Empires and nations

The earlier postings on Armenians, Jews, Turks, and Israelis (and Kurds!) cut a small way into the Big Issue of empires versus nations. A century ago, much of the world's population lived in multiethnic, multireligious empires, ones rules by a dominant group defined by ethnicity and often religion, with other ethnic and religious groups subordinated in political power and civil rights. Some countries (like the United States and France) were already republics, while others, like Great Britain, had mixed republican-imperial features, a combination of aristocracy and popular representation. But the imposing, centuries-old structures of the pre-1914 era were empires like the Austro-Hungarian (dominated by Austrian Germans and Hungarians and which ruled over Christians, Jews, and even some Muslims), the Russian (which ruled over many non-Russian Christians, as well as Jews and Muslims), the Ottoman (which ruled over non-Turks and non-Muslims), and the Chinese (ethnically mostly Han Chinese, but with a mix of languages). Once empire and theocracy were the way of the world. But they have had their day.

The last century has seen a dramatic growth in the number of nation-states and the dismantling of empires, in three major waves: after World War One, after World War Two, and after the Cold War. Clearly, if we want to understand the modern world, we need to, not just note the fact, but understand the why. Let's step back and take in the basic forces at work here.

The most fundamental is the incompatibility of empire and modernity - they're as incompatible as tribalism and modernity, or modernity and theocracy. National self-rule is essential in the modern world and, indeed, one of the pre-conditions of "being modern." The political unit of a nation-state, republic, or representative democracy is a citizen, who has equal, or nearly equal, rights with other citizens. Citizens participate in society (in political life, but not just political life), a sine qua non of constituting a modern society. Political and social units are integrated to an historically unprecedented degree. Empires, with their aristocracies and monarchies, were a whole world apart. Their political basis was narrow. Their political units were radically heterogeneous and unequal: ruling castes, and conquered ruled with varying levels of granted toleration. Outside their narrow political bases, empires often had ignorant and backwards - and in all cases, helpless - populations. These were subjects, not citizens. This type of political structure is compatible with theocracy as well, although it isn't a requirement.

From the fall of the western Roman empire in the late 400s, it took 1200 years for nations-states to be accepted in principle as the organized basis of political life and, even then, only in western Europe. It took another 300 years to sort out which nations would have states, a not-entirely settled issue even now. This question lies at the root of the great partition wars of the last century, the largest being India, but also encompassing Palestine, Cyprus, and Ireland, for example.

At the highest level, this is the evolution at work in the Middle East and Africa, which the nation-state principle and practice are still not fully accepted or even understood. Outside the West, the rise of radical Islam is the main force today in conflict with nationalism. Within the West, there is increasing confusion - especially in Europe, and especially among European elites - about the necessity of nationalism, instead of empire. (The EU is, in some ways, an empire-by-stealth, what happens when nations given up their sovereignty to non-representative supernational institutions lacking democratic legitimacy.) And Europe might very well be faced with theocratic demands in another generation. Already, parts of certain European cities have seen the abandonment of state sovereignty to Islamic-tribal custom, the first such development since the end of the Middle Ages.

Europeans and some Americans might be surprised to hear this. A central postmodern myth, upon which the EU is built, is that World War Two discredited nationalism. The problem is that for the countries responsible for World War Two (primarily Germany, as well as the Soviet Union to a smaller extent) were not fighting for nationalism, but for supernational ideals, like racism. (Nothing will destroy a nation-state faster than racial ideologies - the two are incompatible.) In any case, Europe's great nationalist moment was not 1939, but 1914. Even then, the First World War was a result of the implosion of the empires of central-eastern Europe, not something about the nation-states of western Europe. These empires had started economic and social modernization before they were politically modern, which in turn created impossible contradictions that then did them in. Their final manifestations were the supernational or "pan" ideologies, like pan-Turkism, Aryanism, and other racist movements.

To be part of the modern world means, among other things, living in a nation-state. That excludes much of the social and political practice that dominated human existence for most of recorded history and all of prehistory. For those of us living on the other side of this divide, the historical reality is often forgotten. When we encounter conflicts across this divide, we look around at how we live, but don't see; hear, but don't listen.

Armenians, Turks, Israelis, and Jews: A final word

Someone left a lengthy comment on my first posting on Ottoman Turkey and the Armenian genocide, and I responded in the comments section. The larger issues raised by this history are worth returning to, briefly. I've reposed my response below, slightly edited. Apparently, this reader didn't read my second posting, which would have clarified some things he missed.

My response explains the wrongness of the such views and alludes to the reasons why people hold them. Denial of the bare facts is rare today; instead, there's a lot of dancing around the facts and refusal to label them honestly. Rationalizations based on the Ottoman-Russian war are equally flimsy and irrelevant; they fall into the same scapegoating that the Young Turks themselves engaged in at the time. Their "Armenian problem" preceded the outbreak of war in 1914 by decades. But my response also gets deeper into historical detail than most readers will want; and even greater detail is available in the works of Fromkin, Power, and Florence, among other places. Up here, let me just cut to the chase and answer the question of why this sad history is important today.

There are some broad issues of critical importance that the Armenian genocide and the collapse of the Ottoman empire touch on and illuminate: the incompatibility of empire and modernity; the crisis that every modernizing empire has faced with the rise of chauvinistic and racist movements (like pan-Turkism), often confused with nationalism. Countries with strong Christian-liberal-enlightenment traditions were able to keep these forces at bay or marginalize them - plus they had the alternative of liberal and democratic nationalism, a powerful basis for rejecting racist and class-warfare ideologies. Eurasia's great empires could not; while they all went through liberalizing and reformist phases in the 18th and 19th centuries, these forces were shallow and short-lived, expressed as brief episodes of "enlightened despotism." Both czarist Russia and Ottoman Turkey entered their final, post-liberal phases in the late 19th century, while Germany and Austria-Hungary didn't feel the full impact of such trends until after 1918. The whole subject - empire, nations, modernity, self-rule versus autocracy, aristocracy, monarchy, and theocracy - deserves and will get a posting of its own. I'll just say again: Ataturk, the founder of the modern republic of Turkey, understood these points very well, better than rationalizers of the Young Turks and Ottomans do today. All of the Ottoman minorities - even those, like the Jews, who did well for much of the empire's history - came around to this view by 1918. The Armenian genocide of 1915-17 played a large role in their change of view.

For us today, there is a weirder irony. Contrary to what Libby says, few Armenians (at least none that I know) "wallow" in this history. (There's no business here like Shoah business :) This is a far more crucial issue precisely for modern Turkey itself, a basic question that touches on just how modern it is, and how ready it is to join Europe. It's an unavoidable bridge the Turks will have to cross if they are to join. Imagine if Germany were still having fundamental difficulties facing the Nazi period. Obviously, Jews would be outraged. But forget about that for the moment: What would Germany's neighbors think? Would NATO or the EU have ever have been possible, or the Cold War come to an end, with such a fundamental and ominous question mark hanging in the air? This issue is not about Armenians, Jews, or Israel: it's about Turkey.

