Culture and Foreign Policy: The Neglected Factor in International Relations by Howard J. Wiarda

Author:Howard J. Wiarda [Wiarda, Howard J.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Political Science, General
ISBN: 9781409471899
Google: 619eu90jQGYC
Barnesnoble:
Goodreads: 17552691
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Published: 2012-10-01T00:00:00+00:00

History

The Middle East is the home of some very ancient kingdoms and civilizations. Some of these go back to biblical times. I have myself flown up and down the Persian Gulf, up over the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers (present-day Iraq) where the ancient Garden of Eden may have been located, over what was known as Mesopotamia, Babylon, and the Fertile Crescent where the earliest, organized, large-scale civilizations first took root. It is a weird feeling to fly over or traverse those ancient locations studied in church or synagogue, in church school or Torah classes or in ancient history. Here you are actually in those locales where your god was present.

While the Middle East, like China and India, is the home of some very ancient cultures and civilizations, the nation-states that now dominate the area are relatively new. The Middle East was the founding center of the three main Abrahamic, monotheistic religions: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam; the Torah, the Bible, and the Koran, as well as modern archeology tell the story of these early peoples. From as far back as history records, the Middle East was an area of conflict and competing civilizations: Mesopotamia (present-day Iraq), Persia (present-day Iran), Arabia, Egypt, Hebrews, Byzantium (present-day Turkey).

In ancient times, both Greece (Alexander the Great, Philip of Macedonia) and Rome conquered and had a profound impact on large parts of the area, especially the lands of the Eastern Mediterranean (present-day Lebanon, Palestine, Israel). Greece and Rome brought their cultures as well as their conquering armies; the Middle East absorbed some elements of these Western cultures, while resisting others. From the first to the sixth century A.D., Christianity also emanating from the West had a major impact; in later centuries, and continuing to today, the Christian communities would be persecuted and all but eliminated from the Middle East.

In the seventh century A.D. came Muhammed and the rise of Islam. In those days Islam was a particularly militant as well as militaristic religion; the question on everyone’s mind, with large implications for policy, is whether that is still true today. That is, is Islam always an aggressive and conquering belief system or can it coexist peacefully with other religions and cultures?

Islam lays claim to being a universal religion and a universal polity, fixed and immutable. It is a community of believers backed by state power; there is no separation of church and state in Islam as there is in the United States. As it emerged in the seventh and eighth centuries, Islam moved from being a state to a far-ranging empire. Islam’s conquests in a relatively short period of time were truly phenomenal: throughout the Arabian Peninsula, eastward into India (and eventually down the Malay Peninsula and throughout Indonesia); southward into Africa to include the Nile kingdoms of Egypt and the Sudan; and, over time, Somalia, parts of Ethiopia, Chad, Niger, Mali, Mauritania, Nigeria, and others; westward across North Africa (Libya, Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco) and all the way to the Atlantic; then across the Straits of

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