Page:The Arabs short history-PKHitti.djvu/6

The Arabs Until the first World War almost the entire Arab Asia was in the embrace of the Ottoman Empire. Now Iraq and Jordan, after a period of tutelage as British mandates, arc independent states. Syria and the Republic of Lebanon have been freed from the French mandatory. Most of the Arab peninsula is today under two native potentates: Saud in the north and al-lmam Ahmad in the south. Egypt, which aspires to the headship of the Arab world, became an independent sovereign state in 1922, and Libya in 1951. All those states are now represented by ambassadors or ministers in London and Washington. All have found admission to Western comity through various doors. Ten of these states, of which eight were born after the second World War, have joined to form the League of Arab States. They extend from Morocco to Iraq, including the Sudan, and their influence is mounting in world affairs. Their problems and aspirations, national and international, cannot be fully understood unless projected against the background of the past.

The following pages are addressed not to the scholar, but to the general reader. They tell, very briefly, the story of the rise of Islam in the Middle Ages, its conquests, its empire, its time of greatness and of decay. The story of the Arabians and the Arabic-speaking peoples unrolls before us one of the truly magnificent and instructive panoramas of history. It is hoped that this brief history of the Arab world will suggest how intimately a part of our own history it is. vi