Why I Won’t Teach the Modern Middle East
A flag loses contact with reality and flies off.
A shop window is decorated with dresses of beautiful women, in blue and white.
And everything in three languages: Hebrew, Arabic, and Death.
—Yehuda Amichai, Memorial Day for the War Dead
Don’t write history as poetry, because the weapon is
—Mahmoud Darwish, Don’t Write History as Poetry
the historian. And the historian doesn’t get fever
chills when he names his victims, and doesn’t listen
to the guitar’s rendition. And history is the everyday
of weapons inscribed upon our bodies.
“Don’t teach a class on the modern Middle East until you have tenure. All it takes is one student comment to wreck a career.” This advice, given to me by a senior colleague, was common in the years I was in graduate school (2001-2007). We all heard stories of professors whose political views led to tenure denials. In the aftermath of 9/11, Middle Eastern Studies came under even more scrutiny: Critics began to pen diatribes about how experts on the Middle East had done nothing to keep America safe. Lists sprang up online, naming professors unpatriotic and their classrooms a den for anti-American sentiment. At the same time, 9/11 opened jobs across colleges in the U.S. for experts who could help American undergraduates learn more about Islam and Muslims (Hussein, 2005).
Consequently, any degree of familiarity with the Islamic world could land you a job. Small liberal arts colleges, for instance, could only afford to open up one tenure-track line for an “Islamic world” position. These positions were open to scholars working on any region or time period but being able to teach Israel/Palestine, U.S. foreign policy, and American wars in Iraq and Afghanistan would give you an edge. I completed my PhD in History in 2007 and my research specialization was autobiographies from Mughal India (1526-1857). But I emphasized on my résumé that I had been a teaching assistant for a class on the modern Middle East and that one of the fields in which I was examined for my qualifying exams was modern Middle Eastern history. When I got a tenure-track job at the University of San Francisco, a deciding factor was my ability to teach not just South Asia, but also the Middle East.
While I gained in confidence each year I taught my other classes, my class on the modern Middle East eroded my belief in my ability to teach it well, until I stopped teaching that class altogether. My evaluations were consistently excellent, but they did little to counter my own sense that either I had failed my discipline or that it had failed me. This chapter explores two interlinked questions. First, if the analytical tools of history include careful, deliberate, reflection on the unfamiliar contours of the past, how is a historian to teach a part of the world whose study in America comes from a self-referential, shifting, and urgent present that requires the historian to teach current events often to the exclusion of studying the past? And second, what ways of being in the world can a study of the Ottoman Empire (1299-1922) teach us that a study of the modern Middle East—which typically begins with the end of the Ottoman Empire— cannot?
I address the first question by analyzing the challenge posed to my pedagogy in my class on the modern Middle East and the second through the pedagogical methods I use in a class on the Ottoman past. By contrasting these two classes, I show that the latter is able to extend the scope of historical reasoning, empathy, and critical thinking in ways the former cannot. This is because a class on the modern Middle East at best creates empathy for people of different races and religions in the classroom, but it does not force students to engage with lives from the past in ways a class on the pre-modern past does. Engaging with these lives radically shifts students’ views of present-day religious identities and allows them to see these as a product of history rather than as timeless modes of being in the world. I conclude with some observations about the methodology, ethics, and challenges of being tasked with teaching the difficult histories of the Middle East in the post-9/11 college classroom.
I. Betrayal: Teaching the Middle East
Like the undergraduate class I took on the modern Middle East, and the classes for which I was a teaching assistant in graduate school, the class I taught on the modern Middle East would begin with the decline of the Ottoman Empire in the 19th Century. I nonetheless tried to teach the Ottoman Empire for at least the first two weeks of class, but each semester, I would have to shorten the time I gave to the Ottomans, and give more time to the latest bomb blast, extremist group, or U.S. foreign policy move in the Middle East. Updated editions of textbooks I assigned would follow a similar pattern: Each year, new editions of textbooks on the Middle East would come out, with shorter chapters on the Ottomans, because new pages were needed for the Arab Spring or other newsworthy developments and the pages of the past would be the first casualty (Rustomji, 2004).
