middle east essay introduction

A History of the Middle East 1.01

Robert J. Flynn, Portland Community College

Copyright Year: 2021

Publisher: Portland Community College

Language: English

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Reviewed by Lindsay Benstead, Professor of Politics & Global Affairs, Portland State University on 8/18/23

This textbook provides a comprehensive overview of Middle East history, beginning with the age of the Prophet and ending with the immediate post-9-11 period. It is refreshing to see coverage of North Africa, which is often under-emphasized in... read more

Comprehensiveness rating: 5 see less

This textbook provides a comprehensive overview of Middle East history, beginning with the age of the Prophet and ending with the immediate post-9-11 period. It is refreshing to see coverage of North Africa, which is often under-emphasized in textbooks on the Middle East (MENA) region.

Content Accuracy rating: 5

The textbook is unbiased and accurate. Several canonical works from Middle East history are cited by the author.

Relevance/Longevity rating: 5

Since the focus of the textbook is on history, it will remain relevant for some time to come. While it is true that the discussion ends with the early 2000s, this is not a concern for a history textbook.

Clarity rating: 5

The book is written with clear language that will be understandable to undergraduates.

Consistency rating: 5

The textbook is written in a highly consistent manner across the chapters, in part because it has a single author. However, it is dense and will likely benefit from complementary lectures, discussions, films, and other resources.

Modularity rating: 5

The chapters are clearly titled making it easy for faculty to assign single chapters within different courses, depending on the specific topics and time periods under study.

Organization/Structure/Flow rating: 5

The chapters are organized chronologically, making the textbook easy to follow.

Interface rating: 4

The interface does not include internal links, but it is possible to navigate using Control F without problems. There are no URLs which could go stale.

Grammatical Errors rating: 5

The book is free from grammatical errors.

Cultural Relevance rating: 5

The book covers sensitive topics. It does so in an unbiased manner and draws on scholars from different perspectives and backgrounds.

Table of Contents

• Chapter One: Introduction
• Chapter Two: Muhammad and Islam
• Chapter Three: The Arab Conquest and the Establishment of the Caliphate
• Chapter Four: Religious, Social, and Intellectual Changes During the Caliphate, 632-1258
• Chapter Five: The Decline of the Arab Empire, 809-1300
• Chapter Six: The Gunpowder Empires
• Chapter Seven: Ottoman Crisis and Adaptation, 1566-1768
• Chapter Eight: Western Intrusions, Eastern Responses, 1768-1878
• Chapter Nine: The Twilight of the Ottoman Empire, 1878-1916
• Chapter Ten: “A Peace to End All Peace"
• Chapter Eleven: The Independent States, 1918-1948
• Chapter Twelve: The Middle East Under European Control, 1922-1948
• Chapter Thirteen, The Establishment of Israel, 1918-1948
• Chapter Fourteen: The Age of Nasser, 1949-1967
• Chapter Fifteen: Arabia, Turkey, and Iran, 1949-1979
• Chapter Sixteen: The Middle East After Nasser, 1967-1979
• Chapter Seventeen: Transition and Stalemate, 1980-1990
• Chapter Eighteen: The Gulf War and Its Legacy, 1990-2001

Ancillary Material

About the book.

History of the Middle East is a survey of Middle Eastern History from the time of Muhammad in the seventh century until the eve of the War on Terror in 2001. It is designed to meet the requirements of a single-term introductory course and is aimed at students who have no more than a casual understanding of the history, cultures, and societies of the region. It offers a relatively concise narrative of the region’s historical development that seeks to avoid oversimplification on the one hand and overcomplexity on the other.

About the Contributors

Robert Flynn  received his PhD in diplomatic history from the University of Kentucky in 2001 where he studied with George Herring. He has been an instructor of history at Portland Community College since 2004 and teaches Middle East history, Western Civilization, and US History. He is presently serving as the PCC History Subject Area Committee chair.

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Introduction to the Middle East

This course provides a broad introduction to the history, politics, societies, and cultures of the Middle East. It first critically assesses what is meant by the container "Middle East," examining what holds it together, how it functions as a regional system of interconnected waterways and landmasses, and how it relates to multiple other regional designations (the Mediterranean, EurAsia, Africa, etc.). Next, the course briefly covers origins in Late Antiquity and the birth and spread of Islam up through the rise of the Ottoman, Safavid/Qajar, and Saadian/Alawite empires in the 16th century. The bulk of our attention then focuses on developments from the 19-21st centuries across the region stretching from Morocco to Iran. One goal of the course is for you to develop a literacy/fluency in key terms and geographical references and a basic chronological framework of the region's history. However, the primary goal--with that base knowledge--is for you to also be able to think analytically and critically about key debates, topics, and themes relevant to Middle East. Recurrent topics and themes that we will pursue include geopolitics, state formation, and the importance of the environment and resources. We will also consider the evolving roles of Judaism/Christianity/Islam and other religious traditions and identities in the region; the powerful impact and legacies of empire and colonialism; the importance and ambivalences of nationalism and other forms of collective identity; and the impact of regional and global wars on the region. Extended attention will be devoted to the Palestine-Israel conflict, the role of the US and other Great Power intervention, petro-politics, and the recurrent importance of society-based mobilizations.

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Since it was first published in 2006, this concise overview of the making of the contemporary Middle East has become essential reading for students and general readers who want to gain a better understanding of this diverse region. Writing for a wide audience, Mehran Kamrava takes us from fall of the Ottoman Empire to today, exploring along the way such central issues as the dynamics of economic development, authoritarian endurance, and the Israel-Palestinian conflict. For this new, thoroughly revised edition, he has brought the book fully up to date by incorporating events and issues of the past few years. The Modern Middle East now includes information about the June 2009 Iranian presidential elections and their aftermath, changes precipitated so far by the Obama administration, Israel’s attack on Gaza in 2008, the effects of globalization on economic development, and more.

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An Introduction to the Middle East

Understand the basics of the Middle East quickly and objectively: Geography, people, demographics, politics, and history before and after Islam, with emphasis on demystifying the region, eliminating stereotypes, and providing illuminating context for issues of the day.

• The U. S. Government
• U.S. Foreign Policy
• U.S. Liberal Politics
• U.S. Conservative Politics
• Women's Issues
• Civil Liberties
• Race Relations
• Immigration
• Crime & Punishment
• Canadian Government
• Understanding Types of Government
• What You Need to Know About the Wailing Wall or Western Wall
• Text of 1949 UN Resolution Calling for Referendum on Kashmir
• What Are Ziggurats and How Were They Built?
• The Quraysh Tribe of Mecca
• Defining the Arab World and the Middle East
• Kashmir History and Background
• Leaders of the Middle East: A Photo Gallery
• The Sinai Peninsula From Ancient Times to Today
• What Is the Middle East?
• Syrian President Bashar al-Assad: Profile
• Sunni Versus Shiite Conflict Explained
• Understanding the Barbary Pirates
• The Difference Between Alawites and Sunnis in Syria
• The Middle East

Browse Course Material

Course info.

• Prof. Abigail Jacobson

Departments

As taught in.

• Middle Eastern History
• Modern History

Learning Resource Types

The middle east in the 20th century, readings and videos.

[C] = Cleveland, William L., and Martin Bunton. A History of the Modern Middle East . 5th ed. Westview Press, 2012. ISBN: 9780813348339.

*Note: The readings in the book can also be found in earlier editions.

[G] = Gelvin, James L. The Modern Middle East: A History . 3rd ed. Oxford University Press, 2011. ISBN: 9780199766055.

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Historical Perspectives

The middle east as seen through foreign eyes, twentieth and twenty-first centuries john woods, antiquity to the nineteenth century matthew w. stolper.

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Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries

The middle east as seen through foreign eyes.

Gustave Dore’s Engraving of Canto XXVIII (Lines 30 and 31 of Inferno, the First Part of Dante Alighieri’s Epic Poem, the Divine Comedy)

Conceptions of the Middle East and wider Muslim world are rooted in European culture. They have been fueled by the rivalries that have existed among Muslim and Christian polities, with the Mediterranean Sea functioning as the nexus of connectivity and competition. For globally minded European states and empires, the Muslim world encompassed an alien ideological, political, economic, and social system. Islam, and its Prophet, have both been routinely the target of calumny in European texts dating back to the medieval period. The twelfth-century CE “Song of Roland” portrays Muhammad as a false deity and his followers as misguided pagan idolaters. In the fourteenth-century CE Divine Comedy , Dante Alighieri places Muhammad in the Eighth Circle of Hell where, as an intentional “disseminator of scandal and schism,” he is nearly cleft in two by a sword-wielding demon. In later centuries, when Europeans were making advances in the natural sciences, Islam was explained in terms of psychological pathology, with its Prophet a mentally dysfunctional epileptic. Until well into the twentieth century, it was common in the West to refer to Islam as “Muhammadanism,” a label implying that Christianity is the paradigmatic religious tradition and Islam is an imitation with Muhammad serving as an inferior substitute for Jesus.

From the Cape to Cairo

With the ability of the Ottoman Empire to challenge Europeans militarily from the fourteenth century onward, it was not uncommon for Muslims to be depicted as violent, barbaric savages. In Muslim societies, the segregation of men and women into separate spheres of activity aroused both the prurient fascination and moral indignation of European observers, leading to a characterization of Muslim men as tyrannical oppressors of women and Muslim women as passive victims devoid of power or agency. During the age of European global empires, to correct and reverse perceived cultural shortcomings, colonial governments sought to reconfigure Muslim polities through the imposition of the socio-moral conventions of the modern West.

As a cultural extension of Western Europe, the United States inherited many of these images and ideas, but it was not until after the Second World War that Americans found a suitable context in which to place them. At the conclusion of World War II the United States as a new world power found itself heir to many of the political problems of European colonialism. Between 1946 and 1953, the Foundations were laid for many of the foreign relations problems the United States deals with today. First and foremost, the oil of the region was deemed the “greatest prize in human history” by an American commission established by President Roosevelt. Secondly, the Middle East became a zone of violent proxy conflicts as the United States and the Soviet Union vied for strategic influence. Thirdly, the United States’ support for the creation of the state of Israel, the subsequent dispossession of a large part of the Palestinian population, and the hostility of the surrounding Arab states to both Israel and the displaced Palestinians destabilized the region and continues to be a source of grave concern for American policy makers and the American public. Finally, anti-colonial forms of nationalism, such as Muhammad Musaddiq’s (Mossadegh) Iran, posed a threat to American economic interests. The CIA-orchestrated overthrow of the Iranian government in 1953 in response to Musaddiq’s desire to nationalize Iran’s oil industry marked the first direct involvement of the United States in re-shaping the region politically according to its strategic interests. This intervention was invoked as a rallying point during the 1979 Iranian Revolution when the American-installed Shah was deposed.

It was not until the 1970s that Americans began to feel themselves directly affected by events in the Middle East and Islamic World. The OPEC oil embargo, enacted in retaliation to American support for Israel in the October 1973 War, caused fuel prices to skyrocket and created economic hardship and resentment among Americans, who directed their animosity at the perceived rapaciousness of Arab oil “sheikhs.” In 1979 and 1980, the media spectacle of the Iran hostage crisis captivated Americans and produced a storehouse of dramatic video footage that became the defining imagery of the Middle East for several years to come. In 1983, an attack on the marine barracks in Beirut left 241 American servicemen dead, and throughout the 1980s until the end of the Cold War, Middle East-related hijackings, car bombs, hostage takings, and assassinations abroad seemed almost a daily occurrence.

In the dissolution of the Soviet Union, some saw a vanquishing of the “red menace” of communism only for it to be replaced by a new geo-political threat: the “green wave” of Islam, echoing the “yellow peril” of the early twentieth century. Articulated most memorably in his forecast for a global “clash of civilizations,” Samuel Huntington imagined a post-Cold War world that pitted the forces of Western liberal democracy against a Chinese-Islamic multi-colored mega-enemy. Beyond the political science and foreign policy intelligentsia who cast Muslims as the new spoilers of world peace and security, Islam also plays a significant if negative role in the view of evangelical or fundamentalist Christians with certain eschatological expectations. According to these Christians, signs of the impending cataclysm include a re-establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine and the return of Jerusalem to Jewish control. In most apocalyptic narratives, Muslims are antagonists in the fulfillment of biblical prophecy, which in turn contributes to enthusiastic and uncritical championing of Israel by many American evangelicals. Whatever their motivations, these notions continue to be strikingly expressed in the mainstream media. An instructive example comes from the cover of the May 1994 issue of World Press Review which features two minarets silhouetted against a red-orange sky and a setting sun. Superimposed on this ominous image is the question “Fear of Islam – Is it a real world menace, or just the latest evil empire?” a restrictive formulation that offers no other possible interpretations.

In addition to the shortcomings of American foreign policy and the nurturing of extremist religious ideologies, two other factors have been crucial in conditioning current notions of the Muslim Other: rapidly changing demography and the perception of economic inequality. Growth in Muslim populations in both the United States and western Europe accelerated in the latter half of the twentieth century. Immigration to the United States has increased dramatically since 1960, with the overwhelming majority of these immigrants arriving from the so-called Third World. These new-comers, many of whom are Muslim, have not only diversified major cities but have also transformed the demography of smaller suburban communities and rural townships. Although many Muslims have managed to integrate themselves quite seamlessly into the fabric of Western society, terrorist attacks in New York, Madrid, and London and social unrest among Muslim immigrants in France and Germany have caused some Americans and Europeans to turn a fearful eye toward Islam and perceive growing Muslim communities as internal, existential threats. Finally, in the United States, the gap between the wealthy and middle- and working-class people has steadily widened throughout the last two decades of the twentieth century and into the first decade of the twenty-first century. While middle- and working-class families struggle to deal with this development, hardship and frustration have caused some to seek out situations or individuals to blame for their predicament. In some cases, new immigrants—mostly Latinos but also Middle Easterners and South Asians—are the targets of their hostility.

Professor of Iranian and Central Asian History and of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, The University of Chicago

Alexander Barna

Outreach Coordinator, Center for Middle Eastern Studies, University of Chicago

Guiding Questions

1. The author uses a combination of historic situational reasoning to explain why some believe Islam represents a growing threat to American society. Summarize the author’s six guiding ideas that explain American’s popular views of Islam.

2. In one sense, the United States, as Woods clearly argues, inherited a view of Islam through many European images and ideals, but in another sense our view of Islam has also been shaped by events.  Explain the factors that have defined Islam in the United States. 

