The Modern Middle East - A Political History Since World War I (Third Edition)

by Mehran Kamrava

11. Held, Middle East Patterns, pp. 160–61.

  12. Ibid., pp. 384, 404.

  13. World Bank, “Urban Population (% of Total),” 2011, Development Indicators Database, http://data.worldbank.org/topic/urban-development.

  14. Ibid. Given increased rates of rural-urban migration in recent decades across the Middle East, as in much of the rest of the developing world, it is increasingly difficult to draw cultural, and in some respects spatial, distinctions between the city and the countryside. Therefore, even in Middle Eastern countries with large urban-based populations—Algeria at 73 percent, Iran at 69 percent, Iraq at 67 percent, Jordan at 83 percent, and Turkey at 71 percent—growth in the number of urban residents does not necessarily imply assimilation into the urban mainstream, or what social scientists generally refer to as “urbanization.” Data from World Bank, “Urban Population (% of Total),” 2011, Development Indicators Database, http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.URB.TOTL.IN.ZS.

  15. Snell, Life in the Ancient Near East, p. 148.

  16. Such works are too numerous to mention individually here, but some of the more notable ones are Hourani, History of the Arab Peoples; Lapidus, History of Islamic Societies; Esposito, Oxford History of Islam; and Arthur Goldschmidt Jr., A Concise History of the Middle East, 6th ed. (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1999).

  17. What follows is a brief account of the Prophet Muhammad’s life based on traditional narratives. Problems facing historians writing on the life of the Prophet are the lack of original, contemporary documentation and the interpretative nature of many later accounts of his life. See Donner, “Muhammad and the Caliphate,” pp. 5–6. For a detailed account of the Prophet’s life based on early Islamic sources, see Martin Lings, Muhammad: His Life Based on the Earliest Sources (Cambridge: Islamic Text Society, 1995).

  18. See Richard Bulliet, The Camel and the Wheel (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975), pp. 105–6.

  19. Maxime Rodinson, Muhammad (New York: Pantheon Books, 1980), pp. 103–5.

  20. See ibid., pp. 106–7.

  21. Goldschmidt’s insight into the hijrah is worth repeating here: “Rather than a ‘flight,’ as some have referred to it, the hijrah was a carefully planned maneuver by Muhammad in response to an invitation by the citizens of Yathrib. It enabled him to unite his followers as a community, as a nation. . . . From then on, Muhammad was both a prophet and a lawgiver, both a religious and a political leader.” Goldschmidt, Concise History, pp. 29–30.

  22. Hourani, History of the Arab Peoples, p. 17.

  23. Marshall G. S. Hodgson, The Venture of Islam, vol. 1, The Classical Age of Islam (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974), p. 183.

  24. Quoted in Rafiq Zakaria, Muhammad and the Quran (New York: Penguin Books, 1991), p. 30.

  25. Fazlur Rahman, Islam, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979), p. 69.

  26. Ibid., p. 68.

  27. Ibid., p. 101. Emphasis in original.

  28. See Zakaria, Muhammad and the Quran, pp. 395–400.

  29. For a chronological arrangement of the Quran, see Fathi Osman, Concepts from the Quran: A Topical Reading (Los Angeles: MVI Publications, 1997).

  30. Michael Rogers, The Spread of Islam (New York: Elsevier, 1976), pp. 24–25.

  31. See Wilferd Madelung, The Succession to Muhammad: A Study of the Early Caliphate (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997), especially pp. 1–27.

  32. Lapidus, History of Islamic Societies, pp. 56–57.

  33. S. Husain Jafri, Origins and Early Development of Shʿa Islam (London: Longman, 1979), p. 92.

  34. G. E. Von Grunebaum, Classical Islam: A History, 600–1258, trans. Katherine Watson (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1970), p. 74.

  35. The mawali (literally, “clients”) were foreigners who had converted to Islam. Since their foreign birth did not allow them to be incorporated into the kinship-based society of Arabs, they had to be voluntarily placed into the protection of a clan, thereby becoming their “client.” For the most part, the mawali were treated as second-class citizens. See Jamil Ahmad Chaudry, “Muslims and Mawali,” Hamdard Islamicus 27 (Winter 1994): 85–98.

  36. Adam Mez, The Renaissance of Islam, trans. Salahuddin Khuda Bukhsh and D. S. Margoliouth (London: Luzac, 1937), p. 51.

  37. Von Grunebaum, Classical Islam, p. 81.

  38. Goldschmidt, Concise History, p. 67.

  39. For a fascinating account of life in the city and in the royal court at the time, see G. Le Strange, Baghdad during the Abbasid Caliphate, from Contemporary Arabic and Persian Sources (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1924).

