The Middle EastBernard Lewis

From War to War

Discussion/Reading Questions

1. Which Arabian movement challenged the legitimacy of the Ottoman state and why?

2. Who is one of Wahhab’s converts mentioned in the reading?

3. What do these two men accomplish in the middle of the 18th century?

4. Do these men achieve any success against the Ottoman Empire?

Discussion/Reading Questions

5. How many times do the Russians and Ottomans go to war? (1806 - 1878)

6. Why don’t the Ottomans lose more land in these loses to the Russians?

7. What 2 powers are causing trouble for Iran?

8. What was the effect of the Russian loss to Japan in the Russo - Japanese war of 1905?

Discussion/Reading Questions

9. What drove Russia and Great Britain into an Entente in 1907? What effect did this have on Iran?

10. At this point in the reading, what are some examples that shows how the Ottoman Empire could be deemed “The Sick Man of Europe”?

11. What did the Sultan hope his call to Jihad would do?

Armenian Genocide Question

12. How is the Armenian Genocide addressed in this reading?

The Arab Revolt Questions

13. What made the Arab revolt different from the Armenian?

The Arab Revolt Questions

14. Although not militarily significant, what was significant about the Arab revolt?

15. What does Lewis say about the Ottoman political structure?

16. What were the 3 phases of the European rivalries in the Middle East after the fall of the Ottoman Empire?

17. How did Britain and France divide the Fertile Crescent? (Let’s make a chart)

Britain France

Saudi Arabia

18.How involved were the colonial powers in the Arabian peninsula?

19. Whom does Ibn Saud defeat to consolidate his power in the Arabian peninsula?

20. In what year was the kingdom of Saudi Arabia created?

The Modern Middle East“State Building by Decree”

James Gelvin

The Mandate System(p. 181 - 182)

• “The friendship of France is worth ten Syrias” - Prime Minister David Lloyd George (Great Britain)

1. What is the context of this quote?

2. Why did Lloyd George feel this way?

T.E. Lawrence(Lawrence of Arabia)

Ibn Saud

Hussein bin AliHashemite King (Hijaz)

Sharif and Emir of Mecca

Faisal bin Hussein bin Ali King of Hijaz (1924 - 1925) King of Iraq (1921 - 1933)

Abdullah I bin al-HusseinHashemite Prince

King of Transjordan (1921 - 1946)

King Abdullah IIFourth Hashemite King of Jordan

The Mandate SystemP. 181

1. How did the language used in the League of Nations mandates complicate issues. (Top of page)

2. How was Iraq created?

3. Why did the French separate Lebanon from Syria?

Ethnic Divisions of Syria

The Mandate System(p. 182)

4. How did the creation of Transjordan affect “Zionist immigration”?

5. What are the territories mentioned that formed the creation Iraq?

6. What did each of these divisions have that made this partition seem viable?

Ethnic Divisions of Iraq

Thomas Friedman (NY Times)10/11/14

“It is easy to see how ISIS spread. Think about the life of a 50-year-old Iraqi Sunni male from Mosul. He first got drafted to fight in the eight-year Iran-Iraq war that ended in 1988. Then he had to fight in the Persian Gulf war I after Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait. Then he lived under a decade of U.N. sanctions that broke Iraq’s middle class. Then he had to endure the years of chaos that followed the U.S. invasion, which ended with a corrupt, brutal, pro-Iranian Shiite regime in Baghdad led by Nuri Kamal al-Maliki that did all it could to keep Sunnis poor and powerless. This was the fractured political ecosystem in which ISIS found fertile ground.”