15 Maps That Don't Explain the Middle East at All - The Atlantic

8/10/2019 15 Maps That Don't Explain the Middle East at All - The Atlantic

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Violent upheaval in the Middle East has recently spawned all manner of maps

purporting to explain how the region got this way. Here, instead, are 15 maps

that dont claim as much. Or rather, they do not seek, like many other maps, tocapture some fixed set of core facts about the region. Instead, these maps

provide a more fluid perspective on the Middle East, often by showing what

didnt happen as opposed to what did. But for all these maps dont show, they do

illustrate one thing: the sobering fact that no one mapor even set of mapscan

ever explain the regions complex history and politics.

1. The Imagined Line Between East and West

15 Maps That Don't Explain theMiddle East at All

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aps That Don't Explain the Middle East at All - The Atlantic http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2014/07/15-ma

1 9/18/2014Print to PDFwithout this message by purchasing novaPDF (http://www.novapdf.com/)
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Rudyard Kipling oncewrotethat East is East, and West is West, and never the

twain shall meet. But when you try to map where exactly they diverge, the

border appears to be constantly on the move. The ancient Greeks drew the

West-East distinction between themselves and the Persians along a shifting line

somewhere between the Aegean Sea and the middle of the Anatolian peninsula,

which roughly corresponds to modern-day Turkey. As Islam spread in the

seventh century, many Europeans imagined the corresponding division between

civilizations running between the Islamic world and Christiandom. Later, prior

to World War I, Europeans conception of East began at the borders of theOttoman Empire. This all changed suddenly with the advent of the Cold War,

when a new border between the communist East and capitalist West appeared. If

there has been a constant feature of the division between East and West over the

centuries, its our eagerness to draw a line between them.

2. Mapping Conflict During the Crusades

At a time when the Crusades still serve as the historical starting point for many

discussions of the modern Middle East, this map offers perspective on how these

messy medieval wars became a go-to metaphor for Christian-Muslim conflict.

Shown here are the geographic origins of the Normans and Seljuks, peoples who

emerged from Scandinavia and the Central Asian steppe to conquer the

Christian and Muslim worlds, respectively, before coming into conflict with one

another during the Crusades. In light of their remote origins, the Normans and

Seljukswere originally considereduncivilized barbarians by members of the

civilizations they ultimately conquered. Both groups zealously embraced their

new subjects religions to compensate. Thus, when the Normans and Seljuks

faced off in the 11th century, the rhetoric of religious war helped each side prove

its piety. That same rhetoric performs a similar function today.

3. Mapping Collaboration During the Crusades

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3/11

The pursuit of power drove plenty of violence between Muslims and Christians

during the Crusades, but it also fostered cross-cultural cooperation. One of the

most striking examples is this 12th-century map, made by an Arab geographer

for a crusader king. After the Normans conquered Sicily from the Muslim

Saracens, King Roger II turned to cartography to bolster his rule, hiring the

famous Arab mapmaker Muhammad al-Idrisi to depict the known world for

him. The resulting work is known as the Tabula Rogeriana in Latin and the

Kitab Rujar in Arabic (or by its full title, the book of pleasant journeys into

faraway lands). The map drew on classical Greek sources but was oriented, like

most maps from the Arab and Muslim Mediterranean, with south on top. Thats

the Nile Delta at the top, the Persian Gulf on the top left, Greece on the bottom

right, and Cyprus, Crete, and the Aegean Islands in the middle. The orange and

purple bits that resemble chicken feet are mountains, and the squiggly green

lines rivers.

4. German Asia Minor and German Arabia

Many people wonder what might have happened in Palestine if, after the

disappearance of the Ottoman Empire after World War I, the British had never

colonized it. In all likelihood, the French would have colonized it instead. More

broadly, if the French and British had not divided up the Middle East between

47 Comments

hugoporter

I am afraid that this map does make sense:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S...

