by Bonine, Michael E. ; Amanat, Abbas; Gasper, Michael Ezekiel
In British usages, the term “Middle East” and its near cognates were increasingly used to refer to India and its immediate vicinity. An influential work that spread this perception was Lord Curzon’s 1894 book, Problems of the Far East.81 In the words of its reviewer, “to the author there is a Near East—Russia and Persia; a Central East—India and the adjoining lands; and the regions beyond India, or the Far East.”82 This conception of the Central East, also referred to as the Middle East, became the standard British perception. Indeed, from 1895 onward, British newspapers and magazines commonly employed the term “Middle East” in reference to India and its neighbors.83 General Sir Thomas Gordon’s 1900 article, “The Problem of the Middle East,” discussed Afghanistan and Persia within the context of Anglo-Russian rivalry.84 In 1902, the navy officer and professor Captain Alfred T. Mahan gave the term “Middle East” a strategic and geopolitical cast by defining it in relation to maritime routes essential for military control of the area.85 Although he was an American naval officer, Mahan’s region was an exclusively British definition of the area constructed in response to the objectives and capabilities of sea power. In his 1903 book The Middle Eastern Question, Valentine Chirol tied the India Question to the Eastern Question.86 Addressing the British audience, Arminius Vambéry’s Western Civilization in Eastern Lands, a study on the British-Russian contest in Central Asia, was published in 1906 with “the Middle East” in its subtitle.87
Although “the Nearer East,” “the Near East,” and “the Middle East” were firmly established in European imagination during the second half of the nineteenth century, for the layperson this diversity of concepts may have looked chaotic. So, as a matter of clarity, many authors opted to use both terms together in combination as “the Near and Middle East.” What they intended to imply was the conventional East or the Orient of European imagination or simply the sum of the contents of both terms. The use of these composite terms conveyed a sense of authority and learnedness. Yet others used the composite term to simply avoid their equivocality. Boundaries between Europe and the Far East were easier to conceive than the boundaries between the Near East and the Middle East.
Yet the more usual use of this combined construct was in fact quite learned and intended for the sake of its semantic range, particularly in British conceptions. As Britain’s military and colonial involvements spanned from Egypt to India, this construct was found to be more convenient for writing on international affairs. More important, the Eastern Question was now thought to represent the whole set of relations between Europe and the East. Further, the late nineteenth century also witnessed the rise of non-Western ideologies articulated in a universal language and shared sentiments aimed at particular contexts, most notably the pan-Islamic movement. In the face of such developments, “the Near and the Middle East” was conceived to have referred to the broader spatial content of the Eastern Question from the Balkans to India. When used as such, the construct was largely devoid of its historical content and mostly used in reference to current affairs. Ironically, its geographical content was more definite than all other regionalizing concepts discussed above.
By the early twentieth century, there were quite a variety of terms and usages for this region. For instance, Victor Dickins in 1903 divided the Orient into two broad parts, the Near and Middle East versus the Far East, to point out the civilizational contrast between the two. Charles Eliot in 1907 referred to an area from Constantinople to Delhi in juxtaposition with China. In 1904 Ludwig Wilser used der Nahe und Mittlere Ost to criticize German ambitions to expand in an area where Britain already had a firm hold. Henry Steed in 1915 used the term in reference to the German projects to settle the Eastern Question, having in mind Eastern Europe. In 1909, Henry Dyer’s use of the term excluded India. In 1916 Charles Seymour employed the term “the Near and Central East” in reference to an area from the Ottoman Empire to China, including Central Asia. The Missionary Survey of the World in 1917 established “the Near and the Middle East” among the major divisions of the world for missionary activity. In 1918 Thomas Holdich, who also used “the Near East” and “the Middle East” separately, preferred the combined form when referring to the geographical area between the West and the Farther East.88
Although this composite form was gaining favor, it was not a product of a new geographic vision. Rather it merely added the spatial content of the two terms involved. In any case, its life was cut short to a great extent by Toynbee’s simplification of this conceptual complexity. Toynbee confined the geographical spaces of both terms to the same area and defined them from a strictly civilizational point of view. In sharp contrast with his wartime views and reflective of his subsequent trip to Asia Minor, he distinguished the two terms on the grounds of historical experience rather than contemporary geography. For him the term “Near East” denoted “the civilization which grew up from among the ruins of Ancient Hellenic or Greco-Roman civilization,” whereas the Middle East referred to “the civilization which has grown up from among the ruins of the ancient civilizations of Egypt and Mesopotamia.”89 His Near East map therefore excluded Iran but included Libya and Macedonia.90 He further argued that the West and the Ottomans belonged to different civilizational genealogies with distinct origins and diverse historical trajectories. Unlike its kin in the West, Near Eastern civilization (except in the case of Russia) broke down in the eleventh century due to the premature development of its state structure. However, Middle Eastern civilization broke down in the sixteenth century despite the political and military genius of the early Ottoman Empire. For Toynbee, the terms “Near East” and “Middle East” referred to the same geography but two distinct civilizations and historical trajectories.
