Modern Islamic countries born under European rule

in #history4 years ago (edited)

East Asians like me don't know much about the relationship between European Christian civilization and Islamic civilization. It only knows the long war between Europe and Islam since the Middle Ages.

Mohammed claimed that if Muslims conquered pagans and turned them into Muslims, Muslims would go to heaven.
So, the Muslims proclaimed a sacred war jihad against the world.
After the death of Muhammad, Arabs invaded Europe, Asia, India, Southeast Asia and China to build the Islamic Empire.
The Islamic Empire surpassed the Roman Empire of Europe.

Islamic civilization grew into the largest civilization of the Middle Ages.
Europe has long suffered Islamic invasion.
After the Turks in Central Asia built the Ottoman Turkish Empire, Europe feared the Ottoman invasion.

However, the industrial revolution in Europe caused the fall of Islam. Britain, France, and Russia began to conquer the Ottoman Empire, Egypt, Persia, North Africa, and Central Asia.
The Ottoman Empire, which once frightened Europe in the past, also fell, but it was still the strongest in the Islamic world.

The Turks used all kinds of persecution and exploitation of the Arabs. So, the Arabs revolted to gain independence from the Turkish Empire.
However, the Turkish Empire ruthlessly suppressed the Arab independence movement. When World War I broke out, the Turkish Empire became a Axis power. Then, the princes of Saudi Arabia joined the British and asked to help Arab independence.

Then the British Empire sent Lawrence to the Arabs to support the Arab independence movement.
He was Lawrence of Arabia, who became famous for movies.

Lawrence Lawrence in 1918

Colonel Thomas Edward Lawrence, CB, DSO (16 August 1888 – 19 May 1935), was a British archaeologist, army officer, diplomat, and writer. He was renowned for his role in the Arab Revolt and the Sinai and Palestine Campaign against the Ottoman Empire during the First World War. The breadth and variety of his activities and associations, and his ability to describe them vividly in writing, earned him international fame as Lawrence of Arabia, a title used for the 1962 film based on his wartime activities.

While watching a movie called Lawrence in Arabia, I learned about the birth of the Islamic world in the modern Near East.
The modern Islamic world of Turkey, Syria, Levant, Saudi Arabia and Iraq was created by European empires.
Since the death of Timur, feared by Europeans, Ottoman Turkey has dominated the Arabs. I misunderstood the Turkish and Arabs as the same Muslim people, but the two races were completely different. The Turks and Arabs were like enemies. So, the princes of Saudi Arabia chose to ally with Europe over Turkey.
The British Empire dispatches Lawrence who is fluent in Arabic and knows Arabs to help the Arabs independence movement.
However, the really interesting fact is that Arabs did not know the term Arab. Europe created nationalism, nationality, and state, but the Arabs maintained the original tribalism.
The Arabs were divided into tribes, fighting endless wars and divisions with each other. So, Lawrence exclaimed to the Arab tribes an Arab, nationalism, and liberation of Arabs.
Lawrence exclaimed, like Jesus, that the Arabs must unite and wage a war of independence against Turkey.
However, the Arabs, who have been tribal for thousands of years, did not understand Lawrence's words.
In fact, most Arabs were illiterate and could not understand Lawrence's claims. Eventually, Lawrence became an Islamist himself and organized a direct Islamic army to battle.
He led the war by handing out the spoils of the railroad blasts to the Arabs.

The Turkish army has brutally slaughtered and retaliated against the Arabs. Arabian troops accepted Turkish prisoners, but Turkish army killed Arabian prisoners after tortured them.
However, at the latter half of the war, the long-standing grudges of Arabs and Turkishs exploded.

When the Turkish army massacred the entire Arab village, Lawrence was furious and ordered that all enemies be killed.

After the fall of Ottoman Turkey, the Arab princes was supported Britain and France to build the kingdoms of Syria, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia.
Currently, Levant, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and the Gulf States are all born under European rule.

It is interesting to note that the richest Gulf countries in the Islamic world were born in this era.

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I have read that it was Winston Churchill that determined the national boundaries that were imposed by the British Empire on the Middle East at that time. It is the imperial interests of the City of London that has divided the Kurds into four separate countries, and in similar vein tribal cultural entities were broken and divided against themselves across the region, ensuring the reinstitution of internecine conflict on tribal, as well as national divisions, and the continued disparity in power between the British Empire and developing nations.

It is notable that the British Empire was preparing to divest itself of it's colonies, and did not colonize the ME after the defeat of the Ottoman Empire, as their military superiority at the time would have made possible (Palestine being the exception). Decolonization proceeded in the following decades, as the City had become able to profit more from newly independent countries than over colonies, due to the necessity of maintaining functional governments and the extraordinary expense of doing so where very different cultures and societies often made European framing of nations a very foreign concept.

It is demonstrable that the subsequent development in former colonies was far reduced from what could have been used to improve the quality of life of those free peoples, due to Western control of the international system and financial dominance through their superior military power exacerbated by the deliberate use of national borders to fracture potentially powerful ethnic groups.

"Lawrence exclaimed, like Jesus, that the Arabs must unite and wage a war of independence against Turkey."

I'm not aware that Jesus led a successful armed revolt. Am I completely clueless, or have I misunderstood? Perhaps you meant to compare the revolutionary influence Jesus had on Palestine that later resulted in the Bar Kochba Rebellion. However, that certainly was not Jesus' intent, as he could have easily took up the sword and did not.

Lawrence was all about the sword, and imperial power, which strongly contrasts with Jesus, who instead was concerned with social felicity stemming from philosophical, not military, revolution.

Senior, your English is metaphorical and professional, so I can hardly translate it now. I will reply later.

Please remember that I am an American elementary school level. hahaha

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