The peoples of the Middle East (the chiefly Muslim societies of North Africa and western Asia), were influenced by nationalism between 1914 and 1945. While North Africans, like sub-Saharan Africans and Southeast Asians, experienced Western colonial rule, Arabs in much of western Asia had been controlled for five hundred years by the Ottoman Turks, and under their rule the region was stagnating economically by the 1800s. European influence intensified after World War I, when the Ottoman colonies in Western Asia were transferred to Britain and France, sparking
nationalist resentment among the western Asian Arabs
nationalist resentment among the western Asian Arabs
The Ottoman Territories
World War I was a watershed for Middle Eastern societies because it dismantled the region's major state, the Turkish-dominated Ottoman Empire, and reshaped Arab politics. In the war the Turks favored their longtime ally Germany because it shared their hatred of Russia, which had long hoped to control the narrow body of water that bisected the Ottoman capital city, Istanbul (formerly Constantinople), and provided access between the Black and Mediterranean Seas. The Ottoman Turks also dreamed of liberating Russian-controlled lands in the Caucasus and Central Asia that were inhabited largely by Turkish-speaking peoples. However, the Ottomans and their European allies lost the war, and the resulting breakup of the Ottoman Empire led to the emergence of a new, very different Turkish nation.
The Fall of the Ottoman Empire
The hardships during World War I spurred Arab nationalism against Ottoman rule. Unrest in Syria brought on fierce Ottoman repression, as the Ottomans sent nationalist dissidents into exile and hanged others for treason. The most serious challenge to Ottoman rule came in Arabia, where Sharif Hussein ibn Ali (1856-1931), the Arab ruler of the Hejaz, the western Arabia region that included the Muslim holy cities of Mecca and Medina, shifted his loyalties in the war from the Ottomans to the British, who promised to support independence for the Arabs in Ottoman territory. In 1916, at British urging, Sharif Hussein launched an Arab revolt against the Turks. British officers, including the flamboyant Lt. T. E. Lawrence (famous as "Lawrence of Arabia"), advised Sharif Hussein's tribal forces, which attacked Ottoman bases and communications. The British invaded and occupied southern Iraq, an Ottoman province, which had a strategic position between Arabia, Syria, and Iran and was thought to have oil.
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The end of World War I brought crushed dreams and turmoil to the Middle East. The Arab nationalists such as Sharif Hussein did not know that during the war the eventually victorious European Allies—Britain, France, and Russia—had made secret agreements for dismantling the Ottoman Empire that ignored Arab interests. The czarist Russians had planned after the war to incorporate Istanbul and nearby territories into their empire while Britain and France agreed to partition the Ottoman provinces in western Asia between them, despite British promises to Sharif Hussein about Arab independence. The Russian plans had to be modified after the Communists took power in Russia in 1917 and signed a peace treaty with Germany that allowed the Caucasus region, once under Ottoman rule but occupied by the Russians in the 1800s, to be returned to Germany's Ottoman ally. When the war ended, British troops occupied much of Iraq and Palestine, and French troops controlled the Syrian coast.
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World War I caused great suffering to diverse Ottoman societies. The Caucasus peoples, especially the Christian Armenians, desired independence. Suspecting them of aiding Russia, the Turks turned on the Armenians living in eastern Anatolia. More than a million Armenians were deported, chiefly to Syria and Iraq, while perhaps another million died of thirst, starvation, or systematic slaughter by the Ottoman army. These sufferings created a permanent Turkish-Armenian hostility. After the war the Russians regained control of the Caucasus, including Armenia. In a different context, hunger and disease also affected millions of Arabs in the Ottoman Empire, with 200,000 dying in Syria alone during the war.
The Versailles treaty that ended World War I brought major political change, including dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire. Turkey's neighbors—the Greeks, Italians, and Armenians—made claims on Anatolia and adjacent islands, and European Zionists asked for a Jewish national home in Palestine. The Allies ended Ottoman control of Arab territories and gave autonomy and the option of eventual independence to the Kurds, a Sunni Muslim people, distinct from both Arabs and Turks, who inhabited a large, mountainous region of Western Asia and the dominant ethnic group in southeast Turkey. Both Syria and Iraq declared their independence from the Ottoman empire. However, the League of Nations, dominated by Western countries, awarded France control over Syria and Lebanon, and Britain control over Iraq, Palestine, and Transjordan (today Jordan), under what the League called mandates. In theory mandates were less onerous for local people than colonies because they allowed for administrative assistance for a limited time.
