ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on three new nations: Turkey, Iran, and Saudi Arabia. All were created by governments newly established in all or part of the territories they controlled by the end of the 1920s. The First World War really came to a close in the Middle East not in 1918, but in 1923, when the Treaty of Lausanne established the Republic of Turkey in the Anatolian territories of the former Ottoman Empire. Republicanism had its origins in late Ottoman attempts to create a constitutional representative democracy. Secularism referred to the government’s neutrality in religious affairs and its attempt to separate religion and politics, but in practice was also linked to the secularization of the entire religious component of the former Ottoman government. Revolutionism meant that changes taking place needed to be swift and sometimes drastic in form, to maintain the energy of the reform campaign and to make the changes that they were instituting irreversible.
