Middle East or “Middle Earth”?

Abstract This concluding chapter extends the historical sociology of knowledge of the Middle East introduced at the beginning of the volume through a shift of perspective, from Western fictions of the region to alternative constructions developed within the purported East. This perspective links the Ottoman Empire and its legacy with pre–World War II and postwar Japan. The chapter challenges the idea that the West has held a monopoly in demarcating and sectioning the East by exploring the Japanese transgression and, later, integration of the West’s Middle East into a more comprehensive “Middle Earth” partly overlapping with the Islamosphere, reckoned as a transregional force. By unraveling some of the historic “East-East” involvements that decenter the genealogy of the Middle East from the Western hegemonic fiction, the chapter illustrates how the Middle East of Western hegemony could be deconstructed, provincialized, and recontextualized by disentangling and complexifying the univocal (and power-laden) East-West, Far-Near coordinates dictated by Western Orientalism and imperialism.