Is There a Middle East?
Page 4
Prince von Metternich may have been sarcastic when he remarked in 1820 that “Asien beginnt auf der Landstraße” in Vienna.34 But when Alexander Kinglake noted in 1834 that the East began at Belgrade, he was only one of many other west European travelers who were struck by a different world.35 His sentiment was shared by perhaps the most well-known historian of his time, von Ranke, for whom “noch immer beginnt in Belgrad der Orient.”36 Likewise, for Hippolyte Desprez, “l’Orient commence aux frontières occidentales de la Hongrie.”37 Observing the same difference in Malta, Pierre Victor Ad Ferret noted that the island displayed a dual character involving both European and Asian civilizations.38 An 1848 article in Der Orient described Hungary as being “between the East and the West, between European cultivation and Asiatic coarseness.”39 Eduard Alletz, who wrote one of the earliest accounts of the Eastern Question, considered the inhabitants of this frontier as intermediaries between Turkey and Austria, the Orient and the Occident, and Islam and Christianity.40
The Orient in the Europe-versus-the-East contrast was a wider space than that of the Orient in the West-versus-the-East distinction. The Far East and its cognates in reference to the easternmost corner of Asia was an area that both Muslim and European geographical accounts recognized. The vast regions between Western Europe and China, however, were defined in various ways by a number of terms ranging from the “Middle Orient” to the “Central East.” The Malay Peninsula, for example, was sometimes considered the Middle East, whereas the Philippines was classified as part of the Near East.41 Because of the British involvement in India and China, “the Near East” was used in English with more geographical consciousness where it was often juxtaposed against “the Far East.”42 As the perception of China and its environs came to be accepted as the Far East, the land mass in between was referred to by a number of different regional terms, such as “Front Asia,” “Hither Asia,” “Western Asia,” “Near Asia,” “Central Asia,” and the like. The Eastern Question debate provided meanings to these terms as it was extended to include Europe’s relationship with all of Asia.
CONCEPTUAL ORIGINS OF THE NEAR EAST
The term “Near East” enjoyed a long and colorful history in European languages and thought. The eighteenth-century Italian uses of the term “the Near East” (il vicino Oriente) lacked geographical specification, and in most cases it was used in literature imbued with metaphorical connotations.43 For example, Stanislao Canovai’s use of the phrase “the Near East and the Far West” (al vicino Oriente ed al remoto Occidente) in 1817 still referred to directional space with very little sense of geography.44 Carlo Tenca in 1847 used il vicino Oriente in the context of Cossacks and Lithuanians in a vague sense of identity and geographic location.45 In 1857, La Civiltà cattolica employed the term l’Oriente vicino in reference to a neighboring culture with respect to Italy.46 Despite these uses, the term did not produce a clear geographical image and so remained in Italian without making its way into the mainstream of European thought.
Its German equivalents, however, were used with more civilizational consciousness and geographical underpinnings. By der Vordere Orient, Johann Kanne in 1808 and Johann Wagner in 1815 specified the eastern Mediterranean as a cultural space. An 1834 article in Bilder-Magazin für allgemeine Weltkunde used the same term specifically in reference to an area that included Greece, Asia Minor, Egypt, Syria, and Palestine. The 1833 edition of Jahrbücher der Literatur extended the geographical space of the term all the way to India. In 1849 Georg Rosen mentioned Bursa and Constantinople as major cities of der Vordere Orient. From the 1820s onward, der Nahe Orient or der Nahe Osten, often used interchangeably with der Vordere Orient, came to be more commonly used. In 1827 Carl von Rumohr provided no geographical certainty when he used the term der Nahe Orient when he talked about its cultural influence on Greece and Christianity. Georg Donop in 1834 and Constant Dirckinck-Holmfeld in 1838 used the term in the context of Mesopotamia and Eastern Europe, respectively. In 1875, Hermann Vámbéry portrayed the extent of the “Mohammedan nation” vom nahen Osten bis ins Innere Chinas.47
British commentators, who had been more engaged in other parts of the world from India to China and Africa, showed an increased interest in the Ottoman Empire during the 1853–56 Crimean War when Britain participated in the alliance against Russia. Not surprisingly, then, early uses of the term “Near East” were mostly devoid of the historical and cultural content found in the German tradition. British discourse on the Near East centered on political and commercial interests of the British Empire, and with relatively few exceptions, such as Frederick Townshend’s A Cruise in Greek Waters, the term was often employed in English in juxtaposition to the Far East.48 Thomas Meadow and an anonymous article in Fraser’s Magazine in 1856 both referred to the Near East as the Ottoman Empire in comparison with China—the sick man of the Near East versus the sick man of the Far East.49 Lucy Mitchell in 1883 conceived of “the Near Orient” as a civilizational space with clear inspiration from the German conception of the term.50 The preference given to “Orient” in the construct is telling as it accommodated more cultural and civilizational content than its more secular equivalent “East,” which was more suitable in referring to geographic spaces reflecting strategic and commercial interests. From 1895 onward, when the British press started its extensive coverage of the Ottoman Empire prompted by uprisings in the Balkans, even provincial papers employed the term “the Near East” with regard to the general geographical context of specific political conflicts.51
