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middle east studies
Faculty and students of UC Santa Barbara’s Religious studies kicked-off the academic year with hopes of peace and collaboration in the department and among religious groups worldwide. Department chair Juan Campo urged the campus to focus on efforts to foster peace as students and faculty navigate times of immense violence and suffering on all sides of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
A Woman, Life ,Freedom art projection was displayed on campus earlier this week in solidarity with the struggle for women’s equality in Iran. Shiva Balaghi, a cultural historian and academic coordinator of the UCSB Area Global Initiative, collaborated with her colleagues at two nonprofit organizations, Mozaik and ArtRise Collective, to create the public art project.
In 1951, Moris Sawda’i, an Iraqi Jew, left Baghdad for Israel and worked as an assistant editor on an Israeli film production team. In an unpublished memoir, he wrote, “I hoped to realize my dreams of becoming a great film director. However, at the end of this journey, the fact of working as a small contributor in a big cinema project left me depressed.” Sawda’i went from the top of the film business in his country of birth to starting over, said University of Oslo Middle East cultural historian Pelle Valentin Olsen at a recent UCSB event. The Sawda’i family pioneered the construction of cinemas and established the first Iraqi film studio in the 20th century.
UCSB’s Middle East Studies program hosted University of Michigan historian Kathryn Babayan earlier this month to discuss her book, “The City as Anthology: Eroticism and Urbanity in Early Modern Isfahan.” Babayan spoke about the medium she used to uncover the lives of 17th-century Isfahan residents and migrants—family archives. She said the seldom-viewed records revealed details of relationships and attitudes toward sex that provide a new perspective on the city’s documented history.
UC Santa Barbara religious studies professor Juan Campo and Arabic language lecturer Magda Campo spoke last week on Jewish kosher food and Islamic halal food, and they prepared a chicken and couscous meal for a CalFresh enrollment party co-hosted by UCSB Health & Wellness, Thrive, and the Educational Opportunity Program. The event publicized the CalFresh program and UCSB’s Halal and Kosher Grocery Program for food-insecure students who observe these religions’ dietary laws.
“I was surrounded by those who shared the same music taste as me, whether it was our love for Lebanese artists Nancy Ajram or Fares Karam. We shared the same taste in food, the same values, and the same understanding of what it means to be an Arab in America,” said Jasmin Abdulaziz. “It was astounding to see what had flourished simply by stepping out of my comfort zone and attending a meeting with a room full of strangers.”
In this piece Abdulaziz talks about how she, a Syrian American, found herself a community after joining UCSB’s Lebanese Social Club.
Speaking at the Interdisciplinary Humanities Center’s Taubman Symposium in Jewish Studies, Middle East expert and former diplomat Dennis Ross Ross said that President Trump has “a policy — but not a strategy” for the Middle East.
He pointed out that Trump’s actions show a pattern – a tendency to favor counter-terrorism and counter-Iranian policies, as well as a desire to resolve to the Israel-Palestinian conflict. But, he said, there are flaws in the Trump administrations approach to all three of these Middle East policy areas, and those shortcomings prevent long-term progress.
For many U.S. college students, hearing mention of Iraq evokes images of soldiers, oil, refugees, and destruction. In 2003, the United States invaded the country and American soldiers remained there for roughly eight years. Those soldiers and the combat that surrounded them dominated U.S. media coverage, leaving little room for the stories of Iraqi civilians and the hardships they endured during and after the occupation.
Now, 15 years after the invasion, several departments at UC Santa Barbara came together for a symposium to flip the script and reframe U.S. perspectives on Iraq. “[The goal is to] re-orient us towards Iraq in order to overturn these reductive and insufficient representations of human beings,” said organizer Mona Damluji, a professor in the Film and Media Studies Department.
The two-day event, called “Iraq Front and Center” was held earlier this month to create a space for interdisciplinary conversations, bringing together guest speakers from the diverse perspectives of novelist, journalist, filmmaker, and doctor.
Syrian clarinetist-composer Kinan Azmeh captivated a Santa Barbara audience with a composition about a lover’s resilience in a war-torn Syrian village, which he dedicated to the Islamic philosopher Ibn ‘Arabi.
Azmeh appeared alongside the UCSB Middle East Ensemble for a concert, lecture, and poetry reading to open the Muhyiddin Ibn ‘Arabi Society’s annual conference “This Vast Earth,” hosted by UCSB’s Center for Middle East Studies.
“I was totally inspired by what I read,” Azmeh said, telling the audience how discovering Ibn ‘Arabi’s poetry led him to compose the music. “The piece ended up being a depiction of Ibn ‘Arabi’s journey, of love and fate intersecting.”
