Communication in Middle East and Abroad

The predominant pattern of innovation in the nineteenth century was that the Ottomans filtered the European model of modernization and diffused specific techniques to selected sites in their empire. Centralization was the dominant political ideal associated with modernization. In terms of Arab society, this translated into bringing tribes under central control, which, in turn, involved a stepped-up military capacity and favored spatially unifying technologies such as the telegraph and the railroad. Bedouins realistically viewed the telegraph as an unwelcome government intrusion. The first Ottoman telegraph lines were built in 1855. Beirut was linked to Damascus in 1861 and to Istanbul two years later. Then Iraq was linked by telegraph to Istanbul, but also to India, a move that was thought to enhance the economic stability of the country (England pushed for this to enhance its control over India after the Mutiny of 1857–1859). Istanbul was linked to Arabia in 1901, complementing the Hijaz railroad, which linked Syria to Arabia. The telegraph and railroads were a unifying force economically (because they increased the volume of commerce in the towns and districts along their routes and in their termini) and politically. Because the Hijaz railroad carried pilgrims, it became a visible, material symbol of Pan-Islamism.

The telegraph and railroad were designed to reduce the time and distance factors across the great Eurasian landmass. Ottoman imperial administration differed in places that had the telegraph, where communication was instantaneous, and those that didn't, where it took days for dispatches to arrive, with palpable results in law enforcement, tax collection, price and wage regulation, and so forth. The telegraph was also a spur to democratization, as citizens used telegrams to petition the central government directly. As a result, the pace of innovation may have quickened, at least in cities, and selected rural economies certainly benefited. However, the deeper cultural manifestations of such technologies have yet to be explored.

Darwinian evolution illustrates how acceptance or resistance to modern scientific ideas was channeled along religious lines. The Syrian Protestant College in Beirut (later American University of Beirut) was famously a node of diffusion of Darwinism. The chief backer of Darwin there, Edwin Lewis, was fired for his efforts, but not before having passed the idea to students, mostly secular writers of Christian origin who continued their advocacy of Darwin in Lebanon and Egypt. Among Muslims, interestingly, Shiite theologians tended to have a more moderate view of evolution than did their Sunni counterparts. Religious opposition was uniformly based on scriptural authority, although moderate (generally Shiite) commentators stressed that there was no specific Koranic warrant to oppose the theory.

What explains the receptivity to innovation in the early Islamic world and the rejection of innovation in the modern Islamic world? Under what circumstances did Islam itself become a barrier to the diffusion of ideas and techniques? In the broadest possible terms, so long as a minority of Muslims ruled a majority of non-Muslims (a garrison state model), it was to the advantage of the rulers to be open to whatever innovations might increase their power and augment their prestige. Once Muslims were in a majority, a kind of cultural self-sufficiency set in, which turned the interests of the elite inward, toward refining the Islamic system, which was (in theory, at least) a kind of theocracy in which no distinction was made between religious and civil (legal) spheres and in which religious law regulated all aspects of daily life. Innovation was viewed as arbitrary, having no basis in recognized tenets of Islam. The traditional education system, mosque-based schools (madrasas), never evolved into a system that could encompass exogenous elements. In such a cultural system, innovation is irrelevant. Bid'a (Arabic, "innovation") was held to be both good and bad, betraying ambivalence (at the least) toward innovation, and was invoked selectively against, for example, tobacco, coffee, and various aspects of modern science.