HIST 246 Fall 2021 Modern Middle East and North Africa
Place: UNIV 203 Day and Time: M-W-F, 9:30 am – 10: 20 am
Instructor: Professor Holden Office: UNIV 127 Office Hours: M-W 11 am – 12 pm Email: [email protected]
Face-to-Face
This course analyzes events in Middle East and North Africa from the early-nineteenth century to the present day. For 200 years, peoples in this region of the world have grappled with democracy, religion and national identity as well as conflicting reactions toward various forms of Western interventions. In this class, I will draw your particular attention to the legacy of The Great War, which led to the death of 25% of the population in the Arab world and the end of Ottoman rule.
Learning Outcomes --To assess how the past shapes life in the present-day Middle East and North Africa --To increase understanding of political and economic forces shaping the Middle East and North Africa, going beyond common interpretations of religion as engine of history --This class fosters skills necessary long-term career success. According to Dr. David Deming at Harvard University’s Kennedy School: “...although liberal arts majors start slow, they gradually catch up to their careers in STEM fields...A liberal arts education fosters valuable ‘soft skills’ like problem-solving, critical thinking and adaptability. Such skills are hard to quantify...But they have long-run value in a wide variety of careers.”
Class Preparations: The assignment for each class is listed underneath the specific day and lecture. Students are expected to prepare the assignments for each topic before each class meeting.
I am asking you to acquire two books: a) James L. Gelvin, The Modern Middle East: A History, 5th ed. (Oxford Univeristy Press, 2020. b) Karnig Panian, Goodbye Antoura: A Memoir of the Armenian Genocide (Stanford University Press, 2015).
Course Requirements:
Take Home Exam #1 20% Take Home Exam #2 20% Take Home Exam #3 25% Book Review 25% Engagement 10%
You are expected to check your @purdue.edu email on a daily basis, since I (and other professors) communicate to you through class emails. You can email me at [email protected].
Students will have three take-home exams. Each exam will consist of 2 essay questions. I will provide a review sheet of possible questions one week before the exam. I will email the exam the night before the exam and also upload it on Brightspace. Your responses—as will be described on the actual review sheet—should evaluate material from lectures and class preparations. You must upload your exam to Brightspace by 11 am on the day it is scheduled. I deduct five points for each hour the exam is late. After 5 pm I will not accept the exam, and students receive a 0.
Students submit an analytical review of a memoir about the Armenian Genocide of World War I. Karnig Panian’s Goodbye Antoura: A Memoir of the Armenian Genocide provides a firsthand account of the war’s devastating effects. Your review of this book must be between 750 and 1,000 words (not more, not less). You will have a week to read this book, and we will devote an entire class period to discussing it. I will provide guidelines to help you write the review. You must write it in 12-point type-face, double-spaced, with one-inch margins. I will expect you to upload your review by 12 noon on 15 October. I will take off five points for each day this essay is late.
This class is face-to-face. Attendance is expected, and engagement will be taken into consideration. I reserve the right to raise grades based on consistent attendance and engagement in class or on Blackboard’s discussion board. I encourage you to contact me if you are unable to attend a class in person, and we can figure out via email a way for you to engage the material.
There are a few classes when I will ask you to fill out a worksheet responding to questions on a film. This informal worksheet is not graded, but turning it in demonstrates your engagement.
Grading
A = 94-100 A- = 90-93 B+ = 87-89 B = 84-86 B- = 80-83 C+ = 77-79 C = 74-76 C- = 70-73
Class Guidelines • Prepare (i.e. read or watch assigned material) before class! • Turn in book review and exams on time, or suffer a grading penalty! • Be considerate! Don’t come late to class, or surf the web during lectures!
Disclaimer: In case of a major campus emergency, the requirements on this syllabus are subject to changes required by a revised semester calendar. Any changes will be posted, once the course resumes, on the course website. It may also be obtained by contacting the instructor via email.
Introduction to the Middle East
August 23 (M) Class Introductions
Class Preparations
upload a photo (of yourself!) to Brightspace introduce yourself in 3-5 sentences
August 25 (W) Where Is the Middle East?
