Modernity in the Middle East

Tahrir Square, Cairo, 2011

Middle eastern states agued by previous economic crises and political disunity became “modern” as they were subsumed by the greater world system through the forces of integration, peripheralization, defensive developmentalism, and imperialism. However, as this system progressed, modernity changed from being a Eurocentric concept to a universal conduct that found a unique place in Middle Eastern empires and nation states. Over 19^th and 20^th century reform, modernity helped oppressed Middle Eastern communities rediscover their culture and identity. This essay seeks to evaluate the effects of the evolution of this system on the Middle East.

At the end of the New World, the advent of modernity began with a system of world empires. Four characteristics define this system: several world empires could exist at the same time, world empires spread through military conquest, each empire had to be largely economically self-dependent, and each empire was roughly equivalent in size to any neighboring empires. The modern world system led to a politically disjointed but economically united modern world economy. Modernity introduced the new ideas of nation-states and global economies into a time of crisis. A nation state differed from previous systems. It was a sovereign body with defined borders and an autonomous, centralized government with a shared identity and culture. As for the world economy, every state had different resources. Some states were more advanced in technology and capital. There were winners and losers. A world economy with global divisions of labor was created.

The characteristics that would come to define the modern period were incubated through late antiquity and the “early modern” period. In Late Antiquity, ancient empires like the Byzantine and Sasanian expected obedience, order, taxes or tributes. Empires were united out of allegiance to the ruling body, not a shared identity. The Islamic Empire held similar characteristics but integrated religion into their legitimacy. The Islamic Empire claimed authority through umma and sharia law. Gradually, the role of the caliph became more symbolic. The Islamic Empire was united by religious adherence to umma and sharia, not by the tangible dynast. Still, they didn’t function as nation-states.

By the 10th century, invasions by crusaders, Mongols, and Turkic peoples into the Middle East introduced military patronage states. Here, a chief military leader was the leader of the state. Society was divided into the ruling military elite and the remainder of the population. Nearly all economic resources belonged to the chief military family or families. The laws combined dynastic law, local custom, and sharia. This system laid the groundwork for nation-states. Military patronage states were unstable. Boundaries were constantly in flux.

The last significant change before the Modern period were large-scale, long-lived gunpowder empires. After 1500, knights, horse-warriors, and cavalry could be subdued by gunpowder. The Ottoman Empire was the largest and first to use gunpowder, getting it from Hungarian renegades.. The Safavid Empire was the second. The Qajar Empire and the Mughal Empire also coexisted. The Ottomans and Safavids began as early modern empires that progressed into the modern period.

As the modern world economy further established itself, the industrial giants of Western Europe and North America coalesced into a developed core, the backbone of the global market. Producers from the rest of the world slowly integrated into the market. A periphery of lesser developed states formed around the core that had less influence in global economic and political changes because of their inherent disadvantages. This periphery formed because such states represented opportunity to Western Europe for power and wealth, through conquest or trade. In sum, this was known as integration and peripheralization: poorer states becoming dependent on export-oriented production from global demand, a key concept to understanding how the Middle East became “modern”.

Prior to integration and peripheralization, the Ottomans and Safavids were economically self-sufficient through their rural security, infrastructure projects, streamlining tax collection, opening intraregional trade, and creating government monopolies that kept prices low. They benefited from the rich spice trade between the East indies and Europe.

The Commercial Revolution in Europe spawned technological breakthroughs like compasses, adjustable sails, new crops like tomato and tobacco, an influx of New World gold and silver, the organization of trade through joint stock companies, insurance, and banking, in sum, accelerating the early Modern period and spreading Western hegemony. An infantile globalization had begun. Britain, France, and the Netherlands emerge as leaders in the world economic system. The Ottomans and Safavids, unable to compete, suffered inflation, declining agricultural productivity, and global diversion of trade routes. The empires turned to tax farming to recover revenues. They sold offices and encouraged the elite janissary corps to find jobs and raise families to disarm and deescalate from conflict. When devaluing their respective currencies still didn’t help, the region succumbed to the Eurocentric world economy and placed into peripheries – divisions of labor. Consequently, farmers in the Middle East began the export-oriented production of cash crops like cotton, opium, and tobacco. European and local governments-built railroads and developed ports to facilitate new steamships to bolster growing export industries, symbolizing further integration.

