AS HOME TO SOME OF THE world’s earliest civilizations and the birthplace of three great religions, the Middle East offers a rich tapestry of human life and deeply ingrained traditions. At the same time, the region’s political history, both classic and modern, has been punctuated by the rise and fall of great powers, colonial domination, the birth or creation of new countries, and uneven marches toward political and economic development. The multiple consequences of these developments for the Middle East have been particularly pronounced since the early decades of the twentieth century. In reality, however, they can be traced as...

Since the Middle East is home to some of the world’s earliest civilizations, it is difficult to choose a starting point for examining its political history, for no matter how far back the investigator searches, there still seem to be deeper layers of historical and political developments that influenced the course of later events. For convenience, and admittedly somewhat arbitrarily, I have chosen the dawn of Islam as the starting point of this book. This has some justification: Islam as both a system of beliefs and a historical-political phenomenon has distinctively marked the Middle East, and its rise and evolution...

The end of the Ottoman dynasty marked the termination of caliphal rule as the Middle East had come to know it since the earliest years of Islam. The dramatic changes that were to come had actually started a few years before the death of the Ottomans, with Europe’s growing economic and military interests in the region and an incipient Arab revolt having expedited the sultanate’s demise. The more things change, goes the popular wisdom, the faster they change. This certainly applies to the political history of the Middle East after the end of the Great War, as the order of...

In the Middle East, as elsewhere, nationalism has been a powerful force shaping the destiny and character of peoples and countries. Although most conventional accounts of nationalism in the Middle East trace its genesis back to the mid-nineteenth century, it was in the 1940s and the 1950s that nationalism became what it has been ever since, one of the most dominant forces—if not the most dominant force—in the region’s politics.

Enormous scholarly energy has been spent on defining nationalism and exploring the causes of its birth, and what follows here is of necessity brief and general.¹ For the...

After the Suez Canal crisis of 1956, Nasser’s popularity underwent a gradual but steady decline. As it turned out, 1956 was the apex of his popularity, both domestically and internationally. Almost immediately afterward, the Egyptian president started suffering one setback after another. Throughout the 1950s and into the late 1960s, he remained the hero of the Arab masses, the main protector of “the Arab nation.” But he became increasingly a victim of his own successes, intoxicated by a make-believe victory over “global imperialism.” Soon thereafter, with delusions of grandeur and power, he lost touch with his own people and with...

Few words in the language of politics are as overused and abused as revolution. The Third Worldism of the 1950s and the national liberation movements of the 1960s gave special currency to the word, with self-declared revolutionaries promising liberation from the forces of global oppression and evil at home and abroad. In many ways, the historic developments in China, in Cuba, and throughout Africa in the 1950s and 1960s were indeed revolutionary. Old political orders were destroyed, new ones were built in their place, and existing relationships between the state and society were profoundly altered. But the use of the...

By nature, the consequences of revolutions go far beyond domestic boundaries. They influence, often with great ferocity, prevailing international power relations and the diplomatic status quo. They create power vacuums and opportunities to be exploited, look for allies and enemies on the other side of the border, give rise to those who seek to export the revolution’s message and ideals, and, quite often, culminate in a war involving two or even more belligerents.

The Iranian revolution was no exception. The overthrow of the shah had left a power vacuum in a region of great significance to western Europe and the...

CURRENTLY, THREE PRINCIPAL ISSUES SHAPE THE politics of the contemporary Middle East. Perhaps the most decisive of these issues has been the struggle between dictatorship and democracy, or, more accurately, between state authoritarianism and social resistance. From the 1960s through the 1990s, authoritarian states devised multiple means of political power and control, integral to which were repression and fear. In the 1980s and the 1990s, as their ideological and developmental sources of legitimacy became increasingly bankrupt, and as their promises of controlled liberalization turned out to be hollow and meaningless, their reliance on fear and repression increased exponentially. But the...

Democracies, it is often assumed, do not wage war on each other, since they are made up of institutions through which international conflicts can be peacefully mediated and resolved.¹ The absence of “democratic peace” in the Middle East, as chronicled in the preceding chapters, results from the region’s main political dilemma, namely the absence of democratic political institutions. In fact, as we have seen so far, in the Middle East the state and war have historically assumed a symbiotic relationship: war has been waged by Middle Eastern states, and these states have in turn been shaped by war. By the...

As the first decade of the twenty-first century was drawing to a close, the Middle East found itself in a deepening political morass. The 1980s had seen the rebirth of democracy in Latin America and eastern Europe, but not in the Middle East. In the 1990s much of East Asia embraced democratic rule, but once again the Middle East was left behind. The historian Roger Owen called the Middle East, where aged kings and presidents were simply assumed to have permanent tenure in office, “a veritable kingdom of the old.”¹ Throughout the region, the gap between state and society—between...

One of the most vexing problems in the political history of the modern Middle East, and indeed of the larger global community, has been the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians. Through the vicissitudes of history and the vagaries of power politics, both international and domestic, these two peoples have come to inhabit the same piece of territory. We have, essentially, as the late Deborah Gerner put it, “one land, two peoples.”¹ Over the years, they have fought, cajoled, killed, and harassed each other. And they have been unwilling or unable to find ways of “sharing the promised land.”² An overwhelming...

In one form or another, and to one extent or another, all developing countries have faced formidable obstacles in their efforts to foster economic development. For a variety of reasons, the twists and turns of history have left developing countries in an inferior global position in relation to increasingly more powerful and advanced economies. Domestic political institutions and procedures have remained equally underdeveloped and have been subject to violent oscillations and even revolutions, so that making rational economic policy has been even more difficult. Economic and industrial infrastructure could not or have not been allowed to develop, and when they...

The political history of the Middle East has been fraught with turmoil and political instability. By the middle of the twentieth century, most of the region had experienced two separate, qualitatively different periods of colonial subjugation. First came Ottoman rule, from the early to mid-1500s up until the late 1910s, and then British and French rule, beginning with the end of the First World War and lasting until the late 1940s. Not surprisingly, the state-building processes of the 1940s and 1950s—like those in Turkey in the 1920s and in Iran in the 1930s—took on an urgent and feverish...