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The Emergence of Nationalism in the Modern Middle East
From: University of Chicago
| By:
Rashid Khalidi |
EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION |
 University of Chicago history professor Rashid Khalidi (right) disputes the notion that the same conflicts have raged unabated in the Middle East for centuries. In fact, the current struggles in the region are far from ancient: most did not begin until the twentieth century, with the advent of Arab, Jewish, Kurdish, and other nationalist movements.
Khalidi believes that the situation in the Middle East is not so different from the recent history of Europe, where the upsurge of nationalism in the nineteenth century fueled conflicts that culminated in two world wars. And just as modern nation-states like France and Germany have manufactured pedigrees that stretch back centuries, nationalists in the Middle East have crafted narratives to support their own claims to power. |
 ccording to the conventional wisdom, the Middle East is riven by age-old conflicts, which have been raging since time immemorial. In this, as in so much else, the conventional wisdom is completely wrong. |
The Middle East is indeed riven by conflicts. We need only to turn on our televisions or open the newspapers to see that. But most of those conflicts that we hear so much about are far from being age-old. |
By the historical standards of other regions, most of the conflicts that come to mind when we think of the Middle East are quite recent. Whether we are talking of the Arab-Israeli conflict, that between Iran and Iraq, or the Turkish-Kurdish or Iraqi-Kurdish conflicts, their roots do not go back centuries--indeed none of these major Middle Eastern conflicts originated more than 100 years ago. |
How can this be? And why are we told that enmities in the Middle East have age-old roots? |
We are told this primarily because it is one of the most seductive and convincing tropes of modern nationalism that it encompasses, absorbs, and appropriates whatever came before it within the new national territory. Thus the great philosophers like Confucius dating back to 500 BCE, long before there was a Chinese state or a sense of Chinese ethnicity, are seen as emblematic of the glories of China, and Vercingetorix and other kings of the Gauls are viewed as symbols of France--to the point that Gaulois is the brand name of one of the cigarettes produced by the French Regie de Tabacs. In this sense, modern nationalism is voracious as regards the past. |
Similarly, in the Middle East, peoples who long ago spoke Kurdish, Turkish, Arabic, Persian or Hebrew, but who in the past never operated within a Kurdish or Turkish or Arab or Iranian or Israeli political framework--the framework of a national state with all that implies in terms of borders, language and national homogeneity--are appropriated by the modern nationalisms of the states or national movements which bear their names. |
There was thus a Kurdish people with a certain sense of self and a distinct language (or in the case of the Kurds, a set of languages) 200 or 900 years ago: the famous Sultan Salah al-Din--Saladin--was a Kurd. But this people had no sense of political community as a single national unit. To appropriate the terminology of Benedict Anderson in his seminal book Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Rise and Spread of Nationalism, the Kurds did not imagine themselves as a national political unit 200 or 900 years ago. Needless to say, their descendants today do so imagine themselves. |
The seduction of "temporal imperialism"
One reason for the profound confusion that grips us when we look at modern nationalisms, in the Middle East and elsewhere, is that we are inclined to take the protestations of nationalists about their nation's imagined or appropriated pasts at face value. This confusion is enhanced when modern nationalists can cite an ancient state as part of the past of the modern nation: the Shang and Chou states in China or that of the Gauls in France are examples. In the Middle East, modern nationalists point to the medieval Armenian states, the Seljuq and Ottoman Empires, the Arab caliphate, the Sassanian Empire, or the ancient Israelite state, depending on whether they are Armenian, Turkish, Arab, Iranian or Israeli nationalists. |
Adding to the confusion is the fact that we tend to read the past of more familiar societies in terms of the present. The Plymouth Rock colony is seen in terms of the history of the United States, although that national unit and the consciousness which came with it were over a century and a half in the future when the Pilgrims stepped ashore. Similarly, we talk of Burgundy, Provence, and Gascony in the eleventh century as being parts of France, as of course they are today. But in the eleventh century these were all independent principalities, and in none of them was the suzerainty of the French king acknowledged at the time, nor indeed was French even spoken in the Midi, where Provencal was the local language. Not, except perhaps in the most general geographical sense, did people in those areas then consider themselves to be part of an entity called France. |
If there is a difference between these more familiar societies and those of the Middle East, it is that in Western nations this "temporal imperialism," which appropriates the past of the areas which become part of the nation-state, and thereby stretches the relatively modern national entity back in time, has had slightly longer to work its seductive magic. After a few more generations of national education, national holidays, and visits to museums and state-controlled monuments and archeological sites, Americans and Frenchmen now believe in the lengthy provenance of their national past. |
