The Revenge of Geography: What the Map Tells Us About Coming Conflicts and the Battle Against Fate: What the Map Tells Us About Coming Conflicts and the Battle Against Fate

by Robert D. Kaplan

  To look at the argument in another way, let me return to Morgenthau. Morgenthau writes that the very imperial expansion into relatively empty geographical spaces in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, in Africa, Eurasia, and western North America, deflected great power politics into the periphery of the earth, thereby reducing conflict. For example, the more attention Russia, France, and the United States paid to expanding into far-flung territories in imperial fashion, the less attention they paid to one another, and the more peaceful, in a sense, the world was.24 But by the late nineteenth century, the consolidation of the great nation-states and empires of the West was consummated, and territorial gains could only be made at the expense of one another.25 Morgenthau sums up:

  As the balance of power—with its main weight now in three continents—becomes worldwide, the dichotomy between the circle of the great power and its center, on the one hand, and its periphery and the empty spaces beyond, on the other, must of necessity disappear. The periphery of the balance of power now coincides with the confines of the earth.26

  Whereas Morgenthau’s vision, written during the tense, early Cold War years, spells danger, that of his university colleague McNeill, written in a later, more stable phase of the Cold War, spells hope:

  The Han in ancient China … put a quietus upon the disorders of the warring states by erecting an imperial bureaucratic structure which endured, with occasional breakdown and modest amendment, almost to our own day. The warring states of the twentieth century seem headed for a similar resolution of their conflicts.27

  The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 certainly seems to have borne out McNeill’s optimism. Yet the world is arguably as dangerous today as it was during the Cold War. For the map keeps closing in a multiplicity of ways. Take China: Mao Zedong, at great cost to be sure, consolidated China as a modern state, and China now rises economically (albeit at a slower pace) and militarily as a great power, filling up the Eurasian chessboard even more than Morgenthau could have imagined. Meanwhile, even the remotest parts of the world become further urbanized, and while Spengler could see the decline of culture in the desertion of the soil and agricultural life, sprawling and teeming urban conglomerations are, as McNeill intuited, now leading to the metamorphosis of religion and identity in vigorous and, albeit, troubling ways:28 Islam, for example, becomes less of a traditional, soil-based religion and more of an austere, in some cases ideological, faith, in order to regulate behavior in vast, impersonal slum settings where extended family and kinsmen are less in evidence. This leads to a Middle East of megacities and other urban concentrations in the former countryside that, while poor, are generally low in crime, even as the offshoot is occasionally a destabilizing global terrorism. Christianity, too, becomes, as a consequence of the stresses of suburban living in the American South and West, more ideological, even as a loose form of environmental paganism takes root in the cities of Europe, replacing traditional nationalism, given that the super-state of the European Union has only abstract meaning to all but the elite. Meanwhile, war is no longer, as in eighteenth-century Europe, the “sport of kings,” but an instrument of nationalist and religious fanaticism, whether on a large scale as in the case of Nazi Germany, or on a smaller scale as with al Qaeda.29 Add to that the awful specter of nuclear weapons in the hands of radicalized elites at both the state and substate level. And in the midst of all these awkward, turbulent shifts, classical geography again rears its head, shaping tensions among the West, Russia, Iran, India, China, Korea, Japan, and so on, all of which we will need to explore in detail. McNeill’s thesis of interactions across civilizations has never been truer than today. But it would be a mistake to equate an emerging world culture with political stability: because space—precisely because it is more crowded and therefore more precious than ever before—still matters, and matters greatly.

  Whereas McNeill’s scholarly eye scanned the entire earth, Marshall Hodgson’s scope, for our purposes, was narrower, encompassing the Greater Middle East. Still, Hodgson, a passionate Quaker who died at forty-six, demonstrates a prodigious ambition in his three-volume The Venture of Islam: Conscience and History in a World Civilization, published in full in 1974, six years after his death. For this largely forgotten University of Chicago historian, so much less well known among contemporary journalists than other distinguished scholars of the Middle East, say, Bernard Lewis of Princeton or John Esposito of Georgetown, has in this monumental work put Islam geographically and culturally, according to McNeill, in the context of the larger currents of world history. Hodgson’s style can veer toward the academic and the opaque, but if the reader perseveres, he or she will be rewarded with an explanation as to how Islam was able to emerge, take root, and spread in 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 geographical 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 Mediterranean’s African littoral. The point is that the rigid distinctions of Cold War–area expertise, 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 geography, 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, Hodgson 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 negatively,” he explains, “as that residual group of lands in which the Greek and the Sanskrit traditions did not have their roots and from which the European and Indic regions were eventually 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 Greater Middle East, stretching roughly three thousand miles or more in the lower temperate zone, two geographical features encouraged high culture: the key commercial position, particularly 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 reduced the wealth that could be had by agriculture, and made concentrated h
oldings of productive 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 merchants 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.33

