Word: arabization
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Today's rivalry for Arab leadership is in many respects frankly unequal. After almost four centuries of Ottoman misrule and neglect, Iraq counts fewer than 6,000,000 inhabitants; Egypt has more than 22 million. Egypt is Mediterranean, with a long record of Western influence; Iraq still feels the strong pull of its tribal past...
...Iraq has its geographical unity, its great river valley, and after three generations under a British-created monarch, its own political and economic institutions. Above all, it has oil. Among Arab states, Egypt and Syria lack the oil-creating wealth, Saudi Arabia and the Persian Gulf sheikdoms the economy that can absorb it. Iraq, alone of all Arab nations, has both, and on the wave of its oil royalties it has launched an ambitious program of economic development that is transforming the political balances of the region...
...even the Egyptian embassy questions the Pasha's honesty. Syrian and Egyptian broadcasters have shouted "Traitor" and "Satan," denounced him as a stooge of the British and an Ottoman-style tyrant. He pays no heed. Every Iraqi knows how a half-century ago Nuri leagued with the Arab Patriot Jafar al-Askari to conspire against the Ottoman Turks, then fought on camelback for Emir Feisal in World War I's revolt in the Arabian desert...
...Covenanter. Commissioned a sublieutenant, Nuri rode back to Baghdad, slim, handsome in the mustache sprouted in Constantinople, and fiercely proud of his uniform. He became a platoon commander at a Persian border town, and fell in with Jafar al-Askari, a husky, bull-necked Arab a few years his senior. The two became fast friends, and in 1910, as one member of the family puts it, "they gave each other their sisters." Though in accordance with Arab custom Nuri was not introduced to his bride Naima till the wedding day, Jafar arranged for her to catch a glimpse of Nuri...
...wives and mothers, set off by mule caravan for Constantinople, this time to attend staff college. Shortly after their arrival war broke out in the Balkans, and Nuri went off to the front, but he and Jafar became convinced that advancement was being systematically denied them because they were Arabs. "If we are foreigners, then let's be foreigners," said Nuri. He took over leadership of a cell in the secret Covenant society plotting Arab independence from the decadent and dying Ottoman empire. All cell members wore hooded red gowns at meetings to keep their identity secret from each...