The crises and conflicts of today’s Middle East are rooted in the colonial past. The Israeli-Palestinian dispute, radical Islamism, Iran’s hostility towards the West, the fraught relationship between Turkey and Europe, and between France and Algeria – all these, and a host of other issues, have their origins in the era of European colonial rule. To begin to understand the contemporary Middle East, we need to grasp how it emerged, in essentially its present form, in the half-century between 1917 and 1967.
The modern Middle East – as a string of recent anniversaries has reminded us – was the product of the first World War. After 1918 the victors in that war, Britain and France, divided between them the Arab portions of the Ottoman empire. To their chagrin, the Turks themselves refused to accept defeat and, under Mustafa Kemal, rescued the Anatolian part of the empire and turned it into the modern-day republic of Turkey. But elsewhere in the Middle East European colonial rule was the order of the day. In the postwar carve-up, Britain was allotted Palestine, Transjordan (now Jordan), and Iraq, while France got Syria and Lebanon – each power receiving a mandate to prepare these territories, in theory at least, for eventual independence. Persia (as Iran was then called) and the Arabian peninsula were not formally colonised, but they were heavily influenced, directly or indirectly, by the pax Britannica.
Whatever their motives – the defence of the route to India, the acquisition of oil and military bases, a desire to keep out rivals or protect Christian holy places – the European powers believed they were there to stay. They failed to reckon with the spirit of nationalism – stronger in some places, weaker in others – which was already in the air. Once Turkey had achieved statehood in 1923 and Saudi Arabia in 1932, others in the region were determined to follow suit. The second World War was the turning-point. After six years of conflict, Europe’s grip on empire was enfeebled. International opinion – reflected at the new-born United Nations and shared by an up-and-coming United States – was increasingly hostile to imperialism. In the postwar years, state after state broke free from European rule. By the late 1960s, after the French had withdrawn from Algeria and the British from Aden, the process was more or less complete.
But if the European powers have gone, the memory and folk-memory of their rule remains. In the Middle East, events of a century ago such as the Sykes-Picot agreement and the Balfour Declaration are remembered as if they happened yesterday, and in the blackest terms. In the West, meanwhile, as the number of those directly involved in the European empires dwindles, our opinion of imperialism has changed. We are less inclined to accept the claims made on its behalf, and more inclined to the view that it is wrong for one people to impose foreign rule and foreign occupation on another.
Historians of the period have approached the subject in different ways. Elizabeth Monroe, in Britain’s Moment in the Middle East, wrote an incisive account of the rise and fall of British power in the region from 1914 to the Suez crisis of 1956. Others have focused on individual countries, producing studies of, say, the Palestine mandate or Algeria’s war of independence, or on particular aspects of the drama of decolonisation. In a novel twist, soldiers and counter-insurgency experts now look back to Palestine in the 1930s and Algeria in the 1950s for lessons in fighting the new wars of the 21st century.
This book focuses on the struggle for independence in 10 countries stretching from north Africa to south Arabia. It follows an overall chronology, from the emergence of modern Turkey in the 1920s, to that of Saudi Arabia in the 1930s, of Syria, Israel, and Jordan in the 1940s, Egypt and Iraq in the 1950s, and finally Algeria and the People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen in the 1960s. In each case the key date is that of actual, rather than formal, independence. Purists may object that Algeria is not a Middle Eastern country, and that the Iranian chapter (on the rise and fall of Muhammad Mossadeq) describes a failed, rather than a successful, attempt to break free from foreign tutelage. But both were important episodes in the struggle between nationalism and imperialism in the region, and hence intrinsic parts of the overall story.
The advantage of a country-by-country approach is that it captures the specificity of each – in geography, history, and culture – while highlighting how differently the struggle played out in different settings. Egypt was more homogenous than Iraq; central Arabia far less developed than the Fertile Crescent. Statehood might be achieved through contraction (Turkey) or through expansion (Saudi Arabia). It might involve great violence (Algeria) or be largely peaceful (Jordan). It might be a straight fight between an indigenous people and a colonial power (as in Egypt) – or involve a third party with demands of its own (the colons in Algeria, the Zionist settlers in Palestine).
