The Islamic Middle East historically stretched into Central Asia past the Soviet border

Evidence

We may define the area historically as that of the great Islamic empires of the caliphs and their successors, and of the classical Islamic civilization that grew up under their aegis. Its early, formative period ended before the Crusades. Its final flowering took place under the Turkish and Persian empires, which, from the sixteenth to the early twentieth centuries, divided what we call the Near and Middle East between them. Essentially, it was a civilization of three peoples and of three languages—Arabic, Persian, and Turkish. Its territorial core was Northeast Africa and Southwest Asia. In this sense the Middle East does not stop at the Soviet border, as in the rather artificial diplomatic and military usage, but includes extensive areas in Transcaucasia and Central Asia, which, from the Middle Ages until the Russian conquest, were under Arab, Persian, or Turkish rule and which are still inhabited by Persianor Turkish-speaking Muslims. — Bernard Lewis, From Babel to Dragomans, 1173

Categorization

Category: Factual Claims

• DEFINE: Defines the Middle East civilizational core as Arabic, Persian, and Turkish — a tripeopled, trilinguistic zone.
• SHARE: For someone working on Cold War-era area studies: the book argues the ‘Middle East’ as strategic zone artifically amputated Transcaucasia and Central Asia that historically belonged to the same civilization.

Related

• The Middle East as a civilization extends past the Soviet border into Central Asia (similarity 0.94)
• Soviet Central Asian borders were drawn to guarantee future ethnic conflicts (similarity 0.79)
• Persian, not Arabic, was the classical literary language of late-medieval Islam (similarity 0.78)
• The term Middle East denotes where the three religions meet, not a fixed region (similarity 0.78)