As University of Chicago scholar William McNeill has told us, India, China, and Greece all lay “on the fringes of the anciently civilized world,” protected as they were by mountains, deserts, and sheer distance.1 Of course, this protection was partial, for as we know, Greece was ravaged by Persia, China by the Mongols and the Turkic steppe people, and India by a surfeit of Muslim invaders. Nevertheless, geography provided enough of a barrier for three great and unique civilizations to take root. Lying in the immense space between these civilizations, as noted in an earlier chapter, was what McNeill’s Chicago colleague Marshall Hodgson referred to as the Oikoumene, an antique Greek term for the “inhabited quarter” of the world: this is Herodotus’s world, the parched temperate zone of the Afro-Asian landmass stretching from North Africa to the margins of western China, a belt of territory Hodgson also calls Nile-to-Oxus.2
Hodgson’s vision captures brilliantly several key and contradictory facts: that the Oikoumene—the Greater Middle East—is an easily definable zone existing between Greece, China, and India, distinctly separate from all three, even as it has had pivotal influence on each of them, so that the relationships are extremely organic; and that whereas the Greater Middle East is united by Islam and the legacies of horse and camel nomadism—as opposed to the crop agriculture of China and India—it is also deeply divided within by rivers, oases, and highlands, with great ramifications for political organization to this day. The disparity between the Greater Middle East and China, say, is especially telling. John King Fairbank, the late Harvard China expert, writes:
The cultural homogeneity of ancient China as revealed by the archaeological record contrasts remarkably with the multiplicity and diversity of peoples, states, and cultures in the ancient Middle East. Beginning about 3000 B.C., Egyptians, Sumerians, Semites, Akkadians, Amorites … Assyrians, Phoenicians, Hittites, Medes, Persians, and others jostled one another in a bewildering flux of … warfare and politics. The record is one of pluralism with a vengeance. Irrigation helped agriculture in several centers—the Nile, the Tigris-Euphrates, and the Indus valleys.… Languages, writing systems, and religions proliferated.3
This classical legacy of division remains with us most profoundly across the chasm of the millennia, and is therefore crucial to the volatile politics of the Greater Middle East today. While Arabic has come to unify much of the region, Persian and Turkish predominate in the northern plateau regions, and this is not to mention the many languages of Central Asia and the Caucasus. As Hodgson shows, many individual Middle Eastern states, while products of arbitrary, colonial-era map drawing, also have a sturdy basis in antiquity, that is, in geography. Yet the very multiplicity of these states, as well as the religious, ideological, and democratizing forces that operate within them, further reify their designation as part of Alfred Thayer Mahan’s debatable ground. Indeed, the supreme fact of twenty-first-century world politics is that the most geographically central area of the dry-land earth is also the most unstable.
In the Middle East we have, in the words of the scholars Geoffrey Kemp and Robert E. Harkavy, a “vast quadrilateral,” where Europe, Russia, Asia, and Africa intersect: with the Mediterranean Sea and the Sahara Desert to the west; the Black Sea, the Caucasus, the Caspian Sea, and the Central Asian steppe-land to the north; the Hindu Kush and the Indian Subcontinent to the east; and the Indian Ocean to the south.4 Unlike China or Russia, this quadrilateral does not constitute one massive state; nor, like the Indian Subcontinent, is it even overwhelmingly dominated by one state, which might provide it with at least some semblance of coherence. Nor is it, like Europe, a group of states within highly regulated alliance structures (NATO, the European Union). Rather, the Middle East is characterized by a disorderly and bewildering array of kingdoms, sultanates, theocracies, democracies, and military-style autocracies, whose common borders look formed as if by an unsteady knife. To no surprise of the reader, this whole region, which includes North Africa, the Horn of Africa, Central Asia, and, to a degree, the Indian Subcontinent, constitutes, in effect, one densely packed axis of instability, where continents, historic road networks, and sea lanes converge. What is more, this region comprises 70 percent of the world’s proven oil reserves and 40 percent of its natural gas reserves.5 Too, this region is prone to all the pathologies mentioned by Yale professor Paul Bracken: extremist ideologies, crowd psychology, overlapping missile ranges, and profit-driven mass media as dedicated to their point of view as Fox News is to its. In fact, with the exception of the Korean Peninsula, nuclear proliferation is more of a factor in the Middle East than in any other area.
The Middle East is also in the midst of a youth bulge, in which 65 percent of the population is under the age of thirty. Between 1995 and 2025, the populations of Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Oman, Syria, the West Bank, Gaza Strip, and Yemen will have doubled. Young populations, as we have seen in the Arab Spring, are the most likely to force upheaval and change. The next generation of Middle Eastern rulers, whether in Iran or in the Arab states, will not have the luxury to rule as autocratically as their predecessors, even as democratic experiments in the region show that while elections are easily accomplished, stable and liberal democratic orders are processes that can take generations to refine. In the Middle East, youth bulges and the communications revolution have ignited a string of messy, Mexico-style scenarios (the replacement of decisive one-party states with more chaotic multifactional and multiparty ones), but without Mexico’s level of institutionalization, which, as limited as it is, remains ahead of most countries in the Middle East. Dealing with an authentically democratic Mexico has been harder for the United States than with a Mexico under effective one-party rule. Bristling with advanced armaments, to say nothing of weapons of mass destruction, the Middle East of the next few decades will make the recent era of Arab-Israeli state conflict seem almost like a romantic, sepia-toned chapter of the Cold War and Post Cold War, in which calculations of morality and strategic advantage were relatively clear-cut.
