Modern Middle Eastern History Research Articles

Sociodemographic Characteristics of the Iranian Revolutionary Community in Syria and Lebanon in the 1970s.

The article is devoted to the comprehensive sociodemographic analysis of the local community of Iranian Islamists acting in Syria and Lebanon in the decade preceding the Islamic revolution of 1978-79. Thus far, history of everyday life and the multitudinous activities of the Iranian Islamic opposition in Syria and Lebanon in the 1970s has never become the principal subject of a historic research and has barely received attention from Western specialists in the history of the Islamic Revolution and modern Middle Eastern history, as well as from Iranian historians, scholars and researchers working in the field of the modern history of Iran. However, for a more comprehensive understanding of the Islamic Revolution, revolutionary processes and their logical premises and outcomes, it is highly necessary to carefully consider the sociodemographic characteristics of the active representatives of the Iranian opposition movement in the pre-revolutionary period namely in the 1970s. Throughout the comparative historical analysis of the reliable memories of longtime supporters of the Iranian Islamic movement acting in Syria and Lebanon, the fundamental sociodemographic characteristics of the active members of Iranian revolutionary movement abroad (e.g. gender, age, birthplace and place of living, educational and religious background, social marital status, etc.) are thoroughly highlighted, properly described and analyzed and their sociodemographic portrait is carefully created. The received sociohistorical data may properly serve as a valuable source on the social history of the Iranian society in the pre-revolutionary period, as well as on the complex history of Iranian revolutionary movement and the modern history of the Middle East region.

The Middle East in World History: Spatial and Temporal Reorderings

In addition to my primary research specialty in Ottoman history, I prepared to teach the history of the Islamic Middle East from my first year in graduate school onward, and I did so throughout my academic career, including preparing graduate students to teach Ottoman and modern Middle Eastern history. My start in world history came later. Around the time I got tenure, my department decided, for comically bad reasons, to create a single world history course on the twentieth century. Having never witnessed creation ex nihilo in a department meeting before, I volunteered for the course. The department's reasons for creating the course were farcical, but I recognized it as a valuable intellectual property. In the existing state of the pedagogical literature, no one had paused to analyze the issues that made the twentieth century into more than the last chapter of a comprehensive world history book. A couple of years later, just as we finished teaching the course for the first time, an editor came along and asked if I had ever thought about writing a textbook. Yes, I had thought about it. Only I had assumed many years would pass before anyone would ask. Such were the origins of my coauthored Twentieth-Century World, having gone through seven editions from 1986 until 2010. It would be an understatement to say that radical revisions were required for each new edition, given not only the lengthening chronology but also the often radical revisions and improvements in the literature. If this presentation sounds more like a memoir than a research paper, the reason is that my dual lives in Middle Eastern and world history interacted in the pedagogical realm, raising issues that redirected my basic research and theoretical inquiries along the way.

Competition in the Mid-20th Century Saudi Education System

The formation of the Saudi education system in the middle of the 20th century, with its parallel religious and modernizing authorities, represents a form of institutional gestation that is quite distinct from the dominant models of modern Middle Eastern history. In Saudi Arabia, unlike elsewhere in the postcolonial Arab world, a religious ideology (Wahhabism) was made a centerpiece of the nation-building enterprise. This paper examines that nation-building process through the lens of the competition between the modernizing authorities of the Ministry of Education (Wizārat al-Ma‘ārif), which controlled the bulk of the kingdom’s new educational institutions, and the Wahhābī religious establishment, which was placed in autonomous charge of religious high schools and universities, as well as girls’ primary schools. This paper explores the opposing strategies of modernizers and ulama as they worked to imprint their priorities on the education sector. I look closely at contests over vocational education, resource allocation and authority, and private religious schooling initiatives, through which I map some foundational aspects of the institutionalization of ulama and technocratic authority in the Saudi education sphere. I argue that competition over the future of education was the impulse for cross-pollination between religious and modernizing educational institutions, and that this competition helps to explain the particular nature of the modern Saudi educational system.

