Middle East

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MIDDLE EAST

regional name with various usages and meanings.

The usage and meaning of "Middle East" have been a source of heated debate. As early as 1949, when other terms, particularly "Near East," were still used, Winston Churchill said: "I had always felt that the name 'Middle East' for Egypt, the Levant, Syria, and Turkey was ill-chosen. This was the Near East. Persia and Iraq were the Middle East." Despite the tacit acceptance of the term by most scholars, journalists, and politicians, few specialists would deny a lingering discomfort with the two words.

Regional geographic names based upon directions are always problematic. They necessarily imply a perspective—in this case, obviously that of "the West." "The East" brings to mind the "Eastern Question" that had plagued Europe since the eighteenth century. Earlier, Europeans had used "the Levant," from the French lever (to rise), meaning the place where the sun rises: the eastern coast of the Mediterranean (or of Spain). In the Middle Ages, the favored term was outremer (overseas).

"The East," and its adjectival form "oriental," connoted in the European mind more than just a geographic locale. It evoked a world of strange customs, religious fanaticism, exotic sexual practices, and sybaritic culture. As travels and colonial activity made India, and then China, familiar, the need arose to define "East" further. By the late nineteenth century the Ottoman realm was the "Near East" in contradistinction to China and Japan, the "Far East."

It is generally accepted that the earliest reference to "Middle East" occurs in Alfred Thayer Mahan's "The Persian Gulf and International Relations," in the September 1902 issue of the National Review (London). Popularization of the new usage is credited to Valentine Chirol, Tehran correspondent for The Times who, in the title of the first in a series of articles, "The Middle Eastern Question," dated 14 October 1902, retrieved the term from Mahan's text. An additional factor in its popularization was the shifting balance of power from mainland Europe to the American side of the Atlantic. From an American point of view, everything on the European side of the Atlantic is, geographically, east. Thus, the further reaches occupied by Arabs, Turks, and Persians plausibly seemed more "middle" than "near."

Since the 1950s "the Middle East" has been the favored American term for newly founded academic institutes, programs, and professional associations, though use of "Near East" has persisted in archaeological circles and academic departments founded before World War II. The U.S. Department of State compromised with a division for "Near and Middle East" affairs.

Today "the Middle East" encompasses the lands that stretch from Egypt to Turkey and Iraq, including the Arabian peninsula, usually Iran, and, somewhat less frequently, Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, and Sudan.

The term is in no way coterminous with "the Muslim (or Islamic) world." The majority of the world's Muslims live outside "the Middle East," by any definition. It has been suggested that "the Middle East" is best considered a purely geographical term that encompasses roughly the area of the earliest wave of Muslim conquests, stretching from Morocco to Afghanistan and Pakistan, with the later inclusion of Anatolia (modern Turkey). Others disagree, saying that such a historical definition would also include parts of Europe (such as Spain and Sicily) and central Asia.