2023 – 2024 Course Offerings

This intensive Beginning Arabic I course in Modern Standard Arabic is aimed at students without any (or only little) background in Arabic; not suitable for heritage learners. Using multi-media tools, the course is devoted to the four skills of speaking, listening, reading, and writing with a progression throughout the semester from learning of script and phonology to understanding a wide range of texts and topics that build vocabulary, grammar, and general communicative and cultural competence.

The intensive Intermediate Arabic I course is for students who successfully completed ARAB 012 (or equivalent placement). Using multi-media tools, the course expands students’ competence in the four skills of speaking, listening, reading, and writing in Modern Standard Arabic through a variety of texts and topics that aim at promoting students’ acquisition of vocabulary and grasp of grammar to achieve general communication skills and cultural competence. Prerequisite: ARAB 012, or equivalent placement.

This course is designed as an introduction to Islamic civilization and thought and requires no prior knowledge of Islam or Middle Eastern History. It will focus on the political, social and religious institutions that shaped Islamic civilization as well as on the intellectual and scholarly traditions which characterized the Arab and Muslim world from the pre-Islamic time onwards. Beginning with the geographical, cultural and historical context of the rise of Islam, the life of the Prophet, the Qur’an, it will extend through the pre-modern time, with a special emphasis on texts. The readings consist of a selection of translated primary sources as well as complementary background essays. In addition to the political history of this period, we will discuss a wide range of social and cultural themes including the translation movement, science and literature, art and architecture as well as gender issues. Films and Audios will be also solicited. This course fulfills the College HALC (Humanities, Arts, Literature, Culture) requirements for undergraduate students. Required Session: one hour/week discussion session, which will be arranged at the beginning of the semester. Optional Session: one hour/week discussion session in Arabic.

Core: Diversity/Global

SFS/CULP Core

Core: HALC – Humanities, Arts, Literature, Culture

X-List: MVST

Core: Theology

This course focuses on authentic Arabic media, including print media, video, and computer-based materials. Activities include reading/listening for comprehension, and discussion of topics related to current events, politics, economics, society, and culture. Taught in Arabic. Prerequisite: two years of Arabic, or permission of the instructor. Prerequisite: ARAB 112 or placement by exam.

There is no pass/fail option for this course.

The intensive advanced Arabic I course is for students who successfully completed ARAB 112 (or equivalent placement). Using multi-media tools, the course advances students’ competence in the four skills of speaking, listening, reading, and writing in Modern Standard Arabic. Through building vocabulary and grasp of grammar the course aims at enabling students to comfortably access a wide variety of texts and media that allows them to reach advanced communication skills and cultural competence. Prerequisite: ARAB 112, or equivalent placement.
There is no pass/fail option for this course.

The purpose of this course is to give students who have passed the Arabic proficiency exam another opportunity to further develop their reading, writing, listening and speaking skills. The focus will be on current issues in Arab society and politics featured in the Arab media and social network sites. The materials to be tapped will be primary and secondary, most of which will not be translated, such as film clips, articles, opinion pieces, interviews, statements, government and non-government reports, editorials, blogs, songs, slogans, posters and graffiti. One key feature of the course will be individual or group class presentations and their discussions. It is also the objective of the course that by the end of the semester, students will reach the Superior level rating on the ACTFL scale, i.e. “they can support opinions, hypothesize, discuss topics concretely and abstractly, and handle a linguistically unfamiliar situation”; that their vocabulary will be enriched, their debating skills enhanced.

Core: HALC – Humanities, Arts, Literature, Culture

This session reviews Arabic grammar concepts from the Intensive Intermediate and Advanced Arabic courses. Students in ARAB111, ARAB112, ARAB215, ARAB216, and ARAB217 can register for the zero-credit OR the one-credit section.

This course is an introduction to how Arabic (both the Standard and the colloquial) is used in the different Arab societies and communities. We will study how the variation in Arabic is influenced by different sociological variables such as education, social status, politics, gender, and religion. Topics also include diglossia (native speakers’ use of Standard Arabic and the colloquial), switching between Arabic and foreign languages (code-switching), switching between Standard Arabic and the colloquial (diglossic-switching), the official status of Arabic and foreign languages in the Arab countries. The class will also cover the Arabic spoken by immigrant communities of Arab descent (Heritage Arabic), and the peripheral dialects of Arabic.

