The Middle East / Arabia: 'the cradle of Islam'

Abstract

It is noteworthy that Westerners' oldest destination of travel, seasonal migration, and colonisation should have received its name only in recent times. The term 'Middle East' is a neologism, invented in 1902 by US naval historian Alfred Thayer Mahan to designate the sea and land stretching between a farther East - India - and a nearer one, extending towards the westernmost territories of Asia and the eastern Mediterranean. The centre of Mahan's idiosyncratic map was the Persian Gulf - anticipating later US interest in the area. The new epithet was immediately taken up by The Times , put into circulation by officialdom, and gradually extended to include the mass of land under Ottoman rule - stretching from the Black Sea to equatorial Africa and from India to the heart of the Mediterranean. ‘Middle East’ did not supplant the considerably older term ‘Orient’, but was used interchangeably with it, replicating images of the West’s ‘other’ which characterised European discourses on the East. Both terms embody the ambiguous position of this area in these discourses and reflect an ethnocentric and hierarchical view of the world with the West at its centre and as its standard but, at the same time, indicating the relational positions of Europe and the Middle East and of the latter and the Far East. Raymond Schwab captures this relationality in his classical distinction between the Indian Orient discovered by European Orientalists in the eighteenth century and that older Orient, part of the ‘European room’, the locus of Graeco-Roman and Judeo- Christian civilisations which had shaped Europe itself.