College of Arts & Humanities

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The collections in this community comprise faculty research works, as well as graduate theses and dissertations.

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Subject: search.filters.subject.History, Middle Eastern

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    "Their object is to strengthen the Moslem and repress the Christian": Henry Jessup and the Presbyterian Mission to Syria under Abdul Hamid II
    (2008-08-19) Hays, Evan Lattea Rogers; Wien, Peter; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    Henry Jessup and the American Presbyterian Mission to Syria faced a new challenge in 1885 when the Ottoman authorities closed various American schools there. Jessup, the Secretary of the American mission, responded with a rhetorical campaign against the Ottoman impositions that portrayed the policies of Abdul Hamid II's administration as new, pro-Muslim, anti-Christian, and designed to replace American missionary institutions in Syria with Muslim institutions backed by Ottoman force. While some of Jessup's writing while in Syria from 1856 to 1910 was polemical, his writing surrounding the school controversy in the 1880s rather reflected the historical context of local and foreign educational competition in Syria that now included Ottoman initiatives against foreign institutions who presented a threat to Ottoman-Islamic imperial discipline. This thesis seeks to contextualize Jessup's writing to portray 1885 as a watershed in the history of a mission whose evangelistic efforts were then successfully limited by Ottoman reforms.
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    Of Saints and Sharifian Kings in Morocco: Three Examples of the Politics of Reimagining History Through Reinventing King/Saint Relationship
    (2005-05-27) Ghoulaichi, Fatima; Wang, Orrin; Comparative Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    The relationship between sainthood and the sharifian monarchy in Morocco has attracted much attention from researchers within the area of Moroccan studies. The analysis of this relationship can offer invaluable insights into the dynamics of Moroccan history because the king and the saint are widely regarded as the two most salient actors in this history. Yet, the study of the relationship between these two figures has suffered a tendency towards downplaying its historically dynamic nature, and essentializing the cultural constructs upon which it is predicated. In this thesis, I offer a revisionary reading of king/saint relationship through analyzing three examples from the 'Alawite dynasty. I argue that this relationship has been highly dynamic, and has capitalized on baraka and sharifism as versatile cultural constructs. More significantly, the dynamics of king/saint relationship in Moroccan culture allows the strategic reinvention of history in order to meet the demands of changing historical contexts.