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Today,
the Middle East and the Islamic world are powerful and
inescapable actors on the international stage. They are
destined to remain so in the foreseeable future.
“Globalization” (the buzz word of the 80s and the 90s)
has failed to generate a homogenization process in the
Middle Eastern and Islamic worlds. Far from having
disappeared under the influence of westernization and
globalization, national, religious, ethnic and cultural
specificities have produced new types of complex
socio-political mutations and compositions. To apprehend
and comprehend these new forms, we need a thoroughgoing
understanding of states, societies, people and their
religion. Individuals, movements and nation states of
the Middle East and the Islamic world are continually
discovering and rediscovering, asserting, defining and
redefining their own identities, in their encounter with
the Western world. This intricate process has placed the
Middle East and the Muslim world in a new, urgent, and
international context.
For learned and serene reflection to emerge and for this
to ensue in appropriate action and policy, the complex
past and the rapidly changing present of the Middle East
and the Islamic world require study and understanding.
The training of knowledgeable, open-minded and critical
intellectuals committed to understanding, assessing,
explaining and engaging with the Middle East and the
Islamic world – this is the objective of AUP’s program.
The goal of this program is to train well-grounded,
well-versed and well-informed international citizens,
capable of understanding, analyzing, and conveying their
first-hand knowledge. The program seeks to cultivate a
community of scholars whose nuanced knowledge and
insights will enable them to rise above stereotypes and
amalgams. The subject of the Middle East and the Islamic
world will be approached and taught from different
political and ideological perspectives by individuals
and scholars of the region as well as by those who study
and assess it from elsewhere. Multiple views and
perspectives on the same subject, offered within a
pluralistic and coherent multi-disciplinary approach,
will actively equip students to create their own
syntheses and evolve their own solutions and
convictions.
Firmly based on a rigorous core of lectures, and
complemented by a variety of specialized
discipline-based seminars, the program offers a unique
educational experience. The program will benefit from
the contribution of leading scholars of the Middle East
and the Muslim world as well as from international
experts in the field. The strength of this program
resides in its two-tier objective: imparting,
interpreting and contextualizing facts; drawing on those
facts to reflect on the challenges facing the Middle
East and the Islamic world, as well as on the challenges
which these present to the rest of the world. |
