Subdominant or subordinate groups.
The term minorities is misleading and inappropriate when discussing subdominant or subordinate groups in Middle Eastern history and society. It is a term rooted in the naive assumption of Western social scientists that minor demographic groups can wield only minor political and economic power. In the states of the Middle East, demographic minorities have exercised considerable - even dominant - political and economic power. In the past, an ethnically distinctive minority, Muslims from the Caucasus, ruled the Arabic-speaking majority for centuries (the Mamluk dynasty of Syria [1250 - 1516] and Egypt [1250 - 1517]). During the twentieth century, in Iraq and Lebanon, the only two Arab states where Sunni Muslim Arabs are a minority, the traditional dominance of Sunni Islam has given its adherents disproportionate - in Iraq, dominant - power. The internal disorders that have torn these polities apart are due in no small part to the contradiction between the majoritarian democratic principles to which all pay lip service and the very different realpolitik.
Furthermore, the bases - religious, ethnic, or linguistic - by which one defines such groups are inconsistent over time and place. In addition, the very existence of such groups and the markers that define them have become a controversial political and intellectual issue. A given group might be considered part of the majority by one criterion in one century; in the next, by very different criteria, it might be considered or - more significantly - might consider itself an oppressed minority. The process also may be reversed so that an oppressed minority may attempt to join the formerly oppressing majority.
Religion
Groups in the Islamic Middle East have been defined largely by religion. The traditional minorities - or, more accurately, subdominant groups - have been Christian and Jewish. Within these there have been further divisions by virtue of dogma, rite, and ethnic-linguistic identity. The Ottoman Empire, which dominated the Middle East and North Africa into the twentieth century, recognized most such groups as components of the so-called Millet System. The traditional states of Morocco and Iran followed practices that reflected their different social and religious needs. Because in Morocco, unlike the Ottoman Empire, the Jews were the only significant indigenous non-Muslim group, the institutional arrangements governing them were less elaborate, and their status tended to vary with the reigning Alawite dynasty (1654 - ). The most significant Christian and Jewish groups in Iran under Qajar rule (1795 - 1925) were the Armenians, with small groups of Jews and Nestorians, as well as Zoroastrians. Because of the hostile attitude of Iranian Twelver Shi`ism toward non-Muslims, the opportunities of such groups have been much more restricted than in the Sunni world. However, because of their larger number and economic importance, Armenians in Iran on the whole have fared better than other non-Muslims.
In addition to Christians and Jews, there was another religiously defined subdominant category, Muslim sectarians. For the Ottomans these were Shiʿites. In Iran, in addition to Sunni Muslims, there arose a messianic syncretistic offshoot of Shiʿism, the Baha'i faith. Such groups, unlike Christians and Jews, presented a unique threat to Muslim states because they articulated claims to power based on a similar religious discourse. Unlike Christians and Jews, who had been conditioned by more than a millennium of Muslim rule to accept the principle of status quo, religiously dissenting Muslims had to be retaught that principle from time to time.
Shiʿism represented a significant challenge to Ottoman authority in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries when the rival Safavid dynasty in Iran attempted to use its Shiʿa coreligionists in eastern Anatolia as a fifth column in the Persian-Turkish wars. As this conflict diminished, both Ottoman Sunni rulers and Shiʿite subjects pretended that their differences did not really exist. This process was hastened by the Shiʿite application of the Islamic principle of taqiyya (caution), a doctrine of dispensation that justifies concealing one's true beliefs lest they antagonize the authorities. In the mid-nineteenth century an offshoot of Shiʿism, the Druze of Syria and Lebanon, emerged as a short-lived irritant to Ottoman rule in the region when they helped precipitate a conflict with a rival sectarian group, the Christian Maronites. However, it was only in the last quarter of the twentieth century, decades after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, that Shiʿa became a force in the Arab world. In Lebanon, as a result of the urbanization of previously rural populations and emigration of the Christian elite brought on by years of civil war and foreign invasions, the poor and ignored Shiʿite community of southern Lebanon became a majority that could no longer be ignored. In Iraq, despite comparable upheaval, a Shiʿite community nearly as large, in relative terms, failed to gain comparable influence.
By the nineteenth century in Iran, as a result of the Safavids' successful campaign to convert the country to Twelver Shiʿism centuries earlier, Sunni Islam was reduced to the unaccustomed status of a statistically insignificant religion largely limited to the rural Kurdish community, and thus trebly marginalized. There was also a smaller Sevener Shiʿite community. A far more dangerous religious challenge arose from within Twelver Shiʿism. At first it manifested itself in the Bab movement, which arose in open rebellion to proclaim a new scripture superseding the Qurʾan. Once defeated, it reemerged nonviolently as the Bahaʾi religion, whose tolerant outlook proved attractive in the twentieth century. However, Shiʿite religious authorities regard it as heresy.
