The Shaping of the Modern Middle East (17 page)

There were some individuals, however, more significant for the future than for their own contemporaries, who had begun to think in terms of an Arab national revival. Just as pan-Slavism in the Russian Empire had evoked a pan-Turkish response among the Turkic subject peoples, so pan-Turkism, transplanted from the Russian to the Ottoman Empire, helped arouse an Arab national feeling among those Ottomans who were Muslim but not Turkish. Political Arabism was born about the turn of the century and was fostered chiefly by Syrians, especially by Syrian emigrants to khedivial Egypt such as `Abd al-Rahman al-Kawakibi (1849-1902) and Muhammad Rashid Rida (1865-1935). The former appears to have been first to come out openly against the Turks and the Ottoman sultan and to demand an Arab state with an Arab caliph.

After 1918, Arab resentment was directed against less ambiguous and more rewarding enemies-not the Turks and their caliph, but imperialism and Zionism, easily identified with such older and more familiar entities as the Christians and the Jews. Deprived of their old religious and dynastic loyalties, living in artificial political units created by the conquerors, subject to the rule of alien and infidel masters, the Arabs could find little satisfaction in patriotism and at that time showed little interest in liberalism or socialism of the kind that flourished in India and Southeast Asia. Instead, they turned to an ethnic nationalism of central European type, which in the 1930s drew new inspiration from the central European fountainhead. At first, the Egyptians stood aloof from this movement and were taunted with their "pharaonism." Under the military regime, the Egyptians, too, threw in their lot with Arabism, so thoroughly that the very name of Egypt was for a while wiped off the map, a result that none of the many foreign invaders and oppressors of Egypt had ever been able to achieve.

The word used to express the notion of ethnic nationalism is qawmiyya, an abstract noun formed from gawm, meaning, in classical Arabic, people, followers, group, or tribe, especially the group of kinsfolk mobilized for mutual support. It is in this last sense that the word is used of the North African tribal levies called goum, a dialectal pronunciation of the same word. Like watan, qawmiyya is of Arabic etymology, but was first used in its modern political sense in Turkish, the first Muslim language to require and coin new words for new, Western ideas. In its Turkish form, kavmiyet, the word occurs in the writings of the Young Ottomans as a term for ethnic and local-literally, tribal-nationalities or nationalisms, which conflict with the larger loyalties of the Ottoman sultanate and Islam. Thus in 1870, Ali Suavi criticized a muddleheaded se miofficial Ottoman proposal that the Sublime Porte should, like Italy and Prussia, take up the cause of nationality (kavmiyet) and unite all the Muslims. Ali Suavi rightly pointed out that nationality in Europe meant something entirely different: "Among us there is no problem of nationality. Problems of nationality would cause our ruin. The unification of the Muslims could at most be a question of religion, not a question of nationality."' Two years later, Namik Kemal wrote an eloquent plea for harmony and unity between the different peoples (kavim) making up the Ottoman Empire, in a common patriotism to their Ottoman vatan. He insisted that race and religion were secondary to the major facts of country and citizenship and could best be safeguarded by loyalty to the liberal and tolerant Ottoman state, rather than by breaking it into squabbling and nonviable ethnic fragments.'

Namik Kemal was, of course, concerned chiefly about the Christian Balkan peoples and not about the Turks themselves, who were still far from thinking in ethnic or national terms. His appeal was in vain. Nationalism spread rapidly among the Ottoman Christians and was communicated by them to the Muslims-Albanians, Arabs, and even the Turks themselves. The Albanian national rising in 1912 provoked a passionate rejection from the Muslim patriot, antinationalist poet Mehmet Akif, himself of Albanian extraction:

Your nationality ]milliyet] was Islam ... what is this tribalism ]kavmiyet]?

Is the Arab any better than the Turk, the Laz than the Cherkes or the Kurd,

The Persian than the Chinese? In what?

Could Islam be broken up into component parts? What is happening?

The Prophet himself cursed the idea of tribalism!

The Turk cannot live without the Arab. Who says he can, is mad.

