by Bonine, Michael E. ; Amanat, Abbas; Gasper, Michael Ezekiel
—Mark Twain, The Innocents Abroad
But for Jerusalem—the city of the Great King, the joy of the whole earth, for many generations the focal point of heavenly light—we can only, like her own captives of old, hang the harp upon the willows and weep. Wherever we turn, the eye seems to rest on desolation. It is a city clothed in pall; and yet our affections cling to it as to the most sacred spot on earth.
—J. W. Harding, “The Ruins of Jerusalem”
In this critical trek through the idea of the Middle East as the Holy Land, I have not attempted to answer the question posed in the title of the essay. The answer is, or should be by now, obvious. The Middle East can never stop being the Holy Land as long as this status is central to Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. In this sense, it has not stopped being holy as an idea, admittedly one that is ever present in the current political turmoil in the region. If Zionism had shifted the homeland for the Jews to Africa, as once envisioned by some, there would probably be no modern state of Israel. If there were no political Israel, the conflict between returning settlers from Europe and other parts of the Middle East versus indigenous Palestinians would have taken a very different trajectory. If American foreign policy had not come to support Israel, within the wider Cold War standoff that embroiled all the nations in the Middle East, it might not have been inevitable that the United States would have taken on the master role that Napoleon and Lord Kitchener had once held. If the United States had not committed its troops to the Arabian Peninsula, Osama bin Laden might still be dreaming of a caliphate in jihadi retirement under the Taliban in Afghanistan, and Saddam Hussein conceivably might still be building his palatial mausoleum over the ruins of Nebuchadnezzar’s Babylon.
Some might argue that the idea of the Middle East as the Holy Land, whatever that might mean in the real world, would be mere hocus-pocus were it not for the fact that this region holds a large percentage of the world’s oil wealth or that it might just be the site of a future nuclear Armageddon. I am far too much a pragmatist to dispute such somber and rational explanations of the way things are. Nevertheless, I am skeptical of the explanatory schema of the social sciences that do not account for the generative force of ideas. The Middle East remains holy in large part because it is thinkable as such, not only because of past association but also because its sacred dimensions, no matter how irrational, unproven, and mythical, motivate actors with real-world consequences and resonate with anyone brought up in Judaism, Christianity, or Islam. Even Mark Twain, anti-pilgrim that he was, recognized that even though Palestine had become desolate and unlovely to his mid-nineteenth-century eyes, it remained a dreamland.
My point in posing a rhetorical question in the title of this chapter is to expand our interpretation of the Middle East as an easily manipulated moniker beyond the East-vs.-West binary repudiated by Said but ironically perpetuated through his polemic excess in the very process of exposing it. Having traced our steps on hallowed discursive ground, it is perhaps fitting to close with a biblical metaphor. “Now Israel loved Joseph more than all his children,” reads Genesis 37:3, “because he was the son of his old age: and he made him a coat of many colors.” That mosaic, as anthropologist Carlton Coon once styled the Middle East, can be viewed as a geographical imaginary akin to a coat of many colors.63 Whether the coat is given to Moses as lawgiver, Jesus as savior of the world, or Muhammad as the seal of the prophets, it is seen within each religion as a mark of superiority. But the mark of this divinely sanctioned superiority is one of many colors, dare I say with a multicultural aspect, not a black-and-white distinction. Coloring our interpretation of this region is a mixture of politics, economics, ideologies, and outright individual greed (whether you view that as original sin or hereditary adaptation).
I suggest that texts always have many colors, just as this special coat of privilege has; even seemingly black-and-white images have shades we tend to take for granted. No single text can define a genre as broad and open-ended as travel to the real Middle East, not even by those who approach it, or even reproach it, as the Holy Land. The threads that holds the coat together, like the ethnocentrism that pervades all these texts, is material, no matter how absurd the design imagined. But this authorial bias is such a necessary part for the coat to hold together that we should not let such an objectionable part of reality prevent us from appreciating the full effect of the colors. As shown in the example of William Thomson’s The Land and the Book, comments by real authors should be seen in contrast to each other within the narrative, like the colors in a coat of many colors are viewed, rather than isolated out as meaningful quote blocks in themselves. Did Thomson construct an Oriental as other? Yes, but he did much more than that. At the same time he redefined himself through the mundane act of traveling through a holy land still inhabited. Few souls were saved, in the usual sense, by his mission, but in the process few were damned and perhaps his own was salvaged. Even as foils for his spiritual pilgrimage back to the Bible lands, the people he encountered came alive in his narrative and in his own life.
