The Shaping of the Modern Middle East (8 page)

With European weapons and technology came another importation, European ideas, which were to prove at least equally disruptive to the old social and political order. Until the eighteenth century, the world of Islam had been cut off from almost all intellectual and cultural contact with the West. The Renaissance and the new learning, the scientific, technological, and intellectual movements of Christian Europe found no echo and awoke no response among peoples to whom they were profoundly alien and utterly irrelevant. Even the impact of European commerce and diplomacy, though it could not be wholly avoided, was cushioned and absorbed by an intermediate class of native Christians and, to a lesser extent, Jews who, as merchants, agents, go-betweens, and interpreters, protected their Muslim masters from the contamination of direct contact. The Ottoman Empire in the days of its greatness maintained no resident embassies abroad. Even its dealings with the foreign embassies in Istanbul passed through the hands of the Grand Dragoman, who was usually a Greek. There were very few Muslims with a reading knowledge of a Western language; with a few, trifling exceptions, there were no Arabic, Persian, or Turkish translations of Western books. In the words of an Ottoman historian, "Familiar association with heathens and infidels is forbidden to the people of Islam, and friendly and intimate intercourse between two parties that are to one another as darkness and light is far from desirable."'

The military reform changed all that. Instead of an ignorant barbarian, the Frank became a teacher of the noblest and most crucial of arts, that of war. His language was no longer an "uncouth jargon," as one writer had called it, but the key to essential knowledge.

The military reformers had intended to open a sluice gate in the wall, with a limited and regulated flow. Instead they admitted a flood, a foaming, frothing flood that came seeping and bursting through a thousand cracks, bringing destruction and the seeds of new life. It was a flood that seemed to have no end, as the apparently inexhaustible inventiveness of Europe produced more and newer ideas for each generation to master. During the nineteenth century, two trends predominated, sometimes in harmony, often in conflict with each other: the radical liberalism of the French Revolution and the authoritarian reformism of the Enlightenment.

There were many new channels through which Western ideas could percolate and penetrate to the hitherto sealed world of Islam. Such, for example, were the Muslim visitors from the Middle East, who now began to appear in increasing numbers in the capitals of Europe. Some few intrepid travelers had ventured, even in earlier times, to brave the dangers of unknown Europe, but from the Crusades to the seventeenth century barely a score left any written record-almost all of them official envoys on special missions. In 1791 the Ottoman sultan Selim III sent Ebubekir Ratib Efendi to Vienna, where he produced a detailed report on enlightened despotism at work, with recommendations for reform in the Ottoman Empire. In the succeeding years, the sultan established the first resident embassies in London, Vienna, Berlin, and Paris. They were followed by Persian embassies in the nineteenth century and, informally, by representatives of the new independent power that had arisen in Egypt under Muhammad `Ali and his successors. At a time when a knowledge of foreign languages and an acquaintance with foreign countries were rare and vital qualifications, these embassies provided unique opportunities for acquiring them, and the men who had served in them formed an important element in the new political elite. Neither the ulema nor the army but the translation chambers and the embassies were now the high road to influence and power.

After the diplomats, the second-and in the long run more important-group of Middle Easterners to appear in Europe were the students. The first Egyptian student mission was sent to Italy by Muhammad `Ali Pasha in 1809, and by 1818 there were 23 Egyptian students in Europe. The first Persian student mission appeared in England at about the same time. In 1826 the pasha of Egypt sent the first large Egyptian mission, of 44 students, to Paris. What the pasha could do, the sultan could do better, and in 1827 Sultan Mahmud II, despite strong religious opposition, sent an Ottoman mission of about 150 students to various countries. Over the years hundreds of others followed them, the forerunners of the countless thousands that were still to come. It is a well-known fact that students learn more from one another than from their teachers, and in the universities of Europe in the 1820s, 1830s, and 1840s, there was much to learn.

It was no doubt in part because of this instruction that during the 1860s, a third wave of visitors appeared-exiles. The Young Ottomans were a group of more or less liberal patriots who found it expedient to leave Turkey and continue their criticisms of the sultan's ministers from Europe, where they published opposition journals in London, Paris, and Geneva and had them smuggled into Turkey. They were followed in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century by other liberal and patriotic groups, collectively and rather loosely known as the Young Turks. From time to time, other groups of political exiles came from the Middle East, but on the whole they have been surprisingly few and inactive.

Besides Middle Eastern visitors to the West, there were Western visitors to the Middle East: teachers and scholars, experts and advisers, missionaries and propagandists, as well as political and commercial entrepreneurs of many kinds. The first to exercise personal influence over young Muslims were the European military instructors employed in Turkey, Egypt, and later Persia. Most of them were French, and the language they used was naturally French. The revolution in France did not break this link, and as late as 1796 the imperial Ottoman government sent a request to the Committee of Public Safety in Paris to supply a number of military experts and technicians. They came under the orders of the new French ambassador, General Aubert Dubayet, a native of New Orleans and a fervent revolutionary who had fought in America under Lafayette. The military school in Istanbul, we are told, had a library of four hundred books, many of them French, including a set of the Grande Ency- clopedie. Every university teacher knows that the presence of books in an academic library does not prove that anyone reads them, particularly when the books are in a foreign language and express unfamiliar ideas. All we can say is that the books were accessible and that some of the ideas appear in later generations. Muhammad `Ali in Egypt also recruited French officers, of whom many were available after 1815. His school of mathematics in Cairo had a library with French books, including works by Rousseau and Voltaire and books on European institutions. Many other military missions followed, from a variety of countries, among them a first group of American officers who went to Egypt after the Civil War. Of all groups in Middle Eastern society, the army officers have had the longest and most intensive exposure to Western influence and have the most vital professional interest in modernization and reform. This may help explain the Middle Eastern phenomenon, unusual in other parts of the world, of the professional officer as the spearhead of social change.

Although the officer-instructors were the first Western teachers, there were many others-teachers of every subject in every kind of school. Some taught in the modern-style schools and colleges that were being set up, in increasing numbers, by Middle Eastern governments; others in schools created by foreign missions and governments as a service to humanity and an instrument of cultural policy. They were joined in both groups by growing numbers of Westernized Middle Easterners who had studied in Western schools at home or abroad and had mastered a Western language and skill.

Between 1854 and 1856, the lessons of war came in a new form and with a new intensity. The Crimean War was far from being the first fought by Turkey against Russia, nor was it the first occasion when Turkey had the support of European Christian allies. But in the past, these had been remote and barely visible-cobelligerents against a common enemy rather than allies in any true sense. This time, Britain and France were allies and comrades in arms, with armies on Turkish soil and fleets in Turkish waters engaged in a common war effort. This led to rapid and extensive contacts between Turks and West Europeans at many levels. The large Western presence in Turkish cities-civilian and technical as well as militaryinaugurated many important changes. Some were positive-for example, the extension of the telegraph to Istanbul. The arrival for the first time of correspondents working for daily papers set an example and in time provided an opportunity for the new Turkish newspapers. The foreign presence also gave a new impetus to the improvement of street lighting, transport, and other amenities.

Some of the changes were more equivocal. As an ally of Britain and France, the sultan was enabled to raise war loans in Western financial markets and thus enter the slippery slope to extravagance and bankruptcy.

The dissemination of Western knowledge and ideas was enormously helped by the spread, in various forms, of the European book. As a knowledge of European languages became more common, European books found readers and, more important, translators. During the sixteenth century, two books of Western origin are known to have appeared in Turkish; one-never printed-was a history of France, translated in 1572 by order of the Reis Efendi, the chief secretary in charge of foreign affairs; and the other was an account of the discovery and wonders of the New World, compiled from European sources in about 1580. The seventeenth century brought a couple of books on history and geography and a treatise on the diagnosis and treatment of syphilis, which the Turks, and after them, other Middle Eastern peoples, call firengi; the eighteenth added a few more, including some translations of French books on the military sciences that were printed in Istanbul. Until the end of the eighteenth century, there were still only a handful of Western works available in Turkish, most of them dry and factual compilations prepared for official use; there were none at all in Arabic or Persian.

