From the Archives: Who Made the Map of the Modern Middle East?

The simple answer is: Great Britain. You want the long version?


In The Makers of the Modern Middle East historians T.G. Fraser, Andrew Mango, and Robert McNamara tell the story of how today's Middle East was created from the remains of the Ottoman Empire during the peace negotiations at the end of the First World War.

The Allies weren't the only powers that had an interest in the future of the region. Prince Feisal, who led the Arab Revolt against the Ottoman Empire with British aid, hoped to build an Arab kingdom based on Syria and Palestine. Dr. Chaim Weizmann had laid the political groundwork for British support of a Jewish National Home in Palestine. Mustafa Kemal, later known as Ataturk, created the modern, secular Turkish republic in the teeth of Allied opposition.

Fraser and his co-authors weave the details of competing territorial claims, conflicting political agreements, ignored reports, and colorful characters into a narrative as intricate as an Oriental rug, with a warp of Allied imperial ambitions and a weft of the emerging claims of Arab nationalism, Turkish nationalism and Zionism.

* * *

The bottom line? If you promise the same piece of land to France, the Zionists and an Arab king, someone's going to be unhappy when the war is over

This review previously appeared in Shelf Awareness for Readers.

 

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From the Archives: Alhazen–The First True Scientist?

Anyone who built a pinhole camera from a cereal box to watch the solar eclipse last week owes a debt to Islamic scholar Abu Ali al-Hassan Ibn al-Haytham (ca. 965-1041), known in the West as Alhazen.

Alhazen began his career as just another Islamic polymath. He soon got himself in trouble with the ruler of Cairo by boasting that he could regulate the flow of the Nile with a series of dams and dikes. At first glance, it had looked like such a simple problem. But the more he studied it, the more impossible it seemed. Al-Hakim, known to his subjects as the Mad Caliph with good reason, was getting impatient. Alhazen only saw one way out: he pretended to be crazy. Safely confined as a madman until the caliph's death ten years later, Alhazen continued to work.

Time and isolation? It was the perfect situation for a man with a book to write.

While confined in his home, Alhazen revolutionized the study of optics and laid the foundation for the scientific method. (Move over, Sir Isaac Newton.) Before Alhazen, vision and light were questions of philosophy. Alhazen considered vision and light in terms of mathematics, physics, physiology, and even psychology. In his Book of Optics, he discussed the nature of light and color. He accurately described the mechanism of sight and the anatomy of the eye. He was concerned with reflection and refraction. He experimented with mirrors and lenses. He discovered that rainbows are caused by refraction and calculated the height of earth’s atmosphere. In his spare time, he built the first camera obscura.

Modern physicist Jim al-Khalili, in his excellent The House of Wisdom: How Arabic Science Saved Ancient Knowledge and Gave Us the Renaissance, calls Alhazen the greatest physicist of the medieval world, and possibly the greatest in the 2000 years between Archimedes and Sir Isaac Newton. His Book of Optics was first translated into Latin in the late twelfth or early thirteen century. It had an enormous impact on the work of western scientists from Roger Bacon (c. 1214-1292) to Isaac Newton (1642-1727)., calls Alhazen the greatest physicist of the medieval world, and possibly the greatest in the 2000 years between Archimedes and Sir Isaac Newton. His Book of Optics was first translated into Latin in the late twelfth or early thirteen century. It had an enormous impact on the work of western scientists from Roger Bacon (c. 1214-1292) to Isaac Newton (1642-1727). calls Alhazen the greatest physicist of the medieval world, and possibly the greatest in the 2000 years between Archimedes and Sir Isaac Newton. His Book of Optics was first translated into Latin in the late twelfth or early thirteen century. It had an enormous impact on the work of western scientists from Roger Bacon (c. 1214-1292) to Isaac Newton (1642-1727).

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Stamping Out Women Warriors–In A Good Way

In the course of doing the research for this book on women warriors, I've found plenty of attempts to write women warriors out of history.*  It doesn't make me happy,** but I expected it.

What I didn't expect were the number of women warriors whose countries later embraced them as national heroines and celebrated them with a postage stamp.  It makes sense to me.  It's not only cheaper than putting up a statue, but it has the potential to be seen by many more people.

The woman warrior who has been most thoroughly "stamped" is Joan of Arc--probably the best known woman warrior of all time.*** In addition to being the subject of numerous French stamps, the Maid of Orleans has appeared on stamps issued by places as unlikely as Liberia, Korea, and the Seychelles.

More interesting to me are the women who are honored in their own countries and largely unknown in the West.  (Or at least in the United States.)  Here are a few of my favorites so far:

 

Khawlah bint al-Azwar, who fought in the armies of Islam in the 7th century

Queen Amina of 16th (or possibly 15th) century Nigeria, who united the Hausa states

Queen Njinga of Ndongo, who successfully defended her state against the Portuguese in the 17th century

Vasilisa Kozhina, who organized peasants to fight against Napoleon's army

 

*My "favorites" are the historians who claim various women warriors are simply metaphors for a people's resistance  or a nation's expansion.   Grrr.

**If you walk past my study door on a bad day, you may hear me growling at one of my sources.  I try not to do this in the library.

***When I first told people I was researching women warriors, almost everyone had the same response: "You mean like Joan of Arc?"  The exceptions were two attorneys and a federal judge. They thought I said "women lawyers."

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