Figure 1.--Photography was invented in France (1839). By the 1860s, European photographers appeared in the Ottoman-controlled Arab land. We begin to see the first images of the Arab lands. And it is a a land that cn only be desctibed as a land that time had forgotten. The imges we can see could have been taken centuries even a millebium earlier. Nothing had changes. It is absurd to blame this on the Europeans. The Arabs for eturies had been under Muslim Ottoman rule and in the case of Egypt where there this photograph was taken many more centuris of Muslim rule.

The Ottoman Empire seized the Middle East (16th century) and at times exerted varying degrees of control over North Africa. The Ottomans controlled the Arab lands for several centuries. Even before colonization by the Ottomans, the Arab lands existed as if time stood still. While Europe experienced the Renaissance, Reformation, and Enlightenment as well as the birth of modern science and the Industrial Revolution. Ottoman control meant that the Arabs were shielded from all of the moderizing movement which made the modern world. Life in the Arab world remained unchanged for centuries. Early photographs taken in Egypt and other Arab lands show a life little changed since not only from the medieval times, but often ancient times. These phptographs could have been taken centuries if not a millennium earlier. And even the clothing was almost identical to that worn in the medieval era. In North Africa, the Arabs were so backward that they survived only with state-sponsored piracy. Leading to America's first contact with the Arab world--the Barbary Wars (early-19th century). Egypt achieved its independence from the Ottoman Empire during the Napoleonic Wars. The Europeans after the Napoleonic Wars would stop paying tribute and put a permanent end to Barbary Piracy

Created: 9:59 PM 6/26/2014
Last updated: 9:59 PM 6/26/2014