Islamist Movements and the Arab Spring

The Arab uprisings of 2011, popularly known as the Arab Spring, were first initiated by a broad range of movements shaped primarily by a non-ideological sense of civic identity. As the uprisings gained momentum, however, Islamist groups were able to utilise their organisational strength and mobilisation capabilities to position themselves at the centre of this watershed moment in modern Middle Eastern history. This article examines the role Islamism came to play in the aftermath of the Arab Spring, notably in the reformulation of the norms of regional governance as authoritarian rule appeared poised to be replaced by a system rooted in democratic legitimacy, independent institutions, and a redefined relationship between the state and its citizens. The article begins with a consideration of the evolution of political Islam in the Arab world, from its origins as a significant social movement actor to its various attempts at political engagement with the state. The articlethen proceeds to a more explicit examine of both political Islams role in the Arab Spring and its apparent intentions for the post-authoritarian order. It is argued that, since the Arab uprisings took place, many Islamist groups have abandoned abstract slogans in favour of coherent political platforms concerned with, amongst other things, the role of Islam in a revised constitution and determining the powers and responsibilities of state institutions. Looking ahead to long-term trends, the interpretation of Shariah, understanding the nature of the civil state, and the shape of democratic participation appear set to become crucial issues within Islamist discourse. The realities of rule, requiring pragmatism and compromise, will almost certainly challenge the ideological orientation of political Islam in the coming years, as Islamists come to realise that political survival is predicated not on ideological purity but on practical results.

Interpreting the Oil Kingdom: Opportunities and Hazards

It is telling that Cambridge University Press commissioned two anthropologists to write its histories of modern Yemen and Saudi Arabia. Having escaped the experience of direct colonial rule, these countries do not fit comfortably into the dominant model of modern Middle Eastern history. It follows that the template for modern Saudi statehood cannot be retrieved from the colonial archives, or the postcolonial corporate ones, for that matter. Instead, it must be cobbled out of disparate parts, some Arabian, some Islamic, and some imported. Few modern states defy the reigning scholarly consensuses of economics, politics, history, and anthropology like Saudi Arabia, a place that on account of oil wealth has been transformed almost beyond recognition in the span of two or three generations. As a rentier-based, kinship-organized, orally inscribed, puritanically orthodox Muslim polity, Saudi Arabia poses problems for the best traditions of graduate training in any single discipline.

The Secret Anglo-French War in the Middle East: Intelligence and Decolonization, 1940–1948

The Secret Anglo-French War in the Middle East: Intelligence and Decolonization, 1940–1948

Over the Borderline? Rethinking Territoriality at the Margins of Empire and Nation in the Modern Middle East (Part I)

AbstractThis is the first of two connected articles examining the evolution of historical scholarship on borderlands within the field of Middle East studies. In both articles, I pay particular attention to how historians have addressed the relationship between borderland identities and modern territorializing empires and nation–states. I argue throughout both that analyzing what I call the “lived experience of territoriality” in borderland regions ought to take precedence over approaches that presume the ultimate imposition of fixed nation–state boundaries by the mid‐20th century. The adoption of borderlands as an analytical category along these lines presents an exciting opportunity for future research in modern Middle Eastern history precisely for its malleability. Historians who take a conceptually nuanced approach to borderlands and relate their work to new scholarship on territoriality will be able to explore a range of ways to understand local as well as state experiences and practices of power and politics, sovereignty and authority, and identity and belonging. In Part I, I begin by providing a general overview of key terminology that is prevalent across interdisciplinary scholarship on borderlands, before laying out my own framework for conceptualizing the relationship between borderland identities and modern discourses and practices of territoriality. I end this first installment by tracing the emergence of scholarship on Middle East borderlands within Ottoman historiography, focusing on one key work that pointed in important new directions for historians seeking to examine social and political life in the margins of modern Middle Eastern empires and nation–states.

Over the Borderline? Rethinking Territoriality at the Margins of Empire and Nation in the Modern Middle East (Part II)

AbstractThis is the second of two connected articles examining the evolution of historical scholarship on borderlands within the field of Middle East studies. In both articles, I pay particular attention to how historians have addressed the relationship between borderland identities and modern territorializing empires and nation‐states. I argue throughout both parts that analyzing what I call the “lived experience of territoriality” in borderland regions ought to take precedence over approaches that presume the ultimate imposition of fixed nation‐state boundaries by the mid‐twentieth century. The adoption of borderlands as an analytical category along these lines presents an exciting opportunity for future research in modern Middle Eastern history precisely for its malleability. Historians who take a conceptually nuanced approach to borderlands and relate their work to new scholarship on territoriality will be able to explore a range of ways to understand local as well as state experiences and practices of power and politics; sovereignty and authority; and identity and belonging. In Part I, I focused primarily on laying out a framework for conceptualizing the relationship between borderland identities and the lived experience of modern territoriality. In Part II, I push this framework further by surveying two large themes that have defined the work of Middle East borderland historians over the last two decades – critical cartography and the visual representation of borderland identities and borderlands as sites of contestation and negotiation. In the final section, I sketch out some possibilities for future research, drawing largely on new scholarship from within Middle East studies.

