NMH Syllabus, Fall, 2010
Teachers: Grant Gonzalez and Ted Thornton
| Meeting Times | Background and Perspective |
| Texts and Study Guides | Miscellaneous Resources |
| Requirements | Links to Other Materials |
| Note on Academic Integrity | Most Recent Blog Posts |
| Supplemental Resources |
| Room | Monday | Tuesday | Wednesday 2 | Thursday | Friday |
| Bev 114 | 8:00 – 9:20 | 8:00 – 9:20 | 9:25 – 10:40 | 8:00 – 9:20 | 8:00 – 9:20 |
Required Texts (ordered for Bookstore)
Reza Aslan, No god but God: The Origins, Evolution, and Future of Islam (study guide)
Suzanne Maloney, Iran’s Long Reach: Iran as a Pivotal State in the Muslim World (study guide) (Iran timeline and supplementary articles) (Iran archive at IME Blog)
Stephen Kinzer, Crescent and Star: Turkey Between Two Worlds, Revised Edition, New York: Farrar, Strauss, Giroux, 2008 (background on Turkey)
Additional Online Text: Guide to the Arab-Israeli Conflict for the Islamic Middle East Course
Requirements (see also Policies and Evaluation Criteria)
1. Participation in class discussions and other activities, such as debates, news reports, and responses to films.
2. Readings in texts and daily writings. Writings will be read aloud in class and used as the basis for the day’s discussions. Link to “How to Write Responses to Assigned Readings.”
3. Book Reviews as assigned.
4. Successful completion of a Semester Projec: independent work on an approved topic of choice within the bounds of the course that will include research throughout the semester, an oral report to the class which will be accompanied by a short written report, and a research paper of about ten pages. (25% of final grade).
5. Don’t forget to check the course blog and SWIS each day for new posts.
IMPORTANT NOTES APPLYING TO PAPERS SUBMITTED IN THE COURSE:
1. Review the material on “Academic Integrity” in the School Handbook, especially the paragraph on “Plagiarism.” Documentation (footnoting – click here to review how to construct footnotes ) is your most effective safeguard against charges of plagiarism (more – see NMH History and Social Science Writing Handbook). Train yourself never to cut and paste material from computer files, with the exception of the occasional direct quotation (which should always be surrounded by quotation marks and footnoted). Material you take from other sources and paraphrase (render in your own words) must also be footnoted. A good benchmark to use is to insert a footnote after every quotation and insert at least one footnote per paragraph.
2. Use only web material from universities, published journals, and other sources that have undergone rigorous editing or peer review and that are widely recognized in academic circles for quality scholarship and authority. You may not use Wikipedia as a cited source in any papers submitted in this course (more on this in class). A final reason to be careful about documentation (footnoting and bibliography) is that it authenticates your evidence and lends authority to your paper: i.e. it proves that you did not just make up your evidence; you got it from expert sources. The more expert those sources are, the more authority, weight, and persuasiveness your own paper will carry.
3. NMH believes strongly in the following statement about academic integrity, and effective with the start of the 2010-2011 school year, we have adopted the following policy regarding academic integrity on papers, quizzes, tests, and other major assessments:
Academic Integrity Statement (from the NMH Student Handbook):
- Northfield Mount Hermon is an educational community committed to cultivating high standards and accountability. Ethical behavior is expected of every community member in all aspects of school life, including academic endeavors. A critical part of academic excellence is ethical use of information, which includes honest representation of a student’s work. Students and faculty are expected to demonstrate the principles and practices of academic integrity, as well as to understand what constitutes academic fraud.
- Students will write the following statement on every paper, quiz or test to confirm their academic integrity on that assessment. This will serve to remind students about the importance of doing and claiming their work as their own. This statement serves as a declaration of pride in having done one’s own work and submitting it as such. The statement is:
“On my honor, I have neither given nor received unauthorized aid during this assessment.”
The student will write this statement and sign his or her name.
Supplemental Resources (Some require access via NMH Virtual Desktop):
On the Middle East
Geography Section Islamic Middle East Blog
On the Arab World
“The Arabs: Between Fitna, Fawda and the Deep Blue Sea,” The Economist, Jan. 12, 2008
“Special Report: The Arab World,” The Economist, Oct. 21, 2006
On Islam and and the West
Fouad Ajami, “The Clash,” New York Times Book Review, Jan. 6, 2008
On Lebanon
Background on the 2006-08 political crisis
On Pakistan:
“A Country on the Brink – Pakistan,” The Economist, Jan. 5, 2008
John F. Burns, “Benazir Bhutto” (Obituary), New York Times, Dec. 28, 2007
Steve Coll, “Letter From Pakistan: Time Bomb,” The New Yorker, Jan. 28, 2008. 45ff.
William Dalrymple, “Bhutto’s Deadly Legacy,” New York Times (Op-Ed), Jan. 4, 2007
Carlotta Gall and David Rhohde, “Militants Escape Control of Pakistan, Officials Say,” New York Times, Jan. 15, 2008 (on alleged involvement of Pakistan’s prime military intelligence agency in supporting militant activity).
“The World’s Most Dangerous Place: Pakistan,” The Economist, Jan. 5, 2008
Selig Harrison, “Drawn and Quartered,” (Op-Ed piece), New York Times, Feb. 1, 2008
On Religion and Politics
Ayaan Hirsi Ali, “Blind Faiths,” The New York Times Book Review, Jan. 6, 2008
“The Practice and the Theory: Islam and Democracy,” The Economist, Jan. 12, 2008
Other Articles:
“Afghanistan and Iraq: Must They Be Wars Without End?,” The Economist, Dec. 13, 2007
“Arming Its Friends” (on a new “cold war” between the U.S. and Iran), The Economist, Aug. 4, 2007
Ayaan Hirsi Ali, “The Silence of the Moderates,” International Herald Tribune, Dec. 8, 2007
BBC, “Emerging Voice of Mainstream Islam, Oct. 12, 2007 (see also “A Common Word”: text of a document written by Muslim scholars articulating the common ground between Islam and Christianity; see also a page on the history of Christian-Muslim polemics).
