Challenging students to identify and analyze diverse perspectives is a key objective in any Middle East studies course. This article describes an assignment used in a history course which asks students to compare and contrast articles from Middle Eastern online newspapers. Comparing multiple articles on the same topic exposes students to contrasting views on significant issues. The easy availability of online newspapers “de-centers” students’ perspectives by requiring use of materials from outside the United States. This assignment teaches specific analytical skills, such as finding relevant articles, reading them critically, writing effective summaries, and developing synthetic comparisons. Through an analysis of this assignment, this article discusses the advantages, as well as limitations, of this approach, using students’ own evaluations to assess the achievement of desired learning objectives.

We live in an age of history-making. We live in an age of liquid boundaries, malleable categories, moving and movable human subjects. We live in an age of unspeakable horror, illegible events, incomprehensible human actions. We live in an age of unimagined heroics, unthinkable sacrifices, unforeseen human capacities.

We live in an age of uprisings, upended authorities, unbounded rage. We live in an age of speed, motion that seems unnavigable, movement that seems untrackable. We live in age of unprecedented documentation, inconceivable surveillance, uncontrolled intelligence. We live in age of megalith media, lightning communication, urgent immediacy from near and far.

As in Europe, Islamic studies in the U.S. originated in the tradition of Orientalist scholarship and Christian theology, with its strong textual emphasis, but it has gradually expanded to overlap with Middle East area studies as well as a number of humanistic and social science disciplines, especially religious studies. Over the past several decades, and especially since 9/11, scholarly interest in Islamic studies has mushroomed. This interest is visible in the number of doctoral dissertations produced on Islam and Muslims over the past half-century. As a percentage of all dissertations in the Proquest Dissertations and Theses Database, Islamic studies themes grew from less than one percent prior to the late 1970s to three percent in the 1980s and 1990s, to over four percent since 2001 (see Figure l).

The historical study of Muslim-minority communities in regions commonly associated with “the West” is a field in its infancy. It was not until the 1980s that the enormously diverse groups who adhere to Islam in Western Europe, the United States, and Canada came to be categorized primarily by their religion rather than by their varying races, ethnicities, nationalities, class, or status as immigrants or colonials. This new categorization resulted largely from the recognition of a religious resurgence in public life that was punctuated by the Iranian revolution of 1979 and the “Rushdie Affair.” It was also informed by histories of modernity and experiences of European imperialism that pitted a “modern West” against a “Muslim Orient.” Consequently, as Yasemin Soysal (2001: 165) and many others have noted, “at issue” in the study of Western Muslims has been “the compatibility of Islam—its organizational culture and practice—with European categories of democratic participation and citizenship.” Not even the study of African American Muslims escaped this binary opposition between Islamic identity and democratic citizenship; early studies of the rise of Islam among African Americans generally explained the separatist tendencies of African American Muslim nationalist organizations, such as the Moorish Science Temple and the Nation of Islam, in terms of their appropriation of an Islamic identity. Whether writing about immigrant or indigenous Muslims, scholars have been preoccupied with determining whether Muslims pose an anti-democratic, anti-modern threat to Western societies or if they are yet another addition to the religious, cultural, and political diversity of Western nation-states.

There is something seriously flawed about models of social change that posit the dominant role of in-built civilizational motors. While “the rise of the West” makes great ideology, it is poor history. Like Jared Diamond, I believe that we need to situate the fate of nations in a long-term ecohistorical context. Unlike Diamond, I believe that the ways (and the sequences) in which things happened mattered deeply to what came next. The Mediterranean is a particularly useful case in this light. No longer a center of progress after the sixteenth century, the decline of the Mediterranean is usually ascribed to its inherent cultural deficiencies. While the specific cultural infirmity varies with the historian (amoral familism, patron/clientalism, and religion are some of the favorites) its civilizationalist presuppositions are clear. In this respect the search for “what went wrong” typifies national histories across the region and prefigures the fate of the Third World.

