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Untangling the Web: A Thinking Person's Guide to Why the Middle East is a Mess and Always has Been
The complexities of the Middle East made a little more understandable
296 pages, Paperback
First published February 1, 2011
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September 22, 2018
First, some definitions: Semite derives from "Shem," the "wisest and most responsible" of Noah's sons in the story, not to mention the one who would have dominion over his brothers, and therefore the one whom both Jews and Christians claim as ancestor. Fast-forward to the nineteenth century, when the bible was being subjected to secular scrutiny, while at the same time Europe sought understandings that accorded with its colonial interests--and thus a group of languages was labeled Semitic: Hebrew and Arabic but not Farsi or Turkish. Later still, in 1879, Wilhelm Marr, campaigning for office, applied "Semitic" to Jews, whom he characterized as dangerous outside interlopers from whom his fellow Prussians needed his protection. Presto, the term Semite was separated from its linguistic meaning, Jews were racialized, and the anti-Semitic party was born.
Arab, on the other hand, doesn't refer back to a language but to a geographic area, the 'arav, the western-central part of the peninsula that now has that name. It is cognate with the Hebrew word 'aravah, steppe-like wilderness, which connotes nomads as opposed to town-dwellers; a form of the word first appeared in the ninth century BCE in an Assyrian inscription.
We think of Muslim and Christian but not Jewish Arabs (since we are preoccupied with thinking about Jews versus Arabs), but at the time of Muhammad, Jews had lived in the 'arav for over five centuries, so were also Arabs, ideological concerns notwithstanding.
Islam, needless to say, is a religion, and many Muslims are not Arabs, although the first ones were. Turks gained ascendancy, which by the way is the explanation for how Arabic has often been transliterated into English. Arabic has only the vowels a, i, and u (no e or o); thus the author writes Makka, Madina, Muhammad, Nasir, and so forth--not necessarily the most familiar English spellings.
The terms "Middle East" and "Near East" (similar to the designation of a Semitic language group) are relics of the British colonial era. From the point of view of India or China, the area could be the Near--or Middle--West. Or it could be Western Asia or Southwestern Asia--except that terminology would exclude Egypt and other North African countries.
There is a longish section on the origins of Islam for the Western reader, who will often lack familiarity with that history. That's true; back around 2008 when I read The Voice, the Word, the Books: The Sacred Scripture of the Jews, Christians, and Muslims (my first scholarly book on religion and scripture), I paid less attention to Islam, being more excited to learn about Judaism and Christianity.
Haven't we all become more familiar with the term jihad--the lesser, the greater, whether or not it connotes armed struggle? Intifada--throwing off--first used re the Ottomans and paradoxically nurtured in part by the European colonialist incursions against them as the Europeans were driving the Ottomans out of Algeria and Egypt. Dhimma--a pact according to which a defeated group pays tribute or taxes and in return receives a measure of protection: second-class citizenship, clearly established. Don't we all find it easier to show a measure of magnanimity when we rule? It is precisely when our authority is in question that we become nastier....
Events and history have conspired to interweave Islam more closely with politics and the military than its Western counterparts. I think that's what the author is saying in a somewhat esoteric passage (p. 23): "...the political and spiritual interweave in which Muhammad himself managed to engage..." (as we have the story) "is distinctly different" from the Jesus story and, even considering warlike portions, from the Hebrew scriptures.
Islam (like Judaism and Christianity) has been schismatic from early on. I gather Shi'i (from "sect") is more what could loosely be called fundamentalist, while Sunni ("custom") is indeed more open to the customs and traditions of the peoples to whom Islam spread.
I appreciated the chapter on the Crusades. Although so very condensed, it still highlighted the politics. At bottom the Crusades were the answer to the question of what to do with the energies of a nobility who were challenging papal authority. In other words, you could say, how to deflect and tame a lot of angry warlords: sic them on the infidel(s).
Also, the chapter resolved a riddle for me. I had read several times about how, in thirteenth century Europe, the economy began expanding, and that in turn necessitated religious readjustments as to what was permitted in commercial life. Specifically, Thomas Aquinas gets mentioned in this connection.
