One of my majors in college was geography. Now it seems that most people who never study geography, which in the United States seems to be virtually everyone, has a tendency to conceive of geography as the study and mapping (cartography) of landforms. And sure, this is part of it. But geography is also about human beings - in part how we transform our land, making it into artifacts that serve human purposes (and dealing with the consequences of these changes) and in part about how we socially construct the meaning vis-a-vis our land, which is to say how we culturally define territory, invest it or divest it of value, determine who "owns it" or has "rights to it" and so forth. Geographers study the artifice of the mapped and divided territory and try to understand how these cultural labels substantively alter the nature of human interaction with said territory. Consider how different life was for human beings before and after the concept of privately owned land entered a given civilization's lexicon, or how fundamentally different interstate relations would be today if during the emergence of nationalism and the concept of the nation-state the notion of highly defined state boundaries had never evolved. Regions, it would seem, are just another example of this.
The classical example of a region, the one I learned from Ed Davis, my political geography prof at my alma mater Emory & Henry, was that a region is any assortment of political units (or economic or social - whatever floats your boat) that you group together based on a presupposition of some inherent similarities that made them appropriate to group together. The logic is essentially the same as that of comparative political scientific methodology - we categorize states into groups not merely out of taxonomy utility, but because it helps to make and test hypotheses since the number of control variables drops. Some. States are pretty big and complicated. But I digress.
Regions are, therefore, always artificial - they are always marred, for lack of a better term, by the fact that we create them to serve as a shorthand. If we remember they are a shorthand and therefore cannot be expected to explain everything, more's the better. If we don't, well, the concept of a "region" becomes an empty and useless tool.
This brings us to the Middle East. The term comes from Europe. Yup. No surprise there. For the Europeans the world could be divided into how they related to themselves. Everything east of what was that day considered Europe (is it Russia? the Urals? the Ottoman frontier?) for centuries was known as "the Orient" from the Latin oriens for "rise" (as in the sun) which a signifier for "east" - everything from West of that magical line was "Occident" from occidens, Latin for "set/fall" (again, as in the sun) which is a signifier for "west." Nothing too nefarious, just sort of inaccurate given that no one can agree on what magical line really matters, for starters (Is Eastern Europe really Eastern? Isn't the Earth a sphere suspended in a vacuum?). Add in the fact that it was way too broad a term to have meaning (how many civilizations exist east of "Europe" - presently, according to very famous dead guys like Arnold Toynbee, a lot - I could name the Chinese, Japanese, Turko-Altaic-Mongolo-Siberic, Indic, Islamic, Oceanic, and of course native Australnesian all come to mind, along with a host of other smaller potentials. Finally, Orient was pushed right out the door because Europeans developed entire theories and logics obsessed with distinguishing between the European and "Oriental" mind, frame, and civilization that, by the early 19th Century at minimum, had become grossly stereotypical and insulting, a justification for acts of imperialism.
By the way - I'm not just dissing the Europeans here. My ancestors were by and large European, so I think I'm allowed to, but more than that, I have read enough about other civilizations to know that they all have their sins of stereotyping and institutionalized discrimination which, when it meets with the cartographic ink, has a tendency to make certain civilizations more prominently in in the middle of the maps and others in drab, "Here Be Dragons" colors on the edges - I'm looking at you, every civilization.
Back to the dance. The term "Middle East" wouldn't evolve definitively till the 19th Century - there is some debate where it came from, but I feel confident in asserting it was a natural outgrowth of the use of two other terms - "Far East" to designate East Asia and "Near East" to designate Anatolia and the Levant. The Middle East thus probably (reiterate) was originally conceived of as the broad stripe from the Caucus Mountains to the Gulf of Aden, taking up the entire Arabian Peninsula, as well as at minimum Persia (today's Iran) and parts of what would best be neutrally Western South Asia (today's Afghanistan and Pakistan). Might India be thrown in there some? Sure, probably. How about "greater" India, all the way to Burma. Heck, if you're crazy enough to do it. Central Asia? Why not?
