Making the Modern Middle East

Second Edition

T. G. Fraser, Andrew Mango, Robert McNamara, T. G Fraser

• Publisher: Gingko
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781909942998, 9781909942004
• eBook ISBN: 9781909942011
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: World War I
• Index: Politics & International Relations

A century ago, as World War I got underway, the Middle East was dominated, as it had been for centuries, by the Ottoman Empire. But by 1923, its political shape had changed beyond recognition, as the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and the insistent claims of Arab and Turkish nationalism and Zionism led to a redrawing of borders and shuffling of alliances—a transformation whose consequences are still felt today.
           
This fully revised and updated second edition of The Makers of the Modern Middle East traces those changes and the ensuing history of the region through the rest of the twentieth century and on to the present. Focusing in particular on three leaders—Emir Feisal, Mustafa Kemal, and Chaim Weizmann—the book offers a clear, authoritative account of the region seen from a transnational perspective, one that enables readers to understand its complex history and the way it affects present-day events.

1

The Birth of Nationalisms

The Middle East on the eve of war

In 1900 the Middle East was barely, if we may borrow Prince Metternich’s dismissal of Italy, a ‘geographical expression’. In the early 21st century its affairs could not be ignored. At the end of the First World War, the term ‘Middle East’ was being used by the British, who had come to dominate the region as the result of military conquest, and it has since passed into common usage, which may serve as some defence against accusations of Eurocentrism. Definitions of the region have varied over time, but the limits of this book are marked by the boundaries of what was then the Ottoman Empire. The Turks emerged in the 8th century CE when the Seljuks, guided, according to national legend, by a grey wolf, conquered territories in central Asia. Their name is commemorated in the modern city of Seljuk in Anatolia. Converting to Islam, the Turks, led by the House of Osman, commonly known as the Ottomans, came into conflict with the Christian Byzantine empire, heir to ancient Rome. In 1453, the armies of Mehmed II, ‘the Conqueror’, took Constantinople, a pivotal event in world history.

At its height, the Ottoman Empire extended from the Turkish heartland in Anatolia across Egypt and North Africa, conquering much of the Arab territories as far as the Shatt al-Arab waterway, and in Europe pressing through the Balkans to the gates of Vienna¹. The Sublime State, as it was officially known, was both an Asian and a European empire, its capital uniquely spanning two continents across the narrow Straits of the Bosphorus, one of the most strategic waterways in the world. Constantinople, or Istanbul as it was known to the Turks, with its incomparable skyline etched by the mosques of Aya Sophia, Sultanahmet and Süleymaniye, the first of these also a reminder of the region’s Roman and Byzantine inheritance, was one of the great cities of the world. It was then both imperial and cosmopolitan². From his accession in 1876 until his forced abdication in 1909, the empire was ruled by Abdülhamid II, who, like the Habsburgs and the Romanovs, presided over a fascinating range of peoples and religions.

The Ottoman Empire in the new century

At the heart of Abdülhamid’s empire were the Turks, numbering, perhaps, some 10 million. The empire was ruled by the House of Osman, the Sultan uniting with his temporal rule the office of Caliph, or protector of the Islamic faith³. By the early 20th century, the empire was the last remaining major Islamic polity in a world dominated by the imperialisms of the major Christian powers and Japan, a fact which bound the Turks to their Arab subjects, of whom there were around 7 million. This fact also attracted Muslims across the Islamic world, not least those of British India. Amongst the cities of the empire were Mecca and Medina, the holy cities of Islam, and Jerusalem, sacred to Jews, Christians and Muslims, the world’s three great monotheistic faiths. Whilst the bulk of the empire’s Muslims, belonged to the Sunni, or ‘Orthodox’, branch of Islam, in the historic lands of the Tigris and Euphrates were Najaf and Karbala, the holy cities of the Shias, whose people did not instinctively identify with Ottoman rule⁴. Shias, the minority branch of the Islamic faith, believed that the true successors of the Prophet Muhammad were his son-in-law ‘Ali and his descendants. The two cities held particular sanctity for the Shias since ‘Ali was buried in Najaf and his son, Husayn, who had been killed in battle, was buried in Karbala. They found an affinity with those across the border in Persia, or Iran as it became in 1935, which was the main centre of Shia power. The Shias of the Tigris and Euphrates did not sit entirely comfortably in an empire in which the dominant Turks, as well as most Arabs, were Sunnis, and this was to pose problems in later years once independence came to the region.

