A History of the Middle East

by Peter Mansfield

  Syria/Palestine resumed its historical role as the battlefield for the struggle between the rival rulers of the Tigris–Euphrates and Nile Valleys. But a new element added to Syria’s misery: the Byzantines, who had suffered three centuries of Arab/Muslim invasions, took their opportunity for revenge. Between 962 and 1000, Syria was invaded thirty-eight times by successive Byzantine emperors.

  In 1018 the Fatimid caliph Hakim became insane and declared himself to be God. After his death, a new religion emerged with the belief that Hakim had not died but had only disappeared, and would return in triumph to inaugurate a golden age. Taking their name from one of their leaders who fled to Mount Lebanon, Ismail al-Darazi, the Druze are important because, although never numerous (some 600,000 now live in the Middle East), they are one of the few of the many sub-Shiite sects which appeared at that time to have survived to the present day and have played a crucial role in the history of the region. (Another sub-Shiite sect is the Alawite or Nusairi, that first flourished around Aleppo in the tenth century. This sect has also survived and today forms about 10 per cent of the population of Syria. The fact that President Assad and other key members of his regime belong to this sect has had a significant bearing on the modern history of Syria.)

  In spite of their repeated invasions of Syria/Palestine, the Byzantines were not able to hold this region. In fact the Byzantine, Abbasid and Fatimid Empires were all in a state of decline in the first half of the eleventh century, when a new force burst on the scene. Oghuz Turkish nomads from central Asia, who became known as Seljuks, after one of their chiefs, invaded Persia and in 1050 captured Baghdad, reducing the Abbasid caliph to the status of a vassal. In 1071, they took Syria and Palestine and drove the Fatimids back to Egypt. By the end of the century the Seljuk Empire included Persia, Mesopotamia, Syria and Palestine. But the Turkoman warriors of the Seljuk army were looking to the rich lands of the Byzantine Empire to the west. In 1071 the Seljuk sultan Arp Arslan routed a huge Byzantine army and captured the Byzantine emperor. The Muslim Turks were then able to settle in Asia Minor.

  For four centuries, Byzantium had protected western Christendom from Islamic invasion and expansion from the east. With the Byzantine Empire now in danger of collapse, the Emperor Alexius Comnenus (1081–1118) appealed to Pope Urban II for men to help fight the infidel invaders. On 27 November 1095 the Pope called for recruits to march to the relief of their fellow-Christians in the east and to restore the security of the western pilgrim-routes to the Holy Land.

  The consequent invasion of the Middle East by the Christians of western Europe – the First Crusade – was initially successful. Jerusalem was captured in 1099 and its Muslim and Jewish populations were massacred. A Latin kingdom of Jerusalem and three other crusader principalities were established. The Abbasid caliphs of Baghdad and the Seljuk sultans were largely indifferent to Syria and Palestine, which lay on the periphery of their interests. After one abortive attempt, the Fatimids of Egypt abandoned any effort to recover Jerusalem for Islam. In Syria itself the local Turkish regimes, normally in a state of mutual hostility, frequently allied themselves with the crusaders against each other.

  The petty Christian states, which were manifestly inferior in culture and civilization (the Muslims were astonished by the crusaders’ primitive medical knowledge, for example), were not regarded as a serious threat to the world of Islam. But the crusader states were not content with mere tolerated survival. They became embroiled with their neighbours, and eventually caused the divided Muslim states to unite in a jihad or holy war against them. In 1187 the Kurdish leader Saladin recovered Jerusalem (and, in contrast to the crusaders eighty-eight years previously, spared the lives of those who surrendered). Further crusades were launched in the following century which enabled the diminished Christian states on the coast of Syria and Palestine to survive for a time, but after little more than two centuries they had disappeared.

  Apart from a few magnificent castles and some of their blood through intermarriage, the crusaders left little which endured. Their greatest achievement was drastically to weaken the superior civilization they encountered and to undermine its moral standards. However, in one vitally important respect the crusaders showed that they had an advantage over their Muslim enemies: this was their ability to create sound and workable political institutions. These were feudal rather than democratic, but they enshrined the notion of the rights and obligations of the different sections of society – princes, knights, merchants and peasants. The power of the ruler was not unlimited, and the succession was usually achieved by consent rather than force. In the Muslim lands, on the other hand, although both the principles and procedures of law governing human relationships were more sophisticated and rational, the practice of government was normally arbitrary and unlimited. The tribal democracy of the early caliphs, whose power was limited by a Majlis al-Shura or consultative council, had generally given way to despotism.

