The most important facts about Iran go unstated because they
are so obvious. Any glance at a map would tell us what they are. And these
facts explain how regime change or evolution in Tehran -- when, not if, it
comes -- will dramatically alter geopolitics from the Mediterranean to the
Indian subcontinent and beyond.
Virtually all of the Greater Middle East's oil and natural
gas lies either in the Persian Gulf or the Caspian Sea regions. Just as
shipping lanes radiate from the Persian Gulf, pipelines will increasingly
radiate from the Caspian region to the Mediterranean, the Black Sea, China and
the Indian Ocean. The only country that straddles both energy-producing areas
is Iran, stretching as it does from the Caspian to the Persian Gulf. In a raw
materials' sense, Iran is the Greater Middle East's universal joint.
The Persian Gulf possesses by some accounts 55 percent of
the world's crude oil reserves, and Iran dominates the whole Gulf, from the
Shatt al-Arab on the Iraqi border to the Strait of Hormuz 990 kilometers (615
miles) away. Because of its bays, inlets, coves and islands -- excellent places
for hiding suicide, tanker-ramming speed boats -- Iran's coastline inside the
Strait of Hormuz is 1,356 nautical miles; the next longest, that of the United
Arab Emirates, is only 733 nautical miles. Iran also has 480 kilometers of
Arabian Sea frontage, including the port of Chabahar near the Pakistani border.
This makes Iran vital to providing warm water, Indian Ocean access to the
landlocked Central Asian countries of the former Soviet Union. Meanwhile, the
Iranian coast of the Caspian in the far north, wreathed by thickly forested
mountains, stretches for nearly 650 kilometers from Astara in the west, on the
border with former Soviet Azerbaijan, around to Bandar-e Torkaman in the east,
by the border with natural gas-rich Turkmenistan.
A look at the relief map shows something more. The broad
back of the Zagros Mountains sweeps down through Iran from Anatolia in the
northwest to Balochistan in the southeast. To the west of the Zagros range, the
roads are all open to Iraq. When the British area specialist and travel writer
Freya Stark explored Lorestan in Iran's Zagros Mountains in the early 1930s,
she naturally based herself out of Baghdad, not out of Tehran. To the east and
northeast, the roads are open to Khorasan and the Kara Kum (Black Sand) and
Kizyl Kum (Red Sand) deserts of Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan, respectively. For
just as Iran straddles the rich energy fields of both the Persian Gulf and the
Caspian Sea, it also straddles the Middle East proper and Central Asia. No Arab
country can make that claim (just as no Arab country sits astride two
energy-producing areas). In fact, the Mongol invasion of Iran, which killed
hundreds of thousands of people at a minimum and destroyed the qanat irrigation
system, was that much more severe precisely because of Iran's Central Asian
prospect.
Iranian influence in the former Soviet republics of the
Caucasus and Central Asia is potentially vast. Whereas Azerbaijan on Iran's
northwestern border contains roughly 8 million Azeri Turks, there are twice that
number in Iran's neighboring provinces of Azerbaijan and Tehran. The Azeris
were cofounders of the first Iranian polity since the seventh century rise of
Islam. The first Shiite Shah of Iran (Ismail in 1501) was an Azeri Turk. There
are important Azeri businessmen and ayatollahs in Iran, including current
Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei himself. The point is that whereas Iran's
influence to the west in nearby Turkey and the Arab world has been well
established by the media, its influence to the north and east is equally
profound; and if the future brings less repressive regimes both in Iran and in
the southern, Islamic tier of the former Soviet Union, Iran's influence could
deepen still with more cultural and political interactions.
There is, too, what British historian Michael Axworthy calls
the "Idea of Iran," which, as he explains, is as much about culture
and language as about race and territory.1 Iran, he means, is a
civilizational attractor, much like ancient Greece and China were, pulling
other peoples and languages into its linguistic orbit: the essence of soft
power, in other words. Dari, Tajik, Urdu, Pashtu, Hindi, Bengali and Iraqi Arabic
are all either variants of Persian, or significantly influenced by it. That is,
one can travel from Baghdad in Iraq to Dhaka in Bangladesh and remain inside a
Persian cultural realm.