Hodgson’s Nile-to-Oxus essentially means Egypt to Central Asia, with Egypt as shorthand for all of North Africa. This terminology comprises both the southern, desert-and-plains component of the Middle East, which is Arab, and the northern mountainous tableland, which is non-Arab, and which begins by the Black Sea and ends by the Indian Subcontinent. The sprawling northern plateau region might also be dubbed Bosporus-to-Indus. Bosporus-to-Indus has been heavily influenced by migrations from Central Asia; Nile-to-Oxus by that, too, as well as by heavy sea traffic in the Mediterranean, the Red Sea, and the Indian Ocean. The fact that the Middle East is the intersection point of continents, with an internal geography more intricate than any save Europe, but vaster and spread across twice as many time zones as Europe, makes it necessary for the sake of this discussion to disaggregate the region into constituent parts. Obviously, electronic communications and air travel have overcome geography in recent times, so that crises are defined by political interactions across the entire region. For example, the Israelis intercept a flotilla carrying relief supplies for Gaza and crowds in Turkey, Iran, and throughout the Arab world are inflamed. A fruit and vegetable vendor in south-central Tunisia immolates himself and not only does Tunisia erupt in demonstrations against dictatorial rule, but also much of the Arab world. Still, much can be discerned by studying the map and its inherent divisions.
When looking at a map of the Middle East, three geographical features stand out above others: the Arabian Peninsula, the Iranian plateau, and the Anatolian land bridge.
The Arabian Peninsula is dominated by the kingdom of Saudi Arabia, yet it also includes other important countries. In fact, Saudi Arabia, with a population of only 28.7 million, contains much less than half of all the peninsula’s inhabitants. But Saudi Arabia’s annual population growth rate is nearly 2 percent: if that high rate continues, its population will double in a few decades, putting enormous strain on resources, given that the country is located on steppe-land and water-starved desert. Close to 40 percent of Saudis are under fifteen years of age. Forty percent of Saudi Arabia’s young men are unemployed. The political pressures arising from such a young population for jobs and education will be immense. Saudi Arabia’s power derives not from the size of its population, which in fact is a liability, but from the fact that it leads the world in oil reserves, with 262 billion barrels, and is fourth in the world in natural gas reserves, with 240 trillion cubic feet.
The geographical cradle of the Saudi state, and of the extreme Sunni religious movement known as Wahhabism associated with it, is Najd: an arid region in the center of the Arabian Peninsula, lying between the Great al-Nafud Desert to the north and the Rub al-Khali or Empty Quarter to the south: to the east is the coastal strip of the Persian Gulf; to the west the mountains of Hijaz. The word “Najd” means upland. And its general elevation varies from five thousand feet in the west to under 2,500 feet in the east. The late-nineteenth-century British explorer and Arabist Charles M. Doughty described Najd thus:
The shrieking suany and noise of tumbling water is, as it were, the lamentable voice of a rainless land in all Nejd villages. Day and night this labour of the water may not be intermitted. The strength of oxen cannot profitably draw wells of above three or four fathoms and, if God had not made the camel, Nejd, they say, had been without inhabitant.6
Najd is truly the heart of what Hodgson called camel-based nomadism. It was from the bastion of Najd that Wahhabi fanatics in recent centuries set off on raids in all directions. Though the Hijaz, adjacent to the Red Sea, held the holy cities of Mecca and Medina, the Wahhabist Najdis considered the pilgrimages to the various holy places (with the exception of the haj to the Kaaba in Mecca) to be a form of paganism. While the holy cities of Mecca and Medina connote Muslim religiosity in the Western mind, the truth is somewhat the opposite: it is the very pilgrimage of Muslims from all over the Islamic world that lends a certain cosmopolitanism to these holy cities and to the surrounding Hijaz. The Hijaz, “with its young, urbane, religiously varied population, has never fully accommodated to Saudi and Wahabi rule,” writes career CIA officer Bruce Riedel.7 The people of the Hijaz look to the Red Sea, Egypt, and Syria for cultural sustenance, not to the austere desert of Najd with its Wahhabis. The core fact of this history is that the Wahhabis were unable to hold permanently the peripheries of the Arabian Peninsula, even as their adversaries found it equally difficult to hold the heartland of Najd. The Saudi Arabia that exists today, while a tribute to the vision and skills of one man in the first half of the twentieth century, Abdul Aziz ibn Saud—the Najdi who conquered Hijaz in 1925—holds true to this geographical design.8 The state is focused on Najd and its capital, Riyadh, and does not include the seaboard skeikhdoms of the Persian Gulf, nor Oman and Yemen.
The fundamental danger to Najd-based Saudi Arabia is Yemen. Though Yemen has only a quarter of Saudi Arabia’s land area, its population is almost as large, so that the all-important demographic core of the Arabian Peninsula is in its mountainous southwest corner, where sweeping basalt plateaus, rearing up into sand castle formations and volcanic plugs, embrace a network of oases densely inhabited since antiquity. The Ottoman Turks and the British never really controlled Yemen. Like Nepal and Afghanistan, Yemen, because it was never truly colonized, did not develop strong bureaucratic institutions. When I traveled in the Saudi-Yemeni border area some years back it was crowded with pickup trucks filled with armed young men, loyal to this sheikh or that, even as the presence of the Yemeni government was negligible. Estimates of the number of firearms within Yemen’s borders go as high as eighty million—almost three for every Yemeni. I will never forget what an American military expert told me in the Yemeni capital of Sana’a: “In Yemen you’ve got well over twenty million aggressive, commercial-minded, and well-armed people, all extremely hardworking compared with the Saudis next door. It’s the future, and it terrifies the hell out of the government in Riyadh.”
Saudi Arabia is synonymous with the Arabian Peninsula in the way that India is synonymous with the subcontinent. But while India is heavily populated throughout, Saudi Arabia constitutes a geographically nebulous network of oases separated by vast waterless tracts. Thus, highways and domestic air links are crucial to Saudi Arabia’s cohesion. While India is built on an idea of democracy and religious pluralism, Saudi Arabia is built on loyalty to an extended family. And yet whereas India is virtually surrounded by semi-dysfunctional states, Saudi Arabia’s borders disappear into harmless desert to the north, and are shielded by (in the most part, Bahrain excepted) sturdy, well-governed, self-contained sheikhdoms to the east and southeast: sheikhdoms that, in turn, are products of history and geography. It was because the territories of present-day Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates all lay along the trade route of the nineteenth century’s greatest maritime power, Great Britain, and particularly along its route to India, that Britain negotiated deals with its skeikhs that led to their independence following World War II. Large oil deposits tell the rest of the story of these “Eldorado States,” in the words of British Arabist Peter Mansfield.9
In sum, within the Arabian Peninsula, it remains in the highly populous southwest where Saudi Arabia is really vulnerable: from where weapons, explosives, and the narcotic leaf qat flow in from across the Yemeni border. The future of teeming, tribalized Yemen will go a long way to determining the future of Saudi Arabia, and geography perhaps more than ideas has much to do with it.
