Westmont in Istanbul Spring 2012 Course Overviews
Summary
A critical issue in the Middle East is that of identity. Individuals, communities and nations struggle to define themselves as eastern or western, modern or traditional, conservative or liberal, secular or religious. Moreover, the rapid and forced transition from Ottoman identity to national identity has resulted in continuing struggles between the rights of individuals and communities vis a vis the state. Identities that for centuries had been based in rural, religious and kinship communities have been undermined by mass urban migration and overrun by the totalizing claims and demands of the state.
It is difficult to travel in the region without quickly bumping into perplexing questions of identity: in particular how to benefit from and participate in all that the modern world has to offer, while retaining cultural authenticity.
The course work, speakers and travel are all designed to help students engage this central theme. The purpose is twofold: to understand the challenges that those in the region face due to the historical linkage between modernization and westernization and their particular experience of modernity. Secondly, students will confront the ways in which their own multi-faceted identities are inherited and constructed.
Identity formation requires drawing boundaries. While boundaries are necessary for personal and communal health, they also encourage prejudice and violence. What boundaries can or should be drawn around personal, cultural, faith and national identities? In the process we will challenge assumptions about who we are and who is ‘the other’ and why, inevitably drawing some challenging and - we trust - enriching conclusions.
We will approach the question of identity from historical, social, global, and cross-cultural perspectives. Readings, speakers, assignments, and travel are designed to further students’ understanding of the causes and consequences of their own and other’s identity and highlight the overlapping of multiple identities and our shared human identity.
Thinking Historically about Identity
This course will look at the ways in which individuals and groups use the past to inform their sense of identity and to legitimize their claims and perceptions vis a vis other groups.
· Christianity: Students will study the historical, political and cultural context of the early church. They will study how Christian perceptions and church institutions adjusted to accommodate changing circumstances of Roman persecution, Byzantine ascendancy and persecution and marginalization under Islam. Students will study how this shared history continues to inform the worldview of Christians in the region as they struggle to retain communal solidarity and distinctiveness while also seeking equal rights as citizens.
· Islam: Students will study foundational texts, concepts and historical events in Islam. They will study how key concepts such as gender, violence, authority, prophecy, salvation and community are presented in the Qur’an and hadith and have been understood by subsequent generations of Muslims. They will study the basic tenets and practices of Islam, as well as how those have evolved over time and the key theological and political divergences within their historical, cultural, and political contexts.
· Muslim & Christian Encounters: Students will also study important historical encounters between Muslims and Christians and how the memory of those encounters inform perceptions of, and relations with, the other today.
· Ottoman and Kemalist Turkey: Students will study how national identities are historically informed and supported. They will study the battle over Turkish identity based on the Kemalist and Ottoman period and how these respective visions of the past shape contemporary debates about Turkish identity and its role in the world.
· Students will study how recent Turkish national identity has typically denied its history of ethnic and religious diversity while minority groups preserve real and imagined pasts to promote their cultural distinctiveness.
· Israel/Palestine: Similarly in the case of Israel/Palestine students will study how debates about past violations, and willful selective remembering, are at the heart of both sides’ legitimizing arguments.
· Finally, students will be called upon to appreciate more fully the historical specificity of their own cultural, religious, political and national identities.
Possible Essay Assignments
1. How do contemporary state actors in Turkey represent and deploy the Ottoman and Kemalist past to legitimize competing visions of Turkish identity?
2. How have key Islamic texts and concepts been reinterpreted over time and what are the contextual explanations for that?
3. How did the principles and institutions of the early church adapt to changing historical circumstances?
4. How do Palestinians and Israelis use the past to legitimize their claims to the land and how do individuals and groups within Israel and Palestine use the past to compete for authority and legitimacy within their respective communities?
5. What is meant by the statement: “part of being a nation is getting history wrong”?
Understanding Identity in Society
Having considered the ways in which identities are historically informed, students will also consider the ways in which they are worked out through competition and cooperation within a society. One of the key issues facing Turkey today is the question of whether it is a secular or Islamic state. All members of society are affected by this debate and state actors align themselves in relation to this question. Effectively Turks are unclear what it means to be Turkish and what laws, values and groups should shape Turkish society.
Students will study how the key groups are participating in this debate and what they perceive as being at stake for themselves, their communities and their country. Students will study the dynamics between these groups and hear from representatives of all sides. The diversity within Turkish society will raise questions about how profitably we can speak in monolithic terms about democratic societies, modern societies, traditional societies, western societies, Middle Eastern societies, or Islamic societies. This will be further reinforced by comparisons with Israel, Palestine & Egypt during travel.
By studying the ways in which politics, law, gender, class , religion and ethnicity interact in a foreign society, students will be able to consider in new ways what they may have taken for granted or failed to consider about how similar forces shape American society.
· An important aspect of Turkish society is the role of the military as the self-appointed defenders of Ataturk’s secularist legacy. Students will investigate the continuing, albeit shrinking, role of the military in Turkish society and consider the merit of authoritarian and secular models vs. Islamic and democratic ones.
· Turkey is currently led by the Islamist AK Party. How they seek to Islamize society while preserving the democratic process and drawing closer to Europe raises important questions about the degree to which this is a product of Turkey’s unique experience of modernization and nation building or whether it is a model that can be held up for other Muslim countries to imitate.
· Law and Education are two of the main fields upon which the secularists and Islamists compete. Increasingly, religious groups are establishing independent religious schools and accusations that the ruling Islamist party is clandestinely adding religious content to school curricula are held up as proof of their religious (and thus unconstitutional) agenda. Similarly, Ataturk abolished the religious courts and fired the religious jurists at the founding of the Republic. Yet Islamic law, or sharia, is for many Muslims the marker of living in a truly Islamic society.
