The rise of Middle East studies
For better and worse, Middle East and Islamic studies have become the focus of intense interest, and scrutiny
by Rosanna Tamburri
For several weeks this past summer Marie-Joëlle Zahar watched as bombs rained down on Lebanon, the beloved country of her birth. "I was stunned," says Dr. Zahar, a political science professor at Université de Montréal. "And very discouraged, as a Lebanese, to see my country move so far on the way to reconstruction only to be devastated again," she says in a voice tinged with weariness.
As the conflict raged, her phone rang steadily with interview requests from journalists. She tried to oblige out of a sense of duty to inform and educate others about her homeland. But it wasn't easy distancing herself emotionally from the crisis. She was deeply concerned about family members who live there and others who were awaiting evacuation to Canada. "The crisis in Lebanon has literally paralyzed me," she says. "It has put everything else in my life on hold."
As Dr. Zahar can attest, being a scholar of Middle East and Islamic studies today is both a blessing and a burden. The field is expanding rapidly at universities across the country. Student enrolments are up and universities are hiring Middle East scholars in a variety of areas at a rapid pace. As many as 40 professors have been hired over the past five years, according to CANMES, the Canadian Committee of the Middle East Studies Association of North America. Academic journals are publishing more work in the field and scholars are in demand by news media to explain and interpret the day's events.
This has given the field a sense of urgency and excitement and the attention that many say is long overdue. At the same time, though, there are challenges. Since Sept. 11, 2001, Middle East scholars have been under a microscope, Dr. Zahar says. "Even the most objective of analyses is deemed to be partisan by some. I feel like I'm tip-toeing on eggshells."
To be sure, 9/11 changed the academic landscape as it did many other facets of society. The events of that day, along with the subsequent wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the U.S.-led war on terror and the protracted Arab-Israeli conflict, have stoked students' and the public's curiosity about the region and Islam.
The increasing number of students of Middle Eastern and Islamic heritage has also contributed to growth in the field. "Instead of wanting to drift into the melting pot they want to explore their identity," says William Cleveland, professor of Middle East history at Simon Fraser University. Muslim community groups are also playing a role through their financial support of endowed chairs. The University of Alberta, for example, recently created a chair in Islamic studies which was funded in part by the Edmonton Council of Muslim Communities.
The University of Toronto and McGill University have arguably the largest and most established Middle East and Islamic studies departments in Canada, but others are quickly expanding. One example is the University of Windsor. "We have absolutely no problem filling any course we offer on the Middle East," says Tom Najem, head of the university's political science department and president of CANMES. The university has hired three Middle East specialists in its political science department over the past four years. It recently introduced an Arabic language course and is in the early stages of developing a centre for Middle East governance.
The University of Ottawa created a certificate for a minor in Arabic language and culture last year. Several universities have introduced courses in Islam and Middle East history and politics for the first time while those with established programs are adding to their existing complement. A number of law schools now offer courses in Islamic law. U of T hired two prominent Islamic law scholars last year, Anver Emon and Mohammad Fadel.
Some universities have had difficulty hiring new faculty because of the high demand. "If you are looking to hire a high-profile Islamicist these days you are going to have to use active and creative recruitment strategies," says Willi Braun, director of interdisciplinary religious studies at the University of Alberta, which tried unsuccessfully last year to fill its newly endowed chair in Islamic studies.
But this attention has had other repercussions. Middle East scholars, whether they like it or not, have faced more intense public scrutiny since 9/11. They are often accused of political bias by both those within academia and without. "The field is as political and politically tenuous as the current situation," says Shahrzad Mojab, a professor of adult education and counseling psychology at OISE and director of the Women and Gender Studies Institute at the University of Toronto. "I have been, along with many other of my colleagues . . . a target of many different objections to our scholarship," she says.
Dr. Mojab travels regularly to the Middle East to research and write about the role of women in the region. A Turkish-Canadian group has criticized her work on Kurdish women. The embassy of one Middle Eastern country wrote a letter pointing out perceived mistakes in her research. She says she has received hate mail and threatening phone calls from hard-line pro-Israeli groups. She was once publicly branded an anti-Semite by a faculty member. The criticism, she says, goes beyond academic critique. "It's personal attack."
Students are also quite willing to voice their disapproval. They may pressure professors "not to be so critical, not to speak of negative things, but only to speak of positive things," says Amila Buturovic, a religious studies professor and Noor Fellow in Islamic Studies at York University, whose classes include a large percentage of Muslim students.