Like all good pilgrims, let us have the last word be about Jerusalem, the literal spot venerated by Jews, Christians, and Muslims as sacred outside as well as within time. In mid-nineteenth-century Jerusalem, Reverend Thomson once visited a Jewish synagogue, but the guttural Hebrew of the worshippers was not music to his ears. “The Orientals know nothing of harmony, and cannot appreciate it when heard,” laments Thomson, “but they are often spell-bound, or wrought up to transports of ecstasy, by this very music which has tortured your nerves.”64 Shall we stop here and be content to write off such sentiment as typical Orientalist observation? Shall we dismiss the rhetorical bias of the American missionary as yet another example of a Western observer who came, saw what he wanted, and conquered through one-sided representation? Is it enough to label The Land and the Book as another manifest text with profane latent malicious intent? The next line should give us pause. “I have never known song more truly effective than among these Orientals,” Thomson confides. Immediately after this experience, Thomson’s local Arab guide took him to a concert of Muslim musicians. “Thinking it would be a pleasant remembrance to carry away from the Holy City, I went, and was not disappointed,” notes the rambling travel guide. Music is always in the ears of the beholder, to be sure, but here is a text in which the Holy Land does not mutatis mutandis mute the voices or the instruments of the Orientals themselves. Analyzing such texts as contemporary critical scholars may be “rough pilgrimizing in the Holy Land,” as Twain sarcastically described the process, but the view is well worth the effort.65
6
THE RIVER’S EDGE
The Steppes of the Oxus and the Boundaries of the Near/Middle East and Central Asia, c. 1500-1800
Arash Khazeni
The sands of the Oxus, coarse though they be,
Beneath my feet, were soft as silk to me.
—Rudaki, Chahar Maqala
IN ‘THE VENTURE OF ISLAM’ (1958), Marshall Hodgson defined the “Middle East” as the land between “the Nile and Oxus,” the historical core of what he called “Islamicate civilization.” Hodgson’s designation of the Oxus River (Amu Dar’ya) as the eastern boundary of the region suggested the longstanding ecological and cultural connections between the Middle East and Central Asia:
For this I will not usually use the term “Middle East” but one or another phrase in “Nile to Oxus.” The term “Middle East,” which seems the best phrase of those more commonly used, has a number of disadvantages. It is of course vague. It can be defined at will; but overtones remain, especially overtones implying an Iran of present-day political bounds. Its principal disadvantage stems from its relatively exact military usage, where it originated. It cuts the Iranian highlands in half—the western half (“Persia”) having been assigned to the Mediterranean command, the eastern half (“Afghanistan”) to the Indian command. Since the Iranian highlands are of primary importance in the region that is basic to Irano-Semitic and Islamicate histo
ry, such a usage is completely unacceptable. Unfortunately, the military usage as to the eastern limits of coverage has become standard in a great many works using the phrase “Middle East,” and for many readers it comes to imply an area that is, on balance, more westerly than our history requires.1
In Hodgson’s view, the region known as the “Middle East” was a modern political construct that detached the Iranian plateau from the Central Asian steppes. The creation of the separate geopolitical units of the Middle East and Central Asia fragmented ecological, economic, and cultural ties that once integrated the regions.2 For two thousand years, the series of overland trade routes that made up the fabled “Silk Road” connected a “Turko-Persian” civilization across West and Central Asia, linking pastoral nomadic and settled populations.3 As Martin Lewis and Karen Wigen have contended in The Myth of Continents: A Critique of Metageography (1997), the construction of separate world regions such as the “Middle East” and “Central Asia” were figments of the European “geographical imagination” and taxonomies produced for the Western “map of the world.”4 These modern geographic representations, conceived after the turn of the twentieth century, supplanted older geographic notions that integrated Central Asia and the Near/Middle East (see Chapter 1).
