Middle East Scholars Find Relevance in the Past : Education: Turkish and Israeli professors give attentive students strong background in the region’s history.

The arrival this summer of Hasan Kayali at UC San Diego and Meir Zamir at San Diego State University could not have been timed better.

The two Middle East scholars are finding that the last six weeks’ events in Kuwait and the Arabian Peninsula have provided a compelling backdrop to their modern history courses on the region.

The Turkish-born Kayali was recruited to the UCSD department of history as its first Middle East specialist, both to design courses in the subject area and to strengthen the university’s research efforts as part of a possible future Middle East studies program. While only 20 undergraduates pre-registered for his initial course (tracing the Middle East from the year 1600 to the present), that was before the Iraq crisis erupted, and Kayali expects more students to show up when classes begin Monday.

“Since this is a very politicized subject, I expect many students will come with preconceptions,” Kayali said. “I want to give them an opportunity to re-examine what they think, to re-evaluate their views, to alert them to the diversity in the Middle East, and to caution them against going with easy generalizations.”

Zamir, an Israeli professor who holds a guest history chair for the 1990-91 year at San Diego State, was forced because of limited classroom size to turn away more than 40 students from his modern Middle East history course, which began late last month.

The 40 students who qualified for the class by registering ahead of time are much more attentive than those he taught in a similar class during a guest professorship in 1988-89, Zamir said.

“I would say that the students are certainly much more attuned to the complexity of the situation, that despite the tendency of American students to be without patience for history, they know today they need serious, not instant, study of the past in order to make sense of the present,” said Zamir, a historian from Ben Gurion University in Beersheba, Israel.

Zamir assigns what he calls “heavy, heavy readings” because he finds most American students have so little background about the Middle East “that most don’t even know the maps.”

Zamir added, “So far I don’t see any ‘Rambo’ attitude among these students,” contrary to media reports and public opinion polls suggesting that Americans favor military action against the Iraqi regime.

Kayali, who comes to his assistant professor post from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, also stressed the importance of learning the historical antecedents of contemporary Middle Eastern politics and culture.

“Students are going to be disappointed if they take the course just as a substitute for reading the papers, as sort of a current events course,” Kayali said, although he will make copies of news articles for students to discuss in the context of historical patterns.

“I’m not offering instant analysis of current events, so I want students to be interested in learning history as a tool to figure out the present.”

But Kayali is confident that studying the sweep of Middle East history over the past 300 years can intrigue students enough that they will go beyond the insights they gain into how to view the present American military role on the Arabian Peninsula.

“There’s the historical claims that Iraq has had on Kuwait, the sectarian divisions in Muslim societies, both in Iraq and elsewhere, the meaning of the Islamic revival, the explanations of terms such as Shiite (Muslims) and Sunni (Muslims), as well as the substance of and historical precedents for Islamic resurgence,” Kayali said.

Kayali, who earned both his undergraduate degree and doctorate from Harvard University, returned to the United States only last week from a summer in Turkey, where among other things he was buying books to augment a budding Middle East collection at the UCSD research library.

“There’s lots of concern in Turkey that the country will be dragged into an active conflict with Iraq,” Kayali said, adding that the gung-ho support by Americans for action in the Middle East--as reflected in public opinion polls--is not necessarily shared in Turkey.

“There’s no support for Saddam Hussein, but there’s fear of a war because we have to live with him or whomever comes next,” Kayali said. His father was sufficiently worried about a possible mobilization of Turkish citizens that he urged his son to return to the United States as early as possible, Kayali said.

Both Kayali and Zamir see their “outsider” status as foreign-born scholars a plus in teaching the present courses.

“The fact that I come from the region, the fact that I am more attuned to the region, I think that makes it helpful,” said Zamir, who also has taught at Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y.

“I’m not teaching the course as it is usually taught in the U.S., with an emphasis on present political systems, but rather I’m looking at internal changes within the region and at its own development. . . . I want to get away from the jargon of international politics and superpower relations--things that Americans like very much.”

Neither Kayali nor Zamir wants to push his own view of the present crisis on students.

Kayali, in demurring on giving his opinion, said that, once his students plow their way through the region’s history, “they’ll have as good an opinion as I do, and that is an aim of the course.”