The Poisoned Well draws as far as possible on eye-witness testimony. It casts a wide net, taking in rulers and ruled, men and women, the famous and the unknown. The dramatis personae (listed at the end of the book) include nationalists and colonial administrators, soldiers and spies, consuls and courtesans, oilmen and missionaries, journalists and schoolteachers. Some played a role in the struggle for independence; others simply observed it. I have made use of memoirs, diaries, and letters – published and unpublished – and where possible have interviewed survivors from the period, or their children. I have listened to their stories and looked at their photographs and letters and other mementoes. Human memory is fallible, and it is not always possible to check the accuracy of such testimony. But if there are risks there are also abundant rewards: at its best, oral history tells us not just what happened, but what it felt like to be there.
The origins of this book go back to the early 1990s when, as a journalist with the BBC World Service, I made a radio series called The Making of the Middle East. There were eventually 10 programmes. In Ankara, I was lucky enough to meet people who had known Atatürk; and in Cairo, two of the surviving Free Officers who had overthrown the British-backed monarchy in 1952. I came across one retired soldier and diplomat, Sir Gawain Bell, who could have taken part in virtually all of the programmes: he had been a colonial administrator in Sudan, joined Glubb’s Arab Legion in Jordan, helped put down the Arab revolt in Palestine in the 1930s, fought alongside the Free French in Syria in the second World War, served as British Resident in Kuwait during the Suez crisis, and in the 1960s had taken part in a mission to draw up a new constitution for south Arabia. What’s more, his memory was remarkably intact. Many of those I met then are no longer alive, but their voices live on in the unedited tapes of their interviews.
What was the colonial legacy in the Middle East? I return to this question in the epilogue. First and foremost, the Europeans drew borders – lines in the sand – which, however arbitrary or unwanted, have proved remarkably durable. Some boundaries have been contested, either successfully or unsuccessfully. In Palestine, the Jewish state emerged by conquest during the first Arab-Israeli war. More than four decades later, the Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein laid claim to Kuwait – which Iraqi nationalists had long seen as their country’s natural outlet to the sea-and was driven back only by a large international army. As I write, jihadists are doing their utmost to eliminate the borders of Syria and Iraq. But by and large rulers have chosen to live within the frontiers they inherited from colonial rule, rather than challenge them.
At the same time, the Europeans set the peoples living within these borders on a particular (Western) path of nation-building and modernisation. The building of roads and schools and hospitals, which had begun haltingly in Ottoman times, gathered pace under colonial rule. The results were patchy. When Britain left Iraq and Egypt, illiteracy, disease and poverty were rife. But the foundations of a modern infrastructure had been laid. At the same time, a cultural shift with far-reaching consequences was under way: schoolchildren were taught English or French, Shakespeare or Molière, and began to imbibe a secular culture often at odds with that of their parents. In the process, Middle Easterners acquired a range of attitudes to the West. New elites spoke western languages and embraced a western lifestyle. This cut them off from those of their compatriots who were suspicious of the West and clung to a traditional culture and identity – and who, as the nationalist project faltered, became foot-soldiers in the Islamic revival of the 1970s. A third attitude – perhaps more prevalent than the others – was a deep ambivalence towards the West. Many admired its scientific and material progress but at the same time nursed an abiding resentment of western power and domination, grounded in the memory and folk-memory of the colonial period. All three attitudes persist today.
Western imperialism is not responsible for the ills of the modern Middle East. But the western world has played a significant role in shaping the region and its destiny. This book tells the story of how it did so, and how the Middle East emerged from the shadow of empire.
To set the scene, the story begins with the Ottoman inheritance.
The Poisoned Well: Empire & Its Legacy in the Middle East by Roger Hardy is published by Hurst, at £20
