"For Fuck's Sake, Stop Calling It the Middle East." Nah.

I was scrolling Instagram the other day and landed on a story that said: “For fuck’s sake, stop calling it the Middle East. It’s Southwest Asia.”

There’s a longstanding conversation about whether “Middle East” is a colonizer term. We spent the entire first session of one of my Arab Studies courses at Georgetown digging into just this term.

Middle to who? Middle relative to what? The term developed as a political designation in relation to Europe and Britain. A colonial perspective baked into the language.

Recently there have been brilliant videos circulating making the case that we should decouple from this framing entirely and use terms like SWANA, Southwest Asia and North Africa, or West Asia and North Africa. Geographic terms rather than political ones.

I’ve heard the argument. I understand the critique. And I still use “Middle East.”

I have spent more than a decade of my life learning Arabic. Using it in taxis, with street vendors, with teachers and professors, with people across the region. Talking to them at length about their home.

Across the board, in Arabic, people from the region use a term that translates directly to “Middle East.” They also use “the Arab world,” referring to the 22 countries where Arabic is the most widely spoken language. Even in English, chatting with people in the region, they're going to ask about your opinions of the "Middle East." That is how people who are from there, who grew up there, who speak Arabic as their first language, describe it today.

I am not going to impose my own interpretation of how they should self-identify by switching to SWANA. And frankly, if I used that term with someone while traveling in the region, most people would look at me sideways like, girl please. There are academics and certainly some who would recognize it. But it is not broadly used on the ground.

My audience is largely American. When I say “Middle East,” they know exactly what I’m talking about. That’s the same language western media uses to denigrate, oversimplify, and exoticize the region. I’m using it on purpose to complicate the image they already have.

That’s the whole point.

And while I understand the impulse behind this wave of creators trying to police the term, I don’t think it’s doing what they think it’s doing. We (and I’m really talking about liberals and leftists here) don’t do ourselves any favors by using obscure language to talk about commonly understood concepts, especially when the goal is to shift how people think about those concepts.

So I’ll keep using “Middle East” and “the Arab world” when I’m talking to the general public. And I’ll change my language when the people I meet on the ground change theirs. That’s their call to make, not mine.

As I wrap up my storytelling from Jabal Akhdar, I’m sharing this conversation in full and unedited. I was on a solo weekend exploring a mountainside, and I’d hired a guide who taught me about local plants, about how communities on this mountain have lived for generations, about what it meant to grow up there.

We got to talking about his childhood. About tourism. I can only use one or two sentences of conversations like this when I’m editing for social media, but they feel too important not to share.

Watch what he says about why people come to Oman. And pay attention to his very first experience going to school.

It was in a helicopter. Part of a rural education initiative. How fucking cool!!!

Salim of Mountain Mogli Oman, talking about his childhood, life on the mountain, and more.

I’ve been talking about this tea company for three or four years, since I lived in Northwest Arkansas. I am absolutely certain it’s the best tea I’ve ever tried. Asami Tea Co. does direct-trade imports from smallholder farms on the African continent, and it is just incredible. I have turned all my friends onto it and I can’t recommend them enough.

Not an affiliate link. I just ride for them.

Language is never neutral. Deconstructing it, understanding where it comes from, understanding why certain terms stick. That’s important.

And so is knowing when to shift.

But I also have a very ivory-tower, very academic education. And I’ve watched language get used in liberal and leftist spaces especially as a way to signal that you’re in the know. That you’re on the right side of history. That you’ve done the reading.

What it sometimes does simultaneously is shut the door on the very people we’re trying to bring into the conversation.

That’s what I’m trying to unpack here. Not whether the critique is valid. It is. But whether the strategy is working or even being called for by the people it impacts most.

I don’t think it always is.