  40. Von Grunebaum, Classical Islam, p. 85.

  41. See, for example, Paula Sanders, Ritual, Politics, and the City in Fatimid Cairo (Albany: SUNY Press, 1994); Janet Abu-Lughod, Cairo: 1001 Years of the City Victorious (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1971), pp. 13–36; and Desmond Steward, Great Cairo: Mother of the World (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1969), pp. 63–84.

  42. Goldschmidt, Concise History, p. 86.

  43. Lapidus, History of Islamic Societies, p. 279.

  44. Ibid., p. 145.

  45. Lord Kinross, The Ottoman Centuries: The Rise and Fall of the Turkish Empire (New York: William Morrow, 1977), p. 42.

  46. Ira Lapidus, “Sultanates and Gunpowder Empires: The Middle East,” in Esposito, Oxford History of Islam, p. 377.

  47. Ibid.

  48. Goldschmidt, Concise History, pp. 133–34. An insightful account of Napoléon’s Egyptian campaign is presented by Juan Cole in Napoleon’s Egypt: Invading the Middle East (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007).

  49. Andrew Wheatcroft, The Ottomans: Dissolving Images (London: Penguin Books, 1995), p. 65.

  50. Ibid.

  51. Kinross, Ottoman Centuries, p. 457.

  52. See Bernard Lewis, The Emergence of Modern Turkey, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1968), ch. 4.

  53. Hourani, History of the Arab Peoples, pp. 258–59.

  54. Wheatcroft, Ottomans, p. 69.

  55. Kinross, Ottoman Centuries, p. 418.

  56. Lapidus, History of Islamic Societies, p. 598.

  57. Quoted in Rudolph Peters, “Religious Attitudes towards Modernization in the Ottoman Empire: A Nineteenth Century Pious Text on Steamships, Factories and the Telegraph,” Die Welt des Islams 26 (1986): 95.

  58. See Robin Okey, The Habsburg Monarchy: From Enlightenment to Eclipse (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2001).

  59. Lewis, Emergence of Modern Turkey, pp. 218–19.

  60. Kinross tends to downplay the extent of the “Armenian genocide” by putting the number of dead at half a million. Most other historians, however, including Lewis, put the number of those who perished at one and a half million. See Kinross, Ottoman Centuries, p. 607, and Lewis, Emergence of Modern Turkey, p. 356.

  61. As Lewis puts it, the Young Turks may have given Istanbul drains, but they did not give Turkey a constitutional government. Lewis, Emergence of Modern Turkey, p. 228.

  62. Kinross, Ottoman Centuries, p. 608.

  63. Sufism dates back to the ninth century and arose as a result of mystical influences predating Islam as well as the mystical reading of the Quran (what is called istinbad). Raymond Nicholson, The Mystics of Islam (1914; repr., London: Arkana, 1989), pp. 23–24.

  64. Said Amir Arjomand, The Shadow of God and the Hidden Imam: Religion, Political Order, and Societal Change in Shiʿite Iran from the Beginning to 1890 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), p. 106.

  65. Haneda has compiled a list of some seventy principal religious buildings that the Safavid constructed in Esfahan. See Masashi Haneda, “The Character of the Urbanization of Isfahan in the Later Safavid Period,” in Safavid Persia, ed. Charles Melville (London: I. B. Tauris, 1996), pp. 378–82.

  66. Lapidus, “Sultanates and Gunpowder Empires,” p. 366.

  67. Willem Floor, Safavid Government Institutions (Costa Mesa, CA: Mazda, 2001), p. 1.

  68. Shah Abbas II’s (r. 1642–66) reported fondness for
wine and dancing girls, for example, did not help win him favors with the ulama. See Arjomand, Shadow of God, p. 200.

  69. Lapidus, “Sultanates and Gunpowder Empires,” p. 370.

  70. Ann K. S. Lambton, Qajar Persia: Eleven Studies (London: I. B. Tauris, 1987), p. 96.

  71. Rouhollah K. Ramazani, The Foreign Policy of Iran, 1500 to 1941 (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1966), pp. 66–67.

  72. Ishtiaq Ahmad, Anglo-Iranian Relations, 1905–1919 (Bombay: Asia Publishing House, 1975), p. 48.

  73. Hamid Algar, Religion and State in Iran, 1785–1906: The Role of the Ulama in the Qajar Period (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969), p. 242.

  74. Lambton, Qajar Persia, pp. 321–22.

  2. FROM TERRITORIES TO INDEPENDENT STATES

  1. Ann Williams, Britain and France in the Middle East and North Africa, 1914–1967 (New York: Macmillan, 1968), p. 4.

  2. Roger Adelson, London and the Invention of the Middle East: Money, Power, and War, 1902–1922 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), p. 7.

