Chapter 1. the Making of the Modern Middle East
THE MAKING OF THE 1 MODERN MIDDLE EAST Michael Gasper he Modern Middle East emerged out of a variety of social, cultural, and Tpolitical transformations. The degree of changes differed from place to place, but they left distinct historical experiences, social structures, cultural norms, and political tensions in common across the region we call “the Middle East.” The early experiences of the region, combined with its nineteenth- and twentieth-century encounters with the West—that led the region to be labeled the Middle East—createddistribute a sense of identification across the region. Elements of this common identity date back to the spread of Islam in the seventh cen- tury CE. Islam spread remarkably quickly in the early period, establishingor large empires, converting populations to Islam, and spreading Arabic language and culture.1 The Abbasid, Umayyad, and later the Ottoman, Safavid, and Qajar empires extended across a vast ter- ritory, stretching from North Africa to the Gulf. These empires established a memory of “greatness,” a time of Islamic empires that rivaled the West. By the eighteenth century, the two major political entities in the Middle East, the Ottoman Empire (centered in what is today the Republic of Turkey) and Safavid/Qajar Persia (centered in what is today the Islamicpost, Republic of Iran), enjoyed relative strength and security. The Ottoman Empire was a vast multiethnic, multilingual, and multireli- gious polity that at its peak stretched from central Europe all the way to Yemen and across North Africa to Morocco. It compared favorably with the expanse of the Roman Empire at its height.
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