September 3: How we got here (Gelvin, The Modern Middle East)

Our reading this week was UCLA professor (and Zeynep’s advisor!) James Gelvin’s survey The Modern Middle East.  As per Prof. Shields’ request, everyone brought one passage or concept that struck them.  Here they are:

-Defensive developmentalism: new term for many of us and a central part of Gelvin’s thesis.  Basically, defensive developmentalism is when “rulers or would-be rulers of states outside Europe copied European methods of governance and imposed them on their domains…because those methods seemed to provide the most effective means to protect themselves and mobilize the energies of their populations” (71).  The end goal was, obviously, military reform.  But for military reform, rulers needed to “expand the sources of revenue under their control, their ability to coordinate the activities of their populations, and their ability to discipline their populations” (74).  To collect the taxes that would support these newly created armies, rulers had to expand “access to education…[and promulgate] new legal codes”.

-Gelvin’s conception of modernity, 2 components: world system economy and a world system of nation states (the first of which begins to emerge in the 17th century, the latter in the 19th)

-Chapter 9 (‘Secularism and Modernity’): does secularism mean modernity in Gelvin’s understanding?  No; Gelvin talks about how some thinkers define modernity by the secularizing tendencies that accompanied modernization in Europe.  However, “the prominent role religion plays in politics and political discourse of Middle Eastern states does not mean these states are not modern; rather, it means these states follow an alternative form of modernity” (132; bold mine).

-The tension between westernizing forces and Islam; Islamic modernists and traditionalists

-p. 141/2: industrialization and the economic crisis that it brought to much of the world in the late 19th century (the Depression of 1873).

-import substitution?  Someone also threw out the acronym ISA; we also compared the experience of Ataturk in Turkey and Reza Shah in Iran during this discussion

-Gunpowder Empires: new way of conceptualizing world systems/world history in the early modern period for some of us

-World War I as a crucial turning point in the development of both the nation-state system and world economy (two components of modernity)

-modernity: usually associated with ideals or concepts (e.g. secularism), but Gelvin defines is based on structures and systems

-along with this, Zionism as colonial project (in particular, Nathan found Gelvin’s description of the Israel/Palestine conflict as a ‘real estate dispute’…interesting)

-The idea of osmanlilik, and how the effort to create an Ottoman identity relates to issues of modernity and Islam

-Two opposing conceptions of osmanlilik: the first, beginning with Mahmud II and Tanzimat, is a secular notion of citizenship on the French model; the second is based on Islam and was prominent during the long rule of Abdul Hamid II (though not always the official narrative)

-Gelvin’s putting the Middle East in a global context, through his use of world systems theory

-people often assume that the Middle East is apart from the rest of the world, divorced from the reality other regions face and has a unique set of issues and problems; Gelvin, by highlighting global phenomena like the crisis of the seventeenth century, disabuses us of this notion

-agency vs. victimhood; Professor Shields found Gelvin’s effort to bestow agency on Middle Eastern peoples in telling their history admirable, but not always historically accurate.  Sometimes there are victims, as in the case of Iraq, 2001-2003 (ex. was Iraq really a free agent making choices that affected its future during these years?)

-finally, the text itself as a ‘top down’ history; some people challenged the assumption that you must know the top down history before reading bottom up accounts (e.g. Wasif Jawhariyyeh’s diary), but we didn’t really pursue this topic

Here are some of my notes (condensed!) from the rest of our discussion:

-The nation-state system was not an inevitable development; this was the part of discussion most focused on Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities (I think I have the author and title right on that, though I haven’t read it), so I wasn’t able to follow most of the arguments.  Also in the context of our nationalism discussion, the claim most debated was whether nationalism is truly ‘never authentic, never organic’ (as one person in the class put it) and always a false construction.  We talked a great deal about osmanlilik during this part, and about how osmanlilik was never a fixed project: the emphasis varied between Islam and inclusion/univeralism at different historical moments

-exceptionalism, and how it is often used to oppress.  I honestly don’t remember in what context this came up, but I wrote it down!

-Finally, Sarah posed an interesting question: would the inclusion of different geographic/thematic considerations change Gelvin’s narrative?  This came out of Char’s point that our class is about the Muslim world, but Gelvin’s book focuses on the Middle East, lacking any discussion of Central or Southeast Asia or other Muslim communities across the globe.

See you all at the Seminar Thursday!