You’re close to the thing. Geographical regards do matter. What I don’t condone is the assumption that only Arabs and Persians are eligible for leadership within Islam.

If Persian stands for most of the Muslim constituency of Indo-European stock, then one ought to speak of at least four different groups of peoples, namely, the Arabs, the Persians, the Turkic, and the Hindustanis. Of them, the Persians occupy the geographical center of Islam, dividing its lands in two halves, the Arabs being the dominant force in the western half and the Hindustanis so being in the eastern, while the Turkic peoples are stretched throughout the northern fringe of Islam from east to west and have in history provided the main connections between both halves and with the outer world - Europe in the west, Russia in the north, China and India in the east. Not only does the Turkic constituency include the Turks from Turkey, but also the Azeries, the Turkmenians, the Uzbeks, the Kazaks and the Kyrgyzs as well as the Uigurs in Sinkiang province (former Chinese Turkistan), likewise the Persian constituency includes the Tajiks and several ethnic groups in Afghanistan - but probably not the Pashtuns, who being midway from Persia to Hindustan are as independent an ethnic group as the Kurds (whose ancestry traces back as early as to ancient Hurries).

Sectarian competition is used as a means both to rally the members of one’s own ethnic group and to divide the foe’s. Thus, Shiites of southern Iraq and northeastern Saudi Arabia are an infiltration of Persians into the Arab constituency as much as Sunni Tajiks are an infiltration of Turks into the Persian constituency. Likewise, Turkish Islamism is an infiltration of Arab and Hindustani origin into Turkic peoples, while modernity guided by Atatürk-like laicism might be deemed to be an infiltration of Turkic eclecticism into the other ethnic groups. Finally, the whole Hindustani Islam is an infiltration of Sunni into the heartland of Hindus, so firmly entrenched in Hindustan that it has become a geopolitical force of its own. (Of the problems of Islam amid a crowd of hostile Hindus, the necessity to create a new language, Urdu, tells a great deal, though.)

Today’s competition seems polarized between Arabs and Persians - the former rallying under the banner of Sunni while the latter so doing under the banner of Shia. This picture is entirely the outcome of the last quarter of the 20th century, when fundamentalism won the upper hand in Islam. The point is that Turkic peoples have always stood for a more adaptable, eclectic approach to Islam - something which in the last century was conducive to laicism.

The Turks’ image among westerners owes much to Colonel Lawrence’s The Seven Pillars of Wisdom and subsequent David Lean’s film Lawrence of Arabia, both romantic accounts of WWI in the Middle East that praised the Arabs’ fight against the Ottomans and leave the reader/spectator with an impression that the Turks - allegedly a declining nation in opposition to the raising Arabs - were since done. That makes little justice to the Turkish contribution to Islam and present-day potentialities.

Al-Farabi was an early exponent of the intellectual strength of the eclectic mind prevalent among the Turkic peoples. His maxim that “religion is an imitation of philosophy” served him the purpose to adapt Plato and Aristotle to Islam. His intellectual leadership appealed to both Persian Avicenna and Arab Averroes, who together brought philosophy to an all time peak. Still, the main Turkic contribution was geopolitical. In the late 11th century a Turkic dynasty, the Ghaznavids, took power over northern Afghanistan. From there, the Ghaznavids expanded Islam southward and eastward, until they reached the Indian Ocean well into Hindustan. Thus, Pakistani and Indian Islam might said to have been, in its origin, an expansion of Muslim Turkistan.

Until the fourth century CE, the Turkic peoples were nomadic. Their homeland was western Mongolia, but they ruled the vast steppe from the oases of Takla Makan desert to the Caspian Sea and beyond - the Huns, led by Attila, were one such people that reached much farther to the west until they were ultimately destroyed by the Romans in 451. Yet in the late fifth century, a people of Turkic stock, the Hephthalites, built a sedentary empire in Central Asia and clashed with the Persian Sassanids. As a result, a status quo was reached in 557 according to which the Persians ruled southwest of the Oxus River - present-day Amu-Darya - while the Turks so did northeast of it. The Hephthalite was the first of a series of Turkic empires: never did the western Turks became nomadic again. By the mid-eighth century an Uigur empire was established in the eastern end of Central Asia. Since then, the Silk Road revived, as a workable peace was imposed from the Oxus to the oasis of Turfan far to the east. People, goods, and ideas extensively traveled from one end to the other, and Persians as well as Turks shared with Byzantines the profits of trade from Europe to China and the other way around. Eclecticism was the natural produce of such a land open to the most diverse influences. For Byzantines and Persians the Silk Road was only a section of their lands so that they could preserve a character of their own, but for the sedentary Turks it was their whole land. The character of the land shaped the people‘s mind.

