Armies and State-building in the Modern Middle East

Politics, Nationalism and Military Reform

Stephanie Cronin

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781780767390
• eBook ISBN: 9781786724410
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

The uprisings of 2011, which erupted so unexpectedly and spread across the Middle East, once again propelled the armies of the region to the centre of the political stage. Throughout the region, the experience of the first decade of the twenty-first century provides ample reason to re-examine Middle Eastern armies and the historical context which produced them. By adding an historical understanding to a contemporary political analysis, Stephanie Cronin examines the structures and activities of Middle Eastern armies and their role in state- and empire-building. Focusing on Iran, Afghanistan and Saudi Arabia, Armies, Tribes and States in the Middle East presents a clear and concise analysis of the nature of armies and the differing guises military reform has taken throughout the region. Covering the region from the birth of modern armies there in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, to the military revolutions of the 1950s and 60s and on to the twenty-first century army-building exercises seen in Iraq and Afghanistan, Cronin provides a unique and vital presentation of the role of the military in the modern Middle East.

CHAPTER 1

The Military Revolution in the Middle East

The Nizam-i Jadid in the Nineteenth Century

In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, when the Middle East and North Africa first began to attract the sustained attention of modern European imperialism and colonialism, Arab, Ottoman, Iranian and Afghan polities began what was to be a protracted experiment with army reform. These decades saw the birth of a mania in the Middle East for the import of European methods of military organization and techniques of warfare. Everywhere, in Tunis and Morocco, the Ottoman Empire, Egypt, Iran and Afghanistan, nizam-i jadid (new order) regiments sprang up, sometimes on the ruins of older military formations, sometimes alongside them, unleashing a process of military-led modernization which was to characterize state-building projects throughout the region until well into the twentieth century. The ruling dynasties in these regions embarked on army reform in an effort to meet a number of separate objectives. Certainly they wished to strengthen their defensive capacity and resist growing European hegemony and direct or indirect control by imitating European methods of military organization and warfare. Every indigenous ruler who confronted direct or indirect European control, from the sultans of pre-Protectorate Morocco in the west to the amirs of Afghanistan in the east, followed this path, although with varying degrees of success and often radically different outcomes. But such rulers also adopted novel models of military organization for other purposes: in order to gain an advantage against rival states and enemies in the immediate region and, most importantly, to strengthen their personal position inside their own territories at the expense of competing domestic social, political and military forces. By creating a modern army loyal exclusively to themselves, the Ottoman and Moroccan sultans, the beys of Tunis, the khedives of Egypt, the shahs of Iran and the amirs of Afghanistan hoped to equip their dynasties with a coercive weapon capable of quelling internal autonomous and centrifugal challenges and buttressing their own power as expressed in the form of a modern autocratic state.¹

Early attempts by Middle Eastern rulers to modernize their military forces have usually been understood as driven by shock at successive defeats by European powers, especially by the relentless Russian conquests of Ottoman and Iranian territory and the consequent extension of infidel control over Muslim populations. Napoleon’s occupation of Egypt in 1798, although temporary, provided both a reminder of local military weakness and an impressive display of the power of a modern army. Yet in fact dynastic rulers such as the Qajar shahs of Iran and, most notably of all, Muhammad Ali Pasha of Egypt, desired a large modern army not only for defensive but also for offensive warfare. They wished not only to defend themselves against the relentless pressure from an expanding Europe but also, at least at first, to reconquer territories lost to European control, and to establish and often also to consolidate imperial possessions of their own. One of the very earliest attempts at modern military reform, the request from the Moroccan Sultan in 1767 for Ottoman assistance to organize a unit of artillerymen, was made in preparation for the attempt to recover coastal cities lost to Spanish and Portuguese occupation.² In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the Qajar shahs of Iran struggled for decades to reassert their hegemony against Russian challenges in the eastern Caucasus, especially over Georgia, and creating reformed regiments was a key element in their strategy. Egypt under Muhammad Ali Pasha and Khedive Ismail provides perhaps the most spectacular example of military reform and expansion in the pursuit of empire-building. Muhammad Ali used his nizam to establish Egyptian power in the Arabian peninsula, in the Sudan, and especially in Syria, while Ismail deployed his numerically inflated and unsustainably expensive regiments in imperial adventures in the Horn of Africa, Sudan and Abyssinia.³

