as son of a Lebanese Arab father who was raised by Jewish stepfathers after his father's death, Bradley M. Campbell quipped that his "aspiration is to become ambassador-at-large in the Middle East"?
after serving in U.S. embassies in Egypt and Lebanon, Edward Sheehan wrote his debut novel Kingdom of Illusion about the playboy king of a fictional Middle Eastern country?
Question 3: However, the usage of "Near East" was retained by a variety of academic disciplines, including archaeology and ancient history, where it describes an area identical to the term Middle East, which is not used by these disciplines (see ________).
Question 4: The designation, Mashriq, also from the Arabic root for "east," also denotes a variously-defined region around the Levant, the eastern part of the Arabic-speaking world (as opposed to the ________, the western part).
Question 5: The modern Middle East began after World War I, when the Ottoman Empire, which was allied with the defeated ________, was partitioned into a number of separate nations.
Question 6: [2] However, it became more widely known when American naval strategist ________ used the term in 1902[3] to 'designate the area between Arabia and India'.
Question 8: Islam in its many forms is by far the largest religion in the Middle East, but other faiths, such as Judaism and ________, are also important.