by Bonine, Michael E. ; Amanat, Abbas; Gasper, Michael Ezekiel
Across the Middle East a number of states enacted social programs resembling the welfare states of Western Europe and North America beginning in the mid-twentieth century. The states promoting this new “civic order” drawing on populist nationalist rhetoric pledged a minimum of material support in return for loyalty and compliance from its citizens. The Middle Eastern states espousing these ideas were intimately involved in the emergence of the nonaligned movement and then the Group of 77 and their call for a New International Economic Order that challenged the post–World War II Bretton Woods system. The West, led by the United States, hit back aggressively at this challenge to the status quo of economic liberalism. Gelvin’s chapter shows how this civic order began to unravel toward the end of the twentieth century due to economic and political pressures exerted by the major Western powers. Gelvin concludes with the caveat that the economic crisis of 2008 may open yet another avenue for regional agency. The recent political developments in Tunisia, Egypt, and elsewhere in the region may be the first signs of the opening of just such “another avenue.” In any case, the lesson one can draw from Gelvin’s contribution is that large-scale shifts in the international political economy reverberated in the Middle East, and that Middle Eastern states were major players in contestation over the global economic order over the last seventy-five years or more.
Is there some kind of common history that impels us to accept the Middle East as a single analytical unit? Over thirty years ago the historian Nikki Keddie took up this question in her essay “Is There a Middle East?”4 She concluded that the term had concrete analytical value for those looking at the period after the rise of Islam and before 1500 C.E. She argued that historians of the early centuries of Muslim rule were justified in considering the Middle East (comprised of the Umayyad, early Abbasid, and Ottoman empires) as a single unit of study because after the rise of Islam these lands came to share a common fate. However, citing the divergence between Ottoman and Persian (Iranian) experiences for the period after 1500, she doubted whether there is historical justification for thinking of this entire area as a single unit of study. In addition, while much of the territory that is often considered the Middle East was at times nominally part of the Ottoman Empire, that experience differed greatly from place to place and from one era to another. Ottoman power was sporadic and had limited reach in many hinterland areas of North Africa and the Arabian Peninsula. Another complicating issue is the fact that large portions of the Ottoman Empire, such as Egypt, were nearly independent by the eighteenth century and had begun to develop historical trajectories increasingly independent of their Ottoman pasts.
Historiographical issues aside, people in the area did have their own conceptions of the geography before the notion of the “Middle East” was imposed on them by the West. The contributions of three historians, Arash Khazeni, Gagan D. S. Sood, and Huseyin Yilmaz, shed light on alternative geographies that once marked the imaginative frontiers for some living in the region, while Daniel Varisco examines how Western pilgrims viewed the Holy Land before there was a Middle East. Khazeni and Yilmaz also go one step further and chronicle the beginning of the end of these older imaginative geographies. They describe the processes by which European power obliged a new geographical reckoning upon the populations of the Eurasian and African lands that eventually became the Middle East.
In his chapter on the history of the frontier between Iran and Central Asia, Khazeni explicates the relationship between emergent forms of state power, the new science of map-making, and the geographical imagination of people in the area. He narrates how changes in state power paralleled the ways in which the frontier was represented and understood. Taking a different approach, Sood explores the socioeconomic worlds that produced what he calls a “cosmopolitan Islamic Eurasia.” His history of everyday life recalls the vibrant “arena of circulation and exchange” that incorporated the lands around the Indian Ocean that eventually were to give way to centralized states with fixed territorial borders. Taken together, these historians demonstrate the vitality of geographic-historical imaginaries that were eventually displaced by the Eurocentric notions of the Near and Middle East that were supported by the considerable military, economic, and ideological power of the West.
Lastly, Varisco writes about the complicated relationship between the idea of the Holy Land and visitors to the region. His chapter critiques an account of the binary relationship between Europe and Orient, which he attributes to the late Edward Said, that was predicated on the assumptions of “Western superiority” and “Oriental inferiority.” Varisco reverses this as he argues that in thinking of the Orient-as–Holy Land, Western pilgrims often viewed the region in sacral and ideal terms. As a consequence, the binary conception that overlay their representations was punctuated with a view of the region as a utopia rather than as a site of degradation and misery for which colonial administrators such as Lord Cromer later became famous.
