The Middle East should be distinguished from the Muslim world because some people in the Middle East are not Muslims, notably the Jews, Christians, Mandeans, and Bahais, and most Muslims do not live only in the Middle East, rather in Asia. The Muslim peoples of South and Central Asia will be discussed later in the context of their world regions. The cultural traditions of the Middle East are rich and varied, reflecting the multiple influences of ethnicity, language, religion, and economics. The peoples of the Middle East include various language and culture groups, including the Indo-Europeans, Semitics, Turks, and the Egyptians. The history of the area shows how these various groups coalesced into the contemporary world of the Middle East.
Over the last thousand years, civilization in the Middle East has been transformed into a distinctively Muslim one. Although the Muslims were the heirs to the Sumerians, Greeks, and Romans, they built larger and more beautifully than their predecessors. Muslim scholars produced more science, the doctors developed more sophisticated medical procedures, and the engineers built more effective technologies. After the devastating Mongol conquest of the Middle East in 1258 and the loss of the last Muslim territories in Spain in 1492, much of the Muslim world slipped into a period of economic decline and isolation with the exception of the Ottoman Turks who dominated the Middle East from the early 1500’s to the early 1900’s.

The Middle East today is dominated by three countries. Turkey and Iran are the two large countries with relatively developed economic infrastructures, one more secular and the other more religious. Saudi Arabia is the other important country. Although it has one-third the population of the other three, it is a giant because it controls the holy places of Islam. Although Egypt is located in Africa, it provides important cultural leadership to the Middle East. It is not equal in wealth to the three countries mentioned about, but its popular culture and music are very important, and the legal opinions of its sheiks are widely respected.

The Arabs and the Religious Core of the Sunni World

Saudi Arabia is the Muslim Holy Land, and it is the religious core of the Sunni world. It has the largest concentration of religious teachers who train people in Islam and judges who make the decisions about what is correct behavior, and Sunnis look to Saudi Arabia for religious leadership. Mecca is the religious capital, and the Ka’aba is the center of Mecca.

Bedouin values continue to have an important influence on Arab culture, even though today most Arabs are urban dwellers. One of the most important values is hospitality, and Arabs are known for inviting travelers for dinner and a place to stay for the night. A visitor is under the protection of the head of the family while they are visiting, and this is one of the factors that has facilitated travel throughout the Middle East. Family loyalty is another important value. Grandparents, parents, aunts and uncles, brothers and sisters, husbands and wives, and children are expected to be completely trustworthy. Adultery can be punished by death, and family disloyalty in politics or business can be punished by being banned from the family which is a kind of living death.
 The population of Saudi Arabia tends to be very conservative religiously and socially, and Wahhabism is the dominant Islamic tradition in the country. The followers of Wahhabi Islam think of it as the only path of true Islam, other forms of Islam do not count. Wahhabism has had considerable influence on extremist Islamic movements, and this can be seen in the tendency to vilify societies which are not considered pure enough, whether Muslim or not. The denunciation of the West and of Western oriented Muslims by contemporary Islamic fundamentalists follows this tradition. Once a country is deemed defiled, whether it is Western or Muslim, fundamentalists can justify the use of armed violence in its overthrow. It is all in the name of religious purity. Wahhabis fought first against the Ottoman Empire, trying to create a free and religious pure Arabia. Later, the leaders who eventually set up the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia adopted Wahhabism, and it continues to have popular wide spread support among the Saudi people.
The Arabs are the people located on the Arabian Peninsula. In addition to Saudi Arabia, the other Arab countries include Yemen, Southern Yemen, Oman, the Arab Emirates, Qatar, Kuwait, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, and Jordan. Some of the people who live in Iraq, Syria, or Lebanon are Arabs, but in the northern regions of these countries there are other groups, such as the Kurds and Turks. Since the Arabs are the elite of the Muslim world, they tend to look down on Kurds and Turks who they consider to be less sophisticated which leads to problems of collaboration between these groups. Like the rest of the Muslim world, Arabs are divided into Sunnis and Shi'ites and other smaller sects, and some Arabs are Christians, Mandeans, or Bahai's. So, not all of the Arab world is Muslim, and not all of the Muslim world is Arab.