But, why, I wondered, did the economy expand? At first I thought the answer was the fourth Crusade, in which Western Christendom enriched itself by sacking Constantinople, that is, Eastern Christendom, and the booty flowed in. But that's not right. (See comments below.) I forgot that "gold and silver" does not equal "money," which is a sort of contract between people. Instead, the answer is that the Crusades themselves stimulated the economy, as war (sometimes?) will. So, the economy increased over several centuries, not only in the thirteenth. I also came across mention of a grain surplus during those years. By the way, crusade is a loaded word, you know.
Story of why the Mongols embraced Islam: a Nestorian Christian Mongol general, Kitbugha, died a loser to Egyptian forces in 752 CE, so that the Mongols became convinced Islam was a stronger religion.
The Ottomans were successors to the Mongols, so that when Byzantium fell in 1453, it was to Muslims but not to Arabs.
In 1492, the Ottoman Empire welcomed the expelled Jews, who brought with them from the Iberian peninsula trade networks, a tradition of intermediation between the Christian and Muslim worlds, knowledge of movable type (author says the first books printed in Istanbul were in Hebrew), and command of gunpowder and cannonry, which helped build the Ottoman military. Sultan Beyezit II may not only have invited them; he may have sent ships.
In the sixteenth century Suleiman the Magnificent, extending the Ottoman Empire deep into Europe, was a counterweight to Charles I, Henry VIII, and Francis I. In the words of this author, his successor Selim's loss in 1571 began "a long swoon," resulting in the end of the empire three and a half centuries later during WWI. In reading the circumstances that propelled the loss at the second siege of Vienna, I couldn't help but think "black swan," i.e., no one could have called it. I've read elsewhere that the people of (Western?) Europe feared and even expected being conquered by the East as though it was the end of the world. The West's star rose--industrially, technologically, scientifically, and intellectually--as the Ottoman empire receded and Western imperialism advanced, spreading even into previous Ottoman strongholds such as North Africa.
In a chapter on Arab nationalist aspirations the author recounted the saga of Mehmet and Ibrahim Ali who attempted to build a pan-Arab state in the nineteen century. Mehmet was an Albanian Ottoman who put himself forth as an Arab and tried to build an Arab state based on allying with the religiously conservative Wahabi movement--at least until he had solidified his power base, and then he abandoned it. Wanting to unify diverse groups under the mantle of religion, he put himself forth as not merely an alternative Ottoman sultan but as "caliph." He and his son were aiming for political, cultural, and educational reform but ultimately they couldn't compete with tribal loyalties.
Another early source of Arab nationalism came from American Protestant and French Catholic missionary efforts geared toward using education to counter religious hatred and division--and also toward supplementing the Christian stock in the area. Their efforts led to the first political journals and scientific, literary and artistic associations, culminating in a long patriotic poem by Ibrahim Yazagi that focused on throwing off the Ottoman yoke; hence the earlier reference to intifada. Too treasonable to be written down, it was passed on by word of mouth.
On the Jewish nationalist side, there's the history of Theodor Herzl, an assimilated Austrian Jew who, inspired by the Dreyfus trial and rising tide of antisemitism a la the aforementioned Wilhelm Marr, conceived the idea of a national home for Jews. Buying into the received wisdom that Jews were hated because they were foreign interlopers without a state of their own, he thought he had just the remedy. Not all Jews were on board--not the socialists whose vision of a remedy was universalist in nature, and not the well-to-do whose circumstances shielded them from panic, nor the orthodox for whom the secular movement to build a state was heresy, nor many American Jews for whom America was then the promised land.
The author points out that Jewish nationalism, originating in the context of European romantic nationalism, focused as did German, Italian, or Serbian nationalism on a particular piece of land. "By contrast, nationalism among Arabs never coalesced in that sort of a focused manner" (p. 84), and thus was more prone to being undercut by other aspirations--tribal, religious, cultural, etc.
On the other hand, Jewish nationalism differed from European colonialism in that the immigrants did not come from a specific place (such as England or France), in many cases weren't coming from any place they could call home, and eventually weren't even coming mainly from Europe.
