NEHC

The Ottomans ruled in Anatolia, the Middle East, South East Europe and North Africa for over six hundred years. The objective of this course is to understand the society and culture of this bygone Empire whose legacy continues, in one way or another, in some twenty-five contemporary successor states from the Balkans to the Arabian Peninsula. The course is designed as an introduction to the Ottoman World with a focus on the cultural history of the Ottoman society. It explores identities and mentalities, customs and rituals, status of minorities, mystical orders and religious establishments, literacy and the use of the public sphere.

This course is an exploration of conflict in the Arab world through literature, film and new media. In this course, we will discuss the influence of independence movements, wars, and revolts on Arabic literature: how do writers write about, or film, conflict? How does conflict affect language itself? How do these texts engage with issues of trauma and bearing witness? To answer these questions, we will look at a number of key moments of conflict in the Arab world, including the Arab-Israeli conflicts, the Algerian war of independence, the 2011 Egyptian revolution, the Lebanese and Iraq wars, and the ongoing war in Syria. Rather than follow a historical chronology of these events, we will read these texts thematically, beginning with texts that seek to present themselves as direct, sometimes eye-witness, accounts and then moving on to narratives that complicate the relationship between conflict and its narration.

What were the famous and funny, nice and naughty, sacred and profane, scholarly and popular, silly and profound books read in the pre-modern Muslim world? How did people understand their status in the cosmos, their place in the world, their role in society, their relation to other peoples?
This course provides an overview of the thought and literature of the Islamic world as it developed across a broad geographic area stretching across the central Islamic lands from Morocco and Iberia to the Maldives and India – even into the New World – during the “middle periods” (c. 950 – 1750 C.E.). We engage with a wide variety of primary texts in English translation, as well as various visual, aural and material artifacts, contextualizing them through lectures, secondary readings and discussion. We trace a range of ideas, institutions, and literary works, considering them both on their own merits, and how they evolved in response to changing historical, demographic and religious circumstances. We explore the interaction of culture, ethnicity, history, politics and religion in the creation of individual Muslim identities and a multi-faceted Islamicate civilization (consisting of its intellectual milieu; literary, artistic and musical production; social organization; scientific, philosophical and theological thought; religious, educational, governmental, commercial and social institutions; geographic, ethnic, confessional, gender, social and spatial constructs). In brief, how did noteworthy Muslims at various points and places think through questions of life & death, man & God, faith & belief, the sacred & the profane, law & ethics, tradition vs. innovation, power & politics, class & gender, self & other? How did they wage war; make love; shape the built environment; eat & drink; tell stories; educate their youth; preserve the past; imagine the future; perform piety, devotion and spirituality; construe the virtuous life and righteous community, etc.? How did these ideas change over time?

This course surveys Muslim history-writing in Arabic from its beginnings to the nineteenth century. Through reading the work of historians such as al-Baladhuri, al-Tabari, Miskawayh, Ibn ‘Asakir, Ibn Khaldun, and al-Jabarti, we investigate different genres of historical writing and examine the various methodologies employed by Muslim historians.

This course explores the Islamic tradition of doxography—the study of sectarian differences. We read works by al-Balkhi, (pseudo?)al-Jubba’i, al-Ash‘ari, al-Nawbakhti, al-Shahrastani, and Ibn Hazm to understand what the genre of doxography consisted of, which methods its authors deployed, and how they envisioned the Muslim community and sectarian identities within it.

This course covers the period from ca. 1700 to the present. It explores Muslim intellectuals’ engagement with tradition and modernity in the realms of religion, politics, literature, and law. We discuss debates concerning the role of religion in a modern society, perceptions of Europe and European influence, the challenges of maintain religious and cultural authenticity, and Muslim views of nation-states and nationalism in the Middle East. We also give consideration to the modern developments of transnational jihadism and the Arab Spring. This course sequence meets the general education requirement in civilization studies.