Nor was it an homogeneously Muslim empire, since there were also significant Jewish and Christian minorities. Jews were to be found in the holy cities of Judaism, Jerusalem, Safed, Tiberias and Hebron, as well as in considerable numbers in Baghdad, where they had lived since the Babylonian captivity of the 6th century BCE. Jerusalem, especially its Old City, held a unique place because of its significance for Jews, Christians and Muslims. This deep religious feeling found its focus for Jews in the Western Wall, the only remaining fragment of their Temple which the Roman conquerors of Jerusalem had left intact, while for Muslims the adjacent Dome of the Rock and Al-Agsa Mosque comprised the Haram al-Sharif (the ‘Noble Sanctuary’), their most sacred shrine after Mecca and Medina. For Jews the site was the Temple Mount. Also in the Old City was the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, sacred to Christians. In more recent years, as we will see, Zionist Jews from eastern Europe had also begun to settle. Around Mount Lebanon were the Maronites, a Christian denomination enjoying close links with France and Rome. The region’s Byzantine heritage survived, too, since the Patriarch of Constantinople was the acknowledged head of the eastern Christian Church, as well as of the empire’s thriving Greek community. İzmir, or Smyrna, on the Aegean coast, the second city of the empire in terms of population, was half-Greek, while it was estimated that there were some 150,000 Greeks residing in Constantinople. It was inevitable that they would be suspected of partiality towards their kinsmen across the border, who had won their independence in the 1820s.

The position of two other substantial non-Turkish minorities, the Kurds and Armenians, was even more problematic, not least because large numbers of them were also to be found in other countries. Outside the Ottoman Empire, the Muslim Kurds were a minority population in the north-west of neighbouring Persia, whilst the Christian Armenians were stretched across Turkey, Persia and Russia, whose officials were not above encouraging their national aspirations. Armenians were also aware of the success of the Christian Slavs in prising the Turks out of the Balkans. The Turks, in turn, used the Kurds as a counter to the Armenians. Massacres of Armenians in 1895–6 set an uneasy precedent. When we also include smaller communities such as the Alawites, Chaldaeans, Circassians and Druzes, then the rich diversity of the empire becomes clear, although, as its former Habsburg rival was discovering, this was not always an advantage in an age of burgeoning nationalisms.

Although it was emphatically a Muslim polity, believers in other mono­theistic religions were accorded recognition through the millet system, under which they ran their own affairs. Millet status was accorded to the Latin Catholic, Greek Orthodox, Armenian Catholic, Armenian Gregorian, Syrian and United Chaldaean, Maronite, Protestant and Jewish communities. Nor did the Jews forget that it was the Turks who had given refuge to many of them after their expulsion from Andalucia in the late 15th century. The millet system both acknowledged and respected the empire’s rich variety⁵.

It was, of course, in the Balkans that the most immediate threat to the empire lay. From the time when the unfortunate Grand Vizier Kara Mustafa had failed in his bid to take Vienna in 1683, the Habsburg armies, led by their great commander Prince Eugene, had steadily pushed the Turks back through the Balkans. Austrian expansion came to rest with the de facto acquisition of the Ottoman provinces of Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1878, a poisoned chalice for the dynasty if ever there was one, but by then the Turks were being further challenged in the Balkans. If the Austrians had led the charge to expel the Turks from central and south-eastern Europe, their task was taken up by the Russians, who encouraged the Serbs and Bulgarians to move for independence, just as they had earlier done with the Greeks⁶. By the time of the Congress of Berlin in 1878, Romania, Serbia and Montenegro were also independent, and Bulgaria was soon to follow. The empire’s long-standing dominance in the Balkans finally came to end in the Balkan Wars of 1912–13, which left it with a rump of territory in eastern Thrace, although crucially still in possession of Istanbul and the Bosphorus and the Dardanelles, which linked the Black Sea to the Aegean, the Mediterranean and the seas beyond.

