1.  Islam and politics

a.  Islam and political action
            b.  A single Muslim polity
            c.  Sunni-Shi^ca split
            d.  territorial fragmentation

2.              Pre-20^th Century

a.              Origins of Ottoman and Safavid Empires
b.             Decline of the Empires/”The Eastern Question”

The central fact of the prophet Muhammad's mission, from our point of view, is his dual stature as religious prophet and political leader.  His revelations continued, and became more detailed and "political", as his practical responsibilities grew.  These revelations, collected after his death in written form, compose the Quran, Arabic for recitation, indicating their original oral form.  They set out, along with traditions from the Prophet's life known as "hadith" (sayings) and the sunna (“way” of the Prophet), not only the way for each person to live his life, but also the way of organizing the Muslim community socially and politically.  The Quran, hadith, sunna and their subsequent legal interpretation has developed into a body of Islamic law called "shari^ca".  The implementation of the shari^ca is, in theory, the duty, religious as much as political, of an Muslim political leader.

This unity, again I stress in theory, of religion and the state is the most distinctive political aspect of Muhammad's message and example.  Muslims look to Muhammad's rule, and those of his immediate successors, as the Golden Age of Islam, so this perfect fusion of religious and political responsibilities is an ideal type of polity for Muslims, and implementation of the shari^ca the standard against which political leaders would be judged.  This ideal has never been achieved in subsequent Islamic history, but that does not lessen its power as an example.  Thus, within the political traditions of Islam we can find two contradictory but equally valid impulses that might animate contemporary Muslims in the political realm.

The first is a tendency toward political withdrawal and quietude.  Muslim legal scholars, faced with the subsequent conduct of rulers who did not live up to the Prophet's ideal, developed the notion that the duty of all Muslims was still to obey such rulers.  The scholars feared that constant rebellion would endanger the unity of the Muslim community and expose it to its enemies.  This idea was codified by the great Islamic legal interpreter al-Ghazzali (12th century), and was summarized in the aphorism that "60 years of tyranny are better than one hour of civil strife."  According to this school of thought, which as you can well imagine was very popular with many political leaders, the Muslims were enjoined to give their obedience to the ruler as long as he fulfills certain basic duties -- such as defending the polity and allowing important parts of the shari^ca, mainly having to do with personal status law, to be enforced, and not ruling in flagrant violation of the shari^ca. [not so much in ruler's personal as in his public life -- not to cause scandal]

The second impulse that can be drawn from the political traditions of the Prophet Muhammad and the Golden Age of the Islamic polity is just the opposite of the first:  the call to revolt -- that if the leader is not implementing shari^ca, or is in any other way irreligious, there is religious justification to revolt against him.  Since the righteous rule of the Prophet and his early successors in the model polity for most Muslims, there is a ready-made and very high standard against which to judge any political ruler.  In the name of this standard, the people can be called upon to overthrow the leader, in order to institute a more "Islamic" government.  This impulse has been less frequently called upon in Islamic history, but has always been there and has animated numerous political movements in the history of Islam, right up to the present.

So the political legacy of the days of the Prophet is the ideal of a unified Muslim political community, governed under shari^ca, but the most just and wise person there was.  A difficult ideal to live up to.  Almost immediately after his death there was conflict within the community on how to do that 

A second important political legacy from this golden age of the Prophet and immediately afterwards is the idea of a single, large political entity which encompasses the Muslim world.  Under Muhammad, the Muslim polity encompassed all of Arabia when he died in 632.  Under Abu Bakr, and his successors as Caliph, ^cUmar and ^cUthman, the Muslim Arab polity engaged in a remarkable period of military expansion, capturing Damascus in 636 AD, Jerusalem in 638 AD, Egypt in 639 AD, all from the Byzantine Roman Empire; and reducing the Persian Sassanid Empire in 651 AD.  The Muslim armies spread their rule and the faith through North Africa and into Spain, finally being defeated at Poitiers in 732 (by Charles Martel, the “Hammer” of the Moors).  They were stymied by a revived Byzantine Empire at the Taurus Mountains, but continued expanding East and North into Central Asia. 