In that land, from Transoxus to the ridges of the Mongolian plateau and the Tibetan highland, Buddhism competed with Manichaeism - a fusion of Zoroastrianism and Christian faith - for religious dominance. The Buddhas of Bamiyan, in northern Afghanistan, were carved in the rock in the third and fifth centuries CE. In the seventh century the Muslim Arabs conquered Persia, uprooted Buddhism from northern Afghanistan y reached the shores of the Oxus, where they met the Turks; dualism took refuge in Shiite Islam. Although the Muslim armies stopped at the Oxus, the Arab and Persian merchants very soon traveled the Silk Road, and with them so did Muslim beliefs as well as the Buddhist, Nestorian, and Manichaean. Very little is known about the origin of Sufism, but not too unreasonable a hypothesis says it was born a fusion of Muslim faith and Buddhist mysticism. If so, the place where the fusion happened was, in all likelihood, the new Uigur empire, full of religious effervescence - the Khan converted into Manichaeism in 742, while the earliest news of Sufism is a little later.

Sufism was persecuted as being a Muslim heresy until it became the prevalent sect in Sunni Islam. In becoming so it was used as an anti rationalistic tool. Accordingly, Persian Sufi al-Ghazzali headed a reaction against the Greek philosophy that was exacerbated by the Arab Salafi Ibn Taymiyya. Thus, together Persians and Arabs threw themselves into the most fundamentalist mood by rejecting philosophy to embrace blind faith, while the more pragmatic Turks rose to the political power owing to their abilities to adapt themselves to the most troubling situations. Ibn Taymiyya inspired 18th-century Ibn Wahhab to contrive modern salafi, which grew stronger in the fight against Turkic eclecticism and later on contributed to the collapse of overstretched Ottoman empire.

A premise of the analysis above is that these four ethnic groups are somehow anchored in Islam as much as the Western World is anchored in Christianity. Deep changes in Islam are not excluded a priori that would bring in modernity and a hi-tech society; yet such changes must come from within rather than as an imposition from abroad, let alone by a military agency. Likewise the Anglo-Dutch and a section of the German peoples broke away with the mediaeval propensity to interpret the Bible as according to authority and promoted reason as a substitutive that has finally ushered the transformation of Christianity into a modern civilization, so could the most adaptable constituency in Islam - the Turkic - lead the whole Islam, or at least most of it, toward the same destination.

On the other hand, this approach to the inner dynamics of Islam substantially concurs with Turkic eclecticism, which has always attempted to attach a relativist bridle to every fundamentalist bias of Islam. Will Turkic eclecticism ever recover from its present-day helplessness?

After the Ottoman collapse, the Turkic capacity to adapt shone the brightest with Ataturk’s laicism in the nineteen-twenties, which strongly influenced both Arabs and Persians since through the mid-20th century until the defeat of Pan-Arab laicism by Zionism in the Six Days War. That was a turning point. Salafi, that is, fundamentalist Sunni Islam as promoted by Arab radicals, which had surreptitiously grown stronger owing to Saudi oil, then took on the lead in the west and helped deobandi, that is, fundamentalist Sunni Islam as promoted by Hindustani radicals, to take on the lead in Pakistan. That provoked the Persian reaction by revolutionist Shiite ayatollah Khomeini at the same time that the Soviets invaded Afghanistan. Both moves were eminently defensive; the Islamist revolution in Iran sought political power to help protect Persians and their friends throughout the region, while the Soviets’ occupation of Afghanistan sought to thwart fundamentalist infiltration into the Muslim-majority, Russian-controlled republics of Central Asia. The Shiites succeeded and the Russians failed, so reshaping the whole map from the Mediterranean to the Himalaya. The Russians were (almost) expelled from the region, their place being occupied by Sunni moderates permanently challenged by fundamentalists. Renewed rivalries between Arabs and Persians in the west as well as between Persians and Muslim Hindustanis in the east were brought to the foreground. As a result of the combined impetus of both Salafi and Deobandi Sunnis, on the one hand, and the pressure by radical Shiites, on the other, Central Asia, which is a natural Turkic preserve, has temporarily fallen with fundamentalist, non-eclectic Islam, while Turkey proper suffers of a crisis of identity that has propelled Muslim fundamentalism at home - though Islamism in Turkey is milder, more adaptable than elsewhere.

