Islam and Islamic History in Arabia
and The Middle East
The Coming of the West
The Message |
The Hijrah |
The Rightly Guided Caliphs |
The Umayyads |
Islam In Spain |
The 'Abbasids |
The Golden Age |
The Fatimids |
The Seljuk Turks |
The Crusaders |
The Mongol and The Mamluks |
The Legacy |
The Ottomans |
Revival in The Arab East |
Related Topics
The Holy Quran |
The Faith of Islam |
Arabic Writing |
Science and Scholarship in Al-Andalus |
Arabic Literature |
Arabic Numerals |
The Western world had for centuries been gradually
penetrating most of the areas that had once been part of the Muslim
empire, and in the latter part of the nineteenth century, in the vacuum
left by the long decay and decline of the Ottoman Empire, European
powers came to dominate the Middle East.
Among the first Europeans to gain a foothold in the
Middle East were the Venetians who, as early as the thirteenth century,
had established trading posts in what are now Lebanon, Syria, and
Egypt, and who controlled much of the shipping between Arab and
European ports. Then, in 1497, five years after Ferdinand and Isabella
ended Islamic rule in Spain, Vasco da Gama led a fleet of four
Portuguese ships around Africa and in 1498 found a new sea route to
India from Europe. Dutch, British, and French frigates and merchantmen
followed and began establishing trading outposts along the shores of
the Indian Ocean, eventually undercutting both Venetian shipping and
the Mediterranean trade on which the Middle East had thrived for
millennia.
The process of European penetration was gradual and
complex; but there were, nevertheless, clearly identifiable turning
points. In the sixteenth century, for example, the Ottoman Empire
voluntarily granted a series of concessions called the "Capitulations"
to European powers - concessions which gave the Europeans decided
advantages in foreign trade in the empire. Another turning point was
the invasion of Egypt in 1798 by Napoleon Bonaparte. Hoping to cut
Britain's lines to India and cripple its maritime and economic power,
Napoleon crushed the Mamluks (who governed Egypt under Ottoman
suzerainty) and briefly occupied the country. By defeating Egypt, then
still part of the Ottoman Empire, Napoleon exposed the inner
weaknesses, both military and administrative, of the sultans, shattered
the myth of Ottoman power, and inaugurated more than 150 years of
direct political intervention by the West.
Europe's worldwide nineteenth-century search for raw
materials, markets, military bases, and colonies eventually touched
most of what had been the Arab empire. In 1820 Great Britain imposed a
pact on Arab tribes on the coast of the Arabian Gulf; in the 1830s
France occupied Algeria; in 1839 Britain occupied Aden, at the
strategic entrance to the Red Sea; and in 1869 Ferdinand de Lesseps,
with the backing of the French emperor, completed what would become,
and still is, one of the key shipping arteries of the world, the Suez
Canal.
Western culture spread with Western economic and
political control. In Lebanon missionaries from several countries
founded a network of schools and universities. By introducing modern
Western ideas these fostered the growth of Arab nationalism,
contributed to the revival of Arabic literature, and provided a
powerful impulse toward modernization. In addition to education,
contact with the West led to improvements in medical care and the
introduction of Western techniques in agriculture, commerce, and
industry. For the most part, however, Western domination tended to
benefit the nations of Europe at the expense of the Arab world.
Although the Suez Canal, for example, has been of immense value to
Egypt, the profits for nearly a century went to European shareholders
in the company that managed the canal. Western and Western stimulated
efforts to modernize parts of the Middle East, moreover, often led
Middle Eastern rulers to incur debts which led to European financial
control and then to European political domination. It was such a series
of steps that ended with France occupying Tunisia in 1881 and Britain
taking control of Egypt in 1882. Later, in emulation, Italy in 1911
seized Libya.
Resistance to European penetration took several forms.
In the cities, Arab intellectuals debated whether modernization or a
return to their roots would be the more effective path to the removal
of foreign dominance and, consequently, to independence. Elsewhere,
Muslim leaders such as the Mahdi in the Sudan and 'Abd al-Qadir
al-Jazairi in Algeria took direct action. These struggles were later
romanticized and distorted in a wave of books and films on, for
example, Gordon of Khartoum and the French Foreign Legion. Still other
intellectuals, such as the Egyptian Muhammad 'Abduh and his Syrian
disciple Rashid Rida, undertook to reform the Muslim educational system
and to restate Islamic values in terms of modern concepts - needs
deeply felt by most Muslim thinkers of the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries.
Western penetration also drew the Middle East into the
First World War, when the Ottoman Empire sided with (Germany, and Great
Britain, in response, encouraged and supported the Arab Revolt against
the Turks. By promising aid - and ultimate independence from the
Ottomans - Great Britain encouraged the Arabs to launch a daring
guerrilla campaign against Turkish forces, a campaign widely publicized
in press coverage of T. E. Lawrence ("Lawrence of Arabia") and in
Lawrence's own writings.
