The Penguin History of the World

4 The Ottoman Heritage and the Western Islamic Lands

During the nineteenth century the Ottoman empire all but disappeared in Europe and Africa. In each continent, the basic causes were the same: the disintegrating effect of nationalism and the predatory activities of European powers. The Serbian revolt of 1804 and Muhammad Ali’s establishment of himself as the governor of Egypt in 1805 together opened the final, though long drawn-out, era of Turkish decline. In Europe the next milestone was the Greek revolt; from that time the story of the Ottoman empire in Europe can be told in the dates of the establishment of new nations, until in 1914 Turkey in Europe meant only eastern Thrace. In Islamic Africa the decline of Ottoman power had by then gone even further and faster; much of North Africa had already been virtually independent of the sultan’s rule early in the nineteenth century.

One result was that when nationalism began to appear in Islamic Africa it tended to be directed more against Europeans than against the Ottomans. It was also linked with cultural innovation. The story again begins with the Albanian Muhammad Ali, who had come to Egypt as an Ottoman general in 1801. Though he himself never went further west than his birthplace, Kavalla, in Rumelia (in modern-day Greece), he admired European civilization and thought Egypt could learn from it. He imported technical instructors, employed foreign consultants for health and sanitation measures, printed translations of European books and papers on technical subjects, and sent boys to study in France and England. Yet he was working against the grain. His practical achievements disappointed him, though he opened Egypt to European (especially French) influence as never before. Much of it flowed through educational and technical institutions and reflected an old French interest in the trade and affairs of the Ottoman empire. French was soon the second language of educated Egyptians and a large French community grew up in Alexandria, one of the great cosmopolitan cities of the Mediterranean.

Few modernizing statesmen in the non-European world have been able to confine their borrowings from the West to technical knowledge. Soon, young Egyptians began to pick up political ideas, too; there were plenty of those available in French. Seeds were germinating which would in the end help to transform Europe’s relations with Egypt. Egyptians would draw the same lesson as Indians, Japanese and Chinese: the European disease had to be caught in order to generate the necessary antibodies against it. So, modernization and nationalism became inextricably intertwined. Here lay the origin of an enduring weakness in Middle Eastern nationalism. It was long to be the creed of advanced élites cut off from a society whose masses lived in an Islamic culture still largely uncorroded by European ideas. Paradoxically, the nationalists were usually the most Europeanized members of Egyptian, Syrian and Lebanese societies, and this was true until well into the twentieth century. Yet their ideas were to come to have wider resonance. It was among Christian Arabs of Syria that there seems first to have appeared the idea of pan-Arabian or Arab nationalism (as opposed to Egyptian, Syrian or some other kind), an assertion that all Arabs, wherever they were, constituted a nation. Pan-Arabism was an idea distinct from that of the brotherhood of Islam, which not only embraced millions of non-Arabs, but also excluded many non-Muslim Arabs. The potential complications of this for any attempt actually to realize an Arab nation in practice were, like other weaknesses of pan-Arabist ideas, not to appear until well into the twentieth century.

Another landmark in the history of the former Ottoman lands was the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869. This did more in the long run (though indirectly) than any other single fact to doom Egypt to intervention by foreigners. Yet the canal was not the immediate cause of the start of nineteenth-century interference by Europeans in Egypt’s government. That came about because of the actions of Ismail (the first ruler of Egypt to obtain from the sultan the title of khedive or viceroy, in recognition of his substantial de facto independence). Educated in France, Ismail liked Frenchmen and up-to-date ideas, and travelled much in Europe. He was very extravagant. When he became ruler in 1863, the price of cotton, Egypt’s main export, was high because of the American civil war and Ismail’s financial prospects therefore looked good. Unhappily, his financial management was less than orthodox. The results were to be seen in the rise in the Egyptian national debt; £7 million at Ismail’s accession, it stood at nearly £100 million only thirteen years later. The interest charges amounted to £5 million a year, in an age when such sums mattered.