Seems arbitrary, doesn't it? That's because it was, and to a degree, it still is. Certainly other regions make more sense in other ways - speaking of the "Arab world" being those territories in which the Arab language is dominant makes more sense, for instance, and the same goes for the Turkic and Persian worlds. Speaking of the Islamic world, well, that is huge taking in vastly varied landscapes, cultures (and cultural assumptions), and covering a huge proportion of humanity - perhaps we could narrow it to the Sunni or Shi'a world. Again, imperfect, but something.
So, let me tell you what I mean when I say, "Middle East" (or, rather, greater Middle East) in the context of this blog. It is something very specific - a collection of geographic zones that roughly correlate with certain social, economic, and cultural characteristics imperfectly, but enough that there is some expectation of overlap. Yeah. It is going to be kind of arbitrary. Kind of. There is a logic. Trust tree. Nest.
Let's start with the sub-regions that aren't going to provoke much ire.
1. Anatolia - The peninsula that makes up the bulk of the state of Turkey today - dominantly Sunni Muslim, ethnically mostly Turkish and Kurdish, and a core mass of the ol' Seljuk and Ottoman Empires. Never colonized.
2. The Levant - Formerly referred to as the "Near East," the home of today's Syria, Lebanon, Israel/Palestine (or Palestine/Israel - as you prefer it) agglomeration, and Jordan, all part of the Ottoman Empire and most of the major regional Islamic Empires. Arab culture has been preeminent in most regions, save Lebanon (which is just complex in all the most beautiful, interesting, and sometimes sad ways), though with the emergence of the State of Israel a non-Arab actor, in historical terms, "appeared." That said, while the area has long been Arab and Sunni Muslim dominated, this isn't to say it was ever ethnically or religiously simple - cosmopolitan was conceived of as a word to deal with this region, I'm half convinced - though that doesn't mean people always liked each other before the 1940s. Or the Crusades. Today many minority religious groups are very powerful in this sub-region and the variety of regime sub-types is kind of stunning. Tragically, so is the level of violence, both literal and structural. Divided after the break-up of the Ottoman Empire (against American wishes) by the United Kingdom and France into League of Nations protectorates; also, the territory of Palestine which would become today's Israel was largely colonized (in its initial iteration, at least) by Europeans and Americans of the Jewish faith pursuing the 20th Century's favorite cause, nationalism, and fleeing the very real history of persecution in that faith in Europe.
3. Iran - Iran, formerly Persia to Westerners, the huge subregion that stretches from the Caucus Mountains and Caspian in the north to the Persian (or Arab, depending on who you are) Gulf and Arabian Sea in the South, hugging against the western Himalayas in the east and right across the river from best friend/worst friend forever Iraq, Iran is interesting because it wasn't Ottoman, or Arab, or dominated by Sunni Islam. That said, this ancient state, and it is truly ancient, has a history which in many ways is a dialog with the same questions struggled with by the Turkic and Arabic empires and its history has been, in many ways, one which reflects the choices not taken by those states. The Kingdom of Persia was the primary competitor for dominance of the Middle East with, well, almost every other empire that would emerge for almost its entire history, both before and after conversion to Shi'a Islam. Oh, and while Iran was never directly colonized, it spent a huge portion of the last century dominated utterly by the British. Also, ethno-religiously diverse but definitely Persian dominated Iran is unique in that it is a model for a theocratic Islamic republic, a regime sub-type set that is rivaled only Sunni traditional hereditary states in terms of its influence on 20th and 21st Century Islamic fundamentalist thought.
4. Iraq - You thought I was going to stay romantic didn't you, go with Mesopotamia. Sorry. I'm a rebel. Regardless, Iraq is that territory which, for the time being, is a state that is emerging from a forced regime-change (by the United States and several of its allies, if you didn't know) which is located primarily between the Euphrates and Tigris Rivers. It is a complex state, which is probably why it ideally would never have been only one state in the modern period - it is not definitely dominated by any one ethnic or religious group, but three groups - primarily Sunni Kurds in the north, primarily Sunni Arabs in the central part of the country, and primarily Shi'a Arabs in the south. As such, Iraq really is fascinating in that it it is a geographic wedge between the great Sunni Arab culture and the great Shi'a Persian culture, a transition zone with high levels of cultural diffusion that make the idea (and physical prospect) of splitting the state desperately painful. Iraq is where the Middle East as a whole has come together as a society and now, well, they have to live with it. Iraq was, it should be noted, a protectorate of the British as well.