A third device that was crucial to modernizing the Middle East was defensive developmentalism. The major problems of the seventeenth century with weakening imperial power and constant financial crises had consequences into the nineteenth century. Warlords rejected imperial authority; the Ottomans lost control of Egypt, the Safavids fell to the invasion of Afghanistan. In response to the international shift of power, middle eastern leaders at the beginning of the nineteenth century used policies to reverse fragmentation and centralize authority that strengthen their states.

Defensive developmentalism represents the proliferation of modernity as a concept in middle eastern states as they became more European in institutions, laws, economies, and societies as a means of protecting themselves from, ironically, European influence. In this way, the middle east made their own modernity. Defensive developmentalism first followed military reform by borrowing the disciplinary, organizational, and technological strategies of European states who had more advanced armies.

In Egypt, Mehmet Ali consolidated control over the country, protecting its autonomy under the Ottoman Empire. He sent troops south into Sudan to plunder resources. In 1831, Ali’s son, Ibrahim, further spread Egyptian influence after an expedition to Syria. Syrian soldiers trained under French military tactics were conscripted into the Egyptian army. Ali massacred the mamluk tax farmers, thereby ending tax farming. Setting up a government monopoly of cotton further integrated and peripheralized Egypt into the world economy, making their revenues highly dependent on international cotton prices. The American Civil War and the international depression of 1873 both shocked the markets; cotton prices plummeted, ruining the Egyptian economy and leading to bankruptcy.

Tunisia, Persia, and the Ottoman Empire faced similar fates. They all modernized their armies, rationalized taxation, centralized and expanded administration, and reformed education and law, borrowing heavily from European giants to finance such projects. The Ottomans, for example, established the nizam-I jedid, a new military corps. To reclaim Syria, the Ottoman empire signed the Treaty of Balta Liman, which, in the Commercial Convention document, disallowed monopolies in Turkish territories and placed low tariffs. This further integrating both the empire and Egypt. Foreign debt was inevitable and as state spending was greater than government revenues. Most declared bankruptcy following the international depression of 1873, allowing European creditors to stick their rapacious fingers into the finances of various Middle Eastern economies, for example, with the French protectorate in Tunisia (1871), the Reuter Concession (1872) and d’Arcy Oil Concession (1901), which granted exclusive sixty-year rights to prospect and sell natural gas and petroleum throughout most of Persia, according to the document.

Ultimately, Egypt and Tunisia, followed by the Ottomans, then the Persians were most effective at enacting the centralization of government authority and molding their militaries and institutions to European models. Yet almost all cases resulted in major land loss or occupation. Defensive developmentalism, through conscription, standardized education, and economic development, helped lay the groundwork for the notion of a society.

Imperialism, according to Ronald Robinson, is the process whereby agents of an expanding society gain inordinate influence or control over the vitals of weaker societies. Modern imperialism ushered targeted societies into the modern global economy.

Imperialism can be of two forms, formal and informal. The latter involves economic penetration and diplomacy, and the former requires conquest and the conquering of territory.

In Algeria, imperialism presented itself as settler-colonialism. Autonomous under the Ottomans, Algeria was ruled by deys. In 1830, the French sent their fleet to Algeria, using it to get rid of political dissidents. France built a rail system, facilitating easy colonization for cash cropping, seized all types of land and religious endowments, and focused on growing plantations. France colonized Algeria, claiming to have introduced civilization into the, conversely, uncivilized natives. Imperialism created an inequality between European French citizens and Algerians by differentiating them based on race, language, and religion; these conditions made it possible for an Algerian nationalism to rise later.

Egypt represents imperialism as occupation. Egypt was never the site of a large-scale population migration. Because Egypt was unable to pay its debts following the cotton price crash and depression, European governments established the Caisse de la Dette which controlled Egyptian finances toward debt repayment. The Caisse would control over 50% of Egyptian revenues and eventually, all tax revenues in Egypt’s four provinces. Naturally, the Caisse enraged people in every layer of the Egyptian community, but it was only the beginning. In 1882, the British sent a flotilla to Egypt to preserve their interests in India and the Suez Canal and occupied the state for 74 years. They restructured the Egyptian army to include British officers, expanded cotton cultivation through the Aswan Dam, and sabotaged domestic textile industries to maintain a British monopoly over the integrated Egyptian economy. Later, disillusioned Arab intellectuals would form the first few modern nationalist parties in the Middle East. British directives engaged Egyptians in common activities in a shared marketplace, helping create the notion of a public sphere.

