What makes the Middle East a region

The name, and how far it has been made to reach

Alfred Thayer Mahan's article of September 1902 used the phrase for the water between Arabia and India and for the coaling stations a navy would need to hold it, and he noted in it that he had not seen the term used before. It had in fact appeared in print a little earlier. What his use did was carry it into general circulation, and the British command established at Cairo during the Second World War carried it west again, over Egypt and the country beyond. Nothing in the term fixes an edge. That is why most of the countries usually named with it are filed here under narrower regions instead: the Levant, the Persian Gulf, the Arabian Peninsula, Anatolia and the eastern Mediterranean each hold a page of their own.

The statistical standards decline the word altogether. The UN Statistics Division's M49 has no Middle East in it: Iraq is filed under Western Asia, Iran under Southern Asia beside Afghanistan, India and Pakistan, and the division states of its own groupings that they are a convenience for statistics carrying no political meaning. The World Bank keeps the phrase in the compound Middle East and North Africa, and places both countries filed here inside that region.

The border, and the water it runs through

The line between them dates in outline from the Treaty of Zuhab, concluded on 17 May 1639 between the Ottoman and Safavid states, and successive redrawings at Erzurum in 1847, at Constantinople in 1913 and again in 1937 moved it very little. What has been argued over is the final stretch, where the boundary runs in the Shatt al-Arab, the river formed where the Tigris and the Euphrates meet at al-Qurnah. The 1937 treaty set the line at the low-water mark on the Iranian bank, leaving the channel in Iraq except off Abadan and Khorramshahr. The Algiers accord of 6 March 1975, reached at an OPEC summit, moved it to the thalweg, the deepest line of the channel, and the treaty signed at Baghdad on 13 June 1975 set that out in detail. Iraq renounced the treaty in September 1980, and the war that followed ran to the ceasefire of 20 August 1988 called for by Security Council resolution 598 of 20 July 1987. In August 1990 Iraq accepted the 1975 line again.

The high ground is shared as well. Cheekha Dar, recorded as the highest point in Iraq at 3,611 metres, stands on this border in the Zagros. Damavand, the highest recorded point in Iran at 5,628 metres, stands in the Alborz, well away from it.

What the records hold

Both governments signed the United Nations Charter at San Francisco in June 1945. Both sent delegations to the Baghdad Conference of 10 to 14 September 1960 that founded OPEC alongside Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and Venezuela, and both records date the membership to that month. The rest of the group lists diverge. Iraq has belonged to the Arab League since its founding on 22 March 1945; Iran has not, and its record carries the Non-Aligned Movement and BRICS instead.

Arabic and Kurdish are both official in Iraq under the constitution ratified in October 2005, Persian is the official language of Iran, and Kurdish is spoken on both sides of the line. Baghdad keeps UTC+03:00 and Tehran UTC+03:30, a half-hour offset from it; the Iranian record still carries a summer offset of UTC+04:30, and seasonal clock changes were discontinued there in 2022. The population of Iraq is recorded at 38,274,618 for 2017, and that of Iran at 92,417,700 for 2025.