Ataturk |
Nasser
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Khomeini |
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Ataturk |
Nasser
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Khomeini |
David Robinson 318 Morrill, robindav@mail.matrix.msu.edu Office hrs: by appointment.
Alan Fisher, 301 Morrill, fishera@msu.edu Office hrs: by appointment.
We are now more than 2 years from the events of September 11, 2001. Although from an historical perspective those events are still relatively current, we know a great deal more now about their meaning and causes, and the roles the history of the Middle East, including North Africa and South Asia, has played. Their significance, of course, will be defined only in the future.
In this course we wish to examine the historical "frameworks" for these events, born in the Middle East and South Asia, and - at the writing of this syllabus - for growing American difficulties in Iraq. Our focus will be the competition, over the past century or more, between secularism, nationalism, and Islamism. These have been the primary Middle Eastern responses to European, and later, American, domination of the region, as well as to rapid economic and cultural change.
Although many Americans, private and governmental, in the midst of the September 11 tragedies, could not imagine a context for the attacks beyond an "unprovoked" hatred of America, it is becoming more apparent that the contexts, what we call "frameworks," are far more complicated.
We have chosen to deal with the international dimensions of this sequence of events, and not with questions of the military campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq, the civil liberties in the US and Western Europe, or biological or chemical terrorism. We hope that appropriate faculty, departments and courses will be used to explore these dimensions.
We wish to focus first on the religion which Usama and al-Qa'ida claim to act in the name of - Islam, and the historical culture which it spawned. We start with the assumption that they do not represent the Islamic faith, and that it is critical for intelligent people everywhere not to frame the conflict as a confrontation between "Islam" and "the West." It is obviously important to understand the strands of Islam which they claim to interpret and the resonance which their interpretation has in many parts of the "Islamic world." We will focus, in the second instance, upon the arenas of this conflict, stretching from North Africa (especially Egypt) to South Asia (Pakistan).
We make no pretensions to cover all arenas or issues, but we hope that we will address the most important ones. We hope that students (and faculty and staff) will emerge from this course with a deeper and better understanding of Islam and of the societies in which struggles about religious and ethnic identity and about social and economic survival are being played out.
We wish to thank the following MSU units for their current and/or past support for this course: The Office of the Provost, College of Arts and Letters, Department of History, International Studies and Programs, CASID, James Madison College, and the Center for Integrative Studies in the Arts and Humanities.
WWW Links - Newspapers in English
Two courses on Middle East history are offered. Link to their syllabi below:
HST 372 - The Middle East from the Romans to the Mongols [ca. 100 BCE - 1240 CE]
HST 373 - The Middle East under Ottoman Domination [ca. 1240 CE - 1918 CE]