In addition to my primary research specialty in Ottoman history, I prepared to teach the history of the Islamic Middle East from my first year in graduate school onward, and I did so throughout my academic career, including preparing graduate students to teach Ottoman and modern Middle Eastern history. My start in world history came later. Around the time I got tenure, my department decided, for comically bad reasons, to create a single world history course on the twentieth century. Having never witnessed creation ex nihilo in a department meeting before, I volunteered for the course. The department's reasons for creating the course were farcical, but I recognized it as a valuable intellectual property. In the existing state of the pedagogical literature, no one had paused to analyze the issues that made the twentieth century into more than the last chapter of a comprehensive world history book. A couple of years later, just as we finished teaching the course for the first time, an editor came along and asked if I had ever thought about writing a textbook. Yes, I had thought about it. Only I had assumed many years would pass before anyone would ask. Such were the origins of my coauthored Twentieth-Century World, having gone through seven editions from 1986 until 2010. It would be an understatement to say that radical revisions were required for each new edition, given not only the lengthening chronology but also the often radical revisions and improvements in the literature. If this presentation sounds more like a memoir than a research paper, the reason is that my dual lives in Middle Eastern and world history interacted in the pedagogical realm, raising issues that redirected my basic research and theoretical inquiries along the way.

Thinking about the Middle East in world history suggests asking “why world history?” As a pursuit of professional historians, the study of world history is relatively new. The grandfather of the field is William H. McNeill (1917–2016). When asked “why world history,” one of his answers was that “if you want to write books people will read, you need to ask the big, basic questions that people ask.” To the many historians of his generation who objected that world history was impossible because it tried to do too much, he answered with an analogy from cartography: a world history is no more impossible than a world map. In either case, the detail omitted brings larger contours into view. That brings us to the final important observation that I associate with McNeill: that history is a study in large-scale pattern recognition. To see a large pattern that can be described clearly, as it is manifested in a vast array of data, is a complex mental operation. Nothing distinguishes his work more, in my opinion, than his capacity to do this.

Before we go any further, let's deal with the Europocentrism issue. McNeill's career took off with his Rise of the West (1963). As a non-Westernist, I never read the book: if it was the rise of the West, I thought, how could that be world history? I read his other books, among which Plagues and Peoples (1976) shows him at his world-historical best.Footnote ¹ In 1998, McNeill published a well-known article looking back on the Rise of the West a quarter century after its publication.Footnote ² He was well aware that the notion of the “rise of the West” was not state of the art in world history anymore. Finding ourselves on a plane together at around that time, he told me: “I don't think people are doing that anymore,” that is, teaching the rise of the West as world history. The only problem is, not everybody knows he said that. For a lot of my colleagues, it might as well still be 1963.

The real growth of world history in U.S. higher education occurred as a teaching field. That is what makes McNeill the grandfather of the field. Most of its proponents were lesser lights teaching at institutions great and small, myself included. McNeill had probably already retired from the University of Chicago by the time the World History Association was founded, and the Journal of World History was launched in 1990. Much of the action has continued to occur in the classroom; much of the print production specifically about world history has continued to be pedagogically oriented. The original research that stimulates the field has come from a vast array of specialties and disciplines: world system studies, history of environment and disease, anthropology of indigenous peoples, post-colonial nationalism, Chinese monetary history – any research with global implications, even if its focus is local.Footnote ³ The latest trend is “big history,” pioneered in David Christian's Maps of Time (2004), which brings together cosmology, paleontology, and human history.Footnote ⁴ As far as the first two of its three subjects are concerned, “big history” seems to me to put historians in the position of science journalists, writing up others’ findings about fields to which they cannot be original contributors. That is all I will say about “big history,” although it is not hard to see why a lot of people find it fascinating.

History has to be an empirical discipline. Without empirical evidence, it is nothing; everybody knows that. History does not have to be only an empirical discipline; not everyone does know that. The historical discipline has workshops, particularly in England, I think, whose defenders can dissolve any of those large patterns McNeill talked about in their empirical acid. World historians are most likely to be historians who do not content themselves with empiricism alone, whether their quest takes them all the way to the holy grail of Theory or not.