The Iranian plateau, on the other hand, is synonymous with only one country: Iran. Iran’s population of 74 million is two and a half times that of Saudi Arabia, and is along with Turkey’s and Egypt’s the largest in the Middle East. Moreover, Iran has impressively gotten its population growth rate down to way below one percent, with only 22 percent of its population below the age of fifteen. Thus, Iran’s population is not a burden like Saudi Arabia’s, but an asset. One could argue that, for example, Turkey has an even bigger population, a similarly low population growth rate, and a higher literacy rate. Moreover, Turkey has a stable agricultural economy and is more industrialized than Iran. I will deal with Turkey later. For the moment, note that Turkey is situated to the northwest of Iran, closer to Europe and much further away from major Sunni Arab population centers. Turkey also is in the bottom ranks of hydrocarbon producers. Iran is number three in the world in oil reserves, with 133 billion barrels, but number two in natural gas reserves, with 970 trillion cubic feet. Yet it is Iran’s locational advantage, just to the south of Mackinder’s Heartland, and inside Spykman’s Rimland, that, more than any other factor, is truly something to behold.
Virtually all of the Greater Middle East’s oil and natural gas lies either in the Persian Gulf or the Caspian Sea regions. Just as shipping lanes radiate from the Persian Gulf, pipelines radiate and will radiate from the Caspian region to the Mediterranean, the Black Sea, China, and the Indian Ocean. The only country that straddles both energy-producing areas is Iran, stretching as it does from the Caspian to the Persian Gulf.10 The Persian Gulf possesses by some accounts 55 percent of the world’s crude oil reserves, and Iran dominates the whole Gulf, from the Shatt al Arab on the Iraqi border to the Strait of Hormuz 615 miles away. Because of its bays, inlets, coves, and islands—excellent places for hiding suicide, tanker-ramming speedboats—Iran’s coastline inside the Strait of Hormuz is 1,356 nautical miles; the next longest, that of the United Arab Emirates, is only 733 nautical miles. Iran also has 300 miles of Arabian Sea frontage, including the port of Chah Bahar near the Pakistani border. This makes Iran vital to providing warm water access to the landlocked Central Asian countries of the former Soviet Union. Meanwhile, the Iranian coast of the Caspian in the far north, wreathed by thickly forested mountains, stretches for nearly four hundred miles from Astara in the west, on the border with former Soviet Azerbaijan, around to Bandar-e Torkaman in the east, by the border with Turkmenistan.
A look at the relief map of Eurasia shows something more. The broad back of the Zagros Mountains sweeps down through Iran from Anatolia in the northwest to Baluchistan in the southeast. To the west of the Zagros range, the roads are all open to Mesopotamia. When British area specialist and travel writer Freya Stark explored Iranian Luristan in the Zagros Mountains in the early 1930s, she naturally based herself out of Baghdad, not Tehran.11 To the east and northeast, the roads are open to Khorasan and the Kara Kum (Black Sand) and Kyzyl Kum (Red Sand) deserts of Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan respectively. For just as Iran straddles the rich energy fields of both the Persian Gulf and the Caspian Sea, it also straddles the Middle East proper and Central Asia. No Arab country can make that claim (just as no Arab country sits astride two energy-producing areas). In fact, the Mongol invasion of Iran, which killed hundreds of thousands of people at a minimum, and destroyed the qanat irrigation system, was that much more severe precisely because of Iran’s Central Asian prospect. Iranian influence in the former Soviet republics of the Caucasus and Central Asia is potentially vast, even as these same former Soviet republics, because of ethnic compatriots in northern Iran, could theoretically destabilize the Iranian state. Whereas Azerbaijan on Iran’s northwestern border contains roughly eight million Azeri Turks, there are twice that number in Iran’s neighboring provinces of Azerbaijan and Tehran. The Azeris were cofounders of the Iranian polity. The first Shiite shah of Iran (Ismail in 1501) was an Azeri Turk. There are important Azeri businessmen and ayatollahs in Iran. The point is that whereas Iran’s influence to the west in nearby Turkey and the Arab world is well established, its influence to the north and east is equally profound; and if the future brings less repressive regimes both in Iran and in the southern, Islamic tier of the former Soviet Union, Iran’s influence could deepen still with more cultural and political interactions.
Moreover, Iran, as we know from the headlines, has had, at least through 2011, an enviable political position by the Mediterranean: in Hamas-controlled Gaza, Hezbollah-controlled southern Lebanon, and Alawite Syria. Yet one interpretation of history and geography suggests an Iranian breakout in all directions. In the palace of the sixth-century Sassanian Persian emperors at Ctesiphon, south of modern-day Baghdad, there were empty seats beneath the royal throne for the emperors of Rome and China, and for the leader of the Central Asian nomads, in case those rulers came as supplicants to the court of the king of kings.12 The pretensions of Iranian rulers have not lessened with modernity; in this way the clerics are much like the late shah. That is ultimately why Moscow must tread carefully regarding its relations with Iran. A century ago Russia had a zone of influence in northern Iran. Though Russia is comparatively weaker now, proximity and contiguity do matter.