For the Arab, the Turk is his right eye and his right hand.

Let the Albanians be a warning to you

What confused policy is this, what evil cause?

Hear this from me, who am myself an Albanian....

I say no more-alas my afflicted country... 10

Mehmet Akif was fighting a lost cause. He realized this himself when after a brief association with the Kemalists in Anatolia, during which he wrote the poem that became the national anthem of the Turkish republic, he withdrew to voluntary exile in Cairo. The cause of nationalism spread, ultimately involving all the peoples of the Middle East.

In Iran, a country defined by language, territory, and statehood, the identification of nationalism with a kind of Muslim patriotism was fairly easy. The Iranians are devoutly Islamic, but they are also Shiite and thus marked off from almost all their neighbors. The former Soviet Azerbaijan is also Shiite, but is a lost province of Iran. Iraq has a Shiite majority, but for centuries has been subject to Sunni domination. The historic personality of the modern Iranian state, founded by the Safavid dynasty at the beginning of the sixteenth century, has been shaped by its self-perception as a bastion of Shia Islam surrounded by hostile Sunni powers based in the Ottoman lands, in Central Asia, and in India.

Iran is also divided from its neighbors by language. Apart from Tadjikistan and Afghanistan, where a form of Persian known as Dari is one of the country's two official languages, Iran is surrounded by speakers of Arabic and a number of Turkic and Indic languages. And even the Afghans and Tadjiks are mostly Sunni.

In these circumstances, it was natural that a strong sense of identity and loyalty should develop based on the Shiite faith, the Persian language and culture, and the ancient and historic land of Iran. The relative importance of these and the competing claims of communalism, nationalism, and patriotism have formed a major theme of Iranian debate in this century. The theme of patriotism, of identity based on the land of Iran, has received considerable encouragement in recent decades from the restoration of ancient monuments, the recovery and translation of long-forgotten ancient texts, and the addition of a new dimension to Persian pride and selfawareness. This was encouraged as a matter of policy by the late shah, who, while not entirely neglecting the religious aspect, tried to inculcate in his people a sense of Iranian destiny, of an enduring, unchanging Iran surviving through successive changes of religion and culture and reasserting itself after each foreign invasion. In the shah's version of patriotism, the centralizing and leading role of the monarchy naturally occupied a position of some importance.

In this perspective, the Arab Islamic invasion of the seventh century was not fundamentally different from the earlier conquest by Alexander or the later conquest by the Mongols: the imposition of an alien domination and culture. This was, of course, anathema to religious fundamentalists, who saw in the Islamic conquest the providential opening of Iran to the true faith and who denounced the cult of antiquity as a return to paganism.

In the Soviet Middle East, nationalism had a more checkered career. After the Russian Revolution, national regimes of various political complexions appeared in Central Asia and Transcaucasia. These all were overcome by the Red Army, and the authority of Moscow was restored. Thereafter, nationalism of all forms was considered an offense. From time to time, reports appeared that such offenders had been detected and punished. The most striking case occurred in 1938, when Feyzullah Khojayev, first minister of the Uzbek Republic, and Akmal Ikramov, secretary-general of the Uzbek Communist party, were charged as nationalists and British spies and were shot. This association of offenses, which may seem strange farther south, was for long commonplace in the Soviet Middle East. Soviet spokesmen and their local proteges devoted considerable energy to denouncing the three cardinal errors of pan-Turkism, pan- Iranism, and pan-Islamism. The first would have linked the Turkicspeaking republics with one another and with Turkey; the second would have created a bond between Persian speakers in Tadjikistan and those in Afghanistan and Iran; the third, and in Soviet eyes the most dangerous, would have linked all the Muslim peoples of the Soviet Union with the great world of Islam beyond the frontier and opened them to dangerous and uncontrollable influences. The weakening of Soviet central power and the effective breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991 gave free play to these influences, and the six republics with Muslim majorities now face major choices.