Iran, furthermore, is not some 20th century contrivance of
family and religious ideology like Saudi Arabia, bracketed as the Saudi state
is by arbitrary borders. Iran corresponds almost completely with the Iranian
plateau -- "the Castile of the Near East," in Princeton historian
Peter Brown's phrase -- even as the dynamism of its civilization reaches far
beyond it. The Persian Empire, even as it besieged Greece, "uncoiled, like
a dragon's tail ... as far as the Oxus, Afghanistan and the Indus valley,"
writes Brown.2 W. Barthold, the great Russian geographer of the
turn of the 20th century, concurs, situating Greater Iran between the Euphrates
and the Indus and identifying the Kurds and Afghans as essentially Iranian
peoples.3
Of the ancient peoples of the Near East, only the Hebrews
and the Iranians "have texts and cultural traditions that have survived to
modern times," writes the linguist Nicholas Ostler.4 Persian
(Farsi) was not replaced by Arabic, like so many other tongues, and is in the
same form today as it was in the 11th century, even as it has adopted the
Arabic script. Iran has a far more venerable record as a nation-state and
urbane civilization than most places in the Arab world and all the places in
the Fertile Crescent, including Mesopotamia and Palestine. There is nothing
artificial about Iran, in other words: The very competing power centers within
its clerical regime indicate a greater level of institutionalization than
almost anywhere in the region save for Israel, Egypt and Turkey.
Greater Iran began back in 700 B.C. with the Medes, an
ancient Iranian people who established, with the help of the Scythians, an
independent state in northwestern Iran. By 600 B.C., this empire reached from
central Anatolia to the Hindu Kush (Turkey to Afghanistan), as well as south to
the Persian Gulf. In 549 B.C., Cyrus (the Great), a prince from the Persian
house of Achaemenes, captured the Median capital of Ecbatana (Hamadan) in
western Iran and went on a further bout of conquest. The map of the Achaemenid
Empire, governed from Persepolis (near Shiraz) in southern Iran, shows antique Persia
at its apex, from the sixth to fourth centuries B.C. It stretched from Thrace
and Macedonia in the northwest, and from Libya and Egypt in the southwest, all
the way to the Punjab in the east; and from the Transcaucasus and the Caspian
and Aral seas in the north to the Persian Gulf and the Arabian Sea in the
south. No empire up to that point in world history had matched it. Persia was
the world's first superpower, and Iranian leaders in our era -- both the late
shah and the ayatollahs -- have inculcated this history in their bones. Its
pan-Islamism notwithstanding, the current ruling elite is all about Iranian
nationalism.
The Parthians manifested the best of the Iranian genius --
which was ultimately about tolerance of the cultures over which they ruled,
allowing them a benign suzerainty. Headquartered in the northeastern Iranian
region of Khorasan and the adjacent Kara Kum and speaking an Iranian language,
the Parthians ruled between the third century B.C. and the third century A.D.,
generally from Syria and Iraq to central Afghanistan and Pakistan, including
Armenia and Turkmenistan. Thus, rather than the Bosporus-to-Indus or the
Nile-to-Oxus scope of Achaemenid Persia, the Parthian Empire constitutes a more
realistic vision of a Greater Iran for the 21st century. And this is not
necessarily bad. For the Parthian Empire was extremely decentralized, a zone of
strong influence rather than of outright control, which leaned heavily on art,
architecture and administrative practices inherited from the Greeks. As for the
Iran of today, it is no secret that the clerical regime is formidable, but
demographic, economic and political forces are equally dynamic, and key
segments of the population are restive. So do not discount the possibility of a
new regime in Iran and a consequently benign Iranian empire yet to come.