5. The Arabian Peninsula - We can really talk about two, maybe three, categories of states on the Arabian Peninsula, which is a large, fairly dry bear claw of a piece of land surrounded by narrow gulfs or seas on three sides, the Arabian Sea open water sea on another, and then the deserts that separate northern Arabia from the Peninsula to the North. The biggest state is the never colonized successfully Kingdom of Saudi Arabia - it takes up most of the Peninsula's territory and besides being a regional power driven by an engine of petroleum, it is also home to a traditional monarchy that wasn't installed by someone else - a traditional monarchy that supports a heavy-on-the-Sunni-theocratic institutional design based on Salafi legal teachings. It is also home to the Muslim holy cities of Mecca and Medina, and as such the King, in exchange for the enormous undertaking of maintaining these cities in a state appropriate for the annual hajj, receives enormous international curry and favor. That said, the Saudi Kingdom, while not a hermit kingdom by any means, was always more aloof from the the region's politics than others, partly because its geography allowed it to be, but partly because it was the only state not integrated into the Ottoman Empire or another regional trading empire. The other states were all administered by the Ottomans for extended periods of time or maintained extensive overseas empires - the Gulf states of Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) would all be for the former category, Yemen and Oman of the latter. Regardless, all these states are dominated by Sunni Arabs - though some with a twist - the UAE depends, for instance, on migrant labor of such quantities that the immigrants are a numerical majority, and in Bahrain Shi'a outnumber Sunni, but have virtually none of the political power. Yemen is of course our "maybe a third kinda' state" - no part of the Peninsula has experienced as much warfare as Yemen during the last century where it became a battleground for Cold War politics before finally reuniting in 1990 as a republic (the only one on the Peninsula). Still suffering the after effects of a tough century, its development lags behind that of the other peninsular states. Oh, and both Yemen and Oman? Former British protectorates.
Okay, those are the easiest ones. The next one is slightly more problematic due of a simple question of geography - it isn't even on the same continent as the previous sub-regions. . .
6. North Africa - North Africa is exactly what it sounds like - that strip of states which bound the southern Mediterranean Sea - Morocco (and occupied Western Sahara), Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, and Egypt. All of these states are predominately Arab (though the diversity of what "Arab" means as a concept really comes through when comparing Morocco to Egypt to Oman to Syria) and predominately Sunni Muslim, though significant ethnic and/or religious minority populations exist in most of the states of the region (e.g. Berbers, Bedouin and Coptic Christians). All of these states were at some point part of the Ottoman administration except for Morocco, and all were at some point colonies and/or protectorates of either the United Kingdom or France with the exception of Libya, which was a colony of Italy.
Okay, the phase that is relatively uncontroversial has drawn to a rapid close. From this point on the sub-regions I'm adding to the greater Middle East, or rather dealing with as if they are a part thereof, become a bit more problematic - I'll explain why in each case, of course, but the gist is that these other sub-regions share more and more characteristics with other general regions. That said, all of these regions are predominantly Muslim, though we'll see that there are outlier states which are non-Muslim or that have complex/split religious identities, and see that while in a few of the sub-regions Arab culture and language are important, others lay entirely within the greater Iranian/Persian and Turkish cultural hearths thanks to a long history of empires and migrations across the sweep of Central Asia.
