| plenty of work for sharecroppers who have given up the rural struggle and decamped with their families to town. Whereas at least until very recently the proportion of urban to rural population in Turkey was roughly constant, in Iraq, by all reports, people arc moving into the towns. The sheikhs of Amara complain that they are losing workers at a rate that will endanger agricultural production.(8) Village awareness of belonging to the bottom rung of a centrally controlled state cannot fail to grow when many kin and ex-neighbours are living in the cities, being paid wages out of national oil revenues. The Egyptian situation is still different. A central government has existed for a long time—on and off for a century and a half. The villagers have never had the same autonomy. In recent years both landlord and government have worked to introduce higher output through technical improvement and even social improvements through health clinics and such. The newly liberated estates of the great landlords, now formally owned by the cultivators, have been organized on a basis of officially controlled co-operatives, in which the economic and administrative functions of the landlords have been taken over by professional organizers.(9) The crowning example of government interference with villagers is the program for the settlement of the new villages in the newly reclaimed Tahrir Province. Peasants picked by psychological tests are to live in uniform clothes on a strict and thoroughly uplifting routine.(10) It would be interesting to know what is actually happening, sociologically speaking, in these new villages. It is not only the pressure on villages and their integration into the national social system that is growing rapidly. The urban classes are becoming more dependent on the villagers, both politically and economically. National power and prestige depend very largely on the productivity, in an agricultural country, of the peasants. The politicians may not always see this too clearly, but they all know that "backwardness" is weakness and at least for this reason seek reform in the villagers. The peasants are also becoming a more important political factor. Any attempt at a secret ballot election in which the votes are really counted and published is bound, in countries with large peasant populations, to make the village vote important. In Turkey, the Democratic party won the 1950 election by appealing to and organizing in the villages and they increased their vote in 1954 by the same technique. Officials are very much more polite to villagers than they used to be; village taxes have been reduced; the official price of grain, which is bought by a government organization, has been raised; and many villages have acquired water works and new roads. In Syria, the Baath party claims and works for the support of village sharecroppers, and in Egypt both the Wafd and Nasser have sought village support. This conscious |
| dependence, however limited, of the townsman on the villager is something entirely new in the Middle East. It is precarious, because elections are not politically essential. Yet—and this in itself is interesting—the politicians continue to talk about and to hold elections. Not only the traditional relationship between town, village, and tribe has altered radically. The new nations have also had to deal with the minorities. Here again the most striking changes have been in Turkey. Mustafa Kemal saw the problem very clearly. The bitterness left by the Armenian revolts and massacres and the war of independence against the Greeks was too violent for these minorities ever to accept loyally citizenship in a Turkish republic. By the time the Treaty of Lausanne came to be negotiated, massacres had effectively removed or driven into safer lands most of the Armenian population of Anatolia. The members of the Greek Orthodox millet were a more serious problem, but this was solved by their bodily exchange with Greece by the Treaty of Lausanne (1923), for Moslems, living in what was to be Greek territory. The various Shii sects in Turkey were officially ignored. Their leadership and organisation were indirectly attacked when Mustafa Kemal abolished all the meeting places and organization of the dervish orders, since it is clear that these orders, though ostensibly Sunni, had close relations, at least rurally, with Shiis.(11) Shiis are classed as Moslems for census purposes, so that no accurate figures for their numbers can be given. They do not seem to be numerous among the educated class in Turkey and do not seem to present any political difficulty. The policy toward Sunni minorities is similar. In the Circassian villages, for example, Turkish is spoken in the schools and by the schoolmasters, and this seems to be accepted as right and proper. Only the Kurds, who include both Sunni and Shii tribes, are numerous enough to form a politically important non-Turkish group. They too are taught Turkish, and the policy of Turkification seems to be working so far. It has been said to me that it is the educated Kurds, so far few in number, who object to this policy. But the Kurds are not a united people, and many at least accept cheerfully the status of Turkish citizen. The official end of the millet problem came in 1926. The Treaty of Lausanne guaranteed the legal equality of the minorities, and this meant that so long as the Sharia or a code based on it was still applied to Moslems, the millets had to have their own personal laws. Partly in order to end this permanent institutional symbol of the non-Turkishness of part of his population, Mustafa Kemal hastened the introduction of a European code of law.(12) With this the last remnant of any formal recognition of minorities in Turkey disappeared. This did not end the social reality of ethnic and religious distinctions, but with a vast homogeneous majority, Turkey was able to claim justifiably to be a modern nation-state. |