Bringing the background into the foreground: As history marched toward WWI, England and France competed with Prussia in the Middle East, as all tried to ride the next petroleum-fueled surge of the industrial revolution. Sultan Abdul Hamid II, attempting to modernize his military, improve his finances, and consolidate his territory with railroads, and also aiming to get his Arab population on board, had invited in the Prussians. From the point of view of British interests, that would not do, and, partly in response to Prussian moves, Britain was gradually eating into Ottoman territory, envisioning an empire stretching from India to South Africa and perhaps back to the Levant they had lost in days of yore.
The sultan's efforts all eventually culminated in his overthrow at the hands of the "Young Turks" (1908) and the abandonment once again of those Arab military officers who had been included in his would-be reforms.
Soltes argues that "the most significant issue forcing the explosion of August, 1914 was the question of the future of the Near (Middle) East" (p. 87). He says that by 1916 the British and French were already meeting on how to carve up the Ottoman Empire.
They had sought Arab allies in the fight against the Prussians and Turks. Britain's WWI allies the Hashimites, who had been promised an independent kingdom for their efforts, "were permitted" in 1917 to raise their flag in Damascus. 1917 was also the year of the Balfour Declaration, and henceforth we have "the much too promised land." The British were vague about specific territory, so perhaps a clash wasn't inevitable; on the other hand, though, playing peoples against each other was part and parcel of the colonial method, and not necessarily something they were concerned to avoid.
The aforementioned Hashimites eventually lost out to the Saudis in the Arabian Peninsula, whereupon the British awarded them eastern Palestine, i.e., Jordan. The author asserts that more Palestinians were killed in the subsequent "Black September" uprising of 1970 than in all their struggles with Israel up to that point. I assume he means up to his final editing in 2009.
Regarding the region as a whole, the author goes into the arbitrariness of the borders that were established, done with an eye toward Western interests, not with regard to the people who were to be included. That has not proved to be a recipe for stability.
This detailed review has been only of the first half of the book! I'd say that as the author continues he gets into more familiar territory, territory we have all been over in various reviews and arguments.
Did the Holocaust lead to the founding of the state of Israel? There is a passage showing that can be argued either way. It turns out that's one of those "melted ice cube" arguments. (See my review of The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable). Apply skeptical empiricism here! More seriously, the planning and infrastructure started way before. To build the foundations of a state, the Jews in pre-Israel Palestine used all the adaptive skills they had previously honed while acclimatizing to cultures in which they had found themselves.
Did Jews get a state because of biblical texts saying it was theirs? We may as well also ask whether Arabs reject the state of Israel for religious reasons, i.e., because it's supposed to be the dar al'Islam, or whether (some) Christians do so because there are not supposed to be Jews there (no Jews or Greeks in Christ)--at the same time that (some other) Christians think Jews are supposed to be there, to usher in the Second Coming. It's so hard (maybe impossible) to separate the religious from the political--possibly because they're two sides of the same coin, as reflected in the author's discussion of crusades, past and present.
One other point: the Grand Mufti, Haj Amin al-Husseini, later Hitler ally and fomenter of riots, had been banned by the British from the territory of the mandate in the '20s "for fomenting pogroms and assassinating Arab moderates." It was a British Jew, Sir Herbert Samuel, who as High Commissioner "as an act of appeasement toward Arab extremists, pardoned al'Husseini, passed over the three winning candidates of a Muslim election and granted to al'Husseini the post of Mufti. Ouch.
I should have been taking notes on each chapter as I read it. If I had I wouldn't have found this review such an arduous task, and maybe I'd have included more points from the book's second half. Really, thinking of writing this review helped suppress my rating. But so did the end of the book, in which the author ventured into advice and recommendations that tended toward moralizing and was less than interesting. He seemed to forget his own advice to look at all the myriad of factors. Leave that to the diplomats, and trust the reader to do his or her own thinking.
I also wondered if he'd lost some of the courage of his convictions later in the book.
The author's aim for the book, to do the opposite of cherry-picking, establishes it from the start as hard to review.
One of the author's other aims was to show that Israel/Palestine does not in itself constitute "the Middle East" and, further, that peace there wouldn't resolve the myriad fractures and problems of the region. Well, duh. He wrote his book in 2004 and edited it one last time in 2009; subsequent events post-Spring 2011 have served to reveal that truth even to the blindest, or so one would think. Yet just a few days ago I saw an article that equated peace between Israelis and Palestinians with "Mideast peace."
