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
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