Class Preparations
I have posted a map on Brightspace. I would like each student to download a copy and then draw the borders of the region referred to as the Middle East. Send it to me as an email the day before class and justify the borders that you drew. We will review your responses in class.
August 27 (F) What Is the Middle East?
Class Preparations
Cemil Aydin, “Introduction: What is the Muslim World,” The Idea of the Muslim World: A Global Intellectual History (Harvard University Press, 2017), 1-13.
Michael Ezekiel Gasper, “Conclusion: There Is a Middle East,” in Is There a Middle East?: The Evolution of a Geopolitical Concept, ed. M. Bonine, A. Amanat and ME Gasper (Stanford University Press, 2012), 231-240.
How did Aydin and Gasper further your understanding of the Middle East? What are the categories that can be used to define this region? How would they define Middle East?
The Ottoman Empire
August 30 (M) The Rise of the Ottoman Empire
Class Preparations
Gelvin, The Modern Middle East, 22-55.
Cleveland and Bunton, The Modern Middle East, 35-48.
September 1 (W) Ottoman Defeats, and Looming Imperial Decline
Class Preparations
Cleveland and Bunton, The Modern Middle East, 58-60.
September 3 (F) Napoleon in Egypt
Class Preparations
Napoleon’s Proclamations in Egypt, 1798, from The Napoleon Series Archive.
Abd al-Rahman Jabarti, “The Destruction Caused by the French and the Ottomans in Cairo,” in Al-Jabarti’s History of Egypt, ed. Jane Hathaway (Princeton University Press, 2009), 197-201.
September 6 (M) No Class
September 8 (W) Modernization in Egypt
Class Preparations
Gelvin, The Modern Middle East, 70-88.
Cleveland and Bunton, The Modern Middle East, 61-70.
Rifa’a Rafi’ al-Tahtawi, “The Extraction of Gold or an Overview of Paris,” in Gelvin, The Modern Middle East, 178-179.
September 10 (F) synthesis day
September 13 (M) Forging an Ottoman Identity
Class Preparations
William L. Cleveland and Martin Bunton, A History of the Modern Middle East, 76-86.
Gelvin, The Modern Middle East, 140-165.
“Decrees from the Ottoman Tanzimat,” in Gelvin, The Modern Middle East, 167-172.
Abdullah Cevdet Pasha, “A Muslim Intellectual on the Emancipation of Ottoman Non-Muslims (1856),” in Sephardi Lives: A Documentary History, 1700-1950, ed. Julia Phillips Cohen and Sarah Abrevaya Stein (Stanford University Press, 2014), 120-121.
Ludwig August Frankl, “The Ottoman Chief Rabbi’s Ambivalent Response to the Proclamation of Jewish Equality (1856),” in in Sephardi Lives: A Documentary History, 1700-1950, ed. Julia Phillips Cohen and Sarah Abrevaya Stein (Stanford University Press, 2014), 121-123.
Reflection: What reforms did Ottoman rulers implement in the nineteenth century? How might these reforms have contributed to a new sense of political identity among Ottoman subjects? And what might be potential challenges to forging an inclusive imperial identity?
September 15 (W) British Egypt
Class Preparations
Gelvin, The Modern Middle East, 89-105.
Cleveland and Bunton, The Modern Middle East, 87-102.
Evelyn Baring, First Earl of Cromer, “Why Britain Acquired Egypt in 1882 (1908),” Internet Modern History Sourcebook, accessed 23 June 2021.
Reflection: Why did the British colonize Egypt? How does Lord Cromer illuminate British decision-making? How did the colonization of Egypt serve British interests?
September 17 (F) French Algeria
Class Preparations
Phillip C. Naylor, North Africa: A History from Antiquity to Present (University of Texas Press, 2015), 152-155.
Assia Djebar, “Women, Children, Oxen Dying in Caves,” Fantasia: An Algerian Cavalcade (1993; reprint, Heinemann, 2003), 64-79. fill out worksheet on Djebar excerpt, upload it to Assignments in Brightspace, bring it to class
September 20 (M) Ottoman Baghdad
Class Preparations
Charles Tripp, “The Ottoman Provinces of Baghdad, Basra and Mosul,” in A History of Iraq, 3rd ed. (Cambridge University Press, 2007), 8-29.