Ironically, this process of nation formation and national indoctrination has not been going on in Europe for much longer than in the Middle East, nor are the Middle Eastern nationalisms we have been discussing that much older than those of Europe. As recently as 250 years ago, the British Parliament felt no compunctions about bringing in a German prince, George I, to be sovereign, as it had done two generations earlier with a Dutch prince, William of Orange. This took place in a country where the national idea may have had its earliest implantation, and yet it occasioned only sporadic comment or dissent. Only with the accession of George III in 1760 did the Hanoverians produce a monarch who could speak English with a passable accent. Indeed, it was not until the early nineteenth century that many of the countries of Western Europe were firmly fixed in their modern national identities. In Central, Southern, Eastern, and Northern Europe this process was even more delayed. |
What then distinguishes Middle Eastern nationalisms from those of Europe and other regions, if they are only slightly more recent in their provenance? |
Some would say that it is religion: specifically, the way in which pre-existing religious forms of identity, whether Islamic, Christian, or Jewish, have retained their force or been integrated as part of a modern national identity, as in the case of Israel. |
However, this interweaving of religion with the formation of modern national identity is not by any means unique to the Middle East, or for that matter to the non-European world. We find its parallels in the role of the Catholic Church in the formation of Spanish nationalism, or that of the Church of England in creating a separate British nation, or that of the Orthodox Church in the construction of modern Greek national identity. Similarly striking examples can be found in Poland, the Balkans, and elsewhere in Europe. For those who would deny the ongoing relevance of these seeming relics of the past, it is worth recalling that the British sovereign is still Defender of the Faith, and must marry a member of the Church of England. |
It is sometimes argued that religion is no longer a potent force in Europe, and that this marks a difference from the current situation in the Middle East. But for evidence to the contrary we need only look at the virulence of the conflict in former Yugoslavia, or the occasional explosions of religious xenophobia against Muslims in Germany, France, and Britain. |
How then is the Middle East different from Western Europe in this respect, if it is different at all? |
One difference is that most of the Middle East's political boundaries, and the entities within them, are fairly recent by comparison with Western Europe. There, boundaries were in many cases established before the emergence of the national idea, and the state was in existence before the nation, and came in time to clothe itself in national garb. |
In the Middle East, by contrast, most boundaries, and the political entities within them, were established for the first time in the twentieth century. There are of course a few exceptions--the border between Turkey and Iraq on one side and Iran on the other goes back to Safavid-Ottoman times--but in two of the three cases, the states on either side of it are new ones, established for the first time after World War I. Even within fairly stable states such as Turkey and Morocco, ethnic and national identity is deeply contested, and with it the nature of the nation and therefore who controls the nation-state. The contrast is great with most of Western Europe, where nation-states and boundaries were largely fixed during the nineteenth century. |
What about the impact of these considerations on the conflicts I mentioned earlier? |
In the case of Iran and Iraq, the two modern nation states have inherited some weighty historical baggage, in the form of border disputes--notably over the Shatt al-'Arab waterway through which the Tigris and Euphrates flow into the Gulf--that go back to the Ottoman-Safavid wars of the sixteenth century. They are heirs as well to a certain degree of Sunni-Shi'a friction, as most of Iran's population is Shi'a, while Iraq is dominated by a Sunni Arab minority at the expense of the rights of the Shi'a Arabs and Sunni Kurds. |
These have become part of the basket of differences that separate them, and that contributed to a ruinous nine-year war, which ended in 1988. But these border disputes have come and gone, fading into the background for decades at a time. Similarly, the Sunni-Shi'a divide has provoked little or no conflict between the two sides for just as long, just as it was completely absent in relations between the two states for many decades before the Iranian revolution of 1979. |
In fact, the main underlying causes of conflict between these two countries have not been these long-lasting disputes, which have tended to be wheeled out by the respective regimes on both sides when it was convenient for them. They lie rather in the usual conflicts between nation-states over power, influence, and regional dominance, or the miscalculation of rash, bellicose, and stupid dictators like Saddam Hussein, or the impetuousness of new revolutionary regimes like Iran's after the overthrow of the Shah. |
It is even easier to explain the Kurdish-Turkish and Kurdish-Iraqi conflicts, and indeed all those that pit the Kurds against the various states that control parts of their ancestral homeland. Far from being "age-old," these conflicts are largely the result of the creation of modern nation-states in this part of the world in the first quarter of the twentieth century. There were no Kurdish or Turkish national aspirations before that time in the multi-national Ottoman state, whose basis of legitimacy was religious and dynastic rather than national. |