The Middle East as Seen Through Foreign Eyes  »  Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries  » Essay

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Introduction: Words, Language, Message

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The Introduction, co-written by Yonatan Mendel and Abeer AlNajjar, highlights that language – including ones’ verbal and written expression, selected or forgotten terminology, vowels pronounced or not pronounced, and locations written on road signs – provides researchers with a nuanced, honest and deep analysis of society, of what it tells us and of what it keeps away from us. The authors highlight that for Yasir Suleiman, to whom the book is dedicated, and as seen in his extensive academic research, language deeply and profoundly exposes social and political realities. The authors therefore refer to language in its larger context, including the words which form the building blocks of language, the context in which such words are written and the phraseology selected, and to the way that the study of language may emerge as the ‘Black Box’ of human social and political journeys.

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Ethnicity, nationalism, and migration in the middle east.

• Zeynep Sahin Zeynep Sahin Department of Politics and International Relations in the University of Southern California
• https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190846626.013.174
• Published in print: 01 March 2010
• Published online: 30 November 2017

Since the second half of the 1940s, the Middle East has experienced intense migrations. In 2005 alone, the region received a total of approximately 6 million refugees. Migration flows to and from the Middle East have been linked to nationalist movements and ethnic conflicts. However, these relations have received little attention from scholars. Scholarly work on migration in the Middle East that has accumulated between the early 1950s and the late 1980s falls into two broad categories in terms of subject matter: Jewish migration to Israel and the Palestinian refugees, and migrations to labor-short countries of the Gulf and Europe. New trends in the literature on migration in the Middle East can also be identified, including those relating to the gender aspects of migration, population displacement and resettlement, return migration, and the relationship between migration and security. Although the field has made significant progress—the scope of the literature with respect to subject matter has broadened from the 1980s onward, and the methods used by scholars have become more sophisticated over the years—there are some shortcomings that need to be addressed. A number of important issues, such as citizenship or economic dynamics, remain unexplored. Since labor migrations to and from the Middle East are central to economic development, a focus on the evolution of migration may shed light on numerous relevant themes.

• Middle East
• nationalist movements
• ethnic conflicts
• nationalism
• population displacement
• citizenship

Introduction

Since the nineteenth century , the Middle East’s ethnic, religious, and linguistic heterogeneity has provided the basis for numerous nationalist movements. Some of these have come into conflict with states and majority populations, resulting in ethnic conflicts. Armenians, for example, fought against the Ottoman state in the later nineteenth century , which led to their mass expulsion. The right of autonomy has been claimed by Kurdish nationalist movements in Turkey, Iraq, and Iran since the early twentieth century . In each country, the ongoing ethnic conflicts led to forced migrations and internal displacement. The Jewish nationalist movement that emerged in Europe led to similar consequences for another Middle Eastern society. The creating of a Jewish homeland in 1948 led to the dispersal of Palestinians, who became the largest refugee population in the world. Migration flows to and from the Middle East have been intertwined with nationalist movements and ethnic conflicts. Migration is a crucial component in the political processes of the region, being both prime mover and consequence. However, these relations have received little attention. The primary focus of the existing scholarship on nationalism in the region has came from history, concentrating mostly on Arab nationalism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century (Haim 1962 ; Cleveland 1971 ; Dawn 1973 ; Clements 1976 ; Sivan 1987 ; Khalidi 1991 ; Abukhalil 1992 ; Kramer 1993 ). Since the 1980s, scholars have focused on single case studies (Gershoni 1981 ; Coury 1982 ; Beinin and Lockman 1987 ; Khoury 1987 ; Taspinar 2005 ; Çagatay 2006 ). It is argued that diverse histories and socioeconomic dynamics have led the different forms of nationalism and nationalist movements in the region. It is unlikely to be coincidental that studies about Palestinian and Kurdish movements have constituted a large body of the post-1980s literature on the region (Muslih 1988 ; Ruether 1989 ; Olson 1996 ; Vali 2003 ; Ahmed 2007 ). As Jankowski and Gershoni ( 1997 ) have argued, “nationalism has not been the exclusive motor of communal identity and activism in the Arab world” but it has been the motor of numerous migrations, and their outcomes, between the 1940s and today. This review essay will attempt to fill this lacuna. It is argued that the themes associated with the migration usually revolve around the nationalist movements and ethnic conflicts in the region. Bearing in mind that this is a developing region, economic dynamics must also be considered. Since labor migrations to and from the Middle East are central to economic development, a focus on the evolution of migration may shed light on numerous relevant themes.

Since the second half of the 1940s, the Middle East has experienced intense migratory movements. According to the United Nations (UN) World Migrant Stock Database, which includes Algeria, Libya, Tunisia, Egypt, Morocco, Bahrain, Iraq, Israel, Lebanon, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Turkey, United Arab Emirates, Yemen, Occupied Palestinian Territory, and Iran, the region totaled 26 million international migrants in 2005 . The number of refugees was around 6 million for that same year. The number of migrants is far higher here than in other developing regions. The region includes countries with heavy emigration such as Lebanon, Turkey, Algeria, Morocco, and Egypt, and oil-rich countries identified as the immigrant countries, as they rely on labor migration for their economic development. According to the UN Migrant Stock Data, the percentage of migrant population constituted more than one-half of the total population in three of the region’s countries in 2005 (Qatar 78.3 percent; UAE 71.4 percent; and Kuwait 62.1 percent). In four other countries, Bahrain, Jordan, Israel, and Palestine, the percentage of migrant population was over 30 percent.

Migration in the Middle East has been accelerating in response to economic push and pull factors, including the appeal of Gulf countries for Arab and Asian workers, and the appeal of Western Europe for Middle Eastern workers. Besides economic factors, war and international politics have influenced migration in the Middle East since World War I. Humphrey ( 1993 ) and Tabutin et al. ( 2005 ) have argued that the ethnic and religious diversity of the Middle Eastern diasporas in Europe, North America, and Australia is an indication of the level of ethnic conflict that occurred in the process of carving out nation-states from a multiethnic empire under the impact of European colonialism. There are many examples of how wars and political crises have led to emigration. The Arab–Israeli Wars in 1948 and 1967 led to the migration of Jewish people as well as the dislocation of the Palestinian population. The 1967 war led to the relocation of Egyptians both internally and externally to Kuwait and Saudi Arabia (Antoun 2005 ). Following Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, and the resulting Gulf War of 1991 , mass population dislocations occurred. In one year, it is estimated that between 4 and 5 million people were uprooted. The mass population movement influenced neighboring Turkey and Iran in particular, and other Middle Eastern countries in general. Many of these refugees later returned to Iraq. Since Kuwait, Iraq and Saudi Arabia had a huge migrant labor population, 2 million laborers returned to their countries of origin, including many from Asia (Russell 1992 :721). The ongoing conflicts following the liberation of Kuwait generated the dramatic refugee flow from Iraq.

The argument presented here is as follows. International migration has always been a crucial issue for the economy, politics and social fabric of the Middle East. Academic interest increased with research on Jewish settlement and Palestinian refugees after the Arab–Israeli conflict in the early 1950s. Collecting available statistical data on populations, J. Clarke ( 1972 ) edited some of the earliest research from a geographical perspective. His country-by-country survey provided a comprehensive picture of a wide variety of demographic conditions. The impact of large-scale international labor migration on social and economic structures in both labor-receiving and labor-sending countries has encouraged researchers of diverse disciplines, international organizations and research institutions to address the issue in the 1970s. Despite the magnitude of regional and international migration, migration studies could not be institutionalized as a distinct interdisciplinary field. The definition of subject matter, the role of theory, and the methodologies employed varied according to the tradition of various disciplines. Hollifield and Brettel ( 2007 ) have reported that similar to their counterparts in the US and Europe, social scientists studying the region do not approach immigration from a shared perspective, but from a variety of competing theoretical and ideological viewpoints.

Migration studies of the Middle East can be divided into two periods. The first period started in the early 1950s and continued until the early 1990s. Dramatic changes in the patterns of migration and the development of migration theory in the early 1990s initiated a considerable change in research, theory, and methodology. Literature on transnationalism and attempts to reconsider the state’s role in migration helped scholars deal with these shortcomings after 1995 . This evolution drew heavily on the growing intersection of anthropology and political science with migration studies. This essay will discuss the research and literature that appeared over the period from the early 1950s to the late 1980s. This work can be differentiated from later literature with respect to subject matter and the role of theory. The subject matter of the former literature falls into two broad categories: first, topics related to the Jewish migration to Israel and the Palestinian refugees; and second, the migrations to labor-short countries of the Gulf and Europe.

While it is hard to examine the use of theory in the context of the first subject, studies of labor migration pave the way for theory. In terms of the use of theory in literature, this review essay focuses on economic theory, which was employed to discuss the cause and effect relations of labor migration in both sending and receiving countries. The literature that has emerged since the 1990s involves a wider range of topics than earlier work. While topics related to the Jewish settlement of Israel and the Palestinian refugees remains salient, some neglected issues have been recognized. The feminization of Middle Eastern migration, replacement and return migration, and state responses to both emigration and immigration are among those addressed in the current literature. In terms of the use of theory, recent studies have found migration system theory more dynamic and comprehensive. Moreover, the general tendency toward transnationalism and the role of the state in migration studies has influenced those scholars who study migration and the Middle East after the mid-1990s.

Pointing to recent topics such as the migration–security relationship and transit migration, this essay will point to future directions in research, theory and methodology in migration studies of the Middle East. The last section of the essay will highlight a critical consideration of important elements, such as citizenship issues or immigrant integration in the receiving countries, which remain unconsidered and are closely related to nationalism.

Jewish Migration and Palestinian Refugees in the Early Literature 1950–90

The first category of research started to grow when Jewish immigrants arrived in Israel between 1948 and 1951 . Although studies were highlighting the population movements, they provided important accounts of factors underlying this migration. The nationalist movement and ethnic conflicts were an indispensable part of former literature. The Jewish population in Palestine doubled with over 600,000 new immigrants who would be citizens of the nation-state produced by the nationalist movement. About half of these immigrants had been refugees from Nazi concentration camps and had been displaced. The other half emigrated from the surrounding Arab countries (Kruger 2005 ; Kaplan 2008 ). Tabutin et al. ( 2005 ) report that Israel hosted nearly 3 million voluntary Jewish immigrants from various countries, including the Soviet Union, Ethiopia, European countries, the Middle East, and North Africa.

While the establishment of the state of Israel attracted Jewish immigrants, this development resulted in the expulsion of the Arab Palestinian population. There are no well-founded data on the number of Palestinians leaving their homes at the beginning of 1949 . The most reasonable estimate in many studies is around 700,000. Of these about 240,000 moved to three neighboring states, Lebanon, Transjordan, and Syria (Gilbar 1997 :11). Formidable communities also emerged in Iraq (4,000), Egypt (7,000–10,000), Kuwait (nearly 400,000 until the 1991 Gulf War), Saudi Arabia (150,000), other Gulf states (65,000) and the United States (100,000) (Kimmerling and Migdal 1993 :187). The June 1967 war resulted in another outpouring of 150,000–250,000 Palestinians from the West Bank and Gaza (Russell 1992 :719; Gilbar 1997 :11; Tabutin et al. 2005 :579). G. Talhami ( 2003 ), H. Cohen ( 2005 ), and N. Masalha ( 2000 ) have elaborated the means of expulsion, noting Israel’s determination to expand Jewish settlement, concentrating the internal Palestinian refugees in towns or villages that were distanced from strategically important areas, introducing absentee law, the legal confiscation of absentee property, and refusing to allow the internal refugees to return home. According to the UN statistics, the number of registered Palestine refugees has subsequently grown from 914,000 in 1950 to more than 4.6 million in 2008 , and continues to rise due to natural population growth. Palestinians have been the world’s largest refugee population since 1948 . UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) statistics shows that Afghans and Iraqis have followed the Palestinians. The number of Afghan refugees had reached almost 3.1 million and the number of Iraqis had reached 2.3 million at the end of 2007 .

The Jewish mass migration to Israel and the integration of various Jewish communes comprised the fundamentals of the scholarship on Middle East migration since the 1950s. The first studies about Jewish migration to Israel came out of the disciplines of demography, sociology and anthropology (Eisenstadt 1955 ; Kanovsky 1967 ; Willner 1969 ; Eisenstadt et al. 1970 ). Research institutions, such as the Institute of Contemporary Jewry, Hebrew University of Jerusalem [and] Demographic Center, Prime Minister’s Office, carried out research on the Jewish population in the Diaspora and in Israel to address migratory movements, population dynamics, urban and rural settlement, future developments and their implications from biblical to modern times (Bachi 1974 ). Using American sociological literature, the absorption of immigrants in Israel was examined in a comparative manner. Eisenstadt ( 1955 ) and Eisenstadt et al. ( 1970 ) provided analyses of the distinction between the refugee mentality of the Jewish community in Palestine before 1948 and the refugee mentality of the more recent groups emigrating from Europe. They suggested that differences in the mentalities of these two communities were reflected in forming the new social order and the state bureaucracy of Israel. Drawing on the comparison between immigration to Israel and immigration to other settlement countries, they found that attitudes of individual migrants or communities have been the key determinants for successful integration. In addition to the issues relevant to the mass migration to Israel between 1948 and 1951 , and integration of Jewish immigrants into the new country, the population policies of Israel became major topics of research. Government policies were examined to make projections about the population of Israel in the future and to suggest alternative immigration and fertility policies related to the ability of the Jewish state to survive in the prolonged conflict with its Arab neighbors (Friedlander 1975 ; Bachi 1976 ; Friedlander and Goldscheider 1979 ; Gilbar 1997 ).

From the Jewish side, mass migration and its consequences demanded new research on these new challenges; from the Palestinian side, the emergence of the Palestinian refugee problem and its impacts on the societies of the region urged scholars to conduct additional research. Since 1948 , the refugee problem has been at the heart of the Arab–Israeli conflict. Historians have developed some approaches to the origin of the problem. According to mainstream Israeli historiography dealing with the Israeli state’s pre-history, “the Palestinians fled from their villages and towns in 1948 under orders from their leaders and their number was equal to the number of Jews who left Arab countries for Israel” and the Palestinians’ right of return is an unacceptable maximalist claim, threatening the presence of Israel (Masalha 2003 :2). For instance, the Jewish historian D. Kaplan ( 1951 ) has claimed that the refugee problem is an abnormal problem, and even the recognition of Palestinians as internal refugees in Arab countries would provide better understanding of the problem. In the 1990s and the 2000s, mainstream Israeli historiography has been criticized by Arab and some Jewish historians for misleading historical and ideological orientations (Morris 1987 , 2004 ; Masalha 2000 , 2003 ; Shlaim 2001 ; Pappe 2006a , 2006b ). They have claimed that the refugee problem emerged because of Israel’s two objectives: (1) to clear the land for Jewish settlers and immigrants, and (2) to establish a homogenous Jewish state.