“The Wedding of Regina, 1903,” in A Documentary History of Modern Iraq, Stacy E. Holden, ed. (University Press of Florida, 2012), 18-21. What elements of political, social and cultural change were highlighted in these readings? September 22 (W) Ottoman Palestine
Class Preparations
Gelvin, The Modern Middle East, 106-116 (ch. 7).
watch, Alexandre Promio, “Jaffa Gate in Jerusalem, 1897,” by “Film Rescue” on YouTube.
Ilan Pappé, “Palestine Was an Empty Land,” Ten Myths about Israel (Verso Books, 2017), 3-10.
September 24 (F) Zionist Settlement
Class Preparations
watch Ben Loeterman, “1913: Seeds of Conflict,” PBS, 2015 (53 min.)
fill out worksheet on “Seeds of Conflict,” and upload it to Assignments on Brightspace
This website reviews the historical personalities or commentators in the film: http://1913seedsofconflict.com/. See also, https://www.pbs.org/show/1913-seeds-conflict/.
Reflection: What were the so-called ‘seeds of conflict’ presented in the PBS film? The narrator of the film asks, “how did this place become the site of a bitter and seemingly intractable struggle?” Did the documentary adequately answer this question? How so? Or Why not?
September 27 (M) The Young Turks
Class Preparations
Cleveland and Bunton, The Modern Middle East, 124-134.
Franco, “Baghdadi Jews React to the Modernization of the Ottoman Empire, 28 May 1908,” in Akram Fouad Khater, Sources in the History of the Modern Middle East (Houghton Mifflin, 2004), 35-37. “A Baghdad Petition,” in A Documentary History of Modern Iraq, Stacy E. Holden, ed. (University Press of Florida, 2012), 33-38. Reflection: How did the ideology of the Young Turks compare with their Young Ottoman predecessors? What do these Baghdadi sources suggest about responses to their agenda? September 29 (W) synthesis day
October 1 (F) Take Home Exam #1, no class
World War I
October 4 (M) The Road to War
Class Preparations
Cleveland and Bunton, The Modern Middle East, 139-159.
“The Ottomans,” episode 2 of “World War I through Arab Eyes,” Al Jazeera, 2014 (45 min.).
October 6 (W) Wartime Conditions in Jerusalem
Class Preparations
Stafanie Wichhart, “The 1915 Locust Plague in Palestine,” The Jerusalem Quarterly, 56 & 57 (Winter 2013/Spring 2014): 29-39.
Ihsan Turjman, “An Arab Soldier in the Ottoman Army,” in Gelvin, The Modern Middle East, 251-254. please also read other diary excerpts of Ihsan Turjman posted on Brightspace
Reflection: How did World War I effect political, social and economic developments in Palestine and the rest of the Middle East? What would you deem its long-lasting legacy?
October 8 (F) Wartime Conditions in Baghdad
Class Preparations
Violette Shamash, Memories of Eden: A Journey through Jewish Baghdad (Forum Books, 2008), in Stacy E. Holden, ed., A Documentary History of Modern Iraq (University Press of Florida, 2011), 47-50. [an account of World War I by a Jewish woman in Baghdad who was a child]
Tamara Chalabi, “Stacking Rifles: Hadi and the War (1914-1916),” Late for Tea at the Deer Palace: The Lost Dreams of My Iraqi Family (Harper Collins, 2011), 23-34. [an account of World War I by the granddaughter of a Shi’i resident of Khadhimiya, just outside Baghdad]
General Maude, “Proclamation of Baghdad (19 March 1917).”
October 11 (M) No Class
October 13 (W) Reading and Reflection
Class Preparations
quiz on the first half of Goodbye Antoura to be uploaded to Brightspace
October 15 (F) A Story of Armenian Survival
Class Preparations
Karnig Panian, Goodbye Antoura: A Memoir of the Armenian Genocide (Stanford University Press, 2015, in its entirety!
