The Shaping of the Modern Middle East (25 page)

The withdrawal of France from the Middle East in the aftermath of the Second World War thus created something of a crisis in Lebanese politics. The pressure of pan-Arabism inside Lebanon became very powerful, more so indeed than in the neighboring states, since the Lebanese Muslims, mistrusting the motives that had led to the creation of a separate Lebanon, were not bound to their country even by the same ties of sentiment as their coreligionists in Syria, Egypt, or Iraq. Among most of the Christians, many of the Shiites and Druzes, and even some of the Sunni Muslims, the sense of a separate Lebanese identity was, however, strong, and those of their leaders who believed that Lebanese survival depended on the West looked for a new guarantor to replace the vanished French. To many it seemed that the United States, the greatest power of the Christian West, with its own past record of cultural and educational work in Lebanon and its own current political, military, and economic interests in the area, was best fitted to take over the French role as protector of the Christians and patron of Lebanon. It took several years before the Lebanese and others came to realize that the United States was not prepared to accept this role.

During the eighteenth century, new autonomous regimes, mostly under local dynastic rulers, developed in many parts of the Arabian peninsula. In principle, the Ottomans claimed suzerainty over the whole of it. In practice, they enforced their suzerainty and maintained garrisons only in the Hijaz, containing the holy cities of Mecca and Medina, and-somewhat intermittently-in the Yemen, controlling the southern exit of the Red Sea and the maritime route to Asia. Even in these, they found it simpler to leave most internal matters to local dynasts, reserving only defense and foreign relations for themselves. Elsewhere in Arabia, they were content with an often purely nominal recognition of suzerainty. The rise of the European, notably the British, maritime empires in the East, coinciding with the precipitous decline of Ottoman power, created a favorable situation for the rise of local independence.

The first, and by far the best known, of those who profited from this opportunity were the rulers of the house of Saud, who twice, by conquest and diplomacy, extended their small principality in Najd to cover the greater part of central and northern Arabia. The first time, in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries when the Saudis' expansion was accompanied and indeed accelerated by the rise and spread of the Wahhabi doctrine, they even dared to threaten and sometimes attack the Ottoman provinces of Syria and Iraq. But at that time, the Ottoman Empire, though greatly weakened, was still able to respond to such challenges, and the first Wahhabi/Saudi kingdom was crushed. The Saudis' second attempt began in the last years of the Ottoman Empire and continued, initially with some British help, after its demise. The conquest of the Hijaz, including the holy cities of Mecca and Medina in 1925, gave the Saudis immense religious prestige in the world of Islam. From the 1930s, the discovery and exploitation of oil in the eastern provinces, principally by American companies, brought them vast and steadily increasing wealth. The proclamation of the kingdom and its recognition and support by the Western powers confirmed the Saudis' status in the world.

Another Arabian principality dating back at least to the eighteenth century is Kuwait, where the ruling house of Sabah assumed power in about 1756. Strategically situated between the Ottoman, Persian, and later also the British empires, the Kuwaitis were often able to achieve a high level of prosperity and, by astutely maneuvering between their Ottoman suzerains and their British protectors, a considerable measure of independence. This was formalized in 1961. Like the Saudi kingdom, the Kuwaiti principality was enormously enriched by the discovery and exploitation of oil. Far more than the Saudi kingdom, the small principality was often threatened by larger and more powerful neighbors, to which the new wealth offered new temptations.

In addition to the Saudi and Kuwaiti rulers, other Bedouin and coastal principalities in eastern Arabia followed the path of autonomy and independence, sudden wealth, and endangerment. They include the two states of Qatar and Bahrein, the latter long claimed by Iran; the sultanate of Muscat and Oman; and the seven smaller sheikhdoms of eastern Arabia, which in 1971 combined to form the United (more accurately, federated) Arab Emirates. Some of these were involved in long-drawn-out disputes with the Saudis over an undemarcated frontier and the oil beneath it.

