History of the Middle East

The Middle East is the birthplace and spiritual center of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. The region saw both periods of relative tolerance and violence. In the 20th century, it has been at the center of world affairs, and has been strategically, economically, politically, culturally, and religiously sensitive area. It possesses significant stocks of crude oil. See also List of conflicts in the Middle East.

The Ancient Middle East

The earliest civilizations in the region now known as the Middle East were founded in Mesopotamia and Ancient Egypt. The Sumerians, Babylonians, Assyrians and others built important states. From about 500 BC onward, several empires dominated the region, beginning with the Persian Empire of Achaemenids, followed by the Macedonian empire founded by Alexander the Great, and successor kingdoms such as Ptolemaic Egypt and the Seleucid state in Syria.

In the 1st century BC, the expanding Roman Republic absorbed the whole Eastern Mediterranean area, and under the Roman Empire the region was united with most of Europe and North Africa in a single political and economic unit.

This unity facilitated the spread of Christianity, and by the 5th century the whole region was Christian. The rule of Rome was succeeded in the 4th century AD by that of Constantinople, which led to the creation of a Greek-speaking, Christian Empire, known to historians as the Byzantine Empire, which ruled from the Balkans to the Euphrates. Further east, the Persian Empire was revived by the Parthians and later the Sassanids.

The Arab Middle East

As a result of the unifying effects of Roman and Byzantine rule, there was no real distinction between what is now Europe and what is now the Middle East until the 7th century AD. Anatolia, Syria, Palestine and Egypt were all Christian and Greek speaking, united culturally and politically with the Greco-Roman world under the rule of Constantinople, while Mesopotamia (modern Iraq) formed a buffer zone between the Byzantine and Persian Empires.

The decisive event in the creation of the Middle East as a distinct cultural region was the rise of Islam in the Arabian Peninsula. In 634 the followers of Muhammad set out from Medina. They occupied Palestine in 636, Mesopotamia in 637, Syria and Egypt in 640 and Persia in 642.

The Byzantines succeeded in preventing the Arabs from seizing Anatolia, which remained Christian until the arrival of the Turks 400 years later. The majority of the population in the areas conquered by the Arabs converted to Islam within two generations, creating a permanent cultural frontier between Europe and the Muslim world.

Although the united caliphate created by the first wave of Arab conquests broke up into a series of smaller caliphates and emirates by the late 9th century, the Arabs remained unchallenged in the zone between the Nile and the Tigris (as well as in North Africa and most of Spain) for more than 400 years.

To the east, however, Persia soon reasserted its independence, under dynasties such as the Tahirids, Saffarids, and Samanids, and later adopted a form of Islam, Shi’ism, which the Sunni Muslim Arabs saw as heretical. This created a permanent eastern border to the Arab-Islamic world, although Islam continued to spread to the east, into India and Indonesia.

During this period the Arab world, under the Umayyad, Abbasid and Fatimid caliphates, was the centre of cultural and economic activity in the western half of Eurasia. While Europe endured repeated invasions and saw its population and economic life fall back sharply from the days of the Roman Empire, the great Arab cities such as Cairo, Alexandria, Basra, Damascus and, above all, the metropolis of Baghdad, supported a large population, a prosperous trading economy and a rich cultural life. Arab literature, architecture, medicine and science were far in advance of anything surviving in western Europe. In all of Christendom, only the fading power of Constantinople was able to compete with the Arab world.

Turks, Crusaders and Mongols

The dominance of the Arabs came to a sudden end in the mid 11th century with the arrival of the Seljuk Turks, migrating south from the Turkic homelands in Central Asia, who conquered Persia, Iraq (capturing Baghdad in 1055), Syria, Palestine and the Hejaz, as well as defeating the Byzantines at the Battle of Manzikert and conquering Anatolia. Egypt held out under the Fatimid caliphs until 1169, when it too fell to the Turks. The Seljuks ruled most of the region for the next 200 years, but their empire soon broke up into a number of smaller sultanates.

This fragmentation of the region allowed the Christian west, which since the nadir of its fortunes in the 7th century had staged a remarkable economic and demographic recovery, to re-enter the region. In 1095 Pope Urban II summoned the European aristocracy to recapture the Holy Land for Christianity, and in 1099 the knights of the First Crusade captured Jerusalem. They founded the Kingdom of Jerusalem, which survived until 1187, when Saladin retook the city. Smaller crusader fiefdoms survived until 1291. The Crusaders were unable to establish a permanent presence in the area, mainly because they were unable to attract migrants from Europe once the initial Crusading impulse was spent.

In the early 13th century the Arab Ayyubid sultans regained control of Egypt and Syria from the Turks, but the Arab revival was shortlived. A new wave of invaders, the Mongols of the Golden Horde, swept through the region, sacking Baghdad in 1258 and advancing as far south as the border of Egypt.

The Mongols, however, were not empire builders, and by the mid 14th century they had departed from the region. In their wake the Turkish Mameluk sultans of Egypt gained control of Palestine and Syria, while other Turkish sultans controlled Iraq and Anatolia. Only in the Arabian peninsula did the Arabs rule their own affairs.

The Ottoman era

By the early 15th century a new power had arisen in western Anatolia, the Ottoman emirs, who in 1453 captured Constantinople and made themselves sultans. The Mameluks held the Ottomans out of the Middle East for a century, but in 1514 Selim the Grim began the systematic Ottoman conquest of the region. Iraq was occupied in 1515, Syria in 1516 and Egypt in 1517, extinguishing the Mameluk line. The Ottomans united the whole region under one ruler for the first time since the reign of the Abbasid caliphs of the 10th century, and they kept control of it for 400 years.

