Indeed, one reason Islam has so many "bloody borders" is that it has so many borders: it occupies the functional center of the world. Medieval maps used to draw the world with Jerusalem as the central point, and that still makes a lot of sense. The Middle East is the crossroads of the three continents of the Old World.

yes, and it is important to remember that covering the sahara in muslim green makes the area of the dar-al-islam seem greater than it really is. here is a population map for africa..muslim africa basically rings christian africa on the periphery.

Razib, you're a genius! Why don't you try to publish any of this stuff [without the "bitch," of course]?

Razib:

Let me play the devil's advocate here (or, rather, Catlos' advocate) and pose the following. It's alright to speak of the 'signal:noise' ratio but your use of it does not rise above metaphor, at least in this post. To do so, you must show that civilisational-level attributes affected events 'on the ground'. In other words, your post doesn't show how such attributes enter into any sort of causal nexus in the history of this region. It would be interesting to write a history of the region, incorporating both Huntington & Catlos.

I agree with your general approach, FWIW, but more work needs to be done (I suspect you don't disagree with that, but of course feel free to disagree.).

Kumar

kumar, sure. but that book would be a very large one...catlos' book was only around 400 pages from what i recall, and so it was good at focusing on its own topic. the problem is when catlos transforms the microlevel phenomenon as the be all and end all of intercivilizational connections. i might try to explore this issue myself, but i'm not a scholar with an access to archives and any fluency in non-english languages. to use another analogy, even if two distributions intersect a great deal, ANOVA can glean differences to a signficant level of confidence....

as for how it is relevant in the region, if you move to the southern half of the peninsula, the taifa state appeal to the almoravids and almohads was purely based on civilizational affinity, as these groups were ethnically, geographically and linguistically distinct from the muslim culture of al-andalus. of course, these differences resulted in the inability to forcefully counter the christian advance, but the fact that the appeal was made in the first place suggests the affinity that the muslims of al-andalus felt with muslims across the straits of gibralter....

Razib, you're a genius! Why don't you try to publish any of this stuff [without the "bitch," of course]?

arcane, this is just a hobby, i don't have anything close to a scholarly background. and i don't have much of an interest...this site gets ~2500 unique users a day, so a reasonable audience already exists.

it is important to remember that covering the sahara in muslim green makes the area of the dar-al-islam seem greater than it really is

Sparsely populated regions can be enormously influential. Arabia, Mongolia, central Asia, Scandinavia (Vikings)... The US looks a lot like the Sahara on that map!

Note that South America actually has a history of bloody borders running from the 1870s thru the Chaco wars of the 1930s.