The Oxford Handbook of Contemporary Middle Eastern and North African History

This Oxford Handbook on the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) is an extensive high-quality scholarly enterprise covering much of the essential ground on the modern history of the region by a team of well-informed scholars. It is, however, unfortunate that this collection of essays is tainted by an ideological predisposition that tends to undermine its overall credibility with a mission of academic activism and political advocacy. In the epilogue concluding this encyclopedic compendium the editors spell out their objective noting that “it is incumbent on MENA scholars to act on their better knowledge and keep breaking the epistemic injustice that still shrouds Palestine and the region as a whole” (694).This, therefore, is a collective work explicitly designed to explain and analyze the MENA region in terms dedicated to the re-education of the reading public, who have ostensibly been misled by scholars and pundits (the “international commentariat,” in the words of the editors [xxiii]) who misinform and disinform to create the “epistemic injustice that still shrouds … the region.” This writing of history does not necessarily serve the pursuit of knowledge and truth. This is a brand of “academic activism” that does not seek to enrich human knowledge for knowledge's sake but to effect political change. That, of course, may be a noble cause in its own right, but it is only partly related to scholarship.Between the introduction, “Toward a History of the Present,” and the epilogue, “Revolutionary Times in Contemporary History,” there are seven sections, each including between three to six essays. “Foundations” begins with the environmental history of the region moving on through the nineteenth century of economic change, religious reform, and cultural revival, and culminating with the constitutional reforms in Turkey and Iran in the early twentieth century. “Formations” addresses the MENA region after World War I, focusing on the European mandates, nationalism, and sectarianism, Kemalism in Turkey, and fascist movements in other parts of the region in the interwar years. “Legacies of War and Revolution” is devoted to the emergence of the post–World War II MENA region with studies on Communism in the region, the emergence of Nasserism, the Algerian struggle for independence, the Arab-Israeli conflict, and Iran and its revolutions.Sections on “Neoliberal Authoritarianisms” and “State, Law, and Gender” cover the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries and delve into issues such as rethinking the political economy of oil, media as method in the age of revolution, Syria's economic history, gender in post-invasion Iraq, “sextarianism” in Lebanon, current affairs in Israel/Palestine, and new approaches to the anthropology of Islamic movements. The last two sections, “From Protest Movements to the Arab uprisings” and “Crisis and Collapse” engage in subjects such as the uprisings in historical perspective, Tunisia's history between liberation and renewal, the Arab youth of the twenty-first century, the “New Turkey,” the Kurdish quest for democratic self-governmentin Syria, and, finally, Libya's path to collapse.All in all, thirty-three essays on well-chosen subjects provide an inclusive and comprehensive view of the modern and contemporary history of the region. There are, of course, other topics that were not included. Needless to say, no compendium could possibly be all-inclusive. One subject that could have and should have been addressed is refugees, and not only the Palestinian refugees from 1948, but especially the more recent waves of refugees. These have arisen from crises, civil wars, and collapse in various parts of the region. The region is home to 5.4 percent of the world's population but is the original abode of 37.5 percent of the world's refugees, who pose an extremely difficult social and political challenge to the affluent countries of Western Europe.European countries have become the havens of desire for many millions of these destitute migrants, with far-reaching implications for the political, social, and economic future of Western Europe. Another subject that should have been addressed in depth is that of demographic trends and the linkage between population growth and domestic crisis and upheaval.The introduction, crafted in the Marxist analytical straightjacket of the editors, places regional developments almost entirely in the hands of extraneous factors. The editors accuse the UN Arab Human Development Reports of paternalism toward the people of the region, but are guilty of it themselves. The local peoples are reduced to the role of hapless victims in a grand design composed by the forces of international capitalism in which they have virtually no agency, other than for the masses to take to the streets in rebellion.The more neoliberal economists, multinational companies and pliant national governments have moulded international law and the nation state form in order to “encase [and] inoculate capitalism against the threat of democracy,” the less people trusted their political systems and the rule of law. (xvii–xviii) Surely demographic trends and unmanageable population growth are more directly responsible for regional developments than the machinations of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank.When it wasn't the multinational companies and their allies it was the great powers, who determined the regional course of events. “The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 destroyed a fledgling secular republic while the US-orchestrated and co-funded Mujahidin resistance against Soviet occupation planted terrorist seeds for 9/11” (xvii). The United States, therefore, essentially brought the attack on the Twin Towers upon itself by planting its terrorist seeds, while the Soviets engaged in the destruction of “a fledgling secular republic.” Secular liberation movements in the region, like the PLO or the FLN, have been in decline for decades. There are no secular republics anywhere in the MENA region and it strains the imagination to believe that the one that was just about to emerge in Afghanistan, of all places, was nipped in the bud by the Soviet invasion. As the Taliban almost effortlessly took over Afghanistan in August 2021, within just days after the withdrawal of US and other