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Is There A Middle East?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 January 2009

Nikki R. Keddie
Nikki R. Keddie
Affiliation:
University Of California, Los Angeles
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Extract

The Middle East, as a geographical term, is generally used today to cover the area stretching from Morocco through Afghanistan, and is roughly equivalent to the area of the first wave of Muslim conquests plus Anatolia. It is a predominantly Muslim area with widespread semi-arid and desert conditions where agriculture is heavily dependent on irrigation and pastoral nomadism has been prevalent. With the twentieth-century rise of exclusive linguistic nationalisms, which have taken over many of the emotional overtones formerly concentrated on religious loyalties, it becomes increasingly doubtful that the Middle East is now much more than a geographical expression – covering an area whose inhabitants respond to very different loyalties and values. In Turkey since the days of Atatürk, the ruling and educated élites have gone out of their way to express their identification with Europe and the West and to turn their backs on their traditional Islamic heritage. A glorification of the ‘modern’ and populist elements in the ancient Turkish and Ottoman past has gone along with a downgrading of Arab and Persian cultural influences–indeed the latter are often seen as having corrupted the pure Turkish essence, which only re-emerged with Atatürk’s swepping cultural reforms. Similarly the Iranians are increasingly emulating the technocratic and rationalizing values of the capitalist West, and in the cultural sphere identify with the glorious civilization of pre-Islamic Iran. This identification goes along with a downgrading of Islam and particularly of the Arabs, which has characterized both radical nationalists like the late nineteenth-century Mîrzâ Âqâ Khân Kirmânî and the twentieth-century Ahmad Kasravâ1 and more conservative official nationalists such as the Pahlavi Shahs and their followers. The recent celebrations of the 2500th anniversary of the Persian monarchy, for example, were notable for their virtual exclusion of the Muslim ulama, though religious leaders of other religious were invited, and their lack of specifically Islamic references. In both Iran and Turkey, traditional Islam has become largely a class phenomenon, with the traditional religion followed by a majority of the peasantry and the petty bourgeoisie, but rejected or radically modified by the more educated classes. With the continued spread of Western-style secular education it may be expected that the numbers of people identifying with nationalism and with the West (or with the Communist rather than the Islamic East) will grow.

Type
Articles
Information
International Journal of Middle East Studies , Volume 4 , Issue 3 , July 1973 , pp. 255 - 271
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1973

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References

page 255 note 1 On these men in English see Philipp, Mangol Bayat, ‘Mirza Aqa Khan Kirmani: Nineteenth Century Persian Revolutionary Thinker’ (unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, UCLA, Los Angeles, 1971),Google Scholar and Abrahamian, Ervand, ‘Kasravi: The Integrative Nationalist of Iran’, Middle Eastern Studies (forthcoming).Google Scholar

page 257 note 1 See especially Lewis, Bernard, The Middle East and the West (Bloomington, Indiana, 1964), pp. 9–10.Google Scholar

page 258 note 1 Burke, Edmund, ‘Morocco and the Near East: Reflections on some basic differences’, Archiv. europ. sociol. vol. 10 (1969), pp. 70–94.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

page 259 note 1 Algar, Hamid, Religion and State in Iran 1785–1906: The Role of the Ulama in the Qajar Period;Google ScholarKeddie, Nikki R., Religion and Rebellion in Iran: The Tobacco Protest of 1891–1892, and ‘The Roots of the Ulama's Power in Modern Iran’, in Keddie, Nikki R. (ed.), Scholars, Saints, and Sufis (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1972);Google Scholar and Lambton, Ann K. S., ‘The Persian 'Ulamâ and constitutional reform’, Le Shî'ism Imâmite (Paris, 1970), pp. 245–69.Google Scholar

page 482 note 3 Issawi, Charles, The Economic History of Iran 1800–1914 (Chicago, 1971), p. 20.Google Scholar

page 260 note 1 On Morocco see Burke, op. cit.,Google Scholar and Waterbury, John, The Commander of the Faithful: The Moroccan Political Elite – A Study in Segmented Politics (New York, 1970).Google Scholar

page 482 note 3 See especially Curzon, George N., Persia and the Persian Question, vol. 1 (London, 1892), chaps. XIII–XV; for a more positive view of reformsGoogle Scholar see Farmayan, Hafez Farman, ‘The Forces of Modernization in Nineteenth-Century Iran: A Historical Survey’, in Polk, William R. and Chambers, Richard L. (eds.), Beginnings of Modernization in the Middle East: The Nineteenth Century (Chicago, 1968);Google Scholar on Turkey see Lewis, Bernard, The Emergence of Modern Turkey (London, 1961),Google Scholar and Davison, Roderic H., Reform in the Ottoman Empire 1856–1876 (Princeton, 1963);Google Scholar and on Egypt Vatikiotis, P. J., The Modern History of Egypt (London, 1969).Google Scholar

page 260 note 2 Algar, op. cit.Google Scholar

page 263 note 1 See especially Garthwaite, Gene R., ‘The Bakhtiyâri Khans, the Government of Iran, and the British, 1846–1915’, IJMES, vol. 3, no. I (01. 1972), pp. 24–44.Google Scholar

page 263 note 2 Issawi, op. cit. p. 70.Google Scholar

page 264 note 1 Ibid. chap. I.

page 264 note 2 Ibid. p. 16.

page 265 note 1 A UCLA vice-chancellor who came from the State University of New York at Binghamton once asked me if I was studying ‘SWANA’, and when I asked what that was, he said it was Southwest Asia and North Africa. Perhaps some such new designation will catch on, though one may be permitted to doubt it.Google Scholar

page 265 note 2 See Keddie, Nikki R., Sayyid Jamâl ad-Dîn ‘al-Afghânî’: A Political Biography (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1972), chap. XIII,Google Scholar and ‘Religion and Irreligion in Early Iranian Nationalism’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, vol. 4, no. 3 (04, 1962), pp. 265–95.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

page 267 note 1 A detailed description of these events is found in the British Foreign Office documents of the period.Google Scholar