Yet undoubtedly military defeats at the hands of European armies, as they came to be generalized across the Muslim world in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, did gradually transform the local elites’ perception of their relationship to the West. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, for example, the newly consolidated Qajar state had sufficient self-confidence to envisage the reclamation of Safavid supremacy against the Russian Empire in Transcaucasia. Yet defeat in two disastrous wars with Russia (1804–13, 1826–8) ended such hopes while compensatory attempts to enforce Iranian claims to Herat (1837–8, 1856–7) also ended after two brief but humiliating military conflicts with Britain. As the century wore on, Iranian self-confidence turned to doubt, and the objectives of reform turned inwards to become defensive, focusing on the survival of the state. Muhammad Ali Pasha and the Khedive Ismail might continue to dream of an empire in the Horn of Africa, but no Middle East state could now conceive of offering a military challenge to a European army.

As well as stimulating elite programmes of reform, military defeat was central to Middle Eastern political development in another, more radical, sense. Egypt in both the nineteenth and twentieth centuries illustrates perfectly the linkage between military defeat and the emergence from within the officer corps of a radical political challenge. The multiple failures of the Egyptian army during Khedive Ismail’s empire-building in Abyssinia discredited the old Turco-Circassian command, paving the way for the Urabi Revolt, and the linkage continued in the twentieth century, defeat in Palestine in 1948 galvanizing the Free Officers and leading directly to the 1952 coup.

During the nineteenth century, ruling dynasties across the Middle East and beyond learned a harsh lesson concerning the expense of modern armies. Standing armies were inherently massively more costly than older types of military forces. Based on conscription, they required bureaucratic and administrative expansion and rationalization. They also depended on the ability of the state to organize the receipt and disbursal of regular supplies of cash, all ranks having to be paid whether on active service or not. They required uniforms and especially the kind of weapons, usually only available from abroad, appropriate to modern warfare. Both men and officers required modern education and training. Older military forces made none of these demands. Irregular tribal forces might be raised for specific campaigns and then disbanded and, in any case, were often paid in kind or by means of revenue remission to tribal khans and aghas. In this way, the state had to find no extra cash, but only lost potential revenue which was often in reality only theoretically due. The institution of the timar, the grant of land in return for military service, also freed the state from the necessity of raising additional cash. Officers of such irregular or semi-feudal formations, whether khans or sipahis , were responsible for raising and paying men from among their own peasantry or tribes, and used the tactics, especially that of tribal raiding, with which they were familiar, neither they nor their men requiring formal training or the literacy necessary to modern troops. Although, as rulers introduced the nizam-i jadid, their need for more regular and larger fiscal sources for the new regiments led to the successful abolition of older forms of taxation, notably the timar, yet newer revenue streams were much more difficult to produce and manage efficiently in the absence of administrative and economic development. The inevitable result was a turn to borrowing from those very European countries from whom the nizam regiments were supposedly a defence.

With the partial exception of the Ottoman Empire, the protracted struggles of these states in the nineteenth century to build up modern military forces capable of securing the independence of their realms from European control and achieving the autonomy of their own rule from local intermediary social layers, tribal groups, provincial notables and so on, largely failed. In fact such struggles more often led, through the ruinous debts incurred, to an actual and complete loss of sovereignty and direct European control. By 1869, 1875 and 1876, Tunisia, Egypt and the Ottoman Empire respectively had each been bankrupted by the crippling expense of their modernization programmes, at the heart of which were the nizam regiments. In the Middle East, unlike Europe, the military revolution had been supported neither by any substantive fiscal revolution nor by the agricultural and industrial revolutions which were powering European military development.