Iran, furthermore, is not some twentieth-century contrivance of family and religious ideology like Saudi Arabia, bracketed as it is by arbitrary borders. Iran corresponds almost completely with the Iranian plateau—“the Castile of the Near East,” in Princeton historian Peter Brown’s phrase—even as the dynamism of its civilization reaches far beyond it. Iran was the ancient world’s first superpower. The Persian Empire, even as it besieged Greece, “uncoiled, like a dragon’s tail … as far as the Oxus, Afghanistan and the Indus valley,” writes Brown.13 W. Barthold, the great Russian geographer of the turn of the twentieth century, concurs, situating Greater Iran between the Euphrates and the Indus, and identifying the Kurds and Afghans as essentially Iranian peoples.14
Of the ancient peoples of the Near East, only the Hebrews and the Iranians “have texts and cultural traditions that have survived to modern times,” writes the linguist Nicholas Ostler.15 Persian (Farsi) was not replaced by Arabic, like so many other tongues, and is in the same form today as it was in the eleventh century, even as it has adopted the Arabic script. Iran has a far more venerable record as a nation-state and urbane civilization than most places in the Arab world and all the places in the Fertile Crescent, including Mesopotamia and Palestine. There is nothing artificial about Iran, in other words: the very competing power centers within its clerical regime indicate a greater level of institutionalization than almost anywhere in the region save for Israel and Turkey. Just as the Middle East is the quadrilateral for Afro-Eurasia, that is, for the World-Island, Iran is the Middle East’s very own universal joint. Mackinder’s pivot, rather than in the Central Asian steppe-land, should be moved to the Iranian plateau just to the south. It is no surprise that Iran is increasingly being wooed by both India and China, whose navies may at some point in the twenty-first century share dominance with that of the United States in the Eurasian sea lanes. Though Iran is much smaller in size and population than those two powers, or Russia or Europe for that matter, Iran, because it is in possession of the key geography of the Middle East—in terms of location, population, and energy resources—is, therefore, fundamental to global geopolitics.
There is, too, what British historian Michael Axworthy calls the “Idea of Iran,” which, as he explains, is as much about culture and language as about race and territory.16 Iran, he means, is a civilizational attractor, much as ancient Greece and China were, pulling other peoples and languages into its linguistic orbit: the essence of soft power, in other words, and so emblematic of McNeill’s concept of one civilization and culture influencing another. Dari, Tajik, Urdu, Hindi, Bengali, and Iraqi Arabic are all either variants of Persian or significantly influenced by it. That is, one can travel from Baghdad to Calcutta and remain inside a Persian cultural realm of sorts. A brief scan of Iranian history, with an emphasis on old maps, further clarifies this dynamism.
Greater Iran began back in 700 B.C. with the Medes, an ancient Iranian people who established, with the help of the Scythians, an independent state in northwestern Iran. By 600 B.C., this empire reached from central Anatolia to the Hindu Kush (Turkey to Afghanistan), as well as south to the Persian Gulf. In 549 B.C., Cyrus (the Great), a prince from the Persian house of Achaemenes, captured the Median capital of Ecbatana (Hamadan) in western Iran, and went on a further bout of conquest. The map of the Achaemenid Empire, governed from Persepolis (near Shiraz) in southern Iran, shows antique Persia at its apex, from the sixth to fourth centuries B.C. It stretched from Thrace and Macedonia in the northwest, and from Libya and Egypt in the southwest, all the way to the Punjab in the east; and from the Transcaucasus and the Caspian and Aral seas in the north to the Persian Gulf and the Arabian Sea in the south. This was Bosporus-to-Indus, including the Nile. No empire up to that point in world history had matched it. While the fifth-century B.C. wars between Persia and Greece dominate Western attitudes toward ancient Iran, with our sympathies lying with the Westernized Greeks as opposed to the Asiatic Persians, it is also the case that, as Hodgson notes, the Oikoumene, under the relative peace, tolerance, and sovereignty of Achaemenid Persia and later empires, provided a sturdy base for the emergence and prospering of the great confessional religions.17
“The Parthians,” Axworthy writes, “exemplified the best of Iranian genius—the recognition, acceptance, and tolerance of the complexity of the cultures … over which they ruled.”18 Headquartered in the northeastern Iranian region of Khorasan and the adjacent Kara Kum, and speaking an Iranian language, the Parthians ruled between the third century B.C. and the third century A.D., generally from Syria and Iraq to central Afghanistan and Pakistan, including Armenia and Turkmenistan. Thus, rather than Bosporus-to-Indus or Nile-to-Oxus like Achaemenid Persia, the Parthian Empire constitutes a more realistic vision of a Greater Iran for the twenty-first century. And this is not necessarily bad. For the Parthian Empire was extremely decentralized, a zone of strong influence rather than of outright control, which leaned heavily on art, architecture, and administrative practices inherited from the Greeks. As for the Iran of today, it is no secret that the clerical regime is formidable, but demographic, economic, and political forces are equally dynamic, and key segments of the population are restive.
The medieval record both cartographically and linguistically follows from the ancient one, though in more subtle ways perhaps. In the eighth century the political locus of the Arab world shifted eastward from Syria to Mesopotamia: that is, from the Umayyad caliphs to the Abbasid ones. The Abbasid Caliphate at its zenith in the middle of the ninth century ruled from Tunisia eastward to Pakistan, and from the Caucasus and Central Asia southward to the Persian Gulf. Its capital was the new city of Baghdad, close upon the old Sassanid Persian capital of Ctesiphon; and Persian bureaucratic practices, which added whole new layers of hierarchy, undergirded this new imperium. The Abbasid Caliphate became more a symbol of an Iranian despotism than of an Arab sheikhdom. Some historians have labeled the Abbasid Caliphate the equivalent of the “cultural reconquest” of the Middle East by the Persians under the guise of Arab rulers.19 The Abbasids succumbed to Persian practices just as the Umayyads, closer to Asia Minor, had succumbed to Byzantine ones. “Persian titles, Persian wines and wives, Persian mistresses, Persian songs, as well as Persian ideas and thoughts, won the day,” writes historian Philip K. Hitti.20 The Persians also helped determine medieval Baghdad’s monumental brick architecture and circular ground plan.
