Politics and Change in the Middle East

10e

Roy Anderson, Robert Seibert, Jon Wagner

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000154320
• Edition: 10
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

A longtime bestseller, Politics and Change in the Middle East employs a multidisciplinary approach to comprehensively and evenhandedly study the region's past, present, and future. Through politics, economics, culture, and history, this text offers a rugged analytical framework that familiarizes students with the Middle East and helps them to critically evaluate contemporary developments. Thematically organized, Politics and Change in the Middle East introduces students to the primary actors and issues that define the region and its role in world politics.

1 TRADITIONAL CULTURES OF THE MIDDLE EAST

The Cradle of Civilization and Politics

In dealing with “exotic” peoples and cultures, we often form stereotypical images, based on some grain of truth but containing enough distortion and error to make them useless and often even harmful. Popular images of the Middle East are a case in point.

The Middle East is no stranger to the Western imagination. It is the setting of the Jewish and Christian Holy Scriptures. We derive our images of the Middle East partly from these Scriptures and Hollywood images spun around them and partly from news reports of current events. The Middle East is often seen as the primeval wilderness from which Western civilization sprang—a wilderness that has since lapsed into timeless stagnation. In the popular imagination, the Middle East is inhabited mainly by fierce desert nomads who, driven by a childlike attachment to tradition and the fiery narrowness of the barbaric “Mohammedan” faith, spend most of their time menacing each other and impeding peace and progress. With alarming regularity, the “Arab” is depicted in film and on television as regressive, sex-crazed, violent, and sinister. News coverage highlights “terrorism,” oil profiteering, and other supposed threats, casting Middle Easterners as odious but ineffectual enemies. Thus, Westerners form a composite picture of the Arab (and all native Middle Easterners are commonly thought to be Arabs) as an evil buffoon. However, the popular notion of the Middle East as a geographic and cultural backwater inhabited by ignorant fanatics is incompatible with even the most elementary knowledge of Middle Eastern culture and history.

Besides the need to dispel these common prejudices, there are other reasons why a look at traditional Middle Eastern culture is useful. First, it provides a backdrop against which to understand the historical development of innovative social, religious, and political institutions in the region. Second, it allows us to understand better the aspects of contemporary Middle Eastern life that still retain substantial continuity with past traditions. The Middle East today, like any region of the world, has constructed its modern institutions on a base of traditional social arrangements, values, philosophical assumptions, and everyday practices that are deeply rooted in a cultural heritage. In contrast to most of the Western world, the Middle East contains regions, or aspects of social life, whose continuity with the lifestyle of two or three centuries ago is in some respects more apparent than are the more recent influences of a cosmopolitan, “technicalized” cultural milieu. One must be careful, however, not to fall into the common Eurocentric bias of thinking that all non-Western practices are ancient and lacking in developmental change— a habit of thought encouraged by referring to “tradition” as though it represented some timeless eternality. Except when it is otherwise clear from the context, in this book the term traditional will be used to refer generally to patterns of social and cultural life that prevailed in the few centuries before the massive incursion of European influence and technicalizing changes. As we shall see, however, such cultural features are in many respects part and parcel of historical patterns that reach further back and further forward in time.

Contrary to the previously mentioned Western stereotypes about the region, the most significant historical features of the Middle East were not marginality and simplicity, but centrality and diversity. The centrality of the Middle East in history was partly the product of its strategic location at the junction of the three continents of Africa, Asia, and Europe and its consequent pivotal role in trade, conquest, communication, and migration. Middle Eastern cultural diversity has been aided by local geography and by the complexities of cultural adaptation in the region.

The geographic diversity of the Middle East, which depends largely on the relative availability of water, is striking. Although the “desert” image is correct in that the region is predominantly arid, there are sharp contrasts. The Nile Valley and the “Fertile Crescent” of the Tigris–Euphrates region and Mediterranean coast were the sites of the first-known farming civilizations and the sources of the images of Eden and of the “Land of Milk and Honey.” These geographic contrasts have led to diverse but interlocking ways of life suited to different strategies of survival and adaptation.

