BL-24 - Flipbook - Page 138
A TIME TO REMEMBER
DECODING
THE
MODERN
MIDDLE EAST
By Simon Mayall
Lieutenant General Sir Simon Mayall KBE is a
retired British Army of昀椀cer and a Middle East
adviser at the Ministry of Defence.
T
he concept of the Middle East was largely
a construct of the British Foreign Of昀椀ce in
the 1850s, who sought to draw a distinction
between Britain’s colonies in the Far East,
the Indian Raj, and her interests at the far
end of the Mediterranean.
In doing so, they chose to encompass the totality of the
declining Ottoman Empire’s presence in the Eastern
Mediterranean, the Levant and Mesopotamia, the Persian
Empire of the Qajar dynasty, and those tribal areas that
would, in time, become the Gulf States.
This area had geographical contiguity, positioned as it
was between Asia, Europe and Africa, and, although
extraordinarily diverse in terms of religion and ethnicity,
it had been dominated by the religion of Islam for more
than 1 200 years, and by the “organising principle” of “the
Caliphate”.
The twelve centuries since the death of the Prophet
Mohammed in 632 can be divided into four broad periods.
The 昀椀rst 600 years were the time of Arab dominance,
when Islam destroyed or debilitated the Persian and
Byzantine Empires.
During this period, the message of Allah was taken west,
through the Holy Land, across North Africa, and up
through Spain and over the Pyrenees, and east, by armies
to Central Asia, and by maritime merchants, across the
Indian Ocean, to the Malayan Peninsula and the islands of
Indonesia.
For Muslims, only the divine intervention of God could
account for such rapid and comprehensive success. In this
period the capital of the Caliphate might have moved from
Lieutenant General Sir Simon Mayall
Medina to Damascus, to Baghdad and then to Cairo, but
the instinct for religious certainty would be undiminished.
The only 昀氀y in the ointment in this period of expansion
and success was the establishment and existence of the
relatively short-lived Crusader kingdoms in the 12th and
13th centuries.
The second period was that of the late 15th and early 16th
centuries, when the whole dynamic of the region was
changed. This was a period when the Christians completed
their reconquest of Spain, expelling Muslims from the
Iberian Peninsula; when the Persian Safavid dynasty
embraced Shi’ism as the of昀椀cial religion of Iran; and when
the Turkic Ottomans defeated the Egyptian Mamluks,
transferred the sword and the cloak of Mohammed to
Istanbul, and with them the seat of the Sunni Caliphate.
The third period saw the cockpit of war move to the
Mediterranean and to Central Europe, until Ottoman
expansion was defeated outside the walls of Vienna in
1683, leading to a fourth period, that of a 250-year decline
in Muslim power, with a corresponding increase in the
power of the European, Christian empires.
This Muslim decline reached its nadir in 1918, when the
Allied Powers, utilising the ethnic split between Turks and
Arabs, defeated the Turks, forced the capitulation of the
Ottoman Empire, and remade the Middle East in their own
interests. At the same time, Kemal Ataturk, the Ottoman
hero of Gallipoli, abolished both the Ottoman Sultanate,
and subsequently the Caliphate.
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