The scramble for the Middle East

Jack Dickens: Welcome to The EI Podcast. I’m Jack Dickens, Literary Editor at Engelsberg Ideas. The Middle East continues to be a source of fascination and despair for observers in the West. From the ancient Persians to the post-Ottoman nation states, these lands have been defined by a colourful cast of prophets and sultans, saints and soldiers, mystic poets and cruel potentates. More recently, many have sought to remake the region in their own image, from Arab nationalist projects to the Islamist tide that followed in the wake of the Iranian Revolution. Both the agonising hope of the Arab Spring and the spectre of the ISIS caliphate continue to cast long shadows. The region defies simple explanations. It is, we might say, a cauldron where the fault lines of tribe, faith and geopolitics generate both nihilistic conflicts and unexpected alliances. To discuss all this, I’m joined by historian Simon Sebag Montefiore, author of a remarkable new book, The Cauldron: The Making of the Modern Middle East. Simon, a warm welcome to The EI Podcast.

Simon Sebag Montefiore: Lovely to be on. I’ve wanted to be on for a while. I’m an admirer of the Engelsberg project.

Jack Dickens: At the heart of your new book is the metaphor of a cauldron. Could you explain why you settled on this title for the book and why it captures the story you wanted to tell?

Simon Sebag Montefiore: The good thing about the cauldron is that, on one hand, it represents a metaphor of a bubbling, turbulent, dangerous, red-hot pot of different wars and conflicts, and rival and feuding peoples and sects. But on the other hand, a cauldron can just be a pot of delicious soup, full of delicious ingredients. That is exactly the metaphor of the Middle East I’m talking about. On one hand, as we see today at this very moment, it’s filled with unsolved conflicts and hot wars. But on the other hand, with a historian’s perspective – and also the perspective of someone who enjoys life and loves food, life and variety and diversity – the Middle East is an incredibly rich and enriching place with a wonderful culture and wonderful history. The book is filled with poetry as well as battle plans. That is the image of the cauldron, and that’s why I chose it.

Jack Dickens: The passages from Middle Eastern poets that begin each section of the book are one of the delights of reading it. What made you feel that it was vital to tell this story now? Is this a project that predates recent events in the Middle East, or is it something motivated by the current turmoil?

Simon Sebag Montefiore: That’s a good question. I took real trouble with the poetry because it’s something that sets the tone in a way that is unusual in a political book. I love the fact that it includes Arab poetry, pre-Islamic Arab poetry, Iranian Persian poetry, Jewish Hebrew poetry, and so on. The poetry is an important message signalling the delights of the cauldron as well as its dangers. The book came about in the last three years, so it is a post-October 7th book. What happened was my American publisher, Knopf, after October 7th, asked me whether I would write a short history of Israel. I said I don’t want to do that because I’ve already written Jerusalem: The Biography, which is a history of the Holy Land for 5000 years. I’ve covered the history of Israel from the original Kingdom of Israel to the modern Republic of Israel. So I said, what I’d love to do instead is write a book called The Cauldron: The Making of the Modern Middle East. At the time they didn’t want it, so I forgot about it. Then about a year later, which is about two and a half years ago now, they said, you mentioned the cauldron. Would you write it? And so this is the book. 

It’s partly a reaction to the fact that the Middle East is at the centre even more than usual, of all our consciousness. It’s also at the centre of a decolonising, moral awakening. With the war in Iran, it’s absolutely front and centre. Iran is super important in the book, but so are many lesser-known peoples and smaller countries. The book covers 19 countries. Some of them are constantly in our thoughts, like Iran or Israel or Turkey, and others like Morocco or Oman appear less frequently in these sorts of books. I wanted to encompass all of them.

Jack Dickens: The book covers an extraordinary geographic expanse, including countries that aren’t always covered in histories of the modern Middle East, whether that’s Oman, Morocco, or Sudan. But you begin your narrative at the turn of the 20th century, in 1900. Your prologue opens with a campaign in the Arabian Desert with Abdul Aziz Ibn Saud, who would later go on to found the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Could you sketch out the landscape of the Middle East as it was back then, and how it differed from the Middle East as we know it today?

