![]() 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. Ethnically and linguistically distinct from Persia, though with long-standing cultural ties, and sharing an adherence to 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. 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.ĪZERBAIJAN-A Turkic region to the east of Kurdistan, including a mountainous chunk of northwestern Iran. 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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