The Revenge of Geography (10 page)

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 holdings 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.
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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 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.
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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 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.
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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 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.”
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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.
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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.
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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 could 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.
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Hodgson, like his colleague in the Chicago history department McNeill, is less an academic in the contemporary sense than an old-world intellectual aided by the rigor of tireless, scientifically minded inquiry, an outgrowth perhaps of his particular Quaker intensity. That is, even in the depths of his exploration of minutiae, he sees the grand sweep. His main stage is the ancient Greek Oikoumene, which also, as it happens, forms much of the material for McNeill’s world history, and as we’ve said, much of the background for Herodotus’s fifth-century
B.C
.
Histories
. It may be no accident that this is precisely the world which occupies current news headlines: that region between the eastern Mediterranean and the Iranian-Afghan plateau. For the Oikoumene is where the Eurasian and African landmasses converge, with many outlets to the Indian Ocean via the Red Sea and Persian Gulf, making it ultra-strategic, as well as a stew of migration
patterns and consequently clashing ethnic and sectarian groups. Herodotus’s
Histories
captures this unceasing turbulence.

Herodotus is at the heart of my argument for the relevance of McNeill and Hodgson in the twenty-first century. For this Greek, who was born a Persian subject sometime between 490 and 484
B.C
. in Halicarnassus, in southwestern Asia Minor, maintains in his narrative about the origins and execution of the war between the Greeks and the Persians the perfect balance between geography and the decisions of men. He advances the
partial
determinism we all need. For he shows us a world where the relief map hovers in the background—Greece and Persia and their respective
barbarian
penumbrae in the Near East and North Africa—even as individual passions are acted out with devastating political results. Herodotus stands for the sensibility we need to recover in order to be less surprised by the world to come.

“Custom is king of all,” Herodotus observes, quoting Pindar. Herodotus tells of the Egyptians, who shaved their eyebrows in mourning for a beloved cat, of Libyan tribesmen who wore their hair long on one side and shorn on the other, and smeared their bodies with vermilion. There are the Massagetae, a people who lived east of the Caspian Sea, in what is now Turkmenistan, among whom, when a man grows old, “his relatives come together and kill him, and sheep and goats along with him, and stew all the meat together and have a banquet of it.” First there is only the landscape, the historical experience of a people on it, and the manners and ideas that arise out of that experience. Herodotus is a preserver of the memory of civilizations and their geographies, the myths, fables, and even lies that they lived by. He knows that the better a knack a political leader has for
just what’s out there
, the less likely he is to make tragic mistakes. The Scythians lived on the far side of the Cimmerian Bosporus, where it is so cold that to make mud in the winter they had to light a fire. As Artabanus warns Darius, the Persian king, to no avail: Do not make war against
the Scythians—a swiftly mobile and nomadic people without cities or sown land, who offer no focal point of attack for a large, well-equipped army.
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