Even though I was unused to the pace of the class and the degree to which current events shaped it, I used the same tools I use in any other history class. I introduced students to how historical method could place the universality of human experience within specific historical contexts. Granted, the context I was working in was largely the 20th century, but even this somewhat recent past could shed light on the religious identities my students sought to understand. When I found myself in classrooms in which students were deeply rooted in their identities as Jews or Muslims, for instance, I would ask students to use their imagination to enter the lives of their constructed others through a reading of 20th century texts. I taught the experience of displacement through the writings of Israeli and Palestinian writers such as Amos Oz and Ghada Karmi and the sources revealed both commonalities and divergences in Jewish and Arab experiences of exile (Oz, 2003; Karmi, 1994). This created grudging empathy in students across their personal allegiances and was eye-opening for those who had grown up sheltered from opposing but similar histories (Stickney, 2003; Kirschner, 2012).
The histories with which students had been raised, however, often led students to attack one another and to question my political views. In one class, a Palestinian student accused me of having betrayed my conscience, because I did not show the class the suffering of his people, most likely because I wanted to keep my job. He didn’t think I had anything to teach him, because I did not know what it was like to be forced out of one’s home. I was gentle with this student, as I felt he was being honest and courageous. I told him I had many flaws, but I was not a coward and he would learn that as we came to know one another. I also said that by the end of class, people would make up their own minds about Palestine and I was not going to come to class chanting slogans. I asked him to trust me, to let me teach him how to construct an argument, and how to fight back against the stereotype of the angry Arab that everyone already expected him to be. As a Muslim in the U.S., I knew what anger and helplessness felt like, but I had found a conduit for both that I could give him. Through the class, my student developed empathy for both me and for other students. Eventually, he went on to study human rights law.
In another class, an Israeli student came to my office fuming. She said her mother had warned her about professors like me, who would make her hate her country and turn her into a traitor. “Israel is the only home I know,” she said. “Every country is built from some kind of violence. Why single out the only country that is a homeland for my people?”
I shared with my student my conflicted feelings about Pakistan, my own country: Of course all nations came from violence, but didn’t we owe it to ourselves to be unflinching about seeing it? My student was in danger of failing the class because she kept writing papers on Israel that would lapse into confusion and polemic and her irate comments in class did the same. For her, I created a special assignment. She could write her final paper in two voices; the daughter who loved her country and the scholar who critiqued its formation. Because the two sides of her were at war, I would teach her to honor both without imploding. She began to trust me, wrote a moving final essay, and passed the class.
In both these students, and many others like them, my personal experiences created empathy: I was not only the professor forcing one to forget the suffering of his people and the other to betray her mother. I was also a human being who understood all too well their conflicts, and I was willing to let them express distrust. Being able to trust me, as students came to do, would then allow them to extend to others in class the same empathy they had extended to me and that I had extended to them. When students were able to see me as both a professor—who some felt was too pro-Palestine and others too pro-Israel—and as a human being who had faced similar conflicts as them, I considered this evidence of success.
Another instance in which I oriented my pedagogy towards empathy was when I was able to counter statistics with human stories. This orientation had little to do with historical method and was an ethical choice I felt pressed to make because my students were plugged into a constantly updating, constantly changing, virtual world in which the loss of human life was reduced to numbers. Quite often, I would notice that students would distance themselves from the horror of an event by looking up statistics and arguing about these. For instance, when I talked about the Sabra and Shatila massacres of 1982, a student pulled out his computer and drew up different statistics than mine. Others pulled theirs out and began doing the same and I found myself in a room that was devolving into shouting matches about numbers. I responded by banning laptops and asking students what arbitrary number of deaths was enough to merit caring.