foreign forces, one can only wonder whatever happened to the secular republicans of Afghanistan since the departure of the Russians over thirty years ago.Elections in the West, according to the “extraneous forces” school, have a greater impact on the Middle East than centuries of domestic historical, social, cultural, and religious developments. Thus, the “elections of British prime minister Margaret Thatcher in 1979 and US President Ronald Reagan in 1980 paved the way for violent economic, political, military, and cultural ‘rollback’ at home and abroad” (xviii). These events were followed by the demise of the Soviet Union, which gave free rein to the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank to implement austerity measures. Their policies … dismantled the social fabric and gutted the welfare state the world over. With organized labor and trade unions curtailed, the most destructive forms of organized resistance to globalization have come from xenophobic and identitarian movements, exacerbated by spectacular acts of non-state and state terrorism. (xviii) Islamic radicalism, therefore, like everything else in the region is mainly the work of foreign powers and their collaborators in the institutions of global finance.The credibility of the UN Arab Human Development Reports, which over the years placed much more responsibility for the Arab predicament on local causes such as the chronic deficits in political freedom, in first world education systems and in gender equality, is undermined by citing the “harsh criticism in Western academic circles of the reports' developmentalist underpinnings, paternalist attitude, and for providing intellectual ammunition for foreign intervention” (xx).Developments in the region, in the minds of the editors of this volume, were not, at least in major part, a consequence of the actions and inactions of the peoples of the region, demographic trends, and rapid population growth, declining standards of living, radical politics, gender inequalities, Islamism and sectarianism, a general failure to modernize successfully, and so on and so forth, ad infinitum, but almost solely the influence of extraneous forces like the great powers, the World Bank, the IMF, the multinationals, and Israel.Only marginally to the impact of the extraneous forces is there mention of a rather cryptic, incidental, and almost insignificant “alliance between some oppressive regimes and certain types [my emphases, A.S.] of conservative religious scholars [which] led to interpretations of Islam, which serve the government, but are unamicable to human development” (xix). But religion and the Islamic and Islamist phenomena, in their various forms, are ubiquitous in the public domain, in the schools, and in politics, and not just incidentally in some isolated instances of repressive regimes and certain types of conservatives.Bernard Lewis, reduced and discredited by the editors as “the late orientalist and neocon consultant” (xxiii), noted half a century ago that to “understand anything at all about what is happening in the Muslim world at the present time and what has happened in the past, there are two essential points which need to be grasped. One is the universality of religion as a factor in the lives of the Muslim peoples, and the other is its centrality.”1Indeed, there can be no substitute for the knowledge of the historical, linguistic, and cultural background of the peoples of the MENA region, to truly understand and appreciate the Middle East of our times and its profound political and social undercurrents. This is not about Middle Eastern exceptionalism. Exactly the same would apply to all of the peoples in all regions of the world. ISIS, the editors maintain very correctly, “is the product of dictatorial regimes, failed economies, broken educational systems, and extreme hopelessness, out of which a search for an Islamist utopia was born” (xxiv).But where does the historical responsibility for these developments lie? Centuries of history matter for the MENA region, just as centuries of history matter for everywhere else. They offer a wealth of analytical and explanatory value far more than the incidental elections of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan or the malevolent machinations of international finance.Editors accuse “right wing pundits and born-again atheists” (whoever they may be) of taking their cues from Lewis to cast ISIS as “the true face of modern Islam and, indeed, Islam as a whole” (xxiii). Lewis made no such presumptuous attempt to define any “true face.” Indeed, there is none and it is not for Lewis, pundits of whatever stripe, nor the editors to define this “true face.” It is for Muslims to define the “true faces” of Islam, just as Jews and Christians define their respective multiple faces. Needless to say, there are no precise definitions of the true faces of Islam, Judaism, or Christianity. They are imagined by their various sages, clerics, political activists, and believers in general, and there are almost as many versions as there are interpreters.Fortunately, not all the essays are in lockstep with the paternalistic “extraneous forces” model set out by the editors. The article by Nader Sohrabi on the “Constitutional Revolutions and State Formations in Comparison: Iran and Turkey” is a case in point. It compares the two Middle Eastern cases with constitutional settings outside the Middle East, it discusses the shared religio-political traditions in other Middle Eastern countries and the common geopolitical threat of European imperialism, and analyzes the divergent political features of the Ottoman Empire and Iran. Though in both countries there are critical inputs of outside forces it is the local players who dominate the narrative and it is clearly the Turks, on the one hand, and the Iranians, on the other, who are the key actors. Even though there is the Public Debt Administration in Turkey and the Russian and British intrusion in Iran, it is the locals who are the leading players and not the foreigners.Two military strongmen rose from the ashes of these constitutional revolutions: Atatürk and Reza Shah. Though identified officially and popularly as the founders of modern Turkey and Iran, they were very different personalities. As Sohrabi concludes: The “respective state-building programs of Atatürk and Reza Shah were part of the agendas of the preceding constitutional