World War I in the Middle East

FAIN: FS-50353-13

Georgetown University (Washington, DC 20057-0001)
Mustafa Aksakal (Project Director: March 2013 to May 2015)

A four-week college and university faculty summer seminar for sixteen participants to study World War I in the Middle East.

Famine, disease, and mass murder swept across the Middle East like a tidal wave during the First World War. While Ottoman soldiers shared the horrors of trench warfare that French, Germans, and British faced on the Western Front, Middle Eastern civilians suffered catastrophe on a scale reached in Europe only during the Second World War. Mortality rates of the common soldier were almost double those of his German allies. Yet, the suffering in the Middle East has found little mention in the numerous histories of World War I. And only now have specialists in the Middle East found access to archives to begin filling in this story, crucial to understanding both the history of the Great War as a whole, and the history of the Middle East in the 20th century. We propose to bring disparate scholars together and to acquaint them with the latest research in an enhanced reprise of our highly praised 2012 seminar.