No Stupid Questions

I'm probably very wrong, but maybe trump demanded it in secret so that he's not embroiled in another war in the Middle East

I have a strong suspicion that language prescribed by an Iranian official will have no bearing on what people call that region in English.

"Middle East" is a reference point from the British Isles where there is a more significant chunk of geography directly east of it. When you move into Central Europe, the ME region is called "near East" when translated literally. Because we are already a bit further east and the reference points change. There isn't an English-language equivalent in the West because there's mostly water.

Having exported this language to beyond mostly water to the new world, the designation stuck although it makes no sense from a North American perspective. If we all spoke a truly international version of Esperanto, things might be different. But that's not how it worked out.

I don't think ME as a term has acquired the same problematic stench as "orient" and variants thereof in English. Cardinal directions are quite resistant to that. The Confederate States of America haven't ruined "South" as a term. The Democratic People's Republic of Korea hasn't made "North" go out of style.

Middle East and West Asia are both terms that can be used kind of interchangeably, it just depends on the context. And yes, Europe is a glorified peninsula of the continent of "Eurasia". Interestingly, Russia and a few other countries that straddle the boundary of Europe and Asia teach it as one continent.

In my opinion, the idea of "continents" is ambiguous if we define it as no sea in between, Afro-Eurasia is a monster that isn't helpful to categorise the world. There's good videos on the topic by CGP Grey and Map Men (previously Jay Foreman), you should go look at that I think!

I would rather divide the world based on the geological definition of continents, about the major tectonic plates! But even that can be difficult since what constitutes as a "major" tectonic plate? It's still better in my opinion, since it's something that can be discussed by geologists rather than politicians.

According to Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_tectonic_plates

Under this definition, the continents are (if we only consider major plates as defined by Wikipedia):

• Eurasia
• Africa
• North America
• South America
• Australia
• Antarctica
• Pacific (mostly ocean)

if we include the some of the larger minor plates (I feel like we should):

• Carribean
• Arabia
• India (subcontinent has levelled up!)
• Somali
• Nazca (again, mostly ocean)
• Philippines (another ocean one)

There are lots of smaller ones but those are mostly ocean too

I think it would be neat if the world was divided to have India, Arabia, the Carribean, and Eastern Africa to have the Europe sort of treatment! India alone has more people than the whole of Europe combined (I think you could throw North America too and the Indian region, including Pakistan, Bangladesh, etc., will still be more populous!)

The answers to your primary and secondary questions: it’s political.

Iran calls itself “west Asia” specifically to be contrarian to the Western vernacular. That, and “middle east” is a Roman thing (as is Asia) and Iranians are still a bit put out by the Persian empire falling to Greece and Rome. Most Iranians identify as Persian and consider Iran a Western political entity they’re stuck with but that doesn’t define them.

You know how there’s people in the southern US that live as though the Confederates never lost and they want to hold on to their history and culture? Persians are much more that way.

I'm Iranian and can confirm that it's terminology that is being pushed in the general resistance to the West, as the 'Middle East' is seen as a colonial term. It describes the region's relationhip to Britain. So the term West Asia appeals to lots of people in China, India, Pakistan and former colonies in general.

I personally don't like it. If we're scrapping the term 'Middle East', I'd like to emphasize how the region does in fact sit in the middle between Europe, Africa and Asia. It's at the center of this supercontinent (and it's strategic geography is making itself known at the moment). It's the middle of the 'World Island' so to speak, but I have trouble coming up with a catchy phrase for it.

Different parts of the world are going to look at geography differently. Different countries don't even agree on the number of continents and what they are.

If an Iranian said West Asia, I probably wouldn't disagree because that is them referring to their home country in a direct translation of how they see it. They don't have the cultural baggage of English speakers, so they will look at themselves differently.

So this ultimately goes back to the ancient Greeks, but really the last days of the Roman Empire.

Ancient Greeks drew a clear distinction between themselves and the Iranians, who were to the east. Hence "the East" was seen in Greece as uncouth, aggressive, and imperialist, in contrast to rational, honourable Greece. The Romans, who also didn't get along with Iran, adopted the Greek idea and spread it around Europe. (And they all looked down on the Arabs, who the Greeks sort of lumped in with the Iranians).