movements and their rise could be understood only in that light.” But the two leaders differed considerably. While Ataturk was an enlightened dictator in a republican setting, Reza Shah was more of a despot, according to Sohrabi (87).Raz on “Dodging the Peril of Peace: Israel and the Arabs in the Aftermath of the June 1967 War” is at the other end of the spectrum. Raz outdoes the editors. In their introduction, they note that Palestine is at the core of the “epistemic injustice” in the MENA region. It is at the epicenter of regional developments and the cause of the region's chronic instability. As we learn from the introduction, “Israel expanded its territory after the June 1967 war, blocked Palestinian national aspirations, and destabilized the region” (xxvii). Thus, unprovoked and out of the blue, Israel expanded its territory in 1967 and destabilized the region.As Raz shows, it is invariably all about Israel, with the Arabs as victims at the hands of their belligerent neighbor. The Israelis have no saving grace. They are duplicitous, deceptive, mean, aggressive and are possessed by an insatiable territorial appetite. For them, land for peace is a peril to be dodged, as the title of the essay declares. Raz's essay is a mirror image of the propaganda that Israeli right-wingers produce on the Palestinians, cherry-picking evidence in bad faith (for some stories there is no evidence), truncating quotations, quoting out of context, and supplying malicious translations. There is no empathy for the subject, no effort to explain, only to condemn. This is pamphleteering rather than historical analysis. There is hardly a paragraph without some cause for a corrective comment. A few examples will have to suffice.Premier Eshkol expressed “great desire” to keep the Gaza Strip although, according to Raz, “he had difficulty explaining why.” Perhaps “because of Samson and Delilah,” Eshkol said (271). Examining the source shows that Eshkol had no difficulty with the explanation, but Raz chose not to that Eshkol was some of Eshkol had a for both and Samson and were The was a Eshkol the with the of the to to keep the Strip for But this is a rose with many There are Arabs on various “The true for the according to from leaders of in the who the land of the (271). This is in a especially the seven Raz chose one out of an hardly a source on which to such an as “the and true for taking the the does that the the to take the they the But by the on to that all that the was their desire for more and within the of one is not what course, they the to out of their They had a from the … The who were who at and they not like all the was that they the to take the what the was their for the land and had a on what the not to mention and in the for there were many other political and the land for the to from the was related to the of the on Israel and on the to It had to with the the and the with all to the we are its on at the of the the of to the Israeli of without peace than peace without (271). and to Raz, this was a about it in the same by Raz, said … and on to as they were the to from … their June the Israeli a a withdrawal from the and the in for peace with and Syria, Raz there was a a Israeli The that the peace should be on the international and the of in to Israel to of and the Israel, Raz was far less than it to the however, in for peace with Israel in from of the and It is especially the that this is no Raz still case as the peace over years There was about the were not “a They were as of 1967 in UN and part and of the peace with which made the withdrawal from Israel was in the to from the in for peace with such a was of the failure of the to to which Israel would and, more the of Israel and to on on and the of The failure not on an Israeli to new Palestinian after These refugees were as to from the refugees. The Raz for the by the Israelis was and not which who The by Raz, is as as stories are just Raz an according to the Israelis two on the of the June war, for on that could to the for in the of an This to the The of forces were on the which was but a from home to most of its the of population was in the over on the would have been far more to Israel than to much to military and to its the of the June War Israel engaged in with Palestinian who in in the to the pursuit of the their especially in of the of the Arab The of the in to of the and the PLO the of the Palestinian all this was This in which the are no more than of the Israeli with virtually no role in the of their own national is need not be a of Israel nor of occupation of the Bank to be to provide a more of the of Israeli which are not a of and It would be a challenge to any in the international from ISIS to Iran and North and anywhere and everywhere in policies could be solely as a of and the of Raz, “The and by is a of This is an and of Turkey, through the of the local as the key players in the of the The IMF, the World Bank and the are not and a is the has both in its domestic and in its of foreign and the essay an of the of over the last years. Turkey was no the for countries in the world. The political has been from a to one of This has a of social and political that has destabilized the and one half of the that not for the and was by as a of for and policies were designed to to a while The of religion as a to and the own has become a part of a background of and the failed attempt of a for to the through This effort was less than a cultural and social on a with the original state-building of the at the of the republic.” pursuit of a Turkey in image was designed to the and its republican the civil and with the of over the was “the core and of the all the while from its own The the has over was a of the religious the of state the that the foreign affairs Turkey of the has from its with the European Union, and the United The international Turkey from the to Turkey as a major in the Arab and Muslim world. This has since the failed as have the of the military and foreign who the Western with who a to the East, foreign with an on a and Islamist of the attempt has been by of for the with in the role of “the But in to “he has made into a more on less to the of and over an and destabilized this is an the can and the ideological the does offer a comprehensive and high-quality collection of essays covering a of topics and as such will still to be a very and of the modern Middle East and its historical