Dr. Buturovic strives for balance, saying her role is neither to pander to student pressures nor to change the course of Islam. "I am there to teach what [Islam] has been in historical and broader cultural terms." But not everybody is left satisfied. Sometimes students drop her class in protest. Shouting matches break out during lectures. Students have accused her of misrepresenting Islamic teachings and confirming the public's worst fears. Others contend that she isn't critical enough and that she soft-pedals issues, like the link between Islamic fundamentalism and terrorism.
Some of the most contentious courses to teach are those dealing with Arab-Israeli relations. Saeed Rahnema, a political science professor and director of the school of public policy and administration at York University, says that in more than two decades of teaching in Canada and abroad no course has proven more difficult than the one he currently teaches at York: War and Peace in the Middle East. The class includes a large number of Jewish and Muslim students. "They have close linkages to the region," he says. "They are very passionate about it" and sometimes "the classroom becomes a continuation of the conflict."
Over the years he has developed techniques to help defuse classroom tensions. During particularly heated debates, he asks students to look at and address only him and not one another. "One thing that I make clear from the beginning is that I cannot be intimidated," he says. "Neither would I allow one student or group to intimidate and silence others."
Less-experienced professors are often the most vulnerable to student pressures. One political science professor, who asked that her name not be used, says she spent her first year teaching Arab-Israeli relations "in blissful ignorance." Everything appeared to be going well, she says. "I felt that I had created a climate of discussion that was explanatory and interpretive."
Then, at the end of the session, she was blindsided by the overwhelmingly low scores of her students' evaluations. Mirroring the experience of other professors, she received complaints from some students of being too pro-Israeli and by others of being too favourable to the Palestinian cause. "I was very frustrated," she says.
Tareq Ismael knows the feeling. "After a while you take on everyone: the Muslim community, the Arab community, Arab governments, the pro-Israeli lobby, friends and colleagues," says Dr. Ismael, a political science professor at the University of Calgary who has written extensively on the Middle East. "You learn in our field to weather these things. You just live with it."
Of course, controversy can exist in any discipline, says Virginia Aksan, who teaches Middle East history and chairs the history department at McMaster University. "It's just that the sides are hardened on this one," she says. "It makes the course difficult to teach, but that was true the first time I taught it."
Oded Haklai, who teaches Middle East politics at Queen's University, isn't bothered much by criticism from students or colleagues, even if at times it does get personal. "If academia is about the exchange of ideas then we should be open to receiving criticism," he reasons.
What does trouble him, though, is that the current political climate has tended to generate what he calls "crisis-driven research." Scholars, he says, inevitably end up focusing on war and conflict in the region, in part, he believes, because it's easier to secure funding for these types of study. The distorted image that emerges is one of "a unique region that is somehow in conflict with the rest of the world."
York's Dr. Buturovic agrees. What's needed, she says, is a rethinking of the way the Middle East and Islam are taught, a move away from the "West versus the rest" mentality, and a greater emphasis placed on the interdependence between the Middle East, the West and other regions of the world.
As challenging as the current climate is in Canada, scholars here say their U.S. counterparts face many more hardships. At a conference of U.S. and Canadian Middle East studies professors held at U of T last year, several prominent American academics described how they and their colleagues feel increasingly harassed and vilified post-9/11.
It's why Richard Foltz left the University of Florida last year for a post in Concordia University's religion department. "I found it increasingly difficult to do my job," he says. Students were openly hostile to what he was teaching. Some of them said outright that Islam was a horrible religion.
"I had one student say in front of a class of 50 people that as a member of the military he expected to be sent to Iraq soon and he was probably going to be killing a lot of Muslims so he thought he might learn a bit about them first," he recalls. The professor was accused of being "anti-American" and was visited by FBI officials, who asked him to spy on Muslim students. "I'm sure part of it was they wanted me know that they were aware of me and had their eye on me," he adds.
Since moving to Canada his professional life "has improved by leaps and bounds," he says. While Concordia has seen its share of racial strife in the past, he has encountered very little student hostility here. He likes teaching to Concordia's diverse student body and eventually hopes to make Canada his permanent home.
As the field continues to expand, attracting more students and faculty and generating an ever-growing body of research, some observers have drawn comparisons between Middle East studies and the once-popular Soviet studies programs which declined swiftly after the end of the Cold War.
SFU's Dr. Cleveland, for one, predicts that Middle East and Islamic studies will continue to grow. "The last decade has shown that Islam is an important area of study. Even if the Iraq war ends tomorrow, even if bin Laden is captured tomorrow, Islamic art and architecture and how much Islam has influenced Christianity will remain important areas of study," he says. Unfortunately, he adds after a pause, "it looks like current events will continue to drive it."