The Persians and the Religious Core of the Shi’ite World

For much of the twentieth century, Iran was one of the more Western-oriented countries in the Middle East, but many think the change came too fast. In reaction in 1979, Iranians overthrew the secular Western-oriented government and established in its place a theocracy which re-connected with the Muslim roots of the country. Following that, Iran has been governed by a conservative coalition of Shi’ite clerics who built an Islamist state that has also stimulated Sunni Islamists to aspire to have their own Islamic governments. This Iranian government has been against Western influences which they see as undermining Islam, and they limited international contacts for Iranians as a means of controlling those influences. The Ayatollahs were also opposed to Israel and financed the Hezbollah movement in southern Lebanon which regularly attacked the Jewish state. Iran was accused of supporting other anti-Jewish violence as well, such as the bombing of a Jewish community building in Buenos Aires with a large loss of life.
The Ayatollahs who governed Iran during this period promoted a return to Muslim traditions of greater separation between women and men, and in some respects women’s rights also suffered. Describing this situation, Maryan Poya says,
...the level of gender consciousness is much greater at the end of the 1990's, under the Islamic state, than it was at the height of socio-economic transformation and westernisation in the 1960s and 1970s. The subordination of women in Iran cannot be attributed solely to Islamic ideology and practice. It has to be analysed within a wider perspective, which involves material circumstances and change in gender relations.

Iran has become the beacon in the Middle East for Islamist movements.

Iran is one of the three largest countries in the Middle East, and it has a population of almost seventy million people. It is one of the emerging nations that can be expected to play an important role in the region and perhaps in the world over the next century. It has a rich cultural history in the visual arts and literature. It was known as Persia until 1935 when the modern kingdom was established after being subject for centuries to the Ottoman Turks and later European powers. Monarchical rule continued until 1979 when the Islamic Republic of Iran was established under the rule of Muslim clerics. These clerics or ayatollahs established a government based on Muslim principles and law and suppressed Western influences. Not long after assuming power, the new government triggered an international crisis by allowing the take over of the United States’ embassy in Tehran and the retention of the American embassy staff. This encouraged the decades long series of Islamist attacks against United States’ interests in the Middle East. From 1980 to 1988 the religious Iranian government fought a bloody but indecisive war with secular Iraqi government over disputed territory. Iran became a beacon for Islamist movements throughout the Middle East after the ayatollahs took power.
The Iranians are one of three non-Arab populations in the Middle East. They are Indo-Europeans who migrated out of the Caucasus region a few thousand years ago along with others who settled in Afghanistan and India. They speak Farsi although educated people know Arabic which is used in religious and business affairs, and they follow Shi’ism in contrast to most of the Muslim world which is Sunni. Iran is the only predominantly Shi’ite country in the Middle East, and that combined with its distinctive Indo-European language, Farsi, tends to set it apart from its Arab and Afghan neighbors. The conservative Shi’ite government has been active in supporting Islamist movements in the Middle East, particularly the Hezbollah, the Party of God, an anti-Israeli group working in southern Lebanon. Beginning in the 1990’s the younger generations pushed for reforms, more equitable participation in government, and more openness to the West, stimulating a split between the moderate ayatollahs who supported them and the conservative ones who did not. Shirin Ebadi, the winner of the Nobel Peace Prize in 2003 is one of the activists for change in Iran. The award was given to her “for her efforts for democracy and human rights.” She is a lawyer and former judge, and she has worked especially for the rights of women and children.
Iran is a large and diverse country located at the crossroads of people and influences coming in from Afghanistan and Central Asia, the Arab world, and Turkey. It is defined by its diversity. Eight-nine percent of Iranians are Shi’ites, and ten percent are Sunnis. Eighty-five percent of the people speak Farsi or one of the Turkish dialects. While most Iranians are Persian, there are a number of other ethnic groups such as the Azeris, Kurds, Arabs, Gilakis, Mazandaranis, Balochis, and Turkmens. The Iranians are known for their artistic traditions, and today they continue to produce beautiful hand made rugs that are valued widely around the world.

