This course is about the Red Sea region (modern-day Ethiopia, Yemen, Eritrea, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Sudan, and others) as a significant cultural, intellectual, and political domain in antiquity. Students will learn about how Red Sea societies spanning ancient Africa and Arabia connected the Eastern Mediterranean and Indian Ocean worlds. They will be introduced to the formative histories of scriptural communities Jews, Christians, and Muslims in the region, and explore various Red Sea writings including the Axumite inscriptions, the Kebra Nagast, and the Quran.

The focus will be on the rise of complex societies and the attendant development of architectural and artistic forms that express the needs and aspirations of these societies. Occasional readings in original texts in translation will supplement the study of art and architecture.

This course focuses on the Near East from antiquity to the early centuries of Islam, introducing the most important works of literature, politics, ethics, aesthetics, religion, and science from the region. We ask how, why, and to what ends the Near East sustained such a long period of high humanistic achievement, from Pharaonic Egypt to Islamic Iran, which in turn formed the basis of the high culture of the following millennium.

The Arabian Nights (The 1001 Nights) is a masterpiece of world literature. However, its reception and popularity are fraught with challenges and problems. By tracing its journey from its Persian origins, through its Arabic adaptations, and finally its entry into Europe, this class will consider how the Nights were used to construct imaginings about the Self and the Other in these different contexts. We will cover topics such as orientalism, gender and sexuality, and narrative theory as they relate to the Nights' most famous story cycles and look at the influence of the Nights on modern authors and filmmakers. All readings will be in English.

A broad-ranging introduction to pre-modern, modern, and contemporary Islam in light of how Muslims have approached their foundational religious text, the Qur'an. Topics include: Muhammad and the emergence of Islam; theology, law and ethics; war and peace; mysticism; women and gender; and modern debates on Islamic reform. We shall examine the varied contexts in which Muslims have interpreted their sacred text, their agreements and disagreements on what it means and, more broadly, their often competing understandings of Islam and of what it is to be a Muslim.

This course examines the political dimensions of Islam. This will involve a study of the nature of Islamic political theory, the relationship between the religious and political establishments, the characteristics of an Islamic state, the radicalization of Sunni and Shi'i thought, and the compatibility of Islam and the nation-state, democracy, and constitutionalism, among other topics. Students will be introduced to the complex and polemical phenomenon of political Islam. The examples will be drawn mainly, though not exclusively, from cases and writings from the Middle East.

Prepares NES majors to conduct independent research in Near Eastern Studies by introducing the central questions, debates, and scholarly methodologies that have informed the region's study in varying disciplines (history, comparative literature, religious studies, political science, and anthropology). Includes practical training in academic research and writing: how to design a research project, find and make sense of relevant primary and secondary sources, develop an argument, and write a compelling scholarly paper. Includes museum visits and guest lectures.

What are Digital Humanities? What does the library of the future look like? Will the single-author peer-reviewed article survive the DH storm that is coming? How will the DH impact the ways we do historical research? And what ethical and legal problems arise from the use of DH methods? In this course, we will familiarize ourselves and experiment with a variety of Digital Humanities tools, such as network analysis, geospatial mapping, text mining, and crowdsourcing, interrogating how the DH reshape the ways we approach textual and material culture, ask research questions, process data, publish, and store academic scholarship.

The Cairo Geniza is a cache of texts from an Egyptian synagogue including letters, lists and legal deeds from before 1500, when most Jews lived in the Islamic world. These are some of the best-documented people in pre-modern history and among the most mobile, crossing the Mediterranean and Indian Ocean to trade, study, apprentice and marry. Data science, neural network-based handwritten text recognition and other computational methods are now helping make sense of the texts on a large scale. Students will contribute to an evolving state of knowledge and gain an insider's view of what we can and can't know in premodern history.

Are the Jews a separate nation? Should they have their own country? Where should it be located? This course investigates why Jews and non-Jews alike began asking these questions in the late eighteenth century and explores the varieties of answers they offered. The course's focus is on those who insisted that the Jews were a nation that required a state in the Jews' historic homeland. We will try to understand why these people - known collectively as Zionists - came to these conclusions, and why many others disagreed. The final part of the course will address debates within the State of Israel about what it means to be a "Jewish state."