Because it is often easier for people to care about one life than to care about thousands of lives reduced to statistics, I told my students I would make them care about two lives, that of Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish and his Israeli lover Rita. I taught the history of Israel/Palestine after World War II while tracking the love between these two people, and the wars and allegiances that eventually separated them, and I showed my students how loves like these are the invisible casualties of war (Ferber, 2013). In one particularly tense classroom, where students had again divided on the question of Israel and competing histories clashed in the room, I played Marcel Khalife’s rendition of Darwish’s poem, “Rita and the Rifle.” I asked students who did not speak Arabic to tell me what the song was about. “It’s about lost love,” a student said, and the others agreed. The divided room converged on a primal understanding, beyond language: The loss of love sounds the same everywhere. The music changed the mood in the room. Regardless of political divisions, everyone cared about Darwish and Rita, the way she fueled many of his poems, and the bittersweet poignancy of their love.
I also noticed that my students lived in a world in which they were bombarded by images of violence and they were often angry with me when I refused to show these images in class. A number of students felt that if I just showed enough images of the killed, the tortured, and the broken, they could bring others around to their point of view. When students expressed sorrow and outrage about the torture and sexual abuse of Iraqi prisoners by the U.S. army in 2003 at Abu Gharaib, I assigned Susan Sontag on the moral questions raised by regarding the pain of others—an essay written in response to both the torture and the photographs of torture that surfaced, gleeful and pornographic— but I refused to show the photographs (Sontag, 2004). I wanted the dead not to keep dying in the repeated display of their deaths. I also explained that were it my brutalized body, or the body of someone I loved that surfaced in pictures, I would not want it displayed to a classroom; nor would I want it to be the subject of reasoned discussion or pity.
Even when students disagreed with my choices, I held my ground. If history could not teach hope or teach us how to focus on human dignity in the midst of violence, then literature, music, and poetry gave all of us a frame that could hold the capacity of human beings for both brutality and grace. To the extent that I taught history by the time we entered the second half of the 20th century, I would say history became about knowing chronologies and naming what used to be. This is because the scale of destruction in the present-day Middle East has meant the erasure of history; decimated cities look the same everywhere. I often found myself naming — “This pile of dust you see in Baghdad was once an 8th century mosque”—or “This was once someone’s home in Kabul”—and then following that with chronology, stories, and failed U.N resolutions. In this, I felt like a custodian of a pre-modern past that was repeatedly being obliterated. I could point to the destruction of this past but I could not teach its textures and resonances because that is what I did in my class on the Ottomans, Safavids, and Mughals.
Between creating empathy in the classroom while navigating emotional minefields in my students, changing my lesson plans when current events demanded it, and fielding questions having to do with the day’s headlines, I found myself sucked into a vortex in which I often sacrificed historical method. Perhaps I taught my students to be more compassionate and informed human beings, but I cannot say what I was teaching them had much to do with the most powerful tool of history, namely the ability to let go of the frames through which we see the world and take on those of people who differ from us not just by virtue of race or religion, but by virtue of inhabiting a different time. We were still rooted in our own time and there were only occasional instances in which I was able to address the deep pasts that are being erased or rendered irrelevant in cities, classrooms, and textbooks.
Most importantly, an approach based on empathy, while valuable, is not enough. If we must approach others in a self-referential way—‘You are like me because your people have suffered too; therefore, I no longer hate your kind’—we are not engaging in the combination of critical inquiry and imagination that the study of the past can foster—‘You are nothing like me; therefore I will forget who I am and try to understand you on your own terms.’ This kind of thinking has transformative potential because it pushes us out of the comfort of the present, helps us humanize others who inhabit an entirely different context than ours, and most importantly, reveals to us how our beliefs, identities, and moral codes are a product of our times (Wineburg, 2001). In my modern Middle East class, instead of complementing historical thinking, empathy functioned as a substitute for it because I was tasked with creating empathy in students each time a news headline or present-day event led them to attack one another or question my political commitments.
II. Conversion: Teaching the Ottoman Empire
In contrast, my class on the Ottoman, Safavid, and Mughal Empires extended the scope of empathy to strengthen historical reasoning. By way of background, the Ottomans (1299-1922) controlled much of North Africa and the Eastern Mediterranean, along with parts of Europe and the Arabian Peninsula. The Safavids (1502-1736) ruled Iran and parts of the Caucuses, Iraq, and Afghanistan. The Mughals (1526-1857) controlled most of the Indian subcontinent. All three empires shared a Turkic and Persianate literary culture, and poets, merchants, and artisans travelled frequently between them. The past of these empires is an open field; the empires are over, which means we can study them at length as new sources are translated, new voices reinterpret existing sources, and historians plumb the archives for documents that surprise us with their views of the world.
