"العراق والخليج الفارسي" [و‎‎١‎٧] (٨٦٢/٣٨)

INTRODUCTION
7
Anatolia this civilization touched and influenced the young Hellenic
civilization of the Aegean. Later conquests by Greeks and Parthians
and Sassanid Persians only modified and enlarged the Mesopotamian
tradition, which became the substratum of the remarkable Islamic
civilization which flowered in Iraq, and particularly at Baghdad, in
the period of the Abbasid Caliphate from the eighth to the thirteenth
century a.d. From southern Iraq once again a culture spread west
wards, through north African lands conquered by Moslems and
united by religious ties, to Spain, France, and Italy, where in medieval
times the roots of modern civilization were being established.
The tradition of civilization in Iraq was broken by the Mongolian
invasions, which swept away much of the ancient way of life, and was
prevented from recovery by the dead hand of long centuries of
Ottoman Turkish administration. For the historian Iraq is a land
of famous ruins and monuments, an archaeologist’s delight. The
warnings of the ancient prophets were only too well fulfilled. What
has been uncovered at Nineveh, Babylon, Ur, and other sites is
probably only a tithe of what still lies beneath the soil. Of the
Abbasid towns little has survived, either ruined or intact, excepting
the remarkable complex of Abbasid Samarra.
For the people of Iraq, however, all this is a forgotten tale. In
modern Iraq nearly everything has had to be created anew. All that
survived in 1918 of the great past, even of Abbasid civilization, was
a purely religious and extremely exiguous residuum of Koranic and
traditional belief, ethic, and custom, sufficient for a crude basis of
relations with a man’s neighbour and his Deity. Only the more
exceptional, even of the learned hierarchy, had an understanding of
what Babylon and Islam had meant in past centuries.
The geographical situation of Iraq gives it an importance
independent of cultural associations. Through it run not only the
^shortest but the easiest routes from southern Europe to the Persian
Gulf and to India, and thence to the Far East. From the times of the
Babylonian Empire to the discovery of the Cape route to India the
trade of the Far East always passed through Iraq to the Levantine
ports of the Mediterranean. In the nineteenth century the desire to
control or to prevent others controlling this route involved Great
Britain, Russia, and Germany in attempts to dominate Iraq. The
discovery of oil and the growth of aerial communication in the
twentieth century have given a positive place to Iraq in world
politics, which can hardly be lost so long as oil flows and aircraft need
to break their journey between Europe and India. International