· Women are directly affected and are key participants in the secular vs. religious debate in what is known as the ‘headscarf’ dispute. Should women be allowed to wear what they like, as a cornerstone of personal freedoms, or should religious symbols like the headscarf be banned from government institutions (as they currently are) because pressure will quickly mount for all women to wear the headscarf and some people’s understanding of religion will be imposed on others? Key assumptions about the meaning of personal freedom are inevitably questioned.
· Ethnic and religious minorities are also directly affected by this debate as Ataturk’s secular vision of Turkey left no room for either ethnic or religious minorities. This is changing under the AK party as they have passed laws improving citizens’ rights and have reached out to the Kurds, prioritized development projects in the south east, and allowed greater room for expressions of traditional Islam such as Sufism. Yet difficulties linger, especially for Christians and Muslim minority groups like the Alevis.
Possible Essay Assignments
1. How do power relationships, traditional values, and identity politics meet in the Turkish headscarf debate?
2. What are the connections between political, economic, religious and ethnic marginalization and empowerment?
3. What aspects of Israeli and Palestinian society hinder the peace process?
4. What do you see as being the primary engines of change in Turkish society? Egyptian society? Israeli society? Palestinian society?
5. Which of the following: institutions or individuals, the pursuit of cultural values or political power, has the bigger impact on the societies you have studied?
Thinking Globally about Identity
Students will consider the complexity of cultural identity, their own and others, as they triangulate between national, regional, and global cultural markers.
· Students will develop a greater understanding and appreciation of what makes up Turkish culture. Through comparisons with, and travel to, a few other countries in the region, students will develop more complex categories for understanding culture as they distinguish between national culture and Middle Eastern and Islamic culture.
· Students will consider the difference between Western culture and modern culture by looking at how democracy, personal liberty, equality, and separation of religion and state are promoted and undermined by different actors in the region.
· By studying the historical church and the contemporary Middle Eastern Churches students will confront issues of what it means to be Christian and the ways in which their understanding and expression of Christianity is culturally and historically specific. They will see the ways in which the same faith tradition develops differently in interaction with local culture. They will be asked to consider afresh what it means to be a part of the global body of Christ and what is required of them as members of this body.
· Students will study the geo-political and economic forces that underpin perceived cultural clashes centered in the region, whether they be East vs. West or Islam vs. Judeo-Christianity.
· Students will also study the growing prioritization of personal piety and public religiosity as markers of cultural and national identity. Students will consider the commonalities and differences between Turkey and other countries in the region. While it is often held up as a distinctive of the region, students will be encouraged to compare such developments with the rise of identity politics and culture wars everywhere, and not least in America.
Possible Essay Assignments
1. What are the biggest challenges facing the Middle Eastern church? What role are Western Christians playing in this? What role can or should they play?
2. After studying the past and present of Middle Eastern churches what aspects of Christianity do you find transcend culture and what aspects of Christianity are most susceptible to cultural influence?
3. In what ways are such values as rule of law, liberty, democracy, human rights, and secularism culturally conditioned?
4. After visiting several states in the region, how are terms like East and West, “Islamic society,” “Islamic culture,” and “Islamic politics”, “traditional” and “modern” helpful and harmful?
5. Are you more optimistic of for a ‘dialogue of civilizations’ or fearful of a ‘clash of civilizations’?
Communicating Cross Culturally
Students will study Turkish intensively the first two weeks. We are not dedicating more time to Turkish because even if they studied it all semester they would not be able to have significant conversations in Turkish. Therefore the goal is to provide enough Turkish for greater confidence in basic physical and social navigation. ‘Language partnerships’ rather than courses may continue through the time in Istanbul as a relational as much as linguistic component of the program.
Still every aspect of the semester will involve communicating cross-culturally. Students will participate in weekly service projects while in Istanbul. This is to encourage them to get out into the city and see aspects of society they might otherwise miss. It also communicates that an attitude of service learning is central to any cross-cultural encounter.
Students will meet with a wide range of individuals and groups and be asked to respond sensitively and politely to those with whom they either disagree or don’t understand. The hope is that we can form a partnership with a faculty member at one of the English language universities in Istanbul and have her students and our students do a joint presentation or project. Other assignments will require students to seek the opinions of Istanbulis.
Students will meet Muslims, Christians and Jews and be confronted with the question of the degree to which faith informs culture and culture informs faith. Meeting university students as well as being involved in service projects and learning about development needs, students will confront the degree to which education and class create a common culture that cuts across faith, ethnic and national boundaries. Similarly, they will experience how it may be easier to communicate with a cosmopolitan Muslim for whom faith plays a similar role in her life as in a Westmont student’s life than connecting with a secular American or a provincial Eastern Orthodox Christian.
Possible Essay Assignments
1. Reflect upon service projects and personal encounters: what have you found the most surprising? Rewarding? Troubling?
2. How valuable is ‘culture’ as a category? What can you helpfully say about Turkish, Islamic, Middle Eastern, upper class, lower class, Western and Eastern cultures?
3. What do you see as the biggest challenges to communicating cross-culturally? What are the benefits of overcoming those challenges?
4. How has your understanding of your own cultural identity been informed or changed by this semester?
5. What do you think is essential for you to hold on to in terms of your own cultural identity in order to have something worthwhile to contribute to cross-cultural conversations and what do you feel hinders you from understanding or being understood cross-culturally?