This volume has offered a number of perspectives on the history, evolution, and use of the term “Middle East” in Europe and North America. We have also seen some of the ways that people in the region came to adopt, adapt, or reject the term. The essays have shown how the definition of the region has shifted with various paradigms of inquiry and research whose roots can, at least in part, be traced to the rise and fall of various strategic and political calculations of Western powers. Europe’s colonial and imperial past, the imperatives of the Cold War, and more recently, the so-called war on terror have each played their part in producing contingent incarnations of the Middle East. Consequently, we have come to understand that the idea of the Middle East cannot be separated from the power to create and impose categories of knowledge on the rest of the world. The Middle East exists because the West has possessed sufficient power to give the idea substance. In this regard the colonial past and the imperial present are parts of the equation that make the Middle East real. For it is as real as any other geopolitical abstraction in use today. There is no small irony that the Middle East is an inescapable fact for those who live in the countries of the eastern and southern Mediterranean and southwest Asia even if the mental map on which it depends is imported.
In reflecting on the essays in this book we are left with two basic suppositions. First, despite the pretensions of scientific geography, many subjective elements figure into geographic calculations. Just as these subjective factors are liable to change, so too are the calculations based on them. In this sense geography is neither fixed nor permanent. We have seen that one’s geographical horizons can be imagined in more than one way. These chapters have offered glimpses of alternative geographies that existed before the extension of Western power to the region. Second, the Middle East belongs to a geographic imaginary that is in part built on the general alignment of contemporary geo-strategic power. Accordingly, it will inextricably accumulate new meaning until some major strategic realignment occurs and the geographical paradigms that have been in place for more than a century give way to something new. Until that time, despite the difficulties, the inconsistencies, and the contradictions, we have to say that, indeed, there is a Middle East.
REFERENCE MATTER
NOTES
Chapter 1
1. Marx, Eastern Question, 2.
2. For a detailed discussion of the British role in the making of the Middle East, see Adelson, London and the Invention of the Middle East, as well as his chapter in this volume. For the Middle East as a security concept, see Bilgin, “Inventing Middle Easts,” 10–37. For a geopolitical analysis of the Middle East, see Davutoğlu, Stratejik Derinlik, 129–43, 323–455, as well as the chapter by Waleed Hazbun in this volume.
3. For a fairly recent designs of the region, see Lewis, “Rethinking the Middle East,” 99–119; “G8-Greater Middle East Partnership,” Al-Hayat (February 13, 2004).
4. For the variability and indefinability of the region, see Pearcy, The Middle East—An Indefinable Region, 407–16; Keddie, “Is There a Middle East?” 255–71; Ach
car, “Fantasy of a Region That Does Not Exist”; and the chapter in this volume by Michael E. Bonine, “Of Maps and Regions: Where Is the Geographer’s Middle East?”
5. Argyll, Eastern Question, xv.
6. Millard, Our Eastern Question.
7. Duruy, Abrégé d’histoire universelle, 601–14.
8. Fysh, Time of the End, 19.
9. Wee the, Eastern Question in Its Various Phases, x.
10. Marriott, Eastern Question, 1.
11. Sorel, Eastern Question in the Eighteenth Century, 9.
12. Pepin, Deux ans de règne, 1830–1832, 362; “France,” Morning Chronicle (London) (May 18, 1833); “German Papers,” Morning Chronicle (London) (June 17, 1833); “Foreign Intelligence,” Caledonian Mercury (December 15, 1834); “Foreign Intelligence,” Bell’s Life in London and Sporting Chronicle (February 2, 1834); “Egypt and Mohammed Ali, or Travel in the Valley of the Nile, by James Augustus Saint-John,” France littéraire 13 (1834): 416–17; Bucquet, Compte-rendu des sessions législatives, session de 1834, 275.
13. Cobden, England and Russia (London: James Ridgway & Sons, 1835), 154; Urquhart, Portfolio, 533; Urquhart, “Turkey, Egypt, and the Affairs of the East,” 100–115.
14. Von Ranke, Historisch-politische Zeitschrift, 233.
15. Carl Brown, for example, would still define the Middle East as the Afro-Asian lands of the former Ottoman Empire. See Brown, International Politics and the Middle East, 3–18.
16. For a critique of modern studies on the subject, see Brummett, “Imagining the Early Modern Ottoman Space,” 15–58.
17. Suyuti, for example, thought that the middle of the earth was Jerusalem on the authority of reports he attributed to Prophet Muhammad. See al-Suyuti, History of the Temple of Jerusalem, 2, 15, 20. For other views see Collins, Al-Muqaddasi, 7.
