Introduction

Abstract

The roots of today’s “clash of civilizations” between the Islamic world and the West are not anchored in the legacy of the Crusades or the early Islamic conquests. Instead, it is a more contemporary story rooted in the nineteenth-century history of resistance to Western global hegemony. In this resistance, the Ottoman Middle East believed it had found an ally and a role model in Meiji Japan. As news spread of Japanese domestic and international achievements, a century-long fascination with Japan was ignited in the region that still manages to flicker now and again in the twenty-first century: most recently, in the aftermath of the US-led invasion of Iraq. Japanese troops arrived in Iraq in 2004; shortly thereafter, the Iraqi chairman of the newly opened Iraq Stock Exchange, Ṭālib Ṭabātī’e, was quoted as saying that “if I am permitted to dream, Iraq will develop into the Japan of the Middle East.”1