What turned these terms into staples of media lexicon was their association with the Eastern Question. In early uses of “the Middle East” and its cognates, the term’s reference was more spatial than ideological. During the nineteenth century, within the context of the Eastern Question, it gained its ideological content and came to refer to a particular cultural and human geography with which Europe had a troubled relation. From 1895 onward, “the Eastern Question” was more specifically referred to as “the Near Eastern Question,” “the Near East Question,” “the Problem of the Near East,” and the like.91 The entire historical content of “the Eastern Question” was already embedded in this more specific terminology. Albert Hart, writing in 1923, argued that “the Near Eastern Question” was already twenty-five hundred years old, having first been conceived with the clash between the Athenians and the King of Persia.92 At the same time, “the Nearer Eastern Question” was used synonymously with “the Near Eastern Question” but often with a distinctly Christian perspective.93 In British perceptions, “the Orient” was not only de-mystified by its increasing replacement by “the East” but also partitioned along strategic colonial projects and disenchanted from indigenous geopolitics. Local entanglements were situated within the context of a more abstract and broader confrontation between the West and the East and retranscribed as a new series of “questions.” Thus the China Question became the Far Eastern Question, the India Question and Persian Question became the Middle Eastern Question, and the Turkish (Ottoman) Question became the Near Eastern Question.94 The first maps of this region were drawn only after the Eastern Question was dismantled into the Near Eastern Question and the Middle Eastern Question.
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. It was a shared pursuit, if not a projec
t, to create and reinvigorate a common historical memory, reclaiming lost lands, and repossessing its classical and Christian heritage, a project that entailed establishing first what Europe was not, a negative definition that created oriental stereotypes to identify, compare, and rid. Obsessive discussion of the Turks was, in this context, an inherent part of existing discourses on civilization, commercialism, racism, and feminism that were forging the European self-image.95
In political terms, much of the Eastern Question debate since the Congress of Vienna focused on the post-Ottoman configuration of the contested space from the Danube to the Euphrates. As symbolized by the sick man metaphor, the Ottoman Empire was a relic of past failures, a nonentity without a future whose survival could only be sustained by Great Power rivalry.96 In this respect, the Eastern Question was part of the anti-Ottoman appeal for a united Europe. For as soon as the Eastern Question was answered, the Ottoman Empire would have ceased to exist. The Ottoman Empire’s existence was thus inseparably tied to the Eastern Question. A growing number of European authors then saw no incompatibility in covering the Ottoman Empire not as a separate unit but as chapters of the Eastern Question. A significant outcome of the Eastern Question concerning the construction of the modern Middle East was its regionalizing effect. As it was neatly depicted by the Historische Karten zur Orientalischen Frage, published in Brockhaus’ Konversations-Lexikon (Figure 1.1), the very geographical scope of the Eastern Question created its own regional paradigm.97 Thus “the Middle East” and its cognates were conveniently associated with the geographical locus of the Eastern Question. As the marked transition from “the Eastern Question” to “the Middle Eastern Question” and its cognates reveals, the Eastern Question remained embedded in the Middle East as its principal signifier.
THE LOCAL NEAR EAST, MIDDLE EAST, AND ORIENT
Although imposed from outside, identification with “the Near East” and “the Middle East” was readily received by the locals under the authority of European image making. In the case of the Ottomans, the terms were meaningless but nevertheless adopted as part of the prevailing language in the international press and diplomacy. Once proudly defining themselves as the Rumis, the Ottoman elite first conceded to perceive themselves as easterners in the nineteenth century and then started to imagine themselves as part of “the Near East” by the turn of the twentieth century with almost no inquiry into the meaning and implication of this term.98 This adoption of the term owes a great deal to the presence of the American Committee for Relief in the Near East (Amerikan Şark-ι Karib Muavenet Cemiyeti) that was founded in 1915 to assist Christians living in the Ottoman Empire.99 Yet, even the Ottomans found the term convenient for pragmatic purposes. Having seen the emergence of powerful and expansionist nation-states that were once part of the empire, the Ottoman elite considered themselves not “the problem” but a player just like others in the broader problem that came to be commonly dubbed the Near Eastern Question.
But other locals, the ones seeking independence and new identities, quickly embraced these terms mainly for their secularizing effect, in a quest to turn themselves into legitimate players on the Eastern Question. In the final decades of the Ottoman Empire and after, frequently shifting borders left ethnic and religious communities divided and relocated in newly formed political entities. As in the case of the Association for the Strengthening of Near Eastern Circassian Rights (Şark-ι Karib Çerkesleri Temin-i Hukuk Cemiyeti), these communities used “the Near East” in a diasporic sense.100 Turkish press during the War of Independence found the term “Near East” useful in discussing the area that once was under Ottoman rule.101 For successor states of the Ottoman Empire, self-identification with the Near East also meant proximity to Europe, an act of dissociation from the more exotic “Orient,” and a proof of disowning their Ottoman past.