In 1876 the Egyptian government was bankrupt and ceased to pay its debts, so foreign managers were sent in. Two controllers, one British, one French, were appointed to make sure that Egypt was governed by Ismail’s son with the priority of keeping up revenue and paying off the debt. They were soon blamed by nationalists for the huge burdens of taxation laid upon the Egyptian poor in order to provide the revenue to pay debt interest, as well as for economies such as the reduction of government salaries. The European officials who worked in the name of the khedive were, in the nationalists’ eyes, simply the agents of foreign imperialism. There was growing resentment of the privileged legal position of the many foreigners in Egypt and their special courts.

These grievances led to nationalist conspiracy and eventually to revolution. As well as the Europeanizing xenophobes there were others now urging the reform of Islam, the unity of the Muslim world and a pan-Islamic movement adapted to modern life. Some were simply antagonized by the preponderance of Turks in the khedive’s entourage. But such divisions mattered less after a British intervention frustrated a revolution in 1882. This was not intervention for financial reasons. It took place because British policy, even under a Liberal prime minister who favoured nationalism in other parts of the Ottoman empire, could not accept the danger that the security of the canal route to India might be jeopardized by an unfriendly government at Cairo. It was unthinkable at the time, but British soldiers were only at last to leave Egypt in 1956, tied down until then as they were by strategic dogma.

After 1882, therefore, the British became the prime targets of nationalist hatred in Egypt. They said they wanted to withdraw as soon as a dependable government was available, but could not do so because none was acceptable to them. Instead, British administrators took on more and more of the government of Egypt. This was not wholly deplorable; they reduced the debt and mounted irrigation schemes, which made it possible to feed a growing population (it doubled to about 12 million between 1880 and 1914). They antagonized Egyptians, though, by keeping them out of government service in the interests of economy, by imposing high taxes and by being foreign. After 1900 there was growing unrest and violence. The British and the puppet Egyptian government proceeded firmly against agitation, and also sought ways out through reform. At first administrative, this led in 1913 to a new constitution providing for more representative elections to a more powerful legislative assembly. Unfortunately, the assembly met only for a few months before it was suspended at the outbreak of war. The Egyptian government was pushed into war with Turkey, a khedive suspected of anti-British plotting was replaced, and at the end of the year the British proclaimed a protectorate. The khedive now took the title of sultan.

By then, the Ottoman government had also lost Tripolitania to the Italians, who had invaded it in 1911, partly because of another manifestation of reforming nationalism, this time in Turkey itself. In 1907 a successful rebellion had been started there by the ‘Young Turk’ movement, which had a complicated history, but a simple purpose. As one Young Turk put it: ‘We follow the path traced by Europe … even in our refusal to accept foreign intervention.’ The first part of this meant that they wished to end the despotic rule of Sultan Abdul Hamid and restore a liberal constitution granted in 1876 and subsequently withdrawn. But they wanted this less for its own sake than because they thought it would revive and reform the empire, making possible modernization and an end to the process of decay. Both this programme and the Young Turks’ methods of conspiracy owed much to Europe; they used, for example, masonic lodges as cover and organized secret societies such as those which had flourished among European liberals in the days of the Holy Alliance. But they much resented the increasing interference in Ottoman internal affairs by Europeans, notably in the management of finance, for, as in Egypt, the securing of interest on money lent for internal development had been followed by loss of independence. European bullying had also resulted (they felt) in the Ottoman government’s long and humiliating retreat from the Danube valley and the Balkans.

After a series of mutinies and revolts, the sultan gave way over the constitution in 1908. Liberals abroad smiled on constitutional Turkey; it seemed that misrule was at last to end. But an attempted counter-revolution led to a Young Turk coup, which deposed Abdul Hamid and installed a virtual dictatorship. From 1909 to 1914 the revolutionaries ruled with increasingly dictatorial means from behind the façade of constitutional monarchy. Ominously, one of them announced that ‘there are no longer Bulgars, Greeks, Romanians, Jews, Muslims … we glory in being Ottoman’. This was something quite new: the announcement of the end of the old multi-national regime.

