Read The Shaping of the Modern Middle East for Free Online

Morocco. In all these areas, Berber continues to lose ground to Arabic. In the Caucasian lands, a bewildering variety of languages still flourish. Besides various Turkic and Iranian languages, they include Georgian, Armenian, Circassian, Chechen, and Avar. According to Pliny, the Romans, in their business dealings with the Caucasian peoples, needed 130 interpreters.2

    The three main languages of the Middle East show some variation in usage. Persian is the most unified and least extensive. It is the national language of Iran, with comparatively minor dialectal variation within the national frontiers. It is also used in parts of Afghanistan and is very closely related to Tajik, which, however, was in the Soviet era written in the Cyrillic script. Pashto, Kurdish, and some other minor languages belong to the Iranian family, but are distinct from Persian. Arabic, spoken over a vast area from Iraq to Morocco, shows a wide range of spoken dialects, some of them so far apart as to make conversation impossible. But the written language has remained the same, and its unifying power is being reinforced by the spread of education, the press, broadcasting, and the cinema. Turkish is the least unified of the three. At one time, despite a profusion of spoken dialects, the Turkic peoples had only two major literary languages: the Ottoman Turkish of Turkey, and the so-called Chagatay Turkish, which flourished in Central Asia. Both were written in the Arabic script, which, lacking vowels, tended to conceal dialectal variations and made for a wider area of intelligibility. During the nineteenth century, the Turkish of Azerbaijan also became the vehicle of a distinctive literary revival. It was, however, closely related to Ottoman Turkish and much influenced by Ottoman literature. In the twentieth century, the Arabic script has been abolished in almost all Turkish-speaking areas. In Turkey it has been replaced by the Latin script; in the Soviet Union it was first replaced by the Latin script and then, when the Turks had followed suit, by adaptations of the Cyrillic alphabet. The unified Chagatay literary language gave way to a series of "national" languages in the Soviet Middle East, based on spoken dialects and usually not mutually intelligible.
    The breakup of the Soviet Union and the independence of the six republics with Muslim majorities brought major changes and a sharp division of opinion as to how this new independence should be exercised. The debate over the alphabets aptly symbolized the alternatives before these peoples. Some chose a return to the Arabic alphabet, which they had used before the Russian Revolution-that is, a return to Islam and, no doubt, closer links with the Islamic states of the region and especially with their nearest neighbor, Iran. Some preferred to retain the Cyrillic script and remain part of a looser, more open association of former Soviet states. Still others, especially in Azerbaijan, opted for the Turkish Latin script-that is, the secular, modernizing, and democratic way of life, already taken by the people of the Turkish Republic. It is a choice, one might say, between Kemalism, Khomeinism, and post-Sovietism.

    We have now defined the "Middle East" in terms of geography and history, of religion, language, and culture. It may be useful to attempt a closer definition in terms of present-day political entities. Obviously, one cannot demarcate the frontiers of a zone or region, as one would of a state or province. Except on the seacoasts, the Middle East tapers off in an indeterminate borderland of countries that have much in common with it, yet are not wholly part of it. In current usage, the Middle East consists of Turkey, Iran, and perhaps Afghanistan; of Iraq and the Arabian peninsula; of the four Levant states of Syria, Lebanon, Israel, and Jordan; and of Egypt, with variously defined extensions southward and westward into Arabicspeaking Africa. The southern limit of the Middle East is set in Asia by