Category Archives: Teaching Resources

The School of Mamlūk Studies

Egypt, Islamic History, Scholars, Syria, Teaching Resources


The School of Mamlūk Studies (SMS) is administered by the Universities of Chicago (Ill., USA), Liège (Belgium), and Venice (Italy), respectively represented by Marlis Saleh, Frédéric Bauden, and Antonella Ghersetti. It is currently based at the University of Chicago, where Mamluk-related projects such as Mamlūk Studies Review, the Chicago Online Bibliography of Mamluk Studies, and the Chicago Online Encyclopedia of Mamluk Studies are managed. The mission of SMS is to provide a scholarly forum for a holistic approach to Mamluk studies, and to foster and promote a greater awareness of the Mamluk sultanate (1250–1517). It aims to offer a forum for interdisciplinary debate focused on the Mamluk period in all its historical and cultural dimensions in order to increase, address, investigate, and exchange information and knowledge relevant to Mamluk studies in the broadest meaning of the term. Conceived as a meeting for scholars and graduate students working on any of the many aspects of the Mamluk empire, without neglecting its contacts with other regions, SMS offers to everyone working in the field of Mamluk studies the opportunity to attend annual conferences organized in turn by each of the three collaborating institutions.

The annual conferences will be organized around a general or a more specific theme which scholars will be invited to address. In addition, proposals for panels on other relevant subjects may be submitted by individuals, research teams, or institutions. Accepted panels will be held at the end of the thematic conference. On an irregular basis, SMS will also organize seminars in various fields (such as diplomatics, paleography, codicology, numismatics, epigraphy, etc.) which will be aimed at graduate students. These seminars will be planned to take place prior to or following the annual conference in the institution where the conference is held.

Papers presented at each conference on the selected theme will be published as a monograph, while papers presented at the panels will be considered for publication in Mamlūk Studies Review.

The first annual SMS conference is planned for 2014 in Venice. A call for papers will go out in 2013.

Not Qualified: Exposing the Deception Behind America’s Top 25 Pseudo Experts on Islam

Islamophobia, Islamophobia 101, Teaching Resources, Terrorism Issue


[Click here to download the recent publication of the Muslim Public Affairs Council exposing the lack of credentials of the [mis]leading Islam[ophobic] experts.]

For the benefit of national security and the American public at large, we must ensure that those people speaking about terrorism perpetrated in the name of Islam are qualified. At a minimum, individuals who speak about Islam and its co-opting by violent extremists need to be properly informed and qualified.

To date, groundbreaking research into the anti-Muslim hate industry has been conducted by the Center for American Progress and the Southern Poverty Law Center. Their research focuses primarily on anti-Muslim hate activists’ sources of funding and their possible connections to other forms of hate. No study that we know of has focused on the qualifications of the so-called experts on Islam and Muslim violent extremists.

This study seeks to fill in this research gap by focusing the academic qualifications of 25 individuals who comprise some of the most vocal voices and activists in the anti-Muslim circuit. We specifically focus on highly visible personalities who engage in anti-Islam rhetoric and who frequently and inaccurately speak not only about extremist Muslims, or even Muslims at large, but who also claim to be knowledgeable about the fundamental beliefs and tenets of the Islamic faith.

The study asks the question: Do these individuals have the formal academic credentials to back their explicit and implicit claims of expertise on Islam?

Notes from Algeria and Turkey

Algeria, Conferences and Talks, Islam: Introduction, Teaching Resources, Turkey


Notes from Algeria and Turkey — Charting the Modern Face of Islamic Civilization and Democracy in a Global World

by Bruce Lawrence, Transcultural Islam Research Network, November 30, 2012

What can we learn from an aging Turkish Imam with a pan-Turkish cultural movement to his name and a deceased Algerian philosopher — both of whom command attention as devout Muslims and men of science — about civilizational rebuilding in the modern era?

Scholars gathered in Algiers from Nov 21-22 at the College of Islamic Sciences at the University of Algiers to find out.

“The Philosophy of Civilizational Rebuilding, according to Malek Bennabi and Fetullah Gülen: Guidelines for Creative Thinking & Effective Action” was the theme for the conference, and I was invited to give a paper on this weighty subject.

I had been teaching in Istanbul during Fall 2012. My assignment there had been to train graduate students, both Turkish and non-Turkish, in theories and methods that apply to civilizational studies.

I had also been traveling and giving lectures elsewhere in Turkey, including a memorable lecture to 400 students at Mustafa Kemal University in Antakya — where the topic was Islam and Global Civilization and included a survey of constitutionalism, citizenship and cosmopolitanism, along with numerous approaches to Islamic civilization in the crowded marquee of world civilizations that claim to be both global and universal.

Just who were Fethullah Gülen and Malek Bennabi? Why was their thinking paired to address the topic of civilizational rebuilding, and how would their views advance an initiative that spanned centuries and engaged some of the best minds, from Ibn Khaldun in late 14th century North Africa to Arnold Toynbee in mid-20th century Britain? Continue reading Notes from Algeria and Turkey →

Nineteenth Century Periodicals in Arabic

Journalism and Media, Teaching Resources

A Chronology of Nineteenth Century Periodicals in Arabic (1800-1900): A Research Tool

This website provides a chronology of nineteenth-century periodicals in Arabic.