Serious Questions

The biggest shocker from that map? Iceland is not, technically, secular.

hugoporter

I know. Iceland??? But before you start a petition or something - it's a

mere mistake, me thinks. Iceland is actually very secular.

pedestr1an

It is not a mistake. The official state church is the Evangelical

Lutheran Church. Whether a country is officially secular or has anofficial state religion is not the same question as whether a

society is religious.

hugoporter

You are right, of course. As a freedom loving agnostic, I would

rather see a secular state with religious citizens than a religious

state with agnostic citizens, as is the case in Iceland? What is

written on legislative paper counts and I didn't mean to belittle the

debate, on the contrary. Greece is the same and maybe it is

worth starting petitions. The context of it all however was the

ambiguous "Middle East" and I didn't mean to distract.

fishamaphone

Religion, it turns out, is positively correlated with living in the region between the

equator and the tropic of cancer. Interesting.

hugoporter

Yes, interesting. I somehow wished more people would believe in life

before death.

Alexander S Anderson

What makes England ambiguous? The fact that they are embarrassed by their

state church doesn't make it not a state church.

hugoporter

Isn't it rather their English Law thingy, no constitution and such? Either

way, I find your argument to be right as well and more amusing.

John

We have a British constitution. Also, English people could care

less about our church, absolutely not an embarrassment.

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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S...http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2014/07/15-maps-that-...http://www.novapdf.com/http://www.novapdf.com/http://www.novapdf.com/http://www.novapdf.com/http://www.novapdf.com/http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2014/07/15-maps-that-...http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S...


4/11

them, the Germans would have been perfectly happy to colonize the region,

perhaps after winning World War I. This map shows a German imperialist

fantasy from the end of the 19th century. It appeared as part of an 1897 work by

Adolf Guyer-Zeller, a Swiss railroad magnate. In these maps, Guyer-Zeller seems

keenly interested in the potential for imperial Germany to create rail routesnot

just the famous Berlin-Baghdad railway the Germansbegan building in 1903,

but also links from Aleppo to Moscow and another route east into India.

Deutsch Arabia certainly would have turned out differently than the British- or

French-run Middle East, but its unlikely the inhabitants would have been any

happier with the arrangement in the long run.

5. An Ottoman Ethnography of the Middle East

Its easy to say that the borders of the modern Middle East ignore the regions

ethnic divisions, but its harder to tell what those ethnic divisions are. Many

contemporary maps show clear lines between Arabs and Kurds or Sunnis and


KATIE ENGELHART




ROSE EVELETH




5/11

Shiites, but what about maps from a hundred years ago? Heres one drawn by

the Ottoman government during World War I with some pretty unfamiliar

categories. Most strikingly, it divides the Mediterranean coast between settled

Syrians (the red horizontal lines) and nomadic Arabs (purple vertical lines).

The map similarly divides the regions Turkish-speaking residents between

settled Turks (red vertical lines) and nomadic Turkmen (green checks).

6. Disputed Mosul

Rival powers contested the oil-rich region around the city of Mosul long before

Sunni militants wrested it from Iraqs control this summer. After World War I,

Turkish nationalists drew this ethnographic map to advance their claim to the

former Ottoman province. The legendcleverly divides the provinces population

into Arabs and Non-Arab Muslim Elements, thereby dodging the

inconvenient distinction between Turks and Kurds without quite claiming that

theyre the same. Today, the Kurdistan Regional Government controls much of

the former Mosul province, while the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria occupies thecity itself. And in Turkey, the question of how to reconcile Kurdish ethnicity and

Turkish citizenship remains a hotly contested one. The map is just one example

of the creative cartography mapmakers have often used when given the

impossible task of drawing clear national borders over complicated demographic

realities in the Middle East.

7. The Arab Kingdom


KATIE ENGELHART




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6/11

This map celebrated King Faisals declaration of a short-lived Arab kingdom in

Damascus in 1920. Faisal, famous for his role in the Arab Revolt with T.E.

Lawrence, lost his Syrian kingdom to the French army, at which point he became

king of British-ruled Iraq as something of a consolation. This map offers a

tempting vision of a united Middle East that could have arisen under Faisal in

the absence of European colonialism. But in delineating the borders of Faisalskingdom (the dotted lines), this map also highlights some of the inevitable

problems with that vision. For one thing, Turkey, which as the Ottoman

Empires successor state only grudgingly gave up Mosul province to the British

after World War I, would not have parted peacefully with the territory Faisal

claimed for the Arabs. The Maronite Christians of Mount Lebanon also had

mixed feelings about being included in a Muslim kingdom, not to mention the

Zionists who had already settled in Palestine. Whats more, members of Faisals

family, the Hashemites, proved to be unpopular with many of the actual Middle

Easterners they ruled. Within a decade after World War I, the Hashemites were

driven from their original territory in Mecca by the Saudis, and after World War

II Faisals heirs, who had assumed the leadership of Iraq, were deposed by a


KATIE ENGELHART




ROSE EVELETH




7/11

popular military coup.