But this separation wasn't particularly a thing for the late ancient or entire medieval worlds; if people were aware of other lands, they mostly didn't divide the world into East and West. No, the concept of a division came right at the start of the early modern era, when the Eastern Roman Empire, who identified with the Greeks as well as the Romans, was conquered by Ottoman Türkiye. Ethnic Greeks found references to the barbaric East in ancient sources and revived the idea of "the East" as evil, in contrast to the civilised "West" (ignoring the fact that the Iranians and Turks were plenty civilised, and the uncivilised Mongols had wrecked the shit of every civilisation they came across). Turks were perceived as bizarre, Satanic foreign invaders; Türkiye was also a highly-centralised multicultural state, while the rest of Europe was a patchwork of non-state peoples held together by custom and oaths. Türkiye was thus also seen as exotic and Other. Early modern Christians also attached these traits to Islam as a whole, as they initially were not really away of other Muslim cultures.

A couple of notes. Ottoman Türkiye spanned Europe and Asia, but was culturally a very European country, especially in the 15th century, when the above events went down. The sultans were more concerned with Rumelia than Anatolia; they thought positively of Europeans while heaoing scorn on Arabs, Armenians, and Kurds; and the Ottoman court was utterly dominated by Christian converts to Islam from the Balkans (which was an official policy). See The Ottomans: Khans, Caesars, Caliphs by Marc David Baer for an extensive exploration of this, and also a sweeping look at all that was glorious and terrible about Ottoman Türkiye. You, the person reading this, should absolutely read that book.

Also, no medieval Europe did not have countries, with the possible exception of the Eastern Roman Empire. Peasants gave part of their labour to a local minor lord, who would swear allegiance to a bigger lord, who swore allegiance to a still higher lord, and so on up to the king, but the king only directly controlled a relatively small area of land. The king had no direct authority over the lands of the lesser nobility, who owned those lands; custom and their respective oaths of allegiance, rather than law, dictated that people obeyed the king, and conversely, the king could only push his subjects around so much before they rebelled. Historian Bret Devereaux talks qutie a bit about how medieval Europe actually worked; there is a series here, comparing A Song of Ice and Fire to real history, and another one here, which uses a playthrough of Crusader Kings III to talk about medieval politics. Again, worth reading, though there is quite a lot.

A point that neither Baer nor Devereaux ever make, but can be inferred by reading both, is that the centralisation of power and increasing power and euthority of kings in central and western Europe was the Turks, with their highly-centralised government and powerful sultan, winning quite often, and so the Christian powers gradually became more Turkish. There were real concerns that Catholicism and nascent Protestantism would be conquered and subsumed by Islam.

But anyway! Early modern European Christians drew a distinction between themselves as the Muslim Turks (though before Süleiman the Magnificent became caliph, the majority of the sultan's subjects were also Christian). Thus, "The West" was Christian, and they identified as the heirs of Greece and Rome. "The East" was Muslim/Turkish (though Baer argues that Türkiye had a far better claim to be the inheritors of Rome and Germany (the "Holy Roman Empire") or Russia (the "Third Rome")). There were real fears that Catholicism and nascent Protestantism would be conquered and subsumed by Islam; at best, they would be made subject to a Muslim autocrat, as had already happened to the Greek Orthodox Church. There was some real complexity and nuance here; Holy Roman Emperor Charles V was so unpopular he was derided as the "baptised Turk" (Süleiman was the unbaptised Turk), and Pope Clement VII declared it would be a positive devel

Middle East is meaningless, officially. East of what, middle of where? It's a cultural designation rather than one that is strictly defined by geography. In the Obama administration, we tended to refer to it as "The Middle East and North Africa."

It's an orientalist term, relative to "the far East", and yes, Eurocentric too. The region known as the "Middle East" is actually West Asia. It's in Asia.

Sure, Europe is an Asian peninsula, whatever, but at least "conventionally" Europe is considered its own continent. The countries in the "Middle East" are conventionally considered to be Asian and the westernmost part of Asia. Everybody, including the people who live there, considers the region a part of Asia. That's not a disputed thing. So it makes sense to call them West Asia. I suppose if you want to recognise Europe as an Asian peninsula then we'd have to call West Asia something else.

Asia is a most curious continent. It has a centre, a south, an east, a far east, and a south east.

It doesn't have a north. It doesn't have a west. It certainly has no northwest.

The north is called russia. The west and southwest are called the middle east.

we call it the Levant, the Arabian Peninsula, and NE Africa

but if someone said "Eastern Mediterranean" or "Southwest Asia" I suppose I'd know what they meant

The Middle East is in the middle of the Eastern hemisphere.

I always thought of things between the mediteranian and india as the middle east but it kinda needs to be south of russia. can't say these are hard boarders but its the feel I have when its mentioned.