“In the western imagination,” writes Peter Brown of Princeton, “the Islamic [Abbasid] empire stands as the quintessence of an oriental power. Islam owed this crucial orientation neither to Muhammad nor to the adaptable conquerors of the seventh century, but to the massive resurgence of eastern, Persian traditions in the eighth and ninth centuries.” It wasn’t so much Charles Martel at Tours in 732 who “brought the Arab war machine to a halt,” but the very foundation of Baghdad, which replaced the dynamism of Bedouin cavalry with that of an imperial and luxurious Persian administration.21
Not even the thirteenth-century Mongol conquest of Baghdad, which laid waste to Iraq, and particularly to its irrigation system (as it did in Iran), a devastation from which Iraq never completely recovered, could halt the vitality of Persian arts and letters. The poetry of Rumi, Iraqi, Sa’adi, and Hafez all prospered in the wake of Hulagu Khan’s assault, which had reduced Mesopotamia to a malarial swamp. Nostalgic for their Sassanid ancestors, who had ruled an empire greater than their Parthian predecessors and almost equal to that of the Achaemenids, Persian artists and scholars embellished the intellectual and linguistic terrain of a succession of non-Persian empires—Abbasid, Ghaznavid, Seljuk, Mongol, and Mughal. Persian was the Mughal court language, as well as the diplomatic one for the Ottomans. In the medieval centuries, the Persians may not have ruled directly from Bosporus-to-Indus, as they did in antiquity, but they dominated literary life to the same extent. The “Iranian Empire of the Mind,” as Axworthy calls it, was the potent idea that served to magnify Iran’s geographically envious position, so that a Greater Iran was a historically natural phenomenon.22 Arnold Toynbee poses this tantalizing hypothetical: if Tamerlane (Timur) had not turned his back on northern and central Eurasia and his arms against Iran in 1381, the relationship between Transoxiana and Russia might have been the “inverse” of what they actually became in modern times, with a state roughly the size of the Soviet Union ruled not by Russians from Moscow, but by Iranians ruling from Samarkand.23
As for Shiism, it is very much a component of this idea—despite the culturally bleak and oppressive aura projected by the Shiite clergy from 1979 through at least the first decade of the twenty-first century. While the arrival of the Mahdi in the form of the hidden Twelfth Imam means the end of injustice, and thus is a spur to radical activism, little else in Shiism necessarily inclines the clergy to play an overt political role; Shiism even has a quietest strain that acquiesces to the powers that be, and which is frequently informed by Sufism.24 Witness the example set by Iraq’s leading cleric of recent years, Ayatollah Ali Sistani, who only at pivotal moments makes a plea for political conciliation from behind the scenes. Precisely because of the symbiotic relationship between Iraq and Iran throughout history, with its basis in geography, it is entirely possible that in a post-revolutionary Iran, Iranians will look more toward the Shiite holy cities of Najaf and Karbala in Iraq for spiritual direction than toward their own holy city of Qom; or that Qom will adopt the quietism of Najaf and Karbala.
The French scholar Olivier Roy tells us that Shiism is historically an Arab phenomenon that came late to Iran, but which eventually led to the establishment of a clerical hierarchy for taking power. Shiism was further strengthened by the tradition of a strong and bureaucratic state that Iran has enjoyed since antiquity, relative to those of the Arab world, and which is, as we know, partly a gift of the spatial coherence of the Iranian plateau. The Safavids brought Shiism to Iran in the sixteenth century. Their name comes from their own militant Sufi order, the Safaviyeh, which had originally been Sunni. The Safavids were one of a number of horse-borne brotherhoods of mixed Turkish, Azeri, Georgian, and Persian origin in the late fifteenth century which occupied the mountainous plateau region between the Black and Caspian seas, where eastern Anatolia, the Caucasus, and northwestern Iran come together. In order to build a stable state on the Farsi-speaking Iranian plateau, these new sovereigns of eclectic linguistic and geographical origin adopted Twelver Shiism as the state religion, which awaits the return of the Twelfth Imam, a direct descendant of Muhammad, who is not dead but in occlusion.25 This development was, of course, not preordained by history or geography, and depended greatly on various personalities and circumstances. Had, for example, the Ilkhanid ruler Oljaitu, the scion of a Mongol khanate, not converted to Twelver Shiism in the thirteenth century, the development of Shiism in northwestern Iran might have been different, and who knows how events might have transpired henceforth. In any case, Shiism had been gathering force among various Turkic orders in northwestern Iran, laying the groundwork for the emergence of Safavid Shah Ismail, who imposed Shiism in the wake of his conquests, and brought in Arab theologians from present-day southern Lebanon and Bahrain to form the nucleus of a state clergy.26
The Safavid Empire at its zenith stretched thereabouts from Anatolia and Syria-Mesopotamia to central Afghanistan and Pakistan—yet another variant of Greater Iran through history. Shiism was an agent of Iran’s congealment as a modern nation-state, even as the Iranianization of non-Persian Shiite minorities during the sixteenth century also helped in this regard.27 Iran might have been a great state and nation since antiquity, but the Safavids with their insertion of Shiism onto the Iranian plateau retooled Iran for the modern era.
