The University & Middle East Studies: Tensions Between Critical Inquiry & Institutional Imperatives

To illuminate the context within which the rest of the contributions of this volume are located, we provide a historical perspective on the development of “Middle East studies” in the modern university. Arguing that this history reflects both the varied and rarely congruent political contexts and the converging institutional evolution of universities globally, we examine how the study of the Middle East and North Africa illustrates an uneasy tension in simultaneously fostering critical inquiry, producing educated elites, serving national interests, meeting international markets, and producing truly global knowledge. These different aims of the university not only exist in tension but might, under certain conditions, become actual contradictions. We may be experiencing such a moment of contradiction at the present time, both in the United States and in the Middle East and North Africa itself.