MEIS Student Rana Osman Interns with Maydan

MEIS Student Rana Osman Interns with Maydan

August 2018 MEIS MA graduate, Rana Osman, had the opportunity to intern with Maydan, an online publication of the Ali Vural Ak Center for Global Islamic Studies under the supervision of Dr. Ahmet Tekelioglu during the summer of 2018.

She describes her experiences below:

I have come to appreciate Maydan more as I became familiar with the type of content they publish and their mission. I believe that Maydan provides the platform for informative and honest works and opinions on a wide array of Middle East and Islamic Studies subjects that are of particular importance to students in the field, as well as the general public, who seek to become acquainted with legible introductory information on the subject. In a time where facts are becoming a rare commodity, freedom of press becoming a mere slogan, I find Maydan to be a legitimate source of factual content that caters to MEIS students.

For my first solo project, I had to compile English words that are rooted in Arabic. The more I delved deeper into the endless ocean of known human languages, I found that this project needed more than mere translation; it required an open and critical mind. My research demanded that I remain cognizant of, and employ a philological methodology to each term that I came to verify. I applied this verification methodology to a total of about 145 English words that are epistemologically rooted in the Arabic language. Working on this project and reading through volumes of works has inadvertently exposed me to the hidden world of inter-linguistics pertaining to the global human culture and just how much human beings are connected through historical and cultural shared experiences.

My second contribution required a diligent eye for numbers and statistics, as well as political awareness. In “Hajj in Numbers” I spent hours searching for legitimate sources to extract the influx of number of pilgrims to Makkah (Saudi Arabia) in the past 60-70 years. While there were governmental agencies that solely operated to monitor and record these large numbers, there were also news outlets that were involved in reporting the large international populations that make their journey to Makkah every year. What I learned from the available information is to use my numbers with due dexterity, especially, when politics have come to play a major role, by not only funding some of these news outlets, but also by enacting foreign policies that sometimes prevents pilgrims from a certain nation from enjoying the pilgrimage. With this in mind, the final product of my research included my observations as to why the number of pilgrims from a specific country may have been drastically lower from one year to another, i.e. Chinese pilgrims and the current brutal crackdown on Uyghur Muslims, and the monitoring of Hui Muslims.  

Overall, my experience at Maydan provided me with the opportunity to discipline and reinforce my research skills, as well as tackling the challenges of dissecting multitudes of available information. Particularly, what was most rewarding is the “Islam and Middle East in the Media” weekly roundups, where my peers and I populated the database with most recent news events from around the world. I felt like I was part of a group that is on a mission to share headlines from trusted outlets about Islam and the Middle East in general, which can be quite challenging in today’s political climate. Keeping up with daily headlines raised the bar for my personal reading scrutiny of news articles. I now have an eye for categorizing writing styles and have acquired the ability to decipher underlying messages in every style and phrasing.

 Another project that I equally benefited from is the “Middle East Film” roundup. This initiative seeks to build a database for Middle East or Islamic studies – related films and documentaries that serve for academic use. The objective of this specific project is where I was exposed to a wide variety of film productions that are far from the overpopulated stereotypical content of Muslims and the Middle East, and I realized just how important it is to be self-represented in the media, such as the documentary, Baghdad. However, most importantly, it was even more critical that such documentaries and productions are shared and celebrated, which is what Maydan seeks to accomplish through the compilation of these media productions.