Ethnicity and Linguistics
In the twentieth century, recognized markers of group identity became newly significant in political terms, with extremely disruptive consequences. Ethno-linguistic-regional identity, as it was called, tried to superimpose itself on strong religious affiliations. The quality of being Aleppine, Arab, Azeri, Berber, Cairene, Damascene, Egyptian, Hijazi, Khorasani, Kurdish, Jerusalemite, Najdi, Persian, Syrian, Turkish, and so forth had always existed. Traditionally such identities had been sources of group feeling, of ethnic pride and humor, of poetry, of distinctive cuisine and speech; but they had not been the basis for political organization, power, and sovereignty. Muslims (whether Arabic-speaking or Turkish-speaking or whatever) ruled non-Muslims (whether Arabic-speaking or Turkish-speaking or whatever). Although the latter might on occasion have wealth and exercise political influence, it was always behind the scenes and under the table. Modeling themselves on the newly dominant European notions of national political sovereignty, in the wake of the collapse of the traditional Islamic polities during and after World War I, Middle Eastern peoples attempted to fit the round peg of their traditional religious communal identities into the square hole of ethno-linguistic politics. This seemed to change the basis for determining dominant versus subdominant roles. And it required a number of uneasily and inconsistently reached decisions, none of which were - or are - self-evident. What were the new identities to be? Egyptian, Syrian, or Arab? Turkish or Turanian? Azeri, Turcoman, or Persian? These are merely samples of the host of complex questions that had to be answered for new nations and states to emerge.
In the new nation-states of the Arab world all speakers of Arabic - Christian, Jew, and Muslim (both Sunnis and Shiʿa) - were to be equal; there no longer were to be religious minorities. But that theory hardly described the far more complex and tortured reality. Different Christian groups chose different responses to these opportunities. By and large the Orthodox of Syria and Lebanon identified themselves with their traditional allies, Sunni Muslims, and attempted to support the cause of Arab nationalism. The Maronites, by contrast, preferred the independence of Lebanese identity. Although individual Copts had played a notable role in the rise of Egyptian nationalism, they grew marginalized as it increasingly transformed into Arab nationalism. Even less than Christians, some individual Jews participated in the early stage of Egyptian and Syrian nationalism; but the rise of Zionism and the conflict over Palestine, along with strong religious discrimination, excluded them from any lasting role. There has, however, been one political success story in the politics of religious minorities: the Alawites who dominate Syria's ruling elite, a small Shiʿite sect so extreme that some Muslims deny they are part of Islam. Two factors explain their unique achievement. During the colonial period the French recruited them for military service, so that by the 1960s they were overrepresented in the Syrian officer corps, the country's only electorate. They also denied their sectarian traditions and flocked to the Baʿth party, a bastion of secular Arab nationalism.
The smaller ethnic groups of the Muslim world that lost in the game of national musical chairs - notably the Kurds of western Asia and the Berbers of North Africa, who previously had some claim to power and dominant status by virtue of their Sunni identity - are now ignored and suppressed minorities within new political boundaries. During the 1920s Mustafa Kemal Atatürk and his Turkish Republic, through war and diplomacy, rid Anatolia of most of its Armenians and Greeks - though a large proportion of them in fact spoke Turkish as their first language - and then tried to redefine the only non-Turkish group remaining, the Kurds, as Mountain Turks. Iran has been more successful than most states in the Middle East in welding its varied subdominant groups - Turkic-speaking Az-eris, Turcomans, Qashqaʾis, as well as the Arabs of Khuzistan and the Sunnis - into a relatively coherent polity. Although Persian speakers constitute a bare majority - if that - they have successfully used the appeal of Shiʿite Islam, to which 90 percent of the population adheres, to maintain the country's unity.
The redrawing of the map of the Middle East and North Africa after World War I created new sub-dominant groups without abolishing the old. In short, the region suffers from the worst of both worlds: it is riven both by the old confessional loyalties and by the new political demands of ethnic nationalism.
Bibliography
Braude, Benjamin, and Lewis, Bernard, eds. Christians andJews in the Ottoman Empire: The Functioning of a Plural Society. 2 vols. New York: Holmes and Meier, 1982.
— BENJAMIN BRAUDE
