The Modern Middle East (13 page)

The end for Reza Shah came in early September 1941, by which time the Second World War was reaching into the Middle East. Throughout the 1930s, Iran had looked toward Germany and the United States as welcome Western powers that could help it modernize and, at the same time, could check the traditional imperial designs of Britain and Russia. For the isolationist United States, however, Iran was too remote and geopolitically insignificant to warrant sending more than a few financial and technical advisers.
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Germany, in contrast, flooded Iran with its advisers and technical experts in an effort to undermine British and Soviet influence there and, eventually, make inroads into India.
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Most of the German advisers held sensitive positions in the telephone and telegraph offices. Despite repeated assertions of neutrality by Iran at the beginning of the Second World War, a combined force of British and Soviet forces invaded the country on August 25, 1941, the ground having been prepared earlier by virulent anti-shah propaganda beamed into the country by the British Broadcasting Corporation. An attempt to resist the invaders quickly proved farcical. On September 16, the shah announced his abdication in favor of his twenty-two-year-old son. The British government exiled him first to the island of Mauritius and then to Johannesburg in South Africa, where he died on July 26, 1944. The Pahlavi dynasty he founded was to last for another thirty-five years.

Reza Shah left behind a legacy of absolutist, personalist rule. When he had taken power in 1921, Iran was just emerging from the chaos of the Constitutional Revolution (1905–11) and the crippling effects of the Great War. The country did have a somewhat functioning parliament and the embryonic beginnings of party politics. But political life was at a standstill, economic progress a distant dream, and the influence of foreign powers paramount. Reza Shah’s efforts, while not as revolutionary as those of Atatürk, brought some order to Iranian affairs, fostered a measure of economic growth, and changed the social landscape, albeit superficially and in many cases only temporarily. But his tenure saw little in the way of “political development,” however the concept may be defined, with Iranian politics no less arbitrary and chaotic when he left office than when he took it.
By the time of his forced exile, only three political institutions were left standing—the royal court, the bureaucracy, and the army. And, as the fateful summer days of 1941 bore witness, none could stem the tide of foreign invasion and imposition. At its core, the system was decayed and brittle, bound to fall with the slightest tilt in the balance of power. The son’s reign, it might be noted, fared no better historically than the father’s, ending unceremoniously thirty-five years later.

Ibn Saud’s Arabia

While Iran and Turkey were going through profound changes in their social and political landscapes, in the 1920s and 1930s, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia was just beginning to take shape. Here in the deserts of the Arabian peninsula, neglected by outsiders after the seat of the caliphate was moved from Medina, some of the most dramatic battles for national unification and political consolidation were fought in the late 1800s and early to mid-1900s. Although technically an Ottoman possession, the Arabian peninsula’s geography and climate had long buffered it from Istanbul’s penetrative reach, and the region had existed in a state of de facto semiautonomy. More importantly, by the late 1800s, Istanbul neither cared for nor was in a position to do much in Arabia; its concerns were limited to checking the incipient British presence there and, on occasion, arbitrarily imposing taxes on the local populace.
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The eruption of the Arab Revolt and the establishment of the Kingdom of Hijaz, however brief, highlighted the increasingly fragile hold of the Ottomans on the region. Within this context, in 1902 a young desert warrior named Abdel Aziz ibn Abd el-Rahman, later to be called Ibn Saud, rose from the Saud clan and, under the banner of his family, eventually established a unified kingdom in Arabia, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.