The modern history of Iran has been one of foreign interference in national affairs. The British and Russians tried to establish hegemony over the country shortly before and during World War I, but Reza Shah Pahlavi (1877-1944) proclaimed himself shah (king) in 1925 and began to build a modern nation-state following similar lines used in Turkey. The shah built a modern army and railroad system and stimulated commerce. In 1932 he changed the name of the country from Persia to Iran, as it is known today. Although Iran had a rich cultural heritage and urban tradition, much of that history had been lost. Arab tribal people on the south and west and Afghani tribal people on the north and east borders were groups that were difficult to incorporate into the national cultural life. The educated elite was more religious than secular, so it was impossible to build an international style secular society as Turkey did. Religious leaders turned against Reza Shah in 1941 after he had become increasingly tyrannical and corrupt and forced him from office. After a time of military rule, his son came to power and ruled until he was forced from office in 1979, again by religious leaders.

The Muslim Secular World: Turkey, Iraq, and Syria

After being formed as modern nation-states in the early twentieth century, these countries have been ruled by secular governments, and the national project of each has been to find a balance between secularism and religion. Although Islamist movements exist in these three countries, they have not had generally had state support, and they have had little success.
The Republic of Turkey. Although Turkey is overwhelmingly Muslim, 99.8 percent, the Republic was established as a secular state. Turkish voters have elected Islamist candidates to office on a number of occasions in recent years, but the army zealously guards the secular character of the government. Large segments of the Turkish population are sympathetic to the Islamist movement in opposition to government policy. Most Turkish citizens speak the official language, Turkish, but there are significant minorities that speak Kurdish, Arabic, Armenian, and Greek. The economy is a mixture of industry and commerce with a traditional agriculture sector that still accounts for 40 percent of the economy
The Turkish nationalists reorganized their country as the old Ottoman Empire disintegrated, but first they had to fight off the British, French, Greeks, and Italians who tried to carve out parts of Turkey for themselves. Mustafa Kemal (1881-1938) took charge of the Turkish resistance and fought off the Allied advances into their territory following World War I. Kemal then led the movement to abolish the sultanate and establish the Republic of Turkey with an elected assembly. In 1923 the last of the sultans fled the country, and the new Republic was declared. Kemal was elected president and became known as “Ataturk” or father Turk. The Republic was established as a secular state, and the caliphate was abolished. The Roman alphabet was introduced to write the Turkish language in place of the traditional Arabic script.
Religious courts, which had regulated Ottoman society for centuries, were abolished and replaced by a legal system based on European-style law codes. State schools with an emphasis on science, mathematics, and social sciences took the place of religious schools. Perhaps most striking were the freedoms guaranteed to women. They were given the right to vote, polygamy was outlawed, and women were allowed to seek divorces. Government officials were required to wear business suits rather than traditional Muslim dress to emphasize that Turkey was becoming part of the larger international society.
The Turks were not originally from the Middle East, but they migrated there out of Central Asia after 1000 C.E. They are not Arabs, nor is Arabic the dominant language. They speak a Turkic language like their Central Asian Muslim cousins from whom they have been geographically isolated for a thousand years. In the fourteenth century the Middle Eastern Turks began forging a powerful kingdom that eventually became the Ottoman Turk Empire that ruled the Middle East until the early 1900's. Although Turkey has now lost its empire, the location of Istanbul (Turkey’s largest city and port) on both the European and Asian sides of the Bosporus gives Turkey its unique role as the only country with territory in Europe and the Middle East. Turkish people participate in trade and commerce in both worlds, as well as political and social alliances.
The Turks are known for being pluralistic and having the most democratic political process in the Middle East. Turkey is active in world affairs, and it is the only Middle Eastern country that is a member of NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization). The Turkish government has built a good educational system in which men and women participate fully. As a secular country, women are discouraged from covering their heads in Muslim fashion, and women members of the government are prohibited by law from covering their heads.

