Middle East and Islamic Studies – (M.A.)

Today, the Middle East and the Islamic world are powerful and inescapable actors on the international stage. They are destined to remain so in the foreseeable future. "Globalization" (the buzz word of the 80s and the 90s) has failed to generate a homogenization process in the Middle Eastern and Islamic worlds. Far from having disappeared under the influence of westernization and globalization, national, religious, ethnic and cultural specificities have produced new types of complex socio-political mutations and compositions. To apprehend and comprehend these new forms, we need a thoroughgoing understanding of states, societies, people and their religion. Individuals, movements and nation states of the Middle East and the Islamic world are continually discovering and rediscovering, asserting, defining and redefining their own identities, in their encounter with the Western world. This intricate process has placed the Middle East and the Muslim world in a new, urgent, and international context.

For learned and serene reflection to emerge and for this to ensue in appropriate action and policy, the complex past and the rapidly changing present of the Middle East and the Islamic world require study and understanding. The training of knowledgeable, open-minded and critical intellectuals committed to understanding, assessing, explaining and engaging with the Middle East and the Islamic world - this is the objective of AUP´s program.

The goal of this program is to train well-grounded, well-versed and well-informed international citizens, capable of understanding, analyzing, and conveying their first-hand knowledge. The program seeks to cultivate a community of scholars whose nuanced knowledge and insights will enable them to rise above stereotypes and amalgams. The subject of the Middle East and the Islamic world will be approached and taught from different political and ideological perspectives by individuals and scholars of the region as well as by those who study and assess it from elsewhere. Multiple views and perspectives on the same subject, offered within a pluralistic and coherent multi-disciplinary approach, will actively equip students to create their own syntheses and evolve their own solutions and convictions.

Firmly based on a rigorous core of lectures, and complemented by a variety of specialized discipline-based seminars, the program offers a unique educational experience. The program will benefit from the contribution of leading scholars of the Middle East and the Muslim world as well as from international experts in the field. The strength of this program resides in its two-tier objective: imparting, interpreting and contextualizing facts; drawing on those facts to reflect on the challenges facing the Middle East and the Islamic world, as well as on the challenges which these present to the rest of the world.