Encyclopedia of Social and Cultural Anthropology
Middle East and North Africa
In historical terms, today’s Middle East coincides roughly with the three largest Muslim empires at their greatest extent (except for Spain)—the Umayyad (661–750), the early ‘Abbasid (750-c. 800), and the Ottoman from the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries. In current usage, the Middle East encompasses the region stretching from Morocco to Turkey and Iran—many include Pakistan and Afghanistan—and it is used in this sense by the people of the region itself.
As a whole, the region is semi-arid, so that irrigation agriculture is more characteristic of many areas, including oases (such as Marrakesh in Morocco and Nizwa in Oman) and a narrow belt of cultivated land on either side of the region’s major rivers, such as the Nile, the Tigris, and the Euphrates. Elsewhere, annual rainfall varies so much in timing and quantity that even where agriculture is possible, the yields from wheat and barley, the most common rainfall-fed crops, are highly irregular. As a result, seasonal farming is often combined with *transhumant pastoralism.
Most Middle Eastern countries also possess mountainous regions which have served as zones of refuge from state control. Thus the Kurds of Iraq, Iran, and Turkey, the Berber-speaking tribal groups in the mountainous regions of Morocco and Algeria, and some of the tribal groups of southern Iran remained relatively autonomous until the early twentieth century.
Traditionally, the Middle East has been a region of irrigation, †agriculture, *pastoralism, and long-distance trade, making important the shifting interrelations between *nomads, farmers, and city-dwellers. Despite the prevailing image of the region as populated by nomadic and semi-nomadic peoples—until the 1960s most anthropological studies of the region focused on pastoralists—nomads today constitute less than one per cent of the population and never constituted a majority of the non-urban population in the past. Most non-urban Middle Easterners are *peasants, even if some are tribally organized. Only in recent years, however, have studies of the region’s peasants encompassed changing international and regional economic conditions, which have often led to the substitution of cash crops for subsistence ones, and changes in gender roles as women perform agricultural tasks formerly assumed by men who have sought work elsewhere.
The popular image of the region also belies its rapidly emerging urban profile. If roughly ten per cent of the Middle East’s population was urban in 1900, today it is nearly half. The rate of urbanization continues to increase as a result both of rapid population growth—the Middle East birth rate is one of the highest in the world—and economic transformations which make agriculture less economically viable than labour emigration. Even for countries lacking mineral wealth, oil revenues in neighbouring states have significantly altered social and material life, facilitating trans-national and transregional patterns of labour *migration. The effects are not just economic—the high density of first and second generation North African immigrants in France and Turks in Germany have profound religious and political implications both for countries of origin and for host countries.
*Islam is the region’s predominant religion—the obvious exception is Israel—but even in other countries there are important non-Muslim minorities. Christians form significant minorities in Egypt, Lebanon, Iraq, Syria, and Turkey, and European settlers gave the Maghrib states sizeable Christian populations until the end of the colonial era. Today small but often influential Jewish communities remain in Morocco, Turkey, Tunisia, and Iran. Prior to the founding of Israel in 1948, only Saudi Arabia and the Persian Gulf states lacked Jewish communities. Popular religious practices often coincide between the major religious traditions. Thus in North Africa, Muslim maraboutic, or saint, festivals (musims) and pilgrimages (ziyaras) have their Jewish equivalents (hillulas) (Deshen and Shokeid 1974), and some Moroccan shrines are equally venerated by both Muslims and Jews. These practices also distinguish communities from one another, including between Sunni and Shi’i Muslims (who comprise about ten per cent of Muslims worldwide, with most located in Iran, Southern Iraq and Lebanon), and Christians from Muslims.
The region’s history is dominated by its Arabic, Turkic, and Persian-speaking peoples, but these are heavily influenced by the significant linguistic minorities throughout the region. Many Moroccans and Algerians speak one of North Africa’s several Berber languages, although as national education spreads, most adult males have become bilingual in Arabic. In Iran, many people speak Azeri Turkish, Kurdish, Arabic, and Baluch as their first language; and Kurdish is the first language of many Turks. Nor are the region’s major languages necessarily uniform. Colloquial Moroccan and Algerian Arabic, for example, are difficult for Arabs from other regions to understand, although educated speakers of Arabic readily communicate through the more standardized language of classrooms and the media. Former colonial languages continue to be widely used, especially French in North Africa, notwith-standing official Arabization policies.
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