Iraq. The present day population of this culturally and geographically rich land is divided into three distinct religious populations: the Shi’ite south, the Sunni central zone around Baghdad, and the Kurdish north. As one of the secular Middle Eastern countries, Iraq fought an eight year long war against Iran after it was converted into an Islamic republic in 1979, and it was considered by the West as a bastion against the growth of fundamentalist Muslim governments. The Iraq-Iran war took on an additional religious significance because it was a Sunni government in Iraq fighting against a Shi’ite government in Iran. Eventually, the war ended in a stand-off in which neither country could prevail.
The Sunnis controlled Iraq after its creation as a modern kingdom in 1932, and they continued to rule after it became a republic in 1958. The Sunnis are Arabs and identify with the mainstream of Islam. The Shi’ites in the south are the majority in Iraq, and they identify with the Iranians with whom they are linked religiously and culturally. They protest the dominance of mainstream Islam and practice a more conservative version of the religion. The Ba’ath Party controlled Iraq from 1958 to the invasion and overthrow of Saddam Hussein in 2003 by the United States and its partners. The Ba’athists set up a socialist style secular society with the economy dominated by the government. Religion and politics were separated, and the Islamists were suppressed. But, the richness of Iraq is in its long history, not in its recent past. It has the longest tradition of religion and civilization in the world.
      Iraq is the site of the first king, the first literature, the first great architecture, the first science, and the first professional art. It is the site of the world’s first city, Uruk, where writing, wheel-turned pottery, and other inventions were made. It dominated the Middle East for the first 2000 years and again during the Muslim Empire. Iraqis are justly proud of their rich cultural tradition. This is the land the Greeks referred to it as “Mesopotamia” (the land between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers). Not only did the world’s earliest civilization develop in Iraq, it subsequently influenced civilizations in Asia, Africa, Europe, and the Americas. The various cultures that developed in the Tigris/Euphrates valleys borrowed extensively from each other until they merged into a common Middle Eastern civilization under Muslim influence. The Middle East is the middle not only in the geographical connection of three different continents, but it was also the cultural middle and served as a conduit for cultural traditions between Asia, Africa, and Europe.

      Traditionally, Iraq has been considered the site of the Western World’s Garden of Eden, and the word Eden comes from an early Iraqi (Sumerian) word referring to the well watered grass lands of the south. It is remembered today at Basra Al-Qurna by an old tree, supposedly Adam and Eve’s tree, marking the site of the Garden. Iraq is also the location of Ur, the home city of Abraham, and other great early cities including Babylon, the home of Hammurabi and the legal codes and the place of exile of the early Jews. Nineveh, famous for its parks and zoos, is located here, as well as Nimrud the royal city of the Assyrians, including the palace and the tombs of the queens and princesses. Nippur was a famous religious center in the south of Iraq where much of the Jewish Talmud was compiled. Samarra is a major Sunni religious center near Baghdad, and it has a striking ninth century mosque. Kerbala is an important Shi’ite religious center with a mosque honoring Hussein, the grandson of the prophet Muhammad and considered the true heir to the prophet by the Shi’ites. The Kerbala mosque preserves the same blue tiled facade ornamentation used in Iraqi places of worship since the temples in Uruk. The Kurdish city of Erbil is preserved much like it was in the original cities of Sumer with each quarter of the city being a neighbor organized around a mosque and a market. It has been continuously inhabited for 5,000 years, the oldest inhabited town in the world.
      Syria. The other secular Baathist state in the Middle East has been Syria, the heart of the Fertile Crescent which stretches from the Tigris and Euphrates to the Nile. Syrians are 74 percent Sunni Muslims, 16 percent Alawites, Druze, and other Muslim sects, and 10 percent Christian (Maronite tradition and Armenians). Both Muslim and Christian families are organized as three generation patrilineal extended families. Muslim women were traditionally secluded, especially in the urban areas, and upper class women wore the veil. Since the 1980’s that practice has been in decline, but it became common to wear the hijab, or head scarf. Today, the hijab is worn more as a statement of being religious rather than for modesty. Although the Baathist government is officially secular, like its neighbors Iraq and Turkey, the Islamist movement has been gaining strength in the country in recent years.
Historically, Syria has been the crossroads between the Mesopotamian river valleys and the Mediterranean, and as such it has had a cross current of influences in its cultural history. Even today it has one of the largest Christian populations in a Middle Eastern Muslim country, and it still has a small Jewish population. Syrians are proud of their Muslim tradition of hospitality and tolerance, and Damascus preserves some of the cultural gems from the Umayyad period when it was the capital of the Muslim Empire. Syria competes with Iraq for the title of the Cradle of Civilization. The two oldest cities, Aleppo and Hama, are among the oldest continuously occupied cities in the world. Agriculture, metallurgy, and the alphabet were first developed in Syria. Syria was at the center of the earliest developments of urban planning, long distance trade, diplomacy, and other cultural achievements. Syria came into existence as a nation-state in 1946 after centuries under Ottoman rule and decades under the French.
Stateless Muslims. Kurds and Palestinians are two groups in the Middle East that would like to have their own independent states, but at present they are attached to larger states, most Kurds to Iraq and the Palestinians to Israel. While most Israelis would like to give the Palestinians independence , the Palestinian leaders have rejected the terms offered by Israel. On the other hand, the Kurds are divided between Iraq, Turkey, and Iran and have never been offered their own nation.