This chapter traces the historical processes that led to Central Asia being left off the map of the modern Middle East. Existing studies have offered religious, political, and cultural interpretations of the distance that emerged between the Middle East and Central Asia in modern times. Some have argued, in a tradition dating back to the nineteenth-century explorer Arminius Vambery, that the conversion of Safavid Iran to Shiism created “a barrier of heterodoxy” vis-à-vis a largely Sunni Central Asia. The Sunni-Shi’i sectarian divisions emerging in the region at the time shaped imperial borderlands. At the turn of the sixteenth century, as Shah Isma‘il I (1494-1524) established the Safavid dynasty and set out to convert Iran to Shiism, the Shaybanid Uzbeks became the sovereigns of Transoxania, where they staunchly promoted Sunnism. According to Svat Soucek, this “barrier of heterodoxy” resulted in an almost permanent cultural rift “pitting schismatic Iran against orthodox Central Asia for three hundred years, right down to the latter’s conquest by Russia in the nineteenth century.”5 Other scholars have highlighted the politics of the “Great Game” and Anglo-Russian imperialism during the nineteenth century in determining the boundaries between the Middle East and Central Asia. With the British consolidating their empire in India, the Russians expanding into Central Asia, and the construction of Afghanistan as a buffer between the two empires, the frontiers between the Middle East and Central Asia were closed. This interpretation has many disciples and has been put forth in Peter Hopkirk’s The Great Game and the works of various other scholars.6 More recently, scholars have offered cultural histories of the shaping of the nation or homeland (vatan) and its implications for the eastern borderlands of Iran.7
Without casting aside these prevailing religious, political, and cultural interpretations, this chapter presents an environmental perspective on the making of the boundary between the Iranian plateau and the Central Asian steppes. The Oxus River, long seen as a border between the two ecological worlds, provides a point of entry for such an approach. The Oxus has long been conceived as marking a frontier. It holds a legendary place in the Persianate geographical imagination, denoting Iran’s eastern boundary with Turan (the Persian term for Central Asia), as depicted in the Shahnama, the folkloric Persian epic compiled by Firdawsi.8 Although this frontier was often crossed, it nevertheless represented a natural boundary on the landscape, culturally and geographically separating historic Iran from Turan (and in today’s terms the Near and Middle East from Central Asia). Various episodes from the Shahnama convey this view of the Oxus River as a frontier. One of the best-known parts of the epic to be set on the Oxus occurs at the end of the tale of Siyavash, as Kay Khusraw, Farangis, and the hero Giv ford the river on horseback, crossing over into Iran, while pursued by the Turanian troops of Afrasiyab. This story and the perception of the river’s edge (lab-i rud-i ab) as a frontier are beautifully detailed in illustrated manuscripts of the Shahnama.9 Crossing the Oxus as a movement across frontiers is conventional not only in Persian folklore and literature but in geographical histories and chronicles as well. The perception of the Oxus as a frontier was also developed by classical Muslim geographers, who referred to the river by the name Jayhun or al-Nahr (“the River”), and classified it as the edge of civilization, designating the land south of it as the Persian province of Khurasan and the region to the north as Mavaralnahr (“other side of the river”), commonly referred to in the West as Transoxania.10 The steppes of the Oxus denoted an ecological and cultural frontier ground, renowned as the abode of restless nomads, the “Ghuzz Turkomans.”11 The Oxus was the frontier between the steppe and the sown. The river marked the liminal eastern edges of Islamic empires.
