Faultlines of Iraq
Zachary Latif
The conflict in Iraq is a trite, tedious and rather tiresome issue since the virtual certainty of an American victory was never in serious doubt. The siege of Baghdad will proceed as planned and its capitulation will bring forth a new phase to the liberation. This post is primarily a regurgitation of the Arab East trilogy however it highlights the geopolitical trends of the distinct Iraqi regions and their coalescence into distinct cultural and inevitably (over the course of decades) political entities.
Baghdad has deep historical ramifications for the Islamic Crescent and for its future we must look to its past. The actors of the region have deep stakes in the forthcoming restructuring and realigning that will inevitably come with the liberation of Iraq. Naturally of course before a discourse can be launched into the nuances of Middle Eastern geopolitics there must be an appreciation for the pressing concerns of administering and providing for a state, whose malnourished population teeters precariously on the brink of expiration. Nevertheless Iraq has proven reserves of a hundred billion barrels of crude oil and that will go a long way to ameliorating some of the coming hardships.
Iraq historically has been at the periphery of the Iranian world and has been deeply influenced by Persian culture. Iraq’s premier city, Baghdad, was the centre of the flowering Persian culture and thought. One can discern the underlying trends of the Iraqi shift towards Persia with the rise and fall of its capitols. Babylon, the heart of the ancient world, was by the banks of the Euphrates River and representative of an indigenous Mesopotamian civilisation. In 275 AD its inhabitants were removed to the banks of the Tigris to Seleucia, the capital of the Hellenic Diadochi, and this was later superseded by the Persian capital of Ctesphion on the west bank of the Tigris. Finally after the onslaught of the Islamic hordes, a new city was built on the eastern banks of the Tigris and literally constructed from the ruins of Ctesphion. Named “Madinat al Islam”, city of peace, it soon took the name of the outlying Persian village, Baghdad. Thus Iraq’s history has been that of the intermediary influence between Iranian civilisation and the Arab world.
Critically the faultlines of Iraq are quite unstable, due to the imposition of artificial bounders, however can be discerned with relative ease. The topographical & ethnic nature of the country gives rise to fundamental divisions, the mountainous north, part of the Iranian world, whereas the populous south is a Mesopotamian based culture straddling four nations and the sparsely populated westerly Sunni provinces part of a tribal Arab culture. It is only within cosmopolitan Baghdad that these distinct cultures are able to interact within a framework and that gives hope to an autonomous federation, which will be able to satiate the political aspirations of the Iraqi peoples for the next few decades until the regions begin to diverge.
Iraq is not Iranian, despite significant and at times overwhelming Persian influence, because Iranian civilisation has traditionally existed on high plateaus and mountainous ranges as opposed to the Mesopotamian and Indus cultures, primarily based on alluvial plains and river valleys. The ultimate boundary between Iran & Iraq is the Zagros mountain range for it implies the shift from the Arabic-Mesopotamian river valley culture to Iranian civilisation, which endures in high plateaus.
Kurdistan is a reality, which will progress and develop as the apparatus of a federal status is bestowed to the Kurdish people of Iraq. Kurds are primarily concentrated in the Zagros mountain ranges (despite their historical settlement in the mountainous regions, mirrored by other Iranian populations, the Kurds have recently migrated beyond the Zagros to the outlying cities of Mosul & Kirkuk, and indeed they have a significant presence in Baghdad) and are a natural part of the Iranian world, hence their rapid assimilation within Iran. This inevitable drift is a geopolitical fact since the Kurdish people themselves are aware of their natural affinities with the Iranian race.
The flat plains of South Iraq blend into the Arabic-speaking Khuzestan province of South East Iran whence from there begins the Zagros Range. The Iran-Iraq political border is divided by the Shatt-al-Arab, which is the confluence of the Tigris and Euphrates. This is an unsatisfactory boundary a sentiment highlighted by the prescient Lord Curzon, when he stated in his lectures on Frontiers nearly a century ago, that a river should not serve as a boundary since it is traversable and cultural affinities tends to extend to both sides of the river (unlike a mountain range where isolated population can exist in fertile pockets as illustrated by the scattered populations of northern Pakistan, where unknown languages manage to linger on despite the recent onslaught of the more aggressive Pathan culture).
The Iran-Iraq war may have been caused by Saddam’s rapacity and longing for Khuzestan’s oilfields however it reflect a fundamental geopolitical reality, that the oil-rich Arab region of Khuzestan in Iran belonged to the same cultural and ethnic mix as South Iraq. Rumi once authored a particularly poignant prose (reproduced from Bernard Lewis’s authoritative text, the “Middle East”):
What is to be done Muslims? I, myself, do not know.
I am neither Christian nor Jew, neither Magian nor Muslim
I am not from east or west, not from land or see
I am not from the quarries of nature nor from the spheres of heaven
I am not of earth, not of war, not of air, not of fire
...
I am not from India, not from China, not from Bulgar, not from Saqsin.
I am not from the kingdom of the two Iraqs. I am not from the land of the Khurasan.
...
My place is placeless, my trace is traceless
No body no soul, I am from the soul of souls...
Rumi naturally is trying to imply a state that transcends existence. However what is of particular interest is his line, "I am not from the kingdom of the two Iraqs*." In the 1400s it was acknowledged that there existed two Iraqs, Iraqi Arabi and Iraq Ajami, the former taken for present days South Iraq and the latter for Khuzestan.
The words of Rumi heed us to remember that geo-historical and socio-economic factors will ensure thje progression of distinct Iraqi region within distinct cultural sphere, a historical inevitability that will be hastened by the rise of a loose Iraqi federation.
* In his esotericism Rumi alluded to the different religions and civilisations of his time, the “land of Khurasan” emblematic of Iran (the province is revered for being the birthplace of Iranian civilisation) whereas the land of the two Iraqs symbolised the Arab world. The Bulgars, were the Turkish antecedents of the modern Bulgarian people and could broadly be considered to represent the tribal nomads that were variously invading and settling the civilised world during ancient times (intriguingly the years 800-1300AD were considered to be a period of immense global warming whereas following that there was a Mini-Ice Age and a wave of devastating incursions from the Ural-Altaic range). I am unsure as to his reference Saqsin however China is self-explanatory and was known in great detail to the Muslim world, especially after the Mongol onslaught. Intriguingly India, when referred to by Islamic chronicles, either implied the regions under Muslim domination or in most cases the Punjab, “land of the five rivers”, and consequently the lands through which the Indus coursed through (modern day Pakistan).
Further Notes:
Authoring this post has given me the distinct impression that Iraq shares a few characteristics with Pakistan. The two nations are defined by the north-south course of rivers (the Euphrates, Tigris and the Indus) and have distinct martial Iranian minorities (the Kurds and the Pathans are kindred peoples) residing in the mountainous north. Persian influence on the national culture about and the Shi’ite-Sunni dynamic exists. The two nations are heirs to the oldest civilisations (Indus and Mesopotamian) in the world however their political formation is an artifice arising from the British. However at that the differences begins for whereas Iraq has an authoritarian Arab-Islamic framework, Pakistan is somewhat tempered by its pluralistic and relatively more tolerant past (the number of years of dictatorship has been roughly the same however there is a marked contrast in the severity and censorship). Pakistan’s national culture is far more cohesive than that of Iraq, probably owing to a longer-lasting British presence and the Moghul culture which permeates the nation and best typified by Urdu. Finally whereas Iraq is a nation which bisects numerous fault lines there is a certain historical basis towards Pakistan, which transcends Islam.
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