Prior to the First World War, most of the Middle East was ruled by the Ottoman Turks. Communal identity under the Ottoman millet system was religious, not ethnic or territorial – Christians, Jews, and Muslims could live side by side in the same town, each under their own hierarchy. Communal and religious loyalty was one and the same thing.
Muslim Arabs played important roles and suffered no real discrimination. Arabic was the language of the Quran and mosque; Arabs were religious and legal figures throughout the empire. There were even Arab generals, governors and prime ministers.
While Muslim Arabs were theoretically on a par with Turks, Christian Arabs in any case divided into Greek Orthodox, Catholic, Maronite, and Coptic communities were in law not fully equal citizens of the empire.
But as the Ottoman Empire decayed in the 19th century, Europeans brought printing presses and western ideas to the region. An Arabic literary revival began, planting the seeds of modern nationalism. Cairo, Damascus and Beirut became intellectual centres, where thinkers introduced the idea of regenerating the Arab people and culture, and creating an Arab, as opposed to simply a Muslim, consciousness.
The Arab nationalists gained further influence after 1908, when the liberal Committee of Union and Progress (the so-called “Young Turks”) took power in the empire. They too were nationalists, disgusted with the cosmopolitan Ottoman elite, and sought to make the empire more Turkish. Turkish replaced Arabic as the language of instruction in schools in the Arab provinces.
The Arab reaction was to emphasize its own ethnicity and language. Encouraged by the British, during the First World War an Arab revolt against Turkish rule broke out. But the Arabs were betrayed by the secret Sykes-Picot agreement of 1916, which called for the division of the region between France and Britain after the war.
The heart of Arab nationalist sentiment was in Greater Syria (including Lebanon) and in 1920 a National Congress in Damascus proclaimed the Emir Feisal of the Hashemite dynasty king of Syria. But the movement was crushed, and France, as agreed by the western powers, became the colonial ruler.
The French governed through divide and conquer tactics, separating Christian Lebanon (much enlarged) from Syria, and also creating autonomous units for Alawites, Druze, and Kurds. This assured Paris of some support from minorities.
The British, too, faced uprisings in Egypt and Iraq, while in Palestine, they confronted permanent animosity between the Arab population and the growing Jewish community being developed by the Zionist movement. This burst into flames on numerous occasions, especially in the Arab revolt of 1936 1939.
After the Second World War the League of Arab States was formed, but none of the newly independent individual states gave up any sovereignty.
The loss in the 1948 war to the newly formed Israel by the Arab armies of Syria, Egypt, Iraq, Saudi Arabia and Lebanon came as a shock, demonstrating to Arab nationalists the levels of corruption and inefficiency in their states. It led to nationalist overthrows of old regimes in Egypt, Syria and Iraq, and attempts in Jordan, Lebanon and elsewhere.
Gamel Abdel Nasser, who took power in Egypt, attempted to reconstruct Egyptian society and inspire the rest of the Arab world, by applying a socialist and revolutionary pan Arab ideology that called for a unified Arab state. He appealed to youth across the Arab world.
He had overthrown a corrupt old king, introduced social and economic reforms, and thwarted the western powers at Suez in 1956.
His slogans were republicanism, neutralism, socialism and Arab unity. Other Arab parties especially the Ba’ath (Arab Socialist Renaissance) in Syria and Iraq espoused similar ideals.
In 1958 Egypt and Syria formed the United Arab Republic, but it lasted for only three years. There was also an attempted federation between Iraq and Jordan before the 1958 Iraqi revolution, and at various times Libya attempted to federate with Egypt, Tunisia, Algeria and even Morocco.
These pan Arab ventures failed to get off the ground. And the defeat suffered by Egypt and Syria in the 1967 war with Israel led to disillusionment with secular nationalism among many in the Arab world. Nasser died in 1970 and his successors abandoned his political ideals.
And even as Saddam Hussein tried to stoke up pan-Arab nationalism during Iraq’s eight-year war with Persian Iran in the 1980s, the Lebanese civil war was pitting Christians against Muslims, Sunnis against Shiites All were Arabs.
By the turn of the century, the Ba’ath regimes in Iraq and Syria had become little more than authoritarian dictatorships. The Iraqi Ba’ath party was destroyed in 2003 and the one in Syria is embroiled in a sectarian civil war – one that is also inciting Sunnis and Shiites in neighbouring Iraq and Lebanon to attack one another. More than 1,000 Iraqis were killed in May.
Sunni-led Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Turkey (as well as militant groups allied with Al-Qaeda) are backing the uprising against the Syrian regime, while Shiite Iran and its ally Hezbollah in Lebanon provide arms and men to Bashar al-Assad.
As for Egypt, the country is now ruled by the Muslim Brotherhood.
Today, from Morocco to Iraq, radical forms of Islam have become the main inspiration for political change in the Arab world. The fault lines now are religious, rather than ethnic or nationalist.
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