I'm now officially done with this semester for school. HUX Class 579 - The Arab World has been completed. Hurray for me.
To be honest I think I missed the target in the second assignment (discerning patterns of history in the Arab world). I think if I had injected heroin into my eyeball, drank a case of beer, dropped some acid and then spun around the room 500 times I would have produced a more coherent argument. I'll have to wait and see what my professor thinks about it.
On the third assignment (why are some Arab groups so militant and angry) I believe I did better. While I opened with the hijacking of an El Al flight in 1968 and ended with the Madrid train attacks, I took the scenic route into Westernization, modernization, unhelpful international policies and good old fashioned religious themes.
If you have any interest in the subject I would highly recommend two books by Bernard Lewis: What Went Wrong? and The Crisis of Islam. They are both very short, but make for very compelling reading.
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