A British India Office label still organises three continents’ hinge
The Middle East generally means all of Egypt plus West Asia except the Caucasus—roughly Europe’s older “Near East.” Thirteen of eighteen Middle Eastern states are Arab; Egypt, Iran, and Turkey lead in population, Saudi Arabia in area, and the phrase itself began as a strategist’s coinage for guarding the sea road to India.
Because the region follows political borders rather than continental ones, it takes in East Thrace, the European corner of Turkey. Its core zones are the Arabian Peninsula, Anatolia, the Levant, Mesopotamia and the Iranian plateau, and the usual list runs to 17 UN members plus one British Overseas Territory. After Arabs come Turks, Persians, Kurds, Jews and Assyrians. Judaism, Christianity and Islam all began here, and it was the first place outside Africa that modern humans settled and the first to develop writing.
Deserts dominate Arabia and Egypt, yet the Nile, the Tigris and Euphrates, and the Jordan sustain farming, while the Levant coast and most of Turkey enjoy Mediterranean weather. Petroleum under the Gulf Arab states shapes regional politics, and dependence on fossil fuels plus aridity leave the area highly exposed to climate change and water shortages.
Britain’s India Office may have used the phrase in the 1850s, amid the Great Game with Russia. Alfred Thayer Mahan spread it in a September 1902 National Review essay on the Persian Gulf, arguing the region would need its own Malta and Gibraltar. Valentine Chirol’s 20-part series in The Times, begun that October, widened it to the approaches of India, and after 1903 the paper dropped the quotation marks. Britain’s Cairo-based Middle East Command in the late 1930s and the Middle East Institute, founded in Washington in 1946, fixed the usage.
Washington first used it officially in the 1957 Eisenhower Doctrine, when John Foster Dulles stretched it from Libya to Pakistan. Archaeologists still prefer Near East. Critics such as Hassan Hanafi call the label Eurocentric, yet Arabic papers use ash-Sharq al-Awsat, Turkish says Orta Doğu, and the Bush administration later coined Greater Middle East.
Source: Middle East