Eye Opening and Actually Enjoyable: Using Online Newspapers to Teach Modern Middle Eastern History

Challenging students to identify and analyze diverse perspectives is a key objective in any Middle East studies course. This article describes an assignment used in a history course which asks students to compare and contrast articles from Middle Eastern online newspapers. Comparing multiple articles on the same topic exposes students to contrasting views on significant issues. The easy availability of online newspapers “de-centers” students’ perspectives by requiring use of materials from outside the United States. This assignment teaches specific analytical skills, such as finding relevant articles, reading them critically, writing effective summaries, and developing synthetic comparisons. Through an analysis of this assignment, this article discusses the advantages, as well as limitations, of this approach, using students’ own evaluations to assess the achievement of desired learning objectives.

The British and Foreign Bible Society in Port Said and the Suez Canal

‘All things are for sale in Port Said’, said Madame. Rudyard Kipling, The Light That Failed (1890) At the beginning of the twentieth century, Port Said was four days from Marseilles … four days to meet up with this Tower of Babel where Egyptians, Arabs, Greeks, Maltese, Cypriots, Levantines, Syrians, and Tripolitanians mixed and where they took ocean liners by storm… Valérie Nicolas, Directrice de l'Alliance Française de Port-Saïd, in Marie-Laure Crosnier-Leconte et al., Port-Saïd: Architectures XIXe-XXe siècles (2006) In 1912, the British and Foreign Bible Society (BFBS), a Protestant voluntary society, decided to open a depot for the global distribution of its Bibles in the Egyptian city of Port Said. Located at the northern terminus of the Suez Canal, Port Said was a fuelling centre for steamships and welcomed travellers sailing between the Mediterranean and the Red Sea, and between Europe and Asia. The concentration of resources in Port Said made practical sense for the BFBS, whose leaders favoured a business model of efficiency and mass marketing while proclaiming a mission to share the Bible with the world. Yet, Port Said also had a romantic appeal for the BFBS, whose leaders repeatedly emphasised the city's proximity to historic lands of the Bible. This article surveys the activities of the BFBS in Port Said from the late nineteenth century until the outbreak of the Suez Crisis in 1956 and shows how this work impinged upon several different kinds of history, notably the history of books (including reading, publishing, and translation); of travel during an ‘Age of the Sea’; and of Christian missions and evangelical thought. Connecting British imperial and modern Middle Eastern history, the article also ties the BFBS at Port Said to larger events occurring in Egypt and the region upon Israel's debut in 1948.

Towards a New Ecology of Middle Eastern Identities

Since the West's very early flirtations with the modern Near East, and especially in the past 100 years of East–West relations, there has been considerable difficulty in understanding and defining the Middle East, the Arab world, pan-Arabism, Arab nationalism, and Middle Eastern identities in general. The Western impulse of conflating national identity with language, state, and ethnicity – often subsuming Arabic language into Arab ethnicity – has contributed to this misunderstanding and misreading of the region. For, while the Middle East can be accurately referred to by way of the generic ‘Arab world’ label, the appellation itself is a misleading oversimplification that conceals an inherent diversity and multiplicity of Middle Eastern cultures, ethnicities, languages, and nationalities. And while there is certainly a dominant Arab ethnos, there are also significant numbers of Middle Eastern peoples and nationalities with historical memories and ethno-cultural bonds that challenge the dominant Arabist paradigm. This article proposes a new reading of modern Middle Eastern history and attempts to bring back to the foreground of Middle East Studies the issue of language as a key factor in shaping (and misshaping) the region, with the hope of rediscovering a broader, more honest, and less ideologically tainted discussion on the Middle East and Middle Eastern identities.

The Politics of Debt: The Anglo-Persian Oil Company and the Bakhtiyari Khans

The loss of political independence through increasing indebtedness is a familiar phenomenon in modern Middle Eastern history. Although well-known as an affliction of states and governments, indebte...

