Reconsidering ‘Middle East and Islamic studies’ for a changing world

Abstract

It is generally considered that the expression ‘Middle East’ was coined in 1902 by Alfred Thayer Mahan, in an attempt to delineate a region from the Mediterranean to India. Since then, ‘Middle East’ has become an expression to designate everything related with ‘Islam’ and/or ‘Muslims’, and in recent years a linguistic and political development occurred when, during the Bush administration, the term ‘Greater Middle East’ was used to designate the region from Morocco to Afghanistan and, in some cases, to South-East Asia. The aim of this paper is to question the validity and usefulness of these expressions, and to show how they continue to designate, including in the academic world, an object of study which only exists in abstract terms, ignoring the diversity of those regions and the way its inhabitants view themselves and their identities. Using Edward Said's concept of Orientalism, the main focus will be on the academic world and it will try to assess how the knowledge that is still produced in some scholarly environments continues to misinform the way those regions are seen. Current events in North Africa, Egypt and other countries in the Arab world have shown that political reality is changing, and this paper concludes that methods and theories seeking grand explanations for the Islamic world should also change.

Keywords:

• Middle East studies
• Islamic studies
• Greater Middle East
• Orientalism
• epistemology

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank João Pedro Tavares Carreira, Maria de Fátima Lopes da Conceição and Richard de Luchi for having graciously read various drafts of this paper and for making comments on it. All failings are of course my own.

Notes

¹Another expression which has been questioned by, among others, Souren Melikian.

²The subject will not be developed here, but ‘secularism’ is different from ‘laïcité’, and to say that a state is a secular one is redundant. Every state, even those who claim some sort of divine origin, deals primarily with human and ‘this-worldly’ affairs.

³Timur Kuran (2010), using this same line of reasoning, argues that what slowed the economic development of the Middle East was not colonialism or geography, but Islamic legal institutions from the tenth century onwards. By the nineteenth century, modern economic institutions began to be transplanted to the Middle East, but its economy has not caught up. Once again, never mind the fact that that ‘transplantation’ was done using imperial violence and colonial brutality, and, not surprisingly, Kuran does not explain what happened between the eleventh and eighteenth centuries.

⁴For a review on this book, see Kirill Nourzhanov (2009).

⁵Curiously enough, the way that Moroccans designate their country, al-Maghrib, means, in Arabic, the West.

⁶For further detail on this subject see Carimo Mohomed (2009).