Simon Sebag Montefiore: The reason I chose that scene is that most people begin these histories of the Middle East with Sykes-Picot, Lloyd George, and the fall of the Ottoman Empire. I didn’t, because the reigning spirit of this book is that this is a region ruled by its people. Of course, there are major interventions from outside rulers and empires, whether the Ottomans count as an outside empire is debatable, but certainly the British, French, Italians, Greeks, and all the way up to the Soviets and Americans. The reason I started with this is to signal that this is about the Middle East, overwhelmingly the Arab world. So I begin with the most successful Arab statesman and conqueror of the 20th century, King Abdulaziz of Saudi Arabia, founder of Saudi Arabia. 

Much of the book is told through these nation-makers and kingdom-makers of the Middle East. When it opens in 1900, most of the Middle East was ruled from Constantinople by Sultan Abdul Hamid II of the Ottoman Empire. The Ottoman Empire had ruled the Middle East essentially since 1517, when the Ottoman Sultan Selim the Grim took down the Mamluk Empire that ruled from Egypt and replaced it with the Ottoman Empire. From then on, the Ottomans ruled Egypt, much of North Africa all the way to the borders of Morocco, and much of Arabia, including the two holy cities, Mecca and Medina. To the north, they ruled Iraq and Syria and Turkey. To the south, they ruled what is now Israel and Jerusalem. This was a colossal empire that at its height extended from Budapest to Baghdad. But by 1900, it had lost most of its European possessions and many of its Christian subjects, who went on to found new countries like Serbia or Romania. It became an Islamic empire. Abdul Hamid II was determined to recast the empire as an Islamic state. He emphasised himself not just as Sultan, but as Caliph and ruler and guardian of the holy cities. He used ethnic and sectarian tensions to promote that, which meant repressing particularly his Christian subjects, over a million Armenians, getting on for half a million Greeks, and other Christian minorities like the Assyrians and the Maronites in Lebanon. 

So in 1900, Abdul Hamid ruled much of what we think of as the Middle East today. He ruled Libya, Syria, Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, and Iraq and part of Saudi Arabia, huge territories. In the middle of that was Egypt, a very singular, cosmopolitan civilisation in its own right, and a purportedly independent monarchy that was actually ruled by Britain. Moving east, the centre of Arabia was ruled by no one. Different families and dynasties were fighting for control. The Saudi family had actually ruled the interior of Arabia for most of the 18th and 19th centuries, but they’d lost it to a family called the Rashidis. In 1900, the young Prince Abdulaziz, an extraordinary character, had started to plot to retake his patrimony, his home, his inheritance, which had been lost. Of course, he succeeded in the next 30 years in doing that. When they found oil there, it became an incredibly wealthy country, and it still is. 

Now, 125 years later, Saudi Arabia is one of the key powers and probably the leading Sunni Muslim power in the Middle East. Moving further east, the eastern and southern coasts of Arabia in 1900 were controlled by the British – the Trucial States and various protectorates. The British controlled most of Yemen, which they called Aden, and they controlled Oman and the UAE, all the way up the coast towards Kuwait. That was all British, ruled directly from the Indian Raj, which was the jewel in the crown of the British Empire. They had political agents who supervised these kingdoms and emirates, but the British never actually took direct control of them, they were self-ruling. That is one of the reasons for their success right up to today. And then of course, there’s the huge independent power that wasn’t part of the Ottoman Empire and wasn’t really colonised: Persia, the kingdom of Persia, the empire of Persia.

Jack Dickens: At the beginning of the period you describe, European powers are beginning to encroach increasingly on Ottoman lands and erode the power of the Sultan-caliph in Istanbul. Can you give us a sense of how that leads to the partition of the Middle East following the First World War?

Simon Sebag Montefiore: When we’re looking at the beginning of the 20th century, we’ve just talked about the Ottomans, the British, and how Persia was a large independent but disintegrating kingdom. But moving into North Africa, you have the French expanding as well. The French, since 1828, had started to colonise what became Algeria. Many French colonists lived there, and the French had also added Tunisia to that. They were now eyeing Morocco, which was still an independent sultanate. France had a huge presence. If you go south into sub-Saharan Africa, both Britain and France dominated and had vast empires. The French actually had more Africa territorially than the British did. That’s the picture at the end of the scramble for Africa when everyone was carving it up. One interesting touch is that Egypt had its own empire: Sudan. In 1820, the ruler of Egypt conquered Sudan as an empire, particularly as a source of slaves. So ironically, the Egyptians had started the scramble for Africa. 

