Welcome back for pt. 6 of our survey of the Middle East region. Below is an extremely condensed history of the region which will touch on many of the major developments that have occurred through time. Please understand that this section is not meant to replace the preceding history sections only to supplement them.
For all of history, the Arabian people were desert nomads with just a few exceptions in south-western and western Arabia. These bedouins were surrendered by several great river valley civilizations in Mesopotamia, Egypt, and Indus while the Persian and Hellenistic Greek Empires came to dominate much of the land in later antiquity. An ancient race of Semitic peoples brought monotheism in the form of Judaism to this land of pagan worship. These Hebrews settled in the land of the Levant, an area under constant attack by increasingly powerful empires. These people met their destruction at the hands of the Assyrians before the Levant was finally captured by the Romans. It was under Roman rule that Jesus of Nazareth and Christianity was born. Yet, it was only under the rule of Constantine that the Roman sphere of influence shifted eastward. Constantinople became the capital of Rome and the epicenter for Christian learning. The Emperor thus accepted Christianity in the fourth century, ending state-sponsored persecution and allowed the creed to spread to the known world. Under the Emperor Theodosius a generation or so later, Christianity became the state religion.
In the 6th century, a man was born in Mecca, one of the few cities in western Arabia in the region known as the Hejaz. Muhammad is known as the central prophet of Islam, a religion believers preach to be the perfect, unaltered monotheistic faith of Abraham, Moses, and Jesus with Muhammad recognized as the last messenger of God or Allah. Muhammad and his revelations were initially accepted by some and rejected by others. However, before his death, he was able to bring the Arabian people, who had henceforth existed as warring tribes worshiping idols together, under one unified society with a common thread of Islam connecting them. He achieved this both through diplomacy and conquest.
From a historical perspective, the second most important thing that Muhammad ever did was die. Upon his death, the major schism, or division, of Islam threatened to tear the new creed apart. Sunnis, as they are known today, support an elected political and religious leader (caliph) and reject the opposing (Shia) idea that this caliph should be a descendent of the prophet. Taken a step further, Shia's believe that this leader should place his energies most heavily in interpreting the inner message of the holy text of the Quran. This political difference has marked Islamic civilization to this day. In the early days of Islam and indeed even up until very recently, the Sunni branch has largely been the victor. The early caliphs of Islam carried out The Prophet’s conquests to the greater Arabian Peninsula, the Fertile Crescent, Persia, South Asia, North Africa and the Iberian peninsula. The caliphates that followed in the 8th and 9th centuries reached a golden age with their capital at the newly constructed city of Baghdad. Advances in medicine, mathematics, and science marked this period and foreshadowed the Renaissance to come in Europe.
The unified empire soon yielded much of its territory to other Muslim rulers as their central power declined. The Seljuq Turks from Central Asia came to dominate the Islamic heartlands before moving into Anatolia, threatening Byzantium with capture. The Christian Europeans thus launched a series of wars to bolster Christians in the region and experiment with imperialism. They succeed in taking Jerusalem only to lose it again to Saladin, a Kurdish Muslim who took control in Egypt and the Levant. These powers fought for a while before the Mongol invaders succeeded in conquering everything in sight and forcing the European powers to withdraw to defend their homelands. The Turks were left with a lowly, fractured presence in Anatolia from which Osman I founded a dynasty that would represent power in the Muslim World for five hundred years. The early Ottoman conquests centered around the Byzantine empire and successfully took Constantinople in 1453, renaming it Istanbul. Over the next centuries, Ottoman power came to extend into the Balkans, North Africa, Arabia, and the heartland of Anatolia. Almost as soon as the empire had reached its peak, some say even before, it began to decline because of poor feudal leadership, financial problems, and calculated external pressures. At the same time, the Safavid Persian dynasty established in 1501 stood in ideological defiance of the Sunni Ottomans by converting to and fiercely defending Shiism. Constant wars between the two powers exacerbated the schism and allowed European power to flourish.
Entering World War I as a German Ally, the Ottoman empire, long known as “The Sick Man of Europe”, came to an end. An Arab revolt against the Turks had illuminated their discontent and longing for independence. Their co-conspirators in Europe, however, preferred a system in which they could be easily controlled. The era of Muslim empire was over. The Sykes-Picot agreement, worked out by British and French diplomats, carved up the formally Ottoman-held lands of the Fertile Crescent while completely ignoring the many deep tribal, religious, and cultural differences between the new nations. These new states were organized in such a way as to benefit the British and French while limiting and fragmenting Arab power. Lebanon, a majority Christian area, was made its own country while a mandate for Palestine was established under British control. These two states, one with a large Christian population, and one soon to be Jewish, were yielded the extremely important access to the sea. Present day Syria came under French control while Iraq and Trans-Jordan were established as monarchies with British influence. South of the Levant, a fundamentalist Muslim army under the command of Abdul Aziz Ibn Saud took control of Nejd in central Arabia before conquering the Hejaz, establishing a kingdom later known as Saudi Arabia. With Wahhabism as the state-sponsored religion, the Saudis were, and still are, known as Islamic purists. Their guardianship over the holy places of Mecca and Medina is seen by some as a return to great Muslim values and by others as a departure from the modernity necessary to ensure the survival of the faith. The discovery of oil in Saudi Arabia brought it from one of the poorest countries in the world to one of the richest almost overnight, further bolstering the messianic messages of the early Saudi leadership. Oil has continued the trend of western imperialism in the region up to the modern day.
