The Middle East is ridden with strife thinly
papered over. Arab nation is divided from Arab
nation, fundamentalist Muslims from moderate
Muslims who accept the secular state, Persians
(Iranians) from Arabs, feudal tribal monarchies
from secular republics, the oil-rich from the poor
nations. Why is there so much conflict? Is there
one root cause? If the Zionists had not created
Israel, would there have been peace? Were the
Arabs set against each other by outside powers,
by the Russians, by the British, by the Americans?
Or do the problems of the region derive from a
backlash against the imposition of alien Western
traditions on a traditional Islamic society? Is the
conflict of terror waged in the twenty-first century
by extreme Muslim groups in the Middle East
and the West, a so-called ‘clash of civilisations’?
How artificial are the national frontiers, the result
of great-power bargains imposed on the region
after the First World War?
Central to the Middle East’s geopolitical
importance is its oil, a commodity vital since 1945
to the prosperity of the oil states, the West and
Japan. Before the Second World War Middle
Eastern oil was less significant: the US, Mexico
and Venezuela were the major oil exporters,
Venezuelan oil production alone in 1939 exceeding
that of the entire Middle East. But during
the war, Iraqi oil became vital to Britain, which
occupied the country jointly with the Soviet
Union. It was the dramatic expansion of oil consumption
after the Second World War, the industrial
changeover from coal to oil and the
expansion of motor and air travel that gave the
Middle Eastern oil-producing nations so important
a role in Western economies. The US then
ceased to be an exporter of oil and became an
importer.
Between 1919 and 1939 the US, Britain and
the Netherlands had secured a virtual monopoly of
Middle Eastern oil concessions and so came to
dominate world marketing. Iran was the region’s
major oil producer, and Britain was able to keep
out foreign competition, retaining control until
the nationalisation dispute of 1951. The US oil
giants, meanwhile, worried about oil reserves in
the US, with the backing of the American administration,
gained a large share of the oil concessions,
which were to prove the richest of the
Middle East after the Second World War: Aramco,
a consortium of US companies, secured oil rights
in Saudi Arabia; Gulf Oil, a half-share of the oil
resources of Kuwait; and the US also gained a share
in Iraqi oil. Britain further agreed to share Iraqi oil
with France, whose spheres of influence in the
Middle East contained little oil. French-controlled
Syria, and the Lebanon before 1945, earned additional
royalties from the pipelines carrying oil from
the Iraqi Kirkuk field to Tripoli; a ‘British’ line ran
through Transjordan and Palestine to Haifa. Until
the mid-1950s Britain remained not only the
dominant political power in the Middle East but
also the most important oil power.
During the last decade of the twentieth and the
early years of the new century, the Western wars in
Afghanistan and Iraq dominated world attention.
Another essentially Western conflict between the
Israelis and Palestinians appeared no nearer to a
solution. Other enmities and conflicts within the
Arab world or between Arabs, Persians, Kurds and
ethnic and religious minorities have received far
less attention in the West. Westerners tend to see
these societies of complex religious and ethnic
diversity as much more homogeneously Arab and
Islamic than they are. Understanding the complex
divisions is a key to understanding the conflicts of
the Middle East. It is also true that, apart from
Turks, Kurds, Armenians, Jews and the Persians of
Iran, the Middle East is predominantly Arab, and
that the majority of Arabs are followers of Islam.
This has created a sense of cultural unity: the
Koran and the Arab spoken language help Arabs
to feel that they belong to one civilisation, and
hundreds of thousands of Egyptians, Palestinians
and other Arab nationals, mainly technicians,
teachers and students, work and feel at home in
Arab countries other than their own, principally in
the oil-rich Gulf states. Although Islam is the
dominant faith of the great majority of the peoples
of the Middle East, not all Muslims are Arabs. The
Turks, the Iranians and the Kurds are ethnically
quite distinct from the Arabs, as are many converts
to Islam. The ebb and flow of conquests is
reflected in the diverse cultures and religions of
the Middle East. This becomes clearer as one
looks at the populations country by country.
Modern Turkey, shorn of its Arab empire in
1919, was the most homogeneous of the large
Middle Eastern states. It was much less so by the
twenty-first century, with a minority of 14 million
Kurds among its total population of 73 million.
Syria’s population was about 17.2 million at the
beginning of the twenty-first century, of whom
more than 1 million belong to some eleven different
Christian sects. Most Syrians are Sunni
Muslims, but a minority, the Alawite Muslim sect,
has built up a dominant military and political role
in recent years, though the Druze is another
Muslim sect of importance in Syrian political life.
In Aleppo there is a large Christian minority.
