Free The Shaping of the Modern Middle East by Bernard Lewis Page B

Until modern times, there was an established political order in the Middle East, with the shah as ruler of Persia and the sultan as sovereign or suzerain of the rest. The sultan may not always have been loved by his subjects, but he was respected and, what is more important, accepted as the legitimate sovereign of the last of the Muslim universal empires. The sultan was overthrown and the empire destroyed. In his place came a succession of kings, presidents, and dictators who managed for a time to win the acclamation and support of their peoples, but never that spontaneous and unquestioning acceptance of their right to rule that the old legitimate sovereigns possessed and that dispensed them from the need for either violent repression or demagogic politics.
    With the old legality and loyalty, the peoples of the Middle East also lost their ancient corporate identity. Instead of being members of a millennial Islamic imperial polity, they found themselves citizens of a string of dependencies and then nation-states, most of them entities new to history, often with borrowed or resurrected names, and only now beginning to strike roots in the consciousness and loyalties of their peoples.
    The undermining and collapse of the old political order were accompanied by a parallel process of social and cultural disintegration. The old order may have been decayed, but it was still functioning, with a mutually understood system of loyalties and responsibilities binding together the different groups and classes of society. The old patterns were destroyed, the old values derided and abandoned; in their place a new set of institutions, laws, and standards was imported from the West, which for long remained alien and irrelevant to the needs, feelings, and aspirations of the Muslim peoples of the Middle East. It may well be that these changes were "necessary" and "inevitable," as these words are used by politicians and historians. The fact remains that they brought a period of formlessness and irresponsibility deeply damaging to Middle Eastern polity and society.

    The economic consequences of Westernization are too well known to need more than a brief mention: the explosive rise in population, above all in Egypt, unaccompanied by any corresponding increase in food supply; the enormous new wealth derived from oil unevenly, even erratically, distributed both between and within countries; the widening and more visible gap between rich and poor; the creation of new appetites and ambitions, more rapidly than the means of satisfying them. The technological disparity remained, and successive Middle East wars revealed that buying advanced technological weaponry can do much damage, but does not create a technologically advanced army, still less a technologically advanced society. These tensions have been building up for some time past. In our day they have come to the breaking point.
    The attitude of the peoples of the Middle East toward the West has gone through several phases. For many centuries, while Europe was rising to greater and greater heights of achievement, the East was sinking in the comfortable torpor of decay, unwilling and unable to perceive or to understand the vast changes that were taking place. In the nineteenth century, their illusions of superiority and self-sufficiency were finally shattered, and they awoke to a disagreeable reality in which their countries, their resources, their civilizations, their very souls were menaced by a Europe that was rich and powerful beyond belief and that, in its limitless selfconfidence, aggressiveness, and acquisitiveness, seemed to be bringing the whole world within its grasp.
    In this situation, the mood of the Easterner began to change from ignorant complacency to anxious emulation. The West was great and strong; by study and imitation, it might be possible to discover and apply the elusive secret of its greatness and strength, and generations of eager students and reformers toiled in the search.