Through the Seven Climes / Yedi İklim Boyunca

“Ten dervishes can share a rug, but two kings cannot share a clime.”

– Sa’di, The Golestān

“We either look up at or down on the West; we’ve yet to master looking it straight in the eyes.”

– Lu Xun 

The global order is shifting. The US, the aging hegemon, is consolidating its holdings, trying to manage internal reform and focus its foreign policy on containing China, while somehow keeping order in Europe and the Middle East. Europe is aging and increasingly poorer, and has long ceased to play a role on the global stage. China is rising, but this trend is showing signs of slowing, and the country is still far from being able to project power globally.

So where does this leave us? That’s the question this blog seeks to explore: what happens when power vaccuums emerge and old balances of power are thrown off-kilter. This is the era of the middle powers: regional actors that now find themselves with more resources, more freedom, and more need to shape their neighbourhoods in their own image.

These are countries such as Turkey, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Iran, and India, all of which have either been forced to or have taken advantage of the absence of US leadership to pursue their own regional ambitions more boldly. This blog focuses on analysing these trends in the broader Middle East, especially in the aforementioned countries.

There is also a lot on China, simply because the author knows a fair bit on the subject and earns his living by being a small cog in the machine of the great US-China competition for global dominance.

Why ‘Through the Seven Climes’?

The ancient Iranians divided the world into seven climes, or latitudes; by the time of Aristotle and the conquests of Alexander the Great this division had made its way to the Hellenistic and later on Roman worlds. The next great wave of conquerors, the Islamic Arab Caliphate, incorporated it into their understanding of geography and cosmology.

By the time of the Golden Age of Abbasid Baghdad in the 10th century, this division had become a staple of Islamicate geography and historiography. Geographers, political thinkers, and travellers such as al-Masʿūdī, ibn Khaldūn, and ibn Battutah used it to describe and make sense of the bold, newly globalised and interconnected world they were part of.

The phrase ‘seven climes’ (yedi iklim) or ‘seven worlds’ (yedi cihan) is still part of common, if poetic, parlance in Turkish, roughly meaning ‘the breadth of the world’. The author is a denizen of the seventh clime, spending his summers in the fourth.