The Shaping of the Modern Middle East (5 page)

By 1914, there were, according to various estimates, between 60,000 and 85,000 Jews in these districts. In the peace settlement after the First World War, this area was assigned under a mandate by the League of Nations to the British Empire and renamed Palestine. In 1917, by a unilateral declaration, the British government had expressed its approval of the idea of establishing a "Jewish National Home" in Palestine. This principle was incorporated in the text of the mandate, and the mandatary government was empowered to take the necessary steps to ensure its accomplishment, without, however, compromising the rights of the existing population. Not surprisingly, the mandatary power found the combination of these two tasks to be impossible, especially when the rise of Nazism in Germany and the persecution and subsequent destruction of Jewish communities wherever the Nazis held sway sent thousands of Jews from all over continental Europe fleeing for their lives.

The persecuted Jews of Czarist Russia in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries had an open world before them. The world depression of the 1930s and the world war and the upheavals in the 1940s offered no such opportunity to refugees and survivors from Nazi Europe. On the contrary, all doors were closed to them. In Western Europe, those who survived the Holocaust were able to reintegrate more or less successfully into their former homelands. No such simple solution was available in Eastern Europe, where the survivors of the Holocaust who endeavored to return to their former homes found themselves confronting old and renewed prejudice, aggravated by a new political order. In the Nazi era and its immediate aftermath, great numbers of Jews from Europe made their way to Palestine, often illegally and despite the efforts of the mandatary authorities, sensitive to Arab hostility, to keep them out.

By 1948, the number of Jews had increased to more than half a million, and when the British government renounced the mandate and the United Nations voted for the creation of Jewish and Arab states in the former mandated territories, the Jews took up their option and proclaimed the state of Israel-the first Jewish state in the Holy Land since the destruction of the ancient Jewish polity by the Roman Empire. An incidental consequence of the establishment of this state was to complete the virtual liquidation-by sometimes voluntary and sometimes forced emigration-of the ancient Jewish communities in the Arab lands, whose position had already been undermined by the new and often intolerant nationalism.

The rise of Jewish nationalism and the emergence of the Jewish state were accompanied by the revival of Hebrew, which had previously survived only as a language of religion, scholarship, and literature and as a medium of communication among learned Jews of different nationalities. In Israel it has become the national language, with Arabic as the second official language. Apart from a few isolated communities of Aramaic-speaking Christian villagers in Syria and in the region around Lake Urmia, the other ancient languages of the Middle East have died out almost completely. In general, the Christian and Jewish minorities in the Arab lands speak Arabic; the Jews of Persia, Persian. The Greek- and Armenianspeaking Christians and Spanish-speaking Jews of Turkey constitute exceptions to the general pattern of linguistic assimilation.

Only one linguistic and ethnic minority of any importance has survived in the central lands of Middle Eastern Islam: the Kurds, who number many millions. The largest Kurdish populations are to be found in Turkey, Iraq, and Iran; there are smaller groups in Syria and Transcaucasia. The Kurdish presence in these lands is well attested throughout the Islamic period, and there is evidence that they have been there since remote antiquity. Although soon converted and deeply committed to Islam, to which Kurdish soldiers, statesmen, and scholars made a significant contribution, they retained their own language and identity. Linguistically, Kurdish is related to Persian; culturally, it is heavily indebted to Arabic, but it remains distinct from both. In medieval times, the Kurds, like the other peoples of the region, defined no national territory and established no national state. There were Islamic dynasties of Kurdish as of other ethnic origins, the most notable of which was that founded by the great Saladin. In an Islamic state, religion, not language or ethnicity, defines political identity, and the Kurds were for the most part content to be Muslims in a Muslim polity. In more recent times, however, the emergence of nationalist ideologies and the attempt to create national states have transformed them into minoritiessome of them would say oppressed minorities-in their homelands, and a Kurdish nationalist movement has won increasing support for the argument that the Kurds, like other nations, are entitled to selfdetermination and national independence, or at least autonomy.

