Oxford University Press The Modern Middle East A SourceBook for History.pdf

The Modern

Middle East

A Sourcebook for History

Edited by

Camron Michael Amin,

Benjamin C. Fortna,

and Elizabeth Frierson

Great Clarendon Street, Oxford OX2 6DP

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ISBN 0–19–926209–8 978–0–19–926209–0

13579108642

Preface

The history of the modern Middle East has been written on the basis of a variety

of sources: ofﬁcial and private archives, the periodical press, memoirs, Western

journalists’ and travelers’ accounts, literature, and ofﬁcial reports (including

statistical data). Middle East specialists, who have interpreted these sources and

woven them into an ever longer and more detailed narrative, have done so

with a variety of inﬂuences on their thinking. Since the late eighteenth century,

European (and later American) researchers have investigated the Middle East

against the backdrop of Euro-American hegemony in the region, with their work

supported by and contributing to foreign policies that often furthered Western

political and economic interests at the expense of Middle Eastern societies.

Whether these scholars embraced the implications of Euro-American hegemony

or reviled them, it colored their understanding of the Middle East. Indigenous

Middle Eastern scholars were certainly no less affected by this state of affairs, with

many embracing (and contributing to) methodologies and explanatory paradigms

developed in Western academia even as they argued for different master narratives.

This volume does not seek to interrogate the historiography of the modern

Middle East or to reconcile debates between ‘Orientalists’ and ‘Revisionists’ or

to resolve other long-standing controversies. It does, however, seek to reﬂect

the state of Middle East studies in the early twenty-ﬁrst century, and therefore is

a by-product both of the debates and the traditions of scholarship that characterize

the ﬁeld. Edward Said (d. 2003) was the most celebrated champion of the notion

that the West had invented or created the construct of the ‘East’ in such a way as

to suit its own interests and sense of self. In the realm of academic study this

meant that all Western scholarship on the Middle East was affected by the fact

that Western countries enjoyed considerable inﬂuence upon the politics and eco-

nomics of the Middle East. Europe (Said’s 1978 book Orientalism focused on

British and French scholarship on the Middle East) and, later, American Middle

East specialists were employed in the Western imperialist enterprise. Said argued

that their characterizations of ‘Oriental’ societies as despotic and decadent ghosts

of their idealized medieval selves, served the imperialist agendas of the

nineteenth and twentieth centuries. If Westerners came to believe that Middle

Eastern and Islamic countries were a mess, then they would consider it natural

(even noble) for Europeans to take over those countries. Said was a literary

scholar and his arguments largely rested on devastating critiques of the tone of

viii Preface

Orientalist scholarship, in which deep-seated biases were laid bare. 1 There were

many responses to Orientalism , but the most pointed and durable have come from

Bernard Lewis (whose works were part of the evidence marshalled by Said). Lewis

was quick to point out the historical errors of Said’s literary analysis, and took par-

ticular issue with the implication that Western Orientalists were incapable of

providing meaningful and carefully researched analyses and critiques of the

modern Middle East. 2

The nuanced beginnings of this debate quickly gave way to more heated

exchanges between ‘Orientalist’ scholars (Lewis’s camp) and ‘Revisionist’ scholars

(Said’s camp), with the academic debate spilling over into policy disputes. Today’s

‘clash of civilizations’ controversy (a phrase popularized by Samuel P. Huntington

in 1996)—the notion that there is something irreconcilably different between

West and East (or, more generally, ‘the West and the Rest’) and that conﬂict is

unavoidable—is a legacy of the academic skirmishes between Orientalists and

Revisionists and is at the heart of current policy deates over how best to wage

a ‘war on terror’. 3 That is why it is critical that students of the modern Middle

East be able to reach past these debates and grapple with the kinds of sources

that inform them. Developing a better-informed understanding of the modern

Middle East is no longer merely an academic ideal (if it ever was); it is a civic

responsibility as vital as voting.

