Is There a Middle East? Read online

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  Stanford, California

  ©2012 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. All rights reserved.

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Is there a Middle East?: the evolution of a geopolitical concept / edited by Michael E. Bonine, Abbas Amanat, and Michael Ezekiel Gasper.

  pages cm

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  ISBN 978-0-8047-7526-7 (cloth : alk. paper)—ISBN 978-0-8047-7527-4 (pbk.: alk. paper)

  1. Middle East—Historical geography. 2. Middle East—Historiography. 3. Geopolitics—Middle East. I. Bonine, Michael E., 1942–editor of compilation. II. Amanat, Abbas, editor of compilation. III. Gasper, Michael Ezekiel, 1963–editor of compilation.

  DS44.9.I8 2012

  911′.56—dc23 2011026603

  Typeset by Westchester Book Group in 10/14 Minion

  E-book ISBN: 978-0-8047-8265-4

  Is There a Middle East?

  THE EVOLUTION OF A GEOPOLITICAL CONCEPT

  Edited by Michael E. Bonine, Abbas Amanat, and Michael Ezekiel Gasper

  Is There a Middle East?

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Copyright

  List of Figures

  List of Tables

  Contributors

  Preface

  Introduction: Is There a Middle East?

  Problematizing a Virtual Space

  Abbas Amanat

  PART I THE MIDDLE EAST: DEFINED, OBLIGED, AND DENIED

  1 The Eastern Question and the Ottoman Empire: The Genesis of the Near and Middle East in the Nineteenth Century

  Huseyin Yilmaz

  2 British and U.S. Use and Misuse of the Term “Middle East”

  Roger Adelson

  3 Of Maps and Regions: Where Is the Geographer’s Middle East?

  Michael E. Bonine

  4 Why Are There No Middle Easterners in the Maghrib?

  Ramzi Rouighi

  PART II HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVES OF IDENTITIES AND NARRATIVES IN THE REGION REFERRED TO AS THE MIDDLE EAST

  5 When Did the Holy Land Stop Being Holy? Surveying the Middle East as Sacred Geography

  Daniel Martin Varisco

  6 The River’s Edge: The Steppes of the Oxus and the Boundaries of the Near / Middle East and Central Asia, c. 1500–1800

  Arash Khazeni

  7 An Islamicate Eurasia: Vernacular Perspectives on the Early Modern World

  Gagan D. S. Sood

  8 Scorched Earth: The Problematic Environmental History That Defines the Middle East

  Diana K. Davis

  PART III CHALLENGING EXCEPTIONALISM: THE CONTEMPORARY MIDDLE EAST IN GLOBAL PERSPECTIVE

  9 American Global Economic Policy and the Civic Order in the Middle East

  James L. Gelvin

  10 The Middle East Through the Lens of Critical Geopolitics: Globalization, Terrorism, and the Iraq War

  Waleed Hazbun

  Conclusion: There Is a Middle East!

  Michael Ezekiel Gasper

  Notes

  Bibliography

  Index

  LIST OF FIGURES

  1.1 Historical Map of the Eastern Question. Brockhaus’ Konversations-Lexikon, 1894–1896

  1.2 The Revival of the Eastern Question. Le Petit Journal Supplément Illustré, 1908

  2.1 The Nearer East. Hogarth, The Nearer East, 1902

  3.1 Cultural Regions of the World. Marston, Knox, and Liverman, World Regions in Global Context, 2002

  3.2 Southwestern Asia as defined by Cressey, Asia’s Lands and Peoples, 1944

  3.3 Southwest Asia as defined by Ginsburg, The Pattern of Asia, 1958

  3.4 The Middle East as defined by Fisher, The Middle East, 1978

  3.5a Southwest Asia as defined by Brice, A Systematic Regional Geography, 1966

  3.5b The Middle East as tricontinental hub, the heart of the World-Island. Held, Middle East Patterns, 2011

  3.5c The Middle East as the central region to major global cultures. Anderson and Anderson, An Atlas of Middle Eastern Affairs, 2010