On the fringes of the Middle East zone, a number of other languages remain in use. Afghanistan has two official languages, Pashto and Persian. In North Africa, the indigenous Berber languages are still spoken by very small groups in Libya and Tunisia and by more important minorities in Algeria and Morocco. In all these areas, Berber continues to lose ground to Arabic. In the Caucasian lands, a bewildering variety of languages still flourish. Besides various Turkic and Iranian languages, they include Georgian, Armenian, Circassian, Chechen, and Avar. According to Pliny, the Romans, in their business dealings with the Caucasian peoples, needed 130 interpreters.2

The three main languages of the Middle East show some variation in usage. Persian is the most unified and least extensive. It is the national language of Iran, with comparatively minor dialectal variation within the national frontiers. It is also used in parts of Afghanistan and is very closely related to Tajik, which, however, was in the Soviet era written in the Cyrillic script. Pashto, Kurdish, and some other minor languages belong to the Iranian family, but are distinct from Persian. Arabic, spoken over a vast area from Iraq to Morocco, shows a wide range of spoken dialects, some of them so far apart as to make conversation impossible. But the written language has remained the same, and its unifying power is being reinforced by the spread of education, the press, broadcasting, and the cinema. Turkish is the least unified of the three. At one time, despite a profusion of spoken dialects, the Turkic peoples had only two major literary languages: the Ottoman Turkish of Turkey, and the so-called Chagatay Turkish, which flourished in Central Asia. Both were written in the Arabic script, which, lacking vowels, tended to conceal dialectal variations and made for a wider area of intelligibility. During the nineteenth century, the Turkish of Azerbaijan also became the vehicle of a distinctive literary revival. It was, however, closely related to Ottoman Turkish and much influenced by Ottoman literature. In the twentieth century, the Arabic script has been abolished in almost all Turkish-speaking areas. In Turkey it has been replaced by the Latin script; in the Soviet Union it was first replaced by the Latin script and then, when the Turks had followed suit, by adaptations of the Cyrillic alphabet. The unified Chagatay literary language gave way to a series of "national" languages in the Soviet Middle East, based on spoken dialects and usually not mutually intelligible.

The breakup of the Soviet Union and the independence of the six republics with Muslim majorities brought major changes and a sharp division of opinion as to how this new independence should be exercised. The debate over the alphabets aptly symbolized the alternatives before these peoples. Some chose a return to the Arabic alphabet, which they had used before the Russian Revolution-that is, a return to Islam and, no doubt, closer links with the Islamic states of the region and especially with their nearest neighbor, Iran. Some preferred to retain the Cyrillic script and remain part of a looser, more open association of former Soviet states. Still others, especially in Azerbaijan, opted for the Turkish Latin script-that is, the secular, modernizing, and democratic way of life, already taken by the people of the Turkish Republic. It is a choice, one might say, between Kemalism, Khomeinism, and post-Sovietism.

We have now defined the "Middle East" in terms of geography and history, of religion, language, and culture. It may be useful to attempt a closer definition in terms of present-day political entities. Obviously, one cannot demarcate the frontiers of a zone or region, as one would of a state or province. Except on the seacoasts, the Middle East tapers off in an indeterminate borderland of countries that have much in common with it, yet are not wholly part of it. In current usage, the Middle East consists of Turkey, Iran, and perhaps Afghanistan; of Iraq and the Arabian peninsula; of the four Levant states of Syria, Lebanon, Israel, and Jordan; and of Egypt, with variously defined extensions southward and westward into Arabicspeaking Africa. The southern limit of the Middle East is set in Asia by the seas that wash the shores of Iran and the Arabian peninsula; in Africa, by that vague and contested borderland where Arab and black Africa meet, often in regions of endemic conflict, like the Sudan, Chad, and Mauritania. The one clearly defined limit of the Middle East in current usage has been in the north, where it was usually identified with the Soviet frontier. But this was always historically and culturally inaccurate and no longer corresponds to currently evolving realities. North of the Soviet-Turkish, SovietIranian, and Soviet-Afghan frontiers in Transcaucasia, the Caucasus, and Central Asia are countries that until the nineteenth century were still an integral part of the Middle Eastern world. In earlier days, they belonged to the great Arab, Persian, and Turkic empires of Islam, of which such great Muslim cities as Samarkand and Bukhara were as essential a part as Baghdad or Cairo, Isfahan or Istanbul. Georgia and Armenia are Christian countries on the edge of the Middle East; they have, however, at times been of some importance in Middle Eastern affairs, and many of their peoples have played a variety of roles in the Islamic lands. Of the other southern and Central Asian republics, five are inhabited by Turkic-speaking and, the sixth by Iranian-speaking, Muslims, closely akin in their religious, cultural, and political traditions to the lands of what we have conventionally called the Middle East. After the liquidation of the last British footholds in the Persian Gulf in 1971, these Soviet re publics were indeed the only parts of the Middle East that were still incorporated in a non-Middle Eastern political system with its capital in Europe. This anomaly, too, has ended.

