Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
ticularly of Arabia and the Fertile Crescent, in terms of the trade routes from one extremity
of the Oikoumene to the other, and the very aridity of the region.
This latter point needs explaining. Hodgson tells us that the general lack of water re-
duced the wealth that could be had by agriculture, and made concentrated holdings of pro-
ductive land rare, so that rural life was insecure and downgraded in favor of urban life in
the oases. Money and power converged in the hands of merchants at the “juncture points”
of long-distance Middle East trade routes, particularly when those thoroughfares skirted
close to the sea traffic of the Red Sea, Arabian Sea, and Persian Gulf, giving Arab mer-
chants critical accessibility to the prodigious flows of Indian Ocean trade. And because this
was a world of trade and contracts, ethical behavior and “just dealing” were paramount for
the sake of a stable economic life. Thus, as both the Byzantine and Sassanid empires to the
north weakened in Anatolia and Persia, the stage was set in Arabia and the Fertile Crescent
for the emergence of a faith that emphasized good ethics over one merely ensuring “the
round of the agricultural seasons.” Thus, Islam sprung up as much as a merchants' creed as
a desert one.
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The most important trading center in western and central Arabia was Mecca in the Hejaz,
a region close to the Red Sea. It was at the intersection of two major routes. One went
south and north, with Mecca the midway point, connecting Yemen and the Indian Ocean
ports to Syria and the Mediterranean. The other went west and east, connecting the Horn of
Africa on the nearby, opposite coast of the Red Sea to Mesopotamia and Iran on the Persi-
an Gulf. Mecca was located far enough away from the center of Sassanid power in Iran to
be independent of it, even as it was exposed to urbane religious and philosophical influen-
ces—Zoroastrianism, Manichaeism, Hellenism, Judaism, and so forth—from Persia, Iraq,
and Asia Minor. Though Mecca had no great oasis, it did have sufficient water for camels.
It was protected by hills from Red Sea pirates, and possessed a shrine, the Ka'bah, where
the sacred tokens of the region's clans were gathered and to which pilgrims came from far
and wide. This was the largely geographical context from which the Prophet Muhammad,
a respected local merchant and trader who, in his thirties, became preoccupied with how to
live a just and pure life, sprang. Rather than a mere backwater camp in the desert, Mecca
was a pulsing, cosmopolitan center.
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Of course, geography, in Hodgson's intricate tapestry, does not ultimately explain Islam.
For a religion by its very definition has its basis more in the metaphysical than in the phys-
ical. But he does show how geography contributed to the religion's rise and spread, agglu-
tinated, as Islam was, onto merchant and Bedouin patterns, which were, in turn, creatures
of an arid landscape crisscrossed by trade routes.
Bedouin Arabia was bracketed by three agricultural lands: Syria to the north, Iraq to the
northeast, and Yemen to the south. Each of these three areas was, in turn, connected to a
“political hinterland,” a highland region which, in the sixth and seventh centuries, domin-