Integration, peripheralization, defensive developmentalism, and imperialism worked in unison. Integration and peripheralization made the Middle East a part of the world economy, defensive developmentalism made Middle Eastern states embody European modernism as they followed similar models, normally ending with massive European influence in domestic industry because of debt, and imperialism literally subjugated Middle Eastern states to Eurocentric modernism; witnessing this, Arab nationalist movements formed, seeking to reclaim their identities and autonomy. This was the Great Nineteenth-Century Transformation.

The arrival of the Modern Period in the Middle East had a multifaceted impact on wide-ranging political, cultural, social, economic, demographic, and technological changes that fundamentally altered the region across the 19th and into the early 20th centuries.

Wasif Jawhariyyeh’s life (1897-1972) symbolized how modernist changes affected the daily lives of people in the region, in this case, in Palestine. Religious boundaries between Christians, Jews, and Muslims were fluid. Religious ceremonies shared characteristics. Muslims children played in costumes alongside Jewish Children during Purim. Gender roles and relations were less rigid in his youth. During the late nineteenth century, affluent families moved out of crowded urban areas into the suburbs. This created a special wealth gap in society; a cosmopolitan, bourgeois culture emerged and thrived in the salon culture at the dawn of the 20^th century. A vignette of flourishing Cairo salon culture in Huda Shaarawi’s “A New Mentor and her Salon for Women” shows how the Middle East was modernizing and liberalizing, as a diversity of women engaged with books and discourse at a site for intellectual life.

            A sociopolitical effect of modernization was the formation of a new Islamic orthodoxy. Whether orthodoxy or cosmopolitan culture would dominate the public sphere and thus, the influence on the collective mind. The reconstruction of cities and technological breakthroughs like the nineteenth-century print revolution helped pullulate the sphere and create the notion of a society. Rifāʿa Rafiʿ al-Tahtawi’s reflection in “The Extraction of Gold or an Overview of Paris” on French schools, printing houses, and public life show how exposure to European technologies and institutions inspired new ideas about governance, society, and knowledge.

The Tanzimat reforms launched by the Ottoman state attempted to strengthen the empire in the face of European pressure by modernizing administration, law, and the military. Tanzimat principles made the Ottoman population aware of their political rights and freedom of speech, of job opportunities abroad, of feminism, pan-Islamism, and constitutionalism among other new ideologies. In the “Extract from the Journal Hürriyet”, Namik Kemal displays the emergence of Ottoman constitutionalism.  Kemal argues that constitutionalism and representative government were necessary to deepen reform and ensure liberty. His writing demonstrates the emergence of Ottoman constitutionalism, a political movement that blended Islamic ideas of consultation (shura) with European liberal concepts. Furthermore, in Document “The Hatt-i Sharif of Gulhane”, security of life, honor, and property, equal taxation was promised as part of tanzimat reform. The principle that inhabitants were citizens of a state, not subjects of their rulers, was key in developing nation-states ad societies. People embraced their rights. A new breed of intellectuals, bureaucrats, military officers, and politicians developed.

            Alongside political reform emerged Islamic modernism, a movement that sought to reconcile Islamic principles with the demands of the modern world. Muhammad Abduh’s “The Theology of Unity” (p. 180) illustrates the modernist argument that Islam encourages rational inquiry, moral reform, and scientific investigation. Abduh rejects blind imitation and insists that Islam, properly interpreted, supports progress. His ideas represent a major cultural transformation: the re-reading of Islamic tradition to legitimize participation in modern political and intellectual life, including nationalism, scientific education, and legal reform. Islamic modernism was thus both a response to and catalyst for broader cultural change, setting the foundation for modern movements across the region.

Migration also promoted the circulation of ideas. Workers and students who traveled to Europe or the Americas encountered labor unions, constitutionalism, and nationalism, and brought these concepts back to the Middle East. This circulation intensified social change and contributed to the development of modern political movements.

To conclude, the arrival of the Modern Period transformed the Middle East through the combined forces of integration, peripheralization, defensive developmentalism, and imperialism, reshaping political structures, cultural life, social relations, economies, demographics, and technologies. As Middle Eastern states confronted European power, they adopted new institutions and ideas that both challenged and revitalized older identities. Reform, resistance, and adaptation produced new publics, new national movements, and new understandings of community and governance. Though often coerced into the global system, Middle Eastern societies helped define their own modernity, forging distinctive responses that laid the foundations for the region’s modern political and cultural landscape.

