Being Modern in the Middle East Revolution Nationalism and Colonialism.joshi

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Being Modern in the Middle East: Revolution, Nationalism, Colonialism,

and the Arab Middle Class

Sanjay Joshi

Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East,

Volume 29, Number 2, 2009, pp. 334-336 (Review)

Published by Duke University Press

For additional information about this article

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http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/cst/summary/v029/29.2.joshi.html
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Being Modern in the Middle East: Revolution,

Nationalism, Colonialism, and the Arab Middle Class

Keith David Watenpaugh

Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006

xi + 325 pp., $35.00 (cloth)

Yes, there is a history o modernity in the Middle

East. At a time when, more than ever perhaps, the

region is associated with images of backwardness,

medievalism, and religious anaticism, a book

such as Keith David Watenpaughs is a welcome

addition to the ranks o scholarship. Based on a

microstudy o the city o A leppo, Watenpaughs

Being Modern in the Middle East, however, has con-

tributions to make to the world o scholarship

well beyond the Eastern Mediterranean region

he generalizes about in this study. Scholars inter-

ested in exploring the surprisingly undertheo-

rized category called the middle class pretty

much anywhere in the world will nd much o

interest in this book. O even greater interest are

Watenpaughs historical explorations o what

being modern meant to the middle class o

Aleppo and the region.

Following some o the recent writing on

the subject, Watenpaugh understands the middle

class not so much as a group dened by income

or occupation but as the result o conscious

eorts o a relatively small group o educated

proessionals and businessmen who sought todistinguish themselves both from the traditional

elite o Aleppo and o course the lower orders o

society. For both o these purposes, being mod-

ern, Watenpaugh suggests, was a prerequisite

o middle-class-ness. Rejecting the old impact-

response o modernization theory, Watenpaugh

preers to capture modernity as a lived histori-

cal experience and explore how it has colonized

local politics, cultural practices, and everyday

practices and how that modernity has given

rise to a uniquely modern middle class (8).

The historical exploration of a lived moder-

nity is perhaps the greatest strength o Waten-paughs book. I was tremendously impressed with

how the author was able to weave in a theoretical

discussion o modernity and the middle class

with a detailed empirical case study o Aleppo

between 1908 and 1946. The irst chapter, an

introduction, lays out the main arguments of the

book, ocusing, naturally enough, on terms such

as modernityand middle class. The second chapter

introduces the locale, the city o Aleppo, and its

people, with a ocus on the developments in the

late Ottoman era that acilitated and provided

the context or the emergence o a modern mid-

dle class in the city. The ollowing nine chapters

are organized in three sections, outlining threecritical phases in the history o the Aleppian

middle class. The rst section, rom the Young

Turk revolution o 1908 to the First World War,

shows how the revolution opened up a space into

which the Aleppine middle class could come

into its own, as institutions o the public sphere

such as voluntary associations, newspapers, and

political parties became institutionalized in

the Ottoman Empire. Their mastery over what

Watenpaugh terms the technologies o public

sphere debate allowed or the emergence and

establishment of a middle class largely composed

of religious minorities, displacing the traditionalSunni Muslim elites o Aleppo. I the chapters in

the rst sect ion show the emergence o a con-

dent middle class in Aleppo, aspiring to social

or political hegemony, those in the second sec-

tionocusing on the period rom the end o

the First World War to 1924reveal a dierent

picture. Sundered rom their connections with

the old Ottoman Empire, the middle classes o

Aleppo, along with others in the eastern Medi-

terranean, now struggled to make sense o new

identity as Arab and Syrian. This more somber

period in the history o the Aleppine middle

class is refected in their turn to refections on

the past, but one they ramed within the param-

eters o a new, quintessentially middle-class his-

toricity. The last sect ion examines the period o

the French mandate over Syria between 1924

and 1946, where Watenpaugh examines how the

Aleppine middle class responded to French colo-

nialism. Far rom treating the middle class as a

monolith, Watenpaugh in this section explores

the ambiguities o middle-class politics. Both

resistance to and collaboration with colonialism

were acets o middle-class politics that led some

to briefy firt with ascist orms o politics.Throughout the book, Watenpaughs proj-