The Golden Age of Islam did not only represent the ideal fusion of religious and political authority.  It also represented the ideal of a strong, large, united Muslim polity.  Both of these ideals are real, but both were also short-lived.  Unity – of territory, of authority – came to be challenged almost immediately after the Prophet’s death.

Origins of the Sunni-Shi’i split:  Upon the death of the Prophet in 632 AD, there was no established method of succession to his office of leader of the Islamic community.  In one sense, he could not be replaced, since his prophetic office was unique.  However, there was a need for a successor, or caliph (from the Arabic khalifa), to him as the political leader of the Muslims and their expanding community.  The Prophet left no sons, greatly complicating this matter.  After lengthy argument within the community, one of the Prophet's closest companions, Abu Bakr, succeeded in winning general acceptance as caliph.  The Prophet's nephew and son-in-law ^cAli, husband of his daughter Fatima, had also put himself forward, and only reluctantly submitted to Abu Bakr's authority some months later. 

While this amazingly swift expansion was going on (and it would not remain limited to the territories I mentioned above), all was not well at the center.  The third Caliph ^cUthman, was an old man and a relatively weak leader, and his rule was opposed by ^cAli, the Prophet's son-in-law.  When ^cUthman was murdered in 656 AD, ^cAli seemed to be his natural successor, and was proclaimed so by his followers.  However, members of the powerful Umayyad clan, to which Uthman had belonged, opposed ^cAli and put forward one of their own, Mu'awiyya, governor of Syria, as the next caliph.  Mu'awiyya was joined in revolt by the Muslim conqueror of Egypt, ^cAmr ibn al-^cAs, and their combined forces defeated those of ^cAli at the Battle of Siffin (near the Syrian-Iraqi border) in 657 AD [Quran ploy].  ^cAli's son Husayn later raised a revolt against Mu'awiyya's successor, and was killed at Karbala in 681 AD.

The claim of the Umayyads to the caliphate was recognized by most Muslims as a fait accompli, despite the personal irreligion of some members of the house and despite their rather naked assertion that military power gave them the right to rule.  These "orthodox" Muslims came to be known as Sunnis, because they followed the "sunna", or way, of the Prophet.  However, some members of the community contended that only a blood relative of the Prophet could properly hold the office of caliph.  They continued to give allegiance to the family of ^cAli, and became known as the Shi^ca, or party, of ^cAli.  This is the origin of the major division in Islam that exists down to the present.  As you can see, in its origins the split had no particular theological implications, but was rather a clear and simple struggle for political power.  However, over the centuries, some doctrinal differences developed between the two major divisions, to compound and deepen the political differences that already existed.  (We should note that these differences are hardly as great, from the purely religious point of view, as those between Catholics and Protestants in Christianity, and might be more analogous, though this might be stretching the metaphor, to the differences among the various interpretations of Judaism, or perhaps between Orthodox and Catholic Christianity.)  Today the largest numbers of Shi^cis are found in Iran, which is almost completely Shi^ci, southern Iraq, the Persian Gulf coastal areas and southern Lebanon, with smaller offshoot communities in North Yemen, Syria, and Pakistan.

It is not our purpose to delve very deeply into all the aspects of the Sunni-Shi^ca split, but one particular aspect that has political ramifications must be brought up.  The main branch of Shi^cism, Imami or "Twelver" Shi^cism, holds that the 12th Imam, or successor to ^cAli as head of the Muslim community, disappeared and will some day return to establish a rule of perfect justice in the world.  Until that day, his will is interpreted by certain men of religious learning who achieve a high standing in their community.  This belief has a number of consequences.  First, it allows the Shi^ca community to exist separate of political authority, an absolute necessity for the early centuries of Shi^cism, when it was everywhere a persecuted minority.  Second, it encouraged the development of a more powerful and independent ^culama among the Shi^cis than among the Sunnis, for the leaders of the Shi^ci ^culama could claim to speak in the name of the Hidden Imam.