Not unrelated to the question of empiricism, the choice between micro-conceptual and macro-conceptual approaches is another that divides historians. Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie reportedly divided historians into parachutists and truffle-hunters.Footnote ⁵ Some risk all, throwing themselves out of a plane flying at high altitude for the thrill of the view from on high; others want their noses in the ground, sniffing for delectable bits of evidence that have never been found before. In fact, parachutists are in trouble unless they land safely on the ground. Then they too can search for delectables. In other words, conclusions significant for world history can be reached by both methods. However, McNeill's search for large-pattern recognition and his cartographic analogy to world maps signify that the historian discontented by empiricism is more likely to put on the parachute, jump out of the plane, and try to see the whole world at once.

For historians of all types, time is the primary variable. History focuses on change over time. Among all the human sciences, history alone takes an undifferentiated approach to the human experience as it has evolved over time. This may be more an aspiration than an accomplishment, but it is our aspiration, the fixed star we navigate by. Time is our ultimate concern, but we live in a time-space matrix. Historians need spatial and temporal organization. World historians need to take a macro-conceptual approach to analyzing both. Given the nature of their field, perhaps it is not an accident that historians tend to talk about “periodization” when they think about both space and time. There is nothing about which it is easier for historians to disagree. In part, that is because the space-time units on which they settle are largely heuristic devices provisionally useful for a given discussion. In part, it may also be that the space-time units have a will-’o-the-wisp quality, now appearing out of the empirical data stream of human experience, now dissolving again, depending on how much empirical acid is dripped onto them.

Thinking about historians’ problems in defining space-time units for analysis brings us to a point where we can contemplate the utility of the Middle East as a unit of analysis in the study of history. The history of the names and acronyms applied to the region – Near East, Middle East, Near and Middle East, Middle East and North Africa, MENA, SWANA – is not pertinent here. Among others, Nikki Keddie challenged the utility of taking the Middle East as a unit of analysis long ago. Yet college curricula are still full of courses about the Middle East, scholars in a number of disciplines still get jobs to teach about it, and publishers still publish books by and for them. It may be useful, then, to consider some of the ways in which the integrity of the Middle East as a unit of analysis can be made to both disappear and reappear.

To get things started, I usually define the region for students as four cornered, figuratively speaking. The four corners are Iran, the Arabian peninsula, Egypt, and Turkey. That seems a handy way to translate what is conveyed by the names and acronyms mentioned above.

Magic can easily make this Middle East disappear. Ecologically, it is only part of the Old World arid belt. Unless global warming has produced a new configuration since this observation was published twenty years ago, this arid belt is the largest single terrain feature on planet Earth.Footnote ⁶ It has a hotter southern and western segment spreading from the Atlantic shores of Morocco in the West all the way to Iran, Pakistan, and northern India in the East. It has a colder northern and eastern segment spreading from the historical West Turkistan (now Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Kazakhstan, and Kyrgyzstan) to East Turkistan (Xinjiang) and Mongolia. The place where the two belts most nearly join, and where the topography is most conducive to movement from one to the other coincides roughly with northeastern Iran (Khurasan) and Turkmenistan.Footnote ⁷ In ethnic and linguistic terms, too, with few exceptions the region is prodigally diverse, with no fewer than three Islamic languages of high culture, with these languages all having zones of diffusion extending in different directions far beyond our geographical quadrilateral. As relates to Arabic, we readily acknowledge this when we speak of the Middle East and North Africa; we are not used to acknowledging these wider diffusions as pertains to Turkish and Persian.