Instead of mandates, which they viewed as a new form of colonialism, Arabs often wanted to build their own governments and shape new social systems. Arab nationalists in Syria proposed a democratic government, and some favored granting women the vote, a daring idea. Ignoring Syrian Arab views, French forces quickly occupied Syria and, after facing armed but futile resistance, exiled nationalist leaders. The Allies also ignored the desire of the Kurdish people for their own nation. Despite British proposals for such a change, the Kurds remained divided between Turkey, Persia (Iran), Iraq, and Syria, thus becoming the world's largest ethnic group without their own state.
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A New Turkey
While all the former Ottoman territories experienced change after World War I, the heart of the empire, Turkey, saw the most revolutionary changes. The disastrous defeat in the war and the humiliating agreements that followed left the Turks helpless and bitter, as well as facing a Greek invasion and Arab secession. But under the leadership of the daring war hero and ardent nationalist later known as Kemal Ataturk (kuh-MAHL AT-uh-turk) (1881-1938), the Turks enjoyed a spectacular resurgence. In 1919 Ataturk began mobilizing military forces in eastern Anatolia into a revolutionary organization to oppose the Ottoman sultan, who was discredited by defeats, and to restore dignity to the Turks. Ataturk accepted the loss of Arab lands but wanted to preserve the Turkish majority areas and the eastern Anatolia districts inhabited chiefly by Kurds.
After establishing a rival Turkish government in the central Anatolia city of Ankara, Ataturk led his forces in fighting both the sultan's government in Istanbul and the foreign occupiers, especially the Greek forces that had moved deep into Anatolia. He finally pushed the Greeks back to the Aegean Sea, and eventually Turkey and Greece agreed to a population transfer in which many Greeks living in Turkish territory moved to Greece and the Turks dwelling in Greek lands moved to Turkey. In 1922 Ataturk deposed the Ottoman sultan and set up a republic with himself as president.
Ataturk was a controversial figure among Turks. He violated Muslim customs by pursuing sexual promiscuity and drinking heavily in public; devout Muslims also suspected his morality because of his agnostic stance. In addition, being a Turkish nationalist who glorified the pre-Islamic Turkish past Ataturk dismissed Islamic culture as an inferior mix of age-old mentalities. He favored modernization, announcing that "our eyes are turned westward. We shall transplant Western institutions to Asiatic soil. We wish to be a modern nation with our mind open, and yet to remain ourselves.” Ataturk claimed that secularization and the emancipation of women were the Turkish tradition.
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In the 1920s these ideas were put in action through a dazzling series of reforms that challenged Muslim traditions. They included revamping the legal system along Western lines, replacing Arabic-based script with a Western alphabet, prohibiting polygamy, and granting women equal rights in divorce, child custody, and inheritance. Ataturk abolished Islamic religious schools and courts, and he removed reference to Islam as the state religion from the constitution. He also pushed Western-style clothing and banned the brimless hats popular with Muslim men, such as the fez, turban, and skullcap. His government resembled a parliamentary democracy, but he exercised near dictatorial power and alienated the Kurdish minority by suppressing their language and culture. Ataturk left deeply changed nation, but many of the reforms he introduced were never adopted in the villages, where Islam remained strong influence. However, Ataturk's secular approach remained popular with Turkish nationalists, including n-military officers, influencing Turkish politics today.
Modern Iran, Egypt and Iraq
During this era major changes also occurred in the other major Middle Eastern countries. Like Turkey, Persia, later known as Iran, moved toward modernization, though with fewer permenant changes, and Egyptians and Iraqis turned toward nationalism in response to British attempts to maintain power in those countries.
