Mapping the middle east, p.1
Mapping the Middle East, page 1
MAPPING THE MIDDLE EAST
MAPPING THE
MIDDLE EAST
ZAYDE ANTRIM
REAKTION BOOKS
For Roger and August
Published by
REAKTION BOOKS LTD
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www.reaktionbooks.co.uk
First published 2018
Copyright © Zayde Antrim 2018
All rights reserved
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers
Page References in the Photo Acknowledgements and
Index Match the Printed Edition of this Book.
Printed and bound in China
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
eISBN: 9781780239545
CONTENTS
NOTE ON SPELLING, DATES AND SOURCES
INTRODUCTION: ON THE ‘MIDDLE EAST’ AND MAPPING
ONE
MAPPING THE ‘REALM OF ISLAM’
TWO
MAPPING IN THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE
THREE
EUROPEAN COLONIAL MAPPING IN THE LONG NINETEENTH CENTURY
FOUR
ENCLOSURE AND EXCLUSION IN NATIONAL MAPPING
FIVE
MAPPING ALTERNATIVE GEOGRAPHIES
REFERENCES
BIBLIOGRAPHY
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
PHOTO ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
INDEX
NOTE ON SPELLING, DATES AND SOURCES
IN AN EFFORT to simplify transliteration from Arabic, Persian and Ottoman Turkish for ease of reading, I have dropped diacritical marks (other than the medial ʿayn and hamza), as well as, in the cases of toponyms and well-known proper names, the definite article al-. Exceptions are terms in italics, titles of books and citations. Wherever possible, I have preferred brief, familiar and/or anglicized terms, toponyms and proper names to transliterated ones. This may at times risk anachronism or confusion, as in my use of ‘Syria’ for al-Shām or ‘Iraq’ for al-ʿIrāq, but I take care to situate such toponyms in their historical context. I have adopted modern Turkish spellings for Ottoman rulers and widely accepted anglicizations of other well-known rulers (as in Gamal Abdel Nasser), but I have transliterated other names and terms from Arabic, Persian and Ottoman Turkish following the system in the International Journal of Middle East Studies. All dates are common era (CE), and death dates are preceded by ‘d.’ and in parentheses. The bibliography lists only published sources, with a focus on those that will be accessible to the general reader, but full citations for unpublished manuscripts, archival documents, rare books and related websites can be found in the references. Similarly, captions serve as brief descriptors of illustrations, but full discussions and information about sources are provided in the text and accompanying references.
1 World map from a 16th-century manuscript of the first version of Piri Reis’s Kitāb-i baḥriye (Book of the Sea).
INTRODUCTION: ON THE ‘MIDDLE EAST’ AND MAPPING
This book is a history of mapping in and of a world region commonly identified in English today as the ‘Middle East’ and associated with the history of Islam. This shifting region and its constituent parts have been conceived, named and mapped in many different ways over the past millennium. By focusing on mapping-from-within, I argue, first and foremost, that the people of the region have been making maps of their own worlds for centuries. This may seem obvious, but most histories of cartography are still strikingly Eurocentric, and those that do deal with other parts of the world tend to emphasize their encounters with Europe and European maps from the fifteenth or sixteenth centuries on. By contrast, this book spans a thousand years, from the eleventh to the twenty-first centuries, and only one of its chapters is devoted to maps made by Europeans in the context of colonial encounters. Nonetheless, my second argument is that those encounters and the subsequent rise of the nation-state have severely constrained cartographic and spatial thinking, both within the region and without, making it difficult to visualize other possibilities. In this light, engagement with the pre-colonial, pre-national period is intended not only as an assertion of the chronological depth of indigenous mapping traditions, but as nourishment for our geographical imaginations.
Thus, I use the term ‘Middle East’ here and in the book’s title as a kind of shorthand, in lieu of toponyms that are no longer in use, that would sound unfamiliar to many readers, or that are themselves partial and problematic. I also use it with considerable reluctance, for I am all too aware of its baggage. However, it remains the term most likely to conjure a mental map that features the places discussed in this book. Unfortunately, it is also likely to conjure a host of negative images and generalizations that stem from the history of its use, which is inseparable from the history of European and North American imperialism. The term started circulating in Europe in the nineteenth century and was used in particular by the British to distinguish colonial projects in India and Central Asia (the ‘Middle East’) from foreign policy toward the Ottoman Empire (the ‘Near East’). At the very least, therefore, these terms were expressions of directional orientation particular to the people of northwestern Europe; the same lands, for instance, would be considered to some degree west of people living in China. But these terms were not merely expressions of directional orientation. Their emergence was inseparable from the imposition of European political and economic domination on the rest of the world, as well as accompanying discourses that distinguished a modern, civilized ‘West’ from a traditional, backward ‘East’, in need of proper management. In this context, the use of such terms reflected assumptions of ‘Western’ superiority and entitlement and helped legitimize European control over far-flung lands and peoples.