Arabic Proficiency Prep Course

Core: Diversity/Domestic

Core: Diversity/Global

SFS/CULP Social Science

SFS/CULP Core

X-List: LING

X-List: MAAS

This course will focus on the close reading, translation, and literary cultural interpretation of selected passages from the foundational texts of Arab-Islamic culture: Qurʾān, Tafsīr, al-Sīrah al-Nabawiyyah, and Poetry. A focus on morphology and syntax aims at developing accuracy and precision in reading and translation, but also to develop an appreciation of their rhetorical and semantic function in the refinement of expression and meaning, whether in classical or modern Arabic. Critical readings will explore the linguistic, literary, and cultural dimensions of these formative texts. Grading and Requirements: Perfect attendance is expected. If you miss a class you will be required to complete a make-up assignment, as determined by the instructor, with one week of the missed class. Requirements and Grading: Class preparation and participation: 40% Four Unit Essays and Translation Quizzes: 40% Final Research or Translation Project: 20% Advanced Arabic II (ARAB 216/ARAB217) or the equivalent; or permission of the instructor.

Core: HALC – Humanities, Arts, Literature, Culture

Analyzing political discourse can be done through Critical Discourse Analysis or the (Socio)-linguistic Analysis. Following the (socio)-linguistic approach, this course introduces the descriptive, rhetorical and sociolinguistic approaches to the analysis of Arabic political discourse. The course will survey a variety of studies on the Arabic political discourse and their linguistic and rhetorical strategies for achieving a wide range of political objectives such as influence and persuasion. The linguistic tools for analyzing the discourse include word choice, naming and reference, predication, sentence constructions (such as transitivity, modality), speech acts, presupposition, rhetorical devices (such as metaphors, puns), code switching. Students will analyze a variety of texts on the Arabic political discourse. Readings will be in Arabic and English. The class will be conducted in Arabic and the homework and the research will be written in Arabic. Students are expected to be in the post advanced level of Arabic.

Arabic Proficiency Prep Course

Core: Diversity/Domestic

Core: Diversity/Global

SFS/CULP Social Science

SFS/CULP Core

This course will familiarize students with the sources, research tools and methods used in the field of Islamic Studies. We will look at the history of the discipline and survey its major areas of research, covering history, language and literature, the religious sciences (Qur’an, Hadith, law, and theology), as well as philosophy and the social sciences. Students will be exposed to various approaches to the study of Islam and its major debates.

This course surveys cultural production in Iraq and the USA, across a number of mediums (poetry, song, film, journalism, memoir, fiction). This course will be conducted in English, and translations will be provided to any student. Interested students will be able to read Iraqi works in the original. The main focus of this course will be on American and Iraqi writers and artists as they responded to the US invasion and occupation of Iraq, with the aim of providing sufficient regional and historical background to appreciate the scope of the US invasion, its various meanings for Iraqis and Americans, and its consequences for both societies. Themes will include: embeddedness in journalism and literature; sectarianism and its critiques; the military-literary complex; combatant culture; exilic writing; the persistence of Orientalism.

X-List: AMST

X-List: CULP

X-List: FMST

Early Arabic Poetry: Ritual, Orality and Performance seeks to situate the pre- and early Islamic qasida within the purview of contemporary literary critical approaches as a basis for the close reading, translation and interpretation of the original Arabic texts. Special attention will be given to the transition from the Jahiliyyah to Islam. Class time will be divided between discussions of the literary critical readings, the translation (including issues of philology and grammar) of the texts, and the literary interpretation of texts. Except for the translation segment, the class will be conducted primarily in Arabic. The course will be conducted in seminar format: that is, the students are expected to prepare to translate and to present and discuss the critical readings in class. Some of the readings and translations will be divided in small group assignments to enable us to cover all the material.