These histories are difficult to understand because they are inaccessible without an expert familiar with the primary sources, who can guide students through a world otherwise relegated to the shadows. What is difficult about them is also what is the most rewarding: They require students to let go of present-day modes of understanding the world because none of us was alive in the sixteenth century. We must instead read our sources and analyze them with a view to understanding the choices available to people, critiquing how each source tells its story, and arriving at independent conclusions about both the past and the present.
I start by pulling up a map of the world, chopped up into countries. Then I contrast this with a map of the three empires, in which there were no national boundaries and travel did not require passports. How did people think about themselves in this world? What did it as mean to be a Jew from Ottoman Salonica or a Christian from Mughal Delhi? If you were a merchant, and your city fell out of Mughal into Safavid hands, would you feel a need to change allegiances and if so, what would this entail? To answer these questions, students close-read primary sources that include letters, personal memoirs, legal documents, poetry, and literature. Student also read secondary sources that consist of scholarly writings about the world we are studying. Religious identity generates a great deal of interest; the reason for this interest is the degree to which students read about religious extremism in the present and often come to class assuming that religious communities have always been at odds with one another.
Two stories of conversion that I use in my classes illustrate both the complexity of religious identity in the pre-colonial Muslim world and what it takes to draw students away from the present, into the past, and then back to the present armed with a new lens with which to think about the time-period in history they inhabit. Below, I have chosen two stories from the Ottoman Empire to illustrate what I see as the distinct texture of a past few classes on the modern Middle East address.
Here is the first story: A man from Tangier, Ibn Battuta (1304-1369) once traveled across the world. After traveling through Mongol and Ottoman lands in Central Asia, he wished to travel to Constantinople, which was then under Byzantine rule. Ibn Battuta made the acquaintance of a woman called Khatun Bayalun, a daughter of the king of Constantinople; Khatun Bayalun had converted to Islam to marry an Uzbek Khan. The Khatun was pregnant and wished to have her child in her father’s house. Attaching himself to her caravan gave Ibn Battuta a means of entering a city otherwise difficult for a Muslim to enter. Ibn Battuta reports that as the Khatun’s caravan entered Christian lands, her entourage began to eat pork and drink wine. But the Khatun was angry when one of her men made fun of how the Muslims in the caravan were praying and continued to protect Ibn Battuta. When she arrived at her father’s house, she announced that she was no longer returning to her husband. Continuing his travels in Constantinople, Ibn Battuta, now accompanied by a Jewish translator, met a former Byzantine king, who had retired to a convent. On hearing that Ibn Battuta had visited the holy city of Jerusalem, the king clasped his hands and touched his feet, saying that these were the hands and feet that had touched the holy sites of the sacred city (Gibb, 2006, pp. 152-163).
We explore this story from many angles. Students know that women were given in marriage to seal political contracts and express a modern concern: What about the rights of women? Sometimes, students bring up forced conversions under groups such as Daesh in the Middle East and ask if Ibn Battuta’s text offers evidence that Muslims have been subjugating non-Muslim populations for centuries. I remind students that people from the past could not possibly have imagined nationalism, modern warfare, and even the desire to create a bounded nation entirely composed of Muslims: In the past we are studying, all Muslim polities consisted of non-Muslims, many of whom occupied positions of power. The three empires we are studying often fought wars with one another and had non-Muslim allies. And of course, the notion of rights, as we understand it today, did not exist in medieval discourse. This means students must think outside modern frames of reference when studying the Ottoman past.
