I.

Introduction

Middle East, region loosely defined by geography and culture, located in south-western Asia and north-eastern Africa. In most current usage, the term Middle East refers collectively to Cyprus, Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Israel, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Turkey, Yemen, and the states and emirates along the southern and eastern fringes of the Arabian Peninsula, namely, Bahrain, Oman, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates.

The term was coined in 1900 and in its earliest uses designated the northern approaches to India from Iran to Tibet. The Middle East therefore occupied the area between the Near East, a term used to signify the Ottoman Empire and its successor states from Serbia to Iraq, and the Far East, consisting principally of China and Japan. Following the break up of the Ottoman Empire after World War I the term Near East declined in popularity (although it has never disappeared) and parts of its domain, namely the Arab Near East, came to be described in British official terminology as the Middle East. The Middle East thus began a journey westwards and was further enlarged during World War II when, in British political and military usage, the term came to signify more or less the area defined above. The Middle East was a wholly strategic concept; countries and peoples were not grouped together because it was thought they had any cultural affinities one with another, but because outsiders, mainly the British, found it convenient to treat them as a bloc for military and political purposes. Nevertheless, as the term found currency in academic circles so elements of cultural unity were detected, in particular the circumstance that the religion of Islam was dominant. However, Islam is not, of course, confined to the Middle East even though the region saw its emergence, and, when used to designate this so-called cultural area, the unity of which is based on Islamic law and custom, the term Middle East usually embraces a much more extensive region (although one by no means coterminous with Islam), stretching from the borders of Afghanistan and Pakistan in the east through all of North Africa, including Sudan and the Maghreb, comprising Libya, Tunisia, Algeria, and Morocco.