Empires of the Sand: The Struggle for Mastery in the Middle East, 1789-1923

This volume offers a comprehensive reinterpretation of the struggle for mastery in the Middle East during the long 19th century (1789-1923). This book denies primacy to western imperialism in the restructuring of the region and attributes equal responsibility to regional powers. rejecting the view of modern middle eastern history as an offshoot of global power politics, the authors argue that the main impetus for the developments of this momentous period came from the local actors. Ottoman and western imperial powers alike are implicated in a delicate balancing act of manipulation and intrigue in which they sought to exploit regional and world affairs to their greatest advantage. backed by a wealth of archival sources, the authors refute the standard belief that Europe was responsible for the destruction of the Ottoman Empire and the region's political unity. Instead, they show how the Hashemites played a decisive role in shaping present middle eastern boundaries and in hastening the collapse of Ottoman rule. similarly, local states and regimes had few qualms about seeking support and protection from the "infidel" powers they had vilified whenever their interest so required. This work sees a pattern of pragmatic cooperation and conflict between the Middle East and the West during the past two centuries, rather than a clash of civilizations." Such vision affords new ways of viewing the Middle east's past as well as its volatile present.

Struggle and Survival in the Modern Middle East

Until now, we have known very little of the lives of ordinary Middle Eastern men and women, despite extensive research on the modern Middle East. With this collection of essays, the life stories of peasants, villagers, pastoralists, and urbanites can finally be heard - no more will our view of the Middle East be seen only over the shoulders of the elite. These twenty-four biographies are drawn from the entire Middle East - from Morocco to Afghanistan - and provide vantage points from which to understand modern Middle Eastern history 'from the bottom up'. Spanning the past 150 years and reflecting important transformations, the stories challenge elite-centered accounts of what has occurred in the Middle East and illuminate hidden corners of a largely unrecorded world. The essays, divided chronologically, provide a comprehensive framework for those unfamiliar with Middle Eastern social history. 'Pre-Colonial Lives' covers the period from 1850 until World War I, 'Colonial Lives' chronicles the beginning of European rule, and 'Contemporary Lives' relates the massive changes of the postwar era. Through them, we see how specific ecologies, ways of life, ethnic, class and gender situations can shape individual human action.

Two great British historians of the modern Middle East

As a serious subject of scholarly investigation modern Middle Eastern history is very young. It was only 50 years ago that the subject began to be studied by historians who were adequately equipped for the work. Its subsequent rapid progress to the position of respectability which it now occupies within the discipline of history owes much to the work of a handful of scholars among whom Albert Hourani and Elie Kedourie were especially conspicuous. The deaths of these two notable historians should not pass without an acknowledgement of the debt which we owe them and an appreciation of their contribution to the happy revolution in the branch of history which they adorned.

Albert Hourani, 1915–1993

It is not easy to sum up, and considerably harder to assess, the life’s work of a scholar as influential and prolific as Albert Hourani. It is harder still to do with any precision when he was a man whose influence was exercised as much through his teaching, his lectures and his erudite conversation and commentary as it was through the broad range of his scholarly writings on the modern Middle East.That Hourani was prolific is evidenced by the eight books he wrote, seven works he edited, the 157 articles and shorter pieces and over 100 book reviews he produced over a scholarly career spanning nearly five decades. Among them were writings of great importance to the field. These included the seminal Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age 1789–1939, which has gone through two editions and numerous reprints, and may be one of the most widely read works in modern Middle Eastern history. Among his articles, “Ottoman Reform and the Politics of the Notables,” originally published in the volume Beginnings of Modernization in the Middle East: The Nineteenth Century in 1968 and reissued in 1981, has provided a concept—that of “the politics of the notables”—which has helped a generation of historians to better understand the society and politics of the modern Middle East.

The Historiography of Modern Iraq

THE COMPILATION OF A CRITICAL BIBLIOGRAPHY of modern Iraqi history is not a particularly arduous task, although the relative paucity of scholarly studies is neither an accurate reflection of the intrinsic interest of the subject nor of the quality of much that has been produced. The best writing on modern Iraq ranks among the best writing on modern Middle Eastern history, and much recent scholarship, including the work of younger Iraqi scholars like 'Isam al-Khafaji, Hadi al-'Alawi, Falih 'Abd al-Jabbar and 'Abd al-Salam Yusuf, has concentrated on analytical issues such as the nature of the rentier state, the interpretation and significance of modern Islamic thought, and forms of cultural discourse, all concerns widely shared by their contemporaries in other Arab countries.' Among the more tragic aspects of the brutal and despotic regimes under which the population of Iraq has suffered for so long is that many of its most talented citizens have been forced into exile and that the best of its scholars can only express themselves freely outside Iraq. Apart from this, an important reason for the lack of academic attention Iraq has received is the sheer difficulty of carrying out research there, for Iraqis and foreigners alike. Thus the best-known field studies of modern Iraqi society2 are based on work carried out well before the Revolution of 1958; no comparable studies have been published since then, although a number of Iraqis have produced doctoral theses on sociological or anthropological topics that have tended to remain confined to the shelves of British or American university libraries (that is, they have not been published in book or article form in any European languages). This is also the case for less obviously sensitive historical periods; as far as is known to us, only one foreign scholar has carried out the kind of research in the Islamic law courts or the local Ottoman archives comparable to that of Abd al-Karim Rafeq or Andre Raymond and their students, which has so illuminated our understanding of Syria and Egypt in the seventeenth to nine-

