| to upset the existing arrangements, but where and when the new rights were enforced, the results were very often misappropriation, absentee landlordism, confusion, and protracted litigation. Technical change is obvious. Aircraft, radio, and such are dramatic marvels. But perhaps even more socially relevant are improved methods of administration. More efficient record-keeping, communicating, and checking up amount to more efficient ways of pushing other people around. Technical and administrative advance go hand in hand. New technical organizations like factories call for new degrees of precision and reliability in the co-operation of large numbers of people. The new devices and new administrative methods give new power to interfere in the daily life of both urban and rural communities. The positions in the new hierarchy require specialized knowledge and training. Power no longer rests simply on the command of hereditary resources. Important social positions demand indispensable technical knowledge and experience, and those who possess it are able to exercise power through this very fact. This involves the rise of the professional and business class, particularly represented in the Middle East by the army officers, who, while the professions are still small in numbers, are the only professional group that has the means, through its monopoly of armed force, of pressing the government really hard. In discussing Westernization, people frequently assume that the main factor in change is intellectual conviction. Parliamentary government, a secular independent judiciary, and so forth are intrinsically such excellent ideas that once people know about them they adopt them. We shall be nearer the mark if we look at the social context and ask what in the situation is conducive to the use of these institutions and ideas—if we look for manipulation, not simply conviction. In 1918, the end of the Ottoman Empire left a politically open situation, with Western powers and various indigenous groups and peoples competing for power and territory. It is not surprising that with western Europe in the ascendant, ideas that had both the prestige of belonging to the victorious allies and the more concrete advantage of being likely to enlist their support should have swept the board. With the establishment of the League of Nations, it was assumed that the nation was the only possible politically autonomous unit, and nationalism was the most obvious political ploy. Egypt, which really lay outside the empire already, had a clearly defined "protected" status and accepted frontiers Even here the best weapons against the Westerners were the Westerners' own weapons, and Egypt soon achieved nominal independence. Turkey was also by an astonishing feat of arms able to secure national unity and independence. The remaining states were eventually divided into British and French spheres of influence from which, after another world war, emerged six independent Arab states and Israel. |
| With the mandates and treaties, the direct pressure from the West toward the establishment of Western social institutions intensified. At the same time, the indigenous drive to establish national power and prestige by taking from the West was also gaining ground. Hence technical and administrative change accelerated rapidly. All the new institutions were based on an entirely new conception of the political entity—the national state—with the government claiming to represent the social unit to which the ultimate loyalty of all its citizens should be given and ready to interfere in the lives of all sections of the population, not merely to maintain order and the status quo, but to produce a permanent state of change along a path of eternal improvement—that is, to pursue "progress" and "civilization." The old divisions into religious, language, and local communities, and into townsmen, villagers, and tribes, which still existed— which, indeed, had in some cases been strengthened by the period of conflict and insecurity—had theoretically no place in the new scheme of things, with which they were plainly inconsistent. But the new central governments had the benefit of the new techniques and methods of administration. They controlled professional armed forces, which made rebellions unsuccessful, and they were learning how to exert control over the daily lives of their citizens on a scale these semiautonomous peoples had never experienced. The new means of communication—motor car, telephone, and radio—worked in the same direction, bringing parts of the society into contact, forcing them to see themselves as bits of the nation rather than as the center of their own universe. Communities that had been almost self-contained social systems of their own became parts of a single social system, with the government and its Westernized servants firmly at the top. The people who have lost most by the changes are the tribes. One-time independent Bedouin communities have been "pacified," and in many cases settled as fellahin. The new technology has deprived many of them of their main sources of income— camel-breeding and caravan escort—and the modern weapons in the hands of regular armies make their resistance to governments much less effective. The new frontiers cut across the tribes' normal routes of migration and upset their traditional pasturing practices. Their raids became either a disturbance of the national peace, or worse still, aggression against another state. They are no longer the cream of Middle East society, but by the new urban standards barbarians, who must first become peasants like their former subjects before they can begin to achieve "civilization." The working out of the confusion from the Ottoman land reform has meant that in many cases land held by complex tribal customary rights has been registered as the personal property of the sheikh, who is thus converted from a political head into an |
