Still Awaited: A Truly Objective History of the Making of the Modern Middle East.

• Author: Mehmet, Ozay
• Position: Books - Book review

The Fall of the Ottomans, The Great War in the Middle East

By Eugene Rogan

Basic Books, 2015, 512 pages, $20.75, ISBN: 9780465023073

The Ottoman Endgame, War, Revolution and the Making of the Modern Middle East, 1908-1923

By Sean McMeekin

Penguin Books, 2016, 570 pages. $35.00, ISBN: 9781594205323

Lawrence in Arabia, War, Deceit, Imperial Folly and the Making of the Modern Middle East

By Scott Anderson

Signal, 2014, 577 pages, $22.00, ISBN: 9781782392026

The Poisoned Well, Empire and Its Legacy in the Middle East

By Roger Hardy

Oxford University Press, 2017, 380 pages, $27.95, ISBN: 9780190623203

The Enemy at the Gate, Habsburgs, Ottomans and the Battle for Europe

By Andrew Wheatcroft

Basic Books, 2008, 337 pages, $24.00, ISBN: 9780465020812

We are now witnessing a harvest of new history books on the making of the modern Middle East. Five are chosen for a critical review below. They are works by experts, well-researched and highly readable and infinitely more objective than the over-supply of Eurocentric or Orientalist books of the past. Yet, all four have limitations, lacking due Ottoman/Turkish/Arab/Muslim sentiment and "flavor." The fifth on the Ottoman siege of Vienna is illuminating and relevant to the on-going debate on Turkey-EU relations. It, too, has its limitations.

When, finally, the Ottoman world came to a bitter end [Turks, Greeks, Armenians, Arabs and others paying heavily in blood and tears], were the Turks and Ottomans irrational, wholly responsible for what happened? What really explains the numerous Western invasions from the British take-over of Egypt in 1882 (or still earlier the French in North Africa) to the Bush-Blair intervention in Iraq in 2002 and its shameful aftermath to this day? Can the people of the Middle East ever taste freedom and independence so long as the Israel-Palestine problem remains unresolved?

The trauma and vacuum created by the Western imperialist destruction of the Ottoman Empire haunt us still. Imperialism has spawned Neo-imperialism. Kipling's Great Game is now a globalized market-place in which capital and technology move freely, but not labor. Sadly, we are still a long way away from a truly objective history of the Death and Heritage of the Sick Man of Europe. [By "objective" we mean history that is unbiased, evenhanded account, in which local people's welfare is uppermost, outsiders' interest secondary.] Aksakal's superb, but short, book, The Ottoman Road to War in 1914 is but an opening chapter in yet an unfinished History of the Modern Middle East. The standard-bearer in objective history-writing remains Toynbee's The Western Question in Greece and Turkey, A Study in the Contact of Civiliza first published in 1922. We shall return to this theme presently.

It is instructive to begin this review with some questions that remain unanswered.

Why was the Ottoman Empire, long in decline, suddenly condemned to death in St. Petersburg, London and Paris at exactly the onset of the Automobile Age? Yes, old men and empires all, Roman and Ottoman and others, die mortals' death. But why was the Sick Man of Europe put to rest at the onset of the new oil wealth? Who got that wealth?

If religion and faith mattered, why did the Sultan's call for a Global Jihad go unheeded in the Muslim World? Why was it that hundreds of thousands of Indian, African Muslims (alongside ANZACS and other colonials), as well as Arabs could be recruited to fight the Ottoman armies in Mesopotamia and Gaza and elsewhere? What were these Ottomans fighting for anyway?

Who exactly did the leaders of the Arab Revolt represent? How come the Sharif of Mecca got cartloads of gold from the Sultan to raise an army against the British on the Suez, only to betray his master at the last moment? How far did dynastic (and personal) interest prevail in final settlement of those artificial 'lines in the sand' drawn up in secret agreements to divide the Ottoman Loot?

And a contemporary question: Who now believes that George W. Bush and Tony Blair invaded Iraq and destabilized the region for human rights and democracy?

Rogan's book, much to the author's credit, explicitly links the British landings in Basra in the summer of 1915 to the newly discovered oil wealth in Kuwait and Bahrain, which were coveted by British oil interests in London (pp. 79-81). British India played a vital role in this campaign, not only with pre-war intelligence concerning the oil wealth and trade opportunity. Most significantly, British India provided the raw manpower, Hindus and Indian Muslims, to drive the Ottomans out. Rogan also well documents the diplomacy of betrayal of Sharif Huseyin (p. 402), his final (secret) meeting in Cairo in 1921 with Churchill, when the Arab national cause was traded for British-dependent dynasties in Saudi Arabia, Transjordan and Iraq. Rogan's account of battles is especially unique and fascinating as he stresses the ordinary soldier and minor actors caught in a wider conflict which only few could decipher.

This otherwise superb work suffers when the author suddenly stops being an objective historian and allows personal emotionalism to take over. He endorses the genocide narrative in the tragic case of the Ottoman Armenians in chapter seven and footnote 17 (pp. 424-425). Missionaries write from "conviction," objective historians from archival evidence evaluated with an open mind. Rogan chose to rely on "genocide" authors only, rejecting the converse hypothesis in historians such as Guenter Lewy, while also ignoring important facts of the conflict. McMeekin's account on this tragedy (chapter 10) is far more balanced and factually more...