ect is less to trace some sort of inexorable rise of

the middle class as a political force than to trace

the historical processes through which vocabu-

laries and institutions associated with middle-

class modernity became normative in Aleppo

and the eastern Mediterranean region. This is

what he means when he argues that the revolu-

tion o 1908 made indelible and permanent the

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B o o k R e v i e w s

politics o middle-class modernity in the Eastern

Mediterranean (67). Though the actual political

power wielded by the Aleppine middle class waxed

and waned, the act that even the traditional elite

were compelled to speak the language o liberal-

ism and reorm in the new era inaugurated in 1908

and aterward is testament to the strength o his

argument. But the project o modernity ultimately

remained an incomplete one, in Watenpaughsassessment o the region. A liberal, cosmopolitan

middle class that spoke the language o rationality,

expected openness and meritocracy, and looked for

alliances beyond the sectarian and communal divi-

sions o the day did not succeed in establishing a

hegemonic presence in the eastern Mediterranean.

Instead, another ace o modernity, the authoritar-

ian modern state, became much more signicant in

the region.

This may be as good a t ime as any to coness

that my own area o expertise is South Asian his-

tory rather than that o the Middle East. Though

I may miss some o the local nuances critical toWatenpaughs account o the region, I do share a

deep interest in most o the themes Watenpaugh

explores in his monograph. As there are some inevi-

table overlaps as well as evident dierences in the

two historical contexts, a review by a h istorian o

another area may even be useul or readers o an

explicitly comparative journal such as this one. Cer-

tainly the best way to understand the middle class

in either area is not as a xed sociological category

dened by income and/or occupation but, rather,

as a project o educated proessionals who sought

to create, through the public sphere, a series odistinctions between themselves and classes above

and below. But the middle class o Aleppo and the

region, unlike India, were not successul in estab-

lishing their hegemony in the postcolonial milieu.

That critical dierence probably accounts or some

signicant dierences in the analysis and represen-

tation o the middle class in Watenpaughs account

and those o South Asia.

Most recent scholarly analysis o the middle

class in South Asia is much more critical o the

middle-class projects than Watenpaugh is of his sub-

jects. Undoubtedly, this is to some extent colored by

the peripheral position the middle class occupies incontemporary Syria, as the conclusion to the book

clearly demonstrates. Yet it does, to some extent,

prevent a more thoroughgoing critique o middle-

class politics, and its limitat ions, which might have

allowed readers to see them as more active agents

in the process o their disempowerment. Could it

be that their desire to distance themselves rom

the lower orders actually prevents the middle class

o the region rom realizing their political goals?

Given the ways in which the middle-class projects

across the world have been highly gendered, the

absence o attention to the gendered elements o

the middle-class politics o Aleppo are also surpris-

ing in this otherwise theoretically astute work. I

would also have loved to see questions o religious

identity and middle-class-ness elaborated on a little

more. Watenpaugh leaves readers with a teasing re-

erence at the end o the book, where he describeshow the loss o hope in modernitys ideals, rather

than commitment to Islam, is leading middle-class

men to strap dynamite to their waists and become

suicide bombers (301). Rather than see this only as

the product o a debased middle class o contempo-

rary Syria, it might have been interesting to see ways

in which a new notions in religiosity emerge in the

process o middle-class ormation in Aleppo.

The one area where the similarities between

South Asia and the Middle East become very appar-

ent is in Watenpaughs historical and historiographi-

cal struggle with notions o modernitya concern

that lies at the heart o most scholarship o the post-colonial world. The central, and most signicant,

contribution o Watenpaughs book remains his

detailed examination o the nature o the modern

fashioned by the Aleppine middle class. Rather than

all into the trap o Eurocentric historiography and

lament the impossibility o the Middle Eastern peo-

ple achieving true modernity, he looks to tease out

the local experience and construction o the mod-

ern in Aleppo. Yet, here too, my South Asian train-

ing leads me to wonder i he may not have taken his

arguments urther. Though Watenpaugh is careul

to distance himsel rom Eurocentric approaches,and even endorses Dipesh Chakrabartys call to

provincialize Europe, he does not use the di-

erence between the metropole and the colony to

refect back on the limitations o the ideal type o

modernity given to us by the colonial world. Instead,

early in the book, he clearly states that though

modernity can be thought of as a language that can

acquire local dialects, these local idioms must be

comprised o the denitive components o moder-

nity (14). These denitive components include the

central planks o rational discourse and institutions

o civil society pioneered in Europe. Perhaps a more

critical look at the premises o Western modernityand its deinitive components may have added

another acet to Watenpaughs admirable analysis

o the eastern Mediterranean region.

