Why do refer to the Middle East as the ‘Middle East? The Middle East is a very vague descriptive term of this region that was created by the British, sometimes it was even referred to as the ‘Near East’. Both of these terms describe the region based on Eurocentric maps, and the term itself is vague since it’s unknown whether the term the ‘Middle East’ also includes North African countries or if it includes them, and what countries specifically count as ‘Middle Eastern’? So since the term isn’t accurate nor was it created by the people of the region, why do we still refer to the region as the ‘Middle East’?
I would say that this is one of the many ways that we, as people of the Middle East who have been previously colonized by the West, hold on to and reconstruct colonial ideas. Although, there have been some changes in the past couple of years where some people have started to use terms such as MENA, the Middle East and North Africa, as well as SWANA, Β South West Asia and North African. These new terms are a lot more accurate in terms of description and are not as vague. However, despite the creation of these new terms, the ‘Middle East’ is still the most used. A lot of people from this region, especially the youth, claim that they want to get rid of any trace of western colonialism in every possible way. The issue is that a lot of things in our everyday life have been created or influenced by the western colonialists without us even realising it. That makes the challenge of erasing traces of the west a lot harder, especially when some of these things have been embedded into our history, culture, and society that ripping them apart might cause damage and the only way to change them is by changing the whole system and reinventing it.
One example that is relevant to students in Education City, is when students go to these American universities and take classes on decolonizing the Middle East in English. Classes that reveal, for example, how the Britsh and the French divided and weakened the region which has led to so many of the current issues in this region, such as the creation of Israel. While the intention of the students may be to learn about the history of the region in their university, the reconstruction of colonial thought can occur in this situation in multiple ways. So, is the perspective they are told by their western universities objective and accurately represent the experiences of the Middle Eastern people under colonialism? Doesn’t learning the history of the Middle East in English, the language of the colonizers, keep the traces of colonialism alive? And why do we attend these universities in the first place? We have other options yet we have chosen to attend a western university, why is that so? I think we often do these things unintentionally and we tend to keep colonial thoughts and ideas alive without actually meaning to, but they inevitably stay alive because of their existence in our everyday life.