An Introduction to the Modern Middle East

History, Religion, Political Economy, Politics

David S. Sorenson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780367097967
• eBook ISBN: 9780429975042
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Middle Eastern Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Combining elements of comparative politics with a country-by-country analysis, author David S. Sorenson provides a complete and accessible introduction to the modern Middle East. With an emphasis on the politics of the region, the text also dedicates chapters specifically to the history, religions, and economies of countries in the Persian (Arabian) Gulf, the Eastern Mediterranean, and North Africa. In each country chapter, a brief political history is followed by discussions of democratization, religious politics, women's issues, civil society, economic development, privatization, and foreign relations.

In this updated and revised second edition, An Introduction to the Modern Middle East includes new material on the Arab Spring, the changes in Turkish politics, the Iranian nuclear issues, and the latest efforts to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian dilemma. Introductory chapters provide an important thematic overview for each of the book's individual country chapters and short vignettes throughout the book offer readers a chance for personal reflection.

NOTES

PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION

1. Some claim that Arab identity must go further, to include descendants of Ishmael, Abraham’s son by his Egyptian servant Hagar.

INTRODUCTION: THINKING ABOUT THE MIDDLE EAST

1. One of the best books on the history and religious symbolism of Jerusalem is Eric H. Cline, Jerusalem Besieged: From Ancient Canaan to Modern Israel (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press), 2004.

2. I use the term BCE to replace BC as the period before the time of Christ, and CE instead of AD for the period after that time. I do so to avoid centering a dating system on any religion, though the meaning is the same.

3. “In the Heart of Muslim Belief,” International Herald Tribune, February 10, 2006.

4. Quoted in “The Crusader’s Giant Footprints,” Washington Post, October 23, 2001.

5. Europeans could not pronounce the name of Abu Jafar Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khawarizmi, who wrote ten books on mathematics, so his name came out in Europe as Alogrismus, which later was adapted to the logic of stepwise computation of numbers, familiar to computer operators as “algorithms.”

6. These developments are chronicled in Francis Robinson, “Knowledge, Its Transmission, and the Making of Muslim Societies,” in The Cambridge Illustrated History of the Islamic World, ed. Francis Robinson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 228–229.

7. Ibn Khaldun, The Muqaddimah: An Introduction to History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1967).

8. Joshua Parens, Metaphysics and Rhetoric: Alfarabi’s Summary of Plato’s ‘Laws’ (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995).

9. See Ross E. Dudd, The Adventures of Ibn Battuta: A Muslim Traveler of the Fourteenth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986).

10. Bryan S. Turner, Orientalism, Postmodernism, and Globalism (London: Routledge, 1994), p. 46. See also Richard E. Rubenstein, Aristotle’s Children: How Christians, Muslims, and Jews Rediscovered the Ancient Wisdom and Illuminated the Dark Ages (New York: Harcourt, 2003).

11. André Raymond, Cairo (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), p. 101.

12. For an insightful discussion on the varying images of Islam in the West, see Zachary Lockman, Contending Visions of the Middle East: The History and Politics of Orientalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).

13. Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon, 1978), p. 3.

14. Flaubert does not mention his soliciting prostitutes in Egypt, Syria, or Turkey.

15. Said, Orientalism, pp. 295, 308–328. Curiously, Said does not mention Karl Wittfogel, whose Oriental Despotism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1957) argues that “hydraulic societies” (those dependent on water management) require centralization of power (thus the title) and the elimination of countervailing groups to survive.

16. Douglas Little, American Orientalism: The United States and the Middle East Since 1945 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002).

17. Lockman, Contending Visions, pp. 248–251.

18. Martin Kramer, Ivory Towers on Sand: The Failure of Middle Eastern Studies in America (Washington, DC: Washington Institute for Near East Policy, 2001).

19. Halim Barakat, The Arab World: Society, Culture, and State (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), p. 42; Michael Bonner, Jihad in Islamic History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006), p. 160.