Under British control, the area of Palestine continued to experience an influx of Jewish pilgrims, a sight which dismayed the local Arab Muslim population. Jewish nationalism, or Zionism, is said to have encouraged this migration and in fact, it was this nationalism that in no small part helped usher in the era of Arab nationalism. Between the two world wars and beyond, the Arab states struggled to accept their new nationhood. Military coups, successions, elections, and assassinations all came to the fore but perhaps the nation that most effectively identified itself apart from its Arab brothers was Palestine. Palestinian nationalism spread quickly first in defense and later in defiance of Zionism and this struggle has come to define the Levant ever since. After the discoveries of Hitler’s atrocities against Jews during World War II, immigration to Palestine accelerated to unprecedented levels as the Jews of Europe ceased to entrust their defense to any but their own. Britain and the international community sought ways to settle the conflict but as tensions erupted into violence, none were fully accepted. On May 14th, 1948, the state of Israel was established by the governing authority along the previously proposed UN partition agreement. The very next day the Arab nations of Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, and Syria invaded, beginning the long and bloody history of warfare in modern Palestine. Israel won the war and took over much of the previously appointed Arab lands. Jordan (renamed the same year) annexed the West Bank while Egypt gained hegemony over the Gaza Strip. Massive migration from Palestine by Arabs and to Palestine by Jews numbered around 700,000 for both sides after the war. The Jewish state had been established but the newly nationalized Palestinians were left without a nation.
In the birth of the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) in 1964, Palestine found an outlet to struggle against their situation. Eventually on the outs with their Jordanian hosts, they were violently repelled to Lebanon in which a sectarian powder keg was ignited upon their arrival. A long and bloody war with many intermingling alliances set the tempo for future conflicts in the Middle East. In 1988, Palestine declared its independence but to this day has lacked the recognition of Israel, The United States, and much of Europe. The Palestinian Authority, which was created to administer the lands under Palestinian control, continues to lack real power. The authority has lost power in the Gaza Strip to Hamas, a violent nationalist group, who have come to govern the area. Today, Israel faces international pressure due to its policy of building settlements in areas thought to be reserved for Palestinians, for erecting a barrier wall along their claimed territory, and for failing to negotiate an end to the occupation of the perceived Palestinian territories. All the while, the Palestinian people continue to live in great poverty without a universally recognized country to call home.
Out of the failures of Arab nationalism came a figure that would seek to unify the Arabs but succeeded only in dividing world opinion. Gamal Abdel Nasser took power in Egypt in 1952 following the deposal of the British-backed King. Nasser sought to incite pan-Arab unity across the region which he saw as necessary if the Arabs were to defend themselves against European power and eliminate the state of Israel whom he saw as an extension of Western imperial power over the Arabs. His dream of unity would not come to pass and his brief union with Syria under the name The United Arab Republic would forever stand as the disappointing Apex of pan-Arabism. Nasser’s rhetoric against Israel and his military adventurism on her borders inspired a pre-emptive strike by Israel in 1967 in which the Egyptian air force was decimated while grounded. Later, the armies of Syria, Jordan, and Iraq were all routed by Israel in what has become known as the Six-Day War. Israel took over the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, the Golan Heights in Syria as well as the Sinai Peninsula. A humiliating defeat had been cast on Nasser and the nationalists and their system was exposed as a failure. In the decades that followed transnational identities owing themselves to tribal, ethnic or religious struggles would come to dominate the region. As the secular, western ideas of nationalism, socialism, and democracy all failed, in turn, to bring prosperity to the people of the Middle East, they increasingly turned towards the ideology that had liberated their ancestors from constant servitude. The Muslim revival was set in motion.