The Ottomans also conquered Greece, the Balkans and most of Hungary, setting the new frontier between east and west far to the north of the Danube. But in the west Europe was rapidly expanding, demographically, economically and culturally, with the new wealth of the Americas fuelling a boom that laid the foundations for the growth of capitalism and the industrial revolution.

By the 17th century Europe had overtaken the Muslim world in wealth, population and-most importantly-technology. Although Christianity and Islam were equally hostile to the acquisitive instincts of capitalism, the Protestant reformation broke the power of the Catholic Church and allowed individualism to flourish unchecked in northern Europe.

By 1700 the Ottomans had been driven out of Hungary and the balance of power along the frontier had shifted decisively in favour of the west. Although some areas of Ottoman Europe, such as Albania and Bosnia, saw many conversions to Islam, the area was never culturally absorbed into the Muslim world.

From 1700 to 1918 the Ottomans steadily retreated, and the Middle East fell further and further behind Europe, becoming increasingly inward-looking and defensive. During the 19th century Greece, Serbia, Romania and Bulgaria asserted their independence, and in the Balkan Wars of 1912-1913 the Ottomans were driven out of Europe altogether, except for the city of Constantinople and its hinterland.

By the 19th century the Ottoman Empire was the “sick man of Europe”, increasingly under the financial control of the European powers. Domination soon turned to outright conquest. The French annexed Algeria in 1830 and Tunisia in 1878. The British occupied Egypt in 1882, though it remained under nominal Ottoman sovereignty.

The British also established effective control of the Persian Gulf, and the French extended their influence into Lebanon and Syria. In 1912 the Italians seized Libya and the Dodecanese islands, just off the coast of the Ottoman heartland of Anatolia. The Ottomans turned to Germany to protect them from the western powers, but the result was increasing financial and military dependence on Germany.

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Middle Eastern rulers tried to modernise their states to compete more effectively with the European powers. Reforming rulers such as Muhammad Ali in Egypt, the Ottoman Sultan Abdul Hamid II and the authors of the 1906 revolution in Persia all sought to import versions of the western model of constitutional government, civil law, secular education and industrial development into their countries. Across the region railways and telegraphs lines were built, schools and universities were opened, and a new class of army officers, lawyers, teachers and administrators emerged, challenging the traditional leadership of Islamic scholars.

Unfortunately, in all these cases the money to pay for the reforms was borrowed from the west, and the crippling debt this entailed led to bankruptcy and even greater western domination, which tended to discredit the reformers. Egypt, for example, fell under British control because the ambitious projects of Muhammad Ali and his successors bankrupted the state. Additionally, the westernisation of the Islamic world created professional armies, led by officers who were both willing and able to seize power for themselves-a problem which has plagued the Middle East ever since.

There was also the problem that affects all reforming absolute rulers: they are prepared to consider all reforms except giving up their own power. Abdul Hamid, for example, grew ever more autocratic as he tried to impose reforms on his reluctant empire. Reforming ministers in Persia also tried to impose modernisation on their subjects, provoking sharp resistance.

The most ambitious reformers were the Young Turks (officially called the Committee for Union and Progress), who seized power in the Ottoman Empire in 1908. Led by an ambitious pair of army officers, Ismail Enver (Enver Pasha) and Ahmed Cemal (Cemal Pasha), and a radical lawyer, Mehmed Talat (Talat Pasha), the Young Turks initially established a constitutional monarchy, but soon became a ruling junta, with Talat as Grand Vizier and Enver as War Minister, which tried to force a radical modernisation program onto the Ottoman Empire.

The plan had several flaws. First it entailed imposing the Turkish language and centralised government on what had hitherto been a multi-lingual and loosely-governed empire, which alienated the Arabic-speaking regions of the empire and caused an upsurge in Arab nationalism. Secondly it drove the empire ever deeper into debt. And thirdly, when Enver Bey formed an alliance with Germany, which he saw as the most advanced military power in Europe, it cost the empire the support of Britain, which had protected the Ottomans against Russian encroachment all through the 19th century.

In 1914 Enver Bey’s alliance with Germany led the Young Turks into the fatal step of joining Germany and Austria-Hungary in World War I, against Britain and France. The British saw the Ottomans as the weak link in the enemy alliance, and concentrated on knocking them out of the war. When a direct assault failed at Gallipoli in 1915, they turned to fomenting revolution in the Ottoman domains, exploiting the awakening force of Arab nationalism. The British found an ally in Sherif Hussein ibn Ali, the hereditary ruler of Mecca and believed by Muslims to be a descendant of the family of the Prophet Muhammad, who led an Arab Revolt against Ottoman rule, having received a promise of Arab independence in exchange.

Meanwhile, the fall of the Ottomans had allowed Turkish Revolutionaries and Kemal Ataturk to seize power in Turkey and embark on a program of modernisation and secularisation. The new state abolished the caliphate, emancipated women, enforced western dress and the use of Turkish in place of Ottoman language, which has highly influenced from arabic and persian, and abolished the jurisdiction of the Islamic courts. In effect, Turkey become culturally part of Europe. Ever since, Turkey has insisted that it is a European country and not part of the Middle East.