The term ‘Middle East’ would gain additional traction, and a higher degree of specificity, in the middle of the twentieth century, just as the United States launched its own bid for global dominance. In the period after the Second World War, American journalists, policy-makers and scholars increasingly used the term to refer to a strategically significant area, stretching in most formulations from Libya or Egypt to Iran or Afghanistan, in which the twin priorities of U.S. foreign policy were to build a bulwark against Communism and ensure access to cheap oil. To these ends, the U.S. government funded Middle East Studies programmes in institutions of higher education, which produced a new generation of intellectuals whose very training was predicated on the existence and coherence of such a region. This went hand-in-hand with growing media attention, which tended to trade in stereotypes – leering Arabs, extravagant wealth and fanatical Muslims, among others. In the past two decades, American obsession with the Middle East has only grown, though the post-9/11 ‘War on Terror’ has replaced the Cold War as the chief paradigm for foreign policy in the region. This has resulted in protracted U.S. military occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as bombing campaigns, drone strikes and proxy wars that have caused mass destruction in Libya, Syria, Yemen and beyond. Against this backdrop, the term ‘Middle East’ has a particular currency in the Anglo-American world that makes it hard to ignore, even if its connotations are far from neutral.1
Indeed, in order to problematize the idea of the Middle East, it is necessary to use the term in the first place, but here I intend it mainly as a way of ensuring that we are all on the same page – or map – before travelling into the deep past and retrieving its forgotten geographies. While there are other widely understood terms I could use (and will, elsewhere in this book) – most notably some combination of subcontinental designations, such as West Asia/North Africa – these too have limitations, only one of which is their comparative unwieldiness. The idea of the continents has its own history, along with its own baggage. Efforts to delimit the continent of Europe and to distinguish it from Asia, for instance, have been predicated on the same kinds of assumptions of European superiority as discourses contrasting ‘West’ and ‘East’. Whatever term I use, the point is that people have imagined meaningful world regions on scales similar to that of the Middle East, and with considerable overlap, in many ways over the past thousand years. Parameters have shifted and the modes of mapping have varied, but regional or ‘superregional’ thinking is nothing new, nor is it the preserve of the West.2 That said, this book is not intended to replace ‘the Middle East’ with a more accurate or authentic toponym, but to emphasize the contingency of all methods of dividing the world and endowing those divisions with meaning. They are never measurable in terms of their proximity or faithfulness to an outside reality – whether geographical, historical or political – but they are, rather, always already implicated in that reality. In taking this approach, I hope to contribute to ongoing conversations that push us to think critically about the ways people have described, named and visualized the world, both in the past and today.
One of the places those conversations have been the most lively is in the field of critical cartography. Since the 1980s work in this field has questioned assumptions about the objectivity of maps, as well as approaches that evaluate them primarily in terms of scientific progress and accuracy. Instead, scholars have started to understand maps as graphic representations of space, which can be deconstructed and interpreted using a range of methods adapted from art history, linguistics and literary criticism.3 In so d oing, they have expanded the definition of a map to encompass a wider range of artefacts than would be considered in a scientific approach, some of which may at first seem more like diagrams or paintings than maps. This is a particularly welcome development for this book, as many of the graphic representations I analyse as maps, particularly those from earlier periods, would be ignored in a more traditional cartographic history. Thus, at times I will use terms like map, image and illustration interchangeably, and I will combine methods of interpretation drawn from literary criticism, such as close reading, with insights from scholarship in art history.
Another important development in the field of critical cartography is increased attention to the relationship between maps and power, both the ways in which states use maps to conquer or control territory and the more subtle ways in which maps erase certain social or political formations and suppress alternative visions of space. At the most basic level, all maps must be understood as selective representations that are intended to facilitate a task and/or to make claims or arguments. This is true even for a simple road map, which tends to emphasize one means of transportation (usually by car) at the expense of another (walking, for example) and furnishes information relevant for that use (tolls or one-way streets) as opposed to other kinds of information (the location of pavements or crossing signals). A less seemingly neutral example might be maps that use coloured shading to depict U.S. presidential election results by state without factoring in population density. A candidate who wins states that are large in area, whether or not they have large populations, will appear on these maps to have had more support than a candidate who wins small states. Even if such choices are unintentional, they exert power by shaping people’s perceptions of the places a map represents and the message it communicates.4
Maps are not only selective representations, they are also embedded, often literally within texts (as when they appear in books, manuscripts, newspapers or websites) and always within the historical and discursive contexts of their production and circulation. They cannot, therefore, be analysed on their own, even when they appear in stand-alone form, but must always be situated within their political and cultural milieu and in dialogue with related geographical discourses. This is true not only in terms of the ability to interpret the writing and iconography on a map, but in terms of grasping the arguments it is making, the power dynamics it advances and its impact on an audience. Some scholars have taken this one step further and proposed ‘mapping’ as a practice or performance, with an emphasis on maps-in-circuit, their varied and often embodied modes of reception, and their perhaps unexpected ‘afterlives’.5 While I embrace the term ‘mapping’, as it suggests a creative, open-ended process and avoids the scientific connotations of ‘cartography’, I focus less on how maps are made and what people do with them than on the ways in which maps build on, intersect with, and influence each other over time to produce changing understandings of space.