With hindsight, the Young Turks seem more comprehensible than they did at the time. They faced problems like those of many modernizers in non-European countries and their violent methods have been emulated by many since from necessity or imagined necessity. They threw themselves into reform of every branch of government (importing many European advisers). To seek (for instance) to improve the education of girls was a significant gesture in an Islamic country. But they took power in an empire displaying blatant signs of backwardness and during a shattering succession of diplomatic humiliations, which weakened their appeal and led them to rely on force. After the Austrian annexation of Bosnia, the ruler of Bulgaria won an acknowledgement of Bulgarian independence, and the Cretans announced their union with Greece. A brief pause then was followed by the Italian attack on Tripoli, and then the Balkan Wars and further military defeat.

Under such strain, it was soon apparent that the post-reform harmony among the peoples to which liberals had looked forward was a chimera. Religion, language, social custom and nationality still fragmented even what was left of the empire. The Young Turks were driven back more and more upon the assertion of one nationalism among many, that of the Ottomans. This, of course, led to resentment among other peoples. The result was once more massacre, tyranny and assassination, the time-honoured instruments of rule at Constantinople; from 1913 they were deployed by a triumvirate of Young Turks who ruled as a collective dictatorship until the outbreak of the Great War.

Though they had disappointed many of their admirers, these men had the future on their side. They represented the ideas which would one day remake the Ottoman heritage: nationalism and modernization. They had even – willy-nilly – done something towards this by losing most of the little that was left of the Ottoman empire in Europe, thus releasing themselves from a burden. But their heritage was still too encumbering in 1914. Before them lay no better alternative as a vehicle for reform than nationalism. How little pan-Islamic ideas would mean was to be shown by what happened after 1914 in the largest remaining block of Ottoman territory, the largely Muslim provinces of Asia.

In 1914 these covered a large and strategically very important area. From the Caucasus the frontiers with Persia ran down to the Gulf near Basra, at the mouth of the Tigris. On the southern shore of the Gulf Ottoman rule ran around Kuwait (with an independent sheikh and under British protection) and then back to the coast as far south as Qatar. From here the coasts of Arabia right around to the entrance of the Red Sea were in one way or another under British influence, but the whole interior and Red Sea coast were Ottoman. Under British pressure the Sinai desert had been surrendered to Egypt a few years before, but the ancient lands of Palestine, Syria and Mesopotamia were still all Turkish. This was the heartland of historical Islam, and the sultan was still caliph, its spiritual leader.

This heritage was to crumble as the strategy and politics of world war played upon it. Even within the historic Islamic heartland, there had been signs before 1914 that new political forces were at work. In part, they stemmed from old-established European cultural influences, which operated in Syria and the Lebanon much more strongly than in Egypt. French influence had been joined in those countries by American missionary efforts and the foundation of schools and colleges to which there came Arab boys, both Muslim and Christian, from all over the Arab world. The Levant was culturally advanced and literate. On the eve of the world war over a hundred Arabic newspapers were published in the Ottoman empire outside Egypt.

An important crystallization had followed the triumph of the Young Turks and their Ottomanizing tendencies. Secret societies and open groups of dissidents were formed among Arab exiles, notably in Paris and Cairo. In the background was another uncertain factor: the rulers of the Arabian Peninsula, whose allegiance to the sultan was shaky. The most important of them was Hussein, sharif of Mecca, in whom by 1914 the Turkish government had no confidence. A year earlier there had also been the ominous sign of a meeting of Arabs in Persia to consider the independence of Iraq. Against this, the Turks could only hope that the divisiveness of the different interests represented among the Arabs would preserve the status quo.

