Continuities And Changes In The Arab World

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The dimensions in the Arab world were always fluctuating being ruled and conquered by many different people and nations. However, today’s Arab nations began forming since the breakup of the Ottoman Empire. Their role in the region played a key part in the development of these countries. The Middle East today or the Arab world spans from Morocco is the west to the Gulf Sea in the east including all countries in the zone. The ottomans ruled a major part of the world from the 14th century till the first half of the 20th century when the empire dissolved. Throughout this time they had control over the Arab world. The ottomans being Turkish had their own set of traditions however they had declared Arabic as the official language and they claimed …show more content…

“The Arab nation must be independent of the Turks …The Turks ruined the Arabs”. They started to believe that without the Turks they would have been the most civilized nations in the world since the Arabs are better at doing things. (Hourani, 1970 , p. 278) Also as mentioned in Dawn (1973, p. 132) “The Arabs had declined after the non-Arab (Turk) came to dominate them and reduced learning to the religious sciences and religion to bigotry and fanaticism.” The ideas began flourishing the people wanted to change their situations, the views people once had of the Ottoman Empire were no longer what they were before. In Haddad’s writing he discusses the implications Turkish nationalism has on the Syrians and the Arabs. We can see the differences beginning to emerge and each “state” begins to look after its people locally not as it was before. The Turks began viewing themselves as Turkish not Arabs. Whereas Syria and other nations began trying to hold on to the Arab identity and try to push it forward within their national identities that were also growing at that time with the return of many scholars from