University of California San Diego Modern Middle East James Gelvin Questions i will need questions answered from James Gelvin, The Modern Middle East: A H

University of California San Diego Modern Middle East James Gelvin Questions i will need questions answered from

James Gelvin, The Modern Middle East: A History, 4th edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), pp. 220-287.

James Gelvin, The Modern Middle East: A History, 4th edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), pp. 288-299.

Karen Armstrong, Islam: A Short History (New York: The Modern Library, 2000), pp. 156-178

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Important Themes in Gelvin, pp. 220-287:

1. What is nationalism? And how did it come about in the Middle East? What economic, social, and political factors did contribute to the emergence of Ottoman, Arab, Turkish, and Persian nationalism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries?

2. Why was it that most forms of nationalism in the Middle East started with an intellectual movement that focused on the importance of language and literature in that culture?

3. How did the Palestine-Israel conflict begin in the Middle East? What factors did contribute to the emergence of this conflict in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries?

4. How did the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians evolve since 1948? Why is it that the Israeli-Palestinian region has witnessed at least one major outbreak of violence in every decade since the 1948 War (in 1956, 1967, 1973, 1987, and 2000)? What are some of the larger implications of this conflict in Israeli and Palestinian societies, as well as the Middle East as a whole?

5. Gelvin gives three reasons for the development of authoritarian governments in the Middle East in the twentieth century. What are these reasons?

6. How did a “developmentalist ethos” emerge in the Middle East during the twentieth century? How did successive governments in the region develop economic and social policies that empowered certain groups while at the same time disempowered others?

Important Themes in Gelvin, pp. 288-299:

1. Describe the path that Middle Eastern countries took to arrive at the so-called oil revolution of the 1970s? How did they whittle down step-by-step the privileges they had previously given to Western firms, corporations, and countries under various concessions and unequal treaties?

2. What is a rentier state? How do oil and other rents affect Middle Eastern politics?

Important Themes in Armstrong, pp. 156-178:

1. Armstrong identifies one major historical challenge for the establishment of a modern Muslim state (a state that would be at once modern and true to its own historical tradition) in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The main historical challenge according to her was the rise of secularism and nationalism in the Middle East in the past two centuries. In what ways did secular nationalism hamper the development of democracy, the rule of law, and the formation of a balanced modern state in the Middle East?

2. What is fundamentalism? In what ways is fundamentalism connected to the rise of secularism and modernity in the contemporary world? Why do fundamentalists not represent the depth and variety of the religious tradition they claim to believe in? Do all fundamentalists act in the same way and resort to coercion and violence?

3. How did fundamentalist theorists in Islam (individuals such as Mawdudi and Sayyid Qutb) define the concept of jahiliyya (ignorance) in the modern Middle East? Who did they consider to be their most important opponent? 4. What does Armstrong mean when she states that fundamentalism has helped Muslims to come to modernity in their own terms? In what ways did fundamentalism help domesticate an indigenous form of modernity in the Middle East?

5. What are the challenges of Muslims as minorities in various countries in Europe, North America, or South Asia? How do Muslims go about dealing with these challenges?