That Keith Watenpaughs work is a seminal

contribution to the history o the region and to

the larger scholarly universe cannot be eclipsed by

the minor disagreements noted above. It must be a

required part o any sort o reading list on modern

Middle Eastern history, and I am sure that it will


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Comp

arative

Studie

sof

South

Asia,

Africa

andthe

MiddleE

ast

orm an important component o graduate courses

on the history o the region. But, perhaps equally

signicant, Being Modern in the Middle Eastis a very

important contribution to the rank o scholarly

studies o the middle class across the world. It adds

one more work to a relatively small list o books that

can and should be used to illustrate how the expe-

rience o modernity and the ormation the middle

class are both unique to specic regions yet oera wealth o possibilities or comparative historical

scholarship.

Sanjay Joshi

Northern Arizona University

doi 10.1215/1089201x-2009-014

Empires of Intelligence: Security Services

and Colonial Disorder after 1914

Martin Thomas

Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008

xiii + 428 pp., $49.95 (cloth)

Told rom the vantage point o the colonial archive,

Martin ThomassEmpires of Intelligenceprovides an

in-depth comparative study o British and French

inormation-gathering techniques and services

developed and variously applied in the Middle East

and North Arica as the sine qua non o imperial

government during the interwar period; moreover,

Thomas analyzes the reasons or the ailure o intel-

ligence to secure a stable social and political envi-ronment, or, alternatively, to prevent disorder. The

history o this instrumental orm o colonial knowl-

edge is ramed within a notion o the intelligence

state. As the irst comparative study o colonial

intelligence gathering in the early twentieth cen-

tury (1), according to Thomas, the book excavates

an extensive documentary base and draws on an

impressive array o secondary material to oer a

layered view o how intelligence operated. However,

the book also raises more questions than it is able

to answer, which is a problem o theory and method

rather than o the works novelty.

On the one hand the work adumbrates thespecicity o intelligence as a orm o knowledge,

while on the other hand it demonstrates the need

to conceive it broadly when viewed in the context o

empire. In the introduction, Thomas proposes a dis-

tinction between metropolitan and colonial inor-

mation-gathering processes, a theme he develops

urther in the ollowing three chapters. Colonial

states were intelligence states insoar as the entire

bureaucratic apparatus o imperial administration

in Muslim territories contributed to state surveil-

lance o the subject population (14). The colonial

dierence here seems to rest on a positivist and lib-

eral conception o state, wherein intelligence and

power were [not] one and the same (2). Thomass

claim depends on the assumption that consensual

rule, the ostensible norm within the metropolitan

context, was predicated on bases otherthan that o

the evolving system o state surveillance over thecourse o the nineteenth century, which eventually

became a tool or ensuring social stability through

responsive government rather than through repres-

sionthe ormer being the domain o liberal poli-

tics. In the wake o decades now o studies on power

inspired by Michel Foucault, this type o claim

would appear rather naive. Indeed, the remainder

o the text, through the telling details, which are its

strength, belies the weakness o this ramework or

a comparative analysis o intelligence conceived as

a particular technology o government that inter-

twined with other modern disciplinary and regula-

tory practices. That being said, while a Foucauldianramework might complicate the authors concep-

tion of power and its global distribution, the former,

too, would need to be complicated in order to appre-

hend colonial dierence.

In chapters 49, Thomas highlights instances

o colonial rule in which that rule appeared tenu-

ous or was indeed in danger o being undone. This

choice is partia lly understandable given his rame-

work o the intelligence state, although one might

query even in this regard whether the rame would

hold up against ordinary instances o colonial

administration. But i we do not share the assump-tion that knowledge and power are categorically dif-

erent, then the material he presents would require

another analytic, to which the text itsel points the

way. An enormous range o colonial authorities

encounters with potential and actual threats is

recounted and meticulously dissected in order to

illuminate the speciic interplays o intelligence-

gathering techniques, indigenous and external

actors, and the policy-making structure o impe-

rial governments. Tracking existing and potential

challenges to colonial rule rom Morocco to Iraq,

rom city to desert, and within the metropole itsel

in the case o France and the Algerians, Thomasmarshals a mountain of evidence that demonstrates

the diversity o intelligence situations, actors, and

even epistemologies (in the case o tribal law, or

example) that characterized the history o Brit-

ish and French attempts to impose order on their

dependent subjects, or prevent their disorder. In

short, the practices o imperial government were

irreducible to any overarching theory o state that

presupposed the workings o a sovereign subject

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Being Modern in the Middle East Revolution Nationalism and Colonialism.joshi