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This is my response to the commenter at the first posting.

[snip]

What you're doing is what a lot of Ottoman-Young Turk apologists do, which is to essentially admit the Armenian massacre of World War One, then rationalize by playing with words, teasing readers with a seductive historical amnesia, or tell Jews in particular that they did well under the Ottomans or that modern Turkey is a good ally of Israel. I didn't compare the Armenian genocide directly to the Holocaust. In certain respects - its Teutonic thoroughness, the irrational paranoia of antisemitism - the Holocaust was unique. But by that standard, the Holocaust would be the only genocide in the book, and that's certainly not right either. I also don't want to stoop to genocide card-trading: you know, I'll swap your Holocaust for two genocides and 20 pogroms, hold the mustard.

As I wrote, the most damning evidence on the genocide was precisely the reaction of the German, Austrian, and American ambassadors, allied to Turkey or neutral. All three diplomatic missions quickly concluded in 1915 that the Young Turks (Enver and Talaat) were trying to exterminate the Armenians within the Ottoman Empire. Enver and Djemal admitted as much to the Germans. That's genocide, period.

Nor was there any military reason for extermination. While apologists try to claim the Ottoman Armenians were rebelling, there's no evidence of such rebellion. The real reason was that Turkey's offensive against Russia in the winter of 1915 was a disastrous failure, and the Young Turks needed someone to blame. The Armenians had already been such targets in the past, and they were near the Russo-Turkish border. So they were convenient scapegoats for [terrible bungling]. Outside the universe of rationalizers and apologists (like Toynbee), historians and observers at the time understood that the Young Turks' program in 1915-17 was continuous with past Ottoman behavior toward their Christian minority subjects - it was NOT about winning the war with Russia. If wiping out the Armenians was so critical to the Turkish war effort, why did the German and Austrian ambassadors protest it? After all, they had a large stake in Turkish success against Russia.

Nor is it true that the Christian minorities "flourished" under the Ottomans, at least not in the Empire's last century. Much of it was in steep long-term decline in any case. But the Ottomans' contradictory efforts to liberalize and modernize their empire, while still keeping the dhimmis in some kind of subordinate status, created an impossible situation, one that could only be resolved in one of three ways: convert all Ottoman subjects into equal citizens (which ran against Islamic law and Turkish dominance), relinquish Turkish rule over the dhimmis (which is what ended up happening), or genocide. This problem was not unique to the Ottomans. Next door, the Russian empire went through a similar cycle, during the same period, and for similar reasons: liberalization and reform earlier in the 19th century, followed by violent reaction (pogroms etc.) aimed at preserving the older imperial-feudal-theocratic structure before it disintegrated. These governments in part created this dilemma by their earlier efforts at reform. The Ottoman Christian subjects suffered in the last couple generations before the war because either granting them full rights or accepting their growing demands for independence would mean the end of the Ottoman empire as traditionally constituted. Once the Ottoman authorities accepted this, they began (in the 1890s, a decade after the pogroms started in Russia) a series of anti-Christian massacres. Something similar happened in German-speaking lands, but not until after 1918. Until then, Germany and Austro-Hungary retained many liberal features.

The reason Jews did so well for so long under the Ottomans was that, being small in number and having no state or political power, they were not a threat. While Enver and Talaat were anti-Christian, they were not anti-Jewish. But the Jews just came late to nationalism, and the Ottomans didn't get the chance before 1918 to persecute them on a large scale. BTW, Djemal did understand this; while not anti-Christian, he did start persecution of Jews during the war. By 1918, almost all the Jews in the empire wanted an Allied victory - among other things, they had seen what happened to the Armenians. [The Jews of Palestine also suffered greatly under wartime Young Turk rule.]

Finally, I don't want to sound as if I'm being mindlessly anti-Turkish. I've been to Turkey and find a lot to admire about it. Ataturk was a great man, for his military brilliance and his political acumen. Everyone chatters about his master stroke of making Turkey a secular republic, abolishing the caliphate/sultanate. (The Sultan was already a prisoner of his own government in any case, before the war.) What people should admire at least as much is that Kemal also understood that Turkey could not become a modern republic unless it abandoned its rule over non-Turkish and non-Muslim subjects. Unlike the Young Turk triumvirate, Ataturk was a great military commander, one with real victories under his belt - and no need to commit genocide to achieve them.

It's more clear in my second posting, but I'll spell it out: why does the modern Turkish republic feel the need to rationalize for what the collapsing Ottoman Empire did? After all, modern Germany is constituted by a very different political regime from the Nazis or even the Kaisers (not that I want to equate the two). This is what baffles a lot of foreign observers otherwise sympathetic toward, and admiring of, modern Turkey.

Armenians, Turks, Israelis, and Jews II

It would better if Turkey had continued its pre-1990s attitude of ambiguity towards the Ottoman empire and its final decades as "the sick man of Europe." That would at least make a good starting point towards recognition of what the wartime Ottoman government attempted and partly succeeded in doing, and why.

But that was not to be. In the last 15 years, Kemalism has suffered not only attacks from the outside (from the Islamic forces that deny nationalism, secularism, and republicanism), but also from an internal identity crisis. Instead of reaffirming Ataturk's basic commitment of Turkey toward a European future, Turkey's secular elites have fallen into a powerful Ottoman nostalgia, lamenting the empire's final days as a vanished golden era of Turkish power. It is not Kemalism that is the problem, but the abandonment of it. Turkey's elites are now in the grips of a romantic swoon - like Gone with the Wind - with the usual highly selective historical memory.

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What about the Kurds? The Kurds are a Muslim, but Indo-European, people who speak a language closely related to Farsi (Persian). They live mainly in the mountainous areas of northern Iraq, a tip of Syria, part of Iran, and a large chunk of mountainous eastern Anatolia. They have never had a unified state, although they have produced famous Muslim leaders such as Saladin, who defeated the Crusaders in Jerusalem in 1187.

