Introduction
This post is the second installment of my series on the idea of the “Middle East.”
In the first part, I explored the origins of the term. I demonstrated how it emerged out of two interconnected imperial concerns: the Eastern Question, which was about the future of the Ottoman Empire, and Britain’s need to secure India from any foreign intervention. I analyzed how, even though it made its way into the geopolitical lexicon in the early 20th century, the idea of the “Middle East” actually took hold during World War II, when the region became ever more important for European/global powers due to the discovery of oil in the early 20th century.
As the term became more common, however, it came to mean different things for different people. While journalists and politicians used it in oversimplified ways, specialists who studied the region went against this usage and questioned the idea of the “Middle East” itself.
This is where I’ll pick up the narrative this week. I’ll argue that scholars from the mid-1960s onwards came to problematize the idea of the “Middle East” and unearth the power dynamics that are inherent to the term. They also offered alternative frameworks that aimed to better capture the historical, cultural, and religious diversity of the region. Meanwhile, others rejected the use of the term altogether and presented counter-discourses to challenge the imperial hegemonic narratives.
Early critiques
One of the earliest instances where a scholar looked at the notion of the “Middle East” from a critical perspective was an article written by Roderic Davison and published in Foreign Affairs in 1960. In it, Davison laid bare the imperial history of the term, arguing that the common denominator in all the discourse surrounding the “Middle East” has always been imperial (and especially British) strategic and political interests.1
Davison admitted that “no one knows where the Middle East is.”2 The term was inherently fluid and indeterminate in nature and resisted any attempt at an exact definition. Citing the impossibility of the task, he proposed “an agreement on arbitrary limits,” claiming that the core of the region consisted of “Turkey, Iran, Israel, Egypt, and the Arab states of Asia.”3
In another article, Nikki Keddie, a scholar of Iran, also critiqued the concept of the “Middle East.” Both the timing of and the journal in which the article was published were indicative. Keddie’s article came out in 1973, right when the oil crisis was putting the “Middle East” once again squarely on the map of world politics. Not only that, but it was also published in the International Journal of Middle East Studies, the flagship academic publication of the Middle East Studies Association, which was formed in the U.S. in the 1960s when the Middle East started gaining importance within American diplomacy circles.
Like Davison before her, Keddie problematized the idea of the Middle East from the start, titling her article “Is There a Middle East?” She argued that despite the assumptions made by the average person, it would be erroneous and futile to search for a common thread between the countries and societies that made up this region called “the Middle East.”4
Although she recognized the term’s artificiality, Keddie still operated within the confines of the framework that “Middle East” imposed on scholarly literature. Believing it to be a necessary evil, she claimed that the scholars were stuck with it until a better alternative could be found. What she modestly proposed was “that we not reify concepts so as to distort our ability to look at history and reality afresh.”5 Instead, Keddie advocated a more context-driven approach in analysis, arguing that terms such as “the Muslim World,” the “Arab world,” or the “Mediterranean” may work better as analytical frameworks.6
Orientalism and the Middle East as Europe’s “inferior other”
While Davison and Keddie pointed out the historical inconsistencies in the use of the “Middle East,” a more sustained and groundbreaking critique was advanced by Edward Said in the late 1970s in his seminal work Orientalism. Although it is true that Said’s criticism of the “Orient” was not limited to the concept of the “Middle East” per se, his analysis of how the Europeans/Westerners constructed an artificial Orient as Europe’s inferior other had much to teach later scholars who engaged critically with the idea of the “Middle East.”
In Orientalism, Said argued that, especially from the 18th century onwards, Europeans came to create a mental construct of what they deemed as the “Orient” as different from Europe. According to this logic, Orient was everything Europe was not. While the Orient was timeless, stagnant, and backwards, Europe meant History, dynamism, and progress. It was, Said claimed, a classic case of self-definition through othering.7
In the age of high imperialism of the 19th century, when the ideas of the Near East and Middle East were starting to enter the geopolitical lexicon, this mental framework became a useful tool for justifying European colonial expansion. Once constructed as Europe’s inferior other, the territories labeled as the Orient and the people living in those regions were lumped together and became a natural stage for the European/colonial idea of mission civilisatrice to unfold. This was what the French had in mind when they invaded Algeria in 1830, and the British occupied Egypt in 1882. Since the Orientals were deemed to be unfit for self-rule, Europeans took it upon themselves to do it for them.
Seen through this lens, the Eastern Question, which laid the groundwork for the idea of the “Middle East” to emerge in the early 20th century, goes beyond simply being a geopolitical term. It becomes a cultural designation that defines non-Europeans as inferior others.
Huseyin Yılmaz aptly connects the dots between the idea of Orientalism and how the Eastern Question, and later the idea of “Middle East,” came to be defined when he writes:
“In broad terms, the Eastern Question was about establishing a new world order. In other words, it was European intellectuals’ self-proclaimed mission to accord order to the rest of the world. Yet, more specifically, it was about envisioning Europe vis-à-vis the Ottoman Empire, for it represented an alien civilization still surviving on the same continent these Europeans saw as the dispenser of modern civilization, uncompromised by inferior races and cultures. The Eastern Question in this way became integral to the process of purifying Europe from cultural contamination by enlightening or driving out its Asiatic elements.”8
And just as it was true for the Eastern Question in the late 19th century, nowadays the idea of “Middle East” continues to be associated with a set of negative concepts and ideas that separate the “West” from the “rest,” including “terrorism, instability, violence, Islamic fundamentalism, anti-Americanism, oppression of women, or oil wealth.”9 As a result, scholars following in the footsteps of Said (among others) have continued to question and emphasize the artificial, reductionist, and discriminatory nature of the idea of “Middle East” in their works.