Nonetheless, whatever the degree of success or failure experienced by various countries with the ostensible objective of military modernization, the creation of a modern army, the attempt itself wrought profound change on a number of levels, administrative, social, political and intellectual. Educational institutions developed, at least at first, largely in response to the needs of the new armies for officers. Expanding educational opportunities and increased contact with the wider world, not only with Europe but across the Middle East, led to the growing salience of a discourse of reform. Conscription, based on a census, began administrative centralization, and the need for modern weapons led to experiments with industry. As these processes began to gather pace, wider changes in society and its relationship to the state became evident. In the Ottoman Empire, the new army became a route for the social advancement of officers from modest provincial backgrounds, while in Egypt it also provided the mechanism for the articulation of a new Egyptian national consciousness, such developments imparting a revolutionary dimension to the modern army’s burgeoning sense of its own national mission. Everywhere, the ability of the state to extend its reach, and therefore its sovereignty, across the entire national territory and over the lives of the national population increased exponentially.⁴

Although the late eighteenth century marked the beginning of nizam mania in the Middle East, military reform, reorganization and modernization was itself nothing new. In the sixteenth century the threat from Portugal had led the Sa‘di dynasty in Morocco to introduce sophisticated military reforms, integrating arquebusiers and artillery into their forces and developing combined infantry–cavalry tactics for their battles. In 1578 the Moroccans, with these forces, inflicted a crushing defeat on the Portuguese, leaving Morocco safe from European invasion until 1844.⁵ In late sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Iran, the Safavids had organized corps of musketeers and artillery while the eighteenth century saw a consistent determination by the Ottomans to overcome the deficiencies of their reliance on Janissaries and timariots. By the time of the Russo–Ottoman war of 1768–74, the Ottomans were already relying to a great extent on an increased enrolment of infantry and cavalry regiments from indigenous, Muslim, landless peasants and their payment from the central treasury.⁶ Nor were specific developments, such as the presence of European advisors in the Middle East, novel innovations in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Hungarian and German gunners had assisted Mehmed II at Constantinople in 1453 and in the early sixteenth century the Portuguese provided Iran with cannon for use against the Uzbeks.⁷ Throughout the eighteenth century, European adventurers, the Hungarian and French converts, Ibrahim Muteferrika and the Comte de Bonneval, and later the French officer Baron de Tott, had provided a conduit through which the Ottoman elite might gain access to European ideas of military organization.

These dynamics of military change, evident at various times and in various locations across the Middle East, arose from the competitive emulation between warring polities which had also driven the evolution of armies in Europe where states were locked in prolonged dynastic conflict.⁸ They were generated from within the societies concerned, were prompted by the logic of conflict with near neighbours, and do not appear to have produced any marked cultural or religious opposition. By the eighteenth century, however, an awareness was spreading across the Middle East of a fundamental reversal of its relationship with Europe, perhaps best exemplified by the treaty of Küçük-Kaynarca in 1774, when for the first time the defeated Ottomans were forced to cede sovereignty over a Muslim population, the Crimean Tartars, to a Christian power, Russia. The resulting consciousness of a new and inexplicable vulnerability produced both a determination to unlock the secrets of an apparently novel European military preeminence, but also a crisis of confidence and legitimacy for the Muslim rulers initiating this project. From now on, experiments in military modernization were to become a lightning rod for wider resentments, elite but also popular, against foreign infidel encroachments.

The renewal projects of the dynastic rulers of the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Middle East were informed by a range of different influences. Direct emulation of the armies of western Europe, especially Britain and France, often with the assistance of European renegades, was one model for change. The efficacy of French armies was, for example, vividly illustrated at close quarters by Napoleon’s crushing defeat of the Mamluks⁹ at the Battle of the Pyramids in 1798. Across North Africa and the Middle East in the early decades of the nineteenth century, considerable numbers of veterans, deserters, converts to Islam, and unemployed officers demobilized after the Napoleonic wars, offered their knowledge of European armies and their experience of modern warfare to sultan, bey and pasha.