The European construction of “the Near East” seems to have largely originated from German scholarship on the Orient that was bereft of political or strategic references. By the mid-nineteenth century, der Vordere Orient or its cognates established themselves in the German imagination as a cultural space with some degree of geographical clarity, albeit without neatly drawn borders. Whether it was nahe or vorder and combined with Orient, Ost or Morgenland, almost all constructs of “the Near East” in German pointed to a less definite geographical space while certainly implying a marked civilizational contrast. The German imagination of the Near East was shaped by scholarly study of the Orient in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; particularly important were the works of the highly respected Ottoman specialists Dimitrie Cantemir and Joseph von Hammer-Purgstall. Since Paul Rycaut’s monumental work published in 1667, The Present State of the Ottoman Empire, British commentators were generally more interested in the political economy of the Orient than in its culture, at least until the latter half of the nineteenth century.52
In various accounts, throughout the nineteenth century and beyond, “the Near East” indicated a cultural space distinct from that of Europe that might encompass the whole geographical area between Western Europe and India (or some part of it). Often, it simply referred to the former or current Ottoman lands. As such, it sometimes included Eastern Europe and Persia but most frequently it was represented as comprising the Balkans and Asia Minor. Whereas the term “Orient” remained part of the construct in French and Italian, it was less common in English and German. Although it was sometimes used interchangeably, “the Near Orient” often implied the Asian and African parts of the Ottoman Empire whereas “the Near East” referred to Eastern Europe and the Balkans.53 This distinction was made clearer when the term was used together with continental designations such as “the Near East of Europe” or “the Near East of Asia.”54 Further, although “the Near East” and “the Near Orient” were used as synonyms, their semantics were not identical. More precise scholars seem to have used “the Near East” in reference to the civilizational space from where modern Europe originated and still historically connected, whereas “the Near Orient” referred to a non-European cultural space that may include an Islamic presence.
A close cognate of “the Near East” was “the Nearer East,” which was used interchangeably with the former. It was mostly used in British writing and was used even more commonly than “the Near East” in the second half of the ni
neteenth century.55 In early uses of the term its geographical space closely corresponded to the Ottoman Empire, in most cases the area stretching from the Balkans to Mesopotamia. Authors who preferred this term over “the Near East” also displayed more geographical consciousness as they often attempted to give a visible definition of the terrain it represented. Richard Burton, a serious student of Islamic culture, and his wife Isabel Burton comfortably used the term in their works without feeling it necessary to define its geographical space (but which appears to be the area between the Nile and the Euphrates).56 In 1873, W. J. Lamport used the term in his discussion of the religious sects of the Levant.57 In the British press it was used almost synonymously with “the Near East” within the broader political context of the Eastern Question. In the aftermath of the Russo-Turkish War of 1877–78, the British papers the Pall Mall Gazette and the Newcastle Courant used the term in reference to an area from the Balkans to Central Asia, an area where Britain had an uneasy relationship with Russia.58 As in the case of “the Near East,” the term became a media staple from 1895 onward, commonly referring to Ottoman space in discussions of political conflicts.59
But what really distinguished “the Nearer East” from “the Near East” was its distinctly Christian character. More specifically, it was the preferred term to signify the biblical space of the Old and New Testaments centered on the Holy Land. By extension, depending on the subject in question, it could refer to the broader Christian space between Western Europe and Persia. But it also alluded to a temporal proximity as opposed to the old Near East of pre-Christian antiquity. As in the case of Hegel’s “Hither Asia,” the adjective “nearer” in this construct implied historical and religious affinity more than geographical and spatial proximity.