Iran (Persia) has a mainly Persian Shia Muslim
population of 36 million out of the whole population
of 70.3 million in 2004. The division of Islam
into Sunni and Shia occurred a generation after
the death of the Prophet Mohammed in AD 632,
following a dispute over the succession to the
caliphate. Ali, Mohammed’s first cousin, lost this
contest, and his followers founded the Shia
branch, whose members look to their spiritual
leaders for divine guidance on the interpretation
of the Koran. The Sunni are also known as orthodox
Muslims. Differences between Shia and Sunni
have important political implications, for the Shias
are in a majority in Iran and in significant minorities
in neighbouring Lebanon. Worldwide, the
Shia branch comprises only one in ten Muslims. It
should be remembered that there are also non-
Arab Muslims such as the Sunni and Shia Kurds of
Iran, Iraq and Turkey. There are two major
minorities in Iran, 16 million Azeri Shiite Muslims
and some 5 million Kurds bordering Iraq’s Kurds.
Iraq reflects the chequered composition of
Middle Eastern countries. The majority of the
population at the start of the twenty-first century
are Shia Muslim Arabs, 16 million out of the total
population of 26 million (2004). They live in the
south of the country. Northern Iraq is predominantly
Kurd. But there are also Turcoman and
Assyrians. The Kurds follow the Sunni branch of
Muslims. They are not Arabs, have preserved their
national identity, language and culture despite
being partitioned between their neighbours,
Turkey, USSR, Iran and Iraq all anxious to suppress
them as dangerous minorities. In Iraq there
are 4.6 million Kurds. The country between the
north and south is inhabited by 8.9 million
dominant Sunni Arabs placed in key positions of
power by Saddam Hussein, who is a Sunni Arab.
There is enmity between the Sunni Arab centre
and the Kurdish north despite the religious link.
In the capital Baghdad there was a large and prosperous
Jewish community until persecution led to
their mass exodus in 1950 to 1951. In the region
around oil-rich Mosul there is an Assyrian
Christian minority. Iraq is an artificial creation,
once a pawn in the Middle Eastern carve-up by
the strongest powers in the region who intended
Iraq to create balance and stability to the region
with its important oil resources. After the First
World War it became a British League of Nations
Mandate. In the major cities, with rapid urbanisation,
there is a mix of religions and ethnicity.
Baghdad is mainly Sunni and Basra, Shiite.
The most religiously and ethnically divided
country is mountainous Lebanon, among whose
population of 3.7 million today no one group has
an overall majority. The Muslim population is
divided between Shia, Sunni and the Druze; the
Maronite Catholic Christians, who have their own
patriarch but accept the Pope as head of the
Church, are the largest single Christian group and,
together with other Christian communities, once
made up about half the total population. Today
the Muslims form the majority. So sensitive an
issue have precise population numbers been in the
Lebanon that no official census of the communities
has been taken for half a century. The breakdown
in 1957 of a power-sharing agreement between
Maronites and Sunni, the so-called National Pact,
plus interference by neighbours, as well as by the
militant Palestinian Liberation Organisation,
plunged the Lebanon into bloody civil war. At the
opening of the twenty-first century the main divisions
were between 1.5 million Shiite Arabs, 1.6
Sunni Arabs and 1.4 million Christians.
The population of the territory under
Jordanian control after the 1967 war with Israel
was about 3.8 million in 1987. In the West Bank,
assigned to Jordan (Transjordan) in 1949 after
the first Arab–Israeli War, there were a further
500,000 Arab Palestinians under Israeli control.
The relationship between Arab Jordanians and
Arab Palestinians who are seeking their own independence
has been a strained one. The Jordanians
are Sunni Muslims; in the West Bank there is a
minority of Christians. In 2004, the total population
of Israel is 7 million. In the occupied West
Bank and Gaza occupied since 1967 there are
more than 3 million Palestinians and over
200,000 Israeli settlers. In Israel itself there are
more than 1 million Arabs.
The Arabian peninsula’s most important state
is Saudi Arabia, unified by Ibn Saud and his
zealous followers, the Wahhabi, after the defeat
of his rival Hussain Sharif of Mecca in the 1920s,
and in 2002 having a population of about 23.5
million. Originally the poverty-stricken Bedouins
of Saudi Arabia and their tribal chiefs were of
political importance because they ruled over the
holy cities of Mecca and Medina, and so, with
British backing, could be set up as rival caliphs
appealing to the Muslims of the Ottoman and
Indian empires against the Caliph Sultan of
Turkey. This proved of some value to Britain in
the First World War but its sponsorship proved
insufficient to unite the Arabs. The tribes of the
Arabian peninsula were among the poorest in the
Middle East, and most of the peninsula, except
for the pilgrimage routes and the coastline, was
isolated from the rest of the world. Ibn Saud’s
new kingdom of Sunni Arabs was backward and
poor, his rule patriarchal. Patriarchal rule has continued
to the present day, but the kingdom has
become one of the richest in the world as a result
of the post-war development of the huge oil discoveries
made in the 1930s. Before then, there
had been nothing to attract the British, who
maintained friendly relations and did not interfere
in Saudi Arabia’s internal affairs. Desperate for
revenue, Ibn Saud in 1933 granted concessions
for oil-prospecting to American oil companies
which were exploited after the war by the Arabian
American Oil Company (Aramco).