  3. Elie Kedourie, England and the Middle East: The Destruction of the Ottoman Empire, 1914–1921 (London: Mansell, 1987), p. 15.

  4. Williams, Britain and France, p. 6.

  5. J. C. Hurewitz, Diplomacy in the Near and Middle East: A Documentary Record, vol. 1, 1535–1914 (Princeton, NJ: D. Van Nostrand, 1956), p. 264.

  6. Jukka Nevakivi, Britain, France, and the Middle East, 1914–1920 (London: Athlone, 1969), p. 5.

  7. The Ottomans had already lost Egypt, first to the ambitious Muhammad Ali and then to the British in 1882.

  8. M. E. Yapp, The Making of the Modern Middle East, 1792–1923 (London: Longman, 1987), p. 301.

  9. More specifically, Hussein claimed to be from the same Hashemite clan of the Quraysh as the Prophet had been. Despite their eventual eclipse in the Hijaz, the Hashemites later became powerful in Jordan, where they still remain the ruling family.

  10. The territorial promises contained in the Hussein-McMahon Corre-spondence, which later came to be called the Damascus Protocol, can be found in Randall Baker, King Husain and the Kingdom of Hejaz (New York: Oleander, 1979), p. 65.

  11. On popular portrayals of T. E. Lawrence, the historian Arthur Goldschmidt has said it best: “I will not deny that Lawrence’s Seven Pillars of Wisdom is a book worth reading or that Lawrence of Arabia is a great film. But neither one is history.” Arthur Goldschmidt Jr., A Concise History of the Middle East, 6th ed. (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1999), p. 183.

  12. Hurewitz, Diplomacy, p. 19.

  13. Quoted in Philip Graves, Memoirs of King Abdullah of Transjordan (London: Jonathan Cape, 1951), p. 203.

  14. The decision to change the country’s name from Transjordan to Jordan was adopted, following the country’s independence, in the same parliamentary session (on May 22, 1946) that changed Abdullah’s official title from emir (i.e., commander) to king. Kamal Salibi, The Modern History of Jordan (London: I. B. Tauris, 1993), p. 153.

  15. Adelson, London, pp. 149–50.

  16. Quoted in Doreen Ingrams, Palestine Papers, 1917–1922: Seeds of Conflict (London: John Murray, 1972), p. 18. For a full treatment of the declaration, see Leonard Stein, The Balfour Declaration (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1961), especially pp. 543–56.

  17. Yapp, Making of the Modern Middle East, pp. 290–91.

  18. Quoted in Adelson, London, p. 151.

  19. Sykes’s commitment to the Zionist cause actually sprang from his fervent desire to keep the French out of Palestine. See Stein, Balfour Declaration, pp. 233–39.

  20. Quoted in Peter Mansfield, The Ottoman Empire and Its Successors (New York: Macmillan, 1973), p. 50.

  21. Quoted in Joshua Baylson, Territorial Allocation by Imperial Rivalry: The Human Legacy in the Near East (Chicago: University of Chicago, Department of Geography, 1987), p. 104.

  22. Yapp, Making of the Modern Middle East, pp. 335–36.

  23. Ibid., pp. 329–30.

  24. Not surprisingly, Churchill’s views on the matter are somewhat different. In his memoirs he writes: “I never felt that the Arab countries had had anything from us but fair play. To Britain, and Britain alone, they owed their very existence as nations. We created them; British money and British advisers set the pace of their advance; British arms protected them.” Winston Churchill, Memoirs of the Second World War (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1959), p. 1014.

  25. Baylson, Territorial Allocation, p. 106.

  26. Eliezer Tauber, The Formation of Modern Syria and Iraq (London: Frank Cass, 1995), p. 67.

  27. According to Baylson, Transjordan served two purposes for the British: it provided a buffer against Syria, and it facilitated the construction of a railway line from the Mediterranean to India through Iraq. Baylson, Territorial Alloca-tion, p. 108.

  28. In the words of a British cabinet minister at the time, “It is now the Canal and India; there is no such thing now to us as India alone. India is any number of cyphers; but the Canal is the unit that makes these cyphers valuable” (emphasis in original). Quoted in Yapp, Making of the Modern Middle East, p. 226.

  29. Ibid., p. 229.

  30. Albert Hourani, A History of the Arab Peoples (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1991), p. 228.

  31. Charles-André Julien, History of North Africa: Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco, trans. John Petrie (New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1970), p. 270.

  32. For an example of the first view, see Robin Bidwell, Morocco under Colonial Rule: French Administration of Tribal Areas, 1912–1956 (London: Frank Cass, 1973), p. 33; for an example of the second, see C. R. Pennell, Morocco since 1830: A History (New York: NYU Press, 2000), p. 28.