The life of Palestinians in refugee camps and in host countries had received significant attention. Theories and methods from sociology and anthropology dominated these studies as well. For instance, relying on interviews and participant observations, Y. Ben-Parath and E. Marx ( 1971 ) described the layout of the refugee camp, Jalazon, and its formal organization. They sought to investigate to what extent traditional social patterns persisted. The involvement of international organizations, mainly the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), paved the way for research examining their impact and their policies. From a political science perspective, E. Buehrig ( 1971 ) has argued that UNRWA’s education program did not erode the political nature of the refugee problem. According to his analysis, UNRWA has enhanced Palestinian consciousness, thus increasing the competence of the Palestinians to manage their own future. The agency was accused of being overtaken by the political character of the refugee problem.

Conceptualization has remained a distinctively politicized aspect of the relevant research due to the ongoing disagreements about historical facts. The identification of Palestinians, whether as refugees, displaced persons, or migrants has been an enduring debate among scholars, policy makers, and international organizations. UNRWA defined Palestine refugees as the persons whose normal place of residence was Palestine between June 1946 and May 1948 , and those who lost both their homes and means of livelihood as a result of the 1948 Arab–Israeli conflict. However, the situation has become much more complex since 1948 .

Changes in the Literature on Jewish Migration and Palestinian Refugees after 1990

Studies examining the mass immigration of Jews to the state of Israel continue to be produced. However, the focus of the research has shifted from the role of individual immigrants and communities to the role of state policies on immigrant integration (Morris 1987 , 2001 ; Shlaim 2001 ; Hacohen 2003 ). D. Hacohen ( 2003 ) has argued that Israel’s early immigration policies were shaped by various institutions and organizations as well as by individuals. Since the fall of the communist bloc triggered a Jewish migration from the ex-USSR to Israel in the 1990s, several studies have focused on the main aspects of this immigration wave (Buwalda 1997 ; Morozov 1999 ; Gitelman 2003 ; 2007 ).

In contrast to the relative lack of attention to Palestinian refugees in the older literature, after the 1990s the unsolved problem of refugees has attracted researchers from various disciplines. The history of the refugee problem has remained a main topic area. Novel approaches concerning methodology and historiography have been useful in the recent literature for overcoming the absence of Palestinian documentary records. Masalha ( 2005 ) has written that oral history could be the major means of reconstructing the history of Palestinian refugees and internally displaced Palestinians. Oral history is perceived as having similar importance in reconstructing the Palestinians’ history as in the recollection and collective memorization of the Holocaust. In a similar vein, Pappe ( 2006b ) has argued that the studies addressing the issue should incorporate the history and approach of the actors who were absent in the official narratives such as women, children, peasants, workers, town dwellers and farmers.

In addition to the studies about the history of the problem, the impact of the refugee issue on the Israeli-Palestinian question and the rights of refugees has become a primary subject. Case studies comparing the Palestinian refugee problem with other refugee problems have provided an enriching perspective for both refugee and diaspora studies. For example, in Palestinian Refugees: Pawns to Political Actors , Talhami ( 2003 ) has examined the impact of the refugee issue on the larger Palestinian political picture. The book presents a general outline of the history of refugees as refugees, and not as guerrillas or a transformed Palestinian elite.

The issue of Palestinian right of return remains a significant puzzle, which was addressed both by academics and policy makers after 2000 (Aruri 2001 ; Ginat and Perkins 2001 ; Dumper 2006 , 2007 ; Brynen and El-Rifai 2007 ). The studies have addressed many questions about the historical roots of the Palestinian refugee problem, Israeli perceptions of the problem, the practical feasibility of return, and the role of state actors and institutions in the solution of the problem including the United States and the European Union. For instance, Palestinian Refugees ( 2007 ), edited by Brynen and El-Rifai, addressed the absorption policies of a possible Palestinian state, highlighting that a significant number of Palestinians may choose to reside in a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza regardless of whatever other residential options may or may not be offered to them. The book has presented various findings about the anticipated social and economic impacts of refugee repatriation and some possible policy options to deal with these.

The literature growing after 1990 has given considerable emphasis to framing the Palestinian refugee problem within a broader context. Methodologically, comparative studies have started to replace case studies. For instance, in Palestinian Refugee Repatriation: Global Perspectives , Dumper ( 2006 ) examined the extent to which international practices in refugee repatriation can be transferred to the Palestinian context. Acknowledging distinct features of Palestinian–Israeli conflict, Dumper criticized the previous literature that portrays the Palestinian refugee problem as exceptional. This perspective might be an impediment to the formulation of policy options that should draw on international experience. In order to see how the insights and lessons learned may apply to the Palestinian case’s present similarities, Dumper ( 2007 ) examined the experience of the international community in dealing with other refugee situations. He argued that there is transferability of international experiences, although some areas of the conflict require context for specific solutions. Aiming to contribute to such possible solutions, the recent literature has highlighted important steps of resolution rather than the history of the problem. However, the endurance of the Palestinian refugee problem raises many questions about the life of refugees for investigation. For instance, the life of refugee children raised in the camps is one of the issues that have received the attention of researchers. Palestinian children and adolescents living both within and outside of refugee camps in the Middle East are the foci of Children of Palestine (Chatty and Hundt 2005 ). This work tries to move beyond the stereotypes and Western-based theoretical approaches in analyzing the refugee problem. The study team brought together researchers from anthropology, sociology, political science, education, and psychiatry. In addition, the study tried to include all countries hosting Palestinian refugees in addition to the West Bank and Gaza. The research on the Palestinian refugees has been more interdisciplinary and more inclusive in terms of the diverse geographies of the refugees.

Literature on Migration to Labor-Short Countries of Gulf and the West

The literature on labor migration in the Middle East is influenced by the theoretical developments in the field of migration studies. Various methods are employed to arrive at a better understanding of the topic. Two of the three main approaches used in the field of international migration are closely related to the Middle East. Until the late 1990s, scholars found economic theory and migration systems theory more applicable than historical structural theory in examining the international labor migration of the Middle East.

With respect to method, two tendencies have dominated the studies: macro-economic reviews and case studies. Using economic theories has led researchers to choose methods by referring to the tools of economic modeling. Both methods are heavily dependent on quantitative and aggregated data, including statistics on population, economic indicators such as relative wages, savings, remittances, and consumer price indices (Serageldin et al. 1985 ). Researchers have used data drawing on official statistics, surveys, and interviews. Individual migrants and migrant families have been used as units of analysis. The aim is to present the state of migration and to forecast labor flows. In particular, organizations and research institutes have been interested in macro-level economic analyses. Case study methods, which have appealed to many scholars, have been used to investigate the impact of labor migration on a country. These case studies have enabled discussions of the developmental, economic, and socio-psychological implications of emigration and immigration by highlighting families, villages, and communities.

Labor Migration to Western Countries

Workers from colonial North Africa made up part of the labor migration to the Western European countries after World War I. By 1921 there were over 36,000 workers from colonial Algeria in France (Humphrey 1993 :5). In the 1960s and 1970s, North African countries and Turkey had been attractive sources for meeting the labor demands of Western European countries. While many Lebanese and Syrians went to the US, workers from North African countries and Turkey went to France, Germany, Belgium, and the Netherlands as a result of bilateral agreements. High unemployment rates in receiving countries, which increased the demands for citizenship rights by workers from colonies, and the realization that temporary workers were looking for more permanent settlement, prompted restrictive immigration legislation (Humphrey 1993 ). Although labor migration reduced its pace after the oil crisis in 1973 , family unification, clandestine entries, and the migration of refugees from the Middle Eastern countries to Europe have continued. In 2000 , eight Western countries (Germany, Australia, Belgium, Canada, US, France, the Netherlands, and Sweden) harbored 6.5 million migrants from the Middle East, accounting for a very large share of the total migrants in Europe. Europe has played a dominant role as a host region due to the historical ties, its earlier migration policies and its geographical proximity (Tabutin et al. 2005 ).

The literature evolved from historical analyses of the influence of colonialism on North African societies. Then, economic theories are found beneficial in drawing macro-economic reviews of migration from the Middle East to Western Europe, and in investigating linkages between economic development and migration. After the theoretical contributions of transnationalism, questions about the influences of labor migration and return migration have been addressed. World Bank Papers were focused on the economic dimension of migration. Works like Simulating Flows of Labor in the Middle East and North Africa ( 1985 ) analyzed labor flows among 19 countries located in Western Asia and Northern Africa. The paper developed a systemic approach to defining certain parameters or movements, and used relevant economic models (Serageldin et al. 1985 :2–3).

In addition to economic theory, the historical structural approach has been helpful in discussions of labor migration from the Middle East to Europe. Drawing on arguments from Marxist political economy, the historical structural approach was used to address the migration of the 1970s. The approach placed emphasis on the unequal distribution of economic and political power. It showed the mass recruitment of labor by capital to be a tool of unequal hegemonic relations (Castles and Miller 2003 ). The approach differs from other economic theories discussed below. Rather than portraying migration as voluntary or individual interest-based action, the historical structural approach showed that labor migration contributes to the dominance of first world powers. The legacy of colonialism, the result of wars, and the regional inequalities that followed, show how migration should be explained by historical and structural factors. The historical structural approach was criticized for failing to explain the frequent breakdown of migration policies as well as its inadequate attention to the role of individuals and groups (Castles and Miller 2003 ). The first study to use some arguments of the historical structural approach was Geographic Interpretation of International Migration: A Case Study of the Maghreb . By incorporating economic theory and the structural historical approach, Anne and Allan Findlay ( 1982 ) examined the emigration from Maghreb. From an economic viewpoint, they explained emigration as no more than a convenient means of reducing labor surpluses in each country in the region during the 1960s. They argued that the geographical analysis of international migration provided evidence of structural disequilibria in the economy.

Case studies were less able to address the complexity of the migration phenomenon than macro reviews of the region. While macro reviews focus on the economic dimensions of labor migration, the case studies raised thoughtful questions about the social and political aspects of the issue. In order to provide a broader view, case studies develop middle-range theories, incorporating economic theory, and the historical structural approach to explain causes of emigration and social theory to recognize its social implications. Unat’s study ( 1976 ) of Turkish labor migration to Europe between 1960 and 1975 was the earliest on the topic. The book sets the various dimensions of the large-scale migration by raising critical questions about Turkish administrative structures and German state policies; emigration’s impact on national development; and the possible negative implications for migrants and the nation as a whole.

Labor Migration to Gulf Countries

The rise of oil prices in 1973 generated an economic boom and rapid international migration to the member states of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC). A massive influx of foreign labor migration was observed in the region in a short time span. While there were approximately 885,000 migrant workers in the six member states of the GCC in 1970 , the number increased to 5 million, which represented 70 percent of the GCC labor force, in 1985 and 12 million in 2005 (Russell 1992 :720; UN 2006 ).

As Seccombe showed, the absence of reliable labor market data and the restriction on research in the host countries made new research difficult. In this context, much more research had been conducted in the labor-exporting countries than in the labor-receiving countries. Although studies started in the form of the simple quantification of labor flows, concerns regarding the social, economic, and cultural consequences of international migration grew over time.

The impact of large-scale international labor migration on social and economic structures in both labor-receiving and labor-sending countries has pushed academics, international organizations and research institutions to address the issue (Choucri 1977 ; Seccombe 1985 ). Farrag’s studies in 1974 and 1979 are important for presenting a statistical scale of migrant workers abroad (cited in Seccombe 1985 :336). In a similar vein, in 1976 the Japanese Cooperation Center for the Middle East published a study that analyzes regional labor shortages in the early 1970s and forecasts domestic labor demand and supply in the 1980s in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE).

Several regional conferences on labor migration organized by research institutions showed the increased attention to the topic, especially the direction and scale of migration. As Seccombe discussed in his review article, the papers had an economic-determinist perspective in terms of their focus on economic pull factors and the implications of labor migration for economic development. The establishment of the International Migration Project (IMP) under the auspices of the World Employment Program of the International Labor Office (ILO) accelerated research on labor migration in the Arab world.

Role of Economic Theories

Studies heavily employed economic theories to explain the causes and effects of the issue. They concentrated on the economic factors driving the migration. Economic theories are built on general theories such as the tendencies of people to move from densely to sparsely populated areas, or from low to high income areas, or those that link migrations to fluctuations in the business cycle (Castles and Miller 2003 :22). Economic theories are often known as “push–pull” theories. They assert that some factors in the origin countries push people to emigrate, while some advantages in receiving countries attract these people to immigrate. As Castles and Miller point out, push factors include demographic growth, low living standard, lack of economic opportunities and political repression. Pull factors include demand for labor, availability of land and good economic opportunities and political freedoms. Beyond the economy, economic theories have influenced sociology, social demography and other disciplines. Economic theories are likely to be ahistorical and individualistic. They build their assumptions on the idea that individual migrants are the key actors of migration. Studying migration at the individual level could use an analytical model sharing the economic assumptions of a utility-maximizing decision-making process (Sell 1987 ). Instead of treating migration as a process, it is treated it as a single act, a means of leaving the origin country and settling in the receiving country.

A prominent academic journal, International Migration Review , published the first article about labor migration in the Middle East in 1977 . Lawrence Hadley examined the migration of Egyptian human capital to the Arab oil-producing states. Based on econometric modeling, Hadley used a cost–benefit analysis to evaluate the profitability of exporting the human capital of Egypt. The cost–benefit model used data on remittances to illustrate that the export of human capital is profitable from the perspective of the welfare of Egyptians nationals and the general economic development in Egypt.

Addressing the political and cultural factors influencing migration, Choucri, who published the second article in the same journal in 1977 , argued that international migration in the Middle East harbors political and economic effects that may be potentially explosive. Besides focusing on economic factors, Choucri highlighted political and cultural factors influencing migration. Egyptian state policies are used to explain continuity and change in migration patterns. Using economic theory, the author highlighted pull factors such as higher wages, greater employment, and greater access to social services, which attract people to oil-rich Arab countries. Non-economic factors such as cultural similarity, Egypt’s role of political leadership and as the cultural pace setter in the region were taken into consideration to examine new migration in the Middle East (Choucri 1977 ). Moreover, Choucri showed us how migration becomes, for both donor and recipient, an indirect and often inadvertent instrument of foreign policy. Since the beginning of intra-regional migration in the mid-1970s, political factors have also influenced migration. The sending and receiving countries did not hesitate to use population movements as a political threat. The 1977 article is significant due to its effort to anticipate losses and gains of labor migration for Egypt in economic and sociopolitical terms. It is interesting that instead of sending–receiving or home–host dichotomies, Choucri used the donor and recipient country dichotomy. The conceptualization illustrates that recently arrived manpower was a great contribution to the economies of labor-scarce countries. Choucri’s article was followed by the publication of International Migration Project coordinators Birks and Sinclair’s two major books in 1980 : International Migration and Development in the Arab Region and Arab Manpower: The Crisis of Development . The main arguments of these books are that the system of labor migration is full of advantages for all parties.

