Competing Visions of the Middle East

Today, the Middle East is a region of the world characterized by nations with a wide variety of political systems. There are monarchies (governments ruled by a single person), as in Saudi Arabia and Jordan; republics (governments ruled by representatives of the people), as in Egypt and Lebanon; Islamic republics (governments ruled by representatives of the Islamic faith), as in Iran; republics under military rule (governments ruled by representatives of the military), as in Syria; and democracies (governments ruled directly by the people), as in Israel. There are also militant organizations within many states pushing for change, even revolution. Some nations are ruled primarily by Islamic religious law, or Sharia, as in Saudi Arabia and Iran, and most of the Arab nations show the influence of Islamic law. However, some nations' governments are primarily secular, or nonreligious, such as Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, and Israel. Only Israel has a multiparty democracy, similar to the form of government in the United States and most European nations. Most Middle Eastern nations have a single leader who severely limits the expression of political groups that do not support the current government. (Egypt, for example, which is often considered one of the more progressive of the Middle Eastern countries, authorized its first multiparty elections in 2005.)

Not only do the political systems in the Middle Eastern nations show real variety, but so do their cultures. Some of the Arab countries—Iraq and Lebanon, for example—allow women full access to employment, education, and other civil rights. Others, such as Saudi Arabia, insist that women be strictly separated from men in most circumstances, and restrict women's right to drive or show their faces in public. Most Middle Eastern countries experience friction between their Muslim and non-Muslim populations, and also—as in Iraq and Lebanon—between the Sunni and Shiite branches of Islam.

These great variations in political and cultural life indicate that the Middle East is a region where important questions about religion, government, and philosophy come up on a daily basis. In this chapter of the book, some of the fundamental guiding visions for the nature of social and political life in the Middle East that have emerged since the late nineteenth century will be presented. One of the most controversial issues in all of Middle Eastern history has been the influence of Zionism, a political movement that sought to create a Jewish homeland in Palestine—and succeeded when it created the state of Israel in 1948. Included in this chapter are excerpts from Theodor Herzl's book The Jewish State (1896), which gave birth to the international Zionist movement.

Zionism was a nationalist movement. Like all nationalist movements, it sought to create a nation that reflected the interests and culture of a particular social group, in this case followers of the Jewish faith. Arab nations that came into being after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire (a vast empire of southwest Asia, northeast Africa, and southeast Europe that reigned from the thirteenth century to the early twentieth century. It was ruled mainly from Turkey and was heavily influenced by the Islamic religion) during World War I (1914–18; war in which Great Britain, France, the United States, and their allies defeated Germany, Austria-Hungary, and their allies) also embraced nationalism as they formed states and gained political independence. For many Arab leaders, however, nationalism wasn't enough. They wanted independent Arab nations to join together to increase their strength and promote their Arab identity. Their vision was called Pan-Arabism, and one of its greatest spokesmen was Gamal Abdel Nasser (1918–1970), the president of Egypt from 1958 to 1970 and one of the founders of the United Arab Republic, a short-lived effort to unite Arab nations. In 1959 he laid out his vision in a speech to military officers; excerpts from that important speech are included in this chapter.

The most extreme visions for transforming the Middle East come from supporters of Islam who want to see a more radical transformation of Muslim societies, both in the Middle East and in any country with a large Muslim population. These people, often called Islamic fundamentalists, or Islamists, want to make religion the basis of their entire political and social system. They also want to eliminate all traces of Western influence in the Middle East. Some of them resort to acts of terrorism to try to achieve their goals. Osama bin Laden (1957–), best known as the orchestrator of the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center in New York City and the Pentagon in Washington, D.C., on September 11, 2001, proposed his violent vision for the triumph of Islamic fundamentalism in a statement attributed to the World Islamic Front.

All of the documents in this chapter present ideas on how the Middle East region should be structured both politically and religiously. Many of these documents continue to influence the politics and social organization of Middle Eastern countries today.