The Shaping of the Modern Middle East (4 page)

The peoples who spoke these three languages appeared successively at the center of the Middle Eastern stage. The first were the Arabs. At the beginning of the seventh century, the Arabs were to be found only in the Arabian peninsula and its borderlands. The many countries in Southwest Asia and North Africa that are now called Arab were inhabited by a variety of nations, most of them Christian by religion, and some, but not all, Semitic in speech. They spoke numerous languages-Aramaic in the Fertile Crescent, Coptic in Egypt, Berber and neo-Punic in North Africa. In addition, they used Greek in the East and Latin in the West as the media of government, commerce, and culture.

As a result of the successive waves of conquest and colonization that followed the rise of Islam in Arabia, these countries were incorporated into a new empire stretching from the Atlantic and the Pyrenees in the West to the borders of China and India in the East. For a couple of centuries, this new empire was dominated by the Arabian conquerors, who formed a sort of conquistador aristocracy within it. The faith that they had brought and the language in which its sacred scriptures were written provided the basis and the medium of a rich new civilization created by people of many faiths and nations, but expressed in the Arabic language and conforming to the standards of Islamic piety and aesthetics. In time, the Arabs were compelled to share or even relinquish their political primacy, giving place to new bureaucratic and military elites of alien origin. The Arabic language, however, retained its cultural preeminence long after its speakers had lost the realities of power. From the border of Persia and Iraq, right across the Fertile Crescent into North Africa, Arabic supplanted all previous official languages and, in its written form, remains the common language to the present day.

East of the Perso-Iraqi border, the Arab conquerors succeeded in imposing their religion, their script, and, for a while, their literary and scientific language, but not their speech or their national identity. The Persians were Islamized; they wrote Arabic and indeed made an enormous contribution to the international literature of Islam written in the Arabic language. They remained Persian, however, differing from the Arabs in speech and sentiment. Like the other conquered peoples of the Arab Empire, they had an ancient language and literature; unlike them, they were sustained by still recent memories of independence and imperial greatness, and by a practical experience of administration and statecraft that soon won them a leading role in Arab government. During the ninth and tenth centuries, Persia reemerged on the political scene. Independent Persian dynasties appeared in what were formerly provinces of the Arab Empire, and a new Islamic Persian literary language developed with a rich and brilliant literature, responding to the tastes of Persianspeaking courts and patrons and reflecting the new self-awareness of the Persians as a distinct cultural group within Islam-in many ways the most advanced.

From about the tenth century onward, Muslim Persian began to replace Arabic as the predominant literary medium outside the countries of Arabic speech. Arabic was no longer the universal governmental and cultural language of Islam, as Latin had been in medieval Europe. Instead, it was restricted, except for religious and legal purposes, to those countries that, centuries later, came to be called Arab. Farther east, not only in Persia but also in the areas of Persian cultural influence in Turkey, Central Asia, and India, Persian became the dominant literary language, and the Persian replaced the Arabic classics as the models for imitation. As the decline of the Arab lands coincided with the renaissance of Iran, Cairo, Damascus, and Baghdad gave place to the cities of the Persians and Turks, and these became the great creative centers of Islamic civilization, now entering on its second, and Persian, phase of achievement.

At about the same time, or slightly later, the Turks, the third of the three major peoples of the Islamic heartlands, made their appearance. They had come into the Middle East from Central Asia, from their homelands beyond the Jaxartes (Sir Darya) River. Most of the Turks had been pagans, though groups among them had professed forms of Christianity, Manichaeism, Judaism, and Buddhism. But over time they were almost without exception converted to Islam and came to play an important and then, for a long time, a dominant role in the Islamic world.

The Turks at first came into the Middle East as soldiers and individuals and soon predominated in the armies of Islam. In the eleventh century, they came as conquerors and colonists and set up a new empire in the heartlands of Islam, with its center in Persia. The first Arab Muslim conquerors had been halted by the Byzantines at the Taurus Mountains, which from the seventh to the eleventh centuries marked the frontier between Islam and Christendom. The Turks succeeded where earlier invaders had failed, and they pushed the barrier of Europe farther back, bringing Asia Minor into the world of Islam. After the conquest they settled there in great numbers, so that Western visitors-though not the inhabitants-began to call the country Turkey, after the name of the dominant ethnic and linguistic element there.