We then return to the story to examine Ibn Battuta’s reaction to the Khatun’s shedding of Muslim practice on her return to Christian lands. Ibn Battuta lives in a world in which a number of Muslim empires command power, is assured of the primacy of Muslim authority, and aware that he is now in lands that are controlled by Christians. He writes that the caravan of people with whom he enters Constantinople causes a stir among the city’s inhabitants, who point to the caravan and shout “Saracinu! Saracinu!” (Muslims! Muslims!) to one another. The text tells us that a clear sense of Muslim/Christian difference existed at the time, but Muslims and Christians also had similar cultural sensibilities, as evidenced by the former king’s desire to hear about Jerusalem from Ibn Battuta and to kiss his hands. Conversion, in stories like these, appears to be a quotidian matter. Were a former Byzantine king to become a Muslim, or were the Ottoman king to embrace Christianity or Judaism, this would likely cause consternation among their followers given the symbolic weight of kingship. But a woman converting when forming a marriage alliance and shrugging off her religion on entering her old country does not draw censure from Ibn Battuta. The Khatun also appears to be exercising a degree of autonomy: She has chosen to remain in her father’s lands after expressing a wish that she will give birth there (Ryan, 1998; Weller, 2006).
Here is another story. In the year 1666, a Jewish theologian, Sabbatai Zevi who had declared himself the messiah, announced his intention to topple the Ottoman sultan. Prior to his bold claim, the charismatic Zevi had amassed both opponents and acolytes. In Ottoman Salonika (the city of Thessoloniki in present-day Greece), Zevi had studied with local scholars who had excommunicated him for pronouncing the divine name and sent him into exile in 1659. But the city also consisted of Jews who, in anticipation of his prophecies about ushering in the day of redemption coming true, closed their businesses, began to fast to death, and to whip themselves until their backs bled. Christians and Muslims in the pre-dominantly Jewish city looked askance at Sabbatai Zevi’s followers. Messianic claims did not necessarily lead to trouble but a statement about toppling the king was another matter.
On his march to Istanbul, Zevi was arrested. Despite denying his messianic claims, he was sent to a prison in Gallipoli. A Polish Jew named Nehemiah visited Zevi in prison and informed him that a second messiah’s coming was nigh; this second messiah was Nehemiah himself. The two men quarrelled, and Nehemiah reported to the Ottoman authorities that Zevi did in fact believe himself to be the messiah and furthermore, accused Zevi of immorality. The Ottoman Sultan, Mehmed IV, wary of the danger of making a martyr out of Zevi, gave him the option of converting to Islam. Zevi agreed to do so, took the title Aziz Mehmed Effendi and the title of Chief Palace Gatekeeper, and lived under a royal pension until being exiled again for seditious activity. A number of Jews who converted with him formed their own religious community, which blended Judaic and Islamic mysticism. Although Ottoman authorities regarded Zevi’s followers, the Ma’min (the faithful, as they called themselves) with some degree of suspicion, they largely left them alone (Mazower, 2004, pp. 68-74).
This story generates rich debate in class. While the spectacle of present-day Muslim groups and forced conversion looms large in my students’ imaginations, the otherworldliness of this story—a king, a messiah, the question of what the messiah really believed—is complicated and vibrant and students realize that they are dealing, literally, with a foreign country. This then leads to genuine intellectual curiosity about the past: Why did Zevi convert instead of choosing martyrdom? Did that mean he did not really believe he was the messiah, because a true messiah would have been willing to die for his beliefs? What did conversion mean if a substantial number of people converted with him and what exactly did they convert to? Were Islam and Judaism mutually exclusive categories or were they translatable to the point that mysticism in one—including beliefs in messiahs—mirrored mysticism in the other? In this story too, I ask students to imagine themselves as Ottoman subjects. What would they have done if they had been in Zevi’s place or his followers’? Or, if they had been the king faced with a charismatic messiah?
Some students are motivated by pragmatism: Conversion could be a means of keeping good relations with the king and maintaining a choice group of followers. Others choose a heroic death on the grounds that they wish to be remembered as martyrs. Many times, students trade good-natured barbs with one another about their choices and often try to convert others to their point of view. Nehemiah’s role in turning in Zevi also points to another layer of complexity in dealings between Muslims and Jews: The Ottoman king was faced with two quarrelling messiahs and all three men played their hand with a view to preserving their own power. While present-day Jewish and Muslim identities come to blows over the very recent question of Israel, allowing Muslim and Jewish students to study lives like Zevi’s allows them to enrich their own heritage and to complicate their understanding of what it might mean to be Jewish or Muslim.