8. The New Assyria and 9. The New Palestine

The period of upheaval following the collapse of the Ottoman Empire produced a

number of novel ideas for new states. Some of these, like the New Assyria (1916),

moved from the imagination to the drawing board, and then no further. First

published in an Assyrian nationalist newspaper, this map represents the rather

ambitious vision, held by members of the Chaldean, Nestorian, and Sryani

minorities in the Middle East, for embracing a common identity based on

religious similarities and shared history as the basis for their own politicallysovereign territory. Other proposals, like this map of Palestine (1917), did

become a reality, albeit in somewhat altered form. In the article that

accompanied the publication of this map, the Russian-born Zionist Isaac Don

Levine advocatedthe creation of a Jewish state called Palestine whose borders

would encompass Gaza, the West Bank, and southern Lebanon. Levine credited

centuries of Christian oppression for the endurance of Jewish identity,

highlighted Jewish financial support for George Washington and the American

Revolution, and then concluded that with the Russian revolution and overthrow

of the tsar, anti-Semitism was on the decline. Thus, a Jewish state was needed

purely as a matter of national self-determination.


KATIE ENGELHART




ROSE EVELETH




8/11

10. Divided Syria


KATIE ENGELHART




ROSE EVELETH




9/11

The British are often accused of cynically creating Iraq as an artificial,

unworkable state by joining territory inhabited by Shiites, Sunnis, and Kurds. In

Syria, the French once faced the opposite charge. As we now discuss the

possibility of Syria collapsing into smaller ethnic enclaves, it is worth

remembering that the French originally proposed a similar division. Hoping to

preempt the emergence of Arab nationalism through their own cynical policy of

divide and rule, the French, as this map from 1922 shows, planned to break what

is now Syria into Alawite and Druze mini-states alongside separate, largely

Sunni, territories in the countrys north and south that would be governed from

Aleppo and Damascus. They eventually abandoned the idea in the face ofprotests from local Arab nationalists who demanded a larger, multi-ethnic state.

11. A French Ethnography of Syria

In the 1930s, French colonial authorities came up with their own ethnographic

mapping of the Eastern Mediterranean coast. Some of the categoriesin this map

are the same ones the Ottomans used, while others, such as Yezidis and

Circassians, are different. But what stands out is that, in keeping with the French

policy of divide and rule, one group is noticeably absent from the 18 religious


KATIE ENGELHART




ROSE EVELETH




10/11

and ethnic groups included in the key: Arabs.

12. Everyday Eating in the Eastern Mediterranean

Taking a detour from war and conflict, this map shows where foods known in the

U.S. as Mediterranean or Middle Eastern are most commonly found. These

foods can cross religious, national, and linguistic boundaries even while they

also define unique culinary, cultural, and geographic regions. The practice of

drinking strong coffee in small cups with grounds, for example, reaches from the

Balkans all the way to North Africa. Hummus, though, is relatively rare in

Greece and Turkey. Like falafel, the dish spreads north to a limit that is, I can

only assume coincidentally, coterminous with that of the Arabic language.

Distilled liquor flavored with anise is consumed under a variety of namesouzo,

raki, arakacross the region. In the Balkans, however, raki refers to a

different, more popular drink that more closely resembles grappaor maybepaint thinner. Sometimes, culinary culture defies political borders; other times,

it conforms to them. In the Turkish city of Izmir, you can eat grilled octopus that

tastes identical to the octopus youd find on the nearby Greek island of Chios.

But in Izmir you can also find a range of dishes like lahmacunand cig koftethat

are almost completely unknown in Greece. These foods were brought to Izmir

from southeastern Turkey by domestic migrants.

13. The Middle East Moves West and 14. North


KATIE ENGELHART




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11/11

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15 Maps That Don't Explain the Middle East at All - The Atlantic