Middle East History Lecture Series

This talk will reflect on, and attempt to contextualize, the Gezi Park protests of May 2013. What does this decade of more or less global protest have to tell us about the place of sound, and the human voice, in protest and in public space more generally? The talk will look back at various highly iconic performative moments, soundscapes and songs associated with the Gezi Park protests, including Kardeş Türküler’s “Tencere Tava Havası”, the David Martello’s ‘piano recital’, and “Every Day I’m Chapulling." Martin Stokes is King Edward Professor of Music at the King's College London in the United Kingdom, where he teaches a range of courses in ethnomusicology and the anthropology of music, many, but not all, with a focus on the music of the Middle East and the Islamic world

Considered the most mature and progressive art movement in the Arab world through most of the second half of the twentieth century, Iraqi art faced debilitating challenges through the sanctions of the 1990s and then the invasion of 2003. While the sanctions and wars changed the nature of Iraqi art, the 2003 invasion with its destruction of infrastructure had deeper and wider ramifications. This talk will review the development of modern art during the most optimistic period of Iraqi history and its transformation during the following years till today.

Sami Shalom Chetrit, a renowned Moroccan-Israeli poet and activist, discuses his documentary on the award-winning Moroccan-Israeli poet Erez Bitton, the voice of Israel’s marginalized classes for decades.

The break-up of the Ottoman Empire produced massive migration waves in the Balkans. However, when the Muslim populations grew larger in some areas, migration to Turkey was rendered impossible, and these peoples were obliged to stay within the borders of new nation states. Today the Turks in Bulgaria, approximately one million people, are the largest Muslim minority in the Balkans. They have faced various stages of nation building and border changes, as well as war, ethnic cleansing, assimilation and forced migration. These events have had a definitive effect on minority-majority relations in Bulgaria as well as on the understanding of Christian-Muslim co-existence. Nevertheless, despite harsh policies imposed by Bulgarian authorities, especially during the Cold War, the Turks of Bulgaria have managed to maintain their contact with Turkey, which they always considered to be their ‘motherland’. Dr. Tahir’s presentation will explore the progress of Turkish minority rights in Bulgaria, while analyzing the formation of this nation state in its multi-ethnic environment. He will examine communist statehood in Bulgaria, focusing on issues of minority accommodation and religious tolerance. After considering the popularity of minority rights discussions in the Balkans and Turkey and the effects of the European Integration process, Dr. Tahir will conclude with an evaluation of the so-called ‘Bulgarian ethnic model’, which has been held up as an example of peaceful settlement of ethnic conflicts in the Balkans.

During the fall of al-Andalus (known to Christians as the reconquista) some of the first substantial Muslim populations came under permanent non-Muslim rule. For centuries, Muslims had lived alongside Jews and Christians who accepted a subordinate, dhimmī status. Christian conquest inverted this hierarchy and thus presented novel and difficult questions for Muslim jurists. Could Muslims accept minority status under Christian rule, or must they emigrate to Muslim-ruled territory? Scholars interested in Islamic legal responses to Christian conquest have devoted generous attention to the legal opinions (fatwās) of one jurist in particular, Fez’s chief muftī Ahmad al-Wansharīsī (died 1508). In this talk, I explore multiple ways of reading al-Wansharīsī’s infamous fatwās obligating Iberian Muslims to leave their conquered homelands. Did these texts speed the “downfall of Spanish Islam”? Do they represent Islamic law at its medieval worst, strict and inhumane? Or were they a thinly veiled commentary on the lesser-known Reconquest, the expansion of Portugal into Morocco? Are the questions posed to al-Wansharīsī “true” stories? This talk critiques the perceived exceptionalism of the Iberian Muslim predicament, takes a fresh look at Muslim-Christian relations in North Africa, and considers fatwās as narratives of indigenous resistance and political critique. Jocelyn Hendrickson is Assistant Professor of Religious Studies and History & Classics at the University of Alberta. Her research focuses on Islamic legal history in medieval and early modern North Africa and Iberia. She has published articles in Islamic Law and Society, Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies, and MELA Notes: Journal of Middle Eastern Librarianship.