In the early 1980s, the World Bank started to give attention to the topic, fundamentally to forecast migration flows in the mid-1980s. Similar to earlier studies, economic theories are employed to examine labor migration. One of the first studies was Labor Migration from Bangladesh to the Middle East (Ali et al. 1981 ). It examined the costs and benefits of the labor migration to Gulf countries that started in the mid-1970s. Taking individuals as the key actors of the migration process, the paper addressed the characteristics of the migrants from Bangladesh. From an economic viewpoint, it highlighted the remittances and their impact on the national economies. Since Bangladesh was competing with other South Asian countries in terms of labor supply to the Gulf region, the report proposed that Bangladesh is a good choice for meeting Middle Eastern labor needs. In a similar vein, drawing heavily on both the International Migration Project and World Bank reports, Pennisi ( 1981 ) examined the expansion of East Asian labor flows to the Middle East. Pennisi discussed opportunities for, and constraints against, the development of coordinated bilateral and multilateral labor market policies in the Arab region.

The 1983 conference on Asian Labor Migration to the Middle East led to the introduction of new studies focused on contract workers, their families and communities. These studies demonstrated that net flows of Asian labor to the region since 1975 have been considerably higher than estimates by the International Migration Project or World Bank (Seccombe 1985 ). Beginning in the mid-1970s, the number of Asians increased because of labor demand, wage levels, and political factors.

Role of Migration Systems Theory

The inadequacy of economic theory and the historical structural approach led to the emergence of a new approach, migration systems theory. The new theory aims to consider the whole spectrum of population movement to elucidate the interactions between different types of migrant flows or different types of migration status (Portes and Borocz 1989 ; Kritz et al. 1992 ). At the heart of the systems approach is the concept of a migration system constituted by a group of countries that exchange relatively large numbers of migrants (Kritz et al. 1992 ). The approach proposes that economic (wage and price differentials, regional blocs) and political (exit, entry, and settlement policies, international relations) structures define the systems within which international migration flows are likely to occur. The systems approach adds network theory to analysis, aiming to trace distinct processes occurring between macro conditions, policies and potential migrants. It views networks of dynamic relationships and variable social arrangements rather than static sets of kin and friend (Kritz et al. 1992 ). Network theory was made more advanced by recognizing institutions as the agents of migration networks like individual migrants. The systems approach also calls attention to changing linkages and feedback mechanisms between countries in the migration system.

Studies on migration and the Middle East have tended to employ network theory and the migration systems approach to discuss regional dynamics as well as international migration. Although labor migration to the Gulf was used to analyze things from an economic viewpoint in the 1980s, in the 1990s the network and migration systems approach started to play a fundamental role in the analysis. Influenced by network theory, Sell ( 1987 ) developed the social process perspective to explain Egypt’s emigration. In his study, treating migration as a process, Sell ( 1987 ) argued that labor demand and state policies constitute official channels of immigration. Although Sell focused on unofficial channels for immigration employment as a significant part of the process, he asserts that labor market and state policies keep their critical role. The last phase in the social process perspective model is the emergence of immigrant communities (Sell 1987 ). Gilbar’s 1997 study of Palestinian and Egyptian societies is an example of the migration systems approach. Gilbar raised questions about how demographic and political developments had intertwined with the labor migration in the region from the early 1950s till the early 1990s. Although the nation-state is considered a prime actor in contemporary migration theory, especially with regard to its role in policy formation and control of flow, the prolonged situation of Palestinian refugees requires an analysis comparing one nation-state with one community.

Migrant sending states in South Asia have been interested in labor migration. The migration systems approach and network analysis provided theoretical and methodological tools for addressing labor migration from the sending countries’ perspective. For example, in their edited book Labor Migration to the Middle East , Eelens et al. ( 1991 ) focus on the several dimensions of labor migration that have occurred from Sri Lanka to the Gulf since the end of 1970s. In order to address the topic more comprehensively, they looked at the recruitment process, the policy of the Gulf states, and the socioeconomic conditions of the Sri Lankan migrant workers. In terms of feedback, the study focused on the impact of labor migration on Sri Lankan society by focusing on its implications for social stratification and social mobility. The analyses treat the impact of the phenomenon on household structure, marriage stability and the well-being of children. Unique characteristics of Sri Lankan labor migration, such as the large percentage of its migrants who are women, led the authors to treat gender as an independent issue. They analyze the socioeconomic position and religious status of Sri Lankan Muslim women migrating to the Gulf as well as the impact of female migration on the country of origin.

The historical structural approach paves the way for addressing neglected issues such as the role of nation-states. In this context, examining large-scale migration from Pakistan to the Middle East during the 1970s and 1980s, Addleton ( 1992 ) argued that migration altered the character of development in Pakistan through its influence on consumption, employment and investment patterns. He discussed the reduced role of the nation-state in effectively promoting national unity and in creating a centralized economy. Despite an enduring emphasis on economic determinants, the role of political and historical ties is neglected in the analysis.

In the migration systems theory, villages emerged as the new unit of analysis in the early 1990s. Nada ( 1991 ) has investigated the process of contemporary international migration among rural Egyptians between 1968 and 1988 by highlighting villages as units of analysis. She discussed the influence of international migration on the socioeconomic development of village life in rural Egypt. The main argument presented in the study is that rural migration and the return of migrants has helped improve and modernize life in rural Egypt.

New Trends in the Literature on Migration and the Middle East

As Hollifield and Brettel ( 2007 ) have noted, interest in international migration in the social sciences has tended to ebb and flow with various waves of emigration and immigration. The early 1990s were the years for migration waves in the Middle East, driven by the dramatic events and massive displacements that resulted from wars and ethnic conflicts. The consequences of the Gulf War paved the way for changes in subject matter. These studies brought novel subject matter related to migration, such as displacement, resettlement and return migration. Moreover, the early 1990s were the years when the migration patterns of the Middle East changed dramatically. The feminization of migration is the most significant change that gained attention. Review articles were written to address influential changes in a short time period (Russell 1992 ; Shami and McCann 1993 ).

Despite the presence of various types of migration, the old literature treated Palestinian refugees and labor migration to the Gulf as unique. Refugee studies rarely viewed the issues relevant to Palestinian refugees as a part of the question it had been addressing. According to Talhami ( 2003 ), Palestinians have been excluded from most refugee studies because of the politicizing of the solution separating this refugee case from any other. In terms of migration studies, the Middle East could not offer promising insights. Migration theory in Europe and North America was suffering from ethnocentrism. Specific characteristics necessitated developing a regional, theoretical, and comparative framework for the study of migration in the Middle East. As Shami and McCann ( 1993 ) have suggested, the main blocs of possible frameworks had to be (or based on) the nature of the processes, the agents carrying out the processes including both man-made and natural, underlying causes, the implications and outcomes of the migration. Scholars from various disciplines aim to provide comparative studies (Gilbar 1997 ).

Although empirical and historical analysis dominated previous studies on migration and the Middle East, these efforts rarely emphasized theory. Scholars became more cautious about theory in later studies. They employed theoretical frameworks to address parallel issues. Some theories, such as transnationalism (i.e., based on migration experiences in the West), have been found useful. However, conceptual agreement has remained elusive. Studies continue to define the same migration issue, such as the Palestinian refugee problem, on the basis of differing concepts. According to some studies, for example, the Palestinian issue is characterized as a refugee problem or forced migration, while in other studies it is defined as internal migration or voluntary migration. When new concepts such as internal displacement were introduced, some studies started to use them, resulting in conceptual abundance rather than consensus. Lack of conceptual clarity impacts upon the ongoing character of the problem. The way in which one or more concepts are used may play a crucial role in deciding policies or producing agreements.

Despite its ethnocentrism, advancements in migration theory have had considerable impact on research about the Middle East. The enthusiasm of cultural and social anthropologists for the concepts of transnationalism and globalization has influenced studies on migration and the Middle East since 1990 . It has particularly been useful for writing micro-social history. Shami ( 1996 ) argued that the concepts of transnationalism and globalization enable us to look at both the dynamics of regionalism and global changes in the Middle Eastern context. Due to the search for a theoretical framework in the literature, transnationalism has appealed to scholars who are interested in multidisciplinarity. The literature on transnationalism provides a broad perspective, focusing on multiple actors involving migration in the course of time and space. It considers migration as a process having intertwined complex steps. The literature questions the one-way assumption of migration definitions, stressing the interplay or interrelations of the two places, and the migrant networks among migrants. For instance, in Iranian Refugees and Exiles since Khomeini ( 1991 ), edited by Fathi, the authors aimed to develop a theoretical model that could be helpful to understanding the stages and dimensions of the Iranian migration experience. They have examined the applicability of some of the conceptual categories proposed in the migration literature such as forced migration, displacement, exile, and resettlement in addressing Iranian exiles and refugees abroad.

The transnationalism literature came with methodological suggestions. Since transnationalism grew out of anthropology, it offers ethnographic methods to study migration. However, Middle Eastern scholars have had a suspicion that ethnography tends to misrepresent the societies when the subject is forced migration and the subjects are female migrants from the Middle East. Interestingly, Middle Eastern societies are usually portrayed as static and deeply traditional in many examples of ethnographic studies (Shami 1996 ). On the other hand, ethnography provides a means for scholars to go further in single case studies. The method enables us to trace the impact of migration in small research units such as communities, villages and families. Employing transnationalism theory and method, Antoun ( 2005 ) conducted an in-depth anthropological case study of the experience of transnational migration of villagers in Kafr al-Ma, Jordan. The study, entitled Documenting Transnational Migration , draws on the data gathered in nine research trips over a period of 39 years, often dealing with several generations of the same family in the same community. In addition to its methodological contribution, the study substantially differs from previous ones with respect to its subject matter. First, Antoun’s longitudinal research offers a record of both change and continuity in the life of transnational migrants. Second, Antoun observes that immigrants experience difficulty integrating into the society of their respective host countries. He enumerates, for example, the considerable problems encountered by Jordanian immigrants in the process of cultural adaptation. Similarly, Khedler ( 2007 ) designates a town, namely Ettadhamen in Tunisia, as a unit of analysis to assess transnational movements between Middle East countries and Western countries. He employs ethnographic research techniques to investigate the motivations of Tunisian men emigrating from such a town to Italy. He finds that in addition to some personal motivations, social networks and media motivate men from this town to emigrate.

While anthropology has suggested the ethnographic method for exploring the cultural and social impact of migration on small research units, sociology has suggested social network analysis for investigating the complex sets of relationships in the process of migration and integration. Monsutti ( 2005 ) has combined insights of transnationalism with basics of network theory in his study exploring Hazaras, the oppressed minority population from central Afghanistan who immigrated to Iran. According to Monsutti, the money-transfer networks and social networks simultaneously are created in both receiving and sending communities. Like analysis of immigrant experiences in Iran, transnationalism and network analysis have been used to examine experiences of those who had to emigrate mainly to Europe, Canada, and the US. In 1991 , Fathi edited a volume exploring the experiences of Iranian refugees and exiles in France, the US, and Canada. The articles employed theoretical frameworks from migration literature, diaspora studies, and transnationalism. In 2005 , Spellman focused on the Iranians in Britain through the lens of transnationalism and diaspora literature. Under the twin influences of ethnographic methods and network analysis techniques, current research has become more specific. Der-Martirosian ( 2007 ) highlighted the economic integration of Iranian male immigrants in Los Angeles ( 1987–8 ), and has found significant effects of ethnic and kinship ties during initial and settled phases. The networks and transnational practices enable us to investigate both the initial phase of the migration experiences and the survival strategies of immigrants in the host countries.

The transnationalism literature has been criticized for its ignoring of the state by stressing only flows and networks. It was clear that bringing the state back into the field would provide better understanding of a range of issues including numerous migration types, issues related to citizenship, and bilateral relations between receiving and sending states. Cesari ( 1992 ) noted that between France and the Maghreb countries, specifically Algeria and Tunisia, transnational space is emerging within which persons, as well as goods and religious and political values, circulate both ways. State authorities in Algeria and Tunisia attempted to recognize and benefit from this mixed French-Maghrebean space for developing relations between Europe and the Maghreb. In her comparative research, Brand ( 2006 ) went further by focusing on the sending states policies toward emigration and their nationals abroad. Taking the country cases of Morocco, Tunisia, Lebanon, and Jordan, the book explores the relationship between the government of sending states, emigration processes and communities of emigrants. The research shows that transnationalism literature is applicable to address some neglected issues such as sending states’ ongoing influence on citizens abroad from a theoretical perspective. Although postmodernists have criticized political scientists for always ending up reproducing the conventional nation-state point of view, studies such as Brand’s have suggested that the state maintains its sovereignty and resilience by adopting new policies and tools.

Gender and Migration

Women have been the subject of academic literature from the 1970s onward. The impact of migration on migrants’ wives who stayed home was examined particularly in the Egyptian and Lebanese contexts (Azzam and Shaib 1980 ; Khafagy 1984 ; Taylor 1984 ). However, female labor immigration to the Gulf was a relatively novel phenomenon in the 1990s (Ismail 1999 ; Sabban 2001 ; Shah 2004 ). Mostly, Asian women from the Philippines and Sri Lanka have taken up positions in domestic services, and to a much lesser extent in health and educational services. Investment in export manufacturing zones in Dubai, as well as other parts of the Middle East such as Egypt and Morocco, lead to a pattern of feminization in labor migration (Humphrey 1993 ). Middle East Avenue ( 1993 ) by Brochmann marked this new intellectual agenda. Focusing on female labor migration from Sri Lanka to the Gulf countries, Brochmann ( 1993 ) argued that the causes and consequences of female contract-labor migration are different from those of male migration.

Although many refugee studies about the Middle East exclusively focus on male refugees, some studies challenge this generalization. Bauer ( 1991 ) has examined Iranian women refugees/exiles in Turkey and West Germany. She found that the adaptation of female refugees/exiles who emigrated alone depends on their class and family background, education, the formation of networks and friendships during the migration, the policy of host states, and migrant status.

Studies focusing on gender have contributed to the literature both because they have led to the development of a multilevel approach and because they point to neglected actors, women, in the terrain of migration. They aim to combine micro-level analyses of communities, households, and individuals with the macro-level analysis of international and national factors.

