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Y321: The Middle East 1908–2011: Ottomans to Arab Spring

Statehood and Pan Arabism in the Middle East: monarchies, Baathist regimes and Iran

  • 2 things to know
  • Unit group 3

Overview

Recall questions on Jordan’s survival, the Saudi-Wahhabi alliance and Ibn Saud, the Baath Party, Assad’s Syria and 2011, Iraq from Faisal to Saddam Hussein and relations with the United States, and Iran from the Pahlavis to 1979.

What you need to know

Answer each one before you reveal it.

Your recallNot started
Numbers

How did Faisal become king of Iraq, and how independent was his kingdom?

Numbers

Trace how Iraq moved from monarchy to Saddam Hussein's rule.

Questions from this subtopic

Each one with the model answer underneath.

  1. 1

    How did the Hashemite kingdom of Jordan survive?

    Model answer

    Created for Abdullah in 1921 and independent in 1946, it rested on the loyalty of Bedouin-recruited armed forces, on British and later American subsidy, and on Hussein's readiness to suppress opposition while conceding gradually.

  2. 2

    What is the origin of the Saudi state's alliance with the Wahhabi movement?

    Model answer

    An eighteenth-century pact between the house of Saud and the preacher Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab, whose puritanical reform of Islam gave the dynasty's conquests religious authority and gave his teaching a protector.

  3. 3

    How did Ibn Saud build his kingdom, and what secured it?

    Model answer

    He took Riyadh in 1902 and the Hijaz in the 1920s, proclaiming the kingdom in 1932; oil revenues from the late 1930s and a security relationship with the United States then underpinned it.

  4. 4

    Summarise what the Baath Party stood for.

    Model answer

    Founded in Damascus in the 1940s by Michel Aflaq and Salah al-Din al-Bitar, it preached Arab unity, freedom from foreign control and socialism, treating the Arabs as one secular nation.

  5. 5

    How did Hafez al-Assad govern Syria?

    Model answer

    Seizing power in 1970, he built a police state resting on the army, the Baath Party and his fellow Alawites, and crushed the Muslim Brotherhood's rising at Hama in 1982 with great loss of life.

  6. 6

    What happened in Syria in 2011?

    Model answer

    Protests against Bashar al-Assad, inspired by risings elsewhere in the Arab world, were met with force and escalated from demonstrations into armed rebellion.

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