For the shahs of Iran and perhaps too the Ottoman sultans, the Russian example was most present and visible. Here Russia’s Petrine Revolution appeared to offer a template of especial relevance. By the 1820s, Iran had fought and lost two wars against the encroaching Russian Empire. The shah, Fath Ali Shah, and especially his son, Abbas Mirza, responded to this newly apparent vulnerability by concluding that Iran’s military weakness vis-à-vis imperial Russia was a result of its failure to adopt European military organization and disciplined tactics.¹⁰ Abbas arrived at this conclusion not only on the basis of direct experience of Russian military prowess but also because of an emerging ideological predisposition to adopt Russian autocratic reform as an appropriate model for Qajar political objectives. For the early Qajar elite in general, the arrival of Russian armies within Iranian territories in the Caucasus and their menacing of Tabriz appeared to be the culmination of a process of reform and state-building which had begun in Russia a century earlier with Peter the Great. According to this Enlightenment interpretation, transmitted to Abbas Mirza through the medium of Voltaire, Peter’s success was due to his introduction of military and administrative reforms based on a western European model and his suppression of opposition from military and clerical representatives of the old order. This was the model for military reform, albeit highly partisan and even mythical, which the early Qajar shahs were determined to import into Iran.¹¹

Yet the rapid diffusion of notions of military reorganization was not due to a simple process of borrowing from Europe. As noted above, Middle Eastern armies had shown considerable organizational dynamism at earlier periods, sharing in the competitive emulation which was driving military change both in Europe and beyond. The routes by which concepts of military organization and innovations in military technology were transmitted throughout the Middle East and North Africa were complex. Nineteenth-century Europe itself offered no single model of military development, and Middle Eastern countries in general appear to have been influenced at least as much by each local effort at reform as by the unmediated European example. In the early nineteenth century, it was not the European example, but those of the Ottoman Empire and of Muhammad Ali in Egypt which were of key significance in spreading ideas of military reform throughout the Middle East and North Africa. The adoption of a template of the standing army, recruited from conscripts, led by professional officers, paid regularly in cash from a central treasury, and armed with modern weapons, by rulers possessing the military prowess of Muhammad Ali or the prestige of the Ottoman sultancaliph, made these patterns to some extent palatable to wider elite Muslim opinion.

The existence of local models, the Ottoman Empire, Egypt under Muhammad Ali Pasha, was of some utility in rendering palatable in the wider region innovations in military practice which, in an era of an unprecedented European menace, aroused widespread distrust. Earlier emulation had been untarnished by the political and civilizational risks which were becoming ever more apparent as the nineteenth century wore on. Now, fears of European cultural and intellectual, as well as political and military domination, made the introduction of practices originating in Europe deeply problematic. Everywhere, the nizam regiments faced growing opposition and hostility. Such hostility was further aggravated by the harsh burdens which military reform, and the wider centralization of government in general, imposed on the population at large.

One response to the opposition evoked by the nizam regiments was to attempt to indigenize the proposed reforms. This attempt, its changing impact in the context of an apparently irresistible European colonial drive, and the ultimate revelation of its hollowness is best demonstrated by the Moroccan experience. In the first reform period in Morocco, between 1845 and 1873, the Sultan introduced typical New Order forces, following the example of Tunisia, Egypt and the Ottoman Empire, as well as the model of the French Armée d’Afrique. Criticism of the apparent mimicking of infidel methods was nonetheless strong, and intensified after the defeat of the Moroccans by the French at the Battle of Isly in 1844. The response of the court was to sponsor a literature which located the nizam troops within the local political and religious culture, arguing that the Sultan’s formation of these regiments was a requirement of his duty to wage jihad, and that the regiments themselves were an historical type, rather than a European invention, for which precedents could be found in Islamic history and military traditions.¹² In the second reform period, the nizam continued to consolidate itself as a r...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Armies, State-Building and Politics in the Middle East
• Chapter 1: The Military Revolution in the Middle East
• Chapter 2: Importing Modernity: European Military Missions to Qajar Iran
• Chapter 3: Building and Rebuilding Afghanistan’s Army: An Historical Perspective
• Chapter 4: The Iranian Army under Monarchy and Republic: State-Building, Empire-Building and Revolution
• Chapter 5: Tribes, Coups and Princes: Building a Modern Army in Saudi Arabia
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Select Bibliography