  It has been wisely observed that the most disastrous effect of the crusades on the Islamic heartland was Islam’s retreat into isolation:

  Although the epoch of the Crusades ignited a genuine economic and cultural revolution in Western Europe, in the Orient these holy wars led to long centuries of decadence and obscurantism. Assaulted from all quarters, the Muslim world turned in on itself. It became over-sensitive, defensive, intolerant, sterile – attitudes that grew steadily worse as world-wide evolution, a process from which the Muslim world felt excluded, continued.

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  This was the long-term consequence. At the time, the triumphant elimination of the Christian invaders was seen as proof of the superiority of the Islamic faith, which, as always has to be remembered, Muslims believe to be designated by God to succeed and perfect the other monotheisms. A few contemporary Muslim chroniclers were prepared to acknowledge the virtues of the system of government in the crusader states, but such comparisons were considered irrelevant once these states had been eliminated.

  With the final defeat and expulsion of the crusaders, Islam was triumphant throughout the Middle East region. In Egypt, the splendid but short-lived Ayyubid dynasty founded by Saladin was replaced by the Mamlukes, who at the end of the thirteenth century extended their empire to Syria. The Seljuks gradually pushed forward their domains in Anatolia at the expense of Byzantium, whose decline had been accelerated by the crusaders who in their Fourth Crusade, at the beginning of the thirteenth century, caused a struggle in Constantinople between western Latin and eastern Greek Christians. The Seljuk dynasty in Asia Minor was known as ‘the Sultanate of Rum’ (Arabic for Rome), a Muslim inheritor of the eastern flank of the Roman Empire.

  In the beginning of the thirteenth century, the Muslim world had to face a new and terrifying threat: the Mongols. Like the nomadic Turkish tribes before them, the Mongols burst out of central Asia into the rich lands of the Fertile Crescent. In 1220 Genghis Khan seized Persia; in 1243 his successors routed the entire Seljuk army and went on to occupy the Sultanate of Rum. In 1258 Genghis Khan’s grandson Hulagu captured Baghdad and eliminated the last ghostly relic of the Abbasid caliphate, as his armies completed the destruction of the great irrigation works of Mesopotamia.

  It seemed as if nothing could prevent the Mongols from overruning Syria and Egypt. But the Egyptian Mamlukes rallied to inflict a crushing defeat on the Mongols at Ain Jalout in Palestine in 1260. In that it saved the heartlands of the Muslim world from being overwhelmed, this was one of the decisive battles in the history of the world. The Mongol threat was far greater than that of the Christian crusaders, but it was also short-lived. Eastern and western Christians both nursed hopes that the Mongols could be converted to Christianity. Instead, in 1295, the Mongol khan announced that he had become a Muslim. The struggle for the Middle East continued to be within the world of Islam.

  The three centuries of Mamluke rule in Egypt and Syria showed many of the aspects of an advanced civilization. With the demise of Baghdad and the reduction of Muslim Spain, the great centres of Islamic l
earning and literary and artistic achievement were now Cairo, Damascus and Aleppo. Exquisite architecture and artefacts have survived from the period. These cities were wealthy and prosperous, as trade poured through both to and from the East. But these centuries were disastrous in the way that power was exercised and in the development of political institutions. If Muslim society was relatively stable, its rulers were not. The Mamlukes’ code prevented the founding of a hereditary dynasty, and in matters of government they fell back on their ferocious and unyielding military tradition. Mamluke sultans of Egypt rarely lasted more than a few years before they were ousted by a stronger rival. Similarly, Mamluke generals fought each other for the governorship of Syria. As the Mongol Empire declined, there was no longer an external threat to enforce the unity that had been achieved at Ain Jalout.

  The Mamlukes were not aware that their fate was being sealed by events that were taking place in Asia Minor. At the end of the thirteenth century this was the territory of some dozen Turkish warrior-princes, or ghazis, who had overwhelmed most of the provinces of the Byzantine Empire. Nominally tributaries of the Mongol khans, they had become increasingly independent. One of these, named Osman, was the founder of a dynasty and empire which grew to control most of the world of Islam for four centuries.