The Kurds were vaguely promised a homeland of some sort after 1918. But the facts on ground defeated them. Iran remained independent and neutral. The largest group of Kurds, in eastern Anatolia, came under the rule of the new Turkish republic, and in a strange status, as Muslims but not Turks. The second-largest group of Kurds, centered around Mosul and Kirkuk, were reluctantly herded by Britain, the new Mandatory power under the League of Nations, into what became Iraq. The Kurds of Turkey have suffered from second-class status ever since. The Kurds of Iraq, in recent decades, suffered not just from second-class status, but savage persecution under Saddam, including chemical gassing toward the end of the Iran-Iraq war in the late 1980s.*

The more radical Kurds in Turkey formed a Marxist-oriented guerilla movement (the Kurdish Workers Party, or PKK) that started to revolt against the Turkish state in the 1970s. After the Cold War ended, the PKK lost its old sponsor (the Soviets) and needed a new one. There is circumstantial, but strong, evidence that this new sponsor is - no surprise - Iran. The recent PKK incursions into Turkey (clearly modeled on Hizbollah's attack on northern Israel in June 2006) are designed to provoke Turkey into invading northern Iraq the same way that Israel invaded Lebanon in 2006. In this view, which is probably right, Tehran has an opportunity to create a new international crisis, not only for the US, but to divert attention from its nuclear weapons program - not that different from the Cartoon Jihad of early 2006.

The Turkish Kurds still have grievances, although the post-Cold War period did see a large improvement for them. They were allowed some degree of linguistic and cultural autonomy, although not self-government. That liberalization has petered out, because it ran into more and more resistance from Turkish elites and ordinary Turks in the street.

One final twist: the Kurds and the Armenians hate each other.

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What to do? Look at the Israeli attitude. At a human level, free of official obligations, everyone in Israel knows what happened to the Armenians: you merely have to walk around the Armenian quarter of Jerusalem and talk to descendants of survivors. It's a ritual Israelis know well in another context. The newspapers certainly have no difficulty talking about it. But the Israeli ambassadors have a tougher job. Turkey is a key ally of Israel, while the present country of Armenia has formed a strange alliance with Syria and Iran. So on a official level, Israeli governments maintain a careful ambiguity whenever this issue comes up.

Successive American governments have to do the same: Turkey is a key ally in the Middle East and a member of NATO. The US officially backs Turkey's membership in the European Union. Hence the manifesto from the Secretaries of State and Defense. This in spite of the fact that, over the last 15 years, Turkey has developed some nasty new strains of anti-Americanism and antisemitism and is facing apparently insuperable obstacles to its full membership in the EU.

But that doesn't mean people can't know what they know on an everyday level, even if they oppose something as in-your-face as the recent Congressional resolution. There are other ways to work on this problem without turning it into diplomatic high explosive. David Harris, the American Jewish Committee's executive director, explains:

From my experience in tackling difficult relationships, I believe that engagement, not avoidance, is the best strategy. In a perfect world, Armenian and Turkish historians would sit together and review the archival material, debate differences, and seek a common understanding of the past. To date, that hasn’t happened in any meaningful way. I continue to hope that it will. It should. We at AJC have offered our services, if needed, to help facilitate such an encounter. Ninety years of distance ought to allow for the creation of a “safe” space to consider contested issues.

Two important Turkish writers, the novelist Orhan Pamuk and the historian Taner Akcam, have written and spoken at length about the Ottoman empire's final agony and what happened to its Armenians; both now face official prosecution and freelance death-threats for their pains. And it's important to recognize that the problem, while exacerbated by the Iraq war, is not American: Turkey's strange drift and regression result from an internal crisis. The Armenian genocide of 1915-17 is a fact; acknowledgment by Turkey of that fact won't happen unless the more basic crisis of Turkish national identity is constructively resolved. Otherwise, Congressional resolutions will mean nothing. The ruling Justice and Development Party, suspected by many of being crypto-Islamist, is a better bet here than the bankrupt Kemalist elite. Although supporting the JDP involves some risks, better a moderate religious party committed to democracy than decayed imperial stench and a heavy whiff of fascism.

Hrant Dink, an Armenian-Turkish journalist, one of the few Armenians left in Turkey, was assassinated earlier this year by a pan-Turkish fanatic. His funeral was attended by tens of thousands, mostly Turks. He once said he'd rather live in a democratic Turkey that had a hard time admitting the truth about the Armenian genocide, than in an autocratic Turkey that pushed some kind of "official line" on the subject, even if it happened to be the truth.

What Dink was saying was that "official history," like "official science," is a dangerous business. History, like science, works from the bottom up, not from the top down. To acknowledge facts on an individual level is one thing; to manufacture history like a political platform is a dead-end. It serves neither historical truth, nor the dead, nor the living.**

POSTSCRIPT: The national ADL's position has always been to avoid the word "genocide" in discussing the Ottoman Armenians and try to avoid the subject altogether. The New England ADL, facing criticism from local Jewish, Armenian, and human-rights groups, rejected the view of the national ADL, which then fired its New England regional director. (The Boston area has a significant Armenian diaspora, partly from those who fled the Ottomans during and after the Great War.) Eventually, the national ADL changed its view somewhat, but only under intense pressure.

The ADL's national director, Abe Foxman, later complained bitterly about what he viewed as the mistaken "idealism" of other Jewish groups, their refusal to play realpolitik. Undoubtedly, Foxman has a point, and he seems to view himself as the only adult in the room, so to speak. Some have tried to portray this as a conflict between promoting "interests" versus promoting "values." And really, given that choice, who wants to be on the side of "values" - politics is about interests, not values, right?

But the deeper issue here does involve Jewish interests. A world in which genocide is practiced, then ignored and denied - and the ignoring and the denial are essential to the practice - is a dangerous world for Jews, any ethnic or religious minority, and anyone who cares about freedom and human life. As the AJC's David Harris put it,

... as the issue once again heats up in the United States, it’s important to be clear. In a book entitled Holocaust Denial, published by the American Jewish Committee in 1993, the author, Kenneth Stern, an AJC staff expert on the subject, noted: “That the Armenian genocide is now considered a topic for debate, or as something to be discounted as old history, does not bode well for those who would oppose Holocaust denial.”

He was right. Picture a day when a muscle-flexing Iran or Saudi Arabia seeks to make denial of the Holocaust a condition of doing business with other countries. Sound far-fetched? It shouldn’t.

We have many interests as a Jewish people. Protecting historical truth ought to be right up there near the top of the list.

Final thoughts from Victor Davis Hanson.

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References

Some standard references in English in print today on the Ottoman Empire, the Armenians, and World War One. Fromkin and Power make extensive use of contemporary and pre-war documents, both published and unpublished, which are not lacking on these topics.

~ Winston S. Churchill, The Aftermath (1929; supplementary volume to The World Crisis: 1911-1918), covers the period 1918-24 in connection to British policy and the Anglo-Greek war against the Turks in great detail. He includes the unforgettable story of how a monkey's bite killed the King of Greece and many more besides. Churchill was both a participant in and an important historian of these events. It covers much else as well, such as the Russian Civil War and the Anglo-Irish and Irish Civil Wars of the same post-1918 period.