  3.6 The Middle East as defined by Beaumont, Blake, and Wagstaff, The Middle East, 1976

  3.7 The Middle East as defined by Held and Cummings, Middle East Patterns, 2011

  3.8 The Middle East: Flexibility of Delineation. Pearcy, The Middle East, 1964

  3.9 Geopolitical regions and subregions of the Middle East and North Africa as defined by Drysdale and Blake, The Middle East and North Africa, 1985

  3.10 The Middle East and North Africa as defined by Marston, Knox, and Liverman, World Regions in Global Context, 2002

  3.11 North Africa / Southwest Asia Realm as defined by de Blij and Mueller, Geography, 2007

  3.12 The Middle East and North Africa as defined by English and Miller, World Regional Geography, 1989

  3.13a Middle East: The Focus. National Geographic Society, National Geographic Atlas of the Middle East, 2003

  3.13b Middle East: Featured Area. National Geographic Society, National Geographic Atlas of the Middle East, 2008

  3.13c Middle East: The Broader Definition. National Geographic Society, National Geographic Atlas of the Middle East, 2003

  3.14 The Middle East as defined by Central Intelligence Agency, Atlas, 1973

  3.15 The Middle East and North Africa as defined by Blake, Dewdney, and Mitchell, The Cambridge Atlas of the Middle East and North Africa, 1987

  3.16 The Middle East as defined by Anderson and Anderson, An Atlas of Middle Eastern Affairs, 2010

  3.17 A Heuristic World Regionalization Scheme. Lewis and Wigen, The Myth of Continents, 1997

  3.18 The Middle East and Central Asia as defined by Eickelman, The Middle East and Central Asia, 1998

  6.1 Map of modern-day Uzbekistan, showing Amu Darya (Oxus) through Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan to the Aral Sea. United Nations, January 2004

  6.2 Map of Safavid Persia with the Oxus River still depicted as flowing into the Caspian Sea. Sanson, 1680

  7.1 Islamicate Eurasia, c. eighteenth century

  8.1 Camel bones in southern Morocco

  8.2 Fords of the Jordan by A. W. Calcott. Horne, Landscape Illustrations of the Bible, 1836

  8.3 Bedouin tents. Elmendorf, A Camera Crusade Through the Holy Land, 1912

  8.4 Fossil pollen diagram from a core taken in the Middle Atlas, Morocco, showing the changing levels of plant pollen over the last 14,000 years

  8.5 Photo of Roman ruins at Cuicul, Djemila, Algeria. Alzonne, Clément L’Algérie, 1937

  8.6 The Balfour Forest above the Jezreel Valley, 1947

  10.1 Barnett’s “Core” and “Gap.” “The Pentagon’s new map” as redrawn in Roberts, Secord, and Sparke, “Neoliberal Geopolitics,” 2003

  LIST OF TABLES

  7.1 Places in Islamicate Eurasia

  7.2 Markers of personal identity in Islamicate Eurasia

  7.3 Collectives in Islamicate Eurasia

  CONTRIBUTORS

  ROGER ADELSON is recently retired as Professor of History at Arizona State University, Tempe, where he taught beginning in 1974. After receiving his Ph.D. at Washington University, St. Louis, he was Alistair Horne Senior Research Fellow at Oxford and taught at Harvard University. Dr. Adelson’s research has focused on British and U.S. policies toward
the Middle East since the mid-nineteenth century. He edited The Historian from 1990 to 1996 and has published more than one hundred articles, essays, and reviews in history journals. He is the author of Mark Sykes: Portrait of an Amateur (1975), London and the Invention of the Middle East: Money, Power and War, 1902–1922 (1995), and Churchill and the British Impact in the Middle East (2009). He is presently writing Truman to Bush: The Impact of the Middle East on the U.S. Presidency.