Finally, although it did not present an immediate danger, the latest converts to the culture of territorial nationalism were the Jews. Their history had taken a new turn when, in 1897, there appeared a Zionist Congress whose aim was the securing of a national home. Thus, in the long history of Jewry, assimilation, still barely achieved in many European countries after the liberating age of the French Revolution, was now replaced as an ideal by nationalism. The desirable location had not at once been clear – Argentina and Uganda were suggested at different times – but by the end of the century Zionist opinion had come to rest finally on Palestine. Jewish immigration there had begun, though still on a small scale. The unrolling of the war was to change its significance.

Curious parallels existed between the Ottoman and Habsburg empires in 1914. Both sought war, seeing it, in part, as a solution to their problems. Yet both were bound to suffer from it, because too many people inside and outside their borders saw in war an opportunity to score at their expense. In the end, both empires were to be destroyed by it. Even at the outset, Russia, the historic enemy, seemed likely to benefit since Turkey’s entry to the war evaporated the last of the tradition of resistance of the British and French to the establishment of tsarist power at Constantinople. For their part, the French had their own fish to fry in the Middle Eastern pan. Though their irritation over a British presence in Egypt had subsided somewhat with the making of the entente and a free hand for France in Morocco, there was a tradition of a special French role in the Levant. The evocations of St Louis and the crusaders, with which some enthusiasts made play, did not have to be taken seriously, but, undeniably, French governments had for a hundred years claimed to exercise a special protection of Catholicism in the Ottoman empire, especially in Syria, to which Napoleon III had sent a French army in the 1860s. There was also the cultural predominance evinced by the wide use of the French language among the educated in the Levant, and much French capital was invested there. These were not forces which could be overlooked.

Nevertheless, in 1914 Turkey’s main military antagonists outside Europe were likely to be Russia in the Caucasus, and Great Britain at Suez. The defence of the canal was the foundation of British strategic thinking in the area, but it soon became clear that no great danger threatened it. Then events occurred revealing new factors which would in the end turn the Middle and Near East upside-down. At the end of 1914 an Indian-British army landed at Basra to safeguard oil supplies from Persia. This was the beginning of the interplay of oil and politics in the historical destiny of this area, though it was not to show itself fully until well after the Ottoman empire had ceased to exist. On the other hand, an approach which the British governor of Egypt made to Sharif Hussein in October 1914 bore fruit very quickly. This was the first attempt to use the weapon of Arab nationalism.

The attraction of striking a blow against Germany’s ally became all the greater as fighting went on bloodily but indecisively in Europe. An attempt in 1915 to force the Dardanelles by combined naval and land operations, in the hope of taking Constantinople, became bogged down. By then Europe’s civil war had already set in train forces one day to be turned against her. But there was a limit to what could be offered to Arab allies. Terms were not agreed with Hussein until the beginning of 1916. He had demanded independence for all the Arab lands south of a line running along the 37th degree of latitude – this was about eighty miles north of a line from Aleppo to Mosul and included, in effect, the whole of the Ottoman empire outside Turkey and Kurdistan. It was much more than the British could take at the gallop. The French had to be consulted, too, because of their special interest in Syria. When an agreement was made between the British and French on spheres of influence in a partitioned Ottoman empire it left many questions still unsettled for the future, including the status of Iraq, but an Arab nationalist political programme looked like becoming a reality.

The future of such undertakings was soon in doubt. The Arab revolt began in June 1916 with an attack on the Turkish garrison of Medina. The rising was never to be more than a distraction from the main theatres of war, but it prospered and became a legend. Soon the British felt they must take the Arabs more seriously; Hussein was recognized as king of the Hejaz. Their own troops pressed forwards in 1917 into Palestine, taking Jerusalem. In 1918 they were to enter Damascus together with the Arabs. Before this, though, two other events had further complicated the situation. One was the American entry into the war; in a statement of war aims President Wilson said he favoured ‘an absolute unmolested opportunity of development’ for the non-Turks of the Ottoman empire. The other was the Bolshevik publication of their predecessors’ secret diplomacy; this revealed Anglo-French proposals for spheres of influence in the Middle East. One part of this agreement had been that Palestine should be administered internationally. Another irritant was added when it was announced that British policy favoured the establishment of a national home in Palestine for the Jewish people. The ‘Balfour Declaration’ can be accounted the greatest success of Zionism down to this time. It was not strictly incompatible with what had been said to the Arabs, and President Wilson had joined in the good work by introducing to it qualifications to protect Palestinians who were not Jews, but it is almost inconceivable that it could ever have operated unchallenged, especially when further British and French expressions of goodwill towards Arab aspirations followed in 1918. On the morrow of Turkish defeat, the outlook was thoroughly confused.