By conquest and settlement, Asia Minor became a predominantly Turkish land, linked by a continuous belt of Turkish populations with the older Turkish lands in Transcaucasia and Central and eastern Asia. Almost everywhere else in the Middle East, the Turks, though a minority, formed the ruling element. Even in Iran, Syria, and Egypt-even as far away as Muslim India-the ruling dynasties were Turkish, the armies were Turkish, although the overwhelming mass of the population were not. Through a millennium of Turkish hegemony it came to be generally accepted that Turks commanded while others obeyed, and a non-Turk in authority was regarded as an oddity. During this period, Turkish finally emerged as the third major language of the area. Like Persian before it, Turkish was Islamized, written in the Arabic script, with a large Arabo- Persian vocabulary representing the great heritage of Islamic-especially Perso-Islamic-civilization. This language provided the medium of the third great phase of Islamic Middle Eastern civilization, that of the Turks. Its first main center was in the East, where a rich culture flourished in Herat, Samarkand, and Bukhara in the eastern Turkish language. Thereafter, it developed especially in the Ottoman Empire, the last and greatest of the Turkish empires. By the sixteenth century, Ottoman rule, suzerainty, or influence extended over almost all the lands of Arabic speech. Only in a few remote and inaccessible places-in faraway Morocco, the mountain valleys of Lebanon, and the deserts of Arabia-did men of Arabic speech rule themselves. Their return to political independence, after an eclipse of nearly a millennium, has been one of the most explosive events of the twentieth century.

Islam, then, is the dominant faith, and Arabic, Persian, and Turkish are the dominant languages. The older religions and languages of the area have by no means entirely disappeared, and they survive in a mosaic of minorities that make the Middle East a museum of religious and linguistic history. At the time of the Arab conquests, Persia was Zoroastrian, and Egypt and the countries of the Fertile Crescent professed various forms of Christianity. All these countries had important Jewish communities. Of these religions, Zoroastrianism suffered the most. The Persian state, unlike the Christian empire, was completely overcome and destroyed. The Zoroastrians, lacking either the stimulation of powerful friends beyond the border enjoyed by the Christians or the bitter skill in survival possessed by the Jews, fell into discouragement and decline. They took little or no part in the Iranian cultural and political revival in the Middle Ages and are today represented by only a few thousand followers in Iran and a small community in the Indian subcontinent.

Christianity was defeated but not destroyed by the rise of Islam in the Middle East. The processes of settlement, conversion, and assimilation gradually reduced the Christians from a majority to a minority of the population. They retained, however, a vigorous communal and religious life and, secure in the tolerance of the Muslim state, were able to play a minor but significant role in the creation of classical Islamic civilization. The Crusades, with their legacy of conflict and suspicion, brought a permanent worsening in the relations of the Christians with their Muslim neighbors. Although still enjoying the basic rights secured by Muslim law, they were now socially isolated from the Muslims and virtually excluded from the active cultural and political role they had played in the past. The first phases of Westernization and national revival gave the Christian minority, for a while, a new and important function in Middle Eastern life and affairs. The shift from liberal patriotism to communal nationalism and the growth of hostility to the Christian West have again reduced it.

Only in one place did Christians as such continue to play a vital and decisive role. The republic of Lebanon, as formed under the French mandate, was a new creation with new frontiers, but it expressed an old reality. The mountain that formed the core of the socalled Greater Lebanon has since medieval times been a refuge and a citadel of religious and political nonconformity; its people have an old tradition of initiative and independence. In an age of submission, the Lebanese amirs succeeded, under both Mamluks and Ottomans, in preserving a considerable measure of autonomy. The Christian people of Lebanon, possessing both the Arabic language and a link with the West dating back to the Crusades, were able to make an immense contribution to both the spread of Western culture in the Middle East and the emergence of a new Arab consciousness in response to it. The civil war, which flared up briefly in Lebanon in 1958 and raged from 1975 to 1991, has greatly reduced the role of the Lebanese in Arab affairs and, more important, of the Christians inside Lebanon. Even the city of Beirut, once one of the major commercial, financial, and intellectual centers of the Arab world, has lost its primacy.

