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

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

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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.
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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.
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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.”
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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

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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,