ancient and their Islamic flowerings. But although they have passed through many ethnic and linguistic changes and adopted several Semitic scripts, they never adopted Semitic speech. Persians in the east and Hittites, Greeks, and Turks in the north have stood on roughly the same ethnic boundaries. Ottomans and Safavids in the sixteenth century resumed the roles and conflicts of Byzantines and Sasanids in the sixth, and evoked still more ancient memories. Today the tablelands form the two states of Turkey and Iran, inhabited by peoples who, though Muslim, share neither the language of the Arabs nor the long trauma of subjection and liberation. The dividing line between Arab and non-Arab is an old one, and the frontier that it marks, along the foothills and the mountain approaches, is much older.

Between Taurus and Sinai, between the desert and the sea, lies the region forming the four modern states of Syria, Lebanon, Israel, and Jordan, which the Greeks and Romans called Syria, the Arabs called the lands of Sham, and European traders called the Levant. The broken terrain of this region is in marked contrast with the river valleys and plateaus that supported the neighboring empires and has usually been reflected in a cultural and political fragmentation. Only on rare occasions has the temporary eclipse of other powers permitted the emergence of a strong power in Syria. More often, the Syrian lands formed a mosaic of small principalities, the objects and the scene of struggles between their more powerful neighbors. When the rulers of Egypt were strong, it was they who tried to extend their control into as much of Syria as possible, as did Pharaoh Thutmosis and Ptolemy, Pompey and Ibn Tulun, Fatimids and Mamluks, Napoleon, Muhammad `Ali, the British, and Nasser. Egypt is most vulnerable on its northeastern frontier, through which many invaders have come, and Egyptian governments have usually tried to maintain at least a bridgehead on the far side of Sinai. At other times, the Levant was dominated from the east-for example, by the Assyrians, the Persians, and the Abbasids; from the north-by the Hittites, Byzantines, and Ottomans; or from the sea.

A dominant geographical feature of this region is the spine of mountains that runs down its center-the Lebanon and Anti Lebanon, with their northward and southward extensions. The mountains divide the Syrian lands into two: a western slope facing the Mediterranean and Europe, and an eastern slope facing the desert and Asia. The distinction between them is an old one and has from time to time been renewed by fresh waves of invasion from both sides. The Philistines and the Phoenicians were both sea peoples, the former coming from the West, the latter facing toward it. The ancient Israelites were a people of the desert and the hills, who held and finally defeated the Philistine invaders. Greek and Roman culture flourished in the coastlands and languished in the interior. Antioch was a great Greek metropolis, and the maritime city of Berytus housed a notable school of Roman law-the Roman university of Beirut, as it were. Only occasionally, as under the Maccabees in Judea, did the older culture of the interior assert itself against the pervasive Hellenistic influence. The Arab invasions renewed the hegemony of the East and, for a brief interval, even made Damascus an imperial capital. The Crusaders, marching south from Antioch to Gaza, for a while restored the Levant coast to Europe, but could not penetrate the interior. They never entered Aleppo or Damascus and were able to hold Jerusalem, their main objective, for only a short time. In our own day, the distinction between the two is still clear, as between Beirut and Damascus, or, in a different and much more acute form, between Tel Aviv and Amman.

Two hundred years ago, when the European science of Egyptology was just beginning, all that was known of the ancient Middle East before the conquests of Alexander was what was said about it by the Bible and the Greek authors. There were still Egyptians in Egypt, Persians in Persia, the descendants of other ancient peoples in neighboring lands; but the old states and religions and civilizations were dead and literally buried, the old languages long since forgotten, their secrets locked in ancient scripts that no one could decipher. Only a few minorities-Coptic Christians in Egypt and Zoroastrians in Iran and India-remained faithful to the old religions and preserved some knowledge of the final phases of their ancient languages and cultures. These remained unknown outside their own communities. Two of the peoples active in the ancient Middle East had survived with a continuing identity and memory and with a large impact on the world. The Greeks and Jews were still Greeks and Jews and still knew Greek and Hebrew; in these ancient yet living languages, they had preserved immortal works of religion and literature, which passed into the common inheritance of mankind. In these works was all that the living human memory had retained of the ancient Middle East. Even that much was barely known among the Muslims, who read neither the Bible nor the Greek historians and had only a little secondhand information filtered through from these same sources, together with a few vague legends of uncertain origin. The rediscovery of the ancient Middle East was largely the work of European scholarship-of archaeologists who found the sources of information, philologists who, using Coptic and Zoroastrian evidence, deciphered and interpreted them, and historians and others who evaluated and exploited them. Their scholarship ultimately found disciples in the Middle East and added a new dimension to the historical self-awareness of its peoples, which had hitherto in effect been limited to the period beginning with the Islamic revelation.

The Middle East is the home of three great religions: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. All three of them still survive there; one has prevailed. For the last fourteen centuries, the Middle East has been preeminently the land of Islam, the geographical and spiritual center of the Islamic world, where the Muslim faith was born and the civilization of Islam received its first, classical formulations. Islam is by no means limited to the Middle East, however. There are huge communities of Muslims in Africa and Asia, some of them far larger than the combined population of the Middle East. But all of them are secondary, postclassical, in a sense colonial, related to the heartlands of Islam, as are the lands of overseas settlement to Europe. It was in the Middle East that the great events took place which form the common historical memory of Muslims everywhere, and that the classic Islamic identity evolved. It was there that the basic Islamic patterns and traditions took shape, in the dominions of the caliphs and sultans of the great universal empires of medieval Islam, in lands that were, with some exceptions here and there, of Arabic, Persian, and Turkish speech.

Since the rise of Islam in the seventh century, these three languages have predominated in the region, ousting such earlier media of communication and culture as Greek, Coptic, and Syriac and condemning them either to extinction or to liturgical or dialectal fossilization. The three are very unlike one another, belonging to different and unrelated language families. Arabic is a Semitic language, akin to Hebrew and Syriac; Persian is an Indo-European language, related to Sanskrit on the one side and to most of the languages of Europe on the other; Turkish belongs to another group again, the Turco-Tatar family of languages, extending across Central Asia to the Far East and even to the Arctic. The three languages, though structurally quite different, are culturally closely related; an immense vocabulary of Arabic loanwords is used in Persian, and of Arabic and Persian loanwords in Turkish. Persians and Turks alike drew on Arabic, just as Europeans drew on Latin and Greek, both to borrow existing terms for old notions and to coin new terms for new ones. Both "metaphysics" and "telegraphy" are English words of Greek etymology; the Arabic vocabulary of Turkish offers parallels to both types of borrowing.