American History/American Studies in the Middle East Context: Reflections on Six Years at the American University of Beirut

I will reflect in this presentation on my six years as a professor of U.S. history at the American University of Beirut, the premier English-language university in Lebanon.  My years in Beirut coincided with an especially turbulent period in the region’s history.  I arrived in September 2000, ten days before the eruption just to the south of the second Palestinian intifada.  I left in July 2006, in the midst of that summer’s Israel-Lebanon war.  I also witnessed local reactions to the fall of the Twin Towers, the fall of the Taliban, and the spring 2003 fall of Baghdad. 

Teaching American history in this context is, I learned, a stimulating but unexpectedly treacherous undertaking.  As the world’s only superpower and a major actor in Middle East politics, the United States is the focus of intense attention and profound misconceptions.  Educated people believe they know a great deal about American society, when in reality they often know very little.  Thus, in teaching modern U.S. politics, I emphasized complex, shifting dynamics and the tenuousness of any faction’s victories.  Much of my audience, at least at the outset, believed that the United States is run from behind the scenes by a cabal of American Jews.  In teaching post-World War II American foreign policy, I highlighted the blundering miscalculations of U.S. decision makers, a contrast from my students’ view of American intelligence agencies as supremely competent and all-powerful.

I gained a broader perspective on handling U.S.-related material when the university received a multi-million dollar grant to establish a Center for American Studies.  I emerged with a sense of the great peril of importing an American Studies model developed in the United States to a foreign locale that badly needs to develop its own scholarly perspectives on American society.