*assign book review, due 25 October*
October 18 (M) The Mandate System
Class Preparations
Gelvin, The Modern Middle East, 189-206.
“The New Middle East,” episode 3 of “World War I through Arab Eyes,” Al Jazeera, 2014 (47 min.)
October 20 (W) Gertrude Bell, Kingmaker
Class Preparations
watch, Zeva Oelbaum and Sabine Krayenbuhl, “Letters from Baghdad,” 2018 (95 min.). [available at Purdue Library’s Kanopy, https://purdue.kanopy.com/product/letters-baghdad]
Reflections: What sources did the film use to present Bell’s life? How do you think the filmmaker would describe Bell: agent of change (revolutionary) or defender of the status quo (reactionary)? How did she transgress norms of her time? And how did she maintain them?
October 22 (F) British Iraq
Class Preparations
Phebe Marr with Ibrahim al-Marashi, “The British Mandate, 1920-1932,” in The Modern History of Iraq, 4th ed. (Westview Press, 2017), 17-28.
Reflections: 1. What are British interests in the ME at the end of the war? 2. How do you think those needs influence the colonial regime set up in Iraq? 3. What might you have changed if you were a British officer of that time? Given British interests of GB, could they have set up any other system of post-Ottoman rule in the Iraq? Why, and how? Or, why not...?
October 25 (M) Greek-Turkish Population Exchange
Sarah Shields, “The Greek Turkish Population Exchange: Internationally Administered Ethnic Cleansing,” in MERIP, 267 (September 2013).
Mark Mazower, “The Muslim Exodus,” Salonica: City of Ghosts: Christians, Muslims and Jew, 1430-1950 (Knopf, 2005), 311-332 (ch. 17).
Ernest Hemingway, “A Silent, Ghastly Procession,” in Dateline: Toronto: Hemingway’s Complete Toronto Star Dispatches, 1920-1924, ed. William White (Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1985), 232.
*Book Review Due*
October 27 (W) Ataturk’s Turkey
Class Preparations
Cleveland and Bunton, A History of the Modern Middle East, 166-175.
Gelvin, The Modern Middle East, 207-231 (ch. 12 and ch. 13).
Reflection: Why did Mustafa Kemal emerge from World War I as a military leader capable of reorganizing the Ottoman heartland as a modern state? What was his vision for the state? And how did his vision of a modern state compare and contrast with ideas of the Ottoman era?
October 29 (F) synthesis day
November 1 (M) Take-Home Exam #2
State Building
November 3 (W) The Creation of Israel
Class Preparations
Gelvin, The Modern Middle East, 232-250 (ch. 14).
“The Balfour Declaration (2 November 1917),” Gelvin, The Modern Middle East, 257.
Zionist Commission to Palestine, “Statement to the International Commission on Turkey- American Section,” June 1919, King Crane Digital Collection, Oberlin College Archives.
“The King-Crane Commission: Recommendations (August 28, 1919),” The Arab-Israeli Reader: A Documentary History of the Middle East Conflict, 8th ed., ed. Walter Laqueur and Dan Schueftan (Penguin Books, 2016), 23-25.
November 5 (F) Nationalism(s) in Post-Ottoman Palestine
“Masada, 1942,” in Ari Shavit, My Promised Land: The Triumph and Tragedy of Israel (Random House, 2013), 71-98.
Ali Younes, “Nakba Day: For Palestinians, Not Just a Historical Event,” Al Jazeera (15 May 2021).
Response #14: What is Masada? And its significance? And what is Nakba Day? And its significance? Why are monuments and commemorations so meaningful in post-Ottoman Palestine? How would Ihsan Turjman (Ottoman soldier) understood the meanings?
November 8 (M) Egypt’s (Qualified) Independence
Class Preparations
Erez Manela, “Woodrow Wilson and ‘the Ugliest of Treacheries,’” The New York Times (9 March 2019).
Gelvin, The Modern Middle East, 261-290.
Cleveland and Bunton, A History of the Modern Middle East, 184-194.