Another factor contributing to diversity in the Middle East is the region’s long and complex cultural evolution. Before about 10,000 B.C.E., all the world’s peoples were gatherers of wild foods; the domestication of plants and animals—which set human culture on its path of increasing complexity—originated in the Middle East at about that time. During the ensuing 12 millennia, the Middle East has ranked in the vanguard of social and technological evolution more consistently than any other region of the world. From the Middle East, Europe received not only its basic agricultural crops and techniques but also all the most fundamental social and cultural elements we associate with “civilization,” including literacy, urban life, and occupational specialization.

It is especially interesting, in view of this book’s political theme, that the Middle East was the site of the earliest states and formal governments. Partly because of the organizational requirements of irrigation systems, the independent villages of the region were soon encompassed in regional forms of political organization, in which the village-dwelling farmers became “peasants” dominated by a nonfarming urban ruling class. This ruler–producer split was the foundation of the state because it facilitated, through various forms of taxation, a substantial amount of surplus production—that is, production that exceeded the subsistence needs of the farming population. This surplus subsidized the power of the state and ultimately allowed the existence of an urban population engaged in various occupations not directly associated with agricultural production, a necessary condition for the specialized accomplishments of “civilized” peoples. The necessity of enforcing peasant taxation and protecting the prerogatives of the ruling classes, regulating trade and exchange, and generally mediating social relationships in an increasingly complicated society gave rise to what we now take for granted as the political apparatus of the state: legal codes, police and military forces, courts, and other instruments of “law and order.”

The role of the Middle East in political innovation did not end with the early civilizations; the region was also the birthplace of three world religions, each involving unique contributions to social thought. Yet despite the leadership of the Middle East in political and social development, the region has long been characterized by social conservatism. The everyday lives of most peasants, nomads, and townspeople have until more recently been little affected by intellectual and organizational advances in the larger society; instead, these lifestyles have been woven into the fabric of an increasingly complicated plural society.

FOUNDATIONS OF SOCIAL DIVERSITY

The American “melting pot” ideology views cultural diversity as an accidental and temporary byproduct of history, whereas such diversity has been an enduring and valued part of life in the Middle East. Middle Eastern culture is characterized not only by diversity but also by pluralism—the maintenance of diversity as a significant aspect of the social system. The use of cultural diversity, or pluralism, as a structuring principle in society has led some writers to characterize social life in this region as a “mosaic.” This mosaic character is particularly difficult to describe because it follows no simple pigeonhole scheme but includes many dimensions, levels, and criteria of variation that often cut across one another. These include six important dimensions of variability and identity that together have shaped much of the character of traditional life in the Middle East: (l) ecological pluralism, (2) regional and local ethnic pluralism, (3) religion, (4) family and tribe, (5) occupational groups, and (6) class distinctions. Although it is sometimes useful to discuss these criteria separately, the reader should remember that in practice they are partly dependent on one another.

Ecological Diversity

Of the many elements that contribute to social diversity in the Middle East, one of the most basic is the relation of people to the land. The vicissitudes of wind patterns, rainfall, and river courses, combined with the effects of irrigation systems, often lead to stark contrasts in the land and its potential uses. In parts of Egypt, a railroad track divides a verdant field producing two or three crops a year from a desert so barren as to discourage even Bedouin herders. Although the arable regions constitute less than 10 percent of the land in the Middle East, their role in the economic and social order of the region has been crucial since prehistoric times. For several thousand years, since the beginnings of the state and its associated intensive agricultural techniques, a large portion of Middle Eastern farmland and an even larger portion of the farming population and agricultural produce have depended on irrigation systems.