The Muslim Middle East and Well-Being Today

      The Muslim world of the Middle East gradually fell behind the West and Asia economically over the last couple of centuries, and this has led to a gap in well-being with those parts of the world. For a region that was once the wealthiest power of its day, it has become one of the poorest areas of the world. The combined economies of all Muslim Middle Eastern countries in the early twenty-first century were smaller than most individual European countries. This slide from wealth and power to relative poverty is a grievous memory to many in the Muslim world, and since it coincided with the growth in the wealth of the Christian West, there are some who blame the West for their own misfortune. Although religious ideology does not create the economy of a country, many religious partisans claim that wealth and power are the blessing of God on a country. So, economy and well-being become religious issues for many people in the West and in the Muslim world.
Well-Being and Religion in the Middle East. Material well-being is often seen as an expression of the success of a society and by extension, its religion. After the fall of the Ottoman Empire, the Muslim world has not had a political and economic organization to compete with the Western, Christian world. The Muslim world has fallen behind the Christian West in wealth and technology after decades of colonial rule and more recently the powerlessness of the small nation-states into which the Muslim world has been divided. For centuries Muslims dominated the Mediterranean economically and militarily, but today many Muslim countries are among the world’s poorest and least literate. God’s promise to the Muslims that they will rule seems inconsistent with their current state in the world.
Measures of wealth and well-being among the Middle Eastern countries show a wide variation from the wealthy Persian Gulf oil states to the impoverished ones of Iraq, Palestinian Authority, and Yemen. The luxury of private jets and seaside palaces of the United Arab Emirates contrast with the donkey carts and peasant huts of Yemen. Even in the modestly wealthy country of Saudi Arabia, there are wide differences in lifestyle between the thousands of princely families who live handsomely, and the common people who have high rates of unemployment. These quantitative measures give an indication of well-being, but there are other important qualitative factors, including family bonds, religious faith, and personal happiness that should also be considered.

Table 10.1
Well-Being of Muslim Middle Eastern States

The countries of the Middle East can be divided into wealthy states (U.A.E., Qatar, Kuwait, and Saudi Arabia), the poor states (Iraq and Yemen), and the vast middle (Egypt, Iran, Jordan, Lebanon, Oman, Syria, and Turkey). The thirty million people in the wealthy states (9.5 percent of the Middle East) lead international lives and live very comfortably while the forty-eight million people (15 percent) in the poorest states live subsistence oriented day to day lives. The people in the vast middle include 240 million people (75 percent of the total), and they live a reasonably good lifestyle. The Gini Index measures the degree of inequality in the distribution of family income in a country, but it has been calculated for only four countries in the Middle East. For Egypt the number is 28.9, which represents a high degree of equality. Yemen is somewhat more unequal at 33.4, Jordan is 36.4, and Turkey at 41.5. The indices for these four countries rank in the moderate to low inequality range, compared to other nations in the world. Does this confirm Islam’s claim to a brotherhood of humankind and the centrality of almsgiving to the practice of the religion? It does seem to indicate that.
Well-being is not only measured by wealth, but there are a number of other social indicators that reflect the quality of life for men and women. These measures range from median age and unemployment rates to life expectancy, fertility rates, and literacy. The median age of each country indicates its stability with the youngest populations coming from the poorest state (Yemen) and the oldest populations usually coming from wealthy or stable countries (Qatar, U.A.E., Lebanon, Kuwait, and Turkey). The official unemployment rates probably underestimate the true size of the problem, but even with that Yemen, Syria, and Saudi Arabia have incredibly high rates. Young men seem to be the ones most affected by the lack of jobs which can contribute to their turning to armed militancy to fight for greater equity.