When the First World War came, the Ottoman Empire had fallen into the hands of the Young Turks, particularly a faction led by Talat Pasha and his two comrades, Enver and Jamal. They were incredibly tough ultra-nationalists who really embraced a sort of proto-Nazi Turkish supremacism. They were eugenicists who believed in social Darwinism. Once they brought Turkey into the First World War, they found themselves under attack from Russia, from Britain in the Dardanelles. In the struggle for survival, they blamed the Christians within the Empire and embarked on a brutal genocide of Armenians, Greeks, Maronites, Assyrians, and other Christian sects. They lost the First World War, though they were much more resilient than anyone expected, defeating the British in several battles. 

When they finally succumbed in 1918, the British, French, and Americans – the ruling allies who won the war – were determined to punish the Turks for their war crimes. They devised this huge division of the Middle East. Looking back, we can see that the British, French, and Americans didn’t really know exactly what they were doing. But the Ottomans had had 400 years to rule the Middle East and ended up in what was essentially a genocide. So one has to conclude that it’s not just Western powers that find the Middle East difficult to govern. Their plan was to divide it up. The French took what is Greater Syria. The British took Iraq and what is now Israel and Jordan, and they already had Egypt and the states like Aden, Oman, and the Trucial States. They decided they would give half of Turkey to the Greeks to found a new Byzantine Empire there, keep Constantinople for themselves because it was a great world city, and give eastern Turkey to the Kurds and Armenians. The Turks themselves would only get a little bit in the middle. Mustafa Kemal Pasha, the most successful Ottoman commander of the war and a fascinating character who became known as Ataturk, launched a rebellion against the empires to create a new state, the Turkish Republic, and a new Turkish nationalism. 

He launched a war in all directions – he expelled the French from Cilicia, the Armenians, the Kurds, and then he defeated the Greeks in a massive war in 1922. Out of this brutal ethnic conflict, with huge deportations, massacres of Greeks, burning cities, and the purging of an entire ethnic group from a place where they’d lived for several thousand years, came the Turkish Republic. The British and French were more successful in the Levant and the main part of the Middle East, where they managed to put down rebellions and keep their mandates, which was the new name for colonies, really. They’ve taken a lot of blame for what’s happened since, but it’s interesting because they actually only ruled them for around 30 years. 

Out of those mandates came the modern states of the Middle East. Just as there’d never been a Turkish republic or a country called Turkey before the Ottoman Empire, the new states that emerged from the Ottoman Empire and from the British and French mandates were also new countries that had never existed before. They had ancient names like Palestine, Syria, Lebanon, and Iraq, but they were new. Sometimes they’ve struggled to work coherently as states, but essentially all of them really became fully independent in the 1940s after the Second World War. That’s when the sort of modern architecture of the Middle East really emerged. You can see how the flux of these ideas played out. The British weren’t really sure what to do in their new mandate of Palestine. They had promised a Jewish homeland in Palestine, but what did that mean? Some people wanted that to be a state, some wanted just a Jewish presence where Jews could go and live under an Arab king, and others were Jewish socialists who arrived there and bought small farms and wanted to be socialistic farmers in small communities. The British hoped they would be able to give independence to a new state called Palestine in which Jews could immigrate and live in a single binational state. 

But looking at how fluctuating all these ideas were, in Syria the French wanted to create five or six new states: one for two for the Sunni Arabs, one for the Maronites, one for the Alawites, one for the Druze, and maybe one for the Kurds. In the end, they decided not to. They just created Lebanon and Syria. You can see that all these states were new creations. Similarly, when Libya became independent, that too was a new creation. It had been formed out of two or three Turkish vilayets. Iraq was formed out of three Ottoman vilayets. Algeria was formed by the French as an addition to the Metropole itself – a department of France. When it rebelled against the French in 1956 to 1963, it emerged as that entire entity as an independent country after a brutal war of rebellion. Morocco, at the other end, was an ancient country, and the French managed to take it over as a protectorate. When it became independent, it became a kingdom under its ruling dynasty. The whole modern Middle East emerged after World War Two in the form of these new states, some of them the result of rebellions and ethnic wars like Turkey and Israel – their founding is quite similar – and others arrived as fully formed new states created by Western statesmen like Syria and Iraq.