The medieval record both cartographically and linguistically
follows from the ancient one, though in more subtle ways. In the eighth century
the political locus of the Arab world shifted eastward from Syria to
Mesopotamia -- that is, from the Umayyad caliphs to the Abbasid ones --
signaling, in effect, the rise of Iran. (The second caliph, Omar bin
al-Khattab, during whose reign the Islamic armies conquered the Sassanids,
adopted the Persian system of administration called the Diwan.) The Abbasid
Caliphate at its zenith in the middle of the ninth century ruled from Tunisia
eastward to Pakistan, and from the Caucasus and Central Asia southward to the
Persian Gulf. Its capital was the new city of Baghdad, close upon the old
Sassanid Persian capital of Ctesiphon; and Persian bureaucratic practices,
which added whole new layers of hierarchy, undergirded this new imperium. The
Abbasid Caliphate of Baghdad became more a symbol of an Iranian despotism than
of an Arab sheikhdom. Some historians have labeled the Abbasid Caliphate the
equivalent of the "cultural reconquest" of the Middle East by the
Persians under the guise of Arab rulers.5 The Abbasids
succumbed to Persian practices just as the Umayyads, closer to Asia Minor, had
succumbed to Byzantine ones. "Persian titles, Persian wines and wives,
Persian mistresses, Persian songs, as well as Persian ideas and thoughts, won
the day," writes the historian Philip K. Hitti.6 "In
the western imagination," writes Peter Brown, "the Islamic [Abbasid]
empire stands as the quintessence of an oriental power. Islam owed this crucial
orientation neither to Muhammad nor to the adaptable conquerors of the seventh
century, but to the massive resurgence of eastern, Persian traditions in the
eighth and ninth centuries.7"
As for Shiism, it is very much a component of this Iranian
cultural dynamism -- despite the culturally bleak and oppressive aura projected
by the ruling Shiite clergy in these dark times in Tehran. While the arrival of
the Mahdi in the form of the hidden Twelfth Imam means the end of injustice,
and thus acts as a spur to radical activism, little else in Shiism necessarily
inclines the clergy to play an overt political role; Shiism even has a quietest
strain that acquiesces to the powers that be and that is frequently informed by
Sufism.8 Witness the example set by Iraq's leading cleric of
recent years, Ayatollah Ali Sistani (of Iranian heritage), who only at pivotal
moments makes a plea for political conciliation from behind the scenes.
Precisely because of the symbiotic relationship between Iraq and Iran
throughout history, with its basis in geography, it is entirely possible that
in a post-revolutionary Iran, Iranians will look more toward the Shiite holy
cities of An Najaf and Karbala in Iraq for spiritual direction than toward
their own holy city of Qom. It is even possible that Qom will adopt the
quietism of An Najaf and Karbala. This is despite the profound differences
between Shia of Arab descent and those of Persian descent.
The French scholar Olivier Roy tells us that Shiism is
historically an Arab phenomenon that came late to Iran but that eventually led
to the establishment of a clerical hierarchy for taking power. Shiism was
further strengthened by the tradition of a strong and bureaucratic state that
Iran has enjoyed since antiquity, relative to those of the Arab world, and that
is, as we know, partly a gift of the spatial coherence of the Iranian plateau.
The Safavids brought Shiism to Iran in the 16th century. Their name comes from
their own militant Sufi order, the Safaviyeh, which had originally been Sunni.
The Safavids were merely one of a number of horse-borne brotherhoods of mixed
Turkish, Azeri, Georgian and Persian origin in the late 15th century that
occupied the mountainous plateau region between the Black and Caspian seas,
where eastern Anatolia, the Caucasus and northwestern Iran come together. In
order to build a stable state on the Farsi-speaking Iranian plateau, these new
sovereigns of eclectic linguistic and geographical origin adopted Twelver
Shiism as the state religion, which awaits the return of the Twelfth Imam, a
direct descendant of Mohammed, who is not dead but in occlusion.9 The
Safavid Empire at its zenith stretched thereabouts from Anatolia and
Syria-Mesopotamia to central Afghanistan and Pakistan -- yet another variant of
Greater Iran through history. Shiism was an agent of Iran's congealment as a
modern nation-state, even as the Iranianization of non-Persian Shiite and Sunni
minorities during the 16th century also helped in this regard.10 Iran
might have been a great state and nation since antiquity, but the Safavids with
their insertion of Shiism onto the Iranian plateau retooled Iran for the modern
era.
Indeed, revolutionary Iran of the late 20th and early 21st
centuries is a fitting expression of this powerful and singular legacy. Of
course, the rise of the ayatollahs has been a lowering event in the sense of
the violence done to -- and I do not mean to exaggerate -- the voluptuous,
sophisticated and intellectually stimulating traditions of the Iranian past.
