A History of the Middle East
Read A History of the Middle East Online
Authors: Peter Mansfield,Nicolas Pelham
PENGUIN BOOKS
A HISTORY OF THE MIDDLE EAST
Peter Mansfield was born in 1928 in Ranchi, India, and was educated at Winchester and Cambridge. In 1955 he joined the British Foreign Office and went to Lebanon to study Arabic at the Middle East Centre for Arabic Studies. In November 1956 he resigned from the foreign service over the Suez affair, but remained in Beirut working as a political and economic journalist. He edited the
Middle East Forum
and corresponded regularly for the
Financial Times
, the
Economist
, the
Guardian
, the
Indian Express
and other newspapers. From 1961 to 1967 he was the Middle East correspondent of the
Sunday Times
, based mainly in Cairo. After 1967 he lived in London, but made regular visits to the Middle East and North Africa, and in the winter of 1971–2 he was visiting lecturer on Middle East politics at Willamette University, Oregon. As editor his books include
The Middle East: A Political and Economic Survey
and
Who’s Who in the Arab World
. He has also written
Nasser’s Egypt
,
Nasser: A Biography
,
The British in Egypt
,
The Ottoman Empire and Its Successors
,
Kuwait: Vanguard of the Gulf
and
The Arabs
, a comprehensive study generally believed to be his magnum opus, which is also published by Penguin. Peter Mansfield died in 1996, and in its obituary notice
The Times
praised him as ‘Eloquent, scholarly, free from convention…[He] earned himself a distinguished place by forty years of thoughtful work and the passion of his convictions.’
Nicolas Pelham studied Arabic in Damascus, before joining a London law firm specializing in Islamic law. In 1992 he moved to Cairo as editor of the
Middle East Times
, and then joined the BBC Arabic Service producing documentary programmes from across the Arab world. In 1998 he moved to Morocco as correspondent for the
Economist
, the BBC and the
Observer
. In 2005 he moved to Jerusalem as a senior analyst for International Crisis Group, reporting on Israeli and Palestinian affairs.
A History of the
Middle East
Fourth Edition
revised and updated by Nicolas Pelham
PETER MANSFIELD
PENGUIN BOOKS
Published by the Penguin Group
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First published in Great Britain by Penguin Books Ltd 1991
First published in the United States of America by Viking Penguin,
a division of Penguin Books USA Inc., 1991
Published in Penguin Books (UK and USA) 1992
Second edition published in Penguin Books (UK) 2003
Published in Penguin Books (USA) 2004
Third edition published in Penguin Books (UK) 2010
This fourth edition published in Penguin Books (UK and USA) 2013
Copyright © Peter Mansfield, 1991
Copyright © The Estate of Peter Mansfield, 2003
Copyright © Nicolas Pelham, 2010, 2013
All rights reserved. No part of this product may be reproduced, scanned,
or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission.
Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials
in violation of the authors’ rights. Purchase only authorized editions.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Mansfield, Peter, 1928–
A history of the Middle East / Peter Mansfield.—Fourth edition / revised
and updated by Nicolas Pelham.
pages cm
ISBN 978-0-698-15659-3
1. Middle East—History—19th century. 2. Middle East—History—20th century. I. Pelham, Nicolas. II. Title.
DS62.4.M36 2013
956—dc23 2013019936
To Luis Cañizares
1. Introduction: from Ancient to Modern
2. Islam on the Defensive, 1800–
3. Muhammad Ali’s Egypt: Ottoman Rival
4. The Struggle for Reform, 1840–1900
5. Britain in Egypt, 1882–1914
9. The Anglo-French Interregnum, 1918–1939
Partition of the Arab East.
The Inter-war Years – Egypt;
The Mandates.
Persia/Iran.
Oil and the Middle East
10. The Second World War and Its Aftermath
Middle East Reactions: Nationalism, Pan-Arabism and Islam
11. The Entry of the Superpowers and the Nasser Era, 1950–1970
The Rise of the Oil States.
Egyptian Initiatives.
Israel/Palestine and the Lebanese Victim.
Islamic Reassertion, Revolution and War.
Iraq’s World Challenge
Humbling Iraq.