Power changed hands in many societies throughout the sixties and seventies and Israel continued to be victories both militarily and diplomatically with the help of The West. One society too often ignored before this period (indeed hardly mentioned even here) was about to explode in revolution. For over 2000 years the Persian people of Iran had lived under a monarchy. Attempts at reform had been crushed and the people lived in intense poverty. When Mohammad Mosaddegh came to be Prime Minister and began to carry out his progressive agenda, the United States and Britain deposed him in a (not so) secret coup. The shah increased his power but the people had a new voice in Ayatollah Khomeini, a religious jurist who spoke of revolution. He was exiled but continued to send and preach sub verse across Iran. Huge democratic protests followed and, upon Khomeini’s return in 1979, the Islamic Republic of Iran was founded in which a supreme leader who is chosen by an elected council serves as the religious leader and a president and parliament are elected directly by the people. As a majority Shia nation, the Islamic part of the distinction was based on Shia practices and jurisprudence. This frightened both the West who knew little of the creed and the Arab World which was controlled almost entirely by Sunni leaders. Shortly after the declaration of the new state, a Sunni Arab leader rebuffed Khomeini’s rhetoric by declaring war. Saddam Hussein of Iraq, a Sunni ruling over a majority Shia people, gained the huge monetary and spiritual support of Saudi Arabia and aid from the United States. For more than seven years the two sides fought, losing hundreds of thousands of men each with the war ending in a stalemate. Largely seen as a victory for the West, the revolution in Iran did not spread and the republic suffered severe economic strain. Saddam was seen as a hero to many Sunni Arabs. The West’s obsession with revolutionary Iran and their Lebanon-based militia Hezbollah pitted them directly against Shia Islam. What happened next should not have surprised them.
Around the same time as the Iranian revolution, during the broader Cold War period, Soviet aggression in Afghanistan was met with hostility by the Muslim nations of the Middle East who dismissed the Soviet leadership as godless. Particularly from Saudi Arabia, Arabs began to travel to Pakistan to be trained, equipped and sent on a jihad, or holy struggle against the godless Soviets with the monetary help of The United States and Saudi Arabia. Their actions repelled the Soviets out of Afghanistan and their union fell shortly after. These so-called Afghan Arabs found themselves in a situation their ancestors had been in once before. Through Muslim unity, they believed they had defeated a superpower just as the Early Muslim armies defeated the two of their time (Byzantium and Sassanid Persia). Muslim unity had succeeded where all other attempts had failed. The jihadists took this to heart and returned to their homelands, emboldened by their successes.
In the early nineties, inspired by his “victory” in Iran, Saddam believed himself to be the protector of the Arab people all of whom should respect him as such. When the small nation of Kuwait resisted his authority in 1990, he invaded and took control of their plentiful oil fields. The UN sought a diplomatic solution to the issue but when Saddam marched on Saudi Arabia, the US tired of waiting and launched a counter-attack on Saddam. With a coalition of Western and Arab states, the US met Saddam with overwhelming firepower and drove him back into Iraq. World opinion had shifted against him and the international community called for his disarmament. The US imposed crippling sanctions on the country who over the next decade was reduced from one of the most advanced states in Asia to one of the poorest anywhere in the world. The United States military deployment to the region after the war put them within striking range of any conflict in the Middle East and many see this as an insurance policy to stabilize global oil supply.
One jihadi who had left a wealthy family and successful business in Saudi Arabia to fight in Afghanistan was Osama bin Laden. Bin Laden’s recruitment and training center in Pakistan, al-Qaeda became internationally famous when in 2000, they claimed responsibility for the bombing of the USS Cole in the Port of Aden in Yemen, forcing it to leave port and symbolizing the retreat of the US from Arab affairs, or so they thought. Bin Laden had laid out a list of grievances against the United States including their support for Israel, their occupation of Arab lands, and their destruction of Iraq in his 1996 and ’98 fatwas, or Islamic legal decisions. In bin Laden’s mind, these issuances constituted a declaration of war. It is important to understand that the attacks carried out by al-Qaeda came not because of some vague metaphysical ideas about freedom or the hatred thereof but rather because of specifically stated foreign policy objections. Osama bin Laden also revealed later that his intention was to carry out a financial war of attrition against the US in which their constant need to engage unknown enemies half a world away would break their bank and lead to insurmountable unrest within their country causing it, like the Soviet Union before, to collapse.
After the September 11th attacks in 2001, the US and their allies quickly invaded Afghanistan where a decade earlier, the fundamentalist Sunni Taliban had conquered the weak country and provided refuge to al-Qaeda. Within a few months, they deposed the Taliban but they struggled to bring stability to the country. Traditionally governed by tribal leaders, the centralized government supported by the US held little power and the armed forces were plagued with corruption and faced regular desertion by its less than loyal soldiers. While the US were able to kill or capture several al-Qaeda operators, the world began to realize the extent to which the group was a network of interconnected operations rather than a centralized organization. For every deputy that fell, another rose to take his place. To make matters worse, the Taliban continues to launch attacks from Pakistan to this day, making peace a very distant possibility.
