The Middle East is always blurry

In recent weeks, the crossed declarations of the North American and Iranian governments regarding the Strait of Hormuz, in addition to those expanded by Israel or Saudi Arabia, have been incessant and, in general, little or not at all reliable. Rather not at all: Trump says one thing, Tehran the contrary, and then the Pakistani mediators contradict both statements at the same time. Meanwhile, however, stock market fluctuations on a global scale have been dizzying (speculators love this environmental noise). Now they say they have reached an agreement; we'll see. The information that reaches us from that corner of the world is usually uncertain: we always see the Middle East as blurry, even when relative peace reigns there.A thousand years ago it was also like this, but for other reasons. During the late Middle Ages, pilgrims, merchants, or crusaders returning from Jerusalem carried under their arms accounts in which factual information (little) was mixed with myths, exaggerations, and pure religious and political propaganda (a lot). The East was always an imprecise, distant, symbolic space: a more theological than geopolitical setting. The chronicles showed a world perceived through a capricious, changing veil. Sometimes the figure of a perfidious infidel emerged, who the next day, all of a sudden, was transfigured into an exotic, fascinating being laden with treasures. It could be threatening or attractive, as convenient.The paradox is that today, in the midst of the mega-information age, uncertainty persists and may even become more pronounced. Contradictory statements, comically divergent versions from each regional actor, the great information war between blocs: here is intense noise that never subsides. In fact, our excess of information does not attenuate uncertainty, but rather multiplies it, because what centuries ago was a lack of data, now is an excess of data without hierarchy. Fundamentally, the Middle East continues to be for Europe a space where information is—let's say—structurally suspect. It is not that we know little despite knowing a lot, but rather that we know too many incompatible things, contradictory things, and always multi-filtered things. A thousand years ago, the East was a mythical space, a symbolic territory, not a delimited and mapped region. Chronicles described a world populated by strange people and indescribable wonders where geography was always imprecise and elastic, and events were often interpreted as providential signs. In the 21st century, the situation has reversed without improving: the information deficit has been replaced by a worrying surplus. The flashy statements from Washington, Tehran, Jerusalem, Ankara, or Riyadh arrive in real-time, but each is part of a communication strategy that relegates veracity to a third or fourth place. Furthermore, social networks multiply these apocryphal versions and create ephemeral mirages in one direction or another. Perhaps right now, June 15, 2026, we are witnessing one.

Centuries ago, nobody could know what was really happening in Antioch or Damascus until months later (sometimes even years) and it was always through a few interested intermediaries. Now the uncertainty is strategic: the actors in the region generate (pseudo)information with political intentions, and the speed at which it circulates prevents it from being processed reasonably. Technology has accelerated the flow of information, but it has not eliminated the opacity that hopelessly segregates a geopolitically symbolic, very dense, fragmented, ultraconflictive space. Both now and a millennium ago, the Middle East presents itself to us as a territory narrated, rather than known.The North American essayist of Palestinian origin Edward W. Said published Orientalism in 1978, an essay in which he argued that, for many centuries, Christian Western culture has been constructing an image of the East based both on attractive fantasies (refinement, luxury, sensuality, etc.) and on very negative prejudices (cruelty, apathy, disloyalty, etc.). According to Said, orientalism, understood as the imaginary and imprecise vision of an equally imaginary and imprecise place (where does this East fall?), only contains the set of contradictory projections that the West has been accumulating over the centuries while rethinking itself. The Middle East is always blurred for the reasons we have explained before, but also as a consequence of this special perception. A thousand years ago, Europeans fantasized about unimaginable riches and now many are fascinated by the kitsch luxury of the oil monarchies of the Persian Gulf. The situation has not changed much.