Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
ated it. For Syria, it was the highlands of Anatolia; for Iraq, it was the highlands of Iran;
for Yemen, there was a somewhat weaker interrelationship with the Abyssinian highlands
(modern-day Ethiopia). Islam would conquer most of these areas, but geography would
partly determine that these clusters of agricultural civilization, particularly Syria and Iraq,
the two arcs of the Fertile Crescent, would retain their communal identity and thus become
rival centers of Islamic power.
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Hodgson's historical sweep of late antiquity and the medieval era in the first two
volumes of his epic teaches much about how modern Middle Eastern states, the ostensible
results of Western colonialism, actually came about, and why they are less artificial than
they have been alleged to be. Egypt, Yemen, Syria, and Iraq, as we have seen, not to men-
tion Morocco, hemmed in by seas and the Atlas Mountains, and Tunisia, heir to ancient
Carthage, are all ancient redoubts of civilizations, the legitimate precursors to these mod-
ern states, even if the demarcated borders of these states in the midst of flat desert are of-
ten arbitrary. Toynbee, lamenting the divisions of the Arab world, alleges that Westerniz-
fact that Islam constitutes a world civilization does not mean it was determined to be one
polity, for as Hodgson shows, that civilization had many different population nodes, with
a rich pre-Islamic past, that has come into play in the postcolonial era. The Iranian high-
lands, as Hodgson writes, have always been intrinsically related to the politics and cul-
ture of Mesopotamia, something very much in evidence since the American invasion of
Iraq in 2003, which opened the door to the reentry of Iran into the region. Indeed, the bor-
der between Persia and Mesopotamia, which constantly shifted, was for long periods the
Euphrates River itself, now in the heart of Iraq. The Arabs conquered the Sassanid Em-
pire, situated in the heart of the Iranian tableland in
A.D
. 644, only twenty-two years after
Muhammad's flight, or
hegira
, from Mecca to Medina, the event which marks the start of
the Islamic era in world history. But the Anatolian highlands were more remote and sprawl-
ing, and thus partly on account of geography it would not be until more than four hundred
years later, in 1071, that the Seljuk Turks—not the Arabs—captured the Anatolian heart-
land for Islam, in the Battle of Manzikert against the Byzantine Empire.
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The Seljuks were a steppe people from the deep interior of Eurasia, who invaded Anato-
lia from the east (Manzikert was in eastern Anatolia). But just as the Arabs never suc-
ceeded in capturing the mountain fastnesses of Anatolia, the Seljuks, deep inside those
very fastnesses, never quite succeeded either in maintaining stable rule over the heart of
Islamdom—the Fertile Crescent and the Iranian plateau, to say nothing of the Hejaz and
the rest of desert Arabia to the south. This was again geography at work. (Though the Ot-
toman Turks, heirs to the Seljuks, would conquer Arab deserts, their rule was often weak.)
Turkic rule would triumph as far east as Bengal, at the furthest extreme of the Indian Sub-
continent, but this was part of a southward population movement across the whole, vast