Modernizing Iran
Before World War I, when Britain and Russia exercised influence, Persian independence had been limited. The end of the war left Britain with the power to impose a protectorate over Persia under which the Persian government was maintained but was forced to accept British loans, financial controls, advisers, and military forces. Growing Persian opposition prompted the British to withdraw their troops in 1919 and seek a new approach. Britain supported General Reza Khan (REE-za kahn) (1877-1944), a soldier from a modest background who wanted to end the corrupt, ineffective royal dynasty, installed in 1794, establish a secular republic, and address economic underdevelopment. In 1921 Reza Khan took control of the government with British backing, ending the monarchy. Reza Khan was supported by secular Shi'ites, who had long struggled for a more democratic and open society. In 1924 an influential local magazine praised Reza Khan for freeing the country from having a king and expressed the hope that soon it would escape the domination of the powerful Shi'ite clergy. But in 1925, at the urging of Shiite clerics, Reza Khan abandoned the republican government and formed the Pahlavi (PAH-lah-vee) dynasty, with himself as king (known in Persia as a shah).
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Although restoring a royal government, Reza Khan, like Ataturk in Turkey, set his country on a path toward modernization and, in 1935, renamed his nation Iran, a symbolic break with the past. The shah created a large national army through conscription, built railroads and roads, and established government factories to produce textiles, sugar, cement, and steel. He spurred the economy by taking control over the oil industry, an act that improved Iran's political standing in the world. The regime also made social changes that outraged Muslin? conservatives, such as introducing a Western law code and encouraging men to wear Western hats and clothes. It also outlawed the veiling of women in public, which had the unintended effect of forcing women who wanted to wear the veil to stay home. But while the modernists, merchants, and middle class supported Reza Khan's policies, there was little improvement for poor Iranians, who mostly despised the government. Reza Khan expanded the landlord class at peasant expense.
The shah admired Ataturk's reforms but, lacking Ataturk's charisma and education, had less success in transforming Iran.
During World War II Reza Shah favored Germany. This position prompted an Anglo-Russian occupation of Iran, which the Allies needed as a supply route. Humiliated by the foreign intervention, Reza Shah abdicated in favor of his twenty-two year-old son, Muhammad Reza Pahlavi (REH-zah PAH-lahvee) (1919-1980), and went into exile. The son ruled until 1979.
Egypt
British control of Egypt and Iraq and Arab resistance to that control fostered nationalist feeling in those countries. In Egypt during World War I the British had imposed martial law and drafted peasants to build roads and railroads and dig trenches in war zones. Egyptians resented these policies and the thousands of British soldiers stationed in their country during the war. A peasant song of the period castigated British officials for carrying off the peasants' corn, camels, and cattle and pleaded to be left alone. After the war nationalists unsuccessfully sought an end to British domination. The leading nationalist party, the Wafd, was led by Saad Zaghlul (sod ZOG-lool) (ca. 1857-1927), who had studied theology under Islamic modernists and then earned a French law degree. The Wafd was a secular movement seeking independence, representative government, civil liberties, and curtailed powers for the pro-British monarchy.
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British missteps led to political change. In 1919 the British arrested Zaghlul and other Wafd leaders. Enraged Egyptians responded with strikes, student demonstrations, sabotage of railroads, and the murder of British soldiers. The anti-British movement united rich and poor, Muslims and Coptic Christians, men and women. The turmoil forced the British to release Zaghlul, who then went to the Paris Peace Conference to plead for national self-determination but, like Vietnam's Ho Chi Minh, was ignored. Upon returning to Egypt, Zaghlul was arrested again, but the resulting unrest forced Britain to grant Egypt limited independence in 1922, which nationalists saw as a sham, since Britain still controlled Egypt's defense and foreign affairs. In 1936 Britain officially ended its occupation and established an alliance with Egypt. But Britain still kept thousands of troops along the Suez Canal, which connected the Mediterranean and Red Seas through northeast Egypt, and it also shared with Egypt the administration of Sudan, the territory bordering Egypt on the south. Resentment of the continuing British presence increased during World War II.
