flict about the best course to adopt. Communists
sought revolutionary change, but the new rulers
feared that such a pace would sweep them away as
well. Some groups, such as the powerful Muslim
Brotherhood, insisted that the only road to Arab
salvation was to reject Western secularism alto-
gether and to return to an Islamic past that would
allow religion to embrace the whole way of life
and guide all aspects of social policy and state-
craft. Others insisted that outside help, whether
Western or Soviet, was essential for rapid progress
and that Islamic fundamentalism was an obstacle
to modernisation. The emerging leadership deriv-
ed its authority not from the ballot box or from
constitutional procedures, but from violent coups.
In this way the military replaced the landowners
as the backbone of the new regimes. When they
came to power the officers frequently had no cen-
tral strategy nor any detailed policies; the coher-
ence of their programme depended on the quality
of the leadership.
In Syria the repercussions of the lost war con-
tributed to a military coup in March 1949. Three
further military coups occurred during the next
three years, but it was not until 1966 that the
secular socialist Ba’athist Party, strong in the
army, seized undisputed power, by staging yet
another coup. Neighbouring Lebanon, with its
delicate compromises, began to fall apart when, in
1958, the Christian president attempted to fore-
stall pro-Nasser and anti-Western Arab nationalist
movements (for Nasser, see p. 440). The struggle
between Christian and Muslim groups plunged
the country into confusion, and the presence of
Palestinian refugees had added a further destabil-
ising element to the kaleidoscope of the Lebanese
polity. The US threw its weight behind the
Christian president, landed marines and for a
time an uneasy peace was maintained between
the various armed factions loyal to their own lead-
ers, Druze, Sunni, Shia and Christian Maronite
Falangist. The threat of civil war was not banished,
only postponed.
In Jordan too the rise of Arab nationalism
made itself felt. The astute King Abdullah, who
had wanted to live peacefully with the Jews pro-
vided they would accept his rule over Palestine,
and who had then gone on to capture the West
Bank and half of Jerusalem during the Palestinian
war, was assassinated by a Palestinian Arab in July
- His successor in 1952, after a brief inter-
lude, was the young King Hussein, who managed
to retain his throne by preserving the loyalty of
the army and – despite Jordan’s continued finan-
cial and military dependence on Britain – severing
treaty ties with the British, so asserting Jordanian
independence. Saudi Arabia, still feudal, still disci-
plined by a fundamentalist Islamic tradition re-
mains the only major Arab nation apart from
Jordan where the monarchy has survived into the
last quarter of the twentieth century.
In Iraq, King Faisal II and the most powerful
politician in the country, Nuri-es-Said, seemed to
guarantee a firmly pro-Western conservative gov-
ernment, but Arab nationalism in Iraq in 1948
already limited the conservatives’ freedom of
action. There was no open break with Britain, but
even Nuri-es-Said could not afford to identify
himself too closely with the West. The Arab
League, of which Iraq was a leading member, also
contained Egypt, which disputed with Iraq the
leadership of the Arab peoples. Policies of reform
and development were too slow in Iraq; the
landowners and conservative politicians had no
wish to promote radical change, so Nasser’s
Egyptian revolution proved a serious threat to the
‘old gang’ in Iraq. In 1958 the Iraqi army led a
bloody revolution. It came as a shock to the West,
not least because of the brutal murders of Faisal
and Nuri-es-Said. The alliance with the West was
discarded.
In neighbouring Iran, after the Second World
War, a groundswell of discontent threatened to
oust the Shah and the conservative politicians
from power. The withdrawal of the Russians and
the provision of US advice and aid had not solved
the inherent problems of Iranian society. A wide-
spread rejection of foreign influence, both
American and British, was just one indication of
the growth of nationalism. The technologically
advanced Anglo-Iranian Oil Company was the
most visible sign of foreign exploitation, and
though it provided much of the state’s revenue it
employed only a very small proportion of the
Iranian working population. Despite the develop-
ment of the oil industry, Iran was still one of the
1
1956: CRISIS IN THE MIDDLE EAST – SUEZ 439
