Is There a Middle East? Read online

  ON DECEMBER 17, 2010, a 26-year-old street vendor of fruits and vegetables, Mohamed Bouazizi of Sidi Bouzid, Tunisia, humiliated when the police confiscated his produce, doused himself with gasoline and set himself on fire. He died of his burns on January 4, 2011, and thus began the Arab Spring, with protests that spread to the rest of Tunisia and then throughout the region—from Libya and Egypt to Syria and the Arabian Peninsula. Nearby Iran had its highly contested election of summer 2009, and its Green Movement has continued to stage demonstrations since that time. The populations of this region, particularly the young, with their social media, fed up with corruption, inherited leadership, economic injustices, and human rights abuses, have erupted in massive riots and protests against their own governments. With a predominantly Muslim population, this region also has been accused of fostering and harboring “Islamic terrorists,” from the earlier Muslim Brotherhood of Egypt to the terrorist network of the now-killed Osama bin Laden.

  But where are we talking about? Is this indeed a coherent geographical and cultural region? What is the significance for scholarship and government policies for treating and understanding the Middle East as a “region”? Is North Africa part of the Middle East? These subjects are the focus of this volume, which tackles the question, “Is there a Middle East?” If we consider the events of the Arab Spring, as well as the typical front-page news of the last decade, from the invasion of Iraq and the attempts to eliminate al-Qaeda and the Taliban from Afghanistan and Pakistan to the world’s dependency on oil, we begin to understand that we are indeed talking about a most significant geopolitical region. Whereas the term “Middle East” is certainly common usage among scholars and the media, exactly (or perhaps inexactly) where is this? How did this term and usage come about? Is it a valid way to conceptualize and understand this region? And what are the impact and consequences of this abstract category and its use?

  This volume addresses these questions. It shows how the Eastern Question of the nineteenth century provides much of the framework for the conceptualizing of the Near East and Middle East of the twentieth century, with the latter term predominating after World War II. These essays will show that the Middle East is a complicated and changing region, with often conflicting definitions, usages, and impacts. Some of the chapters will bring out other identities and allegiances for parts of the region, particularly for periods before any of this area was called the Middle East. Today this region, including the “Greater Middle East,” has evolved as a geopolitical concept that influences how governments approach the region in terms of their foreign policy, foreign aid, and military assistance (or intervention). The U.S. general public also views the Middle East as a region of Islamists, war and conflict, oil, and massive foreign and military aid. It certainly behooves us not only to ask, “Is there a Middle East?” but also to provide an answer to that question, and to why that answer is significant for understanding today’s complicated world. That is the task of this volume.

  The kernel of an idea for this book came from an earlier workshop in May 2006 at the Center for International and Area Studies (now the MacMillan Center) at Yale University. We acknowledge and appreciate support from Yale University’s Edward J. and Dorothy Clarke Kempf Memorial Fund and thank the organizers and supporters of that event, including August Ranis, then Director of YCIAS, Nancy Ruther, Associate Director, Barbara Papacoda, administrator of the Council on Middle East Studies, and the staff of MacMillan. We acknowledge and thank the editors and staff of Stanford University Press, whose competence and encouragement have enabled this book to come to fruition. We thank two anonymous reviewers for their thoughtful comments and recommendations. For helping to make the book a reality, special recognition goes to Mirela Saykovska, a research assistant at the University of Arizona, whose technological and organizing skills were instrumental in bringing the manuscript to completion. We also thank the University of Arizona for the support of a subvention for publishing illustrations and maps as well as paying for permissions and for the redrawing of several maps by Stanford University Press.

  As educators and coeditors, we greatly benefitted from the contributions to this volume, and we believe that specialists, students, and the general reader will find it useful for teaching, study, and further research.

  Michael E. Bonine

  Abbas Amanat

  Michael Ezekiel Gasper

  May 17, 2011

  Is There a Middle East?

  INTRODUCTION: IS THERE A MIDDLE EAST?