Indeed, revolutionary Iran of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries is a fitting expression of this powerful and singular legacy. Of course, the rise of the ayatollahs has been a lowering event in the sense of the violence done to—and I do not mean to exaggerate—the voluptuous, sophisticated, and intellectually stimulating traditions of the Iranian past. (Persia—“that land of poets and roses!” exclaims the introductory epistle of James J. Morier’s The Adventures of Hajji Baba of Ispahan.)28 But comparison, it is famously said, is the beginning of all serious scholarship. Compared to the upheavals and revolutions in the Arab world during the early and middle phases of the Cold War, the regime ushered in by the 1978–1979 Iranian Revolution was striking in its vitality and modernity. The truth is, and this is something that goes directly back to the Achaemenids of antiquity, everything about the Iranian past and present is of a high quality, whether it is the dynamism of its empires from Cyrus to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (who can deny the sheer Iranian talent for running terrorist networks in Lebanon, Gaza, and Iraq, which is, after all, an aspect of imperial rule!), or the political thought and writings of its Shiite clergy; or the complex efficiency of the bureaucracy and security services in cracking down on dissidents. Tehran’s revolutionary order has constituted a richly developed governmental structure with a diffusion of power centers: it was never a crude one-man thugocracy like the kind Saddam Hussein ran in neighboring Arab Iraq. Olivier Roy tells us that the “originality” of the Iranian Revolution lies in the alliance between the clergy and the Islamist intelligentsia:
The Shiite clergy is incontestably more open to the non-Islamic corpus than the Sunni [Arab] ulamas. The ayatollahs are great readers (including of Marx and Feuerbach): there is something of the Jesuit or Dominican in them. Hence they combine clear philosophical syncretism with an exacting casuistic legalism.… The twofold culture of the Shiite clergy is striking: highly traditionalist … and yet very open to the modern world.29
In fact, it is this relatively advanced and modernist strain that makes the “Shiite imagination,” in Roy’s words, “more easily adaptable to the idea of revolution”: an idea which, in turn, requires a sense of history and social justice combined with that of martyrdom. The Sunni Arab world, though it has had its reformers and modernizers, like Muhammad Abduh and Rashid Rida in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, simply lacked for too long the exposure to Western political philosophers such as Hegel and Marx to the degree of Iran: whose mullahs, in the vein of Hegel and Marx, base their moral superiority on an understanding of the purpose of history. Unlike the conservatism of the Afghan mujahidin or the suffocating military regimes of the Arab world, revolutionary Iran in the 1980s saw itself as part of a fraternity that included the Sandinistas in Nicaragua and the African National Congress in South Africa.30 Though clerical rule descended in recent years to mere brutal repression—the mark of a tired regime in its decadent, Brezhnevite phase—the very doctrinal and abstract nature of the infighting that still occurs behind closed doors is testament to the elevated nature of Iranian culture. The Iranian state has been stronger and more elaborately organized than any in the Greater Middle East, save for Turkey and Israel, and the Islamic Revolution did not dismantle the Iranian state, but, rather, attached itself to it. The regime maintained universal suffrage and instituted a presidential system, even if the clerics and security services abused it through an apparently rigged election in 2009.
Again, what made the clerical regime in Iran so effective in the pursuit of its interests, from Lebanon to Afghanistan, was its merger with the Iranian state, which itself is the product of history and geography. The Green Movement, which emerged in the course of massive anti-regime demonstrations following the disputed election of 2009, is very much like the regime it sought to topple: greatly sophisticated by the standards of the region (at least until the Jasmine Revolution in Tunisia two years later), and thus another demonstration of the Iranian genius. The Greens constituted a world-class democracy movement, having mastered the latest means in communications technology—Twitter, Facebook, text messaging—to advance their organizational throwweight, and having adopted a potent mixture of nationalism and universal moral values to advance their cause. It took all the means of repression of the Iranian state, subtle and not, to drive the Greens underground. Were the Greens ever to take power, or to facilitate a change in the clerical regime’s philosophy and foreign policy toward moderation, Iran, because of its strong state and dynamic idea, would have the means to shift the whole groundwork of the Middle East away from radicalization; providing political expression for a new bourgeoisie with middle-class values that has been quietly rising throughout the Greater Middle East, and which the American obsession with al Qaeda and radicalism obscured until the Arab Spring of 2011.31
To speak in terms of destiny is dangerous, since it implies an acceptance of fate and determinism, but clearly given Iran’s geography, history, and human capital, it seems likely that the Greater Middle East, and by extension Eurasia, will be critically affected by Iran’s own political evolution, for better or for worse.
The best indication that Iran has yet to fulfill such a destiny lies in what has not quite happened yet in Central Asia. Let me explain. Iran’s geography, as noted, gives it frontage on Central Asia to the same extent that it has on Mesopotamia and the Middle East. But the disintegration of the Soviet Union has brought limited gains to Iran, when one takes into account the whole history of Greater Iran in the region. The very suffix “istan,” used for Central Asian countries and which means “place,” is Persian. The conduits for Islamization and civilization in Central Asia were the Persian language and culture. The language of the intelligentsia and other elites in Central Asia up through the beginning of the twentieth century was one form of Persian or another. Yet as Roy and others recount, after 1991, Shiite Azerbaijan to the northwest adopted the Latin alphabet and turned to Turkey for tutelage. As for the republics to the northeast of Iran, Sunni Uzbekistan oriented itself more toward a nationalistic than an Islamic base, for fear of its own homegrown fundamentalists: this makes it wary of Iran. Tajikistan, Sunni but Persian speaking, seeks a protector in Iran, but Iran is constrained for fear of making an enemy of the many Turkic-speaking Muslims elsewhere in Central Asia.32 What’s more, being nomads and semi-nomads, Central Asians were rarely devout Muslims to start with, and seven decades of communism only strengthened their secularist tendencies. Having to relearn Islam, they are both put off and intimidated by clerical Iran.
Of course, there have been positive developments from the viewpoint of Tehran. Iran, as its nuclear program attests, is among the most technologically advanced countries in the Middle East (in keeping with its culture and politics), and as such has built hydroelectric projects and roads and railroads in these Central Asian countries that will one day link them all to Iran—either directly or through Afghanistan. Moreover, a natural gas pipeline now connects southeastern Turkmenistan with northeastern Iran, bringing Turkmen gas to Iran’s Caspian region, and thus freeing up Tehran’s own gas production in southern Iran for export via the Persian Gulf. (This goes along with a rail link built in the 1990s connecting the two countries.) Turkmenistan has the world’s fourth largest natural gas reserves, and has committed its entire gas exports to Iran, China, and Russia. Hence, the possibility arises of a Eurasian energy axis united by the crucial geography of three continental powers all up through 2011 opposed to Western democracy.33 Iran and Kazakhstan have built an oil pipeline connecting the two countries, with Kazakh oil being pumped to Iran’s north, even as an equivalent amount of oil is shipped from Iran’s south out through the Persian Gulf. Kazakhstan and Iran will also be linked by rail, providing Kazakhstan with direct access to the Gulf. A rail line may also connect mountainous Tajikistan to Iran, via Afghanistan. Iran constitutes the shortest route for all these natural-resource-rich countries to reach international markets.
