The Orient unveiled in a thousand and one maps

The Middle East scares as much as it fascinates. Everyone has heard – the news is rich – about this space enclosed between Europe, Africa and Asia, and everyone thinks they have an idea (often dark and violent). However, rare are the regions of the world to have woven, over the course of their history, such a puzzling complexity.

Whether Near or Middle, this East has interacted continuously with Europe and the West for centuries. For better and for worse. Understanding what is going on in the Levant and beyond is a necessity; come back to this story, a must. This is the intention of the editorial staff of Life and World : without ever deviating from the long term, this time they have chosen as guides maps which tell and decipher the great story of the Middle East in a special edition entitled “The Middle East in maps”.

These maps offer an irreplaceable geohistoric representation to untie the threads of the past. By locating, for example, the city of Uruk where the first writing was born, in the land of Sumer, around 3400 BC. AD; by tracing the route of the eight crusades in the Middle Ages, to better understand the extent of these not so holy wars; by revisiting the dismantling of the Ottoman Empire in three dates (1916, 1920, 1923); by illustrating the entanglement of the Kurdish file along the borders of this great Kurdistan divided between four states (Iran, Iraq, Syria, Turkey); by recalling the colonial ambitions of Europe in the East, episodes which, even today, explain France’s special links with a country like Lebanon.

To the rhythm of the upheavals

These maps then provide an essential geopolitical representation to better understand the dynamics of a region with millennial civilizations, which in a little over a century has become the epicenter of major clashes.

If throughout the XIX^e century the route to India and the fate of the Ottoman Empire have shaped regional balances, just like the insoluble Israeli-Palestinian conflict for seven decades, the year 2020 marks a turning point.

Ten years after the “Arab Spring”, a new shock wave has brutally upset the military and political positions of countries also hit by the Covid-19 pandemic. In Syria, of course, mired in an endless war and occupied to the north by Turkey; in Libya, fragmented by an inextricable civil war; in this Iraq weakened since the departure of American troops (2011); and in all the other states allied to the United States that have become unpredictable (Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Israel) or presented as their declared enemy (Iran). Without forgetting the popular protests (Iran, Iraq, Lebanon), the great return of Russia to the zone and the assertion of Turkey as a new regional power.

Geographical maps, therefore, revised and adjusted to the rhythm of the upheavals of a fragile region. Cards to reshuffle those of our understanding of a Middle East whose fate remains linked to our own history.