Historically, civilization emerged in this region. However, as if paying the price for this lead, the Middle East went through a transformation not seen in the other historical Eurasian zones of high civilization – the European, South Asian, and East Asian. In each of the others, belief systems and literary cultures that emerged in ancient times retained their “classic” status in one way or another until the present. In contrast, the Middle East, after giving rise to monotheism in ancient times, went through a cultural revolution in the seventh century of the common era, setting a new classical standard in the form of Islam, and the new universe of knowledge that emerged around the Qurʾanic revelation. Islam called for geopolitical unity, but that has not stopped unity from breaking down into the political fragmentation prevalent in the period between the decline of the Abbasids and the rise of the Ottomans and Safavids, not to speak of the many states now in existence. The rise of Islam and its new civilization has also not prevented the survival and re-emergence of peoples rooted in the region's pre-Islamic past, as seen in the profusion of Christian sects and peoples and especially in the Jewish people and the state of Israel. Now globalizing trends challenge the integrity of all regionalisms.

Magic can make the Middle East reappear, just as easily as it made the region disappear. Ecologically, it centered the Old World arid belt and joined its southwestern and northeastern extensions. The antiquity of civilization in the Middle East permitted the rise of a new classic civilization much later than in the other major civilizational zones. Islam emerged in the Middle East, then spread along the Old World arid belt – eventually also far beyond. In its pre-modern geopolitical history, the region seemed to achieve greater prosperity and security when integrated in large empires, from Umayyads and Abbasids to Ottomans, than when fragmented in small states. The speed of the early Islamic conquests and the premium on large-scale political integration seem to have left a lasting imprint of militarism and authoritarianism on the political culture of the region, the Ottoman Empire of the 1830s being the first state to my knowledge to create a local administration staffed by civilians. Authoritarian rule meant in turn that the highest value for the subjects was justice, an idea easily translated in modern times into social justice but not so easily into democracy or individual rights. Linguistically, the region's three most populous countries are the “flagships” of cultural production in each of the three languages of high culture in which Islamic civilization ultimately came to be propagated. The same trends and technologies of globalization that threaten the integrity of regions make it possible to assert ideas and beliefs based in the region more strongly than ever and with global reverberations, especially given the growth of global diasporas whose “hyphenated” identities link them to the Middle East as well as to their new homelands.

By now, you may deduce that I think the Middle East has a certain “staying power” as a productive unit of analysis, even in the globalizing world of the twenty-first century. Given what I said above about the cognitive challenges of recognizing large patterns in vast arrays of data, the analytical coherence of the Middle East no doubt lies partly in the eye of the beholder. However, I think there is also a coherence that corresponds to deep-structural features of the region. Most fundamentally, human and natural resources are distributed very unevenly across the region, and its contemporary political map magnifies this fact. A list of the nations of the region ranked by population throws this disparity into high relief. One of the Middle East's most curious features is that it has countries with disproportionately high populations at three of its corners. Egypt, Turkey, and Iran are the flagship countries of cultural production in the three leading Islamic languages, and each of them is also the historical center of states and empires that controlled much larger parts of the region. By available figures, these three countries are also the titans of the region in terms of population.Footnote ⁸ Reported populations of 84 million apiece for Turkey and Iran and 102 million for Egypt make each of them more than twice as populous as the next-most populous country, Iraq (40 million). Bringing in the wider Arab peripheries adds one exception – Algeria (44 million) – but not by much. Half the countries of the region have populations reported at 10 million or less. These figures may not be reliable; indeed, it is hard not to suspect that some countries’ census bureaus have inflated themselves into demographic paper tigers. That does not change the fact that this order of disparity has prevailed in the population statistics for the region for as long as I can remember.

Each colossus has historical reasons for its standing, although what worked in the past may not in future. For thousands of years, Egypt was the “gift of the Nile,” producing the surplus that enabled it to compete at times for control of geographical Syria, when Egypt itself was not coveted by imperial powers from the Romans to the British. Egypt could at least feed itself until the Nasser period, when the Third World population explosion of the mid-twentieth century deprived it of that ability. Turkey not only possessed a natural seat of empire in Istanbul, but made it through the Third World population explosion of the mid-twentieth century without losing self-sufficiency in food. It lacked sufficient energy resources but otherwise had the best diversified resources in the region. Since the 1980 turn toward export-led growth, it also has developed the most advanced economy. The mountains and deserts of Iran present a much tougher challenge to political integration. Nonetheless, from ancient times to the present, one of the regional behemoths has been centered in Iran and at times also in the neighboring lower Tigris-Euphrates region. One of the factors that holds the Middle East together historically is that it exists in a state of tension among its three titans and their competing ambitions.