November 10 (W) The Egypt of Gamal Abdel Nasser
Class Preparations
Cleveland and Bunton, A History of the Modern Middle East, 286-305.
Gamal Abdel Nasser, “On Zionism and Israel (1960-1966),” The Arab-Israeli Reader: A Documentary History of the Middle East Conflict, 8th ed., ed. Walter Laqueur and Dan Schueftan (Penguin Books, 2016), 89-93.
Victor Cohen, “The Account of Dr. Victor Cohen,” in The Lost World of the Egyptian Jews: First-Person Accounts from Egypt’s Jewish Community in the Twentieth Century, ed.s Liliane S. Dammond with Yvette M. Raby (iUniverse, 2007), 30-43.
November 12 (F) Egyptian Nationalism
Class Preparations
watch, Michael Goldman, “Umm Kulthum: a Voice Like Egypt,” 1996 (67 min.) [available on Brightspace]
November 15 (M) Ethnic and Sectarian Fault Lines in Iraq
Class Preparations
Cleveland and Bunton, A History of the Modern Middle East, 195-203.
Muhammad al-Khalisi, “Shi’is Oppose (Rigged) Election,” in A Documentary History of Modern Iraq, Stacy E. Holden, ed. (University Press of Florida, 2012), 81-86. Wallace Lyon, Kurds, Arabs & Britons: The Memoir of Wallace Lyon in Iraq, 1918-1944 (London: I.B. Tauris, 2002), 92-96.
November 17 (W) Iraq’s Failed Liberalization
Class Preparations
Cleveland and Bunton, A History of the Modern Middle East, 310-313.
“Sami Michael,” in Iraq’s Last Jews: Stories of Daily Life, Upheaval, and Escape from Modern Babylon, ed. Tamar Morad, Dennis Shasha, and Robert Shasha (Palgrave MacMillan, 2009), 77- 91.
Reflections: Why did liberal institutions fail to emerge in Iraq? What specific events, political conditions and historic forces thwarted representative democracy in independent Iraq?
November 19 (F) synthesis day
Class Preparations
November 22 (M) Take-Home Exam #3
November 24 (W) No Class
November 26 (F) No Class
Historical Memory
November 29 (M) Turkey: From Ataturk to Erdogan
Class Preparations
watch, Gilles Cayatte and Gillaume Perrier, “Erdogan: The Making of a Sultan,” 2016 (58 min.). [available to view on Amazon]
Jenny B. White, “The Turkish Complex,” The American Interest 10, no. 4 (2 February 2015), 15- 23.
Reflection: How would you compare Reycip Erdogan with Mustafa Kemal? How does Erdogan offer glaring differences and similarities with Ataturk? What is Erdogan’s vision of a modern state, and how does this vision engage Ottoman imperialism? And towards what end?
December 1 (W) The Hagia Sophia
Class Preparations
watch “Will Hagia Sophia Become a Mosque Again,” Inside Story on Al Jazeera, 2 July 2020 (25 min.).
Heghnar Zeitlan Wattenpaugh, “Hagia Sophia’s Status Change Threatens Cultural Rights, Berkeley Center for Religion, Peace and World Affairs at Georgetown University, 30 July 2020.
George Demacopoulos, “Hagia Sophia and the Challenge of Religious Freedom,” Public Orthodoxy, nd.
Reflections: Why did Erdogan make the decision to turn the Hagia Sophia into an active mosque? What are the arguments for and against this decision? Notre Dame is part of a UNESCO heritage site designated in 1991 (Paris, Banks of the Seine). Is there a comparison to be made between Hagia Sophia and Notre Dame in Paris? And if so, with what effect?
December 3 (F) US Recognizes the Armenian Genocide
Class Preparations
“Battle Over History,” 60 Minutes, 2010 (12 min.). [available at Purdue Libraries]
President J. Biden, “Statement on Armenian Remembrance Day,” The White House (24 April 2021).
Andrew Doran, “Stop Giving Erdogan a Veto over US Recognition of the Armenian Genocide,” Foreign Policy (23 April 2021).
December 6 (M) No Class
December 8 (W) No Class
December 10 (F) No Class
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