Is There a Middle East?

The Evolution of a Geopolitical Concept

Michael E. Bonine, Abbas Amanat, Michael Ezekiel Gasper

• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9780804782654
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Middle Eastern History
• Index: History

Is the idea of the "Middle East" simply a geopolitical construct conceived by the West to serve particular strategic and economic interests—or can we identify geographical, historical, cultural, and political patterns to indicate some sort of internal coherence to this label? While the term has achieved common usage, no one studying the region has yet addressed whether this conceptualization has real meaning—and then articulated what and where the Middle East is, or is not.

This volume fills the void, offering a diverse set of voices—from political and cultural historians, to social scientists, geographers, and political economists—to debate the possible manifestations and meanings of the Middle East. At a time when geopolitical forces, social currents, and environmental concerns have brought attention to the region, this volume examines the very definition and geographic and cultural boundaries of the Middle East in an unprecedented way.

THE MIDDLE EAST: DEFINED, OBLIGED, AND DENIED

Part I

1

THE EASTERN QUESTION AND THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE

The Genesis of the Near and Middle East in the Nineteenth Century

Huseyin Yilmaz

NEAR EAST OR MIDDLE EAST maps were first drawn at the height of intense interest in what Karl Marx labeled “the Eternal Eastern Question.”¹ It was the content of this question that defined the geography of this region that came to be known as the modern Middle East. Later attempts to give a consistent geographical or cultural definition to the term all followed major international developments or were made in anticipation of major geostrategic shifts, ultimately creating multiple “Middle Easts” that were based on different sets of criteria.² Two such attempts in recent memory were the redrawing of the Middle East following the end of the Cold War and the Greater Middle East Partnership discussed in the G-8 summit in 2004.³

Despite staying at the center of international politics for more than a century, the region still has no standard textbook definition.⁴ In the popular imagination as well as academic studies, the Middle East is often conceived of as the locus of an international question rather than a geographically or culturally definable region. Except for the questions it posed, there is hardly any common element that defines the various “Middle Easts” constructed in the media, academic scholarship, and political agencies. As the nature and scope of the Middle Eastern Question change, so do the region’s boundaries. There has been no secular organizing principle to make the Middle East a meaningful region other than a historical memory built by the very term itself.

At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the term “the Eastern Question” was generically applied to almost all conflicts taking place in Eastern Europe, including those in Poland, Macedonia, and the Caucasus. Toward the late nineteenth century, however, within the context of a broader confrontation between Europe and the Orient, the scope of the Eastern Question was extended to all of Eurasia, producing such formulations as “the Afghan branch of the Eastern Question.”⁵ Even Americans conceived of their western entanglements as “our Eastern Question” in reference to American-Japanese conflict.⁶ Reflecting this holistic view in 1878, Victor Duruy presented the three core problems of the Eastern Question as Constantinople, l’Asie Centrale, and l’Océan Pacifique.⁷ In some Christian apocalyptic literature, however, “the Eastern Question” referred specifically to the holy land where the demise of the Ottoman Empire would signal the coming of the Armageddon.⁸ For them it was a matter of divine providence foretold in scripture and that was unfolding to fulfill prophecies.⁹

Views on the scope and historical depth of the Eastern Question ranged from a mere Great Power rivalry to an existential conflict between two incompatible worldviews with no beginning point in time. John Marriott, who wrote the now classical account on the subject, stated in 1940 that “from time immemorial, Europe has been confronted with an ‘Eastern Question.’ ”¹⁰ For him, conflicts between the Roman Empire and Hellenistic monarchies and between Christianity and Islam reflected this confrontation. Although the semantic range of the term “the Eastern Question” was extended to include the whole scope of relations between the West and the Orient, unless specified it commonly referred to the Euro-Ottoman context. Albert Sorel, who wrote a widely read textbook on the Eastern Question in 1898, argued that “since the first entry of the Turk into Europe, there has been an Eastern Question.” It was this perception of the Eastern Question that gave rise to the notion of the Near Eastern Question by the late nineteenth century, from which current conceptions of the Middle East originated.¹¹

