The Shaping of the Modern Middle East (6 page)

From both directions, however, new and deadlier blows were to follow. On two occasions, the Islamic Middle East was crushed and overwhelmed by alien invaders who dominated it by force of arms and, if they did not destroy the old civilization, sapped the confidence of those who maintained it and turned them on to new paths. The first was the invasion of the heathen Mongols from eastern Asia, who ended the Baghdad caliphate and, for the first time since the Prophet, subjected some of the heartlands of Islam to non-Islamic rule. The second was the impact of the modern West.

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The Impact of the West

It has been our practice for some time now to speak of the group of countries to which we belong as the West, a term that is no longer a purely geographical expression, but also denotes a cultural, social, and, until recently, a political and military entity. What are the geographical boundaries of this entity-not merely of the Western alliance, which are fairly obvious, but of the larger entity whose will to survive the alliance expressed? The westernmost limit of the West is clear enough: the Pacific coast-and dependencies-of North America. The eastern limit is more problematic. Leaving aside the local American concept of the West, the West as a cultural or civilizational entity has generally been understood to cover both shores of the North Atlantic and to extend into Europe to a point that has been variously fixed, at various times and for various purposes, on the Channel, the Rhine, the Elbe, the Oder, the Vistula, the Bosphorus, and the Ural Mountains, the conventional boundary between Europe and Asia.

The West is most easily defined in relation to the East, and of course there is more than one East. In the West, when we used to speak of East-West contrasts and conflicts, we usually meant the Cold War and its ramifications. In this sense, the East meant the Soviet or Communist blocs (the two were not identical); the West meant the Western alliance and its associates, sometimes loosely called the free world. It included, in this context, a string of more or less dictatorial regimes on several continents, but excluded Sweden, Switzerland, Ireland, and, of course, Finland.

The former Soviet East is not, however, our only point of reference. There is also what one might call, with only apparent tautology, the Oriental East-the many countries, societies, and peoples of Asia and, for that matter, of Africa who, however they may differ among themselves, have this much in common; that the Christian or post-Christian civilization of Europe and its daughters is alien to them, that they have for long been subject to its domination or influence, and that they have now brought that subjection to an end. For many in the Middle East and also, to a diminishing extent, in other parts of Asia, the real East-West struggle is and has long been this, and its purpose is to remove the last vestiges of Western imperial domination in the East. The Western-Soviet conflict, according to this view, was an irrelevance: useful in many ways, no doubt, but not directly of concern to the Eastern peoples. One might even argue that Russia itself is really a part of the West, with which it was linked by its dominant European population, its Judeo-Christian and Greco-Roman background, its scientific and industrial development, and, some would add, its predatory habits. Recent developments in the former Soviet Union clearly indicate a growing desire by the Russians to reclaim and reassert their Western, or, to be more precise, their European, heritage.

In the Middle East, the term "West," expressing a cultural and political entity, is a comparatively new one, almost as new as the term "Middle East" and, like it, of Western origin. But again, like the term "Middle East," it denotes an ancient reality long known and familiar under other names. In recent years, some attention has been given to the problem of national images and stereotypes, and some writers have sought to describe and classify the memories and prejudices that shape Western attitudes toward the Middle East and their influence on the formation of Western policy. Far less attention has been given to the origins and development of Middle Eastern attitudes toward the West, though these are of at least equal importance in determining relations between the two. In the absence of the rather Western habits of self-analysis and self-criticism, they may even be of greater importance.

The word "West" has been used since medieval times by Muslim writers, but not to denote Christian Europe. Islam had its own west, in North Africa and Spain, reaching as far as the Atlantic, and had no reason to apply this term to the infidel and barbarian lands that lay to the north of the Mediterranean Sea. For the medieval Muslim, the world was divided into two great zones, the house of Islam and the house of war. South and east of the house of Islam, the house of war was inhabited by pagans and idolaters, ready for conquest and ripe for conversion. North and northwest lay the empires and kingdoms of Christendom, the greatest rival of the Islamic faith, the deadliest enemy of Islamic power. At first it was the Greek Christians of Byzantium who sustained the shocks of Islamic attack; later, while Byzantium faltered and finally succumbed to Turkish conquest, the Franks of western Europe counterattacked from Spain to Palestine, in Africa and in Asia. From late medieval times onward, the image of the European Christian changed in Muslim minds. The Orthodox Greek, now a fellow subject of the Turkish sultan, ceased to be a redoubtable foe and became a harmless neighbor. His place as enemy in chief was taken by the Frank. This term, commonly applied to the Crusaders in contemporary Arabic writings, was generalized to cover the Catholic-later also Protestant-peoples of central and western Europe, to distinguish them from the Muslims, on the one hand, and the Greek Orthodox Christians, on the other.

For the medieval Muslim, the Franks were a race of barbarous infidels, of little interest or concern to the peoples of Islam. In the Muslim worldview, Christianity, like Judaism, was in origin a true faith, representing an earlier link in the chain of divine revelations that had culminated in the final and perfect revelation vouchsafed to Muhammad. What was true in it was preserved in Islam; the rest was accretion and distortion. Christianity, and with it the Christian civilization founded on it, could accordingly be dismissed as something incomplete, superseded, and debased. This view is certainly more tolerant than that of contemporary Christian Europe, which regarded Islam as something subsequent to God's final revelation and therefore wholly false and evil, and it is reflected in the far greater tolerance accorded to the followers of the rival faith. This, however, did not make for any greater esteem. The Greeks were custodians of an ancient civilization from whom something could be learned and with whom a form of coexistence had been evolved in the course of the centuries. The wild, fierce tribes of darkest Europe were thought to have no such redeeming features. It is noteworthy that while many works were translated into Arabic from Greek, Syriac, old Persian, and other languages, only one book-a late Roman history-was translated from Latin and none from any other Western language throughout the Middle Ages.