7. Sahara-Sahelian Africa - The Sahara desert, much of which is contained in the region already described as North Africa, is nothing you aren't already familiar with - it is the desert that all other deserts are measured by in popular culture. The Sahel, however, may be less familiar to you - it is the dry transitional region that divides the Sahara from the wetter areas of central Africa, a place of very dry, often seasons grassland and savanna prone to droughts. This region fascinates me, and I wish I could find more on the pre-Western kingdoms that dominated the region (growth area, future historians) but in essence what we find is that the region was dominated by oasis and trading kingdoms specializing in high-profit durable goods for centuries, save around huge sources of water that allowed for denser populations (e.g. the Nile). The states I include in this sub-region are Mauritania, Mali, Niger, Chad, the Sudan, Somalia, Ethiopia, Eritrea, and Djibouti - states that we can roughly divide into four groups. Mauritania, Mali, Niger, and Chad are all former French holdings that are truly desert regions in which you have relatively high ethno-national diversity and a significant, if not overwhelming, Islamic population, though in the case of the first is Arabic an official language. These are areas that were converted fairly soon after the emergence of Islam but which were politically (though perhaps not economically) far less integrated into the "Islamic mainstream" of North Africa and Southwest Asia. The Sudan, well, it gets its own category - ethnically diverse, split religiously, home to radically different climates, this enormous former colony of Britain seems to be on its way to becoming multiple states and I can't but think that isn't for the best for everyone involved. Northern Sudan is definitively Arab territory, while the Darfur in the west resembles Chad culturally and Southern Sudan is definitely "East African" and home to more practicers of traditional religions and Christianity - though Arabic is frequently used as a lingua franca throughout the country and in urban areas. Ethiopia and Eritrea represent our third clumping - Eritrea being a part of Ethiopia until the 1990s - ethnically diverse states which are majority Christian with large numbers of Muslims. Eritrea has had more definitely Arabic influence (hardly surprising given its geography) though both are clearly sheltered politically from the region's greater movements - transitional again is the by-word. Both were administered together as a colony of Italy during the early 20th Century. The final clumping are those states which are part of greater Somalia - Somalia, Djibouti, and the often overlooked predominately Somali territories of Ethiopia known as the Ogadan. The Somali people are overwhelmingly Muslim by faith, though there is great variance in terms of interpretation, and the there has been significant Arab influence on Somalian history and culture - hardly surprising given its deep and enduring relationships with the states on the nearby Arabian Peninsula - their territories were colonized by both the United Kingdom and Italy in Somalia proper, Italy in the Ogadan, and France in what is today Djibouti.
8. Western South Asia - Yes, I did just distinguish between Western South Asia and Southwest Asia - if you're from near the Southern West Virginia/Southwest Virginia borderlands, like I am, you'll be able to keep up. If not, well, such is life. The gist is this - Afghanistan and Pakistan are in essence transitional zones between Persian/Iranian culture, to their West, Central Asia to their North, and the astounding cultural complexity of the Indian subcontinent to the their East. Of course, both of these states (if we can meaningfully talk about Afghanistan as a functional state) were administered as part of the British "Empire of India," but that does not tell us much - what is critical is to bear in mind that both are overwhelmingly Muslim religiously (Pakistan now far more so now than historically after the flight of non-Muslims from Pakistan and Muslims from India in the mid-20th Century), though with many different Islamic traditions, and with distinct divides between more secular urban areas and rural areas dominated by traditional institutions.
9. Central Asia - The meaning of Central Asia has shifted over time, but what it has always been is that area of mountain, steppe, taiga, desert, and tundra filled Asia dominated by political-economies specially suited to difficult-to-survive-in-environments. Arguably huge parts of today's Russian Federation, People's Republic of China, and India should be included - they only reason I leave them out is that, well, the Central Asian peoples of these regions aren't really that in control of their own political destinies (e.g. Xinjiang, traditional home of the Uyghur Turks) , on the one hand, and on the other, the fact that while many of the Central Asians are of the Muslim faith, these are generally (with meaningful exceptions) in the minority. Thus, while Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, and Kyrgyzstan are probably more like Mongolia than Morocco, the predominance of Buddhism and indigenous religious beliefs in Mongolia has prompted me to leave it right out. Regardless, the states included in this definition of Central Asia are overwhelmingly dominated by the speakers of Turkic languages, unsurprising since this is where the Turks of Southwest Asia originally migrated from centuries before, and all are former Soviet holdings that broke away during the Revolutions of 1989 to 1991. Which of course makes one wonder about the future of other primarily Islamic regions in Central Asia that haven't achieved independence should demonstration effect really ramp up at sometime in the future.