The imbalances in the distribution of human and natural resources across the map acquired totally new complications with the rise since 1945 in global demand for Middle East oil. As of 2017, five out of ten of the world's countries with the largest proven oil reserves are in the Middle East proper, if we include Libya. Saudi Arabia leads this ranking, followed by Iran and Iraq.Footnote ⁹ Since the OPEC oil revolution of the 1970s, the vast infusion of oil income into Saudi Arabia in particular has created something of another titan at the fourth corner of our Middle Eastern quadrilateral. Some of the consequences are benign. At the same time, it is difficult to escape the conclusion that Saudi Arabia's external policy is Janus-faced, with one face turned toward the West and another turned toward the Islamic countries, among which it promotes its Wahhabi religious ideology and foments sectarian conflict.Footnote ¹⁰

Today, this points toward another battle of the titans between Saudi Arabia and Iran – something that would have been inconceivable with the factor endowments that historically characterized the Arabian corner of our Middle Eastern quadrilateral. The problem about petroleum-based economies, especially in countries where all the oil revenue goes to the ruler, is that the petroleum income in and of itself does not lead to the development of an advanced, diversified economy. Even after 1973, dependence on petroleum exports amounted to a colonial export boom writ large, that is, a boom dependent on the export of a single agro-mineral commodity. The oil boom was not going to modernize the exporting economies any more than the cotton boom of the early 1860s modernized the economy of the Egypt of Muhammad Ali's successors. The unbalancing effects of oil-export dependency are most dramatic in high-population countries with complex economies. By 1979, Iran had already become an acute case of that distortion. In a country with a small population, the chances for the ruler's oil income to “trickle down” to pacify his subjects are greater. At the start of the OPEC oil boom, Saudi Arabia ought to have shared the “small size” advantage with the Gulf states, but if its population statistics are to be believed, the Saudi population has more than quintupled since 1970, from 6 to 35 million. In the region they inhabit, it is not hard to see why the Saudis would like to become a titan in every sense. Is such a trajectory sustainable?

The disparities in the distribution of the Middle East's human and natural resources have acquired a new angle with the rise of Saudi petro-power, but before that they had been there in a different configuration since ancient times. Ecologically and historically, the lands of the region have always been divided into three geoeconomic categories. At one extreme, were the most arid zones, particularly the Arabian peninsula and parts of Syria and Iraq. In the middle was the historical Fertile Crescent, consisting in the East of the Tigris and Euphrates river systems and in the West of the agriculturally productive parts of northern Syria and the Mediterranean climatic zone along the Levantine coast. At the far extreme from the deserts were the region's three behemoths. Today, these are Egypt, Turkey, and Iran; before that they had been the cores of successive states and empires since ancient times. What empowered them was, at bottom, the agrarian productivity of the Nile, of the Tigris-Euphrates and cultivable parts of Iran, and of much of Anatolia, which has the milder, wetter climate and productivity of the Mediterranean climatic zones all around its coastline. This kind of geographical distinction assumes sharper definition in the minds of geographers than it does when you walk the ground in the region. However, in the aggregate, there is enough truth in it to affect the history of the region enduringly.

For example, while empires based in Egypt, Turkey, Iran, or the river lands of Iraq competed to dominate the region, consider what happened in the other geographical zones that we have imagined. The Arabian peninsula fell off the geopolitical checkerboard most of the time, factoring in the life of the wider region through the incense trade, the pilgrimage, or the epoch-making surge that followed the rise of Islam. Meanwhile, the denizens of the Fertile Crescent lived more exciting lives in the zone of competition and fragmentation among the three empires. Small polities could and did flourish in greater Syria. On the Iraqi side, as late as the Abbasids, the Tigris-Euphrates supported empire-building. So did Iran, however, from Achaemenian times on.