(Persia -- "that land of poets and roses!" exclaims the introductory
epistle of James J. Morier's The Adventures of Hajji Baba of Ispahan.11)
But comparison, it is famously said, is the beginning of all serious
scholarship. And compared to the upheavals and revolutions in the Arab world
during the early and middle phases of the Cold War, the regime ushered in by
the 1978-79 Iranian Revolution was striking in its élan and modernity. The
truth is, and this is something that goes directly back to the Achaemenids of
antiquity, everything about the Iranian past and present is of a high quality,
whether it is the dynamism of its empires from Cyrus the Great to Mahmoud
Ahmadinejad (Who can deny the sheer Iranian talent for running militant
networks in Lebanon, Gaza and Iraq, which is, after all, an aspect of imperial
rule!); or the political thought and writings of its Shiite clergy; or the
complex efficiency of the bureaucracy and security services in cracking down on
dissidents. Tehran's revolutionary order constitutes a richly developed
governmental structure with a diffusion of power centers; it is not a crude
one-man thugocracy like the kind Saddam Hussein ran in neighboring Arab Iraq.
Again, what makes the clerical regime in Iran so effective
in the pursuit of its interests, from Lebanon to Afghanistan, is its merger
with the Iranian state, which itself is the product of history and geography.
The Green Movement, which emerged in the course of massive anti-regime
demonstrations following the disputed elections of 2009, is very much like the
regime it seeks to topple. The Greens were greatly sophisticated by the
standards of the region (at least until the Jasmine Revolution in Tunisia two
years later), and thus another demonstration of the Iranian genius. The Greens
constituted a world-class democracy movement, having mastered the latest means
in communications technology -- Twitter, Facebook, text messaging -- to advance
their organizational throw weight and having adopted a potent mixture of
nationalism and universal moral values to advance their cause. It took all the
means of repression of the Iranian state, subtle and not, to drive the Greens
underground. (In fact, the Iranian regime was far more surgical in its
repression of the Greens than the Syrian regime has thus far been in its own
violent attempt to silence dissent.) Were the Greens ever to take power, or to
facilitate a change in the clerical regime's philosophy and foreign policy
toward moderation, Iran, because of its strong state and dynamic idea, would
have the means to shift the whole groundwork of the Middle East away from
radicalization, providing political expression for a new bourgeoisie with
middle-class values that has been quietly rising throughout the Greater Middle
East, and which the American obsession with al Qaeda and radicalism obscured
until the Arab Spring of 2011.12
To speak in terms of destiny is dangerous, since it implies
an acceptance of fate and determinism, but clearly given Iran's geography,
history and human capital, it seems likely that the Greater Middle East, and by
extension, Eurasia, will be critically affected by Iran's own political
evolution, for better or for worse.
The best indication that Iran has yet to fulfill such a
destiny lies in what has not quite happened yet in Central Asia. Let me
explain. Iran's geography, as noted, gives it frontage on Central Asia to the
same extent that it has on Mesopotamia and the Middle East. But the
disintegration of the Soviet Union has brought limited gains to Iran, when one
takes into account the whole history of Greater Iran in the region. The very
suffix "istan," used for Central and South Asian countries and which
means "place," is Persian. The conduits for Islamization and
civilization in Central Asia were the Persian language and culture. The
language of the intelligentsia and other elites in Central Asia up through the
beginning of the 20th century was one form of Persian or another. But after
1991, Shiite Azerbaijan to the northwest adopted the Latin alphabet and turned
to Turkey for tutelage. As for the republics to the northeast of Iran, Sunni
Uzbekistan oriented itself more toward a nationalistic than an Islamic base, for
fear of its own homegrown fundamentalists -- this makes it wary of Iran.
Tajikistan, Sunni but Persian-speaking, seeks a protector in Iran, but Iran is
constrained for fear of making an enemy of the many Turkic-speaking Muslims
elsewhere in Central Asia.13 What's more, being nomads and
semi-nomads, Central Asians were rarely devout Muslims to start with, and seven
decades of communism only strengthened their secularist tendencies. Having to
relearn Islam, they are both put off and intimidated by clerical Iran.
