The Middle East region, comprising the Arabian Peninsula, Mesopotamia and the Levant, contains within it the three earliest centres of Islamic civilisation:
the Hejaz, dominated by Mecca and Medina, where the Prophet Muhammad preached and where the first Islamic community developed under his aegis and that of the first three caliphs; greater Syria, centred on Damascus, the capital of the Umayyad dynasty from 661 to 750, and containing Jerusalem, Islam’s first qibla and its third holy city; and Iraq, where the new capital of Baghdad became the centre of a vast empire under the Abbasids, where the consensus that grew into Islamic orthodoxy was first hammered out, and where the chief elements of classical Islamic civilisation were developed.
In the course of time, of course, the centres of power in the Islamic heartlands were to shift elsewhere—to Fatimids, Ayyubids and Mamluks in Egypt, to the Ottoman Turks with their capital in European Byzantium and to the Safavids in Iran. Turks and Persians ruled where Arab dynasties had once held sway. And Islam itself spread and consolidated its power in fresh regions: India, Africa, the Far East. The Arabian Peninsula remained much what it had been before the advent of Islam, a backwater, of significance only for the holy cities of Mecca and Medina and the myth of the untainted nomad roaming its deserts. Iraq and the Levant became Ottoman provinces.
Religiously, the fortunes of the region followed its relegation to provincial status. The great focuses of Islamic scholarship lay elsewhere, in Fes, Cairo, Istanbul, or Isfahan, and even when individual scholars of merit originated in provincial centres, they generally gravitated to the great cities where their talents could be best put to use. Organised Sufism spread throughout the Ottoman Empire but left the Arabian Peninsula virtually untouched. Mecca and Medina retained their quality of holiness, of course, and continued to attract the pious and pilgrims, playing in this respect an important role in bringing together scholars and holy men from the length and breadth of the Islamic world.
In some cases, their experiences in Mecca were to become turning-points in the lives of men who rose to positions of eminence elsewhere. In the early nineteenth century, for example, the Sufi reformer Ahmad ibn Idris al-Fasi (1760-1837) attracted large numbers of pupils to Mecca, where he had settled in 1818. Although the movement he founded had little direct impact in Arabia, pupils such as Muhammad Uthman al-Mirghani and Muhammad ibn Ali al-Sanusi established brotherhoods—the Mirghaniyya and Sanusiyya—that were to have an enormous impact in the Sudan and Libya respectively.Removed as they were from the centres of power, these regions came for the most part more slowly than others into the orbit of the European powers and, in consequence, faced the problems of Westernisation and modernisation rather later than the rest of the central Islamic world. Areas like Oman, Yemen and what is now Saudi Arabia remained remote and deeply rooted in tradition until well into the twentieth century. Change, when it came, often came swiftly and with devastating results. Unlike Turks or Levantines or coastal North Africans, who had never been wholly isolated from the world around them, the inhabitants of the inland reaches of the Arabian Peninsula were denied the comforts of a gradual induction into the ways of the Technical Age that was invisibly but inexorably tightening its grip on their borders.
Islamic society and, in particular, Islamic religion possessed resources which rendered them, if not impervious to outside influences, at least capable of resisting wholesale capitulation to them. In many less developed societies, the impact of Western culture was generally productive of profound changes in the religious life of the people, generating indigenous movements of spiritual renewal from the cargo-cults of Melanesia to the nativist churches of sub-Saharan Africa. Islam, on the other hand, had a wide panoply of religious texts, functionaries, institutions and routines that made resistance to Western pressures in that sphere relatively easy and even inevitable.
This is not to say that religion in the Islamic world has remained unaffected by changes mediated by agencies of the West. Whole areas of life have passed out of the sphere of religious control, from education, law and even commerce to neighbourhood associations and the family. But the chief developments in the religious sphere have either represented a closing of ranks against the forces of secularisation or a continuation of internally inspired currents of renewal or reaction, such as the Tijani and Sanusi brotherhoods of North Africa, the Sudanese Mahdist rebellion, the Iranian Babi sect, or even more modern movements in Iran, Egypt, and elsewhere.Nevertheless, although religious developments have taken their own course and Islam has retained its internal autonomy against Western systems of thought and behaviour, external factors have played an enormous role in ensuring the success or failure of specific trends or movements, whether indirectly by influencing the general economic and social climate or directly by the despatch of gunboats or the organisation of coups d’etat. Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, then, the fortunes of Islam in the Middle East have been closely tied to internal political changes (themselves as often as not the result of Great Power intrigues or direct intervention) on the one hand and to external pressures on the other.