The whole picture is nothing if not complicated. The factions and alliances in Syria, for instance, could almost pass for satire, if not so tragic. Under the circumstances, no wonder so many of us have recourse to our familiar and self-vindicating albeit insoluble narratives!
Arab, on the other hand, doesn't refer back to a language but to a geographic area, the 'arav, the western-central part of the peninsula that now has that name. It is cognate with the Hebrew word 'aravah, steppe-like wilderness, which connotes nomads as opposed to town-dwellers; a form of the word first appeared in the ninth century BCE in an Assyrian inscription.
We think of Muslim and Christian but not Jewish Arabs (since we are preoccupied with thinking about Jews versus Arabs), but at the time of Muhammad, Jews had lived in the 'arav for over five centuries, so were also Arabs, ideological concerns notwithstanding.
Islam, needless to say, is a religion, and many Muslims are not Arabs, although the first ones were. Turks gained ascendancy, which by the way is the explanation for how Arabic has often been transliterated into English. Arabic has only the vowels a, i, and u (no e or o); thus the author writes Makka, Madina, Muhammad, Nasir, and so forth--not necessarily the most familiar English spellings.
The terms "Middle East" and "Near East" (similar to the designation of a Semitic language group) are relics of the British colonial era. From the point of view of India or China, the area could be the Near--or Middle--West. Or it could be Western Asia or Southwestern Asia--except that terminology would exclude Egypt and other North African countries.
There is a longish section on the origins of Islam for the Western reader, who will often lack familiarity with that history. That's true; back around 2008 when I read The Voice, the Word, the Books: The Sacred Scripture of the Jews, Christians, and Muslims (my first scholarly book on religion and scripture), I paid less attention to Islam, being more excited to learn about Judaism and Christianity.
Haven't we all become more familiar with the term jihad--the lesser, the greater, whether or not it connotes armed struggle? Intifada--throwing off--first used re the Ottomans and paradoxically nurtured in part by the European colonialist incursions against them as the Europeans were driving the Ottomans out of Algeria and Egypt. Dhimma--a pact according to which a defeated group pays tribute or taxes and in return receives a measure of protection: second-class citizenship, clearly established. Don't we all find it easier to show a measure of magnanimity when we rule? It is precisely when our authority is in question that we become nastier....
Events and history have conspired to interweave Islam more closely with politics and the military than its Western counterparts. I think that's what the author is saying in a somewhat esoteric passage (p. 23): "...the political and spiritual interweave in which Muhammad himself managed to engage..." (as we have the story) "is distinctly different" from the Jesus story and, even considering warlike portions, from the Hebrew scriptures.
Islam (like Judaism and Christianity) has been schismatic from early on. I gather Shi'i (from "sect") is more what could loosely be called fundamentalist, while Sunni ("custom") is indeed more open to the customs and traditions of the peoples to whom Islam spread.
I appreciated the chapter on the Crusades. Although so very condensed, it still highlighted the politics. At bottom the Crusades were the answer to the question of what to do with the energies of a nobility who were challenging papal authority. In other words, you could say, how to deflect and tame a lot of angry warlords: sic them on the infidel(s).
Also, the chapter resolved a riddle for me. I had read several times about how, in thirteenth century Europe, the economy began expanding, and that in turn necessitated religious readjustments as to what was permitted in commercial life. Specifically, Thomas Aquinas gets mentioned in this connection.
But, why, I wondered, did the economy expand? At first I thought the answer was the fourth Crusade, in which Western Christendom enriched itself by sacking Constantinople, that is, Eastern Christendom, and the booty flowed in. But that's not right. (See comments below.) I forgot that "gold and silver" does not equal "money," which is a sort of contract between people. Instead, the answer is that the Crusades themselves stimulated the economy, as war (sometimes?) will. So, the economy increased over several centuries, not only in the thirteenth. I also came across mention of a grain surplus during those years. By the way, crusade is a loaded word, you know.
Story of why the Mongols embraced Islam: a Nestorian Christian Mongol general, Kitbugha, died a loser to Egyptian forces in 752 CE, so that the Mongols became convinced Islam was a stronger religion.