Jack Dickens: A combination of war, local rebellions, and European imperial interests redrew the map of the Middle East and North Africa. There’s another thread running through your narrative – the notion of historical contingency, in a way that is quite refreshing. There’s a sense that multiple futures were available to contemporaries in the region, and that if different choices had been made at different times, the political configuration of the region could be completely different today. What are some of those alternative futures that might have emerged?

Simon Sebag Montefiore: A good example is Libya now, which is in the middle of a civil war. Libya could be one country. It could also be two, Tripoli and Benghazi. It may well break into two countries. Another example would be Lebanon. The French created it after considering breaking it up into smaller ethnic sectarian entities. They decided instead to create what they called Greater Lebanon, to coin a phrase, a one-state solution. The idea was that it would be a multi-ethnic state with a confessional division of power in which the Maronites were presidents, the Sunnis were prime ministers, the speakers were other sects, and there were certain numbers of MPs for the Druze and other peoples and sects and Shia. As you can see, that hasn’t worked very well because the Hezbollah Shiite militia, backed by Iran, for many years captured the state and degraded it to the extent that it’s bankrupt, impoverished, and chaotic. It’s trying to restore its union, integrity, and coherence now. If that doesn’t succeed, Lebanon could ultimately split into sectarian entities. 

Similarly with Syria, the new president of Syria, Ahmed Al-Sharaa, a former ISIS emir, is trying to create a united Syria, the idea the French wanted. But if he fails, there’s a danger that it could break up into those very entities the French considered, an Alawite state around the Mediterranean coast, a Druze state in the south, and so on. There are tons of examples of how all these countries could have turned out differently. In the case of Israel and the Palestinian Arabs, there were so many moments when more sensible and actually more peaceful states could have been found. Particularly in the 1930s, when the Jewish leader Ben-Gurion was discussing with the Al-Husayni family ways that there could be a state called Judea and an Arab state that would be much bigger, and they could have existed in some form. There have been many peace plans, and the best of them all involved King Abdullah of Jordan ruling the Palestinian Arab parts of Palestine and the Jews forming a new state that they were going to call either Judea or Israel. There are multitudinous possible deals there. 

But you see other possibilities too. For example, the rise of ISIS after the Arab Spring was an extremely violent, spectacularly violent Islamist militia that tried to create a new Islamic State that would encompass most of Syria and most of Iraq. Had that succeeded, the whole map of the Middle East would have been redrawn. Had its leaders, led by Al-Baghdadi, not been such total psychopaths and exhibitionist psychopaths, no one would have bothered to stop them, I believe. There would have been a huge new state in the Middle East right between what is now Syria and Iraq. Looking ahead, it’s possible that many of these borders will be redrawn to better reflect ethnic loyalties and divisions. But equally, these states could work better too if they used a federal programme. Iraq now, and I don’t want to hold it up as a perfectly governed state, far from it, it’s still dominated by popular mobilisation militias, which are Shia militias, many linked to Iran, but it has worked by allowing the Kurds in the north to have their own Kurdish autonomous zone, which they rule themselves. Maybe that is a way that Iraq can keep working as a state in the future. There are many, many possibilities here, and that’s before we even get to Iran.

Jack Dickens: The Arab-Israeli conflict looms large in your narrative. Why, in your view, has this proven to be so central and so intractable an issue in the modern Middle East?

Simon Sebag Montefiore: I think in some ways it looms larger than other issues, and in other ways it’s actually a relatively minor ethnic crisis within a state, similar to the kind of ethnic rivalries and strife you see in many of these states. Israel is unique in many ways, some due to the idiosyncratic nature of Jewish history itself, but in other ways it’s a typical post-Ottoman state in the Middle East today. But it is intractable. The reason it’s intractable is partly because the Holy Land is so important in Western consciousness. 

