Lecture Series Audio & Video

War and Warfare in the Middle East: Past and Present

The Center for Middle Eastern and North African Studies weekly colloquium series is now available to for viewing online. The theme of the Fall 2009 semester is War and Warfare in the Middle East: Past and Present.

The region of the Middle/Near East and North Africa has witnessed numerous wars and armed conflicts since ancient times up to the present. Some were a result of territorial expansion by imperial states or nomadic invasions; others were triggered by local competition for resources between two or more countries of the region. Still others were intended or unintended outcomes of broader geopolitical confrontations, such as WWI and WWII and, later on, the Cold War between the Soviet Union and the Western world. Military technology evolved from the first use of camels and chariots to gunpowder and canon, more recently, also to chemical weapons. Slave armies and feudal military have been replaced by the mass conscripted armies of modern nation states. On the ideological plane, wars and military conflicts have been justified by reference to a wide variety of causes, from the “liberation” of the Holy Land from an “infidel” enemy to Europe’s “civilizing mission”; from establishing the homeland for a people that did not have one to stopping the proliferation of WMD, to the spread of nationalism, Socialism, Islamism, democracy, and so on. Our seminar will examine the political, societal, demographic, and military dimensions of wars and military conflicts in the region as well as their ideological justifications across the centuries.

Virgina Aksan, McMaster University: The Ottoman Empire and the Culture of War

Tom O'Donnell, University of Michigan: Iran and the Nuclear Issue

Gotfried Hagen, University of Michigan: German Jihad in World War I

Orly Halpern, Israeli-American Reporter: Israel's Declared Existential Threats with a Focus on Conversations with Hamas

Fuat Dundar, University of Michigan: The Last Thirty Years of the Kurdish Question in Turkey through Abdulah Ocalan's Biography

Mark Schwartz, Grand Valley State University: Warfare in the Ancient Near East

Walter Kaegi, University of Chicago: The Muslim Conquest of Byzantine North Africa in the Seventh Century

Sherman Jackson, University of Michigan: Jihad

Religion and the Subversive (Fall 2008)

The Center for Middle Eastern and North African Studies weekly colloquium series is now available to for viewing online. The theme of the Fall 2008 semester is Religion and the Subversive.

Religion implies a claim to truth, and thus to authority. Yet, such power continues to be subverted, by a multitude of phenomena, by those who have less power. In the course of this semester, we want to use our colloquium and mini-course Comparative Perspectives on the Middle East to explore how the three monotheistic religions and their authority have been challenged by, and reacted to heresy, blasphemy, satire, laughter, doubt, in short, by the human imagination, or how they have been disputed by claims to alternative or ‘higher’ truths, such as scientific knowledge and political ideology.

Gottfried Hagen lecture: Blasphemy in Defense of Piety?

Dr. Rainer Bromer lecture: Apologetic and Polemic Darwinism in the Middle East

Dr. Christiane Gruber lecture: The Power and Problem of the Image: Depictions of the Prophet Muhammad in Islamic Traditions

Dr. Yaron Eliav lecture: Jewish Notions of Idolatry and their Function in the Religious Landscape of the Roman Mediterranean

Ambassador (Ret) Melvyn Levitsky lecture: Unintended Consequences: U.S. Cold War Policy and Afghanistan's 'Holy Warriors'

Dr. Mahdi Tourage lecture: Humor and Subversion in Persian Sufi Tradition

Dr. Webb Keane lecture: Freedom and Blasphemy: On Indonesian Press Bans and Danish Cartoons

Dr. Ryan Szpiech lecture: Hijacking Scriptures in Medieval Polemics

Dr. Elliot Ginsberg lecture: Time, Dreams and Laughter: Snapshots of the Subversive in Jewish Mystical Tradition (and its aftershocks)

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