Similarly, the discovery and development of oil
wells along the Persian Gulf, in Kuwait and
Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates (Trucial
States) and Oman, transformed those regions of
the Arabian peninsula into one of the wealthiest
in the world. In contrast, Yemen, with a population
estimated at 19 million in 2002, has few
valuable resources and is very poor. But a number
of companies are continuing exploration for
gas and oil and production is expanding. The
Yemenites belong to a branch of the Shia Muslims
– most Arabs are Sunni. Britain’s interests in the
Arabian peninsula, before the irruption of oil,
were mainly strategic. To safeguard commercial
routes and the oil supplies from Iraq and Iran,
Britain held on to Aden and maintained protectorate
relationships with the tribal sheikhs along
the coastline of the Arabian Sea and Persian Gulf.
Egypt is among the largest Middle Eastern
states but also one of the poorest. As elsewhere in
the region, the population has increased very
rapidly in the twentieth century and efforts to
modernise, and especially to improve the lot of
the peasants, can scarcely keep pace with the rate
of population growth from some 18 million in
1947 to an estimated 73 million fifty-seven years
later. The great majority of Egyptians are Sunni
Muslims, but there is a minority of Arab-speaking
Copts (Greek for Egyptian), who have followed
Christianity under their own patriarchs. Most
members of an ancient community of Jews were
expelled after 1956.
The Sudan, to the south, which shares the lifegiving
Nile with Egypt, was nominally under
Anglo-Egyptian rule from 1899 until independence
in 1956 but it was, in reality, controlled by
Britain. The main ethnic division is between the
mixed, mainly Sunni Muslim peoples of the
northern and central regions and the southern
tribes, which tend to be either pagan or Christian
converts. Some have been converted to Islam,
others resist northern attempts at Islamisation.
This division, which has often led to conflict and
warfare, remains one of the most serious internal
problems facing the modern Sudan’s 31.1 million
inhabitants (2000 figure), of whom just under a
third belong to one of the black African peoples.
In western Sudan in the Darfur region, African
people started a revolt and one million were
driven out by Arab militias, villages burnt and
50,000 killed in 2004. The great majority of
Libya’s 5.3 million people in 2000 were Sunni
Muslims; Arabic is the national language, though
some Berber-speaking districts remain. Once one
of the poorest Arab countries, comprised as it is
largely of desert, the discovery of oil in the 1960s
transformed the economy and the ambitions of
the Libyan political leadership.
The Middle East is overwhelmingly Arab and
Islamic. There are constant appeals to Arab unity
and Islamic solidarity, as well as calls for the political
organisation of an Arab League. Unions of
different Arab nations are talked about and even
established, though only for short periods. The
State of Israel was seen as the common enemy,
the intruder that has seized Arab lands and alienated
most of Palestine from Arab rule. By the
twenty-first century the Arab world has accepted
that Israel has established itself securely and its
neighbours, with more or less willingness, are
accommodating themselves to reality. As we have
seen, the sense of a common civilisation and language
and the pride in Islam are shared by millions
of Arabs, and the educated classes are
conscious of these links across national frontiers.
But nationalism is relatively new to the Arabs,
except in Egypt, which was influenced by the
Napoleonic invasion and Western ideas in the
nineteenth century. Socialism, industrial development
and demands for constitutional government
are other signs of the Western impact on the
Middle East of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries,
but they have not got very far.
After the defeat of 1918 the Turks became a
strongly nationalist country under Mustafa Kemal,
known as Kemal Atatürk (Father of the Turks).
Modern Turkey with a population in 2000 of 66.7
million is based on the military success of Atatürk,
who defied the Western Allies and by 1923 had reestablished
complete Turkish sovereignty over its
territories, shorn of the Arab empire, by threatening
to fight again for his country. The legacy was
bitter rivalry with Greece, which had to abandon
its own attempted expansion in Asia Minor. It is a
rivalry that persists to the present day, with disputes
in the Aegean and over the future of Cyprus.
