The Shaping of the Modern Middle East (7 page)

In the early days of European expansion, in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, it might well have seemed that the Middle East was about to be caught between the two pincers of the west Europeans, advancing by sea from the southeast, from their bases in India, and the Russians coming down from the north. But that danger in its military and political form was averted. A new power had arisen in the Middle East, able to hold both the Black and Red seas for Islam and to halt the northern and the southern intruders. The beginnings of European expansion had coincided with the emergence of two new Middle Eastern empires: the Safavid state in Iran and the Ottoman state in Turkey. In the early years of the sixteenth century, a bitter struggle between the two for supremacy in the Middle East resulted in an Ottoman victory. The Arab lands, already long accustomed to the rule of Turkish and other alien military castes, became part of the Ottoman Empire for four hundred years.

Shielded by the military might of the Ottoman Empire from invasion and by the panoply of traditional learning from reality, the peoples of the Middle East continued to cherish the ancient human myth of self-sufficiency-to believe, as other societies before and after them have believed, in the immeasurable and immutable superiority of their own way of life and to despise the barbarous Western infidel from an altitude of correct doctrine reinforced by military power.

The succession of Ottoman victories over Christian adversaries during the sixteenth century can only have encouraged this attitude; the military stalemate of the seventeenth century brought no real reason to modify it. The real change began only when the Ottoman Empire suffered decisive and unmistakable defeats: defeats in battle followed by loss of territory and peace treaties dictated by victorious enemies. It was a new and painful experience and initiated a long and difficult adjustment that has not yet been completed.

The process began with the second Turkish siege of Vienna, in 1683. The Turkish failure this time was decisive and final, and was followed by a rapid advance of the Austrians and their allies deep into Ottoman territory. In 1696 the Russians seized Azov, thus gaining their first foothold on the Black Sea; in 1699 the Austrians imposed the treaty of Carlowitz-the first to be signed by the Ottoman Empire as a defeated power. Despite occasional rallies, the processes of defeat, humiliation, and withdrawal continued during the eighteenth century, the bitterest blow of all being the Russian annexation, in 1783, of the old Turkish, Islamic land of the Crimea.

The problem first appeared as military, and the first remedies propounded were also military. The Ottoman armies had been defeated in the field by European armies; it might therefore be wise to adopt European weapons, training, and techniques. From time to time during the eighteenth century, military instructors were imported from Europe, technical schools were established, and Turkish officers and cadets were instructed in the European arts of war. It was a small beginning, but an immensely significant one. For the first time, young Muslims, instead of despising the uncouth Westerners, were accepting them as guides and teachers, learning their languages, and reading their books. By the end of the eighteenth century, the young artillery cadet who had learned French to read his gunnery manual could find other reading matter, more explosive and more penetrating.

The military reforms, though the first and for long the most important, were not the only breaches in the wall of self-sufficiency. In 1729 the first Turkish printing press was established in Istanbul; by 1742, when it was closed, it had printed seventeen books, including a description of France by a Turkish ambassador sent there in 1721 and a treatise on the military arts as applied in the armies of Europe. The loss of cultural self-confidence can also be seen in the European influences that began to affect Ottoman architecture, even religious architecture, as in the Italianate baroque ornamentation of the Nuruosmaniye mosque, completed in 1755.

The feeling of weakness and decline induced by military defeat must have been reinforced by the rapid increase in European exports to the Middle East, now extending beyond luxury products to include such staples as sugar and coffee. It was a time of discouragement that variously found expression in a withdrawal of consent from Ottoman supremacy, in a first, tentative groping toward European ways, in the currency of an Islamic saying, now repeated with a new meaning and a new poignancy: "This world is the prison of the believers and the paradise of the unbelievers."'

During the eighteenth century, the chief territorial threat to the Middle East came from the north, where the military empire of Russia advanced steadily toward the Black Sea and the Caucasus. England and France-by now Asian as well as European powerswere the chief commercial rivals, competing in the markets of Egypt, the Levant, and Persia.