Population Displacement and Resettlement

Population displacement and resettlement entered the literature in the early 1990s. Displacement and resettlement are defined as the processes of collective dislocation and/or settlement of people away from their normal habitat by a superior force (Shami and McCann 1993 ). Although early literature neglected forced migration, the region has been hosting many “peoples without a country,” such as Kurds, Armenians, and Palestinians.

Some of the authoritarian policies of Middle East countries combined with the consequences of the Gulf War to produce displacement and resettlement of Kurds and Palestinians up to and beyond the 1990s. Since the displacement was a worldwide problem, some Western countries, international and nongovernmental organizations became interested in these issues. They conducted research to address problems relevant to displacement and develop policy responses. Research establishes that the mass displacement has become a serious threat to the security and stability of the Middle East, and Africa in particular. Thus, edited volumes or reports about displacement and resettlement have tended to include a chapter about the issue in the Middle East (Ember et al. 2004 ; Alborzi 2006 ; Kacowicz 2007 ).

In this context, survey research conducted by the Norwegian Refugee Council and Global Internally Displaced People Project ( 2002 ) in 48 countries finds that the main factors of displacement include armed conflict, generalized violence, the systematic violation of human rights, and the displacement or dislocation of people as a primary or political objective of either government or rebel forces. All of the factors are relevant to the political scene of the region. The study provides information about the displacement in the Middle East. It notes that the region has the least internally displaced persons compared to other regions, accounting for 1.5 million as of early 2002 . The vast majority of them are in Iraq among ethnic Kurds, Turkmens, and Assyrians as a result of Iraqi government politics against non-Arab citizens since the 1970s and factional Kurdish infighting. The ongoing crisis in Iraq has led research to address the problem of Iraqi refugees and internally displaced persons by exploring their status in Iraq and host countries, progress and shortfalls of international response, and the problems of return (Alborzi 2006 ; Middle East Institute 2008 ).

It is clear that the state returned to discussions as a crucial actor of migration processes. Introduction of the state has enriched arguments concerning the dynamics and implications of migration in the Middle Eastern context. The state plays a direct or indirect role in displacement of people through civil or international wars, along with the use of force against ethnic-religious minorities or government-led development projects. Since the nation-state controls the entry of people through legislative, institutional, and administrative tools, it is still the main agent of resettlement.

Return Migration

The Gulf crisis demonstrated that migration and international politics are inseparably intertwined in the region. It is estimated that 250,000 Jordanians mostly of Palestinian origin and about 160,000 Egyptians had to leave Kuwait after the conflict. In addition, several hundred thousands of Yemenis left Saudi Arabia in the early 1990s (Tabutin et al. 2005 :576). The unavoidable return of migrant workers from the Gulf has triggered research about the numerous implications of return migration in the origin countries. The financial and political risks of reliance upon labor export have been reconsidered. Due to the Gulf countries’ labor force demands consequent to return migration, replacement migration became a new trend, sustained until the mid-1990s. The reasons for the emergence of this trend differed from regime to regime, but usually stemmed from a general unease about foreign laborers’ growing sense of entitlement, particularly Arab-origin immigrant laborers (McMurray 1999 ).

Both return and replacement migration could not be attributed only to the Gulf War. Return migration is defined as a specific type of migration by the Development Research Center on Migration, Globalization and Poverty ( 2003 ). Studies found that the act of return could be driven by several factors. Skilled professionals and entrepreneurs sometimes return to their origin countries so that they might contribute to its development (Jain 2006 ). Migrant workers returning from Western European countries after a certain time might be an example. For instance, Cassarino ( 2000 ) has examined the patterns of resource mobilization and the strategies for survival developed by some Tunisian entrepreneur-returnees.

Moreover, the return of rejected asylum seekers and irregular migrants occupies a place among the reasons of return migration. Refugees coming from Iraq and Iran whose applications were rejected by the Western European states have to return to their origin countries. Analysis of the process of return and replacement, and the consequences, might contribute to the academic literature as well as having significant policy implications.

Future Directions

There have been considerable changes in the research, theory, and methodology from early 1990 onward. Major advances and shortcomings in the field help us to think about the how studies in migration and the Middle East will be shaped in the future.

Kapiszewski ( 2001 ) has noted that the gathering of demographic and other statistical data is something very new in this part of the world. Despite the magnitude of migration into and out of the Middle East, the field is still suffering from a lack of accurate empirical data. There is a serious problem of readily accessible, trustworthy data. To fill the empirical gap, Tabutin et al. published a comprehensive survey study in 2005 on the demography of the Arab world and the Middle East from the 1950s to 2000 . In this study, international migration constituted a separate section. But the study still suffered from lack of data. Since demographic indicators such as migrant stocks, net migration rates, refugee population, and the number of transit and illegal migrants are valuable inputs for every research project, the demographers’ contribution has been, and continues to be, very important for future studies.

The literature continued to put the emphasis on the factors provoking migratory flows from the Middle East countries to the Western European countries. Bodega et al. ( 1995 ) explore the case of emigration from Morocco to Spain, and argue that important demographic, socioeconomic and political-religious differences within the sending countries in the Middle East and the Europe lead migratory flows. In a similar vein, based on data drawn from Egypt, Morocco and Turkey for households with family members living abroad, Dalen et al. ( 2005 ) have examined the role of remittances in the emigration intention of family members. They have found that each country presents a different story about driving forces behind the remittance behaviors.

In contrast to postmodernist assumptions that magnitude of international migration is a manifestation of the decline of the state, research shows that states will keep their central role in discussions regarding migration. Migration scholars tend to focus on government policies toward emigration, immigration, and transit migration. Particularly, the dynamics of migration policy changes in receiving and sending countries are beginning to be addressed. The focus has shifted from the impact of an international migration regime and globalization to security concerns, initiating more restrictive policies (Feiler 2003 ).

For a long time, the literature neglected the citizenship issues of the immigrants. Few studies address the status of migrant workers in these countries. The topic has been under close scrutiny in recent years with the influence of media and international organizations’ interests in migrants in the Gulf countries. In Nationals and Expatriates , Kapiszewski ( 2001 ) initiated a discussion about the plural character of host countries in the Gulf region. He notes that there is no equality between expatriate groups and indigenous citizen groups, either in law or in daily practices. Antoun ( 2005 ) has furthered argument by suggesting that the inequality has been relevant for migrant nationals from other Arab states. Besides lack of cultural pluralism, the segregation of migrants physically and socially has been the norm in the relations of migrants and host countries’ populations. One year later, Jain ( 2006 ) looked at citizenship laws in the Gulf to analyze the condition of Indian migrants. Jain notes that the migrants in the Gulf are transitory as stringent residency requirements and the contractual nature of their work bar them from permanent settlement in these countries. Thus, the exclusion of migrants and systems of social stratification were institutionalized in terms of ethnicity/nationality and class. As exemplified in these studies, ongoing problems demonstrate that citizenship has to be distinctively taken into consideration in the literature.

The discussion of citizenship initiates discussions on the integration of immigrants in the Middle Eastern countries. Although transnationalism literature contributes to the discussion by focusing on the survival strategies of the migrants in the host countries, further research should pave the way for examining several aspects of immigrant integration. We have limited knowledge about the political, social, and cultural integration in the Middle East context.

The new migration types such as return migration, replacement migration, and internal migration began to be discussed in the 1990s. The complexity and dynamic character of migration will always generate novel types and subtypes. For instance, Antoun ( 2005 ) pointed to migration for higher education as one of the neglected types. He argues that richness of migrant experiences observed in migration for higher education indicates the impossibility of reducing migrant experience to a series of generalities. The concept of transit migration entered the migration policy discourse during the early 1990s. The United Nations Economic Commission defines transit migration as a migration type in which migrants immigrate with the intention of seeking the possibility there to emigrate to another country as the country of final destination (Duvell 2006 ). Some scholars have examined the transit migration pattern occurring in the neighborhood of Europe. In this context, those Middle East countries that have Mediterranean shores have become the subject of inquiry. Icduygu ( 2006 ) has listed Turkey, Libya, Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia as transit states, while Fargues and Bensaad ( 2007 ) have added Yemen, since it is a gateway for those immigrating to Gulf countries. The transit state’s policies on immigration control have brought problems for those states and receiving countries of Europe. This new pattern has raised questions that have been investigated by scholars (Roman 2000 ; Boubakri 2004 ; Duvell 2006 ; Icduygu 2006 ).

A survey of the literature demonstrates that the field has made significant progress. The scope of the literature in terms of its subject matter has broadened from the 1980s onward. Variations in theories, moving from economic theory to transnationalism, have enriched our discussions. The literature reflects the influence of nationalist movements on migration movements. Studies on the Middle East have contributed to broader migration theory as well as theories about the new forms of nationalism. The methods used in the field have become more sophisticated over the years. But the assessment offered in this essay also serves to identify some shortcomings.

A first shortcoming concerns conceptualization. It is hardly surprising that conceptualization constituted the crucial task for both theory testing and theory building. The introduction of new concepts occurred over time. The policy implications of the research have demonstrated that conceptualization plays a vital role in these discussions. Similar terms are used differently by particular countries, nongovernmental organizations and international bodies. The different usages, including those from statistics, led to difficulty in the reliability and accessibility of relevant data. In the long run, fragmented data resulted in problems of knowledge accumulation. The concepts of “foreign person” and “immigrant” are used interchangeably, although the former refers to a universe including asylum seekers, stateless people, foreign diplomats and consular personnel, and transit migrants. There is a similar conceptual problem in refugee studies. Many states hesitate to recognize the refugee status of those who have been forced or obliged to flee or to leave their homes or places of habitual residence, resulting in a significant conceptual lag for academic studies.

In addition to this conceptual lag, refugee studies encounter other problems. Political crises in the last decade, particularly those in Israel, Iraq, and Afghanistan, have generated and continue to generate many refugees. Unfortunately, the politicized aspects of the topics impede studies that go much beyond descriptive reports written by nongovernmental organizations. In-depth studies focusing on refugees and hosting states might provide richer data, enabling comparative studies. Also, studies on refugees might lead to significant policy implication.

Despite the role of several diasporas – those of Palestinians, Kurds, Iranians, Armenians – in Middle East politics, the number of studies addressing the diaspora populations living in the region has been low. Some studies, however, have emerged. For instance, Migliorino ( 2008 ) examines the Armenian community and their cultural integration in Lebanon and Syria. His study provides an extra dimension to studies on refugees in the region and studies on diaspora. It is noteworthy that incorporating the region into the global diaspora literature may enrich the relevant literatures and reveal unconsidered aspects of the long migration history of the Middle East.

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Nationalism and the crisis of community in the Middle East

• Published: 10 November 2018
• Volume 42 , pages 351–357, ( 2018 )

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• Feyzi Baban 1  

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Introduction

The collapse of the Ottoman Empire at the turn of the twentieth century was chaotic and led to imperial control and incorporation of the Middle East into the world capitalist system. Except for Iran, Turkey, and much later Israel, national states in the region emerged by way of imperial bargains. After the Second World War, Arab states under colonial rule gained their independence and sought to build nations. However, rather than becoming fully consolidated national communities, many descended into authoritarianism and sectarian rule. At the turn of the twenty-first century, the region is once more in political turmoil, and several states such as Iraq, Libya, and Syria ceased to be functional. The Arab Spring of 2011 has not produced much-needed and much-anticipated democratization. Instead, after a brief period of opening up, descent into authoritarianism accelerated even in countries such as Turkey, which had been hailed as a model of democratic consolidation. It is in the wake of this tumultuous century that the five articles in this volume explore the sad reality that national consolidation in the Middle East is not only far from complete but further fragmenting along ethnic, religious, and sectarian lines.

Nationalism emerged in the Middle East during the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. National identities and nation-building efforts, rather than developing over time as part of new class relations and social formations, became entangled with modernization, colonialism, and imperial redrawing of boundaries. The multicultural social fabric of the Ottoman Empire had led to the emergence of the millet, which recognized the legal and social autonomy of non-Muslim (i.e., Christian and Jewish) religious communities, and this loose structure was able to maintain the cultural, ethnic, and religious plurality of its provinces over four hundred years.

The same multicultural administrative ethos became more structured in the nineteenth century, once the age of nationalism emerged in Europe and reached Ottoman borders. Taking hold first in the Balkan provinces, nationalism eventually arrived in the empire’s Middle Eastern provinces in the late nineteenth century. While Turkish, Iranian, and later Zionist nation building differs from Arab forms of nationalism, efforts at modernization shaped early nationalism throughout the region.

After the Balkan provinces separated in the late nineteenth century and the Ottoman Empire began to crumble, its governing elite finally grasped that it could no longer hold together ethnically and religiously diverse populations under the umbrella of an amorphous Ottoman identity. Turkish nationalism emerged in the wake of this painful realization that only a unified national identity could maintain what was left of the empire. As a reaction to the multicultural, multiethnic, and multireligious social fabric of the Ottoman Empire, Turkish nationalism combined elements of corporatism and communitarianism as it sought to create a homogeneous nation out of a highly heterogeneous population (Berkes 1959 ). The governing elite of the late Ottoman empire, unable to prevent Balkan nationalism and failing to promote “Ottomanism” as an identity to galvanize other Muslim populations, turned to Turkish ethnic identity to establish and maintain national community in Anatolia and what remained of Thrace (Hanioglu 2008 ).

Prior to the First World War, the Committee of Union and Progress (the CUP) advocated pan-Turkism, which emphasized ethnic unity of the Turkish people within and outside the empire. Yet it proved hard to consolidate large groups in Anatolia under a Turkish ethnic identity. The Ottomans never defined themselves as exclusively Turks, and Anatolia—the putative center of this new ethnic identity—has always had heterogeneous populations with multiple religious and ethnic identities. As a result, Turkish nation building became one of the region’s most radical seeking to create a single national identity out of diverse groups with no sense of national belonging.

Furthermore, the national project in Turkey, unique in the region, merged nation building with complete westernization. Turkish nationalism aimed for a homogeneous, secular, and western nation as it attempted not only to create a new national community but also to forge individual citizens as its agents (Mardin 2006 ). This new citizenship was antithetical to the traditional Ottoman identity, which reflected various religious and communal cultural codes, and the new “national” identity mostly excluded religious and ethnic minorities such as Armenians, Greeks, and Kurds.

