Is There a Middle East?

by Bonine, Michael E. ; Amanat, Abbas; Gasper, Michael Ezekiel

  Although Brooks seems to reject a cultural determinist view of Middle East exceptionalism, he nevertheless suggests that it is America’s role to “bring” the Arabs into modernity, implying that they are incapable of bringing themselves due to their societies’ own internal characteristics. Such a view still relies on the binary logic of Middle East exceptionalism, and it can only really be understood through the lens of “American exceptionalism.” In other words, the Bush administration viewed itself as capable of negating the region’s exceptional status due to the exceptional capacities and universal values of the United States. As a senior adviser to President Bush explained to journalist Ron Suskind: “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”88

  CONCLUSION: THERE IS A MIDDLE EAST!

  Michael Ezekiel Gasper

  The Middle East has become. . . a geographical expression for countries whose current orientations show more diversity than unity.

  —Nikki Keddie, Is There a Middle East?

  SO, IS THERE A MIDDLE EAST? And if so, where is it? Is it a particular place? If not, what is it? This volume shows the ways in which the term “Middle East” seems to evoke a set of questions, or often a set of problems, more than it does a clearly delineated geographical location. These essays show how the concept of the Middle East was and is constructed and reconstructed from a variety of sources that include political/strategic, religious, and ideological elements that often have little relation to the region’s geography, culture, or history. Accordingly, this collection suggests that rather than try to define or redefine or not define the Middle East it is perhaps more fruitful to investigate the effects that this abstract category has had, and continues to have, on the way that many people in the world think and act with respect to the region. In this sense these chapters enumerate some of the links between the production of knowledge and the categories used to arrange that knowledge and their impact on the lives of the people who live there. Thus, in the main this diverse collection of essays by historians, geographers, anthropologists, and political scientists shares a concern with the effects of geographic categories on the lives that people lead and the ways that scholars depict them.1

  The contributors take the question “Is there a Middle East?” as a starting point to explore how the production of knowledge has consequences in the ways people think and have thought about the region both inside and outside of it. For example, Diana Davis argues that the environmental history of the region is based on assumptions derived in part from biblical imagery of a land of milk and honey. Her chapter charts the emergence of the “declensionist environmental narrative,” which asserts that livestock overgrazing, careless deforestation, and general mismanagement caused the land to lose its putative “biblical” lushness. She then shows how this assumption became foundational for narratives of Middle Eastern environmental history and even more perversely for land management strategies of both local states and of the international development community.

  Perhaps the primary question that comes to mind in reading these chapters is first and foremost, is there a Middle East? Too often laypeople, influential commentators, policy experts, and even scholars speak confidently about “the Middle East” without clearly defining the object to which they are referring. The essays in the volume have attempted to speak to this paradox from a variety of different perspectives that take into account geographical, historical, and ideological factors. These chapters explore the reception and evolution of the imaginative power of the West. They explicate how outsiders—Europeans and Americans—have delineated and defined the region geographically and conceptually. We have learned that the outlines of the Middle East changed according to strategic and professional concerns lying outside of the region. We have also glimpsed the perhaps unwitting collusion on the part of the academy in the making and remaking of the modern Middle East.2 In their contributions, Hüseyin Yılmaz, Roger Adelson, and Michael Bonine describe some of the myriad permutations of the term among experts and laypeople and the dizzying array of political and professional considerations that went into their making.

  Yılmaz begins this discussion by identifying the discursive antecedents that came to underpin the term in its early development. He shows that after World War I the term “Middle East” inherited much of the politics and the sense of absolute Otherness that underlay the “Eastern Question” in the nineteenth century. As a consequence, during the twentieth century the Middle East, including the lands of the Ottoman Empire and its successor states, which was formerly the referent territory for the “Eastern Question,” continued to signify all that the West was not. In some of the recent debates about the appropriateness of the modern Turkish Republic joining the European Union, one detects traces of these same arguments. For example, a French parliamentarian responding to a question about Turkish ascension to the EU remarked that the “integration of Turkey is the breakdown of the European project. . . . We don’t have a common history, culture or vision. . . . European identity is built on a common history, a Judeo-Christian culture, a culture of human rights and the enlightenment ideas.”3

  Adelson adds another dimension to this discussion as he examines the history and use (and “misuse”) of the term by British and American figures in the early twentieth century. Then he traces how experts in a number of disciplines and fields of endeavor transformed the “Middle East” into a mainstay of policy discussions and public discourse. Bonine focuses more narrowly on how professional geographers conceptualized the region and examines the way they have aggregated, and in some cases disaggregated, the Middle East (and North Africa). While Adelson and Bonine look at the rise of expertise and specialization on the Middle East in the Anglophone world, Ramzi Rouighi provides much-needed insight into how this process unfolded in Francophone discourses on North Africa. In his contribution to the volume Rouighi explicates how the idea of “the Middle East” was and was not translated into the discursive practices of Francophone North Africans.