Hussein was at that moment recognized as king of the Arab peoples by Great Britain, but this did little for him. It was not Arab nationalists but the British and French, with the help of the League of Nations, who were to lay out the map of the modern Arab world. During a confused decade the British and French then became embroiled with the Arabs whom they had themselves conjured on to the stage of world politics, while the Arab leaders quarrelled among themselves. The mirage of Islamic unity once more faded away but, mercifully, so did the Russian threat (even if only briefly), and only two great powers were left engaged in the Middle East. They distrusted one another, but could agree, roughly, on the basis that if the British had their way in Iraq the French could have theirs in Syria. This was legitimized by the League of Nations awarding mandates for Arab lands to them. Palestine, Jordan and Iraq went to the British and Syria to the French, who governed high-handedly from the start, having to install themselves by force after a national congress had asked for independence or a British or American mandate. They evicted the king the Arabs had chosen, Hussein’s son, and subsequently had to face a full-scale insurrection. The French were still holding their own by force in the 1930s, though there were by then signs that they would concede some power to the nationalists. Unfortunately, the Syrian situation soon also showed the disintegrating power of nationalism when the Kurdish people of north Syria revolted against the prospect of submergence in an Arab state, so introducing to European diplomats another Middle Eastern problem with a long life before it.

The Arabian peninsula was meanwhile racked by a struggle between Hussein and yet another king with whom the British had negotiated a treaty (his followers, to make things more difficult still, were members of a particularly puritanical Islamic sect who added religious to dynastic and tribal conflict). Hussein was displaced, and in 1932 the new kingdom of Saudi Arabia emerged in the place of the Hejaz. From this flowed other problems, for sons of Hussein were by this time kings of Iraq and Jordan. After heavy fighting had shown the difficulties ahead, the British had moved as fast as they dared towards the ending of the mandate over Iraq, seeking only to secure British strategic interests by preserving a military and air force presence. In 1932, accordingly, Iraq entered the League of Nations as an independent and fully sovereign state. Earlier, Jordan had been recognized as independent by the British in 1928, again with some retention of military and financial powers.

Palestine was much more difficult. From 1921, when there were anti-Jewish riots by Arabs alarmed over Jewish immigration and Jewish acquisition of Arab land, that unhappy country was never to be long at peace. More was at stake than merely religious or national feeling. Jewish immigration meant the irruption of a new Europeanizing and modernizing force, its operation changing economic relationships and imposing new demands on a traditional society. The British mandatory power was caught between the outcry of the Arabs if it did not restrict Jewish immigration, and the outcry of the Jews if it did. Arab governments now had to be taken into account too, and they occupied lands which were economically and strategically important to British security. World opinion was becoming involved. The question became more inflamed than ever when in 1933 there came to power in Germany a regime which persecuted Jews and began to take away the legal and social gains they had been making since the French Revolution. By 1937 there were pitched battles between Jews and Arabs in Palestine. Soon a British army was trying to hold down an Arab insurrection.

The collapse of the paramount power in the Arab lands had often in the past been followed by a period of disorder. What was unclear this time was whether disorder would be followed – as earlier periods of anarchy had eventually been – by the establishment of a new imperial hegemony. The British did not want that role; after a brief spell of imperial intoxication in the aftermath of victory, they desired only to secure their own fundamental interests in the area – the protection of the Suez Canal and the swelling flow of oil from Iraq and Iran. Between 1918 and 1934 a great pipeline had been built from northern Iraq across Jordan and Palestine to Haifa, thus giving yet another new twist to the future of these territories. The consumption of oil in Europe was not yet so large that there was any general dependence on it, nor had the great discoveries been made which would again change the political position in the 1950s. But a new factor was making itself felt; the Royal Navy had turned over to oil for its ships.

