Colloquium in Middle East History
Fall 2013
The revolutions that have rolled across the Arab world in the past two years came out of the blue -- but also out of history. Missing from much analysis has been the historical perspective that activists themselves carried into the streets. After an introduction to the revolts of the Arab Spring, this seminar takes students into the earlier struggles for constitutional government that inspired today’s movements. We structure our historical excavation around the stories of earlier activists captured in my new book, Justice Interrupted: The Struggle for Constitutional Government in the Middle East. We supplement those vignettes with translations of primary sources as well as a bit of political and social history. We ask: what enabled these activists to build such powerful movements? Why did their efforts in the past fail? How have today’s activists learned from their predecessors? Students will write two short midterm papers and then focus, in the last six weeks of the course, on writing their own papers on the roots of one of today’s constitutional revivals and revolts in Tunisia, Egypt, Syria, and Iraq. Collective reading assignments include memoirs of both “Mr. Google,” whose Facebook page helped launch Egypt’s 2011 revolution and of Ahmad Urabi, petitions of Arabs in Damascus for constitutional monarchy in 1920, and the history of Iraqis’ overthrow of their monarchy in 1958. Participation and midterms constitute half the final grade, and the research paper constitutes the other half. This course meets the Second Writing, non-Western, and Historical Studies requirements.
