CMES PhD Graduate Teaches New Course on Persian Gulf History
This fall, nine undergraduates and five graduate students took a new Harvard history course called “The Modern Persian Gulf Region: Politics, Economy and Society.” Developed and taught by Arbella Bet-Shlimon, a recent graduate of CMES's joint PhD program in History and Middle Eastern Studies, the course is one of few Harvard history courses in recent memory to focus on the modern Persian Gulf region. Gulf history, says Bet-Shlimon, is not a common topic in Middle Eastern studies in the U.S., where Egypt and the Levant are usually seen as the core of the Arab world, receiving the most attention in scholarship and on syllabuses. The Gulf is often treated as a side topic. That's a mistake, according to Bet-Shlimon: “It can't be marginalized any more. I think the Gulf needs to be centered rather than marginalized within the broader Middle East.” When the region is studied, it tends to be from the perspective of political science and security studies. “Historical perspective,” Bet-Shlimon maintains, “is really needed to contextualize contemporary studies.” Her course's unit on oil, for instance, which is titled “The Political Economy and Social Life of Oil,” considers oil not just as an economic force, but as a political force as well, and also explores the social effects of the presence of the oil industry in Gulf countries.
The course also departs from tradition in considering the entire Persian Gulf region, Iran and Iraq as well as the Arabian peninsula’s Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries, most traditionally thought of as the Gulf states, as a coherent subject of historical inquiry. The dynamics between all these countries, Bet-Shlimon explains, are extremely important: after all, the GCC was formed partly in response to the Iranian revolution. Viewed together, patterns begin to emerge, even in earlier eras. Bet-Shlimon cites as an example a series of oil workers' strikes, in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia in 1945, Kirkuk, Iraq in 1946, and Abadan, Iran also in 1946. These events are rarely considered in the same context, she explains, “but I would argue that you have to see it as a wave of labor movements in the oil industry that happened in this region, and you can only see that if you look at all those countries together.”
Edward Golden, who will graduate from CMES's AM program in Regional Studies—Middle East in May 2013, took Bet-Shlimon's course in the fall. “The class really developed a good sense of the political and historical trends within the Gulf,” he says, “and related them to what was going in the larger Middle East.” Golden, whose research interests include U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East post-WWII, wrote his final paper on the Dhahran Airfield in Saudi Arabia and its ties to ARAMCO, arguing that the U.S. used a combination of a small military presence and military and development aid to maintain its interests in the region during the Cold War.
Golden was drawn to the course for its approach of breaking the Middle East down to a “more manageable geographic region,” and says he was surprised to learn that Gulf history isn't a more common topic in the U.S. Though understudied, the region's history has recently been gaining prominence as a topic of study. “Gulf history is something that's buzzing in the air right now,” Bet-Shlimon says, noting the 2010 formation of the Association for Gulf and Arabian Peninsula Studies (a sub-group of the Middle East Studies Association). The enormous presence of expatriate workers in the GCC countries is also stimulating interest in the region’s transnational linkages and diverse societies. As critical independent study of the region becomes more common, she hopes courses like hers will become a standard part of Middle Eastern studies curricula.
As an undergrad, Bet-Shlimon didn't originally set out to study the Middle East. She majored in English at the University of Washington, which she attended in the early 2000s during the attacks of September 11, 2001 and the U.S. invasion of Iraq, a time when Iraq and the Middle East were very much in the news and on people's minds. Bet-Shlimon, whose parents are Iraqi Assyrians, didn't trust everything she was hearing in the news and in conversation. “To put it bluntly,” she says, “the more I read the news, the more I thought, 'Those people need to read a history book!'” Though immensely dissatisfied with the narratives coming from the media, she also realized that her own understanding of the country was essentially personal, and didn't feel equipped to contest the popular narratives. “I decided that studying the Middle East from a critical humanistic perspective was the best way to engage in the dialogues and the discourses about the Middle East that go on popularly,” she explains.
Knowing she wanted to pursue Middle Eastern studies, though not her exact approach, she enrolled in an interdisciplinary Middle Eastern studies Master's degree program at the University of Michigan. She arrived at history as a methodological approach while doing original research for her Master’s thesis on American foreign policy in Iraq in the 1950s. “Digging into declassified American State Department documents on microfilm, I went ‘Oh, this is the raw material of everything around us!’ I started to realize that everything really is a historical primary source and that this method of critically reading sources and constructing a sort of analytical story made a lot of sense to me.” She compares it to literary studies, which also involves the critical reading of texts, but contextualized in a way she had found lacking as an English major. Her interest in the history and effects of oil in the Middle East also developed from her Master's thesis. Reviewing State Department microfilms on Iraq in the '50s, she kept seeing oil come up, yet the existing literature focused almost entirely on U.S. concerns about communist influence in Iraq. “There was a lack of understanding of oil as a political force rather than just an economic force,” she explains, “and a sort of over-focus on ideology without understanding the economic contingencies of that.” Her thesis underlined the effects of the oil industry as crucial to the understanding of U.S. interests in Iraq in the '50s, inseparable from Cold War fears.