Finally, it created a powerful rationale, in certain circumstances, for the rejection of political authority.  This rejection could either be in the form of political quietude and non-participation, or could be in the form of active revolt in the name of the representative of the Hidden Imam.  Now we must be clear on this point.  Shi^cism is not an inherently "revolutionary" creed.  In the history of Shi^cism, there were periods when the clergy enjoined their followers to accept Sunni rulers, while maintaining their own faith in secret.  There were other times, most notably during the great Safavid Empire in Persia, when the political authority embraced Shi^cism and won the active support of the clergy. 
 

Territorial Fragmentation:  Break-up of the unity of the Muslim polity – Abbasids come to power in 747, challenging Umayyads.  But an Umayyad family member sets himself up in Spain as a rival caliph, marking the first division of the polity.  A Shi’i dynasty, the Fatimids, emerge out of North Africa in the 900’s and set up a rival polity based in Egypt, with Cairo as its capital.  By the time the Crusader and Mongol invasions come in the 1100’s and 1200’s, the centralized power of the Abbasid dynasty had dissipated, and regional rulers were the norm throughout the Muslim polity.  The Mongol sack of Baghdad in 1258 marked the end of the Abbasids, and the end of a formal claim of a single Muslim polity.

The Ottoman and Safavid Empires

In the fluidity of the post-Abbassid political world, a number of dynasties emerged, two of which, both non-Arab, would have a major impact on the history of the Middle East.  The first was a Turkic clan established by ^cUthman [not the same guy as the 4th caliph], a mercenary in the Abbassid service.  His successors, known to the West as the Ottomans, established themselves in Asia Minor by the end of the 13th century, and spread their influence westward in Anatolia and into the Balkans.  In 1453 Muhammad II did what no other Muslim leader had been able to do -- conquer Constantinople and put an end to the great Byzantine Roman Empire.  The Ottomans reconstituted the great imperial city as Istanbul and made it the capital of their Sunni Muslim empire, which at its height would rule all of North Africa save Morocco, all of the Arab Middle East save the remote deserts of Arabia, vast stretches of Asia Minor and Central Asia, and all of the Balkans up to Vienna.  The height of the Empire's expansion and grandeur came during the reign of Sulayman, from 1520 to 1566.  He was a contemporary of such great historical figures as Henry VIII, Francis I, and Charles V, the Holy Roman Emperor and King of Spain, yet it was Sulayman who was called "The Magnificent", in tribute to the extent of his military power, the security of his realms, and the opulence of his capital.  [Maybe story about his letter to Francis I]

The only challenger to Ottoman power in the Middle East during these centuries came from the Safavid Dynasty in Iran.  The Safavids, whose power was based on a Turkic sufi order [maybe something on sufis] converted into a military machine, came to power in Iran in 1502, building their empire on the ruins of the Mongol destructions of a century earlier.  What was unique about the Safavids is that they were a Shi^ci dynasty, and actively worked to convert Iran, which already had a large number of Shi^cis, into a completely Shi^ci realm.  To a great extent they succeeded, and institutionalized Shi^cism, for centuries a religion of a downtrodden minority, became a major bulwark of Safavid rule.  The Shi^ci ^culama, in return for state sponsorship and support, reluctantly ceded their claim to represent the hidden Imam to the Safavid Shahs, though later, under weaker successors, the clergy would reassert this right.  It was under the Safavids, particularly the Shah Abbas the Great (1588-1629), that the intimate connection between Shi^cism and Iranian national identity began to develop.

The Ottomans and the Safavids remained military rivals, a rivalry whose intensity was deepened by the Sunni-Shi^ca divide, engaging in frequent campaigns against each other in what is now Iraq and in the Causasus -- Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia.  The Ottoman Empire was much more a multinational entity, while the Safavid realm eventually came to be based more on the national entity of Iran. 

