Muslim Cultures: The Middle East & Beyond

Overview

We live in a world where knowledge about Islam and Muslims has taken on vital importance.  Islam is a global religion, with over 1 billion practitioners worldwide — nearly one quarter of the world’s population.  While Americans generally think of Islam in relation to the Middle East, only 20% of the Muslims live in the Middle East.   Nearly half the world’s Muslims live east of Pakistan, and Indonesia is home to the world’s largest Muslim population.  Islam is one of the fastest growing religions in the United States.  Islam is a cultural as well as a religious element in major societies that span the Mediterranean world, Africa, and Asia, from Dakar to Djakarta.  Islam has also become an important cultural force and presence in Northern Europe and the Americas during the modern period.

Despite the growing presence of Islam and Muslim nations on the global stage, too many Americans are uninformed about basic Muslim beliefs, practices, and history and too many Muslims have only a superficial understanding of Western cultures, institutions, and values.  Few Americans recognize the diversity of Islamic cultures or know how much Muslims have contributed to philosophy, science, commerce, and art.  The diversity and breadth of Islamic culture is obscured by mainstream media images that reduce the Muslim world to the conflicts in the Middle East, represent Muslims as terrorists or fundamentalist extremists, and portray Islam as universally oppressive to women and antagonistic to human rights and democracy.

In this Focus cluster, and in Islamic Studies at Duke more broadly, we affirm the value of interdisciplinary scholarship and cross-cultural conversation to foster new interpretations of Islam and promote positive relations between Muslims and non-Muslims.   We will grapple with the complexity of Islam with its global presence and culturally embedded expressions.  We will approach the Islamic world and Muslims through comparative, cross-cultural lenses as we explore the cultural and pop-cultural representations, expressions, and variations of Islam across the globe.

Visit the Muslim Cultures cluster web site.

Courses

Seminar: Cultural Anthropology Cultures of Conflict: Israel and Palestine

Rebecca Stein, Assitant Professor, Cultural Anthropology

This seminar examines the status of Arabs and Jews in the modern Middle East (1880-present) with particular attention to the case of Israel and Palestine.  Our readings will focus on the ways that Arabs and Jews in the contemporary Middle East are represented in cultural texts such as memoirs, fictional writings, travelogues and film (documentary and feature).  In conversation with scholarship from across the disciplines (history, anthropology, political science, geography), we will be considering what these cultural texts might teach us about nationalism, ethnicity, identity formation, history and memory, gender, and the politics of representation in the Middle East.
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Seminar: Turkish 135S Euro-Islam: Turks from the Ottoman Empire to the European Union

Erdag Göknar, Assistant Professor, Slavic & Eurasian Studies

This seminar examines the situation of “Turks” and Muslims in various European contexts of power and displacement.  In other words, it is a survey of manifestations of “Euro-Islam” beginning with the establishment of Turkish and Muslim communities in the Balkans (under the Ottoman Empire) to the present situation of immigrant communities in Germany and Turkey’s EU aspirations.  Themes include the “ghazi thesis”, sufism, the “Ottoman legacy”, and political Islam.  We will furthermore be tracing scholarly debates on representation, gender and identity through historiography, literature, travelogues, and some film.
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Seminar: African & Asian Languages & Literature Al-Qaeda’s Terrorism: Roots, Responses and Ramifications

Mbaye Lo, Instructor, African & Asian Languages & Literature

The focus of this seminar is Al-Qaeda, its ideology and its terrorism.  The seminar examines Al-Qaeda’s religious ideology and political development by exploring the origins and the narrative discourse of modern Islamic organizations dating back to the Salfi Movement of the nineteenth-century.  Within these historical contexts, the seminar will present the patterns and ramifications of Al-Qaeda’s terrorist activities.  Based on the class readings, guest speakers, films and discussions, students will work on analysing case studies from the Middle East and beyond.  They will use critical thinking in order to differentiate Muslim proper narrative discourse from that of Al-Qaeda and its affiliated groups.
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Focus 99 Special Topics in Focus: Lived Islam: Politics, Culture and the Everyday

Kelly Jarrett, Program Coordinator, Duke Islamic Studies Center

The use of the plural — “Muslim Cultures” — in the title of this Focus cluster was consciously chosen in order to challenge and complicate dominant representations of Islam as monolithic.  9/11 was a watershed event that placed Islam, for good and bad, prominently in the national and international spotlight.  On the one hand, some people responded to the events and effects of 9/11 by wanting to learn about or to educate others about Islam and Muslim cultures, histories, and beliefs.   Enrollments in language and Islamic Studies courses have grown, bookstores report that sales of the Qur’an have increased, and there has been an explosion of scholarly works, journalism, and documentaries about Islam and the Muslim world.  On the other hand, the diversity of Muslim cultures, beliefs, and practices is often obscured by dominant representations of Islam that reduce the Muslim world to the Middle East, Islam to Salafi/Wahibi fundamentalism, and Muslims to terrorists.

In this context of globalization, instant communication, and mass media misrepresentation, if we want to be responsible global citizens we simply cannot afford to be uninformed and ignorant of each others cultures, beliefs, traditions, and histories.   This Focus cluster is one attempt to provide you with an opportunity to learn about the diversity and complexity of Islam.  In this course, we will examine how Islam is expressed and interpreted in different historical and cultural contexts and how these contexts shape Muslim identities.  We will draw on the seminars on terrorism and Palestinian-Israeli conflict to explore how relations between Muslims and non-Muslims are represented and misrepresented in media and popular culture.  And most important, we will engage with you to connect what we’re studying in the classroom to our lived experiences at Duke and beyond.
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