In a certain sense, interest in Middle East history goes back to the founding era at Harvard, long before the term “Middle East” had been coined and a History Department established. Increase Mather (1639–1723), who graduated from Harvard College and later served as its president, was one of many seventeenth-century intellectuals in western Christendom to write a chiliastic tract in which the setting of the millennial scenario was, naturally, the area that is now called the Middle East—as analyzed in one of seven dissertations completed under the History and Middle Eastern Studies program in 2004. In the meantime, the nature of academic interest in and approaches to the Middle East have undergone dramatic changes.

Whether it was driven by millennial enthusiasm or by more sober concerns, the proto-history of the study of the “Middle East” was closely associated with biblical studies and Semitic languages. It was the transformation of Harvard from a provincial institution into a modern research university during the nineteenth century that eventually ushered in signs of a serious interest in the study of Middle East history. For the first modern instruction in the field, we have to look to Archibald Coolidge, a diplomatic historian who introduced Harvard students to some of the mysteries of the Ottoman empire. One of his students, Albert Howe Lybyer, produced what may well be the first significant monograph in the United States on the Ottoman state—based on his 1909 dissertation and published in 1913 in the Harvard Historical Studies series—when the empire was still part of the political scene of Europe and Asia. After World War I, in the wake of seismic shifts in the political landscape of the region, both Coolidge and Lybyer were busy writing books and essays on “the question of the Near East.”

When William Langer mobilized forces at Harvard to establish a Center for Middle Eastern Studies after World War II, he already had a scholarly record going back to the 1920s that gave firm recognition to the importance of Middle East history. As Langer notes in his memoirs, Coolidge inspired in him a life-long interest in “the Near Eastern Question” and, hence, from the outset he included the subject in his teaching and publishing. The creation of the Center also owed much to the energies of Richard Frye, whose appointment to an assistant professorship in History and the Committee on Comparative Philology in 1949 signaled the arrival for the first time of a scholar who could do research in Middle Eastern history using Middle Eastern languages. After the establishment of CMES, Middle East history received a big boost, if not a regular home within a department, through the appointment of Sir Hamilton Gibb as University Professor.

In the following decades, the faculty providing instruction on the Middle East mushroomed and, although not all of them were historians, they came to include some of the most prominent scholars who have worked on historical aspects of Middle Eastern societies and cultures. Whichever department they saw as their home, and whatever their own disciplinary preferences, more than a few Harvard professors—among them, George Makdisi at NELC, Oleg Grabar in the History of Art and Architecture, Muhsin Mahdi at NELC, and Abdelhamid Sabra in the History of Science—made immense contributions to the study of Middle East history, not only through their own work but also by inspiring students to undertake original research projects in the field. Eminent figures in Middle East history at leading universities in the United States, and in the region itself, have came out of the ranks of Harvard alumni.

And then there were historians like Robert Lee Wolff, the Byzantinist and Balkanist, or David Landes, the economic historian, who did not necessarily think of themselves as historians of the Middle East, but played considerable roles in that vein, nonetheless. A number of scholars—Stanford Shaw, Ira Lapidus, Richard Bulliett, Dennis Skiotis, Zachary Lockman, and Will Rollman, to name a few—served as junior faculty before they moved to distinguished careers at other institutions.

Still, reports of visiting committees from the 1970s and the early 1980s perceptively and persistently pointed out that the Center, although it flourished in certain respects, needed a solid base in History, both intellectually and institutionally. Partly as a consequence of CMES’s success in responding to that challenge since the mid-1980s, the situation is radically different today. Thanks to four senior appointments in less than two decades (Roy Mottahedeh, Roger Owen, Cemal Kafadar, and Afsaneh Najmabadi), the Middle East is now firmly embedded in the History Department, the disciplinary home of historical research and writing at Harvard. All of us have served and continue to serve CMES in different capacities, while the Center has provided and continues to provide a home for a good part of our intellectual and social activities. Most students of Middle East history at Harvard are accepted through the joint degree program, and most of the PhD students at the Center are students of History.