The Ottomans were successors to the Mongols, so that when Byzantium fell in 1453, it was to Muslims but not to Arabs.
In 1492, the Ottoman Empire welcomed the expelled Jews, who brought with them from the Iberian peninsula trade networks, a tradition of intermediation between the Christian and Muslim worlds, knowledge of movable type (author says the first books printed in Istanbul were in Hebrew), and command of gunpowder and cannonry, which helped build the Ottoman military. Sultan Beyezit II may not only have invited them; he may have sent ships.
In the sixteenth century Suleiman the Magnificent, extending the Ottoman Empire deep into Europe, was a counterweight to Charles I, Henry VIII, and Francis I. In the words of this author, his successor Selim's loss in 1571 began "a long swoon," resulting in the end of the empire three and a half centuries later during WWI. In reading the circumstances that propelled the loss at the second siege of Vienna, I couldn't help but think "black swan," i.e., no one could have called it. I've read elsewhere that the people of (Western?) Europe feared and even expected being conquered by the East as though it was the end of the world. The West's star rose--industrially, technologically, scientifically, and intellectually--as the Ottoman empire receded and Western imperialism advanced, spreading even into previous Ottoman strongholds such as North Africa.
In a chapter on Arab nationalist aspirations the author recounted the saga of Mehmet and Ibrahim Ali who attempted to build a pan-Arab state in the nineteen century. Mehmet was an Albanian Ottoman who put himself forth as an Arab and tried to build an Arab state based on allying with the religiously conservative Wahabi movement--at least until he had solidified his power base, and then he abandoned it. Wanting to unify diverse groups under the mantle of religion, he put himself forth as not merely an alternative Ottoman sultan but as "caliph." He and his son were aiming for political, cultural, and educational reform but ultimately they couldn't compete with tribal loyalties.
Another early source of Arab nationalism came from American Protestant and French Catholic missionary efforts geared toward using education to counter religious hatred and division--and also toward supplementing the Christian stock in the area. Their efforts led to the first political journals and scientific, literary and artistic associations, culminating in a long patriotic poem by Ibrahim Yazagi that focused on throwing off the Ottoman yoke; hence the earlier reference to intifada. Too treasonable to be written down, it was passed on by word of mouth.
On the Jewish nationalist side, there's the history of Theodor Herzl, an assimilated Austrian Jew who, inspired by the Dreyfus trial and rising tide of antisemitism a la the aforementioned Wilhelm Marr, conceived the idea of a national home for Jews. Buying into the received wisdom that Jews were hated because they were foreign interlopers without a state of their own, he thought he had just the remedy. Not all Jews were on board--not the socialists whose vision of a remedy was universalist in nature, and not the well-to-do whose circumstances shielded them from panic, nor the orthodox for whom the secular movement to build a state was heresy, nor many American Jews for whom America was then the promised land.
The author points out that Jewish nationalism, originating in the context of European romantic nationalism, focused as did German, Italian, or Serbian nationalism on a particular piece of land. "By contrast, nationalism among Arabs never coalesced in that sort of a focused manner" (p. 84), and thus was more prone to being undercut by other aspirations--tribal, religious, cultural, etc.
On the other hand, Jewish nationalism differed from European colonialism in that the immigrants did not come from a specific place (such as England or France), in many cases weren't coming from any place they could call home, and eventually weren't even coming mainly from Europe.
Bringing the background into the foreground: As history marched toward WWI, England and France competed with Prussia in the Middle East, as all tried to ride the next petroleum-fueled surge of the industrial revolution. Sultan Abdul Hamid II, attempting to modernize his military, improve his finances, and consolidate his territory with railroads, and also aiming to get his Arab population on board, had invited in the Prussians. From the point of view of British interests, that would not do, and, partly in response to Prussian moves, Britain was gradually eating into Ottoman territory, envisioning an empire stretching from India to South Africa and perhaps back to the Levant they had lost in days of yore.
...since the various involvements from without (i.e., the Prussians, the British, the French--for starters) had their own agendas, it was inevitable that the Arabs and Jews would collide without rapprochement. The collision interwove the collision of European interests that led up to and exploded into World War I. Put otherwise, a new round of the Crusades was beginning, albeit (this time--my insertion) under a more overtly economic and political banner, with religion hidden beneath the surface.... (p. 85)
The sultan's efforts all eventually culminated in his overthrow at the hands of the "Young Turks" (1908) and the abandonment once again of those Arab military officers who had been included in his would-be reforms.