  Problematizing a Virtual Space

  Abbas Amanat

  WHEN THE FIRST television network started broadcasting in Tehran in 1958, its adopted motto was “The first private television in the Middle East.” For many Iranian viewers the novelty of the new medium brought with it the idea that their country was a part of a larger region called the Middle East. Iranians aside, this of course was not the first encounter with the term. One can find references in geographical textbooks of the 1950s to the oil fields of the Middle East, or to the wartime Anglo-American Middle East Supply Center established in 1941 to aid the Allies’ war effort in the region. The 1956 Suez War was often labeled in the headlines as a Middle East crisis, while the luxuriously produced journal Aramco World, first published in 1949, displayed glimpses of the region’s natural beauty and material culture. The accidental way the Middle East nomenclature entered our geographical horizon enabled many specialists in the West, beginning especially from the late 1950s, to increasingly identify themselves with the nascent field of Middle East studies, then barely distinguishable from Oriental studies or Islamic studies.

  Decades of scholarship and teaching about this region and its history, society, culture, and politics does not seem to have resolved the Middle East as a puzzling entity. Under its rubric we teach courses, organize conferences, publish books, define our field, and wage academic brinkmanship. In the harsher world of geopolitical realities, real conflicts have been fought in the Middle East, from World War II and the Arab-Israeli conflict to the Persian Gulf wars and Afghanistan. Such conflict seems indelibly tied to the notion of the Middle East as a playing field for the Cold War, which involved, often inadvertently, many of the countries of the region. The often unfavorable view of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) in the Western media and of course anxieties in recent years over the real or assumed threat of religious militancy further perpetuated the ambiguity. Today the ongoing popular movements of protest in the Arab world (and prior to that the Green Movement in Iran in the spring of 2009) cast on the region an entirely new light stressing a greater degree of social homogeneity and a shared quest across the region for democracy, openness, and political accountability.

  Yet a century of increasing usage of the Middle East as an organizing principle, and its ever-growing boundaries, stretching today (at least for some observers) from Pakistan and Afghanistan to Morocco, have not clarified many conceptual issues related to this elusive term. The long overdue task of problematizing it from geographical, historical, cultural, and sociopolitical perspectives hence is the focus of this volume. It can be argued that the countries of Western Asia and North Africa that are put together on the map as the Middle East neither constitute a continental landmass nor sufficiently bind together by any unifying characteristics. Marshall Hodgson’s well-known “Nile to Oxus” stretch, which he considered as the Islamic heartlands, represents a plausible geocultural entity that was carved in the midst of the Eurasian landmass together with a part of Africa. Yet Hodgson was the first to admit that this “venture of Islam” was above all about sharpening of diverse cultural identities, emerging ethnolinguistic communities, sectarian divisions, and modern national identities.

  Although today the Nile to Oxus world roughly matches the boundaries of the Middle East (that is if one excludes Central Asia and North Africa), there is much that can be said about the circumstances leading to the rise and prevalence of the term Middle East. We may ask, for instance, why the old legal notion of
dar al-Islam (the abode of Islam) was never translated into sustained geopolitical boundaries on today’s regional and world maps—what Hodgson called the “Islamicate.” Is it because Islam could no longer operate as a unifying principle perhaps as early as the sixteenth century when the Ottoman, Safavid, Mughal, and Uzbek territorial empires each appeared independent from the other as “guarded domains” (mamalik-i mahrusa) in the historical and geographical works in Persian and Turkish? The European cartographers too honored these imperial divisions. For a long time, moreover, along with the imperial notion of the “guarded domains,” a range of indigenous terms such as mulk (kingdom), mamlakat (realm, country; at times mamlakat-i Islam or more recently mamalik-i Islami), ard or sarzamin (land), and iqlim (climate) served their purposes without an apparent need to conceptualize a broader notion of regional territory before the twentieth century and reconfiguration by Western imperial imagining.