But if you compare it to what happened in the formation of Turkey in 1922-1923, or the wars between Iran and Iraq, or the war between America and Iraq, it’s a pretty tiny conflict and issue, until the tragedy of Gaza on October 7th. The reason why it’s so intractable is partly because both sides ultimately have failed to come to a workable compromise, and maybe they never will, or maybe they will. A compromise is actually quite feasible if a large enough constituency in each nation agreed to it. But it’s made a lot worse by the fact that the Israeli state was created and the Palestinians failed to create their state in 1948, so soon after the Arab powers became independent. The effect was that the Arab nations of the Arab League began their independent life with a massive military defeat and humiliation, and they blamed that on the Israeli state. They used the Palestinian Arab people, the 750,000 refugees, half of them who had fled, half of them who had been driven out by the Israelis, as a political pawn and prevented them from ever settling anywhere. That was a project supported by the international community, with the United Nations forming a special charity organisation to protect, but also in effect to preserve, the refugee status of the Palestinians. 

Another part is that Palestine and Israel is a very small space to have two countries in it, even if the creation of those countries was a simple matter, which it isn’t. I believe that a future two-state solution, and I’m very keen on a Palestinian state somehow, would work better if there was some sort of federal relationship between the Palestinian entity and a larger Arab state nearby, maybe Jordan. But the real reason for its intractability and its status in the West is that the Holy Land is a cultural and religious obsession and remains so to this day. That explains a lot of the reasons why it is such a massive issue today among Western activists.

Jack Dickens: There’s a great line from an Israeli diplomat and politician, which you cite in the book, saying that ‘Palestinian leaders never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity’. But you argue that this could equally be true of Israeli leaders over the last 40 or 50 years.

Simon Sebag Montefiore: Yeah, I think they both have to be blamed for the failures. You have to remember that there was around 20 to 25 years when a majority of both peoples wanted to find a compromise and believed in a negotiated settlement. There were always extremists on both sides who wanted to kill people to stop it happening. Ultimately, there’s really no choice to that plan – both sides would have to recognise the other’s historical narrative and existence as a nation. That came close to happening in the 80s, 90s, and early 2000s. It could happen again. But one has to recognise that after October 7th, the unbearable slaughter and brutality committed by Hamas on Israeli civilians, and after Israel’s ferocious war against Hamas in Gaza, in which tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians were killed, both nations are deeply traumatised and enraged. It will take a long time before they recover.

Jack Dickens: I think that gets to the heart of another crucial narrative arc that you trace in the book: the rise and fall of secular nationalism, whether that’s the Arab nationalism of Nasser or the Iranian and Turkish nationalism of Mohammad Reza Pahlavi or Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, and its displacement in the 1970s by a new form of revolutionary Islamism. What caused this displacement and was it inevitable?

Simon Sebag Montefiore: I think it was probably inevitable because pan-Arab nationalism, championed by Gamal Abdel Nasser, was at its height incredibly successful and looked incredibly successful. In 1956, Nasser was able to take control of the Suez Canal and throw out the British. In 1958, he united Syria and Egypt into one country. It looked like he was unstoppable. But in fact, he overreached. He established a police state in Egypt. The Syrians threw him out. There was a civil war in Yemen in which he launched a sort of quasi-colonial war, using poison gas and massive numbers of troops to suppress the Yemenis. 

Ultimately, he was forced into a position where he began to talk very aggressively about the destruction of Israel. That led to the Six-Day War, in which the Arab forces were soundly defeated. That defeat led to the collapse of that vision of pan-Arabism. But it took 10 years for a real replacement to emerge. When it did, it was the 1979 Iranian Revolution – the Iranian Islamic Revolution that provided a narrative and replacement that co-opted some features of Arab nationalism but into an Islamist manifestation of it. This was an anti-Western, radical Islamism that initially took power in Iran. Iran is a Shiite country, of course, but it also caused a Sunni version of its radicalism to thrive and surge across the region. We still see that today, not only in Iran but in its allies – Hezbollah, Hamas, the Iraqi militias, and the Houthis. As we speak, part of that is playing out in Yemen, where Saudi Arabia, representing the opposite approach to Islam, is leading a war now to destroy the Houthis, which may lead to the collapse of the Houthi regime or at least their retreat to their mountainous redoubts. 