Islamophobia was originally developed as a concept in the late 1990s by political activists to draw attention to rhetoric and actions directed at Islam and Muslims in Western liberal democracies. In recent years, Islamophobia has evolved from a primarily political concept toward one increasingly deployed for analytical purposes. Researchers have begun using the term to identify the history, presence, dimensions, intensity, causes, and consequences of anti-Islamic and anti-Muslim sentiments. In short, Islamophobia is an emerging comparative concept in the social sciences. Yet, there is no widely-accepted definition of the term. As a result, it is extremely difficult to compare levels of Islamophobia across time, location, or social group, or to levels of analogous categories like racism, anti-Semitism, or xenophobia.

A useful paradigm for studying Mediterranean and world history is the concept behind a course I teach, “The Mediterranean as a Borderland.” The paradigm of the borderland was generated by policymakers and social scientists studying the American Southwest and developed for the field of history by Oscar Martinez at the University of Arizona. Arizona is in the borderland, the region close to the border between the United States and Mexico where the influence of Mexico can be directly felt. There is of course an equivalent region on the other side in Mexico that is directly influenced by its proximity to the United States. These two regions together comprise the borderland, and they are in many ways more similar to each other than either is to the rest of the nation it belongs to. Unlike the border itself, which divides one country from another, the borderland is the area where the two societies meet and overlap. The Mediterranean Sea is often seen as a border between Christian and Muslim civilizations to the north and south. It can therefore be studied as a borderland, the region where the two overlap. Such a study highlights similarities, influences, and exchanges rather than differences and oppositions; it forms a necessary corrective to today’s emphasis on the “clash of civilizations.” This paper gives a historiography of the borderland paradigm and its application in the Mediterranean, and compares it with the closely related concept of the frontier.

Are Western Muslims integrating? Can Western Muslims integrate? Over the past 20 years, significant attention has been invested in examinations stimulated by the extensive public commentary addressing such questions. This brief review aims to demystify the examination of Western Muslims’ integration in the interest of re-embedding this subject matter in the broader scholarship about immigration and settlement. Within this expanding field of study, Western Muslims can (and should) be examined at the community level, where specific ethno-cultural groups represent but case studies among hundreds of Western Muslim communities that differ in their immigration context, countries of origin, sects, and ethno-cultural backgrounds. Simultaneously, the collection of statistical data should be used to test hypotheses that are developed in studies of such communities. The dialogue between qualitative and quantitative approaches provides research openings to more rigorously push the state of knowledge in this area, and I describe some of these openings below.

An extraordinary letter was discovered in a neglected pile of medieval diplomatic correspondence in the Vatican Libraries: a letter from Al-Murtada the Almohad, Muslim Caliph in Marrakech to Pope Innocent IV (1243–1254). The letter, written in finest official calligraphy, proposes an alliance between the Caliph and the Vicar of Christ, the leader of an institution that had called for organized crusades against the Islamic world. While the history of Pope Innocent IV’s contacts with the Muslim rulers of Marrakech remains obscure, the sources indicate that Pope Innocent IV sent envoys south to Marrakech. One of these envoys was Lope d’Ayn. Lope became Bishop of Marrakech, shepherd of a flock of paid Christian mercenaries who were sent to Marrakech by that sometime leader of the reconquista, Ferdinand III of Castile, in a deal he had struck with the Almohads. Although they now had Christians fighting for them and cathedral bells competing with the call to prayer, the Almohads were powerful agitators of jihad against the Christians only decades before. Scholars know only a little about Lope d’Ayn’s story or the historical context of this letter between Caliph Murtada and the Pope. Although very recent research is encouraging, there is a great deal to know about the history of the mercenaries of Marrakech or the interactions between Jews, Muslims and Christians that occurred in early thirteenth century Marrakech. The neglect of Lope d’Ayn and the contacts between the Papacy and the Almohads is only one example of a much wider neglect of North Africa contacts with Europe in the secondary literature in English. While scholarship in English has focused on correspondence, commerce and travel from West to East, between Europe, the Levant and Egypt, there were also important cultural bridges being crossed between North and South, between North Africa and Europe in the Medieval Western Mediterranean.

