MENA 200 Making the Modern Middle East: Culture, Politics, History
This team-taught course offers an interdisciplinary introduction to major issues in the history of the Middle East and North Africa since the nineteenth century, and also an introduction to Middle East studies as field of study. That is, we will seek to understand how the modern Middle East was "made," as well as how something called "the Middle East" emerged as a geopolitical entity and a conceptual category. Among the topics explored are the history of the idea of the "Middle East" and the multiples meanings of "modernity" in that context; the complex relations between the Middle East and the West; the historical formation of Middle East nation-states, polities, ideologies, identities, and economies; and the dynamic struggles unfolding in the region since the 2011 Arab uprisings. The course will consider the making of these structures, events, and relationships from a range of perspectives, including imaginative ones. Course material will encompass literary, cinematic, historical, and social science materials, as well as both primary documents and secondary scholarly sources.
MENA 290 History of the Modern Middle East, 1789-Present
The course surveys the factors that shaped the political, economic, and social features of the modern Middle East from 1789 to the present. The course begins with a study of traditional (mainly Ottoman) institutions; it then traces the forces which weakened those institutions and examines the efforts of Middle Eastern leaders to resist or encourage change. The second half of the course focuses on the period since World War I. It examines the origins of the Arab-Israeli conflict, the significance of secular ideologies such as Arab nationalism and socialism, the successes and failure of the Nasser regime in Egypt, the rise of Islamism, the Iranian revolution, and the Middle East since the end of the Cold War.
MENA 301-2-20 Revolutionary Egypt under Nasser and Sadat
This will be a seminar-colloquium focusing on the background of the July, 1952 Revolution and controversies surrounding the course of its development. We shall examine the major issues of the British occupation, the Palace faction and the centrist Wafd Party--in the context of their spiraling confrontation. We shall analyze the background of Gamal Abd al-Nasir (Nasser) and his associates (including Anwar al-Sadat) in order to pose a fundamental question: were these individuals committed to genuine social change or did they remain bourgeois capitalists, psychologically tied to the West, and thus dependent on it? Subsequently, we shall examine Egypt's involvement with the Palestine Problem, dilemmas of economic growth, international alignments, and the 'Cold Peace' with Israel.
In this course we will study the collection of stories known in English as The Arabian Nights orThe Thousand and One Nights. While in the contemporary popular imagination the Nights is often reduced to a few well-known stories, this course will take a wider approach to the collection, and study it as the product of an ongoing process of translation, circulation, and exchange. Over the quarter, we will read the earliest of these stories, as well as follow the collection's history from its evolution in Arabic oral and manuscript traditions to its eighteenth- century "discovery" and translation into European languages. While the collection has been called a "book with no author" because of its long history of oral and textual evolution, it could just as easily be called a book of many authors, who include its anonymous Sanskrit, Persian, and Arabic originators and transmitters, its French and English translators, and its modern interpreters. The last third of the course will therefore be devoted to the modern "afterlives" of the collection in novels, film, and theater. We will consider how the Nights has been used in these works as a vehicle for deeply-considered investigations into narrative form and also clichéd and colonially-imbued images of the Middle East. Reading and watching these works next to and against the Arabic versions, we will encounter the vast variety of ways that the Nights has been a source of narrative techniques, literary themes, political allegories, and feminist debates across literary traditions.