  In the volumes of writing on the Middle East, one discovers that some do not hesitate to define it as the Arab world plus Iran, Turkey, and Israel. However, one can find others who include Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, Turkey, Iran, Mauritania, Sudan, and Somalia. Others insist on excluding Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, and Libya, while some append the Central Asian nations of the former Soviet Union to their Middle East. In addition, in more recent days it is fairly common to find references to Afghanistan and Pakistan as Middle Eastern states. As Bonine has shown, even for professional geographers the geographical ambiguity of the region is perhaps most clearly manifested in the fact that there is neither consistency nor even a clear consensus on the outlines of the region.

  One may suggest that the term “Middle East” is often so imprecisely or variously defined that it becomes almost meaningless. Similarly, one may put forth many warranted criticisms about the political nature of the concept, or one may readily accept that delineating regions such as the Middle East inevitably entails political questions. However, pointing out that our geographical concepts are informed by our politics hardly ranks as a major theoretical insight. Indeed, a variety of decisions factor into the production of categories, definitions and concepts that we use to make sense of the world. No one can doubt that the decision on what to include or exclude within a regional rubric inevitably involves some political considerations, and this book has explored the politics of geography in the term “Middle East.”

  If a standard geographical description eludes us, perhaps some other way that the region is commonly represented as a single unit provides a criterion by which to better grasp the nature of the Middle East. While no doubt an incomplete list, some of the more familiar themes that are often said to unite t
he Middle East range from religion to language to ethnicity to political identity.

  Over the decades many of those writing about the Middle East began with the assumption that Islam is the linchpin for understanding the region. There are a number of reasons why this is a fallacy. The most basic problem is that Islam by itself does not provide a coherent frame of analysis for students of the region, which contains significant minorities of non-Muslims such as Christians, Jews, Bahi’is, and Zoroastrians. To privilege Islam as the primary social and cultural marker effectively excludes many millions of people from consideration. Second, and even more obvious, the Muslim world does not correspond to the Middle East; the vast majority of Muslims live outside the region—however one defines it. Thus, the term “Muslim” tells us very little that is specific to the Middle East. It is an open question as to what kinds of specific insights for one region may be garnered from the designation “Muslim,” since it applies to a fifth of the world’s population. Why should we presume that being a Muslim in the Middle East differs from being a Muslim qua Muslim in Pakistan or Chile? That a large segment of the population self-identifies as Muslim would tell a researcher very little that is specific to the Middle East. At the same time, while it is true that in the contemporary Middle East one encounters a host of self-described Islamic social and political organizations, charity and welfare societies, and a range of piety movements, this is hardly unique to the region. One can find similar organizations, associations, and movements among Muslims in many other parts of the world, including the United States and Europe.

  One can find stacks of dusty books that no one reads anymore that argue that to come to grips with Middle Eastern society, politics, and history one must begin and end with an emphasis on Islam. All of these books lost their sheen when some shift in Middle Eastern politics or society demonstrated the fallacy of this supposition. This happened during the Nassar era when a “dangerous” form of assertive nationalism inspired by atheistic communism was said to be displacing Islam as the primary sociopolitical force in Middle Eastern society. It happened again after the Iranian Revolution and the assassination of Anwar Sadat, when books about Islamic quietism were replaced with books about resurgent and revolutionary Islam. We saw this after the events of September 11, 2001, and we have seen this once again in the wake of the political convulsions that began in Tunisia in early 2011 and then spread throughout much of the Arab world, and we will no doubt continue to see this occur. The simple fact is that “Islam” is too broad a signifier to provide any useful insight into a society’s politics, culture, or history. Indeed, in studying the diversity of cultural and social phenomena, to say nothing of the political dynamics of the Middle East, one is severely handicapped by using “Islam” as the primary investigative instrument. Imagine trying to use the rubric “Christianity” to understand the breath of European culture, politics, and history throughout the entire modern period!

  Another common iteration of the term “Middle East” has it roughly interchangeable with the Arab world. The Arab world is a collection of about twenty-five countries where a single language (Arabic) and a single “ethnicity” (Arab) ostensibly dominate. This Middle East/Arab world would necessarily include all of North Africa, the Arabian Peninsula, the Persian Gulf, the eastern Mediterranean, and several states in northeast Africa, and would exclude Israel, Cyprus, Turkey, and Iran. However, great linguistic heterogeneity exists within this area, as significant minorities of non-Arabic speakers reside in both North Africa and the Arab states of the East. In addition, there are significant differences between Arabic dialects themselves. And as for “Arabs” being an ethnic group, this is a misnomer. An Arab is simply a designation for a person whose mother tongue is Arabic, regardless of one’s “ethnic” origin. Even if we ignore these issues, the more basic problem, of course, is that if the term “Middle East” is to denote an entity larger than the Arab world we are faced with including the many millions of Turkic and Persianate language speakers. However one looks at it, the Arab world is linguistically heterogeneous, and the larger Middle East is even more so.