The invasion of Egypt by a French expeditionary force under General Napoleon Bonaparte in 1798 opened a new phase in the history of Western impact. Both Western and Middle Eastern historians have seen it as a watershed in history: the first armed inroad of the modern West into the Middle East, the first shock to Islamic complacency, the first impulse to Westernization and reform. In all these respects, it was to some extent anticipated by the Turkish defeats in the north and by the Turkish response to them. Its importance, however, remains considerable. To the Muslims, Bonaparte demonstrated how easily a modern European army could invade, conquer, and govern one of the heartlands of Islam; to the British, how easily a hostile power could cut their overland route to India. Both parties, in their different ways, learned the lesson, drew inferences, and took action. The French expedition brought the problems of impact and response, in an acute form, to the Arab lands; it also inaugurated a century and a half of direct Anglo-French involvement in the affairs of these lands.

The menace from the north had by no means ended. By the eighteenth century, the Russians had won control of the northern and eastern shores of the Black Sea, now no longer a Muslim lake. In 1800 they annexed Georgia; in 1806 they captured Baku; and in the early decades of the nineteenth century they took from Persia and from local rulers the provinces now forming the former Soviet republics of Armenia and Azerbaijan.

The 1850s and 1860s were a period of rapid and significant development in the Middle East. The Crimean War had the usual catalytic effect of a major war, bringing swift and sudden changes and a new intensity of feeling and experience. The alliance with Britain and France and the arrival of British and French troops in Turkey brought contacts with the West on a scale without precedent.

Halted in the nearer east by the Crimean War, the Russians turned their attention to Central Asia, where in the 1860s and 1870s they subjugated the khanates of Khokand, Bukhara, and Khiva. The annexation of the area between the Caspian Sea and the Oxus River in the 1880s consolidated their position in Central Asia and on the northeastern frontier of Persia. A different kind of problem arose in Ottoman Europe, where the rise of nationalist movements threatened the Turks with both the loss of territory and the contamination of dangerous ideas.

In the Arab lands, the interference and influence of the West passed through several phases. In the first half of the nineteenth century, the Western interest was chiefly in trade and transit. True, there was some territorial encroachment, as in the Persian Gulf and in southern Arabia, where the British seized Aden in 1839, but these advances were limited to the far periphery and were concerned primarily with the security of the sea-lanes. The interests of Great Britain, by now the most active Western power in the Middle East, were served by the famous policy of "maintaining the integrity and independence of the Ottoman Empire." It seemed reasonable to assume that the Turks, as the dominant and established power in the area, would align themselves with those whose interests were purely economic and strategic, against a potential enemy whose aims were expansionist and disruptive. This British policy was abandoned only with extreme reluctance and with many nostalgic hankerings. In a sense, first British and then American policies in the Middle East in recent years have represented a series of inconclusive attempts to discover or, failing that, to create a Middle Eastern power whose integrity and independence they could maintain and whose rulers, in return, would safeguard their vital interests. It may be noted that both the British and the Ottomans were rather better at this game of protection than were any subsequent players of the roles of protector and protege.

The second half of the nineteenth century brought important changes. The rapid modernization of the transit routes, the growth of direct Western economic and financial interest in the area, and, from the 1880s onward, the extension of German influence in Turkey led to a realignment of British policy. The occupation of Egypt, undertaken in 1882 for a limited purpose and a limited time, became permanent and was extended to the Sudan. In 1918 the Ottoman Empire, which for four centuries had held the Arab lands, was defeated and destroyed, and a series of new, unfamiliar political structures were assembled from the debris.

Between 1918 and 1945, Britain and France, in fitful association and rivalry, were the dominant powers in the Arab East. Aden, Palestine, and the Sudan were ruled directly through regimes of a colonial type; elsewhere, control-if that is the right word-was indirect. It was maintained through local governments, some of them under mandate, others nominally independent, with a variable and uncertain degree of responsibility for their own affairs. These arrangements ended in the years following the Second World War, when all the countries of the Arab Middle East acquired full political independence and found new leaders and guides to exercise it on their behalf.

