ROUTLEDGE LIBRARY EDITIONS: POLITICS OF THE MIDDLE EAST
Volume 1
ARAB AND REGIONAL POLITICS IN THE MIDDLE EAST
ARAB AND REGIONAL POLITICS IN THE MIDDLE EAST
P.J. VATIKIOTIS
First published in 1984 by Croom Helm Ltd
This edition first published in 2016
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1984 P.J. Vatikiotis
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ISBN: 978-1-138-83939-7 (Set)
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ISBN: 978-1-138-92513-7 (Volume 1) (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-315-68045-3 (Volume 1) (ebk)
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Arab and Regional Politics in the Middle East
P. J. Vatikiotis
1984 P.J. Vatikiotis
Croom Helm Ltd, Provident House, Burrell Row,
Beckenham, Kent BR3 1AT
Croom Helm Australia Pty Ltd, First Floor,
139 King Street, Sydney, NSW 2001
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Vatikiotis, P.J.
Arab and regional politics in the Middle East.
1. Near EastPolitics and government
I. Title
320.956 JQ1758.A1
ISBN 0-7099-2609-X
All rights reserved. For information, write:
St. Martins Press, Inc., 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010
First published in the United States of America in 1984
Library of Congress Card Catalog Number: 84-40051
ISBN 0-312-04692-8
Printed and bound in Great Britain
CONTENTS
This book comprises a selection of articles, essays and reviews on the history and politics of the Middle East which were written or published over the last twenty-five years. It does not include specialised studies of medieval Islamic political history and theory, or essays written in Arabic and Greek, or shorter pieces written for weekly magazines and review periodicals. The studies included are concerned with three main topics. The first is the problem of religion and politics, or religion and state, as the major and long-standing preoccupation of Muslims themselves. The second is that of inter-Arab and regional politics, approached mainly from a local-regional rather than an international perspective. The third is Egypt.
Most Westerners have become aware of the complex relation between religion and politics in the Middle East only recently, mainly as a result of events in Iran since 1978. Two of the essays dealing with this matter were written and first published in 19568. If these are compared with those included in
Throughout the 1950s I was, as a result of my earlier study of the Ismaili revolution in the tenth century culminating in the establishment of the Fatimid Caliphate in Cairo, only to return now, in the 1980s, to a reconsideration of more far-reaching developments and protean questions against the broad historical experience of the region.
Completed studies, published or unpublished, which are concerned mainly with cultural and literary themes are not included.
Notes
. A study of Islam and the Nation-State, based on the Patten Foundation Lectures I delivered at Indiana University, USA, in 1982, is to be published soon.
. The Fatimid Theory of the State (1957).
. The Egyptian Army in Politics (1961, 1975); The Modern History of Egypt (1969, 1972, 1976), 2nd edn Egypt from Muhammad Ali to Sadat (1980, 1983); Nasser and his Generation (1978).
. Conflict in the Middle East (1971).
The question of Muslim response to Western influence has often been put to the Muslim intellectual. The beginnings of reform in Islam and the Near East in general first found expression in men like Sayyid Ahmad Khan, Muhammad Abduh, Ameer Ali, and Muhammad Iqbal. Western civilisation, its science, and its material benefits, were known to these intellectuals, enabling them to establish rapport with the West. One must be cautious, however, not to identify educational contact with the inner life of the two peoples the Muslim world and the West. For, traditionally, they have run apart. The contact between East and West on a mass level has been preconditioned and marred by political considerations, the intellectual crosscurrents notwithstanding. Such contact has been further complicated by the unreadiness of the Muslim to rationalise, since his religion has never constituted for him an abstract intellectual system. Islam, on the contrary, is regarded by him as an active existential religion that discourages isolation and quietude.
Nevertheless, the gradual awareness of the masses today of their heritage and national destiny has diffused the responsibility of response to the present challenges into a wider spectrum of society. The intellectual, therefore, cannot merely superimpose a modification of traditional values, in the light of his Western training. He must be aware of the vacuum that may be created and provide a solid replacement of indigenous origin and character, albeit a synthetic one.
Can there be a so-called Protestant revolt within Islam today? The Protestant Reformation in Europe paved the way for the relatively free development of modern science, philosophy, and historical criticism. Conversely, while Europe lay dormant in its darkest hours of inquisitorial ignorance, Muslim thinkers were probing nature and philosophy. But the contentment of imperial power, extending too far to be adequately controlled, allowed for degeneration from within, until destruction from without became inevitable. Ultimately, prolonged occupation, together with rigid emulation in matters of religion and thought, engendered an atmosphere of inertia and social stagnation.1
Response by the Muslim intellectuals of the last seventy-five years to the challenge presented by Western penetration has been in the main apologetic. It romantically attempted to recast Islam as a super-philosophy containing all the elements that were operative in the phenomenal rise of the West. The Muslim apologist, in contrasting the lack of authoritarianism in Islamic politics to European political history, for example, is only offering superficial resistance to Western influence.2 So far, the mere claim that the religion, properly interpreted and understood, allows for all exigencies of change, has proven insufficient stimulation for improvement at the mass level. For it is necessary to get people thinking in terms of this viability as a matter of course. On the contrary, the old pre-Islamic resignation to inscrutable
