“Prejudice is an antipathy based on faulty and inflexible generalization. It may be felt or expressed. It may be directed toward a group or an individual of that group.” So the social psychologist Gordon Allport defined prejudice in a 1954 book on the subject. My focus today is on a specific sort of prejudice and discrimination, that against Muslims. Prejudice is generally recognized as similar in meaning to bias, and as having to do with attitudes and beliefs. Discrimination is the practical disadvantaging of the member of a class of persons, not for his or her personal actions but for those associated with his or her group by the majority in society.

Discussing the banning of Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses in some Islamic countries, Vijay Mishra and Bob Hodge argue:

Apparently, the consequences triggered by the publication of Rushdie’s novel, in the preceding century, raised many significant questions about the relationship between East and West, colonized and colonizer. Nevertheless, the hostility toward the book in some Middle Eastern and Islamic countries is not related to the issue of language, identified by Mishra and Hodge as “the language of the empire.” The use of colonial languages rarely represents a threat to Islamic culture because unlike the literature of ex-colonies in Asia, Africa, South America, the West Indies and the Caribbean, dominantly written in the language of the western colonizers, literature in a large part of the Arab-Islamic world is composed in indigenous languages. It is important to point out therefore that the issue of language, raised above, is irrelevant because the campaign against Satanic Verses is rooted in the radical constructs of religious hegemony integral to contemporary political Islamic doctrines.

Since the middle of the twentieth century there have been three waves of historiography on the late Ottoman world. Each rose to prominence in a different global setting, functioned as a broad intellectual orientation, and was replaced by another somewhat less hegemonic theoretical current after about two decades. The key differences between the three episodes are evident in terms of their thematic priorities, analytical frameworks, and the research designs and methodological choices of scholars. These three waves of Ottoman history writing can be classified as modernization approaches, macro models, and post-structural agendas.

While I was editing this interview with Orhan Pamuk in the Spring 2007, the media exploded with him: “Pamuk Wins the Nobel Prize!” It was not surprising, because for sometime now Orhan Pamuk has been known the world over as the “super hero” of Turkish literature. In Turkey, once again, the media turned its gaze away from Iraq, EU, unemployment, and questions of accountability in government, to contemplate why, how and what Pamuk had won, and the question of who is Orhan Pamuk? As the intensity of the debate increased, I began to wonder if Orhan Pamuk himself would be following it as if it was about somebody else. It certainly did not sound like the dissonance could be about one person, as the public contemplated him, unfolding multiple layers of his political convictions, his nationalism, his character, family, marriage, and private life. As the attention to his work disappeared, he was processed and reproduced by the media, with an effort that surpassed the media frenzy regarding his trial for his statements on genocide. Pamuk the author was replaced by Pamuk the image on the pages of tabloids. A year ago, when I asked if she had read Orhan Pamuk, a young woman in Istanbul had inquired, “Is he somebody?” Oh! Yes!, he is somebody, actually he has become more than that.

In teaching Middle East Politics (MEP) courses, instructors speak of many challenges, particularly students' typical uninformed and misleading preconceived notions about the region. Based on extensive experience in teaching MEP classes, my observations suggest that using Information Fluency (IF) principles, along with the application of internet technology, significantly improves course effectiveness for both students and faculty. The following essay is based on a study of the results of teaching MEP using an IF-inspired assignment in both the face-to-face and on-line course formats. To enhance the classroom environment, I use WebCT technology to deliver, supplement, and assess my MEP classes. Along with this discussion, I have appended relevant information from the syllabus for my course, CPO 3403 Politics of the Middle East. The complete syllabus can be accessed from my website: http://www.cas.ucf.edu/politicalscience/main.php?URL=sadri.

Translator’s note: The Written Heritage Research and Publication Center (WHRPC) was established in January 1995 under the auspices of the Office of the Deputy Minister for Cultural Activities at the Ministry of Islamic Culture and Guidance in Iran. It was given the task of researching and publishing important texts of Iranian and Islamic civilizations. The Center concentrates on the editing of texts that have not yet been published, those whose existing editions may be improved by more attentive editorial efforts, and Persian and Arabic works for which better manuscripts have been discovered since the preparation of their original editions. The center’s areas of concentration are: Persian and Arabic literatures, History, Geography, Islamic Sciences, and the Tranoxianian Heritage. Since 2004 this center has increased its cooperation with international organizations that share its goals and interests. More about this institution may be found at its website at: http://www.mirasmaktoob.ir. What follows is a brief description of the activities of the WHRPC in the fields of textual studies and codicology, as presented by Dr. Akbar Irani, the director of WHRPC, in a lecture that he delivered in August of 2007 in the third conference of the Society of Islamic Manuscripts in Cambridge, England. I have taken few liberties with the text in order to transform the narrative from a talk to a report.

The Kurdish nationalist tradition is surely not very old. The earliest origins of Kurdish nationalism coincide with the beginning of modernity in Kurdistan, which emerged with the secular humanism of the ‘Western Enlightenment,’ ushering in a gradual decline of traditional Islamic identity. The nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries in Kurdish history were a period for the incubation and growth of nationalism in Kurdistan. The famous temporary conquest of Iranian Kurdistan by Sheikh ‘Ubaydullah Nehrî (d. 1883), son of Sheikh Sayyid Taha, is the most important event in the history of early Kurdish nationalism. What I want to present here is in no way a complete investigation of the revolt of ‘Ubaydullah and his nationalist efforts. This is no more than an introduction to some newly-found Persian documents from the Institute of Persian National Records (IPNR) in Tehran, a schema of basic subjects surrounding the rebellion of ‘Ubaydullah and the Kurdish tribes as reflected in Persian diplomatic reports. Here I can only list the documents without entering into much detail. This collection has attracted little attention yet, but is well worth intensive investigation.

The Middle East is deconstructing—that is, the concept of a coherent geographic entity with the label “Middle East.” A Thematic Conversation on this subject began at the 2005 MESA Annual Meeting in Washington, D.C., and will conclude at the 2007 meeting in Montréal. These discussions grow out of efforts in the 1990s to rethink area studies globally, spurred by programs at the Ford Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, and the Social Science Research Council, among others. A variety of scholars have taken up these issues with regard to the Middle East specifically over the past decade, including the Carolina Center for the Study of the Middle East and Muslim Civilizations at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, which organized this Thematic Conversation.