Chapter One: Introduction
A History of the Middle East is a survey of Middle Eastern history from the time of Muhammad in the seventh century until the eve of the al-Qaeda attacks on the United States in 2001. It is designed to meet the requirements of a single-term introductory course and is aimed at students who have no more than a casual understanding of the history, cultures, and societies of the region. It offers a relatively concise narrative of the region’s historical development that seeks to avoid oversimplification on the one hand and overcomplexity on the other.
Why Study History
This work rests on the assumption that a knowledge of history is an essential prerequisite for the proper functioning of a democratic polity. Self-governing political systems depend on the ability of their citizenries to make wise and productive choices about how to approach complex problems. Effective decision making, in turn, requires a strong comprehension of the context of the questions under debate and an appreciation of how people addressed similar situations in the past. In other words, citizens must understand the history of the issues that they confront if they are to make informed choices. Importantly they need to comprehend the subject not as students and laypeople typically perceive it, but instead in the way that professional historians do.
These understandings are very different. The popular definition of history describes it as the accumulated events, actions, decisions, cultural constructs, relationships, and institutions that stretch back at least as far as the development of civilization some five- thousand years ago. According to this view, everything that people have ever done is history. Professional historians hold a different conception of the subject—one that is both quite distinct from the popular understanding and far more useful for those seeking to be engaged participants in a democratic system. According to this definition, history is the study of the past for the purpose of interpreting it in order to provide what historians call a “usable past” that can help people in the present-day contextualize and better comprehend the issues that they face. Historians are particularly interested in how current political structures, cultural practices, power relations, and social institutions developed. For example, scholars today study events such as the Paris Peace Conference of 1919 to better comprehend why many Middle Eastern nations have weak civil societies and, why, as a result, many of them lack genuinely representative governments. In other words, professional historians research the past not because they are history “buffs” or antiquarians who find the subject intrinsically interesting—though they do—but instead because the subject offers vital insights into the issues and problems that people confront today.
An understanding of history along these lines can certainly help Americans acquire a better grasp of the development of a region that is, today, of vital importance to their country. Such has not always been the case. Indeed, prior to the First World War, US engagement with the region was limited largely to Protestant missionary activities and to related educational efforts such as the establishment of the American University of Beirut. With the discovery of petroleum in Saudi Arabia just before World War II and with the onset of the Cold War in the late 1940s, however, the US began to assert its interests in the Middle East both formally and informally. American involvement in the region steadily grew over the ensuing decades due to the region’s emergence as a major player in the global economy, and it rose sharply beginning in the early 1980s to the point that the Middle East became, after 2001, the primary focus of American foreign policy and military engagement. As the historian of international relations Andrew Bacevich perceptively notes, “[f]rom the end of World War II to 1980, virtually no American soldiers were killed in action while serving in that region Since 1990, virtually no American soldiers have been killed in action anywhere except in the Greater Middle East.”
Despite Washington’s increasingly intensive involvement in the Middle East over the past few decades, however, most Americans still lack a basic understanding of the region’s history. Few are aware of the ways in which Islam shaped the Middle East or understand the role that European imperialists played in forming its modern political and diplomatic contours. Even government officials and legislators who oversee American policy toward the Middle East are frequently ignorant of rudimentary aspects of the region’s history and culture and fail to understand how those factors continue to influence contemporary identities and fault lines. As the journalist Jeff Stein noted in 2006, many congresspeople and policymakers—including the FBI’s chief of counterterrorism—could not summarize something as basic as the difference between Sunnism and Shi’ism at a time when American troops were desperately trying to impose order on a country, Iraq, that was riven by communal violence between those confessional groups. Considering the importance that Washington continues to assign to the region, Americans and Europeans—be they policymakers, legislators, or citizens—clearly need a substantially better understanding of the Middle East if they are to avoid the policy missteps of the recent past.
Approach
This textbook is designed to satisfy that need and to offer students and faculty an affordable yet comprehensive text. I have written it explicitly with introductory courses in mind and have organized and presented the material accordingly. To meet the needs of all students, it requires no background knowledge of Middle Eastern history. To facilitate readability and to emphasize the role of causality as a force in history, it largely adheres to a traditional, chronological approach to the subject. To align with most Middle Eastern history classes, it begins with the emergence of Islam in the seventh century CE and omits coverage of the region’s long, pre-Islamic history.
The book focuses predominantly on the political history of the Middle East. Its basic narrative consequently emphasizes the region’s political development, international relations, and the formulation and execution of state policies. It follows this approach for two reasons. First, for the entire period covered in this text, key political questions, Who should rule? How should the state be structured? What powers should the government have?, occupied the attention of the region’s peoples. In other words, the Middle East’s political history is significant because those who lived in the region and made its history believed it was important. Second, far from being antithetical to other ways of exploring the topic such as those that examine it through a social or cultural lens, a focus on political history can offer a solid starting point for inquiries based on those approaches. Specifically, this text provides students in courses organized along those lines with the foundational knowledge needed for them to contextualize, and thus better understand, the Middle East’s cultural and social evolution. This is not to suggest that this work exclusively centers on politics. While social, cultural, intellectual, and religious history may not organize the broader structure of the work, they nonetheless receive significant attention and are woven into the broader narrative in ways that relate them to the textbook’s focus on political developments.