The term “the Eastern Question” entered into wider circulation with the 1815 Congress of Vienna. Ironically, among the many eastern questions of the nineteenth century, the Eastern Question that formed the focal theme of European thought and diplomacy for much of this and the early part of the twentieth century initially emerged not as Europe’s Turkish problem but as the Ottoman Empire’s Egyptian problem. European interest on the Eastern Question seems to have been prompted by the internal crisis of the Ottoman Empire in 1831–40 when Muhammad Ali, the governor of Egypt, captured Syria and much of western Anatolia, a crisis overcome by the intervention of Britain and Austria. The French press, which was more acquainted with the region because of Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt a few decades earlier, was the main source of information for the broader Europe.¹² In fact, during the 1830s the British press commonly referred to the crisis as “the Oriental Question,” a literal translation of the standard French term la Question d’Orient.¹³ The reason the Egyptian crisis brought about such an uproar in European public opinion was the possibility of an imminent collapse of the Ottoman Empire that might lead to a total reshuffling of power among major contenders in Europe. Already in 1836, Leopold von Ranke prophetically noted that die Orientalische Frage was of universal significance.¹⁴

THE QUESTION OF THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE IN EUROPEAN IMAGINATION

Contemporary conceptions of the Middle East are intimately connected with the way modern Europe was constructed and the Ottoman Empire was perceived since the early modern period.¹⁵ More specifically, the depiction of the Ottoman Empire in modern cartography and geography was part of the same process by which modern images of the Middle East were constructed. However, defining Europe and placing the Ottoman Empire in any meaningful geographical category were no easy tasks. Lacking any meaningful physical or cultural commonality, the landscape under the Ottoman rule had no unifying element other than being a political geography shaped by an administrative grid and elite culture. The extensiveness of the Ottoman territories, running from the Caucasus to North Africa, presented no shared historical memory other than the one constructed by the Ottoman Empire itself, a memory fiercely contested by newly emerging national formations in the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Indeed, earlier political conglomerations such as the Roman and the Byzantine empires similarly left few lasting unifying features within these lands.

Cartographic and geographical representations of the Ottoman Empire produced in Europe since the sixteenth century hardly accorded it a geopolitical unity. It was typically depicted as a fragmented structure stretching over three continents and considered to be primarily belonging to Asia or the Orient. It was portrayed as a contested space for different faiths, languages, ethnicities, and historical memories. European cartographers, in continuum from the Ptolemaic representations of scientific geography, presented the space from Eastern Europe to Persia in accordance with their own needs, with little attention given to representative markers of the Ottoman Empire. Western European travelers, who were usually less equipped to perceive the unifying elements of Ottoman society, often found themselves baffled by the myriad ethnicities and languages they came across between Belgrade and Constantinople, thus having difficulty attributing any sense of unity to the land they were crossing.

As Palmira Brummett recently showed, despite a surge in European interest in the study of the East and the Ottoman Empire, most authors were still much better versed in the antiquated perceptions of the area than in contemporary realities.¹⁶ They had very little knowledge of, or regard for, Ottoman administrative divisions, regions, or city names. Instead, they primarily resorted to Greco-Roman and biblical terminology in their representations. Early modern European information gathering and representation provided the Eastern Question debate of the nineteenth century with a picture of the Ottoman Empire that was geographically fragmented, socially divided, linguistically disunited, and culturally incoherent. Such views formed the staple of the Eastern Question debate in which the Ottoman Empire was considered to be a non-European entity confined to Asia.

