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the seas that wash the shores of Iran and the Arabian peninsula; in Africa, by that vague and contested borderland where Arab and black Africa meet, often in regions of endemic conflict, like the Sudan, Chad, and Mauritania. The one clearly defined limit of the Middle East in current usage has been in the north, where it was usually identified with the Soviet frontier. But this was always historically and culturally inaccurate and no longer corresponds to currently evolving realities. North of the Soviet-Turkish, SovietIranian, and Soviet-Afghan frontiers in Transcaucasia, the Caucasus, and Central Asia are countries that until the nineteenth century were still an integral part of the Middle Eastern world. In earlier days, they belonged to the great Arab, Persian, and Turkic empires of Islam, of which such great Muslim cities as Samarkand and Bukhara were as essential a part as Baghdad or Cairo, Isfahan or Istanbul. Georgia and Armenia are Christian countries on the edge of the Middle East; they have, however, at times been of some importance in Middle Eastern affairs, and many of their peoples have played a variety of roles in the Islamic lands. Of the other southern and Central Asian republics, five are inhabited by Turkic-speaking and, the sixth by Iranian-speaking, Muslims, closely akin in their religious, cultural, and political traditions to the lands of what we have conventionally called the Middle East. After the liquidation of the last British footholds in the Persian Gulf in 1971, these Soviet re publics were indeed the only parts of the Middle East that were still incorporated in a non-Middle Eastern political system with its capital in Europe. This anomaly, too, has ended.

    Until the Iranian revolution in 1979, it might have seemed that too much stress had been laid on Islam-on religion-in defining the Middle East, which is, after all, a twentieth-century term and which consists of a group of nationally defined states professing strong nationalist and/or patriotic sentiments. There was a time not so long ago when the stamp of Islam in the Middle East seemed to be growing dim. But it was by no means effaced, and it is now clearer than ever.
    Religion means different things to different people. In the West it means principally a system of belief and worship, distinct from, and in modern times usually subordinate to, national and political allegiances. But for Muslims it conveys a great deal more than that. Islam is a civilization, a term that corresponds to Christendom as well as Christianity in the West. No doubt, many local, national, and regional traditions and characteristics have survived among the Muslim peoples and have gained greatly in importance in modern times, but on all the peoples that have accepted them, the faith and law of Islam have impressed a stamp of common identity, which remains even when faith is lost and the law has been abandoned.
    This common identity rests, in the first instance, on the Muslim creed that "God is One and Muhammad is His Prophet," on the Qur'an and the traditions, and on the whole subtle and complex system of theology and law that has evolved from them. The teachings of historical Islam, besides moral and ritual precepts and theological dogmas, include much that in the West would be called law: civil, criminal, and even constitutional law. For the traditional Muslim believer, these laws emanate from the same source and possess the same authority as do the laws of conduct and worship. The political traditions of the Islamic peoples were shaped for centuries by the formulations of the doctors of the holy law and by the memories of the Muslim empires of the past. Their languages, irrespective of origin, were written in the same Arabic script and borrowed an immense vocabulary of Arabic words, especially of terms belonging to two closely related fields of endeavor, one of religion and culture and the other of law and government.
    It is not difficult to recognize an Islamic work