The Sauds were one of the prominent families in the Najd (central) region of Arabia who had long lived in the vicinity of Riyadh. Officially, the Saud “dynasty” dates back to 1726, when a certain Muhammad ibn Saud settled in and started ruling over the city of Daraʾiyah, northwest of Riyadh. In 1745 he met and was won over by the puritanical ideas of a traveling sheikh (literally, “teacher”) named Muhammad ibn Abdel Wahhab. Thus ensued a powerful alliance between the two Muhammads, with one in charge of military command and the other motivating the religio-ideological zeal of the Wahhabi movement. The Wahhabis were, more accurately, unitarians (Muwwahidun, from
wahid,
“one”) who sought to reverse what they perceived to be the corruption of Islam’s rigid monotheism by the increasing tendency among believers, particularly Shiʿites and Sufis, to
deify certain individuals. The Muwwahidun’s spread was fast and ferocious—resulting in the sacking of Karbala in 1802 and the occupation of Mecca and Medina in 1803 and 1805, respectively—but it was not irreversible. By the 1880s, the Saud clan was being eclipsed by another rising family, the Al Rashids, who in turn ran the Sauds out of the Riyadh area in 1890. Not until 1902 did a twenty-one-year-old member of the Saud family, Abdel Aziz, recapture Riyadh in a daring raid and from there go on to become the king of Arabia.

A detailed discussion of Abdel Aziz’s conquest of Arabia and his rise to power, while fascinating and rich in melodrama, is beyond the scope of this chapter.
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By all accounts, however, Abdel Aziz was a brave warrior who, through a series of military conquests, the spread of Wahhabi doctrine, and countless marriages, gradually brought all of Arabia under his control.
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Throughout, he was aided in his endeavors by the British, who provided him with a monthly stipend plus arms and ammunition, finding him a convenient and willing thorn in the side of the Ottoman sultan.
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Abdel Aziz encouraged Wahhabi nomads (bedouins) to settle into village communities and to farm. Calling themselves the Akhwan (brothers), they in turn became fanatical warriors for his cause. But before long the Akhwan had become too powerful and unruly, as well as opposed to such modern and supposedly corrupting innovations as the radio. More damaging to Abdel Aziz were their frequent raids on caravans and attacks on British interests in Iraq. In 1932, in one of his last battles, Abdel Aziz finally subdued and disbanded them.

Although most of Abdel Aziz’s early conquests were in the Najd region, by the early 1920s his long-awaited dream of dominance over the Hijaz became a reality as British support for the Hashemite Kingdom of Hijaz began wavering. In the year 1924 the city of Taʾif fell to his forces, and within a few months he was in control of Mecca. Medina and Jedda fell the following year. By 1926, Abdel Aziz had grown confident enough to declare himself the king of Hijaz and sultan of Najd, a title he formally changed on September 27, 1932, to king of Saudi Arabia. His kingdom was now complete.

While Ibn Saud was renowned for his generosity—often giving visitors gold, Arabian horses, or cars (at a time when cars were a rarity)—the late 1920s and early 1930s witnessed a dwindling of his resources, to the point that at times he could not even pay his staff’s salaries.
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In May 1933, however, the Saudi government signed an oil concession agreement with the Standard Oil of California Company, which changed its name first to the California Arabian Standard Oil Company and then to the Arabian
American Oil Company, Aramco. In many ways, the terms of this agreement, like those signed earlier between Western companies and other emerging Middle Eastern oil countries, laid the foundations for the later development of rentier economies (see chapter 10). On the basis of the agreement, after an initial loan of £50,000 in gold, the company would pay Saudi Arabia an annual rent of £5,000 in gold and a further loan of £15,000 in gold as soon as oil was discovered in commercial quantities.
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That discovery was made in 1935 in Dhahran, and commercial exploitation began in 1938. By 1939, the once-impoverished kingdom was receiving an annual royalty of about £200,000 in gold.
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British, Italian, German, and Japanese oil companies soon began jostling for the favor of Ibn Saud as well. But the old desert warrior was no modern statesman and knew little about state finances and budgetary matters. By the time of his death in 1953, the country was once again on the verge of bankruptcy. Saud, his successor, was hardly more successful in his endeavors, and not until the appointment of his brother, Crown Prince Faisal, as the finance minister did the country’s finances assume a semblance of order.