In writing on the history of Christianity, some authors were still thinking of the Nearer East from a comparative perspective within the parameters of the contemporary British Empire. Among them, Sir James Tennent in his Christianity in Ceylon pointed to the area between Persia and Greece as the Nearer East as one of the travel routes in the dispersion of the Aryan family.60 In 1860, a review article on the New Essayists in the Ecclesiastic portrayed Jesus as “the Gospel of the Nearer East” and considered Buddhism “the Gospel of India.”61 Henry Wilson, who shared the same vision of Buddhism, although in a slightly different formulation, stated that “the Gospel of Jesus was proclaimed in the Nearer East.”62
The biblical scholar Francis Upham provided a more tangible geographic definition of the Nearer East geography in 1875, based on his reading of the scripture and etymological analysis.63 For him, the “Biblical East” had two meanings: in the singular it referred to Mesopotamia whereas in the less definite plural it denoted Persia. When considered as such, the East mentioned in the Bible in the context of Ezekiel, Isaiah, and Solomon must be understood as “the Nearer East.” In addition, in the Hebrew scriptures, “the Far East” meant Persia, and so Cyrus was “the man from the Far East” and the “wise men” were Persians.64 Taken from Upham, this image of the Nearer East was further romanticized and even introduced in Sunday school curricula. The London Quarterly Review in 1872 used “the Nearer East” as the geographical space for medieval relations of Christianity and Mohammedanism. For the Journal of the Anthropological Institute in 1876 the Nearer East spanned from Egypt to Assyria where the Genesis myth spread. In the same year, Van Lennep provided a detailed study of biblical geography that centered on the Nearer East.65
By the 1880s, “the Nearer East” as the lands of the Bible was firmly established in British thought.66 Around the turn of the twentieth century, Christian authors placed a neatly defined biblical geography within the Orient of the European imagination. Francis Griffith defined it as an area that included “Babylonia, Assyria, Phonecia, Syria, Asia Minor, and Egypt.” In Hubert Bancroft’s depiction, it included “Palestine, Syria, and Egypt.” Thus when Justin McCarthy wrote about the conflict between “Greece and Turkey” as “the question in the Nearer East,” he was using a distinctly Christian view of the Eastern Question.67
Writing at a time when a number of different regionalizing conceptions were already in circulation with overlapping references, the British archaeologist and scholar David George Hogarth attempted to develop a coherent definition of the Nearer East by taking into account physical features, current politics, economic interaction, human distribution, civilizational traits, and historical memory. He thus came up with a region that corresponded to a land mass from the Adriatic Sea and Black Sea to the Indian Ocean and Caspian Sea. Land was demarcated by straight lines overriding existing political boundaries and natural physical features (see Figure 2.1). Although he conceived of the area primarily as the hinterland of three ancient civilizations, the Aegean, the Nile, and the Mesopotamian, surprisingly, he included the whole Arabian Peninsula, which occupied the largest as well as the central-most section of this region, producing a Nearer East not imagined by most other authors. He marked the boundary between the Nearer and the Farther East in Sind, which was considered by many of his contemporaries as part of the Middle East. For the northwestern boundary of this conceived region, Hogarth could not think of any obvious marker other than a civilizational divide:
For want of an effective natural division, the north-western limit of the East depends largely on political conditions. Where centres of the superior civilization of the West lie so near at hand as to exercise an intrusive influence in any case, occupation by a Power, which does not derive its origin from the East, quickly decides in favour of the West. . . . [W]e must set the northwestern limit of our “Nearer East” at the Balkan water-parting; but somewhat arbitrarily and without begging the question that there East and West are divided in any very obvious manner, or will long continue to be divided even as obviously as now.68
