Changing Patterns of Political Organization in the Twentieth-Century Middle East

SHE PURPOSE of this paper is to make a contribution to the understanding of systems in the twentieth-century Middle East by concentrating on one major aspect of these systems, namely their organizations. To set the limits to our inquiry, we propose to define organizations as consciously organized groups other than formal and conventional institutions of the state, which either in their avowed objectives or in their actual impact are meant to influence developments in the state in which they operate. The Middle East as a whole is here assumed to lend itself to such an inquiry for the same reasons for which this area has traditionally been singled out and separated from other areas in historical, cultural, and social research, namely the existence and persistence of certain unifying factors despite the considerable diversity within the region. Had this study been focused on Western society, its title might perhaps appropriately refer to parties and pressure groups. For our purposes this would be too restrictive. It would, moreover, imply some degree of the democratic framework which obtains predominantly in Western societies. Within the context of the Middle Eastern scene we have preferred to use the more generalized term, political organization, as having the advantage of embracing not only the parties but other organizations characteristic of the Middle Eastern social environment as well

Ancient history · Archaeology · Geography · Middle East · Political science · Politics · History · Islamic Studies and History · Law

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