By diverting Turkish strength and blocking the
Turkish-German route to the Red Sea and India, the Arab Revolt
contributed substantially to the Allied victory, but it did not result
in full independence for the Arab lands. Instead, France and Great
Britain secretly agreed to partition most of the Arab provinces of the
Ottoman Empire between them and eventually obtained mandates from the
League of Nations: Britain over Iraq, Palestine, and Transjordan;
France over Syria and Lebanon. The mandates were inconsistent with
British promises to the Arabs and, furthermore, contrary to the
recommendations of President Wilson's King-Crane Commission, a group
sent to the Middle East in 1919 specifically to ascertain the wishes of
the Arab peoples.
The mandates, however, were granted, thus extending
Western control of the Middle East and also setting the stage for one
of the most tragic and intractable conflicts of modern times: the
conflict over Palestine which has, since 1948, ignited four wars, sent
masses of Palestinian Arabs into exile, contributed to the energy
crisis of 1973, and, from 1975 on, fueled the civil war in Lebanon.
The conflict over Palestine actually goes back to 1896,
when Theodor Herzl published a pamphlet called Der Judenstaat ("The
Jewish State"), in which he advocated British-backed Jewish
colonization in Argentina or Palestine - with the hope of eventually
creating a sovereign Jewish state. Herzl's writings and personal
advocacy led to the formal development of Zionism, a political movement
dedicated to the creation of such a state, and eventually focusing on
Palestine. The Zionist claim to Palestine was mainly based on the fact
that there had been periods of Hebrew rule in Canaan and the land west
of the Jordan River between 1300 B.C. and A.D. 70.
The Arabs considered this claim to be without
substance. Palestine, they pointed out, had been part of the Islamic
world almost continually for twelve centuries; from 636 to the First
World War. In 1917, however, Lord Balfour, the British Foreign
Secretary, issued the Baltour Declaration, which promised British
support for the establishment of a "national home for the Jewish
people" in Palestine providing that "nothing shall he done which may
prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish
communities" - a reference to the Arabs, who then were 92 percent of
the population. The declaration was interpreted by key Zionist leaders
as support for a sovereign Jewish state, but this interpretation has
been disputed. Both Winston Churchill and Lord Balfour himself later
said publicly that "a national home" meant a cultural or religious
center, a view that America's King-Crane Commission independently
presented. Establishment of a national home did not imply a Jewish
state, the commission said.
In the wake of the Balfour Declaration, and during the
British mandate, Jewish immigration increased. So, in proportion did
sporadic strife between Arabs and Jews. Immigration nevertheless
continued and in the 1930s - with the rise of Adolf Hitler - and after
World War II, Jewish immigration increased still further. As British
efforts to control it generated widespread disapproval in the West and
stimulated underground warfare by militant Zionist units against
British forces, Britain eventually placed the problem in the hands of
the United Nations, which in 1947 voted to partition Palestine into
Jewish and Arab States.
Fighting then flared up in Palestine. Six months later,
when Britain withdrew and formation of the State of Israel was
proclaimed, the Arabs went to war against the newly declared nation. As
Jewish forces were victorious - and as stories spread that some 250
Arab civilians had been massacred in a village called Deir Yassin -
thousands of Palestinians fled, among the first of today's 3.4 million
refugees and exiles. Eventually the United Nations negotiated a truce,
but fighting became endemic and war broke out again in 1956, 1967, and
1973. The 1967 war triggered underground warfare by Palestinian
militants, whose attacks were primarily aimed at Israel, but also
included strikes in Europe and hijackings on international air routes.
In order to settle the conflict, numerous United
Nations Resolutions have been passed calling for peace, the return of
the refugees to their homes, Israeli withdrawal from occupied
territories, and the establishment of permanent boundaries. Several
Western nations have attempted mediation, a Palestinian spokesman has
argued the matter before the General Assembly of the UN, and in 1977
President Sadat of Egypt traveled to Jerusalem and appeared before the
Israeli parliament in an unprecedented peace initiative. President
Carter of the United States brought the leaders of Egypt and Israel
together in the United States and himself traveled to the Middle East
in an attempt to persuade at least these two countries to conclude a
peace treaty, and in March 1979 Egypt and Israel signed a treaty to
which the United States was also a signatory. Although it led to an
improvement in Egyptian-Israeli relations which resulted in Israeli
evacuation of some occupied Egyptian territory and the opening of the
Suez Canal to Israeli ships, however, this separate peace treaty did
nothing to bring about withdrawal of Israeli occupation forces from
East Jerusalem, the West Bank, and the Golan Heights of Syria and left
untouched the root cause of the entire problem- that is, the status of
the Palestinians. The immediate net result of the treaty, in fact, was
a general increase in tension in the Middle East which manifested
itself in an apparent increase in Israeli intransigence in the occupied
territories and the isolation of Egypt from the rest of the Arab world,
including those countries on which it has been most heavily dependent
for economic and political backing and which were opposed to the
separate treaty because it failed to achieve a permanent and
comprehensive peace.