The Middle East is never out of the news. Since I wrote the first edition of this book in 2005, there has been an invasion of Lebanon by Israel, followed by a similar incursion by Israeli defence forces into Gaza. The Iranian regime has held an election whose legitimacy has been questioned, and Iranian security forces have killed protesting civilians in the streets in a way that echoes the murder of demonstrators under the Shah back in 1978–9. Iran has also ratcheted up the stakes on the issue of nuclear weapons, and the possibility of a nuclear arms race in the Middle East has now become a reality.
As I write the new edition in mid-2010, Israeli commandos are intercepting six ships carrying aid to the blockaded Palestinians in Gaza. Several people in the flotilla died: Israel accuses them of being extremist-linked Muslims out for martyrdom, whereas their defenders describe them as innocent humanitarians murdered by trigger-happy soldiers. Either way, commentators in British and American journals and newspapers suggest Israel has lost out in terms of publicity and credibility, and Iran has gained mightily in prestige throughout the Muslim world and in the Middle East in particular. To others, though, Israel is the besieged nation, a beacon of democracy surrounded by dictatorships, with the hard-line persecuting Ayatollahs of Iran becoming an increasing threat to world peace.
In other words, not only do events unfold in the region by the day, but the decisions and actions of the key players remain as deeply controversial and divisive as ever. Since so much of what happens is linked to how people in the second decade of the twenty-first century see the past – from the Holocaust in the 1940s to events and battles dating back in the seventh century, nearly 1,400 years ago but like yesterday to millions in the Middle East – an understanding of history is as vital to comprehending today’s news headlines as it has ever been. The task of this book continues.
Before we even begin a history of the Middle East, we ought first to define our terms.
The very expression ‘Middle East’ is, as commentators rightly point out, a Eurocentric or certainly a Western term. The original term was Near East, but even that does not help us very much. For, if we look at a map, the area is only in the east if you look at it from Europe or the USA. Seen from China, for instance, it is in the west. (The Chinese, for example, call themselves the Middle Kingdom, which might be an accurate reflection of how the Chinese have seen themselves historically, but does not provide geographic accuracy.) Strictly speaking, therefore, it might be better to call it something like south-west Asia.
Historically other terms existed before Near East or Middle East. These have included the Levant (as the sun rises there), the Orient or, if we look just at the region of Iraq where much of the Hebrew Scriptures are situated, the Fertile Crescent.
This does not take us much further, however. The Islamic conquests in the seventh century initiated the Golden Age of the Caliphates – roughly the seventh to the thirteenth centuries – and placed a vast swathe of territory under the control of the new Muslim Caliphs stretching from Spain and Morocco on the Atlantic eastwards to the borders of the Hindu Kush in what is now Pakistan. Anatolia also faced increasing Muslim inroads as Byzantine power waned. This entire region was profoundly and permanently altered by Islamic culture, and remains strongly Muslim to this day. Ethnic Arabs live in the northern part of Africa as well as the ancient Fertile Crescent and the Arabian Peninsula, and, for over seven centuries, they ruled over an Empire that included parts of Spain. Similarly the Turks, whose origins are in Central Asia, conquered not only the Arab heartland but much of south-eastern Europe as well, holding sway over these areas for over 500 years.
As a consequence, to use the newer, and geographically more precise term, south-west Asia, would be considerably to curtail what we can look at in this book. For one can argue, historically, that large areas of both Spain and the Balkans, to take but two examples, were at times politically and culturally very much an integral part of a broad Islamic civilization that stretched for thousands of miles beyond the traditional confines of the term ‘Middle East’.
This therefore begs the original question – what exactly comprises the Middle East? In this book I have adopted a pragmatic approach, starting off with the region that we think of as the Middle East today, since that is the region where most of the action I will describe took place, but stretching well beyond those borders when necessity dictates a change of geographic emphasis. Therefore I include Egypt; what we now call Israel, Palestine, Syria, Lebanon, Iraq and Iran; the countries of the Arabian Peninsula, including those of the Persian Gulf; and Turkey, even though that did not become mainly Islamic until the Middle Ages. But I am leaving out the Caucasus (traditionally for some reason thought of as part of Europe); the Sudan (although the northern part of that is Muslim); Northern Africa beyond Egypt; and Islamic Central Asia, though I will refer both to these and the peripheral lands – Spain, the Maghreb, the Balkans – when historically necessary.
In ancient times, the empires within the central Middle East region were centred on the Fertile Crescent and Egypt, and expanded at their peaks westwards to Greece and eastwards to Afghanistan. In Roman times, that empire controlled northern Africa and much of the Middle East, including Anatolia, but not the territory ruled by the Seleucid, Parthian and then Sassanid Empires in what is roughly today’s Iran.
The extent of Islamic rule in the Golden Age of the Caliphates has already been mentioned above, while the Ottoman Turks for their part controlled what we call the geographical Middle East, much of northern Africa and large swathes of South-East Europe, as far as Hungary. But they were never able to conquer what we now call Iran, although they did rule the Crimea for a long while.
Historically, the Middle East has also been lumped together, with the rest of Asia, and called the Orient. This nomenclature has become controversial, especially since the late Palestinian Christian-American writer Edward Said wrote a book called Orientalism. In this he rightly attacked the condescending way in which many in the West have looked down upon the peoples living in this vast area, especially its central, Middle Eastern, component. While perhaps unfair on some of his critics, the book and Said’s subsequent strictures did draw attention to the need to avoid writing biased history, and the expression ‘Orient’, which is surely far too broad, has thankfully gone out of favour. Thanks to television, we no longer regard the region as mysterious or exotic, filled with snake charmers and harems.
We do, however, as the eminent Pakistani social anthropologist and peace campaigner Akbar Ahmed reminds us in Islam Under Siege, still tend to regard the area’s main religion, Islam, as being innately violent, a myth that will be disproved throughout the course of this book.
(In any case, only a very small percentage of the world’s Muslims live in the region, with the biggest Muslim-inhabited nations being India, Indonesia and Pakistan, none of which is either Arabic or in the Middle East.)
So while some misconceptions and stereotypes are thankfully behind us, others have reared their ugly heads, especially after the attacks on the USA in 2001 and those in Europe in the years following.
As we will see in the Introduction, it is difficult, when looking at the entire history of the region, over thousands of years, to consider everything. Much of Assyrian, Babylonian and Egyptian culture is fascinating. Anyone who has been to the Middle East, or seen the astonishing artefacts in museums in cities such as Berlin, London or New York (where there is an entire temple to visit), will understand the lasting appeal of these ancient civilizations.
However, in order to draw a line, I have considered them mainly in the light of what affects us now and, in particular, the rise of the three great, and still very extant, Middle Eastern monotheistic religions: Judaism, Christianity and Islam. No one worships Ra or Mithras today. However, Zoroastrianism is regarded by many as having influenced the existing monotheistic faiths, and so where the past does impinge upon the present, I have given such faiths full due. Those wanting to know more about Abu Simbel or the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, to take just two of the justly famous relics of the past, will need to read elsewhere, and I have given due details in the bibliography.
Events in the Middle East are changing all the time. They will probably have changed by the time that you read this. But that all goes to show what a vitally important part of the world it remains, and why it is so fascinating to study. Furthermore, since my main aim is to show how we in the West owe so much to the region, that basic truth still holds, however much might have changed politically in the area now. We remain as much the intellectual and cultural descendants of the great discoveries of the Middle East as we have always been.