This work also does not advance a strong unifying argument. At first look, this choice may seem to contradict the earlier claim that interpretation is the main focus of professional historians; in fact, it is consistent with that view. I have opted to produce a work that is—such as can be the case—neutral in tone because I believe strongly that the interpretive direction of a given class is, in the end, the purview not of the author of the adopted textbook but instead of the person teaching that course. By deemphasizing my interpretation of events, this textbook frees professors and teachers who use it to articulate their own themes. Please note, however, that this approach does not mean that this book eschews historical argumentation. Instead, it seeks to expose students to some of the more important historiographical debates of recent decades by addressing them in the overall narrative. For example, Chapter Two largely follows the traditional story of Muhammad, but also explores the very different interpretation of Islam’s origins that revisionist scholars such as Patricia Crone have developed.
While the text does not seek to advance a particular argument, it does develop two broad themes. First, it explores the part that faith, particularly the religion of Islam, played in shaping the political, social, cultural, and intellectual development of the region. Understanding religion’s influence can help us to address several key questions. What impact has Islam had on the nature of modern Middle Eastern states? To what degree are present-day gender relations in the region the product of Islam? Did religion advance or impede scientific and philosophic knowledge in the Muslim world?
To what extent did it shape political ideology and the structure of government in the region? Second, this book examines the nature of interactions between the Muslim Middle East and the West with the aim of helping students to develop a more sophisticated understanding of that relationship. It is a commonplace in many quarters today that the West and the Muslim world have been in a constant state of conflict going back to the Arab conquest of Syria and Egypt in the 630s and 640s and that the two cultures are today locked in an ongoing “Clash of Civilizations.” This work argues implicitly that such an interpretation is, at best, a gross oversimplification that ignores the many instances in which the two regions have enjoyed cooperative rather than conflicting relations.
Structure
This book is organized chronologically and divides the history of the Middle East into four periods: Islam and the Caliphate, The Ottoman Empire, the Western Intrusion, and Decolonization and America’s Bid for Mastery.
The first section focuses on the emergence of Islam and on the growth and transformation of the Arab-Muslim Caliphate. Chapter Two explores Muhammad (c. 570-632), the revolutionary political, social, and cultural message that he brought to Arabia, and the origins of the Muslim community. It also provides a very brief overview of Islam’s main tenets and characteristics. Chapter Three surveys the Arab Conquest and the formation of the Arab Empire from the death of the prophet through the high point of the Abbasid Caliphate. Chapter Four assesses intellectual trends during the Arab Empire and the ways in which Islam evolved, diversified, and took on many of its defining characteristics in the centuries following Muhammad. Chapter Five examines the gradual weakening of the Abbasid Caliphate, the growing political dominance in the Middle East of recently arrived Turkic people, the Crusades, and, finally, the Mongol destruction of the Abbasid Caliphate.
The second section assesses the Middle East under Ottoman rule. Chapter Six explores the growth of the empire, tracing the emergence of the Ottoman Dynasty, its rise to dominance, and the characteristics that made it successful. It also examines the similar Safavid Dynasty in Iran. Chapter Seven looks at how the Ottoman Empire evolved from the mid-sixteenth to the mid-eighteenth centuries. It also addresses the historical debate over whether changes in the empire are better understood as a case of decline or transformation. Chapter Eight focuses on two topics. First, it looks at the growing Western diplomatic and economic dominance of the Middle East from the 1760s through the 1870s. Second, it examines the bifurcated regional response to this challenge wherein some states, political players, and thinkers reacted by promoting policies designed to imitate the West while others instead argued that the region could best counter the European states through a revival of Islamic practices and values.
The third section reviews the period of European imperial domination from World War I through the late 1940s. Chapter Nine explores political changes in the Ottoman Empire in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, the emergence of Zionism, and the outbreak of the First World War. Chapter Ten examines the conclusion of the Great War and the subsequent diplomatic settlement that resulted in the European powers establishing control over nearly the entire region and imposing on it new frontiers and a Western-style state system. Chapter Eleven studies the efforts of Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Türkiye to maintain their independence during the Interwar Period and World War II, while Chapter Twelve surveys the experience of Egypt, Lebanon, Iraq, Transjordan, and Syria under Western control between the Paris Peace Conference and 1948. Chapter Thirteen traces the struggle for control of Palestine during the 1920s and 1930s, and the 1948 War that accompanied the establishment of Israel.
The final section of the book centers on decolonization and America’s effort to impose order on the region. Chapter Fourteen investigates the ways in which decolonization, the Cold War, nationalism, hostility among the Arab states, and the Arab-Israeli conflict shaped the development of the region from 1949 to 1967. Chapter Fifteen assesses the history of Saudi Arabia, Türkiye, and Iran between World War II and 1979, paying special attention to the coup against Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh (1882-1967) in 1953 and to the Iranian Revolution in the late 1970s.
