Middle Eastern studies is a name given to a number of academic programs associated with the study of the culture, politics, economy, and geography of the Middle East, an area that is generally interpreted to cover a range of nations extending from North Africa in the west to the Chinese frontier, including Israel, Lebanon, Palestine, Jordan, Egypt, Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Syria, Saudi Arabia and multiple other nations. It is considered...
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Middle Eastern studies is a name given to a number of academic programs associated with the study of the culture, politics, economy, and geography of the Middle East, an area that is generally interpreted to cover a range of nations extending from North Africa in the west to the Chinese frontier, including Israel, Lebanon, Palestine, Jordan, Egypt, Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Syria, Saudi Arabia and multiple other nations. It is considered a form of area studies, taking an interdisciplinary approach to the study of a region.
Although some academic programs combine Middle Eastern Studies with Islamic Studies, based on the preponderance of Muslims in the region, others maintain these areas of study as separate disciplines.
In 1978 Edward Said, a Palestinian American professor of Comparative Literature at Columbia University, published his book Orientalism, in which he accused earlier scholars of a "subtle and persistent Eurocentric prejudice against Arabo-Islamic peoples and...
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