~ Rebecca West, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon: A Journey through Yugoslavia (1941). Published the week Italy and Germany invaded Yugoslavia in April 1941, this monumental treatment of the Balkans and modern Yugoslavia is the greatest English-language work of contemporary history of the last century. Along the way, West is detailed and damning about the Ottoman and Hapsburg empires, their final decades of rapacity and oppression, and the huge mess they left behind when they imploded. Her book has had no equal since, but Robert Kaplan's Balkan Ghosts is a fitting sequel, paying repeated tribute to its model, and, like West's book, informs its readers of far-off places of which they knew nothing.

~ David Fromkin, A Peace to End All Peace: The Fall of the Ottoman Empire and the Creation of the Modern Middle East (1989), covers the period 1912-1924, with the greater Middle East (including Turkey and Central Asia) as the geographic frame. Best recent one-volume treatment; indispensable.

~ Samantha Power, "A Problem from Hell": America and the Age of Genocide (2002), covers the major genocides of the last century, from the Armenians in the First World War to Kosovo in the late 1990s; also indispensable.

~ Accounts devoted to the Armenian genocide itself include the books of Graber, Melson, and Balakian. There is also the once-famous novel of Franz Werfel, The Forty Days of Musa Dagh (1934), still worth reading and still shocking.

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* This episode is also covered in Power's book.

Even the Arabs, Muslim but not Turkish, got a nationalist movement in World War One, although ironically, they were the last Ottoman group to do so - undoubtedly because they were Muslim and the majority and thus had the least incentive to revolt.

** Bush complained recently, in connection with the Congressional resolution, that he can't be put into the position of sorting through the Ottoman empire's history. It's hard not to sympathize - that's too much homework for anyone. Clinton had Yugoslavia, and Bush lept half-blindfolded into Iraq. One leftover Ottoman mess per presidency is enough.

Armenians, Turks, Israelis, and Jews I

Maybe I should have blogged this earlier ... and added the Kurds as a fifth to the list. Suddenly, it's blown up in our faces.

The recent uproar over the ADL's flip-flop on the Armenian genocide was a hot topic in the Israeli newspapers when I was in Israel at the end of the summer. All of them - left, right, religious, secular - found the flip-flop bizarre. What happened to the Ottoman Armenians during World War One is common knowledge, and genocide-denial is not a business Israelis or Jews should want to get into. But that was just the beginning.

More recently, the US Congress considered a non-binding resolution endorsing the facts of what happened and labeling it genocide. The resolution has triggered an internal political and external diplomatic crisis for Turkey. Congress had passed earlier resolutions about this, going back to the 1980s, but they were not as emphatic and didn't use the word "genocide."

But it's not just a change in Congressional resolutions. A lot has changed since then in Turkey, and the resolution could not have come at a worse time for Turkish politics or US-Turkish relations. That's why the resolution was opposed by President Bush, former Presidents Clinton and Bush Sr., and by all currently living Secretaries of State.

Since the end of the Cold War, Turkey has drifted farther and farther away from its secular-republican ideology of Kemalism, formulated by the founder of the modern Turkish republic, Mustafa Kemal. Also known as Ataturk ("Father of the Turks"), he organized both critical Great War victories for Turkey: the defeat of the 1915 Anglo-French landings at Gallipoli and of the Anglo-Greek offensive of 1920-22.* While the Ottoman empire's fragments became the pieces later assembled into the modern Middle East, Ataturk retrenched in Anatolia and regenerated Turkey as a national republic, free of its old imperial superstructure. When the Greek-Turkish war ended in 1922, over a million Greeks were expelled from Anatolia, where they had lived since the days of Homer; almost a million Turks were counterexpelled from mainland Greece into Turkey. Alas, no one ever said nation-building would be pretty - but it's not half as ugly as empire collapse.

Ever since, Turkey has been a secular-nationalist republic protected its military. Everyone's heard of the Islamist Refah (or Welfare) Party that arose in the early 1990s and how it was prevented from taking power by the Turkey military. While radical and pan-Islamic thought has gained a foothold in Turkey in the last generation, and Turkey's ruling secular elites have been in a state of corruption and decline for decades, many Turks (not just the army) are devoted to Ataturk's ideal and now view it as their passport to EU membership and becoming a truly Western country.

The Refah party re-established itself as the Justice and Development Party, without an overt Islamic component, and went on to win successive later victories in Turkish elections. They currently run Turkey's elected civilian government. But something else has happened that is less known in the West, something directly related to the present crisis.

The attitude of Kemal and his followers toward the Armenians and the events of 1915-17 was ambiguous. The Turks consistently distanced themselves from Ottoman persecution of Christian minorities (which went on repeatedly all through the empire's final century: Serbs, Greeks, Romanians, Bulgarians, as well as Armenians), while simultaneously denying that the massacre of Armenians in 1915-17 was a deliberate attempt at extermination. Ataturk's military government even prosecuted a few of the final Ottoman government's high offficials for war crimes in 1919-20. The general attitude was that what the Ottoman government did in its final death throes had nothing to do with the modern Turkish republic that arose from the ruins.

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Why did the massacre happen? Did it happen? For the bare facts of the case, consult Samantha Power's classic history of 20th century genocide, "A Problem From Hell:" America in the Age of Genocide. The first chapter of her book covers this, the first of the 20th century's great "race-murders," as US ambassador to Turkey Henry Morgenthau, Sr., labeled it while it was happening: about 800,000 to a million Armenians dead. The word "genocide" was coined in the 1940s, by Raphael Lemkin, a Polish-Jewish lawyer struggling to capture the intent and the act in a single word that could be written into laws and treaties that would ban it. Power accepts Lemkin's narrow but unconditional definition: a deliberate attempt, successful or not, to exterminate a national, ethnic, or religious group. It doesn't include fuzzier notions of "imperialism," "cultural genocide," and so on: it's nothing but plain physical extermination. Lemkin struggled with this concept before Hitler's planned and largely completed genocide of European and Middle Eastern Jews; Lemkin was thinking of the Armenians when he did so, not the future fate of his own people.**

To understand why the massacre happened, it's better to turn to David Fromkin's comprehensive The Peace to End All Peace, the most useful modern book covering the end of the Ottoman empire and the rise of the modern Middle East. Fromkin treats the "greater Middle East," which includes Turkey and Central Asia. This larger perspective is essential to understanding the Ottoman empire, why it collapsed, and what happened when it collapsed.

The modern Middle East is often traced, not back to 1918, but to 1798, when Napoleon invaded Egypt, which at that time was loosely attached to the Ottoman empire. His intent was to make Egypt modern, by force, in the same way that the French revolutionary armies were marching all over Europe under the banner of Liberty, Fraternity, and Equality. Napoleon was defeated by the British, and Egypt passed into the control of reforming local rulers such as Muhammad Ali. The Ottomans themselves later adopted such reformist approaches, much like the "enlightened despots" of Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Russia in the same period. To some extent, they were forced to do so by the system of capitulations that European powers had forced on the Turks, by which European powers became protectors of Ottoman minorities and which was widely resented in the empire. The Ottoman realm included Turkish Muslims, but also non-Turkish Arabs, as well as a confusing array of Christian minorities and Jews. These latter were the dhimmis, the subordinated and second-class groups that were tolerated under Islamic law with large legal and political disabilities. The Ottoman empire did not have citizens in any case, but subjects - an important distinction.