This attitude may have been justified in the so-called Dark Ages, when Frankish Europe really was backward and inferior; it can only have been reinforced by the conduct of the Crusaders in the Middle East and elsewhere. But already in the high Middle Ages it was becoming dangerously out of date.

From the end of the fifteenth century, the peoples of Europe embarked on a vast movement of expansion-commercial, political, cultural, and demographic-which by the twentieth century had brought almost the whole world into the orbit of European civilization. It was an expansion at both ends; while the Portuguese and Spaniards, the English, Dutch, and French sailed across the oceans from western Europe to discover new worlds and conquer old ones, the Russians advanced southward and eastward across the steppes, toward the Middle East and into Asia.

At both ends of Europe this expansion began with a reconquest, developing along similar and almost contemporary lines. In the East, the rulers of Muscovy, after a long struggle, liberated their city and land from the rule of the Muslim Tatars, whose final attack they defeated in 1480. In the West, the Portuguese and then the Spaniards completed the reconquest of the Iberian peninsula from the Arabs and Moors, who had invaded it eight centuries previously, and won their final victory with the capture of Granada, the last Muslim state in western Europe, in 1492. At both ends of Europe, the victorious Christians followed their former masters whence they had comethe Russians into Tartary and Asia, the Iberians into Africa and beyond. There were, of course, obvious military reasons for pursuing the attack: to complete the destruction of the enemy, giving him no time to regroup and mount a counterattack. But soon the reconquest became a conquest, sustained by the same momentum and inspired by the same mixture of religious and material motives.

This process of expansion has gone through various forms and phases and has been known by various names. One of them is colonization; others are the white man's burden, manifest destiny, and whatever synonym the Russians may use for the process that carried them from Muscovy to the Urals and from the Urals to the Pacific. In some areas, the process of colonization was so successful and so complete that the previous inhabitants were displaced or reduced to insignificance, and the colonizers were strong enough to stand on their own feet without needing to lean any longer on the mother country. The French in North Africa did not quite reach this point; the English in North America did. In most of Asia and Africa, the original cultures and peoples were too strong and too deeply rooted to be displaced, and the colonizers were limited to the role of overlords and rulers. The result was the classic imperial system of government as it existed in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

In the Middle East, the impact of European imperialism was late, brief, and, for the most part, indirect. The impact of Europe was, however, profound and overwhelming.

At first, this impact was entirely economic. Both politically and militarily, the European states were far weaker than the Islamic states of the Middle East, and they came not as masters or rulers, still less as invaders, but as humble petitioners seeking the grace and favor of the lords of Islam and asking only permission to buy and sell in the seaports and in a few towns in the interior. The first European footholds in the Mediterranean Islamic seaports had been gained during the Crusades. They remained even after the defeat and expulsion of the Crusaders, and in Ottoman times they grew, expanded, and flourished.

In the trade between the maritime states of Western Europe and the Muslim states of the Middle East, the Westerners had several practical advantages. Their ships, built to face the Atlantic gales, were stronger, larger, and more maneuverable than those of the Muslim powers. They could carry more guns and also larger cargoes, and they could travel greater distances at relatively low cost. Once they had explored the eastern seas, they were able to bring goods from South and Southeast Asia to the Middle East; once they had consolidated their tropical and semitropical colonies in the Americas and Southeast Asia, they were able to supply a much wider range of merchandise than in medieval times.

Perhaps more important than this was a different attitude toward production and commerce. The rise of mercantilism in the produceroriented West helped European trading companies and the states that protected and encouraged them to achieve a level of commercial organization and a concentration of economic energies unknown and unparalleled in the consumer-oriented Islamic Middle East, where-as a matter of fact more than theory-"market forces" operated without serious restriction. The Western trading corporations, with the help of their business-minded governments, represented an entirely new force. Their power was enormously increased when Western Europeans were installed in South and Southeast Asia not only as traders, but also as rulers, and they were therefore able to control the trade in spices and other commodities between Asia and Europe from both ends. Western merchants, and later manufacturers and eventually governments, were able to es tablish almost total domination of Middle Eastern markets and ultimately even of many major Middle Eastern manufactures.

It is easy to cite examples. Middle Eastern textiles, once highly regarded in the West, were driven first from external and then even from domestic markets by Western goods, which, though certainly not better, were more efficiently and cheaply produced and more aggressively marketed. Even coffee and sugar, two items that once figured prominently among Middle Eastern exports to the West, where they were previously unknown, were in time produced by the Western powers in their tropical colonies, and eventually-thanks again to cheaper production and better marketing-they were transferred from the export to the import side of Middle Eastern trade with Western Europe. By the eighteenth century, when a Turk or an Arab indulged in a cup of sweetened coffee, in all probability the coffee had been brought by Dutch merchants from lava and the sugar by British or French merchants from the West Indies. Only the hot water was of local provenance. In the course of the nineteenth century, even that became doubtful, as Western companies dominated the rapidly expanding utilities in Middle Eastern cities.