Another region where parts of the Arab world enjoyed some measure of autonomy or even independence was North Africa. This autonomy could, however, only in a very limited sense be described as Arab. The Ottoman conquest of Egypt in 1517 was followed by a rapid extension of Turkish domination across North Africa, reaching ultimately as far as-but not beyond-the frontier of Morocco. This Turkish expansion was in part a response to local appeals for help, in part a consequence of the great struggle between the Ottoman and Spanish rulers for the control of the Mediterranean.

Egypt was incorporated in the Ottoman system and governed by an Ottoman provincial administration from which it only gradually and subsequently emerged. Morocco remained an independent mon archy, Arabic by language and culture, entirely outside the Ottoman world. In the remaining countries, now comprising Libya, Tunisia, and Algeria, a variety of local rulers maintained autonomous regimes under Ottoman suzerainty. Unlike the princes of Arabia, however, they were Turks, not Arabs. Their armies and administrators were Turks or Turkicized North Africans, and even their language of government remained Turkish for a very long time. The extensive correspondence with North African rulers, preserved in the archives of the various European countries that had dealings with them, is for the most part in Turkish. Only in Morocco, and in the more remote mountain and desert areas where tribal independence survived, was Arabic still used as a language of government and diplomacy.

The countries of the Fertile Crescent-the old centers of Arab civilization and identity, the seat of the great Arab caliphates of Damascus and Baghdad-were fully incorporated into the ottoman Empire. They were divided into Ottoman provinces, governed by Ottoman administrators, garrisoned by Ottoman troops, and-with some rare exceptions-controlled directly from Istanbul. Some weakening of the bonds that tied these provinces to the imperial capital during the eighteenth century was remedied in the nineteenth century when new weaponry and new means of communication gave the central government far more effective means of control over even its more distant provinces. Ottoman control of the Fertile Crescent ended only with the Ottoman Empire itself.

The Ottomans, who had ruled much of the Middle East for four centuries or more, had erected a political structure that endured and a political system that worked. They had also created a political culture, which was well understood and in which each knew his powers and possibilities, his duties, and his limits. The Ottoman system had fallen on bad times, but despite many difficulties, it was still functioning and was still accepted probably by most of the population. In its last decades, the Ottoman order had begun to show signs of recovery, even of improvement. This development was, however, deflected and terminated by the Ottoman entry into the First World War and the resulting end of the empire-the collapse of the Ottoman state and the fragmentation of its territories.

As the smoke of battle and the mists of diplomacy cleared from the Middle Eastern scene in the years following the end of the First World War, it became apparent that great changes had taken place and new forces had arisen. In the long run, they made the position of the Western powers in the area untenable. At first, however, their position seemed very strong. The Ottoman Empire had gone, and the new Turkish republic, after successfully defending the Turkish homeland, renounced all concern in the Arab lands to the south. The Austrian, German, and Russian empires, all of which in the past had been redoubtable rivals of the West, were, for the time being, out of the game. Italy was still too weak and disunited to play any major part, thus leaving a clear field to Britain and France.

In the partition of the Ottoman Empire after the First World War, the Arab provinces were divided between the British and French empires and administered through mandates, a system ostensibly devised to prepare these countries for independence under the guidance of the mandatary powers. The eastern arm of the Fertile Crescent, consisting of the Ottoman vilayets of Mosul, Baghdad, and Basra, was constituted a kingdom and given the name Iraq, a medieval term for the central and southern areas of the country. Its eastern frontier with Iran coincided with the former eastern frontier of the Ottoman Empire, which had finally been agreed by the Turks and the Iranians shortly before the outbreak of war. Its other frontiers were determined and, where necessary, negotiated by the British. The western arm of the Fertile Crescent was divided between two mandates: one in the north, named Syria and allocated to France, and the other in the south, named Palestine and allocated to Britain. Both names were Greco-Roman, part of the Western classical tradition. They were brought by the new rulers from Europe, where they were in common use, to the Middle East, where they were not.