It is important to reiterate that this is not a history of cartographic science. I do not evaluate maps as exemplars of technical achievement or in terms of the accuracy of their representations, nor do I assert for what might be called ‘Islamic’ maps their rightful place in the onward march of scientific progress.6 Instead, I explore the ideas that maps convey, which are always historically and culturally contingent. This has also guided my choice of maps. The emphasis here is not on maps that can be presented as evidence of new discoveries or methods, but on maps that are revealing of major trends in spatial thought. I do treat some maps in light of the technical achievements they purport to display, as this is often a strategy for establishing authority and delegitimizing other approaches. In cases like these, I am engaging in ‘denaturalization’, the process by which a map that appears to be factual, self-evident or innocent – often because of the presumed objectivity of its scientific methods – is exposed as constructed, complex and inseparable from power relations. In other cases a map will appear so unfamiliar to today’s readers that my task is rather to make sense of it, to render it a bit more self-evident, in order to resist tendencies to dismiss it as exotic or primitive.
A study that spans a thousand years and the vast area lying between the Atlantic Ocean and the Oxus and Indus river valleys would not be possible without drawing upon a rich body of prior scholarship. My contribution lies in sketching the contours of, and the relationships between, mapping traditions over a long chronological period, as well as providing exemplary close readings of maps, rather than uncovering new sources or delving deeply into one tradition or period. The references, therefore, are essential resources for further reading, and I could not have put this book together without the scholarship cited there. However, one of the consequences of the academic specialization that makes groundbreaking work possible is that comparisons over time and space, especially those that bridge the so-called ‘modern’/‘pre-modern’ divide, sometimes get lost. The goal of this book is to make those connections, to bring this material to a broader audience and, it is hoped, to inspire further research.
Each of the book’s five chronologically organized chapters contextualizes and interprets a set of maps that are representative or compelling examples of regional and superregional thought in the period. Reproductions of most of these maps allow readers to compare the image with my written analysis and to get a sense of the visual culture from which it emerged. Chapter One explores the ways in which a superregion known as the ‘realm of Islam’ was mapped between the eleventh and fifteenth centuries, with an emphasis on diversity-in-unity. Its subdivisions were envisioned as distinctive but porous categories of belonging, connected to each other and to lands beyond by graphic displays of proximity and collective ritual practice. Chapter Two argues that Ottoman mapping traditions emerging in the sixteenth century were expressions of belonging in meaningful regions, rather than claims to territory or sovereignty. The resulting artefacts tended to be series of large-scale maps that stressed mobility and blurred what might be thought of as political or cultural borders. Chapter Three builds on the shift toward a continental division of the world that had begun, in the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Ottoman Empire, to interrupt and supersede earlier mapping traditions. It investigates the nineteenth-century tradition of European colonial mapping, which facilitated expansionist conquests and produced enclosures that fragmented and erased indigenous people. Chapter Four looks at the rise of national mapping in the twentieth century in conjunction with the emergence of a nation-state system based on the twin goals of securing bounded territories and producing homogeneous national populations. This occurred in some places against, and in others alongside, colonial projects, but always with devastating effects for those excluded or dispossessed by its regime of enclosure. Chapter Five opens with the return of superregional mapping in the context of mid-twentieth-century pan-Arabist discourses and evaluates its possibilities as an alternative to national mapping. It concludes with a discussion of the persistence of a cartographic obsession with partition and the reification of religious and ethnic identities in the twenty-first-century Middle East.
The book’s overarching twofold argument, then, is that a world region loosely corresponding to today’s Middle East has been mapped from within for a thousand years, and that maps and related discourses from the eras of colonialism and nationalism have obscured this deeper past and constrained future possibilities. Generally speaking, in the earlier periods mapping was profoundly connective, highlighting constellations of cities, regions and segments of coastline, even those that extended over great distances. Maps tended to stress mobility, overlap or contiguity between the places they depicted and to serve as links to meaningful spaces or pasts. By contrast, mapping from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries on becomes more and more about atomizing territorial taxonomies and what could be called a ‘godlike’ gaze. Taken to its extreme in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, mapping has become an exercise in who belongs where, and the insidious logic of partition and social engineering seems to have taken over. This is where the book ends, with a plea for spatial thinking that complicates or subverts the enclosures with which we have become so familiar, particularly that of the religiously or ethno-linguistically majoritarian nation-state. While there is much talk about today’s unprecedented levels of connectivity and mobility, this book shows a disturbing trend over the past millennium toward spatializing identity, with the consequence that mobility is for too many people the unwelcome effect of cartographic exclusion. Ultimately, the maps in this book are intended as both a challenge and an inspiration to seek new approaches to mapping that transcend or unsettle the taken-for-granted divisions of our world.