20. Raphael Patai, The Arab Mind (New York: Scribner’s, 1973), critiqued by Dag Tuastad, “Neo-Orientalism and the New Barbarian Thesis: Aspects of Symbolic Violence in the Middle East Conflict(s),” Third World Quarterly, August 2003, esp. p. 592.

21. Tuastad, “Neo-Orientalism,” pp. 593–596.

22. Kramer, Ivory Towers, p. 123.

23. Ibid., pp. 96–97.

24. “Revisionist” historians Benny Morris, Righteous Victims: A History of the Zionist-Arab Conflict, 1881–1999 (New York: Knopf, 1999), and Avi Shlaim, The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World (New York: Norton, 2000), largely blame Israel for initiating the Palestinian exodus, while Israeli scholars like Efraim Karsh, Fabricating Israeli History: The “New Historians” (Portland, OR: Frank Cass, 1997), accuse the revisionists of selective documentation.

SECTION 1: THE HISTORICAL, RELIGIOUS, ECONOMIC, AND POLITICAL FOUNDATIONS OF THE MIDDLE EAST

CHAPTER 1: THE MODERN HISTORY OF THE MIDDLE EAST

1. Joan Peters, From Time Immemorial: The Origins of the Arab-Jewish Conflict over Palestine (New York: Harper & Row, 1984), pp. 402–403. Baruch Kimmerling and Joel S. Migdal, Palestinians: The Making of a People (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), p. xvii, claim that Peters’s account is based on erroneous information, taken out of context.

2. For a debate on evidence supporting or refuting the existence of the First Temple, see the following articles in Biblical Archaeology Review, July–August 1998, pp. 24–46: Margreet Steiner, “It’s Not There: Archaeology Proves a Negative”; Jane Cahill, “It Is There: The Archaeological Evidence Proves It”; and Navav Na’aman, “It Is There: Ancient Texts Prove It.”

3. James Reston, “The Issue in Cairo: Israel a US ‘Base,’” New York Times, June 5, 1967, p. 1.

4. Shahrough Akhavi, “Islam and the West in World History,” Third World Quarterly 3 (2003): 553–554; Saad Eddin Ibrahim, “An Open Door,” Wilson Quarterly, spring 2004, p. 37.

5. Earl Wavell, The Palestine Campaign (London: Constable, 1931), pp. 28–32.

6. Charles Townshend, Desert Hell: The British Invasion of Mesopotamia (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press), 2011.

7. David Fromkin, A Peace to End All Peace: The Fall of the Ottoman Empire and the Creation of the Modern Middle East (New York: Avon, 1989), p. 174.

8. The title “Caliph of the Hejaz” was initially proposed by Arabs as early as the fifteenth century, though it was offered to Hussein by Lord Kitchener, the British agent in Cairo. When Hussein realized that the British were not going to recognize him as king of Arabia, he attempted to gain their support for a more limited suzerainty where he would at least have power over rival Arab tribes (like the al-Saud). But he failed to get even this and was exiled to Cyprus by Abdul Azziz al-Saud. See Joshua Teitlebaum, “Sharif Hussein ibn Ali and the Hashemite Vision of the Post-Ottoman Order: From Chieftaincy to Suzerainty,” Middle East Studies, January 1998, pp. 103–122.

9. Fromkin, Peace to End All Peace, pp. 338–339.

10. The Sykes-Picot Agreement conflicted with American statements supporting selfdetermination and opposing...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface to the Second Edition
• Preface to the First Edition
• Glossary
• Map of the Middle East
• Introduction: Thinking About the Middle East
• SECTION I The Historical, Religious, Economic, and Political Foundations of the Middle East
• SECTION II The Countries of the Arabian Peninsula and Arabian Gulf Area
• SECTION III The Countries of the Eastern Mediterranean
• SECTION IV The Countries of North Africa
• Notes
• Index