A good example is Karen Culcasi’s article, where she argues that it is a more or less futile endeavor to try to find an exact definition of what or where “Middle East” is. Instead, she argues that the “Middle East,” just as any world region, “is not a naturally existing place waiting to be defined, labeled, and described but a discursive construct” that comes into existence through “a variety of power relationships.”10
Culcasi, like many others, emphasizes the fact that there is no single unifying characteristic that we can use to define the region in a coherent manner. The region is too diverse ethno-linguistically, religiously, and historically to fit into a single unifying grid, the usual suspects being an Arab identity or Islamic culture. And in the absence of this overarching characteristic that would help denote the region once and for all, the “Middle East” continues to be a framework that is imposed on the region, mostly as a relic of the European imperial and colonial past that continues to resonate in our day and age.11
What are the alternatives?
Scholars have not just critiqued the “Middle East” idea, they also proposed different alternatives. Abbas Amanat, for instance, argues that we can “deconstruct” the Middle East into “more realistic and historically viable” regions. He proposes to look deeper, for instance, into Egypt’s connections with the eastern Mediterranean, Iran’s with Central Asia as well as the Persian Gulf, and the Arabian Peninsula’s with the Indian Ocean and Eastern Africa, among many others.12
As a mirror image of this approach, Nile Green argues for widening our perspective and going beyond conventional regional designations by integrating the “Middle East” into a geographic space that he calls the “Indian Ocean area.” Green proposes that focusing on the historical, social, and economic connections between the Mediterranean, Indian Ocean, and Inner Asia would give us a more nuanced understanding of the region that we usually think of as the “Middle East,” while also allowing us to go beyond Eurocentric frameworks.13
Moreover, instead of passively accepting the imperial constructs, inhabitants of the “Middle East” came up with counter discourses that challenge Eurocentric frameworks, as well. For her article on the topic, Culcasi analyzed hundreds of maps and world atlases published in eight different countries located in the “Middle East.” Maps, Culcasi reminds us, are powerful tools that “create and perpetuate dominant geographical discourses.”14 What she found at the end of her research was that the bulk of the cartographic materials produced in these states either chose not to map a place called “Middle East” or produced and labeled a different geographic entity called “the Arab Homeland.”15
The idea of “the Arab Homeland” gained prominence, especially as pan-Arabism gained momentum from the mid-20th century onwards. It mainly consisted of “the states of Morocco, Tunisia, Algeria, Libya, Egypt, Sudan, Palestine (Israel is not included), Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Iraq, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Oman, the UAE and Yemen” and was created as a “a counter-discourse to western geographical divisions of a portion of the world.”16
Its anti-hegemonic characteristic aside, however, there is no way to escape the fact that “the Arab Homeland” is also an artificial construct with reductionist assumptions and inner contradictions. The Arabs and Arab states, for instance, do not constitute a homogenous group and have different social, economic, and historical makeups. Moreover, in the territory designated as the “Arab homeland” live many different ethnic groups, including Jews, Berbers, and Kurds.17 In short, even though it serves its purpose as an anti-hegemonic discourse, the idea of “Arab Homeland” also calls for critical attention in its deployment as a tool of analysis.
Conclusion- Where do we go from here?
Although it may not be very easy to admit it, the idea of the “Middle East” is here to stay.
Unfortunately, it’s too pervasive a concept within the media and geopolitical discourse to be dislodged completely in the near future. As Culcasi demonstrates, even the inhabitants of the region themselves occasionally deployed the idea of the Middle East, although “it is rare and only used in very specific circumstances.”18
Having said that, the fact that the Middle East continues to be a hegemonic discourse does not mean we need to accept it wholesale. The least we can do is to be mindful of its imperial and colonial genealogy and the reductionist assumptions that it contains. Moreover, we can also be aware of the cultural baggage that the term entails and recognize the stereotypes that its use may produce in our minds.
Only by taking a critical approach can we chip away at the hegemonic discursive power that the idea of the “Middle East” carries. It may be a Sisyphean task, but it’s still worth trying.
Until next time!
Roderic H. Davison, “Where is the Middle East?,” Foreign Affairs, Vol.38 No:4 (Jul 1960): 674.
Ibid., 666.
Ibid., 674-675.
Nikki R. Keddie, “Is there a Middle East?,” International Journal of Middle Studies, Vol. 4 (1973): 255-258.
Ibid., 269.
Ibid.
Edward Said, Orientalism (London: Penguin Books, 2003 [1978]).
Hüseyin Yılmaz, “The Eastern Question and the Ottoman Empire: The Genesis of the Near and Middle East in the Nineteenth Century" in Is There a Middle East: The Evolution of a Geopolitical Concept, eds. Michael E. Bonine, Abbas Amanat, and Michael Ezekiel Gasper (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2012), 27.
Karen Culcasi, “Constructing and Naturalizing the Middle East,” Geographical Review, Vol. 100, No:4 (October 2010): 584.
Ibid.
Ibid., 591-593.
Abbas Amanat, “Is There a Middle East: Problematizing a Virtual Space” in Is There a Middle East: The Evolution of a Geopolitical Concept, eds. Michael E. Bonine, Abbas Amanat, and Michael Ezekiel Gasper (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2012), 5.
Nile Green, “Re-Thinking the ‘Middle East’ after the Oceanic Turn,” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, Vol. 34 (2014): 556–64.
Karen Culcasi, “Mapping the Middle East from Within: (Counter-) Cartographies of an Imperialist Construction, Antipode (2011): 6.
Ibid., 2.
Ibid., 8.
Ibid., 9-10.
Ibid., 11.
Sounds a bit similar to Central Europe (where I live) in terms of a very diverse region that includes Slavs, Germans and others, though with the distinction that people in here don't really mind the description.
very helpful - and appropriately contextual - analysis!