The concept of the Middle East was largely a construct of the British Foreign Office in the 1850s, who sought to draw a distinction between Britain’s colonies in the Far East, the Indian Raj, and her interests at the far end of the Mediterranean.

In doing so, they chose to encompass the totality of the declining Ottoman Empire’s presence in the Eastern Mediterranean, the Levant and Mesopotamia, the Persian Empire of the Qajar dynasty, and those tribal areas that would, in time, become the Gulf States.

This area had geographical contiguity, positioned as it was between Asia, Europe and Africa, and, although extraordinarily diverse in terms of religion and ethnicity, it had been dominated by the religion of Islam for more than 1 200 years, and by the “organising principle” of “the Caliphate”.

The twelve centuries since the death of the Prophet Mohammed in 632 can be divided into four broad periods. The first 600 years were the time of Arab dominance, when Islam destroyed or debilitated the Persian and Byzantine Empires.

During this period, the message of Allah was taken west, through the Holy Land, across North Africa, and up through Spain and over the Pyrenees, and east, by armies to Central Asia, and by maritime merchants, across the Indian Ocean, to the Malayan Peninsula and the islands of Indonesia.

For Muslims, only the divine intervention of God could account for such rapid and comprehensive success. In this period the capital of the Caliphate might have moved from Medina to Damascus, to Baghdad and then to Cairo, but the instinct for religious certainty would be undiminished. The only fly in the ointment in this period of expansion and success was the establishment and existence of the relatively short-lived Crusader kingdoms in the 12th and 13th centuries.

The second period was that of the late 15th and early 16th centuries, when the whole dynamic of the region was changed. This was a period when the Christians completed their reconquest of Spain, expelling Muslims from the Iberian Peninsula; when the Persian Safavid dynasty embraced Shi’ism as the official religion of Iran; and when the Turkic Ottomans defeated the Egyptian Mamluks, transferred the sword and the cloak of Mohammed to Istanbul, and with them the seat of the Sunni Caliphate.

The third period saw the cockpit of war move to the Mediterranean and to Central Europe, until Ottoman expansion was defeated outside the walls of Vienna in 1683, leading to a fourth period, that of a 250-year decline in Muslim power, with a corresponding increase in the power of the European, Christian empires.

This Muslim decline reached its nadir in 1918, when the Allied Powers, utilising the ethnic split between Turks and Arabs, defeated the Turks, forced the capitulation of the Ottoman Empire, and remade the Middle East in their own interests. At the same time, Kemal Ataturk, the Ottoman hero of Gallipoli, abolished both the Ottoman Sultanate, and subsequently the Caliphate.

The “new” Middle East no longer had any imperial or religious “organising principle”, just an array of new political entities, including the new British Mandate territory of Palestine, with its commitment to providing a national home for the Jewish people, albeit with the caveat “that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine”.

It is easy to be critical of the Allied Powers for the nature of their approach to the region in the early 1920s, but the “original sin” lay with the Ottoman decision to back the Central Powers. Britain and France, wrestling with the tragedy of their own 2 million dead, were left with the consequences of Ottoman failure and collapse, not to mention that of the German, Austro-Hungarian and Russian Empires.

Needless to say, the reassuringly straight lines on the new maps of the Middle East, and those of Central and Eastern Europe, disguised the reality of the complex ethnic and religious mosaic that lay underneath, including all the frictions, fractures, and fissures.

A region whose multiple identities had, for more than a millennium, been rooted in family, clan, tribe and city, with religious loyalty owed to a distant Caliph, was now confronted with western concepts and models of nation, state, liberalism, democracy and secularism. In the intervening century this has, predictably and understandably, proved to be a very difficult and uneasy fit.

The establishment of the State of Israel after World War Two added further religious and political complexity to the equation for, like the Crusader kingdoms of an earlier time, its existence was deemed an affront to the establishment of Islam as the dominant ideological force across the region. Hence the routine use, by Al Qaeda and Islamic State, of the pejorative expression “Zionists and Crusaders”.

Given the complexity of the region, when people now talk in general terms of the Middle East, they need to be challenged as to which Middle East they mean. Countries and regions may have very obvious geographical and physical length and breadth, but they also have very important historical and religious depth. Such cultural depth gives people, and peoples, the opportunity to create national mythologies, based on the selective use of entitlement, inspiration and grievance, as Putin has done in Russia.

In this context, a good way to approach an understanding of the Middle East is to adopt the model of the Olympic Rings. In such a model it is helpful to put the first ring around the Arabian Peninsula, which was the birthplace of the Prophet Mohammed, and the origin of Islam, its Five Pillars, the Koran, and the Two Holy Cities.

The second ring goes around Egypt, possibly the first “nation state”, with its memories of pre-Islamic, Pharaonic greatness, and its more modern consciousness of Nasser and pan-Arab leadership.

The third ring goes around the modern Republic of Turkey, where the example and memories of Ottoman dominance are never far from the surface, even with its modern Islamist alignment.

The fourth ring fits over Iran, whose Persian imperial past continues to influence its attitude and approach to the region, and the world, and whose Islamic Revolutionary identity and championing of the Shia communities of the Muslim world has been so problematic in the last half-century.

The last ring, positioned in the centre of this geo-political Venn diagram, rests across the area of the “Sykes-Picot Agreement”, and contains the modern states of Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Israel, and the Palestinian Territories, none of whose actions can be examined or understood without recourse to assessing the impact on, and the attitudes and reactions of, the other four rings. Only in this context can the Israeli – Hamas/Palestine/Gaza conflict be understood.