18. Yücesoy, “Ancient Imperial Heritage and Islamic Universal Historiography,” 135–55.
19. Al-Mes’udi, Meadows of Gold and Mines of Gems, 76.
20. Ibid., 200.
21. Ibid., 334.
22. For medieval Muslim views on Babil, see Janssen, Babil, the City of Witchcraft and Wine, 114–15.
23. Ibn al-Jawzi, Al-muntazam fi al-tarikh, 70.
24. Ibn al-Wardi, Ajaib al-buldan, 77.
25. Ibid., 78.
26. Ibn Khordâdhbeh, Kitâb al-masâlik wa’l-mamâlik, 234.
27. Wasat al-mashriq literally means “the middle of the East”; see Ibn Khordâdhbeh, Kitâb al-masâlik, 4.
28. al-Dhahabi, Tarikh al-Islam, 249. I am grateful to Hayrettin Yücesoy of Saint Louis University for providing me with this reference.
29. Ibn al-Wardi, Ajaib al-buldan, 15, 29, 107. For the Ottoman adoption of this designation, see lî, Künhü’l Ahbar, 218–30. For classical views in Islamic geography, see İbrahim Harekat, “Mağrib,” in Türkiye Diyanet Vakfı İslam ansiklopedisi, vol. 27 (Istanbul: Türkiye Diyanet Vakfı, 1988–).
30. “Al-Maghrib,” in Encyclopedia of Islam, 2nd ed., vol. 5 (Leiden: Brill, 1960–2009),
31. Ibn Khaldun, Tarikh Ibn Khaldun.
32. Hegel, Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Geschichte, 211. For an English translation, see Hegel, The Philosophy of History, 242.
33. Franzos, Aus Halb-Asien Culturbilder aus Galizien, der Bukowina, Südrußland und Rumänien. For an analysis of European views on Eastern Jewry, see Saposnik, “Europe and Its Orients in Zionist Culture Before the First World War,” 1105–23, and Levesque, “Mapping the Other,” 145–65.
34. Sowards, Moderne Geschichte des Balkans: Der Balkan im Zeitalter des Na-tionalismus, 42.
35. Tyler, European Powers and the Near East, 1875–1908; Scheffler, “ ‘Fertile Crescent,’ ‘Oriens,’ ‘Middle East,’” 253–72.
36. Von Ranke, Historisch-politische Zeitschrift, 236.
37. Desprez, “Souvenirs de l’Europe orientale: La grande Illyrie et le mouvement illyrien,” 1007–1029.
38. Ferret, Voyage en Abyssinie dans les provinces du Tigré, du Samen et de l’Amhara, 44.
39. Julius Fürst, “Oesterreichische Nebenländer,” Der Orient, 9/40 (1848): 315–18.
40. Alletz, De la démocratie nouvelle, 359.
41. Wright and Reid, Malay Peninsula; Wright and Reid, “Near East,” 904–7.
42. Meadows, Chinese and Their Rebellions, 188; Meadows, “Communications with the Far East,” 574–81.
43. Rubbi, Poesie ebraiche, 19.
44. Canovai, Panegirici di Stanislao Canovai delle scuole pie, 214.
45. Tenca, “Della litteratura Slava,” 53–67.
46. “L’Obolo per la fede,” La Civiltà cattolica 6 (1857): 385–400.
47. Kanne, Erste Urkunden der Geschichte oder allgemeine Mythologie, 459; Wagner, Der Staat, 384; Wagner, “Einige vorlaufige Angaben und Bemerkungen,” 172–76; Wagner, Jahrbücher der Literatur, 41; Rosen, Mesnewi oder doppelverse des Scheich-Mewlânâ Dschelâl-ed-dîn Rûmî, 41; von Rumohr, Italienische Forschungen, 311; Donop, Das magusanische Europa, 140; Dirckinck-Holmfeld, ed., Politisches Journal, nebst Anzeige von Gelehrten und andern Sachen, 281; Vámbéry, Der Islam im neunzehnten Jahrhundert, 18.
48. Townshend, A Cruise in Greek Waters with a Hunting Excursion in Tunis, 285.
49. Meadows, Chinese and Their Rebellions, 188; Meadows, “Communications with the Far East,” 574–81. For similar examples of this Far East-based perception of the Near East, see “The Fleets at Cherbourgh,” Littel’s Living Age 30 (1865): 571–73; Sala, Echoes of the Year Eighteen Hundred and Eighty-three, 238–39; Lowell, Chosön, 164; The Parliamentary Debates, ser. 4, vol. 19 (London: Reuter’s Telegram Co., 1893), 1899; “Want to Aid China,” Chicago Daily Tribune (January 30, 1898); “Why Not China Conference?” Daily News (March 12, 1898); Sladen, Queer Things About Persia, xii.