  As has often been noted, the “east” (mashriq) and the “west” (maghrib) of the Islamic world up to the twentieth century remained intrinsic: the latter exclusively a reference to North Africa, and the former a vague reference to Iran and eastern neighboring lands, the so-called Persianate world of Marshall Hodgson as opposed to the Arabic cultural and linguistic world of Arabia, Mesopotamia (Bayn al-Nahrayn, Iraq), Syria (Shamat), Egypt, and North Africa. The West, in reference to Europe (or more specifically to western Europe) continued to be identified as the land of Franks (Arabic: al-Afranj; Persian: Farang; Turkish: Ferenj) following nomenclature that came about after the early Islamic empire’s contacts with the Carolingian empire of the Franks. Before the age of Muslim discovery in the nineteenth century, there were also the Russians (Urus), the Slavs (Saqalib), and other a host of non-Westerners known to Muslims. They included Christian Abyssinians, the Muslims of Western China (khata) and China proper (khutan and chin) stretching beyond as far east as Japan, and of course the Hindustan (“province” of India), which was envisioned, as were many other lands surrounding the Islamic empires, as a province attached to the outside of the Islamic core. This indigenous geopolitical culture, confident of its own place in the world, seldom felt the need for differentiating between the Islamic empire (or Muslim empires of early modern times) and Christendom or the heathen world of the “Other.”

  As late as the mid-twentieth century the new defining concepts that originated in Europe and the United States did not entirely supplant these older indigenous notions, nor were these modern terms adopted uncritically by the peoples of the region. Western geopolitical nomenclature that had divided the ancient East into the Near East and the Far East, by the early twentieth century also discovered a Middle East in between almost as an afterthought. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries these concepts of “near” and “far” were forged by Europeans in contradistinction to the concrete perception of the West as the Self. The people of the former Muslim empires who no longer were subjects of the “guarded domains”—specifically the Ottoman Empire—thus became citizens of infant nation-states. Under the auspices of European mandatory powers some of the former provinces of the Ottoman Empire after the First World War were carved out or lumped together to create Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, and Jordan. These countries together with Iran, Egypt, and Arabia in turn were placed in a newly constructed category of the Middle East. Abiding by the East-West cultural dichotomy vis-à-vis the all-powerful West (Arabic: al-gharb; Persian: gharb), they were as diverse culturally and linguistically as in their historical experiences and exposure to modernity. Even Iran, with frontiers that remained relatively intact since the thirteenth century (and often identified by Europeans as continuation of the Persian Empire of ancient times), was brought into the Middle East construct along with Egypt, another ancient land of independent identity, the new Republic of Turkey, the last remnant of the old Ottoman Empire, and a host of new states in the Eastern Mediterranean and Persian Gulf.

  Absence of an intrinsic regional notion and identity in the postcolonial era added greater weight to the Middle East nomenclature as an extrinsic construct. Even with its curious history it eventually gained global acceptance. Rooted in the ancient Greek cosmographic division of the world into the Orient (where the sun rises) versus the Occident (where the sun sets), it was embedded in a prehistoric notion of a yet undivided Eurasian landmass. Whereas connotations of the Orient in the twentieth century have become mostly cultural—as in the discourse of Orientalism and its critics—the East took on a more geopolitical undertone (even as it served as a neutral nomenclature for an academic field). Yet if it were not the old Orient, it still betrays a deeply Eurocentric arrangement. “East of where?” we may ask, and the answer is obvious. The universal usage of the term Middle East, not only in Europe and in the Americas but in East Asia, South Asia, Southeast Asia, and Australia, further proves preponderance of an essentially colonial construct.