The clearest and most obvious indication of the decline of nations and states is their defeat on the battlefield.  The Ottoman state had been a dynamic, expansionist, militant state from its foundation for a period of 600 years, but the tide had begun to turn by the end of the 1600's.  In 1683 Ottoman armies beseiged the great Habsburg capital of Vienna, the furthest extension of Ottoman power into Europe; from that point on the story of Ottoman arms is, with some rare exceptions, a story of retreat and defeat.  In 1699 the Sultan was forced to conclude the Treaty of Carlowitz with the Habsburg Emporer, the first treaty in which the Ottomans were clearly the defeated power.  At Carlowitz, the Ottomans were forced for the first time to cede previously conquered territories back to their Christian enemies.  From then on it was no longer the Ottoman Empire which was a threat to Christian Europe, but rather Christian Europe which was a military and political threat to the Muslim empire.

At about the same time that the Habsburgs took the offensive against the Ottomans, the Russian Empire, under Peter the Great, began to challenge the Sultan in the area around the Black Sea.  A milestone in this process was the 1774 Treaty of Kuchuk Kainardji, following yet another Ottoman defeat to the Czarist forces.  In this treaty the Sultan was forced to recognize further Russian gains on the Black Sea, to grant Russian merchants freedom of trade in the Empire and freedom of navigation in peacetime in the Black Sea and the Straits, and, perhaps most importantly for the future, to recognize the Czar's right to intervene politically on behalf of the Orthodox Christian subjects in the Ottoman realm.  Moscow would exploit this right to stir up the Sultans Orthodox subjects, particularly in the Balkans, for political purposes, right up until the collapse of the Czarist regime.  Moreover, this concession set a precedent, as the other Western powers claimed patronage of other religious minorities in the Empire as a means for political intervention and influence. 

In Persia, the Safavid Dynasty won some brilliant victories to the East, in Afghanistan and India, but by the mid-1700's had suffered defeats to the expanding Russian empire in Central Asia (losing Baku and other Caspian territories), was facing revolts in Afghanistan, and suffered from serious internal struggles within the dynasty.  The rule of the Safavid house collapsed amid internicene fighting, as the centrifugal tendencies within the Persian empire (tribal autonomy, mostly) began to assert themselves.  Finally, by the end of the 1700's, the Qajar Dynasty had established itself as rulers of Persia.  The Qajar Shahs, however, could exercise very little control over their state, and certainly could not match the authority of the Safavids at their height. [regional, tribal, and clergy autonomy]

The Eastern Question

It was, roughly speaking, at the beginning of the 19th century that these factors -- one domestic (Ottoman and Persian decline), and one having to do with the Great Powers (European resurgence) -- combined to begin a century long-crisis in the Middle East.  The weakness of the local powers lured the Europeans into the region.  All were intent on grabbing some piece of their Middle Eastern domains.  At the same time, the Ottoman and Qajar states became pawns in European power politics, and European power rivalries were fought out over them.  Some European powers at certain times supported the Middle Eastern empires, hoping that they would act as buffers to the expansion of European rivals.  This minuet of the Ottomans, the Qajars, the British, the French, the Austrians and the Russians is known to historians as "The Eastern Question".  We have seen that the Russian interest was to expand southward, at the expense of both the Ottomans and the Qajars.  The Austrians wanted both to expand their realms in the Balkans, and to check the forward policy of Moscow.  The French were anxious to secure commercial and political advantage in the Levant, and looked covetously toward the North African territories under nominal Ottoman control.  And Great Britain, already established in India, sought to prevent any hostile power (most notably Russia and France) from establishing itself along the sea and land routes to India. 

While each of the European powers certainly had its interests in the area, we must also keep in mind that the Middle East was, for them, at best a secondary theater of operations -- a sideshow to the main game, continental power politics.  European policy at any time in the region was a factor not just of these particular local interests, but of the European balance.  Trading assets in the Middle East in exchange for larger interests on the continent was common, and we will discuss some of these instances.  The Ottomans and the Qajars sought to play the powers off against one another to preserve their independence, and to a certain extent, more in Istabul than in Teheran, to learn from European successes how to regain the political and military power that had once made them great.

