Displaced Iraqis cross the Iraq-Syria border. Photograph by Khalid Mohammed / AP

The late historian and critic Tony Judt once described Europe before the First World War as “an intricate, interwoven tapestry of overlapping languages, religions, communities and nations.” After the period between 1914 and 1945, as a result of war, ethnic cleansing, and border drawing, a new, more stable Europe emerged, in which “almost everybody now lived in their own country, among their own people.” Thirty million were uprooted and dispersed by Stalin and Hitler between 1939 and 1943, a process that was repeated after the defeat of the Axis armies. Germans, Poles, Balts, Croats, Ukrainians, Hungarians, Slovaks, Romanians, Turks, and many others were shunted around the continent. The result was “a Europe of nation states more ethnically homogenous than ever before.”

Is a similar process of nation formation taking place in Iraq and Syria today? As in Europe, borders were drawn all over the Fertile Crescent following the First World War, and many of those borders have now become notional abstractions as millions of refugees flee conflict zones in Mosul, Aleppo, Homs, and Raqqa. The demographic map of the region is in flux, and analysts have wasted little time in declaring that the rise of the Islamic State in Iraq and al-Sham augurs the death of Sykes-Picot, the British-French treaty that established many of the Middle East’s modern borders, its creations now unstitched and exposed in their artificiality.

Dismantling the colonial Middle East is a narrative that ISIS itself has made a centerpiece of its propaganda. A (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YyM0_sv5h88) posted on YouTube earlier this summer features a soft-spoken Chilean fighter named Abu Safiyya hoisting ISIS’s black banner up a flagpole at an abandoned checkpoint on the Iraqi-Syrian border. The flag flutters as a pathos-filled soundtrack swells, and the clip’s title, “The End of Sykes-Picot,” appears on the screen in a handsome sans-serif font.

“Right now, we’re on the side of al-Sham,” or Syria, Abu Safiyya says, surveying the landscape. “As you can see, this is the so-called border of Sykes-Picot. … We do not recognize it and we will never recognize it.” What ISIS recognizes instead is a single, borderless expanse comprising most of the Middle Eastern territories formerly ruled by the Ottoman Empire, for a start. With the self-appointment of the group’s leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, as the new caliph of the world’s 1.6 billion Muslims, one can see how a line drawn in the sand of the Syrian desert might not hold very much significance to him.

Debates about borders are always about the territories they encompass rather than the borders themselves. To recognize a border is to admit that a certain shape exists on a map, but also that the space it defines in the world is coherent: that it subsumes a recognizable reality, such as the zoning laws of a city or the geography of a baseball rivalry. Whatever Iraq and Syria may be today, their coherence—as historical ideas, as administrative provinces, and as political symbols—predates by many centuries the British-French agreement that drew their current borders.

There are few places, in fact, endowed with as much cosmological and political significance as Iraq or Syria in the medieval Arabic literary and intellectual tradition. Even as they came under the sway of different rulers and were pulled apart into benighted principalities or swallowed up by vast global empires, the territories retained their elemental status as core geographical components of the sublunary world.

The approximate borders of Iraq and Syria according to the medieval sources overlap significantly with the modern ones. Medieval Syria included all of present-day Lebanon, Jordan, Israel, and the Palestinian territories, while medieval Iraq extended about as far north as Tikrit. Ironically, most of the territory currently held by ISIS was not considered part of Iraq or Syria in the medieval world, but was rather known as the Jazira, an important border area in northern Mesopotamia contested by various power centers throughout Islamic history.

According to Islamic tradition regarding the creation of the Earth, God made ten virtues and vices and sprinkled them among the primordial territories. Courage and discord went to Syria, while nobility and hypocrisy found themselves in Iraq. Following Ptolemy, the Arab geographers placed Syria in the third clime and Iraq in the fourth, both known for their temperate weather. Syria was known for delicious apples, cooling rains and snow, expensive fragrances, and plagues, while Iraq was famous for its elegant scribes, fresh dates, and pleurisy.

The twelfth-century Syrian poet Ibn Munir al-Tarabulsi described his male beloved as “haughty as a Persian, tender as a Syrian / elegant as an Iraqi, eloquent as a Hijazi,” and his Turkish-accented Arabic as “more intoxicating than any heartwarming wine.” Such affective associations, expressed in the language of geography, remained potent across centuries of classical Arabic poetry. They continued to be recycled long after Iraq was deserted by its elegant scribes, who traveled westward in advance of the Mongol conquests, and after Syria was eclipsed by India as the source of the finest perfumes. Even as their populations were transformed by war, migration, and environmental disasters, the sense of these places’ distinctiveness endured.

This endurance was due, in many ways, to the significance of Iraq and Syria in the early political and sectarian history of Islam. In the year 657, two and a half decades after the death of the Prophet Muhammad, the Muslim community was embroiled in a civil war over the question of its leadership. Muhammad’s son-in-law, Ali ibn Abi Talib, ruled as caliph, with his power base in Iraq. He was challenged by the powerful governor of Syria, Mu‘awiya ibn Abi Sufyan, who would eventually prevail and move the empire’s capital to Damascus.

Their first military confrontation, however, was indecisive, so Ali and Mu‘awiya agreed to an arbitration process. Tellingly, the meeting was held at Dumat al-Jandal, in what is now Saudi Arabia, a spot specifically chosen because it was equidistant from Iraq and Syria.

“Tell the people to follow Ali,” a silver-tongued savant nicknamed al-Ahnaf (“the Crook-Footed”) advised Ali’s representative, Abu Musa al-Ash’ari. “But if they refuse, then propose that the people of Syria select a candidate from among the Prophet’s tribesmen in Iraq, and the people of Iraq select a candidate from the Prophet’s tribesmen in Syria.” A second meeting could then be convened to choose the caliph from between these two candidates.

Abu Musa didn’t follow al-Ahnaf’s advice, but the historical sources preserved it nonetheless, perhaps as a way of imagining how different Islamic history would be had the conflict been resolved as a compromise between the people of Syria and the people of Iraq. Instead, the arbitration fell apart, war returned, and the community fell irreversibly onto the path toward the Sunni-Shiite schism.

Syria and Iraq are not merely a pair of problematic shapes on a map, and the agreements that followed the First World War, in drawing the borders, did not create modern states out of thin air; they created them out of far more substantial things—the tangled thickets of communal memory, landscapes drawn in poetry and prose, and centuries of political culture memorialized in chronicles, oral epics, and biographies. The history of the region is one of variegation and multiplicity, and its indigenous geography has long recognized boundaries, territories, and localisms where the new caliph and his army see only the singularity of his rule.

Elias Muhanna is an assistant professor of comparative literature at Brown University.