The fragmentation of political power within the Islamic world allows the Byzantine Empire to continue to hold on to Asia Minor. This will in due course be passed westward to Europe, where it will form the basis for further advance. These different strands mingle and synthesize to form a massive new body of knowledge, almost certainly the most advanced in the world at that time. Technological and scientific developments have come in from China (for example paper) and India ( the decimal system), which Arab scholars add to Greek thought (medicine and philosophy, amongst much else) plus major contributions of their own (including in optics, algebra and philosophy). The Muslim world is home to a flourishing, and highly sophisticated, cultural life. Nevertheless, the Caliphate continues to exist in the minds of Muslims: it is simply that the caliphs have increasingly taken on a more symbolic role as the focus of their religious loyalties. By this date, the Caliphs have ceased to exercise much political power, even in Iraq. Shortly after this, different provinces began to fall away from Baghdad’s political control: Spain, North Africa, Egypt, Syria, western India and much of Iran. ![]() Very soon after 750 Baghdad replaced Damascus as the capital of the Caliphate shifting the center of gravity of the Muslim world eastward. But as it turned out, decisions made during the conflict and in the peace talks afterwards set the stage for both World War II and a century of chaos and war in the Middle East.What is happening in Middle East in 979CE Fragmentation Woodrow Wilson called World War I the war to end all war. And ISIS/ISIL, the so-called Islamic State, has vowed that one of its aims is reversing the effects of Sykes-Picot in their entirety. But it has long been a rallying cry for Arab nationalists. Sykes-Picot isn’t celebrated in Britain or France today, and many Americas may not know about it. So what about the people living where Sykes and Picot drew their lines in the sand? What did they want? That they were largely ignored has been the source of much misery since. Fitzgerald explains why France first claimed Mosul, with its oil (then all potential), only to cede it to Britain soon after the war ended in 1918: the French were initially thinking less about oil in Mosul than their long-time interests in what became Lebanon and Syria. The Middle East, sometimes also called Near East, is a region at the crossroads between. The countries were allies against Germany, Austria, and the Ottomans, but they also had their own interests and colonial agendas. The map below shows Western Asia and the Middle East, today a hot spot for political and religious unrest, full-scale wars, and a theater of proxy conflicts between the two most powerful countries - the USA and Russia. According to Khalidi, Sykes and Picot assumed they were formalizing the pre-existing European financial control of the region by inaugurating a new era of more direct political control.Įdward Peter Fitzgerald elucidates the competing British and French interests involved in the Levant (yet another European name for the region). An alliance with the Central Powers proved to be the old Empire’s final undoing, leading to its splintering at the end of the war. By the First World War, the Empire was propped up by European investments. The doddering Ottoman Empire had been described as “the sick man of Europe” since the 1850s. ![]() ![]() Khalidi argues that the agreement was prefigured by the already existing economic partition of the Ottoman Arab provinces. Out of Sykes-Picot came the outlines-indeed even some of the still-existing borders-of Palestine (later Israel), Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Iraq, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia. This made their deal one of the last European colonial projects of the century whose second half saw the sometimes violent end of such missions. Sykes and Picot divided the Near East, as it was then known to Europeans, into British and French spheres of influence, with enough for the Russians to keep them happy. The Sykes-Picot deal was one of the last European colonial projects of the century.
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