  Just as they speak many languages, the region’s peoples are comprised of many different ethnicities. Nevertheless, the idea that somehow the Middle East is where one finds only Arabs still persists. In any case, as mentioned above, the term “Arab” itself is fraught in many ways. “Arab” is little more than an approximate linguistic designation. Just as the Arabic language has many dialects (even if generally mutually comprehensible), Arabic speakers come in all sizes, shapes, and colors. This can lead to much confusion. For example, one often reads that the conflict between northern and southern Sudan pits “Africans” against “Arabs” as if this were some kind of race conflict. Obviously, all Sudanese are Africans, and moreover, the partisans of both sides often do not differ significantly from one another with regard to physical appearance. If the ethnic term “Arab” is so encumbered, how are we to size up the even more general category, Middle Easterner? Rouighi examines this question from the perspective of the people of the Maghrib (Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia). He explains why the people of the Maghrib do not see their countries as part of the Middle East or consider themselves Middle Easterners.

  Just as these frameworks fail to capture the diversity of the Middle East, one is hard pressed to uncover a single comprehensive and exclusive political formation that is distinct from the rest of the world. For example, Middle Eastern states are organized in ways familiar to political scientists studying any other region of the world. Nor is the range of ideological orientations particularly unique. Liberal, statist, corporatist, and socialist trends vie with Islam-inspired political movements and organizations that have counterparts throughout the wider Muslim world and, indeed, across the globe. There exist few political ideologies—besides an array of garden variety particularist nationalisms—that are singularly “Middle Eastern.” This is not to deny that powerful ideological currents have transcended the region’s national borders over the last 150 years (the various Arab nationalisms are perhaps the most obvious) and that for periods these have been very important. Nevertheless, however successful these movements might have been at particular moments, they faced both strong internal and external obstacles that frustrated their full crystallization. This is one reason observers were equally surprised and hard pressed to explain the obvious similarities between the protests and upheavals that began in the Tunisian town of Sidi Bouzid in December 2010 and then spread through much of the rest of the Arab world in winter and spring 2011. First in Tunisia, and then in Egypt, Yemen, Morocco, Jordan, Bahrain, Oman, Libya, and Syria, protesters called for democratic reform by strengthening the rule of law. In addition, they called for an end to the corruption and cronyism that had marked these countries’ economic life for decades. People throughout the entire region even took up the same chant coined by demonstrators in Tunisia, “The people want the downfall of the regime.”

  In the face of the above observations, some are willing to accept that the complicated human geography of the Middle East frustrates almost any conceivable cultural, religious, or political framework for defining the region even while they suggest a negative framework for understanding it as a single unit. For them Middle Easterners have isolation from global economic and political trends in common. Similarly, one of the stereotypical commonplaces one encounters in best-selling nonfiction, newspaper commentary, and latenight comedy shows is that “the people in the Middle East have been killing one another since the beginning of time and will continue to do so.” This view echoes one found surprisingly often in more serious commentary and even among some in policy circles. It is so pernicious because it displaces the role of history, that is, the agency of human beings, with this odd amalgam of geopolitical folklore. The most troubling effect of this is that the Middle East seems to stand outside the rules of history and rationality. Unfortunately, it is not hyperbole to suggest that the Middle East, in so much of what is written today, is represented as the
quintessential exception to the human experience.

  Despite the obvious parallels with the rest of the postcolonial world, many specialists and influential media figures continue to see the region through this lens of “exceptionalism.” The basic idea of exceptionalism is that the social, political, and economic life of Middle East society operates according to criteria different than those found elsewhere in the world. This is the starting point for Waleed Hazbun’s chapter. In it he analyzes the production and husbanding of the idea of Middle East exceptionalism in the face of globalization in Western academia and media. In his critical intervention he shows how the “geopolitical imaginary” of Middle East exceptionalism supports a “mental map” for a particular kind of political geography. In the post-9/11 world this mental map has been translated into American-led efforts to “fix” the Middle East by making it unexceptional. This would be accomplished through a range of indirect and direct interventions, including the use of military force. Hazbun provocatively concludes that Middle East exceptionalism has ultimately served the imperial aims of the West.

  Here one might interject that there are indeed things that are exceptional to the contemporary Middle East. For example, some states in the region control vast petroleum resources. Doesn’t the wealth derived from these resources insulate these states and indeed the entire region from the forces of the global economic order? Historian James Gelvin’s contribution speaks directly to this question. His chapter looks at developments in Middle Eastern political economy from the Great Depression to the present. Specifically, it explicates how transformations in the regional “civil order” (the relations among citizens and those between citizens and state) were the result of both local and global forces, and in so doing he too casts grave doubt on the Middle East exceptionalist narrative. His chapter situates major shifts in the regional political economy solidly within global developments.