Is There a Middle East?
Page 9
But what is a continent? Martin Lewis and Karen Wigen’s thought-provoking The Myth of Continents tackles the assumptions and misconceptions that have led to the construction of the world into seven continents (as well as other world divisions, such as East and West, North and South, or Third World and First World, and even nation-states). They emphasize how continents—and nation-states—have “become reified as natural and fundamental building blocks of global geography, rather than being recognized as the constructed, contingent, and often imposed political-geographical units that they are.”7 They note that world regions and continents are the products of overgeneralizations, and in fact some regions are defined according to criteria that differ from case to case. Yet, despite such problems, Lewis and Wigen “insist that world regions—more or less boundable areas united by broad social and cultural features—do exist and that their recognition and delineation are essential for geographical understanding.”8 Indeed, there must be some way to talk about the world—its diversity, patterns, and organization. So, the question is whether or not world cultural regions—and in our case, the Middle East (if it is a world cultural region)—are valid terms to use in the attempt to understand, study, and analyze a group of peoples, a group of countries, or a region. So in addition to the question, Is there a Middle East? there is a related and as difficult question: Where is the Middle East?
Figure 3.1. Cultural Regions of the World. Adapted from Figure 1.1 in Marston, Knox, and Liverman, World Regions in Global Context, 2002. By kind permission of the publisher.
First, let us delve into how and when “world regions” came about—into the divisions generally put forth today, for example, in world geography textbooks. Basically, our present world cultural regions emerged from the period of World War II, when the lack of American international expertise and knowledge resulted in efforts to rectify that deficiency. In June 1942, the Smithsonian Institution established an ethnogeographic board, which was dominated by anthropologists but also included linguists and cultural geographers, to provide research and be a think tank for the war effort. The board met twice a year and mainly fielded requests from various governmental, military, and private agencies; one of their main products was a 187-page waterproof book titled Survival on Land and Sea,9 which soldiers and sailors in the Pacific carried during the war. The board created a roster of more than five thousand individuals who had knowledge of the culture and languages of more than ten thousand cultural groups, and it divided the roster’s world into the regions of Africa, Asia, Europe, Latin America, North America, and Oceania.10 Hence, “the world regional concept that shaped postwar area studies was essentially formulated by anthropologists, and the world regional map they posited was subject to almost no debate.”11
The establishment of major area study associations—specifically the Association of Asian Studies, Latin American Studies Association, African Studies Association, Slavic Studies Association, and the Middle East Studies Association of North America—in the decades following World War II also helped to solidify the treatment of knowledge within specific world cultural regions. Various funding agencies, such as the Social Science Research Council, American Council for Learned Societies, and Ford Foundation, began to provide research funds for work and study in specific world cultural regions. Finally, the establishment of Title VI area studies centers, funded by the federal government, led to many programs and teaching positions at major universities within departments that focused on specific language and area studies. These world divisions were the Far East, Southeast Asia, South Asia, Europe, Africa, Latin America, Soviet Union (later replaced with the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe), and the Near East (later replaced with the Middle East). As Lewis and Wigen note, “This reorganization of the global map into world areas was readily adopted by geographers, anthropologists, and other scholars. In the 1950s, a few world geography textbooks were organized around the architecture of continents, but by the end of the decade the transition to a world area framework (usually called world regions by geographers) was essentially complete.”12
Geographers’ minor role in the study of the Middle East is shown by their rather minimal participation in the emergence of the area studies programs after World War II. In November 1947, a major national conference on the study of world areas took place in New York City.13 Slightly more than one hundred individuals participated; most were rather prominent academics but also there were representatives from government agencies, foundations, and a few other organizations. Although there were at least twenty anthropologists, five political scientists, eight historians, and more than twenty individuals from language and area study programs (e.g., Russian Institute, Institute of Latin American Studies), among them, there were only two academic geographers: Richard Hartshorne from the University of Wisconsin (one of the major figures of twentieth-century American geography) and Preston James from Syracuse University (a major Latin American geographer who wrote one of the principal regional geographies of Latin America). The conference focused on six world regions: Latin America, Soviet Union, Southeast Asia and India, Near East, Europe, and the Far East, and organized panels reported on the status of their area studies and offered recommendations. Hartshorne was with the Europe group, and of course James was with Latin America. The Near East Panel comprised ten individuals:
Walter L. Wright Jr. (Panel Chairman), Department of Oriental
Languages and Literatures, Princeton University
Carleton S. Coon, Department of Anthropology, Harvard University
Mortimer Graves, American Council of Learned Societies
Philip K. Hitti, Department of Oriental Languages and Literatures, Princeton University
Frank S. Hopkins, Foreign Service Institute, U.S. Department of State
Halford L. Hoskins, School of Advance International Studies
John A. Morrison, National War College
Ephraim A. Speiser, Graduate School, Division of Humanities, University of Pennsylvania
Lewis V. Thomas, Department of Oriental Languages and Literatures, Princeton University
T. Cuyler Young, Department of Oriental Languages and Literatures, Princeton University
The panel on the Near East and the one on Southeast Asia “called attention to the neglect of these two important areas of the world by American scholarship and education, and urged recruitment and training of specialized personnel.”14 It is quite interesting that in the three pages of the Near East panel report, the issue of the use of the term “Near East” versus “Middle East” is not even mentioned.15 The presence of archaeologists, such as T. Cuyler Young, who preferred—and still prefer the term “Near East” for this region, may certainly have been a factor for referring to the region as the Near East rather than as the Middle East. They did recognize, however, that “the interpenetrations involved in the Near Eastern area, both ancient and modern, in terms of geography, politics, and culture, mean that the area has so many facets that at present no rigid delimitation of its boundaries should be attempted.”16 Although this referred mainly to disciplinary boundaries, it might as well have referred to spatial boundaries as well.
