The Shaping of the Modern Middle East (9 page)

From time to time, Middle Eastern thinkers have put the question: What is the result of all this Westernization? It is a question that we of the West may well ask ourselves, too. It is our complacent habit in the Western world to make ourselves the model of virtue and progress. To be like us is to be good; to be unlike us is to be bad. To become more like us is to improve; to become less like us is to deteriorate. It is not necessarily so. When civilizations clash, there is one that prevails and one that is shattered. Idealists and ideologues may talk glibly of "a marriage of the best elements" from both sides, but the usual result of such an encounter is a cohabitation of the worst.

The impact of the West in the Middle East has brought great benefits and will surely bring others-in wealth and comfort, knowledge and artifacts, and the opening of new ways that were previously shut. These are good roads, though it is not always certain where they lead.

Westernization-the work of Westerners and still more of Wes- ternizers-has also brought changes of doubtful merit. One of these is the political disintegration and fragmentation of the region. Until modern times, there was an established political order in the Middle East, with the shah as ruler of Persia and the sultan as sovereign or suzerain of the rest. The sultan may not always have been loved by his subjects, but he was respected and, what is more important, accepted as the legitimate sovereign of the last of the Muslim universal empires. The sultan was overthrown and the empire destroyed. In his place came a succession of kings, presidents, and dictators who managed for a time to win the acclamation and support of their peoples, but never that spontaneous and unquestioning acceptance of their right to rule that the old legitimate sovereigns possessed and that dispensed them from the need for either violent repression or demagogic politics.

With the old legality and loyalty, the peoples of the Middle East also lost their ancient corporate identity. Instead of being members of a millennial Islamic imperial polity, they found themselves citizens of a string of dependencies and then nation-states, most of them entities new to history, often with borrowed or resurrected names, and only now beginning to strike roots in the consciousness and loyalties of their peoples.

The undermining and collapse of the old political order were accompanied by a parallel process of social and cultural disintegration. The old order may have been decayed, but it was still functioning, with a mutually understood system of loyalties and responsibilities binding together the different groups and classes of society. The old patterns were destroyed, the old values derided and abandoned; in their place a new set of institutions, laws, and standards was imported from the West, which for long remained alien and irrelevant to the needs, feelings, and aspirations of the Muslim peoples of the Middle East. It may well be that these changes were "necessary" and "inevitable," as these words are used by politicians and historians. The fact remains that they brought a period of formlessness and irresponsibility deeply damaging to Middle Eastern polity and society.

The economic consequences of Westernization are too well known to need more than a brief mention: the explosive rise in population, above all in Egypt, unaccompanied by any corresponding increase in food supply; the enormous new wealth derived from oil unevenly, even erratically, distributed both between and within countries; the widening and more visible gap between rich and poor; the creation of new appetites and ambitions, more rapidly than the means of satisfying them. The technological disparity remained, and successive Middle East wars revealed that buying advanced technological weaponry can do much damage, but does not create a technologically advanced army, still less a technologically advanced society. These tensions have been building up for some time past. In our day they have come to the breaking point.

The attitude of the peoples of the Middle East toward the West has gone through several phases. For many centuries, while Europe was rising to greater and greater heights of achievement, the East was sinking in the comfortable torpor of decay, unwilling and unable to perceive or to understand the vast changes that were taking place. In the nineteenth century, their illusions of superiority and self-sufficiency were finally shattered, and they awoke to a disagreeable reality in which their countries, their resources, their civilizations, their very souls were menaced by a Europe that was rich and powerful beyond belief and that, in its limitless selfconfidence, aggressiveness, and acquisitiveness, seemed to be bringing the whole world within its grasp.

In this situation, the mood of the Easterner began to change from ignorant complacency to anxious emulation. The West was great and strong; by study and imitation, it might be possible to discover and apply the elusive secret of its greatness and strength, and generations of eager students and reformers toiled in the search. They may not have loved the West, or even understood it, but they did admire and respect it.

There came a time when many of them did neither. The mood of admiration and imitation gave way to one of envious rancor. This change was no doubt helped by the West's lamentable political and moral failures; it was also helped by the lessons of liberty and human self-respect that the West had taught. In the words of Muhammad Igbal, in a poem addressed to England, on the desire of the Easterner for freedom:

But most of all, the wave of hostility was due to the crisis of a civilization reacting at last against the impact of alien forces that had dominated, dislocated, and transformed it. It is some of these processes of impact, response, and reaction that must now claim our attention.

3

The Quest for Freedom

In 1878 a young Turkish diplomat called Sadullah went to see the Great Exhibition in Paris. In a letter describing what he saw, he wrote:

In front of the central gate there is a statue of freedom; she has a staff in her hand and is seated on a chair. Her style and appearance convey this message: "0 worthy visitors! When you look upon this fascinating display of human progress, do not forget that all these achievements are the work of freedom. It is under the protection of freedom that peoples and nations attain happiness. Without freedom, there can be no security; without security, no endeavour; without endeavour, no prosperity; without prosperity, no happiness."'