The Ottoman reformers attempted to remake their empire into a modern, secular, and liberal polity, but collided with basic realities that eventually defeated them. The largely illiterate rural population, along with urban religious leaders, was firmly attached the institution of dhimma, with women, slaves, and infidels viewed as subordinate groups, while all Muslim males were theoretically equal. Furthermore, the secular-national concept itself was explosive in the Ottoman context, because, setting religious status aside, the empire contained numerous conquered non-Turkish peoples whose interpretation of Enlightenment ideas naturally led toward national independence and self-rule. It did not naturally lead toward equal citizenship under Ottoman rule, which turned out to be an oxymoron anyway: subjects and dhimmis in the end could not become citizens. Thus, starting with the Serbs and the Greeks, later extending to the Bulgarians, the Romanians, the Armenians, and finally the Jews (who came late to the nationalism party), the Ottoman ethno-religious minorities demanded and in most cases, with the backing of various European powers and later the United States, got their independence - but not without a price.†

That price was strong suspicion and eventual persecution by Ottoman authorities. While the Serbs and Greeks, with British backing, won their independence during the Napoleonic era, groups attempting to assert their rights later were savagely massacred by the last generation of Ottoman governments, when they lurched from reform toward violent reaction. The final ruling faction in Istanbul, the "Young Turks" of the 1908 revolution (Committee for Union and Progress), failed in their last reform attempts. Turkish elites were then led to a new solution to their minorities problem - extermination. Under the sway of a super-national, racial idea (pan-Turkism), the government that led Turkey into alliance with Germany in 1914 looked forward to a new, wholly Turkish empire that would encompass the Turkic peoples of central Asia (the "stans" familiar to us today). What would happen to the non-Turkish minorities was up for debate. Some thought they should be killed; others, that they should be kicked out; still others, that Turks should relinquish rule over them. The similarity to the super-national racial idea of pan-Germanism is not accidental: that idea was the seed of the Nazi movement, which, contrary to myth, was not a nationalist movement, but a pan-European racial movement dedicated to the destruction of the European nation-state system and its replacement by a purified racial empire. In this Aryan-surpemacist empire, "inferior races" would be expelled, enslaved, or eliminated. What's critical to understand is that, before Nazism, this "pan" racial idea had an earlier instance in the final days of the Ottoman empire.

While the entire apparatus of Ottoman rule was not redirected toward exterminating the Armenians, it was the policy of part of the wartime Ottoman government, as Ottoman leaders admitted to their German allies once the massacres were underway. The Ottoman Armenians had cousins across the border in Russia, Turkey's historic enemy. (There was no independent Armenia then; Russian Armenia was ruled by the Czar.) Those Armenians were fervently pro-Russian, and the Ottoman government had reason to suspect the loyalty of its Armenians. The Russians and the Russian Armenians tried to set up an independent Armenian government when they conquered part of Turkey. But the Ottoman Armenians remained resolutely non-political and did not rise to the bait. Contemporary accounts - from then-neutral Americans and from Austrian and German observers stationed in Turkey to help their ally - show rare unanimity on the situation in Ottoman Armenia in 1915: it was quiet.

Some (including many in Turkey) try to use the Russian attempts to get the Ottoman Armenians to rebel as a rationale for the massacre. And if the Turks had merely interred or expelled the Armenians, it would be easier to rationalize. But to see that motive as the basis for the forced deportation and starvation that ensued in 1915-17 is to miss the point. The Ottoman government wasn't just trying to prevent an Armenian "fifth column." It was left by 19th century Ottoman reformers with an impossible dilemma and found a dazzling modern solution - genocide. The war just accelerated the genocidal tendency of Ottoman minorities policy already latent in the preceding generation; the genocide was not a strategy for Turkey to defeat Russia, anymore than the Holocaust was a strategy for Germany to defeat its enemies 30 years later. In both cases, genocide was a goal in its own right.

It also marked a large break in the nature of governmental persecution of minorities - one that shifted from the millennial focus on religion to the apparently "scientific" basis of race. The technological and organizational powers available to the modern state had opened up new vistas of mass murder unavailable and unimaginable to previous eras. The lesson was not lost, especially on Hitler.
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* This is a reminder that, while World War One ended on November 11, 1918 in the West, in the East, with regards to Russia and Turkey, it didn't really end until 1922, after the Russian Civil War, and after Ataturk drove the Greeks out of Anatolia and established the Turkish Republic. Along the way, he abolished the Ottoman caliphate and renounced Ottoman claims over the defunct empire. The 1922 settlement was formalized by the Treaty of Lausanne, which replaced the Treaty of Sèvres, signed in 1919, that had been far more favorable to both the Christian minorities and the European victors.

Among other things, the earlier, harsher Treaty of Sèvres required the Ataturk government to try the Young Turks responsible for the Armenian atrocity - which it did. Several were even executed. The Armenian massacre left a strong impression among the Allied governments that Turkey could not be trusted with rule of non-Muslim minorities or even non-Turkish Muslim Arabs.

** Power's own book is, in part, a contemporary continuation the original human rights movement in the 19th century. Its main early manifestation was abolitionism, and Americans tend not to be familiar with its later development - under the influence of Christian missionaries in the Middle East and Africa - into the immediate ancestor of the "human rights lobby." It is the fruit of a characteristic liberal-Protestant and Anglo-American ethos of the 19th and early 20th centuries, exemplified by such figures as Lincoln, Gladstone, Lloyd-George, and Wilson. More recent examples - such as Jimmy Carter and George W. Bush - mark the later decay of this tradition.

† The entire relevant chapter from Churchill's memoir, The Aftermath, is worth reading (chapter 18, "The Greek Tragedy"), as Churchill was a contemporary observer, helped to instigate the failed Dardanelles campaign of 1915-16, and tried to correct the pro-Ottoman apologetics already then spreading in the 1920s that attempted to rationalize the Armenian massacre. Enemies in the Great War, Britain and Ottoman Turkey had been allies in the nineteenth century, and, in 1914, a significant residue of support for Turkey remained in Britain, especially in the Conservative Party. OTOH, the Liberals, led earlier by Gladstone, had been a thorn in the side of the Ottomans as they launched a final wave of massacres against their Christian subjects in the 1890s.

