50 Years Ago This Week: The Middle East in Turmoil

The Arabs’ empire failed because they lacked the skill of political synthesis. In conquered territory, Arab rulers hewed to the Koran and tended to let the conquered govern themselves. Mohammed designated no successor (caliph); his squabbling heirs split Islam into rival sects. For a time, independent Moslem states retained Mohammed’s vigor. While Europe slept, great Arab universities flourished in Cordova, Baghdad and Cairo; in Spain, the Arab philosopher Averroes revitalized Aristotle. After the death of the Caliph Harun al-Rashid in 809, the Baghdad caliphate plunged into civil war; in succeeding centuries, marauding Mongols poured into the Arab lands, killing people and wrecking schools. In two centuries, ending in 1291, Arabs fought off eight Christian Crusades. Gradually, the caliphs lost touch with their people, becoming decorative mollusks. Finally the Arabs lost even their economic importance to the world; by sailing around Africa to India in 1498, the Portuguese outflanked Arab ports and customs stations. After seizing Egypt in 1517, the Ottoman Turks ossified Arab culture, banning Arabic except in courts and mosques, halting poetry, science and education—just as the European Renaissance was in full bloom.

Asleep for three centuries, the Arabs awoke from isolation when Napoleon took Egypt in 1798. At first they were fascinated by Western ideas, from mixed bathing to parliamentary democracy. Western imperialism, symbolized by the Suez Canal, changed the fascination to hostility. Britain “temporarily” occupied Egypt in 1882—and stayed 75 years. By 1914, Britain, France, Italy and Spain owned all of North Africa, manipulating puppet princes, exempting themselves from local law and suffocating local initiative. European goods carried little or no duty; native industries were taxed to death. Britain long held spending for Egyptian education to 1% of the budget; France left Algerians 85% illiterate. A few collaborators grew rich: a mere .5% of Egyptians owned 36% of all arable land; 1.5% pocketed 50% of the national income. As one result, there was no development of a middle class, which might have created viable economies and stable governments.

By 1920, Europeans controlled virtually the whole Arab world—the largely bitter fruit of Arab cooperation with Britain against the Ottoman Turks in World War I. At the time, the growing Zionist movement argued that Palestine was a “land without people for a people without land.” In fact, it contained 640,000 Arabs. Even so, in different circumstances, the Arabs might well have been able to accept a Jewish state in their midst. But against this historical background it was easy for nationalist propaganda to inflame the Arab masses and to make the establishment of Israel seem like the ultimate indignity. In Arab eyes, the West was not only using the Jews as agents to colonize Palestine but to eject its native population. Arabs see Israelis as naked aggressors, the spearhead of a Western attack on their entire culture.