Another brand of nationalism, strikingly different from the Muslim nationalisms in some respects but surprisingly similar in others, is Jewish nationalism, one of the elements contributing to the growth of political Zionism. The corporate self-awareness of the Jews, like that of the Arabs, is as old as their corporate existence. Like that of the Arabs, it passed through tribal, ethnic, and cultural phases to achieve its most characteristic and most enduring form in religion.

Jewish nationalism began in central and eastern Europe, where the unemancipated, unassimilated Jewish communities formed an entity with all the current criteria of nationhood but two-the possession of a national language and the occupation of a national territory. The Hebrew renascence and the Zionist movement aimed at supplying these two deficiencies. Some substitutes were suggested; the east European Jews did in fact have a language of their own-an archaic Franconian dialect, now known as Yiddish-which they had retained after their medieval migration from the Germanic to the Slavonic lands and which had developed into a rich and flexible language with a remarkable literature. For a while, a kind of Yiddish cultural nationalism found some support, particularly on the left, for the idea of a Jewish secular and popular culture based on the language of the masses. This program, like the so-called Territorialist movement, which accepted the idea of a national home but wanted to have it in some place more convenient and less troublesome than Palestine, failed to win support among the Jewish masses, to whom their ideas seemed pointless and irrelevant. In the early nineteenth century, the nationalist fervor of the Germans, Hungarians, and Poles also involved their Jewish minorities, many of whom felt, fought, and died as Germans, Hungarians, and Poles, for the German, Hungarian, or Polish cause. But the ethnic and often chauvinistic nationalism of these peoples made it difficult for them to accept the Jews as part of the nation, and during the late nineteenth century a sharp cleavage appeared among secularized and national-minded Jews in central and eastern Europe, between those who continued the struggle for acceptance in the reluctant nation and those who turned away to the idea of a separate Jewish nation in its own homeland-the idea, in a word, of Zionism. For traditional religious Jews, nationalism of any kind was an impiety. For the Jews of the democratic West, the question hardly arose, and Zionism was, or seemed to be, largely a philanthropic matter. In central and eastern Europe, the modernized Jews, faced with an intolerable situation, were offered a choice between two solutions: assimiliation into the nation as individuals or assimilation into nationhood as a community. The rise of militant antiSemitism removed the first choice and vastly increased the range and force of the Zionist appeal.

The physical destruction of most of the Jews of continental Europe by the Nazis and their accomplices, and the limited choices available to the survivors, generated a powerful, and in the event irresistible, movement for the creation of a Jewish homeland and a Jewish state. The Christian world, moved by feelings of guilt and compassion, offered little resistance and some support. The Palestinians and their allies, discredited in Western eyes by their wartime record of sympathy for the Axis and hostility to the Allies, failed, first politically and then militarily, in their attempts to prevent the establishment of this state. The attempt and its failure had tragic consequences for the Palestinian people.

In the brutal aftermath of the Second World War and amid the liquidation of old empires and the creation of a new one, some old frontiers were redrawn, some new ones were created, and many millions of people fled or were driven from their homes in eastern Europe, Asia, and Africa. The problem of the Palestinian refugees was by no means the largest of these, but it proved the most enduring and the most bitter. The success of the Palestinians in preserving their identity is even more remarkable in that Palestine as a separate political entity known by that name lasted for only thirty years, from the establishment to the end of the British mandate, and the refugees for the most part lived among peoples of the same language, religion, and culture. In all Arab countries except Jordan, citizenship was refused to Palestinian refugees. Their descendants, even to the third and fourth generations, remained aliens, deprived of political rights and liable to expulsion. All this further embittered the already difficult problem of relations between the new Jewish state and its Arab neighbors, and for a long time a solution seemed beyond the range of possibility.

In 1948 and 1949, the newborn Jewish state narrowly survived its first ordeal by battle. Several more Arab-Israeli wars were fought before the first major step was taken toward peace, with the signature of the Israeli-Egyptian peace treaty in 1979, more than thirty years after the foundation of the state. In the meantime, despite the anomalies of its external relations, Israel was becoming internally more and more like a normal country, and Zionism, at least for its citizens, was gradually being transformed into an Israeli patriotism.