Soltes argues that "the most significant issue forcing the explosion of August, 1914 was the question of the future of the Near (Middle) East" (p. 87). He says that by 1916 the British and French were already meeting on how to carve up the Ottoman Empire.
They had sought Arab allies in the fight against the Prussians and Turks. Britain's WWI allies the Hashimites, who had been promised an independent kingdom for their efforts, "were permitted" in 1917 to raise their flag in Damascus. 1917 was also the year of the Balfour Declaration, and henceforth we have "the much too promised land." The British were vague about specific territory, so perhaps a clash wasn't inevitable; on the other hand, though, playing peoples against each other was part and parcel of the colonial method, and not necessarily something they were concerned to avoid.
The aforementioned Hashimites eventually lost out to the Saudis in the Arabian Peninsula, whereupon the British awarded them eastern Palestine, i.e., Jordan. The author asserts that more Palestinians were killed in the subsequent "Black September" uprising of 1970 than in all their struggles with Israel up to that point. I assume he means up to his final editing in 2009.
Regarding the region as a whole, the author goes into the arbitrariness of the borders that were established, done with an eye toward Western interests, not with regard to the people who were to be included. That has not proved to be a recipe for stability.
This detailed review has been only of the first half of the book! I'd say that as the author continues he gets into more familiar territory, territory we have all been over in various reviews and arguments.
Did the Holocaust lead to the founding of the state of Israel? There is a passage showing that can be argued either way. It turns out that's one of those "melted ice cube" arguments. (See my review of The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable). Apply skeptical empiricism here! More seriously, the planning and infrastructure started way before. To build the foundations of a state, the Jews in pre-Israel Palestine used all the adaptive skills they had previously honed while acclimatizing to cultures in which they had found themselves.
Did Jews get a state because of biblical texts saying it was theirs? We may as well also ask whether Arabs reject the state of Israel for religious reasons, i.e., because it's supposed to be the dar al'Islam, or whether (some) Christians do so because there are not supposed to be Jews there (no Jews or Greeks in Christ)--at the same time that (some other) Christians think Jews are supposed to be there, to usher in the Second Coming. It's so hard (maybe impossible) to separate the religious from the political--possibly because they're two sides of the same coin, as reflected in the author's discussion of crusades, past and present.
One other point: the Grand Mufti, Haj Amin al-Husseini, later Hitler ally and fomenter of riots, had been banned by the British from the territory of the mandate in the '20s "for fomenting pogroms and assassinating Arab moderates." It was a British Jew, Sir Herbert Samuel, who as High Commissioner "as an act of appeasement toward Arab extremists, pardoned al'Husseini, passed over the three winning candidates of a Muslim election and granted to al'Husseini the post of Mufti. Ouch.
I should have been taking notes on each chapter as I read it. If I had I wouldn't have found this review such an arduous task, and maybe I'd have included more points from the book's second half. Really, thinking of writing this review helped suppress my rating. But so did the end of the book, in which the author ventured into advice and recommendations that tended toward moralizing and was less than interesting. He seemed to forget his own advice to look at all the myriad of factors. Leave that to the diplomats, and trust the reader to do his or her own thinking.
I also wondered if he'd lost some of the courage of his convictions later in the book.
The author's aim for the book, to do the opposite of cherry-picking, establishes it from the start as hard to review.
One of the author's other aims was to show that Israel/Palestine does not in itself constitute "the Middle East" and, further, that peace there wouldn't resolve the myriad fractures and problems of the region. Well, duh. He wrote his book in 2004 and edited it one last time in 2009; subsequent events post-Spring 2011 have served to reveal that truth even to the blindest, or so one would think. Yet just a few days ago I saw an article that equated peace between Israelis and Palestinians with "Mideast peace."
The whole picture is nothing if not complicated. The factions and alliances in Syria, for instance, could almost pass for satire, if not so tragic. Under the circumstances, no wonder so many of us have recourse to our familiar and self-vindicating albeit insoluble narratives!
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