by Bonine, Michael E. ; Amanat, Abbas; Gasper, Michael Ezekiel
Figure 3.5a. Southwest Asia as defined by Brice, South-West Asia. Vol. 8, A Systematic Regional Geography, 1966. By kind permission of the publisher.
Figure 3.5b. The Middle East as tricontinental hub, the heart of the World-Island. Held, Middle East Patterns, 2011. By kind permission of the publisher.
Apart from political frontiers, there are no clear boundaries around the region [as] defined.... The sea, which penetrates deeply into the region, is as much a medium for movement as a barrier, and it is easily crossed at the Red Sea, between Africa and Arabia, and the Turkish Straits, between Europe and Asia. The upland which forms much of eastern Iran may retard movement, but well-defined corridors lead through it into Central Asia and northern India. On the south, deserts interpose not so much an impassable barrier between the Middle East, on the one hand, and the Maghreb and the Sudan, on the other, as a difficult and exhausting zone of transition.35
Figure 3.5c. The Middle East as the central region to major global cultures. Anderson and Anderson, An Atlas of Middle Eastern Affairs, 2010. By kind permission of the publisher.
Figure 3.6. The Middle East as defined by Beaumont, Blake, and Wagstaff, Middle East, 1976. By kind permission of the publisher.
In their introduction, these authors emphasize the geopolitical significance of the Middle East, that junction between Europe, Asia, and Africa. Although their book has introductory chapters on the physical and human geography of the region, they group the individual country chapters thematically, focusing mainly on a specific topic within each country—such as agriculture in Iran, population growth and agriculture in Egypt, industrialization in Turkey, and the impact of oil in Libya.
The most widely used textbook today in American undergraduate Middle East regional geography classes is probably Colbert C. Held’s Middle East Patterns: Places, Peoples, and Politics, first published in 1989, followed by later editions published in 1994, 2000, 2005, and 2011.36 Thematic chapters on physical and cultural geography are followed by chapters on regional geography that focus on specific countries or a combination of states, such as Lebanon and Cyprus or Israel and the Occupied Territories. Unlike many of the previous textbooks, which treat the Arabian Peninsula (or Arabia) in one chapter, Held has three separate chapters for this area: “Saudi Arabia: Development in the Desert,” “The Gulf and Its Oil States,” and “Oman and the Yemens: The Southern Fringe.” As indicated in the preface, when Held published his geography in 1989 he noted that “this is the first geography of the Middle East by a U.S. geographer since 1960. This lapse of almost 30 years between such studies is astonishing in view of the vital role of the Middle East in U.S. affairs and the equally vital role of the geographical perspective.”37 Held, who holds a doctorate degree in geography from the University of Nebraska, worked for the U.S. Department of State for sixteen years and was stationed in Beirut, Tehran, and many other parts of the Middle East during his career and then became a diplomat-in-residence at Baylor University. The fifth edition (2011) of Middle East Patterns is coauthored with John Thomas Cummings, who served almost thirty years in government or international organizations in the Middle East.38
Where is Held’s Middle East? He includes the Arab states of Southwest Asia, as well as Turkey and Iran (but not Afghanistan), but only Egypt on the African continent, and hence he excludes Sudan and North Africa (Figure 3.7). This delimitation of the region represents the “core Middle East” as defined by G. Etzel Pearcy (Figure 3.8), for instance, in his 1964 Department of State publication, The Middle East—An Indefinable Region.39 (Pearcy was the geographer of the Department of State,” a long-defunct position.) In 1989, Held stated that “the seventeen countries that are the focus of this book are considered as the Middle East on the latest maps published by the National Geographic Society, Department of State, Central Intelligence Agency, John Bartholomew (leading British map agency), and other international agencies.”40 Similar to Brice, he emphasizes that the Middle East is at the “Tricontinental Junction” of three continents—Europe, Asia, and Africa (Figure 3.5b)—which means that “the Middle East possesses unique geopolitical significance.”41 Regarding possible other terms, such as “Southwest Asia” and Cressey’s “Swasia,” Held states that “the toponym ‘Middle East’ is used in this book, both because it is well accepted in international usage and also because ‘middle’ connotes the region’s central location, its function as a tricontinental hub, and its role as a strategic bridge.”42
Figure 3.7. The Middle East as defined by Held and Cummings, Middle East Patterns, 2011. By kind permission of the publisher.
Figure 3.8. The Middle East: Flexibility of Delineation. Pearcy, The Middle East, 1964.
These textbooks, although varying in detail and definition of the Middle East, are rather conventional in their presentation. They define the importance of the region; have extensive descriptions of the physical geography on a regional scale; include some historical background (albeit often rather minimal); discuss the human geography in terms of languages, religion, lifestyles, and so forth (again, often rather minimally); and then have individual country chapters that go into detail on some of these subjects as well as focus on elements specific to that country.