Of course, there have been positive developments from the
viewpoint of Tehran. Iran, as its nuclear program attests, is one of the most
technologically advanced countries in the Middle East (in keeping with its
culture and politics), and as such has built hydroelectric projects and roads
and railroads in these Central Asian countries that will one day link them all
to Iran -- either directly or through Afghanistan. Moreover, a natural gas
pipeline now connects southeastern Turkmenistan with northeastern Iran,
bringing Turkmen natural gas to Iran's Caspian region, and thus freeing up
Tehran's own natural gas production in southern Iran for export via the
Persian Gulf. (This goes along with a rail link built in the 1990s connecting
the two countries.) Turkmenistan has the world's fourth-largest natural gas
reserves and has committed its entire natural gas exports to Iran, China and
Russia. Hence, the possibility arises of a Eurasian energy axis united by the
crucial geography of three continental powers all for the time being opposed to
Western democracy.14 Iran and Kazakhstan have built an oil
pipeline connecting the two countries, with Kazakh oil being pumped to Iran's
north, even as an equivalent amount of oil is shipped from Iran's south out
through the Persian Gulf. Kazakhstan and Iran will also be linked by rail,
providing Kazakhstan with direct access to the Gulf. A rail line may also
connect mountainous Tajikistan to Iran, via Afghanistan. Iran constitutes the
shortest route for all these natural resource-rich countries to reach
international markets.
So imagine an Iran athwart the pipeline routes of Central
Asia, along with its sub-state, terrorist empire of sorts in the Greater Middle
East. But there is still a problem. Given the prestige that Shiite Iran has
enjoyed in sectors of the Sunni Arab world, to say nothing of Shiite south
Lebanon and Shiite Iraq -- because of the regime's implacable support for the
Palestinian cause and its inherent anti-Semitism -- it is telling that this
ability to attract mass support outside its borders does not similarly carry
over into Central Asia. One issue is that the former Soviet republics maintain
diplomatic relations with Israel and simply lack the hatred toward it that may
still be ubiquitous in the Arab world, despite the initial phases of the Arab
Spring. Yet, there is something larger and deeper at work, something that
limits Iran's appeal not only in Central Asia but in the Arab world as well.
That something is the very persistence of its suffocating clerical rule that,
while impressive in a negative sense -- using Iran's strong state tradition to
ingeniously crush a democratic opposition and torture and rape its own people
-- has also dulled the linguistic and cosmopolitan appeal that throughout
history has accounted for a Greater Iran in a cultural sense. The Technicolor
is gone from the Iranian landscape under this regime and has been replaced by
grainy black and white. Iran's imperial ambitions are for the time being
limited by the very nature of its clerical rule.
Some years back I was in Ashgabat, the capital of
Turkmenistan, from whose vantage point Tehran and Mashad over the border in
Iranian Khorasan have always loomed as cosmopolitan centers of commerce and
pilgrimage, in stark contrast to Turkmenistan's own sparsely populated, nomadic
landscape. But while trade and pipeline politics proceeded apace, Iran held no
real magic, no real appeal for Muslim Turkmens, who are mainly secular and are
put off by the mullahs. As extensive as Iranian influence is by virtue of its
in-your-face challenge to America and Israel, I don't believe we will see the
true appeal of Iran, in all its cultural glory, until the regime liberalizes or
is toppled. A democratic or quasi democratic Iran, precisely because of the geographical
power of the Iranian state, has the possibility to energize hundreds of
millions of fellow Muslims in the Arab world and Central Asia.
Sunni Arab liberalism could be helped in its rise not only
by the example of the West, or because of a democratic yet dysfunctional Iraq,
but also because of the challenge thrown up by a newly liberal and historically
eclectic Shiite Iran in the future. And such an Iran might do what two decades
of post-Cold War Western democracy and civil society promotion have failed to
-- that is, lead to a substantial prying loose of the police state restrictions
in former Soviet Central Asia.
With its rich culture, vast territory and teeming and
sprawling cities, Iran is, in the way of China and India, a civilization unto
itself, whose future will overwhelmingly be determined by internal politics and
social conditions. Unlike the Achaemenid, Sassanid, Safavid and other Iranian
empires of yore, which were either benign or truly inspiring in both a moral
and cultural sense, this current Iranian empire of the mind rules mostly out of
fear and intimidation, through suicide bombers rather than through poets. And
this both reduces its power and signals its eventual downfall.
