Listening to an Iranian official describe his region as “West Asia” got me wondering if the word “Middle East” is on the outs and why. I suspect Middle East is eurocentric for some reason, but West Asia also preserves Europe as a continent, which is Eurocentric in its own way because Europe is not a continent and never was. If we’re calling anything West Asia, it should be Spain and Portugal.
But on the whole, European Christian countries saw Türkiye as different to themselves. Muslim Turks belonged to “the East”, as opposed to European Christians, who belonged to “the West”.
Later on, as trade routes expanded and Europeans learned that Asia was rather large and home to multiple Muslim cultures, and even places that didn’t worship the god of Moses at all, they divided “the East” into three parts. Türkiye, the original “East”, became the Near East. India and China were lumped together as the “Far East”. And so Arabia and Iran, situated bewteen the “Near East” and the “Far East”, were naturally the “Middle East”. Nowadays, of course, “Middle East” mostly means “countries that write with the Arabic script” while “Far East” is rarely used and you don’t see “Near East” at all.
Oh, and at some point people quietly agreed that those European countries that went communist were not part of “the West”, because to many, “the West” is basically generally good and something to aspire to, which the Second World was not. Because the whole concept of “the West” and “places that aren’t the West” is about Othering, making people in “the West” feel superior for being “Western”.
And now you know.