The upshot for the peoples of the Fertile Crescent was that they found themselves living in a zone of fragmentation among their neighboring titans. The rulers of Egypt episodically wanted to control Syria. The Byzantine and Sassanian Empires competed all the way to the northern peripheries of the Arabian Desert. And look at the Biblical history of the ancient Hebrews: first enslaved in Egypt, then weeping by the waters of Babylon. There in a nutshell is life in the fragmentation zone of the Fertile Crescent.

No mere curiosities of the ancient past, the vulnerabilities of the Fertile Crescent seem to be of a deep-structural nature, and they have certainly persisted to the present. It is easy to attribute this fragility to the ethno-religious complexity of the populations, but it is doubtful that geographical Syria and Iraq are ethnographic museums to any greater degree than Iran and Turkey are or were. The problematical consequences of the Sykes-Picot Agreement (1916) for the political geography of the Fertile Crescent – and the reignition of controversy over these boundaries as a result of Iraqi and Syrian events a hundred years later – hint at the deep-structural nature of states’ fragility in this part of the Middle East. The political history of the century since Sykes-Picot is also instructive. Through World War II, British and French dominance through the mandate system maintained a show of coherence inside the recently drawn borders, while “divide and rule” prevailed internally. After 1945, the near simultaneity of decolonization and the first Nakba touched off the radicalizing trend seen in the rise of “Arab socialism” and the period of coups and revolutions in Syria and Iraq.

Since then, the political dynamics in states of the Fertile Crescent have oscillated between two extremes, obviously with variations among countries. At one extreme, they have tended to a kind of stability in hyper-fortified form, such as the regimes of Hafiz and Bashar al-Asad in Syria and Saddam Husayn in Iraq. At the other extreme, they have lapsed into the endless coups of Syria before 1970, the perpetual instability of Lebanon, or the ethno-religious and regional fragmentation following the U.S effort to bring “democracy” to Iraq. As much as Israel differs from the Arab states of the Fertile Crescent, it too participates in the political dynamics of life in this fragmentation zone. If in no other sense, Israel does so by maintaining a democracy for the privileged citizenry who live within its Zionist fortress, but an authoritarian control of the Palestinians in its adjoining peripheries. A rationalization has been found for this in the concept of “ethnic democracy.”Footnote ¹¹ To return to my main point, while arguments aplenty can make the Middle East appear and disappear as if by magic, I conclude that there is a kind of regional coherence that has persisted throughout history, reasserting itself in new forms in different periods. It is conceivable that the new millennium could produce unprecedented transformations that would deprive the region of its durability, but past millennia have not done so. Unchecked climate change could, for example, render large parts of the region uninhabitable.

At the beginning of this discussion, as I led into this debate about the Middle East as a unit in world history, I spoke about my personal experience in developing and teaching a curriculum in world history. Ultimately comprehensive, our curriculum began with a single course on the world in the twentieth century. For me as I worked on the course, it created an opportunity to focus on the issues that had made the twentieth century so different that they amounted to differences in kind from earlier centuries, not just in degree. At the time, no one else had focused on thematizing the twentieth century, at least not in print. The available books for use in such a course were hardly more than separate editions of the last chapters of comprehensive world history books. It was as if no one had paused to consider the fact that the thematics of books designed to start with the rise of civilization might no longer be pertinent to analysis of the contemporary world. That challenged us to identify explicit themes that could organize a whole-history approach to the century while also serving as criteria of selection to keep us from lapsing into encyclopedism.

This approach also had another value. McNeill liked to compare histories of the world to maps of the world. For my part, I compare writing world history to zoom-lens photography. Explicitly articulated themes that could be illustrated by way of example meant that our world history would not be only the view from high in the sky, it could also come right down to earth. For example, one of my favorite examples was the Dinshawai incident of 1906 in the Egyptian delta, a perfect example to illustrate not only agrarian life in a colonial village, but also the chains of economic and political dependency that tied the village through Cairo to London and the world market. I went to Dinshawai to see for myself and do my own illustration photography. But I am getting ahead of myself. That would have been mindless empiricism without the themes I mentioned.