Table 10.2
Indicators of Well-being in Middle Eastern Countries

The most important migratory movements are occurring in Kuwait and Qatar, both wealthy nations that need to import laborers to maintain their economies. In contrast, Iran and Egypt are losing population to emigration as dissatisfaction with local conditions leads more people leave than enter the country. Life expectancy is included as a measure of overall health and medical care, and Yemen, one of the poorest countries in the Middle East, ranks far below the other nations on this measure. The cluster of states from Syria through Iraq to Iran and Saudi Arabia also rank low in life expectancy. The political violence and wars that Iraq has lived through since the 1980's helps to explain why life expectancy is low in that country. Saudi Arabia’s place on the list indicates that wealth does not guarantee longevity. Jordan has the longest life expectancy in the region, but it is not among the wealthy countries. Jordan’s life expectancy combined with the high literacy rates suggest a quality of life higher than most other Middle Eastern countries.
Among the most important indicators of well-being for a society are the measures of literacy for women and fertility (number of children per woman). In most urban civilized societies, men tend to have more access to goods and services than do women. So, if women have well-being in a society, men most probably will also have it. When the pattern of a high birth rate for women and low literacy exists, it suggests low status for them, a pattern that can be seen in Yemen and Iraq. Women seem to have higher status in Jordan, Lebanon, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates. With the exceptions of Iran and Turkey, the birth rates in the Middle East tend to be high by world standards, confirming that the role of women tends to be oriented toward family and children. The Middle Eastern countries with more desirable lifestyles seem to be Iran, Turkey, Kuwait, U.A.E., and Qatar, and the ones that have a less than acceptable indicators of well-being are Iraq and Yemen, each is an area that has been plagued by political turmoil in recent decades.
The United Nations Development Programme has released reports in recent years prepared by Arab scholars on human development in the Middle East. In 2002, the report commented on the widening gaps in freedom, women’s empowerment, and knowledge in the region and called for local governments and international organizations to focus attention on these issues. In 2003, a follow-up report concentrated more on human knowledge and “disabling constraints” that limit the acquisition, diffusion, and production of knowledge in Middle Eastern countries. The conclusion of this report is that knowledge is the key to increased freedom, women’s rights, economic development, and a renaissance in Muslim culture.
The Muslim world covers a broad cross-section of the world's peoples from Africans to Arabs, Chinese, and Malays. The cultural differences are enormous across the Muslim world, and many people find the austere rules of Arab Islam as foreign, including rules on women’s dress, prohibition of alcoholic beverages, and the application of religious laws. Although Islam permits polygyny, most Muslim families are monogamous. Traditional practice in the Arab world favored the seclusion of women within the home to concentrate on the care of the children and the family, but the actual practice in Islam varies greatly, and in many countries women are quite active in the public arena. Muslims are business people, scholars, students, athletes, religious leaders, and family people. The Muslim world from Africa to Asia is a mosaic of peoples and cultural traditions.