Yet what made Hogarth’s conception of the Nearer East compellingly appealing for his contemporaries was his reasoning within the parameters of the Eastern Question.69 The area was conceivable as a region where Western civilization originated, including the Christian code of ethics. For him, the ancient Nearer East included both East and West but now turned into a “Debatable Land” thanks to the spread of Western civilization over this region. This change turned “the Nearer East” into an “Intermediate Region, serving for the communication of the outer West, that itself has created, with an outer East which also owes it much.”70
This comprehensive reconstruction of “the Nearer East” as the area that fell roughly within the domains of the Ottoman Empire was then readily adopted by mainstream scholarship and media and projected to contemporary geographic understanding of the area.71 Thus, apart from the distinctly Christian writings, authors with less essentialist and more nuanced views of the East also seem to have found “the Nearer East” a useful term. Among them were scholars of antiquity who could not easily place the origins of modern civilization in either the then-perceived Occident or the Orient. Benjamin Wheeler, a scholar of Greek and comparative philology and former president of the University of California, was comfortable in using both “the Nearer East” and “the Near East” when referring to ancient civilizations between Mesopotamia and the Nile, including the Aegean. However, when viewing the same area in relation to Indo-Chinese civilizations he preferred the term “the Nearer World.” For him, “in this fabric of the Nearer World joined of the West and the East, the East supplied the informing spirit, the ordered life, the civilization; the West, the moving will and the arm of power.”72
THE EMERGENCE OF THE MODERN MIDDLE EAST
If the terms “Near East” and “Nearer East” created geographical uncertainty, then the term “Middle East” only added to this complexity. It has been a convention among modern scholars to credit Valentine Chirol, Alfred Mahan, and in some cases General Sir Thomas Gordon for coining the term “Middle East” around the turn of the twentieth century.73 The term itself and its various cognates, however, not only were in circulation during the nineteenth century but existed in both Eur
opean and Islamic sources in premodern times as well. In describing Alexander’s reception of the legation of Spaniards and Gauls in Babylon, the fifth-century Spanish historian Orosius, in his Historiae Adversum Paganos, located that realm in the middle of the East (medio Oriente).74 Examining this account of Orosius in 1863, Reinaud translated medio oriente as the heart of the East (le coeur de l’Orient) where Babylon was located.75 In a more cultural sense with no geographical certainty, a 1641 letter written in French used medio oriente in reference to a place where Hebrew and Oriental books could be found.76 The term survived in Italian (il Medio Oriente) and Spanish (el Oriente Medio) and became the standard equivalent of what came to be known eventually as the “Middle East” in English.77
In the nineteenth century, “the Middle East” and its equivalents in European languages often signified two different regions: either Persia and India together or the area encompassing from Persia westward through the Balkans. In 1819 Goethe used the term Mittler Orient, a term still in use in contemporary German, in reference to Persia and her neighbors.78 Due to Goethe’s profound influence on German and the broader European intelligentsia, his conception of “the Middle East” came into wide usage and also had an enduring impact on thinking about Persia and India as part of this region.79 In 1875, a French positivist, Pierre Laffitte, defined what he termed l’Orient occidental et l’Orient moyen, based on ancient conceptions, as an area comprising Arabia, Asia Minor, Syria, Armenia, and Persia. James M. Ludlow, a pastor and prolific author, in 1896 defined “the Middle Orient” as an area centered on Asia Minor but excluding Persia, similar to the definitions of “the Nearer East” preferred by biblical scholars. An 1897 piece in the Catholic World referred to the Middle East alongside Egypt in the context of biblical lands. The travel writers Marius Bernard in 1885 and Hiram Stanley in 1897 included India when they used the terms “the Middle Orient” and le Moyen Orient, respectively. In 1901, the British historian Charles Beazley defined the Middle Orient as an area beyond the Nearer East, which included the Levant, Syria, the Euphrates, and the Caucasus. In 1906 the historian William Morey included Babylon, Assyria, and Persia in his conception of the Middle Orient.80