The primary purpose of my having created this bibliography is to offer teachers and librarians a reliable resource for literature about the Middle East and Arab World. My hope is that anyone using this resource will come to realize the diversity that exists in this part of the world. My bibliography is by no means definitive and will expand over time, but it is a start. I have included a selection of titles for teachers hoping they will take advantage of this section to expand their own understanding of Middle Eastern, Arab and Muslim cultures.

We live in a globalized world and the need for better understanding of other cultures is critical if we are to ever have an impact on the United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goals. Sharing a planet means understanding, collaboration, cooperation, and implementation of goals that will help prevent conflict and further destruction of earth’s environment and sustain a healthy planet for future generations.

​The cultures of the Middle East and the Arab World are some of the least understood cultures in the western world. Currently there is only one narrative circulating in the public sphere about these cultures and that narrative is primarily a negative one. Perhaps some of these stories will lead to a better understanding, to a more positive narrative about cultures I experienced while living in the Middle East. 

On February 2nd, the day after President Mubarak announced he would not run for re-election, we began talking about Egyptian history. Rather arbitrarily we started with Napoleon and Mehmet Ali, two very influential 19th-century military men, neither of whom were Egyptians. They helped us learn about the importance of Egypt’s position in the Mediterranean/Asian/African worlds, about its agricultural abundance, about its unique population distribution and about its long history of military rulers. It was especially interesting to compare Mehmet Ali’s dreams of reform and resurgence with the aspirations of the young people who were interviewed by Richard Engel (NBC) and Nicholas Kristoff (New York Times).

We continued our trek through Egyptian history, learning next about Ismail, the Suez Canal, and the coming of British colonialism. The authentic voice of the Egyptian people is first heard loud and clear in the 1919 Revolution led by Saad Zaghul and the Wafd. That voice becomes a lot less clear during the interwar period as King and Wafd and British play three-corner catch (or even “keep-away”) with the Egyptian political system. The arrival of Nasser on the Egyptian—and world—stage is a momentous turning point. For the first time Egypt has an authentically Egyptian president. For the first time it is truly independent of colonial interference. Or is it? The Cold War ensnares Egypt despite Nasser’s ambition to find a Third Way, and futile wars with Israel drain precious resources and high hopes.

Following defeat in 1967 and (political) victory in 1973, Nasser’s successor, Anwar Sadat, strikes a peace deal with Israel at Camp David. Religious hard-liners who are furious at this bargain assassinate Sadat, setting the stage for the long twilight of the Mubarak years. That was the trajectory of our history study over four weeks. Part of one week was devoted to reading Naguib Mahfouz short stories and discussing the environmental challenges to the Nile basin. The twin goals were to make the history as complete as possible (given the time available and the reading level of my students) and to raise significant questions about Egyptian politics and society that would help us understand what we were seeing live on Al Jazeera English every night from the center of Cairo.

I tried to direct the students to the essential questions with daily homework assignments using Google docs. This is a new wrinkle, something I had never tried before, which was quite successful. I created an assignment sheet with readings (mostly from Goldschmidt) and one or two leading questions. I shared this assignment sheet with each student and asked them to copy it into a Google doc of their own. As they answered the reading questions every night they created one easily retrievable study guide. And, since they shared the document (and editing rights) with me, it also meant that I could easily check their answers and add my comments using the “Insert/Comment” feature.

This homework “in the cloud” provided an immediate access point to the lesson when I put the answers of one or two students up on the screen for us all to read together. This not only shifted some of the teaching to the students themselves, it also encouraged laggards to have their homework complete by the beginning of class. One of the concluding assessments for this unit was to take one of these essential questions as the prompt for a short analytical essay.

An additional assignment was to create a poster pulling together key events in Egyptian history under specific topics, Egypt and Islam, Egypt and democracy, Egypt and the Arab world, etc. Poster making was certainly a throwback activity for such a tech savvy class, rather like a GPS in a ’57 Chevy, but it was something students were familiar with and they took to it with a will. For two days the room was abuzz with paste and scissors and sharpies and little pictures of Nasser. One of the most valuable parts of these posters (which now line the walls of our classroom) I owe to a colleague. She suggested that each poster, just like a good essay, should have a thesis statement. The creation and wording of these statements forced serious thinking by the team members and was a big topic of conversation when they explained their posters to the class.

On the afternoon of March 2, the last day of our Egypt unit, I went up to Columbia University for a special program on the Egyptian revolt. There was a standing room only crowd for the panel of academic notables. Earlier in the day there had been a rumor that Mubarak was going to step down. Suddenly a whisper went down the line, “He’s not leaving!” The old man was not yet ready to leave the stage. Our panel had one more imponderable to ponder. But not for long. The next day as I passed back student essays we watched a clip of ecstatic crowds in the center of Cairo. They were celebrating the end of the Mubarak era and, hopefully, the beginning of a new democratic chapter in Egyptian history. It was a momentous month for Egypt and a remarkable learning experience for some 10th grade history students.

List of sources/resources for classroom use:

• Al Jazeera timeline for February 2011: http://english.aljazeera.net/news/middleeast/2011/01/201112515334871490.html
• Arthur Goldschmidt Jr. and Lawrence Davidson.  A Concise History of the Middle East, 9th Edition. Westview Press, Boulder: 2010.
• William Cleveland. A History of the Modern Middle East, 2nd Edition. Westview Press, Boulder: 2010.
• Michael Klare. Resource Wars. Henry Holt & Co, New York: 2001.
• Naguib Mahfouz in Land of Enchantment, edited by Bernard Lewis and Stanley Burstein, Markus Weiner, 2001.

