Middle East

THE MODERN HISTORY of the Middle East began with the opening of the Suez Canal in November 1869, creating a dramatic shortcut from the Mediterranean Sea to the Red Sea, the Persian Gulf, and the Indian Ocean beyond. With that one event, the Middle East was brought into cultural, economic, and political contact with the developing world of Europe and the United States, after languishing for centuries under the rule of the ailing Ottoman Turkish Empire, the “Sick Man of Europe.” As Philip K. Hitti wrote in History of the Arabs, after the Turks had failed to seize Vienna, Austria, in 1683, “to the internal forces of corruption and decay were added external forces in the 18th century” when the European Great Powers began to cast envious eyes at the spacious Ottoman lands.

As a direct result of the increased commerce in goods and ideas, the Middle Eastern lands were exposed to the forces of modernity. This was especially true in Egypt, where the khedive, or ruler, Ismail, had been carrying on a program of modernization aimed at creating a stable society in a country where too much loyalty still remained with anarchic clans and tribes. Ismail owned significant shares in the Suez Canal Company.

The Suez Canal project had been the brainchild of the Frenchman Ferdinand de Lesseps, who would go on to attempt the first Panama Canal. Great Britain had also sponsored it as a shortcut to its imperial “crown jewel,” India. The British already had a close commercial relationship in Egypt, and thus an interest in ensuring stability, since Egyptian cotton had become a necessary import after American cotton exports stopped during the American Civil War (1861–65). Since the Albanian mercenary Mohammed Ali had ruled Egypt (1805–49), his descendants had given the country perhaps the most enduring, conservative rule in the Middle East.

In spite of growing anarchy in parts of the Ottoman lands, American and European interests began to filter into the region. What is now known as the American University in Beirut was founded in 1866, three years before the opening of the Suez Canal, by Dr. Daniel Bliss. The university became a significant site for educating the local population, in opposition to the languishing education system of the Ottoman Turks. At the same time, the Roman Catholic Church and its teaching orders, particularly the French, worked to expand their educational systems in the Levant, the general term then used for Palestine (today's Israel, Jordan, and West Bank), Lebanon, and Syria. The French had enjoyed close ties with the Levant since the time of the Crusades.

In the 1880s, traditional Muslim institutions, particularly the ulama, or learned men of Islam, began to feel their positions threatened by modernization. One of the leading Islamist thinkers of the time was Jamal al-Din al-Afghani (1839–97), who, Wilfred Cantwell Smith said in Islam in Modern World, “advocated both local nationalisms and pan-Islam,” the movement that viewed all Muslim countries as the traditionally unified Dar al Islam, or “Land of Islam.” Religious leadership led to mob violence.

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