The first major English-language apologist for the Ottomans was British historian Arnold Toynbee, who was also an antisemite. Toynbee claimed that the Armenian massacre was merely wartime Allied propaganda. While it is true that the Allies made effective use of the Armenian massacre in their propaganda, the distrust and horror of Ottoman minorities policy was real and deeply-rooted, and for good reasons. The most damning evidence on the massacre is precisely the records of the German and Austrian missions in Istanbul, not publicly available until after 1918. The ambassadors were convinced by mid-1915 that the Young Turk government meant to exterminate the Ottoman-ruled Armenians. Without guidance from Berlin or Vienna on the issue, they protested verbally but made only feeble attempts to stop it and publicly rationalize for their ally. Individual Germans and Austrians did undertake some attempts to save the surviving Armenians.

Churchill's First World War memoirs are not read much here in the US. They're far more relevant to what we're seeing now - in Turkey, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan - than his better-known Second World War memoirs.

The lost city of the desert

Next stop after Tel Aviv was the twin desert cities of Eilat and Aqaba. They sit on opposite sides, Israeli and Jordanian, of the same harbor at the top of the Red Sea branch called - surprise - the Gulf of Eilat or Aqaba (depending on whom you ask). This tip of the Red Sea actually has four converging countries - Egypt, Israel, Jordan, Saudi Arabia - within a small area. The Israeli-Egyptian border is marked by the small desert town of Taba, a gateway for tourists into and out of the Sinai peninsula. But not for me - my goal was across the harbor in Jordan - the lost desert city of Petra.

It was still August and still very hot when I arrived in Eilat; the first day's high was 45 C or 114 F. Besides wearing a hat at all times during the day, you have to drink water constantly. You don't sweat in the desert. The water just silently leaves your body, and you don't notice until you pass out. So you just drink every ten minutes or so.

You can tour Petra in lots of ways, including on your own. But the more you leave in the hands of your tour company and guide, the less hassle you have. (It also helps to travel light.) Israel and Jordan signed a peace treaty in 1994, and the growth of tourism and the growth of both Eilat and Aqaba as ports have transformed the border area between the two countries. Nonetheless, there are significant visa and crossing fee technicalities you have to take care of before crossing. For Petra itself, a guide is far better than trying on your own. Our guide was both excellent and easy-going. He even gave us a from-the-bus tour of Aqaba, before we headed north toward Petra, which is about half-way to Jordan's capital, Amman.

As we drove down the shoreline boulevard of Aqaba (almost everything you see is new), we passed that enormous Jordanian flag so large you can see it easily from the Israeli side. This flag marks the location of the old Ottoman fort, long since torn down, that once guarded the harbor with its powerful guns. In July 1917, Lawrence and his Beduin irregulars, after "doing the impossible" and crossing the desert behind Aqaba, took the fort from the rear (the Turkish guns couldn't be pointed landward!) and later met Feisal of Mecca, the first Hashemite king, at the shore. The Hashemites at that time ruled Mecca and Medina, the Muslim holy cities, but were kicked out by a Saudi-Wahhabi army from central Arabia in the 1920s. (Thus was born Saudi Arabia.) The British created from trans-Jordanian Palestine a new "Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan," the modern Middle East's oldest surviving government. They included Aqaba as Jordan's only seaport.

The Jordanians were friendly and completely fit the common perception of the desert Beduin as hospitable. There was a fair amount of border security crossing both ways; walking the fifty meters of no-man's land between the guard houses was a little unnerving. Large signs and billboards on the Jordanian side show the current king (Abdullah) and his father (Hussein) and remind you that you're now in a conservative monarchy, albeit a relatively benevolent one. Jordan has opened up to globalization in a significant way, with Aqaba forming (like Eilat) a tax-free zone to attract residents and investment. I heard that Amman has become very modern, with a new airport that even Israelis use (because it's cheaper than Ben Gurion airport, which itself has been completely and dazzlingly rebuilt), and new infrastructure was everywhere we looked. But violent incidents have occurred in Jordan: the 2005 Amman hotel bombings by an al Qa'eda affiliate (not long after similar bombings in the Egyptian Sinai) and, back into the 1990s, an attack by Jordanian border guards on a group of Israeli school children touring Jordan just after the peace treaty. Security was also very evident: civil policemen and army reservists, both prominent in Aqaba and in our destination of Petra.

After Aqaba came the long climb up the desert road (about 90 minutes) to the plateau over the Dead Sea. The temperature dropped to a more comfortable 32 C or 90 F. Funny how your perception of "hot" changes after a day in Eilat!

To see Petra fully, you need about three days - so says my book - but we had only about five hours, which was enough time to see the central part of the Petra site, now a royal Jordanian park. The town outside the park, Wadi Musa, has grown rapidly in recent years, as the government has tried to get the Beduin to give up their nomadic ways and settle down in one spot. The town features a mosque near the reputed Well of Moses (Ain Musa), the rock that Moses struck to get water for the complaining Israelites. As in Aqaba, we were not allowed off the bus; instead our guide got us water and fresh fruit while we waited, and we proceeded to the park entrance.*

You can look at a map and professional photographs of Petra here, or you can watch the third Indiana Jones movie, which was filmed at Petra. I'll just say that the site deserves its status as one of the "new seven wonders of the world." The city is located in a deep rock gorge (the Siq) of mainly sandstone. Except for some Roman-era improvements (like columns and stone pavement), the whole city was carved from this sandstone. It was created by the Nabateans, an originally nomadic north-Arabian people who settled down in this area around 300 BCE, not long after Alexander the Great conquered the area. They adapted a Hellensitic style for their main buildings, including the famous central building, the Khazneh or Treasury. No one is sure what its actual function was. Archaeologists (including T. E. Lawrence) have been working at Petra since the early twentieth century.

Around it are carved residential caves and tombs, and a carved Roman-era amphitheater as well. The innermost part of the Siq contains more Roman-era remains - a colonnaded Cardo (paved commercial street) and a law court. These were destroyed in late antiquity by earthquakes during the city's long decline. The site seems to have been abandoned completely after about 600 CE. It was rediscovered by the outside world in the nineteenth century.

Even the sand at Petra is memorable. It's red, desert-hot, crumbled sandstone, not beach sand. I was wearing sandals, wishing I had worn something more solid, since it burned my feet. Only the big Roman pavement stones were really comfortable to walk on. The Roman engineering was outstanding; sometimes it took a while to decide if I was looking at something modern or ancient.