Although it is meant to include all periodicals published in Arabic or in Arabic and in another language (like the usual pair of Arabic and Ottoman Turkish) or in Arabic written in a different script (like Judeo-Arabic) in the period from 1800 to 1900, this chronology is certainly incomplete. Furthermore, there remain numerous problems with dating and locating individual publications as well as identifying their owners, editors, or publishers. A common problem is that journals with different editors used the same title or the same editors published periodicals under different titles.

Thus, at the moment we consciously publish a working draft with the purpose of making our information available to the scholarly community. We welcome all readers to submit any comment, corrections, and new data via the email addresses provided in the “Submit comments” section. We would like to ask all contributors to always refer to the ID at the end of each row – in case of comments on existing entries – and cite their sources, as otherwise we cannot consider the submission for being included in the table. Every contribution will be acknowledged.

We chose to present the core data as a table containing information on titles, dates of first and last issue published, place(s) of publication, names of publishers and editors, language(s) of publication, and available collections. In addition, we provide various indexes of publishers and locations, as well as a bibliography of the most important secondary sources and available union catalogues. To search any part of the website, the browser’s search function should be invoked (Ctrl-F for Windows, Cmd-F for Mac OSX). Please keep in mind that unicode symbols adhering to the IJMES transliteration must be used.

For details, see the website at the Zentrum Moderner Orient.

Ottoman Music

Languages, Music and Dance, Ottoman Empire, Poetry, Teaching Resources, Turkey


Ottoman ensemble in a Suleymaniye manuscript

For anyone interested in Ottoman music, or music as such, check out the nice webpage just uploaded in the Ottoman History Podcast.

Ottoman Classical Music: History and Transformations
with Mehmet UÄŸur Ekinci
74. Music of the Ottoman Court

While the Ottoman Empire was undoubtedly home to rich and diverse musical traditions, the subject of Ottoman music has often evaded historical analysis due to the scant nature of pre-nineteenth century sources on the subject. In this podcast, Mehmet Uğur Ekinci provides a general outline of the history of music during the Ottoman period along with its various waves of transformation and discusses his upcoming publication of Kevserî Mecmûası, an eighteenth century musical treatise that provides a rare glimpse of notation in Ottoman music before the nineteenth century. We also provide a number of recordings of Ottoman music composed during different periods.

Academic Freedom and Professional Responsibility

"Arab Spring", Anthropology/Sociology, Arab-Israeli Conflict, Islamophobia, Teaching Resources, Terrorism Issue


“Death of Socrates” by Jacques-Louis David, 1787, Metropolitan Museum of Art

Academic Freedom and Professional Responsibility:
A Handbook for Scholars and Teachers of the Middle East

Attempts to undermine professors’ abilities to teach and do research are increasingly directed at scholars who seek to provide a contextualized and critical view of recent international developments and their interaction with US foreign policies and practices.

The first draft of the handbook was based on research undertaken by the Taskforce on Middle East Anthropology to understand available institutional resources, as well as on ethnographic interviews conducted with academics who have encountered obstacles in their teaching and scholarship. The handbook was revised in 2012 by a group of current graduate students and recent PhDs in Middle East Anthropology, at the behest of the original handbook committee.

The revision aimed to evaluate the current atmosphere of academic freedom via a survey distributed to faculty and graduate students studying the Middle East, update the document to reflect legal changes that impact the ability of academics to carry out their scholarship and teaching, review major controversies over academic freedom since the original version of the handbook was published, and update links, citations, and contact information.

The handbook provides concrete suggestions for how to respond to attacks on academic freedom and to avoid them in the first place. It considers the potentials and limitations of internal university structures, professional organizations, legal recourse, and media outlets. Finally, it contains useful pedagogical tools for dealing with difficulties in the classroom, and an informative bibliography of recent writings on academic freedom.

“Academic Freedom and Professional Responsibility: A Handbook for Scholars and Teachers of the Middle East” (2012). Click here for information on how to download a pdf of this report.

Tabsir Redux: Mahdi as Hell…

Anthropology/Sociology, CyberOrient, Islamic Sciences, Teaching Resources, Turkey

Has your atlas arrived yet? The New York Times reported yesterday that prominent American scientists and politicians are receiving what purports to be an “Atlas of Creation” from a Turkish media guru self-named Harun Yahya. No, it is not revenge for the “War on Terror.” Nor is a glossy book of patent nonsense, no matter how intelligently designed and styled as “probably the largest and most beautiful creationist challenge yet to Darwin’s theory” much of a challenge. Scientists will recognize it for a “load of crap,” as Kevin Padian, an evolutionary biologist at the University of California, Berkeley, impolitely phrased it.

The “War on Terror” has manufactured a whole host of new enemies. But what a strange bedfellow is Charles Darwin, who liberated science from the dogmatic demands of religious apologists like Mahdi Yahya a century and a half ago. Darwin’s approach now summarizes all of modern science, a steady advance in knowledge because no specific idea is ever held sacred. This does not mean that scientists must abandon religion and faith, but it does offer a view of the world in which human reason is not abandoned under the cloak and rhetorical dagger of a supposedly spiritual quest for moral behavior. Continue reading Tabsir Redux: Mahdi as Hell… →