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.

An introduction to the history of Palestine, Israel, and the Arab-Israeli conflict from the late-nineteenth century to the present.

From renowned artists to everyday artisans, cultural history provides a lens to view complex formation of societies, ideas, and identities. Spanning Egypt to Ethiopia this course takes the Nile Valley as its scope to break down boundaries between the Middle East and Africa. Rather, it is a useful place to examine the fluidity of cultural production, how it can be localized, nationalized, and globalized. Students will examine forces of imperialism, capitalism, nationalism and explore how 20th century states, empires, and individuals mobilized culture to create and challenge national identity and to articulate their own sense of place.

How did the introduction of new text technologies impact premodern culture? What motivated or delayed the adoption of the codex or the various types of print? Did these technologies encourage new practices or suppress old ones? And how does the story change when we turn from European to Near Eastern contexts? By learning about past text technologies, we'll gain a fuller understanding of how today's digital text technologies leave their mark on how we interact with texts and with the world. This course teaches relevant digital humanities methods for texts and reflects critically on both our current moment and premodern pasts.

Spanning Europe and Asia, the Turkish Republic has long been regarded as a global lynchpin state due to its geography. But no less important has been its role as a bellwether of modernity. Founded by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk in 1923 out of the wreckage of the Ottoman empire, the Turkish Republic with its secular and nationalist ideology championed the universality of Western modernity through the 20th century. But in the 21st century, the Turkey of Recep Tayyip Erdogan has sought to chart a different course. Topics covered include ethno-nationalism, modernity, Islam and Islamism, gender, language and identity, and the Kurdish Question.

This course will explore recent ethnographic/historical texts on material heritage and memory in the Middle East in order to delve into engagements with "the past" and the underlying dynamics which have driven the seemingly paradoxical relationships between "authenticity" and "modernity" in the region.

A survey of the history of Islamic law and its developments, and the attempts of the Muslim jurists to come to term with the challenges of modern times. It will focus on issues in constitutional and personal laws that have the greatest relevance to the modern era.

This course introduces students to classic and recent theoretical debates about secularism and secularization. We will consider a range of historical-ethnographic examples, focusing particularly on the limits of secularism in its modern encounter with Islam and Muslim communities in North Africa, the Middle East, Europe and North America. By comparing the realities of everyday life in a variety of national contexts, we will ask what secularism offers as a human way of experiencing the world, a mode of legitimating norms and constructing authority, and a method of telling stories and creating myths about human values and historical progress.

In this course you will learn the history of one of the world's most enduring Empires, the Ottoman Empire, from its beginnings in the fourteenth century to the advent of reform in the early nineteenth century. At its height, the Ottomans ruled over the Middle East, Southeastern Europe and much of the Mediterranean. About twenty five countries today were at one time part of the Empire. In addition, empire has been the world's most common form of political organization for the last 2500 years. In this course you will also learn the essentials of this enduring political arrangement in governing the world.

Overview of the intersection of the politics and economics of the modern Middle East and North Africa. Study political and economic development and underdevelopment of region's diverse states by exploring the ways in which political institutions affect economic performance and those in which economic conditions influence political events. You'll build on rich historical literature, interdisciplinary theoretical frameworks, and multi-methods empirical studies to think critically about the determinants that lead to underdevelopment vs. development, chaos vs. stability, regime survival vs. overthrow, and political opening vs. stability.

The theme is premodern Arabic biographical literature, with readings from a wide range of tabaqat works.

An introduction to Ottoman paleography and diplomatics. The documents are in divani and rika scripts.

The aim of the course is to provide the linguistic skills and the academic tools that are necessary to carry out research in Syriac Studies. The first session deals with the transcription of Syriac and presents an overview of the basic resources for academic research. The rest of the course centers on a selection of Syriac texts and addresses fundamental notions of literature, culture, and history.

This course explores ethnographic approaches to the study of gender, Islam, and inequality. It surveys the theoretical approaches used to study the intersection of religious practices, gender, and sexuality. Topics include religious women's agency; queer and transgender agency; self and subjectivity; religious law, ethics and politics; governance and the state; and progress, secularism, imperialism and modernity.

Despite its size and location at the center of the Eurasian supercontinent, the Steppe is typically dismissed as a peripheral area or backwater. Although some historians have romanticized the region as a venue of trade and exchange, most ignored or portrayed it as a civilizational impedance, spawning only occasional disruptions. Surveying recent scholarship, this course addresses such questions as, Did the Steppe generate distinct forms of order? Did the Steppe contribute to European state formation? Will the Steppe reemerge as a pivot point of global politics?

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.

Selected topics in Islamic law and jurisprudence. The topics vary from year to year, but the course normally includes reading of fatwas and selected Islamic legal texts in Arabic.

Hands-on introduction to Arabic manuscripts and their material history via Princeton's Garrett Collection of Middle Eastern manuscripts, the largest such collection in North America. Covers the anatomy of the medieval Arabic book, including codicology, supports, scripts, ink, ownership notes, certificates of audition and other paratextual information; and the social history of the book, including reading and transmission, libraries, the modern book trade, and the ethics and legality of the transfer cultural patrimony. Good classical Arabic is a prerequisite; prior experience with manuscripts and paleography is neither expected nor assumed.

Introduces to themes in the study of Iran and the broader Persian-speaking world before 1800. Course introduces students to contemporary debates and works of recent scholarship. Topics vary but can either be organized around broad historical themes and approaches or focus on individual dynasties and time periods. Knowledge of Persian related languages desirable but not necessary.

This course is an interdisciplinary introduction to the idea of sacrifice in ancient Israel. We will examine sacrifice as a religious practice through literature, history, archaeology, and theology. Students will also study material artifacts related to sacrifice, and learn about the histories of excavating, acquiring, and curating those artifacts for public display. The focus of this course will be on ancient Israelite religion, but we will discuss related Mesopotamian, ancient Greek, Christian, and Jewish materials. At the end of the course, we will critically analyze multiple representations of sacrifice and temples in the modern world.

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.

How do we find a window into the lives of ordinary Medieval Muslims? How did the ethics, language and rituals of Islam inform their daily lives? What can we learn about emotions, struggles, material culture, relationships, and lived religion? Course materials include translated letters, petitions, contracts, court cases, tombstone inscriptions, graffiti, and excerpts from chronicles and legal texts. We will also make use of artefacts, images, archaeological evidence and coins. Two class sessions will be held in Rare Books and Special Collections. The class will make a field trip to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City.

This seminar provides a survey of Islamic political thought from its beginnings in the 7th century to the present. What are the key debates in the history of Islamic political thought - on conceptions of government, on religion and politics, on power, on non-Muslims? How did political thought develop in various Arab, Iranian, and Indian contexts? What transformations has it undergone since the late 19th century? How does the legacy of political thought inform political and religious contestations among Muslims today? These are among the questions we will address in this seminar.

This seminar explores the relationship between legal categories, especially categories of legal disability, and social and economic life in Medieval Muslim societies. We begin with "Being a Child" and conclude with "Being Dead." Readings include primary sources such as legal texts, chronicles, legal documents, coins and epigraphy. Classes in the Numismatics Collection and the Arabic manuscript collection at Firestone included.

This seminar focuses on Islamic thought and society during the 17th and the 18th centuries. Our key concerns are two: to understand what Islam, and Islamic thought, looked like in the late medieval and the early modern world; and to think about how we should try to approach the study of Islam in that world. A good deal of our focus is on South Asia, though we also read about other regions, including Iran and the Arab Middle East. The required readings are in English. For those interested, some weeks might have supplementary readings in Arabic as well.