Page 189 - Encyclopedia Of World History Vol V

1966 berkshire encyclopedia of world history

My Palestinian intellectual friend tells me that he might be willing to admit
that God in Hebrew said Jews could have Israel. But he said Allah did not
speak it in Arabic to the Arabs. • Arthur Hertzberg (b. 1921)

Transoxania were the major threat. Safavid rule was Greek, and Armenian Christian rebels, insurgents, and
ended by the Ghilzai Afghans of Kandahar in 1722.The guerrilla forces, often with Russian support, killed Mus-
Afghans in turn were overthrown by Nadir Shah (1736– lim civilians in the Balkans and Anatolia. Ottoman irreg-
1747), an able Turkmen general from Khorasan. Nadir ulars, often composed of recently arrived Muslim refugees
waged wars against Persia’s traditional enemies, the expelled from Russian-conquered lands, and the regular
Ottomans and Mughals. Ottoman army retaliated with ferocity. About 600,000
When Muslim and Christian armies clashed in the six- Armenians perished in the Armenian massacres of 1915–
teenth and seventeenth centuries, usually the Muslims 1916 alone, while the number of Ottoman Muslim
had the upper hand. All this changed in the late eigh- victims—those who perished or were killed or expelled
teenth century. Russian success against the Ottomans from territories occupied by Christians—between 1821
(1768–1774, 1783, 1787–1791) and Napoleon’s inva- and 1922 is estimated at about 10 million.
sion of Egypt (1798) signaled the shift in power between The military came to play an important role in pol-
Islam and the West. itics. In the Ottoman empire, the coup of the “Young
Turk” officers restored the constitution and left the gov-
The Long ernment in civilian hands until 1913, when a military
Nineteenth Century dictatorship took over.When the empire was defeated,
In response to European expansion, nineteenth-century occupied, and truncated by the victors of World War I,
Muslim rulers attempted to modernize their armies along another Young Turk officer, Mustafa Kemal (Atatürk),
European lines.While initial reforms concentrated on the led a successful war of liberation and created a secular
technical aspects of warfare and thus brought only lim- nation-state, the Turkish republic. In Persia, Reza Khan,
ited results, the destruction of the Janissaries by Sultan the leader of a Cossack brigade, seized power in 1921
Mahmud II (reigned 1808–1839), the introduction of and proclaimed himself Shah in 1925, ending the rule
conscription by Muhammad Ali of Egypt (reigned 1805– of the Qajars (1794–1925) and establishing the
1848) in the 1820s and by the Ottomans in 1838, and Pahlavi dynasty that ruled Iran until the 1979 Islamic
the establishment of military and naval academies and revolution.
schools, staff colleges, and war ministries in Egypt and
the Ottoman empire were more significant reforms. Mod- The Twentieth Century
ernized Egyptian and Ottoman armies were successful From the end of World War II until the Suez Crisis in
against local guerrilla forces and insurrections, but were 1956, Britain and France dominated the heartlands of
defeated by the combined forces of nationalism and Islam. By creating states with artificial boundaries, they
Great Power imperialism. France occupied Algeria in planted the seeds of future border disputes and wars
1830, while Britain occupied Egypt in 1882, chiefly to (including, for example, Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in
control the Suez Canal. Due to Great Power intervention, 1990).The creation of Israel in 1948 and the first Arab-
a series of national states were carved out in the Ottoman Israeli war had profound consequences for the future. For
Balkans, and by 1878 Istanbul had lost most of the the victorious Jews it seemed that war and land grab
peninsula. However, thanks to improved administration rather than negotiations was the effective way to deal
and communication made possible by the railway and with the Arabs. For the Palestinians, of whom 700,000
the telegraph, the Ottomans not only kept Anatolia and became refugees, the war sent a similarly erroneous mes-
the Arab lands, but under Abdülhamid II (reigned 1876– sage: If they were to regain their homeland, they had to
1908) they asserted firmer control over these lands. destroy the Jewish state, a policy abandoned only in
During the nineteenth century, warfare also became 1988 when the PLO issued a call for a Palestinian state
more destructive for noncombatants. Serbian, Bulgarian, to coexist with Israel.