The sharp spike in the price of oil in the early 1970s provided petroleum-producing countries with enormous revenues--petrodollars--to invest in the global economy. By the second half of the decade, there was widespread fear in the United States that Arab governments, companies, and individuals were using their vast wealth the "buy up America." The Abscam affair of 1978-1980, in which FBI agents posing as rich Arabs induced several members of Congress to take bribes, reflected this anxiety about the potentially harmful influence of petrodollars. In the dominant American narrative, Abscam suggested that U.S. democracy itself was vulnerable to foreign corruption. To many Americans of Arab descent, however, the affair demonstrated that anti-Arab prejudice had reached alarming proportions and that concerted political action was necessary to combat it. Dr. Salim Yaqub is Associate Professor of History at the University of California, Santa Barbara and Director of UCSB's Center for Cold War Studies and International History. He earned his B.A. from the Academy of Art College and his M.A. at San Francisco State University, continuing on to Yale University, where he earned an M. Phil and a Ph.D. in American History. Dr. Yaqub specializes in the History of American Foreign Relations, 20th-Century American Political History, and Modern Middle Eastern History since 1945.

In early 1990s, Turkey was the only Muslim country where a headscarf ban in schools, universities and public institutions took place. In the aftermath of 9/11, in Western countries pious Muslim women experienced a troubling exclusion from the public sphere in the name of secularism, democracy, liberalism, and women's rights. Meanwhile, domestic courts and international courts such as the European Court of Human Rights, are increasingly influenced by social pressures concerning immigration, rejection of multiculturalism, and by attitudes expressed via Islamophobia, the ‘war on terror,’ and ‘homeland security.’ As a result, many Western governments have failed to recognize and protect essential individual freedoms in relation to Muslim women and public discussion is still going on various form of Islamic attire. While exclusion of pious women from public spaces is spreading in many countries where Muslims are a minority, the Turkish headscarf case continued a politico-legal battle among lawyers, judges, and politicians in Turkey. Recently, the Turkish government’s long awaited reforms on human rights gave a relative comfort to headscarf use in universities and public offices, current political turmoil makes future of the debate unpredictable. Elver argues that law can be used to change underlying social conditions shaping the social contract, role of religion, and the position of women in modern society. Hilal Elver is a Research Professor in Global Studies and Co-director of the Project on Climate Change, Human Security and Democracy at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

Current global warming poses important but difficult questions for historians: How has climate changed, and what has is meant for previous societies? Can we gain insights about climate change vulnerabilities, adaptation, and resilience from the past? Fortunately, current climatology also offers new ways to reconstruct the weather and climate of previous centuries, offering a powerful tool for historians. This talk will explore the state of the field and prospects for a climate history of the Ottoman Empire. Starting with the author’s work on drought, rebellion, and political crisis of the late 16th and 17th centuries, it will consider new historical research on the topic, as well as new findings from climatology and their possible implications for the history of the Ottoman Empire and beyond. Sam White earned his M.A. in Middle East Studies and Modern History from the University of St. Andrews (Scotland) in 2002 and his Ph.D. in history from Columbia University in 2008. He was asst. prof. of environmental history at Oberlin College for five years before joining the history department at OSU in 2013. Prof. White has taught in many areas of environmental history including both global and American surveys as well as "big history" and topical courses on food, animals, and climate. His research focuses on past climate changes and extreme weather, combining scientific data and historical sources to better reconstruct these episodes and understand their influence on human history. His first book, The Climate of Rebellion in the Early Modern Ottoman Empire (Cambridge University Press, 2011), explores the far-reaching effects of severe cold and drought in the Middle East during the "Little Ice Age" of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It won the Middle East Studies Association Albert Hourani award, the Turkish Studies Association Fuat Köprülü award, and the British-Kuwaiti Friendship Society prize for the best book in Middle East and Turkish studies.

Unlike other parts of the Middle East, the Iranian home as a storehouse of people’s belongings has not been paid the scholarly attention it deserves. This inattention is in part due to the inadequacy of the themes that have dominated the scholarship of modern Iranian history, which distracts from understanding transformations of everyday life. By contrast, this presentation shows how a substantial component of the modernization process in Iran advanced in the context of the home. In particular it shows how home life became a topic of interest in the mass media, where politicians, religious figures, the Left and other opposition parties communicated their respective views. Through analyzing a series of case studies and appraising a wide range of media— from newspapers, photographs, films, TV series, novels, and artworks—this talk foregrounds the significance of private life in Iran’s public sphere.

Between 1967 and 1975 the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) burst onto the world stage and transformed the contours of the Arab-Israeli dispute. By casting itself as a national liberation movement and forging ties to other revolutionary groups around the Third World, the PLO won international attention and diplomatic support. However, the PLO's political victories in the international arena ran headlong into U.S. and Israeli efforts to contain the revolutionary organization on the ground. Paul Thomas Chamberlin is associate professor of History at the University of Kentucky. His first book, The Global Offensive: The United States, the Palestine Liberation Organization, and the Making of the Post-Cold War Order was published by Oxford University Press in 2012. He is currently working on an international history of the Cold War in the Third World titled The Cold War's Killing Fields:The Superpower Struggle and the Destruction of the Third World.

