Page 37 - Aamir Rehman - Dubai & Co Global Strategies for Doing Business in the Gulf States-McGraw-Hill (2007)

Lines in the Sand: The GCC in the Broader Middle East 23

known as the Fertile Crescent, where flowing rivers, rich soil, and
human technology enabled early farmers to harvest crops in excess
of their needs. The excess crops could be stored, traded, and used to
support artisans, officials, priests, and other groups of people who
helped craft this early civilization.
The Levant is also home to the “Holy Land,” where many
of the most revered religious sites of Jews, Christians, and
Muslims are located. Many prophets of the monotheistic tradition,
including Abraham and the prophets of Israel, are believed to be
from the Levant. In the Jewish tradition, the Levant is home to the
Promised Land, and it is also where Jesus is believed to have been
born and preached his message while facing Roman persecution.
Jerusalem, a sacred city for the three great monotheistic traditions,
is the spiritual center of the Levant. The region is the birthplace of
the world’s—and the West’s—religious systems and value frame-
works and, as such, has shaped Western and global civilization at
the core.
Quickly after the spread of Islam into the Levant in the seventh
and eighth centuries, it became the seat of the Islamic caliphate.
Damascus (under the Umayyad dynasty) and then Baghdad (under
the Abbasid dynasty) had the political, commercial, and educa-
tional infrastructures needed to sustain leadership of the Muslim
world. Both cities were renowned for their scholarship, art,
sophistication, and cultural development. In fact, the sack of
Baghdad by Mongol invaders in 1258—during which the rivers
reportedly ran black from the ink of books that had been dumped
there by the uneducated invaders—is considered one of the great-
est losses of human knowledge in history. To this day, the Levant
has a relatively high level of literacy, averaging almost 80 percent,
comparable to the far-richer Gulf’s level of 82 percent. 3
Iraq is the most important—and certainly the most promi-
nent—modern state in the Levant. Iraq’s population is close to 27
million and includes Shiite Arab, Sunni Arab, and Kurdish popula-
4
tions. The three communities were united as a single modern state
in the wake of World War I and held together under a monarchy
and then under Saddam Hussein’s military dictatorship. Hussein’s
dictatorship was marked by much violence, both domestic and
international, and after a decade-long war of attrition with Iran in
the 1980s, during which Hussein enjoyed US and Arab support,