A key component of Middle East Studies methodology is to identify and deconstruct the relationship between knowledge about the region and the power structures that give knowledge meaning. Typically, that methodology is applied to Middle East Studies at the post-secondary level. This paper applies that methodology to public schools in Washington, D.C. Through structural analysis, I will tease out the “epistemological commitments” (Abu El Haj 2001) of what the government of Washington, D.C. calls “social studies learning standards” -- short sentences which “detail the knowledge students are expected to acquire at a particular grade level.” Based on my experience teaching the Middle East in a Washington, D.C. public high school, I also raise questions about the relationship between the content standards and teachers’ work conditions, and whether such conditions support or inhibit the development of a praxis (Freire 2016) which could deconstruct US colonialism inside American public schools. One goal of this paper is to bring Middle East Studies into conversation with American Studies, broadly defined, and in particular ethnographic studies of DC that consider the colonial relationship between the US Government and Washingtonians. I conclude by calling for a deeper engagement with the American public school system by Middle East Studies scholars at both a theoretical and practical level

This study examines attributes associated with U.S. Congresswoman Ilhan Omar. Omar's unique intersectionality of identities as a Black, immigrant, Muslim woman presents a rich case study for an examination of attribute agenda setting. A sample of Tweets, all Wall Street Journal articles referencing the congresswoman, and Google searches were obtained for the hashtags (“IlhanOmar,” “GoBack,” and “WelcomeHome.”) from May 2019 to January 2020. The Tweets and articles were then coded for a variety of dimensions. Analysis of the frequencies of words associated with the coding and the hashtags showed that the majority of the messages were negative despite the hashtag for which they were collected. A cross-correlation time series analysis showed that articles and editorials published by the Wall Street Journal predicted spikes in Google searches and Twitter messages. This article pinpoints underlying sociological phenomena about the representations of gender, race, religion, and immigration status to show the arguments that link attributes of Ilhan Omar together on Twitter.

This article will illustrate how using interdisciplinary student-faculty collaborative research can help decolonialize Islamic Studies. This article will be based on a case study of our recently completed student-faculty collaborate research project, Seeing and Hearing Omar ibn Said. Faculty members led a student-faculty research and public outreach project regarding Omar ibn Said, an enslaved Muslim man from the Senegambia region. The students’ work focused on the biographical opera Omar, which was planned for debut at the 2020 Spoleto Festival in Charleston, South Carolina. This interdisciplinary collaboration combined religious studies, history, and performance studies. The students produced outreach materials designed for public engagement and education. Ultimately this article brings to light several important topics: the pedagogy of interdisciplinary studies, giving students agency in an interdisciplinary setting, and the lack of recognition of early Muslims in America.

This article examines the ways that Iranian women have been situated in the nation-building exercise from the White Revolution of 1963 to the 1979 revolution and period of consolidation of clerical power. Social Reproduction Theory elucidates critical facets of both state control and spaces of counterhegemonic resistance. These spaces include publications like Tawfiq, a political satire magazine published in the Pahlavi era, which is featured in the analysis as a site of political contestation that could be utilized and expanded by other opposition groups. This paper argues that in contrast to the popularly accepted dichotomy between liberalized and regressive gender roles, this arena represented a critical failure on the part of the secular opposition, which enabled the clerical faction to co-opt and take control of narratives in which they cast themselves as protectors of women and other vulnerable groups.

Many Afro-Arab women novelists, if not all, have been addressing feminist issues for ages while homeland issues have been masculinized. Against this trend, Leila Abouzeid's academic interests span not only women's issues, but also those of men and of her country as well. Her book shows how a woman is dominated by patriarchy and colonization and how she herself appears to be an executioner. It also shows her struggle and resistance against patriarchy and imperial power, without sacrificing her commitment to her national and religious identity. In contrast to secular feminism, Abouzeid views religion as a source of relief and solace. The study also argues that the men happily adopt the colonial culture whereas their women resist it. Tackling the experience of double colonization in Year of the Elephant captures the experiences of millions of women in both the eastern and western hemispheres who rebel over the laws that govern their lives.