The nonagricultural lands that constitute the bulk of the Middle East are by no means uniform in character. Some of these lands are forested mountain slopes; others are arid steppes capable of supporting nomads with their herds of camels, sheep, or goats; still other regions, such as the “empty quarter” of Arabia or Egypt’s Western Desert, support virtually no human populations at all. Water is the crucial resource in all these regions. The utility of a territory inhabited by a group of camel nomads may change from year to year, day to day, and mile to mile according to variations in rainfall or groundwater. The importance of water is illustrated by the fact that a permanent well, hardly worth noticing in more watered parts of the world, determined the location of the early Arab trading settlement of Mecca, later to become the birthplace of Islam and the spiritual homeland of Muslims around the world.

The geographic division between the desert and the arable lands is a recurrent phenomenon throughout the Middle East, and it has been accompanied by a threefold social division that also spanned the entire region— the division between peasants, nomads, and townspeople. Peasants, who composed three- quarters of the population, were engaged directly in agricultural production and lived in the small, simple villages that dotted the cultivable countryside. Nomads also were engaged in primary economic production, based on the husbandry of camels, sheep, goats, or cattle, usually in regions incapable of supporting agricultural production. Urbanites were engaged not in primary food production but in other, more specialized occupations traditionally ranging from government, scholarship, or priestly functions to crafts, peddling, and begging and more recently including modern industrial, service, and other business pursuits.

Nomads

Nomadic herders captivate the imaginations of Middle Easterner and foreigner alike and often tend to be seen by both (and by nomads themselves) as the “purest” expression of the region’s cultural tradition. The nomads have been economically and politically marginal throughout most of history and are becoming more so today. Although nomads traditionally have been the sole inhabitants of the region’s nonarable land, their population has never been more than a small fraction of the total for the region (in recent times probably less than 15 percent of the population). Nomadic herding was not practiced in the intensive farming regions, and in transitional regions it was combined with village farming. The forms of nomadism varied according to the capacity of the land, which depended on water. Semiarid steppes supported cattle, sheep, and goats, whereas the true desert sustained only camel nomads, such as the Bedouins of Arabia. The camel nomads, for all their aristocratic airs, were confined to the most marginal lands, those unusable to anyone else. Their place in politics has been a complex one. They traditionally have been admired for their independence, virility, and simple virtue, and the fourteenth-century Arab sociologist Ibn Khaldoun took note of their role in periodically taking over and revitalizing the leadership of Islamic states, drawing on their qualities of military discipline and tribal solidarity. It is also true, however, that the political influence of nomads was only sporadic, and that much of the time they were peripheral to the sources of state power. In recent decades, national governments have tried to control nomads by promoting their settlement in sedentary communities.

The ruggedness and apparent simplicity of nomadic life have led to the widespread misconception that it was the oldest and most primitive lifestyle of the Middle East, and that it involved complete independence from the more settled and sophisticated life of the cities and villages. This was not strictly true, for nomadic herders traditionally depended on settled communities for manufactured items and agricultural products, which they obtained by trading their animal products and, before the control of the modern state, by raiding the villages. When drought made herding less feasible, some nomads were able to shift temporarily or permanently to a more settled life in the city or village. The camel nomadism of the desert has existed only since the introduction of the camel in about 2000 B.C.E.; even the herding of sheep and goats, which originated much earlier, depended to some extent on the existence of settled populations and probably did not predate them as a general stage of development.

Of all the nomads in the Middle East, the Arab Bedouin has occupied a position of special significance. The Bedouins are Arabian camel nomads who constitute only one of the many nomadic groups in the Middle East, but they have played a unique role in the cultural consciousness of the region. Before the birth of the Prophet Muhammad, the Arabs (that is, the original speakers of Arabic) were a group of tribes occupying central Arabia. Many were camel nomads, and the others were sailors, caravanners, and townspeople who traced descent from nomadic herders. Islam facilitated the spread of Arabic as the daily language of much of the Middle East and the holy language of all Muslims, and with it came some measure of identification with the Arab Bedouin heritage. Despite the ambivalence that urbanites and villagers have often felt toward the fierce and “lawless” inhabitants of the desert, the Bedouins were at the same time acknowledged as the “truest” Arabs. (In Arabic, the term Arab refers, in the strictest usage, only to the Bedouin.) A Cairo shopkeeper might underscore his business integrity by referring to his (literal or figurative) Bedouin heritage, and the desert outside modern Riyadh is periodically dotted with the tents of Saudi urbanites celebrating their recent Bedouin past with weekend campouts.