Yet, if one were to isolate a single hinge in calculating
Iran's fate, it would be Iraq. Iraq, history and geography tell us, is entwined
in Iranian politics to the degree of no other foreign country. The Shiite
shrines of Imam Ali (the Prophet's cousin and son-in-law) in An Najaf and the
one of Imam Hussain (the grandson of the Prophet) in Karbala, both in
central-southern Iraq, have engendered Shiite theological communities that
challenge that of Qom in Iran. Were Iraqi democracy to exhibit even a modicum
of stability, the freer intellectual atmosphere of the Iraqi holy cities could
eventually have a profound impact on Iranian politics. In a larger sense, a
democratic Iraq can serve as an attractor force of which Iranian reformers
might in the future take advantage. For as Iranians become more deeply
embroiled in Iraqi politics, the very propinquity of the two nations with a
long and common border might work to undermine the more repressive of the two
systems. Iranian politics will become gnarled by interaction with a
pluralistic, ethnically Arab Shiite society. And as the Iranian economic crisis
continues to unfold, ordinary Iranians could well up in anger over hundreds of
millions of dollars being spent by their government to buy influence in Iraq,
Lebanon and elsewhere. This is to say nothing of how Iranians will become
increasingly hated inside Iraq as the equivalent of "Ugly Americans."
Iran would like to simply leverage Iraqi Shiite parties against the Sunni ones.
But that is not altogether possible, since that would narrow the radical
Islamic universalism it seeks to represent in the pan-Sunni world to a
sectarianism with no appeal beyond the community of Shia. Thus, Iran may be
stuck trying to help form shaky Sunni-Shiite coalitions in Iraq and to keep
them perennially functioning, even as Iraqis develop greater hatred for this
intrusion into their domestic affairs. Without justifying the way that the 2003
invasion of Iraq was planned and executed, or rationalizing the trillions of
dollars spent and the hundreds of thousands of lives lost in the war, in the
fullness of time it might very well be that the fall of Saddam Hussein began a
process that will result in the liberation of two countries; not one. Just as
geography has facilitated Iran's subtle colonization of Iraqi politics,
geography could also be a factor in abetting Iraq's influence upon Iran.
The prospect of peaceful regime change -- or evolution -- in
Iran, despite the temporary fizzling of the Green Movement, is still greater
now than in the Soviet Union during most of the Cold War. A liberated Iran, coupled
with less autocratic governments in the Arab world -- governments that would be
focused more on domestic issues because of their own insecurity -- would
encourage a more equal, fluid balance of power between Sunnis and Shia in the
Middle East, something that would help keep the region nervously preoccupied
with itself and on its own internal and regional power dynamics, much more than
on America and Israel.
Additionally, a more liberal regime in Tehran would inspire
a broad cultural continuum worthy of the Persian empires of old, one that would
not be constrained by the clerical forces of reaction.
A more liberal Iran, given the large Kurdish, Azeri, Turkmen
and other minorities in the north and elsewhere, may also be a far less
centrally controlled Iran, with the ethnic peripheries drifting away from
Tehran's orbit. Iran has often been less a state than an amorphous,
multinational empire. Its true size would always be greater and smaller than
any officially designated cartography. While the northwest of today's Iran is
Kurdish and Azeri Turk, parts of western Afghanistan and Tajikistan are
culturally and linguistically compatible with an Iranian state. It is this
amorphousness, so very Parthian, that Iran could return to as the wave of
Islamic extremism and the perceived legitimacy of the mullahs' regime erodes.15
1 Michael Axworthy. A History of Iran: Empire of the Mind, Basic Books, New York, 2008, p. 3.
2 Brown. The World of Late Antiquity,
p. 163.
3 W. Barthold, An Historical
Geography of Iran, Princeton University Press, Princeton, New Jersey,
(1903) 1971 and 1984, pp. x-xi and 4.
4 Ostler, Empires of the Word,
p. 31.
5 Axworthy, p. 78.
6 Philip K. Hitti, The Arabs: A
Short History, Princeton University Press, Princeton, New Jersey, 1943, p.
109.
7 Brown, pp. 202-03.
8 Hiro, Inside Central Asia, p.
359.
9 Olivier Roy, The Failure of
Political Islam, translated by Carol Volk, Harvard University Press,
Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1992 and 1994, pp. 168-70.
10 Roy, The Failure of Political
Islam, p. 168.
11 James Morier, The Adventures of
Hajji Baba of Ispahan, John Murray, London, 1824, p. 5 of 1949 Cresset
Press edition.
12 Vali Nasr, Forces of Fortune: The
Rise of the New Muslim Middle Class and What It Will Mean for Our World,
Free Press, New York, 2009.
13 Roy, p. 193.
14 M. K. Bhadrakumar, "Russia, China,
Iran Energy Map," Asia Times, 2010.
15 Robert D. Kaplan, The Ends of the
Earth: A Journey at the Dawn of the 21st Century, Random
House, New York, 1996, p. 242.
