New Course Offerings -- Middle Eastern and South Asian Languages and Cultures

HIME 1501

Pirates of the Mediterranean
Joshua M. White
Mon 3:30 - 6:00 PM
Nau Hall 242

The success of the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise and the resurgence of piracy off the Horn of Africa have catapulted maritime raiding back into the public consciousness. Books, movies, and news articles have proliferated in recent years that cater to this new interest, and some commentators have sought context for the Somali phenomenon in the early modern Mediterranean. This course examines Mediterranean piracy in its own right, from the proxy battles for supremacy in North Africa in the sixteenth century to the U.S. naval interventions there in the nineteenth. We will pay special attention to the political, social, religious, legal, and economic ramifications of both Christian and Muslim sea raiding. Piracy in the early modern Mediterranean was a universal threat that affected East and West, North and South, Muslims, Christians, and Jews.  It left its mark on the political geography of the coasts, impacted the development of international law and the conduct of diplomacy, and provided the pretext for both Ottoman and European imperial expansion. It mobilized the rhetoric of intractable religious conflict, popularized new genres of literary expression, created new networks of trade and destroyed others, and led thousands into lives of captivity. Its legacy is still with us today.   

HIME 4501

Empire in Distress: The Ottoman Empire in the 17th Century
Joshua M. White
Tu 6:00PM - 8:30PM
New Cabell Hall 412

In 1683, the Ottoman Turks laid siege to Vienna, spurring the formation of a "Holy League" to save Christian Europe from Ottoman domination. It took the combined efforts of multiple European armies to drive the Ottomans back from the gates of the city and out of Central Europe for good. Some 400 years before modern Turkey sought entry into the European Union, the Ottoman Empire was the dominant power on the continent, its territory encompassing most of Eastern Europe, the Balkans, the Middle East, and North Africa. This seminar delves into the fascinating world of the Ottoman Empire at its height, and its turning point. The Ottoman seventeenth century was marked by debilitating financial crises, dynastic turmoil, widespread brigandage and rebellion, grinding wars, and great social and cultural ferment. In the capital of Istanbul and across the empire, a vibrant new culture found inspiration and expression in coffeehouses, popular preachers railed against the excesses of society and "innovations" like tobacco and coffee, and a new intellectual consciousness emerged as the Ottomans began to experience the first shifts in global power that would undermine their rule in the Mediterranean and Europe.

HIME 4511

Roots of the Arab Spring
E.F. Thompson
Th 1:00PM - 3:30PM
Nau Hall 142

The revolutions that have rolled across the Arab world in the past year came out of the blue -- but also out of history.   Missing from much analysis has been the historical perspective that activists themselves carried into the streets.   This seminar prepares students to write research papers on at least one of the three most prominent cases:  Tunisia, Egypt, and Syria.  In the first three weeks, we will read the history of popular revolt, constitutionalism, and the growth of dictatorship in each of these countries since 1880 the time they were part of the Ottoman empire.   Then we will read comparative and theoretical works on the post-colonial state in the Middle East and on Islamic politics, as well as personal accounts of those who participated in the current revolutions.  Themes include the role of media in revolution, women's participation, and the international factors that have shaped the outcomes.  By the sixth week of the seminar, students will choose a paper topic-- either an in-depth study of one case or a comparative study of two or three.   With guidance, students will research and write a draft of the paper by the last day of classes, with a final draft due at the end of the exam period.   Sources may include not only printed memoirs, but internet-based sources, film, photography, music, and other media.   While a knowledge of Arabic may be useful, it is not required.  Required books include Marsot, A History of Egypt; Wickham, Mobilizing Islam;  Ghonim, Revolution 2.0; Seale, Asad; Wedeen, Ambiguities of Domination; Perkins, A History of Modern Tunisia.  Final grades for the course will be calculated as follows:  participation, 25%; midterm papers, 25%; final paper, 50%.

HIME 5052

World War I: Birth of the Modern Middle East
E.F. Thompson
Th 3:30PM - 6:00PM
New Cabell Hall 319

World War I defined the modern Middle East much as the Civil War defined the modern United States.   We begin where David Fromkin left off, in his classic book A Peace to End All Peace, about how Europeans presided over the defeat and dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire, a story popularized in the film Lawrence of Arabia.   The Paris peace negotiations represented the apex of European imperialism, a last exercise of the Great Powers' prerogative in claiming territories and ordering the world's peoples around in an imperial state system.  The Paris peace talks were also the scene of President Woodrow Wilson's attempt to transform that system into an one based on international law and adjudicated by the League of Nations.   Middle Eastern peoples rallied to Wilson's war for democracy and his insistence on the rights of small nations to self-determination.  This seminar then moves from the military and diplomatic views of the war to deeper layers of the war experience: social, economic, demographic.  The war marked the end of efforts by Ottoman peoples to co-exist in a plural society:  it defeated liberal constitutionalism and launched the nationalist politics that continues today in efforts to purify and homogenize societies, and to expel minorities.  We study the Ottomans' efforts before the war to promote pluralism and how the pressures of war instead produced the Armenian genocide, and the traumatic transfers of Turkish and Greek peoples in and out of Anatolia.  We also examine the birth of Palestine and the future Israel in this context.  The Arab-Israeli wars and the rise of Islamism in the later 20th century are rooted in the First World War. 

