Don't Panic: Isis, Terror and the Middle East Read Online Free

Don't Panic: Isis, Terror and the Middle East
Book: Don't Panic: Isis, Terror and the Middle East Read Online Free
Author: Gwynne Dyer
Tags: General, Social Science, History, Political Science, Modern, middle east, Terrorism, World, Islamic Studies, 21st Century, Middle Eastern
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very angry. Angry at their history, angry at those whom they hold responsible for their history, angry even at themselves for allowing themselves to become the victims of that vicious, lethal history.
    They tell a story in the Middle East—if you’ve heard it before, stop me now—about a scorpion who wanted to cross a river. Being unable to swim, he asked a frog to carry him over on his back. The frog refused, fearing that the scorpion might sting him and kill him, but the scorpion pointed out that he would never do such a thing because if the frog died, he would drown. “Okay, hop on,” said the frog, and set out across the river. Halfway across, the scorpion stung the frog. As they both sank beneath the water, the frog gasped out, “Why?” “This is the Middle East,” the scorpion explained.
    Among the educated Arab elite there is a pervasive historical melancholy about the lost Golden Age, the first four centuries after Arab armies overran the southern and eastern territories of the (by then Christian) Roman Empire in the latter 600s. As the Arab conquerors had the wit to retain and even improve upon the administrative and scientific accomplishments of the Greco-Roman cultures they now ruled, the early Arab empires were culturally, technologically and intellectually superior to any other civilization in western Eurasia except, perhaps, Byzantium (what was left of the Eastern Roman Empire after the conquests).
    The tide began to turn with the real start of the Christian reconquista in al Andalus (Muslim-ruled Spain) in the mid-eleventh century, although it took four more centuries to extinguish Muslim rule in all of Spain and Portugal. Around the same time, the Arabic-speaking parts of the Levant (Palestine, Syria, Iraq) were conquered by the Seljuk Turks, an Islamized pastoral people from Central Asia who originally spoke Turkish but used Persian as an administrative language. By the time that the First Crusade, a Western European campaign to recapture the formerly Christian lands on the eastern shores of the Mediterranean, culminated in the Christian conquest of Jerusalem in 1099, the whole of the eastern Arab world was already under foreign rule. The resistance to the Crusaders was commanded mainly by Kurdish and Turkish leaders, not by Arabs.
    The Crusades finally petered out in defeat with the fall of the last Christian stronghold in the Holy Land in 1291, but by then a far greater calamity had struck the Arab world: the Mongol destruction of Baghdad, and indeed of all of Iraq, in 1258. (Iraq did not recover to its pre-Mongol level of population until the early twentieth century.) The Arab Golden Age was over, and no genuinely Arab regime again ruled over the agricultural heartland of the Arab world, from Egypt to Iraq, until the latter part of the twentieth century. Indeed, from the early sixteenth century on it was all part of the Ottoman Empire, and its rulers spoke Turkish.
    Arab intellectuals know every bitter step in this story of decline and defeat. The great majority of ordinary Arabs don’t know the details of the story, of course, but they are well aware that something went terribly wrong in Arab history a long time ago, and that it has been downhill ever since. The last century is particularly bitter, and is well remembered by all parties. The Arabs were promised independence by the British during the First World War (Lawrence of Arabia and all that) and duly revolted against Ottoman rule, only to discover that Britain and France had made a secret deal in 1916 to carve up the Arab world between themselves. Under the Sykes-Picot Agreement, Britain got Iraq, Palestine and Jordan, and France got Syria and Lebanon (the British already had Egypt). Some Arabs refused to accept this carve-up, but their protests were crushed, and after 1918 there were once again no genuinely independent Arab countries except for a few impoverished sheikhdoms in the desert parts of Arabia.
    After the Second World War ended
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