  33. Quoted in John Ruedy, Modern Algeria: The Origins and Development of a Nation (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992), p. 50.

  34. Ibid.

  35. Lisa Anderson, The State and Social Transformation in Tunisia and Libya, 1830–1980 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986), p. 186.

  36. Ali Abdullatif Ahmida, The Making of Modern Libya: State Formation, Colonization, and Resistance, 1830–1932 (Albany: SUNY Press, 1994), p. 104.

  37. S. N. Eisenstadt, “The Kemalist Regime and Modernization: Some Com-parative and Analytical Remarks,” in Atatürk and the Modernization of Turkey, ed. Jacob Landau (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1984), pp. 7–9. As will be seen shortly, “revolutionism,” the translation for Atatürk’s inkilabçilik, was also one of the six “arrows,” or principles, on which the Kemalist ideology was based.

  38. Paul Dumont, “The Origins of the Kemalist Ideology,” in Landau, Atatürk, p. 35.

  39. See Niyazi Berkes, The Development of Secularism in Turkey (Montreal: McGill University Press, 1964), pp. 192–93.

  40. Quoted in Bernard Lewis, The Emergence of Modern Turkey, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1968), p. 257.

  41. Ibid., p. 353.

  42. Ibid., p. 354.

  43. Feroz Ahmad, The Making of Modern Turkey (London: Routledge, 1993), pp. 61–63.

  44. Ibid., p. 58.

  45. Lewis, Emergence of Modern Turkey, pp. 370–71.

  46. Quoted in Andrew Mango, Atatürk (Woodstock, NY: Overlook Press, 2000), p. 463.

  47. This was in contrast to similar prohibitions imposed on the veil at about the same time in Iran and Afghanistan. On hearing about the prohibition of veiling in Afghanistan, Kemal is said to have predicted the overthrow of the country’s King Amanullah as a result. Ahmad, Making of Modern Turkey, p. 87.

  48. Quoted in Lewis, Emergence of Modern Turkey, p. 278.

  49. Ibid., p. 289.

  50. Ahmad, Making of Modern Turkey, p. 97.

  51. Ibid., p. 98.

  52. Lord Kinross, Ataturk: A Biography of Mustafa Kemal, Father of Modern Turkey (New York: William Morrow, 1965), pp. 539–40.

  53. Khan is a term of respect, the closest translation for which is “Lord,” although it does not necessarily have the latter’s feudal connotation.

  54. One of the most l
ucid and accessible accounts of this time period can be found in Ervand Abrahamian’s Iran between Two Revolutions (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1982), especially pp. 92–120.

  55. Donald Wilber, Riza Shah Pahlavi: The Resurrection and Reconstruction of Iran, 1878–1944 (Hicksville, NY: Exposition Press, 1975), p. 75.

  56. The poetry of Mirza Abolqassem Aref Qazvini, who had earlier supported the constitutionalist cause, is most representative. An interesting example reads, in part:

  Now that the banner of republic comes from afar,

  Under its shadow, life will be blessed.

  After the calamity of Qajar comes the festival of the republic.

  Be certain that today is the best of times.

  I’m happy that destiny’s hand placed in the royal court

  The light of dynasty that the shah extinguished.

  With one look toward Europe the shah lost his will,

  In this costly gamble losing his throne.

  Say a dying prayer for dynasty, Aref.

  God forgive it for its evil harms.

  It ruined our country all throughout.

  From now on the country will prosper.

  Whoever holds the republic’s reins,

  There will always be noble men among the people.

  Mirza Abolqassem Aref Qazvini, Koliyyat-e Divan [Complete works] (Tehran: Chapp-e Jadid, 1357/1978), p. 283.

  57. Shahrough Akhavi, Religion and Politics in Contemporary Iran: Clergy-State Relations in the Pahlavi Period (Albany: SUNY Press, 1980), pp. 28–29.

  58. Abrahamian, Iran between Two Revolutions, p. 135.

  59. Reza Khan is said not to have been certain of the precise meaning of Pahlavi for a number of years after adopting it as his last name, and anecdotal evidence suggests he had thought about choosing Pahlavan (literally, “champion”) instead. Wilber, Riza Shah Pahlavi, p. 229.

  60. Ibid., pp. 157–58.

  61. Abrahamian, Iran between Two Revolutions, p. 141.

  62. Homa Katouzian, The Political Economy of Modern Iran, 1926–1979 (New York: NYU Press, 1981), p. 116.

  63. Wilber, Riza Shah Pahlavi, p. 148.

  64. Katouzian, Political Economy of Modern Iran, p. 113.

  65. Abrahamian, Iran between Two Revolutions, pp. 136–37.