Queen Elizabeth II with King Faisal of Iraq during an official visit in 1956. Victoria Station, London. Screenshot from a video by British Pathé. Fair use. This is a guest post written by Nasser Rabbat, director of the Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). The passing of Queen Elizabeth II on September 8, 2022, is presented in the Western media as the end of an era. This unrelentingly broadcast mantra is, to say the least, an overt exaggeration, except perhaps for the die-hard royalists in the UK and the anglophile, mostly wealthy Commonwealth citizens. For the rest of us, her passing’s significance ranges from being a pompous distraction, deliberately spread over many days, to a reminder of how different the world is now from the time of her ascension to the throne in 1952 and how vacuous the British royal pageantry is and totally out of step. The first reminder is particularly poignant for an Arab observer like me, totally comfortable in the Western modes of thought, yet immersed in critiquing their mindless disregard of other, non-Western perspectives. It is also even more distressing because the reign of Elizabeth II coincided with the persistent dismantling of every hopeful aspect of modernity in the vast Arab world – from political independence to economic prosperity, social emancipation, and stability. Elizabeth II was obviously not personally responsible for any of these mishaps, which should be blamed fairly and squarely on the Arab regimes and peoples and their lopsided handling of the challenges they faced in the last 70 years. But she symbolized the colonial world order that, though waning by the time she arrived, had already entrapped not just the Arabs, but the entire Global South, in its extremely unfair distribution of power, knowledge, and wealth. The actors have changed multiple times, but the devastating grip of global inequality has endured almost unscathed. An anachronous map of the British Empire. The colors in the map key are explained according to their related numbers as follows: 1. Pink: colonies held by 1945 2. Orange: Dominions 3. Pink in Orange: colonies of Dominions 4. Dark Red-Brown: areas lost by 1920 5. Light pink: areas occupied in World War II * 6. Purple: Princely States (in India) and other Protectorates 7. Lavender: areas lost by 1705 (England only) 8. Hachured: sphere of influence (click image for better resolution) 9. Salmon: areas of defeated Axis occupied 1943-1955**154, CC BY-SA 3.0 Britain’s meddling in the Arab Mashriq is old (the Maghreb was resolutely ceded to the French). In 1190, a remote predecessor of Elizabeth II, Richard I (Lionheart, r. 1189-99) led the third crusade to Sicily, Cyprus, and the coast of Palestine with mixed results that earned him everlasting fame, nonetheless. The next military foray into Arab lands came in 1801 when the British landed in Egypt to force the withdrawal of the French and re-establish Ottoman rule there. The British reaped huge economic and geopolitical benefits from their manoeuvres around the crumbling Ottoman Empire, snatching outlying territories such as Aden, which came under the rule of the British East India Company in 1839. But the rise of a local modernizing dynasty in Egypt required a quick intervention in 1882 to secure both the financial and navigational benefits generated after the opening of the Suez Canal. The British occupied Egypt until 1954. Sudan was next when it was conquered by a joint British-Egyptian army in 1898. In the meantime, Britain also extended its colonial hegemony to the Gulf sheikhdoms from Kuwait to Oman, tying them by treaties that effectively erased their independence. The end of World War I saw the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and the rush of European colonial powers to gulp up its Arab provinces. Britain, betraying its Arab allies who were promised an independent Arab state, won the most territory of the Mashriq, including Iraq and Trans-Jordan, where it installed two subservient Hashemite dynasties, and Palestine, which was destined to be stripped of its name, identity, and people. This British imperial plan, epitomized by the absurd Balfour Declaration of 1917 promising what was still Ottoman Palestine to the Jewish people, proved disastrous not only to the Palestinians, who lost their country after Israel was established in 1948, but to the entire Arab region. It severed the territorial connection between Egypt and the Mashriq, quashed true liberation, and created an environment hostile to modernity and democracy. Queen Elizabeth II in the wagon with King Hussein of Jordan during a Royal Welcome in 1966. London. Screenshot from a video by British Pathé. Fair use.