All of these, with equal fervor, laid claim to the title "revolutionary," which in time became the most widely accepted claim to legitimacy in government in the Middle East. Later it was usually achieved by military officers deposing the rulers in whose armies they served. In early days, this was sometimes accomplished by a nationalist struggle against foreign overlords.
Since then there have been many others, and by the last decade of the twentieth century, a clear majority of states in the region were governed by regimes installed by means of the violent removal of their predecessors. The first self-styled revolutions in the Middle East were those of the constitutionalists in Iran in 1905 and the Young Turks in the Ottoman Empire in 1908. Islamic law and tradition lay down the limits of the obedience which is owed to the ruler and discuss - albeit with considerable caution - the circumstances in which a ruler forfeits his claim to the allegiance of his subjects and may or rather must lawfully be deposed and replaced.īut the notion of revolution, as developed in sixteenth-century Holland, seventeenth-century England, and eighteenth-century America and France, was alien and new.
#Middle eastern countries install
There is also an old Islamic tradition of challenge to the social and political order by leaders who believed that it was their sacred duty to dethrone tyranny and install justice in its place. The history of the Islamic Middle East, like that of other societies, offers many examples of the overthrow of governments by rebellion or conspiracy. Perhaps the most powerful and persistent of Western political ideas in the region has been that of revolution. The Islamic Republic of Iran claims to be restoring true Islamic government but it does so in the form of a written constitution and an elected parliament - neither with any precedent in Islamic doctrine or history. More remarkably, even some avowedly anti-Western states have retained the Western political apparatus of constitutions and legislative assemblies. Nor indeed were such things as aeroplanes and cars, telephones and televisions, tanks and artillery, seen as Western or as related to the Western philosophies that preceded and facilitated their invention. There was clearly no desire to reverse or even deflect the processes of modernization. The most visible, the most pervasive, and the least recognized aspects of Western influence are in the realm of material things - the infrastructure, amenities, and services of the modern state and city, most of them initiated by past European rulers or concession holders.
But, in every other respect, Western influence grew apace. Recent decades have seen Western political influence reduced to a minimum in the Middle East. Reprinted by permission of Scribner, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, Inc. From his forthcoming book, The Middle East: A Brief History of the Last 2000 Years, by Bernard Lewis. Dodge Professor of Near Eastern Studies Emeritus at Princeton University. the Middle East has been the scene of political turmoil and major warfare, including World War I, World War II, the Arab-Israeli Wars, the Iran-Iraq War and the Persian Gulf Wars. The term is sometimes used in a cultural sense to mean the group of lands in that part of the world predominantly Islamic in culture, thus including the remaining states of N Africa as well as Afghanistan and Pakistan. The area was viewed as midway between Europe and East Asia (traditionally called the Far East ). Thus defined it includes Cyprus, the Asian part of Turkey, Syria, Lebanon, Israel, the West Bank and Gaza, Jordan, Iraq, Iran, the countries of the Arabian peninsula (Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Oman, United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Bahrain, Kuwait), and Egypt and Libya. "The Middle East" is a term traditionally applied by western Europeans to the countries of SW Asia and NE Africa lying W of Afghanistan, Pakistan, and India. The countries in near the sea are commonly known as the Levant. The Mediterranean Sea defines the western edge of the region. These Middle East countries are part of the Asian continent, with the exception of Egypt, which is part of Africa, and the northwestern part of Turkey (colored orange), which is part of the European landmass. Note: The Middle East is a loosely defined geographic region the countries listed are generally considered part of the Middle East.
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