For several centuries, a Beduin clan (the bani Bedoul) has been squatting on the site. The government has tried, without much success, to induce the Bedoul to leave and settle in Wadi Musa. The tourist trade is big business within Petra itself, and the Beduin living there apparently make a good living at it: tourists need water, batteries, film and camel and donkey rides. (There's even a donkey taxi down the Siq and back. No powered vehicles are allowed in the site itself, so animal power is it.) It doesn't require even reading and writing skills; many Beduin are illiterate. But they do have cellphones and some even wear those popular-around-the-world Crocs, which looked strange on people riding camels.**

The Beduin at Petra to some extent are in on the whole "noble savage" joke. One of their most distinctive activities is creating crafts from the desert sandstone, including beautiful layered colored sand creations housed in curvy-shaped glass jars. If you go to Petra, be sure to go to what I thought was the best craft campsite, which features a large, humorous Flintstones sign.***

I wanted to take a picture here, but avoided it - I avoided taking any pictures of people in Jordan, actually. There is a clear taboo on it, partly for security, but also for strong cultural and religious reasons common in the more conservative areas of the Middle East. Not wanting to play to the "ugly tourist" stereotype means learning where such lines are and not crossing them.

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* Originally, I thought such measures we designed to protect Jordanians from us - Jordan is a conservative place, although not radically reactionary (like Saudi Arabia). Later, I realized the isolation was more designed to keep us from mingling with Jordanians in a way that would make us easier targets for terrorists, like the mixed Muslim-foreign tourist situations targeted by the Amman and Sinai terrorists in 2005. When radical Islamic terrorists attack such mixed groups, they're "sending a message" - not just to outsiders, but also to Muslims who mix as equals with non-Muslims. Our group had some Israelis, with a mix of Jews and Christians; many outside groups at Petra were Christian. But a lot of tourist groups at the park were Muslim, mainly from the Gulf kingdoms and, if their dress was any indication, one from Saudi Arabia.

** Not that I'm singling out the Beduin in particular. Crocs look ridiculous on anyone over the age of about 10. Crocs do "breathe," though, making them both protective and comfortable in the desert.

Inside Petra park are also some projects sponsored by the current Queen of Jordan to help the Beduin raise horses and other animals and help the Beduin women in particular. As in any traditional and patriarchal society, they're completely dependent on men. If a woman lacks a husband, father, or brother to rely on, she's in serious trouble.

*** Yes, Jordanians watch television - the Flintstones are dubbed in Arabic.

It didn't happen, and they're here to finish the job

UPDATE: And then there's stuff like this ....
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Wasn't it surreal, that Holocaust denial conference in Tehran? It had all the air of a malevolent witch-doctors' convention, and I don't mean to insult witch doctors :) What is it about this subject that brings out all the kooks? Anti-semitism is a kind of mental disorder; when it becomes widespread in a society, especially among its elites, it signals a societal or civilizational crisis. Anti-semitism is usually not about Jews, but typically about something else, and that "something else" is the real clue to the crisis.

The world's most important Holocaust-denier/minimizer is David Irving, the British historian who wrote a semi-respectable book in the 70s on World War II from the German point of view, but even then drifting over to the dark side; then in later decades showing up at neo-Nazi konklaves and the like. He claimed that Holocaust historian Deborah Lipstadt libeled him, sued her in the UK, and lost his case. Irving was just released from jail in Austria and served in absentia as the star of the Tehran conference.

Several countries in Europe have criminal or civil laws on the books banning Holocaust denial. These sorts of laws, from an American point of view, seem like an out-of-bounds infringement on free speech, even offensive or ridiculous speech. However, Americans aren't used to having large fascist/racist parties in their political culture. Anti-semitism in American society has declined dramatically since 1945 and is now a fringe phenomenon - plus America has never had a movement of political anti-semitism. Not so in Europe: certain European countries, like Austria, Germany, and France, do have such parties - and had them far worse in the recent past - and so Europeans might be excused for having such laws. Nevertheless, such laws are a misguided approach to the problem. Malevolent misinformation needs to be answered with more and better speech, not a ban.

The conference also marked the emergence of a new and frightening alliance: neo-Nazis and radical Islamists, along with a handful of anti-Zionist Jews and fringe radical left kooks (requires subscription). (I wonder if you can "present" a paper at such "conferences," then put it on your CV.) The burgeoning alliance of these groups has been unfolding for almost a decade. People are known by the company they keep, and we must avoid the false but common liberal assumption that better-educated people are immune to such thinking. In the Islamic world, the elites are especially saturated with it. (Ahmadinejad is an engineer.) They believe in it as an all-purpose pseudo-explanation of what their sorry excuse for a civilization suffers - here is today's relevant clue. The analogy with the German-speaking world, especially after 1918, is obvious: there too the core of the anti-semitic movements were made up of a large number of educated people, and Germany more generally was the best-educated society in the Western world. Evidently, it isn't just quantity that counts, but the quality and content of education. And of course, Germany was saturated at that time with its own kind of baneful "identity politics."

Unlike the European/Western world, where reminding people of the basic facts of the Holocaust and the immense evil it represented is largely preaching to the choir, the problem in the Muslim world is a combination of self-interested denial and simple ignorance. Ignorance is the natural state of humanity, while the denial stems from that mixture (again!) of the post-modern and the medieval: bogus claims of victimhood (unless we count collective self-victimization) and religious intolerance. Muslims, especially but not solely in Arab countries, live in, not so much a civilization, but the collapsed ruin of one; in those ruins, they are subject to a flood of official and semi-official anti-semitic propaganda that the Western world has not seen since the 1930s. There is no generally accepted background of historical knowledge to counter this flood, and its effect, especially on Muslims born since about 1970, has been profoundly pernicious.

That needs to change. The agencies best positioned to fight the flood (such as the Anti-Defamation League and the US Holocaust Memorial Museum) have been misguided and myopic in this area, obsessed with relatively marginal threats in the Western world, and only slowly turning their attention to the center of contemporary anti-semitism, the Muslim world. (A future posting will expand on these failures of Jewish institutions and leadership.) The Holocaust Museum did recently start an overdue program directed at the "new" anti-semitism, engaging the help of one of the most important Muslim critics of the Islamic world, the Somali-born Ayaan Hirsi Ali. She discusses anti-semitism in the Muslim world here (requires registration).

Another striking development is Robert Satloff's new book on the Holocaust in North Africa and Arabs and Muslims who helped to rescue Jews under German or Vichy French rule. Satloff is interviewed here; his book is reviewed here (requires subscription). One of the astonishing conclusions of Satloff's research is that the descendants of these Muslim rescuers in question do not want their ancestors recognized as righteous gentiles or listed at Yad Vashem, Israel's Holocaust memorial. Modern anti-semitism has a long history in the modern Middle East, stretching back to the 1920s or before, but its virulence and spread have jumped in recent decades. That makes developments like this (PDF) all the more understandable and necessary. There are Middle Eastern voices speaking out against these trends, but they are few in number, marginal, and under constant threat.

And while we're at it, we should also keep in mind the persecution and (sometimes) genocide of Christians and non-Arabs in the greater Middle East, from the late 19th century on, from the Kurdish mountains to the Sudan. The Armenian case of 1915-17 is merely the best known; the Darfur situation, just the latest.

