Modern Middle East A History

In the wake of 11 September 2001, there has been much talk about the inevitable clash between "East" and "West." This book presents an alternative approach to understanding the genealogy of contemporary events. By taking students and the general reader on a guided tour of the past five hundred years of Middle Eastern history, this book examines how the very forces associated with global "modernity" have shaped social, economic, cultural, and political life in the region. Beginning with the first glimmerings of the current international state and economic systems in the sixteenth century, The Modern Middle East: A History explores the impact of imperial and imperialist legacies, the great nineteenth-century transformation, cultural continuities and upheavals, international diplomacy, economic booms and busts, the emergence of authoritarian regimes, and the current challenges to those regimes on everyday life in an area of vital concern to us all.

Engagingly written, drawing from the author's own research and other studies, and stocked with maps and photographs, original documents and an abundance of supplementary materials, The Modern Middle East: A History will provide both novices and specialists with fresh insights into the events that have shaped history and the debates about them that have absorbed historians.

"An important and much needed conceptual approach to the modern history of the Middle East."--Edmund "Terry" Burke III, University of California, Santa Cruz

"Excellent history text....clearly surpasses other texts I've used. Well organized, comprehensive, yet readable for undergraduates; wonderful illustrations and side-bar comments and good choice of documents."--Robert Kramer, St. Norbert College

Each part ends with Suggested Readings.

Vignettes and Maps

Acknowledgments

A Note on Transliteration

Introduction: September 11 in Historical Perspective

Part I: The Advent of the Modern Age

1. From Late Antiquity to the Dawn of a New Age

2. Gunpowder Empires

3. The Middle East and the Modern World System

4. 4. War, Diplomacy, and the New Global Balance of Power

Documents

Draft Treaty of Amity and Commerce between the Ottoman Empire and France, February 1535

The Travels of Sir John Chardin into Persia and the East-Indies (1)

The Travels of Sir John Chardin into Persia and the East-Indies (2)

Part II: The Question of Modernity

5. Defensive Developmentalism

6. Imperialism

7. Wasif Jawhariyyeh and the Great Nineteenth-Century Transformation

8. The Life of the Mind

9. Secularism and Modernity

10. Constitutionalism

Documents

Commercial Convention (Balta Liman): Britain and the Ottoman Empire

The Hatt-i Sharif of Gulhane

The Islahat Fermani

The d'Arcy Oil Concession

Algeria: Poetry of Loss

Huda Shaarawi: A New Mentor and Her Salon for Women

Rifaa Rafi al-Tahtawi: The Extraction of Gold or an Overview of Paris

Muhammad [insert ayn symbol] Abduh: The Theology of Unity

Namik Kemal: Extract from the Journal Hurriyet

The Supplementary Fundamental Laws of 7 October 1907

Part III: World War I and the Middle East State System

11. State-building by Decree

12. State-building by Revolution and Conquest

13. The Introduction and Spread of Nationalism

14. The Origins of the Arab-Israeli Dispute

Documents

Resolution of the Syrian General Congress at Damascus, 2 July 1919

Theodor Herzl: A Solution of the Jewish Question

The Balfour Declaration, 2 November 1917

Mahmud Darwish: Eleven Planets in the Last Andalusian Sky

Part IV: The Contemporary Era

15. State and Society in the Contemporary Middle East

16. Oil

17. The United States and the Middle East

18. Israel, the Arab States, and the Palestinians

19. The Iranian Revolution

20. Islamic Political Movements

Conclusion: The Middle East in the "Age of Globalization"

Documents

Speech Delivered by President Gamal Abd al-Nasser at Port Said on the Occasion of Victory Day on 23 December 1961

Zakaria Tamer: Tigers on the Tenth Day

U.N. Security Council Resolution 242

Ali Shari ati: The Philosophy of History: The Story of Cain and Abel

Ayatollah Khomeini: Islamic Government

Sayyid Qutb: Milestones

Timeline

Biographical Sketches

Glossary

Credits

Index