Enhancing, or even maintaining, the current level and scope of relevant work in the discipline at Harvard will be an important concern in the near future, due to pending retirements, when some of our current strengths will come under jeopardy. Still, the main challenge for the future is not in securing new History appointments but in deepening and broadening our coverage. Appointments in Economics, Political Science, or Sociology, for instance, would not only allow meaningful coverage of the contemporary Middle East—an area where Harvard certainly needs more faculty and more courses—but would also be quite a boon to historical studies themselves.

In fact, groundbreaking work in Middle East history has not been limited to members of the History Department. Revealingly, one of the most significant events in the study of Middle East history in the late 1980s and the early 1990s at Harvard—a series of workshops on the political economies of the Ottoman, Safavid, and Mughal empires—was organized by Tosun Aricanli, then an associate professor in the Economics Department. Aricanli was supported by two directors, Roy Mottahedeh and William Graham, both scholars of Islam, when he organized those workshops. CMES has played a pivotal role in making such history projects possible, by providing not only funding and institutional support but also a congenial home.

There is more fertile ground today than there has ever been before for engaging in conversations with historians in other fields and with colleagues in other disciplines. Not only do many of us have overlapping interests and research agendas, but we also share common concerns in some of the methods and approaches that enhance our analytical arsenal, as the examples of gender or post-colonial studies suggest. Such dialogues are facilitated by developments in Middle Eastern studies that would have surprised, perhaps even disappointed, the founders of CMES.

During the last three decades of the twentieth century, students of the Middle East started to reimagine their field with a new critical spirit. Both the conceptualization of “the Middle East” as a region that defines the boundaries of an object of study and the whole notion of “area studies” came under intense scrutiny. Scholars working on various countries and themes that fell under the institutional umbrella of Middle Eastern studies grew dissatisfied with relegation to the status of “area experts” and the intellectual marginalization often implied by their discipline. This was not simply a matter of identity and recognition, but an intellectual quest to refine methods and practices in order to achieve an understanding of the societies and cultures of the region that is deeper than what has been allowed by a heavily philological approach or a narrowly political focus. With this quest has also come an intellectually ambitious search for ways to enrich the broader discourse in the human and social sciences, both empirically and theoretically.

Historians of the region, too, were uncomfortable with a legacy shaped within the Orientalist tradition. Even when touched by the growing influences of the social sciences, they were typically situated on the periphery of their discipline, in the role of providers of “case studies” for different theories, particularly those of the modernization school that reigned supreme for at least two decades after World War II. Since the 1970s—even earlier in the case of pioneers like Roger Owen and Roy Mottahedeh—Middle East historians have come to think of themselves first and foremost as historians. That simple step has worked wonders, thanks also to historians of Europe who started to question the Eurocentric view of world history. Evidently, debates around Orientalism have not only fostered increasing sophistication and self-reflexiveness within the field but also rendered it much more relevant for historians of other areas and for scholars of other disciplines.

In the mid-twenty-first century, all this may look banal, but what used to be the histories of other peoples, or even of peoples without history, started to be woven into “history itself.” During this process, Middle East historians, like historians of other areas, have recognized and adopted fresh interpretive strategies that were inspired by social and cultural anthropology, among other sources, as history-writing became more comfortable with interdisciplinarity. For better or for worse, the so-called linguistic turn in history and new forms of textual analysis have had as much influence in Middle East history as in some other fields. Some of the most interesting work in gender history has been conducted by historians of the Middle East. Transnational and transregional history has made such an impact in the field that some of the recent dissertations are hard to classify simply as “Middle East studies.”

