Cities Remember What Maps Forget
History sometimes reveals itself more clearly in cities than in maps. Maps show borders, treaties and declarations. Cities remember how people actually lived.
I spent beautiful years in Baghdad. Today I live in Egypt. Between these two places one can still sense the outline of a Middle East that once functioned very differently from the one that dominates today’s headlines. The streets, the markets, the mixture of languages and traditions still carry traces of a world in which communities were intertwined rather than permanently mobilized against one another.
In 1914, on the eve of the First World War, most of the region from Egypt to Iraq still belonged to the Ottoman imperial system. It was not yet a landscape of modern nation-states but of provinces, trade routes and historic cities whose social life had evolved over centuries. Jews, Muslims and Christians lived alongside one another in many urban centers, sharing language, commerce and everyday life. Differences certainly existed, as they do in every society, but they did not define politics in the way they often do today.
Baghdad illustrates this clearly. For centuries it had been one of the most important Jewish centers in the world. Arabic-speaking Jews were deeply integrated into the cultural and commercial life of the city. Similar patterns could be seen in Cairo, Damascus, Aleppo and many other cities of the region. The Middle East was not a utopia, but plural coexistence was a social habit rather than an exception.
The War That Opened the Map
The fracture began with the collapse of the Ottoman order during the First World War. As the empire weakened, the region became an object of strategic planning for external powers. Wartime diplomacy produced promises that could not easily coexist.
Arab leaders were encouraged to believe that independence would follow if they revolted against the Ottomans. At the same time Britain issued the Balfour Declaration in 1917 supporting the creation of a “national home for the Jewish people” in Palestine.
Palestine thus became the place where a European political project intersected with imperial administration and local society. What had once been a province within a larger imperial framework was transformed into a territory where two national aspirations were expected to develop under the supervision of a colonial authority. From that moment onward the political equilibrium of the region was profoundly disturbed.
1919: The Treaties That Reshaped the Region
The year 1919 marked the diplomatic turning point in which the future of the Middle East began to be formally redrawn. The end of the First World War led to negotiations and agreements intended to reorganize the territories of the defeated Ottoman Empire.
The Paris Peace Conference opened the process of redefining political authority across the former imperial lands. The principle of self-determination was discussed in theory, yet in practice the victorious European powers retained decisive control over the outcome.
From these negotiations emerged the mandate system, which placed several Arab territories under the administrative authority of Britain and France. What appeared on paper as international supervision was in reality a continuation of imperial influence through new legal structures.
Borders were drawn, protectorates established and monarchies supported by outside powers. The new political map did not grow organically from local political traditions. It emerged from diplomatic calculations in distant capitals.
Within this new arrangement the question of Palestine increasingly dominated regional politics. The establishment of Israel in 1948, accompanied by the displacement of large numbers of Palestinians, did not simply create another state. It introduced a permanent fault line into the political landscape of the Middle East. A conflict that had once been part of a colonial transition became the central axis around which regional tensions would revolve for decades.
Witness City: Baghdad
Baghdad reveals what was gradually lost in this transformation. A city that had long embodied the coexistence of different communities became entangled in the violent currents of twentieth-century geopolitics. Wars, sanctions, authoritarian state structures and external interventions reshaped its social fabric.
When people later speak as if religion had always been the inevitable source of conflict, Baghdad stands as a historical contradiction. The deeper forces were political power, territorial engineering and geopolitical rivalry.
Egypt: The Artery of the Region
Egypt occupies another crucial place in this story. Through the Suez Canal and through the symbolic weight of Cairo, the country became one of the strategic arteries of the region. Whoever wished to influence the political future of the Middle East sooner or later had to engage with Egypt.
During the early 1960s a moment appeared in which the trajectory might have shifted. The administration of John F. Kennedy sought to open a more constructive dialogue with Gamal Abdel Nasser. Their correspondence reveals an effort, cautious but genuine, to stabilize relations between the United States and Egypt.
Cultural cooperation, including the international campaign to rescue the temples of Abu Simbel during the construction of the Aswan High Dam, became a visible symbol of this tentative rapprochement.
One small episode captures the atmosphere of that moment. During a telephone conversation confirming that the American financial contribution for the preservation of Abu Simbel and the Nubian temples was on its way, Kennedy asked Nasser with characteristic courtesy whether there was anything further the United States could do. Nasser replied that more than two hundred Egyptian postgraduate students were then studying in Soviet universities and expressed his wish to redirect them toward American institutions. Kennedy’s response was immediate: it would be arranged. In practice, this simple exchange opened an additional channel of communication between Egypt and the United States, suggesting that both leaders were willing—each for their own strategic reasons—to explore a gradual rapprochement.
Moments like this rarely dominate history books, yet they sometimes signal political possibilities. The assassination of Kennedy in November 1963 abruptly closed that chapter before it could develop further. Whether that opening might have produced a different strategic relationship between Washington and Cairo remains one of those questions history leaves unanswered.
Another moment in the region’s history that invites reflection