In 1493, a Czech nobleman named Jan Hasištejnský z Lobkovic embarked on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem. As nearly all Central European pilgrims did, he traveled south through the Tyrol to Venice and joined a large, multinational group there before setting out across the Mediterranean. He remained nearly a month in Venice, meeting prominent political figures, visiting churches and cloisters, and admiring the realism of the painting and sculpture of the Venetian quattrocento. Among all the other marvels of Venice that he describes in his 1505 travelogue is the memory of his day trip to the island of Murano. “In this little town,” he writes, “there are, I think, close to seventy artisans or more, and all are glass makers.” He describes some of the fine works that he saw there, and eagerly adds, “and there is always a great quantity of these various things completed, so that whoever arrives wants to buy something of it.” In this moment, the fifteenth-century tourist is not that far removed from his counterpart in the twenty-first century.

Suspicion of Muslim minorities in Western countries did not start with the attacks of September 11, 2001. The post 9/ll period, however, amplified existing prejudice. Muslims have come under intense scrutiny on the chance that they might be terrorists and have been targeted by most of the counter-terrorist measures adopted since then. In the United States, the initial objective was to catch foreign radicals, as illustrated by the FBI’s massive investigation called “PENTTBOM” which sought to identify aliens involved in the attacks. Additional measures such as the Absconder Apprehension Initiative (AAl) and the implementation of the National Security Entry-Exit registration System (NSEERS), adopted in 2002, targeted foreign Muslims. The enactment of new statutory provisions designed to identify and apprehend foreign terrorists was soon followed by a catch-all strategy targeting all Muslims living in the US. Furthermore, the broad definition of what constitutes a terrorist threat (as developed by the 2001 PATRIOT Act, the 2005 REAL ID Act, and the 2007 Protect America Act) has allowed US authorities to extend the list of terrorist offenses–leading to increased infringement on civil liberties in the name of security. Governmental discrimination also fueled prejudice against Muslims by providing ajustification for anti-Muslim sentiments. A large section of the public welcomed racial/ethnic profiling and various measures limiting the civil rights and the civil liberties of Muslims as a way to improve homeland security.

Muslim minorities in the West have become the improbable targets and tools of the discourses of some politicians in the search for votes, right-wing newspapers and tabloids seeking enlarged readerships, and Conservative activists advocating for their causes. These discourses have often taken bizarre twists, such as the surprisingly successful attempt during the 2007 Democratic primaries by a right-wing organization to depict (the Christian) candidate Obama as a Muslim who attended a “Madrasa” as a child. While the hoax was soon exposed by CNN, surprisingly many mainstream media outlets (e.g. Fox News) uncritically adopted the story and 12 to 18 percent of the American public continues to believe that President Obama is a Muslim.1 Some other recent curious political events that instrumentalize Muslims include vociferous attacks on elected female politicians who choose to wear a headscarf in Belgium, the use of racist language towards Muslim minorities by European candidates and politicians in several countries, and the framing of Muslims as a danger to welfare in Denmark or gay rights in the Netherlands.

Historians of the Middle East and the Balkans have paid little attention to intercommunal relations in Ottoman cities prior to the onset of nationalism and the spread of communal violence in the nineteenth and early twentieth century. Each national and religious community has, therefore, focused on writing and imagining its own history with very little attention to the larger social milieu, economic and social conditions, and interactions outside confessional boundaries in the pre-modern period. The history of the Jewish community has received more attention from scholars, while that of the Greek and Armenian communities has been largely ignored. The literature on Islamic cities also tends to emphasize the homogenous composition of residential neighborhoods in contrast to the diversity of the market place. I will show that in Istanbul, residential quarters remained mixed in their social and religious make-up until Muslim migration from the Balkans during the nineteenth century enhanced the ratio of Muslims. Moreover, the debate among Ottomanists has focused on the existence or absence of the millet system (autonomous communal organizations) prior to the nineteenth century. Scholars have argued that the millet system was a nineteenth century development and that there was great fluidity and interaction among the minority communities and the Muslim majority in Ottoman cities. In the nineteenth century, Tanzimat reforms also centralized the administration of confessional communities and set legal boundaries between them that used to be more porous. Elsewhere, I have discussed the plural legal system in eighteenth century Istanbul.