HIS21170 The Making of the Middle East

Academic Year 2022/2023

The region known as the Middle East is almost synonymous, in the eyes of its foreign observers, with the idea of
violence. From Napoleon’s short-lived occupation of Egypt to the Iranian Revolution of 1979 to
9/11, Euro-American imaginaries were saturated with fantasies and fears of Muslim violence.
Islam, the dominant religion of the people of the Middle East, has been regarded as a particularly
or uniquely bellicose. Words like jihad and caliph struck terror in the minds of colonial officials
and thinktank pundits who shaped entire policies around the idea of containing what they
believed to be divinely-inspired violence. For the powers that were and still be, political
movements and revolutions in the Middle East were evidence of an innate fanaticism—a failure
of modernity itself to tame the passions and the furies of the peoples it left behind. In this
lecture and module we examine a number of myths around the relationship between religion and
violence in the Modern Middle East. In this module, we critically interrogate the most central
cornerstones—sectarianism, artificial borders, for example—of the myth of ‘Muslim rage’ and
come to understand how such ideas have shaped imperial and neo-imperial policy in the region
from the nineteenth century to the present.