Adramatic example of the powerful force of pan-Islamic
sentiment took place on September 11, 2001, when Muslim
militants hijacked four U.S. airliners and turned them
into missiles aimed at the center of world capitalism. Although
the headquarters of the terrorist network that carried
out the attack—known as al-Qaeda—was located in
Afghanistan, the militants themselves came from several
different Muslim states. In the months that followed, support
for al-Qaeda and its mysterious leader, Osama bin
Laden, intensified throughout the Muslim world (see the
box on p. 256). To many observers, it appeared that the
Islamic peoples were embarking on an era of direct confrontation
with the entire Western world.
What were the sources of Muslim anger? In a speech
released on videotape shortly after the attack, bin Laden
declared that the attacks were a response to the “humiliation
and disgrace” that have afflicted the Islamic world
for over eighty years, a period dating back to the end of
World War I.
For the Middle East, the period between the two world
wars was an era of transition. With the fall of the Ottoman
and Persian Empires, new modernizing regimes
emerged in Turkey and Iran, and a more traditionalist
but fiercely independent government was established in
Saudi Arabia. Elsewhere, European influence continued
to be strong; the British and French had mandates in
Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, and Palestine, and British
influence persisted in Iraq and southern Arabia and
throughout the Nile valley. Pan-Arabism was on the rise,
but it lacked focus and coherence.
During World War II, the Middle East became the
cockpit of European rivalries, as it had been during World
War I. The region was more significant to the warring
powers than previously because of the growing importance
of oil and the Suez Canal’s position as a vital sea
route. For a brief period, the Afrika Korps, under the command
of the brilliant German general Erwin Rommel,
threatened to seize Egypt and the Suez Canal, but British
troops defeated the German forces at El Alamein, west of
Alexandria, in 1942 and gradually drove them westward
until their final defeat after the arrival of U.S. troops in
Morocco under the field command of General George S.
Patton. From that time until the end of the war, the entire
region from the Mediterranean Sea eastward was under
secure Allied occupation.
World History