The “Orient” and its equivalents in local languages are now mostly used in the (exotic) tourism industry as a relic of the past. However, in the nineteenth century, it was widely adopted as a supra identity among the peoples of Asia and North Africa before it was partitioned into subregions. From Morocco to Japan, intellectuals and statesmen in the main felt themselves part of the greater Oriental community and, in symbiosis with their peculiar cultural and political identities, could comfortably speak for the whole Orient. Their exposure to colonialism and European claims of civilizational hierarchy created a defensive solidarity and cooperation. European exclusivism and involvement in North Africa and Asia not only created an imaginary Orient with definable qualities but also actually led to an Oriental consciousness among the locals, ultimately creating a more tangible Orient with greater interaction among its leaders. So the Orient became at least in part a reality. The 1905 war between Russia and Japan, for example, was hailed throughout Asia as a victory of the Orient against the West.102 In the face of this strengthening anti-Westernist wave toward the late nineteenth century, envisioning the Orient through regions that suit European views and colonial designs was strategically conducive to break the threat of Oriental consciousness. The same Orient created by European imagination was thus partitioned into separate units. In the age of flourishing pan-movements, differentiating the newly conceived regions of Asia from each other certainly did not fare very well for such threatening ideologies ranging from Pan-Islamism to Pan-Asianism.
Figure 1.1. Historical Map of the Eastern Question. Brockhaus’ Konversations-Lexikon, 1894–1896, 818a (original in color).
CONCLUSION
Despite the rise of modern geography and cartography in the contemporary era, the term “Middle East” and its variations were not created by geographers or cartographers. Rather, they provided them an enduring challenge to map out the region and define it as a coherent geography. Yet it would be meaningless, if not impossible, to trace the origins of these terms to a single historical factor or process. Throughout the nineteenth century and beyond, a number of terms were proposed by different players for different purposes, in many cases independently from each other. Many Christian authors, for example, based their views on the scriptures and considered the Near East as the area centered on the Holy Land. For many Orientalists and historians of antiquity, these terms represented the ancient origins of European civilization, which could be differentiated from the rest of the Orient and yet could not yet be considered part of contemporary European civilization. For British diplomats, “the Middle East” was conceived to facilitate the logistics of its imperial establishment. When British interests centered on India, the area was meaningful as the Middle East. When the imperial interests centered on the Ottoman Empire during World War I, the Levant became the center point of the new Middle East.
In the wake of World War I, the European discourse on the Eastern Question revolved around the widespread belief that it was now finally settled (Figure 1.2). As passionately reported by Toynbee in 1917, the Allied Powers had declared the purpose of the war as “the liberation of the peoples who now lie beneath the murderous tyranny of the Turks” and “the expulsion from Europe of the Ottoman Empire, which has proved itself so radically alien to Western Civilization.”103 Since then, it was often invoked and thought to be still unsettled but rarely used to define Europe’s relationship to its East. Instead, the terms “the Near East” and “the Middle East” almost synonymously replaced “the Eastern Question,” but now without the “Question” attached. The semantic cache of these terms was already charged by the historical content of the Eastern Question.
As their quick and wide reception in both media and academia show, “the Middle East” and other similar constructions proved very convenient in envisioning Europe’s relationship with its East. The civilizing mission entailed prescribing order to the non-European world, a pursuit carried out in tandem with colonialism. Creating such a region enabled European powers to supersede local realities and render their versatile problems into a few manageable categories while freeing themselves from being drawn into existing local entanglements. European observers
could then comfortably render differences and perspectives into a few essential points of conflict, undermine existing social structures and cultural formations, and disenchant geography from its inhabitants and history. In this Eurocentric view of the world, seen from the metropolis, what the periphery lacked may be seen as a shortcoming and what was different may be considered as an anomaly. By regionalizing a given geographical space and rendering its essential qualities into a few universal characteristics, it simplified dealings with the perceived region in question. “The Middle East” as such still primarily signifies Europe’s historical experience. “The Middle East” provides no local imagery prior to its engagement with Europe. It is no surprise, then, that modern scholars are very reluctant to teach courses on the medieval Islamic period under the rubric of the Middle East whereas teaching the modern period of the same area is now commonly referred to as the Modern Middle East.
Figure 1.2. The Revival of the Eastern Question. Le Petit Journal Supplément Illustré 935, October 18,1908 (original in color).
This one-sided and holistic approach not only saved Europeans from seriously studying what they have been regionalizing but also in fact justified or even normalized it. The number of Europeans, from all walks of life, writing on the Eastern Question and the Near East was remarkable. But more astounding was the authoritative and prescriptive language adopted by these authors in drastic contrast to their competence on the subject about which they were writing. Even the most sophisticated intellectuals, some even without seeing and some with a single glance, could read the essential qualities of Oriental societies. Even the ones who spent serious time and effort in observing non-European societies were outside viewers with little understanding and penetration of the culture. The few who displayed a genuine interest in studying societies east of Europe produced the kind of representations with which the represented might not disagree, but these views were greatly dwarfed by the flood of more popular and stereotypical writings in the media.