As our book went through successive revisions, the thematic armature stayed largely the same, while mutating significantly in the formulation of the second of the four themes. As ultimately elaborated. The four themes are as follows:Footnote ¹²

I think it can be very productive in assessing the coherence of the Middle East as a unit of analysis to think of its history over the last century in relation to these themes. To my mind, the rise of the mass society provides the best lead into the other themes as they relate to the Middle East. Demographic growth affects both numbers and quality of life. The total population of the Middle East and North Africa grew from 80 million in 1930 to 419 million in 2000.Footnote ¹³ Aside from the highly skewed distribution of populations among nations, within individual countries, growth rates for rural and urban populations were also highly skewed. After 1950, if the population of a nation quadrupled, the population of its largest city would increase ten times over or more. Greater numbers intensified human interactions, but other changes magnified these effects. Although prodromes of the demographic surge appeared in the 1930s, the post-1945 baby boom was essentially a global phenomenon, coinciding also with the greatest growth period in the history of the world economy (1945–1973). Population growth began to be talked about as a political problem in the early 1960s. Sure enough, babies born in the late 1940s reached young adulthood in the late 1960s, and everything that we associate with “1968” blew up in or around that year. In the Middle East, the effects were compounded by other changes particularly significant for the young. Education was becoming more widely available. In the region where writing had been invented millennia before, it had remained a defining attribute of the elite until then, but at last the push for mass literacy had even come to the Middle East. Turkey achieved mass literacy for males in the early 1950s, for females around 1980, and for the population as a whole in the late 1960s – talk about timing!Footnote ¹⁴ Many other countries were later, and the rapid push to expand education in poor countries caused catastrophic shortfalls in quality.

The age of the mass society was arriving in Middle Eastern politics as well as other aspects of life. In specific, political mobilization, historically another elite monopoly, was now spreading to entire populations. Before 1945, relatively small numbers of Europeans had managed more or less to dominate many countries of the region. In Ankara and Tehran, narrow national elites had done the same. To consider that fact in a more positive light, one of the most fundamental findings of my research for my book Turkey, Islam, Nationalism, and Modernity (2010) was that the creation of a politically mobilized national bourgeoisie had been, in effect, the great achievement of 1860–1960. After 1960, the scope of political mobilization expanded to include the entire population. Things would never be the same again. In the future, when historians debate whether the twenty-first century was a “long” or a “short” one, I bet the difference will be between those who date the new century's start to 1991 and the collapse of socialism and those who date it to “1968” and everything it symbolizes.

Whether or not anyone else thinks the Middle East is a coherent unit, my university – like countless others – bought into the idea to the extent of having me teach the history of the region for over forty years. The first time I taught the subject, the October War had not even occurred. The last time I taught it, we were several years into the Arab Spring. Talk about a course that always needed revision! By the last iteration, I felt I had finally figured out what I wished I had done all along, had I but known enough years before. Once again, this point has meaningful bearing on our discussion about the integrity and viability of the Middle East as a unit of analysis.

My research for Turkey, Islam, Nationalism and Modernity spanned the entire period from 1789 to 2007. The great Ottoman and Turkish process of creating a politically conscious bourgeoisie started at just the time when privately owned Ottoman-language print media began to take off, in 1860. Underlying this were educational reforms that slowly began to raise the tragically low historical literacy rates, implying a market for the new media. This took me into the literature on print capitalism and the role of mass print media in creating nationalism and propagating modernity and world awareness. The rise of print capitalism is identified with the creation of imagined community, a benign consequence. In a multi-ethnic empire, however, the rise of mass-circulation print media will occur in different languages and have divisive effects, a disruptive consequence for regional unity.

The last time I revised my course on the modern Middle East, the role of electronic communications and social media in the Arab Spring reacted with my recent experience in writing about the print revolution of the 1800s, giving me the idea of creating a course that would try to identify all the successive revolutions in communications. I took advantage of a chance to teach the course as a seminar meeting once a week for three hours. For assigned readings, in addition to a textbook for narrative coverage, I assigned Justice Interrupted by Elizabeth Thompson, Islam Dot Com by El-Nawawy and Khamis, and Arab Voices by James Zogby, as well as a paper on another book of their choice.Footnote ¹⁵ Elizabeth Thompson's book, brand new at the time, was particularly important for my course. American students immediately start talking about “democracy” and “liberalism,” and the idea of an authoritarian political culture in which justice was historically the highest value and constitutional order became a symbol of modernity without necessarily being “liberal” or democratic is new to them.