Iranian nation building under the Pahlavi dynasty (1925–1979), though less radical than the Turkish version, followed the same path of secularization. Just as Turkish nationalism deployed pre–Islamic Turkish cultural codes as founding myths, the Shah Mohammad Reza invoked ancient, i.e., pre-Islamic, Persian civilization (Siavoshi 2014 ). However, his project had to reconcile Persian ethnic identity with Shi’i religious identity. While the Sunni Islamic forces in Turkey lacked organizational structure, making de-Islamization there easier, in Iran, the strong institutional foundations of Shi’i tradition undergirded its place in the public sphere and led to various clashes with Persian ethnic identity and culture in the struggle to define nationalist ideology.

Both the Pahlavi dynasty and the later Islamic Republic used various forms of Persian and Shi’i identities to consolidate their regime. While the Shahs emphasized the greatness of the ancient Persian Empire and its pre-Islamic roots to consolidate their modern state and distance the national narrative from Islam, the Islamic Republic re-emphasized Shi’i culture and identity to re-Islamize the national imagination (Litvak 2017 ; Hourcade 2017 ). Just as Turkish nationalism excluded and marginalized ethnic minorities such as Kurds in the national narrative, this Persian–Shi’i tension excluded ethnic identities such as Kurds, Arabs, and Azeris from the national discourse. Iranian nation building, however, was not as anti-Islamic as Turkish.

The demise of Ottomanism as a unifying identity affected Arab elites in Baghdad, Damascus, Beirut, and other major urban centers as nationalism surfaced after 1900. Arab nationalism, unlike its Balkan counterparts, emerged not as an independence movement but calling for greater autonomy and self-governance (Tibi 1997 ). Breaking away from the Islamic empire seemed crucial for the predominantly Christian Balkan peoples. Arab populations, in contrast, were Muslim, like their Ottoman rulers, so saw themselves as among the privileged subjects. Yet the Turkish nationalists who were controlling the central Ottoman state began after 1905 to differentiate Turks from other Muslim peoples, systematically excluded Arabs from administration, and viewed them as inferior to Turks (Hanioglu 1995 , pp. 44–9).

As Turkification intensified, Arab intellectuals in urban centers of the Middle East started to see their future separate from the Turks. Rashid Rida, an influential Arab nationalist thinker, proposed that, because Arab peoples were the earliest Muslims, Arab national identity was more inclusive than narrow Turkish nationalism and the only realistic ground for wider unification for Muslim peoples (Hourani 1983 ).

The chaotic collapse of the Ottoman Empire after the First World War intensified Arab efforts to separate themselves from the Turks. But the new, formal British and French imperial presence in Arab lands complicated the consolidation of Arab nationalism, which began to oscillate between territorial national identities and pan-Arabism. Regional rivalries, sectarian divisions, and ethnic conflicts turned pan-Arabism as a unifying ideology into an unfulfilled dream (Muslih 1991 ). Britain and France’s division of Arab lands with the Sykes–Picot agreement of 1916 and the arbitrary boundaries of League of Nations mandate agreements put the Arab Middle East under tutelage, denying the historical and cultural continuity of these societies and grouping populations into artificial, unstable nation-states— a process that still generates never-ending conflicts through much of the region. Yet, after the effective collapse of pan-Arabism in the 1960s, nation building went hand in hand with modernization.

Zionism was external to the national transformations taking place in the Middle East and developed largely as a response to anti-Semitism in Europe. While the World Zionist Organization (founded in Basel in 1897) claimed to represent all Jews in exile, central and eastern European Jews were the most enthusiastic supporters (Lacqueur 2003 ). Western European Jews, in contrast, at least until the rise of Nazism in Germany and rampant anti-Semitism through much of Europe, saw themselves as nationals of their countries, unlike their co-religionists to the east who had experienced frequent violence and pogroms.

Zionism was a nationalist movement, but it was far from unified, and cultural, religious, and secular versions had different visions of a possible Jewish homeland. However, after the Sixth Zionist Congress (Basel, 1903), a Jewish homeland in Palestine became a dominant outlook within Zionism. The movement set itself simultaneously to build Jewish presence in Ottoman Palestine and establish cultural, economic, and political infrastructure for a new Jewish national society there. Zionism, apart from its internal divisions between cultural, religious, and secular versions, had struggled to reconcile the idea of a Jewish homeland with building a civic nation; after Israel’s independence in 1948, this tension resulted in discriminatory citizenship practices towards native Palestinians within its borders (Ben-Porat and Turner 2011 ; Rosenhek 2011 ). In addition, Zionism coped with forging a national Jewish community consisting of people from many countries possessing different cultural practices and languages. Zionists, like other modern nationalists, knew that they had to start de novo, creating new cultural symbols, institutions, and language (Vital 1982 ).

Despite notable differences, early forms of nation building in the Middle Eastern states reflected their integration into world capitalism and modernization. All were top–down schemes to create modern, secular political communities, and most positioned themselves against traditional forces such as religion and communal ties. National consolidation, however, was slow and uneven and foundered in the late 1960s and early 1970s as a crisis in capital accumulation in the region threatened their patronage systems, which sought to balance various ethnic and religious divisions. Increasingly unable to distribute resources, and failing to establish a coherent narrative of modernity, most stopped trying to build a nation (Bromley 1994 , pp. 172–84).

Political Islam emerged in late 1970s as the strongest counter-narrative to nationalism and modernization. Middle Eastern states had long suppressed the development of civil society, particularly on the left, so as to eliminate alternative narratives to top–down national consolidation. Political Islam emerged as the only viable civil vehicle for expressing opposition to the existing regimes. Islamist forces were quick to challenge secular frameworks of national regimes with alternative narratives that emphasized traditional and Islamic values as key components of national identities. Rather than being pan-Islamist, Islamists, like most nationalists, mobilized their bases in local and national communities and defined their strategies in strictly national terms (Sadowski 2006 , pp. 223–7).

Islamist organizations were effective at organizing in marginalized shantytowns of large cities inhabited by new migrants from the countryside and smaller towns who experienced alienation, discrimination, and exclusion and felt generally left behind by national consolidation. Islamic organizations quickly filled the crucial role of providing social services such as day care, food, and schooling in poor neighborhoods and provided a spiritual anchor to newcomers who felt lost in the pluralism of the big city and no connection to the newly forming national identity. In so many societies, their key message was very similar, and everywhere, they targeted the secular foundations of national regimes. In Turkey, for instance, Islamist parties and organizations were active in urban shantytowns and criticized the republic’s strict secularism and its rejection of the Ottoman legacy, depicting that stance as a rejection of Turkey’s traditional values (Dogan 2017 ). In Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood had a similar organization in Cairo and Alexandria’s poor neighborhoods while targeting modernity as a western ideology designed to weaken the traditional religious and cultural roots of Egyptian society.

By the late 1990s, national narratives had been punctured severely in the Middle East, and the social fabric of many societies started to disintegrate. In Iraq, after the US-led invasion in 2003, it proved impossible to bring together the Shi’i, Sunni, and Kurds, and the country quickly descended into segregated units. The Arab Spring of 2011 not only failed to fulfill latent expectations for democracy but also accelerated the disintegration of national narratives throughout the Middle East. The protracted civil war in Syria, beginning in March 2011, ruptured already fragile social ties between Sunnis, Alawites, and Kurds. In Egypt, since the military coup of July 2013 that removed the Muslim Brotherhood from power, the relative quiet has only masked the ever-growing tensions between secular and Islamist forces, and Coptic Christians have felt increasingly marginalized and fearful.

Similarly, in Turkey, initial optimism under the rule of the Justice and Development Party (JDP: Turkish AKP) beginning in 2002 evaporated as Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s tight grip transformed a democracy into an authoritarian regime. Erdogan and the AKP created a counter-narrative that challenged the republican, secular, and modern Turkish national identity. The AKP not only reintroduced the Ottoman past to redefine Turkish national identity but also launched extensive educational and cultural campaigns to replace secular national identity with a more traditional and religious one. As a result, Turkish society has divided in two, with roughly equal segments subscribing to their own respective national identities.

In Iran, the Islamic regime has been able to hold onto power, but strong reformist elements of civil society, particularly visible among student groups and women’s organizations, demand more freedom. Demonstrations in 2017 revealed deep tensions between state and civil society, as well as cleavages among groups in civil society. The chasm between traditional Islamic and secular forces manifests itself in very different attitudes towards women’s head coverings, women’s place in public life, freedom of thought, and censorship of cultural products. The 2017 protests revealed the regime’s inability to impose strict religious traditionalism on society. The regime tries hard to hold onto power but finds it increasingly difficult to impose its version of traditional religious identity.

Finally, Israel displays a similar divide between secular and religious forces. After 1948, Labor Zionism differentiated itself from other secular forms of Zionism and became a dominant, defining political force. It imagined a secular homeland that would blend Jewish cultural identity with socialist ideals. Religious groups never accepted that vision, but their de facto autonomy has allowed a certain calm in national politics. In order to keep this relative peace, Israel has never defined itself as and declared itself a secular state, but created a “consociation” that allows each sphere to function in its own area. However, since the disintegration of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, many of its non-leftist Jews have moved to Israel. In addition, ultra-religious forces have been increasingly assertive and have been able to fracture the hegemony of Labor Zionism. Everyday tensions between secular and religious groups have increased as the religious groups, no longer content with autonomy, challenge the secular foundations of the state.

The five articles in this volume trace this transformation in national identities and the fragmentation of national states in the Middle East in the last decade. In each case, there are different forces at play, but the underlying narrative is the crisis of nationalism and modernity in the region.

Faedah Totah’s chapter examines the evolution of Syrian nationalism as it evolved from pan-Arab nationalism into a territorial form. It is very timely, as it focuses on the failure of Syrian nationalism to form a coherent national identity as it moved away from pan-Arabism. Its observations are highly relevant to the situations in Iraq and Libya, where national identity also disintegrated. Totah focuses on how the Palestinian cause united Syria’s otherwise-diverse population, becoming a narrative that allowed groups to relate to each other in a uniting moment of national consciousness. Totah’s conclusion, even the Palestinians’ plight was not enough to transcend the divisions among Syria’s ethnic and sectarian groups.

Jonathan Viger analyses the failure of Syrian nation building in terms of class relations. His essay examines the formation and disintegration of a national narrative from the late Ottoman period through to the late 1960s. He explains that, just as with the Palestinian cause in Totah’s analysis, mobilization of the middle classes pitted them against the traditional ruling classes and prepared the ground for national mobilization. The state-dependent middle classes helped form a short-lived populist alliance with the lower classes against the notables and create a nationalist ideology. An urban industrial class developed under the state’s tutelage and became the principal nation builder. Because of the symbiotic relationship between this industrial bourgeoise and the state bureaucracy, “development, state formation, and nation building represented combined process.”

Essays by Sedef Arat-Koc and by Secil Dagtas explore recent developments in nationalism in Turkey, which emerged during the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and was suspicious of difference and multiplicity. The nationalist elite concluded that the empire’s multiethnic and multireligious social fabric was the main reason for its disintegration and aimed to create a unified, secular national identity for its remaining populations. This unitary national identity was the only one visible in the public realm, and the state suppressed any claims of recognition for other identities such as Kurdish, Arab, Christian, or Muslim.

Secil Dagtas’ case study of Turkey’s multiethnic and multireligious Hatay region tracks a shift in this rigid representation of national identity. Annexed into the republic in 1939 from Syria, the region has never fitted properly into the homogeneous national narrative. Hatay, with its Arab, Turkish, Jewish, Christian, Sunni, and Alawite groups and its deep cultural and historical connections with Syria, has always been an oddity in Turkey. Dagtas’ analysis reveals that, despite Turkey’s rigid discourse of national unity, Hatay’s ethno-religious identities constantly shift and change. Focusing on two key moments—the turn to democratization and pluralism in mid-2000 and the arrival of Syrian refugees beginning in 2011—the article reveals constant reconfigurations and daily manifestations of various identities in relation to national citizenship.

Sedef Arat-Koc examines the fragmentation of national discourse and the recent extreme polarization of national politics in Turkey. Since the Justice and Development Party (JDP) took power in 2002, it has claimed to represent excluded and marginalized Turks. These people—mostly migrants from small towns to the margins of big cities, conservative, and not entirely comfortable with secular nationalism—identified the JDP and Erdoğan as their representative against the secular elites of the major centers. Arat-Koc examines the idea of “white” Turks and “black” Turks to show how national identity fragmented and redefined itself in the 1990s. Emerging first as a critique of the middle classes while the Turkish economy was integrating into global neoliberalism, the two labels have evolved into identity positions—the authentic “self” and the “other” of national identity. Arat-Koc depicts both terms as self-declared identities claiming authentic Turkish identity and grounding an extremely polarized national politics. “Black” evolved from being a demand for greater inclusion to forming the JDP’s justification for its increasingly authoritarian and populist governance.

Finally, Michael Vicente Perez examines everyday reproduction of Palestinian nationalism in Jordan. Palestinians’ nationalism, like Kurds’, lacks a corresponding nation state. Furthermore, it has historically shaped itself in terms of two powerful forces: resistance to Israeli occupation in the West Bank and Gaza and a desire to differentiate itself from the national discourses of the countries where Palestinians have been living as refugees. As in any other occupied national community uprooted from its historical land, memory plays a central role in maintaining and reproducing national consciousness. Perez discusses how the use of material objects, including food, in Palestinian homes and institutions in Jordan abets this process. In a land where Jordanian nationalism is the dominant discourse, their own material objects, such as bracelets or specially decorated notebooks, reproduce Palestinians’ national identity and consciousness in everyday living. Palestinians’ vexed relations with the host country, as Perez explains, make many Jordanians see their nationalism as a threat to their own national culture, so the state discourages its public display. Instead, Palestinians turn to material objects as act of defiance.

While each article in this collection focuses on specific circumstances of national crises/transformations in various parts of the Middle East, they have an underlying theme: in the early twenty-first century, nationalism is no longer a unifying ideology in the region. Instead, states face challenges from the demands of ethnic identities, the rise of political Islam, persisting authoritarianism, and recurring economic crisis. All these challenges have created a crisis in governance that exacerbates authoritarian tendencies and chips away at states’ popular legitimacy. The twentieth century started with a period of transformation in the national communities of the Middle East and continued with various political and economic crises, as well as periodic regional wars. So far, the twenty-first century does not seem to promise a better future.

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Baban, F. Nationalism and the crisis of community in the Middle East. Dialect Anthropol 42 , 351–357 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10624-018-9534-5

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Cultures of the Middle East Essay

Introduction.

The Middle East is a region situated between the western part of Asia and northern Africa. At times this region is also known as the Near East. The history of the region is rich and stretches back into the ancient times. Historically, this region has been the main center of world affairs.

