ABSTRACT

The First World War witnessed an unprecedented intrusion of European military power into the Middle East. This not only led to the collapse of the imperial orders of the area, but also brought with it the means of asserting the European conception of the state form as the proper way of organizing political communities. The significance of this development was that it came after a century or so of European economic, cultural and at times military penetration, during which the old forms of authority may have been preserved, but attitudes towards their legitimacy had undergone a gradual transformation. Ideas of popular sovereignty, however imperfectly expressed or realized, had arisen to challenge the absolutism of the Ottoman Sultan and the Qajar Shah in the early 1900s. Similarly responses to the power and inspiration of Europe had led to attempts to redefine the nature of the political community itself. For some the answer seemed to lie in the revitalization of the Islamic community, the decline of which was all too apparent in the fact that the Sultan-Caliph in Istanbul could maintain his position and the territories of his domain only on the sufferance of the European powers. For others, the model of European nationalism appeared to provide a pattern which might usefully be followed if the peoples of the area were not to lose all sense of identity in a world dominated by the interests of others.