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Office Hours: Professor of History David Commins

by Tony Moore

Professor of History David Commins is Dickinson’s Benjamin Rush Chair in the Liberal Arts & Sciences. Earning his Ph.D. at the University of Michigan, he focuses on modern Middle Eastern history with an emphasis on Islamic thought and political movements. He has written several books, including Islam in Saudi Arabia, The Gulf States: A Modern History and Historical Dictionary of Syria. His latest book, , was released in April 2025.

From ancient trade routes to modern geopolitics, the Middle East often feels like the center of the world’s story. What makes Dickinson a meaningful place for students to explore that story in depth?

Dickinson’s academic program has four attributes that make the school a terrific place for students to learn about the Middle East:

1. Foreign languages are essential avenues to understanding the world beyond U.S. borders. The college’s emphasis on foreign language education dovetails with our major’s requirement that students take two years of either Arabic and modern Hebrew.
2. Our global education programs include full-year, one-semester and Mosaic study abroad options in the region. Global education also means bringing international visitors to Carlisle. I've been able to work with the Center for Global Study & Engagement to bring students from the Middle East and scholars from Iraq and Morocco as visiting professors.
3. Dickinson’s strength in interdisciplinary education is a perfect match for the need to dissolve academic department silos that can restrict students’ ability to see the interaction between culture, religion, politics, economy and society.
4. The student-to-faculty ratio makes it possible for faculty to work closely with students, to find out their special interests and talents, and to guide their intellectual journey.

You’ve spent your career immersed in the intellectual and political currents of the modern Middle East (and just published an excellent book on Saudia Arabia). What was the spark that pulled you in—and what keeps the work urgent for you decades later?

When I started college, I was interested in literature, history and French. I made my way to a concentration on the Middle East, Islam and Arabic in a haphazard fashion, choosing electives my first two years. I only signed up for a history major to get into a class restricted to majors. I didn’t get into that class, but I liked my history classes, which included Japan, India and the U.S., and I thought I could switch to English later if I felt like it. Long story short: There was no spark that pulled me in. I drifted my way there.

In graduate school, I specialized in modern Islamic thought, a historical phase dating to the early 1800s when Muslims encountered modern European powers. Modern Islamic thought encompasses debates over theology, law, and politics that have occupied hundreds of religious and lay thinkers across the entire Muslim world. I derive personal enjoyment from delving into a research project on a topic that has yet to receive much or any attention from scholars. When I turned my attention to Saudi Arabia around 2000, there was only one book on religious development for the entire 19th century. Given the anti-American strain in some trends in contemporary Islamic thought, I feel it is important to lend my expertise to deepening Americans’ understanding of the diverse ideas at play in Muslim societies.

The headlines rarely stop, but the deeper histories often get lost. Why is it so essential for students to study the Middle East beyond the news cycle?

I view the question in two frameworks, intrinsic and instrumental. In terms of the intrinsic value of learning, college students seek understanding of the world around them. To become a global citizen, one aim of a Dickinson education, entails developing an appreciation of people from distant cultures and times. In particular, global citizens see what the world looks like from other points of view, and they grasp how historical experiences shape different points of view. When it comes to the Middle East, it’s important for students to learn that it’s a diverse region in terms of language, religion and culture. Finding common elements between societies distant in time and place and their own can turn on the proverbial light bulb in their heads. For instance, a significant theme in pre-Islamic Arabian poetry centers on the celebration of young manhood: fighting prowess and having the coolest steed. Not so different from a lot of popular music, if you substitute a car for a horse.

Ideally, such learning cultivates empathy, which has the potential to inform the instrumental value of acquiring deeper knowledge of the region. Empathy illuminates what lies beneath the news cycle, to be able to see how leaders manipulate national audiences with misinformation and distortions and to engage in national conversations with an informed point of view to question false claims. Current events and innovations in communications technology may make that seem like an old-fashioned idea, but it’s a conviction that animates my teaching and writing.

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Published June 23, 2025