The middle east a brief history of the last 2000 years pdf

The middle east a brief history of the last 2000 years by Bernard Lewis

THE MIDDLE EAST A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE LAST 2000 YEARS

Book introduction

A common sight in most Middle Eastern cities in the coffee-house, or sometimes the tea-house, where at almost any hour of the day you may find men – usually only men – sitting at a table, drinking a cup of coffee or tea, perhaps smoking a cigarette, reading a newspaper, playing a board game, and listening with half an ear to whatever is coming out of the radio or the television installed in the corner.

In outward appearance, this Middle Eastern cafe patron does not look very different from a similar figure sitting in a cafe in Europe, particularly in Mediterranean Europe.

He will look very different from his predecessors in the same place fifty years ago, still more than a hundred years ago.

 That of course is also true of the European sitting in his cafe, but the two cases are far from being the same.

The changes that have taken place in the appearance, the demeanor, the garb, the behavior of the European during that period of time are almost entirely of European origin.

They are changes which, with few exceptions, arose from within the society, and even these recent exceptions came from the closely related society of America.

In the Middle East, on the other hand, the changes, for the most part, originated from outside, from societies and cultures profoundly alien to the indigenous traditions of the Middle Easterners.

The man in a coffee-house, sitting in a chair, by a table, reading a newspaper, encapsulates the changes that have transformed his life and that of his parents – how he looks, what he does, how he dresses, even what he is, symbolizing the immense and devastating changes which, coming out of the West, have affected the Middle East in modern times.

The first, most obvious, and visible change is in the clothes that he wears. It is still possible that he may be wearing traditional dress, but this is becoming less and less frequent in the cities.

Most probably he will be dressed Western-style, with a shirt and slacks or, nowadays, a T-shirt and jeans. Clothes, of course, have tremendous importance, not merely as a way of keeping out the cold and damp and preserving decency, but also – and particularly in this part of the world – as a way of indicating one’s identity, as an affirmation of one’s origins and a recognition signal to others who share them.

 Already in the seventh century BCE in the book of the prophet Zephaniah (1:8), it is stated that ‘In the day of the Lord’s sacrifice’ God will punish ‘all such as are clothed with strange apparel.’ In Jewish and later in Muslim writings,