Encyclopedia of the Middle East and South Asia
ENCYCLOPEDIA
OF
THE MIDDLE EAST AND SOUTH ASIA
Executive Editor:
Prof. Gordon D. Newby, Emory University
Co-Editor:
Prof. Patit Paban Mishra, Sambalpur University,
Visiting Professor, UUM, Malaysia
Editorial Assistant:
Sarita Ines Alami, Emory University
Senior Editorial Board:
Prof.
Oded Borowski, Emory University
Prof.
Roxani Margariti, Emory University
Prof. Gyanendra Pandey, Emory University
Prof. Dan White, University of North Carolina at Charlotte
Publisher:
M. E. Sharpe
AUDIENCE: The primary audience will be users of high school, college
and public libraries in the English-speaking world. Because of the scope and unique perspective
of this work, it will also be useful to professionals interested in
the region, since it will provide up-to-date summaries of our current
state of knowledge and debates about issues of importance.
SCOPE AND PURPOSE: The scope of the Encyclopedia
of the Middle East and South Asia is the geographic region from the East Mediterranean,
including North Africa to and including the sub-continent of South
Asia. It will span the time periods from our
earliest historical knowledge to the present, and include information
on the art, culture, history, politics,social structure, and religions
of the area. It will combine specific terms referring
to events and peoples with broader, conceptual terms aimed at providing
an overview of important issues and concepts.
Historical
and Cultural Cohesiveness of the Middle East and South Asia
From the beginnings
of the history of the world, three riverine areas have been regarded
as the major initiators of civilization: the area around the confluence
of the Tigris and Euphrates, the Indus valley area, and the area of
the lower Nile. The last area, while part of northwest
Africa, has from its earliest proto-historical period been part of
the culture sphere of The Middle East and South Asia, both receiving
and giving impetus to the two other civilizations. Trade
in commodities and ideas haslinked these areas together from before
the time of written historical records.
In the historical ancient
world, trade between the western most part of this area, the Eastern
Mediterranean, and India flourished, both overland through the upper
areas of Persia and by sea through the exploitation of the seasonally
shifting monsoons. With
the military conquests of Alexander of Macedon, and later the intellectual
conquests of Hellenistic civilization, the Middle East and South Asia
sharedin an emerging set of questions and debates about science and
the world, while, at the same time, developing distinctive cultures
and theologies.
The cultures of Judaism,
Christianity, and Islam, originating in the Middle East, become direct
heirs of the views that had developed as a result of a knowledge of
the wider world. The multiple
cultures and populations were viewed as deriving from a single creation
and, hence, related. In
India, the Hindu traditions negotiated multivariate perspectives by
embracing the diversity of the subcontinent's population. Each religion had local roots, yet each was able to reach
widely into the world on the strength of religious belief and commerce.
By the time of the
rise of Islam, traders would go normally overland from Constantinople
to the mouth of the Ganges, traversing past the Caspian sea and the
headwaters of the Oxus, down, across the Indus and over to the Ganges. Others would go by water from Alexandria to the southern tip
of Arabia, over the Indian Ocean and then around India to the sea of
Bengal. To find the locations of settlements
of Jews and Christians in India and Buddhists in Anatolia, one merely
has to follow the trade routes. The
great Jewish sage, Maimonides, received some of his financial support
to write his great works from his brother, who made his fortune plying
the Indian Ocean trade. And
some early European explorers of the East found backing for their expeditions
by claiming to search for Prester John, the legendary character arising
from the very real Christian missionary successes in south Asia and
farther east. It is little wonder that Islam developed its historical and
cultural center in the lands of The Middle East and South Asia, from
there to spread around the world.
The modern interconnectedness
of the area can be viewed, in part, as an outgrowth of its past interconnections
and mutual negotiations, and in part as a result of European, and especially
British, colonialism. British
holdings in India relied heavily on control of the "Middle East" or "Near
East," as the Eurocentric and colonial terminology described the
region. The result has been a further shared
cultural experience, which are sharply marked by post-colonial reactions.
The
Convergences of the Middle East and South Asia as a Subject of
Intellectual Inquiry
Students of the Middle
East, of India, of Islamic civilizations, and of the history of the
three monotheistic religions have found it necessary to expand their
views to include all of The Middle East and South Asia. To
cite just a few examples, the three great Muslim empires, the Ottoman,
the Persian, and the Mughal, all were based on the various versions
of Islam, the various dialects of Persian, and a shared tradition of
art, dress, philosophy, and law. To
understand the later years of the Ottoman empire, one has to look at
issues of pan-Turanism, the desire to include all the Turkic peoples
of the Middle East and South Asia and beyond, and the Khilafat movement,
which intellectually, religiously and to an extent politically, tied
Anatolia to India. Folklore is another shared area that
helps us understand the connectedness of the Middle East and South
Asia. Stories, customs, and cultural themes span the region, appearing
little changed from one locale to another. This sphere of inquiry is institutionalized in the Middle
East and South Asia Folklore Bulletin published by The Division of Comparative Studies in the
Humanities at Ohio State University. On
a more practical basis, during the Iran-Iraq war and the Gulf conflict,
some argued that our policies would have been better informed had we
been able to take a view that looked beyond the parochialism which
separated some parts of the Middle East from other parts and all of
those from South Asia.
COMPETING WORKS: There is no competing encyclopedia or similar reference work
that competes with the proposed Encyclopedia of the Middle East
and South Asia. The
more general encyclopedias of world history, the encyclopedias of the
Middle East and the Encyclopaedia of Islam,
published by E. J. Brill, all contain some materials about the region,
but are not accessible, one-stop sources of information about a region
that is increasingly in the news. The
United States House of Representatives has a subcommittee on the Middle
East and South Asia, recognizing the connectedness and importance of
the area, but, to date, no comprehensive work has appeared in English
that provides easy reference to the full range of topics encompassed
in this encyclopedia.
HEADWORD LISTS: