The Middle East has been treated as exceptional in much of the scholarly literature. It was entirely absent from comparative studies of political transitions until the late 1990s, and even in the early 2000s some of the literature on resilient authoritarianism reproduced a narrative of a region seemingly immune to normal (that is, happening elsewhere) forces of political change. Following this trend, the politics and history of the region are routinely taught in region-specific courses, but they are far less frequently integrated into thematic courses except when the teacher is an area specialist. Unfortunately, the absence of Middle East cases from many broader courses reinforces popular conceptions of regional exceptionalism and deprives possibilities for comparative theorizing. Even worse, our years of teaching undergraduates have taught us that images of harems, pyramids, and desert warriors wielding sabers on camelback still shape many Americans' perceptions of the region. Obviously our classrooms challenge these images, but demand for specialized courses consistently exceeds capacity at a time when sensational images from the region saturate the news media. For those students who do not take or cannot gain a seat in those courses, images of harems, camels, and violence are likely to endure. Worse, the analytical implications of one-dimensional portrayals in political science have been grave, notably when the preoccupation with “culture” as a singular explanatory variable prejudices against exploring other influences on political practices and institutions.