This course provides an interdisciplinary survey of modern Shi’a thought and identity in the Middle East. It complicates dominant narratives and conventional understandings of sectarianism, Shi'a Islam, and geopolitical conflict in the Middle East by differentiating between distinct yet overlapping factors such as state competition (i.e. between Iran and Saudi Arabia), historical legacies of empire and state building, and actual substantive theological and intellectual differences between Shi’a and Sunni Islam. It looks at the origins of Shi’ism and who the Shi’a are today as the second largest denomination within Islam including their diverse ethnic, geographic, cultural, and political backgrounds. The course will focus on modern intellectual and political movements in Shi’a thought from the post-colonial period onwards including Shi'a revivalist thought and national liberation movements in the early 20th century; Shi’a clerical innovation and institutions (including wilayat al-faqih, the theocratic system dominant in Iran); mass pilgrimage practices and sociological changes in the Shi’a world; Iran's Islamic revolution; and, the transnational politics of Shi’a political parties and armed movements, such as the Lebanese Hezbollah, Iraq’s Popular Mobilization Forces (Hashd al-Sha’abi), and Yemen’s Ansarallah (the Houthis). The course will also cover the “Axis of Resistance” that has Iran, Syria, Hezbollah and other partners engaging in new socio-political and intellectual paradigms in the Middle East.

This course has two goals. The first is an interior goal, to introduce students to the major categories of knowledge created and employed in ancient Assyria and Babylonia, as the Mesopotamian “core curriculum.” This was the corpus of material that had to be mastered by scribes of the Neo-Sumerian and Neo-Assyrian periods, including proverbs, lists, omens, geographies, medicine, magic, law, mathematics, history, royal wisdom, and accounting.

The second goal is “exterior”: to examine the epistemological precepts on which knowledge was constructed. What was held to be knowable? What methods and techniques were used to identify and justify knowledge as valid or authentic? What roles did copying, editing, authorship, and literacy play in the production of knowledge texts? How the organization and preservation of texts create canons and curricula?

No prior knowledge of Mesopotamian history or literature is required. Students are asked to think with the primary texts, not to demonstrate mastery of them.

While the words “devil,” “demon,” and “Satan” usually conjure the image of a horned and hoofed archfiend, this has not always been the case. Students in this course will discover both the origins of and complications to dominant popular images of “the Devil” by engaging ancient Middle Eastern and Mediterranean texts, including Mesopotamian literature, the Hebrew Bible, the New Testament, and other early Christian and Jewish texts. We will discuss Satan’s origins as the biblical god Yahweh’s henchman, Mesopotamian and Greco-Roman conceptions of subordinate divine entities, Hellenistic and Roman-period tendencies towards cosmic dualism, and much more. Students will also have the opportunity to explore pop culture and political discourse to examine how Biblical and other ancient demons productively recur in such contexts. A guiding question will be why the category of “demon” has proven so productive and necessary to diverse religious worldviews and what the common features and actions of these figures reveal about persistent human anxieties.

This course is an introduction to the religions of the ancient Middle East—Egypt, the Levant, Anatolia, and Mesopotamia—with an emphasis on the variety to these religions and the ways regional religious expression and practice changed over time. We will read several famous myths, hymns, and other narrowly “religious” texts—including excerpts from the Akkadian creation myth Enūma eliš, the Egyptian Book of the Dead, and a Hittite myth of a disappearing god. But we will also explore visual art and other material culture sources and we will read letters, treaties, and other more mundane texts to define how these sources differently show how religion manifested “on the ground.” The social and political resonances of religion will be stressed, with examples ranging from kings dubiously claiming the rediscovery of important religious texts to international theft of divine statues. We will discuss the influence of ancient Middle Eastern religions on that of neighboring regions, especially the Greco-Roman world. Students will pursue creative projects with the goal of more deeply understanding ancient Middle Eastern religions; these may include adapting a known religious phenomenon to a different medium or genre or even fabricating new texts, images, or practices while demonstrating their innovative benefits and historical connections to skeptical adherents.