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PREFACE
The nucleus of this book is a series of six public lectures delivered at Indiana University, Bloomington, between 19 March and 23 April 1963. Their theme is the relations between the Middle East and the West—the impact of both Western action and Western civilization on the Islamic peoples and societies of the Middle East, and the successive phases of Middle Eastern response. In the first chapter I have attempted to define the Middle East as a historical, geographical, and cultural entity,- in the second, to show what the West has meant and means to Middle Easterners and to trace the processes of Western intrusion, influence, domination, and partial withdrawal. The next three chapters deal with political and intellectual movements in the Middle East in recent and modem times, in three main groups—liberal and socialist, patriotic and nationalist, and Islamic. The final chapter examines the place and role of the countries of the Middle East in international affairs and concludes with a consideration of some of the factors affecting Western policy toward them.
During the nearly thirty years that have passed since the delivery and publication of these lectures, vast changes have taken place in both the world and the region. The Cold War flared to a climax, inflamed the Middle East, and ended. The Soviet Union itself disintegrated, and the vast Muslim lands that had been conquered by the czars and incorporated into the Russian empire recovered their independence and seemed to be returning to the historic Middle East of which they had once been a part. Arabs and Israelis fought several more wars. Palestinians, despairing of active help from the Arab states, formed their own organization. An Egyptian statesman initiated and accomplished the first peace treaty between Israel and an Arab state, and a process was begun which might in time lead to a more general peace in the region. A dictator in Iraq invaded and annexed a neighboring Arab state, thus flouting the rules of both inter-Arab and international coexistence and provoking a massive intervention and involvement of the United States. A revolution in Iran evoked responses all over the Middle East and indeed all over the Islamic world, and transformed the region through the emergence of a new regional power and a new Islamic ideology, radical in both its objectives and its methods.
In all three major themes examined in the lectures—religion, nationhood, and the quest for freedom—far-reaching and significant changes took place, including both successes and failures, both the return to old traditions and the pursuit of new ideas.
In this new edition, I have tried to present and interpret the major changes that have taken place, the new perceptions of freedom, both national and personal, and the attempts being made to achieve it, the changing content and significance of national and patriotic loyalties, and the resurgence of religious and communal identities and commitments. In discussing these processes, I have tried to situate them in both a global and a regional context—in the shifting interplay of regional and global powers on the one hand, and in the far-reaching changes in Middle Eastern economies and societies on the other.
The study of recent and contemporary history presents special problems to the historian. There is the obvious difficulty of the fragmentary and usually secondary quality of his documentation, but in compensation there is the immediacy of his experience of the events of his own time. This in turn brings another danger—that of the historian's own involvement and commitments. We are all, including historians, the children of our own time and place, with loyalties, or at least predispositions, determined by country, race, gender, religion, ideology, and economic, social, and cultural background. Some have argued that since complete impartiality is impossible, the historian should abandon the attempt as false and hypocritical, and present himself frankly as a partisan of his cause. If his ca 'se is just, according to this view, his story will to that degree be authentic. If his cause is unjust, his story will be flawed and should be dismissed accordingly.
In this book, I have adhered to a different view: that the historian owes it to himself and to his readers to try, to the best of his ability, to be objective or at least to be fair—to be conscious of his own commitments and concerns and make due allowance and, where necessary, correct for them, to try to present the different aspects of a problem and the different sides to a dispute in such a way as to allow the reader to form an independent judgment. Above all, he should not prejudge issues and predetermine results by the arbitrary selection of evidence and the use of emotionally charged or biased language. As a famous economist once remarked, "Complete asepsis is impossible, but one does not for that reason perform surgery in a sewer."
The reader will judge how far I have succeeded in my antiseptic precautions to avoid infection. I derive some reassurance from the reception of the first edition of this book, which, among other languages, was translated and published in both Hebrew and Arabic. The Hebrew version was sponsored by the publishing house of the Israeli Ministry of Defense; the Arabic version by the Muslim Brothers. The Arabic translation appeared in two editions: a full book-length version and a shortened version in pamphlet form that was hawked in the vicinity of mosques. I hope I may be forgiven for feeling that a presentation which both Israeli Defense officials and Muslim Brothers thought worthy of publication under their auspices may have achieved some level of objectivity. The translator of the Arabic version, in his introductory remarks, observes that the author of this book is one of two things: a candid friend or an honorable enemy, and in either case, one who does not distort or evade the truth. I am content to abide by that judgment.
Princeton, N.J. April 1993
B.L.
Acknowledgments
The earlier version of this book contained the following note of acknowledgment:
I should like to record my thanks to Indiana University for giving me this opportunity to present my views on this subject, and to my colleagues and students at Bloomington for their gracious and friendly hospitality during the six weeks of my stay. My thanks are also due to my colleagues Dr. S. A. A. Rizvi and Dr. M. E. Yapp, for several helpful suggestions, and to Professor A. T. Hatto and Mr. E. Kedourie for reading and criticizing my typescript. They are of course in no way responsible for any defects that remain. Finally, I would like to thank Professor W. Cantwell Smith and the New American Library of World Literature Inc., for permission to reproduce the passage cited on p. 168, and Simon and Schuster for a quotation from James G. McDonald's My Mission to Israel.
It is now my very pleasant duty to thank my assistant, Jane Baun, for her invaluable help in preparing—and in many different ways, improving—this new edition. I should also like to record my indebtedness to Nancy Lane and Irene Pavitt, of Oxford University Press, for their help and advice in the production of this book. Once again, I offer my thanks to all of them for their many suggestions that I accepted, and my apologies for those that I resisted. From this it will be clear that whatever defects remain are entirely my own.
The Shaping of the Modern Middle East
Sketches for a Historical Portrait
The term "Middle East" was invented in 1902 by the American naval historian Alfred Thayer Mahan, to designate the area between Arabia and India, with its center—from the point of view of the naval strategist—in the Persian Gulf. This new geographical expression was taken up by The Times (of London) and later by the British government and, together with the slightly earlier term "Near East," soon passed into general use. Both names are recent but not modem,-both are relics of a world with Western Europe in the center and other regions grouped around it. Yet in spite of their obsolete origin and parochial outlook, both terms, "Middle East" in particular, have won universal acceptance and are now used to designate this region even by Russians, Africans, and Indians, for whom in fact it lies south, north, or west—even, strangest of all, by the peoples of the Middle East themselves. So useful has the term been found to be that the area of its application, as well as of its use, has been vastly extended, from the original coastlanus of the Persian Gulf to a broad region stretching from the Black Sea to equatorial Africa and from the northwest frontier of India to the Atlantic.1
It is indeed remarkable that a region of such ancient civilization—among the most ancient in the world—should have come to be known, even to itself, by names that are so new and so colorless. Yet if we try to find an adequate substitute for these names, we shall have great difficulty. In India the attempt has indeed been made …
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