Basically, we were having a discussion and I said that a lot of the conflict in the Middle East was due to the fact that borders were drawn by the British/French after they gave up the land they had amassed in the Middle East following WWI, which didn't really take into account the ethnic/religious differences of the groups living there. (Please correct me if any of this is wrong/too simplified!)
My dad apparently was unaware of this, but he went on to say that the Middle East has "always fought each other even before that". I have no idea how accurate that statement is; I don't know too much about Middle Eastern history, but I was under the impression that other than some pretty harsh religious wars between Shia and Sunni Muslims, the area wasn't really in any more conflict that most of the rest of the world at any corresponding time in history.
I'm not trying to get into any political debates or make broad generalizations about the Middle East, I was just wondering what the levels of conflict in the Middle East were and whether they were any more deeply conflicted prior to WWI as compared to other nations/areas.
We see comments like those your dad made pretty often in our media, either referring to supposed "endless conflict" or "eternal hatreds", but this has the effect of dehistoricizing the Middle East. That is, it creates an image of the Middle East as a place without history, that never changes. Whether arising out of a lack of knowledge, or just as often, an effort to push a modern-day political agenda, such portrayals are highly misleading.
As far as violence goes, the Middle East during the early modern period was one of the most peaceful regions in the world, especially the central Arab lands - Egypt, Palestine, Syria, and Iraq. From 1517-1800, these regions experienced only extremely low levels of political violence. I’ve posted on this before, but conflict was essentially limited to four sources:
There was nothing in the Arab world to mirror the widespread destruction of European conflicts like the Wars of Religion in France, the Thirty Years War in Central Europe, or the Khmelnytsky Rebellion and Deluge in Eastern Europe. Arabs were also not generally conscripted into Ottoman armies (when they were it was as non-combatants) and were free to live essentially peaceful lives. These generalizations hold somewhat less true for what's now Turkey, Iran, and the Caucasus, where the Ottoman-Safavid conflict from 1514-1639 was more impactful. Socio-economic and political conditions also created a certain degree of anarchy in 17th-century Anatolia and 18th-century Iran, which involved plenty of violence. But one would only need to glance at other regions of the globe to see that this was hardly abnormal.
Now, as for the supposed “eternal hatred” of Sunnis and Shi’ites, which is probably the most common trope in this genre. Before the emergence of Safavid Iran in 1501, the line between Sunni Islam and Shi’ite Islam was a blurry one. In practice, both religions were generally accommodating of one another. For instance, the attribution of special religious significance to Ali and the descendants the Prophet Muhammad, which is a core part of Shi’ite belief, was practiced by many Sunnis as well, particularly in regions like Anatolia, Iran, and Central Asia where the authority of Sunni scholars educated in the central Arab lands was weaker. While religious scholars of course maintained a distinction between their various sects, neither the common people nor their governments were particularly concerned with imposing orthodoxy or rooting out heresy in the couple centuries before 1500. During the sixteenth century, due to the rise of the Safavid Empire, a process began which some historians call “confessionalization” (a term normally used with regard to a similar process in Protestantism and Catholicism) in which both the Ottoman and Safavid empires, working in tandem with the religions scholars, sought to define and impose an Islamic orthodoxy on their populations, creating in the process a sharper distinction between Sunni and Shi’ite practice than had existed before.
The rise of the Safavids was accompanied by a great deal of violence. They had a radical messianic ideology and engaged in a campaign of forced conversion in Iran (which earned them the disapproval of Shi’ite clergy, who thought conversion should be voluntary and achieved through persuasion). The Sunni population of Baghdad was slaughtered upon its conquest in 1508. The Ottomans under Selim I (r. 1512-1520) engaged in an equally ferocious campaign against the Safavids, massacring tens of thousands of ‘heretics’ in Anatolia who were suspected of Safavid sympathies. So in the sixteenth century, there certainly was Sunni-Shi’ite conflict in the Middle East. But it didn’t last, the antagonism wasn’t eternal. The Ottomans and Safavids signed a permanent peace treaty in 1639, which brought the religious wars to an end – though by then they had long since been more about imperial geopolitical conflict rather than religion per se. In the eighteenth century, when Iran was ruled by Nader Shah, there was even talk of uniting Sunnism and Shi’ism into a single religion by recognizing the Shi’ite Jafari law school as a fifth school of Sunni law. It was never carried out, but the fact that such a thing could even be seriously proposed demonstrates the degree to which Sunnis and Shi’ites had come to accept one another and live side by side.
Well the situation in the Middle East is and was complicated. I will point you in the direction of several good answers we've had on these and related topics, but first, a little bit of context.
At the start of the 19th century, the majority of the Middle East - but not all of it - was under the control of the Ottoman empire. Yemen, Oman the Gulf States and Persia were outside of their sphere, but the territory of modern day Syria, Iraq, parts of Saudia Arabia, Egypt and beyond were under their control, along with part or all of several modern European countries like Bulgaria, Romania, Greece, Serbia and so on.
The Ottoman Empire was a large, multi-ethnic, religiously diverse entity. It was also an empire on the decline by the 19th century. It experienced a variety of internal and external conflicts over that hundred year span, including multiple conflicts with the other Great Powers of the day (Russia, France etc), multiple nationalist revolts (e.g. Greek, Albanian etc) and multiple religious uprisings (e.g. from Christians), even a Tribal conflict or two. I would certainly not categorize the Ottoman Empire over the Middle East as "peaceful and stable" over this period. Even before World War I, the Empire had contracted substantially since it's territorial peak centuries earlier. On the other hand, it's not like Europe or the Americas were turmoil free over this period either. This was the era of peak European colonialism in Africa and Asia, home to the Napoleonic wars, American expansion and subsequent civil war, witness to the emergence of Germany and popular revolutions of all sorts.
You specifically are interested in the outcome of the first world war, because this does get a lot of press regarding contemporary situations in the Middle East. I will transition here into pointing you towards older discussions on the topic:
My own addendum here is that the trend in the Middle East in the first two thirds of the 20th century was towards unification, rather than towards the creation of small states that were extremely sensitive to sectarian differences. The short lived United Arab Republic was one product of this, but over time the ideology of pan-Arabism fell out of favor.