Roger Hardy, “2008: The Year of Palestine?,” BBC, Dec. 31, 2007
Raymond Ibrahim, “The Two Faces of Al Qaeda,” The Chronicle Review, Sept. 21, 2007
On the summer 2006 war between Israel, Gaza, and Lebanon, see summary at History of the Middle East Database. See also The New Yorker Lebanon Archive. See also Michael Young, “Hezbollah’s Other War,” New York Times Magazine, August 13, 2006, 34ff. (accessible only through ProQuest via the NMH Virtual Desktop).
“Islam’s Authority Deficit,” The Economist, June 30, 2007
Barnett R. Rubin, “Saving Afghanistan,” Foreign Affairs, vol. 86, no. 1, Jan.-Feb., 2007
Lee Kuan Yew, “The United States, Iraq, and the War on Terror,” Foreign Affairs, Jan-Feb, 2007
Alaa Al-Aswany, The Yacoubian Building
Tony Horwitz, Baghdad Without a Map (study guide)
Raymond Ibrahim, The Al-Qaeda Reader (New York: Doubleday, 2007)
Gilles Kepel, Bad Moon Rising: A Chronicle of the Middle East Today, trans. by Pascal Ghazaleh (study guide)
Gilles Kepel, Jihad: The Trail of Political Islam (study guide)
Rashid Khalidi, Resurrecting Empire: Western Footprints and America’s Perilous Path in the Middle East (study guide)
Bernard Lewis, The Crisis of Islam (study guide)
Meyer and Brysac, Kingmakers: The Invention of the Modern Middle East (study guide) ; (Additional material at History of Middle East Database)
Ahmed Rashid, Descent into Chaos: The United States and the Failure of Nation Building in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Central Asia - (study guide) (Additional material at History of Middle East Database: see Afghanistan and Pakistan. See also at IME Blog: Afghanistan, Pakistan, and South Asia archives)
Kirsten E. Schulze, The Arab-Israeli Conflict (study guide)
Michael Sells, Approaching the Qur’an: The Early Revelations (Ashland OR: White Cloud Press, 1999)
Anthony Shadid, Night Draws Near: Iraq’s People in the Shadow of America’s War (study guide)
Lawrence Wright, The Looming Tower (study guide)
Roger Cohen, “The Ottoman Swede,”New York Times Op-Ed piece, Sept. 13, 2007
Rachel Donadio, “Fighting Words,” The New York Times Book Review, July 15, 2007 (see also: Salman Rushdie, the “Cartoon” Controversy,” and “Wars of Words and Images.”)
Forbidden Iran – PBS Frontline program on Iran in 2008. More on history of Iran.
David Fromkin, “How the Modern Middle East Map Came to be Drawn,” Smithsonian, May, 1991, 132ff. NMH students, on your Virtual Desktops, copy the following search term,
david fromkin AND how the modern middle east map
and paste it into the Search window at the Gale Group InfoTrac database.
David Fromkin, “Ataturk’s Creation.” New Criterion 18.8 (April 2000),14. NMH students, on your Virtual Desktops, copy the following search term,
david fromkin AND ataturk
and paste it into the search window at Gale Group InfoTrac database. Additional background on Ottoman Empire and on modern Turkey for Fromkin readings. On a new museum to Ataturk in Ankara, see Sabrina Tavernise, “In Complex Times, Turkey Sees a Reassuring Face,” New York Times, Jan. 16, 2008.
Jeffrey Goldberg, “After Iraq,” Atlantic Monthly, Jan-Feb., 2008
Vali Nasr and Ray Takeyh, “The Costs of Containing Iran: Washington’s Misguided New Middle East Policy,” Foreign Affairs, Jan-Feb, 2008. See also: origins of principle of “containment” in U.S. foreign policy)
Ahmed Rashid, The Taliban: Exporting Extremism, Foreign Affairs, Nov/Dec, 1999
House of Saud - Web resources for the PBS Frontline show, which we will screen this term. See also Benchmarks in the History of Saudi Arabia and The Wahhabi Movement (at the History of the Middle East Database). See also Josh Pollack, “Saudi Arabia and the United States, 1931-2002,” in MERIA, vol. 6, no.3, Sept. 2002.PBS “Frontline: The Return of the Taliban”
Saudi Time Bomb? – website devoted to this installment from the PBS Frontline series. See also Benchmarks in the History of Saudi Arabia and The Wahhabi Movement (at the History of the Middle East Database). See also Josh Pollack, “Saudi Arabia and the United States, 1931-2002,” in MERIA, vol. 6, no.3, Sept. 2002.
Ted Thornton, ” Wars of Words and Images” (History of Christian-Muslim Polemics)
A Muslim Proof of God’s Existence
Glossary of Islamic Terms and Concepts
The Political and Religious Landscape of the Middle East at the Dawn of the Twenty-First Century
BBC Debate on French Law Banning the Wearing of Religious Symbols – (see also)
Links to Other Materials (some only through databases licensed to NMH School)
The Qur’an, Sura One: al-Fatiha (“The Opening”)
The Qur’an, Sura Two: al-Baqarah (“The Cow”)
The Hadith (Sahih Bukhari), “Revelation,” Vol. 1, Book 1, Nos. 2 and 3
The Hadith (Sahih Muslim), “Night Journey,” Ch. 75, Book 1, No.308
Readings for Discussions of the World After 9/11