This region is well known to be the home for some of the world’s great religions including Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Middle Eastern countries consist of various cultural and sectarian groups who have lived together in harmony and, somewhat, shared a common geographical, environmental and cultural setting.

However, an observer of a number of events present in the Middle East may easily notice serious clashes among some groups which led, in some cases, to armed struggle and produced complexity at various levels. It is observable that the ongoing intervention of external powers and the creation of the state of “Israel” in 1948 have harmfully contributed to the unsteadiness situation in the Middle East on many fronts.

As a result of the above-mentioned factors, a controversial view has emerged and popularized. This view claim that the Middle East is not only consisting of varied conflicting cultural groups fighting each other, but also experiencing difficulties in interacting with each other on various levels, including the cultural level (Salzman (b), p 5). This paper will provide a critical analysis of the cultural aspects in the Middle East.

Cultural and Sectarian Groups in the Middle East

Culture can be defined as a shared set of beliefs, traditions, and behaviors that is shaped by various aspects including ethnicity, nationality, religion, and language among other factors. The Middle East consists of well over twenty countries which have different religious, ethnic, and linguistic groups.

Despite these variations, the people of the Middle East have common norms and values which are shared among themselves. Previously, the Middle East has been portrayed as a desert region that is characterized by a nomadic lifestyle. Also, this region has closely been associated with oil wealth and territorial and religious conflicts. Though this is true about the region, it has to be noted that there are more aspects related to this region.

Life in the Middle East is quite complex to be comprehended as simple since there are various variables which influence the way in which people live in this region. It is worth to note that a common thread known to be running through the Middle Eastern society is the importance that has been placed on the family institution and values that emanate from solid extended family ties such as loyalty, honor, and respect (Salzman (b), p 16).

The Middle East is characterized by various cultural and sectarian groups. The cultural groups include the Persians, Arabs, and the Jews. Predominantly, the Jews are found in Israel whereas the Persians are found in Iran. The Arabs form the bulk of the people found in the Middle East.

The other cultural groups found in the Middle East include the Turks and the Kurds. Sectarian groups in the region include Hamas, Hezbollah, Beter youth organization, and the Kahanists, among others. The sectarian and the cultural groups in the Middle East are deeply engaged in the politics of the region (Davis, p 555).

The Middle East underwent very little changes after the end of the colonial period. The politics of the region are characterized by sectarian alliances such as the Sunni, Shi’as, and the Kurds in Iraq; Muslims and Christians in Lebanon; Muslims and Copts in Egypt; Turks and Kurds in Turkey; and Sunnis and Shi’as in Saudi Arabia among others. The society in the Middle East is first comprised of groups that prioritize ethnic loyalty (Salzman (a), p 840).

In this case, national identity is often trumped upon in the pursuit of ethnic identity. This has been claimed to be the reason for the instability that is being experienced in the region. This characteristic has paved way for the development of authoritarian rule that is widespread in the region with the exception of Israel and Turkey (Davis, p 555).

The Middle East is known to be the origin of three monotheist religions including Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Each of the religion lays emphasis on peaceful co-existence and tolerance.

Judaism refers to peace, equality, and tolerance; Islam is said to be a religion founded on peace; while Christianity is said to be a religion based on peace and love. The various religions in the region draw their inspirations from ancient texts and have common rules and beliefs. For instance, Islam and Judaism have similar dietary rules and view religion as a foundation for civil law.

The three religions also share prophets. Jesus is significant among the Christians and Muslims, though Muslims also follow the teachings of Prophet Muhammad. Religion plays a central role in the lives of the people in the Middle East (Salzman (b), p 31). Among the Muslims, Friday is considered a holy day; Judaism regard Saturday as their holy day whereas Christians holy day is on Sunday.

Differences between “Cultural” and “Sectarian” Groups

The Middle East is characterized by both cultural and sectarian groups. Cultural groups are those organizations that champion for the enhancement of certain cultural identity. The examples, as mentioned earlier, include the Kurds, Turks, Arabs, Jews, and the Persians.

On the other hand, the sectarian groups are those that base their discrimination and hatred towards others on religious differences; political differences; class differences; and factional or regional differences. Such groups in the Middle East include the Hamas, Hezbollah, Beter youth organization, and the Kahanists, among others.

These organizations have turned to orthodox means in advancing their objectives. Most of them have sanctioned violence in fulfilling their objectives. Most of the groups in the Middle East can be termed as sectarian. This is because the various groups are entangled in the advancement of the group’s objectives based on religious, political, class, regional, or factional differences (Bates and Rassam, p 25).

The Hamas is an Islamic resistance movement which claims to represent the Sunni Islamic organization that has been democratically elected to represent the Palestinians. Hamas is engaged in armed conflict with Israel and has adopted terrorist tactics in fighting for the ‘rights’ of the Palestinians.

They do not recognize the existence of the state of Israel and call for its destruction. Hezbollah on its part is a Lebanese Islamic Shiite organization and political party. It is also known as ‘the Party of God’. Hezbollah was formed in 1982 after Israel invaded Lebanon. Hezbollah is a radical Islamist group that aims to achieve two objectives. First, the organization aims at getting rid of Israeli forces from the Southern Lebanon; and secondly, Hezbollah aims to establish an Islamic republic in Lebanon (Bates and Rassam, p 27).

Hezbollah has been associated with terrorist activities against the United States and Israel. Essentially, the group has been engaging in guerrilla warfare against Israel’s occupation in Southern Lebanon. Hezbollah continues to enjoy support from the Muslim world with Iran and Iraq known to give material and logistic support to the group. In Israel, there are various sectarian and cultural groups such as the Beter youth movement and the Kahanists.

The Beter youth organization is known to promote violence in its mission to defend Israel. The Kahanists on the other hand are a racist extremist religious movement. Even though this group has been outlawed from the Israeli government, it still influences political views. The group is known for its call on violence against the Palestinians (Bates and Rassam, p 43).

The Middle East is comprised of various ethnic communities which include the Arabs, Persians, Turks, Berbers, Jews, and Kurds among others. Most of the countries in the region are multi-ethnic (Baehr, p 394). However, this has not come with benefits as it has been associated with conflicts that are prevalent in the region.

For instance, the Kurds who are widespread across the region have engaged in armed conflicts seeking to establish an independent Kurdistan state. The Hamas and the Hezbollah are also engaged in an armed conflict against Israel’s occupation (Bates and Rassam, p 47).

The Impact of Imperial Powers and the Establishment of “Israel” on the People and Culture of the Middle East

The establishment of the state of Israel at the heart to the Middle Eastern society has had major impacts on the cultural aspect of the region. This has also greatly impacted on the ongoing conflicts and problems in the Middle East. The conflict being experienced in the Middle East cannot be analyzed outside the cultural context (Baehr, p 394).

It has been noted that the 7 th century Arab culture impacted on Islam and the followers of Islamic religion in their view towards non-Muslims. In the current times, the Arab culture and tribalism that is rampant among the Islamic communities in the Middle East impacts on every aspect of life including family relationships, governance issues, and conflicts.

Though most people believe that the conflicts in the Middle East are conflicts that are fanned by political grievances, the truth of the matter is that these conflicts are rooted in the culture and Arab tribalism (Salzman(c), p 23).

It is worth noting that all human societies aspire to establish order for survival and prosperity. The Arab culture ensures security through what is referred to as ‘balanced opposition.’ In this case, all members of the society owe their membership to nested kin groups which are usually big or small in size.

The groups have the obligation to defend each of the members of the group and bear collective responsibility for the activities of the group members. Salzman(c) notes that “If there is a confrontation, families face families, lineage faces lineage, clan faces clan, tribe faces tribe, confederacy faces confederacy, sect faces sect, and the Islamic community faces the infidels,” (p. 23). Therefore, it can be noted that tribalism plays a critical role in the Arab communities of the Middle East.

Israel is regarded as a common enemy by the Arab countries in the Middle East. The Arab countries perceive the establishment of Israel in their land as an encroachment in the heart of their land. Israel occupation has caused a lot of resentment across the Muslim world.

The entrance of the United States, which has tended to support the aggressive policies adopted by Israel against the Palestinian, has only acted to fuel the anger of the Arabs against both the US foreign policies towards the Middle East and Israel in particular (Dajan, p 160).

The emergence of sectarian groups such as the Hamas and the Hezbollah was triggered by anger emanating from Israel’s occupation. Israel can be regarded as a political entity and partly as a cultural entity.

This is because Israel is regarded as a sovereign state which has been recognized by the international community at least basing on the initial boundaries that were created in 1948. At the same time, Israel can be considered as a cultural entity since its establishment in the Middle East was driven by cultural factors where the Jews were determined to go back to their ancestral land.

The conflict between the Arabs and Israel is highly emphasized due to its magnitude. The Muslim Arabs argue that Israel has encroached on their land, which was conquered by Prophet Muhammad, and established their state illegally. The occupation of the land that has belonged to Muslims by Israelis, who are considered as infidels, is considered outrageous and intolerable by the Arabs (Salzman(c), p 27).

The Revolutions in the Arab countries

The Arab world has been experiencing revolutions in the recent past, and this can be said to have resulted from the conflicting interests among the various cultural and sectarian groups in the region. Though the incident that sparked the revolution was economic hardships and iron rule of leaders who did not want to leave political power, the sectarian and cultural groups got a leeway to exacerbate the conflicts and usurp power from the long-time dictators.

In Tunisia, where the revolution begun, the long serving President was removed from power and a new regime installed. Egypt followed suit with sectarian and cultural groups such as the Muslim Brotherhood took advantage of public resentment against the long-serving President, Hussein Mubarak.

This culminated in the removal of President Mubarak from power. In Libya, the long-serving dictator, Muammar Gadhafi was removed from power by the militia groups who were supported by the NATO air strikes. Therefore, it can be asserted that the revolutions in the Arab world were enhanced by the existence of sectarian and cultural groups in the region.

The Middle East can be argued to be comprising of various cultural issues that play a critical role in defining the trend in the region. Essentially, the sectarian conflicts that are rampant in the region can be attributed to the cultural orientation of the region. As noted earlier, the Middle East is characterized by diversity which has acted to fuel the conflicting situation in the region. The Kurds, for instance, have been involved in a struggle to establish their own free state.

Also, there are conflicting situations in which the various tribes are competing for political power in various countries in the region. The Arabs are also engaged in a conflict with Israel based on the notion that all non-Muslims are infidels and have to be subordinate to the Muslims. The most highlighted conflict in the Middle East is that between the Arabs and Israel. The Arab Muslims are against the establishment of Israel in what is regarded as their ancestral land.

Works Cited

Baehr, Peter. Tribes and Terror in the Middle East: A Conversation with Philip Carl Salzman. Soc 46, 2009: 394–397.

Bates, G. Daniel and Amal Rassam. “Peoples and Cultures of the Middle East”. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2nd edition, 2001.

Dajan, S. Munther. The ‘Greater Middle East Initiative’ and the Arab Culture of Rejection. Palestinine-Israel Journal of Politics, Economics, and Culture . 11.3&4, 2004: 158-160.

Davis, Eric. Pens´ee 3: A Sectarian Middle East? Int. J. Middle East Stud . 40, 2008: 555-558.

Salzman, Philip Carl (a). Arab Culture and Postcolonial Theory. Israel Affairs , 13.4 2007: 837–843.

Salzman, Philip Carl (b). Culture and Conflict in the Middle East . New York: Humanity Books, 2008.

Salzman, Philip Carl (c). “The Middle East’s Tribal DNA.” Middle East Quarterly 15.1 2008: 23-33.

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Jordan: The Perfect Introduction to the Middle East

Adventurous Kate contains affiliate links. If you make a purchase through these links, I will earn a commission at no extra cost to you. Thanks!

Dear Readers,

I know that many of you long to see the world.  So you’ve traveled a bit in Europe.  You’ve done the resort vacation in Mexico.  Perhaps you’ve done a bit of Central America or even Asia.

And you’d like to try somewhere new– somewhere adventurous, and exciting, and DIFFERENT.

May I make a suggestion?  Go to Jordan.

But it’s in the Middle East!

Yes, it is.

But is it safe?!

Absolutely.

I can give you three reasons why Jordan is a great destination for first-timers in the Middle East:

Jordan is safe.

While the Middle East may conjure up images of war, Jordan is a very safe country — most consider it the safest country in the region by far — and has been a safe country for a very long time.  You certainly can’t say that about Syria or Lebanon, and even Egypt and Israel concern people and governments more than Jordan.  While Syria is a mess right now, this does not affect Jordan’s safety whatsoever.

Has Jordan had isolated violence and terrorism in the past?  Very, very little.  Just like the United States has.  Just like the United Kingdom has.  Violence and terrorism are so rare in Jordan that its safety is on par with countries of the Western world.

Jordan is well-suited for tourism.

Jordan is chock full of interesting places to see and adventures to explore, and you’ll see some of them further down.  But as far as infrastructure goes, Jordanians have been welcoming tourists for a long time.  English is widely spoken (as is French).  There are hotels at a variety of price ranges, and while I didn’t experience public transportation, I did enjoy exploring Jordan by car .

In short, Jordan is well-equipped for tourists and there are resources for you.

Jordan will welcome you.

Whatever negative images you may have about Middle Easterners will fly out the window as Jordanians welcome you with warm hospitality.  Jordanians are some of the most friendly people I’ve ever met, and I was welcomed into their hearts and homes more or less instantly.

I should mention that Western women are welcomed, even solo travelers, and as long as you respect the local culture and cover your limbs and cleavage , you’ll be fine.

Because of its safety, its tourism infrastructure, and its welcoming nature, Jordan is the perfect destination for first-time visitors to the Middle East.

Here are some of the activities you can do in Jordan:

Love to Cook?  Learn to Cook Like a Jordanian Grandmother!

At Beit Sitti in Amman, I took a cooking class unlike any other I’ve taken.  Rather than everyone having their own cooking station, we each pitched in with different tasks to make a communal meal.  “Beit Sitti” means “My Grandmother’s House,” and that aptly describes the atmosphere — we chatted, laughed, and feasted on SO much delicious food!  I still dream of the mouttabal (roasted eggplant dip).

Love Iconic Experiences?  Float in the Dead Sea!

Yes, floating in the Dead Sea is a lot of fun, and a sensation unlike anything you’ve felt before — but it’s also the key opportunity to get pictures of yourself to show off to your friends!

This is one thing in Jordan that you MUST do.  The Dead Sea is easy enough to get to — make sure you don’t miss floating!

Love Cultural Experiences?  Have Dinner with a Local Family!

One of my most special Jordan experiences was having dinner with a family in Ajloun.  Some families in this region have been launching homestay businesses.  I spent the evening eating a delicious meal and later was climbed on by two adorable, rambunctious children.