The general thrust of these efforts has to include overcoming the deeply ingrained liberal prejudices of white guilt, cultural relativism, and "noble savagery" in connection with the Muslim world. More generally, we should ultimately expect the Muslim world to observe basic decencies that we take for granted in the civilized world. The Islamic world, especially in the Middle East, is a long way from that, but there's no better place to start than with Holocaust-denial, anti-semitism, and genocide-incitement.

Middle East: Deep background

Friends want to know from where I know what I know about the Middle East (ME). My first advice: stop watching television news and treat newspapers with a large grain of salt. The latest faux-tography scandals just reinforce this point.

The Middle East's most basic problems are (1) its tribal/sectarian social structure; and (2) the curse of oil money.

1. The first means that ME countries are not societies in the Western sense, but tribal collectives lacking a "social contract" and making civilization and progress impossible. The only apparent alternative to endless Hobbesian war-of-all-against-all is dictatorship or theocracy.

2. The flow of oil out means a flow of oil money in. That money goes into the hands of elites (governmental and otherwise). It gets squandered on war and terrorism, or socked away in Swiss bank accounts. Governments also use it to buy off their populations, inverting the normal relationship between productive citizens and the tax-dependent state. Without the normal flow of money from society to state, society has no say in how the state operates. Here is one of the main reasons why the Middle East is not democratic.

American policy must be rebuilt from scratch to counter these two problems:

1. Political reform (NOT forced regime change) in promising Arab countries (like Jordan, Morocco, Gulf States) while reducing American relations with Saudi Arabia and Egypt; and

2. An international effort by oil-consuming countries to reduce demand for oil. This is not mainly an American problem (most of that oil goes to Europe and Asia), but American leadership here is nonetheless essential. The international oil market is fully flexible, and oil is a fully fungible commodity, meaning that its pointless to try to achieve "energy independence" -- the oil market in one place is completely coupled to everywhere else.

On the subject of oil money and what it does, look at Roger Stern's concise, arresting analysis of oil market power (a politically managed monopoly with artificially elevated prices) and the ME mischief it makes possible (PDF download). Here's a non-technical summary.

Take a look at JihadWatch and its DhimmiWatch page. You will learn things that the establishment media would rather not discuss about Islam and its attitude towards nonbelievers and their status under traditional Islamic law. If you want to know what a dhimmi is, think of Uncle Tom living under Islamic law, then go read DhimmiWatch. In this vein, consider these books: Andrew Bostom, The Legacy of Jihad (2005) and Ibn Warraq (pseudonym), Why I Am Not a Muslim (2003). In a related vein, check out The David Project, led by the brilliant Charles Jacobs.

The best blog on the Middle East is that of Michael Totten. It is essential reading if you want to keep up and get a flavor of what it's really like. Totten has spent the most time in Lebanon, but also a lot of time in Israel, Kurdistan, and other places. And he has a long list of links to other great blogs and resources, as well as to wonderful essays by himself and others.

Here's my own, far from exhaustive, list of essential books, with comments.

Bernard Lewis: Any book you can get, especially The Muslim Discovery of Europe (1982), The Jews of Islam (1984), Semites and Anti-Semites (1986), Islam and the West (1993), and What Went Wrong? (2001). The last of the polymathic giants, an unrivaled knowledge of languages and literature, one of the last century's greatest historians and Orientalists. Increasingly under attack by PC-ignorant "Middle East studies" hacks not worthy to lick his shoes. Has important blind spots -- too close to the subject in some ways, often blinds him to what Pryce-Jones writes about (see below).

Speaking of PC-ignorant academic hacks, contemplate the corruption of American academia by political correctness and Saudi oil money by following Martin Kramer's devastating study of "Middle East studies," Ivory Towers on Sand (2001).

David Fromkin: International relations faculty at Boston University, author of A Peace to End All Peace (1989), the best single book on the origins of the modern Middle East. Narrows temporal focus to 1910-1924, broadens geographic focus to all of "greater" Middle East, including central Asia (Persia, Afghanistan, Soviet "stans").

Critical insights: the collapse of the Ottoman Empire in 1918 and its caliphate in 1921 started the transition of the ME from an imperial-theocratic to a Western-style secular nation-state system, which transition is resisted by Islamic traditionalists and reactionaries. More than ever, now that the Cold War is over, this is THE major conflict at issue in the ME.

David Pryce-Jones: Journalist and novelist, 60-plus-year veteran of the ME, author of The Closed Circle (1989), the best single book on the culture of the Middle East. Dark, dense, long, with depressingly pessimistic conclusions, worth the long slog to get through it.

Critical points: defines like no other book the keys to the ME's tribal culture: the honor-shame system, power challenging and violent careerism built on sponsored proxyship (think Arafat, Zarqawi, Nasrallah etc.), lack of social contract, resulting in no progress possible -- hence, the "closed circle" or "zero-sum" game. How these tribal patterns interact in a toxic way with Islamic restrictions on women and religious and ethnic minorities. The noxious role played by petrowealth in creating pseudo-modern countries with the material trinkets of modernity (bought from actually modern countries), but lacking real political, social, and economic modernity.

Fouad Ajami: Now teaching at Johns Hopkins, author of two essential books on the post-1967 Middle East, The Arab Predicament (1981 and 1992) and The Dream Palace of the Arabs (1998). The best criticism of the ME is by semi-insider/semi-outsiders -- in Ajami's case, a half-Persian, half-Arab Shiite from Lebanon now living in America.

Conor Cruise O'Brien: Famous Irish diplomat, once Ireland's ambassador to the UN, got to know Israel's ambassador because "Ireland" is next to "Israel" in the alphabet, author of The Siege: The Saga of Israel and Zionism (1986). Somewhat dated and superseded by more recent scholarship, but still the best single-volume introduction.

Fareed Zakaria: I should also mention a book that I'll return to later, his The Future of Freedom (2003), one of the most important foreign policy books published since the end of the Cold War.

This generations' sharpest critics of Islam, not surprisingly, are women. Everyone suffers under the theocracy-based system of honor-shame, but women more so as a rule than men. Many of the best women authors here are Iranian. See these personal odysseys:

- Azar Nafisi's Reading Lolita in Tehran (2003), an astonishing best-seller
- Marjan Satrapi's Persepolis (2003) and Persepolis 2 (2004)
- Roya Hakakian's Journey from the Land of No (2004)

And they're not all Iranian: don't miss Irshad Manji (The Trouble with Islam, 2004) and Ayaan Hirsi Ali (The Caged Virgin, 2006, based on Submission, a 2004 film co-produced with director Theo van Gogh, who was murdered by an Islamic fanatic as a result). See Christopher Hitchens' tribute to Ali here.