Mustafa Kemal broke with Ottoman and Muslim
traditions and during the fifteen years of his rule as
president forced Westernisation on the Turks,
breaking the power of the clergy. The Atatürk tradition,
under which the military became the
guardian of the nation, lives on. In modelling
institutions on the West in the 1930s, Atatürk
combined a parliamentary system with his own
virtual one-party rule and cult of personality. His
protegé and successor was Ismet Inönü, who was
president from 1938 to 1950 and prime minister
from 1961 to 1965. But in the aftermath of the
Second World War and in alliance with the US,
there was both external and internal pressure for
more democratic rule. Strife-ridden civilian governments
have been replaced intermittently by
repressive military rule. The democratic tradition
is weak.
Three peoples were denied the right to form
their own independent nations in the carve-up of
the Ottoman Empire: the Armenians, the
Palestinian Arabs and the Kurds. The Armenians,
with a history of independence and subjection
going back to ancient times, seemed the most
likely to gain independence after the collapse of
the Ottoman Empire, under whose rule they had
suffered genocidal atrocities. Britain and France
hoped that the US would accept a mandate over
Armenia, still partitioned between Turks and
Russians, but the US Senate rejected the notion.
Nevertheless, by the Treaty of Sèvres an independent
Armenian republic was recognised in
1920, but the West made no attempt to defend
the new state when Turkey and Soviet Russia
attacked and divided the republic between them
in December of that year.
The Kurds, who had struggled for independence
when under Ottoman rule, took heart from
Wilson’s promise of self-determination and from
the defeat of the Turks. The same Treaty of
Sèvres recognised the creation of independent
Kurdistan, but Kemal Atatürk tore up the treaty
and forced the Allies to revise it by the Treaty of
Lausanne in 1923; by then he had conquered
Kurdistan. In the final disposition of the Ottoman
Empire the Kurds found themselves minorities in
five states. In 2000 it is estimated 600,000 lived
in the USSR, 4.7 million in Iran, 3.6 million in
Iraq, 1.7 million in Syria and 14 million in
Turkey. They have rebelled sporadically, always to
be savagely repressed. The tragedy of the Kurds
in the aftermath of the second Gulf War, when in
March 1991 they rose against Saddam Hussein
in Iraq, is that no nation wants to raise the issue
of an independent Kurdistan. The US wishes
to build a ‘stable peace’ in the region through an
alliance of Arab states, Iran, Turkey and the
Soviet Union and these have a common interest
in suppressing Kurdish nationalism in their own
countries. The Palestinian diaspora also had its
origins in the aftermath of the First World War.
For more than half a century the sense of national
identity which characterises these three peoples
has not been extinguished – nor, as the twentyfirst
century begins, is it likely to be.
Radio and television can mobilise the masses in
ways not dreamed of in the days of the Ottoman
Empire. In addition, the movement of the rural
population to the cities has been a phenomenon
throughout much of the less developed world,
including the Middle East. In 2000 some 6 million
have crowded into Teheran, Iran’s capital;
Cairo’s population exceeds 10 million; and even in
the Lebanon, a country with a small population,
close to a million live in Beirut. The explosive
growth of urban living, the increase, especially in
towns, of literacy, the frustrations and the thirst
for activity among student groups, the restlessness
of unemployed labour existing on the margins
of subsistence, the abject poverty of most of the
peoples of the Middle East, all these have added
greatly to the volatility of the region and created a
gulf between the urban and rural populations.
In the rural areas, despite some ambitious projects,
high population growth has negated the
advances in crop yields and agricultural methods,
leaving the peasants no less backward and poor. In
the oil-rich states – Saudi Arabia and those along
the Persian Gulf – agriculture is of little importance.
In Iran and Iraq, however, despite the revenues
from oil, agriculture must absorb the labour
and provide a subsistence living for up to half the
population. So the possession of oil alone does not
solve the economic problems of these states.
The purchasing power of the oil-rich states has
turned them into vital elements in the Western
world’s economic advancement. Underdevelopment
and backwardness rub shoulders with ambitious
modern projects and international airports in
the Middle Eastern states. In great-power contests
it remains a region of strategic importance. The
continuities of cultures and religions provide links
with the past, but there are also huge differences
as a result of the transformation that occurred in
the twentieth century.
The resurgence of militant fundamentalism,
especially after the overthrow of the Shah of Iran
by the Ayatollah Khomeini in 1979, threatened
to destabilise the whole region. It was not only a
reaction against Western dominance, whether
Russian, British or American, but also a reversal
of the road to Western modernisation taken by
Turkey under Mustafa Kemal after the First
World War. Thus rival Islamic ideological conflicts
were added to the Western ideological
confrontations of ‘socialism’ and ‘capitalism’.
Among the more powerful nations there is also
a continuous struggle for regional predominance.
In the 1980s there were several such national and
international conflicts. A bloody war between
Iraq and Iran was followed by Saddam Hussein’s
invasion of Kuwait in August 1990, which lined
Syria, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the Western
powers up against him and led to the second Gulf
War in January 1991.
World History