The decline of marriage in recent decades is often tied to the decline of religion. But why should marriage, a contractual relationship centered on sex and property, be seen as a religious practice? This seminar considers the varied and surprising ways in which the great monotheistic traditions of the Near East came to connect certain forms of human marriage - or their rejection- to divine devotion, and considers how marriage worked in societies shaped by these traditions. Spanning biblical Israel to the medieval Islamic world, this course will introduce you to the historical study of Near Eastern religions and to the field of family history.

The senior thesis (498-499) is a year-long project in which students complete a substantial piece of research and scholarship under the supervision and advisement of a Princeton faculty member. While a year-long thesis is due in the student's final semester of study, the work requires sustained investment and attention throughout the academic year. works-in-progress submissions, their due dates, as well as how students' grades for the semester are calculated are outlined below.

A colloquium primarily intended to introduce graduate students to major scholarly trends and debates in the various disciplines and methodologies of Middle East and Islamic Studies.

An introduction to the writing system and grammar of Ottoman Turkish through close reading of graded selections taken from school books, newspapers, short stories, and travelogues printed in the late Ottoman and early Republican era.

A systematic introduction to Syriac language. Close reading of selected passages of Syriac texts.

Palestine and Israel Studies is/are among the most deeply contentious fields of research within Middle Eastern Studies, corresponding to the polarized politics that the field studies. In this course, we choose a topic at the heart of these fields and study the scholarship about it and analyze the relevant primary sources.

An introduction to medieval Near Eastern legal cultures that focuses on the intertwined development of Jewish and Islamic law from late antiquity until the twelfth century. We consider both legal writings such as codes and responsa and evidence for practices in state and communal courts. Geared both to students interested in legal history and to students interested in using legal texts and documents for general historical research.

Course examines the histories, politics and societies of several countries of the Arabian Peninsula. Particular focus is given to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and Yemen. Students explore the complex relationships the peoples of Arabia have with their past, the outside world, and such matters as the social and cultural divisions between the bedu and the hadar, and the interior versus the coastal populations. The course also examines the phenomena of Islamic reformism, political Islam, the dynamics of the global oil market and its effects on society. The aim of the course is to get students acquainted with the modern history of Arabia.

This course focuses on reading texts that are illustrative of various issues in Muslim religious thought. The texts are selected according to students' needs.

This seminar focuses on Indian Ocean and Mediterranean exchange c. 1080-1240 via nearly seven hundred Geniza documents that constitute the oldest portable document corpus from the western Indian Ocean and the largest before the sixteenth century. Our work together focuses on material cultures, including port infrastructure, ship construction, sailing and packing techniques, commodities and manufactured objects, monetary exchanges and gifts, writing and accounting practices, and food and dress.

This course is a survey of Islamic civilization and culture in both historical and in contemporary times. We cover major themes of Islamic religious thought including the Quran and its interpretation, the intellectual history of Islam, Sufism, Islamic law, and Muslim reform. Through the utilization of both secondary and primary sources (religious and literary texts, films), we examine Islam as an ongoing discursive tradition. In addition to gaining an understanding of the problems associated with the study of Islam, this course should equip you with the tools required to analyze broader theoretical issues pertinent to the study of religion.

This course explores the lives and representations of Muslim women from Medieval times to the present. We use scripture, documents, novels, poetry, films, and scholarly studies from different fields. The topics include women's piety, sexuality, marriage, family, slavery, learning, feminisms, war, and the gendering of the "war on terror." A trip to the Metropolitan Museum of Art included.

Medieval Muslims lived in an era of empires, plagues, crusades, famines, and war. How did the beliefs and daily ritual practices of ordinary Muslims provide meaning to their lives, even in troubled times? How did "lived Islam" shape everyday life, from birth to death? How was piety embodied and enacted? We use primary sources in translation, as well as archaeological evidence, artefacts, and coins. The class will visit Rare Books and Special Collections in Firestone. A field trip to the Metropolitan Museum of Art is included in the course.

This seminar has two concerns. First, we examine facets of Islamic thought on matters relating to conceptualizations of history, religion, law, mysticism, politics, authority, and power between the fourteenth and the eighteenth centuries. Second, we pay close attention throughout to questions of approach and method as they relate to these topics.