Syllabus
First Term
1) Nationalism in the Middle East: Origins and Debates
2) The Middle East on the Eve of Modernity
3) The Late Ottoman Empire I: Reform, Ottomanism and Nationalism before Berlin
4) The Late Ottoman Empire II: Reform, Ottomanism and Nationalism after Berlin
5) Reforming the Empire in Qajar Iran
6) World War One and the conflicting British promises
7) Nationalism and Secularism in Republican Turkey
8) Creating a Dynastic Nation: Pahlavi Iran
9) The Making of a Transnational Community: Pan-Arabism in the inter-war Period
10) Nationalism and its ‘Other’: Islam in Egypt
11) Clerics & Revolution: Iran 1978-79
12) Constructing the National Past: History-writing and nation building in Turkey, Iran and the Arab world
13) Revision Session Second Term February 20: Introduction: Middle East and social sciences.
1. The Problem of “Studying” the Region 27 February: Points of Access and Knowledge Formation Readings: Jan Mrázek (2017). Returns to the Wide World: Errant Bohemian Images of Race and Colonialism, Studies in Travel Writing, 21:2. Lila Abu-Lughod (2002). Do Muslim Women Really Need Saving? Anthropological Reflections on Cultural Relativism and its Others, American Anthropologist, vol. 104, No.
3. 28 February, Middle East Lecture Series (17h45, Czech Academy of Sciences, Room 108, Narodni
3): Hugh Kennedy (SOAS, University of London) “The Changing Meanings of the Word Sultan in the History of Islamic Rulership”. March 6: The Role of Religion. Samuli Schielke (2015). I Want to be Committed. Short-lived Trajectories of Salafi Activism in Egypt. Ricerca Folklorica 69 Saba Mahmud (2009). Religious Reason and Secular Affect. An Incommensurable Divide? Critical Inquiry, vol. 34, n.
4.
2. Political Domination and Resistance March 13: Understanding Revolutions Youssef El Chazli (2012), On the Road to Revolutions. How did “depoliticized” Egyptians Became Revolutionaries? Revue Française de Science Politique, 5, vol.
62. Henry Weltmeyer (2011), Unrest and Change. Dispatches from the Frontline of the Class War in Egypt, Globalizations, vol. 5, no.
5. March 20: The State and Social Production of Power Mounira Charrad (2011), Central and Local Patrimonialism: State-Building in Kin-Based Societies, The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, Vol. 636, Patrimonial Power in the Modern World. Julia Elyachar (2014, Upending Infrastructure: Tamarod, Resistance, and Agency after the January 25th Revolution in Egypt, History and Anthropology, 25:4. 21 March, Middle East Lecture Series (17:45. Charles University, Room
238. Celetna
20): Marilyn Booth (Oxford University) "Authorizing feminist readings of Islamic history: Zaynab Fawwaz and the gender politics of Egyptian public discourse in the fin-de-siècle."
3. Youth Cultures March 27: Youth and Generation Change Omnia El Shakry (2011), Youth as a Peril and Promise. The Emergence of Adolescent Psychology in Postwar Egypt, International Journal of Middle East Studies,
43. Deeb, Lara and Mona Harb.
2013. “Choosing Both Faith and Fun: Youth Negotiations of Moral Norms in South Beirut,” Ethnos: Journal of Anthropology. 78(1): 1-22. April 3: Gender, Family, Intimacies Aymon Kreil (2016), Territories of Desire: A Geography of Competing Intimacies in Cairo, Journal of Middle East Women's Studies, 12 (2). Lila Abu Lughod (2011), Seductions of the “Honor Crime”, Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, 22:1. Tania Forte (2001), Shopping in Jenin. Women, homes and political persons in Galilee, City and Society, Volume 13, Issue
2.
4. Studies on Cultural Production: Arts and Media April 10: Arts and Consumption Jonathan H. Shannon (2003), Sultans of Spin: Syrian Sacred Music on the World Stage, American Anthropologist, Vol. 105, No.
2. Christa Salamandra (2000), Consuming Damascus: Public Culture and the Construction of Social Identity in Walter Armbrust (ed.) Mass Mediations. New Approaches to Popular Culture in the Middle East and Beyond. California: University of California Press. Middle East Lecture Series. Alain Dieckhoff (SciencesPo, Paris): Title and Date TBS April 17: Media and Technology Donatella Della Ratta and Augusto Valeriani (2017), Just a Bunch of Arab Geeks? How a “Techie” Elite Shaped a Digital Culture in the Arab Region and Contributed to the Making of Arab Uprisings in Tarik Sabry and Layal Ftouni (eds) Arab Subcultures. Transformations in Theory and Practice. London: I.B. Tauris. Lori Allen (2009), Martyr bodies in the media: Human rights, aesthetics, and the politics of immediation in the Palestinian intifada, American Ethnologist, 36:1.
5. Understanding Sectarian Politics April 24: Guest Lecture: Jakub Záhora Marik Shtern & Haim Yacobi (2018): The urban geopolitics of neighboring: conflict, encounter and class in Jerusalem’s settlement/neighborhood, Urban Geography. Hadas Weiss (2011), Immigration and West Bank Settlement Normalization, Political and Legal Anthropology Review, vol. 34, no.
1. May 1 – Bank Holiday – No Class May 8 – Bank Holiday – No Class
6. City and Economics May 15: Class, Welfare and Social Mobility Julia Elyachar (2003), Mappings of Power: The State, NGOs, and International Organizations in the Informal Economy of Cairo, Comparative Studies in Society and History, Vol. 45, No.
3. Marie Vannetzel (2017), The Muslim Brotherhood’s ‘Virtuous society’ and State Developmentalism in Egypt: The Politics of ‘Goodness’, in Irene Bono, Béatrice Hibou (eds) Development as a Battlefield, Brill. 16 May: Mi
Annotation
This course examines the contemporary history of the Middle East, from an historical and sociological perspective. The course is divided in two parts.
The first section of the course analyses the modernisation of the Middle East in the 19th and 20th centuries following the main themes of Reform and Nationalism. It covers the Arab world, Turkey and Iran, and follows a comparative and thematic approach in order to highlight both unity and diversity of experiences across the region. First, it examines different reform and nationalist movements as modernist projects of imperial regeneration and nation building, and as forms of resistance to established socio, political and cultural orders. Second, it focuses on the interplay between new ideas of nation and political community and the evolution of indigenous/colonial state traditions in the context of the Ottoman and Qajar empires, and of their successor states. Thirdly, it analyses how nationalist ideologies and practices created new contexts of public action and spheres of public engagement in the age of nation states, recasting in a new mould old ideas about political and social reform but also rehearsing them as part of a new politics of ‘national’ heritage. After an introduction devoted to theoretical approaches to modernity and nationalism from a historical perspective and to a survey of ‘decline’ and Orientalist historiography, the first part of the course is devoted to the Ottoman and Qajar Empires then, the course focuses on selected case studies that illustrate the development of forms of state and non-state nationalism in Turkey, Iran and the Arab world after WWI.
The second section of the course, in the spring, is designed to familiarize students with the main sociological concepts and theories through the discussion of selected case studies from contemporary Middle Eastern societies. By viewing the region through the lens of social sciences, this part of the course aims to shed light on issues relevant to the region that are also to be found in other human societies, such as social movements, the politics of youth, social stratification or popular culture. In doing so, the course aims to expand the understanding of the region that goes beyond the thesis of regional specificity of the Middle East and to establish the ground for compared approaches in social, cultural and historical phenomena.