We can date, for purposes of convenience, the beginning of the "Eastern Question" to 1798, the year that a young French marshal of the revolutionary Directorate, named Napoleon Bonaparte, landed with a French expeditionary force in Egypt.  Napoleon sought to deal the British enemy a mortal blow by cutting off a major route to India.  The British, already worried about Russian advances in Central Asia and the Black Sea area, acted to meet this threat, dispatching a naval flotilla and an expeditionary force which defeated the French and forced their evacuation (Napoleon, sensing that greener pastures awaited him, had already abandoned his army and returned to Paris).  From that point it became the position of the British government to slow down and arrest the rate at which the other powers were eating away at Ottoman and Qajar territory.  To this end, the British in 1814 signed a defensive treaty with Persia aimed against Russian expansion; and came to the defense of the Ottomans on numerous occasions:  in 1840, when they were threatened by Muhammad ^cAli; in the Crimean War of 1856 against Russia; and again at the Berlin Conference of 1878, which was called in response to another Ottoman defeat at the hands of the Czar.

Let us not think that Britian's policy in regard to the Middle East was selfless or disinterested.  The British did their share to undermine the local governments, but did so more reluctantly and less blatantly than the other powers.  Because of British public opinion, both elite and mass, successive British governments found it difficult to oppose nationalist revolts by the Christian subjects of the Ottoman empire, from the Serbian and Greek wars for independence in the early 1800's to the Bulgarian and Balkan uprisings at the end of that century.  What the British sought to do in these cases was to support the gradual emancipation of the Christian areas, at a rate which would not precipitate a political crisis in Istanbul, and to do so in a way in which its rivals, particularly France and Russia, would not be strengthened.  The British were also not loathe to acqurie strategic bases in areas under nominal Ottoman control, such as Aden (1829), the Persian Gulf shaykhdoms (1830's), and Cyprus (1878).  Their crowning achievement in this area was Disraeli's aquisition in 1875 of a controlling interest in the Suez Canal, an interest that led Britain in 1882, fearing the machinations of the French and local instability, to militarily occupy Egypt. 

In the economic sphere, Britain also sought to take full advantage of the weaknesses of the Ottomans and the Qajars.  British merchants established commercial beacheads in southern Iraq and southern Iran, from which positions the British encouraged local tribal clients to develop political relations with the Crown.  In both Persia and the Ottoman Empire, the British encouraged the granting of extensive commercial concessions to British subjects, a practice which had serious political consequences in Persia, as we shall see later.  The British, along with other European powers, in effect took over the Ottoman, Egyptian and Persian state treasuries, through international debt commissions (the forerunner of the IMF), for periods during which these states were in arrears on their international debts.  With friends like this, we could wonder why the Ottomans and the Qajars needed enemies, but the state of the political situation was such that British power, no matter how debilitating toward these states in many ways, was an absolute necessity for the maintenance of their independence against the pressures of Russia, and, intermittently, Austria and France.

The French, like the British, had no particular love of the Russians and at times worked with the British to frustrate Russian advances.  Yet, French interests were hardly parallel to British, and certainly not supportive of Ottoman territorial integrity and independence.  It was the French who invaded Egypt to strike at the British line to India, and the French retained a major interest in Egypt up until the end of the century, in opposition to Britain.  France befriended the independent rulers of Egypt, supporting them against the Ottomans, particularly when Muhammad ^cAli was challenging the Sultan militarily in the 1830's, and in the 1860's it was a Frenchman (Ferdinand de Lesseps) who built the Suez canal.  The French also annexed Algeria, still nominally under Ottoman control, in 1830, and established a protectorate over Tunisia in 1881.  Like the Russians, the French also claimed special rights of protection and political alliance with Catholic subjects of the Ottoman empire.  In 1860 Paris sent a military expedition to Lebanon during a period of intercommunal strife to support the Maronite Christians.  This military mission forced the Ottoman government to establish a special regime for the government of Mount Lebanon, and cemented French ties with a community that was at least in theory subject to the Sultan.