MESA 2559-001

Major Dimensions of Arabic-Islamic Civilization
Ahmad Z. Obiedat
Tu 7:00PM - 9:30PM
New Cabell 325

A Two-Semester Survey of the Literatures and History of Ideas in Arab-Islamic Civilization
From Pre-Islam to the Arab Spring - Taught by Ahmad Z. Obiedat – for UNDERGRADUATES & GRADUATES

MESA 2559/6559 - Major Dimensions of Classical and Medieval Arabic-Islamic Civilization (Taught in English) - Fall 2012. No previous perquisite needed. Fulfills Nonwestern and Second Writing requirements.

MESA 2559-002

Women in Social Media in the Middle East and South Asia
Lisa Goff
Mon/Wed, 2:00PM - 3:15PM
Monroe 111

Women in the Middle East have figured prominently in media accounts of the Arab Spring, and have proved themselves particularly adept at using social media outlets such as Twitter, Facebook, and blogs to promote their dual message of political reform and women's rights. Similarly, women in South Asia have embraced social media as a tool for expressing their identities and promoting causes important to women in the region. This course will examine media depictions of women during and after revolutions and uprisings in five selected countries (Iran, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, India, and Pakistan), and explore how women in those countries have used social media to embrace, rebut, or amplify those depictions. It will pay special attention to the ways in which social media facilitate, or possibly limit, women’s roles as producers and creators of culture. A wave of post-Arab Spring literature, films, etc. from across the region has just started to break. The readings in this course will reflect this flood of new material, but will also look back to earlier revolutions and uprisings, including those that overthrew colonial rulers, in order to compare pre- and post-revolutionary depictions of women in media. One aim of the class will be to examine the ways that politicians and religious leaders have historically used women’s bodies to define pro- and anti-revolutionary forces, as well as nationhood. How are women now, with the tools of social media at their command, (re)defining themselves? The course will address themes of mobility and public space, and will examine the multiple ways in which women in the region have both fueled revolutions and been affected by them. Finally, the course will address the current backlash against women in these regions, and the ways in which women remain divided on issues of how best to achieve, and even to define, their own empowerment.

SATR 3300

Literature and Society in South Asia: Breaking the Cast(e)
Mehr Farooqi
Mon/Wed, 2:00PM - 3:15PM
Location: TBA

Dalit literature, is perhaps the most remarkable literary movement to emerge in post-independence India. It is the voice of the marginalized segment of India’s population, those formerly known as untouchables. Though ‘untouchability’ was abolished in 1950 when India adopted a new Constitution after independence from British rule, it still lingers on, especially among the rural population. Untouchable through religious diktat, members of this lowest stratum of the Hindu caste system now call themselves “Dalit” (the term literally means “ground down”) to express their resistance to a three thousand year old socio-religious practice that denies them their basic human rights. Until the advent of Dalit literature, the lives of Dalits had seldom been recorded in Indian literatures, which were traditionally the domain of the privileged high-castes. In this course we will read fictional as well as non-fictional narratives of prominent Dalit writers. We will also watch films to comprehend and contextualize the readings with the backdrop of Dalit lives.

Assignments: Writing four short critical papers (3-4 pages), panel presentation (10-15 mins.), Midterm, Final paper(8 pages).

SATR 3359

Contemporary Pakistani Literature: Complexities of Culture in a Global World
Mehr Farooqi
Tu/Th, 11:00AM - 12:15PM
Location: TBA

Pakistan came into being with the partition of the British Raj between India and Pakistan in 1947. It is the sixth most populous country in the world. Despite its failure to sustain a democracy: the see-saw pattern of military rule, restricted elections and  vigorous power struggles involving the military and political parties, it is still a flourishing centre of South Asian music, art, cuisine and above all Urdu poetry.
Since the 1990s it has also fostered a lively media landscape—overwhelmingly in
Urdu—and writing in English by Pakistani writers has captured the attention of international publishers and readers.
Public interest in Pakistan is too often limited to a narrow account of politics, calamities and terrorism. This pioneering seminar course aims to help students understand contemporary Pakistan in all of its cultural complexities through a reading and engagement with its literature.
Recent publications by a group of young highly regarded Pakistani writers in English such as Mohsin Hamid, Daniyal Mueenudin, Nadim Aslam, Muneeza Shamsie as well as well established Urdu writers such as Intizar Husain and Fehmida Riaz will form the core of readings.  The naming and development of a distinct unity that could be called Pakistani literature will be explored through the critical writing of Muhammad Hasan Askari.

Course work: 500 word critical responses, panel presentations, final paper.