Shahid Bolsen continues a new series on geopolitical fundamentals by laying out the framework behind his analysis: why lands and peoples have baselines they always return to, why the forces that try to straighten them never last, and why one force in history has proven the exception. He offers five tests for identifying a permanently important land and applies them to Bilad ash-Sham, Mesopotamia and the Iranian plateau, drawing on the Qur’an, the Sunnah and the record of the empires that tried to hold them. Along the way he asks who Greece and Rome really belonged to, and the episode closes with an addendum on a country that, he argues, took itself out of the game for fifty years.