  The first Osmanlis – or Ottomans, as they became known in the west – were distinguished among their fellow-ghazis by their wisdom and statecraft. In many ways they resembled the first caliphs of Islam – the Rashidoun or Rightly Guided Ones – in that they combined a passionate and simple faith with a chivalrous and tolerant attitude towards the mainly Christian inhabitants of the lands they conquered. Some of these Christians converted to Islam, but even those who did not frequently welcomed the firm justice of Ottoman rule in contrast to the anarchic misgovernment of the decadent Byzantine Empire.

  In the second half of the fourteenth century, Osman’s grandson Murad I, the first great Ottoman sultan, crossed the Hellespont to extend the young empire into the Christian Balkan states. He applied the principle of toleration to allow non-Muslims to become full citizens and rise to the highest offices of state, so at this very early stage establishing the character of the vast multilingual and multi-ethnic Ottoman Empire, which had much in common with the Roman Empire.

  Murad conquered the Balkans; his son Bayezid I devoted himself to the acquisition of the whole of Asia and the final reduction of Constantinople. He failed at the final hour because of a sudden new threat from the east – the Tartars, who appeared like a reincarnation of their Mongol cousins two centuries earlier. Tamerlane, the terrifying Tartar leader, came close to destroying the Ottoman Empire in its infancy and restoring the ghazi principalities to Byzantium, but he died on his way to new conquests in China. The Ottomans recovered and a generation later produced another outstanding leader in Mohammed II – ‘the Conqueror’ – who in 1453 finally captured Constantinople and overwhelmed the last relics of the Byzantine Empire.

  Western schoolchildren have been taught that, by scattering the legacy of Greece and Rome, the Muslim conquest of Constantinople launched western Christendom into the Renaissance. In fact, although this momentous event had a profound and lasting effect on the imagination of mankind, it marked only the final stage of the withdrawal of non-Muslim power from the Middle East: for many generations the Byzantine Empire had been no more than a shadow of its former dominating presence.

  Europe was already well aware of the Ottoman threat. The Venetians, Hungarians and others had tried to stem the tide by forming temporary alliances with the Ottomans’ rivals in Asia Minor. After the fall of Constantinople, the infidel Turk was for two centuries a towering menace which threatened to burst out from the Balkans and overrun central Europe. Twice – in 1529 and 1683 – the Ottoman forces were on the point of occupying Vienna and overwhelming the Habsburg Empire. In weapons and military strategy – especially the early use of firearms – they were superior, and they had rapidly turned themselves into a formidable naval power which could match anything the Europeans could put to sea. Edward Gibbon’s famous speculation about the consequences for Europe if the Arab/Muslim armies had continued their advance northwards into France in the eighth century (students of Oxford and Cambridge studying the Holy Koran instead of the Bible) could equally have been applied to the Turkish invasions eight centuries later. The Arabs were turned back as much by the unappealing climate of northern Europe as by the army of Charles Martel, leader of the Christian Franks; the Turks from Asia Minor were more accustomed to the frost and snow. The Renaissance monarchs of Europe constantly attempted to combine their forces for new crusades against the world of Islam but, in contrast to their predecessors in the earlier crusades, they were acting not on behalf of Christian pilgrims to the Holy Land or Christian minorities in the Middle East but to protect themselves.

  In its first two centuries, the greater part of the Ottoman Empire’s remarkable energies was directed towards Christian Europe. However, after Mohammed the Conqueror had consolidated the Ottoman hold on Asia Minor, his grandson Selim I, known as ‘the Grim’, turned his attention towards Asia. In Persia the Safavid dynasty had been established when Ismail, known as ‘the Great Sufi’, proclaimed himself shah in 1501. Shortly afterwards he declared Shiite Islam, which was already the faith of most of his subjects, to be the official religion of the empire. In 1508 he occupied Iraq. Selim the Grim – also known as ‘the Just’ for his severe Sunni orthodoxy – defeated Ismail in a great battle in the Valley of Chalderan, near Tabriz. In 1514 he went on to annex the high plateau of eastern Anatolia, which provided the Ottoman Empire with a vital strategic defence against invasion from the west.