By then, it may truly be said that it had become a Middle Eastern empire. The Ottoman Empire still held suzerainty over Egypt, with its fertile Nile valley and the historic cities of Cairo and Alexandria, but this had become a fiction. Since 1882, the country had been ruled by the British, whose interest was generated by the opening in 1869 of the Suez Canal, which provided a key route to their possessions in the east, notably the Indian Empire. Their proconsuls, men like Lords Cromer and Kitchener, paid no heed to the Sultan. Then, in 1911–12, Italy seized Tripolitania and Cyrenaica in a war notable for the first use of bombs dropped from aircraft, a dismal precedent for the century to come⁷. Italy’s colonial adventure also marked the emergence of a young Ottoman major, Mustafa Kemal. In effect, the Turks had been shut out of their historic lands in North Africa as well as in Europe.

The ‘Young Turks’

If it were an empire in geographical retreat, the seeds of renewal were there, nevertheless. The Ottoman state entered the First World War on the side of the Central Powers in 1914 in a reckless gamble by a group of adventurers, led by a triumvirate consisting of two young career officers, Enver and Cemal, and one civilian, Talât. Enver, the leading spirit, was 33 years old in 1914, Cemal was 42 and Talât 40. Enver became Commander-in-Chief (formally Deputy Commander-in-Chief, since the Sultan was nominal C-in-C), Cemal Navy Minister, commander of the Southern Front and Governor of Syria (which included Lebanon and Palestine), and Talât Minister of the Interior and then Grand Vizier (Prime Minister). These leaders of the Committee of Union and Progress, or Young Turks, as they were known in the West, had risen to power and fame in Ottoman Macedonia in the first decade of the 20th century. Their character had been moulded by their experience in fighting the irregular bands of Balkan nationalists – Slav Macedonians, Bulgarians, Greeks, Serbs and, finally, Albanians. Nationalist irregulars were known in Turkish as komitacı (committee-men), a designation which became a byword for ruthlessness, violence and treachery, but also reckless courage. Such men were needed to carve nationally homogeneous states out of a multinational empire – a process which involved massacres, deportations and the flight of millions of refugees. Enver, Cemal and Talât were Turkish komitacıs in a literal sense, too, as leaders of the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP), whose members were known as Unionists (İttihatçı). They were initiated in quasi-Masonic ceremonies in which oaths were sworn on guns and holy books. They conspired against the absolutist regime of Sultan Abdül­hamid II, forced him to reintroduce constitutional rule in 1908, deposed him in 1909 and seized power in a coup in 1913. They believed initially that constitutional rule would reconcile all the ethnic communities of the Ottoman Empire and turn them all into loyal Ottoman citizens under the banner of freedom, fraternity and justice. It was their version of the ideals of the French Revolution, which they admired as the ‘Great Revolution’. But they admired Napoleon even more and also the German and Japanese militarists whose example confirmed their belief that might was right.

Like many other young officers, Mustafa Kemal was attracted to revolutionary politics in the hope that they might transform the fortunes of the empire. When the Young Turks acted against the Sultan in 1908, he was a member of their movement, although not a prominent one. Mustafa, to give him his original name, was born some time in the winter of 1880–1 in the cosmopolitan city of Salonica, now Thessaloniki in Greece. His father, Ali Riza, worked in the timber trade and as a customs officer, providing a decent middle-class income for his young wife Zübeyde. Mustafa was only a child when his father died, but he remained close to his mother, even after her remarriage. In 1899, he entered the imperial war college, doing well there and proceeding to Staff College. That he was an able and assiduous student is amply born out by his subsequent career. No less significantly, he was also attracted to politics, leading to a brief arrest and effective banishment to a military unit in Damascus. Here, too, according to his own account he helped spread revolutionary ideas in Beirut, Jerusalem and Jaffa.

Various staff and regimental appointments followed the Young Turk revolution, but it was Italy’s invasion of Tripolitania and Cyrenaica which gave him the opportunity to make his mark. Travelling in disguise through British-ruled Egypt, he was soon in action against the Italians. With a small force of Turkish regulars and thousands of Arabs, he helped pin down the Italian forces on the coast. It was to no avail, however. Faced with the ability of the Italian fleet to bombard Beirut and the Dardanelles, as well as more immediate threats in the Balkans, the empire was forced to cede its two provinces in October 1912. His return to Turkey saw him posted as military attache to Sofia the following year, which brought promotion to lieutenant-colonel. If in 1914, he was not amongst the most prominent officers in the Ottoman army, he was certainly a well-trained and serious-minded professional, who had experienced active service against a modern European enemy. He also had an acute political brain⁸.