From furious reactions to the cartoons depicting the Prophet Muhammad to the suppression of women, contemporary news from the Muslim world seems to beg the question: Is Islam compatible with freedom and democracy? With an eye sympathetic to both to Western liberalism and Islamic theology, Mustafa Akyol traced the ideological and historical roots of political Islam in his 2011 book Islam without Extremes: A Muslim Case for Liberty. Following the death of the Prophet Muhammad's in 632 AD, an intellectual "war of ideas" raged between rationalist, flexible schools of Islam and the more dogmatic, rigid interpretations. Although the traditionalist school won out, fostering perceptions of Islam as antithetical to modernity, Akyol suggests that a reexamination of the currents of Muslim thought reveal a flourishing of liberalism in the nineteenth-century Ottoman Empire and the unique "Islam-liberal synthesis" of present-day Turkey. His analysis offers a desperately needed intellectual basis for the reconcilability of Islam and religious, political, economic, and social freedoms. Mustafa Akyol is a columnist for two Turkish newspapers, Hürriyet Daily News and Star. His articles have also appeared in The New York Times, Foreign Affairs, Newsweek, Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal. He studied political science and history at Boğaziçi University in Istanbul, where he lives.

Who are the Turks? The answer differs vastly, depending on whether we start from today's Turkey and look back, or whether we start with their origins in what is now Mongolia and look forward. Do the Turkish peoples even form a coherent category? The answer differs vastly, depending on whether we look at their languages (which are very much alike), environmental adaptations, religions, or physical features. (There is no determinant "racial" identity at all). What about their pre-modern history was most significant? One way to answer is to start with the paradox that nomadic peoples always resist state authority, and yet all across Eurasia, the Turks and their cultural cousins, the Mongols, took leading roles in empire building. What about their modern history is most significant? The most significant fact here is that the Turks of Central Asia lost sovereignty, while the Ottoman Empire retained its sovereignty. The Ottomans developed the Islamic tradition of state formation, which evolved into the twentieth century. By comparison with other Muslim-majority polities, the unique course that the Turkish republic has since taken reflects its historical antecedents as much as the choices made by its modern leaders. Carter Vaughn Findley is Humanities Distinguished Professor in the Department of History at the Ohio State University. He is the author ofThe Turks in World History, Ottoman Civil Officialdom: A Social Historyand Bureaucratic Reform in the Ottoman Empire: The Sublime Porte 1789-1922. He is a past president of the World History Association and the Turkish Studies Association.

Since the summer of 2009 in Iran, and the Spring of 2011 in the Arab world, a succession of world historic events have radically altered the geopolitics of the region. How are the rise of the Green Movement in Iran and the revolutionary momentum code-named the Arab Spring connected, and what can we learn from the structural link between these two transformative events in the Arab and Muslim world? Hamid Dabashi is the Hagop Kevorkian Professor of Iranian Studies and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. He received a dual PhD in Sociology of Culture and Islamic Studies from the University of Pennsylvania in 1984, followed by a postdoctoral fellowship at Harvard University

This talk examines the life and work of Dinshah Irani, a prominent Parsi scholar, lawyer, and philanthropist who was a key intellectual intermediary between the Parsi community of Bombay and the intellectual community of Iranian nationalists during the 1920s and 1930s. Dr. Marashi details the role played by Irani in patronizing the publication of Zoroastrian-themed printed works in Bombay that were intended for export to the reading market in Iran, and the important role the Parsi community of Bombay played in the revival of Iranian antiquity during the early twentieth century. He will also highlight the transnational cultural and intellectual history of Iranian nationalism during the Reza Shah period. Afshin Marashi is the Farzaneh Family Chair in Iranian Studies and Associate Professor in the Department of International and Area Studies at the University of Oklahoma. His area of specialization is the cultural and intellectual history of nationalism in nineteenth and twentieth century Iran. He also writes and teaches in the field of comparative nationalism studies. In addition to his teaching and research efforts, Professor Marashi is also the director of Iranian Studies programming in the College of International Studies at OU. He received his BA in Political Science from the University of California at Berkeley in 1992 and his PhD in History from UCLA in 2003.

Critiques of neo-liberalism, authoritarianism, and military rule played an obvious role in the Egyptian revolution. This talk will examine an emerging urbanist agenda in Egypt which has been buoyed by the revolution's commitment to social justice and the desire to move beyond neo-liberalism and improve the built environment, enhance public services and democratize municipal politics. It will also explore the relevance of insights from other nations whose urban populations have increased demands for a fairer share of public resources, broader representation, and public accountability after military rule. Dr. Singerman is an Associate Professor at American University and comparativist whose research interests focus on political change from below, particularly in the Middle East, and more specifically Egypt. Her work examines the formal and informal side of politics, gender, social movements, globalization, public space, protest, and urban politics. Her most recent edited books are Cairo Contested: Governance, Urban Space, and Global Modernity, and Cairo Cosmopolitan: Politics, Culture, and Urban Space in the New Globalized Middle East.