We have spoken about Russian ambitions.  Of all the powers, they were the most openly hostile to the Ottoman and Persian empires, and conducted a steady policy of expansion at their expense.  The Russian interest was not just territorial, though that was certainly part of it.  In the case of Persia, Moscow wanted to extend its strategic defensive line to the Trans-Causasian mountains.  In the case of the Ottomans, the Russians wanted to secure strategic and commercial control of the Black Sea, guarantee their own access to the Bosporus and Dardanelles straits, and, if possible, deny the use of the straits to hostile powers.  They also wanted to make sure that the independence of the Christian people's of the Ottoman Empire redounded to their benefit, not that of their Austrian rivals.  To that end Moscow promoted the idea of Pan-Slavism in those areas, with the Czars as the "natural" leaders of all the Slavic/Orthodox people.  Finally, there was also an ideological aspect to Russian animosity toward Istanbul.  The Romanov czars claimed to be the successors to the Byzantine emporers, protectors of Orthodox Christianity, and founders of the "Third Rome", which is how they styled Moscow.  The reconquest of the "Second Rome", Constantinople, with its Orthodox holy places, was a mission which the early czars nurtured and their successors, to a greater or lesser degree, also adopted.

This hostility did not preclude, however, a certain tactical flexibility in Russian policy.  Given the opportunity, Moscow exhibited a willingness to come to the aid of both the Persian and Ottoman rulers, but only in exchange for conditions that would, in effect, have made the two states Russian protectorates.  When threatened by Muhammad ^cAli, the Porte turned to Moscow for support.  The Russians, in exchange for a defense commitment given in the 1833 Treaty of Hunkiar Iskelessi, demanded from the Ottomans a privileged position in the Black Sea and the Straits.  It appeared that the Ottoman Empire was about to become a Russian protectorate, and this led Great Britain to forcefully oppose Muhammad ^cAli' military ambitions [sending the fleet] and to organize a European diplomatic offensive to roll back the Russian privileges (the 1840 Treaty of London).  The Persians, worried that the British embrace was becoming too tight, in the 1850's sought out Russian support for a military campaign against the British-supported rulers of Afghanistan, but in the end found that the Russian price was too high and the risk of challenging Britain too great.  The Qajars then settled on a policy of playing the two powers off against one another.  In general, we can characterize Russian policy toward the two Middle Eastern empires as one of only occasionally mitigated hostility, and the policy of Britain as a relatively consistent effort to check Russian expansionism.

There is one more European power we must mention, a late-comer to the great "Eastern Question" game.  The German Empire was formally constituted only in 1871, when the Eastern Question game was well under way.  Under the Iron Chancellor Otto von Bismarck, Germany had eschewed colonial adventures and concentrated on maintaining its flexibilty in the Continental power balance.  In fact, it was Bismarck, along with Disraeli, who in 1878 sponsored the Berlin Conference, when another Russian victory over the Ottomans threatened the destruction of the Empire and the beginning of a European war.  Bismarck worked to moderate the Russian gains, balance them with concessions to Britain and Austria, and avoid a European conflict, all while seeking no territorial gain for Germany.  However, when the Iron Chancellor was dismissed and Kaiser Wilhelm began to personally direct policy, Berlin began to take a more active role in the search for colonies (such as in Morocco, up to that time considered a French area of influence) and in the Ottoman Empire.  The Porte, seeing all the other European powers as threats to the Empire's territorial integrity, welcomed German expressions of interest, accepted German military missions for the training of the Imperial forces, and granted German companies an extraordinary concession to build a strategic railroad from Berlin to Baghdad, and then on to Basra. 

German activity in Morocco and in the Ottoman Empire, along with Europe itself, at the beginning of the 20th century, was perceived by Britain, France and Russia as a threat.  This led those powers to compose their rivalries, including those in the Middle East, in preparation for the upcoming European War.  Britain agreed to recognize and support the French role in Morocco in exchange for a similar French recognition of Britain's role in Egypt, and in 1907 Britain and Russia agreed to divide the Persian Empire into spheres of influence to regulate their competition there.  This British activity is evidence of what we stated at the beginning of the lecture -- that Near Eastern diplomacy was a sideshow to the main theater of Europe, and that Britain in particular was willing to compromise in the Near East in order to further its European policy.  We will see in our next lecture, which deals with World War I, that, far from following its policy of protecting the Ottoman Empire, London was willing to partition it among itself, France and Russia in order to appease its WWI allies.