Prior to attending an institution of higher education undergraduate students, particularly those enrolled in community colleges, have little experience with or knowledge of primary documents, those materials created by another people and/or at another time which reveal their culture’s or civilization’s values, ideas, mores, interests, fears, and ambitions, as well as their past whether historically accurate or rewritten for another purpose.  Archaeological evidence, inscriptions, written and orally transmitted documents and other materials, are the foundation stones on which a solid historical understanding of these people must be constructed.  Undergraduates can become lost in a history course due to many things.  First, this may be the first time they are required to thinking historically or analytically about the material presented to them and they may have trouble learning how to formulate their own ideas.  They must learn how to interpret the information they have read, seen, and heard in a manner that supports their own contentions without doing harm to the evidence.  Second, they often have little familiarity with the subject matter and increasingly little previous knowledge of other cultures.  This is particularly true of American college students as they move further away from the history of their own country, which they are supposed to have studied in First Grade, and from the related area of Western European history with which we can still hope they have some nodding acquaintance. 

Islamic history and Middle Eastern history presents students and their teachers with several challenges.  For most, it is a brand new area of inquiry.  They may have heard of current problem or issues taking place in that region of the world on the evening news, but have no concept of the historical background of these matters or basic facts, such as what is the difference between Sunni and Shi’ite Muslims, what influence Islam has had as it became the dominate religion in the region, etc.  They tend to be unfamiliar with the geography of that part of the globe, and the language skills required to more easily access the historical resources are scarce in this cohort of students, and quite honestly, amongst most of their teachers, this author included.

I applied to this NEH institute in order to gain some of that knowledge and to be able to put together a basic but solid Middle Eastern history course for my College.  While I have learned a great deal more about Islam than what I knew previously (basically the 5 Pillars, the Hijra, etc.) to me the most exciting part of the last 5 weeks has been getting a bit more familiar with the primary sources and secondary literature and some of the current areas of debate and investigation presented therein.   With this newly acquired but still admitted narrow experience of Islamic studies what I most would like to do at the moment is to put together a series of primary source readings that the students could work on either individually or in a collaborative learning environment.[1]  The purpose of such a collection and associated exercises would be threefold:  1) get the students excited about the topic by giving them the opportunity to read for themselves the words and ideas of the people they would be studying; 2) while assigning research papers has its place and purpose, I am more interested in this exercise in giving/forcing them to “think” about what it is they have read in a textbook and heard in class, and then to have to pull it together or interpret it in a format that encourages analytical and historical thinking; and 3)  to give them another exercise that will continue to help them improve their writing and verbal communication skills.

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