However, the ongoing search for interdisciplinarity, transnational perspectives, methodological sophistication, and theoretical finesse can be too much of a good thing, especially in a field where the traditional apparatus of scholarship—for example, critical editions of sources and reference materials—remains relatively underdeveloped. The temptation to be at the cutting edge needs constantly to be balanced by fidelity to the standards of what is considered by some to be old-fashioned historiography, based on well-honed philological skills and solid empirical research. It is with that sensibility that Middle East historians at Harvard have developed projects (such as Mottahedeh’s “library of the Islamic world” or Kafadar’s “registers of the Ottoman shari‘a courts”) to provide serialized editions and translations of sources that, we hope, will in turn facilitate a new generation of social and cultural historical studies here and elsewhere.

In fact, the menu of skills associated with historical scholarship is evolving, and becoming more complicated, under pressure from both intellectual currents and technological changes. Our capabilities for instruction and training need to keep up with all this. Some students question the conventional boundaries between fields and disciplines, such as the one between Byzantine and Arab or Ottoman studies, and take the next step to learn the requisite languages. Some students of European colonial history seek to utilize, in addition to European sources, documents that provide indigenous perspectives from the Middle East. There are those who wish to look at East Asian and Middle Eastern experiences in the age of modernity, using archival materials in both regions, in order to do justice to their transregional research agenda. Issues concerning the configuration of space or visual idioms are so central to the projects of some that they look for training in the history of art and architecture or in the anthropology of visual cultures. There is an increasing number of students who emphasize “minority” languages (Greek, say, or Armenian) in addition to one or more of the “basic foursome” (Arabic, Hebrew, Persian, and Turkish) because of their interest in subaltern groups or because they wish to move beyond the essentializing tendencies of a field that has traditionally privileged the “Islamic” at the expense of the “Islamicate.”

Exciting as these developments may be, they also offer challenges to our resources, both human and financial. The growing emphasis on new combinations of linguistic skills, and the search for familiarity with a variety of regions and their scholarly resources, render additional funding needs all the more acute for CMES, since students can hardly afford to spend a summer without language courses and/or travel and they cannot do this without external support. Language instruction on campus, too, needs to be enhanced and placed on a more secure ground through endowed funds.

The growing use of electronic media not only helps language instruction, of course, but also offers some new possibilities for research that might be facilitated by the Center. The transition from conventional modes of instruction and research, based on card or book catalogues and printed or manuscript materials, to research using the Internet is full of hazards as well as joys, however, especially for students who would like to imagine that “it’s all already there on the Internet.” Close cooperation with Middle East librarians and technology experts will be needed for faculty and students to navigate the incomplete, and often erratic, contours of the information highway.

Among practical difficulties, restrictions on travel to and from the region, as well as outright censorship, should also be mentioned. Such curtailments, be they based on circumstances or political decisions, not only impede the flow of ideas and scholars, and access to archives and libraries, but also undermine possibilities for much-needed cooperation with institutions and colleagues in the Middle East.

As students of Middle East history develop new research agendas and strategies, new links are forged between CMES and colleagues in other fields of history or in other disciplines, at Harvard and elsewhere. It is not unusual these days to find a CMES History student whose thesis advisors include an anthropologist, or a legal scholar, or a historian who works on another region. This is primarily a matter of intellectual choices, but students also realize that their chances are thereby strengthened in the job market since demand for instruction in world history (with a focus on a particular region) is rapidly growing, and world history itself is becoming a more rigorous field than it used to be.

Links to other fields and departments are facilitated, of course, by the work of scholars of other areas, especially those who are constructing their own projects in ways that bring them and their students closer to us. Sugata Bose and Robert Travers, for instance, are great assets for Middle Eastern studies because of their own broad conception of the study of South Asian and British colonial history. Sven Beckert’s research on cotton and the global economy in the nineteenth century implies that he casts his net much more widely than is usual for an American historian and conducts research on Egypt, among other places, thereby making it possible for an Americanist and an Ottomanist to imagine collaborating on the organization of a conference and an edited volume on the history of globalization. In the same light, the strength of international history at Harvard, as developed by Akira Iriye and Ernest May, and, it is hoped, to be continued after their retirement, hardly needs to be mentioned.