Nasir al-Din Shah (r. 1848-1896), the longest reigning Qajar monarch traveled to Europe three times during his rule. While he was not the first monarch from the region to travel to Europe, he was the first to record each travel extensively in daily diaries that were made public shortly after. Until recently, these travelogues were dismissed by scholars for focusing on frivolous and repetitive information. This talk presents a new interpretation of Nasir al-Din Shah's extensive travel writing by placing them in their own cultural and political milieu, and by focusing on the question of why the king would choose to so meticulously record his travels. Naghmeh Sohrabi is the Charles (Corky) Goodman Professor of Middle East History and the Associate Director for Research at the Crown Center for Middle East Studies at Brandeis. Professor Sohrabi received her Ph.D. in History and Middle East Studies from Harvard University in 2005, and was a post-doctoral fellow at the Crown Center from 2005-2007. Her book, Taken for Wonder: Nineteenth Century Travel Accounts from Iran to Europe was recently published by Oxford University Press. Her new research focuses on the assassination of Nasir al-Din Shah in 1896 by a follower of Jamal al-Din al-Afghani. In addition to her scholarship on the nineteenth century, Professor Sohrabi writes and lectures on contemporary politics and culture of Iran.

In the years 1921–1951, the Iraqi Jewish community thrived. Numbering around 150,000, this primarily urban community figured prominently in Iraq’s culture, literature and economy. Bashkin raises a few questions relating to the meanings of the Jewish sense of belonging to the Iraqi community through a reading of three poems written by Iraqi Jews. In doing so, I explore the ways in which Iraqi Jews wrote about modernity and secularism, and the manners in which their texts shed light on sociocultural processes occurring in Iraq at the time.

Prof. Crapanzano's paper is concerned with the role of narrative and silence in the passage of a wound – a trauma – from generation to generation. Specifically he looks at the way parental – in case in point, paternal – silence perpetuates the wound in children. Set stories, which inevitably lack particularity, seem incapable of “filling” that silence, fulfilling the children’s quest to know. They subsume what particulars are known in a generalized narrative that, repeated over and over again, loses vitality. Frozen, it intensifies the wound…. Prof. Crapanzano discusses this dynamic in terms of the Harkis – those Algerians who fought alongside the French, as auxiliary troops, during Algeria’s War of Independence. Between seventy and one hundred fifty thousand were slaughtered at the war’s end by the Algerian population at large. Those who managed to escape to France were incarcerated in camps and forestry hamlets, some for over sixteen years.

Beginning in December 2010, the suicide of a Tunisian street vender ignited protests and uprisings that spread throughout the Arab world. James L. Gelvin, Professor of History at UCLA and author of The Arab Uprisings: What Everyone Needs to Know (Oxford University Press, 2012), looks back at the first year of those protests and uprisings, exploring their causes, their trajectories, and the lessons we might learn from them.

Clifford Geertz famously described law as a form of “local knowledge.” In this lecture Prof. Messick examines the Islamic Shari'a as it was manifested in a system of local texts. He refers to a corpus of written work produced by a particular community of Muslim jurists and practitioners. Yemen, mountainous and agrarian, provides the setting; the Zaydis, rooted there for over a thousand years, the juridical community. Although his research in highland Yemen has spanned the last several decades, the readings he discusses focus upon a slightly earlier point in time--the first half of the twentieth century. Prof. Messick concentrates on this recent historical period to study a formation of Shari'a texts in the era of a classically styled Islamic polity.

With the rise of the Arab Spring of 2011, Turkey has been identified by many analysts and activities within and outside of the Middle East as a potential model for post-revolutionary states. Turkey's position as a mediator between the west and the Islamic world appears to be more critical than at any point in recent history. Join us for a forum and discussion with prominent Turkish journalist Abdülhamit Bilici about Turkey's role in shaping the future of the Middle East. Abdülhamit Bilici is General Manager of Cihan News Agency and columnist of both Zaman and Today's Zaman newspapers. He served as the Deputy Editor in Chief of Zaman daily, the largest circulated paper in Turkey. He also worked as the foreign news editor of Zaman and Aksiyon weekly news magazine. As a student of International Relations, Mr. Bilici writes mainly on Turkish foreign policy and world politics. He contributes to other papers on Turkish politics and appears on national and international TV programs to comment on political developments in Turkey.