The century and a half of Anglo-French preeminence in the Middle East-from the mighty conflict of Nelson and Napoleon to the futile collaboration of Eden and Mollet in the failed Suez expedition of 1956-and the somewhat longer period of Westernizing influences in Turkey brought immense and irreversible changes on every level of social existence. By no means were all the changes the work of Western rulers and overlords, most of whom tended to be cautiously conservative in their policies. Some of the most crucial changes were due to vigorous and ruthless Middle Eastern Westernizers-rulers who sought to acquire and master the Western instruments of power, merchants anxious to use Western techniques to amass wealth, men of letters and of action fascinated by the potency of Western knowledge and ideas. The processes of change are symbolically reflected in the progressive adoption of Western dress. Only once before in history had the Muslims departed from their own customs and adopted a foreign style of dress; that was when the Mamluk amirs of late-thirteenth-century Egypt, by order of the sultan, wore Mongol robes and accoutrements and let their hair grow in the Mongol manner. The same kind of sympathetic magic no doubt inspired the adoption of trousers, tunics, and frockcoats in the nineteenth century-first in the army, by order; then in the civil service, again by order; finally among the nonofficial urban literate classes, by a kind of social osmosis. The Mongol style was abandoned at the beginning of the fourteenth century, perhaps because the Mongols themselves were becoming Muslims. The coats and pants of Europe, however, still remain and have become the outward sign and symbol of literacy and modernity. In our own day, the last bastion of Muslim conservatism is falling, as the turban and the tarbush disappear, and the brimmed, peaked, and vizored headgear of the West replaces them. The soldiers of Islamic revolutionary Iran still wear Westernstyle uniforms. Even the diplomats of the Islamic republic-unlike those of the monarchs of Arabia-still wear Western clothes, with only the omission of the necktie to symbolize their rejection of Western ways and constraints.

The beginning was purely military: the simple desire for survival in a world dominated by an expanding and advancing Europe. This required armies in the European style-a simple matter, so it seemed, of training and equipment, to be solved by borrowing a few instructors and indenting for the appropriate supplies. Yet the task of running the new-style armies led inescapably to the building of schools to officer them and the reform of education, to the formation of departments to maintain them and the reform of government, to the creation and administration by the state of services and factories to supply them, and, very tardily, to the reform of the economy.

Economic and technological progress was for a long time largely the work of Europeans. It was they who built roads, railways, bridges, and ports; brought the steam engine in the nineteenth and the petrol engine in the twentieth century, gas and electricity, telegraphy and radio, and the first beginnings of industrial development. Sometimes they came in their own interest as servants of their governments or of concessionary companies, sometimes as experts or advisers employed by Middle Eastern governments and by other entrepreneurs. At first they employed only unskilled local labor, then also semiskilled artisans; finally they were able to draw on important local reserves of technical and professional skill, of the men who ultimately took over from them.

Surely the most important foreign enterprise in the twentieth century was the discovery and exploitation of oil, which placed enormous revenues at the disposal of those Middle Eastern governments that ruled over the lands in which the oil was found. Already in medieval times, Muslim armies had admired and appreciated European weapons, and European merchants were never lacking to provide them for a price. In a letter to the caliph in Baghdad, Saladin explained how European merchants, by supplying him with their most up-to-date weaponry, were contributing to their own defeat and destruction. Some centuries later, European shipwrights, gun founders, and other makers of weapons of war contributed to the Ottoman advance into the heart of Europe. The enormous wealth accruing from the sale of oil enabled Middle Eastern governments to acquire the most modern and the most deadly creations of the Western armaments industry and-as Saddam Hussein demonstrated-to use them as they chose. In buying Western weapons to fight the West, he was following a tradition that was centuries old. So, too, were those who sold them to him.