HERODOTUS AND HIS SUCCESSORS - The Revenge of Geography - page 38

the fabulous and often speedy way that it did, across not just Arabia and North Africa, but
throughout the Indian Ocean littoral, and on land from the Pyrenees to the Tien Shan. 30
It is important to note that Hodgson wrote much of The Venture of Islam in the 1950s and
1960s, when the media spotlight generally gave primacy to the Cold War in Europe. Yet
he unfolds his theme in the first volume with the notion that this Eurocentric vision of the
world has always been wrong, with the prejudice inherent early in mapping conventions. 31
The “absurdity was disguised by the increasingly widespread use of a drastically visually
distortive world map, the Mercator projection, which by exaggerating northward manages
to make an artificially bounded 'Europe' look larger than all 'Africa,' and quite dwarf that
other Eurasian peninsula, India.” Hodgson then proceeds to shift the reader's geographic-
al focus southward and eastward, to what he calls the Oikoumene, the ancient Greek term
for the “inhabited quarter” of the world, the temperate zone of the Afro-Asian landmass
stretching from North Africa to the confines of western China, a belt of territory he also
calls “Nile-to-Oxus.” 32 There is a vagueness in these definitions, which at times contradict
each other. For example, Nile-to-Oxus connotes a region with Egypt at its western end,
whereas the Oikoumene could mean a zone that begins much further west along the Medi-
terranean's African littoral. The point is that the rigid distinctions of Cold War-area ex-
pertise, at their apex when he wrote, with the Middle East sharply differentiated from both
Anatolia and the Indian Subcontinent, fall away as Hodgson shows us a more organic geo-
graphy, delimited by landscape and culture: i.e., that vast and generally parched expanse
between the civilizations of Europe and China, Herodotus's world actually, which Hodgson
intimates holds the key to world history.
Given how globalization is now erasing borders, regions, and cultural distinctions,
Hodgson's deliberately grand and flexible geographic construct is in fact quite useful, for it
suggests how inhospitable the relief map can be to fixed and bold lines. In this way, Hodg-
son helps the reader to visualize the fluid world of late antiquity in which Islam emerged,
as well as the world of today, with China and India increasing their economic presence in
the Greater Middle East (the Oikoumene of yore), even as the Persian Gulf sheikhdoms do
likewise in Africa, thus undoing the artificial divisions we have grown used to.
“The region where Islamicate culture was to be formed can almost be defined negat-
ively,” he explains, “as that residual group of lands in which the Greek and the Sanskrit tra-
ditions did not have their roots and from which the European and Indic regions were even-
tually set off.… In this sense, our region, in the Axial Age [800 to 200 B.C .], consisted of
those lands between the Mediterranean and the Hindu-Kush [Afghanistan] in which Greek
and Sanskrit had at best only local or transient growths.” Within this wide belt of the Great-
er Middle East, stretching roughly three thousand miles or more in the lower temperate
zone, two geographical features encouraged high culture: the key commercial position, par-