Newswise — Like a great crazy quilt comprising a dozen and a half patches at diverging angles, cutting across confabulated ideas of nationhood and culture and bound by tenuous threads, the map of the Middle East remains a source of confusion and consternation for both Westerners and the region’s inhabitants.
How, why and when the nations of the Middle East were shaped is a specialty of Creighton University history professor John Calvert, Ph.D., who has written extensively on modern Middle Eastern history and its social and political movements.
Calvert, author of numerous articles and essays on the Middle East and a biography of Muslim Brotherhood leader Sayyid Qutb, explains how today’s Middle East has its foundations in the wake of World War I and the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire’s more than 600-year reign in the region. Colonial powers, especially Great Britain and France, emboldened by their victory, moved into the Middle East and, quite literally, began drawing lines in the sand.
“These are artificial states with little basis in history,” Calvert said as a means of delineating his thesis for the lecture. “The modern map of the Middle East has its origins in the agreements made during and the peace settlements after World War I, and many of the conflicts that continue to beset the region are linked to what happened after the Great War.”
As accorded in the 1920 Treaty of Sèvres and the League of Nations’ partitioning of the Ottoman Empire — with Germany and Austria-Hungary, one of the Central Powers in the First World War — the French claimed portions of what are today the nations of Syria, Jordan and Lebanon, while Britain was given sovereignty over what would become Iraq and Jordan, along with the Mandate of Palestine and portions of the Arabian Peninsula.
In an attempt to exert their collective wills, the imperial European powers carved out borders transecting religious, societal and cultural values in place for centuries, thereby setting the stage for decades of conflict still seen today.
“It’s how you get a majority Shi’a Muslim Iraq ruled by a minority Sunni government,” Calvert said. “And when the United States toppled Saddam Hussein in 2003, the doors opened for the Shi’a to take power. There are many examples of that. We still see the echo of the Great War in the region.”
There’s also a well-documented history of Middle Eastern revolt against the colonial powers or perceived colonization in the region, much of it with religious roots.
The emergence of the radical group, the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, also has its antecedents in movements that gained traction in the years following World War I and the onset of colonialism in the Middle East. ISIS's extreme efforts at establishing a religious and cultural state in the region, in opposition to Western influences, can be seen in earlier movements to erect an Islamic caliphate opposed to Western modernity and the influence of, among others, Western businesses chiefly interested in the Middle East for its oil reserves.
“We tend to think of radical Islam as a relatively new phenomenon,” Calvert said. “But in the 1920s and 1930s, Islamism begins to emerge as Arabs and other Muslims start asking themselves: ‘How is it our civilization failed and we’re now being dominated by outside powers?’ And they answer that by saying, ‘It’s because we’ve turned away from our native religion and allowed ourselves to be swayed by Western influences.’”
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