| absentee landlord. Very large areas of Iraq seem to have been settled on these terms since 1920.(3) In Syria, the Jezira area, which was formerly uninhabitable because of tribal activities, is now being cultivated by "merchant tractorists" who pay rent to the sheikhs.(4) In Turkey, also, the nomads living in the Taurus Mountains and in the east have been under pressure to settle. The only practically important tribally organized people inside Turkey were the Kurds. The Turkish army has been in action against them several times, from 1925 to the middle 1930's. Normal administration is now in force in all Kurdish areas, and assimilation by the teaching of Turkish seems to be proceeding slowly. Villagers have also been subject to the civilizing and nationalizing pressure. The degree of political and economic integration of the villages into the national life of Turkey is striking. The great national effort of the war of independence, and the symbol it gave the nation in the person of Ataturk, made the population, which was already fairly homogeneous, nationally loyal from the beginning of the republic, in spite of the government's attacks on religious symbols and institutions. The villagers certainly had a great deal to bear: they were told by legislation how to lay out their villages; they were made to wear hats like infidels; they were subjected to a European code in place of their own sacred law; their religious orders were made illegal; and the training of their imams was prohibited. Finally, they were forbidden to write in the sacred Arabic script, and their children were taught the script of the Franks. What averted the direct impact of this series of attacks on their way of life was the absence of an administration capable of enforcing the reforms in detail. Probably this relative inefficiency saved the regime from reactionary rebellion. As the administration has increased in scope and efficiency, so the reforms have slowly reached the villages piecemeal. Only the hat law was rigidly enforced at the time of its enactment. But now the administration is reaching the villages. The headman receives a stream of official orders—the village houses are to be renumbered, a statement of village accounts is required, an electoral role must be submitted, all dogs not actually required to protect sheep must be put to death, and so on. The office of headman has become unpopular. His official duties, even though frequently evaded, are liable to cause trouble with the authorities, or with the villagers, his neighbors, or with both. They often require him to extract money or information from his fellow villagers. All headmen I have come across are accused of embezzling funds, and all of course have strenuously denied it. Almost all were young men between twenty-five and forty years of age, usually with influential senior kin alive. All with scarcely an exception said they wanted to resign as soon as possible and would never undertake the office again, and in many cases a two- or four-year term of official office (5) was in fact broken by retirement. One result of this is that neither the headman nor anyone else could really exercise any leadership or exert pressure to settle village quarrels. This in turn leads to more recourse to |
| urban institutions and personnel, thus intensifying the process of the decline of rural autonomy. At the same time, the usefulness of the government has become more obvious locally. Government credit has increased greatly, and one of the main annual administrative contacts for all villages and most villagers is the paying of the old Agricultural Bank loan and the drawing of a new one after the harvest each year. Roads and road overseers have appeared in villages, water conduits and fountains have been built, officials arrive to assess the harvest in bad years for a debt moratorium, medical officers of health make occasional visits, and village health officers and midwives have settled in some villages. The villager himself goes off to town much more often than he did, hours away in a bus or lorry, instead of days away on foot or donkey. The volume of migrant labor, though it is not, as far as I know, measured by official statistics, has risen very greatly. All these contacts with a self-consciously progressive middle class, which ostentatiously uses a different etiquette (they do not, for example, normally remove shoes when entering a village man's guest room) has made the villager very ready to pour scorn on his own way of life and accomplishments. He sees himself at the bottom of the national scale of social rank. This process of urban interference to improve village life has gone much less far in Syria and Iraq. With minor exceptions, Syrian governments have been too preoccupied with staying in office to do very much about organizing social services to attack the villages. The peasants on the whole have not been subjected to a stream of officials. On the other hand, as Gullick (6) makes very clear for Lebanon, private enterprise has taken a hand. Buses and trucks, radios, and even some technical agricultural and irrigation changes have arrived, though we have, as far as I know, no recent detailed information on the effect of these on the structure of village society. In Iraq, the situation is similar, except that distribution of landholding is even more recent and is even more heavily in favor of the large landowning class. In spite of vast expenditures on dams, and also on roads, bridges, water works, hospitals, and so on, practically nothing has so far been spent on social services for villagers. This is hardly surprising since the government is necessarily dominated by large landlords who do not want middle-class officials wandering about in their villages suggesting reforms. Not only is the first reform suggested likely to be a reduction in the landlord's share of the crop, but middle-class officials are used by the villagers as allies against the landlord's political influence. This is what one would expect a priori, and is clearly brought out in Dr. Salim's study of marsh Arabs.(7) On the other hand, the vast public works that the oil millions have financed have meant |