The ability of Ottoman history to force us to unsettle notions of Jewishness or Muslimness is integral in a U.S classroom in which Jewish and Muslim identities are all too often understood only through the lens of the present, namely through the question of Israel/Palestine and 9/11 (Zaman, 2011). The present, for most of my class, recedes into the background as students redraw their map of the world by erasing lines across space made by new nation states, and letting lines around their own identities become less rigid because of their immersion in a different age. By the time we arrive at the present, after spending a semester in the world as it was before the nationalist movements of the 19th century, the contours of the past have become familiar, and it is easier to see that what we believe to be abiding and timeless—religion, for instance—is itself subject to the forces of change. Students also learn that the boundaries between different faiths were porous in the past in ways they are not in the present.
We know, as scholars, that the Middle East is not just Israel/Palestine and the study of Islam is not just the study of why 9/11 happened. But the degree of attention these topics command in the media, coupled with debates about the role of Muslims in the U.S, means that extricating our classrooms from these topics is impossible unless we simply don’t teach them, or at the very least, set them aside for some time in order to study the much longer past in which present-day boundaries, religious identities, and the ways of being in the world these have created did not apply. I still wonder what would have happened if I had been able to teach both my Israeli student and my Palestinian student about Khatun Bayalun or Sabbatai Zevi, or about Ibn Battuta’s Jerusalem. Had I been able to do so, my students would have had to extend the scope of their imaginations and their capacity for empathy to include Christians, Muslims, and Jews whose lives, choices, and ways of being in the world were radically different from their own. Being able to see one another and their professor as human beings was certainly worth doing, but it did not show them that their very identities were the product of a relatively recent past. Letting lives from the Ottoman past interact with their worldviews would have forced shifts in reflexivity, introspection, and imagination that my class on the modern Middle East could not have done.
III. On Complicity
I taught my last class on the modern Middle East in Spring 2013, the semester I got tenure. I am not sure whether my failure to keep my class anchored in historical method was evidence of my own shortcomings or the state of the field. On the first: One of the ironies that became apparent over the years was that while the study of Islam and Muslims does not begin with 9/11, it was 9/11 that qualified me to be an expert at a time when the demand for experts required the barest of credentials. I had some experience teaching and studying the modern Middle East, but my expertise and passion was Mughal India and its neighbors, the Ottomans and Safavids. I had lived and conducted research in Pakistan, and traveled to Turkey and India, but I had never been to Egypt, Israel/Palestine, Iran, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, or Afghanistan. I barely spoke Arabic. All this is still the case. It is very likely that historians who have lived in the Middle East, conducted research there, and remain engaged in current affairs are able to teach historical thinking in their classes on the modern Middle East in ways I am only able to in my classes on its Ottoman past.
Alternatively, there is no doubt that the present intrudes into classes on Islam and Muslims in ways it simply does not in other fields. The present hovers at the edges of classes on the Ottoman Empire and it all but takes over classes that deal with the contemporary Middle East. The present also makes extraordinary demands of professors who teach Islamic history. For instance, in the fall of 2014, listservs that had academics on them were abuzz about how we needed to come up with strategies to explain Daesh to our students. What readings could we assign? What could we do to make sure our students didn’t think all Muslims were terrorists? Given the hate crimes against Muslims or those presumed to be Muslims in this country, the concern is legitimate (Safi, 2014). And so we shared with one another strategies that included saying things that begin with “not all Muslims,” pointing to violence committed by non-Muslims, linking the Islam touted by radical groups to political contexts, and so forth. But this kind of expertise, shaped as it is by defensiveness and urgency, is as much about our placement in the U.S. as it is about the Middle East. It is also an expertise deployed to serve a persecuted community in the present—American Muslims—often at the risk of flattening the recent past, and having little time to address a deeper past that throws into sharp relief the very confines within which we must operate in the present.