| The Arab states were in a different situation. Their minorities were more numerous, and they were less bitterly hostile to each other. They had even all been united in getting rid of the Turks. Moreover, except for the Arabian peninsula, the major areas were in the hands of mandatory powers. Britain and France could not pursue a revolutionary policy, nor ignore sectarian differences and linguistic minorities, as the Turkish Republican government was able to do. Nor did they start with a single de facto large ethnic majority. Hence, in these countries a different system of personal law continues to apply to the peoples of the minorities. In the political institutions, the existence of these communal loyalties has been clearly recognized, and such institutional differences symbolize and perpetuate the distinctions. Lebanon has a most curious arrangement by which alternate holders of office in ranked order from the president downwards must come from the Christian or Moslem sections of the population, and these in turn divide their allocated offices between themselves according to relative power and importance. In Syria, the arrangements are little less formal. Special arrangements for local government still exist for the areas of the Druses and the Alouites, where the French began the experiment of regional administrations for different cultural groups. The Iraqi Christians have a fixed small number of deputies in the Parliament. One of the more important ministers is a Kurd. In the Kurdish areas Kurdish is spoken in the schools and by the administration. Most of the Kurds are not bilingual, so this regime is more or less inevitable. How far are the loyalties in these countries seriously confused? We do not have any definitive evidence. Many early leading Arab nationalists were Christians, and Christian Arabs certainly consider themselves primarily as Arabs. How far the vast Moslem majority of Arab speakers really regards the Christians as part of the Arab nations, I do not know. Many Arabs are still enthusiastically for Arab nationalism as opposed to Syrian, Iraqi, or Jordanian nationalism. Kurds, Armenians, and so on, on the other hand, are more likely, if they are not committed to a struggle for their own independence, to look to the existing national structures—to become Iraqis or Syrians. The same factors of integration through technological and administrative change that have increased social relations among village, town, and tribe have also operated to reduce the barriers among the communities. Better communications, more officials, more cash crops, more migrant labor, more village social services, enforced national service with the army— all these are bound to build a network of social relations across the communal boundaries, but largely within national boundaries that are more intricate and more numerous than has ever been the case in the past. When the government is so busy governing, no community can retain real autonomy. To bear with the diminution of its autonomy, a group needs to be able to some extent to identify itself with the larger group that the government symbolises, that is, with the nation. Otherwise, the interference, however well intentioned, is almost certain to be |
| interpreted in a hostile light as an attack on the minority and to lead to increased emphasis on loyalty to the minority as opposed to the nation. I have been arguing that the structure of Middle Eastern society suffered a complete change between the middle of the nineteenth century and the middle of the twentieth century. The old structure was based upon the preservation of a balance between and the ascendancy over innumerable communities from outside these communities. It aimed at stability, at preventing disorder and rebellion. As such it was highly successful. Its final collapse did not come through the failure of the structure, but through the external accident of European technologically based power. The Ottoman Empire changed quite noticeably, as all societies do. But the changes were not part of the ideology and were in spite of, rather than encouraged by, the political structure. Society was assumed to be the same forever. Now the same area is divided between territorially distinct and theoretically, but not practically, homogeneous nations, whose governments can preserve order and stability with comparative ease because their police have machine guns and aircraft. This is no longer their preoccupation. Instead they are concerned, on the one hand, with the exclusion of their political rivals from the national government and, on the other hand, with rapid reform and development, in order to preserve, if not to improve, their relative position vis-a-vis other national governments, all equally busy with the same race for technical advance. Society is assumed by the new Westernized rulers to be improving all the time, and government is for all and has the right and duty to interfere with all. Commentary AFIF TANNOUS Chief, Africa and Middle East Analysis Branch, Foreign Agricultural Service, Department of Agriculture Dr Stirling has applied himself successfully to the difficult task of portraying structural changes in a highly complex society. In concentrating upon the broad outlines of the task, he was able to highlight for us major trends and developments over a long period of time, following the break-up of the Ottoman Empire. In the following comments, I shall attempt to supplement his broad analysis by emphasizing certain aspects or by dwelling in more detail upon others. Then I shall permit myself some indulgence in a brief appraisal of the outcome of this intensive, and seemingly overwhelming, process of change in Middle Eastern society. There is no denying the diversity, numerous autonomies, and conflict of loyalties in |