But the wave will recede. American presence in the heartland of the Arabs (in Saudi Arabia since 1990, in Iraq since 2003) has caused the same effect as the Russian in Afghanistan; in other words, such presence is perceived by sections of all the Muslim constituencies as unwarranted interference into the domestic affairs of Islam. A two-step rearrangement of forces is being carried on. As an outcome of the first step, a split into Salafi Arabs is evident, which is be interpreted as a serious divergence as to which strategy is more appropriate for Arabs to retake the lead of Islam. Deobandi Hindustanis, which so far had been a safe ally to Americans - due to both their active stance against the Russians in Afghanistan - risk a major split, too. As a result of the second step, general disarray of Sunni fundamentalism has offered an opportunity to Shia - that is, Persian - fundamentalism to take the lead. That is what together Iran’s nuclear program and Hizbullah’s uprising in Lebanon account for.

Iran’s bid for the nuclear weapon poses a global challenge, yet altogether discloses a geopolitical weakness. Shiites are too concentrated in Iran and its surroundings while too disperse elsewhere. If they are to control Islam at large, or at least western Islam, they deadly need such an overwhelming weapon. Also they need to make theirs the common foe of western Islam - Zionism - though this poses no real danger for either the Shiites or Iran. Actually, the boot is on the other foot: Zionism has been an enemy of the Persians’ enemy and is accordingly a potential ally to them. Therefore, the reason why Iran overstates antagonism to Israel is the Persians’ ambition to lead Islam by and large, which ambition effects antagonism to the Arabs rather than the other way around.

Hizbullah’s war, on the other hand, evidences the Persian agenda to remap Islam: the Shiite unrest in Lebanon precedes the partition of Iraq - which will produce a new Shiite, oil-rich republic. Sooner or later Syria, which for the time being is Iran’s satellite, will be subverted and turned into a full-fledged Islamic republic. Thus, a Shiite confederation will stretch from the Mediterranean coast to the Iranian Plateau. This plan poses a real danger to the Arabs, the Salafi Islamists in particular. In face of such a new danger, previously exaggerated danger as allegedly posed by Zionism is downsized to its real dimension. While Jews worldwide amount to some fifteen million, of which a third already live in Israel, so that in no event could they ever menace Saudi Arabia, Shiite unrest in a southern-Iraqi republic could easily wreak havoc on northeastern Saudi province. The moderate branch of Salafi Islam may tip the scale and find that Zionism is a potential ally to help defeat too aggressive Shiites rather than the other way around.

Thus, Islam is on the brink of a second divide to compound the first one. After a split between pro-Americans and anti-Americans, pro-Zionists and anti-Zionists will face off, with Saudi Arabia leading the former while Iran leading the latter. Now, the unstable balance between pro-Americanism and anti-Zionism - the official stance of Deobandi Hindustanis - is untenable, which will destabilize Pakistan in the medium-long term. All this will not fail to effect a weakening of fundamentalism Sunni in Central Asia, so offering the eclectic, non-fundamentalist Turkic approach to Islam a new opportunity to recover its historic heartland. The problem for the West will then be how to make good ongoing mistakes and help the better.

References

The basic reference is Owen Lattimore (1900-1989), a distinguished American scholar that criticized U.S. foreign policy in Asia, and was charged by Sen. McCarthy of spying in the service of the Soviet Union. (This, however, today seems to price Lattimore’s work at premium rather than at discount.) He published a long series of articles and seven books, ranging from travel diaries to fine scholarship, in which he worked out the idea that nomadic peoples, namely, Turkic and Mongols, helped shape Central Eurasian cultures no less than sedentary ones. An indispensable reading.

Of the French School René Grousset’s The Empire of the Steppes: A History of Central Asia is worth while mentioning.