HIST 228(F) The Middle East Collides with Modernity*

Taking Napoleon's brief occupation of Egypt as a point of departure, this class will explore the sometime antagonistic, often welcoming and rarely ambivalent relationship of Middle Eastern intellectuals, politicians and religious thinkers with the dominant ideology of the post-Enlightenment West: modernity. Readings in this class will be structured to both examine the writings of various thinkers like Rifa'a Tahtawi, Jamal al-Din "al-Afghani," Namik Kemal, Ahmet Midhat pasha, and Jurji Zaydan as well as the western authors like Montesquieu, Fichte, Renan, and Dickens who proved influential to their work. As the course progresses through the "Long Nineteenth Century," students will be asked to consider if the process of incorporation, adaptation, rejection and negotiation inherent to the region's relationship to the ideas of Europe constituted an early non-Western critique of modernity, what Edward Said has termed "a historical experience of resistance against empire." Class evaluations will be based upon a midterm essay and a final essay. Group C

Hour: WATENPAUGH