The Arab states’ names and borders reveal their colonial, artificial origins

Evidence

The main factor in this period was the growing solidity and reality of the individual states. To begin with, most of these were artificial enough—carved out of former provinces of the Ottoman or Western empires, with frontiers that were lines drawn on maps by European statesmen. With the exception of Egypt and to a lesser extent of Lebanon, they had no tradition of separate existence or even of regional autonomy. Even their names reveal their artificiality—Jordan is a river, Lebanon a mountain, Iraq the name of a medieval province, not coincid­ ing with the boundaries of the present state of that name; Syria and Libya are Greek names borrowed and used for the first time in modern Arabic. Even Palestine was a name unused since the early Middle Ages among the Muslim inhabitants of that country, until it was adopted to designate the southern parts of the Ottoman provinces of Damascus and Beirut, together with the separate district of Jerusalem, assigned to British Mandate. — Bernard Lewis, From Babel to Dragomans, 924

Categorization

Category: Factual Claims

• XREF: Connects to debates about postcolonial state artificiality and nation-building in Africa and South Asia; echoes Benedict Anderson’s imagined communities and the arbitrary Scramble-for-Africa borders.
• CANDY: Jordan is a river, Lebanon a mountain, Iraq a medieval province — a compact, tweetable fact cluster about invented Arab state names.

Related

• Most modern Arab state names and borders were European inventions (similarity 0.92)
• League-of-Nations Arab states largely had fabricated identities unnamed for centuries. (similarity 0.86)
• Most modern Middle East states are recent colonial or Ottoman constructs (similarity 0.82)
• Nasser-era Arabism suppressed even the name of Egypt itself (similarity 0.79)