  ABBAS AMANAT is Professor of History and the Director of the Iranian Studies Initiative at Yale MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies at Yale University. He received his B.A. from Tehran University in 1971 and his Ph.D. from Oxford University in 1981. He is the author of numerous works, including Pivot of the Universe: Nasir al-Din Shah and the Iranian Monarch, 1831–1896 (1997) and Resurrection and Renewal: The Making of the Babi Movement in Iran, 1844–1850 (1989), and editor of other books. Amanat was a Carnegie Scholar of Islamic Studies in 2005–7 and the recipient of the Mellon-Sawyer Seminar Grant for Comparative Study of Millennialism in 1998–2001. He is a consulting editor and longtime contributor to the Encyclopedia Iranica and in 1991–98 he was the editor-in-chief of Iranian Studies. He is currently writing In Search of Modern Iran: Authority, Nationhood and Culture (1501–2001) as well as a biography of the Babi leader and poet Fatima Baraghani Qurrat al-‘Ayn (Tahirah) and a documentary history of Qajar Iran (in Persian).

  MICHAEL E. BONINE is Professor of Geography and Professor and Head of the Department of Near Eastern Studies at the University of Arizona, where he has been since 1975. He received his Ph.D. in geography in 1975 from the University of Texas at Austin, completing a dissertation on city-hinterland relationships based upon two years of field work in Yazd and central Iran. He was executive director of the Middle East Studies Association (MESA) from 1982 to 1989. He is the author of numerous articles as well as the author/editor or coeditor of several books, including Yazd and Its Hinterland (1980), Modern Iran: Dialectics of Continuity and Change (1981), Qanat, Kariz and Khattara (1989), Middle Eastern Cities and Islamic Urbanism (1994), and Population, Poverty, and Politics in Middle East Cities (1997). He is working on a manuscript on the Imperial Bank of Persia and its banknotes, as well as a coauthor of a manuscript called The Sacred Egg and the Elegant Plume: The Ostrich in Africa and the Middle East.

  DIANA K. DAVIS, a veterinarian and a geographer, is currently Associate Professor of History at the University of California at Davis. She received her doctorate of veterinary medicine in 1994 from Tufts University School of Veterinary Medicine and her Ph.D. in geography in 2001 from the University of California at Berkeley. She has conducted research with Afghan and Moroccan nomads, and she has worked extensively in the British and French archives. Her first book, Resurrecting the Granary of Rome: Environmental History and French Colonial Expansion in North Africa (2007), was the winner of the George Perkins Marsh Prize, the Meridian Book Award, and the James Blaut Award. Davis has also published articles on various Middle Eastern topics in geography and other scholarly journals. She recently has been named a Guggenheim and Ryskamp (ACLS) Fellow for her new research book project on imperialism and environmental history in the Middle East.

  MICHAEL EZEKIEL GASPER is Assistant Professor in the History Department at Occidental College in Los Angeles, California, where he teaches classes on the cultural, social, political, and economic history of the modern Middle East. He received his M.A and Ph.D. in history and Middle Eastern studies from New York University and has previously taught at Yale, NYU, York College of the City University of New York, and Albright College. In 2008–9 he was named a Carnegie Scholar for his research project, “Rethinking Secularism and Sectarianism in the Lebanese Civil War (1975–1990).” His first book, The Power of Representation: Publics, Peasants and Islam in Egypt (2008), explores nationalism and religious identity in intellectuals’ writing about peasants and how their constructions drew the social boundaries of modern Egypt.

  JAMES L. GELVIN is Professor of History at the University of California, Los Angeles. He received an M.A. in international affairs from the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University and a Ph.D. in history and Middle East studies from Harvard University. He is the author of three books: Nationalism and Mass Politics in Syria at the Close of Empire (1998), The Modern Middle East: A History (2004, 2007), and The Israel-Palestine Conflict: One Hundred Years of War (2005, 2007). He is also author of numerous articles on the social and cultural history of the Middle East (particularly the region of Greater Syria during the early twentieth century), nationalism, the Middle East state system, and Islamic movements. He is currently working on a manuscript titled From Modernization to Globalization: The United States, the Middle East, and the World Economy in the Twentieth Century.

  WALEED HAZBUN is Assistant Professor of Political Studies and Public Administration at the American University of Beirut since fall 2010. Until summer 2010 he was Assistant Professor of Political Science at The Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, where he taught international relations and Middle East politics. He received a Ph.D. in political science from MIT. He is the author of Beaches, Ruins, Resorts: The Politics of Tourism in the Arab World (2008) and has published articles on the politics of travel, geopolitics, and decolonization. He is currently working on extending his work on the cultural political economy of tourism by investigating issues of historical memory, identity, and travel in new forms of tourism development based around history, religion, and the environment across the Middle East. Another project explores the influence of notions of modernity and the politics of modernization on U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East and cultural and intellectual relations between the United States and the Middle East.