Middle East historians also stand to benefit from, as they already contribute to, the institutionalization of Islamic studies through new appointments at the Divinity School. The examples could easily be multiplied, and it should be admitted that there are precedents for such collaboration across fields and disciplines. Yet it is clear, and we need to come to terms with the fact, that historians of the Middle East now find themselves within new networks and crosscurrents created by an unprecedented surge of interest in transnational and transregional perspectives. This is all the more relevant for a field in which historiographies have been shaped to a large degree by nations (e.g., Arabs or Turks) as timeless units of analysis and national or religious identities as ahistorical fixtures.

Shared concerns, both substantive and methodological, imply that there are abundant opportunities for Middle East historians, faculty and students alike, to imagine or partake in collaborative ventures across the University. Initiatives should be taken toward joint courses, conferences, and projects, with an eye to enriching the intellectual life of the campus and to advancing the field of Middle East history itself. And collaboration should be imagined, obviously, not only across different areas of historical research but also across disciplines and programs. Critical developments in film studies, for instance, seem to offer fresh tools for historians to reconsider questions of historical narrative or issues related to the representation of the Middle East in particular, possibilities already explored by a number of colleagues in anthropological and literary studies. Middle East studies is already fortunate in sharing one of its historians, namely Afsaneh Najmabadi, with the program in Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality and CMES can, through workshops and film series, for instance, play an important in role in enhancing the study of Middle East gender history. Environmental history, to give another example, has not yet made significant inroads in Middle East studies, but there are many colleagues on campus who are among the foremost students of the environment, in the Middle East and elsewhere. In that respect, the collaborative venture envisioned by Steve Caton to study “water in the Middle East” could be a dream project since it would bring historians together with students of anthropology, economics, business, public health, and landscape design, toward a deeper understanding of the past and the present of the region.

Ultimately, the work of CMES historians is to improve our understanding of the societies and cultures of the region, past and present. At the same time, those same historians face the challenge of acting upon the growing awareness that “doing Middle East history” means “doing” much more than the Middle East, strictly defined, and “doing” much more than history, strictly defined. It is in its attempt to cope with that challenge, while continuing to generate original and innovative research according to exacting standards of scholarship, that the study of Middle East history at Harvard is poised to remain an intellectually vibrant and enjoyable field.

Cemal Kafadar is Vehbi Koç Professor of Turkish Studies in the History Department. He was Director of CMES from 1999 to 2004. His study of early Ottoman history, Between Two Worlds: The Construction of the Ottoman State, has been translated into Arabic, Greek, and Turkish. Ever in search of hidden troves in archives and libraries, his serendipitous discoveries there have led to works on autobiographical writing and to the editing of a Sufi lady‘s mid-17th-century dream log. He is also pursuing his interest in the narratives of modernity and tradition through research projects related to Ottoman social and cultural life in the early modern era. He plans to publish a book on one of his central concerns, the politics of “crowds” and rebellions in Istanbul from the late 16th to early 19th centuries. Meanwhile, his essays and lectures on the topic will appear in Rebels Without a Cause? Janissaries and Other Riffraff of Ottoman Istanbul (forthcoming). He continues to work on related topics, including the history of coffeehouses, uses of the night, and communities of dissent.

This essay appeared in Part III of Center for Middle Eastern Studies, Harvard University: Reflections on the Past, Visions for the Future a volume produced on the occasion of the Center's 50th anniversary in 2004. The book, edited by Don Babai, will be distributed by Harvard University Press in 2006. The book consists of three parts. Part I presents a critical look at the history of the Center against the backdrop of ongoing debates about Middle Eastern studies and area studies in general. Part II examines the multifaceted operations of CMES that serve the scholarly community within and beyond Harvard. Part III is a series of essays, mainly by members of the core faculty of the Center, offering diverse assessments of the state of Middle Eastern studies today as well visions of how Harvard might meet the complex challenges to the field in the years ahead.