50. Mitchell, History of Ancient Sculpture, 274.
51. For a representative sample, see Graphic (December 28, 1895); Penny Illustrated Paper and Illustrated Times (August 10, 1895); Belfast News-Letter (September 6, 1895); Derby Mercury (September 11, 1895); Ipswich Journal (November 9, 1895); Pall Mall Gazette (November 13, 1895); Birmingham Daily Post (November 20, 1895); Northern Echo (November 20, 1895); Western Mail (November 20, 1895); Manchester Times (November 22, 1895); Leeds Mercury (December 19, 1895); Glasgow Herald (December 23, 1895).
52. Rycaut, Present State of the Ottoman Empire.
53. Mitchell, History of Ancient Sculpture, 274.
54. Flügel, Geschichte der Araber bis auf den Sturz des Chalifats von Bagdad, 143; National Liberal Federation, Proceedings in Connection with the Twentieth Annual Meeting, 27.
55. It seldom appears in other European languages. For French uses of the term V Orient plus proche around the turn of the twentieth century, see Bérard, “Angleterre et Russie, 865–86; Waliszewski, Ivan le Terrible, 132.
56. Richard Burton, Personal Narrative of a Pilgrimage to El Medinah and Mec-cah, 62; Richard Burton, “Unexplored Syria,” 217–19; Isabel Burton, Inner Life of Syria, Palestine, and the Holy Land, 199.
57. Lamport, “Levantine Sects,” 268–76.
58. Pall Mall Gazette (October 15, 1878; April 7, 1879); Newcastle Courant (September 14, 1883).
59. Manchester Times (October 18, 1895); Birmingham Daily Post (October 28, 1895); Northern Echo (October 28, 1895); Leeds Mercury (February 3, 1896); Daily News (February 20, 1896); Bristol Mercury and Daily Post (April 15, 1896); Glasgow Herald (March 25, 1897).
60. “Christianity in Ceylon,” 66–90.
61. “The New Essayists: Dr. Williams and Others,” 240–60.
62. Wilson, “Séances historiques de Genève,” 281.
63. Upham, “Upham on the Star of the Nativity,” 437–51. For Upham, see Adams, Dictionary of American Authors, 394.
64. Upham, “Upham on the Star of the Nativity,” 437–51.
65. Peloubet, Select Notes on the International Sabbath School Lessons, 16; Besant and Palmer, “Jerusalem, the City of Herod and Saladin,” 235; Richard Burton, “The Long Wall of Salona and
the Ruined Cities of Pharia and Gelsa di Lesina,” 262–96; “Van Lennep’s Bible Lands,” 502–4.
66. Gower, My Reminiscences, 365; Fairbairn, Religion in History and in the Life of Today, 156; Lowell, Chosön: The Land of the Morning Calm, 378; Beazley, The Dawn of Modern Geography, 211.
67. Griffith, “Egypt and Assyria,” 155; Bancroft, New Pacific, 407; McCarthy, Story of Gladstone’s Life, 459.
68. Hogarth, Nearer East, 1–2.
69. Ibid., 285.
70. Ibid., 279–80.
71. Allen, European Tour, 118; Strong, Story of the American Board, 393.
72. Wheeler, “The Old World in the New,” 145–53; Wheeler, “Alexander’s Invasion of India,” 525–39.
73. Renton, “Changing Languages of Empire and the Orient,” 645–67; Scheffler, “‘Fertile Crescent,’ ‘Orient,’ ‘Middle East,’” 253–72; Barbir, “Alfred Thayer Mahan, Theodore Roosevelt, the Middle East, and the Twentieth Century”; Lewis and Wigen, The Myth of Continents, 65; Davison, “Where Is the Middle East?” 665–75; Chammou, “Near or Middle East? Choice of Name,” 105–20; Koppes, “Captain Mahan, General Gordon and the Origins of the Term ‘Middle East,’” 95–98.
74. Akbari, “Alexander in the Orient,” 105–26.
75. Reinaud, “Mémoire sur les relations politiques et commerciales de l’Empire romain avec l’Asie orientale,” 93–297.
