Women and Gender in the Middle East

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Secondary

Complete Curriculum, primary resources and annotated bibliograpy

About the project
"Recurring narratives in K-12 World History curricula in the United States, mostly told through textbooks, often occlude as much as they reveal. Broad categories used to frame 'World History' (civilizations, nations, religions, and regions) assume monolithic identities rather than heterogeneous, multi-ethnic and multi-religious societies. While the categories enumerated above may serve as organizing tools to describe peoples, places, and phenomena, they also generate and reify fixed notions of identity that may inappropriately 'Other' related communities, masking the ways in which broader societies and wide regions have historically shared practices, cultural concepts, and societal norms. For example, oversimplification of categories often results in the conflation of the history of the Middle East with the history of Islam. Curricula more responsive to that region's diversity of traditions would correct the assumption that Islamic and Middle Eastern history are synonymous (as numerous traditions, from Manichaeism to Zoroastrianism to Christianity and Judaism have a longer history in the Middle East than does Islam, which itself has a varied and multifaceted past, within and beyond Arabia and the Middle East).

This project is supported in large part by the "Our Shared Past" grants program from the British Council
and Social Science Research Council. The content on this site and any opinions expressed within do not necessarily reflect the official position or views of the British Council or the Social Science Research Council

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