The Middle East
Bernard 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 Ali
Hashemite 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-Hussein
Hashemite Prince
King of Transjordan (1921 - 1946)
King Abdullah II
Fourth Hashemite King of Jordan
The Mandate System
P. 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.”