When I was teaching the modern Middle East, my class would fill to capacity immediately, but my classes on the pre-modern past rarely have more than twelve students. This is because a class titled “The Modern Middle East” suggests that it will explain the present and a class about the Ottomans, Safavids, and Mughals promises to explain the past. Experts are still urgently needed to teach the former, but not to teach the latter. But interestingly, if it is answers to the present we seek—namely, what must we know about the religious communities of the region, or how might one go about being Muslim in today’s world, or even what we can do about enmity between religious communities today—then the answer might not lie in a class that begins with the 19th and 20th centuries. The twentieth century especially is not unfamiliar enough to force upon students the radical acts of imagination that the deep past of the Middle East provides. By the deep past, I mean the past that we no longer remember and that is even beyond the memory of our oldest living relatives, a past that has not been transmitted to us through our grandparents, that does not call for loyalties we defend when these are challenged in a classroom. The distant rhythms, norms, and sensibilities of the deep past insist we shed our skins. Doing so ushers in a range of human expression, agency, and experience absent from our present. It also allows students to develop abiding intellectual interests that transform the scope of their identities.
For instance, one of my students wrote an independent research paper on Jewish historiography in the Ottoman Empire and came away with an appreciation for the histories Jewish communities carried with them into Ottoman lands, the multiplicity of voices that preserved and interpreted the past, and the ability of Jewish history to adapt to movement and change. In her words, instead of seeing Jews through the lens of persecution alone, she saw resilience, creativity, and diversity within Jewish narrations of the past. Her own relation to Jewishness became, as a result, more expansive. In another instance, a student who had grown up with an Islam based on strict, literal interpretations of the Quran was humbled by the range of expression that he found in the Ottoman past, from engravings of Quranic verses on mosques, to poetry that drew on its stories, to forms of artistic expression inspired by the belief in a divine power. The student fluctuated between a compulsive emphasis on the dos and don’ts of the Quran, coupled with periods of self-flagellation for his transgressions. In his own words, the Ottoman past gave him room to breathe, it opened up the possibility that he could have a relationship to Islam that was not simply a checklist of rewards and punishments, and it allowed him to feel inspired and curious rather than resentful and afraid. This has consistently been true of many Muslim students who have taken classes with me on the pre-colonial past.
On and off, my colleagues ask when I plan to offer my Middle East class again. It’s an important class they tell me, especially given “what’s going on.” The phrase “what’s going on,” is a stand in for anything that has exploded in the Middle East in the last four years and is clamoring for more chapters in textbooks and explanations in classrooms. The easiest way for me to explain myself is to ask historians of medieval Europe to imagine what they would do if they had to teach Brexit. Or, if when discussing the Council of Trent, they were asked to explain why Christian groups in the U.S. oppose Planned Parenthood. Of course, my colleagues joke that were there suddenly an explosion in jobs for medieval Europeanists, premised on having to explain Brexit, they too would tailor their job applications accordingly. Complicity is a tricky affair. It allows for immediate gains followed by compromises that are difficult to sustain.
As the years pile up, I feel a combination of relief and guilt. Relief that I need not deal with explaining Daesh in Iraq and Syria, or the enmeshment of Russia in the region, or for that matter, Donald Trump’s foreign policy moves, and guilt that if I am the only historian of the Islamic world at my institution, surely I should step up. But what would stepping up entail? Would I have to look up fake news and Twitter feeds and Trump’s statements and then spend time in class dispelling stereotypes and fact checking? Would it entail more poetry and stories about our basic humanity coupled with more images of dust from countries I have never visited, in which many of my students have lived, and some have fled? Would it mean apologia beginning with “not all Muslims” and the struggle to find meaning in a disenchanted, violent, and often inexplicable present? I would rather teach messiahs.
This article, originally titled “Betrayal, Conversion, and Complicity in the Middle East Classroom” was published in Teaching and Learning the Difficult Past: Comparative Perspectives. Eds. Magdalena Gross and Luke Terra (Routledge, 2018)
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