Peasants and Urbanites

Despite the common perception of pastoral nomadism as the primeval Middle Eastern lifestyle, peasants and traditional city dwellers carried on an equally old and well-established pattern of life, one with roots in the early civilizations of Egypt and Mesopotamia. The historical relationship between village-dwelling peasants and urbanites depended on a political organization that taxed the village-dwelling farmers, subsidizing the ruling class in particular and the nonfarming urban populations in general. The development of the state entailed two divergent ways of life, the urban and the rural, each of which existed as a result of the other. (In this context, “city” and “urban” refer to permanent settlements of any size whose populace consists primarily of nonfarmers—as opposed to a rural peasant “village” whose inhabitants walk daily to their farms.) From the perspective of the traditional Middle Eastern state, the peasant village existed for the purpose of delivering its tax quota in the form of agricultural produce, money, labor, or some combination of these. For their taxes, the villagers rarely, if ever, received such government services as police protection, education, or public works. As long as the village headman delivered the taxes, the village was left to govern itself. Internally, the village was relatively homogeneous, consisting of peasants who exercised little influence on the politics of the state that governed their lives and who had few, if any, opportunities for social mobility.

Although modern Middle Eastern states are generally committed to changing these conditions, life in peasant villages retains a continuity with the past. Many villagers are still small landholders, sharecroppers, or landless laborers. Each village is divided into families and blocks of related families and is headed by a patriarch of the most influential family, whose authority is shared with other village elders. Similar to the nomads, the peasants have been led by the conditions of their lives to a distinctive worldview. In contrast to the nomads, whose traditional values emphasized militant independence, peasants were typically fearful of authority, distrustful of the world outside the village (and often of their own neighbors), and pessimistic with regard to social change. The unenviable position of peasants led traditional urbanites and nomads alike to despise them as “slaves of the soil,” while continuing to depend on them for the production of basic foodstuffs.

If popular conceptions of the Middle East give undue attention to the nomads because of their romantic image, “historical” treatments of the region tend to place great emphasis on the towns and cities as the locus of rulers and their “high” culture, the source of written documents on which historical scholarship largely depends. Traditional urban life in the Middle East does not lend itself easily to general description because urbanites were involved in a great variety of occupations and modes of living. The traditional Middle Eastern cities were, among other things, seats of local ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Brief Contents
• Detailed Contents
• Introduction
• Chapter 1 Traditional Cultures of the Middle East: The Cradle of Civilization and Politics
• Chapter 2 The Foundations of Islam
• Chapter 3 The Political Legacy of Islam, 632–1800 C.E.
• Chapter 4 Western Imperialism, 1800–1914 C.E.
• Chapter 5 The Rise of the State System, 1914–1950
• Chapter 6 The Drive for Self-Determination, 1950–1990
• Chapter 7 Turning Points
• Chapter 8 The Politics of Religion, Culture, and Social Life
• Chapter 9 Political Elites
• Chapter 10 Political Leadership in the Contemporary Middle East
• Chapter 11 The Economic Setting
• Chapter 12 International Relations in the Middle East, 1945–1990
• Chapter 13 International Relations in the Middle East, 1945–1990: The Regional Actors
• Chapter 14 The Middle East and the Changing International Order: 1991–2001
• Chapter 15 Did 9/11 Change Everything?
• Glossary
• Index