Both mandatary powers found it expedient to subdivide the areas under their rule. In the north, the French, after some experiments, established the separate state of Lebanon and retained the name Syria for the remainder. In the south, the British created a separate state east of the Jordan River, which they named Trans-Jordan, and retained the name Palestine for the remaining territory west of the river. Despite some changes in nomenclature, Anglo-French domination remained secure throughout the interwar period and was maintained, with some difficulties, during the Second World War. These countries achieved nationhood and, in a sense, statehood during the period of Anglo-French domination; they won their independence when that domination was decisively ended in the aftermath of the Second World War.

Three major changes in the region helped bring about this result. One was economic, the discovery and development of oil. First in Iran, then in Iraq, and later in Arabia, great new oil fields were discovered and developed. The Middle East soon became one of the major oil-producing regions of the world.

This in turn brought a major change in the strategic significance of the region, which was no longer, as previously, of interest mainly for the transit routes between Europe and further Asia, but became a major asset in its own right, its value increasing steadily with the rise of its oil output and the growing dependence of the advanced world, in war and in peace, on oil supplies. Its strategic importance was again vastly increased with the emergence of a new challenge to Western supremacy, first from fascist Italy and then, of far greater importance, from Nazi Germany. This challenge culminated in the events of the Second World War, of which some of the most decisive battles were fought on Middle Eastern soil. Allied and Axis propagandists competed with each other in flattering nationalist selfesteem and encouraging nationalist aspirations. Axis and Allied armies camped and fought on Middle Eastern soil, employing thousands of local artisans and laborers and bringing with them the economic stresses and dislocations that are inseparable from modern war. For the first time, local political controversy ceased to be exclusively concerned with political matters and dealt in such topics as shortages, high prices, and other indications of an economy under strain.

The war brought two important measures of regional unification, one economic and the other political. The Middle East Supply Centre, at first a British and then an Anglo-American organization, attempted with marked success to integrate the economies of the Middle Eastern countries into a planned whole. The Arab League, founded in 1944, grouped all the Arab sovereign states of the region for the purpose of common political objectives.

These economic and strategic changes greatly accelerated the major political development of the period: the rise of nationalism and the finally irresistible demand for sovereign independence. Already by 1922 and 1923, outbreaks of violence in almost all the Arab countries made it clear that a simple policy of direct rule, as applied in the colonial empires in Asia and Africa, would not work, and a new imperial policy emerged, the main tenor of which was the creation of new Arab states and the concession to them of a degree of independence, coupled with the signing of treaties safeguarding the privileged position of the imperial powers and the right to maintain armed forces on their territories.

On the whole, this policy was a failure. The concessions made to nationalist demands were always too late and too small to satisfy. They were received as expressions of weakness rather than of goodwill, and a situation arose in which nationalist politics were conducted as a competition in extremism, making it impossible for local leaders to accept anything less than their maximum demands. When treaties were achieved, they were signed either with unrepresentative governments without the support of the politically active classes or under the pressure of an urgent external threat-as, for example, the Anglo-Egyptian Treaty of 1936, signed in the shadow of the Italian invasion of Ethiopia.

The move toward granting independence was initiated by Great Britain in the early 1930s, with the recognition of the independence of Iraq in 1932 and of Egypt in 1936. In both, Great Britain maintained a military presence and imposed a subordinate relationship, euphemistically termed an alliance. France tried to make a similar arrangement with Syria and Lebanon, but with less success, and was obliged to relinquish the mandate under British pressure in the course of the Second World War.

The sole remaining mandate, that held by Britain over Palestine, was relinquished in two stages: first the British recognition of the independence of Trans-Jordan, later renamed the Hashimite Kingdom of Jordan, and the later British abandonment of what was left of the Palestine mandate in 1948. The mandate had been received from the defunct League of Nations, and it was returned to the newly established United Nations, which, by a vote of the General Assembly, agreed to divide the remaining mandated territory into three entities: a Jewish state, an Arab state, and a corpus separatum, the city of Jerusalem. The partition resolution was accepted by the Jewish leadership and rejected by the Palestinian Arab leadership and the neighboring Arab states.