  ARASH KHAZENI earned a Ph.D. in modern Middle Eastern history from Yale University in 2006 and is Assistant Professor of Middle Eastern and North African History at Pomona College in Los Angeles, California. In 2009–10, he was a Robert W. Mellon Research Fellow at the Huntington Library. His research is focused on the Islamic world since 1500, with an emphasis on the social, cultural, and environmental history of Iran, Afghanistan, and central Eurasia. He is the author of Tribes and Empire on the Margins of Nineteenth-Century Iran (2010), which received the 2010 Houshang Pourshariati Iranian Studies Book Award from the Middle Eastern Studies Association. He is currently working on an environmental history of the borderlands of Iran, Afghanistan, and central Eurasian steppes, c. 1500–1850.

  RAMZI ROUIGHI is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Southern California. He received an M.A. in historical studies at the New School for Social Research in New York in 1999 and his Ph.D. in history in 2005 from Columbia University. His dissertation, “Mediterranean Crossings, North African Bearings: A Taste of Andalus in Bejaia, 1250–1400,” examined the migration of Andalusians into Ifrīqiyā in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Expanding on that research, he is now completing a book manuscript titled The Making of a Mediterranean Emirate that investigates the processes that led to the making of Ifrīqiyā as a region. Rouighi’s main research interests focus on the medieval Mediterranean and the Sahara, the production of medieval history, and conceptions of power and the past in medieval and modern times.

  GAGAN D. S. SOOD has been the Vasco da Gama Research Fellow at the European University Institute in Florence, Italy, since 2009. Educated at the University of Cambridge, Sciences Po, and Yale University, he received his Ph.D. in 2008, with a dissertation titled Pluralism, Hegemony and Custom in Cosmopolitan Islamic Eurasia, ca. 1720–90, from the Department of History at Yale University. His larger research agenda centers on the history of the Middle East and South Asia in the early modern world and of the region’s differentiated transitions into modern times. He has carried out archival work in Oman, Yemen, Syria, India, France, and the United Kingdom, and at present he is engaged on a project that explores the structures of everyday life in this region and their transformations after the demise of the great empires of
the Ottomans, Safavids, and Mughals. His articles have appeared in the Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient and Modern Asian Studies, and he is working on a book manuscript, provisionally titled An Ecumene Unravelled.

  DANIEL MARTIN VARISCO is Professor and Chair of Anthropology at Hofstra University in Hempstead, New York, where he has taught since 1991. He received his Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of Pennsylvania in 1982, based on eighteen months ethnographic fieldwork on irrigation and water resource use in a highland Yemeni village. During the 1980s he consulted on international development in Yemen and Egypt and received four postdoctoral grants for research on the history of Arab agriculture and folk astronomy. His most recent books are Reading Orientalism: Said and the Unsaid (2007) and Islam Obscured: The Rhetoric of Anthropological Representation (2005). He has published more than forty articles in professional journals and edited Yemen Update from 1990 to 2002. He serves as coeditor of Contemporary Islam, editor of the online journal Cyber-Orient, and webshaykh of the academic blog Tabsir. He is currently working on a comprehensive history of Yemeni agriculture in the Islamic era titled Arabia Viridis.

  HUSEYIN YILMAZ is Assistant Professor in the Department of History, University of South Florida, Tampa. He received his Ph.D. in 2005 from Harvard University in history and Middle Eastern studies. From 2005 to 2008 he was a postdoctoral fellow at the Introduction to the Humanities Program at Stanford University, and in 2008–9 he taught in the Department of History, Stanford University, as acting assistant professor. His research interests include geographical imaginations, social stereotyping, translation, cultural formation, and political thought in the early modern era. He has published articles and book chapters on Ottoman constitutionalism, imperial ideology, and historiography. He is currently working on a book examining imageries of leadership in the sixteenth-century Ottoman Empire.

  PREFACE