  More than two centuries of struggle and intermittent warfare between the Sunni and Shiite Empires ensued. Militarily the Ottomans usually had the upper hand, but Persian cultural influence remained a powerful force in the Turkish Empire, and even when the Ottomans established their definitive control over Mesopotamia in the seventeenth century the majority of its Arabic-speaking people remained Shiite. Shah Ismail may be regarded as the founder of modern Persia (Iran). Unlike the Ottomans, the Safavids had no ambitions to invade and conquer Christian lands. Apart from disputed Mesopotamia, the territories of the Persian Empire remained roughly the same until modern times. But within these borders a great national and religious revival took place. Shah Abbas I, who reigned from 1587 to 1629, was an outstanding military leader, administrator and patron of the arts. Although a zealous Shiite Muslim, he was tolerant towards Christians, allowing the Carmelites and other orders to set up missions and build churches at Isfahan and elsewhere. The Safavid dynasty declined under his less able successors, but Persia remained established as a dominant power in the region. Although encroached upon by its neighbours, it never suffered the dismemberment which was the fate of the Ottoman Empire.

  After his defeat of Persia, Selim turned upon the Mamlukes. Although courageous fighters, in their weakened and semi-anarchic condition these were no match for the superior training and discipline of the Ottoman army. After a battle near Aleppo in 1516, in which the aged Mamluke sultan Qansuh al-Ghawri died of a stroke and his army was annihilated, Selim easily occupied Syria and Palestine. The following year he invaded Egypt and inflicted a final defeat on the Mamlukes outside the walls of Cairo. While he was in Egypt, Selim received a delegation from the Arab sharif, or ruler, of Mecca, who offered him the keys of the Holy City of Islam and the title of ‘Protector of the Holy Places’. The standard and cloak of the Prophet were transferred to Istanbul.

  The North African or Barbary states as far as Morocco soon accepted Ottoman suzerainty. Yemen in south-western Arabia became an Ottoman pashalik, or governorate, in 1537. Of the Arabicspeaking world, only Morocco in the far west, Oman in south-eastern Arabia and the central Arabian peninsula, sparsely inhabited by beduin, remained outside Ottoman control. Although it was not until the eighteenth century that the Ottoman sultans officially adopted for themselves the title of ‘Caliph of Islam’, their c
laim to leadership of Sunni Islam was henceforth disputed only by rebels with local followings in outlying provinces.

  It is hardly surprising that the Arabs of today tend to see their four Ottoman centuries in the darkest terms. Their ancestors had allowed first military leadership and then political leadership in the Islamic world to pass into Turkish hands. Except in the outer extremities of the Arab world, where the Arabs retained some political independence, the Turks were indisputably the governing race. In contrast, the Persians in their own vast homeland were rivals rather than subjects of the Ottoman Turks. Just as wounding to Arab pride was the fact that the Arabic language, the glory of Arab civilization, had yielded its cultural leadership in Islam. Arabic remained the language of religion, as it was bound to be, but Turkish and Persian, after absorbing profound Arabic influence, developed more vital independent cultural worlds of their own.

  Nevertheless, the Ottoman Empire was a splendid Islamic civilization. It reached its zenith under the son of Selim the Grim – Sulaiman the Magnificent, or Lawgiver, who reigned from 1520 to 1566 and was therefore an exact contemporary of the great Renaissance monarchs of Europe – the Habsburg Emperor Charles V, Francis I of France and the Tudor Henry VIII of England. Sulaiman added Hungary, Rhodes and North Africa to his empire, although he failed to take Vienna. But he was much more than a great military campaigner: he was a fine administrator and a stern but humane dispenser of justice. A considerable poet in his own right, he encouraged all the arts at his court. Like all great civilizations, the Ottoman absorbed and transformed various external cultural influences. The first sultans took from the Byzantines. Selim and Sulaiman brought in craftsmen from Tabriz in western Persia to beautify Istanbul. Under Sulaiman, with the help of Sinan – the son of a Christian from Anatolia and one of the finest architects of all time – the work that had begun with Mohammed the Conqueror was completed, and Istanbul became a city of true magnificence at the point of confluence of eastern and western civilization.