At the end of the New World, the advent of modernity began with a system of world empires. Four characteristics define this system: one, several world empires could exist at the same time, two, world empires spread through military conquest, three, each empire had to be largely economically self-dependent (but to the extent that trade was still needed), and four, each empire was roughly equivalent in size to any neighboring empires. The modern world system led to a politically disjointed but economically united modern world economy, wherein independent nation-states could participate in an integrated global market.

Modernity introduced the new ideas of nation-states and global economies into a time of crisis with political instability of imperial governments, and hyperinflation arising from high cash dependency, demographic expansion into Eurasia, and the Spanish Conquest that shocked gold and silver prices. These were new concepts. A nation state differed from previous systems. It was a sovereign body with defined borders, an autonomous, centralized government with a people that had a shared identity and culture, defined by Nations and nationalism that would be required for the concept of a society to develop, where a shared identity united the public sphere and brought it to life. As for the world economy, naturally, every state in the system of world empires had different resources and thus, different priorities. Some states were more advanced in technology and capital, bolstering their individual industries and causing disparity in the global economy as less fortunate states could not compete with new prices and new demands. There were winners and losers in the modern world economy, there would always be a tradeoff. A world economy like no other with global divisions of labor was created.

The characteristics that would come to define the modern period were incubated over time through late antiquity and to “early modern” period, which was especially important. Empires have existed for all recorded history. However, the way empires interacted between themselves and with their subjects is what marks the differences in periods of history.

In the period of Late Antiquity, ancient empires, like the Byzantine and Sasanian empires, expected obedience, order, taxes or tributes from the population. Empires were united out of allegiance to the ruling body, not a shared identity. Imperial governments did not attempt to impose a

single language, ideology, or culture on their populations. The Islamic Empire held similar characteristics but integrated religion into their legitimacy. By the prophet Muhammad’s death, the Islamic community of Medina had spread throughout the Arabian Peninsula. A hundred years after his death, Muslims armies had annexed all of Persia, Mesopotamia, Egypt, and the Levant; this became the Islamic Empire. The Islamic Empire claimed authority through umma,religious community, and sharia law. The leader of the community was the caliph, who acted like a tribal leader. Gradually, the role of the caliph became more symbolic; clearly, empires were now united by religious adherence to umma and sharia, not by the tangible dynast. Still, they didn’t function as nation-states.

         By the 10th century, the region was targeted by crusaders, Mongols, and Turkic peoples. This would steep the region in war and bloodshed, ending the Islamic empire and a unified Muslim community, and catalyzing a new format of rule: military patronage states. A chief military leader was the leader of the state, using subleaders to organize governance. Society was divided into the ruling military elite and the remainder of the population. The second characteristic of military-patronage states was that nearly all economic resources belonged to the chief military family or families which they could distribute as they wished. The laws of military-patronage states combined dynastic law, local custom, and sharia. This system laid the groundwork for nation-states that could participate in a world economy through the centralized, bureaucratically organized, militarized, and culturally unified political orders that replaced the border-fluid and dynastic empires of earlier eras. Military patronage states were still, however, unstable because of the lack of loyalty to the chief. Boundaries of the states were constantly in flux because of warfare and military operations. No permanent sight of governance meant that wherever the dynast set up his tent, is where the capital was.

         The last significant change the world saw before the Modern period were large-scale, long-lived gunpowder empires that contrasted later nation states. After 1500 in Eurasia, knights, horse-warriors, and cavalry that had beleaguered the region could be subdued by the incredible, albeit expensive, invention of gunpowder. It was an assured advantage and a physical harbinger for modernity that changed power dynamics between empires.

         The Ottoman Empire was the largest, longest-spanning (1516-1918), and the first to use gunpowder, receiving the technology from Hungarian Renegades, people proselytized from Catholicism to Islam. The Safavid Empire in current day Iran was the second, main dynasty to use gunpowder. The Qajar Empire and the Mughal Empire that stretched from Afghanistan into the Deccan Plateau also existed but were less significant. Both the Ottomans and Safavids began as early modern empires that progressed into the modern period. This involved abandoning increasingly anachronistic structures and institutions.