ASCM V2008

CIC- midterm, final. Both were 8 quote ID's (interpreting them, not figuring out who they were said by) and a choice of 2 essays from 5 prompts. IIC- midterm, final. 20 MC- from the readings, pretty doable, and some essays.

Weekly readings, which are long, dense, and abstract (think 100 pages of some academic journal on premodern sexualities). A 2-page essay is required for each and is graded. Prepare to learn how to bullshit. These are 40% of your grade, which is nice because it decreases the weight of the exams, but they're still a LOT of work, and usually took me between 6 and 8 hours to do.

I took the full year course of Saliba's sequence to fulfill my Global Core requirement. The classes are pretty similar, but I slightly preferred Contemporary Islamic Civilization (taught in the spring) because it had more interesting readings overall. Both classes are the same- boring lectures, interesting readings, and good TA's. Attendance is required but you can always have a friend sign you in if you guys make a schedule. That said, I always attended lecture because Saliba will basically give you a summary of the readings that are extremely useful for the tests. Essentially, show up and write down what is on the slideshow before going back to your reddit/facebook/whatever to ensure you don't fall asleep Saliba himself is adorable. Basically a silly Mr. Feeney that likes to do things like play Shakira when he is bored. The readings are way more interesting than lecture. They're a little biased but I still learned a ton! They're not super long for the most part. In CIC there were one or two novels we had to read (Mahmouz and a Said work) that were fascinating, take the time to read them! The exams are really straightforward. So long as you go over slide notes and the readings and interpret them in the same way Saliba did,expect to perform well. Overall, a good global core with a boring lecture, good TA's, and interesting readings that isn't too hard.

Prof. Keegan started this class by telling us that he didn't like the course title and wasn't planning on following the description. I was hoping to gain a knowledge of contemporary issues and politics within the Islamic world, as well as to learn about a few Islamic schools of thought, but that is not what this course is about at all with Prof. Keegan. Rather, he takes you on an incredibly abstract tour of how modernity is constructed in Islamic civilization, which involves learning about different Islamic schools of thought and conceptions of power, or at least the theories behind them. Very little is actually learned for fear of "making normative claims", such as when we discussed the sociopolitical conceptions of Sufism, but never actually learned what Sufism is, or when we talked about what attitudes towards sexuality weren't, but never discussed what they were. I do not think I gained much from taking this course, and don't really think I learned much concrete. However, I do know that when I disagree with somebody now, I can yell at them for making normative claims and being problematic, two of Professor Keegan's favorite sayings. Prof. Keegan is very strict, and will yell at you for being on your laptop in class. He takes attendance at the beginning of every lecture and yells at you if you are late and miss it. Attendance is also required for discussion sections. I woul…

Dabashi shows off his knowledge as often as he can. At first it is engaging but it gets tiresome very quickly, especially since he spirals into long soliloquys about irrelevant topics to the class. Coming into the course, I was really looking forward to getting some basic, knowledge of Islamic civilization since i had very little coming in. I don't feel like I got that knowledge here. he's a very poor instructor and pretty much assumes you will get something out of what he's talking about. He's not very interested in bring there, except when he gets to talk about his own politics. He really slips into irrelevant topics a lot, things he is passionate about but which will make you roll your eyes after just a couple of lectures. It's also very easy for him to put his opinion up on a pedestal and to talk about how amazing it is. You get the idea pretty fast that he's not giving you a very wide scope of view points. He doesn't really get into theological differences between sunnis and shiites or the history of conflict between the two. He is pretty fixated only on modern Arab and Iranian politics as it relates to Israel and the US. When he scratches the surface he fails to avoid talking about his own political opinions. He is incredibly bias professor. It's a real mind-suck for the middle of the afternoon (I took the 2:40-3:55 class). You would be better off taking an intro course…

Weekly posts for the discussion section. 1 Midterm. 1 Final.

Midterm essay (25%) Final essay (50%) Discussion section participation (25%)

I am majoring in this subject, and happen to be passionately academically enthralled with the material, and this was by far my least favorite class of the semester. From the very beginning, Professor Saliba told us that our goal in this class was to get a good grade. In class, I felt I learned absolutely nothing. He spent nearly every period (except the first two where we watched a movie, one where he reviewed Israel/Palestine, India/Pakistan, and Kashmir, and two where we watched biographies of Um Kulthum) going over the readings for the week, week by week. As "nice" as it was to have such a through review for the midterm and final, I am leaving feeling totally drained of one semester's worth of a course. I took the class to learn about the Islamic world, and instead spent the semester learned what Saliba's interpretations were of different writers. My TA was the only thing that kept me from dropping the class because he was so fantastic. If you are a major, or interested, I do NOT recommend this class. As a side note though, the midterm was immensely easy and fun (if you like writing about the Islamic world and its history).

Dabashi is arguably brilliant, as he seems to know everything about anything within his field and beyond it. The drawback, though, is that sometimes you’re not sure if he might be BSing a little bit of it and being overblown in his own self-importance. Because Dabashi is fairly full of himself—at least half of the assigned works on the syllabus were prefaced in class with “I wrote this or “I inspired the filmmaker to make this, etc. Dabashi told us at the beginning of the semester that no question was a stupid question, but he then proceeded to make people terrified to speak by summarily shooting down some people’s ideas that didn’t agree with his own or that he thought were not terribly intelligent. Most of the class is based solely on his own ideas and opinions, no matter how much he claims to be adding in a lot of different perspectives. Half the time, when Dabashi was lecturing, I couldn’t even tell that this was a class on Islamic civilization. We talked about Kant and Habermas and other Western philosophy and political theory, and there was no real indication as to how we were supposed to connect it to the theme of Islamic civilization. Because Dabashi enjoyed talking about all of the off-topic topics so much, we got incredibly behind on the syllabus very quickly and never really discussed the last five or six items on the syllabus. The workload for this class was comple…

The readings vary week to week, from sometimes quite a bit, to not so much at all. I didn't read any of the books. The weekly workload was dependent on the TA. Attendance is taken. One midterm and one final.