Caucasus
Date: 20-09-2021
I get saddened by how so many humans tend to only see the differences amongst them. Studying about any war, of which there are way too many, I used to feel extremely sad and helpless for days - if not months. With time, I start to see this as more and more absurd. It is like when we see a kid doing something silly and getting hurt in the process but it also makes us laugh. Not an evil kind of laugh. An absurd kind. A knowledgeable kind. A “you-will-learn-in-time” laugh. I wonder when will humans learn this. Maybe one day we will all suddenly grow up and realize the absurdity of fighting over race, language, color, water, minerals, land, and beliefs…and laugh at how absurd all this disagreement actually is. I don’t see a lot of hope for this as I study world history and witness its continuation and our (maybe growing) divisions…but what would we do if we can muster no hope at all.
I was recently reading Tolstoy’s story “A prisoner in the Caucasus”. To me, Caucasus is one of the most interesting regions on this planet. I am still getting to know this place. It is seen as the border between Asia and Europe. The clear division between the two continents in this region is still not agreed upon, as far as I could find. Hugged between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea, today it comprises parts of Turkey, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Iran, and Southern Russia. What an interesting combination of neighbors! Consequently, it is one of the most culturally diverse places on earth. Throughout human history, it acted as a bridge for the movement of humans across these most fertile lands where the human race is theorized to have begun and spread from. Understandably, fossils of the earliest humans have been discovered here.
As a child in Pakistan, I used to read stories of Jinn (spirits created with free will like humans - in Islam). There were so many examples of stories where a princess is kidnapped by a Jinn because of her beauty and taken to his homeland in Koh-i-kaf; a mysterious place of magic where all spirits lived and humans were forbidden. She is then heroically rescued by the hero, of course, who is able to win necessary magical weapons (like hats/clothes of invisibility or swords that can overpower jinns) with his kind-heartedness, wisdom, and bravery from a wise travelling dervish. I just recently made the connection that Koh-i-Qaf is Mount Qaf from the 10th-century Persian mythology! This mountain myth is thought to be based on the high mountains in the Caucasus that powered over various Persian empires settled in southern Caucasus for most of the last two thousand years. Their snow-covered might and unconquerable spirit led to rich lore surrounding them in Persian mythology. Pakistani culture is heavily influenced by Persian history, culture, and language and Urdu derives heavily from it. I never knew that the children’s stories I read as a kid were thousand-year-old myths from Caucasus! What a wonderfully beautiful realization!
Scientists have been tracing back humans origins that are hypothesized to have started in Africa and spread out later. maybe we all belong to Caucasus and the fertile lands around it. Maybe we all come from here - I say this only as a romanticized outcry. Human origins and migrations are still an active field of research. For all of its natural and cultural beauty, however, this region has also witnessed the worse angels of human nature. It has been the backdrop for continuous invasions, racial injustice, ethnic killings, and violence. It is the perfect symbol and depiction of human failure in terms of admiring our differences. In Tolstoy’story, we see Russian and Tartar soldiers fighting over a piece of land in Caucasus (Crimea War of 1853-56) and how the protagonist (a captured Russian soldier) and his captives find humane connections and fundamental similarities in human emotions and experiences. He escapes with the help of a young Tartar girl in the end. This is my personal understanding of the story, however. There has been a debate that many Russian writers contributed to normalizing the narrative of “good Russian soldier and prisoner” and “violent Caucasians”.
I want to hope that we will all merge back to Caucasus; the feeling of it. The reminder that we are all different yet so similar. The reminder that we all come from one home. Sadly, we have brought conflict back into our own home. The current wars in the middle east might destroy important evidence (human fossils and cultural artifacts) regarding our own origins and migrations. An irreversible loss that can educate us about our own existence…On top of that, sadly, it is not uncommon to still hear the obsolete term “caucasian” being misused as a racial concept as it was originally done in the 17th century (when it was used to identify people from North Asia, Africa, Europe and India). I will read more into the anthropological history of this term and the evolution of the concept of race. Scientifically, it is agreed by biologists to be a human social construct and I think everything about Caucasus reinforces this. After all the progress humans have made, I believe we should be doing better than this.