HIST232 - Who Belongs? Minorities and Nation-Building in the Middle East

In 1918 the Middle East experienced a refugee crisis of unknown dimensions. Famine, poverty, and a devastating influenza epidemic devastated urban and rural communities alike. At the same time, the imperial powers who had won the Great War began shaping the new contours of the Middle East. The lines drawn and disputed have since become the sources of destructive conflicts, impassioned debates, and endless suffering.

Our course explores the myriad markers of national identity and belonging in an era that often imposed unnatural barriers between people of different faiths and ethnicities. In particular, it focuses on the experiences of those who did not share the dominant ethno-linguistic and religious identity of states in which they lived – in other words, minorities. How did people whose leaders did not control the institutions of power protect their rights and interests? In what ways did they try to negotiate their legal participation in the creation of modern nation-states in the Middle East? What were the obstacles strewn on their paths that impeded political inclusion and equality?

These questions remain central to understanding the turmoil and deep wounds that Middle Eastern peoples still carry within them. Our course strives to understand the forces of communal cohesion as well as the causes of national disintegration. Nationalists of whatever breed have often based their romantic notions of community on land, language, religion, or ethnicity and have collided over ownership of territory and the right to sovereignty. Nationalist ideologies did not want to accommodate every competing faith, ethnicity, and culture, but rather to contain and circumvent them. By articulating their beliefs, many nationalists adopted at once a statement of inclusion and a policy of exclusion that frequently led to internal strife and external conflict in their communities - conflicts that are played out in the Middle East today.

We will look at how institutions of nation-building enabled the social construction of faux and forced homogenous identities that defied reality and reinforced dominant prejudices and minority disempowerment. In other words, we will try to understand what it meant to be a minority in the Middle East during two turbulent centuries.