2 A Short History of the Middle East

there are numerous scholarly works; but for those, made aware
by the daily paper that the Middle East is still of great significance
in the modern world and desirous of orientating themselves in
its recent history, there is no single guide. This book is an attempt
to provide that guidance, though the course it has to follow is
neither a clear nor a brilliant one. We cannot embark on our voyage
at a nearer point than the eve of the rise of Islam; and already

'sands begin

to hem his watery march, and dam his streams,
and split his currents; that for many a league
the shorn and parcelfd Oxus strains along
through beds of sand and matted rushy isles—
Oxus, forgetting the bright speed he had
in his high mountain-cradle in Parnerc,
a foil'd circuitous wanderer—till at last
the long'd for dash of waves is heard. . . .'l

To the pioneers of the Arab Awakening thirty years ago the
luminous home of waters' did indeed appear to be 'opening wide';
but we are now proving all over the world that the nineteenth-
century solutions, liberal-democracy and national self-determina-
tion, were at best palliatives, and at worst symptoms, of Man's
primeval disease, his Original Sin of self-will; 2 that the twentieth-
century totalitarianisms only foster that self-will in its most hideous
form; and mankind will find no home

'bright

and tranquil, from whose floor the new-bathed stars
appear'

this side of the Civitas Dei.

Climatic changes covering thousands of years, which may be
summarized in popular language as the recession of the last Ice Age,
had by about 6000 B.C. reduced large tracts of the Middle East to
the virtually rainless and desert conditions which still obtain in the
Sahara, lying athwart Africa with a depth of 1000 miles from north
1 Matthew Arnold, Sohrab and Rustam, end.
2 cf. Reinhold Niebuhr, The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness, 16 L