Benefitting politically from the quick “victory” in Afghanistan, the Bush administration decided that regime change was the most effective way to secure national interests in the region. While first setting their sights on Saudi Arabia, the neo-conservative White House eventually realized that the public considered Saddam Hussein to be an international pariah and, with enough rhetoric a case could be made for his deposal. While public opinion was, in fact, split on the manner and the White House could produce very little reputable evidence against Saddam, George W. Bush’s implication that Saddam and bin Laden were connected was enough to achieve a declaration of war. In 2003, the US and their coalition removed Saddam from power and dismantled his government. Today, we live with the consequences.
After the US invasion of Iraq, and their destruction of the government structure that had held the fragmented nation together, the country unsurprisingly fell apart. Shias, the long-suppressed majority had found their voice for the first time while Sunnis, clinging to their preferential status in Iraq sought to silence them. The sectarian conflict that followed evolved from a domestic dispute to a virtual battle for the future of the Middle East. As many as 40 different groups from countries all over the region were fighting at the peak of the conflict and the US stood at odds with most everyone. Regime change had not yielded stability.
Iraq replaced Afghanistan as the center for jihadi activities and foreign fighters in the post-Saddam years and although the Sunnis were largely repelled, the battle for the Middle East was far from over. In 2011, a Tunisian protester set himself on fire in protest of his government's unfair treatment. This flame spread over the whole of North Africa and Arabia in what has become known as The Arab Spring. After Tunisia came Egypt who (mostly) peacefully deposed President Mubarak (and later his successor Morsi). After Egypt, uprisings against Gaddafi were met with hostility and ended in his death. Libya became a fractured country in which secularists and Islamists continue to fight over the right to rule. In Syria, protests against Bashar al-Assad led to civil war which still rages to this day. In all of these conflicts, foreign fighters make up a good portion of the forces on the ground and the clash of ideologies confuses even the most well-versed ethnographers. Saudi Arabia and Iran have taken control of these conflicts and an ongoing proxy war between the Sunni Arab Saudi’s and the Shia Persian Iranians underscore the deep tensions felt by the Arab population. The Middle East is ripping itself apart and it's anybody’s guess how it all will end.
From the power vacuum established by the US in post-Saddam Iraq, a sinister new force rose to prominence. Eventually calling themselves Islamic State or ISIS, this group differed for all the shadow governments before it in its desire to recreate an Islamic caliphate, the last of which had died along with the Ottoman empire. Taking advantage of power struggles across the Muslim world, these Wahhabi fighters seized significant territory in Iraq shockingly quickly before moving into Syria as well. Declaring a caliphate in June of 2014 with Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi as caliph, the movement legitimized its territorial claim in their own eyes. Thousands of Muslims from all over the World flocked to this new Islamic State and some have left to carry on terror plots around the world. As the Arabian people sought to free themselves from the dual menaces of western and domestic control, they have been forced to fight on a third front against this state which has claimed their religion.
Today, there is violence in every corner of the Middle East but it is far from random. Like the troubles that plagued Northern Ireland or the wars that tore Yugoslavia apart, the genesis of this violence lies in economic and political differences but manifests itself through national, ethnic, and religious identities. To the Arab people who brought Islam to the world, nothing but their religion and their language was given by providence yet rising from the desert they cradled a civilization that, although beset by enemies on all sides, produced victory after victory in militaristic as well as economic, cultural, and educational fields. Yet from these people to whom so little was given by chance, so much was taken. With the discovery of oil, it seemed perhaps providence had returned to the Muslim lands yet lubrication was provided only for the world economy while the people lived under one oppressive regime or another. The Western advance into the Middle East has hardly liberated the populous but has kept the oil flowing. There is no easy answer as to why this region seems to be so entrenched in violence but perhaps a simple theory can at least frame the discussion.
The Middle East is the final and largest example of imperialism in history. While not under the direct hegemony of foreign powers, their defense, infrastructure, and access to economic stability come only through an understanding with The West. An easy example is Saudi Arabia, largely thought to be the most prolific sponsor of violent ideology but a key US ally. In the 19th century, as European Imperialism was reaching its peak, the British writer Hilarie Belloc summed up the idea of the ease with which the British empire had grown by saying, “ whatever happens, we have got The Maxim gun, and they have not”. The Maxim gun, being one of the earliest machine guns completely eclipsed the native subjects which it was used against. Imperialism manifests itself in the Saudi cluster bombing of the “ have not” population of Yemen. We see imperialism in the willingness of the US to go to war to stabilize oil prices and we see it in the complete, unfettered support for Israel by the western powers. Today however what we are witnessing is the same resistance manifested by the IRA in Ireland or the Ustase in Yugoslavia against the power that they believed kept them in poverty and chains. Violence has made change in the past and although the news we are given is cringeworthy, what we are witnessing may prove to be what is needed in the so badly suppressed region of the Middle East.