So imagine an Iran athwart the pipeline routes of Central Asia, along with its substate, terrorist empire-of-sorts in the Greater Middle East. Clearly, we are talking here of a twenty-first-century successor to Mackinder’s Heartland Pivot. But there is still a problem.
Given the prestige that Shiite Iran still enjoys in some sectors of the Arab world, to say nothing of Shiite south Lebanon and Shiite Iraq—because of the regime’s implacable support for the Palestinian cause and its inherent anti-Semitism—it is telling that this ability to attract masses outside its borders does not similarly carry over into Central Asia. One issue is that the former Soviet republics maintain diplomatic relations with Israel, and simply lack the hatred toward the Jewish state that may still be ubiquitous in the Arab world, despite the initial phases of the Arab Spring. But there is something larger and deeper at work: something that limits Iran’s appeal not only in Central Asia but in the Arab world as well. That something is the very persistence of its suffocating clerical rule that while impressive in a negative sense—using Iran’s strong state tradition to ingeniously crush a democratic opposition and torture and rape people—has also dulled the linguistic and cosmopolitan appeal that throughout history has accounted for a Greater Iran in a cultural sense. The Technicolor disappeared from the Iranian landscape under this regime, and was replaced by grainy black-and-white.
Some years back I was in Ashgabat, the capital of Turkmenistan, from whose vantage point Tehran and Mashad over the border in Iranian Khorasan have always loomed as cosmopolitan centers of commerce and pilgrimage, in stark contrast to Turkmenistan’s own sparsely populated, nomadic landscape. But while trade and pipeline politics proceeded apace, Iran held no real magic, no real appeal for Muslim Turkmens, who are mainly secular and were put off by the mullahs. As extensive as Iranian influence is by virtue of its in-your-face challenge to America and Israel, I don’t believe we will see the true appeal of Iran, in all its cultural glory, until the regime liberalizes or is toppled. A democratic or quasi-democratic Iran, precisely because of the geographical power of the Iranian state, has the possibility to energize hundreds of millions of fellow Muslims in both the Arab world and Central Asia.
Sunni Arab liberalism could be helped in its rise not only because of the example of the West, or because of a democratic yet dysfunctional Iraq, but also because of the challenge thrown up by a newly liberal and historically eclectic Shiite Iran. And such an Iran might do what two decades of Post Cold War Western democracy and civil society promotion have failed to, that is, lead to a substantial prying loose of the police state restrictions in former Soviet Central Asia.
Iran’s Shiite regime was able for a time to inspire the lumpen Sunni faithful and oppressed throughout the Middle East against their own tired, pharaonic governments, some of which have since fallen. Through its uncompromising message and nimble intelligence services, Iran for a long time ran an unconventional, postmodern empire of substate entities including Hamas in Palestine, Hezbollah in Lebanon, and the Mahdi movement in southern Iraq. And yet the Iranian regime was quietly despised at home in many quarters, where the concept of Islamic Revolution, because Iranians have actually experienced it, has meant power cuts, destruction of the currency, and mismanagement. The battle for Eurasia, as I have explained, has many fronts, all increasingly interlocked with one another. But the first among equals in this regard is the one for the hearts and minds of Iranians, who comprise, along with Turks, the Muslim world’s most sophisticated population. Here is where the struggle of ideas meets the dictates of geography: here is where the liberal humanism of Isaiah Berlin meets the quasi-determinism of Halford Mackinder.
For as irresistible and overpowering seem the forces of geography, so much still hangs on a thread. Take the story of the brilliant eighteenth-century post-Safavid conqueror Nader Shah. Of Turkic origin, from Khorasan in northeastern Iran, Nader Shah’s Persian Empire stretched from the Transcaucasus to the Indus. His sieges numbered Baghdad, Basra, Kirkuk, Mosul, Kandahar, and Kabul, places that bedevil America in the early twenty-first century, and which were rarely strangers to Iranian rule. Had Nader Shah, as Michael Axworthy writes, not become deranged in the last five years of his life, he could have brought about in Iran “a modernizing state capable of resisting colonial intervention” from the British and Russians in the nineteenth century. But rather than be remembered as the Peter the Great of Persia, who might have dramatically altered Iranian history from then on for the better, his regime ended in misrule and economic disaster.34
Or take the fall of the Shah in 1979. Henry Kissinger once told me that had Jimmy Carter’s administration handled the rebellion against the Shah more competently in the late 1970s, the Shah might have survived and Iran would now be like South Korea, a dynamic regime, with an imperfectly evolved democracy, that always has its minor disagreements with the United States, but which is basically an ally. The Shah’s regime, in his view, was capable of reform, especially given the democratic upheaval in the Soviet Empire that would come a decade later. Though blaming President Carter for the Shah’s fall may be too facile, the possibilities raised by even a slightly different outcome to the Iranian Revolution are still intriguing. Who knows? I do know that when I traveled throughout Iran in the 1990s, having come recently from Egypt, it was the former that was much less anti-American and anti-Israeli than the latter. Iran’s relatively benign relationship with the Jews stretches from antiquity through the reign of the late Shah. Iran’s population contains hope and possibilities.
Or take the opportunity offered to the United States following the attacks of September 11, 2001, when both Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and President Mohammed Khatami condemned the Sunni al Qaeda terrorism in no uncertain terms and Iranians held vigils for the victims in the streets of Tehran, even as crowds in parts of the Arab world cheered on the attacks; or the help Iran gave to the U.S.-led coalition against the Taliban later that year; or the Iranian offer for substantial talks following the fall of Baghdad in the spring of 2003. These are all indications that history, up to this point in time, did not need to turn out as it did. Other outcomes were possible.
