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What's So Bad about Polygamy? Teaching American Religious History in the Muslim Middle East
Patrick Q. Mason
| From 2007 to 2009, I taught at the American University in Cairo (AUC), a private university with a mostly Arab and Muslim undergraduate population. The university features an American liberal arts–style curriculum and all instruction is conducted in English. The nearly five thousand full-time undergraduates come primarily from Egypt (over 80 percent), with others hailing from around the Arab world (primarily Jordan, Palestine, and the Arabian Peninsula) and a few from sub-Saharan Africa, the United States, western Europe, and elsewhere. AUC is prestigious and expensive, particularly in the context of a nation with overwhelming poverty, and thus attracts students mostly from Egypt's elite political, military, and business classes. Given the similar national and socioeconomic background of most AUC attendees, however, the student body is remarkably diverse in terms of ideological orientation and religious commitment, ranging from the (more or less) secular Left to affiliation with the Muslim Brotherhood. This is reflected in the dress on campus, where you will find, on the one hand, many students sporting the latest Western fashions, and, on the other hand, many male students with untrimmed beards (usually indicating a conservative or traditional religious orientation) and female students wearing modest dresses and the hijab (veil). A significant number of students seem to bridge both worlds, or to be caught in between, such as women who simultaneously wear tight designer clothing and the hijab. All of the students are fully modern, with the latest cellular telephones and iPods, though most have a conflicted relationship with the West (and especially with the United States). Typically, they embrace America's consumer products and technology but express reservations with (and sometimes strong opposition to) its political and economic policies, particularly as they impact the Middle East. |
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As the lone historian of the United States on the faculty at AUC, I taught the usual U.S. history survey courses and any electives I chose. In teaching electives and preparing my survey courses, I gravitated toward my own research interests, which include American religious history. Happily, my interests and those of many of the students at AUC—most of whom had never before taken a U.S. history course—seemed to coincide. Here, I will share a few of my experiences teaching American religious history to my mostly Muslim students in the Middle East. Teaching U.S. history in such a unique setting forced me to reflect on the comparative and global aspects of the field. I learned, even more profoundly than I had in an American classroom, how diverse national, cultural, and religious backgrounds condition the perspective of students as they approach the historical and historiographical issues that we, as teachers, present to them. This provides a powerful lesson about how history, though deeply concerned with fidelity to facts and sources, is ultimately an interpretive experience rooted more in our own individual and group subjectivities than many students might expect.1 I also witnessed part of the value of studying other times, places, and cultures—how pulling students out of their own cultural context, particularly by using interactive or immersive techniques—provided them with distance and a kind of intellectual safe place from which they could critically reflect on issues that are relevant to their own experiences. At its best, a global or comparative approach to history gives teachers and students a deeper appreciation of both the universalities and particularities of not only history but also contemporary humanity. |
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