And finally,
10. The Caucasus Region - The Caucasus Mountains are just, well, geographically they're unusual. they are literally a chain of mountains and valleys that separate the Black Sea from the Caspian Sea, east to west, and European Russia from Southwest Asia, north to south. This means they were destined to importance whether their residents desired it or not - put aside the domestic characteristics of this sub-region, it is a corridor for trade, for war, a choke-point between civilizations. That means great history books and high walls. Three states are independent currently in the Caucasus - Azerbaijan, Georgia, and Armenia, but as in the case of Central Asia, the picture is really a little more complicated when we remember that two of these states have quasi-states that are functionally independent within them (Nagorno-Karabakh in Azerbaijan and Abkhazia and South Ossetia in Georgia) and that Russia's most rabidly pro-disintegration regions are nestled in the Russian Caucasians, including Chechnya and Dagestan. The area is ethno-nationally very diverse, adding to the complications (and interest), though most people are either Eastern Orthodox Christians, Armenian Christians, or Muslim - of the independent states, and this is probably what renders this addition to my list more contentious than any other, only Azerbaijan is predominately Muslim - specifically, Shi'a. Why include this region in the list? Well, largely because the Caucasus states, all former Soviet holdings like the Central Asian states, are politically, economically, and culturally so deeply tied to the cultural trends of Southwest Asia - it would be tough not to be when your neighbors for the last several centuries have been the Ottoman Empire and the Kingdom of Persia/Iran. Azerbaijani, by the way, is a Turkic language - Georgian and Armenian are not related to one of the "big three" language groups of the greater Middle East.
To say, first off, that this is a bare-minimum, scratching the barrel sort of explanation is to say the least - I know. I spent hours on this and feel like I could probably work solidly for a week expanding, but I'm not sure whether that would make it more useful as a "brief" introduction to why I am including what I'm including in the concept of greater Middle East. I would like to note a couple of the things we see, maybe not universally, but on a huge scale across all these diverse areas, however, as a final bow on the package:
1. The preeminence of Islam - There are other faiths in these regions, some of which even are in-state majorities. And, certainly, there are a number of very religiously complex states. Further yet, Islam is by no means a monolith, but a complex set of different sects, denominations, and schools of thought. But there is no question that this broad band of states is overwhelmingly Muslim.
2. The preeminence of three major lingo-cultural groups - Again, there is tremendous ethno-national variety and complexity in the greater Middle East, but the Arab, Turkish, and Persian/Iranian cultures are the superpowers, directly or indirectly impacting culture and language in virtually every corner.
3. The environment - The greater Middle East is not, by and large, a land of milk and honey - most of the greater Middle East is agriculturally marginal, meaning it takes a lot of work to live there, dominated as it is by harsh environments - deserts, steppes, savannas, and mountain ranges make up an enormous proportion of the region. Not only that, we see that much of this region is blessed with enormous petroleum and natural gas reserves - this has led to the replication of certain developmental patterns which are rarely successful in the long-term (again, there are key exceptions) in the 20th and early 21st Century - what geographers and social scientists refer to as "resource curse."
4. Democracy is rare - Democracy is very rare in the greater Middle East, rarer than in any othier region of the world, in fact. There are untold theories as to why this is this the case, but that subject deserves a lot of space.
5. Pre-colonial empires - Persian/Iranian, Turkish, and/or Arab - the name of the game for centuries was multi-religious, multi-ethnic empires.
6. Colonial experiences until fairly late - The vast majority of the greater Middle East was, at one time, controlled by one of four powers - the United Kingdom, France, the Soviet Union/Russia, and/or Italy.
[Note: I'll probably be returning to this post in the future to tighten it up, add details, etc. - I'll let you know when I do!]
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