Despite its defeats, the Ottoman state punched well above its weight. This was partly due to the hardihood and courage of Turkish conscripts. ‘The Turkish peasant will hide under his mother’s skirts to avoid conscription, but once in uniform he will fight like a lion’, a Russian expert on Turkey wrote during the war⁹. But there was another reason, to which most Western observers were blind and which historians have come to notice only recently. While the rural masses were illiterate and ignorant of the modern world, there was an elite of experienced and well-trained Turkish civil servants and army officers. Although the reforms of the 19th century (known as the Tanzimat, meaning ‘the (re)ordering’) were routinely decried in the West as inadequate and a sham, by the beginning of the 20th century Ottoman administration compared well with that of other contemporary empires – so much so that many of its former subjects came to regret its eventual dissolution. A recent study suggests that in the Arab lands placed under British and French Mandates at the end of the First World War, there was little improvement for indigenous Muslims in such basic areas as average life expectancy, education, communications and public order¹⁰. Ottoman civil administration was organised on French lines, while in the army French and British advisers were largely replaced by Germans from the reign of Abdülhamid II onwards. The efficiency of Ottoman governors and commanders was often overlooked by Western critics, however, who decried their rule as backward and corrupt. Foreign observers also overlooked the fact that many of the Greeks, particularly along the Aegean coast, were immigrants from the newly independent Greek kingdom who found life under Ottoman rule more rewarding than in their own country. The Young Turks scored their only diplomatic success in 1913 when the Balkan allies fell out among themselves, allowing Enver to reclaim Edirne (Adrianople) and with it eastern Thrace up to the river Meriç (Maritza/Evros) as the last Ottoman foothold in Europe. If the empire was no longer a European power, it had not ceased to be of interest to the powers of Europe.

The Ottoman Empire and its Arab population

By the eve of war, the Ottoman Empire was predominantly a Middle Eastern empire, whose future was likely to turn on relations between the Turks and their most numerous subjects, the Arabs. At the outbreak of the First World War, the Turks had ruled the heartlands of the Arab World encompassing the modern-day states of Syria, Iraq, Jordan, Israel, Saudi Arabia and Arab North Africa for four centuries. Syria, Iraq, Jordan and Palestine were known as the Fertile Crescent due to the important rivers, notably the Tigris and Euphrates, that provided the water resources that made the areas conducive to human settlement. The Ottomans, the last of the great Islamic Turkish tribes to forge a major empire, had conquered the Arab lands in 1517, ruling them, without serious opposition, until the beginning of the 20th century. Only in the last decades of Ottoman rule did proto-nationalist challenges begin to become evident in the Arab territories.

When it emerged in the 7th century CE, Islam was initially synonymous with being Arab. However, within a century of the Arab conquests, religion rather than ethnicity or nationality became ‘the Supreme bond’¹¹, which partly accounts for the willingness of the Arabs to accept Muslim Turkish overlords. Another reason was the nature of Ottoman rule. While ostensibly one of the most centralised empires in the world with all power held by the Sultan, this was, as one observer noted, ‘make-believe’¹². Outside the main urban centres, such as Damascus, Aleppo, Mosul and Baghdad, government control was weak and the Arabic-speaking societies of the Fertile Crescent were split into groupings based on family, tribal, ethnic and religious ties¹³. While Turkish-speaking governors, in theory, held supreme power in the Arabic-speaking regions, in practice linguistic barriers and a lack of military power meant they were dependent on local tribal leaders, the urban rich and religious leaders to maintain even a modicum of influence. These leading groups were known as the a’yan or ‘notables’. The politics of these notables was the dominant fact of political life in the Ottoman Middle East in the 19th and early 20th century¹⁴.

One area of the Arab world held particular significance, Palestine. Although the word ‘Palestine’ was widely understood to refer to the area, it was not even a single provincial entity under the empire, with the northern part lying under the vilayet, or administrative district, of Beirut and the southern region co...

Table of contents

• The Makers of the Modern Middle East
• Contents
• Preface and Acknowledgements
• 1. The Birth of Nationalisms
• 2. Wartime Promises and Expectations
• 3. Arabs and Zionists in Paris
• 4. San Remo and Sèvres: the Flawed Peace
• 5. The Middle East Rebels and the Peace Settlement Revisited
• 6. From War to War
• 7. Conclusion: The Legacy
• Notes
• Further Reading