Iraq
The British also struggled to control Iraq, an artificial creation that united three Ottoman provinces, each dominated by a different group: Sunni Kurds, Sunni Arabs, and Shi'ite Arabs. Describing their occupation as a "liberation," the British promised to bestow on the Iraqis an efficient administration, honest finance, impartial justice, and security; in reality they planned to discourage self-government. To give the appearance of popular support, they held a plebiscite, but they manipulated the results to suggest pro-British sympathies. British occupation soon embittered many Iraqis. In 1920 Shi'ite clerics seeking an Islamic state proclaimed a holy war against the British, prompting various Shi'a and Sunni tribes to rise in rebellion. The British suppressed the rebellion, but at a great cost in money and lives: some 10,000 Iraqi and 400 British died in the fighting. The British kept their own casualty lists low by relying heavily on aerial bombing, which flattened whole villages.
Shaken by the fierce resistance, the British changed direction in Iraq. They introduced limited self-government that allowed Iraqi participation in an appointed Council of State. The skilled diplomacy of a pro-Arab British archaeologist, writer, and diplomat, Lady Gertrude Bell (1868-1926), defused tensions. Seeking a king for Iraq who would be content to "reign but not govern," as Bell put it, in 1921 Britain installed a member of the Hashemite (HASH-uh-mite) royal family of Mecca, Sharif Hussein's son Faisal (1885-1935). In 1930 Faisal convinced Britain to grant Iraq independence, but only after he agreed to accept continued British military bases and government advisers. By then the British had found oil in Iraq, making them unwilling to cut their ties. Many Arabs considered Faisal and his Hashemite successors to be British clients serving British interests, but Iraqi politics after 1930 was shaped by a series of Sunni Arab military strongmen, autocrats who dominated the kings and strongly influenced government policies, more than the kings themselves.
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Islam and Zionism
The stranglehold of European power and Western culture remained concerns of most Middle Eastern societies during the era. Although various colonized peoples struggled to free themselves, nationalist success came slowly. Some movements tried, with limited success, to unite Arabs or Muslims across national borders. In the absence of political success, religion became a focus of attention. Arabs debated the merits of Westernization, the role of Islam in their societies, and the challenge posed by Zionism, an encounter that fostered a long-term hostility between Muslims and Jews.
Struggles over Westernization and Islam
Middle Eastern leaders and thinkers debated how or whether to emulate the powerful Western nations. They envied Western economic development, such as industrialization and a wealth of consumer goods, but disagreed about how many Western cultural, political, and social patterns, such as freethinking, parliamentary democracy, and women's rights, should be adopted. Some sought wholesale transformation; some favored Islamic tradition; and still others sought a middle path between the two, such as mixing Western and Islamic laws. Between 1923 and 1930 Western-style constitutions, which provided for civil liberties and an elected parliament, were adopted in Egypt, Iraq, Lebanon, Transjordan, and Syria. But these parliaments were limited in their duties and unrepresentative. Real power usually remained in the hands of European officials or powerful kings, and most Arab politicians had little respect for civil liberties. Inspired by Western ideals of modernity, Arabs made progress in education, public health, industrialization, and communications, but change came slowly. The Egyptian literacy rate rose from 9 percent in 1917 to only 15 percent in 1937.
Some women also asserted their rights and sought social change. One of these was the Egyptian Huda Shaarawi (HOO-da sha-RAH-we) (1879-1947). From a wealthy Cairo family, Huda had been married off at age thirteen to a much older cousin. Finding the marriage confining, Huda organized nonviolent anti-British demonstrations by women after World War I and then publicly removed her veil in 1923, shocking Egyptians. She founded and led the Egyptian feminist movement, which succeeded in raising the minimum marriage age for girls to sixteen and increasing educational opportunities for women
The debates over Westernization fostered new intellectual currents in the Islamic world, some pro-Western, others anti-Western. Representing the former approach, a blind Egyptian, Taha Husayn (1889-1973), educated in traditional Islamic schools but also at the Sorbonne in Paris, became the key figure of Egyptian literature in the era. In his writings he challenged orthodox Islam and, in 1938, proclaimed that Westernizing Arab culture, which he favored, would fit with Egypt's traditions, which he described as a mix of Pharaonic, Arab, and Western cultures. "I want," he wrote, "our new life to harmonize with our ancient glory?' In contrast, the popular reaction against Westernization came with a new Egyptian religious movement, the Muslim Brotherhood, founded in 1928 by schoolteacher Hasan al-Banna (1906-1949). Al-Banna despised Western values, arguing that it "would be inexcusable for us to turn aside from the path of truth—Islam—and so follow the path of fleshly desires and vanities—the path of Europe."24 The Brotherhood followed a strict interpretation of the Quran and the hadiths, though it also accepted modern technology and was open to a more active public role for women. Expressing a widespread resentment against Western influence, such as films, bars, and modern, figure-revealing women's fashions, the Brotherhood soon developed a following in Sudan and western Asia.