Umpiring the Arab–Israeli Conflict.
Israel’s Missed Opportunity for Peace.
The Elusive Promise of Democratization.
The Growth of Muslim Liberation Theology.
The Globalization of Islamic Jihad
Iraq’s Shia Conversion.
The Sunni Counter-attack.
Iraq’s Civil War and Shia Victory.
The Region-wide Rise of Popular Movements.
Shia Non-state Actors.
Sunni Non-state Actors.
Defending the Old Order: Reviving the Region’s Security States.
Preparing for the Showdown
15. Regime Change from Within not Without
Old and New Autocrats.
The New Old Middle East
In his concluding chapter, ‘Prospects for the Twenty-first Century’, written two decades ago, Peter Mansfield proved remarkably prescient. He predicted the resurgence of an armed Islamic movement across the Middle East. He foresaw that Arab regimes, however slim their power-bases, would survive. But there was one prediction where he went badly awry. In the concluding paragraph of the
History
, Peter ventured that as the Cold War faded away, the United States would lose its
raison d’être
as a military presence in the Arab world, and ‘would hardly maintain its superpower status in the region’.
Perhaps had Western policy-makers harkened, much of the subsequent bloodshed might have been averted. Certainly it is hard to argue that the Middle East is any better for the military intervention that followed. When he completed the first edition almost two decades ago, the United States was at the peak of its power. It was celebrating victory after chasing Iraq out of Kuwait; the mujahideen it backed in Afghanistan had won their
jihad
against the Soviet Union, and Arab states were for the first time preparing to sit down publicly with Israel to negotiate an end to their conflict.
In hindsight it looks a more innocent age. US policies in a region ten thousand miles away have boomeranged, at a cost of thousands of American lives both at home and in the Arab world. After returning to war with Iraq, the US is beating a retreat with the country’s promised political and economic reconstruction still unrealized. In Afghanistan as well as many places elsewhere, the US is fighting its former allies. And after two decades of on-off negotiations, the promised end of conflict between Israel and the Arab world remains as elusive as ever. And under America’s watch hundreds of thousands of Middle Easterners have perished in continuing conflicts in Iraq,
Algeria, Sudan and Israel/Palestine. US credibility in the region is in tatters.
This update of the
History
attempts to analyse what went wrong. In two new chapters, it looks at unfolding US policy towards Iraq, the Arab–Israeli conflict, and the evolving
jihadi
movements. It suggests that rather than seek to opt for regime change from without, US interests would be better served by working with the existing political movements on the ground. Peter understood that to resolve conflicts, societies have to be at peace not just with their enemies but also with themselves. ‘What the Arab world urgently needs is more democracy, wider political participation and much greater respect for human rights,’ he wrote two decades ago.
Almost universally, the deficit is greater today than it was then. Since Peter wrote his book, the Middle East has shrunk in on itself and become a more embittered, suspicious and intolerant place. Cosmopolitan cultures have atomized into their communal parts. For the vast majority of Arabs, the promise of independence has failed to materialize. For Palestinians, their homeland has been cut into an obstacle course of walls and checkpoints, rendering movement for an entire population the most restricted anywhere on earth. From where I write, I like millions of others can travel barely five minutes without being asked for my papers.
Whether the United States can yet be a force for good in the region is much debated. The outpouring of support President Obama received following his May 2009 Cairo address is testimony to the belief of many that it can. Clearly too a superpower cannot withdraw from a region that fuels the world. But as the past decade has shown, America’s armadas, bombings and military bases spark more problems than they solve. And after President Obama invested his political capital in Israel and Iran with no immediate dividend, scepticism abounds that persuasion and soft power can do any better.
Recent books on the Middle East commonly end with a prophecy of better days ahead. Invariably those written in recent years have had their dreams dashed. But if there is now a silver lining, it is that as the US prepares to withdraw from Iraq, the peoples of the
Middle East are again honing their own methods of conflict resolution and self-determination. As Peter notes, ‘over the centuries, the Middle East has confounded the dreams of conquerors and peacemakers alike’. Come the next edition, perhaps the region will again be able to look forward to more Pax and less Americana.