George Saliba

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.

This class sounded amazing. It was maybe the worst class I've taken in my time here. READ: DO NOT TAKE THIS CLASS. The concept of intercultural science sounds interesting, and it could be - but not with this class. The readings are devastating. They are long and dense - it's like reading ancient scientific textbooks. If fact that is what you are doing - and unless you happen to major in whatever the texts cover (units were astronomy/cosmos, physics, optics and the body) they are impossible to comprehend. There is very little context for what you are reading. Also this isn't reading about things that are fascinating - it's literally a bunch of explanations of scientific concepts (geometrical proofs etc.) - so there isn't much actual culture in the readings. The seminar itself is maybe even worse than the readings. If that was possible. Professor Saliba is clearly a giant (and basically the founder of the field) - but he clearly doesn't realize how far out of touch he is with students who haven't studied Arabic mathematicians etc before. He is also mostly deaf - this means that the discussion format of the class is useless. He can't actually hear what you are saying, so he lets you speak and then just says whatever. The class is entirely composed of non-sequiters. That being said, he's clearly a smart guy. He also is obsessed with California and grad school. If you aren't ready…

Note to future students: do not purchase every book the professor lists, because he scans all of the excerpts into Courseworks for you to print out; you really only need to purchase Islam by Fazlur, because you're expected to read the whole book. A lot of students enroll in this class expecting to receive an easy A minus, but I want to warn future students ahead of time that you will need to work for even a B+; I know a few people that made extremely poor grades in this class, so don't think you can just breeze through the semester. That said, I made an A. How did I make that A? I showed up for almost every single class, I spoke during discussion sections, I actually did all of the readings, and I made it known to both the professor and my TA that I wanted to learn the most that I could from the course. This is a large class and it's very easy to become invisible, and it's definitely impossible to speak up during class, so I suggest trying to go to at least one office visit with the professor, but make sure the visit is for a valid reason; for instance, perhaps you could ask the professor to clarify a point he made in class or ask for additional information on something you were interested in. Although the class covers a great deal of information, the midterm and finals are very doable if you keep detailed notes. I suggest writing small blurbs about each individual you cover i…

The most important things every Columbia student should know: 1) always take the elevators in Lerner 2) Islam and Western Science is a class that should be avoided at ALL costs. I took this class thinking I would be avoiding Saliba's rumored rantings in his Contemporary Islamic Civ course and instead ended up learning about.....well, i'm still not actually sure. The only thing I'm sure of after taking this course is that Saliba owns more turtlenecks than any other person I've ever met. Saliba's teaching style was totally disorganized and quite incoherent (especially if you sat more than three rows from the front of the room). He'd segue from pre-class chatter (the class was only about 30 students) right into the lecture, and after 75 minutes of his chatting, the class would suddenly be over with seemingly no material covered. It took me four weeks to realize that when he said, "I have the funniest story to tell you guys...." it meant "take notes". Assigned reading was two boring books (both out of print) and a coursepack that contained about 25 articles, 20 of which he wrote himself. Believe me, his writing isn't much better than his lecturing. After a midterm that was plagued with arbitrary facts (I had to search through the index of one of the books we read to even find a few of the people he asked questions about on the test b/c he never mentioned them in class), he told th…

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).

A lot of really dense readings every week (easily 200+ pages). Prof. Newsome even told a number of the students that he didn't expect we could get through them. They were awful. Required weekly post on courseworks. These form the content for class "discussions." Note class was on Wednesday, posts were due Sunday night. So that's when you had to get at least some of the readings done by - three days before class. Three papers over the course of the semester (5-7 pages each). Problem is there is absolutely no guidance - we were told write what will be interesting to Prof. Saliba. With material this dense this isn't an easy feat. It honestly would have been much easier if there was some direction.

Professor Saliba's class will be useful to you if you come to it with reasonable expectations and prepare adequately. To begin, as survey course it is pointless to expect any epoch to receive in-depth coverage. Saliba is a good lecturer, and I would describe him as a jolly Arabic Santa Claus wearing Indiana Jones' hat. His area of expertise is Arabic Islamic science from about the time of the Crusades until about the European Renaissance, so that's the most academically interesting epoch covered in the class. The biggest take home point from that part of the class is this: after the Roman empire's decline, Islamic civilization grew and developed. It assimilated Greek and Roman ideas and used these to develop novel ideas and approaches in fields like algebra, optics, medicine, and astronomy. This section fascinated me, since it filled in a lot of gaps left by Lit Hum and traditional intellectual histories taught in American schools. Apparently, civilization still developed during the thousand years between the decline of the Roman Empire and the European Renaissance. Saliba getting fired up as he explains the Arabic Islamic underpinnings of Copernicus' heliocentric theory of the solar system was the best lecture in the course. However, as the history approaches the colonial era near the end of the course, the politics of post-colonialism come out, and these will be jarring to a…

Easy: bi-weekly readings, midterm, final (both 25 multiple choice and 5 out of ten short answer). The only trouble is trying to figure out how to study for the midterm and final.

I took CIC last semester to fulfill a core requirement and was really pleased with the class. For someone with very little knowledge of the Arab world, I still wasn't lost in the material. I thought the syllabus was structured so well. There was about a week of introducing us to the broad themes before we got into the meat of the pieces, which all related to each other even as the writers spaned across time periods/countries/religions/etc. The particular TA I had required us to post a one page paper each week overviewing the pieces we had read, and to prepare one presentation during the semester. This was taxing and I hated it at 9:30pm on a Tuesday when I had two and half hours to wade through tons of (sometimes very dense) material and write something about it. But when the midterm and final rolled around, I was so thankful for the instant study guide I had. Columbia students are smart, and even if I didn't understand or totally remember a certain work, I could rely on my peer's responses to the week, as well. Truthfully, I was terrible at paying attention during the lecture and took sporadic notes throughout. The discussion seemed fairly useless only because 50 minutes is such a short time to try and cover a week's worth of material. It would be far too easy to totally slack off in this class, which is why I appreciated the forced posts every week because then I had to get…

Professor Saliba is a decent professor. His class is entertaining and easy to follow along if you are interested in Islamic Culture. It is definitively NOT an easy A like some others have suggested. The issue with his class is that the curve is completely dubious. Students are curved only within their recitation class which means that the final grade is completely arbitrary and does not reflect the student's overall performance. This means a 80/100 student could get a better grade than a 90/100 student depending on their recitation group. Also, he likes to interject his own political opinions into an otherwise fact based class. This seems to be common procedure in the MEALAC department.