A rather different approach is the 1985 textbook by Alasdair Drysdale and Gerald Blake, The Middle East and North Africa: A Political Geography.43 Writing over two decades ago when there were no books dealing exclusively with the political geography of this region, Drysdale and Blake define this area as the Middle East and North Africa (Figure 3.9) and refer to it as one of the “Global Geopolitical Regions.” They note that Fisher basically ignores political geography, whereas Beaumont, Blake, and Wagstaff include only one chapter on the political map of the region in their text. As Drysdale and Blake lament: “Possibly no other major world region has attracted so little attention from political geographers. This lacuna seems all the more surprising in view of the region’s global importance and the numerous instances in which political conflicts within it have geographic origins or dimensions.”44 Unfortunately, little has changed to rectify that lacuna.
By using the phrase “Middle East and North Africa,” Drysdale and Blake solve many of the problems in trying to decide what constitutes the Middle East—and it is surprising that more geographers have not followed this designation (as some scholars in other disciplines have done in their works, for instance). Southwest Asia (without Afghanistan) is their Middle East; however, they also recognize some of the difficulties in trying to delimit this region, even when North Africa is included:
The Middle East and North Africa, as we have defined them, are neither physically nor culturally bounded regions, although their physical environmental and cultural patterns endow them with a distinctive regional identity. There is no standard definition of the Middle East.... However the region may be defined, it is not a closed political system. Culturally, the Middle East in certain areas extends far beyond the outer limits of some of the states of the region, whereas in other areas—as in southern Sudan—different cultural regions impinge on it. The geopolitical influence of the Middle East and North Africa extends into Afghanistan, Pakistan, and the Indian Ocean as well as into the Sahara and the Horn of Africa. No grouping of states can claim to belong to so many geopolitical realms. The coastal states of North Africa are African, Mediterranean, Islamic, and Arab—all influenced politically and economically by nearness to Europe. Most of the states of the Middle East are in Asia, but they have strong ties with the Euro-Mediterranean world or the Afro-Indian Ocean world or both. All but Cyprus, Israel, and Lebanon are Islamic; only Cyprus, Iran, Israel, and Turkey are not Arab.45
Figure 3.9. Geopolitical regions and subregions of the Middle East and North Africa (II) as defined by Drysdale and Blake, The Middle East and North Africa, 1985. By kind permission of the publisher.
Drysdale and Blake’s work is certainly one of the more theoretical and thematic approaches of a geography textbook on this region, with chapters on partitioning of te
rritory, boundary issues, offshore and ocean partitioning issues, and national and regional integration, for instance, in addition to a focus on the Arab-Israeli conflict and the control of petroleum. Although probably the best theoretical textbook on the Middle East by geographers, due to its very focus and content, it also became woefully outdated rather quickly. Unfortunately, there have been no new editions since its original publication in 1985.46
THE MIDDLE EAST AS A WORLD CULTURAL REGION
Having examined some major textbooks specifically on the geography of the Middle East, we now turn to how the Middle East is treated in world regional geography textbooks. Such books as World Regions in Global Context by Marston, Knox, and Liverman, mentioned above, are used by tens of thousands of students across the United States in introductory classes.47 This is the way the majority of geography students—and other undergraduates—are introduced to the Middle East. Marston, Knox, and Liverman refer to the region as the Middle East and North Africa and define it as ranging from Morocco and Western Sahara to Iran, including Sudan but excluding Afghanistan (Figure 3.10). They describe the climate of the region, without ascribing environmental deterministic influences on the people, and their discussions are of high quality and present relevant material about the peoples and social issues of the Middle East. Numerous other recent world regional textbooks are available, particularly because of the rather large market for university classes. These are addressed only briefly, in order to show how they define their Middle East (and why) and the implications of those divisions and spatial patterns.
Figure 3.10. The Middle East and North Africa as defined by Marston, Knox, and Liverman. Adapted from Figure 5.1 in Marston, Knox, and Liverman, World Regions in Global Context, 2002. By kind permission of the publisher.
One of the most popular world regional textbooks has long been Harm J. de Blij and Peter O. Muller’s Geography: Realms, Regions, and Concepts, first published in 1971 and continued through its fourteenth edition in 2010.48 The authors designate the Middle East as the North Africa / Southwest Asia Realm (Figure 3.11). Regarding the term “Middle East,” they mention its Eurocentric origins and acknowledge that
the term has taken hold, and it can be seen and heard in everyday usage by scholars, journalists, and members of the United Nations. In view of the complexity of this realm, its transitional margins, and its far-flung areal components, the name Middle East need be faulted only for being imprecise—it does not make a single-factor region of North Africa / Southwest Asia, as do the terms Dry World, Arab World, and World of Islam. In this chapter we do use this name [Middle East]—but only for one of its regions, not for the realm as a whole.49
The use of the term “realm” for North Africa/Southwest Asia, in fact, enables the authors to expand considerably beyond a narrow definition for the region, and so their realm becomes quite flexible and changeable:
Of all the geographic realms ... the North Africa/Southwest Asian realm has seen the most territorial change. It has expanded, contracted, and expanded again in Europe and Asia, as well as Africa; its margins remain in flux. Islam ... is only one dimension of it, but today it is Islam that energizes its borders—in West and northeastern Africa, in the Caucasus area, in northern Turkestan, in northwestern Pakistan. Unlike the Russian, North American, South Asian, or East Asian realms, this geographic realm has no dominant, anchoring state.... [H]ere is a realm with many core areas, linked by the tenets of an ancient civilization that was infused by the prophet Muhammad fourteen centuries ago.50
De Blij and Muller then designate seven regional components of “this far-flung realm”:
1. Egypt and the Lower Nile Basin: “This region in many ways constitutes the heart of the realm as a whole.... It is the historic focus of this part of the world and a major political cultural force.” In addition to Egypt, it includes the northern part of Sudan.