Nation-States: the New Configuration of Islam

From the beginnings of Islam to the early 1900's, the Muslim world was controlled by large empires or by colonial powers. It was only after World War I in the 1920's that Muslim nation-states began to appear out of the ruins of the Ottoman Empire. In the twentieth century, the Middle East and Africa broke into small individual nation-states each of which has little power. These new countries (Syria, Iraq, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Lebanon) are less than one century old, and most are still in the throes of developing political institutions and defining themselves nationally. The division of the Muslim world into dozens of competing nation-states has effectively eliminated it as a political, military, and economic power on the world stage.
The division of Islam into dozens of nation-states means that there is no centralized representation of Islamic interests today. For 400 years the Ottoman Empire represented Islam to the world and successfully defended its interests. After the fall of Ottoman rule, their Empire was broken up into the nations of Turkey, Iran, Iraq, Syria, Jordan, and Egypt. Other Muslim nations gained their independence after World War II when the European powers lost their colonial holdings, notably Algeria, Morocco, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Indonesia. The Central Asia countries (Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, and others) gained their independence only after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1990. The Muslim world is fighting to establish and define itself as nation-states within the global community. The most intense international conflicts are those of Muslim groups trying to establish their independence from non-Muslim nations (Bosnia and Kosovo from Serbia, Palestine and Israel, Chechnya and Russia, Kashmir and India).

Within these new Muslim nation states, there are intense conflicts over the religious and cultural definition of the new countries. The more secular people are open to the Western capitalistic models of liberal democracies, but they are opposed by religious conservatives who want to create the new national cultures around Islam. They argue that the new nations should be theocracies with Islamic law being the national law. The government of the ayatollahs in Iran and the Taliban government in Afghanistan are two examples of theocracies. The radical fringe of the conservative movement is against all Western cultural, political, and economic influences, and the United States is seen as the epitome of Western influence. Also, this group is usually opposed to the existence of Israel, so attacks on these two countries are common. The struggle with the Serbs, Russians, and Indians are secondary to the jihad against the West. The resolution of these internal conflicts between the Muslim fundamentalists and the moderate liberal factions will determine the face of Islam in the decades to come.

Middle Eastern Civilization Today

Over the last thousand years, civilization in the Middle East has become completely Muslim. Although the Muslims were the heirs to the Sumerians, Greeks, and Romans, they built larger and more beautifully than their predecessors. Muslim scholars produced more science, the doctors developed more sophisticated medical procedures, and the engineers built more effective technologies. After the devastating Mongol conquest of the Middle East in 1258 and the loss of the last Muslim territories in Spain in 1492, much of the Muslim world slipped into a period of economic decline and isolation with the exception of the Ottoman Turks. Although Turkey lost its empire, it still controls the area of the Bosporus, and Istanbul (Turkey’s largest city and port) is located on both the European and Asian sides of the waterway. This gives Turkey its unique role as the only country with territory in Europe and the Middle East. Turkish people move culturally in both worlds, and they participate in trade and economic alliances in both.
But, there are dissident voices in the Middle East. As with people in other parts of the world, many in the Middle East are disturbed by the materialism and capitalism represented by Europe and the United States. In reaction to these foreign forces and the globalization of the economy, fundamentalist religious groups have emerged in many countries challenging this view of the world. Many voices are being heard widely calling for a return to the fundamental principles of family, female seclusion, and Quranic law. Although many Muslims live in terms of pluralism and acceptance of non-Muslim ways, others see the threat to their way of life in global capitalism and listen to the call of fundamentalists to re-affirm traditional values.

In the twentieth century, the Muslim world emerged from centuries of political and economic isolation and colonialism to establish a series of nation- states. By the last half of that century the newly independent Muslim states took their place as important powers on the world stage. Now, in the twenty-first century the Muslim world includes one billion people. They are the dominant population in forty-eight countries extending from Morocco in North Africa to Kazakhstan in Central Asia and Indonesia on the east. Islam has re-emerged as a cosmopolitan, cultural and religious presence, reclaiming its rich heritage. Although there is anger in the Muslim world toward international influences that seem to be threatening the traditional way of life, there are also moderates advocating cultural adaptations between the West and traditional Islamic values.

Conclusions

      Religions are never really separate from the political and cultural context in which they exist, and that is true of contemporary Islam. For most of its 1,400 year history, there has been a imperial voice that represented Islam in the Middle East and that gave political and religious unity to it. However, with the nationalism of the post-World War II period, Islam fragmented into a world of three dozen different countries and can no longer present a unified front to the world. This has given local Muslim populations a freedom not previously known, but this same freedom has led to challenges and conflicts. Islam is re-making itself into a diversified mosaic of religious and political expression.

Boxed Insert One. Timeline