The British believed Suez to be best secured by keeping forces in Egypt, but this caused increasing trouble. The war had intensified Egyptian feeling. Armies of occupation are never popular, and when the war sent up prices the foreigner was blamed. Egyptian nationalist leaders attempted in 1919 to put their case to the Paris peace conference but were prevented from doing so; there followed a rising against the British which was quickly put down. But the British were in retreat. The protectorate was ended in 1922 in the hope of getting ahead of nationalist feeling. Yet the new kingdom of Egypt had an electoral system which returned nationalist majority after nationalist majority, thus making it impossible for an Egyptian government to come to terms for safeguarding British interests which any British government would find acceptable. The result was a prolonged constitutional crisis and intermittent disorder until in 1936 the British finally agreed to be content with a right to garrison the canal zone for a limited number of years. An end was also announced to the jurisdictional privileges of foreigners.

This was part of a British retreat from empire which can be detected elsewhere after 1918, which was in part a reflection of an overstretching of power and resources, as British foreign policy began to be preoccupied by other challenges. Changes in world relationships far from the Middle East thus helped to shape post-Ottoman developments in Islamic lands. Another novel factor was Communism. During the whole of the years between the wars, Soviet radio broadcasting to the Arab countries supported the first Arab Communists. But for all the worry they caused, Communism showed no sign of being able to displace the strongest revolutionary influence of the area, which was still that of Arab nationalism, whose focus had come by 1938 to be Palestine. In that year a congress was held in Syria to support the Palestinian Arab cause. Arab resentment of the brutality of the French in Syria was beginning to be evident, too, as well as an Arab response to the outcry of the Egyptian nationalists against the British. In pan-Arab feeling lay a force which some thought might in the end override the divisions of the Hashemite kingdoms.

Allied agreements during the war also complicated the history of the Ottoman homeland, Turkey (as it was soon to be renamed) itself. The British, French, Greeks and Italians had all agreed on their shares of the booty; the only simplification brought by the war had been the elimination of the Russian claim to Constantinople and the Black Sea Straits. Faced with French, Greek and Italian invasion, the sultan signed a humiliating peace. Greece was given large concessions, the Armenians – of whom up to a million had been massacred by Ottoman forces during the war – would be allowed to form an independent state, while what was left of Turkey was divided into British, French and Italian spheres of influence. This was the most blatant imperialist diktat and a far harsher settlement than that imposed on Germany at Versailles. To drive home the point, European financial control was re-established.

There followed the first successful revision of any part of the peace settlement. It was largely the work of one man, a former Young Turk and the Ottomans’ only victorious general, Mustafa Kemal, who drove out the French and Greeks in turn after frightening away the Italians. He then crushed the Armenian remnant, pushing the borders of independent Armenia eastwards. The British decided to negotiate and so a second treaty was made with Turkey in 1923. It was a triumph of nationalism over the decisions at Paris, and it was the only part of the peace settlement which was negotiated between equals and not imposed on the defeated. It was also the only one in which Soviet negotiators took part and it lasted better than any of the other peace treaties. The capitulations and financial controls disappeared. Turkey gave up her claims to the Arab lands and the islands of the Aegean, Cyprus, Rhodes and the Dodecanese. A big exchange of Greek and Turkish populations followed (380,000 Muslims left Greece for Turkey and nearly 1½ million Orthodox Christians left Turkey for Greece) and thus the hatred of these peoples for one another was reinforced. Yet in the light of subsequent events this outcome could be reckoned one of the more fruitful exercises in ethnic cleansing in the region, leaving a less dangerous situation behind it than it found. And so the Ottoman empire outside Turkey was wound up after six centuries. A new republic then came into existence in 1923 as a national state. Appropriately, the caliphate followed the empire into history in 1924. This was the end of the Ottoman era; of Turkish history, it was a new beginning. The Anatolian Turks were now for the first time in five or six centuries the majority people of their state. Symbolically, the capital was moved to Ankara.