Tribal Law in the Arab World: A Review of the Literature

At the time of Napoleon's invasion of Egypt—the conventional starting point of modern Middle Eastern history—central governments in the Arab world had long been exceedingly weak. The situation began to change after 1800: At an early stage, Egypt was brought under firm control, and toward the end of the century the Ottoman regime began to tighten its grip on its Arab subjects. In some places, however —the Arabian peninsula, for instance, or Morocco—it is only within living memory that the authorities have acquired the kind of power over their territories that a modern state is expected to have.

Some Soviet works on modern middle eastern history

Sustained Soviet interest in the Middle East is expressed in numerous published Soviet works on the area's modern and contemporary history. Much literature has been published on the history of individual countries in this region, as well as on specialised topics. In addition, a considerable number of monographs have appeared on modern Middle Eastern History as a whole as well as on several selected topics (sometimes only tenuously related). They vary in scope, comprising parts of books on the history of the East, Asia and Africa, the Near and Middle East, of the Arab East or the Maghrib. We have selected several of the more characteristic works, attempting to pinpoint the main topics of interest and the methodology of their research. Soviet historical works frequently distinguish among 'novaya istoriya; ('modern history'), 'novyeyshaya istoriya' ('recent history'), 'sovryemyennaya istoriya' ('contemporary history'), and 'aktual'niye problemi' ('current problems'). In the context of the Middle East, it is not always clear how this division works nor is it evident when one period begins and another ends. Let us begin with a text book written by A. A. Guber, G. F. Kim and A. N. Kheyfyets, entitled Novaya istoriya stran Azii i Afriki (The Modern History of the Countries of Asia and Africa), Moscow, Oriental Literature Press, 1975, pp. 544. This is the completely-rewritten second edition of a text book written by Guber and Kheyfyetz in 1961. Intended for the Faculties of History and Institutes of Pedagogy at the University of Moscow, it is divided into two parts: mid-seventeenth century to 1870 and 1870 to 1918. A special section (pp. 503-41) discusses the teaching and research concerning the history of Asia and Africa in czarist Russia and in the Soviet Union. The scope is very wide, as the book's title implies, covering the area from Japan and China, via Indonesia and India, to Iran, the Ottoman Empire and the Arab countries; Africa, by comparison, gets considerably less attention. The emphasis is on political history; economic and other developments are presented in their political context. Not unexpectedly, the entire book follows official doctrine; great stress is placed upon the development of capitalism and colonialist penetration into the areas under discussion. The next heading is 'The Awakening of Asia' in the early twentieth century (pp. 406-99), pertaining chiefly to Iran, the Ottoman Empire, China, the Mongols and India. Attempts to show the influence of the Russian Revolution of 1905 upon other countries, such as Iran (pp. 408 ff.) are made. Following the practice of most Soviet history textbooks, the material is presented in brief, oneor two-page sub-chapters under appropriate headings. This volume includes numerous maps, although virtually no footnotes (except for a few which quote from Lenin, Marx and Engels), nor a suggested bibliography. The facts are presented clearly and precisely, although their

History of the Modern Middle East

The syllabi on modern Middle Eastern history courses submitted by members of MESA were, not unnaturally, varied in general approach, in time span and in area covered. There were certain common elements, however, within the framework of which this syllabus has largely remained. Four such congruences were most important:1)the use of a chronological rather than a topical or problems approach in teaching the history of the modern Middle East (while particular topics or problems were often isolated within a particular time period, all of the syllabi submitted used a chronological framework);2)a general tendency to begin with a brief survey of the medieval history of the Middle East before beginning intensive treatment at the beginning of the nineteenth century;3)an emphasis on internal development and modernization rather than on political-diplomatic history;4)the frequent use of reading assignments (a chapter from one work, a number of pages from another) from a variety of semi-specialized or monographic works rather than reliance on one or more texts or readers.