REGIONS IN PREMODERN MUSLIM GEOGRAPHY

The Eurocentric regionalization of the East not only supplanted the reality of the Ottoman Empire while it was still largely intact, but also it superseded indigenous geographical regimes. Medieval Muslim geographers conceived the world in broad spatial constructions in reference to a center that was Baghdad, Cairo, Jerusalem, or some other Muslim locality of significance.¹⁷ One such theme was “the middle of the earth,” which came from a variety of traditions Muslims came into contact with and was integrated into the self-image of the Abbasid Caliphate. The ninth-century historian al-Dinawari, for example, discussed the middle of the earth in the context of Noah’s distribution of land among his sons where he granted the center piece (wasat al-ard) to Shem, an area which was watered by five rivers: the Euphrates, Tigris, Seyhan, Ceyhan, and Qaysun.¹⁸ For the tenth-century geographer al-Mes’udi, however, Shem’s possession of the middle of the earth (wasat al-ard) consisted of the area from the sacred land (Mecca and Medina) to Hadramawt, Oman, and ‘Alij.¹⁹ This was for al-Mes’udi the middle of the land. In his formulation, which included the oceans, he pointed to the equator as the middle of the earth (wasat al-dunya).²⁰ Yet for the middle of the world he pointed to al-Iraq.²¹ In his analysis of climes, the twelfth-century scholar Ibn al-Jawzi also noted that the center of all climes (awsat al-aqalim) was the fourth clime, Babil, of which al-Iraq constituted its center.²² Further, the center of al-Iraq was Baghdad, “the finest part of the Earth” (safwat al-ard) where the finest of human races infused and beauties of all corners of the world convened.²³ For Muslim geographers working during the high Abbasid Caliphate, the center of the world was Baghdad, from which perceptions of the East and the West were organized.

Muslim geography produced a rich nomenclature of refined geospatial conceptions across the West-East spectrum. The Arabic terms sharq and mashriq were derived from the same etymological root and could be used interchangeably in reference to the East. However, mashriq is more than a directional concept; it is grammatically a place noun, meaning the abode of the sunrise, reminiscent of levant in French and oriens in Latin. Mashriq, in the geospatial sense, could refer to the whole eastern part of the world or a specific region in the East with reference to a perceived center. These terms were further specified through qualifiers of distance. Aqsa al-sharq or al-sharq al-aqsa (the Far East) could refer to a distant East, most commonly to the area centered on China. A fifteenth-century geographer, Ibn al-Wardi, for example, used the term “from the Far East to the Far West” (min aqsa al-mashriq ila aqsa al-maghrib) in reference to the two end points of the known earth encircled by the ocean (min al-muhit ila al-muhit).²⁴ In this horizontal space, he considered Sudan between the East and the West (bayn al-mashriq wa al-maghrib).²⁵

Muslim geography did not develop standard lines of division between the East and the West or within these broad zones. Geographers often developed their directional perceptions in reference to the lands of Islam, their own locations, or Mecca, the universal point of direction for prayers. Ibn Khurra-dadhbih, who wrote one of the earliest Muslim accounts on geography in the ninth century, pointed to the subjectivity of perceptions in regard to the East and the West: “Egypt is for us part of the West but it is the East with respect to al-Andalus. Similarly, Khurasan is for us the East but it is the West with respect to China.”²⁶ He nevertheless not only used spatial directions but also came up with more complex designations. His conception, the “middle of the East” (wasat al-mashriq), for example, referred to a region that roughly corresponds to a part of today’s Central Asia.²⁷ The fourteenth-century historian al-Dhahabi, however, used al-Sharq al-Awsat, the standard term for the Middle East in modern Arabic, in reference to a specific locality somewhere between Baghdad and Damascus.²⁸

Muslim conceptions regarding the West, the gharb and the maghrib, were similar to those regarding the East, but with more certainty in terms of its regional references. The west of the Nile was c...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Copyright
• Title Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Contributors
• Preface
• Introduction: Is There a Middle East?
• Part I: The Middle East: Defined, Obliged, and Denied
• Part II: Historical Perspectives of Identities and Narratives in the Region Referred to as the Middle East
• Part III: Challenging Exceptionalism: The Contemporary Middle East IN Global Perspective
• Conclusion: There Is a Middle East!
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index