Figure 3.11. North Africa/Southwest Asia Realm as defined by de Blij and Mueller. Adapted from figure 7-10 in de Blij and Mueller, Geography, 2007. Reprinted with permission from John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
2. The Maghreb and Its Neighbors: The neighbors are Libya, Chad, Niger, Mali, and Mauritania—and the latter four are part of a transition zone into sub-Saharan Africa.
3. The African Transition Zone: From southern Mauritania on the west to Somalia on the east, the realm dominated by Islamic culture “interdigitates” with that of sub-Saharan Africa. There is no sharp dividing line here: “People of African ethnic stock have adopted the Muslim faith and Arabic language and traditions. As a result, this is less a region than a broad zone of transition.”
4. The Middle East: This region includes Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, and Israel. “It is the crescent-like zone of countries that extends from the eastern Mediterranean coast to the head of the Persian Gulf.” The Palestinian territories are not mentioned as part of the definition, although they do constitute a considerable part of the discussion in the Israel section.
5. The Arabian Peninsula: “Here lies the source and focus of Islam, the holy city of Mecca; here, too lie many of the world’s greatest oil deposits.”
6. The Empire States: “Two of the realm’s giants [are] states with imperial histories and majestic cultures ...: Turkey and Iran.”
7. Turkestan: This includes the Central Asian states following the collapse of the Soviet Union, with Islam a factor. “Boundaries of this region, as in the African Transition Zone, do not always coincide with national borders ..., but regional cultural influences also radiate into China and Pakistan. Afghanistan is also part of this region.”51
The inclusion of Turkestan (Central Asia) and the transition zones into other cultural and environmental areas, such as south of the Sahara, provides a basis, indeed, for rethinking this region—this realm—which I return to in the conclusion. However, the term “Southwest Asia” can be as nebulous as is the term “Middle East.” The U.S. government, for example, recently confused the term, as evidenced by its use in Dennis Ross’s title as the Special Advisor to the Secretary of State for the Gulf and Southwest Asia and its other uses as a strategic term.52
One of the most extensive treatments of the Middle East in a world regional geography textbook is found in Paul Ward English’s World Regional Geography: A Question of Place, first published in 1977 and then published jointly with James A. Miller in later editions (1984, 1989, and 1993).53 It is unusual for geographers who specialize in the Middle East and North Africa to be authors of a world regional geography textbook.54 English (and English and Miller) use the term “Middle East and North Africa” to describe their region, which extends from Morocco (and Spanish Sahara in the first edition) in the west to Afghanistan in the east (Figure 3.12).
Figure 3.12. The Middle East and North Africa as defined by English and Miller, World Regional Geography, 1989. Courtesy of the author.
Compared with what might be included in various other definitions, this is one of the most extensive (but it excludes Sudan). The African chapter, titled “Tropical Africa” in the first edition, is rather problematic for the countries of the Sahel (Mauritania, Mali, etc.) as well as for the Horn of Africa or the southern African countries. (However, they use only the term “Africa” in the third edition). The chapter on the Middle East and North Africa has a heavy emphasis on history and culture—and on Islam—but the reason it is referred to as the Middle East (and North Africa) is never addressed. They identify four subregions: North Africa, Arabian Peninsula, the Northern Highlands (Turkey, Iran, and Afghanistan), and an area they label the Central Middle East, which comprises the Arab states and Israel “flanked on the west and east by two great river valleys, the Nile of Egypt and the Tigris-Euphrates of Iraq.”55 A focus on aspects of what English has termed the “ecological trilogy”56 leads to discussions of nomads, villagers, and urbanites. In the first edition, English provides considerable discussion of his own work, he includes some of his studies in Iran; however, much of this is omitted in the later editions.
Some regio
nal geographies use “Southwest Asia and North Africa” to refer to our region. In 1992, George F. Hepner and Jesse O. McKee published World Regional Geography: A Global Approach, which has a chapter on Southwest Asia-North Africa (written by Basheer K. Nijim).57 The chapter includes the states of North Africa (including Western Sahara, but not Sudan) and Southwest Asia, including Afghanistan. Nijim uses the acronym SWANA to refer collectively to the two terms “Southwest Asia” and “North Africa.” He never addresses the use of the term “Middle East,” although it is used several times toward the end of his chapter when he discusses international trade and several international organizations. John Cole’s 1996 Geography of the World’s Major Regions has a chapter on North Africa and Southwest Asia (North Africa includes Western Sahara but not Sudan, and Southwest Asia includes Afghanistan).58 Interestingly, Cole neither uses the term “Middle East” (or “Near East”) nor addresses why the term is absent throughout the entire chapter.