Love Indiana Jones?  Get Adventurous at Petra!

It won’t take long for the adventurous spirit to come over you — at Petra, covered with so many different ruins, mountains, and trails, you’ll become an explorer in no time.  I loved hiking to the Monastery (by riding a donkey , which WAS NOT easier than climbing!), and it was a blast climbing through the nooks and crannies of the different mountains and canyons.

Love to Relax in the Spa?  Soak in the Ma’in Hot Springs!

There is nothing like standing in a pool and letting a natural hot waterfall run over you.  The Ma’in Hot Springs and Six Senses Spa has plenty of these waterfalls, and it’s the perfect place to soak away the dirt of the desert .  If you love spas, split your time between here and the Dead Sea.

Love Beautiful Landscapes?  Camp in Wadi Rum!

I don’t think anywhere in the world has more magnificent colors than Wadi Rum , the epic desert in southern Jordan where Lawrence of Arabia was filmed.  Try to camp in the desert if you can — that will give you access to seeing the beautiful colors at every time of day, and they’re always changing dramatically.

Love History?  Explore Jerash!

Chances are that you haven’t heard about the city of Jerash.  But if you love your history and ruins, you can’t miss this place.   The ruins are spectacular.  The hilariously cheesy chariot show is worth seeing as well.

Love Tea?  Good — You’ll Drink a LOT of It.

The tea never stops flowing in Jordan.  You’ll be offered tea wherever you go, and  it’s served in tiny glasses with sugar and sometimes mint.  Get ready to drink a lot of it.  There were days when I had seven or eight glasses!

Love Cities?  Check out Rainbow Street in Amman!

The Old City of Amman was as traditional a Middle Eastern city as you could expect — but Rainbow Street could have fit seamlessly into Brooklyn or San Francisco!  Rather than bars, you’ll find a lot of teahouses and shisha cafes with character.

Conclusions About Jordan

I’d like once again to extend my thanks to the Jordan Tourism Board for hosting me in this beautiful country.  It’s a week that I’ll never forget.

For those of you who are skeptical about whether bloggers can be objective when given press trips, I understand your concerns, as some people are afraid to criticize anything they get for free.   I am not one of them.   Let me remind you that I had no qualms about eviscerating one press trip provider when it was warranted .

I bubble over with ebullient praise for Jordan because I love Jordan.  I’ve been recommending it to everyone I know.  It’s not nearly as visited as it should be and it has something for everyone, whether you’re here for the hiking or the spas, whether you’re here solo, with your partner, or with your family.

I hope that you consider it.

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Middle East oil shock would lead to higher interest rates, warns IMF; FTSE 100’s worst day in nine months – as it happened

IMF scenario shows how a 15% jump in oil prices would push up global inflation by 0.7 percentage points

• Try the Be the Chancellor tool
• UK unemployment rate leaps to 4.2% amid fears of job cuts
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• 2d ago FTSE 100 on track for worst day in nine months
• 2d ago IMF: Middle East oil shock would lead to higher interest rates
• 2d ago IMF: 15% rise in oil price would raise global inflation 0.7pp
• 2d ago IMF: low-income developing countries suffering more scarring
• 2d ago Full story: UK households face second year without improved living standards, says IMF
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• 3d ago Global economy facing 'lower economic growth and trade disruptions in 2024'
• 3d ago EasyJet suspends flights to Tel Aviv until late October
• 3d ago Lombardelli: Middle East developments could push up inflation
• 3d ago Fall in inflation likely to be 'bumpy', BoE's Lombardelli warns
• 3d ago UK recruiters see challenging conditions
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• 3d ago TUC: People are too sick to work
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• 3d ago Real wage growth hits 2.5 year high
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• 3d ago Introduction: China's GDP beats forecasts, but there are signs of weakness too

The Resolution Foundation have dug into today’s UK jobs data, and found that economic inactivity has risen to its highest level since 2015 among working age people.

Resolution explain:

This rise is broad based – the inactivity rate is up (and the employment rate down) for all age groups except those aged 35-49, and in all English regions outside London and the South East. The number of people inactive because of ill health has hit a new record high of 2.8 million, while there has been a worrying increase in the number of people who don’t want a job – the number of inactive who want a job is at its lowest since Mar-May 2022.

TUC: People are too sick to work

One cause of Britain’s long-term sickness crisis is the long waiting lists for treatment on the NHS.

Data last week showed that the waiting list for routine hospital treatment in England has fallen for the fifth month in a row, but remained near a record high, with 7.54 million treatments waiting to be carried out at the end of February.

TUC General Secretary Paul Nowak says today:

“NHS waiting lists are near record levels. But instead of taking responsibility, the Tories are attacking people who are too sick to work. The nasty party is back!

European stock markets take a tumble

The London stock market has made a bad start to the morning.

The FTSE 100 index of blue-chip shares has dropped by around 1.35%, or 105 points, to 7860 – its lowest level since 21 March.

Nearly every stock on the index is in the red, with miners and banks among the fallers.

The City is catching up with losses on Wall Street last night, where stocks fell again amid continuing angst that the US Federal Reserve may not cut interest rates as soon as hoped.

Shares across Europe are also in the red, with France’s CAC index down 1.8% at the open and Spain’s IBEX off 1.2%.

China’s faster-than-expected growth in Q1 isn’t cheering investors; perhaps because data for March was weaker than expected….

Victoria Scholar, head of investment at interactive investor , says ,

“ Risk-off sentiment is gripping European markets today - the DAX, CAC and FTSE 100 have shed more than 1% each as negative momentum from yesterday’s sell-off on Wall Street carries forward to this morning’s price action. The strength of the US dollar is proving problematic for risk appetite as hopes fade of a near-term rate cut stateside. San Francisco Fed President Mary Daly said there’s ‘no urgency’ to cut US interest rates. There are also worries about rising geopolitical tensions in the Middle East with concerns about how Israel plans to respond to Iran’s attack over the weekend. In the UK, almost all stocks are in the red today on the FTSE 100, caught up in today’s sell-off. B&M European Value Retail has plunged to the bottom of the blue chip index, giving back yesterday’s gains, despite forecasting full year profit at the top end of guidance.

Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, Mel Stride MP, insists the government is taking steps to tackle the UK’s rise in economic inactivity (see previous post).

“We’ve seen long term sickness related inactivity rise since the pandemic, that’s why we introduced our £2.5bn Back to Work Plan to transform lives and grow the economy. “Our welfare reforms will cut the number of people due to be placed in the highest tier of incapacity benefits by over 370,000. As millions are benefiting from this month’s huge boost to the National Minimum Wage, it is work, not welfare, that delivers the best financial security for British households.”

Alarm over rise in economic inactivity

Labour market experts are alarmed by the continued rise in the number of Britons who are economically inactive, as shown in today’s employment report .

The UK economic inactivity rate for those aged 16 to 64 years has risen to 22.2% in December-February, with 9.404 million people neither in work (employed) or looking for work (unemployed).

That’s 150,000 more than in the previous quarter, and 275,000 more than a year ago, the Office for National Statistics reports.

The ONS says the increase in the last quarter is mainly due to a rise in students and those inactive because of long-term sickness.

There are record numbers out of work due to long-term ill health, points out Tony Wilson , director at the Institute for Employment Studies .

Wilson explains:

“Today’s jobs figures are surprisingly poor, with a steep fall in employment and a sharp rise in those out of work, including an unexpected rise in unemployment. However, most concerning is the rise in ‘economic inactivity’, which is the measure of those not in work but not looking for work, which is even higher now than it was in the depths of the pandemic. Overall there are nearly a million fewer people in the labour force than there were four years ago, and over a million fewer in work than there would have been if pre-crisis trends had continued. The trouble is that not enough people out of work are looking for jobs, rather than that people who are looking for jobs can’t find them. In other words, the weak labour market is holding back economic growth, not the other way round.

Latest figures out this morning from @ONS don't provide much evidence that the government's drive to reduce 'economic inactivity' is going especially well: pic.twitter.com/6GzqEErHDL — Steve Webb (@stevewebb1) April 16, 2024

Ben Harrison , director of the Work Foundation at Lancaster University , says the UK workforce is “sicker and poorer as economic inactivity has risen further to 9.4 million, and unemployment has risen to 4.2%”.

Harrison explains:

“A record 2.82 million people are economically inactive due to long-term sickness, and the UK is facing unresolved structural issues with labour market participation, as employers aim to fill 916,000 vacancies. The UK continues to be an international outlier with participation rates below pre-Covid levels. Since December 2019 to February 2020, 717,000 people have become economically inactive due to ill health and the tide is not turning.

The Institute of Directors is also concerned. Alexandra Hall-Chen , principal policy advisor for employment at the IoD , says:

The rise in economic inactivity over both the quarter and the year is a worrying development for businesses, given its potential to exacerbate persistent skills and labour shortages in the UK. The ongoing expansion of government-funded childcare is a welcome step to increasing labour market participation, but more action from government is urgently needed to increase domestic labour supply.”

The easing pressure in the labour market keeps the Bank of England on track for a summer cut to interest rates, says Yael Selfin, chief economist at KPMG UK.

“The slight easing in regular pay growth will bring some comfort for the Bank of England which has relied on the pay data as a key gauge of domestic inflationary pressure. Moreover, the rise in unemployment rate paints a picture of a less tight labour market. The exact timing of the first rate cut will be a hot debate for the MPC in the coming months.

Real wage growth hits 2.5 year high

UK wage growth has cooled, today’s labour market report shows, but falling inflation means that real pay is actually accelerating.

Regular pay (excluding bonuses) rose by 6.0% per year in December-February, a slowdown on the 6.1% recorded in November-January.

Growth in total pay (which includes bonuses) was unchanged at 5.6%.

But once you account for CPI inflation, real wages are rising at the fastest pace in two and a half years.

Real total pay (adjusted for CPI) was 1.8%, while real regular pay grew by 2.1% – both were last higher in July to September 2021.

UK firms have cut back on their vacancies – another sign that demand for labour is weakening.

There were 916,000 vacancies across the economy in January to March 2024, the ONS reports, which is a drop of 13,000 - or 1.4% – compared with October to December 2023.

Jake Finney, economist at PwC UK , says:

“The latest data suggests the UK labour market continues to cool, albeit at a gradual pace considering the strain the economy has been under over the past few years. The unemployment-to-vacancies ratio, a key measure for the Bank of England, ticked up to 1.6 in the three months to February 2024 as unemployment increased and vacancies fell further.

UK unemployment rate jumps to 4.2%

Newsflash: Britain’s unemployment rate has risen to 4.2%, as the number of workers in payrolled jobs falls and more people leave the jobs market.

The latest healthcheck on the UK’s labour market shows that the unemployment total rose by 85,000 in the December-February quarter, to 1.44 million.

That takes the jobless rate to its highest level since last summer, just before the UK began sliding into a shallow recession.

The number of people in employment fell by 156,000 in the quarter to 32.98 million, as firms cut back on their workforce.

But not all those people joined the ranks of the unemployed; another 150,000 people were classed as ‘economically inactive’ in the quarter, taking the number neither in work nor looking for a job to 9.404 million.

And in March, the number of payrolled employees shrank by 67,000, to 30.3 million.

ONS director of economic statistics Liz McKeown says there are “tentative signs that the jobs market is beginning to cool”, given the drop in headline employment rate and the fall in payrolls.

McKeown adds:

“However, we would recommend caution when looking at the size of the fall in headline employment, as previously highlighted lower sample sizes mean there is greater volatility in quarterly changes than was the case.”

We’ve published the latest UK labour market figures. Headline indicators for the UK labour market for December 2023 to February 2024 show: ▪️ employment was 74.5% ▪️ unemployment was 4.2% ▪️ economic inactivity was 22.2% ➡️ https://t.co/TllNpQLjtS pic.twitter.com/rsTVAKMbfE — Office for National Statistics (ONS) (@ONS) April 16, 2024

Introduction: China's GDP beats forecasts, but there are signs of weakness too

Good morning, and welcome to our rolling coverage of business, the financial markets and the world economy.

China’s economy has beaten expectations for growth in the first quarter of the year, but there are already signs that growth may be slowing.

China’s gross domestic product. grew by 5.3% in January-March compared to a year ago, data released today by the National Bureau of Statistics showed.

That beat foreasts of 4.6% increase, and shows a slight rise on the 5.2% growth recorded in the previous quarter.

China’s National Bureau of Statistics says the country’s economy had continued to rebound in Q1 2024, but also struck a cautious note:

Generally speaking, in the first quarter, the national economy made a good start with positive factors amassing, laying a strong foundation for achieving the annual development targets. However, we should be aware that the external environment is becoming more complex, severe and uncertain, and the foundation for stable and sound economic growth is not solid yet.

📈China's GDP grew 5.3 percent year on year in the first quarter of 2024, data from the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) showed Tuesday, boding well for a steady economic recovery in the following months. #ChinaGDP #ChinaEconomy pic.twitter.com/BWC9DsP6B0 — Chinese Embassy in Fiji (@ChineseEmb_FJ) April 16, 2024

However, a flurry of economic reports from March were weaker than expected, implying that demand softened at the end of the quarter.

Retail sales figures for March only rose by 3.1%, missing forecasts of 4.5% growth, while industrial production grew by 4.5%, failed to meet market expectations of 5.4% growth.

Stephen Innes , managing partner of SPI Asset Management , says:

Amidst mounting concerns over the resilience of the Chinese economy, Tuesday’s data releases from Beijing delivered a mixed bag of results, leaving investors grappling with a multitude of uncertainties. On the one hand, China’s headline Q1 GDP figure of 5.3% exceeded expectations, suggesting a stronger-than-anticipated start to the year and providing a glimmer of hope for meeting annual growth targets. However, the optimism surrounding GDP was tempered by lacklustre performances in other key economic indicators.

Asia-Pacific markets have fallen into the red, with China’s Shenzhen Composite index down 2.3%. Hong Kong’s Hang Seng has lost 1.5%, and Australia’s S&P/ASX 200 is down 1.7%.

Concerns over tensions in the Middle East, along with anxiety over how soon central banks will start cutting interest rates, are dampening risk appetite among investors.

7am BST: UK unemployment report

10am BST: ZEW index of eurozone economic sentiment

10.15am BST: Treasury Committee hearing with Clare Lombardelli, newly appointed deputy governor at the Bank of England.

1.30pm BST: US building permits and housing starts data for March

2pm BST: IMF releases its latest World Economic Outlook

3.15pm BST: IMF releases its latest Global Financial Stability Report

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• UK unemployment and employment statistics

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