Geography dictates that Iran will be pivotal to the trend lines in the Greater Middle East and Eurasia, and it may dictate how it will be pivotal, but it cannot dictate for what purpose it will be pivotal. That is up to the decisions of men.
As I write, true to the innovative imperialist traditions of its medieval and ancient past, Iran has brilliantly erected a postmodern military empire, the first of its kind: one without colonies and without the tanks, armor, and aircraft carriers that have been the usual accompaniments of power. Rather than classic imperialism—invasion and occupation—Iran, notes author and former CIA field officer Robert Baer, is a superpower within the Middle East by virtue of a “three-pronged strategy of proxy warfare, asymmetrical weapons and an appeal to the … downtrodden,” particularly legions of young and frustrated males. Hezbollah, Tehran’s Arab Shiite proxy in Lebanon, Baer points out, “is the de facto state” there, with more military and organizational heft, and more communal commitment, than the official authorities in Beirut possess. In Gaza, Shiite Iran’s furtive military and financial aid, and its “raw anticolonial message,” seduced poor Palestinians trapped in Soweto-like conditions, who were alienated from contiguous Sunni Arab states run by the likes of the former dictator Mubarak.35 Iran, a thousand miles away to the east, felt closer to these downtrodden Palestinians than did Gaza’s border with Egypt under Mubarak’s rule. This, too, was the Iranian genius. Then, at least through 2011, there were the friendly governments in Syria and Iraq, the former of which clung to Iran for dear life as its only real ally, and the latter of which has a political establishment enmeshed with the Iranian intelligence services, which can help stabilize the country or destabilize it, as they wish. Finally, there is the Persian Gulf itself, where Iran is the only major power with its long and shattered coastline opposite small and relatively weak Arab principalities, each of which Tehran can militarily defeat on its own, undermine through local fifth-column Shiite populations, especially in Bahrain as we have seen, or economically damage through terrorism in the Strait of Hormuz.
Though forbidding and formidable, that most important element, again, having to do with enlightenment, is absent. Unlike the Achaemenid, Sassanid, Safavid, and other Iranian empires of yore, which were either benign or truly inspiring in both a moral and cultural sense, this current Iranian empire of the mind rules mostly out of fear and intimidation, through suicide bombers rather than through poets. And this both limits its power and signals its downfall.
Iran, with its rich culture, vast territory, and teeming and sprawling cities, is, in the way of China and India, a universe unto itself, whose future will overwhelmingly be determined by internal politics and social conditions. Yet if one were to isolate a single hinge in calculating Iran’s fate, it would be Iraq. Iraq, history and geography tell us, is entwined in Iranian politics to the degree of no other foreign country. The Shiite shrines of Imam Ali (the Prophet’s cousin and son-in-law) in Najaf and the one of Imam Hussain (the grandson of the Prophet) in Karbala, both in central-southern Iraq, have engendered Shiite theological communities that challenge that of Qom in Iran. Were Iraqi democracy to ensure even a modicum of stability, the freer intellectual atmosphere of the Iraqi holy cities could have an impact on Iranian politics. In a larger sense, a democratic Iraq will serve as an attractor force of which Iranian reformers might in the future take advantage. For as Iranians become more deeply embroiled in Iraqi politics, the very propinquity of the two nations with a long and common border might work to undermine the more repressive of the two systems. Iranian politics will become gnarled by interaction with a pluralistic, ethnically Arab Shiite society. And as the Iranian economic crisis continues to unfold, ordinary Iranians could well up in anger over hundreds of millions of dollars being spent by their government to buy influence in Iraq, Lebanon, and elsewhere. This is to say nothing of how Iranians will become increasingly hated inside Iraq as the equivalent of “Ugly Americans.” Iran would like to simply leverage Iraqi Shiite parties against the Sunni ones. But that is not altogether possible, since that would narrow the radical Islamic universalism it seeks to represent in the pan-Sunni world to a sectarianism with no appeal beyond the community of Shiites. Thus, Iran may be stuck trying to help form shaky Sunni-Shiite coalitions in Iraq and to keep them perennially functioning, even as Iraqis develop greater hatred for the intrusion into their domestic affairs. Without justifying the way that the 2003 invasion of Iraq was planned and executed, or rationalizing the trillions of dollars spent and the hundreds of thousands of lives lost in the war, in the fullness of time it might very well be that the fall of Saddam Hussein began a process that will result in the liberation of two countries; not one. Just as geography has facilitated Iran’s subtle colonization of Iraqi politics, geography could also be a factor in abetting Iraq’s influence upon Iran.
The prospect of peaceful regime change—or evolution—in Iran, despite the temporary fizzling of the Green Movement, is still greater now than in the Soviet Union during most of the Cold War. A liberated Iran, coupled with less autocratic governments in the Arab world—governments that would be focused more on domestic issues because of their own insecurity—would encourage a more equal, fluid balance of power between Sunnis and Shiites in the Middle East: something which would help keep the region nervously preoccupied with itself and on its own internal and regional power dynamics, much more than on America and Israel.
Additionally, a more liberal regime in Tehran would inspire a broad cultural continuum worthy of the Persian empires of old: one that will not be constrained by the clerical forces of reaction.
A more liberal Iran, given the large Kurdish, Azeri, Turkomen, and other minorities in the north and elsewhere, may also be a far less centrally controlled Iran, with the ethnic peripheries drifting away from Tehran’s orbit. Iran has often been less a state than an amorphous, multinational empire. Its true size would always be greater and smaller than any officially designated cartography. While the northwest of today’s Iran is Kurdish and Azeri Turk, parts of western Afghanistan and Tajikistan are culturally and linguistically compatible with an Iranian state. It is this amorphousness, so very Parthian, that Iran could return to as the wave of Islamic extremism and the perceived legitimacy of the mullahs’ regime erodes.36
