Goldschmidt Jr. Arthur - A Concise History of the Middle East

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Set in 10.75 point Minion Pro

A CIP catalog record for the print version of this book is available from the

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EBOOK ISBN: 978-0-8133-4963-3

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

To the memory of Agnes Inglis ONeill, teacher, counselor, friend. She taught every subject with a spirit of fun and each pupil in a spirit of love.

CONTENTS

Maps

Figures

Tables

The Middle East is significant to the rest of the world for its resources, its current struggles between rulers and peoples, and the rise of various forms of resurgent Islam. Its history helps to explain many of the political and military events that dominate the daily news.

This textbook, sometimes called classic, is coauthored by Arthur Goldschmidt, Professor Emeritus of Middle East History at the Pennsylvania State University, and Aomar Boum, Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Los Angeles, and Faculty Fellow at the Universit Internationale de Rabat, Morocco. We facetiously termed an earlier edition A Decreasingly Concise History of the Middle East, but the book has to grow as new events and trends emerge. Certain parts of the traditional text, including the annotated bibliographic essay, are transferred to a designated web page constructed by Westview Press. We will add some other relevant photos to the website, as well as some sample test questions for course instructors.

These cuts made room to include coverage of recent significant changes in the region, including a new final chapter describing environmental changes and challenges, and a penultimate chapter that covers and interprets what has been happening since 2012, when the tenth edition was released. Weve also made relevant additions to the chronology and glossary.

Teachers and students need a book that reflects current scholarship, does not hide its ideas behind a pseudoscholarly style addressed to pedants, and does not reinforce political or ethnic biases. Studentsand members of the wider English-speaking publicdeserve clear explanations of the Arab-Israeli conflict, the Middle Easts role in the energy crisis, the Islamic resurgence, the Iraq War, and the revolutions in Iran and the Arab countries. The book has gone through ten previous editions and, despite the appearance of other general histories, has become ever more widely used in universities worldwide.

Any work of art or scholarship follows conventions. When writing a book that introduces a recondite subject to students and general readers, its authors must tell the audience what these conventions will be. The English system of weights and measures is giving way to the metric system; this book uses both. Prices expressed in non-American currencies, ancient or modern, are given in 2015 US dollar equivalents. Muslims follow a twelve-month lunar calendar dated from the year Muhammad and his associates moved from Mecca to Medina. Quite naturally, they use this calendar when they teach or learn Islamic history. Conversion between the two systems is cumbersome and prone to error. Therefore, all dates given in this text are based on the Gregorian calendar, though we have also used Muslim dates (and identified them as such in the text). When dates appear in parentheses following a rulers name, they refer to the span of his or her reign. Personal names in languages using the Arabic script are transliterated according to the International Journal of Middle East Studies system, minus the diacritics, except for a few persons and places mentioned often in the press. The same applies to a few technical terms that cannot be translated accurately into English.

Our wives, Louise Goldschmidt and Norma Mendoza-Denton, deserve special acknowledgment for their encouragement, patience, and love. Aomar Boum also thanks his daughter, Majdouline Boum-Mendoza.

The work of a great teacher never perisheshence we have retained Arthur Goldschmidts original dedication of this book to an elementary school teacher and principal whose knowledge, ideas, and enthusiasm live on in thousands of her former pupils and in the Georgetown Day School in Washington, DC.

We have likewise retained in this edition many of the contributions made by Lawrence Davidson as coauthor of the eighth, ninth, and tenth editions, and thank him for his generous consent to do so. We would also like to thank the reviewers who sent invaluable feedback and suggestions to Westview Press: Ibrahim al-Marashi (California State University, San Marcos), Sharon Eicher (Friends University), Michael Hinckley (Northern Kentucky University), T. Hunt Tooley (Austin College), and Joan Roland (Pace University).

Finally, wed like to acknowledge the work our colleagues at Westviewour editor Ada Fung, our project editor Amber Morris, and our copyeditor Carrie Wattersonhave done to support the book.

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Arthur Goldschmidt Jr.

Aomar Boum

In this book we introduce the Middle East to English-speaking students and other readers who have not lived in the area or studied its history before. Historical events occur in complex contexts, which everyone must understand in order to act wisely in the future.

Middle East is a rather imprecise term, describing a geographical area that extends from Egypt to Afghanistan or the cultural region in which Islam arose and developed. We plan to make the term clearer in this chapter. First, let us tell you why we think history is the discipline best suited for your introduction to the area. After all, you might look at the Middle East through its systems for allocating power and values using the discipline of political science. An economist would focus on the ways its inhabitants organize themselves to satisfy their material needs. Sociologists and cultural anthropologists would analyze the institutions and group behavior of the various peoples who constitute the Middle East. You could also view its various cultures through their languages, religions, literature, geography, architecture, art, music, dance, and food.