The experience of the Jews in the Middle Ages was in general similar to that of the Christians, but diverged sharply in modern times. The Persian Empire had treated them well; the Romans less well, especially in their Judaean homeland, where their repeated attempts to recover their lost independence gave endless trouble to their imperial masters. After the suppression of the last major Jewish revolt against Roman rule in A.D. 135, the Romans made a determined effort to obliterate even the name and memory of Jewish independence. Jerusalem was renamed Aelia, and a temple to Jupiter was erected on the site of the destroyed Jewish Temple. Even the name Judaea was abolished and replaced by Palestina, from the name of the long-vanished Philistines who had once invaded and for a while inhabited the southern coastal strip. After the conversion of Rome to Christianity, the position of the Jews became significantly worse, and in Byzantine times, they became an oppressed minority. The Arab conquest, which found important Jewish communities all over the Middle East, brought a general improvement in their status and security. The main centers of Judaic scholarship and culture had been in Persian Iraq and Byzantine Palestine. Under Muslim rule the Iraqi community flourished, while that of Palestine, now a minor and disturbed border province, fell into a decline. The Jews of Palestine had a particularly difficult time during the Crusades. They were massacred with the Muslims when the Crusaders captured Jerusalem in 1099 and massacred again with the Christians when the Muslims finally reconquered Acre in 1291. Between these two extremes, however, they did manage to maintain some form of Jewish life in Palestine, and in the thirteenth century there were even waves of Jewish immigration from both Muslim North Africa and Christian Europe, including a party of three hundred French and English rabbis who arrived in Jerusalem in 1211. It was not, however, until after the Ottoman conquest at the beginning of the sixteenth century that fresh immigration from other Mediterranean lands led to the establishment of new and vigorous centers of Jewish intellectual activity in Jerusalem and Safed, with far-reaching influence among Jews in other countries, even in Christian Europe.

Like the Christians, the Jews also made an important, though smaller, contribution to classical Islamic civilization. Like them, too, they suffered from the aftermath of the Crusades. The Ottoman conquests and the immigration of the relatively advanced Spanish and Portuguese Jews brought new opportunities, and during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries they were able to acquire a position of some influence in the Ottoman lands. They lost it during the seventeenth century and were eclipsed, during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, by the vigorous and rising eastern Christian communities.

Throughout the period of the dispersion, Jews from other lands had from time to time settled in the Holy Land. Their numbers, however, had been small, and their purposes mainly religious. In the nineteenth century, an entirely new type of immigrant began to come from Eastern and Central Europe, where the spread of nationalist ideologies provided a new ethos for both gentile persecution and Jewish survival. The new immigrants were men and women whose faith was national rather than religious and whose purpose in the Holy Land was not to pray and die but to work and live. The growth of militant anti-Semitism in Europe gave new point and drive to Jewish nationalism. The two European countries with the largest Jewish populations-Czarist Russia and Austria-Hungary-were both, though differently, affected. In Austria-Hungary, antiSemitism was intellectual and in some degree social. Its effects on the mass of the Jewish population were relatively minor, but its impact on Jewish intellectuals was deeply wounding. It was in the vast and heterogeneous Austro-Hungarian Empire, with its many different nationalities, that Zionism-the idea that there should be a political solution to the Jewish problem, through the restoration of Jewish nationhood and the creation of a Jewish state-was born.

The position of the much larger Jewish communities of the Russian Empire was incomparably worse. Discrimination against Jews was universal and was sanctioned by both law and custom. Persecution was endemic and frequently violent. Caught in an intolerable situation, the Jews found different ways of escape. By far the greatest number solved their problems individually, by emigration above all to America. A small minority sought a political solution by participating in revolutionary movements aimed at the overthrow of the Czarist regime. Another group, also small, chose the Zionist solution of Jewish rebirth and, instead of migrating to the lands of opportunity in the West, chose to migrate to some impoverished and neglected districts of the Ottoman Empire, to which they laid an ancestral claim.