Until the Iranian revolution in 1979, it might have seemed that too much stress had been laid on Islam-on religion-in defining the Middle East, which is, after all, a twentieth-century term and which consists of a group of nationally defined states professing strong nationalist and/or patriotic sentiments. There was a time not so long ago when the stamp of Islam in the Middle East seemed to be growing dim. But it was by no means effaced, and it is now clearer than ever.

Religion means different things to different people. In the West it means principally a system of belief and worship, distinct from, and in modern times usually subordinate to, national and political allegiances. But for Muslims it conveys a great deal more than that. Islam is a civilization, a term that corresponds to Christendom as well as Christianity in the West. No doubt, many local, national, and regional traditions and characteristics have survived among the Muslim peoples and have gained greatly in importance in modern times, but on all the peoples that have accepted them, the faith and law of Islam have impressed a stamp of common identity, which remains even when faith is lost and the law has been abandoned.

This common identity rests, in the first instance, on the Muslim creed that "God is One and Muhammad is His Prophet," on the Qur'an and the traditions, and on the whole subtle and complex system of theology and law that has evolved from them. The teachings of historical Islam, besides moral and ritual precepts and theological dogmas, include much that in the West would be called law: civil, criminal, and even constitutional law. For the traditional Muslim believer, these laws emanate from the same source and possess the same authority as do the laws of conduct and worship. The political traditions of the Islamic peoples were shaped for centuries by the formulations of the doctors of the holy law and by the memories of the Muslim empires of the past. Their languages, irrespective of origin, were written in the same Arabic script and borrowed an immense vocabulary of Arabic words, especially of terms belonging to two closely related fields of endeavor, one of religion and culture and the other of law and government.

It is not difficult to recognize an Islamic work of art. Anyone, even with a limited knowledge of art and architecture, can look through a folder of photographs of buildings and objects and pick out those that are Islamic. The arcade and minaret of the mosque, the arabesque and geometrical patterns of decoration, the rules of sequence and association of both poetry and cookery-all these, despite many variations, show a fundamental unity of tradition and aesthetic that is Islamic, and derives essentially from Middle Eastern-Arabic, Persian, or Turkish-archetypes. In music, buildings, carpets, and cuisine, this unity in diversity of Islamic civilization can be heard, touched, seen, and tasted. It is also present, though less easy to identify and understand, in such things as law, government, and institutions, in social and political attitudes and ideas.

The Islamic history of the Middle East was begun by the great Arab conquests of the seventh and eighth centuries, which, for the first time since Alexander, created a united imperial system from North Africa to the borders of India and China. The territorial and administrative unity of the Arab Empire was in time eroded and destroyed by invasion, dissension, and the processes of political fragmentation; the dominance of the Arab nation was challenged and ended by the rise of other nations within Islam. But the religious and cultural unity of Middle Eastern Islam survived, and was symbolized in the ideal unity of the caliphate, which all agreed to respect. There were moments of grave danger when Islam was threatened from both east and west, but they were overcome. The Turks indeed came as conquerors, but they were converted and assimilated and brought new strength and vigor to a faltering society and polity. With that strength, Islam was able to hold and repel another invasion, that of the Crusaders, from the west.