It is also apparent how tentative their recommendations were; for instance, they focused on developing a general undergraduate course on the Near Eastern area and agreed that “the essential unity of Near Eastern history must never be overlooked, and that interrelations within the Near East and the role of the Near East in world culture must be the basic points of departure for such a survey course.”17 They also (puzzlingly) recommended that there be no language requirements for the undergraduate student of the Near East, although “complete and modern instruction in Arabic, Turkish, and Persian should be offered at the undergraduate level just as French and German are now.”18 The panels of the other areas concentrated on how to conduct research in their regions or how to teach and develop material in their graduate programs, a reflection of how further developed their area studies were (and why the Middle East Studies Association
of North America was not formed until 1966—the last of the major area studies associations to do so).
GEOGRAPHIES OF THE MIDDLE EAST
Separate books on the geography of the Middle East were not published until after World War II, following geographers’ new interest in major world cultural regions. Initially, however, this region was included in some of the early textbooks on Asia. For instance, in 1944, George Cressey, a major figure in American geography at Syracuse University, first published his Asia’s Lands and Peoples.19 In order, Cressey divided Asia into China, Japan, Soviet Union, Southwestern Asia, India, and Southeastern Asia. The chapter titled “The Southwestern Realm” begins by addressing the terms “Near East” and “Middle East”:
The term “Near East” is an indefinite geographical expression which is frequently used but seldom defined. To some it loosely refers to all the lands between Libya and India: to others it is limited to the countries within Asia bordering the Mediterranean; and some would even include India. The words “Middle East” and “Levant” are sometimes introduced for Palestine, Iraq, and near-by areas, but the Middle East is also used variously for North Africa or even India. Like the Far East, the phrase Near East stands for no clearly defined place on the map and it is well to use it sparingly. This [Cressey’s] chapter is an introduction to the eight major countries of Southwestern Asia, between India and the Mediterranean: Turkey, Syria, Palestine, Trans-Jordan, Arabia, Iraq, Iran, and Afghanistan [Figure 3.2].20
After about four pages of text on the Southwestern Realm, short chapters occur on the countries (or mandates) mentioned above. Although the book has about six hundred pages, only forty pages deal with this region, which includes numerous maps, photos, and graphs; hence, it contains rather limited text, much of which focuses on physical geographic descriptions. In contrast, China and the Soviet Union each have more than a hundred pages, and Japan has seventy pages (Cressey was a specialist on East Asia). With only a (rather inadequate) glimpse at the Southwestern Realm states, parts of this region are not even mentioned (e.g., the French mandate of Lebanon and British Trucial States or Oman). It is also revealing that in the acknowledgments of the book, Cressey thanks dozens of experts for their help with specific regions but mentions nobody for the Southwestern Realm—an indication of the absence of American geographers familiar with this region.21
The Pattern of Asia, edited by Norton Ginsburg of the University of Chicago and published in 1958, is another well-known textbook on Asia.22 In it, the region of our concern is referred to as “Southwest Asia” (Figure 3.3), and it covers in general the same states that Cressey’s work covers, except that Afghanistan has been moved to South Asia. Related to the Middle East, the text states:
Southwest Asia forms the largest part of the Middle East region, which extends from Iran, on the east, westward to Cyrenaica, and from Turkey, on the north, southward to central Anglo-Egyptian Sudan. Because of the scope of the text [i.e., Asia], Egypt, Cyrenaica, and the Sudan are not considered in detail, but one should remember that these areas, especially Egypt, are parts of an integrated unit, and that their relationship to Southwest Asia is not only obvious but also very close. ... For the sake of convenience the term “Middle East” will be used here in general discussion except where the subject deals solely with Asiatic matters.23
Figure 3.2. Southwestern Asia as defined by Cressey, Asia’s Lands and Peoples, 1944. By kind permission of the publisher.
Figure 3.3. Southwest Asia as defined by Ginsburg, The Pattern of Asia, 1958.
Figure 3.4. The Middle East as defined by Fisher, The Middle East, 1978. By kind permission of the publisher.
The discussions of the “Middle East” countries in this book are much more extensive than those in Cressey’s text; in fact, this section in Ginsburg’s book constitutes almost 150 pages (out of a total of 900 pages).