The first impulse to the new translation movement seems to have come from the French, for frankly propagandist purposes. Thus, for example, the address of the National Convention to the French people, of 9 October 1794, was translated into Arabic and published in a quarto booklet with the French and Arabic texts on facing pages, a useful aid to students of language and of other things. Other French political writings were translated into Arabic and Turkish and distributed in the Middle East. The French expedition to Egypt made detailed arrangements for the publication of French news and opinion in Arabic.

The immediate impact of all this was, as far as we know, limited. Far more influential was the translation movement that developed during the nineteenth century in the three main centers, in Turkey, Egypt, and Persia. At first it was all officially sponsored and reveals a rather official trend of thought. The first translations made and published under the auspices of Middle Eastern rulers include works on Napoleon and Catherine of Russia, Voltaire's Peter the Great and Charles XII, Robertson's Charles V, and the instructions of Frederick the Great to his commanders. Later the work was taken up and immensely developed by the enterprise of editors, publishers, printers, and translators.

The West had offered new media of communication-printing in the eighteenth, journalism and the telegraph in the nineteenth, and radio and television in the twentieth century-all of which played a great role in the dissemination of Western and other ideas. The first newspapers were mainly official; for example, the leading article in the first issue of the Ottoman official gazette, published on 14 May 1832, defines the function of the press as being to make known the true nature of events and the real purpose of the acts and commands of the government, in order to prevent misunderstanding and forestall uninformed criticism; another purpose was to provide useful knowledge on commerce, science, and the arts. The first nonofficial newspaper in Turkish was a weekly founded in 1840 by an Englishman called William Churchill. It was followed by many others, in Turkish, Arabic, and Persian, as well as other languages.

With the press came the journalist, a new and portentous figure in Middle Eastern life. Another newcomer, no less important, was the lawyer. In the old days, law was holy law, a branch of religious learning, and the only lawyers were the ulema. Legal and constitutional reform, the creation of modern laws and of courts to administer them, brought into existence a new class of secular advocates, who played a great role in the new political life and in the application of new political ideas and methods.

The journalists and lawyers, like the new-style officers and officials, required a new type of education in place of the traditional religious and literary learning of the past. Their pabulum was Western languages and literature, history, geography, and law, to which were later added economics and politics. Most of these subjects were new and strange; they were, however, familiar in that they were all literary in form, capable of being learned from books or lectures and then memorized. They could thus be assimilated into traditional methods of education, relying chiefly on the authority of the teacher and the memory of the student.

The practical and physical sciences, however, were another matter. The once great Muslim tradition of scientific inquiry and experiment had long since atrophied and died, leaving a society strongly resistant to the scientific spirit. In the words of a Turkish historian of science, "The scientific current broke against the dykes of literature and jurisprudence."' No less serious an impediment was the deep-rooted social attitude toward power, work, and status that often makes the Middle Easterner, even today, a bold and resourceful driver but a reluctant and unpredictable mechanic. Medicine, engineering, and other useful sciences were taught at the very first military schools; scientific treatises were among the first Western works translated into Turkish and Arabic, but many medical graduates preferred to become administrators rather than soil their hands with patients, and the scientific schools remained alien and exotic growths in need of constant care and renewed graftings from the West. There was no real development of original scientific work, such as occurred in Japan, China, or India, and each generation of students had to draw again from the sources in the West, which had meanwhile itself been making immense progress. The result was that the disparity in scientific knowledge, technological capacity, and therefore of military power between the Middle East and the advanced countries of the West is greater now than it was two hundred years ago, when the whole process of Westernization began. This disparity was maintained and, indeed, aggravated by the reluctance or inability to make the social and cultural changes that are necessary to sustain a modern state of the Western type. The military consequences of this disparity were dramatically illustrated in the Gulf War of 1991.