The Kurdish problem is further complicated by the fact that there is no ethnic homogeneity in the parts of the Middle East where they live: many areas where Kurds live today, for example, are historically also regions with a large Armenian population--now expunged by the deportations and massacres of 1915. In some cases, the same areas have significant Turkish, Arab, Azeri, or Iranian populations. This was no problem in the pre-national era. Today, however, the same region might be seen as "historically Kurdish," or "historically Armenian," or "historically Turkish" by the partisans of this or that modern national cause. |
The Arab-Israeli conflict
The conflict between Arabs and Israelis is anything but age-old: it barely goes back 100 years, and only became seriously inflamed in the second quarter of the twentieth century. Although both of the protagonists claim ancient lineages, without exception the political units to which they now belong did not exist as sovereign entities 100 years ago, and even the modern national movements which brought them into existence barely existed then. |
Going back over a millennium and a half, there is hardly any history of conflict, in Palestine or elsewhere, between the forbears of the modern Arab and Israeli national movements. Such conflict as has taken place in Palestine over the past 2000 years--and there was a great deal of it--took place between others, whether Romans and Jews, Romans and Persians, Arab Muslims and Byzantines, or Crusaders and Muslims, or between the various Muslim empires and principalities which ruled Palestine and its environs for most of the past 1400 years. |
Only well after the emergence of modern national movements in this region around 100 years ago did the conflict over Palestine between the current protagonists begin in earnest. In each case, at the outset these national movements had a larger scope than just Palestine. Zionism described itself as the national liberation movement of the Jewish people. It reframed Jewish identity and the entirety of Jewish history in modern national terms, arguing for a national home for the Jews in Palestine as the only escape from inevitable, mortal peril in the diaspora. This was a purely European movement in terms of its ideology, its origins, and the conditions it was a response to. It neither paid attention to conditions in, nor originally had many adherents in, two of the major centers of Jewish life in the first half of the twentieth century, the Americas and the Islamic world. Indeed until World War II, the Holocaust, and the rise of Israel, the great majority of Jews in both of these centers were not Zionists. |
Arab nationalism, the force that was originally in contention with Zionism in Palestine, was similarly focused on a far broader scope than just Palestine. It argued that all those between the Atlantic and the Persian Gulf who spoke Arabic and looked back to the achievements of the Arabs were a nation, indeed had always been one, and should live within a political framework which reflected that reality. It too reframed what had formerly been thought of as Islamic history as Arab history, and reconfigured pre-existing identities in Arab national terms. |
These two movements arose at about the same time, and engaged in precisely the same process of appropriating what came before, via nationalist iterations of the archaeology, history, and geography of their homelands, just as do all national movements. Zionism claimed to be the logical culmination and heir of the entirety of Jewish history, including the ancient tribal states described in the Bible, rewriting history so that these states appeared as the precursors of the modern Israeli nation-state. In so doing, like other national movements, Zionism fore-grounded whatever it could find in the historical record, in religious belief and elsewhere that related to its claimed past, while downplaying whatever did not fit into its nationalist narrative. |
In Palestine, where by the beginning of the 1920's Palestinian nationalism had emerged out of the broader current of Arab nationalism, the Palestinian Arab national movement did much the same thing. As showed in my 1997 book, Palestinian Identity, Palestinian national consciousness came into being at about the same time as Zionism. It drew on Arab nationalism, and defined Palestinian identity against Ottoman, foreign and Arab others, as well as against Zionism. Like most other national movements in the Arab countries, it drew on pre-existing religious sentiment, powerful local loyalties to place, and a larger Arab sense of identity. And like other national movements, it selectively annexed elements of the past as seemed suitable: the Philistines, Canaanites and Jebusites, as well as Arab and Muslim history were all thus reinterpreted and appropriated in whole or part as part of the Palestinian national past. |
And as with other national movements, these were not entirely baseless appropriations. There was a connection between ancient and modern Israel, or between Canaanites and Umayyads and modern Palestinians: they just were not precisely the same thing, as apologists of nationalism would have it, and as these newly imagined communities argued that they were. |
Some today would claim that whatever the nature of its roots, the Palestinian-Israeli conflict is particularly intractable because of the religious element involved, an argument that is also made about the Azerbaijani-Armenian, Iranian-Iraqi and other Middle Eastern disputes. |
In the Palestinian-Israeli case, they adduce the issue of Jerusalem, which in some measure was the spark that triggered the latest round of unrest. But there is a good deal of evidence that however much religion may have inflamed things, it is not religion per se that makes these conflicts intractable, but rather nationalisms, which by mobilizing religion--often quite cynically, as in the case of Ariel Sharon's September 2000 visit to the Haram al-Sharif/Temple Mount--lays an absolute political claim to sites, and to the past. |