Following World War II, the first textbooks that focused only on the Middle East (or Southwest Asia) were published. The classic 1950 work by W. B. Fisher, The Middle East: A Physical, Social and Regional Geography, went through seven editions, with the last one published in 1978.24 Fisher, a British geographer at the University of Durham, defines his Middle East as Southwest Asia (without Afghanistan) plus Egypt and Libya. He adds Sudan in the sixth (1971) and seventh (1978) editions (Figure 3.4). In the last (1978) edition, he has the following comment about the use of the term “Middle East”:
After many years of debate, acrid at times, and although the area itself has risen to a position of major world significance, the term “Middle East” still cannot command universal acceptance in a single strict sense—even counting in “Mideast” as a mere abridgement. Perhaps the most that a geographer can say, taking refuge in semantics, is that it can be regarded as a “conventional” regional term of general convenience, like Central Europe or the American Middle West, with many definitions in more detail feasible and logically possible.25
Fisher discusses how the term “Middle East” has been used by both governments and the general public of Great Britain and the United States and hence is a generally accepted term (even if the area delimited is not agreed upon). Fisher, however, goes a step further, stating that “despite the considerable geographical illogicality of ‘Middle East,’ there is one compensation: in its wider meaning this term can be held to denote a single geographical region definable by a few dominating elements that confer strong physical and social unity.”26
Fisher, in fact, justifies his Middle East in a rather extreme environmental deterministic framework:
Within a territory delimitable as extending from Libya to Iran, and Turkey to the Sudan ... it is possible to postulate on geographical grounds the existence of a natural region to which the name Middle East can be applied. ... The outstanding defining element is climatic: the Middle East has a highly unusual and characteristic regime which both sets it apart from its neighbours and also, since climate is a principal determinant in ways of life, the special climate induces highly distinctive and particular human responses and activities. ... [T]he common elements of natural environment and social organization are sufficiently recognizable and strong to justify treatment of the Middle East as one single unit.27
He does recognize that there are some smaller areas “on the margins” that do not fit this climatically determined Middle East—such as southern Sudan, which “in its physical and human geography is in certain respects closer to Central African conditions” or where “extreme southern Arabia is brushed by monsoonal currents that give summer rain.”28 The illogic of Fisher’s definition for his Middle East is illustrated in his justification for adding Sudan to his Middle East in the text’s sixth edition in 1971: “Here, Islamic culture, close resemblance in some but not all environmental features to the characteristic Middle East pattern, and ideological linkages to the rest of the Middle East, could be held to justify inclusion of this extra element in the general scheme.”29 Such logic (or illogic) then begs the question, why does he not include the rest of North Africa or Afghanistan, or, for that matter, parts of Pakistan or Central Asia, in the Middle East region?
W. B. Fisher’s textbook does have rather extensive physical geographic descriptions of the region, both in his general introductory chapters and within the individual regional chapters. Fisher also contributed the physical descriptions of the Middle East for the major annual reference work by Europa, The Middle East and North Africa.30 Although Fisher died in 1984, the Europa publication still uses his physical descriptions of the countries included in its Middle East.
In 1966 W. C. Brice, another British geographer, published South-West Asia, which was part of the series titled “A Systematic Regional Geography” that was written for first-year university courses or advanced-level training college in Great Britain.31 Other volumes in the series included, for instance, The British Isles; Europe; A World Survey—the Human Aspect; Australia, New Zealand and the South-West Pacific; Monsoon Asia; Anglo-America; and The Soviet Union. Brice’s work, which omi
ts all countries of North Africa (including Egypt), does include Afghanistan to the east, and it heavily emphasizes the physical geography, particularly the climate, landforms, and biology. “South-West Asia” is used by Brice instead of “the Near and Middle East” because the latter terms are too confusing and “have been employed by different authorities with very different implications.” According to Brice, “By the Near East is understood the semi-circle of countries round the eastern basin of the Mediterranean, Libya, Egypt, Israel, Lebanon, Syria, Turkey and Greece; while the Middle East is taken to include the states of the Arabian peninsula, together with Jordan, Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan and the province of Baluchistan in Pakistan.”32 Brice also stresses the centrality of Southwest Asia in the Old World, as it is located between Africa, Europe, and the rest of Asia (Figure 3.5a).
A more widely used textbook first published in 1976, also written by British geographers, is The Middle East: A Geographical Study by Peter Beaumont, Gerald H. Blake, and J. Malcolm Wagstaff.33 Beaumont and Blake were at the University of Durham and Wagstaff was at the University of Southampton when this work was first published. Their Middle East runs from Iran to Libya, but it excludes Afghanistan and Sudan (Figure 3.6). Unlike Fisher and his “natural region,” however, these authors note that a wider context (such as North Africa, which then includes the Maghreb states) is often used to define the region. They assert that “the regional and subregional definitions employed in this book are ... essentially pragmatic. The macro-region itself is defined in terms of modern states, since today these may be regarded as constituting distinctive socio-economic systems, despite a number of shared characteristics.”34 And they further state: