Comments on: East: Near, Middle, Far

By: Martin Kramer

Martin Kramer — Tue, 30 Sep 2008 15:36:00 +0000

The National Geographic Society's attempt to salvage Near East in April 1952 was probably a direct rejoinder to an official British determination affirmed in the House of Commons by the British Under-Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs Ernest Davies ten months earlier, in July 1951. Davies:

The term "Near East," which was connected with the Ottoman Empire, is outmoded in this country and "Middle East" has now superseded it for official purposes. The countries included in the term "Middle East" are Egypt, Turkey, Iraq, Persia, Syria, the Lebanon, Jordan, Israel, Saudi Arabia, the Trucial Sheikhdoms, Kuweit, Bahrein, Qatar, Muscat, the Aden Protectorate and the Yemen.

(To which a needling member replied: "Can the hon. Gentleman say that there is nothing eastern that is any nearer than the Middle East now?") This has become the canonical definition of the Middle East, as attested by the products of mainstream cartography in America and Europe.

By: Malik Mufti

Malik Mufti — Tue, 09 Sep 2008 19:48:32 +0000

In the late 1980s, I took a graduate course entitled "From the Near East Question to the Middle East Problem." As the Cold War order began to collapse, the professor joked that perhaps he should add "and Back to the Near East Question Again" to the course title. The distinction to my mind rests on the territories—in the Balkans, Caucasus, and Central Asia—that went out of play geopolitically after World War One. That left the narrower area called the Middle East, centered around the Arab-Israeli and Arab-Iranian fault lines, as an arena of active international politics. With the reactivation of the Balkans, Caucasus, and Central Asia, however, it seems to me reasonable to refer once again to the Near East as a distinct and coherent—only broader— geopolitical subsystem. Malik Mufti is a member of MESH.

By: Martin Kramer

Martin Kramer — Mon, 08 Sep 2008 02:28:46 +0000

This leaves me feeling somewhat anachronistic, since I have my undergraduate and doctoral degrees in Near Eastern Studies from Princeton. It's even more the case since my diplomas are in Latin, and attest that my degrees are in the study of Asia Citerior, which is Asia Minor—apparently the closest thing in Latin to the Near or Middle East. Roman Asia Minor was defined as that part of Asia lying to the west of the Euphrates River. Of course, my studies in Princeton's Near Eastern Studies department covered a lot more than that, including, for example, courses on Egypt and Iran. So I'm afraid my diplomas shortchange me, declaring me an expert on only part of the area I studied. Caveat emptor. Martin Kramer is a member of MESH.