Each document in this volume has been prefaced, translated, and annotated by

a specialist in the particular history and culture from which it was drawn. Each

specialist has endeavored to provide enough information so that the most novice

student can appreciate the document’s value and begin a further exploration either

of its speciﬁc historical context or its relationship to broader themes in modern

1 Incidentally, Said understood ‘Orientalism’ as a product of Western cultural history more than a

result of the realities of the modern Middele East. His audience was Western. In the Middle East

itself, the idea that Western ‘Orientalism’ was tainted by imperialism was an article of faith among the

intelligentsia for at least two decades before the appearance of Said’s Orientalism . Some in the Middle

East, just as some in the rest of the world, have moved on from these debates. See, Mehrzad

Boroujerdi, ‘Iranian Islam and the Faustian Bargain of Western Modernity’, Journal of Peace Research ,

34/1 (Feb. 1997), 1–5.

2 For the latest instalment of this argument, see Bernard Lewis, The Middle East : What Went

Wrong ?: Western Impact and Middle Eastern Response (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002). For a

pointed critique, see Juan R. I. Cole, ‘Review of Bernard Lewis’s What Went Wrong: Western Impact

and Middle Eastern Response ’, ﬁrst published in Global Dialogue , 4/4 (Autumn 2002), and posted (with

permission from GD ) at <http://www.juancole.com/essays/rvlew.htm> on 27 Jan. 2003. Scholars such

as Cole have been subjected to shrill personal invectives by admirers of Lewis such as Martin Kramer

and Daniel Pipes.

3 For an academic critique of Huntington, see Roy P. Mottaheddeh, ‘The Clash of Civilizations:

An Islamicist’s Critique’, Harvard Middle Eastern and Islamic Review , 2/2 (1995), 1–26. For a nuanced

critique with an eye towards the policy implications of Huntington’s work as it relates to the spread of

democracy in the Middle East, see Fareed Zakaria, The Future of Freedom: Illiberal Democracy at Home

and Abroad (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2003).

Preface ix

Middle Eastern history. For our colleagues in the ﬁeld, we aimed to provide an

array of primary sources to teach, discuss, and, perhaps, reconsider critical issues

in modern Middle Eastern history. Some documents provide a window on the

traditional order ‘on the eve of modernity’, to borrow a phrase from Abraham

Marcus, but most deal with the process of modernizing change on a variety of

fronts. The collection is expansive (from the Balkans to South Asia) but certainly

not exhaustive. Nonetheless, for all the important differences in the region, it is

striking how many issues—the expansion of state power, changing gender roles,

religious revival, nationalist mobilization, increasing participation in a wider

global culture and economy, and the redeﬁnition of traditions and identities—are

common and comparable across the greater Middle East.

Readers will note that words from various languages—the original documents

assembled were written in Arabic, Armenian, English, French, Hebrew, Persian,

and a number of Turkic languages—have been represented in a simpliﬁed form

of conventional transliteration schemes. For precision, Middle East specialists

resort to elaborate diacritical marks to indicate the original words they mean

to represent in, or transliterate into, English (or other European language).

For simplicity’s sake, with the exception of the Arabic letters c ayn ( c ) and hamza (’),

these diacritical marks have been omitted. Furthermore, some words appear in

several languages but are pronounced differently. We have taken that into account.

For example, the word for ‘book’ in Arabic, Persian, and Turkish shares a common

Arabic origin. When appearing in the script common to Arabic, Persian, and

(until 1928) Turkish, the word looks the same but is transliterated differently.

Our transliteration reﬂects that difference: in Arabic kitab , in Persian ketab , and

in Turkish kitap . Turkish words are rendered in modern Turkish script, which is

a Latin-based script. Sometimes, these different renderings reﬂect a question

of historical interpretation. For example, the ruler of Egypt from 1805 to 1847

could be understood by some as an Ottoman ofﬁcer (Mehmet Ali) or the man who

initiated Egypt’s emergence as an independent Arab country (Muhammad c Ali).

At other times, the transliteration simply reﬂects the context in which a source

was produced (e.g. a Persian-language newspaper, published in Tehran, Iran),

and does not imply any particular historical debate. It is just one more way in

which we wish to encourage readers to think carefully about the full context of

each document in this collection, and the diversity of the greater Middle East.

This collection was developed as part of a larger (and continuing) project,

funded by the National Endowment of the Humanities, to provide annotated

translations of primary documents to scholars, students, and other people inter-

ested in the history and culture of the Middle East. Please go to our website,

www.umd.umich.edu/middleeastsourcebook

for more information about

the project and to ﬁnd additional documents.

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