Kaan Ucsu

Zionist mapping avoided boundaries altogether, in order to attract immigrants into what was shown to be an empty land. Here the dispossession of Palestinians required brutal erasure of pre-modern geographical discourses. But, as Antrim shows through a poignant analysis of an eleventh-century “Atlas of Islam” map, Palestine was a place of affective resonance within a larger Syrian region. This chapter ends with a work of art: Mona Hatoum’s Present Tense installation uses olive oil soap to construct a floor mosaic in the form of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip – the indigenous soap dissolves the transient boundaries, and questions the power of maps to arbitrate belonging (p. 232). A final fifth chapter shows how the most current crop of maps project alternative and conflicting futures for the Middle East. Al Jazeera covered the Arab Spring by using an image of the Arab World that had no internal political boundaries, no Arab states at all. Western strategists and media continue to draw lines of partitions based on ethnic and sectarian divisions. These maps are testimony to the persistence of colonial practices; they suggest that the Middle East is not in a post-colonial phase, but rather exists in a colonial present. This beautifully produced book should be of interest to a wide readership. Medievalists would learn much from the first two chapters about pre-modern approaches to geographical space. Historians of the modern Middle East would encounter the richness and the opportunities offered by pre-modern mapping traditions. The book’s exploration of maps as tools of colonial and settler colonial projects illuminates so much about Middle Eastern identities. For historians of cartography, this is the best introduction to the mapping tradition in the Middle East in the medieval, early modern and modern periods, offering insights about the power and limitations of maps in other places and times.