The importance of oil in shaping the contemporary political history of Saudi Arabia cannot be overemphasized. Throughout the 1940s and 1950s, Aramco’s influence inside the kingdom continued to grow, to the extent that in 1948 the U.S. Department of State became concerned about the company’s assumption of extraordinary powers in dealing with the Saudi monarch and his ministers.
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Dhahran, with its ever-increasing population of American oil workers, was also beginning to look more and more like an American city—the Bakersfield of Arabia—containing two townships that each housed about five thousand Americans and had almost everything American. But the company’s Arab workers, mostly having only recently been introduced to machinery of any sort, lived in a different world, underpaid and often maltreated by their American foremen.
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By one estimate, this resulted in a turnover rate of some 75 percent between 1945 and 1960.
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Nevertheless, their purchasing power increased, as did that of Ibn Saud.

By the time of Ibn Saud’s death in 1953, Saudi Arabia had finally attained internal security and political stability. Politically, however, little development occurred, as absolute power resided first with the kingdom’s founder and then with his less able son, Saud. In fact, the once austere and frugal reign of the dynasty’s founder had degenerated into corruption and vice near the end, with broken-down Cadillacs strewn across the desert by princes who didn’t know how to or didn’t care to have them repaired.

Saud’s reign brought few changes to the ways of the royal court. His rule coincided with a time of profound disquiet in the Middle East—the Nasserite interlude of the 1950s and 1960s—and through much of that period he effectively entrusted the running of the country to his brother, Crown Prince Faisal. The royal family eventually deposed Saud in November 1964. In the reign of Faisal (r. 1964–75) a concerted effort was made to bring about political institutionalization by creating a modern bureaucracy and introducing procedural formality into the affairs of the state. As the finance minister during his brother’s reign, Faisal had also put the dynasty’s financial house in order earlier. Only then, by the mid-1960s, could Saudi rule be considered to have become consolidated.
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The Saudi Arabia of today is unrecognizable compared to the one Ibn Saud left behind, for it has made economic and industrial leaps and bounds that even the most optimistic assessments could not have imagined. But Ibn Saud’s political legacy continues to loom large in the system he left behind. That the country’s very name reflects the family’s last name represents the degree to which the Saud family permeates the life of the country not only politically but also economically, culturally, and socially. Despite the increasing differentiation of political roles within the Saudi system and the steady involvement of professional technocrats and other qualified nonroyals at the higher levels of the bureaucracy, politics in Saudi Arabia remains essentially a family venture. The state that once belonged to one man, Abdel Aziz, now belongs to a whole family, the Saudis. Absolute family rule and all that goes with it—internal conflicts, palace intrigues, patrimonial politics, potential narrowing of the political base—are still very much features of Saudi Arabian politics.

The end of the Ottoman era brought with it a fundamental redrawing of the map of the Middle East, resulting in the creation of a host of new national entities. But the termination of Istanbul’s imperial control did not necessarily mean that indigenous, national forces could now assert themselves, at least not for another twenty years or so. Even before the Ottomans had died, Britain and France had begun a contest for the spoils of the Middle East, carving it up into respective protectorates with little understanding of or regard for what the locals wanted. Thus began the era of European imperialism in the Middle East. France established protectorates in the Levant and the Maghreb, going so far as to declare Algeria an integral part of its territory and seeking to assimilate its population into its culture. British protectorates were established in Palestine and Transjordan, and Britain maintained effective suzerainty over Egypt, Iraq, and the countries of the
Arabian peninsula. Under the direction and protection of Britain and France, new countries were given shape and new political systems were engineered. Eventually, again under the watchful eyes of the British, Palestine and the Kingdom of Hijaz ceased to exist. National identities and nationalist sentiments were not long to follow, as were sharp reactions to European machinations and dominance.

This chapter highlighted developments in Turkey, Iran, and Saudi Arabia in the formative decades of the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s. In each, the dismantling of the old order brought with it a new, radically different political system. In Iran and Turkey, the new order was composed of self-declared promoters of modernity and industrialization. In each country, the modernizers sought to destroy archaic social and cultural forces that they saw as inimical to progress toward modernity. In Turkey the changes went the furthest, with the state embarking on a concerted campaign to secularize society that included the introduction of a new alphabet and a new calendar. In Iran, however, partly because of the limits of his own agendas—some might say the limits of his intellectual horizon—and the continued powers of the conservative clergy, Reza Shah’s “reforms” were not as far-reaching, though still substantial and significant.