Copts (Greek for Egyptian), who have followed
Christianity under their own patriarchs. Most
members of an ancient community of Jews were
expelled after 1956.
The Sudan, to the south, which shares the life-
giving Nile with Egypt, was nominally under
Anglo-Egyptian rule from 1899 until independ-
ence in 1956 but it was, in reality, controlled by
Britain. The main ethnic division is between the
mixed, mainly Sunni Muslim peoples of the
northern and central regions and the southern
tribes, which tend to be either pagan or Christian
converts. Some have been converted to Islam,
others resist northern attempts at Islamisation.
This division, which has often led to conflict and
warfare, remains one of the most serious internal
problems facing the modern Sudan’s 31.1 million
inhabitants (2000 figure), of whom just under a
third belong to one of the black African peoples.
In western Sudan in the Darfur region, African
people started a revolt and one million were
driven out by Arab militias, villages burnt and
50,000 killed in 2004. The great majority of
Libya’s 5.3 million people in 2000 were Sunni
Muslims; Arabic is the national language, though
some Berber-speaking districts remain. Once one
of the poorest Arab countries, comprised as it is
largely of desert, the discovery of oil in the 1960s
transformed the economy and the ambitions of
the Libyan political leadership.
The Middle East is overwhelmingly Arab and
Islamic. There are constant appeals to Arab unity
and Islamic solidarity, as well as calls for the polit-
ical organisation of an Arab League. Unions of
different Arab nations are talked about and even
established, though only for short periods. The
State of Israel was seen as the common enemy,
the intruder that has seized Arab lands and alien-
ated most of Palestine from Arab rule. By the
twenty-first century the Arab world has accepted
that Israel has established itself securely and its
neighbours, with more or less willingness, are
accommodating themselves to reality. As we have
seen, the sense of a common civilisation and lan-
guage and the pride in Islam are shared by mil-
lions of Arabs, and the educated classes are
conscious of these links across national frontiers.
But nationalism is relatively new to the Arabs,
except in Egypt, which was influenced by the
Napoleonic invasion and Western ideas in the
nineteenth century. Socialism, industrial develop-
ment and demands for constitutional government
are other signs of the Western impact on the
Middle East of the nineteenth and twentieth cen-
turies, but they have not got very far.After the defeat of 1918 the Turks became a
strongly nationalist country under Mustafa Kemal,
known as Kemal Atatürk (Father of the Turks).
Modern Turkey with a population in 2000 of 66.7
million is based on the military success of Atatürk,
who defied the Western Allies and by 1923 had re-
established complete Turkish sovereignty over its
territories, shorn of the Arab empire, by threaten-
ing to fight again for his country. The legacy was
bitter rivalry with Greece, which had to abandon
its own attempted expansion in Asia Minor. It is a
rivalry that persists to the present day, with dis-
putes in the Aegean and over the future of Cyprus.
Mustafa Kemal broke with Ottoman and Muslim
traditions and during the fifteen years of his rule as
president forced Westernisation on the Turks,
breaking the power of the clergy. The Atatürk tra-
dition, under which the military became the
guardian of the nation, lives on. In modelling
institutions on the West in the 1930s, Atatürk
combined a parliamentary system with his own
virtual one-party rule and cult of personality. His
protegé and successor was Ismet Inönü, who was
president from 1938 to 1950 and prime minister
from 1961 to 1965. But in the aftermath of the
Second World War and in alliance with the US,
there was both external and internal pressure for
more democratic rule. Strife-ridden civilian gov-
ernments have been replaced intermittently by
repressive military rule. The democratic tradition
is weak.
Three peoples were denied the right to form
their own independent nations in the carve-up of
the Ottoman Empire: the Armenians, the
Palestinian Arabs and the Kurds. The Armenians,
with a history of independence and subjection
going back to ancient times, seemed the most
likely to gain independence after the collapse of
the Ottoman Empire, under whose rule they had
suffered genocidal atrocities. Britain and France
hoped that the US would accept a mandate over
Armenia, still partitioned between Turks and