The film series began with Shaheen's “Reel Bad Arabs” and Pontecorvo's “Battle of Algiers.” Engagement with film production in the region began with Chahine's “Al-Ard” (1969). My first exposure to Turkish cinema had occurred about that time and would not have motivated me to include Turkish films in class. This early work of Chahine's brought back that sensation. This many years later, a film from the 1960s has the added value of showing how much Middle Eastern cinema has grown and improved. From that point on, the list of films included both documentaries and feature films. Goldman's “Umm Kulthum, a Voice like Egypt,” narrated by Omar Sharif proved extremely fruitful through the parallels between her life, Egypt's political history, and the history of innovations in media, from sound recordings to film, radio, and television.

Subsequent films from the Arab world included Hamed's “Yacoubian Building” (2006), Wassef's “Marina of the Zabbaleen” (2009), Suleiman's “The Time that Remains” (2012), and Noujaim's “The Square” (2013). Having used more Turkish films the year before, I used only one this time, Önder and Gülmez's “Beynelmilel” (2006), which stands out to me as the most profound reflection in any medium on the impact of Turkey's 1980 coup. Animation and alienation went together in two other choices, Satrapi's “Persepolis” (2007) and Folman's “Waltz with Bashir” (2008).

Iranian documentaries yielded revealing contrasts to Satrapi's inability to adjust to life in Iran. Homayoun's “Iran, A Cinematographic Revolution” (2006) provides fascinating insights into both film history and the “normality” of a film industry striving to be revolutionary and different, putting up with censorship in the process. Longinotto and Mir Hosseini's “Divorce Iranian Style” (1998) fascinates in a different way by depicting Iran's new normal inside a sharia court handling cases in family law.

All of these choices are constrained in the sense that the need to find films that “tell a story” pertinent to the themes of a history course made it difficult to include some of the finest, purest expressions of cinematic art or creative subjectivity. Youssef Chahine's autobiographical trilogy provides a case in point, although I have used the middle film, “An Egyptian Story” (1982), for its illustration of the technical possibilities of Egyptian film making, the subjective stresses of life in Egypt, and – as in the documentary on Iranian cinema – the “normality” of working under censorship. Except for “Waltz with Bashir” and “The Time that Remains,” all these films again reflect the cultural dominance of the Middle East's three “titan” countries.

What does it prove to look at the Middle East in terms of a series of revolutions in communication – or to focus more narrowly on its cinematic production – about whether the region is or is not a coherent unit? To answer this question thoroughly would require considering all kinds of media, including television, with its soap operas and “historical” series. From the rise of print capitalism onward, all of the communications revolutions have implied disruption of the unity of the Middle East in one way or another. And yet the soap operas and “historical” dramas cross linguistic borders. Their viewers form imagined communities, just as much as the readers of the early print media did. The content of the films mentioned above also has elements of common address, shaped by Islamic values and the kind of political struggles analyzed in Thompson's Justice Interrupted. In cyberspace, Islamic values are not confined to the Middle East or any other region; yet as the Islamic websites analyzed in El-Nawawy and Khamis's Islam Dot Com illustrate, much of the initiative for and activity on these sites does come from the region at the same time that they amplify the global voice of Muslims networking with one another from all over the world.Footnote ¹⁶

In the long run, the question of whether the Middle East is or is not a meaningful unit of analysis will continue to be debated. Ever since the rise of Islam, the region has taken shape, both as having a certain coherence and as being the center of something much bigger than itself. The persistence of this element of central coherence through time, through the rise and fall of empires, through successive revolutions in communications, seems likely to continue in the future. If Egypt were located in Asia rather than Africa, the problem of what to call the region would vanish, and “Southwest Asia” would probably seem as meaningful a concept as South, Southeast, and East Asia.