The most extreme anti-Western reaction was that of the puritanical Wahhabi movement, which eventually dominated Arabia. The Wahhabis sought a return to a supposedly pristine version of Islam uncorrupted by centuries of change. They were opposed to shaving beards, smoking tobacco, and drinking alcohol. Wahhabi influence grew with the success of a tribal chief, Abdul Aziz Ibn Saud (sah-OOD) (1902-1969), who expanded the power of the Saudi family, which ruled much of central and eastern Arabia (a region known as Najd). By 1932 his forces had taken western Arabia and the Islamic holy cities of Mecca and Medina from the Hashemites and formed the country of Saudi Arabia. As king, Abdul Aziz began strictly enforcing Islamic law by establishing Committees for the Commendation of Virtue and the Condemnation of Vice to police personal behavior. Policemen used long canes to enforce attendance at the five daily prayers, punish alcohol use and listening to music, and harass unveiled women. At the same time, the Saudis welcomed material innovations from the West, such as automobiles, medicine, and telephones. In 1935 oil was discovered in Saudi Arabia, which contained the world's richest oil reserves. The oil wealth chiefly benefited the royal family and their allies, the Wahhabi clergy.
Zionism and Palestine
The roots of a long-term problem for Arab nationalists were planted in Palestine. Before World War I Palestine was part of Ottoman-ruled Syria and had a largely Arab population.The British took over Palestine from the Ottomans after World War Meanwhile, the Zionist movement, which sought a Jewish homeland for the Jewish people, had been formed in the Jewish ghettos of Europe (see Chapters 19 and 21). The Zionist slogan—"a land without a people for a people without a land"—offered a compelling vision: take the long persecuted Jewish minorities and return them to the homeland in Palestine from which they had been expelled by the Romans two millennia earlier. Zionist leaders cultivated the British government, which in 1917 issued the Balfour Declaration, a letter from the British foreign minister to Zionist leaders giving British support for the establishment of Palestine as a national home for the Jewish people. But the Zionist slogan had a flaw: Palestine was not a land without a people. Palestinian Arabs had lived there for many centuries, building cities, cultivating orchards, and herding livestock. A Zionist leader later conceded that Jewish settlers, under the impression that the land was largely uninhabited, were surprised to find people there. In Arab eyes, Jewish immigrants were European colonizers planning to dispossess them.
In the 1920s and 1930s, thousands of European Jews migrated to Palestine with British support, some of them fleeing Nazi Germany. By 1939 the Palestine population of 1.5 million was one-third Jewish. Although Jewish settlers established businesses, industries, and productive farms that contributed greatly to Palestine's economic development, Arabs did not see many benefits and feared they would become a vulnerable numerical minority in what they considered their own land. Land became a contentious issue. Zionist organizations began buying up the best land from absentee Arab landlords who disregarded the customary rights of villagers to use it, uprooting thousands of Arab peasants.
As tensions increased, violence spread, bewildering the British. Sometimes hundreds of Arabs and Jews were killed in armed clashes. In 1936 a major Arab rebellion fostered a three-year civil war. All Arab factions united to demand an end to Jewish immigration and land sales to Jews and to oppose plans for establishing an independent Palestine. Concluding that the Arab-Jewish divide was unbridgeable, Britain proposed a partition into two states and the removal of thousands of Arabs from the Jewish side. Both groups rejected the proposal. In 1939, worried about alienating Egypt and Iraq as Europeans prepared for World War II, Britain placed a limit on Jewish immigration and banned land transfers. But the Holocaust against the Jews in Europe during World War II spurred a more militant Zionism, reinforcing the Jewish desire for a homeland where they could govern themselves.