  Whereas today the term Near East is largely relegated to archeology and studies of ancient civilizations of the eastern Mediterranean, and the term Far East has almost disappeared as a geographical denominator (except perhaps in travel guides and travel literature), the term Middle East is alive and well. The remarkable endurance of the term to the present day, in the headlines and in the political sphere, may best be attributed to tensions in its cosmogony: geopolitics and imperial power rivalries, oil exploration and thirst for energy, territorial and ethnic disputes arising from Western vested interest (such as in Israel/Palestine and Iraq), inefficient and authoritarian regimes in the region, and more recently resurgence of religious extremism. Even if one avoids resorting to the rhetoric of attributing all the ills of the Middle East to the colonial past, the fact remains that in one way or another, in imagination and in reality, these ills directly or indirectly concern the mixed legacy of the West in this region for over a century.

  Does it matter how the term Middle East came about and that it is a Western construct? To most scholars the question seems secondary. It can be argued that to a historian who writes about modern Egypt, or an anthropologist who works on Iran, or a geographer who studies the ecology, demographics, or urbanization of the region, the Middle East is merely a framework, very much like colleagues working on countries of Latin America, Africa, and Eastern Europe. Pragmatic concerns aside, it is undeniable that academics as well as journalists, politicians, and economists are operating within a broader regional framework that has created its own narrative and its own dynamics over at least half a century; some are more viable than others. This collection is an effort to explore both the shaping of the Middle East narrative and the operating dynamics that have given it continued viability.

  Yet we still can envision scenarios whereby the Middle East as an entity can be broken down—deconstructed—to more realistic and historically viable units. The Egyptian delta and eastern Mediterranean lands, for instance, have enjoyed a close interaction for millennia. Egypt also maintained ancient connections with the Sudan and interiors of Africa, whereas the rest of North Africa maintained an active trans-Saharan trade with the lands to the south of the great desert, as well as with the Iberian Peninsula. The Iranian plateau shared historic ties with Central Asia, the Caucasus, and eastern Anatolia as well as with the Mesopotamian hinterlands and through the Persian Gulf with India, the rest of South Asia, and East Africa. The Arabian Peninsula too shared much across the Persian Gulf, the Red Sea, and the Indian Ocean, including with East Africa, India, and beyond. Western Anatolia was part of the eastern Mediterranean world that included mainland Greece and the Balkans and the Black Sea littoral, as well as Egypt and the Levant.

  Of course virtually any region on the world map, it may be argued, is divisible into smaller units, and any region or subregion cannot be seen in isolation and without ties with neighboring lands. The Middle East no doubt is not an exception, yet its case is somewhat distinct because many of the cultural, economic, and ethnic bonds with its immediate lands were weakened or severed in modern times after the demise of the old Muslim empires
and through the experience of colonialism and even more so by the postcolonial rise of nation-states. These older connections were at one time the basis upon which the region thrived economically and culturally. Of course these ties also brought military clashes, nomadic invasions, slavery, and exploitation of hinterlands.

  The Middle East today, much like Europe of the early twentieth century or East Asia, is a land of contested memories and historical animosities. The nationalist narratives of Shi’i Iran (and even southern Iraq), for instance, are fundamentally at odds with the Sunni narrative of Arab nationalism and Pan-Arabism, and both run counter to the Ottoman imperial legacy as appropriated by nationalist secular Turkey. And almost all are in contrast with the Unitarian or Wahhabi narrative of today’s Saudi Arabia and the Salafi movements of dissent across the region.

  Perceptions of modern history in these countries of the region reflect diverse directions and individual logics. Most Arabic-speaking countries experienced British and French colonial presence in one way or another during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, whereas Turkey and Iran were never colonized per se, even though their histories were greatly impacted by European military, diplomatic, and economic interventions. Anger and resentment toward colonizing Europe thus was, and still is, a powerful unifier that has fuelled nationalism and nationalist revolutions in Iran, Egypt, and Algeria, as well as in other countries of the Middle East. In the postcolonial era, however, such animosity quickly projected itself to Israel and the Zionist movement, which has been seen almost unanimously in the Arab world as a Western-sponsored intruder and a legacy of the colonial period. Stories and images of occupied Palestine and the stateless Palestinians generated sympathy and symbiosis, especially after 1967, when they reached beyond the Arab world and gradually became symbols that increasingly appealed to all Muslims.