Autumn

Themes covered in this introductory course will include: Sufism as an interior personal response to the Qur’an and the numinous; Sufi visions; the psychology, spiritual disciplines and practices of Sufism; Sufism as a social reaction against legalism and literalism in religious institutions; the development of institutions and rituals within Sufism itself (shrines, lodges, orders, rules, etc.); saint worship and hagiographies; the body in Sufism; Sufi poetry; Sufi music; theological attacks against Sufism as an antinomian or heretical movement; modernist critiques of Sufism as escapism from political and social responsibility; and Sufism as perennial de-Islamicized theosophy in the modern middle east and in the west.  In addition to lectures and discussion, students will keep an introspective "sufi" diary, observe or participate in Sufi meditation/contemplation.

This sequence deepens and expands the students' knowledge of modern Persian at all levels of reading, writing and speaking. Grammar will be taught at a higher level and a wider vocabulary will enable the students to read stories, articles and poetry and be introduced to examples of classical literature towards the end of the sequence. Introducing the Iranian culture will be continued. Class meets three hours a week with the instructor and (with enough students) two hours with a native informant who conducts grammatical drills and Persian conversation.

This sequence concentrates on modern written Persian as well as modern colloquial usage. Towards the end of the sequence the students will be able to read, write and speak Persian at an elementary level. Introducing the Iranian culture is also a goal. The class meets three hours a week with the instructor and two hours with a native informant who conducts grammatical drills and Persian conversation.

This course will offer a survey of the main political and social developments in Turkey and Iran since the end of WWI.

Course introduces students to the historical context and specific characteristics of the mass printed press (newspapers, cultural and political journals, etc.) in the Ottoman Empire in the 19th C. We will investigate issues such as content, censorship, production, readership and distribution through secondary reading and the examination of period publications.

The course focuses on the formation of the Ottoman polity as an imperial entity following the conquest of Constantinople in 1453 and up to the end of the sixteenth century. Taking as its thematic center point the ideological, social, cultural, and administrative changes introduced by Sultan Suleyman (1520–1566), the seminar also provides a survey of the institutions of his most extensive of early modern Muslim empires. Themes of particular significance are the changing relationship of religion and state, the development of imperial culture, the rule of law, rivalry with contemporary Christian and Muslim powers, and the transition from universal to regional empire. Reading knowledge of at least one European language recommended.

This course surveys the political, social, and economic history of ancient Egypt from pre-dynastic times (ca. 3400 B.C.) until the advent of Islam in the seventh century of our era.

Required of fourth-year students who are majoring in NELC. This is a workshop course designed to survey the fields represented by NELC and to assist students in researching and writing the BA paper. Students must get a Reading and Research form from their College Adviser and complete the form in order to be registered. Signatures are needed from the adviser and Director of Undergraduate Studies. Please indicate on the form that you wish to register for NEHC 29800 Section 01.

This course will explore the narrative history of Central Asia from rise of the nomadism up to the end of the Central Asian Timurids in the fifteenth century. We will discuss the people who lived there, the political entities that ruled, and the region's role in the pre-modern world. This course assumes that Central Asia can be studied as a cohesive unit of historical inquiry and that its peoples, civilizations, and cultures share common elements that make this approach possible. We will devote considerable effort to problems of historiography and methodology and will explore possible solutions to these problems.

Humans across cultures have historically attached great religious, cultural, political, and social value to a variety of cultural artifacts and sites, usually with significant immediate and historical consequences. Political ideologies, such as colonialism and nationalism, wars, poverty, a thriving illicit antiquities market: all of these are entwined with the ways in which the knowledge about the past is manipulated, collected, interpreted, presented, preserved, and destroyed to create meaning in the present. This course explores this relationship between past cultural heritage and the present through a cross-cultural and cross-disciplinary survey of the human obsession with the past. We will consider a variety of topics such as the history of archaeology, the antiquities trade, and disputes over cultural ownership, along with a discussion of the repatriation of artifacts and current controversies surrounding antiquities around the globe.