  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 Persian 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 influences—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.34

  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 physical. But he does show how geography contributed to the religion’s rise and spread, agglutinated, 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, dominated 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.35

  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 mention 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 modern states, even if the demarcated borders of these states in the midst of flat desert are often arbitrary. Toynbee, lamenting the divisions of the Arab world, alleges that Westernization “gained the upper hand before any Islamic universal state was in sight.”36 But the 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 highlands, as Hodgson writes, have always been intrinsically related to the politics and culture 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 border 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 Empire, 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 sprawling, 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 heartland for Islam, in the Battle of Manzikert against the Byzantine Empire.37

  The Seljuks were a steppe people from the deep interior of Eurasia, who invaded Anatolia from the east (Manzikert was in eastern Anatolia). But just as the Arabs never succeeded 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 Ottoman 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 Subcontinent, but this was part of a southward population movement across the whole, vast east–west temperate zone of Eurasia. For these Turkic nomads constituted the bulk of the tribes under the infamous Mongol armies (the Mongols themselves, in any case, were a relatively small elite). We will deal with the Mongol hordes and their geopolitical significance later, but it is interesting here to note Hodgson’s view that the horse nomadism of the Mongols and Turkic peoples was ultimately more crucial to history than the camel nomadism of the Arabs. Because horses could not endure the aridity of Middle Eastern deserts, and the sheep with which these nomads often traveled required relatively dense forage, the Mongol-led armies avoided distant Arabia, and instead ravaged nearer and more environmentally friendly Eastern Europe, Anatolia, northern Mesopotamia and Iran, Central Asia, India, and China: territories that, taken together, would be of overwhelming strategic importance on the map of Eurasia just prior to the advent of gunpowder warfare. The Mongol-Turkic invasions were arguably the most significant event in world history in the second millennium of the common era, and it was mainly because of the use of certain animals tied to geography.38

  Hodgson’s discussion of the Mongols shows how The Venture of Islam is far more than a work of area expertise. To call Hodgson an Arabist or an Islamicist is to inaccurately diminish him. For in his hands, Islam is a vehicle to reveal the most pivotal intellectual, cultural, and geographical trends affecting Afro-Eurasian societies, the entire Old World, in fact, with the Oikoumene of antiquity at its heart. This is not a work of geography per se. Hodgson spends as much time defining Sufi mysticism as he does landscape, to say nothing of the other intellectual and sectarian traditions he unravels. And yet in bringing geography into the discussion in the way that he does, he demonstrates how it interacts with politics and ideology to produce the very texture of history. Take the Ottoman Turks, who eventually replaced their Turkic brethren, the Seljuks, in Anatolia in the late thirteenth century. The “monolithic military caste system” of the Ottomans placed “inherent geographical limits” on the area under their control, in contrast to that of Russia, say, or even of the primitive Mongols. The Ottomans were accustomed to a single grand army, in which the padishah, or emperor, must always be present. At the same time, they had to operate out of a single capital city, Constantinople, in the northeastern Mediterranean by the Black Sea, where the sultanate’s vast bureaucratic structure was headquartered. “As a result, a major campaign coul
d be carried only so far as a single season’s marching would allow”: Vienna to the northwest and Mosul to the southeast were consequently the geographical limits of stable Ottoman expansion on land. The army could winter in some years at Sofia or Aleppo, extending its range, though miring it in great logistical difficulties. In general, however, this absolutist system with all the power, both personal and bureaucratic, concentrated in Constantinople had the effect of taking the capital’s geographical situation and making it an all-determining factor. This was, after a fashion, the inverse of human agency. And it had the effect of leading to the decay of this military state, since once the Ottoman military’s geographical limits were reached, morale as well as rewards declined within the ranks of the soldiery. A less centralized state might have led to a more secure empire, rather than one at the mercy of geography. In the naval realm, too, absolutism exaggerated the tyranny of location, with Ottoman sea power mostly clustered in the Black and Mediterranean seas close to home, with only “transient” success achieved against the Portuguese in the Indian Ocean.39