ABSTRACT
The twentieth century saw Middle Easterners gain independence from historic empires and European colonial powers and establish national states with modern governments. 1 In these states the Circle of Justice as a saying disappeared from political rhetoric, no longer quoted except by historians and the shah of Iran. In the bourgeois states that developed in the first half of the century, however, critics of the government continued to stress the need for justice and the government’s responsibility to the producing classes. By mid-century it was clear that national rulers – kings, presidents, or dictators – were again being forced to reenact the political relationships embodied in the Circle. Numerous experts report state activities and leaders’ pronouncements, as well as people’s requests and protests, that resonated with, although they did not quote, the Circle of Justice. Despite employing the modern languages of constitutionalism, democracy, and socialism, the rulers addressed people who persistently demanded adherence to the culture’s established standard of justice. This concept of justice survived or resurfaced in Middle Eastern political culture not merely because of peasant conservatism but because the Circle of Justice still described some aspects of people’s relationship with the state. The new concepts of nationhood and citizenship did not replace, but were added to, older concepts of interdependency and justice between rulers and people. While the Circle’s influence cannot in most cases be proven, its ubiquity and persistence through the centuries argue for a fundamental role for the understandings it describes in modern Middle Eastern political thinking. The Circle’s heritage does not explain these ideologies fully, but it highlights a recurrent aspect of Middle Eastern politics that was long downplayed or even missing from Western and modern analyses, the expectation that the state is responsible to provide the means of protection, prosperity, and social justice or to compensate for their lack. Having been part of people’s thinking and behavior for so long, the idea of the Circle of Justice could not be eliminated from the culture simply by eliminating the saying.
