LOWER EGYPT-The Nile Delta region to the north, with its cities and commerce-Egypt’s center of gravity. For a decade during the early 20th century it was an independent kingdom. HEJAZ-The urbanized and mercantile Arabian coastal strip along the Red Sea. The people are mainly Arab, but their Ibadhi form of Islam distinguishes them from mainstream Shias and Sunnis. OMAN-This sultanate has been autonomous and distinct for 250 years. A mixed Sunni and Shia population, highly independent, defined primarily by the mountain environment in which most people live. The predominant religious tradition is Shia Islam.īALUCHISTAN-The non-Farsi-speaking and largely Sunni Baluchis occupy an impoverished and increasingly restive region that sprawls across eastern Iran and western Pakistan.ĪRABIA FELIX-A name from ancient times for Arabia’s southwestern corner. PERSIA-Occupying the Iranian heartland, the Persians have constituted a coherent and powerful cultural bloc since antiquity. These Persian Gulf enclaves, which unlike Saudi Arabia have a long mercantile tradition, form a natural collective-more like one another than like anyone else. This arc of territory straddles portions of Iran, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia, and contains at least 20 percent of the world’s proven oil reserves.ĮMIRATES-The existing small, oil-rich Sunni sheikhdoms. THE CRESCENT-On the one hand, ethnically Arab, like the people to the west on the other hand, religiously Shia, like the people to the east. Its brand of Islam is the fundamentalist Wahhabi strain. SOUTHERN TRIBAL AREA-Also largely a Sunni Arab domain, encompassing the Saudi heartland. NORTHERN TRIBAL AREA-Largely a Sunni Arab domain, encompassing the towns, small cities, and deserts of western Iraq and eastern Syria and Jordan. Even the Romans (according to Gibbon) recognized the Kurds as fiercely independent. KURDISTAN-The mountainous Kurdish-speaking region that occupies portions of Turkey, Iraq, Iran, and Syria. In his book The Nine Nations of North America, he broke the continent into its “natural” components-for instance, MexAmerica, Dixie, Ecotopia, and the Empty Quarter, an expanse running from the Great Plains to the Arctic. What are those underlying contours? The analyst Joel Garreau once posed that question in an entirely different geographic context. The political boundaries of the Middle East do not always conform to the region’s underlying social, religious, and demographic contours. Lawrence’s plan, which was crude but at least tried to take regional characteristics into account, was ignored. Lawrence (Lawrence of Arabia) which, among other things, envisioned “Irak” as broken into separate Kurdish and Arab states (a foreshadowing, perhaps, of what may now come to pass). (There have been significant alterations since then, including the creation of Turkey, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, and Israel.) Recently a map was discovered (page 62) and put on display at the Imperial War Museum, in London-a partition plan submitted to the British government in 1918 by T. Called the Sykes-Picot Agreement, it reflected imperial interests rather than local realities.
The modern map of the Middle East was drawn largely at Paris by Britain and France, based on a secret treaty negotiated during the war. The post-Ottoman Middle East, he cautioned, would not be built in a day.Īnd it hasn’t been. David Fromkin, who memorably captured the postwar Paris peace conference in his book A Peace to End All Peace, once noted that it took Europe 14 centuries to emerge in stable form out of the ruins of Rome. The breakup of the Ottoman state came about a generation later, at the end of World War I. Toward the end of the 19th century the British prime minister Lord Salisbury predicted that a breakup of the Ottoman Empire, were it to occur, would be the greatest geopolitical convulsion since the fall of the Roman Empire.
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