This chapter argues that ecological changes in the early modern period shaped the making of the modern boundary between the Near/Middle East and Central Asia. During the late sixteenth century, the Oxus River changed course, its waters swerving eastward from the Caspian to the Aral Sea. This led to an expansion of the Qara Qum (Black Sands) desert, the arid steppes between the Caspian and the Oxus, which was transformed into an ecological space in between empires.12 As the Oxus River changed course, Turkmen pastoralists found new possibilities in the expanding arid steppes of the Qara Qum, making it the center of their vast equestrian culture distant from the reach of empires. The Safavid and Qajar dynasties of Iran saw the contours of their imperial frontiers shaped by the ecology of the steppes. The fluctuation in the course of the Oxus River during the sixteenth century spurred ecological changes on the frontiers between the steppe and the sown. Between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, the Safavids (1501–1722) and the Qajars (1785–1925) unsuccessfully attempted to reclaim the Central Asian steppes and to reestablish the Oxus region as the eastern borderlands of Iran. These imperial projects to reclaim the steppes coincided with a time when the frontiers of empires in Central Asia were being settled and fixed. Whereas the eastern borderlands of Iran were once impermanent, fluid, and only vaguely known, marked by the nature of an untamed river running through the steppes, by the nineteenth century this frontier came to be permanently fixed by boundary pillars and lines drawn on maps.
FLUID FRONTIER
The Oxus River originates in the Pamir Mountains in modern-day Afghanistan, flows through the Qara Qum and Qizil Qum deserts, and empties into the Aral Sea in the steppes of Central Asia, about sixteen hundred miles from its source (Figure 6.1). From the Pamir Mountains, the stream of the Oxus passes to the north of the oasis of Balkh, and from there it winds through the sun-drenched steppes south of city of Bukhara before reaching the delta of Khvarazm near the end of its course. On its path from the Pamir Mountains to the Aral Sea, it flows through and determines the borders of four states: Afghanistan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan.
The hydroclimatic history of the Oxus is complicated, and much of it is speculative. The Oxus has flowed northward from the Pamir Mountains since the late Pleistocene (the geological period that ended about ten thousand years ago). The course of its flow, however, has historically been prone to changes and fluctuations carrying environmental consequences for the frontier between the steppe and the sown. During intervals throughout its history, the river is believed to have partially flowed into the Caspian Sea by way of the Uzboy Channel, an ancient bed of the Oxus that is dried up today. In flood years, the Oxus would overflow, emptying into the Sarykamysh depression about 150 miles southwest of the Aral Sea, continuing its westward flow through the Uzboy Channel into the Caspian Sea (Figure 6.2). Thus, the Caspian and the Aral may have episodically been connected through other bodies of water lying between them until the sixteenth century.13
Figure 6.1. Map of modern-day Uzbekistan, showing Amu Darya (Oxus) through Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan to the Aral Sea (origina
l in color). United Nations, January 2004.
Whether the Oxus was changing channels or flowing into both the Aral and Caspian seas during flood years is not entirely clear. Both climatic fluctuations and ancient irrigation works along the Oxus in Khvarazm may have affected the flow and may have dictated which channels were used. What is certain is that since the sixteenth century, there occurred a complete desiccation of the Sarykamysh depression and hence the Oxus has flowed north only into the Aral Sea. Some references to the changing flow of the Oxus may be gathered from contemporary written sources, which offer scattered descriptions of the river’s changing course. The tenth-century Arab geographer Muqaddasi reported that the Oxus River flowed into the Aral Sea but identified an old bed that led to the Caspian.14 Writing in the fifteenth century, following the destruction of dams and irrigation works on the Oxus that diverted the river’s flow towards the Caspian Sea, Timurid geographer Hafiz Abru claimed that the Aral Sea had nearly disappeared.15 The main contemporary source detailing the eastward shift of the river in the sixteenth century is Abu‘l Ghazi Bahadur (1603–42), khan of Khiva, who writes in Shajara-yi Tarakima (Genealogical History of the Turkmen) that around the year 1576, the Oxus River changed channels, swerving toward the Aral Sea and turning the lands between its former bed and the Caspian Sea into a waterless desert.16Writing much later in the nineteenth century, Muhammad Hasan Khan Sani’ al-Dawla I‘timad al-Saltana claimed that the shift in the flow and the delta of the Oxus created a significant environmental change (taghirat-i tabi‘i) on the eastern frontiers of Iran and added that its drift away from the Caspian and toward the Aral remained clouded in uncertainty, for it occurred over the centuries and went unrecorded in the annals of history.17