This essay explores insights from our experiences teaching undergraduates a set of paired history and political science courses on protest and revolution in the Middle East. Working in groups, students developed simulations of key moments of revolution or protest explored during the courses. The simulation assignment was designed to engage students in an active learning setting and as a shared assignment across both courses. The most interesting result of this project, from the teaching perspective, was its unanticipated ability to expose students to the contingency and emotion that scholarship has recently emphasized as critical to understanding social movements, but which so often falls out of the study of history and political science analyses of protest and revolution. In this paper we explore the simulation assignment, how student groups designed the simulations with limited guidance from instructors, how students took on the assigned roles by engaging deeply with the histories of the events, and how the engagement in the simulations complicated the analyses that formed the bedrock of our course readings. In our analysis we draw on two iterations of the paired courses and use both student qualitative assessments of the course and student reflections on the simulations that were included in group papers.

In Turkish Kaleidoscope, social anthropologist and novelist Jenny White has expanded her repertoire to the graphic novel format to create an account of the violence and political chaos that pervaded Turkey in the late 1970s.2 White builds here on her academic work and her own student experience at Hacettepe University in Ankara. Artist Ergün Gündüz has created visual interpretations of place, space, events, and emotions that bring the story to life. This review is a collaborative class exercise for “Turkey: From Atatürk to Erdoğan” at Brandeis University in the Spring 2021 semester. It reflects on the novel as a text for Turkish history; the format of the work; the aesthetic choices of artist and author; and the experience of encountering this work in the contemporary historical moment. The review incorporates student comments as direct quotations. It was co-authored by Chris Martin, a student in the course.

Evliya Çelebi (d. after 1685), in his Seyahatname, Book of Travels, completed circa 1683, records a host of languages and dialects spoken within the Ottoman Empire at the time and provides practical word lists in transcription, especially for those less familiar to his Turkophone audience, such as Hungarian in the western borderlands and varieties of Kurdish in the eastern regions. Evliya also remarks of places where he met bilingual speakers. For instance, about the city of Ohrid in the central province of Rumelia, he informs us that, though its people mainly speak Greek or Bulgarian, they could converse in “elegant Turkish,” some in a “very urbane and witty” manner typical of Ottoman literati. Yet curiously, about the capital of Istanbul, his hometown, Evliya says nothing specific about any interaction, besides that he had learned “fluent Greek and Latin” from a Christian goldsmith, to be able to read certain chronicles, and in exchange instructed Persian to the craftsman.

After the end of WWI, the leaders of Committee of Union and Progress (CUP) established a political party, Renewal Party, and an underground organization, Karakol, in order to organize a resistance against the Allies and their presence in Ottoman territories. These institutions played an important role in the formation of national resistance in Anatolia before Mustafa Kemal's arrival in the region. The establishment of local resistance forces by former CUP members in Anatolia under the name of Renewal Party and the formation of a network in Istanbul to facilitate the smuggling of weapons, ammunition, former military officers, and Unionists to Anatolia were crucial for the formation of a national resistance movement to be organized under the leadership of Mustafa Kemal after May 1919. This article focuses on these two institutions and their role in Turkish National Struggle.

This article evaluates Saudi Arabia's anti-Communist stance between 1958 and 1967, in the midst of the Cold War. It presents an alternative interpretation of how anti-Communism was framed as a struggle against Arab Nationalism and Zionism in the Middle East. Furthermore, it highlights the different perspectives on anti-Communist agitation provided in primary sources and Saudi historiography and offers fresh insight into the Saudis’ anti-Communist stance. The analysis shows that Saudi attitudes in the Cold War were dominated by a fear of the Soviet Communists that subsequently extended to all other secular ideologies. The article concludes that the Saudi strategy of anti-Communism was a crucial building block to curb the spread of Communism in the twentieth century.

This essay offers a critical perspective on the future of the Arabian Gulf universities with respect to the humanities and philosophy. Although higher education institutions in Saudi Arabia and some other Gulf countries have begun offering some philosophy courses, there are too few degree programs for the humanities and philosophy. Most Gulf colleges still do not offer a bachelor's or master's degree in the Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences (AHSS) based on the common assumption that the future is in STEM, and that degrees in engineering, science, technology, and medicine are more economically viable than their counterparts in the humanities. However, the latest results of the British Academy in its recent research report “Qualified for the Future: Quantifying demand for arts, humanities and social science skills” have shown that graduates in the humanities are more in demand in several areas of employment across the world. Key findings are that people who hold AHSS degrees have similar employability rates to those of STEM graduates. As a result, humanities and social sciences graduates work in a wide range of industries, including education, science and technology, public administration, national defense, financial services, and the media.