Special issue introduction - From region to countries: engineering education in bahrain, egypt, and turkey

rior to the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, DC, on September 11, 2001, Americans tended to have relatively little interest in the region of the world they understood abstractly as the “Middle East.” Indeed, over the previous three decades, the Middle East had emerged as visible to Americans mainly in news reports about conflicts between Israelis and Palestinians and about potential threats to the supply of oil. Largely ignorant of the peoples and histories making up this part of the world, Americans tended to lump them together with a regional identifier. After September 11, this tendency continued, but with the additional unfortunate feature of connecting the region and the peoples within it to terrorism. Indeed, one effect of the subsequent U.S.-led wars in Afghanistan and Iraq has been to further cement American attention on the Middle East, as military strategies unfolded in maps that included the Mediterranean Basin, parts of Central Asia, and the Arabian Peninsula, and to extrapolate from the few to the many. At the same time, the experience of September 11 generated expanded interest among engineering students and engineering faculty in the United States in achieving greater understanding of peoples and issues in the region. For example, students enrolled in an Introduction to Global Issues course taught by one of us, nearly all of whom had been born after the Iranian Revolution and Egyptian-Israeli Peace Treaty of 1979, began raising serious questions about the Middle East, in many cases for the first time in their lives. They moved beyond regional generalizations to inquire into contrasts among people from the region, such as differences between Sunni and Shiite Muslims and, for one student group, different views of technology held by Muslim engineering students and leaders of a local mosque. Interest in the Middle East also expanded among engineering faculty and administrators. For example, at engineering schools whose oil-related programs have historically attracted students and faculty from the “Middle East” region, admission officers developed strategies to keep their institutions attractive to international students. Student organizations throughout the country sought to create more welcoming environments for those Middle Eastern students who did come. Nationally, university administrators have responded quickly and enthusiastically to funded invitations to build new educational institutions in the P