Kemal, as he tended to call himself (the name meant ‘Perfection’), was something of a Peter the Great (though he was not i nterested in territorial expansion after the successful revision of the dictated peace) combined with a more enlightened despot. He was also one of the century’s most effective modernizers. The law was secularized (on the model of the Napoleonic code), the Muslim calendar abandoned, and in 1928 the constitution was amended to remove the statement that Turkey was an Islamic state. To this day, she remains the only Middle Eastern country with a Muslim population to adopt the principle of secularism. Polygamy came to an end. In 1935 the weekly day of rest, formerly Friday, the Islamic holy day, became Sunday and a new word entered the language: vikend (the period from 1 p.m. Saturday to midnight Sunday). Schools ceased to give religious instruction and the fez was forbidden; although it had come from Europe it was considered Muslim. Kemal was conscious of the radical nature of the modernization he wished to achieve and such symbols mattered to him. They were signs, but signs of something very important: the replacement of traditional Islamic society by a European one. One Islamic ideologist urged his fellow Turks to ‘belong to the Turkish nation, the Muslim religion and European civilization’ and did not appear to see difficulties in achieving that. The alphabet was Latinized and this had great importance for education, henceforth obligatory at the primary level. A national past was rewritten in the school-books; it was said that Adam had been a Turk.

Kemal – on whom the National Assembly conferred the name of Atatürk, or ‘Father of the Turks’ – was an immensely significant figure. He was what Muhammad Ali perhaps wanted to be, the first transformer of an Islamic state by modernization. He remains strikingly interesting; until his death in 1938 he seemed determined not to let his revolution congeal. The result was the creation of a state in its day among the most advanced in the world in some ways. In Turkey, a much greater break with the past was involved in giving a new role to women than in Europe, and in 1934 Turkish women received the vote. They were encouraged, too, to enter the professions.

The most important Islamic country not under direct imperial rule by either Europeans or Ottomans before 1914 was Persia. The British and Russians had both interfered in her affairs after agreeing over spheres of influence in 1907, but Russian power had lapsed with the Bolshevik revolution. British forces continued to operate on Persian territory until the end of the war. Resentment against the British was excited when a Persian delegation was not allowed to state its case to the Paris peace conference, and there was a confused period during which the British struggled to find means of maintaining resistance to the Bolsheviks after withdrawal of their forces. (There could be no question of retaining Persia by force, given the overtaxing of British strength.) Almost by accident, however, a British general had already discovered the man who was to do this, though hardly in the way anticipated.

The man was Reza Khan, an officer who carried out a coup d’état in 1921 and at once used the Bolshevik fear of the British to get a treaty conceding all Russian rights and property in Persia and the withdrawal of Soviet forces. Reza Khan then went on to defeat separatists who had British support. In 1925 he was given dictatorial powers by the national assembly and a few months later was proclaimed ‘Shah of Shahs’. He was to rule until 1941 (when the Soviets and the British together turned him off the throne), somewhat in the style of an Iranian Kemal. The abolition of the veil and religious schools showed secularist aims, though they were not pressed so far as in Turkey. In 1928 the capitulations were abolished, an important symbolic step; meanwhile industrialization and the improvement of communications were pressed forward. A close association with Turkey was cultivated. Finally, the Persian strong man won in 1933 the first notable success in a new art, the diplomacy of oil, when the concession held by the Anglo-Persian Oil Company was cancelled. When the British government took the question to the League of Nations, another and more favourable concession was the shah’s greatest victory and the best evidence of the independence of Persia. A new era had opened in the Gulf, fittingly marked in 1935 by an official change of the name of the state: Persia became Iran. Over the next two generations the country – perhaps the most important in the Middle East – would see a strong secularization, which increased domestic tension. Some of this tension is still with us today.