This battle for the heart of Islam is going on right now. It reflects the wider planetary struggle between the open world represented by America and the closed world represented by Russia, China, and Iran. In a small, Middle Eastern regional version, it’s partly a battle for access to the Straits of Hormuz, partly a battle for existential survival by Israel, partly a battle within the House of Islam between two versions of Islam, one open to the West and one absolutely dedicated to resistance and destruction of the West, Western friends and allies, and Israel in the Middle East. We need the open version to win.

Jack Dickens: You cite the Lebanese scholar Nadim Shehadi in your concluding essay, saying that we’ve misunderstood the struggle of ideas in the West. We see it as a struggle between Islam and secularism, when really it is between liberal and radical forms of Islam. What could we do in the West as Western publics and policy makers to try and influence this struggle in our favour? What kinds of policies should we be implementing to make sure that the liberal version – the tolerant, cosmopolitan tradition of Islam – triumphs over that which is intolerant and violent?

Simon Sebag Montefiore: Well, part of it is helping militarily those powers that represent this view. It’s very fashionable amongst decolonial, anti-imperialist activists to obsess about the wonders of the resistance fighters and militias and even Iran – even the blood-spattered regime of Iran – and to denounce the pro-Western regimes, many of which are absolute monarchies or autocracies as well. But actually, the open version of Islam is an ancient version of Islam from pretty much the beginning, from the Umayyad Empire in Damascus, from the Abbasid Empire that ruled the whole Arab empire from Baghdad. This is a strong strain that goes right the way through Islam, right through to modern times, in which Islam is always present in societies, always important and always revered and respected and lived, but doesn’t always control the way people live in private, doesn’t always control the state, and doesn’t always oppress minorities. 

Both these versions of Islam represent strains through history. We need to back the ones that we need to win. There are ways to do this. A bad example was the Gulf War, where we invaded Iraq and found ourselves facing an insurgency that the American invasion had partly unleashed. A good example is the campaign against ISIS, where the Americans and the West provided air power, but the fighting was done by Kurdish and other militias, and they defeated ISIS pretty soundly. In our own societies, we need to be vey careful about protecting Islamist ideas that are actually a threat to our open societies. The big challenge is to embrace and welcome immigrants and their enriching cultures and at the same time to clearly identify those that are inimical to our rights, our liberal democracy, and not to back those. That has been a challenge that I think the British government, the French government, are struggling with, to the disgust of the Emiratis, for example, who have said, ‘We don’t even want our children to study in British universities because Britain is a hotbed of Islamism.’ There are lessons to learn from the Arab world itself.

Jack Dickens: Finally, do you think we need to rethink the notion of the Middle East as a coherent geopolitical entity? Could you explain why?

Simon Sebag Montefiore: Yeah, I think we do. The Middle East right now is seeing the convergence of many theatres. If you look at what’s happening in Arabia, you have Pakistani troops there, Israeli troops in the UAE, Ukrainian advisers, and multiple outside powers now involved. If you look at what’s happening in East Africa and Sudan, there are 12 powers fighting in Sudan now, backing different factions. Saudi Arabia and Turkey are moving closer to Pakistan. India is moving closer to Israel, as Turkey and Greece face off in the Eastern Mediterranean, and Israel is getting closer to Greece. What we see is a convergence of theatres that really expands what used to be called the Middle East from South Europe all the way to South Asia. We need a new word for that. None of the words we’ve got so far really catch it. ‘Swana’ doesn’t really capture East Africa or South Europe. ‘West Asia’ doesn’t mention Africa. So I suggested ‘Samastia’ – Southeast Europe, Middle East, West Asia, East Africa. But I’m sure some of your listeners can do better.

Jack Dickens: We will be sure to hold a poll and let you know what the results are. Simon, thank you very much for your time today.

Simon Sebag Montefiore: Thanks for having me. Really nice to see you.

Jack Dickens: Simon’s book, The Cauldron: The Making of the Modern Middle East, is available to buy now. Having read it, I can say that it is without a doubt the best single-volume narrative history of the modern Middle East that I have come across. So if you want to understand the region, I heartily recommend it.