After receiving her Master's degree, Bet-Shlimon came to Harvard to pursue a PhD in History and Middle Eastern Studies. Her dissertation topic, on the Iraqi city of Kirkuk, started as a twenty-page final paper for history professor Mary D. Lewis's seminar “The Scope of History.” Located in northeastern Iraq, Kirkuk lies within the multi-lingual contested region between the predominantly Kurdish-speaking part of Iraq, controlled by the Kurdistan Regional Government, and the predominantly Arabic-speaking part of the country. The city is home to multiple ethno-linguistic and ethno-religious groups, the largest of which are Kurdish, Arab, and Turkmen. Bet-Shlimon is quick to point out that these groups are easy to oversimplify, and that ethnicity is “constructed and contingent.” Not every Kurdish-speaker primarily self-identifies as Kurdish and subscribes to a “Kurdish narrative” of Kirkuk's history and place in the country; likewise for the city's Arab- and Turkmen-speaking residents. Nonetheless, those narratives are powerful—the city is claimed by Kurds and Turkmens as an ancestral homeland, while its Arab-speaking residents argue that Kirkuk is Iraqi, an example of the country's diversity, and should be part of Iraq.
When she started to research her paper, Bet-Shlimon quickly realized that there was almost nothing written about Kirkuk. “I was so surprised that no one had really done the research into this place,” she remembers. “You have this crisis where the city is claimed by multiple groups, but the understanding of it is very ahistorical, as though this conflict has been there for all time. The reality is that these views are actually historically contingent.” And so her final paper turned into a dissertation topic, framed around the question of how Kirkuk became so conflicted, and what its role as the center of the Iraqi oil industry had to do with that process. As Roger Owen, her thesis adviser, notes, “What makes Bet-Shlimon’s work specially valuable is that it represents one of the very few historical works on a provincial Middle Eastern city, almost all previous urban studies concentrating on cities that became the state capitals.” In her dissertation, which she completed in July, she argues that the Kirkuk had a very different social landscape in the beginning of the last century, and that its current fractured allegiances developed in large part due to the presence of the oil industry and its expatriate employees, the effects of the British mandate, and the “gravitational pull” of Baghdad's nation-building efforts. Bet-Shlimon hopes her work will lend historical perspective to the understanding of Kirkuk, which receives the most attention today from political scientists and policy makers looking for solutions to the current crisis. “I think an understanding of history humanizes these people,” she says. “It makes you less likely to look at this as a sort of pie that we just need to divide, because you realize these three groups haven't always existed this way—they've been constructed over time. I think that is an essential perspective to have.”
This year, having completed her dissertation, Bet-Shlimon has a one-year teaching post-doc as a Harvard College Fellow in the History Department. College Fellows teach a total of three classes, with about a quarter of their time dedicated to their own research. Harvard College student Ben Lamont, a junior concentrating in South Asian Studies, discovered Bet-Shlimon's Gulf history class during shopping week and was immediately drawn to it. He describes Bet-Shlimon and her teaching fellow Elise Burton (a G-3 in the Middle Eastern Studies and History program) as extremely accessible and engaging, and thinks the Harvard College Fellows program is a great idea. “It's nice to have a younger scholar teaching a course,” he says, “I think it adds a different perspective and increases the quality of the instruction. It's also inspiring to aspiring scholars to have someone not that much older in the position.”
Bet-Shlimon appreciates the program as well. The History Department gave her the freedom, as a College Fellow, to choose and develop her own course topics, all three of which stemmed from her research interests. In the fall, along with the course on Gulf history, she taught a course titled “Cities and Borderlands in the History of the Modern Middle East,” which was informed by her work on Kirkuk. This spring, she is teaching a course called “Modern Iraq in the Media and in Historical Perspective,” which combines readings in journalism and history to bring historical perspective to bear on portrayals of Iraq in the media over the past decade. It's a class she would have appreciated as an undergrad struggling to make sense of competing and incomplete narratives of the country. “There was something cathartic about finally teaching it,” she admits, “because it was frustrating to me that it didn't exist ten years ago!”
Arbella Bet-Shlimon will begin a tenure-track position as assistant professor of modern Middle Eastern history at the University of Washington, Seattle in September 2013.
—Article by Johanna Bodnyk