Chapter Sixteen explores the transformative events of the 1970s, including the emergence of religious fundamentalism in the region, that culminated in the watershed year of 1979. Chapter Seventeen focuses on the dominant events and themes of the period from 1979 to 1990. It examines the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, the growing popularity of Islamism, the Intifada, and the Iran-Iraq War. Finally, Chapter Eighteen focuses on the period from 1990 to 2001. It reviews the Gulf War, the failed effort to negotiate a permanent settlement of the conflict between Palestinians and Israelis, the challenge that domestic jihadi movements posed to the region’s established regimes, and the growth of the transnational al-Qaeda terrorist organization.
Geographic Focus
Before we get into the history of the Middle East, we must define its territorial extent and understand how and why people came to view it as a distinct area. Of obvious Eurocentric origins, the term ‘Middle East’ is a comparatively new. Prior to the nineteenth century, Westerners had used the older terms ‘Near East’ or ‘Nearer East’ to refer to the European, African, and Asian territories then under the control of the Ottoman Empire. By the 1840s, however, some British colonial officials had become increasingly dissatisfied with those terms because they left out Iran and the Arabian side of the Persian Gulf. In response, policymakers in Britain’s India Office coined the term ‘Middle East’ in the 1850s to describe an enlarged understanding of the region that included those areas. Though the expression gained some traction in certain parts of the British government during the latter part of the century, it failed to catch on at that time. Ultimately, it was the American naval strategist and historian Alfred Thayer Mahan’s use of the term in his influential article “The Persian Gulf and International Relations” in 1902 that popularized it. Usage of the expression grew rapidly thereafter, culminating in the British government’s decision to designate the body it established to coordinate the defense of the region during World War II as the Middle East Command, a choice that cemented the term’s growing popular acceptance. By the1950s, as a result, it had fully replaced the term ‘Near East’ as a descriptor for the region.
This textbook delineates the region along lines very similar to those used by the Middle East Command during World War II. According to this definition, the region includes the territory encompassed by modern-day Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Oman, Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan, Israel, the Occupied Territories, Lebanon, Syria, and Türkiye. Note, however, that this text will not confine itself exclusively to the area encompassed by that definition. Not only will it discuss events in non-Middle Eastern places such as Western Europe and the United States, but it will also, as necessary, stretch the definition of the region to include territories in North Africa, Central Asia, and the Balkans that were, at times, culturally or politically integrated into the Middle East.
The region’s physical geography abounds in ironies. On the one hand, the Middle East is tremendously arid; Egypt and nearly all of the Arabian peninsula receive at best negligible rainfall, and much of the area cannot sustain agriculture. On the other, the great river valleys of the Tigris, Euphrates, and Nile have sustained large, complex, and highly productive agricultural societies since the dawn of civilization. Indeed, Mesopotamia, the land between the Tigris and Euphrates, was the place where people first practiced intensive agriculture, and Egypt and Mesopotamia remained the greatest wealth producing regions of western Eurasia until the late Middle Ages. Likewise, while the Middle East is famously devoid of basic natural resources such as timber and many ores, it today possesses oil deposits of enormous strategic, economic, and environmental significance.
Less ironic has been the region’s role in trade and cultural exchange. For millennia, the Middle East has been a literal crossroads. The Sinai Peninsula land bridge long served as a conduit for commerce between Southwest Asia and Egypt, while the easily crossed Bosporus and Dardanelles Straits firmly connected the region to Europe. The Middle East also brought disparate regions together via shipborne trade. The Suez Canal and earlier waterways linking the Red Sea to the Nile River connected the Mediterranean to East Africa and South Asia by ship, while the Euphrates River provided easy passage for goods moving between the ports of the Persian Gulf and Asia Minor and the Black Sea. As we shall see, this fortuitous location proved to be a mixed blessing for the region. Under the Arab Empire, the region became the central hub in a massive system of commerce that connected Africa, Europe, South Asia, Central Asia, and China. In more recent times, however, the Middle East’s oil reserves and strategic location drew the unwanted attention of European imperial powers such as Britain, Russia, and France, and later, the United States.
Culturally, the Middle East has always been very diverse. Today, most of the region’s people identify as Arab. Arabs predominate in Egypt, the Arabian Peninsula, Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, and Iraq. However, the Middle East also includes large numbers of people who identify as Turkish and Iranian, as well as smaller numbers of Kurds and Armenians. The region’s religious diversity matches its ethnic heterogeneity. While the people of the Middle East overwhelmingly practice Islam, its Muslim population is divided between the Sunni majority and a Shiʿi minority who are concentrated in Iraq, Iran, and the Persian Gulf region. The Middle East also has smaller numbers of Jews, Druze, and Alawites, as well as Maronite, Assyrian, and Coptic Christians.
This book is neither a religious history nor a Muslim Studies textbook, but it does touch upon faith, especially Islam, to a significant degree. As religious beliefs can be sensitive for observant students, I want to explain up front how this text will address the subject. Designed for higher-education classes, it adheres to academic rules regarding the use of evidence and argumentation. It thus cannot, and will not, weigh in on the validity of religious beliefs that are, by definition, articles of faith. As such, while it seeks to be respectful of peoples’ beliefs, this textbook leaves faith to the reader and treats all religions as human constructions.