Liberty, in other words, is an essential prerequisite to the pursuit of happiness, through the intermediate stages as indicated.

In these words, Sadullah was expressing a view common among Middle Eastern explorers of Europe in the nineteenth century: the view that political freedom was the secret source of Western power and success, the Aladdin's lamp with which the East might conjure up the genie of progress and win the fabulous treasures of the gorgeous and mysterious Occident.

At this point, some definition of terms is necessary. "Freedom" and "independence" are often loosely used as synonyms but should be differentiated. For the sake of clarity, we may, for the moment, define "freedom" as a political term referring to the position of the individual within the group-to the immunity of the citizen from arbitrary and illegal action by the authorities and to his right to participate in the formation and conduct of government. "Independence," on the other hand, refers to the position of the group in relation to other groups-to the formation and sovereignty of the state untrammeled by any superior, alien authority. Freedom and independence are thus quite different-sometimes even mutually exclusive-things and represent different objectives. Freedom is maintained and exercised through a form of political organization that is, by those who practice it, now usually called democracy. It is true that in modern times the word "democracy" has been used with many adjectives and in many other senses: social, organic, basic, guided, and popular; the neo-Marxist dictatorship of the secretariat; the unanimous plebiscitary ratification of military res ges- tae; royal affability and party public relations. Our present concern is with none of these but with free, representative and constitutional government and with the attempt to introduce such government in the Middle East. It has been, so far, a sad story.

The idea of political freedom first appeared in the Middle East at the end of the eighteenth century, grew and developed during the nineteenth, and, in most of the area, died out in the middle of the twentieth.

Despite the elective doctrines of the Muslim jurists, enshrining the memories of a remote nomadic past, the political experience of the Middle East under the caliphs and sultans was one of almost unrelieved autocracy, in which obedience to the sovereign was a religious as well as a political obligation, and disobedience a sin as well as a crime. But although the Muslim sovereign was an autocrat, he was not a pure despot. He was always subject, in theory and to a large extent even in practice, to the holy law of Islam. By the eighteenth century, the effective authority of the Ottoman sultan was limited by such entrenched and powerful groups as the ulema, the janissaries, and the provincial notables. There were, however, no established bodies to represent them. Islamic law knows no corporate legal persons; Islamic history shows no councils or communes, no synods or parliaments, nor any other kind of elected or representative assembly. It is interesting that the jurists never accepted the principle of majority decision. There was no point, since the need for a procedure of corporate, collective decision never arose. In heaven there was one God, and one alone; on earth there was no court but a single judge, no state but a single ruler.

This ancient tradition of autocracy and acquiescence was first breached by the impact of the ideas of the French Revolution. Interest was soon aroused. In April 1797 the English traveler W. G. Browne had a conversation with Hasan Junblat, a Druze chief in Kasrawan, in the north Lebanon: "He was very inquisitive as to the motives and history of the French Revolution, and the present religious creed of that nation; on hearing the detail on which, he however made no interesting remarks.i2 In the following year, with the arrival of the French in Egypt, fuller and perhaps more stimulating details were available. In Turkey the ideas of the revolution became known even earlier and were actively propagated by the French embassy and its friends. On 14 July 1793, the French community had a solemn celebration at which they read the Declaration of the Rights of Man, swore allegiance to the republic, and drank the health of the French republic and Selim III, the soldiers of the motherland and the friends of liberty, and universal brotherhood. The inauguration of the republican flag the following year provided the occasion for a still bigger celebration, culminating in a salute from two French ships moored off Seraglio Point. The party ended with the guests dancing a republican carmagnole around the tree of liberty that had been planted in the soil of Turkey, on the grounds of the French embassy.

There is no evidence that the Turks were much interested in these proceedings. But the ideas that they represented began to percolate, at first in a very limited circle and then to larger and larger groups among the intellectual elite. The tree of liberty bore fruit. The French Revolution was the first great movement of ideas in Europe that was not expressed in more or less Christian terms, and its doctrines could therefore spread, unhampered, through the new channels that were being opened into the world of Islam. A new generation was to grow up fascinated by the ideals of liberty, equality, and fraternity. It was some time before their successors decided that the first two were mutually exclusive, and the third in need of redefinition.

The first step in the direction of constitutional government was taken as early as 1808, when the grand vizier Bayrakdar Mustafa Pasha convened an assembly of dignitaries and provincial lords and notables in Istanbul. After some negotiations, they signed-and made the sultan sign-a deed of agreement. Various interpretations have been placed on these events, which in any case came to nothing. Ad hoc consultative meetings, called meshveret (from the Arabic mashwara), were not uncommon in the Ottoman Empire. What was new and important was that the "deed of agreement" was a reciprocal contract negotiated between the Sultan and groups of his servants and subjects, in which the latter appear as independent contracting parties, receiving as well as conceding certain rights and privileges.