Instructor: Kevin Reinhart, Religion
Overview: With the advent of technology, both the process and the products of undergraduate scholarship are changing.
Students have vivid images Middle East and Islamdom, most derived from television, some from movies. Many of the most significant moments in Islamic history have happened in the full glare of the newsreel and the television camera – the Iranian revolution, the 1967 war, rise of Gamal Abdul Nasser, the Turkish War of Independence, the Nation of Islam and Malcolm X.
To balance students’ limited recollections, we have begun collecting video clips that illustrate Modern Islam’s recent past. The idea is to give Modern Islam a history, so that it is not just Bin Ladin, but also Ataturk, and Hasan al-Banna who is vivid in students’ minds, not just the World Trade Center attacks, but also the First World War in the Middle East and the end of the Ottoman Empire. The archives of British Pathé, and the Lumiere Brothers have recently become available and images from these will be selected first for in-class presentations, and then later on a web site so that students may refer to them after lecture.