The newest of the three lessons, Protests, Revolutions, and Democratic Change, helps students consider the potential effects of the protests on democracy and stability in the Middle East and North Africa.  A second unit, After Mubarak: A New Middle East, helps students consider the implications of a leadership change in Egypt on the prospects for democracy throughout the Middle East and North Africa.  The initial unit, Egypt’s Uprising, provides students with fundamental information about the causes of the uprising, the role of new media, and the U.S response.

Part of the CHOICES Program’s Teaching with the News initiative, these three lessons provide online curriculum materials, video interviews with scholars and policy experts, and ideas to connect the content of the classroom to the headlines in the news.  The resources provided encourage context-based discussion of the popular uprisings and democracy movements in the Middle East and North Africa, raising the following questions and more:

• What do the different protests have in common? What makes each of them unique?
• Do students feel that the examples of Egypt and Tunisia have inspired protesters in other parts of the region?
• What factors have contributed to the success of different protests?
• Why have some governments reacted more violently to the protests than others?
• How could these protests change the lives of everyday people in the region?
• In which countries has the U.S. historically supported authoritarian regimes?
• Has the U.S. response to the protests been consistent, or has it varied from country to country?
• Do the protests present students with a new image of the Middle East?
• Why should people in the United States care about people struggling for democracy halfway around the world?
• What role do students feel they can play in these events?
• Many of those organizing these protests are young people. Do students feel any connection between what’s happening in the Middle East and their own lives?
• Do they feel that there are problems in their own country, state, or community worth protesting over?
• By supporting democracy, does the United States run the risk of harming its own security and economic interests?
• Is there a conflict between the United States’ economic and security interests and its desire to support democracy? Does there have to be?
• What effect might the protests have on human rights in the region? In the short term? In the long term?
• How might democratic change in the Middle East and North Africa impact the conflict between Israelis and  Palestinians?

The following news outlets are helpful in keeping up to date with what is happening in the Middle East and North Africa.

Al Jazeera: Region in Turmoil
http://english.aljazeera.net/indepth/spotlight/2011/02/2011222121213770475.html
Provides an interactive map with summaries of recent demonstrations, as well as in-depth reporting on several countries.

The New York Times: Middle East Protests (2010-2011)
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/world/middleeast/middle-east-hub.html
Provides a summary of the latest major events in the countries experiencing protests, a compilation of related articles, and a range of multimedia resources.


BBC: Mid-East and Arab Unrest
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-12480844
Provides up-to-date reporting on events in the region, including photos and maps.


The Guardian
Arab and Middle East Revolt—An Interactive Map
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/interactive/2011/feb/17/arab-world-protests-bahrain-map
A country-by-country guide to protests in the region.

The Washington Post:  Middle East in Turmoil
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/special/world/middle-east-protests/
Provides a timewww.choices.eduline of major events and additional coverage on the protests. Organized by country.

Al Masry Al Youm
www.almasryalyoum.com/en
An English language edition of an independent Egyptian newspaper and media outlet. Includes videos.

This feature was excerpted from materials compiled by the CHOICES program at Brown University (www.choices.edu).

Whatever the future holds for Tunisia, the Jasmine Revolution will go down in history as the first blossom of the Arab Spring – a series of revolutionary uprisings that spread from tiny Tunisia, to giant Egypt and far beyond. ​

In Tunisia the Jasmine Revolution (so dubbed by the Western press) is known as the Sidi Bouzid Revolt, named after the hometown of Mohamed Bouazizi, the street vendor who immolated himself to protest his thwarted dreams of making even a meager living in Tunisia. Today the news media are focused on the bigger stories of Egypt, Libya and Syria, making if difficult to get updated information about Tunisia, “the little engine that could.”  But Tunisia is still far from completing its revolution, and what happens down the line will determine whether historians will call the Jasmine Revolution a true revolution or not.

Having spent two weeks in Tunisia in the summer of 2010 on a GEEO educator’s tour of Tunisia, I was surprised that this seemingly calm country erupted in a massive protest movement just months after we left.  What had our group missed about what we experienced there?  In our perplexity we were apparently not alone; most news commentators were also surprised.  Yet in retrospect, the signs that Tunisia could harbor a revolutionary movement were there.

European thinkers laid the theoretical framework for studying revolutions primarily in response to the French Revolution.  It was Alexis de Tocqueville who first observed that people exhibited the most revolutionary fervor in regions of France where the quality of life was rising--not falling, as might be expected. Regarding the Jasmine Revolution, Fatma Bouvet de la Maisonneuve commented, “It’s no coincidence that the revolution first started in Tunisia, where we have a high level of education, a sizeable middle class and a greater degree of gender equality” (New York Times of February 22, 2011).  Thus it was Tunisians--primed for a better life, but thwarted by their lack of political rights and economic prospects, and aware of their “relative deprivation” vis-à-vis the Europeans who flock to Tunisia’s beautiful Mediterranean coastline--who spearheaded the Arab spring.

​The following lesson plan takes the definition of revolution as its starting point, and then asks the question:  When can we decide whether or not the Sidi Bouzid revolt led to a successful revolution? By engaging students in ongoing assessments of unfolding events, they must not only “stay tuned” to what happens, but also make critical judgments about their meaning.