Middle Eastern Communities and Migrations Minor

Coordinator: Shah Mahmoud Hanifi
Phone: (540) 568-1743
Email: hanifism@jmu.edu
Website: http://www.jmu.edu/mecm

This minor concentrates on social and political issues involving Muslim, Christian and Jewish populations in their own right and in relation to one another in the territory between the Nile and Indus rivers during the modern period. The program is also designed to accommodate consideration of other communities including Hindu and other South Asians, Anatolian and Central Asian Turks, and Mediterranean peoples in the larger area stretching from North Africa to Southeast Asia as well as Middle Eastern diaspora communities in Europe and the Americas from the ancient period to the present.

The cross disciplinary orientation of the program emphasizes comparison and a synthesis of local, regional, trans-national and global perspectives. The program provides an intellectual foundation that can be usefully applied and built upon in graduate school, the private sector or government service.

Students are required to take 18 credits comprised of six credits of core course work and 12 credits of electives. Students may take no more than nine credits from a single academic unit.

Additional Information

The College of Arts and Letters  departments offer a number of courses listed generically, usually at the 300– and 400–level (including disciplinary capstone and methodology courses, often numbered 395) that can also count toward the MECM minor under certain circumstances.