American University in Cairo

This intermediate Egyptian Colloquial Arabic course develops listening and speaking skills in daily life situations through activities and presentations as well as introducing cultural connotations. It introduces students to the spoken Arabic of Cairo and concentrates on enabling students to communicate effectively in daily life. It targets high-frequency vocabulary and social situations and emphasizes pronunciation.
 

This course introduces long-format non-fiction storytelling and delves into the theoretical and practical realms of documentary filmmaking. It looks into the main elements of documentaries and explores the whole process of documentary filmmaking. The course focuses on the different genres and different techniques of documentary films as an important information base for students to produce their own films. It examines the wide array of documentaries covering political, cultural, historical, social, environmental topics, and more. The variety of genres and various techniques provide a wide base of documentary film experiences; this along with the encouragement of individual creativity is the backbone of the student's project throughout the semester.

This elementary course develops the fundamentals of modern standard Arabic through reading, writing, and oral connection within a framework of the essentials of syntax, morphology, and a working vocabulary. This course is the first part of a three-semester sequence of elementary Modern Standard Arabic.

The Egyptian legal system is considered according to its present structure and historical development including institutions, processes, laws, and the courts. There is special emphasis on developments in constitutional law and the role played by the constitution in the political context of present day Egypt. The course also offers an introduction to Islamic jurisprudence in the classical doctrine, in the pre-modern Egyptian legal system, and in contemporary Egypt.

This course provides an overview of the major human rights treaties, customary norms, international institutions, and mechanisms of enforcement, while at the same time encouraging a critical stance, which questions the role and effect of human rights in a world of distress and inequality.

This course is for private lessons of the qanun instrument. It involves twelve one-hour lessons in the semester. Students are expected to practice a minimum of one hour every day. Students perform before a jury of teachers for the final examination. Students may register for more than one section of MUSC 1800 in the same semester. 

This course examines the analytical object "violence" in its differentiated dimensions. What we think of as violence encompasses multiple phenomena that cannot only be understood as forces of destruction: violence must be grasped as also generative of life-worlds. The course inquires into the nature of violence, explores its epistemological and existential, sensual and structural, exceptional and ordinary dimensions, and forms.

This course introduce the theories and the tools that attempt to explain the emergence, trajectories, and outcomes of social movements. It covers the basic processes by which societies initiate, consolidate, transform, and change their basic institutions and social structures and provides an anatomy of reform and revolutionary social movements, especially those affecting Arab and Third World societies. It examines a variety of case studies of social movements during the 20th century and discusses some of the case studies of the recent wave of uprisings in the Arab World. The course encourages students to think critically about how social movements emerge, sustain themselves, feel, think, achieve their goals or/and decline.

This course is for private lessons in Arab Voice. It involves twelve one-hour lessons in the semester. Students are expected to practice a minimum of one hour every day. Students perform before a jury of teachers for the final examination. Students may register for more than one section of MUSC 1800 in the same semester. 
 

This course locates marriage as a key historical arena where politics and economics intersect. It examines how men and women imagine their nation through marriage and understand their rights and duties in 20th-century Egypt. It demonstrates how marriage is a lens that reflects and critiques larger socioeconomic and political issues. This course provides a history of marriage and nationalism in modern Egypt, rather than just a legal, political, or women’s history. It also contributes to our historical understanding of the marriage crisis, which continues to dominate public debates.