The Program in South Asian and Middle Eastern Studies (PSAMES) has just become a National Resource Center for the study and teaching of the Middle East, with a Title VI grant from the Department of Education. PSAMES promotes research and teaching on two regions that, together, comprise one-fifth of humanity and are home to five of the world’s major religions and its earliest civilizations. The program regularly organizes lectures, cultural events, symposia, and conferences concerning current events, political cultures and societies of the Middle East and South Asia, and research on Muslim communities worldwide. PSAMES faculty members have led summer abroad programs in Egypt and India in recent years and the program supports the graduate level study of Middle Eastern languages with Foreign Language and Area Studies (FLAS) fellowships. PSAMES is committed to fostering outreach activities for K-12 and the community. For more information, please contact the center at psames@illinois.edu or visit our website.

Web Resources

On South Asia:
SARAI: South Asia Resource Access on the Net
A comprehensive listing of reference sources, scholars and institutions, and sources by theme

On the Middle East:
Access Islam: A Window into Islamic Holidays, Traditions and Cultures for Students in Grades 4-8
A project of Thirteen/WNET, supported by Title VI funds, this Web site offers video streaming and ever-expanding resources for K-12 teachers to use in the classroom.

Outreach World: A Resource for Teaching Kids about the World
This often-cited Web site includes much curricular information, news, and further resources about the Middle East, and has been partly developed by faculty at Middle East National Resource Centers around the country.

Books

One of the best ways to introduce a region and a culture is through fiction, while recognizing that to teach fiction always entails raising interesting questions about how lived experience and representation intersect. Below is a list of Arabic fiction in translation that might serve well in a high school classroom. This (very incomplete!) list was compiled by Marilyn Booth (Director, PSAMES, and Associate Professor of Comparative and World Literature). She welcomes comments or questions at mbooth@illinois.edu

Works by Nawal El Saadawi, which are numerous and available, are not listed below.

Leila Abouzeid, Year of the Elephant (Morocco)
Etel Adnan, Sitt Marie Rose (Lebanon—French; on the Lebanese civil war)
Radwa Ashour, Grenada (Egypt; historical novel on Muslim Spain at the time of the Inquisition)
Liana Badr, The Eye of the Mirror (Palestine)
My Grandmother’s Cactus: Stories by Egyptian Women (Marilyn Booth, ed. and trans.)
Ulfat Idilbi, Sabriya: Damascus Bittersweet (Syria)
Ulfat Idilbi, Grandfather’s Tale
Sahar Khalifeh, Wild Thorns (Palestine)
Out al-Kouloub, Ramza (Egypt—early 20th century woman’s life)
Alia Mamdouh, Mothballs (Iraq)
Emily Nasrallah, A House Not Her Own (Lebanon)
Emily Nasrallah, September Birds
Ibtihal Salem, Children of the Waters (Egypt, short stories)
Miral al-Tahawy, The Tent (Egypt)
Latifa al-Zayyat, The Open Door (Egypt—1960s feminist classic about a middle-class girl growing up and her country growing toward independence)
Ibrahim Abdel Maguid, The Other Place (Egypt—about migrant workers in Libya)
Hamdi Abu-Golayyel, Thieves in Retirement (Egypt)
Idris Ali, Dongola: A Novel of Nubia (Egypt/Nubian population)
Abbas al-Aswani, The Yacoubian Building (Egypt—daily lives of inhabitants of a building)
Naguib Mahfouz, Midaq Alley (Egypt)
Naguib Mahfouz, The Cairo Trilogy (Palace Walk, Palace of Desire, Sugar Street): celebrated (but long!) fictional panorama of urban Egyptian society from before World War I to mid-century; also very rich in considering family relations and gender relations of that time and place.
Naguib Mahfouz, The Thief and the Dogs
Naguib Mahfouz, Autumn Quail
Hanna Mina, Fragments of Memory: A Story of a Syrian Family (Syria)
Hassan Nasr, Return to Dar al-Basha (Tunisia)
Yusuf al-Qaid, War in the Land of Egypt (Egypt—fictionalization of the era of the 1973 October war, focusing on issues of class exploitation)
Muhsin al-Ramli, Scattered Crumbs (Iraq)
Tayeb Salih, Season of Migration to the North (Sudan)
Tayeb Salih, The Wedding of Zein and Other Stories