The countries that make up the Middle East have intersecting though distinct and internally complex historical, economic, and linguistic histories. Disparate colonial histories and postcolonial legacies, the religious and socio-political positioning of Arabic as a regional language, and the influences of globalization and translanguaging create nuanced and multilayered multilingualisms that challenge any articulation of overarching models and methods for the teaching and research of writing in the region. At the same time, the Middle East is currently in the throes of economic and political unrest combined with violence and interspersed war in several countries; tensions that have marked the region for many years and are often reflected in the work of the region's writing teachers and scholars. In this ecology, the writing classroom and the discipline of rhetoric and composition become potential discursive spaces where these tensions are played out and encountered critically. As teachers and researchers of writing adapt their rhetoric and practices to create discourse communities using critical language pedagogies and postdigital rhetorics, they engage with the past and present ideological, cultural, economic, and political tensions of the region. Taking the larger tensions and characteristics of the region into consideration, writing scholarship in the Middle East complicates assumptions and renegotiates Western paradigms as it revisits, encounters, and engages complex colonial and linguistic histories and political and socio-cultural realities.