It is worth recalling that the first time in modern history that the "Wailing Wall," or Western Wall, was a subject of political dispute, in 1929, it was not the pious worshippers before the Wall who challenged the status quo and started the disturbances. Nor was it the Muslims in the adjacent Haram al-Sharif. Rather, it was the radical youth wing of the Revisionist Zionist Party, the Herut of Vladimir Jabotinsky, whose ideological heirs are the Likud Party led by Ariel Sharon. This lot of hardened secularists, none of whom was ever accused of being overly given over to religious devotion or pious observance, tried to change the status quo at a religious site which was legally part of a Muslim waqf or pious endowment, but where Jews had worshipped undisturbed for several centuries. This provided the spark for the 1929 riots, one of the first major outbreaks of violence between Arabs and Jews in Palestine. |
Indeed it had been the very sanctity of the Temple Mount to Jews that had led the Muslims to erect the al-Aqsa Mosque there in the first place in the early part of the seventh century. This was an act welcomed at the time by pious Jews, who felt that to trespass on the precincts of the destroyed temple would have been a sacrilege, and who were pleased to see the Muslims venerate it after over six centuries of desolation and desecration mandated by the Romans and enforced by Byzantine Christianity. Indeed, both Jewish and Muslim contemporary sources tell us that Jews were involved in the building and upkeep of the mosque and the adjoining Dome of the Rock, and for centuries there is not one record of Muslim-Jewish friction at the site, although the Crusaders indiscriminately butchered Muslims and Jews there in 1099. |
So if we look carefully, it is not religion which is at the root of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict today, useful though it is as a mobilizing tool for many nationalists on both sides, and deep though the religious feeling of many in both communities is. Religion can certainly inflame this and other conflicts, however, while individuals acting in the name of religion can fan tensions to a dangerous pitch. |
Lessons of history
If I am correct, and if it is indeed Armenian and Azeri, or Iranian and Iraqi, or Algerian and Moroccan nationalism which are in conflict because of their competing realpolitik claims in time and space, and if this and other regional conflicts could be shown to cease permanently if these claims could be settled, as were those between Germany and France in the wake of World War II, what is the prognosis for the Arabs and Israelis? |
I am a professor of history--not someone skilled in predicting the future. But one thing we learn to do as historians is to look at and compare the patterns of the past, including the recent past, and to draw conclusions from them about the present. Doing so in the Middle East and elsewhere, it is clear that in time, with proper arrangements, nations can be brought to overcome their conflicts. France and Germany are one obvious example. It may not be a reassuring one, however, for those interested in the Middle East: Germany was born as a modern nation state in the 1870 war with France, and the two countries thereafter fought two disastrous world wars before they finally achieved a peaceful resolution. They did so by settling the issues between them (and also because Germany was decisively defeated in 1945). |
Recall, however, that while it lasted, this was a conflict where issues of deep historic resonance were invoked by both sides. Sometimes, both sides claimed the same symbols: Charlemagne was an integral part of the national narrative of both, and it is worth noting that the place where he was crowned has two names, Aachen in German and Aix-la-Chapelle in French. Both national movements had competing claims to the same past, an irony which would no doubt have amused Charlemagne, who fancied himself neither French nor German, but rather as the Holy Roman Emperor! Today, of course, when one crosses from France into Germany within a European Union without borders, all of this appears to be quaint and amusing ancient history. |
When will the Armenians and Turkey, or Iran and Iraq, or the Kurds and their various antagonists, or Israel and the Palestinians reach this happy stage? And if there is peace, will there be reconciliation? |
We can look at history for clues to the answer to this question, but we can also expect history to play a role in the resolution of this conflict. History can be used both to inflame and to soothe spirits. In the case of the Armenians and the Turks, the first conference ever between historians from the two sides--which I am proud to say was held at the University of Chicago last year--may have played a small role in this regard, by helping the two sides to bring their national narratives closer together. For the Palestinians and the Israelis to have peace and reconciliation, they will have to do something along the same lines as regards the sensitive questions which separate them, notably the issues of refugees and Jerusalem. Both are questions where if properly handled, history can help defuse tensions, and provide a path to a settlement, while if misused, it can make a settlement impossible. Recent events have not been at all encouraging, as both sides have brandished their distorted versions of history as weapons against one another. We shall see whether some of the more encouraging tentative recent trends regarding the history of the conflict--with revisions of history and acceptance of part of the narrative of the other--can reassert themselves in the future. Unlikely though it may seem, on this depends much of the hope for a real reconciliation between the two sides. |
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